Steve and Anna's Wedding: homily by Joe Chappelle 6/25/2016

Marriage.

Once again, it is the last weekend in June in NYC, which can mean only one thing. Tomorrow, more than a million of our brothers and sisters will march down 5th avenue into Greenwich Village to celebrate their right to be and their right to love whomever they choose. Last year that parade was probably one of the happiest ever, as they finally won the long fight for the right to legally marry. It was the celebration of the end of years of struggle and hardship and on behalf of many who never lived to see the day but on whose shoulders the victorious stand. This year, however, will probably be one of the most somber ever, as we mourn 49 people who were murdered simply because of who they were and who they chose to love. Or perhaps it won't be somber at all. The fact is that the parade happens every year, without fail, in the happiest of times and the saddest of times, no matter what, because what our LGBTQ brothers and sisters know from many years of experience is that the celebration itself IS the protest, IS the political act, IS the most daring and defiant thing to do. To march anyway IS the victory. There is wisdom in that.

In 1967, the famous Supreme Court case of Loving v Virginia saw an interracial couple win their challenge to an immoral law and in so doing, win the right to marry. We take it for granted that people of different races can marry today, but there was a time (not so long ago when this was not only taboo, it was illegal. A state-sanctioned prohibition based on race. But not today. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter gathered the courage to challenge a world that would see them separated to recognize and honor their union. By openly and formally declaring their love, they claimed the victory. There is wisdom in that.

There will be no interracial marriage here today. Nor will there be a same sex marriage here today. But I would argue there are no such things as interracial marriage or same sex marriage. There is only marriage, and there will DEFINITELY be a marriage here today. In the context of a world that wants us to limit love, dismiss love, reject love, belittle love, ignore love, suppress love, outlaw love...in a world that encourages negativity and uses fear and mistrust for political expediency...in a world that seems fueled by divisiveness, hostility, and antagonization... in the context of that world, whenever two young people choose love, share love, and present that love for consecration before their family and friends and especially before God, heaven rejoices and indeed we should too.  Just like Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter did in 1967, let us continue to challenge this world to recognize and honor love. Just like we always do on the last weekend in June, we should openly celebrate this beautiful and happy thing called love, in defiance of what the world wants us to do. But not just in defiance of and in spite of the world, but as witness to the world that love wins. Love always wins. As we consecrate one marriage, we reaffirm all marriages. As the creator of Broadway's Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda reminded us recently, "Love is love is love is love is love is love..."

Of course there is no passive participation in today's ceremony. We all have a job to do. Those were not just empty platitudes in the opening prayer. We family and friends who witness this moment must endeavor to "fulfill our duty to honor, embrace, lift up, protect, and nurture the love that we bless this day."

Often, my Granny used to say "hallelujah anyhow." I never fully understood the significance of those words as a boy but I have internalized this simple but powerful wisdom as a man. Sometimes it is most important to celebrate and rejoice, because the world wants to break our spirits. And after the month we've had, I say this is the time to choose love, to choose life, and to rejoice in our choices. Yes, the world will give you a million reasons why today isn't that big of a deal, or is some relic from a time gone by, but hallelujah anyhow. We anoint this union based on a truth founded on something far surer and firmer than trends, or fads, or what is en vogue. Hallelujah anyhow! That truth is that love wins and as the wisdom that flows from an ancient Gregorian chant reminds us, wherever love and charity are found, God is always there. Surely, brothers and sisters, God is in this place today. Hallelujah anyhow!

So, let's have a marriage. And let us celebrate. Passionately and in defiance of a love-starved world. In the knowledge that what we do is not only joyful, but holy and sanctified. People were constantly telling Jesus whom he should and could not love. And he constantly ignored them. No one understood how radical and political love could be more than Jesus Christ himself.

Anna and Stephen, I didn't quote 1 Corinthians today. As church musicians, I figured you've heard that passage more than most and don't need me to recite it for you yet again, as beautiful a passage as it may be. I will also not lecture you or offer advice for a happy marriage, as I am not married and therefore am no expert in happy marriages. What I will do is remind you that when a scribe asked Jesus what the greatest of the commandments were, hoping to catch Him in a paradox, Jesus said "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Time and time again, in this example and many others, when asked to clarify any perceived discrepancies between His words and the law, Jesus consistently cited love as the preeminent guiding principle above all others. And so, I know that if you allow love to lead you, not only through good times, but especially through difficult times, God will be present in your choices and God will be walking alongside you in all that you do in your life together. Choose love, my dear friends. Not the shallow, happily ever after, never challenged Hollywood version of love, but deep, thoughtful, ethical, selfless, time-tested, true love. Choose love.

