Not for Naught

The menagerie is not for naught, as

Bronko, coming to my aid tonight—

a broken soul in need of something

—satisfied despite. He’d heard the

arguing, knew the limits of the fight

and waited for the chance at salving:

a tongue on open knee I’d otherwise

rebuke, but not this overheated night.

He vied to stay where I was working

and while I prodded him away, a may-

fly (now in June) was taking flight

from whatever spot it had in hiding

to the upstart interest of the dog.

The mayfly, prone to show the blight

of its existence, bounced in ping

pong leaps upon the land-seal’s nose

and inevitably, of course, into his bite.

Bronko, for his part, spit up the thing

and so I clambered up to sweep the scene,

pinch the writhing weakling and invite

the nearby turtles—sort of slumbering

—to finish off what didn’t suit the dog.

They let the insect float about its plight

around their metric pond, never sinking

yet also never thinking of a possible

reprieve. In artificial current it might

have swirled beyond its own surviving:

fancy that! I counted rounds and hoped

it would defy the odds—earn the right

to live miraculous release, what any being

would pray to see. “As flies to wanton

boys are we to th’ gods;” for who’s contrite

in food and general chains of suffering?

Bronko’s long since lost the paltry plot,

and I should follow in his lead and insight,

bid all creatures a quietude of evening.

The world turned June

Dear Symposians, it was so good to have family here this spring--Lena in early March, and Mom, Dick, Greg and Lola here in late May. Prague is famous for its 'spring', unfortunately hampered by an historical misnomer, as 1968 is infamous for its Prague 'fall' (the August 20th invasion of Warsaw Pact watchdogs). History aside, it is lovely here as I write and make the following request:

Please take a look at this draft for my annual contribution to our leave-taking party of colleagues, numbering ten this year. I have a couple imperatives in mind as I draft: a) keep an animal in bay, for better or worse--this time, the hedgehog that may represent Czech Republic better than a nonsensical lion national emblem, or ISP better than its mascot falcon, hijacked from the 'Sokol' movement of Masaryk's First Republic; and b) honor the leave-taking event without pronouncing by 'eulogy' or 'roast' any particulars of a person, as biographical instances--times ten individuals--is a nightmarish matrix.

We all know campsites--from boundary waters to Camp Grow--and we all have ways of weighing in. Add to that any sense of 'ethics', as my working title is 'Hedgehog Ethics':

to Kathleen, Peter, Dianne, Stephen, Anke, Melissa, Shelley, Loic, John, Caroline

An adage of the ages:

leave a campsite cleaner than it was

then, in incremental stages,

campsites cleanse ourselves.

Here, the hedgehogs hold the night—

what presence they assume is barely known

to those who grope in daylight;

they leave well enough alone

and then tidy up the floor.

We wake to worlds unseemly fresh and

so… we sleepwalk out the door

and trample hedgehog land.

But then again, they wait to

trample what we’ve paved—the earth

is rounded with such residue,

with throes of death and birth

travail, dreaming in between.

A curious thing a hedgehog does to wile

away its time: a ‘self-anoint’ routine

to smell like other selves awhile,

to sleep that off and venture

out again. Camouflage, the experts say,

and let them think they’re sure.

Would you anoint yourself today?

We’ve seen good friends and stewards

come and go. To name them now would

satisfy some chronicle, but few words

satisfy their goal for good:

they leave the campsite clean. Scouts

who tread itinerant tracks will know (if not

acknowledge) what it means to grout

the natural foundations, what

they found and what they, too,

will leave again anew. We keep the campsite

clean. We learn from hedgehogs who

glean in kind from us—we might

talk mutual shop some day. Now,

we batten down the hatches, steady selves

for storms unseen, with forecasts how

the fort is stronger than it was.

still waters do run deep

and this symposium is a shepherd's keep! I don't care how many or few look in, but I love that we can post here, comment--check those, and click to make your own, look back at archived stuff and become inspired anew. It's Mother's Day today, and I loved how Kevin Durant made use of his own symposium--the NBA and all its fans--to pass his accolades along, compelling his mom Wanda to make a modest acceptance speech of her own. She nourished her kids on a kind of mush we enjoyed in unincorporated Des Plaines--I long for that dish sometimes--and prayed for their safety, salvation, success, counting not the odds against. Happy Mother's Day, Mom--you are our MVP!

