So Live

What is liberation?

Is it in food?
Protein
Lipid
Carbohydrate
Eating?

What is liberation?

Is it in a word?
The shelves of books
The playwright’s pen
Soundtrack recording
Music?

What is liberation?

Has it got a place?
Has it got a sound?
Has it got a movement?

What is liberation?

Is it only in living?
Passion
Spirit
Art
Is it Pasolini’s murder?

What is liberation?

Is it the coming of a season?
The falling of leaves
The burst of flowers
Drying grass
Frost?

What is liberation?

Is it in a city of millions?
The frowns of friends
Wondrous strange window displays
Highrise graffiti
Gridlock?

What is liberation?

Is it in a small town?
The faces of strangers
Familiar storefronts
Sidewalk graffiti
Traffic?

What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?

Whose chains are these?
My courageous world’s
My culture’s hand
The family’s arm
Mine?

What is liberation?
When all cry
When all suffer
When all starve
When all die?

What is liberation?
When every god speaks
When every god lies
When every god laughs
At freedom.

Fantasma

Photo: Diego Fernandes

I wrote this while listening to Anita Baker.

My dream of you floats

In that place between places

Where I am so comfortable,

So capable, so balanced.

Every note is always perfect,

Every brushstoke carries

The painting to completion.

I am a passenger

Inside the warmth of you,

Your embrace.

Under your touch

Paradise waits around

A turn in the road

Across a rainy sea,

Over there,

Just beyond a kiss.

After Sundown

Waiting for evening

For after sundown

For dark lights

Star lights

Some strong sense of passing

Waiting.

Watching the sun cross over

Watching the sun pass by

Watching the sun fall

Fall closer to you

And where you dream

Remembering smells

Of you on your pillow

After sundown

Remembering to remember

Forgetting to forget

After sundown

Somewhere out east

Behind me

Under night shadow

Such scenes ache

To hold on to time

Rhythms hard shaking

Of mine as yours

And nothing mine

All

After sundown

But waiting hurts

Morning sun burns

That steam of shadow

Till after sundown.

The Antique Store

This short story was originally written as an assignment for a writing class. Its genesis was a cross-country road trip taken by two of my sisters, a roommate and myself. It has gone through many versions and has never been accepted by a publisher except a tiny community newspaper that went out of business before it could be printed. With exceptions, I have received mostly favorable feedback. I still like it.

Tucumcari, when we visited it had an aura of Bagdad Cafe about it and, while it has an "active" side, I describe what I saw. The tumbleweed, the grass growing in the street and the antique store were really there. As for the rest, well, New Mexico is a Land of Enchantment.



* * *

Late afternoon is falling like a party ribbon across eastern New Mexico. The vivid color, sprayed onto the landscape by an overzealous sky, works no comfort on my malaise. A shoulder shrug, the sunset and its brilliant color give up trying to amuse me. A gusty wind is blowing from the east, a tired god trying to blow the flaming sun out. A tumbleweed hurries westward toward some unknown destination; little flurries of dust follow, trying to keep up. I wait, a lone traveler, for denouement, that I may take my final ride into the sunset. We are, the wind, the tumbleweed, and I, clichés of the western desert.

But where are the villains, where are the Indians? The only Indian I had seen was a small boy with holes in the knees of his pants and a blue and green striped t-shirt, all generously dusted with the red and yellow desert dirt. He had been sitting outside the only building having an automobile parked in front, making, or attempting to make, some sort of play guitar from a cereal box, surveying stake and a box of rubber bands. When I stopped to watch his effort, he collected his nascent guitar pieces and vanished into a space between two buildings. The budding Stradivarius did not wish to be a tourist sideshow.

I am walking through Tucumcari, New Mexico, watching shadows stretch and waiting for climax so I can make my way into the sunset, but no one else is on the street. Tough desert grass and thistle have elbowed through the cracked pavement. Tucumcari’s main street is the back of a diseased hermit. Tucumcari is a leper. It lies dying in the desert, not from its disease, but neglect.

Tucumcari and other towns, like San Jon and Glenrio, found a kind of ecstasy in the great prosperity following World War II. These desert shrines astride Route 66 were visited by thousands of pilgrims making their way between Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. An end to their corpulent summer came when interstate 40 freed the way for non-stop travel from coast to coast. The travelers left Tucumcari and her sisters and old route 66 abandoned to the desert. So now, even the tumbleweed is trying to escape.

Off to my left, an electric bulb is glowing inside one of the few shops left to Tucumcari. The sun is not completely set but the shadows are almost strong enough to overwhelm the single bare bulb. It is in an antique shop situated at the corner of two overgrown streets. My attempt to enter is met by a muffled voice requesting me to come back tomorrow. Trying to ascertain if return is warranted, I press my face against the glass of the door. A face appears abruptly and repeats, “come back tomorrow.” Then a window shade, hand lettered, CLOSED, is pulled down and once again I am alone in Tucumcari. So I will return and the showdown will be tomorrow. High noon.

* * *

Cold morning in the desert was the same as it had been for thousands of years, probably. The sun spread its light across the Staked Plain like the breaking of a dam, probably. Nocturnal animals hid in their burrows or where ever they hide during the burn of day, probably. I do not know.

I dream on the shoulder of a naked giant. He crouches on a cliff above an inland sea. Near the rocks beneath us, Tucumcari swirls at the periphery of a maelstrom. Pieces keep breaking off the town and disappearing into the center. The giant begins to stand and from his shoulder I fall into the very center of the whirlpool. I am pulled beneath the surface and I can see the giant smile as his body transforms into the land and sky of New Mexico. I know by his smile he meant for me to fall. The only sound is the rushing of the wind.

* * *

It is noon. I am walking the deserted streets of Tucumcari. Gusts of wind and my feet scraping on broken pavements are the only sounds. It is noon, the sun, balanced on my head, is a giant olla overflowing with heat and light. I find myself on the Street of the Indian Boy, and he is again working on his project, only now, he has retreated to one of the covered wooden sidewalks. He is sitting cross-legged on a bench, trying to will the pieces together. Seeing me evidently embarrasses him, and once again he disappears between the buildings, this time leaving the pieces of his industry.

I can hear the music of a piano. The tune is ragtime, Scott Joplin, but it sounds slow. It is not distorted; rather, it sounds as if someone with perfect rhythm is playing at a deliberately reduced speed, the pace of a walking horse. I feel lighter stepping into the shade of a covered porch. Tucumcari can now support the weight of the sun. I am walking in time with the music, with my ears following the scent of each note to its source. The music is coming from the antique store.

My senses are peaking in the same stomach-surging inevitability of the sex act or an automobile crash. Slight nausea and the heightened awareness of an adrenaline surge are forcing my sensory antenna to full extension. Every fractional second fills with minute detail. An ancient hunter is ready for the kill; the gunfighter is ready for the draw.

