If Any of You Lack Wisdom, Let Him Ask of God: It Is Our Right to Be Secure in the Knowledge that God Lives

 

 

I am reluctant to write about my religion.  There are multiple reasons for this.  I’ve always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and have succeeded in that to a minor extent among a few writers who have had more success than I have.  These days, other than Buddhism, religion isn’t taken seriously in literary circles.  I guess I’m guilty of desiring to be both of the world and in the service of Christ simultaneously.

But it’s more than that.  I also fear friends will be offended, that they’ll feel I’m trying to convert them, and truth be told, I am.  But it’s not that I feel they are deficient in some way.  It’s just that I want to share what is most important in my life—my religion.

So great is this fear, we had some friends visit a couple of summers ago, and we wanted to take them to Cove Fort, not to share our religion, but just because it’s an awesome old lava-stone fort built around a courtyard and restored beautifully.  In short, it’s something beautiful in our area to see.

However, it’s owned by the church.  When we were asked by the missionary tour-guides if we were all members, I quickly said yes, which was a lie.  The truth is I didn’t want our friends to receive a missionary discussion because I didn’t want them to feel we had taken them to the historic site with ulterior motives in mind.  I would have preferred the old fort to have been a hide-out for Butch Cassidy rather than a frequent stop for Brigham Young.

In The Outsider, Colin Wilson follows a significant portion of the literary development of the twentieth century, in which the narrators and/or protagonists (outsiders) of many literary works have this dreadful secret, which they want to suppress because it will do society no good to learn, but they can’t suppress it because there is a “distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no restoration of order” (Wilson 15).

And what is this truth?:  that existence is meaningless, most succinctly captured in Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”:

It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant.  You do not want music.  Certainly you do not want music.  Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.  What did he fear?  It was not fear or dread.  It was something that he knew too well.  It was all nothing and a man was nothing too.  It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.  Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada (Hemmingway 291).

I have felt that sterile night, and have sought the clear light of a clean, well-lit diner to hold off the impending chaos.  So, I’m not here to refute that reality, or to mock those who have stared the void in the eye.

But it is not the only reality I know.

I have another secret, one that is hope, goodness and light.  Oddly, I’m more reluctant to write about that than I am of memories of nothing and for nothing.

But I will be silent no more.

Last weekend I came home from church hurting.  I have an extreme case of epididymitis, an inflammation of the epididymis at the back of the testicle, usually caused by a bacterial infection.  It makes sitting very uncomfortable.

Anyway, I skipped Sunday school, and went back for priesthood.  I was late and just sat down and listened to the lesson.  It was a good lesson, taught by a good friend, and I listened intently but was not particularly moved emotionally.

At the end, I was asked to say the prayer, and I did so.  Part way through, I started to thank God for having the gospel in our lives, and I couldn’t, not because I’m not thankful—it has come to mean everything to me—but because I felt the Holy Ghost so strong I couldn’t speak.  It was as if my tongue had been bound.  I tried three times before I could get it out, and only succeeded on the fourth try.  By that time I was in tears.

When I was finished, before I even knew what I was doing, I rushed over to hug this guy I once knew from the town bar.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that’s just not the sort of thing I do.  I’m shy to the core and physical expression of emotions—even handshakes—just aren’t my sort of thing.

What had happened?  Well, I am thankful for the gospel.  And I haven’t been getting well despite numerous prayers and blessing on my behalf.  It even felt as if I’d been struggling with my testimony, having a few thoughts of “Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name” myself  (Hemmingway 291).  So, perhaps my Father in Heaven felt I needed some reassurance that He was there for me.

But, I don’t think so.  I think it was my old drinking buddy who needed to feel the spirit most, and I was the vehicle used to answer his prayers.  That just seems to be the way the priesthood works—not directly, but through others.  He too was crying when I’d finished my prayer.

I want to continue exploring the void explored in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.  I think it does identify a real phenonemum, and I believe I have some insights into that reality.  But there is not time for that here.