Möbius strips

Mother’s Day, Oklahomas everywhere

Wanda said

a mother’s dream is

seeing to her kid’s each own

Kevin spread

his mother’s word in

bringing the Podoloff home

and giving

it to Mom—Wanda

said a mother’s dream is be-

ing happy

—even when alone—

to oust obstructions and free

her each kid’s

doubts that happiness

cannot be found. Wanda said

Kevin’s dream

indeed is hers, bless

all the prayers preceding bed

bless brothers

sisters, family pets

bless obstructions as they come

Möbius strips

may link chainlike and

dreams so loved are never done

Two Hours on the Pecatonica

One mile down a winding river,
full of overhanging strains
and random estimates, the father
listens as his son complains,
“I’m never doing this again.
The water’s cold, the waves are high,
The stretch we’re on is longer than
you promised. Everything’s a lie!”

Two miles down a rending river,
with the surface rippling
less from flow than from the weather
blowing six weeks into spring,
now the boy turns his teen anger
everywhere at once, turns mad
to the boats and to the river,
to Wisconsin, to his dad.

Three miles down a bending river
making slow turns south and east
through rural hills and rustic pastures,
answering a prayer for peace,
and in time the boy turns quiet,
sullen still but out of breath,
paddling the waves in silence
having beat the horse to death.

Four miles down a wending river,
later in the afternoon
the sun comes out from undercover
like a mouse predicting June
and the boy from broken shadows
finds the words he hadn’t said
and the father smiles at the 
son, as two boats forge ahead.

Five miles down a wand’ring river
muddy shores turn into rocky
bluffs that would defy the river’s
native title, what the Sauk
had called wet earth, but for the moment
man and boy behold the banks
that rise above them as they lumber
onward with unspoken thanks.

Six miles down a wondrous river
four deer running up the bluff,
a turkey flushing into flight,
an eagle soaring just above,
and then the son: “When this is over
and we bring our kayaks home
I guess you’re gonna chew me out for
all the things I’ve said and done.”

Seven miles down the river
a snapping turtle almost bites
the passing paddle, then the father:
“No, son, everything’s all right.
I will be glad when this is over,
proud of you and thrilled that we
could have this afternoon together,
happy you were here with me.”

Eight miles down a winsome river
on a stretch we’ve made our own,
from Blanchardville to Thunder Bridge,
but there’s an island halfway down,
and there’s a goose nest on the island,
and all along the muddy banks
the world is fishing, farming, hunting,
living with unspoken thanks.

The Point of Life

Before the month of Easter ends, I wanted to get in one more post, so I’m predating this one by a half dozen hours.  I wanted to stay in April for Easter’s sake but also to commemorate yet another great author who died this month: Peter Matthiessen, the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction categories.  In fact, with his first winner, The Snow Leopard, he won the award twice, once in 1979 for the brief lived category “Contemporary Thought” and then in 1980 for general nonfiction.  The Snow Leopard is a wonderful travel journal about a layman explorer trying to beat the onset of a Nepalese winter in search of the rarest of wild animals, all the while freshly grieving the loss of his wife to cancer.  Then in 2008, joining only two other three-time writers (Saul Bellow and nonfiction writer Lewis Thomas) he won the fiction award for Shadow Country, a uniquely styled murder mystery set in the early 20th century Everglades.  This was my introduction to Matthiessen, and I liked the book so much I read it twice, hardly deterred by its 900 page length.  He lived a full life, into his eighties, and then this year, a week before his last book was to be published, he succumbed to cancer.  I am now in the middle of his last book, In Paradise, a fictional work that had started as another autobiographical travelogue about an odd assortment of pilgrims to Auschwitz — Jews, Buddhists, Christians; Germans, Poles, Americans; a scoffer of the whole idea of pilgrims to Auschwitz, an atheistic scholar researching a weary subject, a man in search of his roots — who have gathered for a weeklong meditation retreat.

About 40 pages into the book (and I’m not that much further as I write this) there is a compelling quote: “The point of life is to help others through it – who said that?”  This, as it happens, parallels my recent very novice study of Kierkegaard’s three modes of life: the aesthetic, the ethical and the spiritual, and also my recent required advocacy (called on to write a report for our church’s annual congregational meeting) for social ministry.  All of which, combined with a bible verse (Luke 23:43), prompted this work-in-progress poem, which I will title with the lead of the same quote from Matthiessen:


The Point Of Life

1 looks to the stars
turns to the east
leans on the powers
of reason & truth.
1 pays for the view
waits for the feast
contemplates beauty
& holds on to youth.
1 bows to the throne
flees from the beast
stands off alone
while one sets up
a booth.
1 searches within
struggles for peace
sees time begin
to grow long
in the tooth.
1 takes up the cross
suffers the sentence
‘s less where he is now
than where he
is going.
1 ‘s done what he’s done
comes to his senses
turns to the one
hanging next to him,
knowing
1 speaks of a presence
lives for today
lifts up the other
and shows him
the way.




