The shortest measurement of time is happiness.
Dumping Ground is a flexible, shifting workspace where various styles of writing appear and sometimes intermingle. Poetry, aphorisms, short story, autobiography, musings, etc. may appear separately or within each other. A poem may contain an aphorism, a short story a poem. An auto-biographical chapter might read like a short story and contain musings. Material may remain, vanish, be subsumed in another category through my editing process, or exist in several places simultaneously taking on different meanings through context.
The Dumping Ground
The shortest measurement of time is happiness.
Dumping Ground is a flexible, shifting workspace where various styles of writing appear and sometimes intermingle. Poetry, aphorisms, short story, autobiography, musings, etc. may appear separately or within each other. A poem may contain an aphorism, a short story a poem. An auto-biographical chapter might read like a short story and contain musings. Material may remain, vanish, be subsumed in another category through my editing process, or exist in several places simultaneously taking on different meanings through context.
Truth is short, lies long.
This morning, I Xanaxed my way back on top of the heaped,
rotting leaves filled with sow bugs and detritus,
smells seeping upward, always upward,
and popped the morning codone – it’s ok, the pain is used to it.
I’ve found the best way through
is to maintain a long distance relationship with myself,
thus encouraging others by example.
Days drag through years towards oblivion
With thoughts curving away,
stories begin —
“A moon-slice arcs low in the eastern sky.
From here, the Blue Ridge Mountains flatten
to the Tidewater of Virginia,
the ocean there leveling beyond.
The day sunned-in and set with people stirring sand in walks, clicking scenery
with cellphones, or more serious cameras.”
Fragments accumulate —
“Below, a small snail hunts the shadow of a leaf
at pond’s bottom.”
Aphoristic tendencies emerge —
Eternity is anything that lasts longer than yourself.
Time is all we don’t have.
Time is compressed suffering.
Back to words—most words are unnecessary.
I am a bent bookmark in a time without books.
I am lost in computers without pages to turn.
The Path Through
A left-over autumn day –
a birch, white bark peeled and flaking
in the near-shadows of forest’s edge, along a sun-flattened path,
here a dappled nuance, there a broken branch, a bare breeze.
Further along, a hill trudges ahead of forest’s slant,
a deer trails left then right, followed by others a direction.
Afternoon descends stretching morning.
A low valley fog drifts evening, clinging to a light grey rain that does not pause.
Now, night stretches day and time stretches time, and there a path through,
the Milky Way stretching above, every inch squared with stars.
A white vanish
of clouds travel the wind, valleys spread hills to plains,
An inflection of the past, time’s direction outward.
*******
My direction has always been outward.
For the devoted, art becomes larger than the artist, an allegiance pledged,
all else mundane endless obstructions.
The arts are a burden carried on the back of a bow-legged mule.
Artists are un-collared priests with hidden desires
viewed with public suspicion,
living outside the kingdom of DNA.
I have lost touch, the obligatory follows me
draining day’s light to night.
Ebb away and flow no further.
The time before is a slow drift back.
The first scratches on stone – are they art.
Art has its own magic. One must keep a wary eye on magicians.
Light from a thousand sparkles glint like a magician’s eye.
The Dirt Road to Hell
Chapter One
In 1955, I reluctantly emerged into a doomed society. Not that this dire assessment was a new concept, nor was the birth of another malcontent such as myself. History would assign me baby-boomer status.
I would object.
This was the year of Eisenhower’s first heart attack during his first term in office, which also included a minor stroke and a bowel operation. He was tough. It was the 7th heart attack that ended his life in 1969. Ike served two full terms as a Republican President. My father must have been very content. He had survived four years in the Army during WWII and was a conservative all his life. He was a common-sense man of humble tobacco-field background; a do-for-yourself, do-it-right the first time, work-hard-get-ahead middle-class lifer. In ‘55 he was age 36 with 56 years lying in ambush. I was not yet one.
As I imagine it, June, 1955 was a quiet time of before; my father sitting in a worn canvas chair, cloaked in summer heat, warily watching a Florida of little sun-browned barefoot neighbor-kids of 4 or 5 years unknowingly run concentric circles. “Here, he thought, “the earth dreams the sun and tides wash the Bay of Pensacola and Panama City in warm salt.” My father was still young with desires, vaguely aware that life is thrown in a scatter to entice.
I was born a month later on July 3rd, my coming birthdays overshadowed by our national holiday. By my earliest memories, I was one of those shirtless, barefoot bothers skirmishing about. Our past memories are fractured, notorious, – as reliable as an old crime scene and just as guilty of deception – best dispensed with quickly.
I do remember the little boy, hit with a bully’s rock, the gang of children chanting, “His head bled red, his head bled red.” And being chased around our screened-in porch by my mother wielding a fly swatter, because I let that same bully chase me down the street. The next day a gruesome clown-faced inflatable showed up at our house. I was instructed to punch its guts out as practice for future feudalistic encounters. I remember my little girlfriend who kept me company on damp evening hunts for frogs, which we kept in our pockets. I remember being held under the salty waves of Pensacola Bay by large boys and being rescued by a mother’s rage as I looked up through clear water’s edge. I remember sitting on the back stoop with friends, my mother her head sticking out the door asking, “Would you all like a banana?” “Would you like it peeled?” Bananas appeared, flayed bare like a Halloween trick. I recall my mother driving a 50s used ford four-door, slamming the breaks at every stop sign, my older half-brother in hysterics as I continually slid off the slick seat onto the floorboard. Then there were the evening car-rides where my father would often pull over to hand scrape the huge grasshopper and moth guts off the windshield. I remember the little nearby creek when we moved to Panama City where I fished in early mornings provided with a slab of fatty bacon for bait, and the wild dash back home with Tippy, our half Chow-Chow, leaping at my pole. My father would lightly flour the tiny sunfish, then iron-pan fry them for my breakfast. Perhaps my happiest and confusing memory was the brilliant colored billboard with the cutest blond, bronzed girl – a small dog tugging at her bathing suit, offering a glimpse of her little white bottom – my first daydream. I was five by then and repeating kindergarten, having been allowed entrance at age four. They had a school orchestra, mostly instruments to strum or bang, and a little chorus. I would have no part of either till I was given a baton and made conductor – a premonition of a long-off future, a new crime scene. (*see photo at bottom of Dumping Ground)
Ultimately, parenting is about geographically redistributing your children. Disappeared is a real place where fathers send offspring. It was a commonplace event in the 19th century, in an era of large families, to board children elsewhere. In modern times my half-brother Charles, spent his last few high school years in a military boarding school in Georgia, followed by entrance into the Air Force.
I, however, was taken along on a relocation to Mobile, Alabama. My father had received a promotion to assistant manager of an office in the Continental Insurance Company – an imposing company moniker with a patriotic edge. My memories of age six are pale. We had a standard, flat ranch-style house in a flat neighborhood with wide sidewalks stretching beyond my allowed territory. These hot sidewalks of countless squares were a roller-skate heaven for us neighborhood kids. Nearby, a large road sloped slightly downhill. This became the site of a yearly soapbox derby – a slow-motion coast, not fast like our skates. In one of my mother’s old albums, there is a photo from Florida days of Charles in a soapbox racer, likely a father-son project. I still wonder where they found a hill.
I was now ready for first grade school. But just when one feels safe and cozy, bosomed in family, the tides of the Gulf Coast change. I had not escaped military service after all. I found myself registered in the University Military School of Mobile, Alabama. At least I was not boarded overnight, discipline by day only. In distant years, my old-fashioned father would board two nephews under his care in institutions, one private and one military.
One might surmise that I was a problematic youngster, but there was a different reason for placing me at U.M.S., at a school known by initials. This was a 1961 deep-down south in a state of turbulence. A restless black population demanding deserved rights from a wash of white supremacist and an ordinary populace addicted to racial discrimination; for them a normal, acceptable attitude. The history of all this is, or should be, well-known by now. For my part, I was safe in an imposingly private, respectful white institution.
I look at old photos from this weary time. I wear a grey wool uniform with a few plastic bars attached to the lapel. We were issued two uniform versions, one for cool weather and one for the severe Alabama winters. I remember sweating in both seasons while marching in formation with my fellow prisoners. We had a 45 minute session every day following a school convocation in the gymnasium where we saluted the flag while saying our pledge of allegiance, repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and listened to inspirational urgings from the principal. UMS consisted of grades one through twelve. I was there for the first three, grade four being where you were allowed to carry a model wooden rifle in the daily exercises.
Second and third grades are less nebulous in my thoughts. My English teacher comes to mind first; an attractive, short, blondish mid-twenties reminder of that billboard goddess from the now iconic Coppertone advertisements. Being a very nice teacher, she only paddled me once – without malice. All the teachers were certified paddlers. The ladies used a short light paddle, while gym coaches wielded much longer weaponry. My gym class had a daily ritual where a fellow student, named Tuttle, was summoned – “Tuttle,” barked the nearly bald coach. “Front and center, hand on toes -whack – back in line.” Tuttle was the paddled expert. He had me convinced that this daily event was nothing compared with his visits to the principal’s office. The last-resort punishment was kept there in a keyed drawer opened only for his benefit by the Commander. It was even longer and electrified! I listened to Tuttle’s stories with a certain horror and reverential admiration for his paddle-worthy endurance.
The teachers and administrators also carried ranks. My music instructor was Captain Addison. During my second year I rose to the level of a section head of flutophones – one of three holding this imaginary position of student Captain. These pretend positions were no doubt meant as incentives and were achieved by head to head challenges. However, by the beginning of third grade, my competitive ambitions had grown and I challenged the teacher himself. A bemused Captain Addison addressed me, “Well Captain Petty, I think I shall have to concede and give you a field promotion to the rank of Major.” “Thank you Captain, sir, I answered.”
Thinking ahead, I began to covet his baton too but the buzz and zap of an electric paddle played in my musical head. This monumental audacity convinced my father to buy me a real flute and I began private lessons.
When not practicing flute or skating the scorching squares of suburbia, I scrap-booked newspaper clippings of the latest NASA missions to outer space. These historic events were full of drama and media hype, completely irresistible. Even the names of the space craft were eye-catching; the Mercury-Redstone 3 designated Freedom, flown by Astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. – the first American pilot in space, 1961! Irresistible! Shepard was grounded in ’63 due to an inner ear condition. He underwent a successful, experimental surgery in ’69, then returned in 1971 to command Apollo 14, becoming the fifth and oldest man to walk on the moon. From the papers, I discovered that the astronauts, known as the Mercury 7, were all less than 40 years old, less than 5’11”, and graduates of test pilot school with a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying time. And all were smart, with IQs ranging from 135 to 147. Another featured hero of space was John Hershel Glen Jr. He piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6, named Friendship 7, becoming the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. Glen retired from NASA in ’64 and later became a Senator from Ohio serving from 1974-1998. He died in 2016 at the venerable age of 96.
In my search for space news, I would also find other more disturbing information. Back on earth, in Mobile and throughout the country, there were headlines of civil unrest, pickets and protests, school integration, beatings and murders of African-Americans by white supremacists, trials with unconscionable dismissals. Some 300 miles away, the “Ole Miss” riot of 1962 made front page. It was to become a pivotal moment in Civil rights history. In May of 1963, three and a half hours north of Mobile, the Birmingham riot broke into hand to hand battles between protesters and police. It was a horrific event, a premonition of the assassinations of President Kennedy on November 22 ’63 and Martin Luther King in April of ’68. I was quietly sitting in my third grade class when our principal announced Kennedy’s assassination over the intercom. I knew this was something of importance and terrible, but age eight is not an age of deep comprehension.
Similar tensions were spreading in Mobile. By considering societal shifts, my father had made a wise choice, buffering me in a safe, private school. Unrelated to the racial dilemma, were the local news reports of several gruesome murders, the bodies cut into small pieces. I was sternly lectured on safety protocols; do not talk to strangers, do not accept rides from strangers, etc. One day after school, I was waiting out front for my mother to pick me up. Instead, a car pulled over and a man I had never seen before rolled down the window. He calmly said, “I am here to pick you up – take you home.” Puzzled, I stared at him silently. “It’s ok,” he said. “I know your father, we work together – he sent me.” Now I was disturbed! Who was this, was this true? “How do I know you are telling the truth – I don’t know you.” After a pause, his arm emerged with a card and his driver’s license photo. “See, this is me and here is my business card from work,” he laughed. Still unsure and hesitant, I finally got in and was safely taken home. My father explained that my mother had to visit a sick relative out of town and he was stuck at work. Some years later I learned the real story. My mother had experienced an emotional breakdown and needed to spend a few days at a mental institution.
