A Child Born in Fall...

A child born in Fall is born beneath the Moon.

The Moon is full in Fall and’s crisp above all, and Fall is when the Sun goes cold.  In the morning Sun comes down in rays to leave morning chills on pink noses.  Fall in the morning is when words escape from vapor-mouths into the atmosphere.  Is when words go misting steamily off the tongue, and twirl around the cheeks for an instant, and continue on rising toward a sky that is young and blue (like a child who’s lost grip of her balloon and it goes fluttering out of small-arm’d reach up and up and up and oh!).  –In fact When words go misting is not entirely unlike how branch-tips concede their color-full and leafy summer stories to the forest floor for final absorption. Fall is seven sniffling continents of pink pumffly noses.

Fall shares snickering laughs with Spring, his cohort the trickster season.  (“Her name was November, she went by Autumn or Fall”).  Fall catches you taking an afternoon nap, and you suddenly awake in a shiver, wondering “who’s there…me?”  Winter and Summer are different; for example, in Winter you may say, “Ah, here is Winter.  I have my mittens in the drawer.”  And as another example, in Summer you may say, “Well finally here is summer – what a long and rainy spring it was!”   We anticipate Winter; we assume ourselves a Summer.  But Fall does not come gradual, nor slow; Fall leaps the stage unannounced and screams, “Coup d’etat!”, and eats his dessert before his salad and scoffs at groundhogs and meteorologists alike.

In fact in this case I know the very night, to the hour, at which Fall swept across the mountains of Southern California.  And I’ll tell you……. She decided this year to come in on the Chariot Wind, and she would not be overlooked.  While we were away she came (like how comic thieves in black baklavas go pink panther-ing across the lawn at night) and upturned the lawn chairs and toppled the trashcans.  She blew the windows open wide.  She came and ripped the screen doors off of their ever-loving hinges, and then, (after taking deep breath and reloading gusts of wind) she proceeded inside to tussle the bedspreads and to twist the ceiling fans into wild and obtuse angles, and while in there decided to read the entire bedside novel, page for page, and slammed the final cover in disgust when done.  And for the sake of emphasis, before leaving, picked up the front yard and tossed it to the back.  And Moon just shook her head and sighed.

The next morning, walking through main street, a change was about the town.  The village people spoke only in whispers – like an early America on the cusp of war – the type Paul Revere’d go riding through – they all spoke in whispers saying: “did you hear?” and “could it be true?”  And knew a new season had arrived, unholy, un-prophesied, inscrutable.

That night Joel Brad April and I sat around the table on the porch by light of Moon, checking our phones to hear the news of one October child.  We sat around the table and tugged our ears and shifted in our seats.  And when I opened my mind’s eye I saw, with a smile, every other small and excitable congregation doing likewise: one in the bay area, sitting around a similar table and checking phones and pulling wrists; a few of course in the northwest, huddled together under dim lights of evening, checking phones and shifting restlessly in seats of remembrance (perhaps remembering when they too…), and others across the Midwest and on into the South – all the little island congregations across the country – and all of us eager to prepare a gift, shoulder a pack and go a-cameling across the land – all the while whispering “did you hear?” and “could it be true?”

A child born to America in the Fall will open eyes the first time around a thanksgiving dinnertable wonder of wonders.  Will innately understand the warmth of family and discern this sharply (crisp) with the howling bitter cold of dastard wind from through the flume. Will lay awake at nights to gaze through windowblinds at winking harvest moon, and dream of wooden fingers scratching gently at the walls.  Will go from the hearth through life with a heart of hearthstone and chill.  Will forever see through fog.  Will come into the world a knowing child.  Will know and will wait patiently to crawl until undoubtedly inspired by the blooming wonders of spring and summer, and all the rosy secrets that loom and lurk mysterious in the corners of one wild-eyed imagination - for how else did a Mother or a Father ever come to know?

Awwwwww baby. We gotta go now...

on crumbly dry and summer hillsides

A lizard scuttles ‘long my roof, reminds me, “crane your neck!”

Mizz humming-goes-birding balanced there across the oak twig reminds me “lighter is best”.

And all the squalling jays come chorusing in the morning, reminding each other that “Over here? No over there. Over here perhaps.”

Meanwhile and just downhill, the ever-highway sends engine roars to echo up-canyon and dissipate.

Can only write it as it’s felt.

A weathered and wily, still fortunate son am I.

Mountains trees and rivers without end. I lay down to bask and cake atop the baking hillside – the hillside who’s no choice BUT to lay in the sun.

Put it all down in ink and somehow become alone again.

Slugging through the center of my apprenticehood to reality, and asking everywhere are you the teacher of fish?

and are you the fisher of fish-hooks under skin?

and are you the friend of deer?

A world full of women and men with bark for skin.