And now I can continue on to May.

Kepler's Constellations

     on Josef’s acceptance to gymnasium

Phenomenal, it might be said, for the

phenomenological.  Tycho Brahe

observed the orbits after Copernicus

eccentricized the earth. “The sun

sets without setting at all”, a modern

Polish poet would conclude. And

Kepler, charting what he could, upset

the expectations even more. The

orbits didn’t synch, didn’t course the

way a stargazer might think, and

thus a point elliptical had to enter in.

        We travel such roads all the time

        in efforts to get where we want to go

        or what we wish to see: a setting

        sun, a dawning one, days beyond our

        dreams. Occasionally we ante up

        and amble to the dark unknown. God

        knows what’s there—angler fish,

        Lucifer and machinations all our own

        —heaven help us when we fly to

        others we know not of…. Heaven help

        us anyway: we sojourn unaware.

Joe now goes to survey stars celestial

and earthbound. He’ll enter halls

of Jan Kepler Gymnasium and supply

his share of what’s been supplied

by Copernicus, Brahe, countless more

in line with learning and lighting

the dark unknown. “Eat any fruit,” we

recall, “save that from the tree of

the knowledge of good and evil.” Why

tempt us more than the Serpent?

As Magi know, we travel now in grace.

Spelling Lessons

 

Perhaps a spell is lifted in the slumberous news today:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has passed away, and students gone and gifted

sent him, and cc’d me, a wistful wave good-bye.

The spell began December third, some thirteen years ago

with the laureate of Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks, whom I had heard

in ’eighty-two, enchanting us anew. ‘Is she alive?’

a student asked—no Google yet to see—and I replied

‘I hope she hasn’t died. She’s old, for sure and awfully spry—I bet—’

the bell for passing rang, the lesson came to close.

Then later, on the nightly news, I saw the haunting face

of Gwendolyn, a smile of grace: indeed today, an erstwhile vivid muse…

That student would conclude ‘that’s how it sometimes goes.’

Belles lettres studied next and next lent opportune lifelines:

Dickens’ best and worst of times, renderings of Shakespeare texts,

Morrison, Munro, Ishiguro let literature run free

and handed off to Saramago, whose Blindness we pined

to see. Alas, we find we’re in a place we’d been ten years ago—

‘Is he alive?’ and Google now confirms the man to be

but lessons later, mockingly, the Nobel Portugese expired.

Well, he was old and tired—imagine teaching Plath when shockingly

she sealed her flat to take the leaking gas alone…

Havel’s plays—abstruse, absurd—were finally sinking

in by mid-year break, and thinking we could commandeer the new year,

Vaclav moled away in Prague, our common home.

Szymborska’s ‘View with a Grain of Sand’ slid in. We shared

the view and then prepared to wonder with her why and what and who

and, spellbound as we were, this poet left our world.

We hadn’t set things down, when Heaney, digging well

before the mid-term break expelled the chance to see him in our town

(as I had twice before, and relished every word):

“A four foot box, a foot for every year.” Mere inches in,

the school year would begin as the stubborn bogland spell took root.

We studied on—what could we do?—and so

we’re celebrating Easter now, with Lazarus and friends,

and as his curtailed century ends, and as his magic would allow,

we raise Remedios the Beauty… now, for Gabo.

Before your iPhones entered in, we swam in Solitude.

Ambivalent to verisimilitude, the novel failed to find its center

in millennials who had no qualms or queries

about a race condemned or exiled from the memory

of men—whose armory had no time for Macondos on the mend,

no clutter for vacation breaks… or centuries.

Still, we wore three covers out—one had Macondo

on a hill, an island in a Day-Glo Babel, jungle-clad, an anthill stout

and mad, and maybe Ben, my son, saw sheer

delight in that tableau. He painted one his own:

a house and homme and chestnut tree, a sun and moon to look below

and unenormous wings of bluebird flying o’er,

stirring breeze to beat the hurricane. Ben bade

the spell adieu—he drew in solitude a more enlivened place to be,

and when he’s old enough to read the tome,

I hope he’ll see his instinct led him from the start:

his and Gabo’s fleeting art as noble, humble, immaculate, distinct,

and fit for classes, yes—our common home.