Love, If

For those of you out there seeking answers, may I suggest that there are answers, or rather, an answer.   

Love.

Jesus said it, Shakespeare set rhyme to it, Einstein deduced it, the Beatles sang it, Robert Indiana sculpted it, Dr. King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa fought for it; yet, despite these illustrious and accomplished proponents, each one of us must discover for ourselves that it is the truth, and the answer to everything.

Be advised, however, that knowing the answer is not the same as getting the answer, and knowing only marks your starting point on a new road, not an endpoint.   If you’re like me, what will happen next is that you will realize how perfectly terrible you are at it, and how far you actually are from your destination. 

It will probably shock you to know. 

On the other hand, if you’re like me, you’ll be thrilled to have found the road at all.

Anyway, here’s where I am now on that road, in exactly fourteen lines…

Grapefruit Picking

This one's for my dad, whom I love very much...

Grapefruit Picking at my Father’s House (After a Rainy Day and a Cold Night)

Dressed for cold

bird bath ice-filmed

we gather the typical implements:

ladder, gloves, empty boxes and plastic buckets

and the long, red-handled pole

with the wire basket

and grasping prongs

bent inward like a shark’s

backward row of teeth

for plucking the fruit

and catching it

before it can fall

and split

and be

ruined.

The sky beyond the tree

Is evangelical blue

the fruit is the yellow

of crayon suns

the tree is deep green

and dark with shade

and rounded

like a cave-hole

its bowed form

embarrassed

by its own

profligate

abundance.

December Wind

If you are in need of a respite from all the holiday cheer, step this way...

The Ballad of Boba Fett

Boba Fett is arguably one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe.  His reputation as a steely, inscrutable intergalactic soldier of fortune has earned him a special place in the vast coterie of characters from the films.  I was a fan from the beginning, when he first appeared as part of the infamous Christmas Special in 1978.  I raged at his apparent and appalling demise in Return of the Jedi.  I suffered through the garbled course of events that attempted to explain his origin in the second trilogy.  But my connection to the character remained. 

With an equal balance of love and those above-referenced injustices in mind, I’d like to present my latest creation, The Ballad of Boba Fett.  I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. 

For those of you who might be interested, “Behind The Ballad of Boba Fett” contains further musings on my complex relationship to this enigmatic character.  It immediately follows the poem.

The Ballad of Boba Fett

In a galaxy far, far away

I’m talkin’ way, way back in the day

Audiences encountered 
An ace bounty hunter

Called by the French Boba Fett.

(note:  rhyme Fett to "away" and "day":  i.e. "Fay")

The rest of us are willing to bet

That his name is pronounced Boba Fett

Which just goes to show 
The French don’t know

Good consonant etiquette

Either way, though, doesn’t matter

-Call it crepe or pancake batter-

The dread name of Fett 
Once said, ‘twas met

By footsteps as wanted men scattered

Earthquakes and Heartbreaks

When the earthquakes hit Japan last March, I was still teaching.  Many of us had been given smartboards in our classrooms just a few months before, smartboards being these high-tech devices that are part whiteboard, part projector and part computer.  As a result, I was able to show my classes almost real-time images of the devastation occurring on the other side of the Pacific.  I knew that for most of them, it would be difficult to appreciate the magnitude of the tragedy; hell, I couldn’t appreciate the magnitude of the tragedy, and still can’t, and hopefully (and I say this with all due respect) never will.  

Somehow it felt right to experience the geographically distant catastrophe with the community of my students.   We didn’t talk much about it; we didn’t know much beyond what we were seeing.  We just looked at the horrible, impossible images together, and drew a little closer together as people in the classroom.

the butterfly hole

There are many connections between this and the last post, "a funny thing happened on the way to a life."  They are companions in a way, but I imagine the differences between them will stand out more than the similarities.  

If Shel Silverstein wrote about the topic of discovering yourself (and it's entirely possible he did), it might have sounded something like this... 

the butterfly hole

For years I would watch the butterflies

that randomly flitted by

never really knowing what they were

bits of magic in the sky.

Where do butterflies come from?

As a question I thought it quite fair

until I discovered a hole in my head

hiding right beneath my own hair!

Now a hole, people say, is a bad thing,

something that ought to be fixed.

Walking 'round town

with a hole in your crown

is just no way to go

(this we all know)

unless you’re a whale

or an ‘o.’

