August 23, 2006

Cats in the Gobi~~

There was the time
I hitchhiked across the Gobi
Desert of Inner and Outer Mongolia back
in the day when Fr. Teilhard
was residing in the Jesuit house
in Peking and spending afternoons
sipping tea with the sculptress Lucille Swan
in her garden alcove in the city.
This was before the discovery of dinosaur
eggs in China and the Badlands
of Patagonia, but long after
the great Emperor Qin buried
the terra-cotta warriors.

There were no cars in the Gobi
and very few people. Hitchhiking
was a very slow and lonely task.
I spent two days in one spot with my thumb
bent backwards and outstretched…waiting
in the desert cold.
There were camel trains formed
of the nearly wild Bactrians with their
humps of fat. That’s when I got my first camel
ride from a nomad from Karakorum trading
in Chinese silk. There are few or maybe no
lions in the Gobi, but the most beautiful
cat of all, the snow leopard of the Himalayas
with its magnificent tail, visits often.

August 18, 2006

When I woke
I began to remember an accident
from the night before.
As I began to be appalled by the details
I realized I was remembering a dream.
Then I redozed and dreamt I was elected
president and had a fight with my mother
who was interfering with a conversation.
Then I dreamt a lost status had been restored
and I was embraced.
Each tableau brought its own affirmation. Why?
Why are these side trips into the genre
of the absurd reassuring, so affirming,
even in the unpleasantness of their conjectured circumstances?
Is it the satisfaction that accompanies creation:
It was good? … something is better than nothing,
absolutely, that which is where nothing
might be? Just the joy of the whimsy
of the journey? A more or less benign
god-like idolatry: standing in awe before
that which one has made, the repose
of the 7th day, hands on hips, smugly smiling?
Maybe it’s relationship, the satisfaction
arising from the inherent connections
the dreams afford or that are implicit
in their content.

* * *

Friday, later this morning
we will sit for 3 hours as P
receives the final treatment in the first
cycle of 12 week treatments, the last
of the big ones…drip, drip, drip.
This will be a mile marker and good
to have behind us though there are
the accompanying
anxieties of the inevitable effects of next week
as well as those of the unknown,
the 2nd 12 week cycle of treatments,
one per week—drip—for 12 weeks,
and what will be the inevitable effects of these?
And I will be in NJ for the 1st of these
rather than there. Of course, even this
absence is a positive sign for it
would not have been imagined for
the first cycle. Later she will sit erect
in a reclining chair, her right arm
attached to a dangling bag, first
saline, then red, then clear,
then clear, then saline. I will sit
in a straight-back chair more
or less in front of her. She will have
taken a pill orally before hand to counteract—
along with the red drip—the side effects.
It will become tedious, and we will
be surrounded by a few very sick people.
The staff will be pleasant and effectual.
The physician will be interested and reassuring.
When its over we will go own our separate ways:
her back to work next door, me
to have the Pony checked
out to determine why the engine light came on.
Then it will become another 90 degree day in Georgia,
the routine of the ordinary suffused with the extraordinary
in the sacramentality of medical science.

August 17, 2006

It’s morning here. It’s overcast.
It is a YMCA steam room in 1962…
Garfield, New Jersey
after the demise of the DeSoto
and after the end of the Studebaker (as we knew it)
one of which has sat parked on the same flat
tires for 20 years in my uncle’s backyard,
raising the question of the baby or the Botticelli.
I am going for a run now while practicing
my new Zen while running…
the counting of Mustangs. Most
would know me as moderately liberal, but to some extent
I am retrograde; and so, on the run,
an insight: Black is Beautiful. This is an expression
not so true of the DeSoto which demands
to be clad in red and chrome nor of the Studebaker
which must be true to its name: Golden Hawk,
but it is most true of the groomed
Pony: black,
deep, shiny and beautiful. And so there was
an easterly breeze on the run, refreshing, salvific,
and inspiring. In the metaphor of the ancients
and the language of the Renaissance,
the wind listeth where it will and into my mind
blew the a line of Milosz, skeptical though pious,
to the angels
we are a singular event and not a number
submitted to universal law. And with this
blew in the corresponding expression of Houllebecq,
cynical, intoxicated, and impious:
with the exception of a few geniuses (Botticelli,
I presume?) humanity is a mass akin to a school
of fish, a flock of birds…spiritless. Morally
equivalent statements though differing in attitude, ala
the Gospel of John from above … the Gospel of Mark
from below. In the instances of the gospels,
both uplifting despite their differing
anthropological perspectives, however,
in the instance of the Lithuanian poet
vis-à-vis the French novelist, one uplifting,
the other demeaning; one hopeful, the other a debaucher
full of cigarettes, slime, the Thai sex industry and
Irish whiskey. Would the world be better
if we tossed the baby, saved the Botticelli vis-à-vis
William Gass, and incarnated a couple of Joyce Carol Oates’
and Jim Harrison’s eccentric geniuses? Ah,
but then what of art? The Pony’s
parked outside in Buckhead in an unguarded lot
black, beautiful and undusted this morning
after yesterday’s rain. Counted on the run
one white Saleen, hot and throaty, one red coupe, one
red convertible damaged in the grill, one very
beautiful, like a speeding,
shimmering shadow, nearly the Zen
of the unseen, and one dull green.

August 16, 2006

Imagine

living in a world in which

in the sky

the sun means love.

This is this heresy to which I rise

as if startled out of the dream-riddled

delusion of lesser things though

even here the rain

falls on the just and unjust

alike, and the First-day people

of wonder…enchantment, first things

unspoilt by the contamination of fall

now upon us … the blindness of age.

Close my eyes

to crawl back in to my sand crab

cave, hovel of imagination

where I am a convert

of the dew, an acolyte of morning

sun glistening in the needled lawn

(on sun days),

bats no longer darning sock-holes

of the sky. Morning star spread

like a mist across the dawn,

the light, pale metaphysic of belief.

After I awoke this morning,

I went outside into the dark near the garden where the roses grow

and the rosemary...white, yellow, pink, red, and scent of roses and sage filled in the space

beneath the dogwood tree.

In the sky there was a dull white round light. Some say, That's only the moon!

But I say it is the grand tug boat of the night

tugging at the seven seas, the great bays, the tidal rivers, and even

the various sands and loeses of the deserts of the earth. Only the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean

are not responsive to this tug. Who knows why?

And the stars that are night birds that sing the hymnody of the moon

in golden and red whispers

sang, Come to me; come to me.

This is a love story.

When the lion woke,

he woke to the eye of the lion master

known to some as Morning Star

and in other seasons as Evening Star;

the ancients called the light Venus,

the goddess of love ...

the goddess of strife.

And there are those who associate it with Lucifer,

the red dragon of dark light. This is wrong

for only the lion, and not just any lion

but Alpha lion, the king, knows his master

who roves the morning sky and in some seasons the evening sky.

Its glow is formed by the embers of one thousand and one souls

of the wildebeests

ascended from the tropical grasslands of Botswana.

It is an omen of bounty

and protector of early risers

as well as those who frolick late into the night.

This is another love story.