Colorado

Storms batter the windshield. He turns and points.
There. That’s the place. As lightning slivers fall
on a dropping river brimful with trout
that raise themselves to lay themselves in creels.

The car falls suddenly through walls of stone
on a town where sunlight patterns the streets.
Ghost town. Silver's what they took out of here.
The gold's up north. Then we climb, looking

for rainbows on the sky, and stop to rest
above a lake riddled by rain. The clouds
press down, obscure the ragged granite peaks.

There's a miner's shack hidden there in mist,
up that trail we'll climb tomorrow. We pitch
our tent and eat beans huddled from the cold.



Originally published in Ball State University Forum. Autumn 1985 .
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved.

Request for Modification Review

We are planning to fence in our backyard so the puppy can go out by herself and run, run, run. But we live in this thoroughly modern neighborhood that's overseen by Bureaucracy Unlimited, otherwise known as the Home Owner's Association, aka neighborhood gestapo aka bureau of regulations. That means that even though only if you squint as you go by the house (thanks to a line of evergreens at the end of our driveway and the fact there are no houses behind us) maybe you'd be able to see 8 feet of fence, we still have to fill out, submit, and have approved a "Request for Modification Review" that needs to be signed by our neighbor (we only have one on one side because we're the first house on our side of the street once you enter the division) before we can start building.

Did you realize there are over 90 words in that last sentence?

Anyway, I'm not going to bore you with all the things we have to document about the fence. But after I downloaded the form, I saw everything that, supposedly, needs to be approved:

* Exterior decorative objects, front porch flower pots [????????? boy, I got away with one there] lighting, etc. [etc???????????]
* Garden plot [????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Those can really ruin your property value. Now you have to sell to green people ?????????????????]]
* Private pool [?] [So if it's private, why do I need to have it approved?]
* Exterior landscape and maintenance. [I'm okay there. I just won't do anything to my yard. Let nature take its course. At last a green rule.]
* Storm windows/doors [I'd rather freeze anyway. That's what men do. I've learned that from reading blogs.]

Then at the end before I sign, I say I agree no work will begin until I get written approval from the Covenants Committee. I love the biblical nature of all this. After all, I live in the south. Where is Legal Mist when I need her?

Further proof the matrix does exist

As an editor I hesitate to post this without sending it through fact checking first. But what the hey...

A Garden Verse

[1]
i’ve tried to tell you how i feel
but your eyes
keep falling shut

[2]
just this once
can’t you stay up with me

[3]
you once said i was insensitive
because while i slept on the ground in our tent
a storm from the lake filled you with terror.
i recall seeing flames from what we thought
was a dead campfire
glowing eerily against the tent wall.
you thought we were going to die.
now you sleep upstairs while i wrestle this demon
& i excuse you.

this devil is mine

Originally published in A Matter of Mind, Foothills Publishing, 2004.

© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.

All rights reserved.

Way To Go Braja!

Check the spotlight (over in the right sidebar). It's a really good piece of news.

Just two quick things

My daughter, who just became a UU and is on the edge of vegan, was here with our lovely granddaughters and son-in-law this past weekend. (the son-in-law has his lovely side too.) And she likes to cook for us when she comes. So this past weekend she made spaghetti with a vegan bolognese sauce (vegetable stock) made from scratch with meat.

We have a puppy trainer who comes to the house once a week to help us train our very intelligent puppy. Yesterday, she taught her "leave it." I wasn't sure when I watched that it worked. It seemed she was more interested in the treat reward than in actually learning not to do something. But today, she has spent a lot of time looking for things to chew she knows she's not supposed to, and then looking up at me to see if I'll say "leave it. Good, puppy. Here's a reward." I think she's bought the trainer.

Random Friday and The Disciple

1) Things haven't settled down yet, but I have been able to venture out into Blogland with a little more frequency over the last few days. Gee, there's a lot of posts to catch up with.

2) I'm still being held hostage by a cute puppy. Saturdays when S is home, I volunteer to run the most mundane errands while she watches the dog. It just feels good to be out of the house and on my own. I did take her for her first real walk today. I've been walking her back and forth in the driveway and letting her sit at the end of the driveway to watch the cars go by. Everybody waves at us. One of us must be really really cute. But the vet told us not to put her down on the ground where other dogs were until after she built up her immunity from her second shot. She got her second shot a week ago, and the vet said we could walk her on a public sidewalk a week later. The walk wasn't as exciting or interesting as the walks Cloudia takes in Hawaii (And if you haven't read her book ALOHA, Where You Like Go? yet, you should). We just walked down to the street sign we can see from our driveway and back. But there can be beauty in mundane as I've been discovering on Saturdays. And I'll tell you, she was one happy puppy.

