Ten Dollar Chevy

I lost my tape to a shuttle driver in Nashville and never got it back. Then there was that journal full of grandfather poems abandoned in a London taxi. But none of this comes close to the time Martha left her boyfriend waiting in a phone booth on the freeway outside Eureka as she sped away or should I say lurched in that ten dollar Chevy with no windshield and only second and third gears. She never knew how vital it could be to have reverse in the palm of your hand. No reverse gear. So she kept going all the way to the Okanagan Valley and blended in with the seasonal tribe of apple pickers. Left that Chevy in a ditch outside Spokane and hitched into the next stage of life wondering if George had ever figured out she wasn't going to make it back. Maybe he was still there smelling the salt sea air talking lobster pots and 19th century engravings with the local booksellers. Or maybe someone else turned up, someone with a windshield and reverse, to give George a warm bed and a BLT at midnight. Maybe George metamorphosed right there in that northern Californian phone booth like Superman flowering into an indestructible arrangement of blues and reds with flashes of yellow. Maybe a lightning bolt took George out. That sort of thing happens, thought Martha, as she kept moving forward, reaching for another apple and another, not caring when or how things get ripe, only filling the boxes, filling her pockets, filling her heart without remorse, filling her life with the Okanagan autumn before all the leaves would most certainly fall after the first frost.

Avocado

When I first heard avocado trees take eight
years to bear I reckoned I’d be sixty-plus if
I planted one right now a daunting notion
meantime a volunteer tree between our place
and the barn kept growing we puzzled
over its identity the first few years then knew
it to be an avocado maybe a seed started
by a child using a glass with toothpicks holding
aloft the fruit’s center thrown aside the long
root tailing into tap water while two dark
green leaves reached out of the crack long
before we arrived then say four years ago
flowers showed on what had become a shade
tree we’d pruned and shaped agreed to leave
in that corner thus when the first fruit arrived
delighted we opened it up but its watery
bitterness put us off too bad we said not
the good kind and now I’m sixty two lived
here nine full years resigned to another
decade before we’ll find the right variety
though this one bears so much our children
now grown bringing their children two born
this year and a third two years ago
walking between here and the barn over
numbers of fallen avocadoes opening them
up they tell us you have delicious avocadoes
you know and so we do we’re told they’re “goldens”
so many we have to give them away like
everything that comes like a gift without
waiting just as our life here started green
and promising while we planted not knowing
how time would keep us guessing before flowering
before setting the fruit down before us

The Sober Capricorn Moon

The sober Capricorn moon needs a little magic
in her life bent as she is like the bow of the
huntress at rest there in the small room her
arrows spent the night long pierced with
bright places where she pointed and aimed
now heaven itself strained across our minds
by her careful weighing and selecting all
however but her own fate perhaps surrendered
to a gin and tonic half way between five and
six at each day's end though never after
having dined. She served fruit cocktail
I remember, from an ornate Chinese bowl,
green, I recall, with intricate stories
suggesting themselves in the glaze
but then everything she reached into
seemed to have a pattern one never
noticed until she began and she usually
began far beyond the beginning as we
mortals know it. You know, I suppose,
of what I speak. I hope you do, because
the night is cold and she is far away
in her small room, and close enough
to the television screen to touch the captions
orchestrated by a deft touch of her remote.
I hope you do know what I mean. How the word
was in the beginning a sound so close
so intimate so akin and simultaneous its utterance
brought us and everything else into existence.
You know. That word. And the huntress
sober tonight, needing a little magic in her life.

Her Soul Came All This Way

A baby is a baby is a baby till she
turns toward you as the two of you
lie there on Sarah's beautiful quilt
spread out on the floor of the big room
looks at you, she does, with a look
you don't understand, so close she
takes the back of her hand delicately
across your face, the corner of an eye,
the place where the nose rises up
and down until finally her fingers
turn touching your lips searching
inside that space that moved apart,
closed up, opened again, that time
you said something, that time your words
spoke a sound an articulation of
slow music she seems to remember as if
her soul came all this way from
somewhere deep inside and yet out there
somewhere all at the same time
just to touch you