Instead, I also want to testify that life on this earth is not all nada y pues nada.  That God lives and has a plan and purpose for each of us, and that we do not have to know this on blind faith alone, that there are other ways of thinking than logic, and other means of communication than words—and that although we may never know all the pieces of the puzzle to life (to do so would abort free-will),  we are promised by God in James I: 5 that if we sincerely ask of God we can know enough about the meaning of life that we don’t have to make it on faith alone:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

It is our right to be secure in the knowledge (not just belief) that God lives; it is just a matter of being humble and patient enough to receive his reply.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Hemmingway, Ernest. ""A Clean Well-Lighted Place"." Hemmingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Book of the Month Club (Scribner's/Macmillan Publishing), 1987. 291.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1982.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Master’s Scribe (Buddhism, Furious Fiction, Pugs, Zen)

Camilla, the fat pug, waddles across the blue-gray snow fields of Mount Fuji like a three-legged pig.  Jack, the Hokkaido fox, should be chasing her.  But how can he?  One leap and he’ll be well beyond the ugly little tanker.

The narrator won’t like Camilla being called an “ugly little tanker.”  I can hear him say, “Nothing ugly.  Only perception ugly. ” He doesn’t like much of what I type on his behalf.  He says I use too many words.  That’s because he’s a Zen Buddhist monk from Kamakura who sits on a straw mat all day playing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.  He says enlightenment is found in the moment of action.  “No words; use thumbs only, fingers.” 

I’d quit if he didn’t pay well.  He says although words kill the moment, a monk without books to his name is no monk at all these days. 

“California read enlightenment too much!  Zen not self-help.  No problem.  No help.  Just be.”

“Okay,” I say, “but what about the fable?  Why not have the pug chase the fox?  She’s slow; he’s fast.  We have struggle, plot.”

He says Americans are too logical, that you can’t write a fable with logic.  You shouldn’t write a fable at all.  It should just be.

“How can it be, if we don’t write it?” I ask in exasperation.

He smiles, “Your journey, not mine.”

Moving from a Literature of Disbelief to a Literature Belief: An Open-Dialogue with The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Part I: I See Too Deeply (Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer)

There have been three times in my life when I did something irrational and brave:  I said, Screw it, I made a mistake, and I cut chords with the past and almost started down the path to the sort of life I wanted.  But the first couple of times, at the last moment, I faltered and clung to doubt and self-imposed limitations instead of walking out of the picture I was in and into the one I wanted.  Of course, it would not have been perfect, but if I’d had the courage to carry through, it would have been perfect compared to where I’d been.

Pure sunlight shines between two Austrian pines my brother and I planted back in ’96.  The snow, mostly in shadow, is cold, hard and blue.  It seems like the perfect day for reading, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting.  Marci even made Chili.

What I want to reflect on here is moving from a literature and life of isolation and disbelief to a literature and life of connection and belief.  I once thought I’d found my bible, The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  It described perfectly the void I was feeling and the literature I loved.  A window, even if accurate, is just one view of existence.  Having looked through other windows since then, I’d like to go back and look out that window again.

I think all of this will come to play in this dialogue, but I want to get right to the book, and when I found the book, and why it meant so much to me.

It was a cold winter, and during the week I lived alone in a dorm.  I’d dropped out of school and moved back to Dry Creek, this piece of family land that has never let me live fully anywhere else.  But there was nothing here for me.   The only jobs available were the type for college dropouts.  I ended up being a janitor at an indoor mushroom farm on the other side of town and decided a formal education might not be so bad after all, so I went back to school in a bigger town, two hours from Dry Creek.  However, I was twenty-six and really didn’t belong in an undergraduate program anymore.  I’d had some poems published, had been somewhat involved in a writing community in El Paso.  After returning to Utah, all I wanted to do was get my degree, so that I could get a teaching job in my hometown and live the rest of my days at Dry Creek, writing poems about stone, cold water, deer carcasses and drunken nights in the town’s two bars.  I had no belief beyond sight—to live and bear witness to a meaningless universe, which was at least bearable if I were there to witness a deer bounce down a gravel road covered in thin snow, the cottonwood along the creek a faint pink in the last day light.

