All my friends are treasures as far as I'm concerned. Take Walter Parks, one of America's finest singer-songwriters. Walter stands well over six feet tall. He wears classic "old school" hats which enhance his dapper choices: polished boots, tailored jackets, and colorful shirts that any fashionista would envy.A vintage guitar is his essential accessory. You're likely to see a 1953 or 1957 Gibson ES 175, 1965 Fender Jazz Bass, 1967 Guild Starfire Bass, or if you're lucky, a 1929 Tenor banjo. 

Walter collects old instruments like car buffs collect vintage automobiles. He spots forgotten gems lying in moldy basements with bodies scratched and three strings missing. It would be safe to say Walter Parks is in the resurrection business.   

Walter's songs are as well constructed as his guitars. Like a good poem, his music layers in your imagination and remains with you long after his songs are over.

During his concerts, you'll travel to New Mexico, "She says New Mexico is where she's gotta go, cause she's gonna die in Carolina." His ethereal voice and chord combinations relax you into meditation, "Like something sacred, like something beautiful, like something so divine." 

He'll take you back in time to date night in New York City, "We walk into the Roxy, we walk into a dream, go-gos are dancing above the clouds, or, so it seems." He'll sing the story of the southern preacher who drives a powder-blue Lincoln and falls in love with a hippy chick who wears a cowboy hat and a sheer sun dress. The preacher's "done for" when the hippy chick tells him "she gets more booty when Buddha's around."

Even though, Walter  has circled the globe, loves the road, speaks French, and has appeared on the big stages like Carnage Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the Cannes Film Festival, he is an original American musician from the cracker lands of Northern Florida. His finger is on the pulse of what makes our country great. Enjoy his tunes: www.walterparks.com. 

Yesterday, during my first morning in Asheville, I had coffee with Court McCracken, a visual artist and blogger. We met at Clingman Café in Asheville's River Arts District. Court has a growing blog called Art Nurture. Since I've been blogging a bit, I was curious about any new tips she might have. 

She told me she'd been researching Copyblogger for ideas on how to write compelling subject headlines. She said, that's where she learned about The Reason Why strategy. For practice she posted: The Top 17 Reasons Why the World Needs You to be an Artist.

I liked #10 the best:
"The World doesn't need any more crud." 

Court's list reminds us of things we already know. Click here to read it. 

Do you know the photojournalist James Nachtwey? He is considered the best war photographer in the world. Last Friday, I had the privileged of facilitating the weekly TEDxNewYork conversation salon. It was my job to choose a talk from the TED online video archive.  I choose Nachtwey's 2007 TED prize acceptance talk:  My Photographs Bear Witness. 

I picked the talk for two reasons: 1) there's a scene in it that change the way I think about my role as a poet; 2) I was afraid to show the talk to a large group of New Yorkers (60 or so) for fear the graphic images would turn them off. 

My fears were unfounded. More than one person referred to the image that had changed me. A seasoned photojournalist framed Nachtwey very well when he asked the group: "Do you have the courage to lift your camera?" 

When he said it, I wondered if I did; I hoped so. What about you, do you have the courage to lift your camera? 

I concluded the evening by reciting some lines from Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming." All told, it was an inspiring hour on the last Friday of the month. Watch the talk and you'll understand why: My Photographs Bear Witness. 

Last night I streamed NEVER SORRY a documentary film about the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei. As you probably already know, that guy has something to be afraid of. His art goes way beyond one painting, one book, one photograph, one artifact offered to the public for critical judgement. He defies a state that punishes artists like bureaucracies shred paper.

WeiWei shares the tradition of artist as witness with many around the globe. So when I think of my own fears of being judged by my peers, I think first of the artists like WeiWei who risk all knowing they will be judged, celebrated, vilified, and sometimes silenced.

Here’s to courage. May we all have enough of it to wear more than green on St. Patrick’s Day.

Turn your thoughts for a moment to what the poet Charles Wright tells us in the following lines from his poem Lonesome Pine Special.   

It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things, 
                                       the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
                                the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from, And their frayed loveliness.

 Happy Holidays 
Christmas Trees by Robert Frost (1920)
(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
 I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Thinking of the recent shooting in CT, this poem came to mind. 

  Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

     I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas! 
        When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; 
    When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass, 
    And the river flows like a stream of glass; 
        When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, 
    And the faint perfume from its chalice steals — 
    I know what the caged bird feels!

    I know why the caged bird beats his wing 
        Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; 
    For he must fly back to his perch and cling 
    When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; 
        And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars 
    And they pulse again with a keener sting — 
    I know why he beats his wing!

    I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, 
        When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— 
    When he beats his bars and he would be free; 
    It is not a carol of joy or glee, 
        But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, 
    But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings — 
    I know why the caged bird sings!

More than one tree grows in Brooklyn and the oak on the corner of St. Marks and Washington is bare except for at few straggling brown leaves and one sparrow hopping from limb to limb on its way to bread crumbs scattered along the sidewalk.

I might take my muffin and scatter the last bits for the sparrow, because there are always sparrows. The street front window here at Sit and Wonder widens to its old brick walls.

I’m reminded of how hard and beautiful work is. The laying on of hands in tasks that never end. The river knows why it makes sand and why otters with muddy bellies shoot across its moving waters. We could all afford to know more about work, sand, otters, and time. I will not force my memory to tremble with certainty; my soul will do that for me.

I was walking in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris just before Thanksgiving this year. It was cold, cloudy. I passed hundreds of the well attended family tombs with fresh flowers and polished stones that were easy to read:

“À La Memoire de Simantov CARIO, 1906-1942 / Jacques BEHAR, 1873-1943 / Rachel BEHAR, 1884-1943 / Morts à AUSCHWITZ.” 

Scattered among the remembered, were the forgotten tombs with their roofs falling down, brown leaves tangled in spider webs, broken stained glass windows, and doors leaning off rusty hinges bolted into  stone walls crumbling to sand. “That's where the old stags go,” I thought.

No feathers float in this New York Cafe called Pecan,
only people gliding in and out of the green door that opens
on Varick Street where Friday afternoon begins its late
run up to dinner: forks on the table, napkins
pressed, dishes polished. The hungry are always
hungry. I do not wish bad magic on anyone. I wish
only the simple pleasures of men who smoke cigars,
tap their worn shoes on warm sand, and watch couples
sip gin while they stare at the sea. These men who capture
only with their eyes, run with the years, old stags already
lost in the forgotten wilderness.

]]> http://www.jamesnave.com/i-wish-only/feed/ 0 http://www.jamesnave.com/late-fall/ http://www.jamesnave.com/late-fall/#comments Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:53:29 +0000 James Navé http://www.jamesnave.com/?p=2838 “When the Frost is on the Punkin” is a post from: The Poet's Log/James Navé

“When the Frost is on the Punkin” is a post from: The Poet's Log/James Navé

When fall rolls around, I'm reminded of James Whitcomb Riley's old poem WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN. I memorized it years ago when I was performing poetry for school students.

The poem has the old language of the country. Language that seems to have little place where I am now in Brooklyn thinking back on days in Western North Carolina chasing rabbits in the high fields to blow off the fumes after too much Thanksgiving turkey.

WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and the gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin'; of the guineys and the cluckin' of the hens
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O it's then the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock

They's somethin kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here -
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny monring of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock -
When the frost is on the punkin and fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries - kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A preachin' sermons to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below - the clover overhead! -
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too!
I don't know how to tell it - but if sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me -
I'd want to 'commodate 'em - all the whole-indurin' flock -
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

 

 

 

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BUTT IN THE CHAIR Imaginative Storm Paris Writing Workshop. Facilitated by poet James Navé Saturday, 17 November, 9:30h-17:50 Metro: Odeon.

Do you procrastinate? Do you second guess your writing? Does your writing suffer because of it? Are you so busy that you simply don’t put your Butt in the Chair and get on with it.

Want to change that?  Come to the Butt in the Chair Paris Writing Workshop, buckle up, and get on with it. Perfect for all writers: memoir, fiction, poetry, journalism, social media, blogging, and the rest.

A real bargain at 150 euro. To learn more or to register email James Navé at nave@jamesnave.com. You know what to do: Butt in the Chair!

I'm having a beer at The Asheville Public (TAP), a bistro housed in the old Silver Dollar restaurant. When I as a boy, my grandfather used to take me to the Silver Dollar where we ate bacon, fried eggs, and grits. I wasn't allowed coffee. Years later, the owners of the Silver Dollar moved the building from its original location to where it sits today.

I never I imagine I'd be sitting in the former Silver Dollar looking at rows of liquor, taps full of craft beer, and candles burning under fancy flowers. Never did I imagine my former breakfast restaurant would feature: Deconstructed Mac & Cheese, Bobotie Cape May Curried Meat Loaf, Elements of Soy, or Butternut Ravioli.

My iPhone lies face down on the bar. Michael Jackson sings inside the speakers. Cat, the bartender, celebrates Halloween by sporting a Boy Scout persona which drapes across her with an Appollonian sense of a 16 year old boy replacing the 24 year old woman who is very much alive under the sash of her merit badges.

Cranberry and plum bitters sit next to orange flower water. A couple of young men, two stools down, chat with each other. One is a faux doctor, the other is an urban cowboy nursing a tall Blue Ribbon, still $3.

November arrives at midnight. The winter months will afford me the private time that requires attention, reflection, repose, and the acceptance of naked trees, short days, and frost covered berries consumed by a thousand common starlings, passerine birds in the family of Sturnidae.

Night consumes my life.

Oh Jazz man, play that hurricane blues rising through the marsh grass warmer than a coastal moon. Black magic June loves steel rhythm blues and robs melancholy to make me happy. Oh Jazz man, when the air is thin, fill my mouth with night.

Fall in the Carolina mountains suggests time can stand still.

When I took this photo this morning, I wondered what I'd look like if I covered my shaved head with hair as long and wild as the flowers on this bush.

“Once I get started, I don’t have a problem generating work. I need discipline and accountability. I’m a procrastinator. I need someone to answer to. Where’s that writing workshop that puts me in a bare room, straps me to a chair, and denies me food and water until I’ve written 5,000 words?” When Julia spoke these words at the Love Apple in Taos last July, our table roared with laughter.

When you gather a group of writers around a table, the conversation inevitably goes to writing.  I was having dinner with Allegra,Tish, Dora, Cisco, and Julia, who was visiting from Chicago. Julia went on to say how tired she was of safe, sensitive writing workshops and how, when you are a paid writer with deadlines looming, “the shit is real.”

