I want to do what he/she does

I want to do what he does. Or she does. We start that from an early age. Firefighter. Baseball player. Skateboarder. Sometimes those models stick with us and we stay after them. Sometimes they change. Sometimes the reality sets in: I just don't have the sideburns or hair to be Eddie Murray.

As I got older, who those folks were shifted a bit. I remember reading Carl Sandburg when I was 15 and thinking, I want to be able to make someone feel/think like he just made me feel. That would be cool. In my 20s and beyond, that became Rilke, Tom Robbins, Gary Snyder. Jim Harrison.

The stillness of this earth
which we pass through
with the precise speed of our own dreams.

Harrison died this past week. He was 78. He died at his desk, writing. From the way he lived his life, it sounds like a blessing that it wasn't drawn out, to quote those who knew him, "he wasn't cut out for assisted living."

Strictly speaking, the writer's life is not for me. I have no interest spending my days behind a keyboard, indoors, deep in abstract thought or trying to inhabit the minds of characters that live in my head. No thank you. I would rather be outside, living life, and trying to communicate that in some way. And that is part of what Jim Harrison represents for me: living an interesting life.

He spent his life doing things he loved, outside. He did things that you read out, dream about, in some cases forget about. He lived a rich life. With his dogs:

Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

Harrison, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, Edward Abbey. Those guys are the last men standing when I look for my tribe of guys who did, or are doing, what I want to do.

Life and language. I can't get enough of either, though there are plenty of times when language fails, or I don't want it. Harrison got that too:

My heart must be open to the cosmos with no language unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.

Being open to the Universe as a source for language. And as a guide for life. I have been digging the remembrances of Harrison the man, and Harrison the writer. Obviously those two aspects are one and the same. He was a part of his Michigan landscape, the region. He knew it, lived it, and could write about it like no one else. I have the Eastern Shore in my bones that way, I sometimes feel.

I like when you can use the term "rugged individualism," and not have it be hyperbole or false praise. Harrison is the poster child. And that's part of how he inspires me. He doesn't make me want to go to Michigan and do what he did. He makes me want to get out and find, strike up, live my own life. To get outside. To chase dreams.

My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

Interstellar Cosmic Universal Randomness

As random as Bruce Willis in a pink Easter Bunny suit. That's pretty random. Where random is the root word in the phrase, "interstellar, cosmic, universal randomness." And when you frame it that way, it got me to wondering, how random is anything once you go cosmic?

Years ago I walked into the Newscenter in Easton, a book store not known for its poetry selection or for books beyond bestsellers and classics. And on the end cap was a book called "The Shadow of Sirius" by W.S. Merwin. I had heard of Merwin before, but never read him, and had no inclination to pick that book up--it was thin with a pale gray cover, no reason to notice it. But I picked it up, bought it, read it cover to cover. Merwin became a heavy for me. A short stretch later, a former boss/mentor and I went to see Merwin speak/read at the Folger Theater in D.C. In the audience was my former adviser from Washington College, who waited in line with me to go meet Merwin and get books signed. I have not met most of the writers I most look up to. Merwin is one of the few. Looking back, I don't think picking that book up was random.

Both of us understood
what a privilege it was
to be out for a walk
with each other.

I turned in Merwin's thin, gray book to those words yesterday. They wouldn't have meant anything different to me until recently, but they landed right where they were supposed to, cosmically speaking.

Sirius, the Dog Star, is the brightest star visible from any part of the Earth. An interstellar all star. It's easy to spot on winter and spring evenings. And I dig that it is described as "white to blue" in color.

Stars and birds have grabbed my attention a lot lately. Those sky dwellers that leave us at once feeling grounded, but knowing ours is not the only lot, and that we are somehow connected. A view from the back deck, accompanied by books, accompanied by pilsner, conversation, love, watching the birds move about above, or intuiting us moving about beneath the stars. Victor Hugo feels the intermingling of the soul and the stars:

He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of his soul with the depths of the universe.

The intermingling of the soul and the stars. The terrestrial and the heavenly. This universal scale, the cosmic perspective; it is from that balcony that random dissipates, gives way to the underlying pattern.

Merwin's big book of selected poems is titled, "Migration." He is a poet of the birds and the stars. And late in his Sirius book, he turns to the thrush,

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

song unquestioning and unbounded
yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all memory waking into it

The song of the thrush brings the cosmos from the sky, from the night, into the now, waking with all memory. Timeless to temporal.

Random. Like Bruce Willis in a pink Easter Bunny suit. Chuck Palahniuk says of the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, that they, "seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination. Like cognitive training exercises."

Maybe that's how it goes. The Willis Bunny is a step toward faith and imagination. Or maybe, a dude in an Easter Bunny suit isn't random in the connected minds of those who conjured it.

Beer, Poetry & Happiness

Maine Beer Company combined two of my favorite things: beer and poetry. More specifically, really good beer and an iconic poem by one of my heavies, my all-time favorite writers, William Carlos Williams. Red Wheelbarrow Ale has climbed among the leaders in my favorite beer crew.

