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Howling at the Morning Moon

It’s insane to howl at the moon.

But in the early morning January cold
when the full moon burst through the winter clouds
as I jogged along the deserted road,

wolflike, I howled,
howled, and howled again,
barked, yalped at the shingles of the sky.

A primal urge emerged,
my howls, barks, yalps,
echoed ecstatic under the hollow of a bridge—

No one heard my barbaric yalps break
the silence except armadillos, possums,
raccoons, snakes, birds lurking

along the morningside road.
Three miles from my house and civilization;
only the moon saw me.

It’s insane to howl at the moon:
But sometimes. . .

I must.

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Sunday Morning Howls

Should you hear an echoing howl on Sunday morning

just before dawn breaks,  do not be alarmed:

it’s no abandoned pet or rabid dog or wandering wolf.

It’s only me, an early morning runner,

celebrating the self and the primal instincts

within my collective unconscious.

No moon is necessary. . . just the deserted hollow

of an echoing viaduct and the spontaneous joy that overflows

to soothe the savage torpor within.

I hear the primal howl echoing in the morning silence,

the clomp of my running shoes against asphalt,

my heaving breath, the quiet surrounding morning sounds.

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Survival of the Fittest

On the annual bird count,

it took longer than they thought

to stalk the stray cat.

Strong, the shaggy stray could have inflicted

serious damage with its claws,

wild as it was.

His fellow birders held its paws,

with heavy gloves

to protect their hands.

It died quickly, its mouth in an angry

and surprised grimace,

eyes glassy blank.

“That’s one damn cat the birds won’t have to worry about,”

  the cat killer said as he loosed his hands.

The birders left the corpse to rot in the woods,

went back to the annual count. 

They smiled when they sighted

an endangered species

protected against predators.

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No “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” for me            

No “clean, well-lighted place” for me"  

I’ll seek those quiet, red-dim lounges,

‘50’s and early ‘60’s style,

though they exist only in my mind:

a combo—piano, bass, drum set,

a soft sax or a cool clarinet, a mellow horn—

Brubeck and Baker shaped, nothing amplified

the atmosphere of acoustic music,

descending on brown beer bottles

glowing in the half-light,

bottles placed by plainly pretty waitresses

who want no more

than a small tip, a smile,

maybe, in late, lonely moments,

a close, slow dance

without aggression.

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Haiku

The slow, clicking clock

betrays that time will pass as

slow as bitter words.

Mist and morning fog

pelicans resting on the river,

the sun a neon orange.

Thunder and hard rain,

running shoes puddle plashing,

ecstatic spring run.

Full moon grows dim,

in the east a golden sun,

my shadow grows large.

Smells of toil and sweat

from the middle of the pack,

spring’s first 5K race.

One shoe, never two,

plastic, rusty bolts, summer

road alluvia.

Rolling dolphins in

redmorning sun make bright a

dismal gulf of gray.

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Dead Snakes

What makes them

slide from their grassy homes

beside the road to that black asphalt crunch?

I see them on my long runs                                         

to the beach on Sundays,

flattened and drying in the sun,

some speckled and striped with

blunt noses,  some brown or red with silent,                                 

no more ominous rattles.

Can those small-brained, moving alimentary canals

have some higher purpose in silently

sliding onto the road?

Who crunched them on the asphalt road side?

Snake haters,

someone simply driven

to the beach-radiant warmth

not aware he’s crushed something alive?

Why are those snakes on the shoulder of the road?

Is what drove the leopard near

the summit of Kilimanjaro

in those crunched snake brains?

Why does my pace slow,

my heart beat faster

when I see a dead snake on the asphalt?

What drives me to

the hot asphalt where

dead snakes lie dry in the summer sun?

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Deadline

 I tell my students in freshman composition,                          

“A paper is never finished;  it’s just due.”

 I tell them too,

“A poem’s never finished;  it’s just abandoned.”

Some people’s lives are like rough drafts in         

freshman composition

or poetry just drafted:

no polish, no spirit, no voice,

littered with errors,

undiscovered voices

unsung songs,

unmetered days without rhythm,

no metaphored relationships,

no tropes in their years,

no rhyme in their reason,

no editing in their lives,

no revision in their relationships,

no polish in their passions,

… and too soon . . . the deadline.

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Doppelganger

Two shadows followed me on my early morning run:

one was cast by street lights,

another by the setting moon over my right shoulder

as I ran east toward where the sun was not yet.

I was afraid that one or the other shadows

would overtake me,

and I would return from my morning run

an alternate self

caught by a specter from behind.

I  put the street lights and the shadows

behind me as I ran along

the dark morning road toward the beach.

The lights of the drawbridge across the Intracoastal Waterway

cast just one shadow:

the morning moon was waning.

