The Coldest War

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

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Capo 3   (Am, Em, G, C)
His letter arrived on January Two,
He said the British were coming, but the snow came, too,
And they didn’t have food, and they didn’t have shoes,
He wanted to be home, but had to stay through.

Chorus:
Dan, Dan, come home to me if you can.
Leaving now won’t make you less of a man.
Come home to me now, if you can.
Come home to me now, if you can.

 
Soldiers were buried like sheep in the snow,
They were almost smothered by the storm.
The salt water froze, so the boats stood still,
And there wasn’t an escape from that wintry hell.

Chorus.

 
By the time my words arrived, Dan was already gone.
He didn’t have a chance to heed my sweet begging song.
And, the storm went its way, as if it hadn’t ever come,
And the world went on and on.

 
Dan, Dan, you’ll always be my sweet lovin’ man.
You’d have come to me if you’d had the chance,
But the world had other plans.
Yes, the world had other plans.

Where Are You Beautiful: A Song

31 Saturday Dec 2016

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Fingerpick C, G, Am, F repeat

 

Who are you,

And where are you beautiful.

Where’s your song,

That you must sing?

 

Lose yourself,

In all that is beautiful,

What’s torn apart,

What’s crumbling.

 

What’s Crumbling?

 

                                        Improvise

 

Let me hear

Your sweet song.

What makes you cry?

What sets you free?

 

It’s you and me

On the edge of losing

All we have,

To eternity–

 

To eternity.

 

                                      Improvise

 

 

Tell me now,

Where are you beautiful.

What makes you cry?

What makes you sing?

Song of the Chickadee

23 Friday Dec 2016

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There’s a rule among birds,

If it’s singing, it can’t be killing,

Which may, or may not, be true,

Except for the family of plump chickadees,

Who wintered beneath our cedar arch.

With their black caps and gray-backed wings,

They flitted from rail, to pan, to chair, to deck,

To aspen perch, peeking in at us,

Until I plucked my first A minor–

The 3rd and 5th string,

A melancholy chord found in most songs,

Even the chickadees’, it turns out,

When they hear you sing.

What is Aleppo?

15 Thursday Dec 2016

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“We didn’t want anything else but freedom.

This world doesn’t like freedom.”

Abdulkafi Alhamdo, Professor of English, Last Call from Aleppo

What is Aleppo?

All that it was, or dreamed to be,

In rubble. Have you seen rubble?

It’s what hope looks like when it’s collapsed,

Reduced to broken chunks of asphalt

And twisted, distorted beams of rebar.

It’s brown. Not dark brown, but light brown,

The color of dust.

There is no truth, but suffering,

And the realization no help is coming–

No haloed army, no golden trumpets,

No white horses or heroes.

The choices you made,

In your heart of hearts,

Choice, like stone in your heart,

That is Aleppo now–

Stone in your heart.

 

The Cold That is Loneliness

15 Thursday Dec 2016

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The cold that is loneliness–

Ice, snow, hunger.

Did we care

The days had shortened?

Dark mornings,

Dark afternoons,

We stumbled, it’s true,

But don’t we all stumble,

Slide on the ice–

A dangerous toboggan

Of metal and glass and rubber

Just sliding,

sliding, sliding.

Where will it stop–

Against a sign, a bank of snow,

An oncoming car?

We turn the wheel

Left, then right, then left

And tap on the brakes,

Hoping they will catch

Onto something solid.

 

My love, turns out

You were the solid thing

On which I caught.

Beautiful Mustang

21 Thursday Jan 2016

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Beautiful Mustang

Beaty’s Butte, Oregon 2007

Some things survive
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory,

How it felt
To take those first
Feeble, free steps,
Then stretch your neck
Toward breasts,
And the reward
Of warm milk.

The world was starving,
But some things survived,
Like the smell of sage
When your bodies
Lay down at night
And crushed the stems.
You dreamt of flight,
On strong legs;
You dreamt of rest,
Under the mahogany’s shade.

Some things survived,
Like the smell
Of your dam’s fur in rain,
The smell of her sweat.