Beer and poetry are two things that I like to imbibe daily that spin my mind and soul a bit. They can reshuffle the deck, and spin the compass in myriad directions. "Red Wheelbarrow" the poem is short, simple and confounding. Check the technique:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I've written about Williams here before. He was a physician, who had a lifelong medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was not an ivory tower academic. He didn't much dig T.S. Eliot, who he felt was too stock in Europe--history, culture, tradition, allusion--and Williams looked to dial poetry back to more common, everyday language, and write about things and people that were more everyday life.

Some of his poetry, "Red Wheelbarrow" included is about the image it creates, like a still life painting. You can just sit with it, like you would a good beer on a deck in the sun on a spring evening, sun going down behind tall pine trees. It's a scene. You can also play with the Zen idea of the interconnectedness of the Universe. Hell, you can do just about anything you want--the thing about poetry, like beer, is not all tastes are the same, not all interpretations are the same, and you can sit and ponder that shit for a while.

I found good poetry before I found good beer. I'm not sure what the first "good" beer I drank was. But I do know that it was Carl Sandburg that slammed down the strong man mallet and lit the poetry neon sign up for me, when I was 15.

Sandburg dug and wrote about Chicago. So that became the first city I thought about when I thought about poetry. Dude, Chicago has their own poet; a cat that writes all about them and their people, the blue collar folks. Sandburg and Williams had that in common, the common.

Sandburg made his point for me, especially, in a poem called "Happiness:"

I ASKED professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
      me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
      thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
      I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
      the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
      their women and children and a keg of beer and an
      accordion.

Thank you, Carl. It's not the academics or philosophers who know happiness. It's not the business people, who are too clever to get caught in that game. It's the families, sitting along the river, with a keg and music.

When I think of Chicago today, I think of happiness. Not that Chicago is a happy city, but that image resonates. I think of a trip I took there and running along the lake, to Navy Point, going to the Field Museum, the Art Institute, the Adler Planetarium. I think about Wrigley Field and Soldier Field and digging the Bears after the Colts left Baltimore. But those are details, memories.

Today, it's beer, poetry and happiness.

To Dig: Rocks, Puzzles, Geology and Poetry

Firefighter and archaeologist were the first two jobs I wanted to have. Firefighter goes back to my obsession with the show "Emergency!" Roy and John were cool for me long before I knew who Ponch and John or Bo and Luke were. Archaeologist came from seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the then Avalon movie theater.

Yes Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones oozed cool. But it wasn't the whip, or being shot at, or the fights or chases that pulled me in; it was the idea that the planet, its history, was a mystery, a puzzle to be solved, put back together. It was the notion of digging in the earth and uncovering and being able to physically touch and come in contact with history.

It's funny the things in life we let ourselves drift away from when our minds take on more practical matters.

Clearly, science hasn't been the direction I've taken my life. But the gap between a field like science and a pursuit such as poetry aren't too far afield:

On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly than others, the poetry of their subjects... Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. - Herbert Spenser 

Geology, archaeology, philosophy, poetry, they all begin in curiosity, in wonder. They all look to gain or attain some form of mastery, an in-depth attempt at understanding their subject and their world. They all dig in some way, shape, or form.

My mind of late has been on rocks. I am terrible with names, whether people's or things'. I can be bowled over by the magnificence of something I encounter on a hike or trail run, but not try to learn more about it or understand it better. That's one of the things I'm taking into the new year: I want to dig deeper.

Geology, as much as archaeology, can be the study and solving of puzzles. I've had recent conversations with my nine-year-old daughter about continental drift and with friends about Pangaea. Without geological study, there is no mystery, no jaw-dropping wonder about the world on which we find ourselves standing. One of my favorite non-fiction writers in John McPhee. In his "Annals of the Former World," he condenses geology, mystery and poetry into a single sentence:

When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

Summitting Mt. Everest is a supreme physical accomplishment. But knowing what you are standing on, and being able to reel in that absurdity should be a part of that sense of both achievement and mystery.

That is a depth I am looking to add to my own adventures. To dig deeper. To recognize and celebrate the wonder of the geologist, as well as the poet and the philosopher. To go back to the mystery and the puzzles of history that grabbed my attention via Harrison Ford and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I wonder if I need a new hat?

Fireside, Cave Paintings and Dreams

My mind is dancing, fickle like fire. It won't stand still--it jumps, flicks tongues, wall rides, scattering darkness, but dives back down before illuminating. Can't see what's there.

I'm sitting in a cave. It's me, the fire, someone across the fire from me that I can't make out, just an outline. Not a stranger, just can't see across the fire.

Can't make out the cave walls. There are shadows. I need to stoke the fire. With what? Drugs bring smoke but no additional light. They are not the stoke.

tucked up in clefts in the cliffs
growing strict fields of corn and beans
sinking deeper and deeper in the earth
up to your hips in Gods
                 your head all turned to eagle-down
                 & lightning for knees and elbows
your eyes full of pollen

                the smell of bats
                the flavor of sandstone
                grit on the tongue.

                women
                birthing
at the food of ladders in the dark.

Gary Snyder chants. The flames dance higher. Figures on the wall...

Art. Poetry. Drawings. The child, surrounded by nature, is the one connected to the Universe. I know these drawings. I've seen them. I've written about them, read about them.

Caves. Fire. Shelter. Food. Primal elements. Fire meant food, community. It still does. Fire pulls the tribe together. It is conversation, happy hour, camping, return from a trail run to crack a beer, sip soup and share stories. Fire lets us see in the dark.

