Son sleeps to sounds of Soulja Boy
Daughter drinks of delightful dreams
Breath of my love brushes my body like a bright breeze.
Closing eyes, I,
Am lulled to sleep by loved ones lullaby.

Tolerance can be learned only from an enemy; it cannot be learned from your spiritual teacher . . . Therefore, enemies are precious, in that they help us to grow . . . The enemy teaches you inner strength.

The Dalai Lama in A Policy of Kindness

Koan 1:
I observed, “The candle in the narthex is leaning.”
I replied, “Better a crooked candle than one that is not lit.”

Koan 2:
I said, “The squirrel sits on the apex of the roof and speaks loudly to the world.”
I replied, “He is not silent.”

Koan 3:
I said, “I smiled so much in church this morning that my jaws ached.”
I replied, “And your whole body? Did it ache too?”

Journal Entry Sept. 20, 1997

Rainy Monday.

Drops land in staccato rhythm upon the AC in time to children voices reading,
soft and loud, but listening to the librarian’s request for gentleness
(with each other and the books).
The energy of good books elicits the energy of young readers.

Puzzle books are popular, little fingers trace crooked paths.
So too bright thoughts in figuring minds . . . growing!
Familiar trails (and books) are sought out; Space, Princesses . . .
books are the ships that will take them to faraway places.

I, a humble Captain, guide as best as I can,
making sure the books are safely harbored to sail from shelf-coves into the hands that need to travel with them and the circles around which these small sailors gather to discuss them.

All the while the rain falls and the oceans outside and within fill up with wondrous watery thoughts.

Written while volunteering in the library of my daughter’s school.

I drove 4 hours to work 6, in the rain, both ways, bleary-eyed from too much pixel-pushing.

Daughter not exactly happy to see me. She had a hard day too, back to school from break.

Same with the son (standardized testing), testing everything on the dashboard of the rental because our car is in the shop ($1000, mostly brakes).

I’m not feeling it. Nope. Not a happy camper. (Like at Camp Grenada).

Doc office said my meds (see Jagged Little Pill entry) would be ready. So I drive to the pharmacy. Yep. Another nope. They weren’t called in.

Here’s where Grace steps in. Or in this case, Abraham (the pharmacist) who smiles, hands me a couple of pills (free) to hold me over so that I can call the doc tomorrow and hopefully they’ll call it in to the pharmacy.

A small thing (well, two small things actually) but enough to shift me and my mood. His smile transfers to me. On the way out, I tell a stranger who cut his hand that I hope it heals well.

And I realize that all of the little cuts gathered by all of us this day will heal as well.

It is Friday night, almost midnight, and I hobble home down the cracked and broken sidewalks of a sleeping city. She sleeps, but it is with one eye open, like a great cat. Here and there a yellow eye stares out from a dark apartment building.

A lone light bulb hangs from the ceiling and casts an eerie glow on the figures in the windows. A woman catches one last breath of the night breeze. Lovers embrace. A man reads a book. Pupils in the iris of this creature who dreams in the lap of Morpheus. On a heating grate outside the Federal Court of Appeals, a blanketed figure turns restlessly in his sleep.

I stumble past the churches, towering up into the night sky. I, lone priest who presides over a Mass of concrete and steel. No lights shine from these silent giants save those of the clocks and the spotlights on the steeples. There are fences here as well, with gates locked and doors bolted. In the cold darkness inside, the gold on the altar glimmers in the faint light of a passing star which shines through the bars of a stained-glass window.

These stone temples remind me of the office buildings downtown, open for a few hours every week and then abandoned to whatever Lonesome God chooses to creep between the pews and computer terminals.

Across the street lie the embassies, surrounded like prisons by steel gates and iron-wrought fences. Flags hang limp from aluminum poles, forgotten wisps of lands faraway. On stuccoed walls, vines creep, thick and green, and push up and into the window where the diplomat sleeps. A coupe d’état of leaves. And grass and trees.