Back at in college, I’d hear girls laughing outside my dorm room, but they sounded so young, so remote, like distant memories.  They weren’t even that.  I was incredibly shy and my romantic adventures were few and far in between.  Older, I still liked the giddy laughter outside my walls, but it was different.  It did not stir the restless hunger of a teenager.  No, it was more like the fondness of a father.  I had never had a real college experience, but I was mature enough to realize I’d missed that train.  If there was a world for me, this wasn’t it. 

So, during the week, I walled myself in my little cinderblock room to write.   On weekends, I went home, got drunk with a band of single and divorced Paiute women and a drop-out actor, and when not at the bar, soaked in as much of Dry Creek as possible.  The next week I’d start the process all over again.

When at school, I seldom ventured outside my dorm except for class and to go to the library.  My writing professors admired my craft, but as I was writing at a master’s level and most of my classmates had barely opened a book, I had no connection with my peers.  I remember Jim Aton would have us rate each other’s papers and then would give us his rating.  According to my peers, my paper was almost incomprehensible.  According to him, I should get it published.  So, I doubled up on my studies to get out of there.

The campus had a beautiful, new library, with a three story glass atrium, but hardly any books.  On top of that, they had all-but-illiterate undergraduate students weed the small collection they had.  As a result, I’d pick up collectible books on the discard rack for 25 cents.

One of the books I picked up--not a collectable--was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  As it so accurately named what I’d been feeling and capturing in my own writing, it quickly became my Bible.

I still have the book.  It’s the 1982 Tarcher edition from  Houghton Mifflin with a forward by Marilyn Ferguson.  The cover is simple: a black rectangle with a thin red border.  Centered near the top is the title and author, also red print.  It looks serious, revolutionary—and when first published in 1956, it was.  

Chapter One, “Country of the Blind,” begins as follows:

At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem.  He is the hole-in-corner man.

Damn, I thought, that’s me.

He then quotes from Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting.  Her dress, lifted a little, blows out.  But a block in the traffic separates us.  The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed.  It is not the woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one.

Defeated, I followed my impulse casually.  I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner.  Then we walked side by side.  We said a few words; she took me home with her… Then I went through the banal scene.  It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped.  An immense confusion bewilders me.  It is as if I could not see things as they were.  I see too deeply and too much.

I knew that feeling immediately.  It was my old friend.  I’d written poems about it:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn’t a bad idea, and I use to.
Nine o’clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he’d do that,
and I’d grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But then, I don’t know, something happened.

Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body,
but how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?

And how does she stand you,

both of you growing,
swallowing space?

All healthy things get bigger,

more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don’t have it so bad.

I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:

How do I make it mine?

At the time I wrote that poem, my mother thought the ending-line,“How do I make it mine?” referred to marriage.  And it does,  sort of, but not really, because prior to it “something happened,” which is the first fulcrum of the poem, a pivot between the secure fixed universe of youth and the open, uncertain universe of adulthood.  What I desired to make mine was life in all its complexity, but something had robbed me of that possibility.  What was that “something”?

When I opened The Outsider, I knew immediately my something was the same something  that makes the romantic encounter in L’enfer so banal.  Like Henri Barbusse’s protagonist, I also saw “too deeply and too much.”

Or so, I thought at the time.  In this series of essays, I will in fact argue that like so many of my predecessors,  even though I saw deeper than many, I actually didn’t see deeply enough.  But, I'll get to that later.

Is Etta James the Heart and Soul of Poetry?: Etta James, Van Morrison, and the Art of the Repeated Line

I dreamt that the key to poetry is the music of Etta James.  As I really didn’t have a clue who Etta James was, I thought this is either ridiculous or quite significant.  (Note:  a couple of weeks earlier I dreamt I would be the father of a major school of poetics, Rammed-Earth Poetry, so clearly my id is searching for some sort of significance here.)  Still, could a dead relative of mine, or Etta herself, or perhaps even God Almighty be directing my artistic pursuit from the other side?  I don’t know.  Part of me always wants to write off the muse as pure crap, but some of my best poems have come to me in dreams.  So, then I think, well, it’s just the workings of the subconscious.  But, when I put on Etta this morning, I thought sweet damn that lady do sing the blues so sweetly redemption is hanging out on the street corner just waitin to smile up at me with great big, black eyes that contain all the love in the universe!