The cave has more. Skateboarding. Future Primitive. A love that began at 13 and has continued through today at 42 and tomorrow at whatever age. The figures on the wall look like this...

Lance Mountain. The figures are also running. Tribal. More of the cave, the walls are showing now. Scenes, images, symbols from my life. The girls. Passions. Shared experiences. Spelled out on the walls of the cave. Plato would be pleased.

I get up and walk to further parts of the cave. The walls are bare. They are uncovered. Unwritten. Still to be written. The writing is from life. From love. From experience. What is the rest of the story? What symbols? What art?

What becomes paintings on the cave walls begins as dreams. Neil Gaiman knows dreams. He has written Dream's story in epic and graphic fashion. He begins "The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections" with an artist, a playwright and director who is afraid of heights. In his dreams, he fears falling. He believes there are two possible outcomes to falling in a dream: either you wake up, or you die. No good outcome.

And the artist, the dreamer, finds himself in a dream, climbing. At the top of the mountain, he meets Dream. Dream points out that there is a third alternative. "Sometimes when you fall, you fly."

The most unlikely scenario. It flies in the face of common sense. But we aren't talking sense. We are talking dreams. Why would anything sensical wind up as a cave painting?

(Not) Only the Lonely

I ran probably 10 of the 13.1 miles of the Chester River Challenge with a girl I'd never met and will likely never see again. About three miles into the race, a group of us settled into a comfortable pace and pushed along as a pack. Running face first into a 30-40 mph headwind on the second half of the course, this girl in blue and I pushed ahead of the pack.

I've run with a number of folks, but I don't think any of them have had the same foot strike pace that I do. Blue girl did. You only heard one set of feet pounding pavement. We didn't talk much. But at one point, we turned out of the wind down a stretch of hilly, country road, were off mostly on our own, and the thought of running that road, in that weather, as a training run was in my mind, since the rest of my body hurt.

"Sometimes this whole running thing is a bleak, solitary pursuit," I said.

"Yeah, it is," she laughed.

But for those miles, for the couple shared comments, for those common footfalls it wasn't.

Human loneliness seem to be the basic condition for two of my life loves: running and writing. Both have solitude as a building block. Both require you to turn inside, to see what is there and to do something with it. And maybe in the end, both are an answer to this condition of loneliness.

The medium of poetry isn't language, really: it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively. - Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, reviewing Olena Kalytiak Davis's new book.

Maybe writing, especially writing as personal as poetry, is the writer saying, "Hey, this fu**ing sucks. Anyone else?" And the act of writing, the reaching out, if we stumble across some universal feeling or nerve, or at least one other nerve in one other person, the loneliness might abate.

Music can probably be included as a means of combating the lonely. I am not a musician, but I hear it in Delta blues. And I hear it in Sturgill Simpson. Simpson seems to be connecting with a number of folks, Rolling Stone Magazine called his "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music" one of the 50 best albums in 2014.

I dig the way Rolling Stone blurbs it along with some Simpson lyrics:

"Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, they all changed the way I see / But love's the only thing that ever saved my life," sings Simpson. The Kentucky-born singer-songwriter's breakthrough album features plenty more folk wisdom, delivered in a singular barrel-aged baritone.

Since a friend shoved me in Simpson's direction, I have been listening a lot, and he seems to fit any mood, from cleaning the house, to happy hour, to morning coffee, or sipping whiskey under the stars.

Running, writing, and music all seem to be born out of an elemental loneliness. They all feel like ways for the runner, writer, musician to bridge a perceived gap, to connect with something, or someone else. And, lucky us, the act of doing, or reading, or listening, can sometimes let us know that someone else out there gets it. Gets us.

Cast Off

Hass is in the backpack. He has seen me through some rough times. He's become a solace of sorts. I don't want to say a security blanket, this isn't a Linus Van Pelt situation, but Hass has been a comfort. This spring, I carried and consulted his "Sun Under Wood." This go round I've gone back to the source, his first book, "Field Guide."

Hass is meditative. Calming at times. His descriptions of landscapes, animals, family, what makes us human.

Of all the laws
that bind us to the past
the names of things are
stubbornest

Hhhmm, We didn't name this world we encounter. It was named for us, before us. Dammit, we are bound to the past. But that's alright, it gives us a record, a continuity, a history.

The funny thing, this time, Hass isn't enough. There is something to calm about his words. It can't touch on the manic. The excitable. There's no restless leg or restless soul syndrome. That's where Roberto Bolano comes in. Bolano is less sure seeming. He is grappling, struggling, he is not removed or in the background.

Brief like beauty,
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world's majesty and misery
And which is only available to those who love.

Beauty, majesty, they are a package deal with misery. You only get them if you put your heart out there. Bolano's "The Romantic Dogs" is a soul experiencing life first-hand, without a field guide.

On the dogs' path, my soul came upon
my heart. Shattered, but alive,
dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love.
On the dogs' path, there where no one wants to go.

Being replaceable. That's one of the things I've been stuck on recently. Most of us can be replaced at our jobs. Within a year, people will forget who you were. Work at a big enough company, most people don't even know if you are there or not.