The woman closes the window.  A lover reaches back and pulls down the shade.  The man glances at his watch. Two lights go out.  One eye remains to watch the night.  The man reads on . .

I cross the street and step into the shadows of the park, past the tree where the pigeons sleep, their heads tucked under wing. A dark form scurries across the cobblestones. It is a large rat braving the claws of this city. He feasts on crumbs fallen from the plates of the homeless who a few hours before stood in line here for a free meal. Rodent’s Communion on a table of stone.

A piece of plastic, ghostly white, blows up from the street in a vain attempt at escape from reality. Rising ever so slowly, it hangs for a precious moment in the wind before a passing car smashes it to the pavement again. Tomorrow, a black man in a dark blue uniform will come to this corner, pick up the plastic, and place it carefully in the heavy brown paper bag that is the garbage. Then he’ll place the bag on his creaky, bicycle-wheeled cart and move on to the next piece of white trash.

Around the corner, another piece of plastic hangs like a phantom from the limb of an oak. Unlike her brother, she has tasted freedom and she swings and sways in the breeze as if to mock his fate. She dances, unaware that hers is an eternal crucifixion. For as her brother burns, she must forever be, trapped in the tree and taunted by the wind, but never really free.

As I reach the steps of my home, the wind rises up. A piece of paper scrapes across the street.

Rustling of a page and the man slowly closes the book. He yawns, stretches, and reaches for the light. One final yellow eye flickers, goes out, and the city surrenders herself to the night.

Written Mar. 27, 1992

I don’t like you.

I don’t like the way you wear your hair.
I don’t like your infatuation with the color black;
The way you smear it on your lips and wipe it across your eyes,
The way you wear your dress.

You wrap it around your pale skin like you’re some kind of a mummy from Cleopatra’s tomb. They haven’t found it yet, even with all their digging.
Maybe they will someday after they’re done with the Pharaohs.

I don’t like you.

I don’t like the way you bury yourself in the shadows of these ruins.
You’re down so deep that if I had a pick and shovel I couldn’t reach you.

I don’t.
All I got are my hands
and I been throwing stones left and right ever since I met you.

Show yourself, girl.
Throw wide your arms.
Burst out of the dark cotton cocoon that surrounds you.
Let me see your treasure.
Let us all see your glorious crown.

I don’t like you.

I don’t like your hair.
I don’t like your dress.
I don’t like that thing you wear in your nose.

I’m not supposed to like you.
I am to love,
and I find when I look deep into your burning heart
my dislike goes.

Written March 3, 1996

On this day when I celebrate the rising of One whose gifts to me are immeasurable,
I find in my own life such beauty and joy opening after so long a time within my own dark tomb,
that I indeed discover I have again been presented with yet another precious gift
and am suddenly humbled by the astounding idea that there are many more to come.

Selah.

Okay, this is the Plan.

We must determine what plan we will be planning to use to implement our plan. Once we have a plan that has been planned and we have planned to implement the plan, we will plan to put the plan into action. If the plan is not implementable, we will plan to plan another plan and the previous plan we will not plan to implement. Rather we will plan to implement the plan we most recently planned and plan to not use the previous plan.

Further planning may be planned for future plans but at this time let’s plan on using this plan.

(1997)

Dedicated to my sisters everywhere.

I lay awake in the night, waiting.

We had talked often of this night and our love. Yesterday had been the one year anniversary of our unfortunate encounter with this place when an angry and raging sea had vomited us up onto a lonely island. The wreckage that came with us and washed up in the following days convinced us that we were indeed alone. We were too weak to bury the corpses and watched as Nature went her constant, unerring way and picked the bones meticulously clean. I marveled at her apparent lack of concern for our fate, then realized that I had done the same with regards to her in the past.

At least we had each other. The thought of someone close by kept the panic of never seeing home again from rising too high and choking the sanity from our brains. We were indeed alone, but we were alone together.