And I thought there might be something to this crazy dream after all.  Now, I’m not ready to toss William Carlos Williams in the trashcan yet, but maybe there is something other, something just as real, but different than the right-on images, perfect line breaks, and plain ol’ American dialect--something that’s missing not only from my own work, but also the work of my heroes.

I know repetition draws me, the chant, and going back mid-step, before your foot is fully forward, like Van Morrison does:

 

 

But how do you get that on the page independent of the blues band?  If, I say if, I say, if it’s the ramble and the row, the slow winding out, then pulling back in, then bellowing out heart and soul that drives poetry, the eye has to be able to pick that up, line by line, so the music forms in the reader’s mind.

Is it doable?  I don’t know.  Or is that even why Etta James is the heart and soul of poetry?

But, I do know this: although I woke up thinking I had a crazy dream, after listing to Etta, I do believe she is indeed the heart and soul of poetry and I’m more than willing to explore possibility that some of her spirit can be captured in the unaccompanied line. 

Besides, it’s kind of like deciding that Julia Roberts holds the secret to acting.  Even if you’re wrong, after seeing her smile, quite frankly, who gives a damn?  After hearing Etta, my life aint gonna never be the same nohow.  And I thank whatever dead relative cared enough about to let me in on that secret.

 

 

 

The Broken

Sit in recliners
& watch
television
flinching
now & then
from pain
unfolding
like spring.

There are meadows
in the mind, but
the days are blotchy--
a brief moment
of yesteryear
in intense sunlight
before clouds
of reality
move across
the valley
& blacken
the front.

Prayers
are worn
like windbreakers,
always a little
too thin.

Without You, This Valley Is Immense (Poetry, Bob Dylan & George Harrison)

Without you, this valley is immense
and unbearably vacant.  Yet, I take
the long way home because
I fear the void that waits
with a cat, a rabbit,
two dogs, five fish
and six chickens
to jump
all over
me.

I go slow
down past
the dunes
and then
the water
deep
below the
surface
feeding
the thorn-
thicket
of Russian
Olives,

the black

mass
of the basalt flow
heavy in the
distance,
a scab
where
earth
broke
open
hot & living.

I never want a pain like that—

where to pulse and throb
and bleed molten rock
is the only way to sustain
against erosion at a profound level,
life always waiting to be
engulfed
by the sea.

No, an island

is no more the life
for me.

The dogs rush out to see me.

They too hate the house without you.
I feed the chickens; the dogs take a crap.
We go in.  Bunny Boy lets
me know he too has been alone
and wants attention.

Perhaps the fish

swim in bliss
oblivious
to this house
ceasing to be home.

I’m about to settle

into blue or fade
to sepia tone
when Lloyd shows
up & I’m glad
together we can hate
Republicans
until you get
home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unorganized Reflections on Snow and Walking, Part II: Light from a Coleman Lantern on Lacquered Knotty Pine Walls

What was left of the barnyard in 2006.  Our house is now just off to the right.

AccuWeather says that it’s 29 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but I don’t believe it.  I know the temperature of cold around here, and it’s much colder than that outside—probably nineteen or twenty.  I felt it very sharply when I went outside to feed the chickens, and again when I went to look for an extension cord to hook up their heat lamp. 

I didn’t notice the moon, but the dry cold felt just like on those moonlit nights long ago when we’d all pile in the old Ford Falcon with the plastic duck-taped over the triangular vent window.   If there was much snow, we’d park at the single-wide trailer and walk up the rocky lane above the Dugway, where Canyon Road below dropped off the alluvial fan and cut down into the river bottom.

Let’s say it’s such a night, the sun sinking into the pink, misty air to the west.  Dad pulls just beyond the driveway to the trailer, which is semi-packed by the renters.  Mom, I, Muff (our dog) and Wilbur (our pig) head up the deep snow of the road, a great round blue hump up the center, a slanting wood gate in front.  The snow is deep and Muff moves in great playful jumps, exiting and reentering the snow somewhat like a dolphin at sea.  Wilbur just plows ahead, his nose to the ground, snorting as he goes.  I pull my green toboggan sled behind us, which is loaded with a pot of chili and a pan of corn bread.  The snow is deep and soft and the sled doesn’t pull easy.  Several times I have to lift up and yank it.