The sound of her separation
survived, too,
The calling back and forth
From pen to pen,
Your first real lesson
On what it’s like
To be loved.

That way.

In the way
Of the terrible missing.

Some things survive,
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory.

beautiful watching may 09

 

Connection

17 Thursday Dec 2015

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Sit deep, deep in the saddle,

Your ankle, hip, and shoulder

A line, that dissects some star

And continues past,

“Where does space end,”

The question your teacher asked

In the fifth grade.

Which is to say, it never ends,

And I can’t help thinking,

I don’t either,

Nor does this horse,

Engulfed in her own heat,

Evaporating into the cold air

Of another December.

What is it about two souls

That makes the one feel alive,

Connected, two dots, through which

A line extends forever,

Pierces a fabric, so thin,

We were together all along,

Though we didn’t know.

 

 

 

Light In a Black Hole

03 Thursday Sep 2015

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In the center of the Milky Way,

Exists a black hole

Equal to 4.3 million suns.

Its gravity so strong,

There is no light.

We stand on the edge,

An event horizon,

Or, the point of no return,

As refugees push out

And we argue about definitions.

Mothers and fathers,

Children,

Who dream of a good Germany,

A Europe with jobs and new homes.

They launch into black holes:

The Aegean Sea,

The Dark Sea,

Floating back in waves,

Absent of light.

We wonder at this hell,

A place of suffering,

And hope for something beyond,

A better place

Where there is love,

There is light,

Light in a Black Hole.

Break the Way

31 Monday Aug 2015

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Break me the way, you heavy hammer, 

To the deepest bottom of my heart.

Poem by Henrik Ibsen, on his Tombstone

The whir of fan,

the ticking clock,

My breathing, my heartbeat.

There is something

Pulling toward loneliness,

Stopped short by a good book.

The Complete Works of Ibsen.

I follow Nora through the door,

Oswald to death,

Karsten Bernick to truth.

I rush to keep up

With Solness, the Master Builder,

As he clambers the scaffold

To the tower’s highest spot,

Wreath in hand, dizzy, forgetting

He is destined to fall.

How intimate, to descend alongside

These haunted souls,

Hearts and motives exposed,

Laid out for me to judge or pity or pardon,

Or none of the above.

The truth of it fills my need

To hear true words spoken,

Even if only in my head.

Break the way, hammer.

Heavy hammer, break the way.

Norway: Henrik Ibsen

10 Monday Aug 2015

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“Let me tell you–that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann’s last words.

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Henrik Ibsen Skien

Henrick, Enrique, they say, HenReek.

The Henrik of Ghosts and A Doll’s House,

And Enemy of the People.

In Norway, he’s everywhere:

The looming statue in Skien

Framed by the bay,

And the old church

With its two sky-high spires,

towering above the ash-built town.

He refused to return there.

His ending, instead, Oslo,

Where the palace street

Bears his name.

The false doctrine that is the masses

Adore him, bend and kiss

The floorboards of his childhood home.

The compact majority, unwilling

To stand most alone,

More like Peter than the crazed doctor,

United in their fear,

But willing to tread anonymously

The now hollow path,

And bask in its echoes.

The Barn Swallows, Drowned In the Trough

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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I can’t bring death to a world

Where everything dies.

Not even a spider in the front eve,

Its shadow, at night, a good five inches.

It scares the hell out of me,

But how can I fault her,

For dropping down, thread by thread,

And spinning her web.

I can’t add her death

To a world where everything dies.

And yet, I pulled two dead barn swallows

From the galvanized trough by the barn.

I regret, the shallow Victorian bird bath

I wouldn’t purchase, for fear

I’d lure the precious birds to our cat.

Despite trying to avoid bringing death,

It came anyway,

To a world where everything dies.

For Bernie

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

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The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love–
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

(Dirge Without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay)

The Fall came in shadows,

The poetry,

Cancers of breast and prostate,

The tumor in the child’s lung,

By December it emerged

Another way, unpredicted,

Because who can predict death?

Fierce and final,

I would say it ravished,

But that would imply he may have lived.

And he didn’t.

What’s the word for being all gone,

The home you built, inhabited by strangers,

Growing cucumbers and tomatoes

In the garden you put away?