Fifty or so percent of spouses are replaceable, it would seem. If someone isn't happy, they can move on, replace spouse one with a newer model. That's where we are, and that's the reality that relationships, marriages face.

We have an idea at the vastness of the Universe. And our minuscule size therein. Why wouldn't we all be replaceable? What kind of hubris would lead us to think otherwise?

And yet, we long to be unique. Individual. And maybe that is possible. Maybe it takes the right job. the job that brings to bear the things you can do that no one else can do the same. Maybe it takes the right partner: the one for whom the things that make us unique are the things they love, and the things that make them unique are what we can't get enough of.

Routine. Time. Habit. Sunrise, coffee, shower, drive, punch the clock, sit in a chair, punch the clock, drive, child's practice, dinner, homework, sleep. Repeat. x 5. x 30. x 365. And you look around and wonder about the time. Where has it gone? Time, you say? That's a thing we made...

Actually, the concept
Of time arose from the weaving
Together of the great organic
Cycles of the universe,
Sunrise and sunset, the moon
Waxing and waning, the changing
Stars and seasons, the climbing
And declining sun in heaven,
The round of sowing and harvest,
And the life and death of man.

That's our man Rexroth joining the fray. He's the third book in the backpack these days. He's roped onto the big questions, soul permeating the landscape and history, sex weaving its way through his adventures and words. Activity.

Maybe that's what I am getting from Bolano and Rexroth right now: activity. Movement. Getting out of the rut. Get out on the water. Blow bubbles at the sunset. Find and do and be the things that make you, YOU. Find unique and cast off replaceable. Cast off.

Everyday Adventures

Sometimes it's tough to see every day as an adventure. Sometimes there isn't enough coffee in the world to get even the most positive person out the door for a day half full.

Sometimes the mundane spreads its sleep-heavy arms wide around and squeezes tight. Bills. The same commute. The same four walls. The same cubicle. Painting the same house. The work that keeps you from doing the work or play where you feel your adventure awaits.

It is those times when it helps to have friends that remind you of the everyday adventures right in your back yard. Who look for and create adventures where other people drive past, don't take the turn, and never get out of the car.

Places of adventure. Like Claiborne, MD. Where on a Sunday too windy for most to consider going out on the water, a group of kiteboarders turn that wind into this. And just 24 hours later, you have a soul stunning sunset that can make the rest of the day and the world stop, if you take the time to look.

What if we could all see a sunset the way Kenneth Rexroth does when he is just chilling in an apple orchard, reading Sappho with a lady friend:

See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
at once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.

Watch a sunset with someone. Read and be transported back in history and feel the Universe moving through each other in that moment.

There are adventures that fill the mind. There are adventures that stretch and push the body. And there are adventures that enlarge and expand the soul. They are in small towns with no traffic lights. They are in books. They are in sunsets. They are with your people.

Everyday adventures. If we have the eyes to see them. And the mind to take the time to give them a chance to happen.

The Real Work: Gary Snyder and Inheriting Experience

Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's all-time home run record on my birthday. April 8, 1974. I was two years old, possibly smashing cake all over my face. That is one of those singular moments in sports that will be remembered forever by all who were alive and following baseball, or American sports at all. Culturally memorable.

Go back about 20 years before that, to April 8, 1956. Much less culturally relevant to most, and with no fanfare, Beat Generation pioneer, future Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder began a book that would take him 40 years to finish. The book is only 152 pages long. It's not like he was going "War and Peace" on us. But that's how long it took "Mountains and Rivers Without End," as the back cover describes it, "an epic (poem) of geology, prehistory, and mythology."

Snyder is a big deal to me. So much so that the idea for my next tattoo, a sleeve on my left arm, began with the cover art for his book "Turtle Island." He is a game changer, both as a writer, for what he has written, but also as a human, for how he has lived his life. Let's see if I can explain.

If you live a life interesting enough that Jack Kerouac bases one of the characters in his novel "Dharma Bums" after you, chances are you're living a pretty fu**ing cool life. Snyder is one of those writers that has not lived his life behind a desk dreaming things up. He has experienced life. He has lived it. And that's what he writes from: experience, of the world, of the soul, of the planet, of the cosmos, of the human condition.

You can get at what I mean just by looking at a list of the jobs Snyder has held: logger, fire lookout on Desolation Peak, steam freighter crew, translator, carpenter, poet. He has degrees in literature and anthropology and has studied linguistics and Asian languages. When he wanted to dig into Zen Buddhism, he moved to Japan and spent 12 years in intense study. His experience is not limited to books, nor does it shun them. He wrote the first poems that he would published while working as a trail crew laborer for the U.S. Park Service. He was also studying classical Chinese at the time. Of course he was.

The first time I remember really thinking I would like to write for a living, I was 14. I loved and lived skateboarding, body, mind, and soul. It was something I wanted to always be a part of (14 year old me would like to know that 42 year old me still digs skating, I reckon), but I knew I wasn't good enough to be the next Tony Hawk or even a pro skater. So I thought, I'd like to write for "Thrasher" Magazine. Tell skating stories, dig into the culture and become a voice of skating.

For all the various times I've pictured myself as some sort of writer, and for all the words I've written, I've never wanted to live life at a desk. Writing is the outlet, not life itself. It is how I make sense of my life and the world around me. It is how I try to relate to things. But it is not living. I want to experience, to live an interesting life, to imbibe perspective, and then write. If you read Snyder, he gets that.

