It must be said that a few close friends have been pushing for more content here. A wonderfully loud Canadian Geologist living in Sweden at the moment and a grand and heartsick Biologist living in France. I find it interesting that the world travelers are the ones with time enough to complain to me about posting. I love complaint so I appreciate and applaud their efforts. To all my friends, not just the lucky globetrotters, I say this: life is terribly hectic but there must, must always be time enough for art and creation. If we lose our creativity then we lose our sense of worth. We become drones and automatons without any real understanding of self. It is good to have friends that will kick you in the ass when you need it. Sorry if I Have not given you guys anything interesting recently. I will try to be better.
THE ROAD AND THE END
I SHALL foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.
The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.
The dust of the traveled road
Shall touch my hands and face.
Carl Sandburg
"From One Who Stays"
How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange
That other men still go accustomed ways!
I hate their interest in the things they do.
A spectre-horde repeating without change
An old routine. Alone I know the days
Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.
AMY LOWELL
“knowing the field”
this morning begins with a ceiling of cedar
panels and my eye tracing the knots
thinking
of how much is too much to drink
and coming to no conclusions.
i remember a bad rock band preceded by a much better jukebox
that played merle, willie, and hank
over and over
a girl
with what seemed to be a bandana for a shirt
she was with a biker
who looked and sounded the part
but his hands were soft.
the best guess
being he was a lawyer
when the expensive chromed motorcycle was taken into consideration.
we had spent the early morning
under the orange and pink eastern sky
cutting hay
windrowing it
into straight and fragrant lines that stretched
twenty acres.
the dogs
ran behind us
chasing the rabbits that were confused
by the change of landscape.
we drank
well-water from gallon jugs.
sweet on our dry lips under the growing sun
and the smell of the first cutting
on our darkened skins
keeping us solid and in our easy places.
at night the coyotes
leave the swamp
to play in this moon drenched field.
the rabbits would hide in the tall alfalfa
watching.
they must learn to run today
rather than hide.
pound the blood through their delicate veins
so that it may not spill.
while the rabbits educate themselves
the farmers drink too much under neon
and dance in their heavy boots
leaving a dry mud mosaic on the floor.
artists in all of the important ways
seeing patterns
in the work, the fields, the jukebox
and the knots of the cedar.
Lawrence Scott Parkinson
From HENRY FOOL:
Henry lifts up one of Simon's newly acquired classics...
HENRY
And look, if you're gunna read
Wordsworth you've gotta get a more
up-to-date edition. This odoriferous
tome you're so attached to doesn't
even have all fourteen books of the
Prelude. And you need notes.
Commentary. I'll go to the library
and find you the best edition they
have.
SIMON
Thank you, but that's OK. I'll stop
there on my way back from work. Well,
yes, maybe not today, but, you know,
tomorrow, probably.
HENRY
Quit.
SIMON
My job?
HENRY
Yeah.
SIMON
Why?
HENRY
You need time to write, Simon. To
study. To reflect.
SIMON
But I like my job.
HENRY
We all have to make sacrifices. A
vocation like ours, Simon, is not a
nine to five thing. You can't put a
fence around a man's soul. We think
and feel where and when we can think
and feel. We are the servants of our
muse and we toil where she commands.
“description is like fencing a soul”
do not talk to me of sacrifice you lazy bastard
you beautiful and interesting lazy bastard.
i know nothing of your imprisonment but judge you all the same.
that is what we are. Judges of everything different from us.
Judges without history without crucial information
with misplaced hearts like filthy coinage stuck in worn down broken sofas
strung along the streets of some third-rate college town.
you want to fix that heart? then you reach between those cushions
and we will go from there.
only the desperate do of course. those who need Schlitz
and pool funds. those who need to find something,
anything , just to continue.
every so often a homer or hesiod rears up a disturbed voice
sometimes an ovid answers with a different tone
and a discussion commences
but mostly it is more of a bly. loud and interesting for a moment
but too heavyhanded to live very long in another head.
a frightened mind born
of a little knowledge with no direction. Structured more on chaos
theory than any sense of form. enough bullets fired find
the mark. eventually.
let us for a moment, my simon, think of you and while thinking
of you let us also paint into this picture that other bane
of humanity, jesus.
absentee father. misunderstood to a dangerous fault. portrayed
as quite sexless. a solitary dead-end job. crucified
and apparently risen.
You could be brothers, my simon, but he did not have me to guide
his way through the philistines. If anything i
am the mary Magdalene
character but instead of washing your feet I will bathe your mind
and cleanse you of your impure self-doubt and
show you how to love.
