Poems and Stories

Altitude

I have walked below Cho Oyo in it’s brooding slumber,
Seen the tempest avalanche unravel the sleeve of care.
I have feared Tibetan traders in their wild low tents of umber,
Seen nature’s unseen fury take weary partners unawares.

I have pounded up the trail towards heaven
Following Orion and his dogs to where
I did taste both lump and leaven
In life’s hearth bread and still want more.

And when no earthly food would strengthen
I held my breath and did implore
The traders my load to un-encumber
Take it with them to a different shore.

They laughed, offering tea in their tents of umber.
Tasting bitter and more alive, it fed and left a deeper hunger.

This I Know

Organ meats
In strong pot liquor
Will make you swoon
Just that much quicker.

Turkey neck gravy,
dumplings,
Pecan pie,
Now ain’t that something?

My waistline grows
With every birthday
If no button pops
It weren’t no good day.

As the years roll by
One thing I’m knowing –
No pie in heaven,
Then I ain’t going.

At The Queers Museum

I went to the queers museum today
To see the show about the bad old days.
No warrior gays, no teacher gays,
No coach gays, no minister gays,
No politician gays, no savior gays,
No redeemer gays, no Christ-in-all gays,
No Muslim gays, no Jew gays,
Not even any penguin gays.
Where was everybody?

A Chapter From An Unfinished Novel

Steve’s Life Style

The days began to speed up and blur together in Phillipa’s mind. She was barely keeping up at school and Steve was incessant in his desire to see her. She wanted to slow things down a bit, but there was a part of her that found his unpredictable side incredibly attractive and enjoyed not knowing where this was heading.  He had invited her to his condo that night for sushi. They were going to hatch a plan to extract DNA from Kenny and analyze it with the help of Steve’s friend.

Phillipa and April were sitting outside on a park bench, people watching and enjoying the spring sunshine.

“April, can I ask you something? How much do suppose an archeology professor makes a year?”

“I dunno, not much. Why?”

“Steve seems to have a lot of money. His condo is fabulous and he always takes me to the best restaurants in town. He wants to take me to Mexico over spring break to a resort near a Mayan archeological dig.”

“Are you complaining? I’ll trade you for my boyfriend who takes me out for Mexican food twice a week and lives with four other guys. Maybe Steve’s family has money.”

Phillipa put the thought out of her mind and tried to concentrate on studying for her organic chemistry exam. Later she want back to her dorm room, put on a sleeveless cotton sundress, sandals and slipped off her panties at the last minute before leaving and walking across campus to Steve’s condo. Approaching his building, she spotted a real estate flyer advertising one of the condo’s in the building for sale. She slipped it out of it’s plastic holder and looked for the asking price: nearly a million dollars.

She pushed the intercom button for Steve’s apartment. “It’s me, ” she said. “I’ll be right down,” said Steve. “Hey Babe, you look fabulous,” said Steve after opening the door. He grabbed her and gave her a long, wet kiss. “I have something to show you,” he said as they rode the elevator to his top-floor condo. Phillipa loved spending time at Steve’s. It was a living space that seemed to echo the inside of Steve’s mind; it was full of artifacts that gave it a madly eclectic, primal too, even a little sinister. Floor to ceiling shelves along one wall held Mayan dolls, some gruesome in their depiction of ritual sacrifice. Another wall  was  covered with rubbings from petroglyphs from around the world.  Pre-historic hunters tracked  ancient game  across  long-gone  wildernesses, often sporting enormous erections as they hunted. There were photographs of “preserved elders” from a New Zealand tribe who literally smoked their ancestors and placed them on racks high in the mountains as objects of worship.

“Take a look at this,” said Steve, handing her a long, black tube wrapped with string at one end and decorated with intricate carved patterns that looked like leaves. “It is a blow-gun from Paraguay. It is probably a five hundred years old. I got it from a friend working a dig in Cerro Cora. It was a hunting weapon — very deadly. “

While she looked at the blowgun, Steve went into the kitchen and brought out the most beautiful tray of sushi she had ever seen — full of startling looking concoctions.

“Try some of this. — it’s bluefin tuna.  Very rare. That is abalone.  This is Russian cavier,” said Steve while opening the sake. “All extremely fresh — flown in today. I acquired a taste for the exotic stuff while working on a dig near Osaka. They eat deer sushi there — amazing. We aren’t eating Bambi tonight, though.”