A chilly digression: It was the winter of ‘63 that my father took me on a short hike in a nearby wooded area. The weather was unseasonably cold; cold is never normal in Mobile, so I was wearing the only coat I had, my sweaty uniform jacket. While running ahead to explore, I tripped and felt a sudden, sharp pain in my left leg. Looking down, there was a lot of blood. It seems I had found a large fragment of brown glass which sliced my young leg. My father lifted me and proceeded to carry me towards home, perhaps a little less than a mile. To my astonishment, he had to stop twice for a rest break. I had imagined him to be of invincible strength. His biceps were impressive mounds. Of course I would have thought this at age 8, but they mysteriously remained so for his whole life. I believe this to be the result of his early life, growing up on a tobacco farm outside Wingo, Kentucky. He worked beside his father planting seed behind Jack the family mule, harvesting in the fall and storing the tobacco up in the loft of the barn. He was born in 1919 and died in 2011 at age 92. At age 87 he had a car accident and nearly died. Following this he began to experience seizures which required special medicine dispensed by a neurologist. Every appointment was accompanied by a short battery of clinical tests which included handshaking, both left and right hands. My father reveled in this opportunity to express his dislike of doctors by giving the neurologist a display of his crushing grip. Returning to my misadventure, the cut was repaired at a nearby hospital with seven stitches and a scar to remember it by. The cold streak continued throughout the south. One morning I awoke to an amazing white snow; a rare, never-happens occurrence. This time the headlines were of a different nature, reporting the many car collisions by a populace inexperienced with such driving conditions. This provided great amusement for states to the north. One day soon, I would join in their delight. I was leaving Alabama.
*****
ALERT: To run .capital N capital E capital T Framework you must install 4.0
Norton – a fatal error occurred. Would you like to restart?
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Windows cannot repair this computer automatically. RESET.
Poems and Poets
Poems hunch down in the past tense forming a foggy silhouette –
symbols of future fragments of previous moments inhabiting the mind.
The crowd of so many words, unspoken madness.
If we could read silence like a sound.
If we could sing silence.
Poems whisper into days.
Poets have sentenced us to the shackles of written language.
They fancy themselves abbreviated philosophers.
They create nothing but what is in the mind of others.
We could fill the craters of the full, full moon
with the bowels of so many poets.
Counting Today
Today my blood feels thin. I have lost my three dimensional and tactile value.
Today begins with a grey insinuation as life lances the heart.
Follow me today
down the pernicious path where optimism goes to ground.
It dodges my touch, wet earth, hard clay, it resists.
Today only seems like a lifetime because it is.
The Seasons
Tree tips brush slight patterns edging distance. Winds conduct shadows on the ground. The turning of day, newness felt.
A reticent Aeolus puffs the first buds of March,
the tremble of intimacy revealing form,
the dark interior of soil nourished.
Forest light pilfered from the oval edge of night dapples a shifting line as a morning chill shivers my shoulders.
Spring has spat summer – heat-cloaked humidity forcing a retreat.
The earth dreams the sun again and again the sun and creation are synonymous.
And the sun is there all day, sitting in a worn canvas chair drinking a can of beer.
Now moonlight twice reflected, secret meetings.
This moon I’ve heard so much about –
one quarter, one half, full, painted in ochre pastels.
It fills, it wanes, it moves,
It passes one season for another.
For the last time – burnt autumn leaves touch in the wind.
*******
Words are the problem with poems.
A poem is not what you say, but what you might say.
Art is not what you see, but what you might see.
By sharing, the poet suffers.
You would ask the world of me, when all I have is a handful of dirt.
The Universe is shattered perfection.
The blue-black night, the violet–red dawn
Life spent shuffling through past years looking for an explanation,
every edge its thickness, every inaction its consequences,
trying to purge yesterday’s knotted echoes.
In the briefest moment, in a going away, all is lost
to intrusion, to less-worthy, to timeless tragedy, a breach
in trying, desiring, failing, again failing, suffocation, inertia, retreat,
a going not, a return not,
futility, rage of futility, appalling pale hope.
The optimist sees the day, but misses the night.
Here insomnia lingers over lines
as painted poems hover a canvas.
Nothing is remembered so clearly as a dark night dreamt, a day on the rebound.
What happened here is measured in the past tense,
a quantum imprint of sharp-edged youth.
What happened here is a linear expression,
the blade of the past slicing the future, the only evidence we have.
A terror stretch-pinching night awake,
the pulse of day rewound.
Iteration
So many words,
So many ways to say the same things,
Listen, listen to me
they all say.
Motherless
Time grinding it out,
expanding the universe,
empty of pity, remorse,
stars mere specs of light.
And here we are,
a given privilege pushed aside.
Hoot
an overnight rain drips off the roof
and through woods
a small hoot owl I hear.
Like the moon, I wane.
Like the sun, I am late.
Winter Variations
A distant morning,
a pale sun sifting translucent shadows,
tree shadows crossing lines ending December.
The New Year feels old already, the tight bleach of winter pressing,
a forward-leaning weight, heavy, dismal and constrained.
Morning is distant and pale.
A lifting fog reveals lucent trees slowly casting etched images.
A new year breaks the past, pulling winter forward.
The world, a quiet gloom pocketed in corners.
An angular sun looms low, the air chilled with crystals
settling on switch-grass fields sectioned by ice-hard creeks.
Transparent sounds hover the crunch of foraging animals.
Reluctant shadows reveal a weak sun’s intentions.
A time-locked Spring is aching in a landscape of black and white greys,
Winter’s torture a perpetuation of persistence,
of expectations.
At forest’s edge is a perpendicular wall
where Cardinal’s red and Jay’s blue perch on iced limbs,
where wooded shadows merge in damp privacy.
Day wanes as a flood-light moon wrings confessions from a sinking sun.
Shadows blacker than space
invite the submerged distance to float stars,
blinking notes quick as a mordent.
Spring released, a trill in time!
Filled with melodious lust, Pan unites with nymphs.
Dionysus and Silenus grape the fields.
Morning is close.
for Jim and Kay Broschart
Mentor Silenus, “You would ask the world of me, when all I have is a handful of dirt.”
Student Dionysus, “Then I will grow grapes in your dirt.”
Spanish Journey
An atonal day –
the wind thrusting violent shadows through trees,
the air a sea of sweat.
August is submerged, a sunken wreck –
no treasure to be found among the fish grunts and chatter.
The tides of Biscayne Bay, a swirling pulse.
Six inches of soil and spreading swamp.
The Spanish tried but lost the fountain in dark places. In dark places souls of greed vanish.
The Poet’s Gather
Poets gather their thoughts together
in poems, teased apart by letters
selected, spaced, drawn into linear melodies,
their presence rearranged regrets or voluminous celebration,
they speak, they sing, they sing, they grunt.
Their words wrinkle on the page mindless of age,
small naked phrases pushed out screaming,
“Am I legible, will you read between the lines
light as a heavy feather, my smooth translucent pearls
boxed in velvet, these imagined silences out-loud or to another?”
Viole da gamba
Sad Creatures,
dust-laden lamentations.
Your sorrows are real.
Your sorrows are old,
varnished with Baroque viols and gut string sighs.
Any time you have is stolen.
Any stolen time is yours.
Our collective time,
a misshapen continuum with a dry past – a dry future,
before then and after then.
Hold firmly stolen sighs,
they are yours.
to Marin Marais’ Tombeau de Monsieur Meliton
M. M., a Baroque composer, 1656-1728
The Dirt Road to Hell
Preface to Chapter 2
I arose vertical to morning, horizontal to life, daydreaming of my fame for diagonal dancing while procrastinating with a cup of blackened heart to the left, I contemplate the kinks in my karma.
Outside, a slow soak of fog cut with rain dims the sun.
“Psyche, my mortal goddess, are your butterfly wings also my palpitations?”
“Yes, but only now – only then,
will your time stop with a pause or stutter, or a swirling pulse of acceleration.”
Chapter Two
The day waits the dream. Even eight-year-olds travel with baggage.
We left Mobile Alabama in a 60s Ford Falcon stuffed
with Gulf Coast memories,
the rear view mirror blocked with clothes bags and me amongst the more miles to go – a familiar backseat test of patience.
I never saw Mobile again. It remains mapped in a brown south of histories, troubled today as then, time paused.
(to be continued——)
A Simple March
Redbuds align the highway median —
Dogwoods sign a pink-white path towards a casual-blue horizon —
Oblong valleys maintain mountain slopes.
Here, redbuds move slender shapes upward
filling sun-patched patterns of forest –
the green of Shenandoah settling between, setting violet at day’s end.
for Jeanne Larson
The Lamentations of Froberger
Stained glass tears, captured tones of another century.
The oil-sheen of deeply colored velvet,
Irresistible silence.
Johann Jacob Froberger
Baroque composer, 1616-1667
Monarchs
Lully — Chambonnières — Couperin —
& their Royal Ornaments, the dancing Kings of France —
inverted mordents & turns for toed steps on marble floors.
— to dance with Kings, an Allemande, Courante, or Minuet?
—better Versailles than the Guillotine?
—the evil of one or the many?
A Sketch
Madness in the season of Spring,
eyes witnessing Summer.
The sky watches through tree-shadows,
darkening the path.
Follow the path.
Eyes close Autumn and Winter.
Lids of new seasons lift
the sun, sea, moon, earth,
light, motion, reflection, rest.
for Taylor Walle
The Investigation
It all went wrong —
but where in the strangle of time, the moment? Location has everything
to satisfy, to pin it down – place blame.
History is full of those who claim to know –
plenty of accusations out there.
Tragedies flux through time, or just behind.
The moment un-grasped memories fading.
Wait – it will all happen again.
for Louis Ferdinand Celine
Lines
Sorrow is a time, tragedy a place.
The past is symbolic of the future and future dire.
Mind-traps sprung by desires tethered to promises.
I want my life to be a dot, a dash, anything but a period.
Let others blow bugles, I lead a life of rampant inertia.
Every work of art is a crime against the mundane.
To copy myself is most flattering.
Only matter has an edge.
One must paint the lines away.
Time Jumps
The blurred outlines of mountains break
at the deterial slope of her body to feet.
I suffer her slings and arrows
in belly and breast, the slope of back.
It all happened before
Will Shakespeare shook words off the English stage.
Before Eve, in a cave in Lascaux,
the curve of horned ochre beasts reddened the walls of history,
echoes emerging from below desires.
Hominid dreams, rounded stones under acacia trees,
before speech, a whistle —
and before a howl, a scream before time times out.
And from a tree,
the tree
in the sky,
feathered bones fly,
flutes in the wind.
The Church on the Hill
I was down and across the street heading the other way, as usual, looking over my shoulder – they always tell you to look both ways, but it’s behind that should concern you – when I spotted him, “the one” – a shabby old ghost turning the corner of Lexington and Main. It was Sunday morning, a Confederate grey sky with a lurking sun and August humidity, my pockets like wet palms rearranging sweaty balls.
I diagonal-ed over, “Hot, CP?” I queried.
“Yeah man, I’m evaporating.” CP – his initials for Cornered Poet, only name he used, and me? — little cp, Cole Pensa – a youngish writer, Cornered Poet – older, grey like the sky and lurking, always lurking. “Look as us here, he said, “nearly invisible, all the townies tucked away beneath steeples, singing the hymnal away.”
“Why not completely invisible,” I proffered. CP replied with a long sigh that ran out of breath.
“Life is not perfect.” “While they sing four-part harmony like barbershop quartets, I go without – all the bars podunked shut – bookshops closed, every block uphill, all the cares of the world bearing down on me, the cream of hope curdling in my mouth, more spit to swallow, day lingering into endless night, night with its tiny hooked feet grasping and biting, the bite of night, amputation of soul. “
“It really is all about you — saints and sinners,” I mumbled.
“Rather, sinners and me – who else? In the end, I do carry a carrot of optimism in my pocket,” he replied.
“Really – how long has it been in there, must be shriveled by now.”
“It just stays in my pocket, never set free. At least at home I have a thin sanctuary, whisky, Xanax, music – Columbe, Marais, French Baroque – tasteful – ‘I weep for you —but gently.’ Or 200 years later, Mahler in ‘06 Vienna listening to his failing heart while writing Adagios for eternity.”
“You’ve got Xanax?”