Where does one go from yahweh’s child? vonnegut of course.
sacrifice, my simon, does not just mean
one thing only, alone.
it is a process and gathering of many outcomes eventually becoming
loss. Sometimes it goes unnoticed by the one giving
up the ghost, so to speak.
could you imagine walking into a slaughterhouse in beautiful Dresden
then walking out, alive, surrounded by an allied
kristalnacht?
the sacrifice then was of the soul and born of that suffering was a
fractured multi-dimensional account of the
good guys doing bad things.
growth, in other words, my simon. growth from the soil that was
tended by an enemy and a friend. These two
things are the same.
these psycho-philosophical meanderings have put me in mind of
the russians. not those of kubrick infamy but
the originators
gogol and his self-loathing mixed with dostoyevsky’s bleak
brushstroke and chekhov’s mostly
rhetorical questioning.
these men knew sacrifice and called it life. They understood this
disease well. What a grandiose
illness it is,
my simon , to be afflicted by the expansion of the lungs in unison
with a mind unfettered by the
shackles of normalcy
like a slave freed by a mere thought. this is power that no bomb nor
war nor trial of man can
tear asunder.
mark these words as true, my simon, that even as we shit,
you and i, we are beyond
the ordinary. well beyond.
we sit at the right hand of fyodor and drink from a cup offered to
us by homer himself who is closer
to our jesus .
it matters not if we are from st. petersburg or athens or south bend.
what does mean something is where we find
ourselves eventually.
we have to travel the right paths, my simon, or we become lost and
simple. the curse of the garbage man
is simplicity
and a tight schedule. It is a necessity to gather the trash but it is
not our necessity. In fact we can live
in filth and must
to understand qualification. This is good and this is bad and this is
somewhere in between like an
over-ripe orange.
our place in this world, my simon, is to witness and then describe
with crystalline clarity at times the
absolute junk
while, at other times, we must show the most gorgeous series of
events with a single word. this
is our test
to know what to sacrifice and when.
Lawrence Scott Parkinson
“A good-sized hate for the boat-tailed grackle”
I used to sleep poorly
Because I was sure the devil
Was beneath my bed.
You cured that with your simple presence.
I could hear you breath and dream
And knew then
That it was safe for me to do the same.
I awoke to chores and you helped feed the cattle
And the overbred horses would stamp out their frustration
In staccato code against the bottom rail of the corral
Until we poured the oats into the trough.
They purred like barn-cats then.
This fascinated you.
You stood at my side as the hay caught fire
The jumping flames
And the screams and the smell
Like where the devil really lived.
That night I prayed that he was back under my bed
So we could have it out
For what he did
For those he stole.
I told you to leave and you did
And I closed my eyes challenging
the black angel
But he had other appointments
Instead
I rode bareback the bay
Through a clover -field under fresh cotton and sapphire.
I had on the boots we could never afford.
I was followed by tawny mourning-doves
And cardinals dripping scarlet
And out of every lost feather grew a red-oak.
I dug my hands into the black wire mane
And felt the equine history overshadow my own
The power I used and took for granted
Was bleeding up through my arms defying
Gravity and other laws that we will name
Without ever really comprehending
Behind me a sound
Of tearing muscle
The ripping of flesh
And beyond the tragic doves
Beyond the cardinals shedding their souls
Beyond the now tall and massive oaks
A blackness condensed on the horizon
Like a harsh wool blanket pulled over
A once laughing face
The cloud screamed with a thousand voices
My head snapped forward
Because if I stared too long
I would see the things behind me
The field stretched on into small hills
And on the far side
Mountains of a color that cannot exist
A yellow purple like a bruise between
The azure sky and the fertile earth
Salvation lay in those unlikely mountains
Again the dark chorus
louder and sharper
as if it needed my attention to continue on
turning
the red oaks were ash
surrounded by bright embers
that once were cardinals and doves
there were birds still
the cloud was made of black birds
shrieking diving snapping
like miniature crows
eyes without pity or empathy
eyes devoid of anything like a soul
they looked like a thousand rags
soaked in oil
begging for a flame
the animal beneath me was powerful but tiring
and I could feel its heart
pounding on the anvil of its ribs
I looked again to the mountains
And standing on the last hill
Between myself and peace
Was a tall man outfitted like a priest
In a habit the color of a deep hole in the ground
And the air around him bent
As if not wanting to be too close
The hellish menagerie was almost upon me
And driving me into god-awful company
As the first bird touched me
with an ebony wing
the tall man looked at me and smiled
warmly
like he knew me.
“are you there?”
I asked into the night sounds
Of crickets and bullfrogs
I took a deep breath and focused on the ceiling
That my mother had painted eggshell white
“to let the light in” she had said
And it seemed to
“are you there? Please?”
And I heard you in the hall
Pitter-pattering into the room
Licking my hopeful outstretched hand
And crawling under the bed
To drive the boat-tailed grackles and the devil himself
Away from the mountains.
There is very little difference between
god and a good dog.
Lawrence Scott Parkinson
2 years ago