THE DISCIPLE
When we lived in Massachusetts, Friday was my piano lesson day. It was a couple hours for me to put aside all the editing and boring contract writing I do and do something for me. I took lessons from the owner of the music school I went to, and after the second lesson, I understood chords like I had never understood them before. I even sat down one Sunday and started writing out all the chords in order for each major and minor scale. I was liberated. But I still couldn't play. Nevertheless, I knew that Dave, my teacher was good for me.

The lessons were never just simply learn this because that's the next thing in the book. In fact we didn't have "a book." He asked me what I wanted to learn. I told him. And he found things to help me learn it. It was very organic, and music was a good thing. After I had been taking from him for a while, I walked in for my lesson one day and said, "Look, I don't want to keep going the way we're going. I wrote a song and it's like the first song in this blues opera I want to write about John the Baptist, and I'd like to use this lesson time to work on the opera."

He said, "Okay, play the song."

I did. He got interested and took out his guitar to play along with me, and after telling me about what surprised him in the score and that he liked it he said, "Okay. If you want to work on composition, that's what we'll do." That's when The Disciple was born. (Actually, it had been born a few nights earlier when, after having drunk a little too much bourbon, I sat down at the piano and began improvising what I thought was sacred music but then decided it worked a hell of a lot better if I made it bluesy. But that's another post.)

So I caught The Disciple fire, and with Dave's mentoring, I became possessed. I had at least one new song a week, or the core of a new song, or a revision of one I had already written based on his response. I'd bring in what I did, try to play it for him, and then he'd play it and say, "was this what you were hearing?" 95 % of the time, it was.

I never was more convinced I was going to complete a work than I was this one. I basically finished the first act, began working on songs for the second act, completed the overview of act 2 and act 3, and listed the missing songs in act 1. Then we (S and I) moved to Atlanta. There is no Dave (that I've found) in Atlanta, and the work ground to a halt. I try to get back to it, but without Dave, I'm not sure what I've written was exactly what I was hearing. Plus, I have no one to tell me why it wasn't when it wasn't or why what I heard wasn't as good as what I could have heard. I've tried to jump start the process. To no avail. Then, the other day, Rene reminded me it was a worthwhile, or at least an interesting, project. Maybe the collective energy of the blogosphere, maybe some specific people on the blog, will become my Dave.

When I break down and buy better composition software so that it plays what I hear, I'll post the actual songs on the blog. In the meantime, keeping with the theme of random Friday, here are some random things about/from the disciple:

A PARTIAL LIST OF CHARACTERS
Nate: The title character. A disciple of John
John: A tall lanky itinerant preacher
Jesus: A former disciple of John who rises to prominence as a charismatic TV evangelist
Peter: Another disciple of John
Herod: A county sheriff in Alabama
Herodias: Herod's second wife, also his niece
Salome: Herodias's 16-year-old daughter by her first husband, Herod's brother
Several deputies, including the executioner
Several high ranking state officials
Chorus: at variable times other disciples, camp followers who come to hear John preach or who follow Jesus, artisans and craftsmen, ordinary citizens, children who seem to be constantly around Jesus

LYRICS TO EVERY BUTTERFLY (SECOND SONG IN ACT 2--SERMON ON THE MOUNT--SINGER--JESUS AND CHORUS)

Every butterfly that you see
Knows that it's where
It needs to be
Birds that fly
Never ask why
They have wings
Just see all the flowers
Think how many colors
Each season brings
You don't need a why for everything

You don't need to know
Any more than
Day will always follow night
You won't always know when
You'll get it right
Just listen and you'll hear
That song that lives
Somewhere inside
Ev'ry one's got a song
That can't be denied
You don't need a why for everything

Hawk and robin
Sparrow crow and wren
All gliding through the sky
Watch them riding
On the early morning wind
They don't ask
How they know
They don't wonder why
You don't need a why for everything.

© copyright 2007, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved

There's more, but this is Random Friday

The Bather

(Exodus 2.5)

unmilked breasts glisten
delicate oil-coated skin
the daughter of kings

the noon sun dances
from shoulder to gold-chained neck
as girls wrap her hair

take away her robe
watch her glide to the river
and bathe in waters

satiate with death
a basket hidden near shore
is best left unfound


Originally published in The Columbus Dispatch, 1980.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved

This poem appeared in the same article in the Dispatch that Zipporah did.

Zipporah

(I)
Egyptian, why’d you come if all you want’s
To sit and stare at cracks that climb the walls?
My breast that longs to feel your hand caress
It lies here bare while you ignore my needs.
You might as well not stay as make me feel
I have no husband. Tell me what I’ve done
To make you turn your face away from me.
Please help me understand, Moses, why you
Have shut me so completely from your life.