The wind and the sun toughened us; browned our skin and bleached our hair, but we refused to become barbarians. We prided ourselves in the two huts we had constructed side by side amidst the palms with wreckage, palm fronds, and whatever else we could find. We laughed at their strange, ungainly appearance at times, but they were dry and represented home for us here. We surrounded ourselves with as many things as we could make and find that reminded us of our lives before and we spent hours daydreaming together about that far away place called Civilization.

I joked often about turning our little island into a resort and pointed out to Maria where the women could lay out on the beach with their oily bodies and smooth legs glistening in the tropical sun. She never showed much enthusiasm for my imaginary resort or women and chose rather to focus on her family, life, and us. I talked of Jean and the kids too, but the dream of the resort was less painful to think about.

We had chosen to live separately out of respect for our families in the event of a quick rescue. We were pleased with our self-discipline, and yet, as the days slipped by, the hope of rescue diminished to a dull throb and love began to grow and take its place. We did not discard the bands of gold on our fingers and struggled often with our dilemma. In this time of death and despair, something had chosen to blossom within each of us. We had accepted the emergence of our love as we had accepted our fate here and rose to meet the challenge.

A soft step on the beach behind me roused me from my musings and I turned to see Maria coming down from the huts. Her hair shimmered in the moonlight and fell in golden hue around her shoulders. I raised myself to one elbow as she knelt beside me and I read her desire in her eyes and in the smell of her hair as it brushed my face. Then she was in my arms. I kissed her eyes, the curve of her neck; my lips couriers of my love and desire for her.

Tenderly, I placed my hand beneath her skirt and began to caress her leg, moving my fingers slowly up her thigh. She shuddered beneath me, in desire I thought, and I entered her.  We moved together, our bodies writhing, moaning in ecstasy. Warmth exploded from me and I swam in the sea of pleasure. I held her thus for awhile, basking in the glow of her thighs wrapped tight around me.

Maria trembled again and I opened my eyes to hers. She turned quickly away, but I had seen. I turned her face towards me, saw the tears glistening there, the speck of blood on her lip where she had bitten it in pain. Puzzled, I pulled her legs from around me and found them sticky and wet. Her legs were covered with cuts from the ankle to the thigh, ugly streaks of scarlet which dripped tiny drops of her blood. She read the question in my eyes.

“I used a piece of glass that I found on the beach,” she said. “I wanted my legs to be smooth for you.”

In a flash, I saw the resort in my mind’s eye, the rows upon rows of luscious flesh stretched out across the beach. Then the picture shattered before me in awful misery and the pieces fell down around me like Maria’s silent tears. Mine joined hers and as we wept, the moon disappeared behind dark clouds and it began to rain. We stayed huddled together on the beach and let the water wash over our bodies, two lovers lying broken on a deserted island in the sea.

Written 3/15/90 (Edited: 11/15/93)

The toad in the road looms luminous
in the lights of my Chevy Cavalier
as I careen precariously around the
copperhead curves of Mission mountain.

Amphibian eyes gleam in the glare of halogen globes,
reptilian reason revealed in their shiny sheen
before the sharp shadow of the car covers all
in a blur of bleeding black and the toad’s glow
is hidden by the hum of radials hugging hills
wrapped around by roads so serpentine.

Written June 25, 1996

I have lived life so long alone.  What is
within the space of two?  I strain my eyes
to see into the lamplit lines of houses blurred
and stretched by soloflights on roads bent
’round by them. Last night on this same turn
with the wheels still spinning a car hung
suspended on barbed wire above the flashing
red and blue face of a farmer mourning the
death of his fence.  His wife in the house behind
him beside the curve left the lights on to guide
his feet down the private passages where she and
intimacy slept.  Tonight I approach to find the
fence fixed and a glow-in-the-dark garter snake
writhing in the road.  He has chosen a wicked
and fearful place to roam.  I dodge the SOS, lean
into the curve and push on towards home.

Written October 11, 1997

The cat arrives the moment after she leaves the table, assuring us that she is okay, but coughing, the fibers growing in her lungs like moon flower vines squeezing the breath from her chest.