They ate on his balcony overlooking the University of Washington campus, enjoying the sunset and watching the alpenglow on Mt. Ranier.

“I’ve been thinking about getting Kenny’s DNA,” said Steve. “The  best  chance we have is  probably some  preserved  bone marrow, perhaps from the  femur.  I can extract it without  damaging the bone too much. Do you think you can ‘borrow’ his femur for me the next time you are at the Museum?”

“Sure, Indiana, what else do you want me to steal for you?”

“You aren’t getting cold feet, are you? I only need it for a day or so. Then you can return it.”

Phillipa had  misgivings about the plan, but they were being washed away in the glow of the sunset, the sake and Steve’s charm. “I’ll get you your leg bone, but it will cost you. ” she said.

Cororate Offsite

Hotel schmooze, you snooze, you lose,

coffee shop tennebrae and hop

to work on long tables of papers,

endless talk of how to work harder, smarter,

leaner, meaner.

Workout sweat togs wander halls

meandering grey crimson-striped looks

in mirrored walls unending,

salmon strips on lettuce beds,

suits and ties and shoes conferring,

joking, lurking,

softly ringing cell phones pinging,

smiles and sighs unheard,

undreaming.

The River Road

The chain link fence holds high the hawk,

A curlew stalks his muddy dance.

And in paling sky no telltale sign

Of deaths poor plan for concurrence.

So truckers dream your steamy miles

And fertile brides keep wide your aisle.

Accountants peck at your hideous nits

And lumbermen your woods defile.

Soon comes the day when the curtain tears,

The heavy night shall reap our fears.

Today the hawk and the curlew call,

The moment knows what death forswears.

The Bedside (a fifty-word mini-saga)

The king lay dying. He sent for his son who came and knelt at the old man’s bedside.

“There is something you must know,” said the King. “I am not your father. I killed your father by accident in battle. “

“I know,” said the boy, drawing his bone-handle hunting knife.

Poem For Iran

Watching the waves of words go by
   I can't tell if you fell in the street like Neda
Or made it to the alley and a neighbor took you in.
    I can't tell if the Basij caught you
And took you to a basement and beat you bloody.

Still I watch the sea waves of your words.
  Some form fierce alliances, marching like cannon fire.
Others say you want a better life for your daughter.
   I fear someone has marked your doorway
    And will come in the night
And your jagged screams will be your monument.

In the time of stars and goodbyes and leaving
  I will still watch for you and remember your words.
In the time of grieving and covering of heads
  I will watch for you.
In the stars I will watch for you.
   I will know you by the tracks of words.

It Was Like This

It was like this, grandson. In the fall of ’08 there was people walkin’ down the middle of the street, smiling and cryin’ at the same time. They was hanging on each other, crying and laughing and weeping. Staying up all night ’cause there was a black man elected President.  A black man. Noways do I say I could ever live to see that day. Ordinary men broke down and cried. I did too. I was drivin’ home from work and I had to pull over.

Don’t you let anybody ever tell you you ain’t no good. Nobody got the right to say that to any man. Hold your head up, son. No matter what. No matter what they say, no matter how they look at you, no matter what they leave you out of, even now.

I remember of when I was a boy we lived in a little house on a man’s property near Estacada and helped him farm. In those days our toilet was on the porch. Can you believe that? I remember watchin’ my father walk up to the man and touch his hat to his forehead and bow his head and ask him if we could please have an indoor toilet. I felt worse ashamed of him touching his forehead like that worse than anything. Those days are gone now. You don’t understand how it was.

Now listen. In the great gettin’ up day when Jesus comes and all is bright in his glory, that day will be His Day. I will shout and sing Hallelujah. But the day we elected Mr. Obama to be our President. That was our day.

And that day was mighty fine too.

Ah, Paris!

Sitting under the maple trees

In the gardens of the Tuileries,

A bird shat on my hand.

And when I did not move,

Again on my jacket.

In Paris, even the birds do not suffer fools gladly.

Stories From My Father On The Anniversary of D-Day

He was old school. He came home from war and said almost nothing about it for forty years.

This is what I remember him telling me, my brothers and my uncle.