The van stuck in 2006.  Marci and the boys stand about where Dada always parked.
 

Dad has gone back the other way, to the barnyard, to feed the animals, and will catch up to us later.   At the gate, I undo a chain and try to open it.  It doesn’t open easy.  I pull enough so that I can squeeze through.  Then I lift up and push as if I were pushing a stuck car.  It slants forward and then gives all at once.  I fear I will fly forward and over it and land on my face, but I don’t.  It’s still not open, but it’s wide enough to get the sled through.

Mom shines the light ahead and I follow.  We don’t talk too much.  She has an Eskimo styled coat the creates a narrow tube around her face—just enough space to see and breathe, so talking is not easy as the sound gets lost inside the furry tunnel.  I don’t have such a coat, but don’t talk too much either.  Pulling the sled is hard and I’m winded.  Because of the workout, I’m sweating, even though I’m a bit cold.  I’m hot in my coat, especially my head, but my legs are cold and my hands are numb even with gloves.

There is still a pink horizon.  We see the silhouette of Dad cutting across the hay field to meet us, and he does, just below the pond.  He finds the portion of the fence where there is a wooden X and rail made out of Juniper as it is easier to cross over there than at the unsupported strands of barbed wire.  King, our steer, has followed him.  We stop and pet the King as Dad hops over the fence.  No longer moving, we talk for a bit, before moving on.

Although there is still quite a bit of light on top, the path down through the woods to the Cabin is dark and sheltered, the path narrow, with low, snow-loaded branches waiting to reach out and grab you.  We park the sled. Dad carries the big pot of chili; Mom carries the cornbread; and I, armed with the flashlight, lead the way.   Well, sort of.  Muff leaps out in front.  Wilbur, by now is bringing up the rear, glad to walk in the path.  I can hear him snort behind.

About half way down the hill, we startle some deer, which go crashing off to the right.  That in turn startles Mom, who inhales and screams simultaneously and then bursts into laughter.

Dad says, “Well, you know that’s going to happen.”

“I can’t help it Joe, I just can’t help it; it gets me every time.”

It gets Muff too.  He’s nowhere in sight.  He’s darted off into the night, hot on the trail of a small herd of deer.

Finally, we make it to the cabin.  There is a clearing here, but no moonlight yet, so we’re not really aware of it other than that we can sort of make out of the snow-loaded roof of the cabin, a deep blue in the very last of the day light.  The canyon floor is dark, even in the clearing, and only the flashlight shows the way.

The cabin, built in 1978, as viewed last spring with the original roof.  It'll need shingles soon.

 

We put everything on the porch.  I open the door and Dad goes in, grabs the lantern that is hanging from a hook in balcony, brings it out on the porch and lights it.

After it is hissing good, we go in, even Wilbur.  Muff is still off somewhere.  Dad hangs the lantern on the nail, my favorite part. Light spreads out from the hissing center and warms the lacquered knotty pine walls, which look like an orange Tootsie Pop as you approach the Tootsie center.

Unorganized Reflections on Snow and Walking, Part I: Narrative Heading Towards Dry Creek (dogs, deer, hamsters, runt pigs and a small-town health-food store)

View of the chicken coup from the front walk.

 

It is the morning after the first snow of the season.  I sit in my recliner and look out the glass door.  There’s probably three inches on the patio table, but only an inch or two on the ground.  It is always like that with the first snow.  The ground retains its heat and melts most of the snow away.  It is beautiful anyway.  I wish I could go walking, but I don’t much of that these days.

 Walking and snow have always been a part of my life.  When I was young and we lived in town, and there was snow and a full moon, Dad would want to drive up to Dry Creek to burn the stacks of dead juniper left from the railing that took place prior to us purchasing the property. 

