August Burn Notice-Klamath, Oregon

August Burn Notice

The Klamath Basin pale pink morning air

Holds a chill as the sun warms

The night-settled Smoky haze

From the fires north of Medford

And south in the Siskiyou Mountains.

Rain comes variably to the ground

Lately, on rare afternoons.  Lightning

Strikes air to ground, ground to air

And fires start small, most die out.

Others become unmanageable unless Nature

Intercedes and makes heroes and heroines

Of the Hot Shots dodging death flares along the lines.

Our morning stroll in the vacant acres

Alongside the Fred Myers Big Box

Spread Tess out as she adorns herself

In the grasses and alfalfa someone bales

Not more than once a season without irrigation.

There is a crisscross of walking paths I tend

Keeping the seeds out of my shoes and socks.

Doves are flying up in front of Tess.

They have decided it’s time to congregate.

I wonder if they leave here?  Probably.

Locals tell me the snow “tends to stick” here.

Luckily they don’t have far to move

Compared to their Minnesota cousins.

We’ll see.  For now the 30 days and nights

Of August, plus one, burn with the last spears of summer

Sun thrusting its more angular rays at us.

I begin the recycling of my seasonal wanderlust.

Thoughts turn toward “the chase” as Fall sneaks in.

I recall olden days in the high desert sage and red rock

Shaggy ridges, 10,000- footers like Steens

With it’s near surface water and aspens finch yellow

Bathing the eye--some relief from the somber dusty gray-greens,

Browns and tans hiding the quail and chukars of my Paleo-mind.

This Basin is new to me.  I feel it, a stranger for now.

I watch it carefully as anyone new to place ought to.

There are signs of companionship from these hills

Leaning in toward us at holding the haze.

The Cascades are only 40 miles to ridgeline

Then north and skyward looms 9000 foot-plus, McLaughlin Peak.

And south the double-coned Shasta stays snow-clad,

Visible to me when I wander toward it and out of town.

The village mood is more like that of a colonial time here.

Hamilton was moody in its discontent with itself.

I’m gladdened by the energy of Oregonians,

Headin’ to the hills one way or another.

My mind engages in the music, writings and searches here.

Tess feels the ‘dog days’ burn of July and August more than I do.

She too anticipates that expected pleasure

Fall brings in it’s shedding of annual growth, changing hues--

Its molting.  Yes, a new fur is energizing isn’t it Tess?

‘Off with the old on with the new’.

We should shoulder a pack soon and try for some brookies

Over near Bly or Paisley.  The map shows rivers unknown to us

There.  Let’s wait for the next frost and the dampening of these fires

Head out and get lost, a man and his dog.

Let’s ignite some envy.

The ash settles each night on my car.

Our morning walks start a bit later each day

As the sun takes a moment or two longer to bare down on us.

We should find a hillside trail nearby and gain some altitude.

I’m sure it’ll pay in the long run and maybe just in time

To work our way into the Trout Creek Mountains southwest of here.

But first things first, Tess.

First things first.  We need to burn off August slash.

Sit on the porch at sundown.

Watch the red sky burn through the neighborhood trees

Until leaves are dried and brown and down.

That’s when we’ll be up to no good.

Then, we’ll go and go until winter settles into the Basin

And we can become lap dogs again.  

Oh Where, Oh Where Have I Gone

(BP)  July 7, 2014

Note the short form of the date: 7-7-14.  Huh?  Pretty simple math there.  I'm more amused by how those 7s keep popping up in my life.  I remember a bright warm July 7th day in the Year 1977 (77 back then) when I lucked onto my first crane nest in a marsh on Crex Meadows State Wildlife Management Area near Grantsburg, WI.  I took Lyn to see it or maybe she was my luck that day.  It's too long ago now. 

Today, I'm typing this blog post from my new house in Klamath Falls, Oregon.  I probably would have waited for another day, but somehow the magic of the date forced my handand here I  sit writing something, maybe nothing poignant or enlightening (that's probably redundancy itself in those word choices, but on I go). 