He crossed the Atlantic in a troop ship filled with soldiers who were terrified the ship would be sunk by a German U-boat. For some reason they were given unlimited alcohol, to calm them down perhaps, and a lot of them were throwing up. The stench was awful.

He landed at Normandy with the 30th infantry five days after the initial invasion, replacing a chaplain who had been killed.  They were still fighting in the hedgerows above the beaches.

The first time he saw a man disemboweled, he threw up.

Once he saw a man standing in a tank turret who had blinked during an explosion. Hot metal shards of shrapnel had pierced the man’s eyelids and were sticking out of his closed eyes. Dad grabbed a pair of pliers and pulled them out. He said his hands were shaking so hard he could barely do it.

He learned to fish with hand grenades in the stocked ponds of the French nobles.

One day while driving in his jeep, he had a strong feeling he should get out. He did and a few seconds later a piece of shrapnel the size of his fist tore through the back of his seat and then went through the dashboard.

One day he had lunch in a large field with a lot of other officers and General Patton. It wasn’t a big deal.

He was standing one day in a walled courtyard when a shell exploded. A fragment cut his cheek and that was the only wound he got in the war. They gave him a purple heart.

He had a litter-holder welded to the hood of his jeep and drove out on the battlefield retrieving wounded, though it was not his job. They gave him a bronze star and said it would have been silver, if they had not already given out their quota.

He fought at the Battle of the Bulge and crossed the Bridge at Remagen.

The men in his unit called him Brandy, even though he did not drink.

He met the Russians at the Elbe river near Magdeburg.

His unit took over one hundred percent casualties.

He traveled back across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary.

At home he thought college would be good place to transition back to being a civilian.

One day, looking out of his dorm window he saw my Mother come around the corner of a building and said, “that is the woman I’m going to marry.”

They had forty one years together.

Note For My Son

It begins and ends with dogs.

My first memory is of hanging onto the collar of a patient yellow lab.

In between come children, first glowing, then gangly, then somewhat surly, then gone for now.

In between come jobs, first with the hands, then with ratiocination, then with anger at death.

In between come deadlines, day camps, bad bosses, the random deaths of friends, school plays, kidney stones, paychecks and endless television.

In between come laughter, singing, if you are lucky — climbing the wild mountains under a blue-black sky, broken bones, day surgery and bridge work on back molars.

You will have regrets. Everyone does.

When sorrow comes, the dogs will be there.

I had a yellow lab, a black dachsund, a brown dachsund, a lovely Bernese with bad hips,  and now a fiesty Welch Corgi.

If you feel afraid of something, do it anyway.

Learn to forgive, even me.

A Lammargeier

Scything the dawn fields of sky

Leaves stubble of stars

Ask Me by William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

A Country Song Without Verbs #1

Baby shoes, baby clothes,
Empty cradle, lonely home.
Aching heart, worried mind,
Lonesome feeling, end of the line.

Freeway headlights, pouring rain,
Sinking feeling, aching pain,
Suburb houses all the same,
Nothing more to lose, everything to gain.

Font porch lamp light
My ex and her man,
My kids behind them
And a desperate plan.

Anxious eyes, worried kids,
Back seat silence, State patrol car skids.
So-called justice, so-called court.
Restraining order, last resort.

Baby shoes, baby clothes
Empty cradle, lonely home.
Aching heart, worried mind,
Lonesome feeling, end of the line.

I Sing The Body IKEA

I sing the body IKEA, noble in spirit, containing multitudes, worlds within worlds.

Oh, blue natal church of our deliverance, birthing room of our new beginnings. Receive us.

We are poor supplicants, barely worthy to visit sacred Smaland.  Receive our tithings and grant us entrance. Your ranks of chaise lounges, your rows of toilet brushes with matching caddy and soap dispensers sing hymns of annointed ease and grace.

Thy Swedish object names sibilant and soothing, speak of nobler realms and simpler times, unsullied, and unhurried.  Like the Celts of old, who laid the golden boughs on the sacred forest hearth, we  place our rubber trays of utensils on the veneered common life table of our humanity.

We gather our indulgences and file slowly towards your checkout alter, mindful that our grace is fleeting. And though our last minute purchases of compact flourescent bulbs may only nourish our desire for a but a nano-second longer than it takes to scan them and place them in the folds of our robes, grant us that nano-second in peace.