In my peripheral vision I watch my image waver and flicker in the warped window glass of the antique store. I see through the sets of windows at the store’s corner to mountains beyond Tucumcari. Between that unknown territory and myself are black silhouettes within the store. One of the silhouettes is a head, the head of a woman moving within.

In an act of supreme nonchalance and vanity, I stop and check my reflected image. As I turn to face the window, a piece of broken glass in the street glints brightly in sunlight dazzling my eyes, a stage light. I find my audience in the glass. I take a small bow. Thank you, you are wonderful. Without conscious decision my focus shifts: my image, window display, black silhouettes within, twice filtered sky and desert beyond, my image.

My focus flicks from my reflection to an object, almost lost in the careful clutter of a fussy window display, an antique store memory startling like a flashbulb explosion. I am wading the river of Tucumcari’s history and in this slowly dwindling stream a bit of my own past is floating. As I look into the heart of my reflection in this antique store window, a private and exotic rhythm beats.

* * *

She is singing. A sea gull weeps about the sad power of love, the tragedy of nostalgia, of capture in the rough hands of the fate-song. She sings in a voice husky from cigarettes and age.

She is my cousin from the old country.

Her husband died many years before, but she still wears the black of widowhood. Around her square thin shoulders a soft black shawl is wound. Against her breast she fondles and caresses, with long fingers, a small guitar-like instrument. It has twelve strings and, in her affectionate hands, a sound like a small stream, tumbling and splashing down a European hillside. My seven-year-old mind is amazed so many sounds can come from only four fingers and thumb.

She is my cousin from the old country. She stills speaks with a strong accent, even though she immigrated to California as a fifteen-year-old bride and now she is an old woman. Her once jet-black hair is now silvery like weathered wood. She came to marry her cousin, twenty years her senior and a man she had never met. She became a farmer’s wife. She learned to do all the things someone married to the earth must do; she bore her husband’s children, she cleaned, she sewed, she knit, she killed and cleaned rabbits and chickens, and when her husband could not do it, she plowed.

I asked her once if she would show me how to kill and clean a rabbit, an activity she accomplished when I wasn’t present or by turning her back so I could not watch.

“No,” she said, “it is the work of women.”

And plucking chickens?

“That too.”

What is men’s work? She shrugged, “it is the work that men do.” But what is it that they do; I was insistent.

“If a man is a farmer, he plows; if he is a soldier, he shoots a gun; if he is a priest, he prays.”

Can a man play the guitar?

She thought a moment, then nodded. Sometimes, she said men love too much to play the guitar; that was bad. She would not teach me to play.

I would then try to trick her into admitting that a man hunting alone in the woods must know how to clean a rabbit, to pluck a bird.

No, she would shake her head, he would bring it home for his wife to clean.

But what if he did? It was my best seven-year-old manner.

“He should not do that,” she would state mildly, her green eyes not seeming to look at me, but through. Then she would light a cigarette, and holding it like a pipe, blow smoke in my face. Go away, she would demand, next time we will play cards.

But would she play the little guitar too? Yes, yes. Now go away.

Our meetings were brief and few. But always she managed to tell me something. Always she played the guitar, always an introduction to some new thing. Coffee with chicory, it’s bitter, I complained.

“Life is bitter, don’t waste it, drink it.”

Apricots straight from a tree, the sun still hot inside them, these are very sweet.

“Life is sweet, eat quickly or you will lose the juice.”

Teach me the guitar, I begged, then remembering my manners, please.

“Do you see how the guitar is shaped like a woman?” I nodded. “It is better to hold a woman shaped like a woman.”

One day she sang a song about a woman who suffered a disease. The woman in the song knew the disease would kill her. What disease does she have, I asked. (An elderly aunt had just died of cancer.)

“Nostalgia,” my cousin replied.

“What is nostalgia?” It sounded very bad.

“Love,” was the flatly stated answer. “Love like a lemon tree.”

I didn’t understand.

“Always you think love is something it is not.”

“Can you die of love?” the eight-year-old me asked incredulously.

For a moment, the lights in her eyes got bigger, then her husky voice said, “yes. Yes, boy. You can die of love.”

“When I am gone,” she smiled suddenly, “you may have the little guitar.”

* * *

Somehow, I am inside the antique store. I am asking about the music. The ragtime music is coming from a player piano. Why does it sound so slow?

Materializing from shadows that denied corners to the room an elderly woman, the shop owner, tells me the roll was made by a process that recorded the artist playing the piano by some arcane mechanical transcription. Some machines could actually record dynamics; you would need a special player. This particular piano was not capable of that. If I cared to check the roll when it was finished, she tells me patiently, I can actually find out who played for this particular cut.

Faded print on the edge of the stiff paper reveals that the artist performing on this specific roll was an S. Joplin; the tune was also written by S. Joplin. 1904. I am listening to Scott Joplin play his own music. His ghost fingers, fluttering over a keyboard in a western desert town, are winging their easy, graceful way across more than one hundred years.

My mind is still rolling in the mundane miracle of Scott Joplin’s piano playing, but I ask casually, how much she wants for the little guitar in the window. I look at the owner as I slip the piano roll into its box; I fit another into the piano. She is an older woman with iron-grey hair pulled tightly back and fastened in a neat chignon at the nape of her neck. There are heavy grooves above the mouth and around the eyes. It is not an old face, I think, it is an aged face, like cheese or wine. At present it is also a puzzled face.

“The guitar?” she looks toward the window. Perhaps she is puzzled by the abrupt change of focus.

“Yes, the one with the colored inlay around the sound hole; has a scratch on the neck?”

* * *

My cousin handed me the instrument, and I looked up at her slowly. “Are you going away?” I mumbled.

“I told you, when I was gone, you may have the guitar.”

“But you didn’t teach me to play; are you coming back?”

Her face seemed at a great height above me.

“God will teach you to play. That is how I learned.”

I threw the instrument from me and ran to sit in the family car. It was summer and the closed automobile must have been furnace hot, but I shivered. I was lost in an Antarctic storm. Someone had turned the summer heat off and opened a winter door to the polar winds.

The car door jerked open and the strong arm of maternal law yanked me from my freezer chest, and in the next moment a stinging blow landed on my cheek. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” The knifelike voice cut into an already deep wound. “Do you have any idea how much that instrument is worth? It came around the Horn. You had absolutely no right to throw it like that. I don’t know shy she wanted to give it to you anyway, you’d probably just break it; as it is, you put a huge scratch in the handle. Did you hear what I said, young man? That instrument is valuable, it came around the Horn!”

“It’s a neck, not a handle!” my boy soprano shrieked.

Another blow landed and I was promised a long stay in the automobile I had just been pulled from. My father would hear about this.