I have a friend working on a book right now. She's researching, interviewing, transcribing, compiling, writing. Of all of it, she says the writing is the hardest part. What she looks forward to the least. It is draining. It saps her, and then she needs to go recharge, by doing anything but writing. Running, photography, traveling with her husband, playing with dogs.

I function largely the same way, and I think a lot of writers would say the same. Writing is a release, it is a pouring out. It empties you. And then it is your job to go refill your soul. If you don't, what will you have to write about?

In his book, "The Real Work," Snyder posits that he:

...hold(s) the most archaic values on earth... the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

I need to post that on the refrigerator with artwork and photos of our daughters, so that they can read it every day as well. In Mountains and Rivers, the book started on my birthday 20-ish years before I was born, Snyder scrolls:

'The Fashioner of Things
         has no original intentions
Mountains and rivers
         are spirit, condensed.'

The work Snyder is doing, "the real work," that is the inheritance I want to earn.

Eliot in Your Bones

T.S. Eliot abides. He was the last of the big three mind blowers for me in college (the first two were William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche). Eliot was maybe the biggest of the three, because he combined some of the aesthetic/poetic vibe of Blake with the philosophical depth and inquiry of Nietzsche. My last college essay was on Eliot and the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, who Eliot wrote his PhD dissertation on at Harvard.

In the library at Washington College, I found Eliot's book of essays, "Sacred Wood," where his notion of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," reworked my thinking of the literary tradition we inherit, and how that inheritance requires work and study, it isn't just given to us. And the idea that you don't just read the dead poets to know the past, but also feel it in the here and now:

...not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence: the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that that whole of the literature of Europe from Homer...

Writing with a literature in your bones.

After college I put Eliot down for a while. He had redefined poetry, tradition, allusion, scholarship. And that wasn't the world I was inhabiting at the time. A few years later, at some bookstore or another, I found "Four Quartets." Meeting Eliot the first time was mind blowing and hard work, and deep study. Four Quartets was meeting Eliot again for the first time. This Eliot was lyrical, deep, philosophical. I could read him on my own without needing a library for back up.

This past week I was looking for a book in the garage to give to a friend. During that expedition, I unearthed Four Quartets. It was sleeping in a garage box. The next morning, I started from the beginning:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is redeemable.

Four Quartets are connected meditations on our place in the Universe, about Time, and about the Divine. Each of the poems also represents one of the elements: Burnt Norton is air, East Coker is earth, The Dry Salvages is water, Little Gidding is fire. You want depth? You want philosophy? You want poetry you can delve into a spin your head around? Four Quartets has it,

I've been dwelling in solitude a lot lately, my thoughts inhabiting the space around me. Finding Eliot again has brought back a calm, a peace that I thought I had lost; an introspection that is also a self inquisition:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
         love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
        dancing.

I fu**ing hate waiting. I am not good at patience. But there is a zen to Eliot's waiting, where the stillness becomes dancing. That's the kind of stillness I need to find. Dance while you wait, please.

Eliot's notion of cyclical time, time that loops back on itself, where the end and the beginning are the same. It's what I find in coming back to Eliot. Again, for the first time. Eliot is in my bones.

     We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Floating Under the Stars, or Open Book in Case of Emergency

Poetry goes deep. Like a 70-yard bomb dropped perfectly into the hands of your favorite wide receiver. When I read the right stuff, it connects every time. And I have to say it is more essential to my life and mental well being than fiction or non-fiction could ever be. Here's why.

When it comes to books, and probably life in general, I am demanding but have a chronically short attention span. As I've said before, my mind is a series of tangents, followed until the next one comes along . Poetry can deliver in one re-readable, memorizable page what it takes a novel or narrative non-fiction book hundreds of pages to accomplish. And sometimes I need that quick fix, something to straighten my soul out that hits like a shot of bourbon.

At my existentially loneliest, I reach for poetry. When other books feel like a distraction, which is sometimes welcome, most of the time I know I need to sit and ponder. To wonder, to question, to try to get to the bottom and come out the other side.

Saturday I was having one of those kind of evenings, stockpiling some moments like that, when really I shouldn't have been. I had watched our daughters played field hockey, taken them and a friend to see a Spanish Galleon/tall ship in Oxford, then swimming at the Strand. It was a good, full day. The girls were napping. And those existential crisis moments come up on me unexpected.

So I reached for James Tate's "Memoir of the Hawk" and a pale ale. I sat on the deck, listened to the breeze talking to the trees; the birds chirp over the quieter wind; and I dug in. And I did the same thing Sunday, when time presented itself. I did a fair amount of underlining. Tate tapped me on the shoulder with this, looking for that perfect, private place to escape to:

has never been discovered,
is thought to be the source of all fire.
is a pigpen for the soul,
changes its shape and location
when you try to think of it.

I know that place. It recedes into the horizon before you can quite make it out. It's always just beyond my grasp. Fu**ing Tantalus, reaching for hanging fruit, just out of reach. And that doesn't help me solve anything, but it puts me in the frame of mind where, hey, this cat Tate, maybe he knows where I'm coming from. Then he goes for broke in a poem called "Scattered Reflections:"

And only myself to blame--love,
booze, stupidity, mix 'em up
and you'll find yourself babbling
to God in Arabic about a demonic cat
living in your head next to the
fiery urinal.