Come, brothers and sisters, let us claim victory this morning and celebrate love this afternoon in the best example of our Savior: let me remind you that His very first miracle was turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana, so we know He liked a good wedding!

PROTESTING THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE AND DOING THE RIGHT THING

Citizens in Virginia, Ohio, San Diego and Michigan are protesting for the right to lift the stay at home orders and go back to work. They don’t want the cure to be worse than the illness they claim while they wave American and some conferderate flags. Poverty kills they say, I guess only learning this now.

The fact is, if this country had a decent social safety net, middle class folks would not be as anxious about making ends meet after only a month of the stay at home orders. In fiscal year 2018, the average SNAP household received only about $256 a month, and the average recipient about $127 a month — about $1.40 per meal. TANF benefits still leave family incomes at or below 60 percent of the poverty line in every state.  The median TANF payments for all the states in 2010 was $253 month and these payments vary by state.

If the average working class person, the people everyone is clapping for and extolling as heroes, the ones who keep our food on the shelves, drive the bus, take our garbage, cook meals for us – was not in a position where an unexpected $400 expense would cause hardship, maybe withstanding a month of being out of work for the sake of public health would not be so stressful.

Sure, no one wants to continue to be shut down, and we do need to start talking about what the “new normal is”,  but since when do we put the public health at risk for the sake of the economy? Ask yourself a different question: why is it that a month of being on lock down is such a financial burden on people? And what happened to the supports that would help each of us individually if we fell on hard times? These days, we have all fallen on hard times at once.

The only scientific way to beat this corona virus, without a vaccine yet, without anti-virals yet, is social distancing and stay at home orders, closing those vectors where people gather and are likely to facilitate this virus’ transmission. After 50 years of Republicans dismantling the “administrative state”,  those folks waving flags, driving their new Ford F350 trucks to the rallies, are concerned that THEY are being left behind.  A good section of the country, people who are making the Federal Minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, working 2 or 3 jobs, already understand about being left behind.

To be fair, the protestors are not wrong that this closed economy, if left closed long enough, will do serious damage to people’s lives. But gathering this way, will only result in more Covid-19 cases, causing more work for our heroic medical personnel. Besides, this has been the choice the Repbulicans made for decades as they systematically dismantled the social safety net;  when they gambled on the fact that even middle class citizens wanting to attend sporting events and eat at their favorite restaurants would never need to use the safety net.

When it was just dark skinned people who had to use the safety net, it was ok to cut those back. Now that it is all of us lining up in mile-long car lines at food banks, we are angry. But the anger is pointed to the governors who want to exercise caution. Instead, it should be at the Republicans who insist on constantly eroding the public safety net because as this pandemic has shown us, at some point, all of us will need it. 

To be sure, we should be  having these discussions about how to open the economy again in a safe manner, but not at the expense of public health, which could cause this pandemic to last even longer and result in even more deaths. What has happened to the idea of the common good? That we pull together to help each other? Sometimes, as in that scene in the movie “Moonstruck” I want to take part of the American public, slap them across the face and scream, “Snap out of it!”

Maybe instead of waving flags and demanding our tyrant governors (who are only trying to save our lives) let us go back to work at the risk of death, we need to demand viable support system for the times when we will not have access to our livelihoods, at least for a time. Whether it is UBI, or raising the miminum wage, strengthening unions (which drive wages up), or increasing programs that have been proven to have an impact on poverty like SNAP, WIC and TANF, increasing Medicaid access – it doesn’t matter. We need to redesign our human needs programs as part of an economic recovery and continuity plan, with the idea that all of us, at some point, will need to use it.  

And also because it the right thing to do. It is the human thing to do. It is the decent thing to do. And for a nation that claims to be “Christian” – it is also the Christian thing to do.