With death in every corner of the globe,

and Spring too.

Close your eyes and see if you can’t open the Hand of Thought

Let those concepts grow forceps

And scuttle away.

I was out for a run this morning when I happened upon a coyote.

We were both very simple,

silly even.

He stopped mid-trot

looked at me as if to think – “will it eat me?” and “will I eat it?”

I kept him in sight for two miles

before disappearing to the brush and middle way.

huntington

Zooming up coast from Dana Point all the way to Huntington proper I was

smiling out the window whipping by,

singing to praise whosoever proffered me this Sunday

yet another.

How devastatingly beautiful, I think, is

the black lab, leashed and lapping along, also

the wino, shuffling sidewalks, hands-a-pockets,

the joggers blonding ponytails go Swish! Swish!

storefronts glimmer in the early earthly glow

and by god the Bikers! - those sinew-sleek and anatomic bodies

humping their sleek machines uphill.

I stop to fill gas (!!4.29 a Steal!)

And watch big-screen television while minding the pump,

think: "this is the donning of the age of aquarius,"

lean against my car door and starearound

the other strangers leaning on car doors too,

all of us an island - a mountain underwater.

Back on the road keep zooming till I reach

Laguna! - 'la pieta' draped across the knees of coast,

ellegant as her name, I think, 

if famous to the world she came then famous she'll return

into the sea - streets, shops, palms and all...

Laguna with her perfectly groomed every-thing's,

nature tamed and manicured you know

it's all a lot a picture show.

Laguna with her snowy-white teeth,

sun-kissed shoulders and,

bourgeois-blue eyes.

(but before Laguna or even Dana Point this morning

remember leaving San Clemente...)

San Clemente where the curved roads go curving

in curves o'er hills of swerving swells,

where all manner of surf shops, pubs and parlors,

suburbia of Pendleton Military Base and outgrowth of such,

San Clemente where I awoke

(on memorial day nonetheless)

on the roof of said suburbia.

San Clemente where I awoke to the sound of palm fronds breezing,

on the roof where the whole gangofus had slept

in a jumble of drunken comforts and pillow-arms,

on the roof of Southern California with stars close as my nose,

where because of rain throughout the night

the whole gang one by one had left, grumpily wet,

- except for Elliott and Me, who've slept in puddles before and didn't mind.

And so now I go zooming up the Highway Pacific 1

--that ocean-hugging highway where a couple Octobers ago

E and I had gone rushing South through foggy gloom

with mad goal to cover old Oregon's coast in a single weekend,

and also in order to throw the huppiest halloween bash this side 'o the galaxy,

and also to swim in seas of midnight naked and free,

and also to look up and see that nocturnal flock of gulls go squawking overhead in

one big white feathery omen'd troup, as if to say to us: 

"Ahoy, feather your friggots boys, wa-hah!"

And so now I go zooming North up that unbeleivably self-same highway,

halfway believing, for the wonderful power of these memories, that

I'll run into E and Me (any second now...)

coming the other direction.

O sweet spontaneous 

earth how often have

the 

doting

    fingers of prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty .  how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

        (but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

  thou answerest

them only with

   spring)

-Estlin Cummings

my fire eats everything

Though at first I was responsible

(flint spark to scaly schist

over dead twig and dry leaf),

just as a word, once spoken,

no longer belongs to it’s author - so this fire went free.

And now

 

My fire eats everything

 

Decaying heartwood of a

once hearty hemlock,

malignant maple or

aging oak,

young proud poplar

never thought he’d see the day -

my fire gladly receives and

gladly burns.

Eats 'em all up.

 

My fire remembers nothing.

Knows no language, age or fashion,

where it comes or

how it might should act.

Cares not for reason,

entertains no concept of progress and

never envies.

Only ever sings the timeless tune of

Cackle-spark and Flicker-flame.

And a fickle song indeed,

capable of sustaining life

on freezing winter nights,

capable of purifying water,

coal, gold, earth.

Capable of consuming entire

forests

mountains

homes and

villages.

Eats 'em all up.

 

 

My fire comes from a long line of fires:

heat for the first man

brother to the first rain

harbringer of illumination all types

and all gods fashioned in fire-likenesses:

From the earliest Pyrolaters

Tonatiuh for the Aztecs

Ra who oversaw the pyramids

Sacred flame of the Vestal Virgins

Bodhisattva of the sun 

and the burning bush to Moses spoke.

Fire who, once harnessed,

became the catalyst of modern man, the modern family

and modern warfare.

 

And for all this I ask,

“who is the God of fire?”

 

Which upon hearing nothing

I return to sitting

and thinking how

Dark the night,

how silent the world,

save for the cackling of

my fire.  My fire who eats everything

- there see it!

See it in the night.