My grandmother arrived to second my mother’s low opinion of me and ask had she seen what I had done to the guitar-that-had-come-around-the-horn-that-was-incredibly-valuable wasn’t-another-in-the-world; his father really ought to talk to him; a long talk.

My cousin came slowly across the grass leaning on a black cane, her hair flashing in the summer sun like broken glass.

“I will talk to him,” she made it a demand.

My demons were banished to hell. The tormentors departed into the small house.

She looked at me a long time. Did I remember the shape of the guitar? What was it? What would happen if I had thrown a real woman like that? Did I know her neck would have been broken? She told me a story of a fisherman, who took his guitar to sea, and frustrated with what he called its bad temper, he had tossed it overboard and when he returned home, his wife drowned in the tide waiting for him.

“You mean she drowned because he threw his guitar in the water?” I asked in disbelief.

My cousin just shrugged.

* * *

“It’s not really in very good shape,” the storeowner pulled the guitar from its resting place. “The strings are gut and need to be replaced.” She held the instrument out to me. Without reaching for it, I asked the price again.

* * *

My cousin again offered me the guitar, but my anger at her leaving returned, and I climbed back into the car. She nodded slowly at me through the window then turned and disappeared into her house.

The last I saw of my cousin was the skirt of her long widow-black dress dragging up the shallow front steps, the light flashing on shiny material as it flicked over each tread, a silent valediction.

Later, I repented and asked my parents if I could have the guitar after all, but one or another of numerous relatives had taken, or sold it, along with the rest of my cousin’s belongings, and nostalgia became my disease.

* * *

“Why don’t you make me an offer?” the owner smiles, a coquette, and pretends to play the guitar. The southwest trader has found an item a customer cannot do without. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

I laughed, almost hysterically. Yes. Oh, yes.

“Thirty bucks,” I say, not hoping she will accept.

“Thirty bucks!!” she is rattled for moment, then begins an arduous few minutes of haggling in which we return to my original thirty dollars, and, because she says I am such a great haggler, takes off an additional five.

Handing her the money, she looks vaguely disturbed and offers to wrap it in some paper. My decline of the offer seems to bother her, so I quickly leave the antique store’s darkness for the heavy sun of the eroded empty street. Scott Joplin’s ‘Easy Winners’ follows me out the door.

Wandering through the streets, I talk and caress the voluptuous curves of the instrument. When I find a half rotten bench, I sit, still talking to the guitar. I tell about intervening years; I waltz and pirouette it on my lap.

I grow gradually less voluble and just begin examining its surface. It must have sat for a long while in the window of the antique store because my fingers are grimy from its accumulated dust. The guitar’s once glossy finish is entirely gone and the underlying wood looks grey and tired. The strings are so old and dry the sound they make is harsh and cracked, a voice hoarse with age. It is not an instrument that should ever be played again, or at least, only in pretend, like the storeowner had done.

A small paper sticker is attached to the back of the instrument near the rounded bottom, a tag with the price written in faded ink. Five dollars. I laugh and cry thinking about the price of modern medicine.

I am still laughing when the Indian boy comes out from between the buildings. Seeing me, he starts to return between them, but turns when I call.

I hold out the guitar. He smiles.

END

The Tilt of the Board

I think an amazing and simple concept has escaped our culture. We have complicated most processes to such an extent that it is difficult to find serenity. I wonder if this is one of those thoughts that people have been having for centuries and either can do, or will do nothing about it. So many other activities and daily events are so like this in character. Habitual living. I was recalling earlier today how I first became attracted to surfing.

I was visiting my Aunt Mary who lived at the time in Campbell, a suburb of San Jose, California. It was during the school Easter break and during the week my aunt planned lots of activities to keep myself and her four sons busy; she was, by trade, a teacher and I am not sure she did anything without planning but everything seemed completely spontaneous. One morning she packed her four sons and myself along with, I think, one of her friends and maybe the friend’s sons, altogether into a bright yellow-orange Volkswagen Van and drove us over the mountains to one of the beaches near Santa Cruz. I remember one of my cousins asking her if we were going to the “cement ship”.

The idea of a cement ship intrigued me. How could a ship be made of cement? Was it a real ship? How did it float? All questions a teacher was well equipped to handle. These questions occupied at least part of the drive over treacherous Highway 17, and when she wasn’t concentrating so much on driving, answers came easily forth. But Highway 17 takes a lot of concentration and I have always had a need to watch the road with the driver, so I don’t really recall what her answers were, but we did arrive in Santa Cruz and found our way to the correct beach.

After finding our spot on the sand and laying out towels, arranging picnic equipment and setting up a small beach umbrella, my cousins took me to see the cement ship. It had been a real ship and apparently then fell on hard times and became permanently moored, or rather, grounded. It had been deteriorating for many years but certainly still looked like a ship and for boys our ages had a certain romantic excitement about it.

As the morning wore on, we swam a little then walked back to our “spot” on the beach and ate our lunch. That meal was memorable because my cousins ate differently than my family even at picnics. They came from the anglo side of the family and ate hotdogs and burgers with mustard and catsup, american cheese and maybe a slice of pickle. They drank lemonade, coca-cola or rootbeer. My family had vast quantities of sour-dough bread, canned sardines or oysters as an appetizer, oven-roasted chicken cooked in or with wine and herbs, or fire cooked sausages, or firey choriço cooked with pinto beans. Dessert might be ice cream made by my grandfather or figs or apricots off my grandmother's trees. To drink there was usually red wine for the adults and ginger beer for the children. On this occasion the food was what my cousins would call “normal” picnic food, consisting of sandwiches, potato chips, lemonade and apples.

As I finished my lunch I remember eating the last of a small bag of potato chips, not unheard of fare in my family but certainly rare, and then biting into an apple. The taste sensation was of seawater! So much so that I thought somehow that seawater had gotten on the apple. Not so. I found more potato chips and ran an experiment. I drank whatever was nearby and crunched my purloined chips then bit into the apple again. Seawater! Not particularly pleasant but worth the experiment.

My Aunt told us all mildly to wait an hour before we went back in the water after we had eaten. I remember wondering if we would still be there an hour later or if everyone would have gotten tired of waiting and gone home. But we spent an hour or so running in and out of the surf, playing wave tag and chasing each other up and down the beach. It was during this post-lunch waiting period that I spent watching some people surf, an activity of which, up to that point, I hadn’t paid any attention at all.

Some older boys, related I think, to my Aunt’s friend, had driven themselves down and had brought their surfboards. When they seemed to be more interested in talking to some girls in two-piece bathing suits than surfing, I asked, or maybe begged to borrow a board from one of the boys. The boy that owned the board told me I could use it if I could lift it and if I was careful. Assuring him that I would be very careful, I pushed and pulled it, and even managed to balance it precariously on my head for a short while but eventually got it down to the water and out beyond the crowded shore break to where there were far fewer people and hardly any wave action at all. “Outside” surfers would say. I was laying prone on the board and enjoying a relative isolation from all the people noise and the heat of the sand.