Good writing, for me, should make you think, should make you laugh, should connect you to the broader world. Love, booze and stupidity will leave you dumbfounded.

When I was young,
I thought respectable meant dead.
...

And then at some invisible point
you realize it is the same story
told over and over, and that's
when you either move on or die.

Maybe we all reach that point. Where we recognize the rut. Where wherever we go, we are stuck hearing the same cocktail party banter, sitting in the same cubicle, walking in circles. We're like a dog, spinning itself a space to lie down.

But here is where Tate lets loose the long tight spiral that lands in my hands in stride down the sideline:

I drove the whole country, examining
homes, stores, businesses, streets,
people, like a crazed inspector general,
when all I was looking for was me.
I concluded that there was no me,
just flutterings, shudderings, and shadows.
I think most people feel the same way,
and it isn't bad, floating under the stars
at night like fireflies sending signals.

Floating under the stars at night. Maybe that is what we do in this life. And we're so concerned that we're floating on the right kind of raft, or boat, or if we have on our swanky swimsuits, that we forget to look up. We forget to look at the stars.

Floating under the stars at night. And it isn't bad.

Of Words and Souls

I wonder if my soul has words written on it. And if it does, what words are they? As I've been walking through the worlds of Virginia Woolf and Charles Williams and Neil Gaiman, I always have a book of poetry going. Poetry where a poet, in the space of a page, can make me ponder love, life, the Cosmos, loss, sex, our place in the Universe and Nature, the color blue, mythology, history, God. Maybe in the space of three stanzas. Can do what it takes novelists 500 pages to do. Condense the soul into words, just a few, and make it speak.

Because a poem is made up of words, speech is how the soul is embodied. (Frank Bidart, from an interview at the end of "Metaphysical Dog.")

Sometimes when I read something that someone I know writes, I can hear their voice saying their words. At its best, I feel like my writing has my voice, my speech, my soul embedded in it. You want to see what my soul looks like? Can you see it in my eyes? Is my soul blue? Or could I better show it in something I've written, something that feels like everything I have to say, or have said yet. Can my soul live on a page, or on a screen, separate from me, created by itself? Or can you hear it in my voice? Tricky fu**ers, these souls. How can we get our arms around them?

Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem. (Bidart, same interview)

Last evening, we were sitting on a dock on the Tred Avon River. A heron flew by overhead and landed by the shore. We have established that herons do enough for me that I have one tattooed on my arm. I've talked about herons as my spirit animal on here before. Watching a heron fly, with its legs kicked back long behind it; then watching it transition, ungracefully to land; and then to see them still, balanced, stoic in the water. I wonder if something outside of you, observed by you, can speak your soul? I wonder if my soul could be captured in that clumsy transition from air to water, when the legs come down and arrest forward momentum, both looking improbable, but working every time. My ungraceful, improbable, functional soul.

The words, like a bonfire encased
in glass, glowed on the horizon.

Can a soul be contained in words? Are words written on the soul of one who writes? If words are connected to the soul, maybe they would look like a bonfire encased in glass, glow(ing) on the horizon.

But I think Bidart's right. That's the creative struggle. To get the whole soul into the poem, the painting, the art. Maybe words, maybe art, maybe love is how the soul speaks to another or to itself.

Wrestling Rilke

Rilke stands in the doorway. You have to reckon with him. If you write and think and feel, there is no getting around him. He has said too much. Even to folks like me who have and will only read him translated. I put Rilke and Rimbaud in the category of favorite poets whose asses I would sometimes like to kick. Because as brilliant and breath taking and mind and soul expanding as they are, sometimes I don't want them to be right.

Let me explain. Here's Rilke from the first of his "Duino Elegies:"

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming experience.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

Fu**. Now what? I have sat reading Rilke in the Oxford Park. On Deer Isle in Maine. In the library at Washington College, though I never studied him in a class. Sitting on the back deck of the last three houses we've lived in.

"Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror..." that, "serenely disdains to annihilate us." Picture Jack Nicholson in military uniform leaning forward in your face saying, "You can't handle beauty!"

Those things we spend our lives looking for, hoping to find. Beauty. Happiness. Peace. Then wrestle with the idea that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. And let's talk about love for a minute as something of beauty. The early days of being in love, as fantastic as they are, for most people who harbor healthy insecurities, there is also some real fear lying just behind the beauty of it. Fear that it won't end well; fear that you'll be swept away and maybe it won't be reciprocated; fear of losing yourself; fear of getting hurt. In matters of the heart, that fear is there.

That's not a perfect analogy, but it points the finger, for me, at what Rilke is saying. But there is more to Rilke than that. A shit-ton more. This is what I've got time for this morning. So wrestle with beauty and terror is the same experience. Wrestle with Rilke. And maybe we'll come back to him and show why sometimes you don't have to feel like he needs an existential ass-whooping.