POEM: WHAT THE LIVING DO

After Marie Howe

It begins with the excavation of a body,
the bloody sutures, the swollen diseased
organ, removed, until the body is

reconfigured beyond recognition.
There is salvage radiation of the prostate bed
that rescues nothing, that only gets more painful

with each of the thirty-three treatments until the smell
of burnt flesh pervades. Until the scarred tissue, purple
as a bruise, is pissed as a passing blood clot, until

everything feels char-broiled. Extra well done.
The Lupron injections they give in the hip removes all
testosterone from the body. It’s the same drug they give to

serial rapists, leaving a sweating mass at night,
leaving exhaustion, leaving weakness so much stronger
than was thought possible at the end of a day,

leaving a voice too hoarse to speak, and the sleep too
short to be restful. Then the  fists-full of Enzalutamide,
pills like small planets, to further reduce

testosterone, hoping to starve the cancer once more.
Until lesions appear, lighting up the bone-scan like a
Christmas tree, so now is the time to inject Radium 223

Dichloride into the blood, drunk up by the poor bones,
eroding by the day, until that stops, and then Docetaxel
is poured into veins and the body is scoured from the

inside out. Here is the nausea. Here, is the hair loss.
And there is the neuropathy to look forward to.
It’s hard to make a good accounting of where one

has been when the body has lost track of what
is good.  All of this is what the living do. How anger is
useless. How fear is replaced by the clinical callousness

of whatever the next treatment is.  Yes, Yes you say.
That makes sense, because it allays death one more time.
And this is what the living do.

Reading Ginsberg’s “Kadish” in the dark, fingers
sweeping across the page with the hope that the
words will be absorbed by finger tips, to find their

way to those dark spots on the spine, because we use
everything at our disposal to swat away the flies that
gather around us, even if it makes no sense at all.

Last Day At The Lake: August 17, 2019

(Missing from the picture, Steve, Anna and Jude)

LAST DAY AT THE LAKE AUGUST 17, 2019

The house is sadder without the others. The driveway is so long. It now feels  barren without all the cars. The cavernous vaulted ceilings are empty, no longer reverberating with the jokes and game laughter of the evenings, filling the empty spaces.

The over-sized kitchen seems useless with just the four of us remaining. Knowing the only plans for today in the works is to eat, shower, cleanup, and leave, makes the light hanging from the bulb over the butcher block in the kitchen more desperate to hold on.  No trips to the beach packed like sherpas down the path with food, beer, chairs, blankets and lawn games like ladder-ball and cornhole.  No, it is just like the astronauts from the Gemini Space program in the Sixties circumnavigating the globe for a dozen days, then re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, always in danger of burning up. And like those astronauts, we go back to our routine lives with a different vocabulary than when we left. Others ask us what it was like, and we oblige, knowing there are parts that are so inexpressible in human language. So the first week after vacation, we are somewhat mute. Being at the lake can be just as disorienting as going into space.

One by one, as my children and grandchild leave, they take with them a little of the spirit that this large house lit up with for one week. Soon another family will fill it with their own mix of savory and sweetness that will mark their family time.

We are no perfect family to be sure. We spend a lot of time saying “sorry” and even more time releasing each other from the transgressions we commit against each other. For this week, we each drop what we are doing to make an effort to presence: to bear witness to the  importance of our relationship to each other. The currency we transact in is games, laughter, and dear God, the food we make and bring and share.

In the deep song  that is my heart I know this will not go on forever. Nothing does! We find a place that is really just a moment, to call our home for one week. We set up camp, plant a flag that is us, and invite those in our lives we are closest to and love the most, and invite them into the circle of us – odd ducks that we are.

We relish only what is, because at the lake, after all, that is the only thing that matters.

BECAUSE FAITH IN MY OWN SUFFERING IS LIKE A BURLAP SACK, FILLED WITH BURNT EARTH

In Ethiopia, no stranger to grief,

they bury the dead from

the Lion Air 737 Max 8 crash in

caskets with sacks filled with

the scorched earth from the

nearby crash site, where no one

survived when the plane dropped

like acid rain, a boat anchor out of a

wide open sky. The lightness of a pine

box would simply not do. It would not

satisfy the iron grip that is grief.

In cases like this, we need death to push

back on us a little, we need its gravity

to mean what it says, or else  the whole

damned thing  feels like a fraud.

The way in this part of the world, when there is

no food, mud is sometimes shaped into food,
shaped like cookies, so hands and eyes believe

with much less effort than mouths, hearts and heads

do, so empty bellies will be quiet, and we can sleep.

 This cancer is killing me,

taking many tiny bites until i am gone.

If not the real me, then the me I remembered. 

I should be sicker than I am.