I wish I knew your dreams. Each night I lie
Beside you while you toss and cry out names –
Egyptian names I’ve never heard you say
But names demanding terror even here.
I want to see the things you see, but how?
Aren’t I your wife? And didn’t Father take
You in, make you a son, and give you all
He has? Then why do you reject us now
With silence, Moses? Tell me what I’ve done.

(II)
Zipporah, near Mt. Horeb, where I take
The sheep to feed, I found a bush still green
And unconsumed by desert sun. The sheep
Won’t touch it. And as I wondered at it I
Removed my sandals. I felt as if I stood
On holy ground. Then to this place a man
Who’d fled from Egypt came and asked
If I could give him water, and I did.
And while he drank, he told a brutal tale

Of evil winding in Egyptian sands,
Of Hebrew bodies covered with raw sores,
Of babies starved because their mothers not
Allowed near wells go dry. And as he talked
I raised my hands to look at them. Look here.
This skin, Zipporah, it’s their skin. Their sores
Have covered both my palms. I dropped my staff.
I stared at him. I stammered. Then I asked
Could no one help, and all he said was, “You.”

(III)
No, Moses, don’t think that. Come here and lie
Beside me. There is nothing you can do.
You left them long ago. Lie here with me.
We are your kin, and you’ve become like us.
This desert land, Egyptian, is your home.
Let Pharaoh answer for his sins. Don’t take
Them on yourself. The people there don’t want
Your help. They ran you off. They’re Pharaoh’s slaves.
You have your life. Leave justice up to God.

Originally published in The Columbus Dispatch, 1980.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who commented on the last post. It made this Grandpa feel good.

And, because some of you have asked....




Her name is Yeats, and she's twice as big as she was when we brought her home two weeks ago when she was twice as big as when we picked her out of the litter two weeks before. . .

This is just to say (and I've lost two followers over night)

Rae at US IN TEJAS tagged me for a meme. And Marty at Dark Star Discovery (what a wonderful Blog name) won two awards and passed them along to me. Thank you, both of you. Considering the fact I've been totally AWOL from the Blogosphere for way longer than I ever thought I'd be, and will for more days ahead, I'm touched. I'll do the meme and post the awards and pass them on soon. But again, thanks.

My neo counter does show 3 visitors from Mongolia

My son sent me an email this week with the subject line "Word Mechanic a hit in Mongolia." Remember the picture of this elevator sign that one of the consultants that works with the bank my son works for sent him from Mongolia?

Well it seems that after that post appeared, someone changed the sign. This is what's there now.

I'm just happy I could be of service.

Just an observation

Our new puppy (in the house officially for a week now) has a very short attention span and an even shorter memory.

Half way through something, she can't remember why she's paying attention.

Here's what I did all day

I'm not editing the following paragraph. I'm reading the article it came from. It's from a journal article I have to read (along with about 12 other similar pieces) in order to write the brief articles I write for a health providers newsletter.

C-reactive protein was discovered and named for its binding to pneumococcal somatic C-polysaccharide [29] in which it recognizes the phosphocholine residues which are present in this ribitol teichoic acid [30]. Phosphocholine is the natural ligand to which CRP binds with highest affinity and this key ligand is ubiquitous as the polar head group of phosphatidlyl choline in cell membranes and plasma lipoproteins. Phosphocholine is also present in constituents of many bacteria, fungi and parasites and plants and the importance for mammalian biology of its recognition is exemplified by the fact that a significant proportion of the germline antibody specificities are directed at it. However, CRP does not bind to all materials containing phosphocholine as the residues must be 'available' or in an appropriate sterochemical configuration. Thus CRP binds to dead or damaged cells in which significant amounts of lysophosphatidyl choline are present, but not the surface of living healthy cells [31]. Binding of CRP to apoptotic cells is controversial and the most rigorous evidence suggests that CRP only binds to so-called late apoptotic cells which are effectively necrotic [32–34]. CRP also binds to oxidized phospholipids [33], platelet activating factor [35], modified LDL [36], β-VLDL, concentrated normal VLDL [37] and to small nuclear ribonucleoprotein particles (which do not contain phosphocholine) when these are exposed in dead or damaged cells [38, 39].

That and watch the dog. I was an English major, for crying out loud. I think my brain just went necrotic.

How I came to write poetry -- Part 1

Bee asked me in a comment when it was I first started writing poetry. I tried to answer her but it felt as if I was writing too much to leave in a response. So I promised to post my answer. The answer is I don't know. That is I don't know if you count juvenalia.


My mother claims my favorite book when I was a child was Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse. That may be why I bought it for my own kids when they were small.