Did you think you’d see April,

The planting of the seeds?

Or July, with its harvest?

New hands take up old work,

And so, it goes on without us.

After a short time, even memory,

Struggles to keep us alive.

The Number of Our Days

29 Friday May 2015

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From our first breath,

Straight from the womb,

We average twenty five thousand

Nine hundred fifteen days,

Of welcoming the sun,

Falling asleep under the moon.

You can buy a car for that much,

But it won’t have leather,

Or a back-up camera,

Or, probably GPS.

His doctor said, two and half years,

The average in late stage prostate cancer,

But I like to think,

Nine hundred twelve and a half days.

Nine hundred twelve times

To welcome the sun,

Nine hundred twelve times

To fall asleep under the moon

And a half day left over,

To dream about both.

Meditation On Touching a Horse

22 Friday May 2015

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You can feel the warm blood

Under his summer coat,

Sun-slick and shiney,

Sweat, that smells of grass,

Which is to say, sweet,

His breathing, his gut-sounds.

Take a moment and trace,

With the palm of your open hand,

From the softness of his muzzle

To the enclave between ears,

Then down along his thick neck,

Under the chestnut of his mane.

Keep sliding your hand along his withers,

To his broad back and belly,

His hips, buttocks, tail.

Take the trust and the quiet

Into your heart

And unfold it over and over

Throughout your day.

Think, grace.

Think, gratitude.

Think, peace.

Hope.

Where Are You Beautiful?

14 Thursday May 2015

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Who are you,

And where are you beautiful,

Where’s your song,

And what you want to be?

Tell me now,

Where are you beautiful,

What makes you cry,

What makes you sing?

Lose yourself,

In all that is beautiful,

What’s torn apart,

What’s crumbling.

Let me hear

Your sweet sound,

What you want to say

When no one can see.

It’s you and me

On the edge of losing

All we have,

To eternity.

Hog Lake

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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cowboy looking at fishlake

There are dirt roads that bend

‘Round still lakes and extend forever

Atop basalt cliffs, between sagebrush

And serviceberry, balsamroot,

And the periwinkle twinkling of camas blossom.

You can travel down those roads,

But you’ll always be a stranger,

And they’ll always speak a language

You don’t quite understand.

There are dirt roads that pass by waterfalls,

Pouring themselves out,

In radiant rush,

Step by step, shelf by shelf,

Into the calm of Hog Lake,

While the red tails swirl above,

Thinking of fish or water

Or returning to their nests.

You can travel down those roads,

But you’ll always be a stranger,

And they’ll always speak a language

You don’t quite understand.

But travel there anyway

And try to memorize the inflection of bees,

Or the longing in the song of the spring swallow.

Listen for the whisper of grass

Beneath mule deer and coyote.

And, while you’re there,

Send up a prayer of thanks,

A wish, for it to go on and on and on.

hog lake falls

An Empty Nest

09 Thursday Apr 2015

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They always said how wonderful

The house, emptied of chaos:

Ceaseless noise, busyness, broken things.

Think of all you can do, they said,

And I imagined myself traveling:

Rome, Ireland, rural Maine.

When baby birds fly away,

The parents also disappear,

The nest emptied, quiet, molding,

Until the next spring,

When it’s borrowed anew,

Re-imagined with mud and straw,

And hair from the horse’s mane.

I understand what it’s like,

The need to take flight

From the quiet beds.

What’s the point of the nest

With no throat-open birds,

Waiting to be fed?

Death Is For Later

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Life’s not the breath you take,
The breathing in and out
That gets you through the day
Ain’t what it’s all about.
You just might miss the point
Trying to win the race.
Life’s not the breaths you take,
But the moments
That take your breath away.

George Strait

 

3.

Have you ever noticed the beauty

Of a star-filled winter night,

Your breath radiant,

Twinkling in fine, frozen mist.

The quiet,

That’s not quiet, really,

But stillness:

Your heart beating,

Your cheeks stinging,

Your life framed amidst tree-shadows,

Moon whispers,

And incredible, fathomless wonder

At being alive.