I knew nothing of the sea except my enjoyment of it. I really wasn’t much of a swimmer although I had taken a YMCA swimming course. I was probably eleven. I didn’t know how to surf. I didn’t even think of trying. I was floating on a big blue and white surfboard and using it kind of like a pool chair. I was enjoying the gentle rocking motion and the warmth of the Santa Cruz’s spring sun. I was also floating on that blue and white board further and further out into the wide blue Pacific.

I remember thinking at the time there was really nothing to keep me from floating outward into the coastal current and all the way down to Mexico. I had, at the time, recently read a story of a Chumash boy in a dugout or bark or some kind of canoe, paddling between, or out to, or from, the Channel Islands and fearing being caught in the California Current. I thought it might rather be fun to be able to move along in the ocean and not need to paddle.

I do not remember if someone called me or another person on a surfboard came by, or I just got the notion to go back in, but in I started, thinking I’d have to paddle myself all the way back to the beach. The waves moving toward the beach were quite small and slow moving and as far out as I was, it was going to prove to be, and more importantly, looked, like a long, long paddle. My naïveté was a lucky thing for me, as I had no clear realization of the depth of water I was in, or that the momentary calm of Monterey Bay was an asset to an ignorant pre-teen without much ability as a swimmer.

The surfboard, one of the old balsa-wood construction types, was like a diving platform for someone my size. It was quite stable. It also paddled like a diving platform for someone my size. I think I even stood up on it to look around. My lack of knowledge, regarding how to place oneself on a surfboard, made standing up a perilous adventure. So I paddled and I paddled and I paddled; my skinny arms flailing along the rails like a three-horsepower outboard pushing the Queen Mary. Then I would rest for a while and again start paddling. Rest and then paddle. Rest and paddle. It became a horrid exercise in repetition and perhaps because of the distance, seeming futility.

At some juncture during my paddling it dawned on me that I had indeed paddled way too far out and maybe I really had caught the sea current and was on my way to learning Spanish. I could not see my Aunt or her friend, or my cousins or their friends or anyone I knew or recognized, and the people on the beach looked like ants and, well, I started to panic a little.

But my panic stricken arms were tired so I took another rest and then I spotted, far far down the beach my Aunt waving her arms at me, or at least I thought she was waving at me, and my calm returned and I refocused my attention on getting to the beach. I tried all kinds of techniques; both arms at once, one arm after another, hands only, pushing myself back on the board and using feet only, holding onto the tail-kick, full legs, knees down only; I discovered that one arm after another mid-board was best, despite the size of the board and my skeletal arms.

I don’t precisely remember when it happened but I do know it was somewhere out where full-grown men were standing on the sandy bottom with just their head out of water and occasionally a toddler sitting on their shoulders, but somehow the speed of my paddling and the speed of the waves rolling by, found an equilibrium and I was being pushed by a wave with no help at all from my weary arms. I was enthralled and delighted that I had discovered a principle of grand locomotion that was better than a carnival ride, and neither I nor anyone else had to pay for a ticket and neither had I anyone telling me I wasn’t big enough or old enough.

I felt lifted and energized. And the board began picking up speed a little. Now this was living! Then abruptly and directly in the path of the board a swimmer emerged from underwater with the back of his head to me and in my fear I leaned my body to the right which I honestly thought would roll my body off the board leaving the board to continue along its path to provide the unsuspecting swimmer with new blue and white stripes. Much to my amazement on a flattening, though still steep learning curve, the board tilted with me as I clutched the rails, even though I didn’t know they were called rails, and, to my stunned amazement, turned like a roller coaster car avoiding the completely unaware swimmer and picking up even more speed!

Keeping my death grip on the rails and fearing that the board would flip, I pulled hard on the right and pushed on the left and to my relief the board slowed and in response to my pressure straightened perpendicular to the wave and began to turn slowly to the left. Making this discovery, I pushed slightly more weight to the left and sure enough, the board turned more left and began to pick up speed again. I was zooming along nicely mow. I gave some pressure to the right side and again the board slowed a little and I was heading straight into the beach.

Twenty yards, ten yards, just a few more feet and then another head popped up, this time a toddler playing in the water a few feet from the sandy beach, but this time with wisdom aforehand, I pushed on the left side of the board and yielding to my pressure, the board turned, picked up a final burst of speed, missing the child and avoiding what might have been the first beheading at sea of a two-year old by an eleven year old with a longboard. With another slight lift the board and I were pushed onto the beach where I lay for a while feeling the relief that comes from a stay of execution.

Another small wave rolling in again lifted myself and the board, us, I was thinking by this time, and pushed us a few inches further onto the sand with a hissing crunch I’ve come to know well and my first surfing adventure was over. The simplicity of sliding along on a wave made by the forces of nature, out of control and in control simultaneously, changed something about the way my mind worked. At the very least, it changed the way I perceive the world, and I knew it at the time. Then I got a confirmation.

As I lay there still on the board, feeling my panic abate and a kind of relaxed energy returning, I rested my head on my arm and stared at grains of sand here and there sparkling in Santa Cruz’s afternoon sun, a pair of bare feet walking by, flipped a small amount of sand into my face and a voice from far above said, “nice ride.”

The Big Show

Walking a dusty western lane

We heard strange music

A marching tune with heavy drums,

Floating between dust motes

Trombones and piccolos,

Accordion and calliope,

Rusty notes on the wind,

Colliding faintly

Among dry grass and star thistle,

Flickering on leaves

Of late summer green trees.

From some Time

Before grass and trees

Were trees and grass.

Hear it in the mid-day sun

Hear it in the mid-night moonlight

A parade to wary ears

Bringing impossible memory

From a faraway circus

A somewhen show

We never saw

And never will.

No Deserto Do Tempo

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

see me stand

myself standing

by myself alone

on a desert plain

outside the time of time

standing between

a future of futures

no past passes passed

a present would wet drifting dust.

This timeless dust

denies me you

you have passed

past predicts future

future makes time

time is you

you are there

I am here.

Diary Day

Today began so easily. I woke early for me; I went to sleep around three a.m., so waking at 10:00 a.m. was like sleeping in for me. I normally get about six hours of sleep. Last night I don't remember dreaming.

I was at a friend's house on the coast and the sound of waves usually puts me to sleep and then gently wakes me. I didn't hear the waves this morning, but instead just drifted to the surface. I knew I had to get my clothing and all the rest of my paraphernalia together for the drive home so I made myself a cup of tea and finished organizing everything. I was ready to leave in an hour and a half but I delayed to check my email and because I just didn't want to leave the sight of the ocean.