It's hot here these past few days.  When I moved here I had checked the monthly average temperatures and I'd like to remark now that average temperatures for a day or a month or a year remain meaningless.  When you live a day in a place with a history of average temperatures on the books you find that this 99 degree day is way off the average temperature for the month of July in Klamath Falls.  In person, one could wonder why the hell I picked this spot to live in, when I could have lived anywhere I could afford the rent and that works out to be just about anywhere on a city to city basis.  (There's a ghetto in just about every city these days you know and I can afford rent in a ghetto).  Tess, poor Tess is in a "Dog Days" frame of mind and activity.  She rises, moves around the house, twirls a bit and lays back down as if she might have found an escape from the heat her coat holds against her pink skin.  I try to imagine how hot it is inside that dog that uses a tongue for an air conditioner while our entire skin has the ability to sweat and, given some air movement, cool us down.  I should buy her an air conditioner, give her one of the spare rooms in this three bedroom house and treat her like the dignitary she believes she is around here.  The nights are supposed to be in the low 60's this week.  Moving toward the high 50's as the week melts away.

I just now finished a reading of Pablo Neruda's poems; "Odes to Opposites" selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook and translated by Ken Krabbenhoft.  Whoa!  I'm still in a state of 'stundedness' which is not a word probably, but who says it ain't?  I get my organic juice from such reading.  Damn!  He just takes a word, like; "Spring" or "Joy" or "Secret Love" and writes these 'follow the bouncing ball' kinds of poems of which any one of them would allow me to wrap up my poeting career before my death and sail off into the sunset grinning like the demon I am suspected of being cloaked in my heathenistic birthday suit.  Ahh, but Neruda's not like that.  He's like Walt Whitman in his commitment to 'his song' and that it might just be important that somebody reads it, absorbs it, reacts to it in a joyful manner and lives happily somewhat thereafter.  Neruda can't help himself he writes to us.  He has to do this writing life he's lived.  He gets up early, writes and throws the musical score of his words out there hit or miss, for better or worse, for richer or poorer until death do take him apart.  My reading is, for me, like playing a game a bingo where at the end of every poem I yell out; "Bingo!!!", but no one hears me and I don't get a pile of cash or a free pass to the next pancake and sausage breakfast put on by the Knights of Columbus.  I get a vortex in my gray matter and I have to shake my head in disbelief of his effort to make me understand what he calls his calling, 'writing about the wonders of the world' just for us.  I'm too stupid to be a poet.  That's why I call what I sometimes do with words in a free-verse poetic format, "poeting".  Yes, that makes me a work in progress rather and a polished gem like Neruda.  He writes poems.  I write at them.  Like an amateur archer shoots at a target with a "bullseye".  My target is a flushing out of my collected memory on a subject with hope of a "hook" somewhere near the end that will make me joyful and maybe someone who reads it will admit that they "get it" (what ever that means).

So.  Here I am.  Klamath Falls, Oregon or Bust for at least a year (or I pay a penalty for breaking my 12 month lease).  I seem to have lost my sense of migration.  My focus on "migrating" until I find a home:  My "boll weevil" experience has ended for the time being (that's us humans you know, "time beings").  I'll admit to some projects in the works.  A memoir about my dad's life of course.  That is crawling along at the speed of a tortoise, but it's on my mind often.  I'll keep at it and have to return to Minnesota for a bit more genealogy work and some verification of the lies I'm telling in it up to this point.  Books take time and money.  We'll see which I run out of first.

I also have this nifty project going on Norman Maclean's story; "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky".  That is a great story and of course I left all the data for that one back in Hamilton, Montana.  A great excuse to go back there and dig a bit deeper into the history of that story so I can produce something to satisfy myself for what Norman's writings have meant to my desire to be a writer.

The latest find is a story poem about the Japanese bomb balloons they sent our way toward the end of WWII.  Near here is Bly, Oregon where a monument commemorating five children and a Sunday School marm.  All were killeed when  they found such a balloon and it exploded after one of them messed with it while on a picnic in the woods about 10 miles NE of Bly.  I was consumed by the little history I found on that event and have now laid down and outline of a multi-part poem to keep that story alive as it deserves to be written about for it's irony if not it's tragedy.  They were the only war casualties on American soil during WWII.  I'm closest to the data for that piece so it'll keep me digging here for the joy-juice I need to finish that project.