He, the cat, has always been this way, sensing the pain of people and coming round to be a comforting presence.

He perches on her chair, turning his head in time to the conversation, silent but a participant none the less.

The others at table are sure that he has simply come for the butter.
I know better.

He is here to make sure that I don’t forget her, unseen, softly coughing in the bathroom, my prayers falling like petals in the silence between her staccato breaths.

Written October 20, 2005

Two days later, I’m on the tractor, talking to the wind about you, wishing that this crop of doubts that has grown up in my mind would disappear like the grass I’m mowing down.

The bushog bangs and I am listening to the echo of Daddy’s gunshot in my brain. I stand beside him under the carport in the darkness of a summer night as he places the flashlight on the barrel of the 22 and sights along the beam at the white flash of the armadillo who’s been getting into our garden. I hear the THUMP as the wounded animal bounces off the bushog parked in the field and then in a flash he’s gone before the echo of the shot dies away.

“I never knew one could move so fast,” Daddy says. He levers another shell into the gun and goes out to the pasture to look for him.

We found him the next day, dead, curled up at the edge of the woods just outside the hole that was his home. Dad said, “I guess I got him.”

Thirty years and two days later, I’m standing here, looking down at this armadillo, at the hole in his shell, feeling my armor crack within as you wrap your arms tightly around me again.

I am no soothsayer. These bones at the feet of my memory will not tell me a thing. I don’t know if it’s my faith or my doubts they’re showing.

I’m just a man on a tractor, talking to the wind about you, mowing.

Written June 3, 2000

My guitar is cracked.
The strap broke and it hit the concrete in front of the church right before I kissed the woman pastor good-bye.
“La lluvia viene como el reino de Dios,” I told her and pointed to the darkening sky.
She smiled.

It still plays like it did that night before the light of the bandit struck my eyes. I was singing The Sound of Silence.
“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made and the sign flashed out its warning. . .”
The bus jerks as our driver hits the brakes and through the letters IN GOD WE TRUST stenciled on the windshield, I see the white truck, the men in fatigues, the lights, the guns. Suddenly, he is before me, his light in my eyes, a Uzi on his hip.
“Cierren sus ojos,” he says.
“Close your eyes.”
“Cierre su voca,” he says.
“Do not speak.”
Silence, save my whispered prayers and the grinding of gears as we race to a hidden place. Silence, save the leader’s commands and Carla’s translation minus his “o se matamos.” Or we will kill you. Silence, save the whimpers of 6 year old Andrea. Silence, save our breathing. Silence, save the clicking of the switch as the bandit before me shines his light again and again on my face.
I watch him though slitted lids, my guitar balanced precariously on my knees, bouncing with each jar and bump, ready to fall like a shot and break this awful sound of silence.

There is a screech, a crunch, and we stop. The sharp scent of diesel fuel comes through the open
windows. We have hit a large rock.
“Esta bien,” the comandante says.
It’s time to get off.
When it is my turn, I take my hands from my head and say, “Mi guitarra, senor, mi guitarra.” It is a question. The bandit nods and I, my hands in plain view, my eyes on his face and gun, slowly lift the guitar from my trembling thighs and place it gently in the seat ahead of me. The bandit, the limit of his patience reached, grabs me and shoves me down the aisle towards the door. Hands back on my head, I stand in the doorway on the steps beside the words on the windshield before the beckoning sugar cane. I think of the girls and the women already outside shrinking from the unkind hands of the comandante and his men. I think of my lily-white artist hands clutching my head and what they will do to the men if something happens to the women. I think of my camera in the bag in the darkness at the back of the bus and the photographs I have taken thus far on the trip. 2 rolls. 52 prints. 22 still in the camera. None will match the image burned to the back of my retinas by fear, collective conscience, and the remembered history of what men have done to each other over the years. There is no camera like the human eye and its developer mind. I step off of the bus and look to my left.