If only the disease would take me by the

shoulders, shake me into the gray doubt

of what is incurable. I need it to punch me

around a little, rough me up,

leave its marks over me,  so my scars can

remind me of where I have been.

Who I am.
What I have to lose. 

What I have already lost. 
 

So I can believe in my own suffering,

So I can bury my own burnt earth in burlap bags,

to feel the missing, so I can feel the demands of loss.

So I can still give a voice to sorrow while I am able.

WHAT I WILL MISS ABOUT BOB TOTH

When I heard the news that Bob would  not return through those doors, the place felt empty, even though there was a dozen people working there that day. He was a mostly stealthy figure anyway, he didn’t say much and when he did, he mumbled. His hair curled around a weathered face, with more lines deepening whenever he smiled.

Full disclosure, I did not work with Bob in the larger way that others did. I was in IT and as such, I was a support person whose life-purpose was to provide service and make others’ work lives easier, more efficient. Still, we engaged in small ways. In ways that go unnoticed, until one or the other of us is gone.

Bob was an avid reader, always promoting Haruki Murakami novels, trying to get me to read them. Whenever he walked by my open door (he would once a day), he stopped to lean in, and crack a joke about Trump or Bush or Chenney. We were both ardent democrats and we would often discuss the incongruities of Republican administrations. I will miss those conversations, though they were often at times when I was up to my elbows in detailed, mind-numbing work. In my head, I was always thinking Not now Bob! but eventually, I pushed my chair away from the desk, and we talked sometimes for thirty minutes or more.

If I had a book of poetry, say a Tracy K. Smith, or an Audre Lorde collection of poems, lying on the corner of my desk, waiting to be pulled out for lunch time reading, he would crane his neck to read the title, and ask me about it and we would discuss what we were reading. He beamed with pride that time I travelled to the Berkshires to attend a poetry reading given by  his wife Cynthia.

Once, he gave me a folio print of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, Gift, which was so tender that I just had to hang it in my office:

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Czesław Miłosz

I understood that I was the man in this poem who realized he was once that gardener, carefree, and unembarrassed by this fact, but now I realize that Bob must have felt the same way. We were both finding paths into our gardens, recognizing the irony of lives that are pulled us away from us, from where we wanted to be, of jobs that at some point,  in some small way, let us down. We are both idealists, but we are also both pragmatists!

A colleague stops by and we discuss the poem hanging on my wall. She talks about the strange synchronicity that the great choreography of life surrounds us with. She points out to me that the last line of that poem could be read as a triumph of death. We discuss the last time she saw Bob, that Friday before he left for the weekend, how inexplicably she sat him down and had him talk for hours about his vision of the paper brands he has nurtured for decades, and how she never saw Bob so animated. Perhaps, she wondered, over the years, with corporate mergers and take-overs, the paper stopped mattering and that made Bob withdraw, resigned even, to the eventual demise of these papers he helped bring to market. But things were changing with the latest acquisition! He felt optimistic. He left for the weekend, and now neither one of us will see him again.

There are so many conversations about politics and art and culture and literature we have waiting for us. Like billions and billions of others who leave for any weekend, we assumed we would be back on Monday, he would be back, to stop at my door, and “waste” a half hour of my time talking about things normal people don’t talk about. “Mi-chael” he would mumble when he came to my door, emphasizing the first syllable of my name, stretching his scarecrow arms above his head, holding the post and lintel of the door of my office.

I will miss his dry humor, of which I always received during one of my daily “Bob Visits”.  I told him he should submit entries to the New Yorker cartoon captions contest and I believe he may have tried his hand at a few, I am not sure. He always had me laughing out loud when he came up with his crazy ideas for beating Republicans in various elections. When Trump announced during a campaign debate that Senator John McCain was no hero because he got shot down, I reminded him that I am pretty sure he made that joke eight years ago when McCain ran against Obama. A bit edgy, sure, harsh, but it was a joke between two friends, not a public statement or tweet. And with Trump it’s about meanness, and with Bob it was always sardonic.

The best of each of us is lost in the small transactional movements of living, those confessional moments we have with each other, the ones no one will ever know or believe. So much of our relationships are built on this, which is why storytelling is so important. I’m reminded of the line from the Galway Kinnell poem Strong is Your Hold On  Me: “I believe in the miracles of art, but what prodigy will keep you safe beside me?” Art and culture does not protect us. It’s not meant to. It leads us to a more humane way.  It makes the journey more bearable. Right now, there is a Bob-shaped hole in my universe and it hurts. Time, they say, will help, though I am not really sure I want it to heal completely. See, missing him reminds me of that connection, and that I will miss too.

Over the coming days and weeks, others will add their own puzzle pieces about what they will miss about Bob, but these are mine. I am most saddened by the sudden realization that there was a depth of him I never had the chance to get to experience, given our jobs. He once referred to me during a presentation to the rest of the company at a sales meeting as my comrade, Mike Biegner or something like that and it was true. We were not friends in the sense of going out and buying drinks and asking each other what we did last weekend. We both just liked to be around things and people that represented a universe so much larger than our office walls.

He reminded me of this, over and over and over. I will miss that too.

30 Poems in 30 Days
Fund Raiser for Center for New Americans

Nov 1, 2018

 I AM FROM 

I am from loud dinners that shun propriety.

I am from the mob of seven others and one bathroom.

I am from the holy artifacts of words

and from the swinging rhythm of speech punctuated with

Italian words twisted with a New York accent.

I am from Seven Fishes at Christmas, and scungilli anytime.

I am from Easter Egg bread, 

and the house with an egg-beater for a doorknob.

I am from radiation, and surgery clips re-discovered each time

on the MRI. Every. Time.

I am from the Orange and Blue frustration of another New York Mets’ loss.

I am from blood and the unseen murderers in that blood.

I am from sacrifice that polished my life and now polishes my dreams.

I am from trust that is the grit we toss onto ice helping us stay upright in winter.

I am from solitude out of which daffodils and tulips and crocus grow.

I am from the prayer of the dancing juniper and mountain wind.

I am from Big Sky, the scent of pine and clear air and northern lights.

I am from dawn light washing everything clean just

as I am from twilight as it introduces me to the dark from which I grow.

I am from that which holds onto what is important; 

I am from the bric-a-brac of things left outside, angled against the house, 

that will not last, the kinds of things that never point to the quick of me.

I am from the gang of those who know this about me and share it without speaking.

Nov 2, 2018

THE CHARADE OF WALKING THROUGH WOODS

Before you know it, these trees will drop their pretense

and show us what they are really made of, instead of

shaking their pom-poms like cheerleaders for old man

winter. Soon enough, venous hands will scratch the

impossibly blue ice sky as one arctic front after another will

slap us square in the face and will ask: Well honestly, what did you expect?

And while we love our walks in the woods this time of year,

we know that we are no different. Despite our best efforts,

we lead with the parts of us that are most colorful, the parts

we want others to name and know. Soon enough, much will be

asked of us while claw-hands close around our throats, when we

will be faced with decisions we never dreamed we needed to make,

when we will be asked once again, to drop the charade and come totally clean.

NOV 3, 2018

 GRAVITY, LIKE MANY HINDU GODS, HAS MORE THAN ONE FORM

My fear is that gravity holds me too close to the earth but this

same force that keeps me safe and locked away will also send

me spiraling into a bonecrushing spin toward splintering annihilation.

Trust is a kind of wind resistance that will eventually will slow me down

or like the early Gemini space capsules, will threaten to burn me into a

cinder that will fall without notice into the vast, lonely ocean.

NOV 4, 2018    

CONNECTIONS

The boy with frantic curls grabs at his mother

who holds his toddler sibling after passing

me, busy writing at a table, drinking coffee.

“Mom, that guy over there,” and he points

to me, I can tell, but I am writing, “looks

just like…” and then I can’t hear the rest.

“Yes,” I hear the mother say. “He does,”

unware that I always listen,

unaware that most things in nature do,

The boy’s face is angelic, like lace.

He has made a connection from his own

private world to the larger, scarier one.

He has built a bridge into the unknown

and is satisfied.

NOV 5, 2018

ON THE OCCASION OF THIS HOUR,

WHEN WE CONSIDER WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

On good days this world blossoms, but on the others our voices are softened

by fear so large it’s mistaken for a thunderhead and carried off by the wind.

We go unheard, starting to look more and more like the sepia photos of my

immigrant grandfather, who at seventeen, came over many times bringing family

 to build a way out of his own predicament, who is young enough in these pictures

 to be unaware of his own death – an agnostic till the end, just like the rest of us.

On the occasion of this hour, there are impossible questions that age us all

at seven times the normal rate, like a dog.

Come sit beside me and tell me why you have made the journey,

risked everything or nothing to come. I will believe you.

I will not say a word, but will watch in terror as I listen. I will feed you

because your hunger is so expansive  it has become its own landmass

 that you can lay claim to. I will feel the breath of your language on me

like wings of the monarchs on their trip home to the caves of Mexico

this time of year. On this day, at this hour, there is a darkness that feels                                                                                                                                                                                

like coal,  that burdens us like lead.  We know your short, sleepless nights.

I will bake you bread. In time, when the yeast rises, and love is carried in the

aroma all will be fed. Our common blood will give off heat. Our luminous skins

in all their various shades of earth will  never be warmer than what we hold

in our joined hands together, when we are at last home.

NOV 6, 2018

FIXABLE

against the news of the plant closure

I slam down a bourbon and ice with

a couple of guys in shipping I have

worked with for years. on concrete

floors, from dirty coffee mugs we drink

making toasts to blush a seasoned sailor

at home the words barely squirrel through

my lips in numb disbelief that my job has

gone missing along with one-hundred others

but I am lucky

because like Leonardo DiCaprio at the end

of Titantic, I am riding the stern of this

behemoth straight down to the icy tines

of this Davy-Jones’-locker-of a job

when I am able to speak to my wife

my blessed wife

she looks concerned then sidles up

next to me, snakes her arm around

my neck, closing ranks, keeping out

the ruffian invader that is loss.

NOV 7, 2018

CRUELTY IS THE POINT

Cruelty is the point. There’s no law against it

(unless we are talking about animals)

Or else law has been stripped away from the meaty heart of justice

so that it’s a cold bone we shake without warmth, without skin to

press in embrace, no tear to shed,  unless it’s one of our own who’s died.

(The reservoirs of our anger are all tattooed: theirs and  ours.)

We wear a metallic edge of meanness like a confederate flag

– for which there is also no law against – that normalizes laughter

as the correct human response to suffering.

(even laughing when the other misspells the word as in the previous sentence as ass.)

I am at a loss for cruelty,  unable to respond.

Afraid, I let it slide, and I am sorry for that. Very sorry.

As if we are two different species, you and me.

How were you taught? Who taught you? What were you taught?

We ache for our tribe to include me and mine but at the exclusion

of difference  since this makes us safe, praying to the right gods,

for the right reasons, with the right people, for the thrill of thinking,

sure glad it ain’t me    when the fighting breaks out,

when hunger thunders through swollen bellies,

when disease takes our best and brightest and no one cares,

when one is shot for holding a cell phone in his Nana’s backyard.

Call me a snowflake, I dare you to provoke me.

I will break your hollow heart with kindness.  Laugh at my naivete.

Try to turn me into a cartoon piñata, easy to poke. Think I will break?

Tell me there is more to every interaction than what you hate about me.

Tell me you find more joy in pictures of my grandchild than harming all the

things in my life you don’t know and don’t even want to know.   Please.

NOV 8, 2018

THE UNBOUND HOURS

A coffee card punched with the tenth cup freebie.

The cowlick of a morning sun.

The barren shadow of trees in tender light.

The first fresh coagulate of river ice of the season.

The two-toothed brimming smile of my grandson.

The way light washes everything new, fresh.

A needle slick shape of a crew team at rest in the

                  morning river.

A chance to sit  quietly, alone.

NOV 9, 2018

I WALK OVER PAVEMENT AND

I WALK OVER GRASS

and over every surface I am someone else
and over every surface I change

and with each breath I am right 

and with each exhale I am wrong

and with every act I am good

and when I make amends I am not

I am a city-boy and your redneck brother

I am always your lefty sister

I walk over pavement and I walk over grass

I burst forth from the womb
speaking the tongues of ancestors

I lie still on my death bed waiting

for you to come

And from the same dirt we rose up

to name things and in naming take full dominion

&know the hurt you have kept folded

in your pocket away from others’ eyes

I walk over pavement and I walk over grass

I know what it is to bind to love and
I know the blinding light that is being in love

I am your enemy but also your hero

I am the home you are driven from

I am all of  these things and more to you
I am the cage that protects your rabbit heart

I am the respite from your worried wandering
I am the revelation to your wonder of things

I walk over pavement and I walk over grass

carved from your smile I am not me alone
carved from my smile you are my Holy Mass

carved from what I want is what you want
carved from what we think is how we are alone

we walk over pavement and we walk over grass

we walk for what is to be and we walk for the past

Nov 10, 2018

Letter To My Friend, The Doctor,

On the Writing Prompt Photo of Her Mother

I was thinking of the photo of your mother reading you posted online. 

You say she was in her late 30s, but dear God, she looks like could be twelve!

I was thinking of that picture and how it could be used as a writing prompt. 

The look in her eyes, so intense, and the color, (though this was a black and

white photo) is jet black, the kind of eyes night would have, if night had eyes. 

What color were they? Your eyes are more  like liquid, lucid in their promise.

But in your mother’s eyes there is a potency that makes me remember the

picture. What stresses did she gather into her fists as folded bed sheets,

to hold off for an hour of reading, I wonder? What worried her so that she

escaped by sitting alone, reading? From the photos of your father,  (whom

you resemble by the way – you have his gangliness, his length, his face),

some of those poses are ones I have seen you make and I have not really

known you very long, so it must be a genetic thing, but you are the doctor,

so you tell me.  The drill holes of her eyes speak of your ardor or ok,

we can call it compulsion, or OCD if we must be so twenty-first century about it,

I just call it your superpower.

You should know this though: it has a history. And this picture? It offers proof.

For all I know, your parents were powerful people, like you, and when others met

them, they would walk away thinking, wow, so much energy of the universe channels

through these two! But I never knew either of your parents. Or maybe they were not

so powerful, old photos don't work so well to capture the soul of a person, despite

what those Amazon tribesmen think, the ones who refuse to let moderns take their

picture, fearing it will capture their souls. Instead, she sits and reads, oblivious, finding

herself lost in the book, ignoring the photographer and the viewer of the picture.

NOV 11, 2018

OVERHEARD FROM A GRANDMOTHER TO HER GRANDCHILDREN ASKING

HOW SHE DID VISITING THEIR CLASSROOM TODAY

Was I kind?

Was I safe?

Was I neat?

I would settle for any of these.

OVERHEARD AT THE COFFEE MACHINE

I spend half of every day

Trying to be sure that I

Don’t replicate the mis-

Takes I made yesterday.

OVERHEARD AT THE DUNKIN DONUTS

When I add you to Find My Friends,

I can worry a little more

about you.

NOV 12, 2018

AFTER DRIVING SO LONG,

            IT’S TIME TO CHANGE DRIVERS

(Inspired by Amy Dryansky’s,  Past a Certain Point of Magnification,

All Portraits Become Landscapes)

I don’t feel like a holy spirit.

I possess the inspiration of a moth.

It’s not clear to me if the ringing in my ears is just me

            or some warning of an impending end time.

Please dispense with the desire to beatify,

            to  turn me into a relic whose bits of bone

            in one’s pocket brings one closer to God.

I must hang on to the cynicism, it will come in handy.

(I must remember to feed and nurture mine.)

Faith pulls me along like a tractor plowing fields

but I can’t risk leaving  what’s in store for me

             to the wind and shadows.

           

I need heavy objects or

three astrophysicists to haunt my dreams and

assure me that the sun remains an astronomical body,

that it will show its face again, that gravity will

not take off and leave us

(no magic, this, no miracle needed).

Life breaks apart and all the broken tree limbs are bones

suggesting that nothing ducks out the back.

The next act will sweep in, a rip tide pile of leaves

that rises and falls once more while

I hold on with clenched fingers, nails digging-in.

I will patch whatever comes my way and call it normal.

NOV 13, 2018

PARK HILL ORCHARD, PRE-THANKSGIVING, 2018

The sunlight at the  orchard is a shiny button,

crisp as a Gold Rush apple.

Trees have relented and given up everything,

a perfect model of stillness.

Everything visible. Everything so inviting.

It’s true that visitors come for the colors, but some come for the release,

the leaves’ great resignation to a winter

hovering off the shores of November. Brown hens scamper

while the cock of the roost makes

his presence known with a blood-curdling cry of male bravado.

The art scattered through the field is usually hidden

by the drunken abundance of summer,

but now, each tree is its own art installation, venous limbs at tippy-top

gyrate against a fat blue sky and

wraithy clouds, while terra cotta faces stand as if on

Easter Island, sunning.

There is still flora clinging to life (no matter what that life is, it seems).

Some living things are like that.

Buying apples helps. They are sweet but dry,

so firm, they crack between teeth.

We eat a few slices, while some fall to the ground.

In the end there are fewer second chances.

Thanksgiving is ten days away and soon we will be

among those who see us as redeemable as the latest CVS

coupon. This lets us hold hands,

call each other family

to close ranks, 

so nothing

gets in.

NOV 14-2018

SEASHELL

/There are words within every sea shell/

/that you are able to coax right out of the ocean/

/onto the white sands/

/like a sheet of paper./

/Even the stars are jealous/

/of how you spin beauty/

/out of thin air. /

NOV 15, 2018

The Day My Toaster Was Replaced With a Cactus

Today I went to make toast but the toaster had been replaced with a cactus.
I am not afraid of cactus, but toasters scare me to death.
When I was young, I’d heard stories of people being electrocuted
Sticking forks or knives into trap-like slots that hold bread for toasting.
I was certain my toaster would lure me into its mouth &
I would be the victim of its razor teeth.

Perhaps those living in cactus climates – Arizonans, or Nevadans – have their
Own horror stories about cactus, of those impaled on barbs & left for dead.
Maybe there are stories of hemophiliacs bleeding to death after
An angry encounter with a cactus, rescued from a local nursery.

We carry our orange-cone stories with us everywhere
The ones that warn us of the objects of this world that can harm us.
Things we learn through saturation are hardest to quit.

Nov 16, 2018

Book Making

we type everything into the computer

to produce professional looking works in

order to capture moments of sparkling genius

we take for granted. still, we bind copies by

hand whenever we can, sketch with pen

and ink, & affix & append & book-make very limited edition copies of the one work

that will shake up the world, then dole it out

with an eye dropper or flood everything

with world’s largest Super Soaker we can find. 

or perhaps  we show no one at all because we love what we make by hand without mechanism without artifice or prosthetics of any kind.

we love what it makes us.

NOV 17, 2018

POETRY CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Haikus are how aliens try to communicate with us.

5-7-5 is the nitrogen to phosphorus to potassium

ratio and that is what aliens are made of.

Too much nitrogen results in being too green

(and needing a hair cut in a serious way).

Centos are not breath mints, but poems made of lines

from other poets. Circular centos are poems made by

the same lines of the same set of poets, causing an infinite

loop of poesy, resulting in the urge to drink.

Ghazals are so graceful, bouncing along the

literary Serengeti, dispersing wide light

and dust, until night gently disrobes, and reclines.

It’s getting late, so write me a poem.

Throw out your voice, make a sound you won't regret.

It’s coming for all, you know and poetry is in on it.

NOV 18, 2018

 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA,

CAMP FIRE 2018

smoke rises like a prayer

building petition

so long as you don’t mind

a little asthma.

like the cries of a thousand

out of hot embers

heat thrums in waves like a wall

(who will go get them

those wanting to be found?

or at least the meat and

bone of them

what is left of them

the accident of them

what is remembered of them

what is recalled in

photos of them

what can be carried of them

who will go?)

loss the only story,

the one we are ashamed of

afraid to admit to

the one told in a sky

illumined by flames seen

from outer space.

even the laws of

physics cry out as

probability gives way

to dusky certitude.

then who will go get them?

NOV 19, 2018

FINALLY, ENGAGING THE GRIEF

my father was taken `

before i learned what it was to be a man

and my mother before my heart

grew to the size of the watermelon it is

trying to hold all the tears of a planet

after breaking down like I did you should know

i have needed to do this for some time

just not in front of  you all

and i am sorry for that

there are some things

that need to be whispered

NOV 20, 2018

SOMEDAY I’LL LOVE YOU, MICHAEL BIEGNER

(After Ocean Vuong, After Frank O’Hara, After Roger Reaves)

Hey Michael, heads up!

Others are on their way to  you, to crowd your space.

The line for solitude goes half-way around the block

but you will walk through them like Moses parting the

Red Sea anyway. A whisper is how things reveal  them-

selves to you, phantasm of collegiality, social butterfly 

of mysterious proportions, through radio waves of

irrelevance, you negotiate it all, man!

As a child, remember how those who searched for you

met with perfect stillness, an evolutionary trick of protection.

But you found a tribe anyway, and bought you lock, stock,

and barrel with the currency of kindness, and interests as thick

as primal forests, not the ones now, the ones before deforestation,

the ones before climate change, the ones before everything had an

IP address and GPS coordinates, before everyone had to be some-

place all the time, before you had to be unseen.