“Robert Schumann with his Florestan and Eusebius – wild and calm twins of his bipolar psyche – me, I’m bipolar too, just that my doppelgangers are both the same – paranoid.
“It really is all about you —,” I thought – out loud!
“Well sinners and me — maybe only me. You know, I was born in ‘that year’ – the one the government —
“Hey friend, let’s try me for a change,” I said. “Have you read the latest in my Dumping Ground?“
No.”
“Not enough time?”
“Plenty of time.” “Listen, friends are people who disappoint. Enemies you know what they’re about, no expectations – as a friend, why would you presume otherwise of me.”
— the one the government owns, the one that allows me to fuck at 18, drink at 21, collect S.S. at 65, and die on the record at the coroner’s office. Every year since has been beautifully forgettable.”
“Well then — have you got anything new,” I poked.
“Sure, you can have this – he reached in his one pocket without a hole, pulled out a crumpled page, crumpled it some more and tossed it at me.” I stretched the words out and read the smudged lead penciling.
It is all a plot, a plot against us all.
Years push by, gassed turds floating in the air,
ghosts of years, a plot of death.
People never know when it happens to them,
that’s left to the rest of us,
grapes vinegar, crumbs of bread dry.
I wasn’t born, I was excised, chopped in little pieces, sanded with the coarse paper of life, unwanted, unsolicited, dragged by tv cowboys on painted horses, my skin tugging at the coarse rocks of earth,
tearing on the sharpened corners of vengeance.
“Wow, you could use a time-out – there’s plenty of all-day left, let’s get out of town,
to the countryside, fresh and green.”
“What? Really? —where critters chew in the night – and I don’t mean the animals.”
“Ok then, can I come with you – a little whiskey and Xanax, some classical music —?
“Get lost cp – you little CrackPot!”
The Cornered Poet muttered off down the street, looking left and right – especially behind.
Alert:
This program has reached the end of its life and may pose additional risks,
you may want to uninstall it, or exclude it from the future.
Note: Ran into the Cornered Poet last week.
Crossed the street to chat with him,
should have ducked around the other corner –
called me a Crack-Pot.
Well, he sent me another poem, not my fault, which I share here.
— Cole Pensa
Songs of Translucent Transparency
There is a henge of fire on the slopes,
we set, forgetting how to pass.
Yet we take comfort in its boundaries, not knowing the day of our slaughter.
Not knowing – time seems endless, green and nourishing.
If I am obscure today it is only a retreat,
from dirt under fingernails, fungus under toenails,
a nose picked, earwax swabbed –
already you turn away,
my cry is like a gull on the wing shitting grey on harbor pylons.
The pain is mine, I know —
it leaks out, smears, waits to be stepped in – and, it, smells.
Still, I try to share.
The mind is formed as thoughts surround it,
linking us with action.
Easily, it becomes unchecked mania,
a brown paper bag of social isolation.
Today’s song: You can count on me,
I get it.
I am here for you,
I am there for you, and
we can do it together.
Silence
— so immense its echo never returns.
—The Cornered Poet
— so I returned his “Songs” with one of my own: –little cp
Valley Song
Spring a side-step
Summer a downbeat.
Rains pound rivers
fish splash underwater.
Animals path a way through
to river’s edge, dense shade pushed aside,
to drink strips of sun off gurgling water.
Sounds swirl past measuring distance,
river-time fed by eons,
time on its side, winding –
rocks to pebbles pay homage to power and peace.
for K.M.
The Night Fell
—and the sleet of Canada fell in S. Carolina and Alabama, only it was rain for boiling peanuts and buttered grits served on off-white plates, and the napkins of the north are upon us said the brown south of histories, and the the white robes of Rome, and the marble Gods of Greece with amputated arms and penises- hammered on mead, and it snowed in the Pyrenees last year, the spring melt flowing down the Nile carrying Egyptians who don’t mind, while mud floods in California, and Hawaii expands lava borders with Mexico, and my senorita sleeps beside a cactus of thorns beneath a concentric moon.
for Jeff Stone
The Open Palm
Ritual seduction, addiction, a repetition of beads snaked between thumbless fingers,
tattooed on thighs in a brain-stem dampened cave by elders who were not responsible.
The back of your hand carries nothing, it is the other side of the molten moon,
the no-land-zone of a generation times a generation.
The open palm receives the open palm.
Summer Lecture
Nobility of the wild seed,
the leathery brown of bare feet,
burs & airborne seeds & bugs that appear to be airborne seeds.
Shade claims its boundaries beneath maple and sky,
a heat in our forehead, the inability to move beyond
as air collapses inward, a blue blaze.
I’m tired,
a pin-pricked balloon circles above,
my body a thousand tiny holes, gasping.
I’m tired.
The horizon stretches taut,
snapping to darkness – allusions, illusions, delusions.
I’m tired.
A yellow star pales red, dying, a quantum obscurity.
Inverted tears pale red, slowly falling up a gentle cheek.
I am tired.
Oratorio 1738
Another Largo
drags another foggy morning through London streets,
an organ and chorus join, praising King Saul, Handel conducts,
pages leafed back in a leather-bound bible.
All day, the fog is a shifting camouflage,
loitering backdoor alleys like a prostitute leafed back.
In a slow creep it consumes the night,
phasing to rain beneath a starless vacuum
as the Witch of Endor raises the ghost of prophet Samuel.
Correspondence: 1738
Dear Mr. Handel,
I write to inquire of the maggots in your brain. I would ask firstly, “Where might you have received these maggots? Are they available in London or by import. I have heard, through the kind correspondence of Sir Jennens, that perhaps you breed these valuable maggots yourself? Also, from Lord Burlington, that I might procure squerrls that sound like little bells, used in your new production, Saul. As I have no permanent residence and travel incognito, you may reach me via the gracious Lord Burlington with whom I am temporarily lodging. From a humble man of excessive curiosity and necessary discretion, your servant,
The Cornered Poet
{Further information at Wikipedia: Saul (Handel) & Charles Jennins}
Extension
How can I speak without offending?
How can I offend without speaking?
My tongue cleaves as it looks into eyes
of empty hearts and hollow ears,
as mountains sing in a pitch lower than whales in the sea,
arias in an antique cleff, words await redemption inside the heart of the tongue.
Short Seasons Long
They impress with form unconstrained, uncontained,
spewing green in spring,
shedding fall yellows edged in bronze.
In summer, overgrown, overripe, indexed in waves of heat.
Sloping white in winter, a tundra beyond melt.
Max the Scar
Now this! This shifting phenomenon layered across the night, almost incandescent, glowing ghosts of fog moving in thick, then thin gestures crossways to the empty highway. It was mesmerizing and dangerously seductive – the play of roads edge in the one headlight, the passenger side veering right, suddenly jerked away from the old 50’s song hissing on the radio. Nine, ten hours of mapped center lines through four states. Was the gas gauge low or stuck beneath glimpses of the Missouri moon. I wondered, are we fog-creatures – phasing to invisibility as we leave society to die alone, in the mist where meaning is magically transformed?
I rolled into town around 2 am under night’s bleak, dark blanket. The lot was nearly full, but quiet at this ratty motel edged with spot floods pointed at the front office. Inside, the clerk pulled on a nearly empty pint of whisky before filing it behind the counter.
“Ten bucks extra for late-night parties of one, he said.”
“Yeah, like hell, I menaced back —you want ten bucks, well there’s no time like never!” I had my own pint patiently waiting my attention.
Morning split in two, light splicing across the far wall. It was near noon as I dressed and cased the closest diner down and across the street. “Breakfast special – lunch not so much,” read the sign. An honest appraisal I guessed. Bacon thick cut, eggs over once, and corner-cut toast – your choice of imported Alabama-style grits or stewed apples. Last call before lunch menu. “Tips if you want to leave by the front door—!” read another sign lettered in worn gold print. A necessary encouragement I reckoned.
I had been in this town before, in fact, two years of adolescent angst – nineth and tenth grades of high school – before my parents split up and split town leaving me the one spliced against the wall. Well time moves on, so did I – wasting time like it belonged to me for over four decades. Mostly east-coasting, taking part-time jobs when I couldn’t ‘cook a scam.’ That’s what we ‘in the know’ called it. I had ambition you see – I was an itch on society yearning to be an itch on the universe. I was a drifter. In Germany, they have a nicer phrase – “der geselle” – the journeyman, and I was of German-Dutch descent.
Right now, I needed to escort my vintage junker to the local garage, easy to find – on the corner of every small town. This one had a Sinclair sign, the one with a Brontosaurus smiling after a lunch of Jurassic greens – now turned to black gold. I hadn’t seen one of these signs in years, the last time was at the ’64-’65 World’s Fair in NY City. I was up from Baltimore – a little collection errand for the boss. I remember most the parking lot – 10,000 cars, half just like mine, a nightmare of fins leftover from the 50s. The Sinclair Oil Co. had a huge exhibit with all kinds of life-sized dinos, and they were giving away coupons (one per family) for free gas. I saw the exhibit once, but entered several more times, until I began to look familiar. Anyway, that was the last hurray – Sinclair was de-dinoed by ’69.
It was hot – no need to say humid, a given. There was a large fan – broken, and a small oscillating one pointed at the working corner. Above, on a steel beam 12 feet up was a small boom box piping local am-radio from Kennet, the biggest town in Dunklin County, MO – central bible-belt, amen.
“Have you got a minute, I asked?” The fan oscillated.
“Yeah, busy now – wait – no smoking.”
I tossed my cigarette outside, then noticed the sign next to the door, “Don’t smoke in my garage and I won’t shit in your car!” I waited. Ten minutes, twenty. He was buried under the hood, a headless body wavering in the humid tide of the South. Finally, he turned half my way –
“What’s your problem?”
Me, or my car? I have a perpendicular problem – I don’t like to walk.”
I had his attention. He left-eyed me and glanced at the license plate.
“Not from here —.”
“Not now.”
“Oh, so what about the car?
“Not from around here either – it needs a right headlight, new front tires, and has a slow oil leak. Can you get to it today.”
“No, busy now – leave it around the side.”
“Till when?”
“—when it’s fixed, he huffed.”
“Old ass, I thought, dinosaur of the south. The South is a scab time scrapes open over and over – one of these days — !”
Today, another grey sky, and we take what we can with a sigh. Seems I would “be around” in this small town of my past – Dunkinpo. They say, never burn bridges behind you – blow them up! Well, someone rebuilt the bridge – here I am – again – in the Bootheel of Missouri, a small, square appendage bounded by Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas – the Missouri river, west – the Mississippi river east and Iowa flat to the north. I came down from the northeast on Interstate 55 S. to 164 W. to the back-roads ambling S.W. of Gobbler below and east of Senath above Hornersville about 10 miles east of the St. Francis River border to Arkansas. The name, Dunkinpo, is derived from a German/Dutch two-word collision, not mentioned in polite company. Strictly speaking it is too small to be town, but Dunkinpolars don’t like the terms village or “unincorporated community.” There is a main street – no named side streets, the obligatory dry-goods store, diner, a two-room library, and the one-man garage sign show. The closest post office is in Hornersville, population 620. Hornersville has a middle school and shares operations of the Senath-Hornersville Sr. High School, which I marginally attended. Hornersville is south and Senath heading north with Kennet another 10 miles further. Kennet is the big city – a place of trouble and corruption with hotels, theaters, and liquor stores. More than 10,000 people live in Kennet – due to migrations from the smaller surrounding towns and unincorporated villages. And here I am – again!
It was hotter, no need to mention humidity. I decided to edge down the shadier side of Main Street to the library where a window air conditioner offered sanctuary and books offered solace. It was here I had discovered the rest of the world. Looking through the shelves, I spot books with my name still on the checkout cards. Here is Oscar Levant telling me of late-night debaucheries at Hollywood parties. The booze and pills shared with Judy Garland and wit-battles with the likes of Groucho Marx. The times of depression spent in Mt. Sanai mental health ward, committed there by his wife, June, ‘for the good of all’ as he put it. Also, whimsical tales of his recitals across the country as a concert pianist. He was in high demand for both his musical abilities and Hollywood reputation. Oscar was a regular cynic on the TV show Information Please and appeared in more than 200 movies! And here I was – here, nowhere! One observation of his I always kept close was, “It’s not what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts.” —what an apt prediction, how did he know? More discoveries were French names like Camus and Gide, the darkness of Huysman’s Against Nature, short stories and philosophy by Jean-Paul Sarte – literature with a different outlook than locally expounded. I even took to calling myself Jean-Paul in the morning mirror. As I look at the cards, I see my name alone on these volumes. How did they ever get here – fate, for me alone? Certainly no one else ever read them, or they would have been summarily removed.