Yes, that's why I'm here.  No matter where I stopped in my migration, the purpose was to enter the writing life and pay my dues until I get released from this desire I have to write, to be a "writer" even if this blog or some e-Book is the result of my time and effort.  I mean what else do I really have to do I? f I can get a jazzed up about dates like 7-7-77 or 7-7-14, I mean, come on...

So here's to a great adventure almost finished.  I plan to travel to Portland, OR; Olympia, WA; and Marysville, WA yet this summer, but I've already driven back to Hamilton and picked up my belongings and toted them back here to KFalls.  I'm settling.  "Sticking" is what it's called out West.  Yet, as Ry Cooder keeps singing in my ear, "How can you keep moving if you don't migrate too", seems to rise up within me every so often and if it don't stop I'll be "on the road again".  We'll see or at least I will.  I'm not sure who is reading this or paying any attention to this one man band.  STOP.

Tote That Pack, Run That Dog

Spring is sneaking up on us this year.  Cagy critter not taking any chances that we will get all carried away and try to turn dirt in the flower beds or the garden.  Tess and I have been walking all winter along the Bitterroot River in Hamilton.  Yesterday felt like spring might be hatching.  I stuffed a little weight in my backpack, grabbed a water bottle (Tess can drink out of the river), found a little bag of jerky and we were off for our first five-miler of the year.

I drove the SUE BLUE RUE to a game and fish fishing access, parked and Tess and I piled out as if we were heading into the Bob Marshall for a week.  Bridge to bridge I estimate a five mile hike for me and twice that for Tess of course.  All went well, some aches at sundown and a pill each and we slept like babies.  I'm going to try to do every-other-day like this for a week to give Tess a chance and, well, me too ya know, to get the hang of it.  I'll keep increasing my pack loads and soon get her a pack to carry her food for those two or three day hikes I'm planning now and then this summer. 

So, the real work begins for a summer of Travels with Tess. 

Winter Passing The Baton

I hear the cars going past this little house I rent on Main Street.  A rash of snowstorms plopped down on Hamilton like a child jumping into his parents morning bed.  Buried for days it seemed; all white and shovel bent the neighborhood worked away at it daily last week.  The enthusiasm for shoveling was out of nostalgia that, "It only lasts a few days.  We don't get much snow in Hamilton, you know?"  Yet, by about day 10 of snow every night and shoveling the fluff of it every morning the snow carolers came later and later to the sidewalks of Main Street to meet their public obligation of clearing the way for the odd pedestrian.  And now, today, the slush sounds like a concert tympani section giving its cymbals irregular dulled collisions as the slush is thrown against my car and the neighbors and the rest.  Rain, too, gets in the mix and, "She is a mess out there, Tess.  We should wait for our walk today.  Maybe post a blog to slow us down a bit."

I welcome the finish of it.  Winter is not my friend so much anymore.  It's beauty never frowns or smiles as Baudelaire would say of "Beauty".  And soon it'll be dry as hell and turning toward hot and the sullenness of this little valley will return to its comfortable prognostications of what is "normal".  

I have enough to do rain or shine.  Shine is nice though as Tess comes home from the "run" a bit more wore out and not quite so muddied as she'll be later today sniffing the rivers edge and calibrating every organic bit of matter that comes within nose range.  If noses were Glocks, we'd all be dead, given dogs like Tess with her absolutely certain sense of smell.  I wondered about that yesterday with my cribbage partners at the River Rising Coffee House.  "What if we could see smells?", I asked them.  "Well", one responded, "we can see some."  I could not answer this.  I did not have the data he did for such a response.  I did suggest we could see things that smell.  "But", I continued, "What if we could see the smell itself? Wouldn't our world be a bit tipsy then?"

It reminds me I have to get busy on a poem that came knocking on my noggin in thoughts of death the other day.  No!  I'm not lingering there in the graveyard much anymore, but people keep dying in the neighborhood and their obits seem to want me to read them, especially those young lives lost that had so much more going for them at 21 or so than I did.  And now they will not flower as I once did.  While now I find myself in the vase on the mantle a bit dehydrated from neglect, petals dropped and brown, calyxes curled to a crisp. "What if our soul is outside our bodies? What if everything outside our bodies is our soul as we like to imagine a "soul" being a something or other that has a type of permanence?"  I know, I have to think about the frailty of that brain fart.  But, when they come, I'm lost for a while in thought about the idea until I figure out whether the poem really wants out or is just teasing.