I am nine years ago in this same country, trying to decipher the headline and fuzzy photograph of a foreign newspaper now gathering dust in a box beneath my bed.
A row of flesh.
Bodies before a bus.
The cycle repeats. I turn my head. My eyes snap the picture.
Flash of lightning.
Exposure.
I lie down on the cool grass, take my place beside the rest. Here we are, frozen, so much alive and yet so close to being dead.

Written April 19, 1999 reflecting on my bus being hijacked while on a service trip in Central America

There is pain here.
It hovers in the air above your head like the blue smoke from your cigarette.
It peeks around the corner of a dark doorway.
It eases up to you and breathes across the hairs on the back of your neck.

There is pain here
and it stands right behind you,
up close, pressed against your back
with its arms wrapped tight around you like an overprotective
parent.  Don’t go.
I mean the world is a very cruel place.
You’ll get hurt.
You’ll be broken.
There will be people out there who will see your pain and they will laugh.
They won’t laugh with you, they will laugh at you.
So stay here, close the door, and hide inside.
Don’t go.

You don’t want to be broken.

But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be . . . broken?
Isn’t that what we all are . . . broken?
Look around you.
There is pain here.
It’s not standing behind or hovering in the air above us or peeking around the doorway.
It’s inside.
It’s in pieces,
scattered like the shards of a mirror in the bathroom
of our hearts.

Bad luck, baby.
Seven years bad luck.

Written March 3, 1996

Beneath shadowed eaves hangs the head of a hart
who with sightless eyes stares out to the meadow
where his sisters leap and dart,
and fly o’er crooked fences cast down upon the grass
by a bleeding sun.  Day is done and her light is fading fast.

Does a thought still flash across your marbled orbs,
a flame flickering in your hollow head
of the glorious scene before
the bullet broke your headlong flight and sent you
crashing to the earth?

Will you suddenly tear yourself from these wooden walls,
bound across the porch to the lawn,
and join your kind one more time in their darkling
dance of immortal mirth?

Written February 25, 1996

The strength of woman is revealed again by little girls who,
with bee stings still showing baking-soda white on their dark bodies,
dance before us like calypso-colored swans.

The boys enter the pulsing place as if to a church,
sit down in silence, and watch in awe and wonder
the writhing rhythm of the dancers and the dance.

The dance is eternal. So too the wonder.
When I look at man, I see the lightning.
When I see woman, I hear the thunder.

Written July 26, 1996

The slats from the reading lamp cast shadowed prison bars on the walls around me. I wonder when my heart will feel again. I am so cold and Winter is coming. Everything that was so precious just doesn’t satisfy. Even you; your flesh is icy too.

There is anger in the night outside, voices screaming, and I wonder why I think my life, my dreams, are so important. Skeletons parade before my mind’s eye in blue and black and white, brittle and broken, a suffering child, once alive, now shadows dying. I feel guilt at my pain, the simple luxury of thought without concern for survival.

I could laugh at this prison on these walls gathered around me, but it rings hollow like my chest. The bars remain, and in some way, with them I feel safe, secure.

Until they disappear with the click of the light and the uncertain night falls fearfully and gently around me.

Written October 6, 1992

I’ve got a friend; he’s a family man.
Every time I stop by his house to visit, he looks like a scared bunny rabbit.
He puts his hands to his head and tells his son to go back upstairs
for the third time.
We talk, but he’s never really there.
Some of him is, but the other pieces are upstairs;
–One’s cleaning her room,
–One’s getting ready for bed,
–One’s sitting in the highchair,
–One’s doing his history homework,
–One’s getting chocolate chip cookies for the guest downstairs;
A jigsaw puzzle that’s never whole.

It’s time to roll.
We take our disjointed conversation outside.
I spit and hit a bush nearby.
He says I shouldn’t.
It’s the cookies, I reply.
He understands.
I make my getaway, and wonder if I’ll ever have the guts to be a
family man.

Written November 7, 1995