The waves were bigger this morning and quite a few surfers had gathered. As I drove by I thought about the day ahead and the day behind.

Yesterday had been flat so I went into the City to visit another friend. He seemed more energetic than he has been for a while and in general just healthier. Often he seems depressive because he has never found his "work". He told me he found a workplace he really likes and also that whatever he does next he is going to do until he retires. This came as quite a surprise because he has spent a lot of time bouncing from one job to another trying to find the "perfect" job and regretting all the time he has spent at whatever job he just left. He also told me he has started, restarted actually, taking dance classes. When I told him I thought this was a good idea because dance is a great meditation and since he wasn't going to be getting in any major ballet companies...which he interrupted, joking, "yes I am". At least, I thought he was joking, so I laughed. Then he said, "why are you laughing?" in such a dead-pan manner, I wasn't sure he wasn't fantasizing about being a "star" again. I have heard this before. My friend suffers a bit from agoraphobia so on occasion he has lived locked away in his apartment and the only stimulus he has had has been his own mind and television.

He is one of those people who is impressed with the idea of movie stars and celebrities and talks about whoever has the lastest headlines. Depending on whether he finds them the kind of talent he appreciates he spends a lot of time praising or blaspheming them. He is a good person with a history of poor choices. Like lunch.

He invited me to lunch and I let him choose the place where we would eat. He chose a little restaurant with a crepe menu and kept telling me that before the place changed its name it had really great sandwiches. When the server came to take our order he ordered a sandwich. The server was very accommodating and asked him what kind of sandwich he would like and my friend told him chicken salad. There were no sandwiches on the menu at all, but the server said we don't have chicken salad but I think we can make a sandwich with a broiled chicken breast and some veggies. My friend thought that sounded fine and agreed. He told the server what kind of bread he wanted and that was that. When his lunch arrived he said as the server walked away, "I am unimpressed." When he said this I refrained from comment. Then when lunch was over the server came over and placed the bill in front of me.

This isn't so unusual. When I am with someone or even in a group of people servers frequently hand me the bill. I made a joke and handed the bill to my friend. The server had a little laugh and walked away. My friend studied the bill for a few minutes then handed it back to me. I asked if I was paying. Rather reluctantly, he handed me a bill to cover his sandwich. Just the sandwich. I couldn't help feeling somehow I had been taken for a bit of a ride. After eating he asked if I minded if he went to the drugstore to buy a vitamin box, and then to another variety store to buy soap.

I haven't seen my friend for quite a while although we've talked on the phone. Currently he isn't working so he has pretty much nothing but time to look for work and buy what he thinks is necessary for his life. I really don't mind doing these things but it just seems surprising to me that when I haven't seen a friend for some time they would choose something as mundane as looking for a vitamin box over conversation. He seemed surprised when I told him I was going back to the coast house to finish my laundry. I told him this after we had returned to his apartment and he started looking videos up on You-Tube, and wanted to show me "these great dance videos".

The drive from the coast was almost meditational. I stopped once for petrol and after that the traffic just seemed to open in front of me. Except for the compulsory stop at a toll plaza, I drove straight through to my home. Very unusual I thought. Unloading anything I didn't want at work, I took a moment to drink some juice then went on to work.

Before I even had opened my door, I noticed that a number of clients were already back at the hotel from their own work. It was a pleasant day so they were standing around conversing and looking generally happy. One man came to tell me he needed a room next week and could we set him up. Not a problem. Then something happened.

I heard loud, very loud, talking and what sounded like crying from somewhere outside. I went outside to inspect because the woman making the noise had a really intrusive sound to her voice. What I found was a woman curled into a fetal position in one of the parking spots with her head pressed to the pavement and a cell phone held tightly to her ear and shrieking loudly but indistinctly. I simply told her to stop. She interrupted her shrieking to tell me almost conversationally to call 911. Then she repeated it. Conversationally. Then she went back to shrieking into the cell phone. When I told her to stop, she interrupted her "conversation" again to tell me to call 911 and that she thought maybe she had hurt her head on the pavement.

I realized there wasn't a lot of reasonable action occurring so I returned to the office to call 911. Fifteen seconds after I had entered the office and while I was talking to the 911 operator, she picked herself up and marched straight into the middle of the street, threw herself face down and stretched out perpendicular to the yellow line. She stretched out her legs and arms to present as long a silhouette as possible. Traffic immediately started slowing and another of the hotel guests ran into the street to prevent the woman from being run over. I saw him bend over her and say something to which her visible response was a swim like kick and pounding of her fists on the pavement. He hesitated a moment then taking hold of the back of her jeans picked her up like a suitcase and walked with her back to the relative safety of the parking lot, where he placed her much more gently than I believe he wanted.

An elevated pick-up which had been forced to stop pulled into the parking lot and two tattooed burly fellows got out and proceeded to berate the man who had carried the woman to the parking lot because he had not put her in the shade. She said nothing. I had run from the office to tell everyone who had gathered that the police and the fire department would be arriving soon and to just leave her where she was. The incipient fight between the guest and the hopeful heroes ended suddenly and the tattooed gentlemen drove away. I told the guest who carried the woman out of the street that the police might want to ask him some questions to which he replied he was okay with that. i returned to the office where another guest, very very angry, was telling no one in particular that she "wasn't going to put up with this" and she was leaving.

The manager's son, who does not work for the hotel, asked the woman rather confrontationally what she had said. And she gladly repeated everything. The son then told her that the woman wasn't a guest of the hotel and this wasn't the fault of the hotel. The woman did not care and said so, she also reaffirmed she was leaving. The son seemed really offended at her anger more than anything else, so I interrupted and told her that it was fine. She could leave if she wanted. I pulled her bill out and destroyed it so she could see that it had actually been destroyed. She then pointedly told me she hadn't paid for the first night and I told her to never mind, it was on the hotel. She then said she wasn't trying to get out of paying the bill, she just wasn't going to put up with activity like that. I repeated that we were fine with her choice and to leave with our blessing. To which she did.

Here's the thing. The entire incident with the woman on the street had taken about three minutes. Then including the arrival of the police and the fire department, a total of maybe five minutes had passed while she and I had our discussion in the office. When she left the office, her husband was already trying to get their car out of their parking space which was partially blocked by one of the emergency vehicles. She walked straight to the car and got in. They had a little difficulty getting passed the police car and motorcycle and fire engine. So from the time the incident had started till the time they got out of the parking lot wasn't more than about twelve minutes. Much of that time she had spent in the office telling us she was leaving.

These people had come to the hotel as part of a wine tasting tour they were making. They had bought wine the day before and had at least planned on a two day stay. They had arrived from where ever they had gone today about a minute before the whole incident had started. Literally. Maybe less than a minute. So from arrival at the hotel till departure not more than fifteen minutes passed.