Cello

I don't know what to say — your notes go deeper than my toes, your face with more curves than a ballerina juggling oranges. Yesterday the rain was only a thought. Today it is still a thought. Clouds descend in the night and take us in. I dream about you. You strike a chord. Your long neck dances in the shadows. One song after another thrusts itself across your bow. All across the planet we listen to your high rise harmonics, your castles in the air, your dungeons quiet with the mummified past in chains, your walls wet with thoughts of tomorrow — across the ocean your skittering flight catches white caps and your lips kiss the piano keys at such a rate there's no stopping you now, there's no resisting your zither lips...the vibrations are too much. I feel old in your presence. My heartbeat races after you but I can't keep up and it's still daytime, somewhere. How many minutes now, your hand has been holding my pulse. Yes, okay, I'm alive, but I've forgotten how to breathe. I'm on my knees still standing before your long low smile — everyone's head's turned and the staircase is spiral

Makana

Makes me smile thinking back on Makana's performance at the Kahilu Tuesday night. How masterful, yes, but how balanced, with a great deal of respect paid to Sonny Chillingsworth, his kumu. Makana sent out maybe four of Sonny's trademark songs, with a little talkstory explaining Sonny's other life as an opera singer and Sonny's nickname as The Waimea Cowboy, before giving us that extraordinary portrait of Sonny himself performing Kaula'ili with precise, clipped strumming and fretwork, whole-body waves, head-snaps, jerks, and the rhythm of the horse in the hammer thumb on the open bass string — and Sonny's heartfelt moralizing — this acknowledgment of Makana's own influences expressed with grace and humor, so Hawaiian... Meantime the rest of the concert filled to bursting — think of all those smile muscles and sprinkle in some tears of sheer joy — with songs like Pu'uanahulu, Hi'ilawe, Ku'ulei 'Awapuhi, Makee Ailana — how did he do it? Sometimes his head thrown back in song as his fingers danced like wave-chasing crabs, back and forth, up and down the shoreline of Evening Star, his guitar. Now his fingers fly over the frets — we know them now as the bones, the iwi — while his long, long notes rise up into the dark flying grid of the Kahilu.

Influences I

Introibo ad altare Dei...and if you recognize the antiphon which kicks off the Tridentine Mass, then you're showing your childhood religion and your age at the same time; or else you're a James Joyce fanatic. Hard to believe I served Mass as an altar boy before school, before the age of nine. Influence number one?

Well, I was already addressing my angel most nights, sensing his presence, too, whilst sensing a kind of bisexuality in that holy invisibility. After all, there was the long hair and the long dress-like apparel we saw the priest wearing. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed working out the sheer numbers of people, animals, not to mention the weather, all things God is charged with managing, well, creating, then, now, and in the future. I knew the direct line to God notion was rather tenuous, let's put it that way. So I addressed my angel.

So there's a lot there in that early influence, a plethora of Greek and Latin, the superstructure of Catholicism in our lives, the lives of the saints, the authority of the priest coinciding with the humanity of the priests whom I got to know and work with as an altar boy — by the way, never any hanky panky, mostly positive, only one cranky curmudgeon, with one devoted pastor in the old sense of one who looks after his sheep, taking us to Weston-super-Mare on field trips, rehearsing the various kinds of services with patience and wisdom — which brings me to the profound theatrical nature of the Church service.

The church in which I served, still there as far as I know, is called St. Mary's-on-the-Quay, Bristol. Right there you have an early grasp on hyphenation! Right there you have a sense of Bristol's own history, with the word "quay" weighed and qualified over and over till I understood Bristol's romance with ships. And in the architecture you have the Greek columns, Ionic in appearance, although the structure was built in 1840. Those columns loomed monumentally to my eight year old self. When I revisited the place years later, everything seemed smaller, though the echoing of single steps upon the wooden floor within still rang out. A Palladian symmetry one finds in theatre in no small way. Most of the theatres I've worked in were Palladian by design. The concept of the "fourth wall" that separates audience from players, that of the proscenium arch which frames the drama, was intimately familiar to me in form and function by the time I was five years old.

Backstage was the sacristy, where we got ready, put on our costumes, and on Sundays, for high Mass, readied our ceremonial candles.

I was fascinated and gratified to read George Bernard Shaw's comments in his "Our Theatre in the Nineties" regarding the origins of the Christian Church, "founded gaily with a pun...where you must not laugh...giving way to that older and greater Church to which I [Shaw] belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness."