My shoes touched the sand before sunrise,

the soft splash of low-tide waves lulled me

to an openness to the power around me.

Back on the road,

away from the beach toward home,

the shadows gone:

no rising sun yet,

no setting moon,

no street light shadows in the pre-dawn.

Home, I take my pulse,

check my time and pace

and feel I am someone new.

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Intimations of Eternity

Old Wordsworth’s thousand blended notes of spring

Run through my mind the last few days of May:

My days and troubled nights quite often bring

The dark and silent sadness of dismay.

We lose our love of solitude too soon,

And prison shades close in to make us thralls:

Those shades of servitude at life’s near noon

Obscure the splendor of the soul of All.

My weakened voice is strengthened and finds words;

The notes long captive in my heart and soul

Burst forth in bold new bright and changing chords

That echo through my essence, warm my old.

As years obscure our lost nativity,

New birth in age reveals eternity.

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Limitations

The rosy glow of younger generations,

The ebb and flow of strength I feel some days,

Remind me of my human limitations.

The rush of youth and all its excitations

Bring back that lost-day lust that soon decays

The rosy glow of younger generations.

At breakfast, lunch, and dinner meditations,

My mind moves back in time to former ways,

Reminds me of  my human limitations.

At Sunday’s confession, propitiation,

My mind moves through a haze of sixty Mays,

The rosy glow of younger generations.

The Sunday runs and runner high reflections,

My aging knees, the pain my body pays,

Remind me of  my human limitations.

So life goes on with quiet transitions,

While those around scarce sense my heart’s dismay;

The rosy glow of younger generations

Remind me of  my human limitations.

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Mid-Life Crisis         

In the warm February winter late in my fifty-second year,

  I walked into the Gulf-Coast sun,    

     put the top down on my red convertible, on its second day,

       turned on the engine,

        and “cranked up” the oldies station on the radio stereo.

As if programmed,

   the disk jockey cued and played Elvis!

              “Burning Love!”

I was 16 again.

I swung away from the curb,

                                           accelerated,                 

                                               pulled my “Carpe diem” cap down snug.

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Nightmare

In darkness, frenzied, frightened, bound in bed

By bonds of sleep, my dream of Hell recurred

Again:  a classroom filled with dark instead

Of light and peopled by pupils interred

Within their sterile shells of “culture,” each

A mirror, each reflecting his own dark

Sarcophagus, each mind embalmed.  I reach

To “gladly teach,” to light ashes, to spark

The kindled embers smoldering below

What’s left of that which “man has made of man.”

The Nightmare ends the same each night:  with slow

And steady speech I teach the best I can.

But dreadful dreams are dreams, and bells will ring:

My Nightmare’s noisily the real true thing.

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A Sense of Wonder

Solena, our cat, who was named for the sun

and the summer solstice,

for that is when we brought her home from her wild mother,

sits at the sliding, glass door

and looks at the beams of her namesake

breaking across the patio.

In her cateyes is a sense of wonder.

I get up from my chair to slide the door open,

and out she springs like a slinky.

She senses the wonder of the world.

I do not.

Where has it gone these forty or so years,

since I went into the front room with the broken player piano

and was overwhelmed with the sense of the wonder of being alive.

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The Undriven Screw

As I sat in the bathroom in your old trailer

this morning, I saw a half-driven screw

in the toilet-tissue bracket.

Our old house was proliferated with undriven screws,

unnailed nails, leaky faucets, drains that wouldn’t drain,

commodes that wouldn’t flush.

The leaky roof stained the ceiling wallpaper;

outside, unpainted boards and trim cracked and pealed in the sun;

the lawn went unmowed, cluttered with junk.

Though you were a mechanic, our junker cars

ran rough and wanted work,

while that of your best boozing friend

ran smooth, almost like new,

because next to a tub of iced beer,

you tinkered over it every Sunday

before you two went somewhere else to do your boozing.

Everything and anyone seemed more important than us;

things and the family fell apart.

Now you are gone.

The undriven screw, the leaky faucet,

the junk-cluttered yard,

the chaos all around my inheritance.

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Scalping Time

I pull the lawnmower from the outbuilding, gas it up, and

“scalp” the yard, just as Chemlawn told me to do.

It’s a hard mow:

   the engine chokes on the newgreen and deadbrown grass;

   the wheels sink into the carpet turf;

   the deck sticks on tufts sticking up above the ground;

   the grass catcher fills every five minutes;

   the winter blown trash shreds into confetti;

   the muscles I haven’t used since last November’s mow

   strain and pull and ache some.

With the tugs and stops and stalls and constant clipping,

emptying, I smile, enjoy the smell of grass and spring.