I am impressed at the speed of their packing.

August Moon, Blue Moon, Any Moon

Photo: Diego Fernandes

eternal sacred night passing

under a small lght

a lesser light

a street light

a hall light

a nightlight

the moon

Moon and I

soft as whispers

brush new strangers

fingers cat fur fine

crawl intimate space

one here

one here

one there

one there

nipple

thigh

behind a knee

baby soft hair

here and

here and

there and

there and

sometimes time is timidly

occasionally

a hand gently cupping

ah oh

hip

shoulder

calf

cupped

because

cupped

I feel a newness

these strangers

they feel mine

across infinite

tiny distance

an arc of knowing

they know

that I know that

I know that

they know that

I know, we know

our secret names.

A Morality Question

At times I go looking through old journals and on occasions I find some entry I wrote (and maybe all of them are this way) after I thought I had reached some special sort of understanding about myself or my situation in the world. In looking back on these entries I know this is foolish, however understanding is a tricky thing. What is the thing I am talking about and is it really that particular thing I think I have come to understand. Here is an example:

{no date...this is unusual because I usually date everything}
"? re: Voice. I feel I am gaining an understanding of good vocal technique but losing my sense of music somehow. i am also gaining insights into my own psychology which seem to have nothing to do with vocal technique per se, e.g., "nigger lips". I had not even thought of that for twenty years. Is this a kind of hidden handicap? I was talking to N... yesterday (10 July 2005) and it occured (sic) to me what Balachine {(sic) this is a reference to the great choreographer George Balanchine} meant when he told a woman in response to a question about whether her daughter would dance; "C'est une quéstion morale." A morality question? That means that her daughter could not become a dancer unless she (the daughter) committed herself to the morality of the dance. Is not morality a commitment of faith to the rule of an order? One then marries oneself to one's order, like a priest to his church, or a monarch to his country."

There is a "back story" to this. I take voice lessons. I took voice lessons for a very long time and then I stopped for a number of years, then took them up again. I take voice lessons because I like to sing. I am not sure I am a very good singer, but I have received compliments and I enjoy it. More importantly, and no one seems to believe me when I tell them this, it is a form of discipline to me, self-discipline, which I think I need. I have also taken and taught dance. Dance is another form of self-discipline for me, including teaching. I like the 'morality' of the disciplines. In July of 2005, exactly one year ago, I was having a voice lesson and my teacher told me to do something and I tried to do it but didn't succeed because, and he noticed this, that I seemed to have a lot of muscle tension in my lips.

I have had a lot of voice teachers but this is the only teacher I have ever had who can tell what I am doing without being able to see my face. I tested this one day by turning my back on him and doing whatever exercise he was asking me to do and he told me exactly what I was doing wrong. He knew without seeing my face where the tension was, how my tongue was placed, whether I was relaxed in the way that he requires, etc. When I asked him how he could do this, he said, "I can feel it." Needless to say, I was very impressed.

On the particular day in question, I seemed to have a lot of muscle tension in my lips, and he noticed. He said, "you seem to be trying to pull your lips in, or hide them or something." Oh dear!

What came flooding back into my mind almost made me cry, so I tried to laugh instead, jumped around for a few moments in what must have looked like a bit of a seizure or what we used to call a "spaz dance". My voice teacher is used to seeing such things, so he just waited until I came to rest and asked me what had just happened. I was embarrassed and had a very hard time telling him what had come creeping back into my mind.

It is even difficult to write about it now. So this is like a confession but I do not know to whom the sin belongs. Here is the history.

When I first went to school, I knew how to read. No one else in my class seemed to know how to read, and I thought it may have upset my kindergarten teacher. I now think a lot of things about me upset my kindergarten teacher. On one January day shortly after Christmas break, I brought some of my Christmas presents to school; one present was a book and the book was a rather complicated story with rabbits as the main characters. Just a book with a story about rabbits. It wasn't a Beatrix Potter book, nor was it a book about the Easter Bunny. It was just a story that had rabbits instead of humans as the heros and villians. And it was something I could bring for show and tell and, I thought, maybe have the teacher read, or allow me to read, to the class.

So when I came to class with my book, I asked the teacher if she would read it to the class. I told her I had already read it at home and that I thought it was quite good. She looked at it rather absent-mindedly and told me to bring it back and maybe we could read it at Easter. But, I protested, it wasn't an Easter book, it was just a book about rabbits. No, she was very firm, bring it back at Easter. But she didn't give it back to me to bring it back at Easter. She took it and put it on a shelf which no kindergartner could reach and started the regular class. This last action really puzzled me as you might imagine because she had told me to bring it back at Easter and then she didn't give it back so I could bring it back.

As a back-up share and tell item, I had also brought some toy cars to school. There were about twenty of them and they were all made in the same scale and underneath were labeled with whatever sort of automobile they were supposed to represent, and they were very accurate representations. During one of our recesses I took the cars out to the play area with a girl named Paula with blond braids who always seemed to wear plaid dresses with white collars. Sometimes a red plaid and sometimes a green or blue plaid, but always with a white collar. She and I were very good friends; she seemed to get into more trouble than any of the other girls for some reason. Maybe the teacher didn't like her either. Maybe the teacher didn't like Paula because Paula and I were friends. I do not know.

After the recess I packed up all my cars and put them into the special box they had come in and took them into the classroom and put them carefully under my table. Because Paula sat next to me she could tell me how much she really enjoyed playing with the cars during recess. The kindergarten teacher heard her telling me this and told her she had to stand in the corner until she was sorry she had spoken during class. Then the girl who sat across from me said something to me about Paula standing in the corner and the teacher heard her too but for some reason did not make her stand in the corner. The teacher then told me that I had to put my cars in a different place than under my table and showed me where they had to go which wasn't in the same place as my book. In fact, the book couldn't be reached or seen by any of the kindergarteners, but the cars I was told to put on a shelf where all the educational toys, puzzles, blocks and regular kindergarten books were, as if they were to be put there so the entire class could share them. Honestly, I didn't mind putting them there, I brought them for sharing. But then, after class was over, a strange thing happened.

After the bell rang and all the students were gathering their share and tell things and their coats and bags, a student named Douggy picked up all my tiny cars except for one miniature Ford pick-up truck which he took out of the special box, and started out the door with them. I immediately intercepted him and angrily asked him what he thought he was doing with my cars. He told me he "wanted them" and that was all there was to it. I wasn't going to allow him to proceed so I yelled for the teacher and told her that "Douggy was taking my cars!" And then another odd thing happened. The teacher came over and told me to let Douggy have the cars. Why? I asked angrily, should I let Douggy have my favorite Christmas present?