I wandered further into the second room. Still pressed against the wall in a back corner was a chewed-up, wobbly legged wooden table with a two-speed turntable for playing records – either 78 rpm or the modern 331/3 kind. Back then, taking cues from Levant’s book, “A Smattering of Ignorance,” I found two conductors to call my favorites: Leopold Stokowski and Fritz Reiner. According to Levant, Stokowski conducted with a choreographic, bare-handed approach, the other, Fritz Reiner, used a microscopic beat attached to a small baton. I would imagine these motions as I listened to a world of sound not common elsewhere in my life. Beyond all that I could imagine lay my discovery of the German composer, Mahler! The little library contained just two recordings, on new 331/3 speed records – his first and fifth symphonies. The first was titled “The Titan.” The fifth propelled one’s inner self into the deep universe beyond. When I listened to these, I made sure the headphones were tight. I felt there must be something forbidden about this music, at least in Dunkinpo. This modest sampling of higher education would have to suffice – I never needed nor finished school. I left Dunkinpo at age 15, but I had the libraries of a nation, or at least the East coast, to nourish my intellectual cravings and salve my autodidactic disease.
Ruminating is circular, back alleys and hideaways, sink holes of the weary and worn, best to swallow these black holes before being swallowed. I looked over towards the front desk – a familiar face now lined with wrinkles emerging, the brilliant sun blinding from behind – an angelic apparition of the bible belt?
“Max!?”
“Yes, is it you Angel?”
“It’s all me!”
She was a little plumper than before, but in an enticing way. Her given German name was Frieda Engel – Engel being Angel in English and I came into this world, Maximillian Abendroth. ‘Max of the Night’ they called me – Abendroth meaning evening or dark.
“What have you been doing – these passing years?”
“Nothing really.”
“What kind of nothing?”
“The kind one can’t verbalize – like painting without crayons or dancing diagonally. Only, I can’t dance – my toes cramp a polonaise while my legs boogey.”
“But you must work – to eat?”
“I hold no special regard for work, or those who labor. Sweat is what connects us to the beasts. While others work hard, I only work lightly. I aspire though. I would like to live a poetic life of obscurity, settle into a comfortable poverty – diligently represent the bottom of society – ah, we can only dream.”
“Hmmm, wonder, what should I think about that?”
“Wonder as you wish, everything just is anyway, or only someone else’s opinion.”
“Quite a relaxed take on life, Max. Seems to me you were more anxious – back then, and I definitely remember more cursing.”
“Well, I have mended some of the lower fences – I only curse on Sundays now.”
“Oh, so no church—?”
“—too many like-minded folks in one place for a drifter, the collective you know, and if there is a God, he will never find me in this abyss anyway.” It’s a big and bigger universe with time an eternity and events the scarification of time – without them, no time. I am but a scar on time.”
“Oh, so now it’s Max the Scar – instead of Night? Very dignified indeed! Well, I suspect you have had enough of the diner – why don’t you come around to the house, seven or so, dinner and drinks – tips included.”
It was a short walk to Angel’s, as with everywhere in D-Po. I followed my memory up the gravel lane to the stone walkway and up the slight grade to the house – one of the finest homes in the county. Angel’s family had a long history in Missouri, back to the 1830s when Daniel Dunklin became governor of the state, hence Dunklin County – founded in 1845, a year after the Governor died. The Engel family were German immigrants. They were knowledgeable about growing wheat and their farm prospered, quickly expanding with the help of enslaved workers. At the turn of the century, when the boll weevil destroyed Arkansas’ cotton crops, there was a surge of cotton growers into Missouri. The family rented out parcels of land to sharecroppers and became wealthy. This much I remembered from my one anxiety ridden visit – to meet Angel’s father.
The night air was a humid mesh lowering the sky, the scant flickering of a few early stars filtering through. A hedge of rhododendron lined both sides of the walkway and large elephant ears of several varieties garnished the front of the house. Guardian Magnolia trees flanked the front lawn, their duties distinguished by a century of service.
I slowed my pace, taking in the grand old house – a folk-styled Victorian, late 1850’s. The covered porch, trimmed out in turned cedar balusters, extended around the side of the two-story house with an additional morning porch located on the second floor above the entrance door. Two brown brick chimneys exited the roof line, with one more just visible offset to the far left. This was the Carriage House, sturdily built sometime after the main dwelling. The entrance to the porch was placed directly in front of the door in a welcoming fashion with a double-headed, brass dragon knocker. Before I could knock, Angel occupied the doorway, though I never saw the door opening – more apparitions?
“Guten Abend Max, enter please, this way.”
The low ceiling hallway was dimly lit with archaic bulbs giving off an oxidized yellow hue. This suddenly opened to a beautiful space with 12-foot ceilings and a brilliant chandelier – what a clever and dramatic effect, created by lowering the entrance. The floors were finely kept polished hardwood. Off to the left, a staircase echoed the exterior porch with fluted poplar spindles and sporting an ornate finial. There was a locally quarried stone fireplace enhanced with floor to ceiling pilasters.
“Come along Max.”
The hallway continued, now at full height, with an equally large room to the right where Angel’s Blunther Grand was displayed. Here the lighting was better, focused on the keys of the brown piano. The décor was less formal, curtains drawn against the heat, a small Persian carpet beneath to balance the sound against reflections from the hard wooden floors.
“You still play?”
“Certainly, I studied for years – I teach now. I even have students traveling from ‘big-town Sennet,’ where they have studios and music clubs – and instructors with degrees. My piano was built in 1936. It’s two sizes up from baby grands! That the same year, Blunther built one for Hindenburg – mine has survived. And those estranged half-brothers, Brahms and Wagner owned Blunthers – so did Mahler, and your favorite Liberace.”
“Hey, no need to be so cruel – you know it’s Mahler I worship. The weight of his Adagios alone would crush a little town like this.”
“Yes, but nearly no piano music by him for me to play.”
“Well then, play me something hazy. You know, I came in around 2 am through heavy fog and saw the strangest lights.”
“Have you forgotten – the Senath ghost lights?”
“Yes, I guess so – I came in from the northeast – Senath is northwest of here.”
“People see them over between Arbyrd and Synath – where county road C and US 412 meet. I’ve heard there are some out in western Missouri too, near Hornet – Spooklights, they call them. Happens all around the world, in places with high humidity. Here is a hazy piece for you – Reverie by Debussy.”
The music began to rise and fall gently in her left hand joined by a descending melody, single notes at first. The rocking left hand stretched across the bottom of the piano, sweeping the keys while the top line was now full with octaves. This transitioned to a close four-part harmony, the texture hymn-like but there was no church in this music. Now Debussy closes, the theme returning buried in the middle, breaking the accompaniment in half – then into fragments from before — then a vanish–. She was still, her heart quiet and mine satisfied. Finally, the trance was dissolved with a new suggestion.
“How about something to lift the fog, something less hazy – sparkling?”
She opened the heavily tapestried drapes, the play of sunlight on water gushed through the air propelled by a palatial fountain – dashed from her fingers, her hands dipping in the water, tossing it up and outward –
“Jeux d-eau I exclaimed!”
Ravel was a brilliant chandelier in her hands.
“Brava! Brava! Encore me – more please.”
“Maybe a short one – we do have plans out back – aperitifs with the hummers, and maybe a piece of candy? Peppermint??”
Sure enough. She played a piece written in homage to Auguste Get, the culinary inventor of French Pippermint. The lightheaded frivolity of Belle Epoque waltzing beneath a chandelier – here – in Dunkinpo! This piece I didn’t know.
“It’s by a friend of Debussy’s, Deodat de Severac. While Debussy remained in the limelight of Paris, Deodat went provincial, becoming an incredibly sophisticated country cousin.”
“I see, as Schumann said, “‘There is always more to learn.’” You play beautifully, where did you study?”
“Right here, in this room with Professor Haentzschel.”
My father thought he was crackpot, but I liked him. He was aggravating and kind.
“Relax, relax, he would say.”
“Yes professor.”
“That alternating move is called the dog-paddle, but for you it is the graceful hands of a ballerina – arms and hands of a dancer, without them they could not keep their balance – same at the piano, more so since you sit – emotion through motion – practice!”
“Yes professor.”
And when I hit wrong notes, the rants began.
“What, do you have elves in your piano today – playing the cracks? What was that! Your elves are now Gnomes!! Practice more, or it’s back to Czerny and Burgmuller!”
“Yes professor, more practice, I promise.”
“I am certainly impressed, Angel, you must be very popular with the locals, Max exclaimed.”
“Not really. I tried to present a recital, with a small token admission – no one attended. Then I tried to give one for free – no one came.”
“Oh my—!”
“Enough for now, let’s go out back – I have freshly made Gin fizzes, fresh Missouri air – thick not thin – and imported hummingbirds.”
Through the kitchen with the adjoining butler’s pantry to the back porch we went. Screened droplets of evening condensing inverted tiny worlds – split seconds of time stretching moments before combining into downward streams. Two arbors on either side were hung with feeders – the focus of conquest as warring hummers swooped and maneuvered.
“Up from the Mexican Yucatan, right?”
“I like to think mine are from Costa Rica or the Caribbean They arrive in April and leave with bellies full of sugar water.”
“They do seem greedy, but I prefer your gin fizz, just the right choice, an escape from a long day.”
“Yes, it’s really classic – but I like to substitute tangerines for the orange juice – lightens it up – the rest it standard – lemon juice, sugar – 2-3 oz of gin, heavy cream, and an egg white whipped – chilled club soda, and someone special to drink them with – is really nice!”
“Man, these hummers are crisscrossing with a vengeance – one lands, another ambushes.”
I knew about ambushes, one of the reasons I was on the road. The East Coast had suddenly become a smaller place. It was becoming dark. I lit a cigarette and puffed the embers out into the nearness of night.
“Let’s go in Max.”
“Sure Angel.”
She disappeared into the Butler’s Pantry. I could hear the rustling of plates and clink of silver. I watched as she set the split Round Oak table, the leaf having been removed from service long ago. It seems Angel lived a reclusive life of music and students – life in the arts is like an open wound salved with a periphery of societal pleasantries. Most people haven’t a clue.
“We have some old favorites tonight, to start – cheese curds and toasted ravioli with a nice Moselle-style Riesling from Crown Valley Winery- that’s in St. Genevieve County. For later, I have opened a really good Blumenhof red – ‘Court of the Flowers’ – award winning aged Norton from indigenous Missouri grapes. It will go with the Crawdad Boil, I know you will like that!”
“I’ve been in Maryland for a while now, great crabs but not even close to a real Boil. Do you have some Delta Blues to go with that? Some, “I woke up this morning and everything I had was gone.”
“Well Max, you were the one gone all this time, you know I did miss you.”
“That was long ago Angel, and I was lost – no parents – no way to stay here with Social Workers after me, wanting to ‘place me’ somewhere else. I have thought of you of course. And tonight, your music was so meaningful to me. There are next to no classical music stations in this country, and I’m not socially dressed to attend the concert hall.”
“Matters not, not now anyway – ‘to Missouri and lost friends.’”
“‘And to lost ghosts—‘ could you pour me a glass of that Norton, I’ve a hankerin’ for crawdads!”
After dinner, with a glass of Edelbrand cherry brandy in hand, I coaxed more music from my hostess. A music of reminiscence, youth recalled, thick not thin – late Brahms. First, the Intermezzo from Op. 116. Who would think this is in E Major – the pickup beat leans into a dissonance darkening to c# minor, the melody falling, always falling. For nearly two pages nostalgia drips till a few measures brighten into major, the left hand floating upward – still the right hand descends. Along with nature, Brahms collects the dew to drops – those inverted tears. Age falling, always.
Then Angel picked up the pace with some earlier Rhapsodies, impassioned, flaring and surging forth. Both in minor keys, the first dazzling with octave passages and sweeping scales tinged Hungarian. The next, with it’s low-rumble-earth-breaking-open, hands crossing, carrying the line over and recovering again and again – finally reduced to a nervous, brief diminuendo, suddenly crashed by two fortissimo chords to conclude. Played together, they exhaust. Angel came over bringing the snifter of brandy, its fragrance released in our glasses. The upholstered sofa, meant to trap visitors, enveloped our spreading shapes as she gave me a light kiss on the cheek.
“I thought I felt the room shake with tremolos, I inquired?”