All my teaching says to look "in".  Now, I'm pretty certain after so many years of getting data from "out there" and so little from "inside" to work with, I can only assume I'm on to something worth a few lines and a bit of dream-scaping.  As this body that drags my brain around gets into shape for the last kick at the cat and I don't sense a soul so much "in there", just thoughts and memories and some days some serious gurgling from my guts I get a tingle to write to the soul that might be "out there".  And maybe that old adage that, "Her soul has left her" is a bit short on the answer.  Maybe it never was in her.  Maybe it was always out there and that's why our brain keeps poking us to get off our asses and get out of the blackness of the interior and get hunting for sun-ripened huckleberries this late July.  I know when Mike is picking and eating hucks there ain't no doubt in my mind that his soul is rubbing off blue on his fingers as he stuffs his face in the bear's patch on that far away rim overlooking the Clarks Fork Valley below his perch on high. 

Linda Shelley Was Found Dead Last Sunday

BlogPress (BP)

Ron Crete
Hamilton, Montana

The body of Linda Shelley was found Sunday by a man out walking.  She had huddled down in a dense clump of willows behind a local grocery store only a block from a 24-hour convenience store.  In fact, in an area I run Tess and many others walk or run their dogs as well.  Any of us could have found her.  Some of her friends and other compassionate persons who knew her had helped her pay some of her monthly bills, rent, etc., but for some reason Linda went for her last walk last Saturday night or a night or two before that and her body gave in to hypothermia as she nested in that harbor of willows.

I followed the story for a few days.  Watched the line or two given to her unusual death on Missoula television and felt the entire community waking up to the simple fact some people go homeless in our backyards and for some human reason cannot be helped out of their solitude or aloneness, preferring to pass up any more of the same life they have been experiencing for too long.  Of course maybe there was a "blip" in her brain that turned off her normal survival instincts and she didn't know what she was doing.  I'm going with the previous conjecture until the police tell us more.  For now, Linda Shelley is dead.

There seems to be a mood that settles over a small town like Hamilton when such, almost paranormal, bad things happen like Linda Shelley's death.  First, there seems to be a rash of odd crimes that show up.  One just now getting court time is a death by a stomp in the belly apparently by a friend or acquaintance who didn't like something the dead guy said about the accused girlfriends hair or some such nonsense.  A political story of an appointed official is another quirk of fate that has our town humming.  A woman who was supposed to be accounting for the county (i.e., County Treasurer, appointee) seems to have missed the opportunity to make the numbers work in a timely manner.  How many numbers can a county 25,000 or so people have to contend with.  Then, a winter settles into Hamilton that might be quite normal on a scale of 100 years, but it happens at a time when there is much acrimony in the community mind about things just generally being a little on the "whacked" side of customary life.  Like I said, a "rash" of misfortune seems to be tripping a wire that causes a chain of actions like a Rube Goldberg contraption and the little burg of Hamilton is in a tizzy.

There is an emotional haze that hovers over our little town right now too.  I'm a poet.  I can feel it.  Does anyone else sense that our normal rotation is a bit out of alignment with Highway 93 where it crosses Main Street?  You know what I mean.  People are thinking about these occurrences they are not used to spending time mentally processing.  It's not as strong as you would feel if the world had warmed up a whole degree on average in a day, but it's the kind of "pulse check" a community doesn't take very often.  We are in the middle of a community mentally checking it's vital signs.  And, to be honest, I sense there is probably much talk over coffee about it going on too.  Maybe, just maybe, we are taking a time-out.  We have gone to our perspective corners and like children gone off the acceptable line of behavior, we Hamilton adults are rechecking our math seeking answers to a few too many things we don't usually pay any attention to.

So, that sense pushed a poem out of me yesterday and I tried to send it to the Ravalli Republic to publish on the Op Ed Page.  They can't publish poems because they can't verify "authorship".  Now that seems to me to be a chink in the armor of reality in itself and a further indication that our world of rapid and mass media is gone a bit out of tune with community conversation.  I emailed it to them.  I would have hand carried it to them and signed the damn thing if they said they had a protocol for such.  No matter.  I'm happy just blogging it today and letting Linda Shelley rest in peace.