I honestly cannot remember what the teacher told me except something about Douggy not having anything to share and tell about. And she restrained me until Douggy had left the school. I alternated crying and screaming all the way home, but the closer I got to my house the angrier I got and when I reached the safety of our living room, I was probably red in the face with anger and my mother asked me what was wrong. When I told her what had happened and could she do anything, she just seemed to get very calm and perhaps a little sadly said, never mind, just don't take anything else you like to school.

I was astounded, to say the least. My mother was tough. And I am not talking about a kindergartner's point of view. She was tough and quite capable of battle. When my older sister had gotten in trouble for calling one of the other girls in her class a bitch, my sister had been sent home in tears and my mother got a call from the principal telling her exactly what had transpired. "Did you know your daughter called (let's call her Jane) a bitch?!" "Yes," my mother replied reasonably, "my daughter told me what happened." "Well," demanded the principal, "don't you think she should apologize to (Jane)?" Without a pause, my mother replied, "I don't know. Is she a bitch?" I know my sister returned to school without any further incident other than she and the other girl were kept well apart. My mother was tough.

There was something I did not know about the world.

My parents made no effort to recover my little cars and it was clear from the moment it happened that the teacher was not going to make any effort to recover them either. What had actually transpired here? I even asked my brother if he understood what was going on but he also could shed no light on the situation. But I did have the one little toy to remind me of the incident. Whenever I looked at that little truck, I recalled with full force, the complete injustice of the situation and even today I am not sure what exactly transpired. But here is my guess.

My family is mixed ethnically and over the years, I have heard comments at different times from different people that alluded to that facet of my heritage. Because my appearance and the appearance of my family is in no way unusual, there is no way to tell from the surface that we are anything but anglo-saxon. But if the subject comes up, and I am surprised how often it does come up, the mention of the latin side has sometimes brought out a side of people I am not sure I would have believed existed if I had not had the experience.

There are actually several examples; my favorite story about this sort of thing happened to me at a friend's house. I had spent many hours over time enjoying these people's company. One afternoon my friend's mother started talking about people belonging to my ethnic group sometimes rather disparagingly and she got more disparaging as she warmed up. My friend made several attempts to slow her down and only succeeded in stopping her when he finally shouted at her that I was indeed a member of that group. There was a rather long silence which was finally broken by his grandmother who said rather dryly, "you are not." When I replied in the affirmative she said, not without humor, "well!.....I let one in my house!" She also told me that being part anglo "saved me". The disturbing part of this to me, happened when I asked his mother what kind of bad experiences she had had with members of "those people". She told me she had never had any bad experiences because she never knew any. That is true prejudice. No direct knowledge, only rumor and some kind of strange floating reputation inform a person's attitude. Another like incident happened one day while members of my college world religions class were waiting for the professor to arrive.

It was a beautiful spring morning and many people had arrived early to read or drink coffee or just chat. Somehow the subject of ethnic backgrounds came up and while I was a member of the conversation, it seemed to me that when people were describing their backgrounds there was a kind of sameness about them. One older woman, who had told us about her desire to change her life by re-entering college and the work world after her divorce, told everyone her anglo-teutonic background all the while smiling and saying "how cool", "how neat" when people said they came from Northern European backgrounds. She seemed genuinely intrigued by mixtures of English/French or German/French or Dutch/German/Czech. I was really just listening when she asked me in a kind of breathlessly happy voice, "and what are you?" When I told her, the smile faded and she literally took a step backward away from me saying, "did you know they married black people?" She didn't say being part anglo saved me.

Was my Oklahoma-born kindergarten teacher (oh yes, I remember) a bigot? A racist? I do not know. This only occurred to me much later as a possibility. Was this the reason my mother had been cowed so easily? I do not know. And that is the nature of this strange beast. The recipient is almost never sure. What I do know is this: after that day, I hated "poor little Douggy", and he was the first person I heard call me "nigger lips".

I am glad I had read my book before that day in kindergarten because that was also never returned.

The Story of a Path

This is a story about a path.

This path is the most marvelous of ways that lead along the far western edges of a great ocean. it is not a roadway where noisome automobiles and trucks with their noxious fumes buzz and roar by like monsters outside their nightmare origins. There are no motorcycles or bicycles nor very much indication of man's technology at all. It is a place where there is neither sound nor silence.

It is a wondrous path that winds its way along the sundown edge of a continent sharing conversation with the sea, frequently with great gusto, sometimes in quiet appreciation. The rolling breakers tell a tale of the many moods of wind and storm at the sea's far corners. The ocean is a mighty force and knows how to wear away the rocks and pound them into sand and the land knows that while the sea is mighty it is really the land which holds the sea like a favored jewel away from the consuming fires of the center of the planet. Not that this is any ordinary planet of course, because this path, this planet is the place where liveliness meets eternity and the circles of the world and the encircling sea are riven from the immortal and the linear indefinite.

This way does not hang orphan-like in the fundament of space.

This is the Path, the way of testing. Its frontiers and increments filled with the excitement of crisis and observation. It winds hither and thither on cliffs above the sea, raising and lowering its stretches from wide beaches and tide-pool strewn moraine to dizzying heights towering thousands of feet above the waves. Some of its borderlands are arid, empty of life and stretch seconds into days and fear is palpable, but the crossing reward is a cool drink at a crystalline fountain and the remembrance treasured experience.

There are other intervals of the way where the days and years flash as a strobe, where sun and moon and even the shape of the land itself can be seen to shift under the pressures of joy and beauty. These are the places where the green and growing things bloom and prosper by the roadside and never seem touched by time or disease. Multi-hued flowers and trees shaped exotically by the wind remembering once upon a time. The narrowing and widening path, sometimes paved and stepped from the memory of people gone before fades to stone and clay and dust and sand where that memory fails. Sun glistens brightly and rain strikes gently. Fog and mist are comforters for the seekers, but the Traveler winds his way alone in this remnant of Eden for this is where tranquility reigns and the only reward is a memory of longing.

For each seeker on the way a key is left. That key is remarkable for its placement, its presence in unexpected places and every key is shaped according to need. Every seeker is startled by the timing of the appearance of the key, but each seeker is left to decide its value. Not every traveler perceives the unusual timing and presence of the key, thinking perhaps it is merely detritus dropped by some other, its utility missing and long past, but for myself, I will retain this key even though I am shocked by its persistent voice and alien appearance, not for the human hand is this key for it is weightless and spaceless.

Sooner or later along the way most wayfinders encounter a great test. It frequently takes the shape of a tree although this shape is deceptive. In some ways this tree is the path because it is the path which inculcates its shape and nature when first encountered, and the response to the test generates futures and the coursing of the path. For those wayfarers who do not see it, it remains "alive" in a manner completely unsuspected and hidden. It motivates and drives the undisciplined and buffets the simple with a terrible urgency. Some will wish to strike it down, some find it ugly beyond bearing. Some find it difficult to leave, some with great ease. Many travelers see it as a great tree, some as a nightmarish thorned shrub. For some it blocks the path completely, but for those who learn an appreciation of its fierce beauty, a new test and an unexpected gift is found.