“Just the usual tremors, leftovers from the 1811 Madrid Quakes – you know we lost several relatives in that event, largest on record. Along with our “Tornado Alley” status, its lucky anyone lives here – and on reclaimed swampland yet.”
“Guess I prefer musical tremolos to tremors and relatives who remain far in the past.”
We sat quietly, each passing our thoughts through the air wondering if they would recognize the other. With the music silent, the frogs in the Magnolia trees chorused of all their guardians had witnessed, tales true and exaggerated, bringing them closer.
Angel turned towards me, “Are you staying?”
“When the “wizard” finally waves his wand over my car — I left off, she was a pause in tense air. Can’t deny it, I am a drifter you know – if I stopped, quit the road, stayed in one place – I’d be a bum. And what does Dunkinpo have to offer a bum?”
She gave me a look from the past, her voice modulating, softening, “Are you staying —?”
The sun malingered through delicate gauze drapes, morning aromas of dark coffee and chicory mingling with musical notes from below – a youthful Johannes, his Andante so full of hope and romance. I had long ago memorized the poetic couplet included in the manuscript.
Der Abend dammert, das Mondlicht scheint, Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint Und halten sich selig umfangen. Sternau
Through evening’s shade, the pale moon gleams While rapt in love’s ecstatic dreams Two hearts are fondly beating.
Angel heard me coming down and pulled me towards the kitchen. There was a breakfast nook on the side, away from intrusive sunshine. I begged off on a large breakfast opting for toast and two cups of black Joe. Slowly rising, I excused myself, for a cigarette and a little walk down to the wizard. As I approached, I remembered the threatening sign and killed my half smoked Turkish Special. I was down to my last pack, with Faders Tobacco in Baltimore a distant wisp in the East.
“How’s my Chariot I inquired?”
“ — ’round side.”
At least he hadn’t misplaced it. It was unlocked, I quickly pocketed the keys dangling from the ignition.
“What’s the damage?”
“Oil, gasket – you were leaking, two 60,000-mile tires, one headlight – you’re going to need a ring job soon.”
“Ok, but how much now?”
“167 dollars.”
“You sure are a succinct businessman, wizard.”
“Sliding out from beneath a car, he shot me an up-angled glance and pointed. There across the shop, another sign – “No Cussing, or I Keep your Car!”
“Shit, oh shit, I better pay quickly! Sorry— just slipped out —twice.”
I drove around town and up a few country roads, taking my time, thinking things over. Then I drove to Kennet, the sinful town we were warned against as children. It seemed dreary and sleepy to me. So small for such a big reputation, but Dunkinpo was a dry town and at least I found a bar on a corner complete with local bums. Maybe I should join them, I thought. I could come up here and hang out if things got dull at home. Staying with Angel I would have comforts, she was an heiress to a fortune after all, a real cultured lady of the south. And more than that, the music – music is more than anything. But what of the townies – how long till I was ostracized? After all there is a strength in the collective – a horrible potential for violence. Surely my very presence would anger them. I mulled over beer and bar nuts, the day yawning to evening. Finally, I returned to the grand house – one of the finest in the county. Angel was waiting, sitting on the porch swing, waiting. I sat with her. Words slid back down my throat. I had decided, but the words were lodged inside the cold decades I had spent alone.
“Listen Angel, you are more special than anyone I have ever been with, but I can’t stay just now, I have business in California that is unavoidable – for my new boss. I promise you I will try to return as quickly as possible.”
Her pause hung thick, the tree frogs were silent, the Magnolias ominous. I didn’t know what else to say or do. I rose and thanked her for the dinner and music and with a ‘till I return’ retreated down the steps and slightly sloped path.
Once Max was out of sight, his car engine beyond hearing, Angel opened the door, went down the dusky hallway and entered the music room. The Brahms Sonata was still open to the Andante, the one with verse at the top. Quietly, with one beautiful motion, she closed the score.
As he drove along, Max thought to himself – drift west old man, just drift. A fine mist had begun to cover the windshield. He decided to avoid traveling directly west through Arkansas, instead heading Northwest past Senath. Somehow the car was sluggish. With each mile a thickening fog seemed to push the gas pedal back, holding him in place – ahead, now to the side, then ahead again, a light of obscure shape, of shapeless borders. He felt alone as never before and there was a thinness to him – then with one last regret, he was gone.
c. 2023 Byron W. Petty
The Old Theme of Society Versus the Individual
(“—a cage searching for a bird.” Kafka)
In Max the Scar, two individuals struggle with society. Max is a low-level gangster who has exchanged life in normal society for one outside of the law. Even this dark society betrays him and when presented with a possible out – renewed life with a former girlfriend, the benefits of monetary security and artistic (musical) bliss, he balks and runs – still concerned with the dangers of the collective surrounding him, he disappears.
Angel has nearly as much difficulty. She has retreated into a solitary life of music – the only outer contact, her students. There is no mention of her attending gatherings of any kind. Her one trip outside is to a tiny library. Yet it seems empty too, not even a librarian exists. She and Max share an evening of music, food and drink, conversation, and romance. She offers him all he could want and all she wants is his company. It is not to be. However, as her life fills with disappointment and she closes the score on the piano, we still hear the ringing tones, the healing power of music reverberating in her Missouri mansion.
Warum?
It disappeared. My nerve cells ache with the wish to know. It was there once, on the edge of reaching out to me, the answer in my ear from far away. Why do you ask? Why do you wonder? Why do you think? Did you grow up? Yet remain the same tortured child, alone with why?
For Robert Schumann
A Pebble to Sand
Dreams hide under the bed, everyone knows. Dreams float in the air and in dark fogs confess their guilt.
And like you I am you, our guilt floating apart, in dreams under the bed.
Everyone knows
ambition rolls like a heavy stone wearing down imagination.
Like the sun cleaved by a shadow the soul sweats desire, and little by little, measured by time little and divided, a pebble to sand.
Across the World,
the blue sky & sea exchange places, a calm moon resting in both,
shallow craters, weathered secrets in both.
Across the world,
knifing leaves of bamboo rustle syllables & sway green,
a red sunset rises yellow, the pale horizon fading dawn as a warmth grows.
Across the world,
an artic wind maps white along a desolate edge.
Penguins sway and chorus the invisible sky & land.
Triumvirate of Society: Religion, Politics, Commerce
The individual Versus Society
(“—a cage searching for a bird.” Kafka)
In Max the Scar, two individuals struggle with society. Max, a low-level gangster with autodidactic disease, has exchanged life in normal society for one outside of the law. Even this dark society betrays him and when presented with a possible out – renewed life with Angel, a former girlfriend, and the benefits of monetary security and artistic (musical) bliss she offers, he balks and runs – still concerned with the dangers of the collective surrounding him, he disappears.
The nature of Max is highlighted with surrounding circumstances. The heat, humidity, haze, mist, fog, reclaimed swampland – all are damp, unpleasant aspects that Max is not pleased with, just as he is uncomfortable with society. As these weather images are vague so is the lack of clarity and action within Max. And now, enlarged by potential danger, (as was his criminal life) he must consider disasters such as deadly earthquakes and tornados. Even the mysterious lights in the fog become ominous and threatening. Yet here he is again, as he mentions repeatedly. Static, stuck, going nowhere in life, bogged down in Dunkinpo and despite the entreaties of Angel, he can only continue his escape into habitual crime, thinning out with the mist.
Angel, having carried a simmering torch for years, finds Max in the local library – a place of solitude for both with no obligations, no collective. Angel is attractive and hospitable, intelligent, and sophisticated. She enjoys the musical hums of her Costa Rican hummingbirds as she sips wines from Crown Valley and the Court of Flowers – symbols of upper-class elegance. She displays warmth in her desire to share music with her students, she has thrown open the heavy drapes of her mansion and exposed the light – Ravel’s Jeux d’eau brilliantly shimmering through the room, all this could be for Max. Though connecting with his acquired interest in classical music, Angel fails in drawing him away from his seedy life. “Matters not, she says.” Is her isolation similar to Max’s? “I tried to present a recital — —no one came, explained Angel.” Her’s is a passive aggressive sentence from Society. With most of society, classical music “matters not.” But for those fully absorbed, it is the only beacon in a fog. Angel symbolically closes the page on Max, but not on her devotion to music.
Further Note: A character may communicate without speech, through action or absence of action. With Angel, there is no mention of her attending gatherings of any kind. Her one trip outside is to a tiny library, but for Max, it seems empty too – not even a librarian exists. Surely Angel must at least shop for food and drink; however, no invitations are issued for parties except an unattended musical offering.
Backstage:
While planning and researching this story, certain little coincidences occurred. The opening two paragraphs were sketched late one night just before sleep – a quasi-detective kind of script, which I continued the next morning. First, I needed a place. I figured something southern, but not deep south – not South Carolina or Georgia, not Alabama – I never found Tennessee or Kentucky quite southern. I looked up a google map of the Mississippi river and was drawn to Missouri. There was, in the southern corner, a small square – a county bordering Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The unusual shape stood out as many of the larger western states were squarely drawn. Missouri however has straight lines to the north and south, but meandering borders east, the Mississippi River– and west, the Missouri River. Good enough, I left it at that for the moment. Now for a town to settle in. In an earlier story I had used the old-fashioned term Podunk, meaning kind of backward. I thought of twisting this, producing Dunkpo. Still, it needed more, thus Dunkinpo. I liked it. Then, while ruminating, I thought this sounded rather German, so I looked up translations of dunkin and po. Sure enough, in German dunkin means sort of or kind of like and po means shit – “kind of like shit” – perfect! The next day I began researching Missouri and discovered that the little square was “Dunklin County” named afterDaniel Dunklin (1790-1844), the fifth governor of Missouri (1832-1836) and was nicknamed the Bootheel” of Missouri. (Catchy – allusions of Italy’s “Boot” and the panhandle of Florida and Texas?) Dunklin was certainly a close match to my “town” Dunkin-po! Aside from Dunkinpo, all the other towns mentioned are real and located as described in the story. Also, there was a history of German immigrants which surged with the 19th century construction of railroads, another connection with Dunkinpo.
I further discovered that Dunklin County is a place with dire weather, being in the infamous “Tornado Alley,” and the epicenter of the massive “Madrid” earthquakes of 1881-12. I had now spent 2-3 days researching and had earlier noticed but dismissed a mention of “strange lights” – the Synath-Arbyrd lights. When I went back to this information, I was pleased to see that this mystery occurs on foggy nights, like the one my character arrived on. Things were shaping up; this could supply a nice veil to the story.I had already decided on a shady fellow who bumps into a former girlfriend who is (classical) musically inclined. Now was the time to select names for my prime characters of German lineage. So, I searched a simple, generic list of German names settling on Maxmillian Abendroth and Frieda Engel. Next, I checked for their American equivalents. As explained in the story, Abendroth means evening or dark. Again, unplanned but just right – he arrived in the evening in a fog and was of a dark nature, being an “enforcer.” Engel means “Angel” and works nicely – music is often referred to as angelic and soothes the savage beast – perhaps Max?
It took two weeks to research and draft the story. As a classical musician, I am addicted to Youtube music videos. Sometime into the week, though I did not want any obvious connections in the character names, and I am familiar with many, many composers/musicians, I spotted a sidebar with the name Abendroth. Looking him up, I found a Herman Paul Maximillian Abendroth, 1883-1956 – a German conductor, composer, and pianist. I had never heard of this musician. His dates would have overlapped with my Max Abendroth. And he had a dark mark against his character. Liberally minded, he was detained by the Nazi party in 1934. Upon relinquishing his views, he subsequently joined the Nazi Party and held positions of significant importance in music, such as: Director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, Professor of Leipzig Conservatory, Conductor of the Bayreuth Festival of Wagner’s Operas 1943 & 1944 (Hitler officialized and organized the festivity.) His career continued with remarkable success under Communist Germany from 1945-1956. Once I had found him, Youtube obliged with a second Abendroth.
Walter Fedor Georg Abendroth, (1896-1973) a composer, writer, and editor who composed five symphonies, chamber music, etc. Following WWII, he was Allied Control Council “Denazified” and labeled him as a Nationalist Anti-Semite. Again, an Abendroth on the other side of society.
These coincidences were becoming like the lights of Senath!