In that same essay comprising "The Author's Apology" — you can find it in Shaw's "Prefaces" 1906 — one significant influence in my life dovetails beautifully into another when Shaw writes: "...if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." The context of that manifesto-like statement is that Shaw notes how play-going in London may well have replaced church-going, which is fine, he says, if only the theatre took itself seriously. I took Shaw so seriously that I look back in wonder at how I left it, how many years it's been since I was a stage door regular, and what the devil — what the angel! — am I doing about it now. I could say I'm doing my best to chronicle the things I experienced while I did the work in the theatre. But somehow I know in my heart of hearts that's not enough. Once you've experience the power and possibility of the theatre, and you believe in it like I came to believe in it, there's not a day goes by when you don't say to yourself you owe it to the community in which you live to make it happen. That is another topic entirely.

Church and theatre as early influences come easily to the fore, that's the point here. And with that, a fascination with audience. What makes them work? In the I Ching one finds Thunder over Earth in the 16th hexagram, an arrangement of lines where one strong line makes its way into the fourth place, a shift in balance, so to speak, a shift heavenward... Wilhem writes "This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance...is the law of movement along the line of least resistance..." Wilhem goes on to describe the birth of theatre in his commentary on this hexagram. Finally, he quotes Confucius, "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." For me, that's a sparkling jewel set in the ocean of book called the I Ching. "It is good to organize helpers and to set people in motion," writes our friend, Blythe in her version of the I Ching at this point, where "thunder comes resounding out of the earth."

I suppose I've come to this island in the Pacific to get as far away from theatre as possible, in order to "see it". That is a generous perspective written after the fact of moving here, but there's a truth in it that I recognize.

At a very early age I saw the activities in the church where I was a backstage regular produce an effect on the audience, though it ranged from season to season. Christmas Mass was a power to reckon with. Day in, day out, yes, yes, yes, we will go through the motions, speak the lines, carry the heavy book from one side of the altar to another at the given point, tinkle our small bells at the raising of the host, but the nature of worship seems to depend so much on props and a kind of duty to a trinity of powers, the higher power being worshiped, the medium power of the church mucky-mucks, and the low power voltage of the handful of worshipers who attend daily Mass. Come Christmas, all that changes. The colorful vestments come out. The number of acolytes is more than quadrupled. Four times that! Who are these guys? Never seen them before! And they're all bigger than me! And the congregation? No room at the inn. They're lining the streets, squeezed into the portico, pressed against the inner walls of the church itself where the Stations of the Cross threaten to knock them on the heads...where were you people last week? last month? This was a tremendous influence on me, to see this show of strength from both sides of the divide, coming together with intonations, concatenations, bells, books, candles, colors red and gold, incense for the divine, voices raised in glory...you just want to shout out, Oh My God! And I guess you do, at various points in the proceedings. And I'm just a pipsqueak in red and white, not the usual black and white of everyday Mass, but I'm "in it" and it's terribly powerful, this coming together, this Enthusiasm, as the I Ching rightly points out. Oh the collection baskets are full on Christmas Day!

Early influences...

Go Far, Dear Book

and speak again of meteors and men, how the poet held a running grasp on life, catching it up and letting it go simultaneously free as a red robin in winter, yet rooted as the almond tree in spring come awake in pink blooms in full cloud on Tuesday, become carpet of petals underfoot by next Sunday night. The falling.

I knew him not as the musician, actor and playwright, but as a magician. I even met him in a blackout. His old cottage was ablaze with candlelight that first night. Where the flames grew between the elm logs in the inglenook fireplace, he carefully positioned lumps of coal, to extend the fire into the night. He listened and watched till the embers became muted and the silences grew apart. It was there he spoke carefully of Gogarty and Stephens, Plotinus and Steven McKenna's translations, Darwin's grandchildren at the zoo, Shelley's presence of mind filling a bathtub of ice for his child's fever, authors who simply cannot read their own work aloud, and worse, authors who return and tamper with earlier drafts, to "improve" today something they'd written a long time ago, or how some plants insist on blooming early, forsyth and almond being two examples. And did you know "glamour" and "grammar" are the same?