The gift is a vessel and for those who find the vessel in the perfection of their desire a kind of equilibrium is reached and the weighing and carriage of the vessel becomes another kind of converse along the way. It may appear as a simple cup, old or new, chipped or perfection itself. Some travelers experience it as a kylix, an amphora, some a great vase and some a simple mug. For the unwary it becomes an illusive siren appearing at many times in many forms at one time seducing the seeker with false promise and another time betraying him with a mask of the ideal only to later reveal its true nature. It may be that this is the greatest of all gifts and the test is to see and accept the vessel for its true nature and perhaps in the fullness of time the traveler will see the path strewn with vessels, each with its own beauty.

The finality of the path arrives when the seeker reaches what to many becomes the most terrifying of barriers, and the greatest test. This barrier is as infinite as the seeker understands. For all it is a known, a given, but many have pushed its presence from their minds or tried to condense it to an understandable form. For those, the barrier is insurmountable and impenetrable, they will curse and scratch at it and throw themselves time and time again at its surface. They will attempt a climb or an excavation but such efforts will be futile. The traveler will again be startled by when this barrier appears and where and each will ask himself how this came to be. The unprepared will find no answer.

For myself the barrier seems the greatest of opportunities and if I learn wisdom I can discover the permeable nature of its vastness. It is a possibility that my response to the gifts and tests of the path will prove this to be true.

An Ode To Terrorists

At times I go looking through old journals and stacks of paper for stories or poems I wrote and every once in a while I come across one I know I wrote because there it is, scribbled out on some spare piece of paper or in a notebook with changes made, words crossed out and the whole dated. Occasionally, there is a notation about why or where it was written, but usually these old pieces just float there on the page, artifacts of an earlier me that I read and then ask, who was he that wrote this? What was in his mind?

This short rather prophetic piece was written in April of 1988.

AN ODE TO TERRORISTS

An entertainment award
For decimating our innocent population
And carrying our lovely nation
Into adulthood.
Blow your horms
You have succeeded where
The four horsemen have failed.

Postcard From Spain

When I went looking for a story I had written a few years back, I found this piece from 2003. My wonderful friend Nancy and I had gone to Spain to participate in a volunteer project studying Mediterranean dolphins, but the project got canceled that year and we ended with a number of extra weeks to just be tourists. We had a blast driving the backroads of Portugal and Spain and amused ourselves taking pictures and visiting out of season and unforgettable out of the way places. The Costa del Sol was one of the off-season variety.

People walking
Astride the Costa del Sol
What does that mean?
I ask myself.
"Astride the Costa del Sol"
The (can you hear the guitars?)
Costa del Sol
the costa del sol
The coast of the sun
in the sun, by the sun
The Sunny Shore.
Sunny still in January
Swimming with a
few late unripe English
Trying to force
A winter blossom
To their cheeks.
Some Spaniards
at home?
The few, the Proud, the...
Horrified!
Staring at my naked
feet!
In winter!?
Naked feet!
Ay!
My naked tootsies
Having made a first
Very timid step
Into
The rather chilly,
Rather polluted
(at an invisible level, of course invisible
this is the
Costa del Sol)
My bare California
Feet,
Stepping their first step
into the "Wine Dark Sea"
just down from the
small stream
with the cans
and the odd bits of paper,
running rather slowly,
but surely into
The Costa del Sol.
Where it goes on to pick up
a few more
Plastic jugs and more bits of paper
thrown there by
no doubt,
The few, the Proud, a Loud
and a rather Grave
Tourist
and yes,
the odd Spaniard
who must live
and revel
at his
Costa del Sol.
So we walk,
My friends my feet and I
Along this famous line of surf,
Picking up shells
The odd stone
Here and here and here
Black, with pink and white
Pin-striping-when-wet.
From this marine delight
I raise my film star eyes
To lock gazes with
A Spanish Lady
and her consort on
The Costa Del Sol De España
and she stares
she stares
and she stares
at my naked...feet.
Then she stares and stares
and stares and stares and stares and
Then stares into my eyes and
she stares into my film star eyes and
she stares into my eyes
Then gathering her
Thoughts
Into a tight
Ball of lightening
¡Contempt!
Throws them at my
foolish delight
In the color, and the sand,
and the sea and the sound
and the smells of her
Beautiful
Costa del Sol.

Somewhere Near Nijar

Photo: Ancama_99

It isn't any news to those who have traveled there, but for you who haven't, Spain is a land of strange extremes. Dignified and comic simultaneously, I could believe it is the place where the circus was invented. Driving through the southeast corner of Andalucía, a desert country, the driest in Europe, my friend Nancy and I were sharing thoughts about the landscape and the people when she suddenly screamed sending chills up my spine and nearly ending us in a ditch. Gathering my scattered wits from the odd corners of the car where they had fled, she pointed out what could have been the set for a Fellini film. Set solitary in the midst of a desert plain was what could only be called a cemetery for carnivals, filled with remnants of side-shows and floats and displays for the discriminating carney.

In a barren country
of small delight
where even thoughts
find little food or drink
and must lie dessicated
among abandoned
catechisms,
a desert way-station mirage
rests
plaintively calling
here, for a penny or two
a small price
a tiny coin
for this pittance
a carney, a gypsy
and the master of ceremonies will
tie your eyes to an old idea,
force feeding
your starving roots
slaking your thirsts
ending your hungers
at this desert well
and cry his delights
between the new and the newer
to the future of your futures.
Lady and Gentleman
Señora y Señor
¡Aquí esperamos con mágico!
On this dry desert road
there waits a simple
magic prestidigitory meal
with
mannikins and marvels
serving your deepest desires
"Check you strength!
Here are the actual barbells from he,
the strongest man alive
See the marvels and the marvelous
The Fat Lady or Her Beloved Bearded Sister!
Here, my beloved guests
reside the best,
that will shock and astound
the Freaks and their Friends
Animals Native and Animals Exotic
Fear not, we have marvels unending.
Though our reputation must a slight
tarnish bear
but though
each miracle may
need slight repair perhaps be slightly broken,
such minimal flaws cannot hide us,
we here,
the most,
the incomparable, astounding
universe
of the fun and the frightening
the finite and the infinite.
Here it is
where verse is reverse
and life is lived!
The Fulsome Funhouse of Fabulous Mirrors.
Step Right Up!
Step Right Up Here!
This is your last chance
Last chance to see
What you've forgotten all along...
The thrilling...
The marvelous...
The scintillating...
what you've never been shown
the fantastic
incredible
Place Between Places
Where the actual Unknown is most truly Known.