Pax Nabisco.

______________________________

Ode to Linda Shelley  (1953-2014)

I did not know you.
You have some fame now
Though, and some who still care
Grieve through your strange tragic passing.

We want to know why
You chose the cave
Of willows to hold you
As you passed into deep sleep--

Timelessness-- while we linger
Wondering of your courage.
Were your thoughts so far
From us, your town, more perfect

Than any words of hope or comfort
We offered you in this life? Could
We have been a shelter
That kept you with us a while longer?

You did not take much from us
As you wandered in and out
Of a few lives asking little;
Even durable company, not.

I wonder, were you seeking comfort there?
I know willows and they say
They forever bend to save themselves
From wind or the freezing cold of winter.

Sleep well then, now in your chosen place.
Let us wonder where we did not hear your
Calling out, or see you turning in for the long night.
There, where the wisp of the willow coddled you.

We have now thought deeply of your life.
Cannot imagine it for ourselves.
Yet your inclination to let Nature
Take you in ought to warm us as an ending.

The Garden Gate

The Garden Gate

Children ride the garden gate

Not aware it might unhinge.

That chore of worry is for watchful parents

Standing somewhat crooked

Back-pressed by a gloved hand-heel

In the bountiful row of red tomatoes.

The garden work of children simply

The squealed glee of childhood.

Innocence experimenting with the squinching

Rusted hinge calling all able hands

To Summer’s sweet whiffs

Musky soil harrowed around

The tempting fruits of waning daylight.

Within each gardener

A sense of reward for daily toil

Far from the pleasured memories

Those layering childhood lessons

Stamped in the blossoming minds

To be carried long as remembered times.

The baskets of vegetables,

Those wide brimmed wire-handled, leg-spreading

Heavy, back heaving woven carriers
Filled with color;

Red, green, or orange,

And textures;

Hairy, prickly, or smooth and of scents

Sour, sweet, acrid or erotic.

No child of a gardener goddess

Forgets those pussy-willow soft years

Leading up to gardening as “dirty” teenage chore.

Each sensation of a grandmother’s garden

Is stored and binds family as one life.

A place where shredded, sliced and diced

Offerings are tasted and liked or “patooeed”;

When family dinners exhaust words muttered mouthed-full,

And family rituals, no matter how seldom

Shared, are felt as certainty and pride of relatedness.

With time the gate hinge opens

Others go in and out

Creating their own world

Trying new angles of light, water and seeded soil.

Children walk off to school, then fly

Driving away from graduation,

Shedding rice after sworn vows,

Bearing children and someday too,

Fixing the gate and tilling  good soil.

Then once upon a day

A life nears closing time.

 The elder assumed family journalist

The one always outside the pictured

Rituals that make family a house-hold

Is stricken and changed.  Her body turns on her mind.

Where once she stood erect and watchful,

Where measured stride was effortlessly fluid and wild,

Where yard-sticked new ones  measured inches of pride.

And  too, those children now parents

Still offered hard earned confidence

A salve on a world of impossible sprains

For those parents of children growing to soon wise.

No longer bent above the rows,

Unable to hoist the wire-handled harvest to wagon

She stands by, unable to wildly swing the hammock held child.

Somehow the new squealers seem more joyful

To the greying grandmother.

And time offers no reward for a life pressed hard

Against decades of twisted and turned

Cucumber vines of career journeys--

A new set of children dirtied in new-turned rows

Their houses now in towns

More rooms but less dirt for the growing plot.

Places where no gate harbors the harvest

For the new faces and voices.

Then, a gift is offered.

And a life becomes memories of that specially rolled crust--

The perfect golden custard squash pie;

A measured life goes beyond prime fruitfulness.

Courage enlightens through an unpredictable

Fractured future to become wisdom gifted. 

At last, she is released from knowing when to let

The tortured body’s clock unwind, when to leave

The chase in the biological accounts of young stout hearts.

When do we let the land have its way with us?

When will it take back its fuel for its perpetual renewal?

Maybe after hearing one last time, “Close the gate,”

As though the sanctity of humanity needed secure latching.