A few days after this, I introduced a “former teacher” for Angel into the story. I clicked on my saved list of German men’s names. My sole criteria were that it be rather difficult to pronounce at first glance, appropriate for a German professor of music. I chose Haentzschel – two vowels a and e followed by ntzsch, six consonances. That would do. Again, I did not want the name to trigger any immediate recognition, which it doesn’t, but I dutifully investigated and behold – another musician, Georg Haentzschel 1907-1992, again within the lifespans of Max and Angel, this time reputable like Angel. I decided to keep him – turns out he was a pianist first, then composer. He became well known for his film scores from the 1940s. That would have been enough, but remember the Madrid earthquakes? It turns out that my, rather Angel’s Professor Haentzschel was the sole person killed on April 13th, 1992, in Cologne during the Roermond earthquake which registered 5.8 on the Richter scale!
Spooklights of Senath!!
As the meadow spreads
Beneath summer’s wrinkled heat, you tell me how the grass hops
and how the green field is splotched yellow,
small blue flowers pulling down the sky,
matching your loosely tied bonnet and open blouse.
A light wind comes in snatches from all directions
pushing shyly,
lifting pale green leaves on low-hanging branches
at shadowy borders beneath aged limbs.
In this comfort, the ground ties the sloping valley to mountain’s ridge.
You glance at me and smile at the morning and evening
as the meadow spreads time slowly, gently.
for my Shuko
The Ones
They knew how to languish, there was a great silence surrounding
and a terrifying brevity to their music.
Do you hear the crowd?
It is not a murmuring but a hiss, a roar,
the unanimous scream of hang him, shoot him, disembowel him,
cut his throat and dissect him – burn his bones and read them.
There you will find his confession.
The crowd, like a knife in the night slicing the glare of morning,
the horizon a white desolation,
like a prison yard at night – all the stars in the universe blackened out, the night blank,
life blinded, barbed howls of peeling anguish.
*******
Still, this need to tie things together, as if we could truly explain, clarify our existence, hide our disappointment in others, in ourselves, cry without tears.
*******
Depression is not a grey dusk, but a brilliant, piercing light, following, twisting as you try to turn away.
The effort to see through, to unify even a small part, is a timeless wind buried beneath the earth, darker than black, bleaker than lost hope, nerves of pain stretching like tendrils curling around desperation, the edge of obsidian bleeding night, glinting in oblivion.
*******
You don’t have to find time, it searches you out with every square inch, every atomic nano measured. Time, tedious and tired of expanding, takes us along in this merciless way. Perverse is the joy of the universe! Life is not bright enough to see, the end is closer than you think- dimmed by the daily trudge. I know. I know many things – how to dodge back and forth, to obscure, pause, quote, maintain, adjust, scratch something and say,
” You know what, it ——–,” then trail off thoughtfully, muttering,
“Just PI the numbers out, if they don’t repeat, then they are equally different. Everyone is.”
The Cornered Poet
Contrasts
The ocean, obvious and dreadful with persistence.
washes away, tide after tide – back and back and forth and forth, the bidding of time and time lost.
The lake serene, quietly glasses night stars.
A moon skirmish across its surface is escort to dawn.
for Scott Williams
Return to Blueridge
Soon the air will crisp burnt orange and ochre,
the evening sun pulling color from treetops along the Blueridge,
here in southwest Virginia – a pause.
Flannel shirts with patterns squared and long-legged jeans
cover the familiar chill, each to his own shiver
of approaching winter-greys
and blue shadows along snowbanks’ edge.
It’s all about elevation and endurance,
mountain and valley,
creatures of skin and fur struggle.
When green sprigs it way back on bare limbs,
boring beetles move beneath bark.
When skinks stir and toads upward thrust,
a slight spring haze replaces winter’s clarity,
short-sleeved shirts rub new.
For Greer Stene
Everything and All
Totally forgotten, I come across myself again and again,
and find my philosophy has deepened until it is just like before.
Everything and all
always between
time either side the imagined moment.
I don’t occupy myself, things occupy me, life an intrusion,
time dripping, time splashing – a monstrous wave consuming events.
I was world-weary as an infant
and now my days break.
Outside, a slow soak of fog cut with rain dims the sun,
and the sun like a pressed rose persists.
Passacaglia
Late and late November
and the woods refuse to surrender their grey, their grey.
It is theirs to keep and weep,
and I weep in the grey woods so grey,
in late and late November.
Can a whisper echo, an echo howl?
Will the moon bleed memories, scream winter’s bowel?
Red ice, red ice!
Poets strip the bark of words, thieve the image, shred the pith.
Autumn burns its colors, poetic desires denied.
And winter is bare, so bare.
So bare, red winter.
In memoriam, for Edgar Warren Williams
Time Slip
Old sayings
spittle across old lips
parted and pursed
before a crackling fire.
The howling wind outside
echoes a time-slipped past all the same.
“You young ones gather no thoughts
and have to be told, chestnuts don’t roast themselves you know.
When we were your age, the chestnuts were so much larger — and sweeter!
And then was in the now — pausing, extending the silence —
As I remember, I forget; the pieces of memory tear,
but I recall sitting by a woodstove with grandma,
smellin’ the beans and pork stewing,
being warmed by her lip-cornered smile and shy, quick glances.”
“It will be Christmas soon, she said,
and we will roast the biggest, sweetest chestnuts you have ever seen!”
The Synopsis
Due to prison overcrowding, prisoner xx333’s solitary confinement is adjusted, now two to a cell. All other restrictions remain in force.
For the next twenty-five years he exists. His cellmate is in every way all the manifestations of evil inflicting endless brutality and torment, from beatings and rape to mental subjugation by humiliating and redundant atrocities.
Finally, prisoner xx333 is released early at year twenty-four and one half for submissive behavior and existing.
During his dismissal meeting with the Warden, he discovers that every week his cellmate had been changed – switched out. To him, they had all appeared as the same faceless monster.
Now on the outside, he found them – the multitude waiting for him.
They were known only as “Society.
Froberger
The dark earth beneath the grave,
salt extracted from grief; tears rounded to notes hewn
from wood and string.
The same notes of others, unaware.
How did he come to know these places,
their immensurable inflections, the exact notes I crave?
For Now
The moon swaying through a slight fog, melting to one side,
flowing over a soft warm edge against the back of my retina,
like a shadow moved by the wind, my heart pours.
Naked night, your indigo-black body presses into valleys without hills,
where everything looks like something, sounds like something.
The moon more subtle in wane below nomadic constellations,
holds hesitantly its place with dawn’s scattering of stars.
Are you Venus?
How I wish to join you, become a Pagan God,
my stylish nudity a rounded oval shape, take my place by rights.
For now, my heart pours like a wind-swept shadow.
The Cold Stone Floor
The little boy was adamant.
“My foots are cold, he exclaimed!”
“The house is cold; the stone floor is cold! he continued, I’m cold, I’m cold!”
The little boy would search his whole life for this missing warmth,
but he never found socks for his foots.
The Other Eternity
Another drawn flat day, the brownish-red bulb of sun flickers
a cyclic tragedy giving shape to dead vegetation.
For three days I have risen before the sun and scraped a fire from twigs as winter dips
through a sky of blue promises, now colors born of rust, decay, lingering resignation,
sliced moments of distrust, a waking insomnia of redundance.
Now the sun is straight above and clings to noon all day,
and all day is this day burned afresh and withered,
struck out, mercy a lost hope driven to corners of a brief night,
stars pocketing linear myths of humans.
When substance is still, heat has flown
to a dark, long night and the wild horse of youth is a constellation no more.
And the stars are no more.
And time has no more slaves, and the contour of black holes are lost information.
And we never were.
No Awakening
—from slumber I woke,
from no dreams to no dreams,
only to evade being bubbled-in by greed and hypocrisy,
the strait-laced, straight as an arrow,
straight forward into the straight and narrow.
It surrounds you, the resentment and bitterness well-up inside,
the crushing emptiness of mankind,
and from waking, I slumbered to no dreams from no dreams.
Nature, The Universe, and Man
A scumbled frost covers fall,
a wet cold winter beneath a brown sun
through a dormant grey,
through a stretch of patience
drear and drear.
The sun flirts with time, pins down sentient life.
Geometric people, the squares and rectangles –
life was already tedious, the straights stuck,
the triangles singularly pointed, a few ovals trying,
even fewer circulars, the rare round,
and extinct concentrics.
Time flirts with us all,
the sun goes down, us with it –
drear and drear.
Oh desire,
to be tickled with a tiny brush dipped in gold,
freed of a driven past, all life’s miseries filled!
Yet doubts of now do harass, and my round shape flattened to the floor in a flash,
quells my most bounteous, oh desire.
Disappeared is a Real Place
The magician held a large black hat, up for all to see, proclaiming he would pull a rabbit out of this hat. He reached in, and to a confused but amazed audience, pulled out another hat – the first hat had disappeared. The magician had simply turned the hat inside out creating a two-hatted illusion.
“But where was the rabbit, the audience demanded to know!”
“The rabbit really was there, he calmly explained, but existed only in the other hat.”
Play it again Bukowski
I play poems like a whorehouse piano,
pounding the ink-black keys, got the beat,
can’t stop the beat.
Howling strings harmonize, the melody moans, stomping the floor and pedaling the sighs.
Ink man, more ink!
Passing Thoughts
A slender moon speculates the dawn.
The sun calculates the equator as earth spins its middle-aged bulge.
Time subtracts as it adds on, thought the old man, and multiplies at the end.
Past Thoughts
A man considering suicide accidentally kills himself just
as an intruder sneaks in and murders the man, not realizing he is already dead.
Baroque Stanza
Flat is the sky, flat my heart.
Round is the earth, round my desires.
Deep the ocean, deep my anguish.
It was worshiped.
It was flat, its length was its width, and it had no dimensions.
It contained no entropy and was an immensurable darkness.
Still, it was worshiped and began to fill with infinite pressure.
The explosion was infinite, nothing left nothing to worship.
Thus, time was inflicted upon the universe.
Morning
How the green grass does hop
with small blue and yellow flowers
as dew molecules to sky.
Cycle
The sun without whole, fractured,
flattened by sky,
and sky’s brown tints merging earth,
and from earth, waters that vanish.
Drawn from water, earth and sky blue
behind a cadmium sun, whole.
Only I don’t know
Sorrow is a time, tragedy a place, the past symbolic.
How much of the poem extends beyond the poet?
Only one idea he forms
over and over
it emerges, twisted contortions.
Clarified, the poet ceases.
Observed Particles
I’m as beautiful as a toe cramp.
Acts of kindness can be practiced, forming positive habits.
Thoughts occur to those who think.
We are a shared drift.
An old echo searching validation, is it me?
We all share one daily chore – each other.
The day is partly, and I am not the rest.
Another day, another bother.
Another day, another acid bath.
I am full of fruit and flowers today, but weeds and rot are nearby.
Life is hereditary, and inconvenient.
Even the darkest night has a shadow.
The Pagan Gods, with their stylish nudity, are the envy of man.
Only the mediocre are always at their best. Oscar Wilde??
The optimist finds more good than evil. The pessimist knows better.
See with your ears, hear with your eyes.
Make observations, not rules.
Anything that can be used, can be abused.
Language is biased. The art of writing celebrates the vague.
The poet, born empty, repeats himself till death.
We are the masters of time; for without us, who would observe the events which create time?
I precede all my actions.
The fall of gravity’s gasp is sounded at the bottom
Nothing can be better than something.
Society is the eraser of the individual.
Participating in society is like rolling in poison ivy, first the itch, ————.
Be smart, don’t fall in with the gobble of society.
When society tries to put you in a cage, rattle it!
Disillusionment is the beginning of understanding.
Existence is what we live and die within.
Non-existence before, and after – life is vestigial.
The singular thing that truly impresses is the inevitable.
Win some, lose some, lose all.
Let the inner self drip out into the world, each drop a flood.
With unabashed bravura I greet the day by becoming an object at rest, remaining at rest.
Information is a highly perishable product.
Existence waits patiently for non-existence.
Curiosity is the progenitor of creativity.
Every creative act contributes particles of peace to our existence.
Creativist – a person who practices creative acts daily.
Within the universe, life is vestigial.
Infinity is Orange.
Visible space is the backside of Infinity.
The Universe: in the end, one can never know.
To Swim the Aegean
I went for a swim with Thales. It was early of day and life was in lull. The Persians were off somewhere, otherwise occupied with Assyrians. We met up on the outskirts of Miletus. The walk from the river Maeander to the seaside beaches was short and brisk, and I thought the time of season too brief, too cold for this. Thales though, he held the only opinions that mattered.