He reached for the matches, plucking one of the two wooden ends offering themselves to him from the shut box, poked around the bowl of his pipe for a bit and then touched the flame to its contents, curls and wafts of smoke now joining their counterparts in fire and candle till there was an almighty haze over the proceedings as each book became a doorway to another world. When he took down Coleridge, we all went to the Lakes and complained about the damned postman who knocked too soon. Blake took longer to get back from his long walks, maybe days. And Stephens calmed us all down again, got our breathing to follow the rhythm of goats on their path until we looked down and saw our own souls big as life right there in the room.

In The Doorway

There is shelter on the threshold
an opening in the strange world
a word to be twisted out across
the page
a metaphor in the rain, say,
a difficult night in the city
a number
sometimes a slit, the mouth of the door,
a brass flap for letters
or a child's enquiries
too short for the rapper, the knocker,
the bell
Who's inside?
I hear them coming
Let me catch my breath up in the chest
and pretend I'm ready
a simple thing, really,
without which there would be no house
no entry, no room, no stairs
leading somewhere
What's on the other side?
In the this sacred belief we call
The Way of the Door
open yourself to my entreaties
Twist the doorknob left or right
and you will see me there
half in shadow
almost waiting
always poised
Anticipate my coming
without footsteps only heartbeats
Bring in the light from which I came
and break it like an egg
Beat it into tonight
so we can see our dreams
Take away your draftproof seal
and your deadbolts
Take away the cobwebs and
autumnal debris caught up
in the corner of your post
and lintel existence Take away
the frame and open up
to me

That’s The Catch

That's the catch, she said.

Martha was overcome with fumes of fatality. Or do I mean, fatalism. Yes, that's right, more of an -ism sort of day if you can believe that. Pinched shoes were just one more sign that her life was being squeezed out by sacrificial justifications: Oh it's all right, I'll just...or Nevermind, it's only a small sacrifice to make...

It's as if she was as they say always waiting, not for a bus that would take her somewhere fun or purposeful, but for the penny to drop, the catch to click shut and make another blood blister on Martha's fickle finger of fate. Everything but everything was a matter of fate for poor Martha — as if her childhood wounds and fears had become the roadmap for her life of superstition. She saw it in the mirror each morning and walked away from it quickly.

Giving Up Too Early

Some say don't. A sign of weakness. Come to find out, it's smart action, called listening to yourself. But what about the effort it takes

You know, the effort, the work, the blood, sweat and tears, the little agro, the traffic jam on the way to the golden fleece, the major deal, the hassle, the fol-de-rol, the right old whatsit, the set-to, the pain-in-the-arse that's worth it at the end, you know, the end that never comes...

I mean, what about the time you really didn't want to but you did and then you became a better person — you know, win or lose it all, meaning, sleep, credibility, confidence, money and self-respect, just to become a better a person. Or would you rather be a couch potato? I suppose a famous memoir called Confessions of a Couch Potato would really sell at Barnes and Noble don't you think? Fast action there, all those bags of chips, maybe some ranch dip or to really spice things up, salsa, yeah! And then there's the world of the couch: all things must come to the couch, as Harry S. Freud once said. And there you are, giving it up for the cushions, the mites, the coulds, the TV remote, the crumbs and ancient raisins, once jewels from Cleopatra's famous barge — that's it, you're floating now — is it the Nile or the Zambezi? The Thames or the Mississippi? — Ah, just put your feet up and float away — or nowhere in particular.

More Vivid Than Reality

Well sure. Absolutely. Certainly. Say no more. Or do I hear, Say more, Say more! Perhaps less is more. Perhaps less has an edge before which each unfolds their shoji screen willing it to be cut. There on the other side, something more acute, the shadow fled, the mother alarmed by all the signs, our hair stands to attention, our sense of smell takes over and leads our senses into the light, where we find pinks like secret mucous linings, a cave illuminated where only the foolish dared venture — outside, explosions, an engine revs up and then recedes, the other part of the equation come alive, shifting our focus like the dial of an antique microscope, back, back, till we see monstrous detail become intricate patterns, till the general shape of things gives way to a gathering of three, bent in silence over a table in a café, and then a crowd, a movement, handing the precious book from one to another, and then the coastline where ants all walk on the right, and then, the blue orb spinning, turning, cloud-hidden, as the philosopher warned us, and then, a speck of light, and the shadow returns.