This is when the notion of Dominatrix Writing Workshop was born. Tish said she’d bring the whip. Dora volunteered boots. Cisco, who was known to lasso chairs, said he’d throw in the ropes. “We can power the printers with treadmills and tell hungry writers, no pages no lunch... No leaving without your manuscripts!”

We’d hit on something. We all knew it.

Sure, we’ve all located our boots and flexed our muscles since that night. And while there have been no incidents of unwanted chair-strapping, we are holding ourselves and each other more accountable to the craft. We are holding our clients more accountable to the words and pages. And yes, we are getting shit done.

Thanks, Tish Vallés for co-writing this with me.

How Would I Paint the Future? As large red ball in the hands of a child, her face glowing rain and warm mist, her dreams turning in a tropical sea.

How would I paint happiness? As the smell of a lover’s breath spreading into a lifetime of sunlight that edges  along bare limbs on a warm February day.

How would I paint love? Oval eyes, a nose of gold, and lips drinking an entire ocean, gallons of waves at a time.

How would I paint a leap of faith? A blind man picking flowers after midnight  with lights spinning around his head.

How would I paint death? Red like a great dragon with wings of lightning fanning the sky, the whole world held in its claws trembling, always trembling.

How would I paint nostalgia? A room of diffused light, palms brushing adobe walls. Fingers shadow dancing on the keys for a woman, drinking alone, hiding her eyes from a man in a white tuxedo crossing the carpet to the bar.

How many times have you moved in your lifetime?  I can't count how many times I've  packed up my stuff, loaded it in a car or a truck, paused for one last look at the empty rooms before I clicked the door shut and walked away. Sometimes, loneliness followed me down the driveway, other times, excitement. Either way, like a folk song, I was moving on.

Yesterday, Tish and I moved into our new digs in Brooklyn on St. Marks Avenue. It's a large studio with a loft, tall south facing windows, a few trees out back, and a pretty good view of backyard Brooklyn, which you don't see from the street. It's an old building that's been renovated.

I've promised myself, I'll stay put.  Well, stay put starting in December when I return from my fall work schedule which has me in Asheville till end of October. Don't forget you're invited to come to my covered dish dinner this coming Sunday at Hawk and Ivy That same day, I'm hosting an Imaginative Storm Creative Writing Workshop from 12-4.  Hope to see you on Sunday.

You’re invited to my Book Launch Celebration and Poetry Party, Sunday, September 30, 5-8 p.m. Hawk and Ivy, Barnardsville, NC 

Please join me and help celebrate my new work, Looking at Light, 100 Poems in 100 Days After Cancer. Come at 5 p.m. for a covered dish dinner party. Then gather on the porch a poetry party and salon discussion about how poetry helped me stay connected while I was healing from surgery for prostate cancer. My surgeon, Dr. David DeHoll, will be on hand for this conversation. 

There will be a modest $5 fee to thank Hawk & Ivy for the generous use of their beautiful property and to thank Eve for her flowers. Directions to Hawk and Ivy 

WORKSHOP EARLIER THAT DAY: Join me for an Imaginative Storm Writing Workshop, 12-4 pm. In this workshop, we’ll explore how poetry and writing can give you the strength to release yourself into the unreachable depth and velocity of the breaching stream.  Come write with us. Tuition: $40

A couple of days ago, I was an online conversations about right and wrong. The blogger on the other end took the position that right is right and wrong. While I'm a fan of doing what's right, I tend to think there are shades of grey between to the two poles. What follows is my response to his right is right comment.

Lately, I've come to think that while in theory right is right and wrong is wrong, there are usually at least two sides to every  story. Many times both people think they are right.

When you say, there is only one side of right, what do you mean?

For example, you live in a modern small town in West Texas. You're an upright citizen. Your next door neighbor's dog barks constantly and keeps you up almost every night.  You ask your neighbor in a friendly manner if he can do something about it. Your neighbor does nothing. The dog barks for another week.

What do you do?

1) Report the neighbor to the authorities whom you know will do nothing because the neighbor has a brother on the force?

2) Continue to ask the neighbor to be considerate?

3) Suck it up and buy ear plugs?

4) Sneak across one night at 2 am, choke the dog with your bare hands, and throw the body in the fast moving creek?

What choice is right? Are there other options?

Two bullies, Brett Spivey and Ronald Fender stood like prison guards at the top of the wooden stairs that climbed the red clay bank at the corner of the ball field. Both were too tall, too heavy, and too old, fifteen, to be in the eight grade. But there they stood, their large heads drooping forward like ripe gourds infected with orange pimples.

As little Buddy Evan walked across the playground, he kept his fingers crossed that the wooden stairs would be free of the skinheads who had chosen him, about a week ago, as their afterschool plaything. But every afternoon at 3:25, Brett and Ronald perched at the top of the stairs waiting for him like a couple of dumpster diving pigs without brains.

And every afternoon, when Buddy saw them leaning on the rail, his tongue secreted a bitter metallic taste that was a cross between gun oil and burnt liver in a cast iron pan. These goons weighted 145 each. Buddy topped out at 121 with his school bag. No play book on earth would give Buddy the edge. Truth was, if he had an edge, it wasn’t much.

All he could hope for was that the two budding Hitlers would let him pass in peace.

Please join me this coming Saturday, September 8 in downtown Asheville for my book launch reading of Looking at Light, 100 Poems in 100 Days. 7 pm at Malaprops Cafe. Click here for details.

THE VISITING ASS

A friend of mine, Jonathan Slator, who is a wonderful poet and a very busy man sent me an email this morning.  See what he said below, then  see my answer after.

JONATHAN’S EMAIL

Nave, thanks for the offer to read my new material. At the moment I am consumed with setting up this crazy film, and though I would hesitate to spout some crap about only being able to write when the "muse visiteth" I feel I have to be at least approaching a mood of some tranquility before I can produce anything remotely worthwhile.

What I can do is read and i wondered if you had any suggestions of poets whose work I might find interesting.

cheers js

MY ANSWER

First, I'm more of a fan of the "visiting ass" (in the chair) than I am of the "visiting muse." I do think tranquility plays a role, but am not sure which comes first, the ass or tranquility. In my more frazzled moments, when I pause, take a breath, and reflect, tranquility emerges.  Perhaps, it’s that easy.

I've often read, that the poet William Carlos Williams, who was also a pediatrician,  wrote many of his poems on his prescription pads. This explains all those short poems he was famous for like, The Red Wheelbarrow. I suspect William understood well the power of pausing between patients to scribble a bit of verse. I wonder if he ever said, "to hell with drugs" and prescribed a poem to be filled in a state of tranquility.

I encourage you to leave the notion of "producing anything remotely worthwhile" behind. I heard you read in Taos and believe me, what you make/write is worthwhile. Remember the moans of surprise and delight when you read? They moaned for good reason.

As for books of poetry, I like Marvin Bell's "Mars Being Red." It's a wonderful book that walks the line between social commentary and political protest: "Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers / on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost / inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush / of youth, while our steps released the squeaks . . . "

Philip Levine  is another poet I like. His book "What Work Is" uses plain language in complicated ways. You punch the clock when you read his work: “We stand in the rain in a long line / waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. / You know what work is--if you're / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it."

Finally, I recommend reading poetry books cover to cover like novels. I also recommend checking each poem after you read it. Some people hate writing in books. I’m not one of them. I like to leave marks.

Here’s to all the “happy asses in chairs” all over the world.

Best, Navé

INITIATION: MY FIRST POEM  

When I was a boy, my maternal grandmother, Roberta, would say to me: “There’s going to be a gypsy woman with two lions in tow come over the mountain and take you away.”

Roberta-all her grandchildren called her Roberta-graduated from Meredith College in 1919 and soon afterward moved to Western North Carolina to teach in a small school in Murphy. In her later years, she worked at the Buncombe Health Department and lived in a large two-story white house at the end of our road, Pine Lane.

Roberta was a poet. She favored a Waterman fountain pen. “A fountain pen slows you down and gives you time to think,” she said.

One day, Roberta walked with me to the big pine next to her house and pointed toward Spencer’s Mountain. “That’s where the gypsy woman lives,” she said. When she went back inside, I gazed at Spencer’s Mountain and wondered what if the gypsy would look like when she came to get me.

Would she have gold hoop earrings and dance to Spanish music? Would the bracelets around her wrists glitter like the rings on her thumbs? Would her black hair flow over her red silk dress? Would she really have two lions in tow?

Robert’s gypsy woman fostered my tendency towards poetry, daydreaming, imagination, and fantasy. Writing it all down as prose and poetry came years later, when I was in my early thirties.

How do you find creative identity? Essay by James Navé

My father was an Appalachian fiddler who also played guitar, mandolin, accordion, and piano. As a boy growing up in Western North Carolina, he taught me how to play the guitar. As soon as I learned enough cords to play rhythm, he started taking me to the old time music circles that gathered almost every night somewhere in Buncombe County.

The musicians came from all walks of life, tobacco farmers, nurses, lawyers, mechanics, truck drivers, plumbers. If you asked any one of them what they did, they would say, "I play music." Because they loved playing music, the question of their creativity identities never came up.

Playing music was second nature. It never occurred to any of them to think they weren’t musicians. They threw themselves into the old songs like, Sweet Georgia Brown, Bill Bailey, Old Joe Clarke, Cripple Creek, Down Yonder, Tennessee Waltz, Lonesome Road Blues, and Alabama Jubilee.

They never worried about playing the songs perfectly. They didn’t think about going pro, nor did they play for money. “Creative Block” was not a term you’d find in their vocabulary. They played music. They did it all the time. They were musicians.

Regardless of the creative form you work in, like the musicians, when you show up and do the work (play if you will) your creative identity will find you more than you will find it.

Best of luck . . .

The Good Earth - A poem by James Navé 

A small rabbit eats its way under the sage outside my window. My hands are steady. A large cloud makes a grey Z in the sky. I cannot control the form a cloud will take, or when it will grow tired of the sky and rearrange its pattern to suit the wind, or the temperature, or the cooling when the sun goes down.

In the stillness of my rest, old memories thaw, tumble out, become hot again. The land glows. My face glows with it. Now has always been now. The wind pulls my eye across the sun. Bells ring. I draw a circle in the good earth.

I generated this following bit of writing yesterday at our annual Imaginative Storm Workshop held at Wired Cafe. Allegra Huston offered us this prompt:

“Rather than falling, night, to the watchful eye, rises” - A. Roger Ekirch -- “At Day's Close: Night in Times Past”

We wrote for 10 minutes.

“Rather than falling, night, to the watchful eye rises.”

