2020 2021 does it matter?

 

The man I’ve known for thirty-seven years is having cookies and ice cream and watching a bad movie. This year ends and another begins. No resolutions needed or required. This past year has been unprecedented, but only in the way every year is, aren’t we're always encountering the unknown? Disappearing from the past; unknown by the future. Time would be difficult without the persons we know and love. We can reach out, send our words, share pictures and poems and books, jokes and help hold up one another’s defeat and grief. Thanks, and thanks and thanks again for the love. Be safe, be kind, be strong. 

Two poems and a Haibun, three pictures of starlings, Tuesday of the Cold Moon, watching this year draw to a close

 All that glitters

Starlings stop at the wall,
find my offering of bread
crusts and seeds.
 
In the fading light
they shine as though brushed
with gold leaf.
 
Thanks enough.

                 Anti-twitcher

The term "twitcher", sometimes misapplied

as a synonym for birder ~~Wikipedia

 

Starlings invade each spring

black bullet of rat-on-wings,

short-tailed speckle,

dog-diving blemish,

songbird plagiarist,

dirty hangers-on;

they own the wall

wing-flutter like heartbeat,

that drives the cats wild.

Murmuration

When the man walks into the room, seventy-three women breathe in as one. It had been five weeks since any of us had smelled a man, and he is clean, soap and cedar, a scent that wafts through the barracks, is fresh and dangerous; looking across the aisle at Bridgette, she closes her eyes and inhales deeply as he walks past. But he is not here to bring us back a part of life we have shut out.

Our CC’s, two slight women who both share the same last name, Riley, have become our warped den mothers, here to make us sailors. They are present to help this Chief, who is here to get us ready for an inspection. Today’s lesson is how to make us work as one team, one mindset as we prepare for this assessment and to help us to become that component we’ll need to be as we move on in the Navy. 

His first order is for us to remove our duty belts, thick, white web belts with a metal buckle that we wear as accompaniment to our dungarees. Then he tells us to push our bunks and lockers to the bulk head. As I’m pushing my rack I’m reviewing the order, settling it into my head; this is not to be a review of how to fold our blankets and t-shirts. Then we hit the line, stand at attention as he walks back and forth reading names, looking us in the eye, a movement we do not return. 

He barks, “Do you want to pass this next inspection?” 
As one we call out, “Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you ready to do anything for the sailors in your unit?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you prepared to help each other through this training?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Then drop to the deck and give me twenty!”

Bodies drop into push-up position and we call out, “Sir, one, sir! Sir, two, sir! Sir, three, sir!” Raising and lowering as one animal to the bright tile floor. At twenty, we rise, back into our lines, back to attention. He paces past Bridgette again, and she can’t help herself, she breathes in his scent, like succor. I try not to smile, and must duck my head ever so slightly to avoid her look at me across the aisle.

“Is there something funny recruit?” Petty Officer Riley asks, popping around the girl next to me.

“No, ma’am.” I say. She looks me over then walks on, getting people back on the line, stopping to listen to Recruit Garcia’s ragged breathing. Garcia is from Texas, some rural enclave where she lived with her grandparents and younger brothers. Joining the Navy was her grandfather’s idea, he needed her to get out in any way possible. She is barely eighteen and scared. She is so afraid she’ll be sent home, she literally shakes every time we line up. After Riley moves down the room, I whisper, “Deep breaths. Deep breaths.” She clenches and unclenches her fists, but her breathing evens and she relaxes before the next command is barked.

“Duty belts on, straighten those racks and lockers!”

We do as we’re told a blur of motion and then we’re ordered outside into formation, then "let’s do some marchin’, " the word is spit out, hits us like a knife edge; away we go left and right, left and right, flanking, flanking, reverse direction, left and right. All the while being assaulted “you are a unit, you will work as one” from all sides. We are halfway down another pass on the grinder we hear “to the rear march” and as one body we turn.

shadow on the sky
starlings wheel 
wings in one motion

Blackbird fly

 

I stop when wings whisper above me.
I look up I follow flight. I follow acrobats
through trees, I follow their color flash
and song stutter as they swing from branch
to eaves, rooftops. I lean back and
watch as the mockingbird and jay rise
high in the pine and meet the morning sun.
Sparrows bicker and Cardinals titter. A long
rope of blackbirds passes over me, one
minute, two, three and then four, five before
they clear, over the trees and gone.

On the passing of Barry Lopez

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.” ― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I read Arctic Dreams in Norfolk or San Diego, one of those edge of an ocean Navy towns. It was an introduction to Barry Lopez. It would have to have been one of those occasions when I had a chunk of time to myself. So, Jerry was either deployed or we were still separated from one another by a whole country. Those long months in "foreign surroundings" were perfect for Lopez's work.

I was fortunate to hear Barry Lopez read, once at Fishtrap in Wallowa County and then again in Ashland at the Chautauqua Poets & Writers series. Over the years I dipped into his work or just stumbled across something that floored me. Those words will always be there. I love this quote from Love in the Time of Terror that originally was published in Orion and I "stumbled" upon via LitHub: "...is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?"