This Morning

This morning the waves are weaker than yesterday which is curious when you consider how the moon is waxing and perhaps even more telling, the entire population of the northern hemisphere is breathing out at regular intervals and you have to admit that is a gravitational force to reckon with. Personally I don't subscribe to the theory I saw written on a student locker at the U of W back in the late 60s, that there is no gravity, the earth sucks — but it did give me pause for thought. I mean if all the cow farts in the known world can add up to an overwhelming toxic accumulation of methane in the atmosphere around our planet, who will stand up and denigrate the theory of the effect of mass breathing on gravity? Not to mention the effect of fogging up the glasses of all who are wearing them — a spectacle indeed!

Where was I? This morning the waves are weaker but you know I can only speak for myself really and I have been eating more of everything of late, just to keep my feet on the ground — a sure sign I'm an air sign in great danger of getting sucked into a lunar gravitational pull at any moment.

The Secret Of Life

Turning 62 has been fun. Take for example dinner at The Eagle in Cambridge where I had baked salmon on a bed of cous cous with a small green salad and two glasses of house merlot. By chance we sat at the table where Crick and Watson announced their DNA findings to the world. I say "by chance" because this was pointed out to us by a slim arcane creature in a sea blue shoulder to ankle outfit and finger-tipped magenta running from her hairline down her forehead. Was she really blonde? Does it matter? We established from across the room she wouldn't mind our joining her at the four top just vacated by six or was it twelve twenty-somethings.

"I only want a little bit of the table," she said. As we gathered our jackets and hats and daypacks to our newfound corner in the ancient, low-beamed and extremely busy pub, she said, "Are you geneticists?"

"What did you say?" I said.

"Are you geneticists?"

"Why do you ask? Something about our body language?"

She turned to look at the wall behind me and said, "This is where the geneticists always sit."

I followed her sightline and read:

The Eagle, Cambridge
Discovery of DNA

On this spot, in February 28, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson made the first public announcement of the discovery of DNA with the words "We have discovered the secret of life..."

Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that effect, said I.

Meanwhile our dining neighbor poured forth on a series of topics from Isaac Newton, whom she was currently studying, to John Dee the Elizabethan whose extraordinary library is reckoned to have fed Shakespeare's wellsprings of creativity. The South Bank's Globe Theatre came up. They really should provide the whole Elizabethan experience, she said, wooden platters and Elizabethan fare. Like wild boar? I said. She laughed and said she was vegan, that wouldn't do. And serve the meals in Elizabethan costume, she said. Somehow God slipped in before we even had a chance to order our food, particulary the thought that God is really comprised of the entirety of human consciousness, a though I shared. She was a painter, one who was becoming jolly tired of stretching her own canvas, one who is currently reading a book on the saints besides the three works on Newton, who dislike unpleasantries, avoided them like the plague, which happily, I wanted to add, he also avoided.

I was well into my salmon by the time she left, putting her Isaac Newton Institute coffee mug in a plastic bag before secreting it in the voluminous folds of her cloth bag. She did manage to say she was quite fond of St Joseph of... who lived on air. I turned again to the plaque fixed up there over my left shoulder, this time reading the last sentence:

"Throughout their early partnership Watson and Crick dined in this room on six days every week."

Six days a week!

My mother once told me, Fly with the eagles, my son, but this put a whole new spin on her advice.

Have lunch in The Eagle every day of the week but one!

On the way back to my friends' house, I squeezed my rental between tight parallel lines of cars, made right hand turns by turning left on roundabouts, gave way to a double-decker bus coming head-on at us over a one-lane traffic "calming" speed bump, and I thought about the complexities of Cambridge, where one takes long, deviating detours around stretches of ancient buildings in a law-abiding negotiation of ornate one-way systems...I thought, Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that affect. No wonder Crick and Watson came up with the secret of life in spirals of DNA. They had to GET to The Eagle. And like all our mothers have told us, it's the journey itself that really counts, but I can't help thinking it must really help when there's a glass of house merlot waiting at the other end.

But it's more complicated than that. We sat across from each other, my old friend and I, having first met at a theatre called The New London on Drury Lane. He worked the flying system and I pushed scenery about down below. Several years later, he worked the Lyttleton and I worked the Olivier at the National Theatre on the South Bank. Then, as I embarked on my life as father of a family, and all my theatre mates faded from view, he rescued me with a job at The Comedy just off Leicester Square. I say all this because our lives have spiraled around each other, with long arcs of time and space separating our different realities, but we always seem to intersect, like that night at The Eagle, when we raised our glasses to The Journey and gave thanks for our parallel lives that sometimes bring us together.