And when the night rises the old day becomes a woman’s whisper. She tells of caves where lions sleep. Night sails over you, impressing you with stars that casts spells. I am a tender man who longs for smoke filled trees.

Voodoo time is the best time for electricity inside love making. Swamp fires chase my shadow. I rub my toes in the wee-hours when fireflies flutter over the calm red fox.

The night knows when a song is true, knows sweet notes shimmer over lilies in the cool spring.

The night knows the false songs too. How they fall from frozen clouds and shatter on the ice blanket ground. Lovers will not sing these songs.

They let them seep into the ground. The night shimmers when it rises. It is always summer when the songs are true.

This morning while I was preparing for my first public Taos performance (along with poet Tracey Schmidt and musician Matthew Cox) of selected prose poems from my new book, Looking at Light, I started thinking about an article I read in the Atlantic in 1991, titled Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia.

Can poetry matter? Given all the changes the world since '91, there’s little doubt in my mind, and perhaps in yours, the answer is a resounding Yes!

Poetry matters because it asks you to think more deeply about who you are and why you do what you do. It matters because it stirs your passions, connects you to your dreams, and engages you in your purpose.

When I was in my first semester at Vermont College,  I asked my faculty advisor Jack Meyers reveal the secret of writing poetry. Jack, rest his soul, leaned back in his chair and said. “It’s easy. All you have to do is wallow around in the swamp of your psychology until you find something messy, then write about it.”

Jack knew, as well as any of us, how messy life can be. He also knew that while poetry cannot solve all our problems, can help us make some sense of the world and who we are in it. Poetry gives us pleasure, sticks to our souls, and enlivens our imaginations.

The world is full of poetry. Sometimes written, sometimes read, often seen, like the flock of quail feeding under the sage outside my window this morning. The baby chicks have started to fly.

No moon guided the way to the edge of Linville Gorge that night about ten years ago when I decided to go see the Brown Mountain Lights. From the gorge far below, the river echo inside the calls of tree frogs.

A mile across the gorge, few flashes, like oversized lightening bug floated on the slopes that rose and curved across the star peppered sky.

The wind picked up. A group of tourists not to far away laughed and shouted happy to be on the edge of the gorge. An hour passed.

Then without a sound, the ridge line across the gorge shimmered like fluorescent fur on a fox's back. The light increased until the whole ridge glowed for miles. The saddle of the ridge swelled and boiled until a magnificent pulsating orb rose like a helium moon on fire spitting and dripping and throbbing. It floated in the sky for a good three minutes. And just a fast as it rose, it sank back down and the gorge went black again.

As I stood there watching the stars settle back over the ridge and felt the cool air on my warm skin, I wondered, had a large orb the size of the moon just appeared over the ridge, hung in the sky, then sunk back into the mountains like something that had never happened?  You tell me . . .

Greetings from Union Street in Brooklyn. Spring is coming soon. Until then, here’s an interesting idea to ponder:

Creativity is a DNA imperative. It is impossible for us to not be creative. We make things by nature.

What do you think? True or False?

I’ll be exploring this idea and more in my free Artist’s Way class at the NY Open Center on Tuesday night February 21, 2012 from 7:30-9:00. Register here.

On the following Tuesday, February 28, I’ll begin teaching a six week Artist’s Way course which will take us into springtime and bannana split territory. Affordable? Yes. Register here.

Please share this with your NY friends:  The Artist's Way: NY Open Center.

 Thanks a million for your help

I’ve been visiting Arlene Burns in snowbound Mosier, OR for the past week. Last night after supper, Arlene asked me to read some of my revised work, “Looking At Light, 100 Poems in 100 Days.”

We settled in front of her wood stove. I asked her to make comments. I began with poem # 20 JUST PAST KATE’S HOUSE.

“This morning at 9:45 am, Scott Donaldson, my surgeon, clipped the nickel staples from my belly. He left a small raw wound the size of an iris at the bottom of the scar. I will keep it clean.”

Arlene stopped me on the third sentence. “When you say ‘Iris at the bottom of the scar,’ do you mean you had a flower at the bottom?” I explained that I’d meant the iris of an eye. “Then why don’t you say ‘eye’ instead of ‘iris?’”

She was right, “eye” was more accurate than “iris.” An eye is soft, wet and vulnerable, just like my wound, which was indeed the size of an eye. So out went the “iris” and in went the “eye.”

The current version follows. If you’d like to read the original version first, it’s on my blog: http://www.jamesnave.com/?p=881

JUST PAST KATE’S HOUSE, April 20 100/20

This morning at 9:45 am, Scott Donaldson, my surgeon, clipped the nickel staples from my belly. He left a small raw wound the size of an eye at the bottom of the scar. I will keep it clean.

Now my healing will be unseen like the Leprechauns that dart across the bogs of Connemara.  The Sky Road is a good place for Leprechauns. So too are the rocks overturned along shore just past Kate’s house where wild ponies gaze at fluttering grass and moss covered gates bang to the rhythm of rain, old boats, and sea songs.

Do Leprechauns laugh when we sing off key?

===========================

Feel free to send me your thoughts on how you revise.

Join me for my upcoming Imaginative Storm Writing Telephone workshop which I’ll be teaching 3 Wednesday evenings, February 8, 15, 22. 7:00pm - 8:30pm EST, http://www.increaseyourcreativity.com/.

On the same page, watch my six minute video on The Imaginative Storm creativity process, http://www.increaseyourcreativity.com/.

Happy Trails.

Why write poetry? Because we all gravitate towards the beautiful, the romantic, the lyrical. Why say, “ I stood at the crossroad and didn’t know which way to go,” when you can say, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler?” Why say, “I’m so into you” when you can say, “I’ve got you under my skin. I’ve got you deep in the heart of me?”

You write poetry because it’s inside your imagination, your blood, and your soul. Poetry stretches back to the oldest records of language. Even modern poems contain echos of grunts, howls, and growls that quicken your pulse.

Grunts, howls, and growls may not come to mind whey you think of poetry. You might possess a more formal construct, like the one that your professor, who wore the same shoes everyday, imposed on you when he made you write essay after essay on exactly “what the poet meant.”
Fortunately, this approach is becoming less and less common, thanks to the storytellers, the spoken word artists, and the risky poets who experiment with language in ways that seem old and new at the same time.

Anyone can learn to write poetry–it’s simply a matter of getting your rear end in a chair and practicing the craft with determination, a commitment to dive in, and the willingness to take risks. It requires dancing with your words until they make you sing, or weep, or both. This is how you become a poet.

Why write poetry? Because we all gravitate towards the beautiful, the romantic, the lyrical. Why say, “ I stood at the crossroad and didn’t know which way to go,” when you can say, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler?” Why say, “I’m so into you” when you can say, “I’ve got you under my skin. I’ve got you deep in the heart of me?”

You write poetry because it’s inside your imagination, your blood, and your soul. Poetry stretches back to the oldest records of language. Even modern poems contain echos of grunts, howls, and growls that quicken your pulse.

Grunts, howls, and growls may not come to mind whey you think of poetry. You might possess a more formal construct, like the one that your professor, who wore the same shoes everyday, imposed on you when he made you write essay after essay on exactly “what the poet meant.”
Fortunately, this approach is becoming less and less common, thanks to the storytellers, the spoken word artists, and the risky poets who experiment with language in ways that seem old and new at the same time.

Anyone can learn to write poetry–it’s simply a matter of getting your rear end in a chair and practicing the craft with determination, a commitment to dive in, and the willingness to take risks. It requires dancing with your words until they make you sing, or weep, or both. This is how you become a poet.

Love is like land.
And like land
the only boundaries
love knows
are the fences
we erect.
Land is eternal,
fences ephemeral.
Beyond the shore,
my wings spread
above the sea,
I am in love
with waves.

Happy 2012. Fingers crossed for good luck! May all your choices be good ones.

One of the first choices I made this year was to pick a word that would push me forward over the next twelve months. I chose LIVE.

Inspired by LIVE, Tish Vallés, my life partner, produced a surprising YouTube video called “Live Like Picasso: 2012 Manifesto and Message from Navé”

I promise you’ll enjoy it. Listen Now.

I’m still busy revising my 100 poems in 100 days book. The working title is “100 Days / Looking At Light.” As you might imagine, choices abound.

For example, here are two revision choices.

1) “Today for the first time since my operation, I walked down the drive to the raised vegetable beds. ”

2) “Today for the first time since my operation, I ventured down the drive stopping at the young peas and garlic in their raised vegetable beds.”

Which one would you choose? As if there are only two creative choices.

Speaking of creativity, as you may know, I’ve been teaching a fair number of Artist’s Way creativity classes over the past couple of years. Last summer, I joined Susan Fuller to teach the course via telephone.

Our conversations have been lively. One of the questions we tackled in our last phone conversation was: “Is it possible for a human being to creative a life one would call art in the same way you might call a painting art?”

I’m not sure. Is that what Lady Gaga has done? What do you think?

Our next 6 Week Artist’s Way class runs January 10-February 14, 7-8:30 pm.

Learn more here: The Artist's Way.

Join us. Email me if you have questions.

Happy New Year!

If you were reading this blog earlier this year, you’ll remember I started writing 100 poems in 100 days on April 1, the morning after my surgery for prostate cancer at Pardee Hospital in Hendersonville, NC. I concluded it on July 9 at my nephew’s wedding in Boston.

I wrote it in three very different locations: 1) Asheville 2) Taos 3) New York.

Now six months later, after giving the text a rest, it’s time to revise.The revision process requires a different vibe than the generative process. In addition to creativity, spontaneity, and imagination, it includes strategy, intuition, and ruthlessness.

My strategy will be to revise the work into a compelling book to read. My intuition will tell me what to cut, keep, or revise. My ruthlessness will help me follow through on what I must do.

For example, on May 29 in poem #59 I wrote:

“The roar of the Harley has been echoing out of Taos since Dennis Hopper (who died last year of prostate cancer) and Peter Fonda exploded out of the Rio Grande Gorge and blazed across the silver screen.”

Allegra Huston, author of LOVE CHILD, a memoir about growing up as the youngest daughter of the film director, John Huston, and Allan Wolf, author of THE WATCH THAT ENDS THE NIGHT, a prize winning novel in verse about the sinking of the Titanic, both told me the above phrase sounded like weak magazine writing.

What should I do, keep, cut, or revise?

I’ll post more about this process as I go along. Thanks for reading.

What do any of us think about at when the night is over and we're walking home alone?

I took this picture on Saturday night just off Rue du St. Denis in Paris.

The easy 3 a.m. Paris air slips through my open window. Four floors below a few cars roll down Boulevard Saint Michel. A grey bicycle’s flashing red tail light leans into a side street.