Be safe, be kind, love and embrace fearlessly this burning world.

So this is Christmas

Be safe, be kind, wear your mask. Remember to ask,
 Are you okay? Then listen. Listen.

The studied notes of our genome

My son, my epiphany, was born at 0300 December 24, 1990 at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. I say my epiphany because I was not prepared for the amount of hit-me-in-the-heart love I would feel. I liken it to the moment the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. Yesterday I was reading a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and there’s a line, A hundred doors spring open and I thought yes, that’s it. 

My son has become a conundrum rolled in a cloak of silence. He was a happy baby, a happy boy, a loving child. He was teamed perfectly with his sister. She was (is) bold and headstrong and he was restrained and calming. Both smart, creative and full of laughter and light: children.

Both are grown now. Both have made their own marks in the world, their own lives, in wildly different ways. You think that you’d always feel any hurt like a web vibrating to the fly’s touch. But the news of disappointment comes the same way, if at all, dribs and drabs, piecemeal. I guess it feels like what Ellis from No Country For Old Men says, “What you got ain’t nothing new.” Families are tentative.
 
Here’s something I wrote recently, called Palindrome, that thing that is the same forward and back. You can’t get back what was taken, you can work to repair what is still possible. My son is thirty and silent, my father is dead; I’ve never shut the door to possibility.

PALINDROME

One of my warmest memories of my father is when I am three or four. It’s evening, my father is home from a day in the woods. He’s settled into his chair smoking a pipe and watching TV. I curl up in his arms my head in the cradle between his shoulder and chin. The tobacco smell is sweet, he wears Old Spice and the remnants of this smell is always on him. He bathed after coming home from work; he does not shave in the afternoon. When I move my head or he speaks his whiskers graze my cheeks. He wears a flannel shirt which is line-dried and smells of apple and sky. I feel his heart beat, I hear his breath.  This memory ends there, because I always fell asleep.

This particular memory loomed when I held my son when he was small as he placed his head beside mine or rested where he could hear my heart.  By that time my father had excised me from his life and my son would only meet him once, though I tried to tell each of the other in halting and strange ways. They would have gotten along. My son would have loved the endless tools and building, he would have taken to welding (which he did later in high school) and mechanics. My father may have found someone who was content to sit and learn. To learn the names and ways of all the tools and motors. To be content in the silent hum of machine and a man.

~~~

And here, also, a poem. Indulge me, it's a tough day:

A semi-explanation for our continued disorders
 
Here is stardust disguised as bone:
vertebrae, wrist, cup of hip,
time secreted in tibia and femur.
The moon’s shadows have nothing on us.
 
Things that hold the half-life of joy
stay buried deep in the marrow;
we carry this as our inheritance.
A collective grief waiting to be stirred.
 
Here where wonder hesitates, dreams
pretend to sleep. Who knew sadness,
was a recessive gene? Inertia like a hidden
blood disorder, shyness passed down like a lazy eye.
 
Better to believe in prayers and spells
than the studied notes of our genome.
I can apologize in advance but I cannot
give you the cure that will heal us.

~~M.E. Hope

Music and lights

This morning the alarm was set to play Charley Pride. When Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ began playing, I said Take it Jerry! And he confessed he does not know Charley Pride’s music. He said they did not listen to country music. Of course, they had a few more options and weren’t really tied to the 12 hours in-valley broadcast of KWVR. Granted you could occasionally get a station from Lewiston or Walla Walla, we could hear American Top 40, but you had to want it. I had a friend in the Navy who, when she’d mention a song and I’d say I don’t know that, would yell at me, Yes, you do! But I didn’t. She was from Philadelphia and could name songs and singers and groups and the years they had hits. I was culturally “deprived” by listening to instrumental, country, the curious “music for the dinner hour”, the farm report and Swap and Shop. But I knew Ferlin Husky and Dolly Parton, (oh we knew Dolly) Sons of the Pioneers, Chet Atkins and Porter Wagner. Now I need to teach Jerry one Charley Pride song and why not his biggest hit?

Well people may try to guess, the secret of my happiness
But some of them never learn it's a simple thing
The secret I'm speaking of, is a woman & a man in love
And the answer is in this song that I always sing

And it’s the Solstice! Jupiter and Saturn are closest to earth that they’ve been since 1623 and, per an article I read, the closest observable since 1226. The convergence. At dusk, as if on cue, they showed up low in the southwest sky. There is also rumor that tonight during the longest night the Ursid meteor shower will be peaking. All this celestial wonder comes after a bright and sunny day. When we went out for our afternoon walk, I mentioned that the sun was at the point in the sky that it rose to in Belgium and then sort of skirted the sky before it disappeared. Days shortened in chunks you could see and feel and then Winter Solstice hit you could feel it rewind until you were closing the black out curtains in the summer to cut out the light.