Waking Up

"Why do we wake 'up'?" he said. He's the one at the coffee shop always skims through the West Hawaii Today and pops his head over the broadsheets to make an announcement or ask a question. That morning, the topic was 'up' and its usage.

The few in our corner happily generated instances of up's peculiarities. Yes, wake up. Also, shut up, put up, hang up, get it up — knowing smiles all 'round — and smarten up, or dress up. Show up, up and at 'em, up and leave, up country, up land...I can hardly do justice to the long list...

Later on my walk up mauka from Upolu, I thought of earlier times when lexicons were built upon incantations uttered across steaming cups of tea or coffee, and Dr Johnson came to mind. I'd always associated the great man of letters and his Club with tea shops but now I find I can't substantiate that myth, for they met at the Turk's Head around beer time. And then I thought of Newton, his preoccupation with what goes up must come down...I wanted to squeeze his calculus for a drop of common blood, the sort shed by those who nursed cups of tea or coffee shortly upon rising, the sort who mused upon the reason for all things, including the force of nature. But I find no evidence other than my own gut feeling that the ordinary mortal did indeed discuss the nature of 'up' if for no other reason than the nature of 'down' weighed so heavily upon them.

One only has to enter into the great rotunda of the room once called the British Reading Room to understand how 'up' holds infinite appeal. 'Up' is our legacy, though it requires a great deal of stretching or yoga, since standing up strains our frames, sitting up even more so, and looking up...just think of the weight of the head balanced by the organization of the skeleton, muscles, tendons, neural network, the miraculous lot that has been given us.

Think too, how the primitive syllable is formed by emitting a sound from the throat and then, sealing it with the lips as it escapes the mouth...it's a noble word, 'up', and I am heartened by its treatment at the coffee shop the other day.

Shelley

I look into the mirror this morning as I shave and wonder about Shelley. He was born 218 years ago today. I wondered if he watched his dad, Tim, take the open razor to his face over a steaming bowl of water straight from the hob. That's how my grandfather Tom started his day, only he carried the water from the bog himself the day before. I helped him do it, so I know. How quiet was the mouth of the shiny steel pail as it drank the surface water, careful to avoid bits of moss and peat. My grandfathers were born a hundred years after Shelley and I doubt they'd heard of him, but they would have liked him I feel, as long as we didn't bring up the atheism and a few essays written to the Irish people when the poet was 19, visiting the country.

Unless you're utterly focused on leprechauns and tweed jackets, it's hard not to notice how fresh the blood shed for Ireland's liberty. Right there in Dublin's Sráid Uí Chonaill, or O'Connell Street, one of the widest streets in all of Europe, you can see where the bullets chipped away at the columns of the GPO. From Parnell to Larkin, the politicos are well represented in granite or bronze. And the Nelson Pillar blown up by radicals 44 years ago? It was replaced with The Spire of Dublin, said to be the world's largest sculpture. When I visited Kilmainham Gaol at our youngest daughter's insistence a few years ago, we were both struck by the prison's sense of monument or memorial to Irish rebels.

Shelley was convinced you could do this without bloodshed. This is unusual. His friend Byron thought otherwise, which is why Byron's pistols now occupy a place of honor in Greece's Benaki Museum.

I was visiting my cousin Annette and her husband Rodney in Eastbourne, back in 1970, and came across Shelley for the first time. I liberated a 1907 Complete Poetical Works for 15 shillings or 75 pence. England's currency being in transition that year, both prices are still penciled inside the cover. When I first started researching at the British Museum's Reading Room, I was tickled to see some of the books delivered wore a ribbon to keep the book intact. Now there's a red ribbon holding my old Shelley together, the cover having come adrift who knows when, during one of our moves between England and Hawai'i. Only this morning does the ribbon's color leap out at me.

The thing is, my dear, dear Shelley, sometimes we cut ourselves shaving.

Even today, many people think of Shelley as a lyric poet, when he was in truth a radical thinker who was not afraid to speak out. He was suppressed, if anything. Poets like Matthew Arnold called him a minor poet with no influence. Meanwhile the list of devotees is long and formidable, among them Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Krishnamurti. His behavior, the way he abandoned Harriet and kept Mary pregnant while apparently diddling Claire, etc., etc., is reprehensible but as my mentor once said, forgivable in a poet.

"Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry."

My compassion for those around him, especially his families, grows as I grow older. But I have no patience with those who would keep him a trivial fancifier of words. I find myself siding with those who feel Shelley was assassinated. He was dangerous.

"Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

His "Defence of Poetry" should be mandatory reading.

The fact that I'd forked out 15 bob for Shelley's poems, sacrificing a few meals in the process, made an early impression on my mentor. We had Shelley in common and decades of friendship were founded on Shelley's work. My mentor's favorite was "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," particularly the fifth and sixth stanzas,

"V
...When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, —
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

VI
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night —
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou — O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express."

August

Named for an emperor, these days have a round, plump, dry summer taste in the mouth. Sun shifts its course more clearly overhead, bearing down with its arc. I note our tendergreen snap beans crane their necks into it, into the arc of the sun, into the emperor days. In the next room, ukelele strums, words with half our alphabet missing, a voice reaching through the walls with stories of Hualalai, Kawaihae, Kona, wind, flowers and sweethearts. Soon other sounds come in from New York. They've been up a while. The world feels like a boxing match to them. The crowd cheers and boos for this cause or that cause, truth vs evil, weighing in at 800 million barrels of crude, it's slick, it's bad for jobs, great for the military, Pakistan Taliban Floodwaters Islam, not to mention cohabitating politicos in Australia explaining what goes on behind closed doors, privacy no longer personal property, take Niger they're too hungry and beat up to care, somebody's down, somebody's up, the ref's on his knees, slapping the canvas with his left hand while the talking heads discuss how it's going to go, how it went last time, how the statistics managed to leak out before the truth had a chance, how the national discussion revolves around disclosure...then all that is muted, the wind comes in, the ukelele rings out, the walls feel more how shall I say? calm. Time for breakfast on this third day of August.

Icarus Risen

Breughel was not a cynic. Anyone can see the man painted inclusively. Everyone, everything counted. Today. What we can say is that the painter stayed true to the timeless myth as he knew it, ala Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid too, stays the course, doesn't stray from the essential story. For that matter, centuries and centuries later, Auden and Williams make the same decision. They work with what's been given.

I have heard people, students in particular, wonder if Icarus swam to shore and spent a life avoiding crazy inventors like his father. He grew a beard, they say, and dropped out for a few years. Maybe he experienced sexual enlightenment with the farmer's daughter. Did he learn how to butcher lamb under the careful watch of the shepherd? These men, and few others, really understood forgiveness, patience and the power of staying. They knew Icarus — he went by the name Sky, kind of trendy in those days after the fall — they knew he would keep moving. But for now, they were happy to be his anchor, make sure he got fed. They nurtured him like they would any creature or plant, silently acknowledging his rate of growth, his nightmares, his fear of heights and water. They encouraged him to find his own way in the world, a world with different sorts of risks, the kind you read about in the paper or watch on the six o'clock news.

They never took it personally, either, when they came across his crazy journal entries, his sketches, his plans for escape.

Somewhere out there was Daedalus. Nobody talks about that.

Certain Landscapes

I don't know what it is about certain landscapes that pulls me in — I mean that sort of portrait without people, with space and time intersected in such a way that leaves one hesitating: will the darkness overtake, overcome the light, after all? That is a question that could haunt us if we allowed. It is very dark outside our ken, what we think we know, what our senses are given to understand. "The Darkness Around Us Is Deep," as William Stafford says. So it is these still places, where the clouds lock into a freeze-frame of indecision, whether to turn horsetail and lift us into light or plunge us into cumulo-darkness for the rest of eternity. It is the open space, the open question.

Brueghel’s Farmer

Breughel’s farmer lays his sword there
on a rock, cracks a whip and steadies
the plough. The horse’s head is down
too, as the inventor’s son falls to earth,
an early UFO, spewing feathers heavy-
ended with beeswax. Just another teen
who won’t listen to reason. His father
forgets to mention the middle path
was something made up, a metaphor,
for traveling between extremes. Meanwhile,
the farmer cuts through a telephone line
aesthetically laid to rest in a shallow grave
so the inventor’s web isn’t in our face.
No one looks up so we don’t see our children
falling, all our tips, advice and words of wisdom
mostly sticky now and useless. The phone’s
dead. Can’t get word in or out.