My first success at poetry -- we're talking real juvenalia here -- came in the third grade. The Holy Name Catholic School newspaper published a poem I had written about my religious joy. I don't remember much except how it started.


I wish I were the little bell
That tinkles loud and clear
To tell the people kneeling down
That you are coming near.


That was it for poetry for a long time. When I was in the fourth or fifth grade I won an essay contest sponsored by the newspapers in Columbus. There were three winners from the city -- one for each paper -- and I was the youngest of the three. The essay was about why my father should be named father of the year, and the prize was three days and two nights in Washington DC at the Mayflower Hotel, including air fare, tickets for the All Star game, and fifty dollars pocket money. The editor of the Dispatch also arranged for a friend of his, the head of the transit company in DC, to give my father and me a personal tour of the city.


My family was not a literary family. The only books I recall being in the house until I was 11 were kids' picture books, Reader's Digest condensed novels, books about art, books about crafts, and scout books. My father was a boy scout leader. He also painted, worked with ceramics, did wood carvings, made things out of leather, and invented his own art media. He also taught ceramics at night in a studio on the north side of town. The one thing he didn't do was quit his day job.

I did go to the library and got books from school. At the library I would find juvenile sports novels. The kind where some bright and talented high school football player went to Small Time College because he needed to stay close to home and help the family by working in the five and ten. (They call them dollar stores now but five and tens were much better.) He makes the football team, has problems in school that weren't entirely his fault, and almost gets kicked off the team. Things always seemed to work out, though, and he'd make the team just in time to play so that Small Time College got it's biggest win ever against Humongous State University.

The books I got at school were mainly hagiography. The one I remember the most was called God's Teenager about the life of Dominic Savio who died at the age of fifteen. The biggest effect these books had on me was to make me do things like go to sleep at night wondering what it felt like to wear a hair shirt.

I continued writing little poems in the style of A Child's Garden of Verse and getting them published in the school paper and other similar venues. But I much preferred prose and studying math and history.

When I was 11 we moved into a house outside the city that had belonged to a professor friend of my father who had died. We got the furniture and the books. And I was hooked on books.

John Updike 1932-2009

The world is a better place for his having been a part of it. He will be missed.

His knees trembled, as if after an arduous climb. He had made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what? ("Bech Enters Heaven" in Bech: A Book , 1970)

Archaeologist

Dying, the salmon leap the dams, taking
no food until they reach their destined stream,
then lie together to climb, forsaking
all but release from the dark primal dream

of birth, the odor of gravelly holes
that went with them down to sea, there to rise
like tides swelling the mouths of rivers, shoals
that rush headlong backwards in time. Their prize,

death without knowing, obliteration.

Just as here, I, shedding a lifetime’s fears,
feel the dark rush of anticipation.
In hope of hearing songs of ancient seers
I’ve stalked the echoes of superstition
and learned the rhythms of death’s repetition.

Originally published in The Amherst Review, 1986.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved.

The day after

Yesterday was truly a great day for America. So I'm not sure why this bothers me. But why in what is supposed to be his most inspiring speech did he use these lines, and why have they become the lines everyone quotes?

I mean I do see their appropriateness, but they are no "Ask not what ..."

Inaugaration Day

"My God. We did it. We did it."

Colin Powell

Challenger: An Elegy

“The world stopped when the Challenger exploded.”
A visitor’s note at the Challenger Web site

(I)
Nothing works. Neither day nor night.
All the stars disappear. Birds in mid flight
Fold their wings and fall, refusing to fly.
The sun sinks slowly then freezes in the sky.
The winds stand still. Fish die in the ocean.
The pendulum’s swing remains the only motion.

(II)
That night I saw Orion rising overhead and knew
That things exist beyond the meaning of the words we use.
Some things are only light, or sound, or pressure on the skin.
Some things inhabit space before the space where words begin.

Now all the words in all the books cannot inhabit space
Reserved for things that vanish from our lives without a trace.
The names we give we give to things we know can be recalled.
And words won’t salvage anything when you see the heavens fall.

Once Jupiter held up the stars for a longer night of love.
Jehovah stayed the sun with force for slaughter from above.
But never once has someone made a minute fail to pass
Or just by willing made the trilling air of a bird song last
Beyond its final note dissolved inside an evening wind.
Yet still the sky at night gives hope you’ll hear it once again.

III
goddess boat -- serpent
at the feet of Orion,
trailing the heavens
bodies without down-
link fall from the sky, and you,
leaping like a hare,
lift the hunter killed
by his love past my window.

gods and goddesses
tease the human isolate
with monstrous burning
while we raise new myths
from the scattered debris
of human yearning.

Originally published in A Matter of Mind, Foothills Publishing, 2004.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved.