In a lonely open space I wish I knew,
A world of splintered wood and metal tools,
Lived those who came before, the barely known:
The wanderers, who had to elsewhere go,
Although the reasons of the time are lost.
So much, so many, blowing winds of life:
The randomness of one when viewed by all,
Or all when viewed by one from distant time.
But we have categories that we use
To sweep away the lives of many gone,
To boil down to sentences the mass
Of groups of people, as though no one lived
Who had the movement free that we enjoy
Or ever had a conscience, before us.

---

For the last two weeks, I’ve spent eight hours a day in a nursing home, and if the TV has been on, it has been on westerns.

Both of my parents loved westerns, yet I remember two things they told me about them as a kid: (1) they’re fiction; and (2) they’re often perniciously wrong, particularly in their portrayal of antagonists.

One of the distinctions between good and bad drama is how fair it is to antagonists. Good drama manages to be fair without lessening the audience’s engagement. Bad drama gives us two-dimensional villains.

In the quasi-historical world of westerns, bad-drama portrayals of antagonists materialized in ways we would now call racist. Which was what my parents meant by “perniciously wrong”.

My parents were both born circa 1930, which means that the pre-automobile era was strong in the memory of many of the adults they grew up around. The culture of horses for transportation had been widespread for hundreds of years before its sudden and rapid demise, and westerns put their generation in touch with a world that had disappeared within the lifetimes of people important to them.

Westerns were often called “horse operas”, which is a more descriptive name in many ways. All of the dramatic ridiculousness of operas, plus horses.

---

The term “western” has come to have another connotation in academic circles. It means “bad”.

Westerns, as a movie genre, are looked at similarly, and in many ways, as related. Most everything bad about western society can be found in westerns.

So they died out, as a genre, in movies and on television.

Many of the tropes and conventions of westerns, however, have found a home other places: Star Wars, to mention one. Lucas just put his antagonists in faceless white masks and helmets, and set his gunfights in outer space.

---

Watching westerns, after all these years, I can see both why they were so popular and why they now aren’t. It’s hard for people now to imagine how popular westerns once were. It’s a lot like trying to explain how big Sears or even Woolworth’s used to be.

My mom, in the severely weakened state she’s in, finds comfort in them, though. So on they’ll stay.

In a couple of days, my brother will be here, and I will head back to Georgia. But I will, in the meantime, have seen more episodes of “Laramie” and “Death Valley Days” than I ever knew existed.

efflorescent
in her thought,
her love and choices
numinous,
a river never
damned or caught,
her even shadows

luminous

---

I was in my long period of recovering from my illness when I met her. She was a brilliant woman.

Life had been hard on her. Grief, loss, and injustice had darkened her doorway for years.

She, too, was dealing with illness. But whereas I was getting better, she was headed in the opposite direction.

We didn’t talk about our troubles, though, at least not often. We mostly talked about music and the cosmos and literature and national parks and hydroelectric power and languages (her field of study) and philosophy and oddities of regional dialects, to name a few topics I can remember.

I do not think I had ever met anyone who was so consistently misunderstood by people around her than she was. To me, she was easy to understand, although I cannot say I ever came close to figuring her out. She was thinker, a pure thinker, and much of what others found odd or off-putting was to me a sign of someone who was constantly thinking about everything.

She had emotions, too, of course, but those had been so stretched and frayed by events in her life that they did not have that tendency to snap back into place that luckier people’s emotions have. She could get angry over something simple, or show no anger whatsoever over something major. But she would notice it, and comment it on it. She was always thinking, even about her own interior landscape.

The illness she suffered from was one that, thankfully, left her mind intact; however, over the time I knew her, the physical part of her life became very difficult. She never resented me my good fortune; she never resented anybody anything.

Hers was a grand, celestial sort of mind: she loved the writing of Henri Bergson, and often quoted him to me (frequently in French, which I would then have to ask for a translation):

“Intuition is a method of feeling one’s way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.”

“When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.”

“… all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.”

I last saw her nearly twenty-five years ago, and she died, in her mid-thirties, a couple of years after that. As a sort of tribute, I went out and bought every Henri Bergson book in English translation that I could find, and read them. It seemed like something she would have liked.

She had no living relatives when she died, even though she died young. I didn’t hear about her death until nearly six months afterwards, from a mutual friend down in Florida. I was going through a divorce at the time, and I mentioned the news of her death to my soon-to-be-ex-wife, who had met her.

“I always liked her,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too,” I said.

 

history melts
beneath the heat
of moral
sensibility;

capable
though we might be,
it seems past our
ability

to understand,
to comprehend
the real within the
versions we

accept and eat
for breakfast as
the truth about
our history

---

The Eagle and Phenix Mill has predecessors going back prior to the Civil War; what’s left of it has been transformed, in the present day, into a series of high end condominiums and apartments. You can see for yourself, if you care to. There’s also a section on that website about the mill’s history.

I first saw the mill (and the city of Columbus, Georgia it sits in) back in the mid 1980’s when I went to see an Atlanta Hawks game with a friend of mine. He did not take the most direct route there and back from where we lived in northwest Florida, because that would have taken us through Auburn, Alabama, and he was a die-hard University of Alabama fan. So we went somewhat out of our way, through Columbus, GA, instead.

Just one of those weird memories.

I wasn’t to see the city again until I interviewed there almost 24 years ago for the company I work for to this day.

When I moved to Columbus in 1995, the mill lay empty; virtually all the mills did. Since then, a renaissance of sorts has happened downtown, with the restoration and renovation of the Eagle and Phenix as a part of it. I’ve known several people who lived there.

One of them was a former boss, who lived there while he was going through a divorce. He had found out that his wife had been having an affair for something like five years. He was a high-flying executive type whose job required frequent travel and their kids had reached the age where they didn’t need their stay-at-home-mom as much anymore. Both husband and wife were very young looking, attractive people.

Maybe you or I could have seen it coming, but he didn’t.

Prioritizing our identity versus our relationships is an issue everyone struggles with, because relationships involve sacrificing some of our own desires. In practice, it is either worth it, or it is not.

I’m not really in the judging business — I don’t look good in robes, for one thing — I’m more in the understanding business. And I do of course realize there are moral issues involved. But relationships are, as I’ve said elsewhere, voluntary: every single day, both people in a relationship choose whether or not to continue to have the relationship. And there isn’t one unless they both choose to have one. She made the choice she made. They are now divorced.

He kind of re-purposed himself, after his marriage ended, somewhat like the Eagle and Phenix building he lived in immediately after. Did some building, remodeled a few things. Found a new purpose, like another type of bird, rising from his own ashes.

Or like the old Eagle Mill did, after being burned to the ground.

A gallimaufry are my thoughts,
Chaotic, a melange —
A daily dose of junk consumed,
A type of mental paunch —

Of malady, and sassafras,
And creosotic sludge —
A gallimaufry are my thoughts,
But who am I to judge?

---

Sometimes I think of lines for poems that I can’t make work. Lines like:

responsibility sits
like bright colors on
the shoulders of
an eel

Which I may use yet. Or

She liked to kiss
The way that other people like
To spite

Which I may also find the right place for.

Oh, why not, let’s go for it now:

Sing me something with a scent:
Turgid and grandiloquent,
Bright and shiny, dull and gray,
Til the hours wile away —

Battle me and rattle me,
Make my dreams come true:
Just don’t ever go away,
That would never do.

Cacophany waits
Like shell trumpets
For those who hear,
But cannot feel.
And there, responsbility sits
Like bright colors
On the shoulders of
An eel.
Intensely purposeful and vague
Are things we need to handle,
But here beneath the ocean’s weight
You cannot light a candle.

I knew a girl who loved her rum,
She liked it chill and neat;
And she had a collection, but
It was not quite complete —

She took me once to add to it.
It was a off-beat night;
She liked to kiss
The way that other people like
To spite.

I spoke to her of ocean things,
And all my scented songs;
And then she threw me out the door
To right a thousand wrongs.

You wonder now, as well you might,
What all of this could mean —
It means that love is everything
And all else

In-between

Ok, so that’s done. But it makes me think of the subject of comic book art. So how about

That cover, with the trademark spotlight effect, contains the pencil work of Ernie Chan (credited sometimes as “Ernie Chua”) who was one of my favorites as a kid. Here are a few more of his:

Speaking of Batman, if Batman wrote poetry, I wonder what it would be like?

It would probably a lot like Rorschach’s journal. In fact, I think that was the idea of Rorschach’s journal. Eccch.

Comic book production is a technology I don’t really get. For years, it was the same with comic strips. Charles Schulz would draw something in his studio, and it would end up in a newspaper on our kitchen table, via some process.

Given what it took in those days just to copy a document — and if you’ve never had to use carbon paper in your life, count yourself blessed — I never was clear how drawn images got into newspapers. Or photographs, for that matter.

The good thing is, when you write about things you don’t understand, you never run out of things to write about.

Someone asked me, in response to a post the other day, if I’d really posted nearly 8,000 poems. Searching on the tag “poetry” it appears the correct number as of this writing is 7,782. As you can see, total posts are over 8,300, which include 426 that are just for me.

And I’m not even counting the 18 or so poems I’ve posted as a part of these Nano Poblano “Poetic Essays”, which you might not want to do either, after having read this essay.

But the word “essay” just means “attempt”, which I interpret to mean you don’t have to succeed to write an essay.

Which works out well.

in the keening wind, the palm tree blows,
but no one knows, for no one’s there —
with the coming chill of novembertime,
the truth is, i’m just half-aware

of the verse i lost, of the dream forgot,
of a vacant lot, and a vacant stare —
in the billowing wind, the palm stays tall,
but i don’t recall,
and i just

don’t care

---

I’m forever losing poems. You might think this odd coming from someone who has posted just under 8,000 of them in the last four years, but it is nonetheless true. I have poems worked out in my mind, but by the time I get to a keyboard, they are gone. Vanished.

Like many writers, I have concluded (naturally) that those would have been the best things I ever wrote, changing my life and that of my family, if only… if only… but, alas.

I figure I’m not really a writer if I can’t make my own life more dramatic than it really is.

Owen fidgeted at the lonely desk, watching a fly buzzing around the one bare light bulb above his head. Eyes aching from the whisky, he nonetheless poured the last of it into a glass and downed it in one. “If only I could remember,” he thought…

If only indeed, Owen. Or, you could just write another one. Which I typically do.

I’ve written elsewhere about why I write poetry; one additional reason I do it is that, paragraphs like the one above, where I can’t seem to remember whether I’m writing 2nd or 1st person, aren’t really a problem with poetry. I also can ignore things like keeping my tense consistent. Having to keep tense consistent makes me consistently tense.

Another group of poems that never get published comes under the category of “Dumb Ideas I Keep Coming Back To”. And no, I’m not going to tell you what any of them are, because they are truly dumb. The ideas these poems contain start out as insightful generalizations I think I’ve discovered, only to realize, upon reflection, they are (a) not insightful; and (b) untrue. In short, these ideas are dumb.

But I keep coming back to them. Another type of forgetting, I guess.

I know from back in my single days that you have to have a type of amnesia to continue to ask women to dance. You have to forget the number of women who’ve rejected you.

Which was fourteen, by the way. I haven’t forgotten that. I can probably tell you all of their names. I would write a poem about it, but I would no doubt forget it by the time I got to typing.

I never took rejection well, which is odd, because I got a lot of practice. I can almost always tell people who don’t have a lot of practice in this area. Even though they have heartaches and tragedies, like the rest of us, whatever self-doubt they have doesn’t involve a fundamental questioning of their own value. Which likely means, in scenarios of rejection, they were far more often the rejector rather than the rejectee.

Speaking of types of amnesia, my experience of people who do a lot of rejecting in the dating world is that they don’t remember it. This is largely because they felt the people they rejected weren’t worth remembering.

Which the rejectees know.

Romantic heartbreak, though, is just another forgotten poem; that thing that could have made us great and happy and well-known, but is just a type of fiction. Because everything not-done has no real being, at least, not in history.

But it’s all fair game in writing.

It’s strange how the appearance of things changes as times change. Not the actual appearance, although that may change, as well: the aspect of things, depending on our moods and situations.

We all experience this when a place is new versus when it is familiar. What looks strange or even ominous may become commonplace and friendly, once known. Many people have the experience of noticing how different the same things look depending on the weather. A street may look dirty and depressing on a muddy, rainy day that seems clean and cheerful on a bright, sunny one.

When I first came to Green Valley, Arizona in 2001, I was a newlywed, and my wife and I were carrying with us our three youngest children. We stayed for the week of Spring Break. For my two daughters who came, that trip was their favorite vacation they took as kids. We swam, played games in the pool, stayed up late, visited the Desert Museum, went and saw a copper mine. We also went to a place called the “Gaslight Theater”, which was brilliant and funny.

The town was brand new to me: my parents had been here something like 2 1/2 years at that time. The Santa Rita mountains lay on one side and mine tailings (that I mistook for hills, because they’re huge and stretch for miles) lay on the other. There was desert all around, but plenty of trees in the city, including the line of pecan trees around the river bed for which the place was named. The topography was like nothing I had ever seen.

The next time I came back, it was just my son and me; my parents had come east to Georgia to visit us in the meantime. We went up into the mountains, saw a classical music concert, attended church, revisited the Gaslight Theater for a new show. It unseasonably rained the week we were there; my son and I played video games in the hotel, and made up words to the background music that we both still remember.

My parents came to visit us the next year, but my father wasn’t driving this time, for the first time in their lives.

The next year he died.

I returned alone for the funeral, meeting my brother and sister there, and the place had taken on a different aspect. I was glad I had two marvelous trips there to get to know the place. It was January, wintertime, and the place seemed so different than it had in the spring and fall. Still, to me, it was a place, a land, a topography that my father loved, and that’s how it looked. That’s what I noticed. I also thought a lot about the places he had been proudest to show us.