Happy Hour

At different times, I have seen the Universe from our back porch: reflected in the Butterfly Bush; reflected in kids bouncing on the trampoline; reflected in Evolution Craft Brewing's Lot No. 6 Double IPA; reflected in Walt Whitman or Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's poetry, or Kerouac's "On the Road," or Thomas Merton; reflected in scooping up the dead baby bird that fell from the tree.

The breeze blows over fresh cut grass as I read...

The world gives you itself in fragments / in splinters:

and

in 1 flaming summer you catch bits of the universe licking its face
the moment 1 indescribable girl
      rips her Oaxacan blouse,
just at the crescent of sweat from her armpits

with the hoppy taste of IPA still dancing on my tongue and tickling my brain as crickets take over the soundtrack, backed by cars and diesel engines from the highway.

THIS is happy hour.

Chasing Wallace Stevens, Adam Brown and Danny Way

Maybe I've been chasing Wallace Stevens all along. I don't know. I'm no expert. Didn't know that much about him, really. But he came to stand for something in my mind before I even read him.

Wallace Stevens is a path, a way to combine the philosophical and the creative; the absurd and the profound; the stars, the Earth, myth and books. From my first times reading him, I've know he was doing something with his writing that I want to do with mine. It's also his commitment to writing, since he didn't write for a living, but still made time, composing in his head on his walk to work. All the same, I don't want to get shoved to the ground by Hemingway or sell insurance like Stevens did.

I like Stevens as a model, albeit an imperfect one. Not a catwalk-turning model, but something to strive for.  I've been thinking about a couple other models lately: Adam Brown and Danny Way. I don't have designs on being a modernist poet, a Navy SEAL or a game-changing professional skateboarder. But at times I've wanted to be all three.

I'm not going to go into detail about Adam Brown's story. I'll let Eric Blehm do that for you in his book "Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of Navy SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown," which I think all human beings should read. What I want to say about Brown is that he has become a model for me for overcoming obstacles. From drug addiction to injuries that should have ended his career, Brown relentlessly and compassionately ran down his dream. He would not be stopped. That's something I want to cultivate further in myself.

And Danny Way represents a couple things. Forging a new path, a new way of doing things is part of it. As I've mentioned here, I've been hooked on skateboarding since I was 13. At that time it was Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain and the Bones Brigade. It was Christian Hosoi and the Alva skaters. It was Mark Gonzales and Mike Vallely. And then at a time when I had drifted a way from skating, Danny Way started building mega ramps and doing things that make my jaw and stomach drop.

If you want to be inspired by the story of a guy who goes after what he loves doing, watch "Waiting for Lightning" about Way jumping over the Great Wall of China. But it's as much Way's life story as it is the jump itself. And that's where it's most powerful. Way represents for me, figuring out how to make a living doing what you love, even when you weren't sure there was a living to be made doing it. Way didn't become a pro skater in a cookie-cutter manner, he redefined what people thought could be done on a skateboard, and revolutionized the sport. Whereas most people think that work is somewhere you go, put in effort, get paid--doctor, lawyer, teacher--Way invented another way to go, doing what he loves.

So there are three models I'm perpetually chasing. Chasing Wallace Stevens is a commitment to write and a striving for depth and form, marrying philosophy and creativity. Chasing Adam Brown is living up to Brown's example of overcoming any obstacle in my path, while not losing sight of what's important in my life. And Chasing Danny Way is creating a new way to think about, to pursue making a living and doing what I love.

That's a lot of chasing. Time to lace up the running shoes.

"And miles to go before I sleep"

Robert Frost and I don't talk much. He's a bit old school and rhymey for my taste. A funny thing though, when a poet reaches out of your memory, out of your subconscious, to chat.

I've had Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in my head for a number of months now. Particularly the last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I hear Frost speaking in the deep, Southern drawl or Mr. Chew, our 10th grade English teacher at St. James. Mr. Chew was also our cross country coach, who got us out running through the woods, usually before they were snowy, and there wasn't much stopping going on.

Frost's narrator stops to chill, take in a scene, a moment, where most folks en route keep cranking. But there was something more going on. Maybe Frost-the-narrator (FTN) is tired, fed up with work, with bills, with all the shit he's got to do. The moment of hesitation presents something else. Dude, fu** it, what if I just chill here and take this in. For good?

The temptation is there, "the woods are lovely, dark and deep." But FTN doesn't give himself more than the passing thought. Nah, man, "I've got promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep." I got shit to do.

Let's face it, we've got days, maybe weeks-months-years where the temptation of the snowy woods is there. It's funny though, how often I hear Mr. Chew as FTN, out of the blue with those last three lines, "But I've got promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep."

So this fall and winter, I've had Frost and Chew speaking up from memory, from subconscious, saying hey. And then on New Year's Day, as we're taking out Christmas decorations down, Robin pulls down a blackboard she writes a new seasonal message on every couple months. She wipes the old "Merry Christmas" off. She says:

What if I put the first verse of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," on the board?

I've never mentioned Frost, or Mr. Chew, or that poem to her. Voices, speaking from the past. Our past, for us to hear. If we listen.

That would be cool, hon.

So I leave you with Frost's whole poem. You can say it out loud, in a deep Southern drawl if you want.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.  

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.  

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

"The world runs through us"

I could start with dreams, since I rarely have them. I hadn't dreamed on consecutive nights in more than a decade. "Sleeps in Fits" could be my Indian name. But there I was dreaming--super powers one night, confused in a distorted neighborhood the next. Deep sleep, Freud be damned.