I know if it’s spring “scalping time,”

the vernal equinox comes soon,

. . . and I am alive.

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Self-Defining

Some moan in life’s stern tests it’s best resigning

To random chance, the undirected fall;

I think in times of trial I’m self defining.

Some people thrive in self-indulgent whining

To live their lives within a prison wall,

And moan in life’s stern tests it’s best resigning.

My life’s not chance, with free will I’m outlining

The self I want to be, so with each fall,

I think in times of trial I’m self defining.

Some move through life in thoughtless self-confining,

And see what lies beyond a void-less pall

Then moan in life’s stern tests it’s best resigning.

Each test becomes a quiet quest refining

The course I’ll take to not be held in thrall;

I think in times of trial I’m self defining.

Our lives evolve in times of stress, aligning

Our souls within to face the Force of All.

Some moan in life’s stern tests it’s best resigning;

I think in times of trial I’m self-defining.

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The

Road

Lies

Straight

Before me:

A ribbon of

Three miles that

Rise into the horizon,

Perpendicular from the flat

Concrete clump  beneath my feet,

Each time a new journey of discovery.

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So

So

(li

tu

de)

ul

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August 6—The Feast of the Transfiguration

On the mountain,

Elijah, Moses, Jesus

Jesus,

transfigured.

Above the city,                             

Enola Gay, Tibbets, the crew, the bomb

Hiroshima,

transfigured.

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Tallying the Swizzle Sticks

He sat on a couch in the Boom-Boom Room

and systematically

lay wooden swizzle sticks

from Black Jack and Coke

on the table.

His goal was 10.

He thought two rows of four swizzle sticks

crossed diagonally by a fifth

showed symmetry,

affirmed his manhood.

He didn’t know he had a problem.

He knew the barmaids

in a half-dozen clubs

by first names.

and they knew him,

because they liked him.

He didn’t much like himself,

reliving his father’s life

a life he vowed not to relive,

a  wasted life

of boasts and failure.

Next time he would go for 15. 

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Stray Dog

He joined me just around

the corner of my house

as I was out for a six-mile

on a Sunday morning about seven:

A black dog with a brown muzzle

and brown socks and white salty-looking stripes

on his shoulders, a red cloth collar around his neck

with the end dangling down about four inches.

He was a friendly dog, not aggressive;

he never barked,

just padded through the puddles

left by the early morning rain.

I thought he would follow along for a while                                                

then tire and give up.                                                                                        

I spoke to him gruffly,                                                

and he would slow and drop behind about 10 yards,

but I still heard the click of his paws  

on the pavement, and soon he was again by my side.

At two and a half miles, I picked up a  stick  

tossed it in front of him, hoping to discourage him from                         

following where I was headed:   

there might be some treacherous traffic.

He stayed with me, even when I passed the yards                                                         

with barking, aggressive dogs.

Up onto the first set of river levees, toward the three-mile mark

still the pad of paws.

Off the levee and by the police

I thought about stopping                                                                             and asking someone to take custody of the stray,

but I didn’t.

Across the most dangerous intersection,

up onto another river levee past the football stadium,

back up onto the levee toward the five-mile.

Still he was there alongside, slightly ahead

slightly behind, distracted only momentarily

by a cat in the distance

dashing into the bushes.

Five miles and off the levee just short of six

he followed me through the steep

levee and the slick morning grass."

Six miles. Home.

I left him where I found him,

a solitary running companion.

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The Flash of Order tc "The Flash of Order "

The mind and force of order spoke but once

Through light:  primordial chaos trembled at

The sound, and all things formless rushed to form

And flashed against the silent black’s abyss.

That force to form has never ceased, but since         

Evolved through one-celled slime to fish to ape

To man in whom the image of the sound

Fresh flashed to order from disorder shape.

So hairy hands became a mind that touched

A stone;  and from the dark of caves he came,      

To order chaos into form; the light 

Primeval from within demanded it.

And close behind this thinking man there stood

A man of more than instinct, skill, and brawn

A man of insight closer still to light           

Than all the builders, warriors, kings, and gods:

The poet saw and sang what no man else

Could see and say:  the light flashed in his mind. 

            The ancient cities rose to fall and all

That’s left behind is what their poets saw,       

For they amid the dark’s attack preserved

What light remained through all those eras lost.

So Homer told the tale of Troy and all

The death and ruin Helen’s beauty wrought.

Upon the scroll within the piles of stones,                     

The poet’s light remained, at times his mind

The only vestige bright amid despair,               

Despair, in fading hope that all was lost: 

His mind the microcosmic cosmos charged                           

With light, a light unconquered by the dark.                       

            By forest torches, woodpile embers’ ebb,                      

By candle, gaslight glow the poet’s sight          

Was there to see and tell and write;  by light