After school, he’d come home and tell Mom to cook up a big pot of chili.  We’d gather the two dogs, Lady and Muff, both Pomeranian mixes.  Lady, a mixture of Pomeranian and Chihuahua, was slender and dainty like a deer.   She even had the personality of a doe.  She was Dad’s dog, and pretty much terrified of everyone else.   The slightest unexpected movement would set her prancing across the room for the shelter of the legs of a table or chair.  Muff, a mixture of Pomeranian and Terrier, was short, stocky, and fearless.  He ran all over town, biting the wheels of cars and semi-trucks as he raced through the streets with wild abandon.  He lost his life, telling a German Shepherd he better not even dare step into our yard.  But he had his soft side.  He loved hamsters.  I had a couple.  And he loved mine.  Not to eat, but as pets.  I’d also walk him downtown (back then there actually was one) to the health food store, which oddly enough sold vitamins, Asian food, soft-serve yogurt and small pets, such as hamsters and ferrets.  I’d bring Muff inside and walk him up and down the small aisle and he’d sit up in front of each cage, begging to get a hamster out to meet him.

But I digress.  This post was to be about snow, and to snow we will get.  We’d all climb in the old Ford Falcon, which was old even back then.  The one window was busted out and had plastic taped over it.  Fortunately, for us, Dad had a weird accounting system.  He didn’t have enough money to purchase a new automobile, but he did have enough go in with two friends and buy Dry Creek.  That single decision will affect generations.  It is why, right now, I can sit almost housebound, and look out the sliding glass window at a stretch of untamed white.  I glance now and then for the sight of deer or turkey.  So far, nothing, but it will not stay like that.  Without question, I will see deer today without even trying.  They are as much a part of my life as subways are to a residence of New York City, as elevated trains are to  a residence of Chicago.

 

A similar snow storm from last year viewed from our sliding glass door.

I think, perhaps, deer are the reason Dad purchased Dry Creek.  Everything else was a justification.  Yes, it did have an alfalfa field then, but due to lack of water, we only got two crops (instead of the normal three or four).  And yes, there was a barn yard, and we did have animals—chickens, pigs, sheep and one steer.  But those were but excuses.

A herd of deer right out the front door--a daily sight October through May.

The real reason to hold the property was to watch deer in the moonlight.   That is why the dogs, the chili and the family were in the car, headed up Canyon Road. Oh, and the pigs.  I forgot the pigs.  We had two pet ones.  I can’t remember how many farm ones, maybe three or four.  Both the pets were runts.  Wilber was the eldest of the two.  He was born small and his mother ostracized him.  Dad rescued him and brought him home to be bottle fed.  Wilbur was soon up and growing, full of spunk.  His favorite activity in the summer was taking his snout, scooping up the neighborhood dogs, and tossing them.  Surprisingly, the neighborhood dogs liked it too.   There’d be four or five dogs on the front lawn waiting to be tossed.

The second runt remained a runt until the day she died.  She simply didn’t grow.  She was healthy, but tiny.  I wouldn’t believe it either, if I didn’t know better.  Dad called her Oinka.  She was the size of a toy poodle and he treated her like a toy poodle.  He took her everywhere, even up north, to Salt Lake, the big city.  He carried her around in a box.  He’d take her into K-mart or wherever.  He’d get away with it by telling people she was a new breed of dog called a Piggle.  Again, I wouldn’t believe it if I were not there. 

But I don’t think Oinka ever made the moonlight-snow-and-deer excursions.  Her life was happy, but short.  She died during the summer, sleeping in her box of the front porch while Dad worked in the front yard.  The sun moved and he didn’t notice.  She had a stroke.  For a week she could only walk backwards and then she died.  He was heartbroken.

So, if memory serves me right, Oinka was not there.  Lady, either.  She too had died.  We’d planted a baby spruce down by the cabin in memory of her.  So, I guess, it wasn’t two dogs, just one dog and a pig, a pot of chili, and Mom, Dad and I headed up Canyon Road towards the snow, the moon, the deer, the bonfire and all that glory.

But, that will have to wait until next time.  Sometimes life is so rich that it can’t be reduced to something neat and trim, like a plotted, suburban lawn, but must stretch on, undefined, untamed as the snowy Juniper flats of Dry Creek.