I could start with inspiration, reading Jack Kerouac's poems, or Junot Diaz, Carl Sandburg or Matthew Dickman. Writers who read the world and themselves and swirl the two together on the page. Writers who look beyond language to what the words point at.

I could start with reading Ada Limon's "Shark in the Rivers," sitting along the Anacostia River while a Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter circle-hovers the river, three, four times; the river a debris-littered still in the days after Hurricane Sandy.

The pilot and I look at the river, neither of us wants to jump in.

The helicopter's WHUP is louder than the river, but not as loud as Sandy.

Ada Limon says, "This is the way / the world runs through us..."

and I wonder if she means with dreams, inspiration, words, poetry, helicopters and hurricanes.

I get why Thales fell in a well

I get why Thales fell in a well. The stars invented the word mesmerize for their own use.

I fling the kitchen trash bag in to the garbage can outside and crane my head back. The Milky Way, Orion's Belt, the dippers, whatever stencil you want to put over the night sky.

Philosophers and poets are kids, still fascinated by stars and clouds; still at home with their backs on the cool grass, their eyes searching, trying to make sense of the sky.

Thales is credited as the first Greek philosopher, before Socrates (pronounced "So-crates," Bill and Ted style), Plato or Aristotle who posterity came to know better. Thales, the story goes, was walking, eyes to the sky, and fell into a well, not paying any mind to where he was going.

You can think Thales a fool (history says otherwise) or you can envy his focus, his commitment to his sense of wonder. Philosophy and poetry both begin in wonder, expanding on Aristotle's notion.

When I take the trash out on a clear night, I get Thales. I'm glad there's not a well near our sidewalk.

If I were to write a poem

If I were going to write a poem, it would have to have coffee in it. Coffee is the prime morning mover. It's the Alpha. It's another word for mojo. A poem would start with coffee, for sure.

And speaking about mojo, a poem I wrote would have to have Muddy Waters. His mojo working has been tickling my eardrums and soul, rocking them like they were in a hammock.

If I were going to write a poem, it should have a hammock in it, absolutely. It's the spring breeze and warm sunshine on the skin season of hammocks. It would also have to include some cut grass. Maybe cutting grass, with some reference to pull-starting the lawnmower for the first time in the spring--that rite of passage, requiring faith, luck and extra elbow grease to wake the mower from its seasonal slumber.

Hammocks, though a present-day obsession, are also a remembering back yards past--getting dumped from our hammock as a kid and getting the wind knocked out of me for the first time. Another way to get brained was playing on the monkey bars.

If I were to write a poem it would have to have monkey bars. Both the kind you played on and the book by Matthew Lippman, which is the kind you play in. Because I saw that today was Lippman's birthday and picked up "Monkey Bars," and it made me think, this is the kind of shit I need to spend my time reading, and re-reading, and writing.

That poem would have to include the Nationals because it is spring training and we're a buzz with the Nats, with tickets for Davey Johnson's boys' home opener against the Reds. When I'm rocking my Nats hat and see the Curly W in the rear view mirror taking the girls to school, it curls a soul smile.

If I were to write a poem today, it would have to include running, since we've had a return to spring running and racing and the Rise Up Runners. It would have to include longboard skateboarding, with the girls and the dogs around the neighborhood and the sound the wheels make cruising on the road.

A poem would have to include pale ale and cherry blossoms, the Bay Bridge and the D.C. waterfront. It would have to include dock bars and mulch and Langston Hughes writing down the blues in verse.

Man, that's a lot of stuff. If I were to write a poem this morning I'd have to unpack my consciousness, empty out my mind into words I haven't thought about yet and hope it comes across. Yeah. Sure glad I'm not writing a poem this morning.

Sipping "Volcanic Sunlight"

Perhaps poetry is irrelevant today. Saul Williams, a poet, is not. When you perform at Def Jam events, when you make an album with Trent Reznor, when you project words, thoughts and feelings like a force of nature, relevance remains. It lifts you up.

I remember hearing Williams recite poetry at the end of one of the great hip hop albums, Blackalicious "Blazing Arrow." I remember being moved by it, but not knowing who he was. This past summer, TWM71 brought him back to my attention and I picked up his book "The Dead Emcee Scrolls."

If Williams just wrote poetry and read it at bookstores, he wouldn't stand out. That's the problem with poetry. It's too easy for people to dismiss. There's no cache. Why would I want to see/hear/read/write that?



Matthew Zapruder, also a poet, wrote a great piece in the L.A. Times called "Why I Rhyme." It looks at what drew him to poetry, but also at the evolution of poetry through rhyme to today's free verse. There are some gems there.

"Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind... the leap from one thought to another... that leap, that movement is what makes poetry." -MZ

Williams makes leaps from one form to another, moving beyond poetry proper. He is an actor, he is a musician. He has a singing voice that may be kin to Lenny Kravitz's. I think Williams' reaching out, expanding the boundaries of poetry to more culturally relevant forms of expression can invigorate poetry.

Williams' art is performance. That's what connects it. It isn't content to live quietly on a page. It wants ears. On Feb. 23, at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., it will have mine.