We caught the brownish morning sun, pasteled, dancing its image through a watery haze not yet lifted. As expected, it was a frigid dip in the expansive Aegean. I held my cold breath and called out, “Thales, you are crazy-nuts!”
Thales was deep in the depths of thought, his meditations probing the sea bottom, measuring the volume of mists to become rain-soaked crops in Spring, filling dates and citrus with sweet sugars, grapes with the promise of wine. All the world from moisture, the first principle.
We tread our sandals through the beach sand to a local village. The fisherman found port there, “Where Sailors sail, fish are caught,” the peasants would chant. All seemed to have heard of ‘Thales of Miletus’ – his reputation a common given – though his abstract reasoning lie beyond the vast night sky, beyond their narrow ken. A few had heard that he imagined the Earth floating upon the water, that land and all inhabitants were spawn of water. Life was water. The element of life was water.
True enough, all Thales could talk about was water, water. “My friend, water,” he would say.
“Listen here Thales, I’m hungry. I went for your swim, there are fish being prepared all about us, roasted over dry wood coals – I call upon the God of fire to feed me!
“Water, he said.”
“Yes, yes —————-sure —————-.”
“It is the one element, the arche, from which all flow. Take this wood from water, build a fire from it, boil a vessel of water upon it, cook your fish in it, but remember – there are no Gods!”
Water, water – it’s all he spoke of – I wasn’t listening. The fish with char-seared skin peeling, flesh pulling from bones, gently falling to my mouth—.
“Thales! Your bounty from water is truly delicious! Especially the ones that didn’t get away!”
Last Thoughts
Last Thoughts
—a letter from Thales of Miletus.
I am not an optimist about death, nor will I be coerced into optimism about life. I am a Dimmer, of Ionian ancestry caught between the Greeks and Persians, a regional buffer, pawn, and rebel. I survive.
From water to earth, may you have fish to eat.
Thales
Note to Diogenes:
Diogenes, your zig-zag body sleeping in a cracked claypot — your arm and left leg are sticking out.
I saw you pissing the other day, and heard that you copulate on street corners, and lecture fellow Greeks about the dreams of stray dogs — woof!
Guess I would make for a lousy cynic, a failed stoic — piling my possessions in corners – rounding off my square abode, taking the diagonal path – a geometry few animals understand.
Though I would like to copulate on a street corner one day.
Alexander the Great
Then nobody moved
nobody breathed
one foot shifted
one eye blinked
time hovered.
The air quivered
a green sun set
night waited
darkness became a shadow
the sky opened
nobody moved.
A scream with ears lept
into space and between
over a burning henge
circles mingled
a hand
an arm reached withdrew
withdrew banished hope withdrew.
One dissonance trumpeted
then two
then three.
An oval brown owl
beneath breath held
breath released
flew
time clumped.
Nobody moved.
For a While
Time and again
the sun drops in its slot,
blackening the sky.
A moist moon
rises against time
and again, and lights a dark path trailing an arc.
And again time
and now and for a while through distant mists,
pale stars scrape infinity.
for Shuko
The Expansion
The sun, a pale winter tint within a bluish-greyed aura,
snowed fields below slicked with ice
filling distance with distance,
a blank impoverished scape.
A creek cuts black and concealed, dormant and depleted,
its water motionless.
The woods stand in frozen lines.
A wind tears through limbs as they vanish behind granular white walls,
their whispers silenced.
Halting above, the moon bleaches white,
sunken craters map harbingers from long ago.
Here, no spring eternal awaits.
This is not now, only before and after –
between blinked out of existence,
everywhere despair, dark despair.
Light does not stretch to the next star.
Empty sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
Dolente!
Is there no hope here?
There is no hope here, was there ever?
The worshiped sun has vanished,
a deep merciless red darkens,
and this place consumed.
At the Edge
Darkness is not an absence,
but the shadow of everything
where we dwell within the obscure, losing bits of self,
becoming blind, we hear the squawk of hoarse voices.
*******
She sings, she sings the night.
She sings the dawn dripping blood.
She disappears.
*******
“Not all flowers are pink with hope, said the little girl.”
“Death’s gestures mingle with peace,
of our fate only the tears of others,
of others remain.”
*******
A snap of time,
lodged between intentions and failures,
the breeze of old notes seethe with dreadful persistence,
the bidding of time spoken in the ancient tongue of the universe,
where we live in scrambled pieces, life climbing all over itself.
*******
We brainwash ourselves,
chaos our ever-present companion
trying to sidestep the inevitable, short of hope.
An enveloping gloom shines forth.
A lake calms,
glassing night’s stars,
an escort to dawn.
At the edge of time, time.
Amino Acids
—to begin with the end and not wonder at night’s spreading dark grey, at the leavened brown and charred black stretches circling forward with impunity around the incision of time, as black holes clean, sucking blatant matter’s five percent of valueless existence.
The City That Pissed Itself
My life is a myth, my memory a prime suspect plagued with doubts, mutable realities. I find myself back in Baltimore, time dissolved. I left so long ago, with a deep rumble in my chest, an oath never to return, not ever to this nightmare.
Yet, there she is, crawling down the street-side of cars, using them to prop and propel – the Goddamn Lady, we called her – shabby clothes, some kind of torn hat, rubber boots stained with gutter filth and chemical city-salts used to keep traffic moving. Suddenly she stopped. I followed her stare, fixed on the corner where a man’s upper torso seemed to be emerging from a manhole in the street. Inexplicably, he began to move forward across the intersection, as if through solid asphalt! The Goddamn Lady was frozen, catatonic, awed-out. I was freaked! Was it the blotter acid from last night? Slowly, I realized this miraculous vision was not a moving-manhole-man, he was an unfortunate, missing both legs, his three-foot stature gliding through traffic on a square platform with wheels. The Goddamn Lady turned around retreating along the line of parked cars up North Charles. I followed the vision for several blocks, like an entranced acolyte drawn into the church of the damned, who crawl and pass through concrete walls of deformity. Eventually, he turned west, and I left him to his journey towards the polluted city sunset of Baltimore.
Time slip-slides past. By day, the shaded side of streets trade places with a glaring heat sunned down in the merciless length of earth’s summer orbit. At night, the humidity persists, swelters, contains. Those who venture out, beware – all streets are side streets at night. I lived in a one room efficiency on St. Paul Street, a block up from Mt. Vernon Square where the famous statue of George Washington stands, a one hundred- and eighty-foot colossus visible throughout the city’s sprawl. President Washington holds a document in his right hand which, from any distance, any angle, looks like a violation of public urination laws. At nighttime, the statue is lit by flood lights attracting bug swarms and cauldrons of bats circling G.W.’s head. Across the square stands a nineteenth century mausoleum of classical music – the Peabody Conservatory – filled with clean-cuts, mostly, though some entertain various debaucheries.
I had lazed through the morning, losing the cooler temperatures to late afternoon. Needs are an insistent constant, so I headed up St. Paul, cut over to Charles then left on Preston, home of the Acme Grocery, a cramped, dark and dingy, overpriced-no-alternative. I needed the usual carton of Camels unfiltered; a six-pack of National Bo beer and whatever meat and vegetables were on sale and weren’t too heavy to haul on foot. As I came out with a brown bag pressed tight under my left arm, cigarette in right hand, I spotted my man, Pierpot, cattycornered across the way.
“Hey, P.p. I called out.”
A dirty look responded, “Don’t call me that you schmuck.”
P.p., I mean Pierpot was a 30’s short, stocky black man – one eye patched, the other focused like a cold pinch. He was alright, we got along. I crossed over and offered a cold beer in alms. We headed over a few blocks to his digs and took up residence on the front stone steps. Public drinking was censured in the city, but this part of town was scarcely policed, and Pierpot liked to hang, greet the passing ladies. Not once had I seen any friendly response from these feminine delights, but P.p. thought of himself as a desirable asset.
Pierpot was a businessman. I didn’t know much about his background, the less being better, but did inquire about his unusual name. Turns out it was an aberration of Pierre or Pierrot, some French Guianese ancestry via the slave trade.
“This is Baltimore you know; he growled.”
I did know not to fuck around with his lacking sense of humor. I had heard a few stories from him, and others, about short baseball bats and kneecaps. I believed them. He was a source – me, a customer.
“Hey man, how’s the market today – fresh produce, I asked?”
“Yeah, schmuck, lettuce from California, tamales from Mexico.”
“Don’t call me schmuck, call me sir.” “What about jumpin’ beans, the little ones?”
“Sure, how many – a dozen?”
“—times 9 minus eight.”
“How the shit much is that Sir Schmuck?”
“A round one hundred – if you got ‘em.”
“Yeah, man – I got plenty, how many of these are for you?”
(P.p. didn’t like other dealers near his action.)
“All for me, P.p.!”
“P. who”
“Sorry Pierpot, Your Royal Specialty.”
“Can’t be, how many of these dots are you takin’, you know you can razor-cut in half, right?
“I could, but they’re micro-dots – hard to cut – I just chug, three, four – last week tried seven with a bottle of Bordeaux and a qualude to cut the speed – too much filler in this city-acid!”
“Damn, you a crazy one, cool but crazy! What the hell is Bordeaux?”
“You should know, what with being French and all – it’s red wine, Pierpot.”
“Yeah? Fancy name —-. The dots cost some though.”
“There’s the rub, I’m a little light – you know I’m good for it though.”
“Yeah, heard you don’t like baseball — listen, go up Calvert, right on East Chase, under the expressway, across Greenmount and one block north on Biddle. There’s a clinic that tests experimental pharms for some government thing; they pay out good.
It’s near Rosie’s, the witchin’ lady.”
“You mean the astrologer?”
“Yeah, man.”
The next day, I took a long walk to where one is better off avoiding. I kept my hopeful wallet in my front left pocket, pocketknife in right. Always best to keep your hand in with the knife, as a sign, an alert. That and a steady-quick pace shows you have direction and purpose – not to be messed with.
I found the rundown brick rowhouse with a sign out front directing visitors to the basement door. Inside was a small waiting room with two folding chairs, a lady behind a table, and a clipboard with pen. After filling out forms, the receptionist took me to an even smaller room with a metal examining table, a few diagnostic contraptions, and one adjustable chair on wheels. I thought of the moving-manhole-man and wondered about my life choices.
A middle-aged doctor entered, looked at the forms, and asked a few questions which I dodged and complied with at the same time. He looked dubious, but didn’t follow up. Maybe I was his type after all.
“Mr. Schmuck, —“
“Don’t call me that, call me sir.””
“Ok, Sir Schmuck, my nurse – the receptionist – will draw a blood sample, then I will administer an EKG scan.”
“Really?”
“It’s required.”
More compliance on my part rubbed me the wrong way, but money – you can’t get it at the Acme Grocery. The blood test was familiar, but I had never had an EKG, I was only 23 years old, wasn’t that for old people, I wondered? Here I was lying on the cold, steel table feeling vulnerable, yet thinking if I had one of these in my digs, I could chill even on the hottest days.
Now I was all hooked up, suction cups glue-stuck to my hairy chest, wire leads attached to an oblong machine with a paper roll – just like the Acme – scrolling my health bill, but with me getting the dough. There seemed to be some confusion. A few beeps, blips – more health questions. The EKG results weren’t quite right, something in its scribbles—. The middle-aged doctor decided to run the test again, after all I was young. With a skewed glance, he assured me all was fine and that I’d be contacted by mail for a three-month trial of a promising new drug, I would be contributing to society – a first for me. The only catch was the money came at the end of the trial. Shit!
Well, several weeks passed before I received an official government notification in the mail. It succinctly stated that I was not a viable test subject. Rejected.
How insulting! I felt perfectly viable!!
I had been on P.p.s “you owe me” list for longer than most. One hundred divided by twelve was eight innings in baseball with only one inning left – and I knew the batter only too well.
Byron Petty 1/19/2025
Excerpt from The Dirt Road to Hell —
—a hot noon break on a tobacco farm, 1930s KY. Jack the mule is beneath his favorite shade gathering black-honey locust pods in 20-year-old grey lips. Later that day, Joe Petty forks 50lb bales of hay some 14 feet against the opening at the top of the barn. Here on window’s edge my father, Byron Wilson – smallest and youngest of the three boys, ducks and pulls at the same time. His family called him by both first and middle names, not always with endearment. When I was twelve, he passed on to me his old 22 rifle, bequeathed to him at that same age in Wingo KY, 1931. He shot squirrels mostly, some possums which he sold to local black sharecroppers. In the fall he chased down on foot the half-grown rabbits dodging their way through cut corn stalks. When the weather took on its November bite, it was time to slaughter and smoke ham. Father Joe shot a pig in the head. It was Byron Wilson’s job to keep the kindling fire alive in 1931. It was a start. The end was 80 years to come.