A year later, my mom told us she was selling their house, and moving into a retirement community called La Posada. It was a wonderful place, she said. When I came to visit her, first by myself, then again with my son, I had to agree.

It was, and is, a wonderful place.

When my mother first moved in, she was seventy-four, but she looked more like fifty-four. “You’re too young for this place,” she heard. A lot.

The place was beautiful, and sunny, and she had a wonderful apartment, large bedroom, living, room, her piano, room for books. It was on the second floor of an apartment building called “La Vista”. The dining room was full of friends. She was always on the go. Exercising, going places, doing things. She took us to a place where she and about thirty other women from her church made stuffed animals to give to underprivileged kids for Christmas. She tutored new Americans in English for free at a Community Center.

As I walked around the extensive grounds of La Posada, the place seemed marvelous, a community of people who hadn’t stopped living just because they’d gotten older. My mom had friends at church, and friends in town, and the place seemed full of possibilities.

I went to see her about every other year for awhile, she still took trips back to see us the other years, although, one ill-fated trip, she ended up in the hospital, and she never ventured east again.

For her eightieth birthday, my whole family came out to see her, along with one of my few remaining aunts. We made one last trip into Tucson to see some museums and go once more to the Gaslight Theater, which, my daughters were glad to see, was as funny as they remembered, and not just something little kids would like.

By that time, she was slowing down considerably, but still going.

Eventually, I would go once per year to see her, different times of year. The town was still beautiful, and had become very familiar to me. But certain aspects of it had changed. Her best friend in town moved to a facility in Tucson and they lost track of each other. I noticed that the people we would eat with when we ate at the dining facility kept changing. My mom also volunteered at the Memory Care center, and took me to visit a friend who was in the Assisted Living Facility. She also showed me the Nursing Home.

“Once people come here, they never come out again,” she told me.

Soon, her health problems had magnified. She had a heart condition for years; now she was diagnosed, more-or-less simultaneously, with Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. She had given up driving, which was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Driving meant freedom. Even though the facility offered free rides to wherever, it just wasn’t the same. My trips out there usually had a large element of taking her to do various errands.

She let us know she had decided to move into the Assisted Living Facility around 2 1/2 years ago, because, she said, she “couldn’t keep up with her medicine”. My sister helped her move, I came a few weeks later, and noticed the much smaller room she now occupied. She was walking with a cane.

By the next time I saw her, she used a walker, which she was using earlier this year (April) when I came to visit.

She briefly made use of a wheelchair since then. Now she is bedridden, and cannot move unless someone moves her.

When I drove into town a little over a week ago, it was midnight, so I noticed little. But in the ensuing days, I realized: this place looks totally different to me now.

I don’t look at the mountains, so beloved by my father.

I don’t notice the mine tailings, so hard to believe unless you see them.

I don’t really register the friendly architecture, or the sunny patches where people play golf.

The life we see in a place
Is the life
We give a place

A land, once soul-filling, lies
Not empty, but
Emptied of meaning

Painted over with
The realization that

There are two kinds of people:

Those who know family is important, and

Those who know family is important too late

– November, 2018

a swirling
bellowing flower
opening

---

The year after I turned twenty, the university I attended put on a Shakespeare festival. Sitting in the audience was one of the formative artistic experiences of my life.

Sadly, these performances have disappeared from the university’s meticulously kept theatrical archives, possibly because they did The Taming of the Shrew as one of three plays, and are now ashamed to admit it. However, I really don’t know why. Their records go back decades before that; and that year looks suspiciously thin on listed performances.

Great theatrical performances change us in ways no other art form can. It’s similar to movies, but more intimate and tangible. Elements of virtually all of the other arts are present, as well.

Measure For Measure was one of the plays I saw as part of that festival, and its exploration of sexual harassment and double standards for people in power made a tremendous impression on me. Because it has a happy ending, it is classified as one of Shakespeare’s comedies; few of his tragedies, however, are more disturbing.

The main thing I noticed about The Taming Of The Shrew was how well the joking innuendo came across almost 500 years after being written. I didn’t take the plot terribly seriously, as this play is truly a comedy, in the modern sense.

As You Like It was magical in every way. The performance I saw combined music, dance, scenery, and costumes in a brilliant manner. That play has a lot of famous dialogue, which, placed in context, increased exponentially in meaning for me. When I heard a setting of Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind sung by my youngest daughter’s high school chorus, I was taken back in memory to seeing this play in college.

For those of you involved in producing art, of whatever kind: you never know how it will effect people, or for how long. When the winter wind of life blows, it is a very good thing to have the experience of great art to warm you.