Perhaps it’s a young man peddling home from his favorite bar where he gave a woman he’d never met a rose. They drank wine and ate cheap popcorn from the small black bowl the bartender kept on the bar. There are thousands of bicycles here in Paris.

This story could be just as true as the next one. I can’t tell you why I’m wide awake in the middle of the night making up a story about a young man on a bicycle while I’m staring down on an empty street. You could call it good luck I suppose, being up this late with nothing better to do.

Tiny blue lights glow in
nets above the bar. Joe pours
drinks. It’s Friday night.
The flamenco dancer snaps
and spins across the floor.
An older man serenades her
in Spanish. His fingers feather
the fretted neck. After the set,
the night belongs to her.
He understand this.
It’s the music that makes
them dream.

Paris, France:
I’m back
in my spot
on the sixth
floor, 38 rue
Dauphine
watching the fall
sun sweep
old walls.
Jet trails fade
in the diffused sky.

You've always traced your first love memories back 
to when you kissed Barbara Newell on that June night

she came from Kirkwood, Missouri and you both 
cruised the Parkway until you found a dirt road, lit 

a couple Marlboros and let the smoke above your
eyes drift and curl into ivory air. You leaned into

her hair and she French kissed you like you were
in the movies. Made the girls at the local footballs games 

seem like porcelain dolls. You knew it was too good 
to be true, but you kissed her anyway because 

you wanted to and you knew she did too. That's what 
made it sweet. Sure Barbara went back to Kirkwood 

a week later and left you to watch the porcelain dolls 
swimming at the pool like silver fish that moved

so fast you could never catch them. In early Fall some 
of the dolls would be cheerleaders cartwheeling in

the cold air, yelling the Jets over the 50 yard line. You 
would sit in the bleachers, not all that interested in touchdowns. 

Nick Fox is working on 100 poems in 100 days.
I am the lucky one who gets to read his work.
Here's my response to his poem, "Jesus Year."
Nick is 33 today.

Time moves so fast, so fast, so fast.
One day you seem eternal, then winter comes,
snow. You think it will last forever this freeze
that keeps you awake until spring thaws
with flowers, bluebirds, and a wilderness
of desire to live forever. The dead will always
rise, and rise, and rise. You and I will live
as long as we can, forever, forever, forever.

Previous: After midnight we moved across the street to Le Conti where I recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service to a mapmaker from New Zealand named Chris Mills, who then recited “The Blind Cartographer,” his only poem, or so he said.

Our night ended at 4 a.m. We wandered towards the river in the fluctuating air of soon to come dawn. We climbed the wooden stairs, happy to be alive in a world spinning slightly fast.

I spent the next week wandering through out of the way gardens full of small ponds with tadpoles in them. Above heavy wooden doors, odd faces peered at me out of ceramic foliage. Nude sunbathers lounged along the Seine, occasionally rolling over on their thick towels. The private parties on the wealthy river barges seemed as if they’d been there forever, like the ancient rings that held the ropes that kept the boats in place along the stone.

Above the river on the sidewalk near Point Neuf, an organ grinder with a sharp beard, thick glasses, and a dreamy 1930 sepia face spun French tunes out of an ornate music box covered in velvet with two large cats curled on top. Young lovers sat in the slanting sun on wide white walls where fat pigeons circles stale bread under the busy shoes of people who didn't notice them.

The grinder’s tunes faded into the crowd I walked with across Point Neuf to rue Dauphine. Bright flowers bloomed in little vases above bullet riddled steps where partisans fell defending Paris in 1944. Picasso had walked this neighborhood, so had James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Langston Hughes, Simon de Beauvoir, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the rest of the millions mostly forgotten over the centuries past.

Time seldom favors the unfortunate except perhaps now and then when two young sisters wander through a field of flowers. Or stumble, by no design of their own, into a few days of joy that confirms they are still children even though the world they came from gets very dark after the sun goes down.

Most of the people I know describe synchronicity as an unexpected event that produces a good outcome. For example, you pick up a weekly newspaper and notice a small ad in the classifieds for that rare old Martin guitar you’ve been searching for for years. You ring the number. Find out it’s still for sale. Rush over; buy it.  

Of course, you have synchronicity to thank for your guitar, but what part of synchronicity do you thank? The moment your eye fell on the classified page? Your decision to go to your local cafe where you spotted the ad? The red light that held you for two minutes?  

We often think of synchronicity as “simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.” The red light holding you back changes your timing which leads you to decide to go to the cafe where you pick up the paper and read the ad.  

To my eye, synchronicity is more than a single event that pops up now and then. Julia Cameron says in THE ARTIST'S WAY, synchronicity is “answered prayers,” a field sign, if you will, of a deeper cosmic order, an order that has always been and always will be.  

There are those who call this God. Others call it infinity. Some look up at the Milky Way on a December night north of Taos on the Rim Road and wonder, “what does all this mean?”  It means, of course, that we are part of something much great than ourselves, an all pervasive 360 cosmic multi-dimensional synchronicity that’s at work all the time  

The more you look for synchronicity, the more you notice it. “I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move.” Tennyson says in his Ulysses. 

Your awareness of  synchronicity determines how much or how little you experience it.  Awareness is only half of the equation; action is the other half. You wouldn’t own your guitar if you hadn’t made that phone call. 

Synchronicity is everywhere; let us all have the good sense to take advantage of its abundance!    

Paris: May 23-30 1985

Previous: John pulled a tall Guinness from his small refrigerator under the counter in his twenty square foot kitchen and poured two glasses. We cheered my arrival; then toasted the passing of time.

As we sipped our beers. John cooked a couple of well done cheeseburgers which we smothered in mustard and ate before he left for an eleven o’clock meeting. Save for a radio playing American pop somewhere below, the small flat’s silence lulled me into a deep four hour nap. I woke to a door slamming in the courtyard and swifts above the chimneys in the hot afternoon.

John returned around 7:30 eager to show me around the neighborhood. Our first stop was Le Buci where we stood at the bar and drank beers while we remembered the moon walk, the bats, Eliza Kelly, and the car crash inside the long curve on Highway 64 just east of Lake Toxaway.

John told me about harvesting sugar cane in Cuba. I told him about the night I drove from Phoenix to L.A. in an old 65 Chevy van, windows down, 99 degrees. He told me about shooting photos in El Salvador. I told him about steam exploding off the red rocks in the 110 degree sweat lodge by the frozen stream where we swam during the longest night of the year. He told me about watching Miles Davis blow his tunes in the smoky old clubs of Paris. I told him I’d owned a pizza restaurant along the Inland Waterway in coastal Carolina and had lost my second marriage to the sounds of the sea.

After midnight we moved across the street to Le Conti where I recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service to a mapmaker from New Zealand named Chris Mills, who then recited “The Blind Cartographer,” his only poem, or so he said.

Our night ended at 4 a.m. We wandered towards the river up rue Dauphine in the fluctuating air of soon to come dawn. We climbed the wooden stairs, happy to be alive in a world spinning slightly fast.

May 22, 1985 10 a.m.

John’s door was green. I knocked.

“Hey man,” John yelled as he hurried down the stairs and opened the door.

He peered at me curious about what the fifteen years had done. I peered back curious to see how time had shaped him. After all, we were men in our mid-thirties, no longer boys.

Things had change.

I was five-nine, stocky, oval brown eyes, olive skin, bald (three years away from shaving my head), deep voice, and cocky like the fighting roosters I would bet on many years later in Manila. I was an American poet.

John was six-one, lean frame, loose black hair, sun brown arms, angular nose, and piercing blue photographer’s eyes that had already earned their keep in conflict regions around the world. He was a Dutch photojournalist.

“It’s been a while.” I said as I hauled my gear up the stairs into his 300 square foot one room flat.

There was a telephone beside his futon on the floor. Photos hung on his walls: El Salvador, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Beirut, Paris fashion week, John’s father in his uniform standing beside a WW1 Biplane, and jazz players like Ray Charles and Miles Davis, framed large. John’s south facing windows with their white shutters flooded in morning light opened to medieval roofs centuries old.

John pulled a tall Guinness from his small refrigerator under the counter in his 20 square foot kitchen and poured it in two glasses. We cheered my arrival, then toasted the passing of time.

Outside my window on Union Street, rain rocks leaves and returns me to autumn fields beyond my grandfather’s barn where I played in the afternoon sun when I was a boy.

The old brown dog barked. The fat pig snorted. Red hens circled unsuspecting grasshoppers. Wind blew down from sassafras ridge.

Today, there’s a quarter on the floor in the middle of our living room in Brooklyn. Tails up, it says, “Live Free Or Die; New Hampshire, 1788.”

This brownstone was not here in 1788, nor was my grandfather’s barn, or my white Ralph Lauren shirt, or the iPhone sitting on top of the Poets and Writers magazine someone gave me in passing.

Outside my window, delivery trucks honk at motorcycles. Recycling comes twice a week. Old men hurry home from Key Grocery with white bags. Manhattan bound daydreamers with yellow metro cards rush to the Q train.

In 1788, Union Street was a deer path; hawks hunted squirrels that fell out of trees.

The last time John and I had seen each other had been fifteen years earlier in Denver during the summer of 1970 when I’d hitchhiked from Asheville and John had driven his VW bus up from Mexico City.

John and I had gotten to know each a couple of years earlier in 1968 at Brevard College in Brevard, NC. He was a young world traveler from Holland who had grown up as the son of a Dutch diplomat. I was a country boy from Candler, NC who had grown up the son of a lineman for Carolina, Power, and Light.

During the summer of the first moon landing, 1969, when I was in summer school and John was working construction at DuPont, we shared a cabin at Lake Sega five miles west of Brevard just off the Rosman Highway. We spend many nights listening to Jesus Christ Superstar with the hippy chicks three cabins down. We cooked endless dinners. Talk into the night about revolution, love, and where the road would take us.

We did all this while contending with a daily arrival of bats in our living room. They invaded from the infested attic which must have contained a million of the furry little vampires. They darted over the couch, into the kitchen, under the doors, and looped over the television until we finally shooed them out the door, caught them in a net, or swatted them, with no remorse, like flies.

August found John on his way to Mexico in his VW bus with a peace sign painted on the back and his student visa two months expired. It found me returning to my sophomore year at Brevard where my grades would droop and I would fall in love with a low country girl named Laura from Mount Pleasant, S.C., a brief candle.

I remembered all this while I was standing in the hall of 38 rue Dauphine trying to figure out which of the three doors to take for the six flight walk up to John’s top floor flat. I opened the middle door, a long way from Denver.

The first step, the only one made of stone, was well worn by the traffic of history. I imagined young Nazi officers their boots peeling off the stone racing up the steps in search of partisans scheming their next attack from an attic high above the street.

John’s door was green. I knocked.

Jazz follows me around the room
on this first Brooklyn day of cool
air, crisp, clear. Frost will come soon,
unexpected. My birthday falls
in November. Leaves will release, make
way for the sharp contrast of stems
and sky. Light off glass will turn
old shacks beautiful again.

May 21, 1985 NYC

Newark airport hustled me to my rush hour shuttle to JFK, cloudy and hot. An army sergeant sat next to me, young, important, going somewhere.

May 22, 1985 Paris, 7 a.m.

Mist rained down on the trees and morning traffic as the flight touched down. I took the RER (train) to Saint Michele, Paris.

On the ride, Paul who seemed uncertain of his attractive American girlfriend, Susan, wouldn’t stop talking about his plans for their trip. Susan stared out the window at small cars disappearing into fog.

Just as now, in 1985, Paris woke slowly. Shop doors jingled. Trucks blocked the street. Men in overcoats with their cases on brass foot rests below their stools leaned against bars and sipped coffee.

Young mothers, sometimes with no husbands, hurried their toddlers along. Students rushed past street cleaners in green suits sweeping cigarette butts into streams of water and debris that flowed into drains, inevitable separation.

I walked down rue Saint André des Arts, took a right on Rue André Mazet, and turned right to 38 rue Dauphine.

Code 4327A buzzed the door open to bicycles leaning against a wall. The coffee smells drifted from an open window on the second floor.

“We Are the World,” the current American pop hit, echoed in the dim light reflecting on the mail boxes I scanned till I found the name I was looking for: John van Hasselt, a college roommate.

The last time we’d seen each other had been fifteen years ago in Denver during the summer of 1970 when I’d hitchhiked from North Carolina and he’d driven his VW bus up from Mexico.

I woke early after a good night’s rest on thick sheep skin. Andrew played a waltz on his hammered dulcimer. We drank rich coffee with half and half.

We stopped by Burger World for breakfast before we hit the road to Greensboro. Andrew had agreed to drop me of at the airport on his round about way to Atlanta.

We made fast work of it arriving two hours before the Piedmont Air departure to Newark and the connecting flight to Paris.

The airport was full of travelers. A young woman with a southern accent took a drag off a Marlboro. Her boyfriend sported a baseball cap and a shirt with its yellow collar turned up.

I had a conversation about poetry with a woman named Penny just before I boarded the plane to discover that thunderstorms might cancel the flight.

I wondered if I’d make the 9 p.m. from New York to Paris? The last thing I’d expected were thunderstorms. How little we control what we think we’re in control of.

Nothing to do but wait.

The storm veered south. The plane flew north. A woman in a green dress napped. A man in a white shirt read a magazine. I stared out the window.

(The crazy woman who would build the fire in the middle of the night would use The Tibetan Book of the Dead for fuel.)

I just came across an old journal about my first trip to France, May-July, 1985.

Upon arrival, I drank wine with John van Hasselt at Le Buci on rue Dauphine until almost dawn.

Later in the trip, after a train to Cannes and two weeks hitchhiking around the south of France, I spent two more weeks at DHAGPO KAGYU LING Centre d’études et de meditation sur le Buddhism, Montignac.

A crazy woman built a fire in the middle of the night. I drove a Peugeot to the sea.

I’ve been meaning to transcribe this story for years. I’ll post the pages as I go. I expect it’ll be more surprising to me than to you. It’s written in pencil; the pages are torn.

First Trip to France begins in Asheville, NC, May 20, 1985.

Visited Andrew Brown. Prepared for trip to France. Organized gear. Traveler’s Checks. Locks. First Aid. Golden Seal. Shaving Kit. Aspirin. Band Aids. Pens. Poetry Book. Socks. Pants. Pack. Camera. Removed labels from new equipment. Got Folktellers address from Barbara Freeman.

Went to Hedy Fischer and AD Anderson’s. Vegetarian dinner. Drank Wine. Carol Navsky and Andrew Brown were there. Full green evening trees reminded me of the song, Danny Boy.

"Lean Deeply, So Permanent" is a spontaneous poem I generated for Paul Devlin and Emily Rabbe’s at their wedding celebration (September 10, 2011) which was held on a lovely bluff overlooking the sea at the end of Long Island.

Listen to the original recording live with wind and crickets:
Lean Deeply, So Permanent

We all live inside 
the impulse, one 
minute at a time 
things mount up. 
Sometimes 
our eyes touch 
each other and 
everything becomes 
important. Then 
we love each other 
and that becomes 
even more important. 

Sometimes 
we forget this. 
Sometimes 
when the rush 
overwhelms
our bodies and we feel 
like we’ve been 
wrapped up and sent 
off in a bland package 
to be lost 
in the back of a room. 
We forget this. 

But only briefly, because 
when the wind blows and 
the easy sun wraps itself 
around what 
we care about, 
we remember 
each other 
again.

And we 
keep doing that 
over and over
because
we have wrapped 
ourselves in purpose. 
We’ve wrapped ourselves 
in that one second 
when everything counted 
for everything. 
When we love 
each other 
as much as we 
are capable of loving 
each other. So 
deeply, so permanent. 
Everything 
belongs to us 
and it always will. 
We will remember this 
forever and forever.  

Thanks for reading my thoughts and poems over the past few months.

This note is to let you know this coming Thursday, September 8 5:30-6:30pm, I’m facilitating a free Increase Your Creativity Artist’s Way phone class with Susan Fuller.

Follow this link to register: http://www.increaseyourcreativity.com

Officially the subject is “How to Make the Most of Your Morning Pages.” Unofficially, you can expect the conversation (thanks to the influence of the people on the call) to veer towards how to make the most of any of your rough drafts, Morning Pages, Imaginative Storms, or otherwise.

On the ground, I’ll be facilitating a 7-session Artist’s Way course at the New York Open Center Mondays, September 12-October 31, 7:30-9:30. The first class is free.

If you’re in New York on September 12, drop by and take the free class, I’d enjoy seeing you there.

Follow this link to register: http://bit.ly/pyxuSU.

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, taught this class until she moved to Santa Fe last year. Thanks to Julia’s recommendation, I’m able to take her place.

On a personal note, Tish and I just moved into a lovely flat in Brooklyn, Park Slope. It has three large south facing windows and enough room for dinners and salons. When you’re in New York, let me know. We’ll invite you over for tea.

Send me your news. It’ll bounce my day along.

These are the days of being September again.

Trees line the streets here in Brooklyn where I could swear submarines once floated under a red stream in the influx and influence of a robin’s weeping.

I tick-tock with a wilderness song full of dreams and memories. All things begin and end in a brief flash.

Slightly off center from too many miles over the highways of the world, I lean into my long story. There are eyes in forest, and lovely flowers, and believers.

Outside my window, a jay called from the wet branches above the morning traffic along Union Street.

There’s jazz once again streaming out of Bose speakers on this easy Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, "just one of those crazy flings." Our new flat welcomes the sun through three large windows looking down on Union Street, slightly busy.

Manhattan, less than five miles away, seem distant, removed, as if the island knows it must contain itself within itself, as islands tend to do. One slide of my subway card will take me from here to there. Enter. Ride.

Emerge thirty minutes later into a city always assuming itself forward into the Pygmalion truth of itself, and of me, and of all who wander in the crisp, clear, blue dazzling air of September in New York, undisturbed.

I am sensing the storm, Irene, which comes from Africa
and contains billions of tons lifted from the Atlantic
carries more than wind and water.

Ancient messages travel in the storm, old stories
we have known forever. The storm is a part of us
as much as we are part of the storm.

Our power and its power are the same; we know what it knows.

Have you seen the journey artists?

I’ve seen them flipping the racks in the Goodwill Store on 3rd Avenue where I buy
nine dollar designer shirts.

No, I have not seen an owl lately, but yesterday I saw four journey artists: black eyes, blue eyes, grey eyes, green eyes, fire in their bellies

I bought the best shirt from the rack, silk, made in Thailand where a large elephant wanders on Sukhumvit Road past the bus bar’s old men drinking with big bellies.

They are not journey artists; they are old men with big bellies. The Goodwill store is dusty. What do you expect from a nine dollar store?

I’ve known journey artists who wear expensive shirts with starched collars.

I once drank a 2007 Scarecrow Cabernet with a journey artist. She wore a long red dress and told me a story about how alligators move fast in prehistoric flash.

There is always a shirt on the rack that will fit you. Journey artists know this.

I prefer fine cotton. I also like to watch rats in the subway, behind garbage cans, and under old tires.

There are certainly rats in Bangkok in the hot sad streets on lady-boy nights. Journey artists know this too; they sometimes call them hedgehogs.

Journey artists will tell you there’s no such thing as sin, then change their tune and tell you if sin exists you’ll find it under a coffee can.

Maybe the best thing to do now is drop a quarter in a pay phone and dial a number.
Let it ring four times. A journey artist will answer.

He will know who you are. He’ll tell you he "once had a friend who was married seven different times to eleven different women." You will believe him.

Soon, you will see two elephants crossing Madison Square Park. How do I know this?
A journey artist told me so.

Feeny we will miss you and in our missing we will sing songs for you.

You who birthed our story; over and over our impossible became possible. We touched you and you touched us. Touched our knees, our arms, our cheeks, our lips, gave us room to wonder.

In pure receptivity you came to us and we came to you. The arrangement was more than any of us ever bargained for, more than our hopes, more than our dreams, more than we ever imagined.

Feeny we will wave to you from the fires of our lives for the rest of our lives. You taught us a language we thought we’d forgotten, so familiar. We sailed further because of you.

On Friday nights at the Taos Inn, time stood still. But you knew better than any of us about time standing still while those cars rolled by and honked their horns.

Yes, it was all too brief, like the candle in the song that's always going out. But it does not go out. Fire never does.

You were fluent in everything. You wore scarves. You told us you’d traveled all over the world and we could go there too.

To you, we were ships, if not ships, we were rockets. If not rockets, we were sail planes. If not sail planes, we were shamans. If not shamans, we were mist. If not mist, we were everything we would become. You always knew this.

When you spoke; we believed you. Now, you tell us a new story.

We will miss you and in our missing we will come to know more of who we are. You taught us this and so much more. We will miss you Feeny. We will miss you.

Prompt: Describe an encounter of a powerful sort.

You are as much an ant as anyone else. You dot this Paris street walking in dim rain at the height of a window. You’re headed for art at Museé d’Orsay, old train station.

Your on the hunt for surprise in the fields of ancient and modern art.

You might even meet a future lover who lives in Istanbul. You buy your ticket € 8. It’s 11:41. You will be hungry when you’re finished. What hubris to think you would not be hungry. There is consciousness in hunger.


You turn left up the wet steps. Seven students smile for pictures in front of the horse at the entrance. You walk by them. An unexpected design collects in their laughter, so commonplace among the young little tourists haunting Paris

You have the desire to be snow, then black stone in this city you were not born in. In a tension of anticipation, you go inside, out of the rain and cold. The room is flat. Your are unimpressed.

“Where is all the famous art?” you wonder. “I came for giants not miniature,” you mutter.

You don’t want to be a cog, a speck, a universal nothing dressed in jeans and a sweater. You are here to see the centuries. You walk into another room. It grows.

Ancient voices begin to sing in tones familiar, known all along. Though the narrow windows you see fog and rain on the Seine.

There are canvas everywhere. The silence in the room is a drum beating. You have always been part of this. You walk through elements. Each room gets bigger. You are taller now. Your voice is human, alive.

The walls are moving. The students are still smiling. The frames have gold on them. Women open their fur coats to white marble. You take a sip of water. You walk through all the rooms.

You come to the other end of the station. You see arrows pointing up the stairs. You go up. The students are in front. Paintings line the stairs above the green rail.

Your heels click on the steps five flights up. Hundreds of trains left this station when the Nazis were here. You know this, don't you? You arrive at the top and look down. Everything is 3D. The whole place is moving, men, women, flashes, specks, dots.

The whole room throbs. You are a part of it. You realize you have been fooled into thinking you belong to yourself, that you have not been noticed, that your are alone. Clearly this is not true.

You have been made into art. You have become what you came to see.

Three feet above the damp ground. I stared at ten thousand tiny pine needles on the lowest limb of a pine growing beside the pass through road.

Not part of the tree almost more a cluster of mist detached from the trunk, swaying in the breeze and the hint of rain to come

Each needle reflected light down the boney branches, turned right, turned left, pointed at my chest. A slight breeze swayed the limbs extending from the trunk where five cones hung.

Did this outpost of needles four feet off the ground know how easy it would be for the gardener to come along and with no more thought than, “I’m doing my job; This limb’s gotta go,” snap it off and throw it in the pile?

I moved closer until the branches brushed my shirt wet. Eye cocked, I shrank small enough to walk in and become part of what the sun knows, what air knows, what the forest floor requires to bring seedlings out of loam into bush, into tree.

Not fast like bamboo, it’s just grass, but slow like tree.

The five cones clung to the possibility they would fall to the ground, be covered with snow, grow back in the spring. A slight breeze swayed the colony of leaves. It was August.

Just as I’d hoped the workshop Omega poetry workshop facilitated by Marie Howe, exceeded my expectations. We were asked to write an invocation that started with “I call on.” 
Here’s mine:

I CALL ON

I call on the expression of terror and blessing, the blue blood cells of lazy lizards, the invisible, the dead, the living. I call on the spirits that roam inside buffalo eyes.

I call on tremendous apples that float in the sky. I call on wingless desire. I call. I call. I call.

I call on florescent lights in the basements of suburbia. I call on the bully who teaches me how to risk all with no concern.

I call on broken arms, the arguments between the old couple in the store.

I call on the red hot stones melting in the sweat lodge fire.

I call on the scar under the hairs on my belly. I call on my old guitar lost now in a basement.

I call on the black snake. I call on the dog killed because he sat on the top steps barking west. I call on his body floating by the old rusty truck in the stream.

I call on Feeny’s flowing hair and on the sun that browns her face as she watches adobe walls.

I call on the old red chair I once sat on in the middle of a Taos road. I call on the smuggled cigars Ben brought to the party.

I call on all the pieces of paper I’ve ever thrown into trash cans.

I’m driving north to Boston tomorrow for the National Poetry Slam championships.
I’ve washed my car, changed my oil, rotated my tires, and packed my gear.

Sundays is a good day to drive, less traffic, no work projects.

I’ll take I-26 out of Asheville to Johnson City, TN where I’ll pick up I-81 for a 600 mile stretch to Scranton, PA, then east to Boston, 933 miles total trip.

I’ve traveled this route many times over the years especially during the Poetry Alive! (www.poetryalive.com) days, 1986-1991, when I was touring the country performing tradition poetry as theater for school students. We traveled in teams of two.

Allan Wolf (www.allanwolf.com) who is now among America’s most successful writers of young adult poetry and fiction, was one of my most enjoyable road partners. Allan spent a fair amount of time searching billboards and other commercial signs for missing letters.

He claimed there were teams of alphabet bandits who had been hired by a “secret organization” to rearrange road signs to communicate messages to the human race. Allan suspected this “secret organization” might be in alliance with elements from other planets.

This idea made perfect sense to me. Allan and I spent much time trying to crack these covert messages built around missing letters. We concluded the message were all about greatness. Which was what Tennyson’s Ulysses was talking about when he said, “For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars until I die.

Even now, I still keep an eye out for signs with missing letters. I’ll let you know what the messages say tomorrow on my trip to Boston.

Flowers return to spider webs. Summer grows
later by the second. I’ve been walking on clouds.
My wings have grown bells. Porcelain fingers ivory.
Warm and green in these frying pan days, I run
to the mountain where the cool wind blows
and mercy comes easy in the blue night air.

Bodies marked with stories
were on display this afternoon
at the Dripolator coffee shop.
So far, I’ve resisted the permanence
of my privacy sitting on the surface
of my skin. No ink tells my story,
although I’m considering a mark
or two. What would they be?

Once in the Maghreb,
1993, I played basketball
with a squad of Marines
at the American Embassy
in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Lean, fit, rock hard, battle
ready, it took them fifteen
minutes to melt me in the
fierce heat. They played
with no concern for my
inability to pace behind
their training, speed,
agility to break right
in defense of things
that come fast, too
quick for most eyes
to see, all afternoon
the ball arched across
thick West African skies.

Earlier this afternoon
clouds rumbled
in the West, then
did nothing more
before they dissipated
in the grandfather heat
under the sweltering
sun. The air was
moisture, medieval
and thick, without
the benefit of breeze.
When storms blow
in winter, howl all
night into the dark
dawn grey, I tell
the impervious ice
how much I long
for July days like
this one when
everything I touch
seems like it has
been on fire forever.

Two women of middle-age smoked Camels
behind the counter at the “Cheap-O” just off I-26

where I gassed up, $3.43 a gallon, on my way back
from Savannah yesterday afternoon. In the rear

of the store thousands of crickets fiddled. Live fish
bait next to the restroom door in a wire covered wooden

cage surrounded by Fritos, M&M’s, Snickers, beef jerky,
oily peanuts, paper towels, motor oil, and white bread.

The crickets, content, if crickets can be so, in their dark
cool box, reminded me of the New York subway rat I once

watched run along the tracks below the platform stopping
now and then to paw a discarded potato chip bag the train

flipped over when it sped to a halt, spilled em out, piled em on,
rolled away leaving the rat behind to do what rats do like I left

the crickets behind as I jingled my keys across the shoe burning
asphalt. A purple semi from Amarillo bucked a couple of times

before it turned right down the ramp into the flow between the lines;
I followed it, northwest to Asheville, steady in the Carolina heat.

Last night at Lulu's
chocolate bar in Savannah,
Walter Parks’ swampy jazz
& blues drifted over the room.
Walt invited me to tossed in
few poems behind the drummer’s
beat. The smooth night carried
the audience warm. A woman
with tattoos on her arms brought
chocolate. I closed the show
with a poem about how the road
had carried me away from home.
Afterwards, I ate a small bite
of key lime pie. The ice water
tasted good. A young couple
from Miami, by way of Medellín,
in town for the first time, drank
beers and smiled. Mostly green
lights followed us home to
Jones Street. At every turn
a little of my life fell into history.

A fine rain fell on
Savannah’s Jones
Street earlier tonight,
Walter Parks played
“True Colors” down
the frets of his red
1952 Gibson ES175.
I watched my reflection
on the window, transparent
in the black of blue night,
shadows over my face.
A thick moth circled
a street light just beyond
the leaves in the live oak
trees. Traffic disturbed
the moist street, passed
by, never came back.
“There’s much to be
found in the void left
when something goes
away.” I thought,
as I listened to the rain
stop and the excited
sounds of college
students going out
for a Friday night
“Georgia on my
mind” good time
in this low country
land of whatever
you please,

Sparrows, kittens,
and the trill of a middle-
aged folk singer gave
me a splash of pleasure
this afternoon as I relaxed
on the porch of of Asheville’s
largest health food stores.
My ‘97 Camry sat among
hundreds in the parking lot.
Sparrows ripped at the crackers
under the round tables. Children
jumped and pointed at the “cute
kittens” in cages looking for
a home. The folk singer’s old
blue eyes glowed as she leaned
forward into the usual afternoon.

In Savannah, where
I’m going on Friday,
summer weaves
easy in and out
of live oaks, Spanish
moss, porch sitting,
straw hats, ghosts,
grits, scent of salt
marsh, mud, gulls,
waves capping in
97 degree heat.
I am not of the sea,
yet I am drawn
to the sea. It slides
away and comes
back again. It has
been doing this
forever. That’s why
I stand so close.

The heat broiled New York
yesterday morning as I caught

the N train from Madison Square Park,
transferred to the M60 bus in Queens

then onto La Guardia for USAir to
Asheville’s rain forest jungle

of green soaking in 93 degrees.
The sun disappeared over

the ridge behind I-26. Twilight
cooled the air. Cicadas sang.

The Carolina moon shone
until the sun returned;

I rose, glad as always, to find
the world alive and good again.

Before I move on to what comes next on The Poet’s Log, I’d like to thank you for your comments and encouragement as you followed my 100 poems in 100 days post surgery writing project.

I started with no expectation other to write 30 poems in 30 days (known as 30/30) because April was poetry month declared so by the Academy of American Poets in 1996.

As early as the poem #4, I realized how lucky I was to have the opportunity to write about such a dynamic life altering experience as having my cancerous prostate removed. By the poem #22, I was certain I didn’t want to stop at poem #30, thus 100 poems in 100 days.

As the series progressed, some poems took only an hour; others took four hours or more. No matter how little or much time I spend, I was always determined to post, before my midnight deadline, a serviceable, if not kick ass poem for you to read.

Your comments, your emails, your Facebook “Likes,” and your phones calls played a huge role in helping me achieve my 100/100 goal. We all have a story to tell; thank you so much for listening to mine. Your support helped me more than you’ll know.

In the beginning
there was grace
and now
“the end is my beginning”
as Eliot says.
This morning the sun
arched West down
East 25th Street
just before I hopped out
of bed, showered, dressed
and headed,
in MJ Butler’s BMW, Tish
driving with the Manila
skill of a Grand Prix
champion to Boston
for the wedding of my
nephew, Sammy and
his bride Emily.
The old familiar road
stirred me as it always
has. Clouds with grey
edges hung in the faded sky.
The midday sun, bold on trees
shimmered where owls waited
100 days after my surgery.
Mass Pike rolled us into
Bean Town. Twelve hundred miles
from our first home in Asheville
my brother Sam, the father
of the groom, smiled us
down the sidewalk to the
wedding lawn emerald green
expanding in the afternoon
Sammy and Emily exchanged
vows in the cycle of
permanence. Ceremony
requires ritual opening
of the heart; the intense
acceptance of fire. Warm
under apple trees
in bells and memories, I sat
on the second row, alive
in the time and place
of three generations.

Just south of Houston going down
Spring late yesterday in the rush

hour cool of a passing storm
I rang my good friend Julia

Cameron in Santa Fe who told me
a lizard had just whipped-tailed

over her rug, paused behind
a table leg, then darted, brown

lightening across her blue floor
out her kitchen door on its hind

legs vanishing like a miniature
dinosaur into the desert. I’m

sure he was unaware of Julia
in her leather chair or the clanging

and rattling around me as I stood
under the canopy of a small tree

energized by the clamoring crowd
darting for cover like the lizard

who most likely found his way
to shelter under some cool rock

away from the sun. Like I have
done so often over these past

99 poems, each one distinct, loose,
wild, born in the day, in the night,

in the city, in the country full
of jazz and blues and places

I have been, lovers hiding
in low notes, primitive, modern,

thunder, trains, whispers, bees
along the pull line, blades, pads,

urine, scar, hot, cold, snow, heat,
all sliding me back to who I have

become, again the same man
slightly altered happy to believe,

now more than ever, in what
“a little moonlight can do.”

From my regular vantage at
Table 12, I watched a UPS
driver wheel three packages
past the Furry Land Pet Supplies
in the clattering and rumbling of
summer’s perfect pace that
reminded me how quickly
I had cycled through the days
since my surgery. Just a flash
ago, I woke in my hospital bed,
unplugged, rickety, red eyes
relieved, happy to be alive
and illuminated on the smooth
surface of time; I felt no ambition,
no urgency, no hurry to do anything
except relax into the simplicity
of eating a hard boiled egg, talking
to Tish, and writing the first stanza
in this amazing journey that ends
Saturday, 100 poems in 100 days,
prayers, wishes, dreams, honey
naked shadows flowing down
a river in an age of circumstances
that will always lead me home.

Summer enticed me
out on the street today
in the scorching heat
I was happy to be alive,
relaxed, sweating, full
of purpose, elated
at my body’s return,
strong as the trunk
of an oak, although
I knew, and will always
know, how fast Autumn
leaves scatter on snow
that covers sleeping
ground. I was more
interested in small dogs
on leashes, traffic cops
peeling off citations,
monogrammed sleeves,
black limos, engines
running, and Echo,
the forty-foot, nine year
old girl’s face on the lawn
in Madison Square Park
looking south at the Flat
Iron Building where 5th
Avenue and Broadway
split at 23rd. Surrounded
by grass and summer trees,
her presence, only four
stories high, rose above
the towering buildings into
thick clouds full of gathering rain.

Last night the banks of the Hudson
exploded in a dazzle of fireworks
that bloomed across the sky above
the cheers of millions who
had wandered down to the riverside
with children on their hips, flags
on their backs, sparkles spinning
above their heads, speaking
a thousand languages under
the sun sinking fast like a submarine
into the diminishing night. I watched
the show on 14th Street in front of
the Crooked Knife where echoing
booms rolling behind flashes of light
reminded me how fast sound vibrates
silence, crawls on your skin, and gives
the world something to think about.
After the last showers of light the street
grew normal again, I smiled about how
happy fireworks have always made me
and how much I like explosions booming
in the shadow crazy sky.

The roof, where I sometimes sit under
the beach umbrella, eased into the cool 4th

of July morning as I watched a large New Yorker
dragonfly with 360 eyes glide across

the deck to check if I might be a thin blue cloud,
or a plum dangling in a tree, or a moonstruck frog

lost in the freedom of paradise. He hung until he
decided we were brothers of the wing, able to hover,

fly backwards, and take off vertically like l did last night
at Molly O’s in the East Village when Walter Parks

invited me onstage to drop down unto our version
of America the Beautiful. Full of midnight, we jazzed

our hearts out to all the late walkers, journey agents,
Eulipions, wide eye flies, day runners, dreamers,

steel bangers, long haulers, cutters, menders, fixers,
drivers, layers, players, and floaters above the clouds.

America was beautiful as we laid down our tune, lights low,
crowd sweet, room mellow and juju free in the midnight air.

A man in his early 80’s peered
over the rail from the upstairs
library of Birch Café into the freedom
of Sunday morning’s easy flow.
His creased face, kind, somewhat
elegant, slightly misplaced reminded
me of one of those rain spouting
gargoyles on the towers of Notre
Dame staring down at the free
dreamers, tourists, and scamming
clairvoyants who buy your sympathy
with large brown eyes before they
pick your pockets in the disappearing
crowd. When something goes missing
most of the time you never get it back
like my Tilley Hat that disappeared
yesterday afternoon on the 3rd floor
of Branes and Noble while I was
reading business books on emerging
trends. One moment it was in my
hand, the next moment, gone. Left
behind on a shelf. Dropped on
the floor. Lifted when my head was
turned. Perhaps it was swallowed by
the ether, leaving my hand heavy with
a phantom sense of what had disappeared
forever from the permanence of my life.

The mountain spring
inside the pebble house
was cold before we were
born, ancient, long, green,
beautiful. I saw you floating,
shadow among the other
shadows. You pulled me
shining slowly against pine
bark, loam, forest floor,
saplings. When the rain
came the pebble house
gave birth. We drank each
other before we became
woodland, caught dew in
our fluid mouths open
we sang older like trees
inside the pebble house;
there was enough spring
to go around.

My life, full of luck,
choices, and circumstances
has taught me to read
The National Enquirer
while waiting in line at
the grocery, basket
full of wild salmon, tea,
pepper, peas, carrots,

crab cakes, almond milk,
and olive oil. I’ve always
believed every word in
that rag because I’ve learned
that stories do not have to
be exact to be true.
After all, can you really
remember exactly what

happened during that
sightless night between
one and five a.m. when
you were in a meadow
full of flowers, making love,
waiting for the light?
Even if you’ve never
done such a thing; tell

me you have. I will believe
you when you say you became
purple and peacock; when
you say, you walked on
the tops of trees; when
you say the forest spoke
to you in the language
of stones broken open.

Go ahead, lie to me.
Be deliberate. Give
it your best shot.
Make it a whopper!

The cool transparent breeze of summer eased over
my brown skin earlier this morning as I walked south

on 5th Avenue fascinated with how the self-
contained street changes every swing of my arms

in flashes of sun, then shadows on my face in the reflection
of me passing windows, Tumi Tech bag shouldered

with Mac inside, bits and pieces of my life fully digitized.
Bits and pieces mind you, there’s so much left to tell

and so much more to life to tell it in. Great volumes of river
pushes me to the sea; spreading unpredictable, forcing

nothing, absorbing all, expanding, expanding, expanding
the green of summer love into the rich wilderness of fall

exploding into winter where snow wolves roam and paw
the ice for coming spring. Eventually I will become the sea;

river remembered will be my story, cycles of forward
movement, spinning, always spinning full of so much left to tell.

Since June 9th, New York
has showered me with
rich voices, deep shadows,
and all sorts of prayers
as I’ve listened to the loud,
soft, heavy, thin, light,
scat of right now swing
time that belongs to me
as much as to anybody
else. “Heard melodies
are sweet, but those
unheard are sweeter,”
said Keats and I think
he’s right. That’s why
I keep listening to the
trash cans, quick talk,
cash drawers, air
conditioners, plastic
bags, and eggs scrambling
on the grill, the bone,
the belly, and the heart
of this city’s flourish
of constant overtones
more permanent than
any of us will ever be,
no matter how beautiful
our voices, perfect
our notes, or sweet
our songs like Sammy
Davis, Jr when you
listen to him sing,
“hello young lovers”
and he tells us all to
“follow our hearts”
because the bliss of
everything depends
on it. Who has the
soul to say no to
something like that?

At 11:30 am today, I was back in my regular corner,
Table 12, East Village, Avenue A, watching the comings

and goings of citizens past shops and stores with names
like Vampire Geeks, Stand-Up MRI, and Poppy’s Gourmet

with its chicken cheese special and green ATM sign
that flashed neon for “come and get your money” lunch

time in the city of hungry people: girls in cut off jeans,
teenagers with tattoos on bare skin, mother’s laughing

after their children running down the street, elderly ladies
correcting manuscripts, lawyers on cell phones, and two men

from Paris ordering burgers at the next table over from where
I was thinking about the fires burning near Los Alamos, or why

a tattoo could be good or bad, or how old I would be when
I died, or how yesterday afternoon I noticed the complicated

face of a young cop on my agile walk l across Union Square
to Andorama in search of the perfect 300 mm lens so I could

magnify the whole world good again in the holy light of New
York patiently waiting for all of us to make way out of the din.

The old summer sun followed me
down First Avenue this afternoon,

a route I’m as familiar with as my
hand or, I know you’ll find this hard

to believe, the first full double rainbow
I ever saw blazing over the Taos Pueblo

deeper and deeper into the thirsty earth’s
aftermath of rain and thunder. It’s true,

something you’ve never seen can look
more familiar than the faces you’ve been

looking at all your life. There were horses
in the field and two boys playing along

the fence under the rainbow they’d known
so many times before. Those who have

forgotten about the striding desires of
peregrine hearts will tell you rainbows

evaporate in the sun and nobody has ever
found a pot of gold at the end of one.

They are right, of course. Yet, I’ve never
gazed at a rainbow without having

the profound sense that it has been
there forever and will remain so,

complete with its pot of gold, for as
long as I’m willing to look.

Yesterday’s sunset washed
Vanderbilt Avenue in a cool

breeze that made room
for the doo-wop under

the steps of a young
couple getting out of

their old BMW, hungry
for an early dinner at

Cornelius Cafe full of light
and shadows and the regular

Saturday gathering of poets.
All friends, laughing the afternoon

away in clairvoyant images
full of honey, wine, and smokey

places where Spanish music
weeps and falcons fall out of

the postcard sky. For some
odd reason, in the middle

of a conversation with Ray
about why old Ulysses was

restless in his kingdom
I remembered Andy Williams

singing A Summer Place
and how his version of

that song washed over my
teenage ears in a profusion

of emotions that slowly
intersected my years with

turned memories that helped
me understand why, like Ulysses,

I have always longed for
the “dark broad seas” more

than I’ve pined for the permanence
of the still quiet land.

I’ve been in New York eighteen
days. Long enough for the city to
coax me into the lights, the dazzle,
the honks and songs of the young,

the cakes and lattes at Birch Café,
the smooth rails in the park, and small
pieces of chocolate I’ve allowed my
tongue on these streets that celebrate

whatever runaway you want. You should
have been on the R train to Spring Street
yesterday afternoon in the quick crowd
moving toward night like Tish and I were,

on our way to a wedding party at La
Esquina, full of love songs and chatter
where silk women stood in fashionable
circles. Swirling their drinks, asking

questions none would remember years
later when they found themselves standing
along a fence near a cottage, print dresses
open to the sun, bosoms children happy

under silver dollar clouds near the crocodile
sea that always pulls us away from where
we are. Like last night pulled me when
I thought of why the surgeon’s knife

must always be sharp and quick and
take what it wants leaving you behind
in the afterglow listening to the dreams
of others as if they belonged to you.

Upstairs in the Birch Cafe library,
where I’m on my third cup of green
tea, you can help yourself to the small

collection of haphazard titles, Shadow
and Light, The Shooters, Hunger,
Acts of Faith, Everyday Grace,

Vengeance, The Ruling Class,
and Stuart at the Library. I love
how stories play me like the old

man played the baby grand in
the lobby of the Gershwin Hotel
yesterday afternoon, scratched

and slightly worn, his fingers moved
across the keys in a fabulous array
of notes that floated in the red room

full of skeletal art where lions
and tigers tangled on still canvas
above the blue grey carpet, and

checkered euro travelers gathered
on couches their bags beside
their knees, some beautiful

primroses, others slightly off key,
happy to be alive, yet uncertain,
perhaps even a little delicate,

like the last light over water lilies
before tree frogs and other night
creatures begin to sing.

Today after a long phone conversation with
Paul Pascarella about the nuances of releasing
a trout into a fast moving stream, I hurried down
six flights of grey stairs into the jukebox air

full of rain and impulse and a sun brown couple
gliding down the sidewalk. “With wet hands,
I took her to the shallows, held her gently
in the easy flow, moved her back and forth,

nose to tail, until three bubbles of air emerged
and she regained her strength until finally
as if she were my own child, I released her.”
The couple turned south, hand in hand, talking

about theater and what they planned to do later
in the night. In New York, if you’re not careful,
your hours will fall out of the sky and no one
will hear them splash in the sea. Nobody

wants this; life is too damn precious. Everybody
knows there’s juice in giving yourself over to
your dazzle, your swagger, your cool, your electricity,
your fire breathing sword swallowing days

under the big top when human cannonballs blaze
across thin air. Wet your hands, take yourself
to the shallows, hold yourself gently in the easy
flow. Move back and forth, nose to tail, until three

bubbles of air emerge and you regain your strength,
then finally, as if you were your own child, release
yourself back into the “unreachable depth and velocity
of the breaching stream.”

Southern Colorado belonged to
Paul Pascarella this morning
when he rang me to say
the rivers were flashing rainbows
over twenty inches long ready
to swallow his golden stone
fly reflecting on the pebbles
along the bottom. “Catch and
release; I like to let them live.”

He said, as a tall woman with tattoos
rushed past the window of my cafe,
arms swinging, bag against her
undisciplined hip, happy, jiggling
in the shadows of the strawberry
sun, headed where she wanted to
go in the transparent air so far from
the trout swimming in the Rockies.

I’ve grown accustomed to my summer
ramblings in this fly away city where blue
lights pulse on squares and the hum
of rickety music can be heard on corners
everywhere. I am glad for the sweaty
pleasures of afternoon and how the city
will stream me downtown later tonight
to Union Station where crisscrossing
poets will sing their own version
of what it means to be flashing
rainbows over twenty inches long.

Today at 1:16 p.m. while
the earth was turning to
summer, Bob Marley’s
No Woman, No Cry drifted
easy over the speakers at
Table 12 on Avenue A
just as my vegetable soup
arrived steaming in its white
bowl; the waitress scurried
away to another table where
she poured Coke in a glass from
an old fashioned eight ounce bottle.

Summer’s singular quest
asks us to give ourselves
over to the permanence of
green spellbound afternoons
that seem to last forever even
though we know the truth
of how fast the earth turns
and what happens to our
faces when it does.

That’s why it’s a good idea
to do whatever we want,
whenever we can, like weep
in the rain. Make love on
a saintly hill. Pray to the gods
of porches and drive-in movies.

Moan like we mean it when
haze floats ephemeral from
the summer trees and rises
across the spine to the top
of the mountain like I did
when I was living in a tent
during the summer of 1981,
the year Bob Marley died.

My umbrella moderates the breeze here on the roof
where bees come and go from a small nest in the eves
a few feet from where my computer is plugged into a box.

I never noticed these bees until this morning when their black
and yellow movement along the flat white drain stopped my eye.
“So much beauty in such unexpected places,” I thought.

What I’ve seen, I have become, and what I’ve become,
I have kept, and what I’ve kept is mine forever.

Like the young lawyer on at the corner store, red glow
bouncing off magnolia green in the drunken summer afternoon
full of girls laughing across the street, he will tell you he will
live no where else, and mean it for the rest of his life.

Like the boys playing under the “L” in Chicago, they will tell you
what is true about the beat and the rhythm in the beauty of America.

Like the old hippy in the Rockies watching the stars appear out of
the sunset, beautiful and falling down, he will tell you he moved
up high so long ago he can’t remember where he came from.

Like the gorgeous woman curising Rodeo Drive in her Lamborghini,
she will tell you “all of this is mine,” and believe it to the bottom
of her bones.

Like the teenager selling cookies at the ice cream store in Mosier,
Oregon, she will tell you she loves sheets of rain falling on the Gorge
when wind surfers ride the waves.

What I’ve seen, I have become, and what I’ve become, I have kept,
and what I’ve kept is mine forever like this roof, and these bees,
and my three shirts drying in the breeze.

The Sunday afternoon 5 o’clock sun filters through
my roof top beach umbrella. A gaggle of puffy clouds
whiten the pale blue sky. To my ears’ delight,
a mourning dove’s sweet coos have replaced
the mockingbird’s ambulance cries.

New York is a walking city and earlier
Tish and I strolled to our local cinema to see
Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” We came
before noon for our $6 tickets, a bag of popcorn, and
settled in to watch the big screen roll across
Paris.

I like walking in New York but there is nothing like
walking around Paris. I love walking in Paris so much,
when my doctor first mentioned prostate cancer
my first thought was, “I’ll never see Paris
again.”

This morning I sat, 80 days from my surgery
bathing in this delightful film about a writer who longed
for Paris of the 20’s in the rain, who traveled
across “time-present-to-time-past” to Point Neuf,
Notre Dame, Jardin du Luxembourg, Maxim’s,
Cafe Procope, Gertrude Stein’s house,
Odeon Metro Stop, and up a long series
of steps to la Basilica du Sacré Coeur de Montmarte.

I have walked these areas well in a drumroll
of footfalls that have always threaded me back
to 38 rue Dauphine where the wood worn steps,
(They must have know Nazis, GI’s and Les Partisans.)
have always carried me up the 6 flights to the tidy
one room boheme aerie that belongs to
John van Hasselt, my soul brother
and his lovely artist’s wife,
Sylvie Pourel.

Yesterday after the storms
washed New York clear again,
I walked to the Goodwill store
for some formerly very pricey
button downs on sale for $8.95.

I’ve always gone for X-Large
loose, flowing, skin free
underneath. Although, lately
I’ve switched to Large since
I’m slimmer now.

Not as slim as when I sported
a Medium Bleeding Madras
into typing class at Enka High
where I learned the keyboard
from a pretty teacher, pregnant
and terrified about her husband
on the front lines in Vietnam.
She was tall and had dark
brown hair forty five years ago.

I fancied myself a dandy
in my Madras with its unstable
vegetable dyes calling out
to all the girls how cool I was,
a Painted Bunting to be reckoned
with, hopping down the hall,
caroling from my exposed perch.

Yesterday as I shuffled through
the forest of subdued blues
and reds hanging on the racks
in the small store, I remembered,
for a brief moment, how my royal
Madras faded across the tender
night when Carolyn Shope and I
swayed at the school dance
to Nat King Cole’s nightingale
singing across Berkley Square.

At four thirty this morning, a lightning packed
storm boomed across the sky submerging
Manhattan in thick sheets of water that rattled
me awake just in time to hear the panicked
drain on the 6th floor roof-deck struggle and
gurgle as it sucked too much down its throat.



If you were going to find your perfect coffee shop along
the sun bleached concert paths in the East Village
would you take the vibe approach like I did this morning

at 8:30 when I turned left on 25th because I was listening
to the cat wind whispering in the June heavy trees?
I walked down the street thinking about how I once

watched a small black rail, rare bird of the Florida Everglades,
disappear into sea hay where Great Blue Herons meditate
and Marsh Minks feed, tide restless on the beach.

Perfection is always within our reach. And I have found it
at Ost Café on the corner of E. 12th and Avenue A, sipping
my green tea, listening to Johnny Cash sing “love is the higher

law.” I’m getting fat on what grows inside me. I’ll tell you now,
when music parks its moonbeams between what I know and
what I don’t know, there’s always enough thunder to go around.

NOTE: Crossing Union Square is out of order because I forgot to click publish on my Wordpress blog.

The Buddhist shrine sitting above the fireplace in the cool
morning air that drifted down 25th Street this morning
reminded me of the box turtle’s beauty, the lavish patterns

of his domed shell, his beaked nose, and sharp claws moving
him forward over the hundred years of his life. So much like
Buddhist monks I’ve seen smiling, chanting, mindful, wise,

possessing nothing, a part of everything like I was this afternoon
crossing Union Square flip-flops smacking the rain draining from
the city, on the way to the sea. I was on my way home, no more

a Buddhist monk than when I was at The Taos Inn and tried to
convince the bartender I was a high lama on vacation for a week
and all I wanted was a Carlsberg beer to pass the time.