Watch it flicker,

spark defiant,

watch it something fierce

piercing scalding warnings toward

the whole world of darkness

unafraid.  As if to say,

"I was not the first, nor

will be the last."

And issuing me now a boon

in the form of a spark.

My fire eats everything

and when my fire finally dwindles

the universe sleeps.

once I was a seabrooder

Ah shoot it’s nearly been a month and what to say!

On a Saturday too...  Suppose I should peruse pictures and journals and contemplate all Saturdays of Past, what then?.  And I bid you think: how many Saturdays have thine eyes be-winked?  And how many of those swam, sung, slurp’d and slept through?  How many spent in company of friends, or strangers who'd later become friends, or all alone with only your woebegone face in the mirror brushing teeth?  How many Saturdays spent on mountain tops, waking cold to nylon walls of tent and sky, or wandering with full pockets in halls of malls or making Sunday plans in corner booths over stack a pancakes?  But besides yourself how many Saturdays are being right now lived across the green and blue globe?  I’d like to take my hand and spin the globe and while it’s spinning touch my finger down, and wherever it lands I say, “Saturday in Slovenia of course!”  For example where are my Saturdays in Spain I had and loved but lost?  I spent a few in Canadia not many… And what’s the business of a calendar anyway?  In the morning you know a Saturday’ll last forever, when the sun comes peeking through blinds you see her hiding there, toes poking out from underneath big heavy drapes you spy her there…   Like scrubbing my left ear and accidentally turning some hidden valve in there which looses all Saturdays to come swooshing around my temples in plain memory’s view:

May 16 ’09 one of the first I see (picture above to prove it):

“On this particular morning E and I awake perfectly bleary eyed and discombobulated from sleeping like tombstone’d mummies on hard-packed dirt and rocks – but waking up like born again persons wearing smiles.  Taking once more that salt bath in the sea splash offered exclusively in West Italia for a limited time only.  Breakfast with the boys (eggs over toast is translatable) before kayaking through limitless sea blues and sea breezes feeling free.  Afterwards running into Wil and the gang on the beach and going with them to big pizza feast.  Talks on trains and rocks down by the water in Riomaggiore, after which we say a few good-byes naturally.”

Or September 18 ’10 so ordinary:

“Cleaned the house today all favors and flavors – and 't was a dust bunny siege!  A grit and grime guerilla war.  Man the laundry ahoy there!  Man your scally-rags and swing the jib-broom!  All for one and whitely done.  Sparkle shine into the horizon victorious – plop down and read a book.”

Or just a few, not so long ago May 28

“In a hotel room where all’s familiar,

morning juice and a hot shower does

healthy for the soul.

Headphones in and hanging heavy on every word of

“Slaughterhouse 5” (once a year)

While childhood brothers Mike and Joel,

(also having just hot-showered their hearts clean)

lay watching hockey on the box

chatting casually like they did 15 years ago

on floors of homes rug’d and safe.”

Or the very next week as I’m trying ta leave town but get caught in a mad carnival of memorial day yard sales:

“Zooming through streets of Saturday Wrightwood to music, saying to myself, “out of the way pa!” and “where’s the junk, joe?” and all the stuff-hungry families meandering on manicured lawns saying “honey, should I?” and “a nickel for another yah?” and “well hell, it fits me well!” and through all this comes me zooming ‘round corners and up hills, skirting rows of parked cars and parked junk, whole hordes of men with junk in their eyes and poor children destined to ingest junk... but there goes me whip, revv, zoom!  Finally bursting into the open freedom downhill descent towards L.A. and Old Friends and Miss Pacifica too, another weekend in the railroad earth ahead.”

How hilarious and sad and lovely those past Saturdays, those past me's and you's - which would I could contain each one in it's very own snow globe, I'd line the walls and bookshelves all of them... and at any point in time I walk up and peek inside one to view a 'former me' and a 'past you' playing ourselves and spinning around to music while Saturday snowflakes swarm overhead... every Saturday I ever lived... I peek in one and see us sitting around with bottoms to sofas, conversing absentmindedly as if there's no snow overhead at all... and I've got 'em all lined up in rows and rows and shelves and stacked high, so as I grow older the house becomes filled and cluttered to the roof with snow globes! - globes in cabinets and across the mantel and heaped in corner piles and photos of more snow globes hanging on the wall and snow globes in the fruit basket... and coming home from work in the evenings I put coffee to boil, begin a fire in the woodstove, pluck a globe from off the dinner table, walk across the room and go "pahloomph" into my easy chair, set my globe upon the arm rest to light a pipe, pick it up again, study with sadness, raise an eyebrow in question, then turn it upside down and chuckle to remember another Saturday I'd forgot, and I bet I'd peek in there and ask out loud as if anyone could hear me, "aren't you cold in all that world of snow?"