 

Galveston, November, 1947 ("Heartaches" by Harry James and Marion Morgan; "Wanderlust" by Paul McCartney)

Glory

This is the second poem in a series of linked-poems I plan to write in Glory, a novel-in-verse based loosely on Visions of Glory by John Pontius, a spiritual account of “Spencer,” an unidentified individual who shared his visionary experience with Pontius.  Other than noting that Spencer's father killed someone while driving under the influence as a teen, that he was sent to war, that he married and left Spencer's mother, Pontius does not provide many details here.  This allowed me free reign of my imagination.  I thought, Where would a returning soldier be likely to end up?   Galveston.  Then, I picked a likely year.  When I typed in "Galveston, 1947" to get a feel for the place and time, I found '47 was no ordinary year for the big bay.  But, I didn't know how to finish the poem.  Then, as is often the case, two borrowed lines came to me--"light out wanderlust / head us out to sea"--that my mind heard wrong in order to fit the poem:  "light up wanderlust / head out to sea".    
   

Galveston, November, 1947 

It was gray day along the Strand

when my mother met my father.
She didn’t see the metaphor coming
even after they crossed the causeway
in his new Series 62 convertible Cadillac
to see the ruins of Texas City,

and later sitting on the bright red hood,

eating cheese and cucumber sandwiches
amongst the lingering empty car hulls
in a vacated parking lot a quarter mile from
the explosion.  It was romantic
holding each other fiercely
against the wind amongst twisted, ash-covered
metal exoskeletons.

My father skirted the war, his youth
(and no doubt the drunken episode
in Farmington, Utah that led to his sentence),
but reveled to recover
the day the Grandcamp, still moored at dock,
rocked Galveston Bay.

Mother sat transfixed by the thick,
short wave of his bangs
casting a thin, black shadow
across his brow, adding mystery
and excitement to details he rattled off
with the passion of a poet:

There I was, amongst falling bales of burning twain.
Hell, the anchor was hurled across the entire city.
Two sightseeing planes had their wings torn off.
Even in Galveston blokes were knocked to their knees,
in Houston windows shattered.  They even say
the shock wave shook Louisiana.
Hell, Monsanto bloody Chemical Company
never paid me enough anyway.
Damn well deserve to be wiped away.

And over the radio, came a warning,

from Harry James and Marion Morgan--

Heartaches
Heartaches
My loving you meant only heartaches...

 

But the daughter of a preacher,
my mother just couldn't hear it.
Light up wanderlust,
head us out to sea.

 

1954: First Death & the Birth of the Transistor Radio ("Hey There" by Rosemary Clooney)

Glory

This is the first poem in a series of linked-poems I plan to write in Glory, a novel-in-verse based loosely on Visions of Glory by John Pontius, a spiritual account of “Spencer,” an unidentified individual who shared his visionary experience with Pontius.  In this poem, I took details from two paragraphs of his and juxtaposed them with the invention of the transistor radio.  The coinciding of these two events (and the song) is purely the product of my imagination even though the accounts individually are fairly true to their sources.

1954:  First Death & the Birth of the Transistor Radio

I was born dead

the day the transistor radio
came out: October 18, 1954.

The love child of Regency Division

of Industrial Development
Engineering Associates and
Texas Instruments was olive.
My skin was blue-black.

The doctor took one look at me

and handed me to one of four nurses.
An internal Texas Instruments Information
Bulletin stated TI-ers could be “justly proud”
of creating a tiny transistor cheaply enough
to replace tubes.   I too was tiny,
but unlike the radio, I had no signal.

The nurse wrapped me in newspaper

and placed me in a stainless steel sink.

At 6 feet, 6 inches, Jack St. Clair Kilby stood tall,

the proud daddy of the first integrated circuit.
My mother was bleeding badly
when they told her I was still born.
She was relieved.  She didn’t want me.

But somewhere there was a signal.

I was on some frequency.
The nurse picked me up to dispose of me
and found me struggling to breath.

Low clouds hung along the Wasatch Front.

I was driven to Primary Children’s Hospital.