—to be continued
APPLE CREEK
The woods are deep with a thick morning fog. Invisible critters are shuffling autumn leaves, stepping between muffled sounds.
Apple Creek, I call it, is running full from last week’s rains. I am happy. I keep to myself; so does Cider, a black cat with one eye patched white. We stay to ourselves together, sharing the one-level “extended” shack with its add-on rooms meant for unexpected family growth. All this luxury on nine acres of overgrown, nearly worthless land – just the way I like it – name’s Robert James Southwright – or R.J.
I’m from around. Grew up, most people do, began shinin’ at an early age, lots of corn shine, but fruit in the fall. My early education fell from the sky like a dark cloud refusing to dump. When I got a little older, I married a girl younger and had a boy. My wife, Tildy, found out about better places and set out to explore them – with an “other.” The boy, she left behind. His name is Tony, only now he is a man with his own boy, and I hide from them both. Tony followed my lead in the shinin’ business only, he wasn’t so smart – got caught and did two years. His boy continued both traditions, but only managed six months in county jail.
The only “time” I ever did, was time itself. I grew old – finally qualified for S.S. checks, though they were puny. Tony would show up with a fifth or quart, get me drunk, leave some meager groceries, beans, more beans, coerce my signature and sneak my check away. He won’t find me now, not here!
Apple Creek forks as it enters the property, spreading a winding y across a small field before entering the wooded bottoms – just the right security for my little operation. Between the shack and field are five aged-heirloom apple trees – three green, two red. The wet summer and fogged-in mornings left an abundant crop, and this old shack even has a ready-store, built-on root cellar. I’ve downsized now, at my age, three twenty-gallon runs – sixty gallons gives me just about enough. I indulge a fifth every day exceptin’ Sundays. That day is for two fifths and hymn singin’, only I don’t know the words – or tunes – just hum something up from the air.
I should mention Cider’s contributions – smart cat. I named him Cider because he governs the mash, the apple cider before stillin’. He always knows when it’s just right, rubbin’ the pot meowing, then yowling, and if that doesn’t get my attention, watch out – hissin’ and scratchin’ is next – smart cat! By chance, Cider is nine years old (like our nine acres) with all nine lives left – maybe more than me.
I found this hide-away by chance too, just passin’ through and lookin’ around. It’s a bit out of a nowhere town, down a county country road. The drive up to the house is a good ways – dirt with a scatter of gravel and potholes. The shack is long-end sideways to the drive, doors front-side and back-side with windows at the short ends. It fits. Life is quiet. I am happy, you can ask Cider.
Days push along the nights. Life is quiet. Trees slant shadows across the house. But late the other day, Cider heard something out there. I cracked a look through the door, saw two figures dressed in black suits comin’ up. They were almost here already. Why!? They had no business here, nobody did. No time for me to mull, I stood back from the door and didn’t move. Knocks followed. Then more, a pause, more, pause—. Finally, it seemed they had left. More knocks! The back door – they had circled around! I picked up a big, crooked stick I kept for lost souls – ‘cause that’s what they would be if they didn’t get outa here soon! Quiet. Then quieter, a long pause. Still, I waited. When I settled down and patienced out, I opened the front door – they were gone, but on the ground lay a strange, lined pamphlet. “Jesus is your Savior, it said.” Signed by Church of the Ladderday Saints and Blacksuits. Seemed odd. cider meowed.
I had a solution for calmin’ nerves – an old tin tasting cup I used for my trade. Shine always tasted better in this cup; I thought as I filled it to the rim. The day had stopped pushin’, it was draggin’ instead. I wandered from one window to the other. Was that another suspicious sound? The problem is you can’t see the front or back from these damned windows! I quickly went out the back door and around the side closest the woods. Standing with my back against the shack, like a mugger ready to pounce, I one-eyed the situation. It was a whole car-full this time. A man at the wheel and a bunch of teenagers dressed like some sort of Hollywood gangster film. I panicked. What if they knew about my still, what if they wanted a cut? They knocked on the door just once, then pounded shaking the hinges till they were ready to fall off. One was yellin’ at the others, tellin’ them to do their worst. They ran all over the yard cussin’, breaking anything that would break, pissin’ wherever they liked. The man in the car honked again and again. At last, they strutted over to the car, fillin’ the seats with their anger as the elder drove off.
I stood there; my back glued to the wooden slats. What the hell was that about!? This was turning into a two-fifth Sunday on a Wednesday. My cup would runneth over for sure.
But before I could push back a swig, I heard a car fast approachin’. I went inside and locked the back door – and what was left of the front. Sure enough, another trespasser – in a Plymouth Fury III four-door; the kind police sometimes used. Sure enough, I could see two cops inside. That was it for me, I slip-shimmied out the side window, running through the meadow up the hill along a ridge where large boulders could hide a shiner. From there I could see down to the shack. The two officers surveyed, inspected, discussed. After a while, they left a piece of yellow paper tacked to my door. It was full dusk now as I edged my way home. The paper was a warning about a teenage gang in the area with a request for any information. At least they weren’t on to me and my still. And surely this was the last invasion—.
Again! Why me!? This is not makin’ me happy!!
Another car, this one expensive, one of those family SUV things coming along slowly, haltin’, and startin’ again. I decided to face this one head on, protect my property, my peace. They pulled up some 20 feet away, still lookin’ unsure. The driver, a woman, got out and opened the back door. She gathered in hand two little children, both girls. This I guessed I could handle; I had my ire up when they reached the door.
“Trick or Treat, the girls yelled together.”
They were dressed like little angels, they were. I was astonished. The whole day had been one great and terrifyin’ confusion. What a place I had picked to make my shine-home! Cider yowled dashing past!
“Hello little angels, I said, as sweetly as I could summon.”
“We want candy, they answered, again in unison.”
“Well, we’ve a problem there, I don’t have any candy, but I can give you some delicious apples – from my Apple Creek Farm.”
“Candy!” “Are they candied apples–?”
“No, ‘fraid not, but they taste pretty good. You can have as many as you like.”
There was disappointment on their faces as the mother grumbled,
“Take the damn apples!”
13 Blocks
It was October, the month of falling colors, leaves of hues – yellows, bright oranges dotted with browns, deep and brilliant reds. Ours was a small town where we kids all knew each other and played games of kick ball in the field around a curve, just beyond the last building in town where a dirt road wandered off out of sight. There, an old mansion leaned against the distant sky, its lawn filled with maple and live oak, thickly surrounded by overgrown tangles of leafy brush. Here we played games of hide and seek, tag, and dare. Though out of sight of parents and townsfolk, we felt like we were being eyed from behind broken shutters – paint peeled shutters, but maybe that was just our collective imaginations. It simply was not possible.
The last owner of the weathered old mansion was descended from a distant lineage of Bavarian Counts. He had died suddenly in years paled by time, well before ours. It was said that when he passed over all the dogs throughout the town howled and cats hissed and hid themselves beneath front porches. This year was the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of that hushed event.
Playing at our games nearby, we noticed the leaves were not yet released from bondage, not drifting downward as expected to cover the lawn of the gated, circular lane leading uphill to the broad steps and wide porch. The angular tilt of the mansion seemed to breathe or rather exhale only through its monstrous spires, the midsection of its blackened frame consuming the westward view obscuring sunsets. Shadows crept slowly forwards toward our field of childish pastimes. As the leaves clung to the centuries, they became a dark and darker red with each October day.
Hallows Eve was near and our dare-you challenges included more shoves and extended elaborations: climb the gate, circle the great house twice, three times, climb the porch steps, knock and run, knock and wait, hide in the thick bushes and jump out with a boo you – but to whom? Such was our imagination, amplified and held like the blood-red leaves that would not or could not fall.
Slowly the days diminished, and Hallows Eve was made real by our motherly-stitched costumes. With our paper grocery bags hopefully held, we gathered in little gangs of cheer and fear. We were released into the night past our usual curfews by parents smiling knowingly. “Boo to you,” followed us into the dark. Porch and streetlights merged into shadows relinquishing their previous forms. As we went along, we noticed black signs painted with red-on-white lettering dotting the sidewalks of our tiny thirteen square block town. We spread out, but the signs kept urging, pushing us towards one destination – the Mansion. It had taken on a gruesome aspect, seeming to increase its size, the spires reaching high into the cobalt black sky, penetrating the yellow moon; a moon with a greenish halo engulfing the scant, faded stars. Our eyes strained at the black abyss; our dares now whispered. The dirt road was slick with night dew. Our playing field was a flat silence. We looked into each other’s eyes, unblinking sockets. It was decided. The boys would take the dares, we girls would straggle back.
Jostling ahead, scarcely a breath between them, their feet syncing, anxiety increasing, they reached the gate, no need to climb, it was open. Drawn together in group dread, with muffled coughs and shaking bags – now at the top of the steps, now the creaking porch, they slowed. The door hovered in its frame concealing a fate they couldn’t begin to comprehend, vanishing beyond their young dreams, absorbing their fantasies.
Suddenly, with a charging immediacy, the large, looming door burst! A roaring ‘Boo You’ was followed by thunderous laughter. Crowding the doorway, stood their parents, all dressed as ghouls!
“Happy Gallows Eve, little ones!”
Byron Petty
October 2024
Booster
Last week Sherry and I headed out Rt. 64 W. to a faint little town west of southwest – Clifton Forge, VA, formerly Jackson’s River Station. Scooched in the Alleghenies teetering the edge of West VA, Clifton Forge is a one-street town. Even the single grocery store has only one way in and one out. Next to it is the local pharmacy – this one lit in dying fluorescent, flickering a sickly, yellow hue over the advertised bargains, buy two get one half off.
We were there for our Covid boosters-by-appointment and ahead of schedule. With no one up front to greet us, we checked the rear prescription counter – one of those old, elevated alters where white-clad deities purvey ominous concoctions. From further back a voice,
“Have a seat and wait—.”
We spied an offering of two three-quartered sized hard folding-chairs squeezed so that the back of one would touch the back of the next. We stood instead – arms dangling, then folded.
Eventually a young lady, early 20s, emerged from the restricted recesses bringing loosely concealed needles and vials. As we took our diminutive seats, she proceeded to kneel before us upon the worn, unsanitary carpet, tread upon by unimaginable assortments of shoe-borne diseases. With a glance in the opposite direction, I bravely volunteered Sherry to go first. Leaning in off-balance, our young shot-giver was forced to act quickly.
“Wow, Sherry exclaimed,” “I didn’t feel a thing!”
Shot-giver replied, “Thanks! I just got back from my honeymoon yesterday and gave my first 40 shots.”
Still, my expectation of a painless experience was dubious. She grasped my shoulder and pinched a flap of my freckled age-loosened skin, rolling it back and forth several extra times. Jab!
“Sorry, I don’t like the way your skin puckers, just a minute, I’ll get another needle.”
“Hey, I objected, did you inject the vaccine!?”
“Certainly not sir, I only stuck you.”
“Oh, that’s great I thought, how comforting.”
I was mulling over my dismay when she returned with another dose loaded. Brimming with youthful confidence born of her one-day expertise, Shot-giver let loose a successful yip of accomplishment,
“That should do you!”
As we left the yellowing pall of the old pharmacy, I turned to Sherry and angrily growled,
“Both shots hurt like hell!”
Byron Petty – 2021
NIGHT OUT
I noticed her in the frozen food aisle at Food Lion. She was holding a bag of frozen peas, reading the ingredients.
I straight-lined it over.
“What’s your name doll?
“Carlotta.”
“Who’s going to eat those peas, Carlotta?
“Just me, got no family.”
She didn’t look the homeless type, probably an orphan.
“You know doll, its Easter Sunday. Shouldn’t you be somewheres?”
She thought for a long moment.
“Don’t like church, but I’m planning a big night out — or in.”
“With whom?”
“Maybe you, sweet peas—.”
“Maybe.”
She turned away, walking like she knew I was watching, like men like. I couldn’t stop thinking about Carlotta — and the peas. I had a hankerin’ for both. It could be her third eye that got to me; it had a way of drawing you in, kind of subtle and sad. And her orange-red hair – wow!
We hooked up later that evening for peas and Easter ham — and a lotta dessert. Not all Sundays are about church.
Musariart Studio 