The Sixth Day

If you've been reading the poetry here, you've probably noticed by now that I am more inspired by nature than anything else.  To me, the math is pretty simple.  We were created, and the world around us was created, to be together.  No matter how distinct we try to make ourselves from the rest of creation, it is a fundamental fact of our existence.  In fact, the greater the distance we try to put between ourselves and nature, the more we try to separate ourselves from it, the more we see ourselves in it, at least the true parts of ourselves.  So, if you want to find truth, look to nature - it's incapable of lying.    

The Sixth Day

Traveling in Alaska one summer

I witnessed the land

-no, not witnessed-

I became the land. 

Because I

became the land, I know

what it feels like to be

gouged by the scratching

fingernails of glaciers

pulling back,

exposing my fresh, bright earth

to the air

for the first time in eons

if ever.

Wild rampant green

born from gray ice.

Saguaro Stand

The saguaro stand

ranges along the upward slope

of a deserted mountain.

Stretching

from the ancient rock

-the talus of creation-

each one

soldier straight 

facing the firestorm heat

of a summer sun.

Haiku #2

I can now see why people say that writing haiku is addictive.  Since writing the first one a couple weeks ago, I'm having a hard time not arranging my thoughts in a 5/7/5 syllable order.  

  buzzing cicadas       
  high-voltage sweltering sound
  hum summer madness

These are the kind of cicadas we get each year in Phoenix.  They come out in late June/early July, whenever we get our first sustained spike in humidity.  For instance, July 3rd was the first day I heard one this year.  They serve as a bellwether of the approaching monsoon season, which tends to hit right around the time we're all getting fed up with the heat.  With the monsoon, the weather changes from simply hot to sweltering.  The cicadas play their high-pitched, irritating serenade (think of a really overindulgent harmonica player who sits on one high note for hours on end, kind of like listening to John Popper live) all day long, every day until the end of summer. I can hear them right now, through the walls of the house, with the fan on and the television in the background.  They are the sound of summer madness in Phoenix.

I saw my soul

This poem comes from an image that has been burned in my memory since we took a trip to Alaska in 2005.  We flew into Anchorage and rented an RV.  We arrived late in the day, so we only made it about 70 miles out of the city before stopping at a campground next to a lake for the night.  The next morning, I was by myself, walking along the shore, when I saw this enormous bird swoop in silently and land on the lake maybe fifty yards away.  It was larger, more powerful, and a purer white than any egret or heron I’ve ever seen.  I was completely dumbstruck by the sheer improbability of this amazingly pure thing in such a dirty place (literally dirty; it was a forest after all - there was dirt everywhere).  This vision also touched me on a deeper level, but I couldn’t quite figure out how or why. 

So this morning I was working on this image in connection with another poem about Alaska.  I was trying to combine it with some other impressions and observations, and they just weren’t going together.  Then I realized:  this image is its own thing, and needs to be its own poem.  Once I separated it from the rest and began looking at it in a new way, I understood exactly why it was etched so clearly in my mind, and what it meant to me.

I saw my soul

in the incomprehensible

pure whiteness

of a trumpeter swan.

Delicate, dignified and brawny

descending calmly

to merge onto the mirrored lake

amid the ring of pine-spiked and

bouldered shore

within a corrupt and

brutal wild.

Imagine the sublimity of seeing one pure white swan settling down on this. . . 

Haiku #1

The idea behind this haiku has been rattling around my head (in prose form) for years and years.  I’ve never written a haiku before, but the thought just seemed to lend itself to the form.

sudden desert rain

washes clean the dusty lens  

clarifies the world

gift

Grace

doesn’t excuse

it erases.

It forgives, and then it frees.

Grace

doesn’t console

it relieves.

It wordlessly lifts, carries weight away.

Grace

doesn’t tolerate

It accepts everything, makes the past ok.

Grace

doesn’t understand

it just does.

It buys pain, and pays with peace.

Grace

doesn’t help

it heals.

It cleans the mortal wound, makes good again.

The greatest gift is to be good again.

falling free

Fleeting the firmament

           fleeing the fixed multitude

                a paper edge line in the sky

                       a residual streak and gone

                                   always almost missed.

                                      My resonant heart in kindred 

                                             arcs with all the fixed multitude.

                                                               Oh! for the freedom of a

                                                                                                      falling

                                                                                             
                                                                                              star!