My mother was told “I had pinked up”. 
On the radio, Rosemary Clooney sang,

Hey there you on that high flyin cloud
though he won't throw a crumb to you
you think someday he'll come to you
better forget him, him with his nose in the air
he has you dancin on a string...

 

To my mother, it could have been about my father,

but more likely a no-good, absent God.

 

 

Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks: The Sounds of Dark Growing Tall

Yesterday I was headed to work early. It was dawn, the day still small along the eastern horizon outside the passenger window. I dropped off the skirt of Cedar Mountain and made my way down the rim of the bowl towards alfalfa fields still in darkness at the bottom, headlights picking up blades of rye and electrical poles along the side as I crossed the vast valley with scattered farm lights off in the distance holding onto the last sustenance of night as the world edged away from the deep morning towards smudgy detail.

NPR.  A short bit, a mentioning, the poet Galway Kinnell has passed away.

Though a poet, not too many poets have touched my life.  I'm not sure why.  I can count them on one hand.  A couple who I personally know.  The others dead.  Williams, Yeats.  Now Galway Kinnell too.

It brings back memories.  Poems that put me in places not too unlike this:

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying, Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

His poems touched my silent places--those moments from childhood, when though with friends, you're not really there, but instead stuck in a moment, the night growing tall, electric sounds--cicadas and crickets--stealing you away from present company and biting your subconscious with a venom which lasts forever--the eternal now.

I first read Kinnell in a class from Leslie Ullman at UTEP, and though I might not have known it at the time, his poems changed my life forever.  Nothing big.  I did return to my roots, and like him, I live on a farm (sort of).  But, I would have done that anyway.  Rock, night and soil are too much a part of who I am not to eventually pull me back.

But it's the sounds in his poems, the depth--the fusing of life and death, dark and light, thickly muddily, organically--that has changed me in some way.

Most of the students who were drawn to words then (which were not many) were drawn to Ginsberg, Brooks, Clifton or Plath, poets, who one way or another, pushed language--either neon-flashy, like Ginsberg or Plath; or homespun get-down-and-lay-it-on-the-line, like Clifton and Brooks.

Kinnell, I guess, pushes language too.  But it's different.  Whereas Ginsberg drives the sounds and images into you, it seems Kinnell sits on a worn, wood step and waits for them to arrive and then asks, "Did you hear that over there in the corn field?"  Of course, he knows you did, he's made sure you have, but he does it so casually you're not aware he's led you away from the safety of the porch until it's too late, and you'll never view the world the same again.

One night, working late at an all-night copy center on Mesa Street in El Paso and needing a poem for class in the morning, I built the following from bricks from Kinnell's poems.  It works primarily because of his words, not mine.  I'm okay with that.  I was young, yearning to be great.  In him, I felt the depth and grandness of epic time--deep water, rich soil, rotting bodies, reaching roots--stories greater than one single self. 

I don't yearn as much to be great anymore.  I'd rather sit on my back step and watch the deer violate my flower beds.  But I still believe in stories archaic deep--trilobites frozen in a limestone wall, blood in the veins, camphor in the night.  And this poem takes me back to a time I was just discovering the language of my life.

Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks

I had been working so long,
until midnight I think,
but it felt like three.
I closed up shop,
dragged my weary eyes up the street to Village Inn
for a needle of coffee in each socket.

And then to,
there among the fat men with shiny badges,
read Galway Kinnell,
it was like a dream, dark growing tall,
two small boys bearing cornstalk violins
--I swear I saw them!--
outside the Circle K across the street.

Above the Franklin Mountains the moon ate itself out.
Two young lovers sat on the curb,
their tennis shoes in the dusty gutter.
Headlights and hum zipped past
like lion eyes after zebra.
The young just sat there, heads trailed
by the beginning of necks,
shivering in the guarantee they'd be bodies,
flesh rivered by blue erratic wanderings
of blood, saliva passed back and forth,
hands running stone saint smooth stone.

I laid down my tip and lit
a cigarette, a small fire against
the loneliness that I knew would rain
when I tore open my bed like a polar bear
and climbed in and closed her up
after, against the wind,
to sleep in blood
and pain.