Now penitent, watchful through blinkered eyes for we know not the hour of our arising, with the power of our mute relics quickly ebbing through the tines of our shopping carts, we hurry to our cars, assume the position behind the steering wheel and proceed in reverse through the gates of thy blazing blue Eden.

Seen From The Train

A blathery of world travelers

A paint pot of flowers in a summer field

A smudge of canals

An O’Keefe of wild flowers

A hump of dry brown hills

A paling of morning light on  farm fields

A florescence of mothballed batttleships

A rustication of quonset huts

A tedium of fence line

An impaling of river pilings

A flickering of bridge girders

A clotting of concrete rubble

A misery of storefronts

A bramble of steel piping

A shudder of field grass

A velvet of cover crops

A catenary of power lines

An Edward Hopper steel warehouse with a blue door

A chuckle of small birds

A droop of palm trees

An audacity of hill houses

A sweetness of marsh grass

A wilding of grafitti

A revival gathering of oak trees

A gust of summer scarves

A bloom of sewer smells

A joined sideburns and handlebar moustache on a farm worker

I Loved You by Pushkin, Translated by Nabakov

I loved you: lover, perhaps is yet

not quite extinguised in my soul;

but let it trouble you no more;

with nothing do I wish to sadden you.

I loved you mutely, without hope,

either by shyness irked or jealously;

I loved you so sincerely, with such tenderness,

as by another loved God grant you be.

Wild Things in Captivity by D.H. Lawrence

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try.

A Poem Robert Burns, who was dared to rhyme “Timbuktu” in a poem:

When Tim and I a walkin’ went

We spied three lassies in a tent.

Since they were three and we but two,

I bucked one and Timbuktu.

A Poem by W.H. Auden

Guard your civility with guns,

Your modes and your declensions.

Any lout can spear with ease

Singular Archimedes.

A Radio With Guts by Charles Bukowski

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street
I used to get drunk
and throw the radio through the window
while it was playing, and, of course,
it would break the glass in the window
and the radio would sit there on the roof
still playing
and I’d tell my woman,
“Ah, what a marvelous radio!”
the next morning I’d take the window
off the hinges
and carry it down the street
to the glass man
who would put in another pane.
I kept throwing that radio through the window
each time I got drunk
and it would sit there on the roof
still playing-
a magic radio
a radio with guts,
and each morning I’d take the window
back to the glass man.
I don’t remember how it ended exactly
though I do remember
we finally moved out.
there was a woman downstairs who worked in
the garden in her bathing suit,
she really dug with that trowel
and she put her behind up in the air
and I used to sit in the window
and watch the sun shine all over that thing
while the music played.

A Word To Husbands by Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming

With love in the loving cup,

Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;

Whenever you’re right, shut up.

I Made A Mistake by Charles Bukowski

“Keyboarding ” 101

My computer keys stare back at me,
Blind, inert, cupped in their fake ease.
Together we waltz across Texas, hand in..[CAPS LOCK] [CRAP!].
Meanwhile, my meandering ideas paper the walls,
Run across the dining room table and across the patio,
But the keyboard..the damn keyboard..backspace…dammmm…esc, esc
Del,del,del…

My Dog’s Feet Run To Wickedness

Anarchy isn’t what you are about.

There is method behind your whiskered snout.

And though God gave you no waggable tail

You are filled with glee my home to assail.

If you be Coyote, the Trickster returned,

We are not amused — now go tip over the fern.

Goodbye President Bush

I’ll won’t miss the solipsistic swagger,

The mooing eyes, the pouting anger,

But I’ll wave in grandeur like an Italian duke

To see your finger leave the nukes.

Intoxication

Henry David Thoreau said that a match was finally found for him: he fell in love with a shrub oak.

I always thought he was a few bricks short of a load.

Brilliant and prophetic, no doubt.

But where was the moistness, the fever dreams?

He had one human love — early and unrequited. Then he turned his attention to trees and the

Merrimack river and barn swallows flying across the face of the moon.

Well, now that I think about it.

Maybe he was on to something.

A Good Dog Gone Bad

Those were my shoes

And those were my glasses.

If you had two,

I’d kick both your asses.

The Ant, by Ogden Nash

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?