She holds us now to a silent creed;

An ancient nurturing instinct, a dance

Ever so gently and gaily performed and taught.

Her grace spoken:

“Enter the garden lovingly.

Swing on the gate you little rascals. 

Sprout and continue my never-ending story.”

How Many Seconds in a Year?

Friends, Family and Countrymen:

A year.  That's what Valentine's Day signals for me now; another year.  It's more like New Years Day than a 'honey-bun' day.  Yet, in some ways it's still nice to be aware that couples are thinking deeply about the other, the soulmate, the wife, the hubby and doing something a little out of the ordinary or an oo-la-la-lot out of the ordinary.  To those of you supposedly in love who are passing up your daily or once a year chance to indulge yourselves in what it means to be "in love" go out and get yourself spanked, hard and long, you idiots.  If you're inclined to let bullshit get in the way of that little bit of time you get on this planet with someone at least remotely compatible with your needs and your offerings, I can only lower my head and want to kick dirt on your shoes for making such a bad call on a "fastball right down the pipe".

To those of you offering me so much time to walk along and console me I'm feeling loved and I've learned from you.  In this year, together, or with me out a wandering alone, time has been by biggest companion.  Lots of it.  A year after a death as personal as Lyn's was to me (more so to her of course) time's pace was as much of the pain as the achy-breaky heart syndrome I worked to overcome.  A year is a lot of seconds.  And I feel I counted each one as something remembered, felt or imagined coming into that moment and taunting me into considering it; wanted to or not.  I feel I lived that entire year more so than all the other 64 years of my, starting to smell like an old person, life.  Something about the "replacement" exercises of that aloneness I've written or talked to you about--that "object" word that is really a verb, "replacing".  It is where a "re-placing of time as it stands still beside and inside.  And it is immovable until it is a noun, "replacement".  Then you can hop over it or jump around whatever it is.  Mostly though I want to say thank you for being with me all year and continuing on if you can (I ought to be able to pay you back somehow in time).  I know, I just said it was so very long, but it's intensity taught me much about dealing with the time I have left. 

I must tell you I have no idea what the meaning of life or death is after this year.  It makes so sense to me either way.  What an outcome.  You head into grieving believing you're going to come out the other side (or not caring if you do or not) and once passing through you suspect your gain will be insight into the "Why Me?", "What is the point of it all", "Oh, I get it" questions all answered up and neatly packed into your backpack and ready for the next walk or stroll through Life's Park.  Nope.  Not a clue.  Clueless, is a better or best term I can come up with.  I think this outcome shortens my life in many ways.  It was so much fun ignoring the lack of aim of a life for 64 years that I actually just became "me" and learned about "others" and fa la la la la, la la la laa'd into the comma my brain wants me to be in.  It's like the Kroll's Cafe commercials in Fargo where two German crones come on TV to tell about their cafe, those silver bullet diners and their catch phrase is, "Shut up and Eat?".  Damn!!  That's about it for me now.  A year digging into the soul of my soul and I come out completely uncertain about almost everything I felt some certainty toward before.  You know like "truth".  Pretty stable idea in life for most, but "truth" is on a string and it swings like an old hanging bridge over an ancient forest's river artery.  What a great invention our brains.  And to head into today and beyond realizing it's best advice and clearest message is going to be, "Shut up and eat!"  It's enough I'm sure, to send many folks off looking for the answer in a bible or from the flapping jaws of da preacher man. 

I'm different without her.  Also, my mom and dad, David's wife Jane, Lyn's brother Lewis, all dying during that time Lyn and I spent walking around her death messenger on the farm have affected my psyche in the sense that I hardly realized they were dying right before my very eyes, while all the time I could only see Lyn and be steady to aid her if she ever called out.  Those almost seven years of tending to her cancer beast and her needs took her away from me one day at a time until she reached a point about five years in where we started to become separate in our thoughts and deeds of living as farmers.  She made time then, once my parents were secured in their vaults in hallowed ground, Jane too, to think about her life and her kids and their kids and our time together as the package of her life.  It absorbed her somewhat more than I expected.  I had imagined that there would be great chats about "life" and the "pursuit of happiness", but that was not Lyn's style.  "Let it be" was Lyn's style and she worked at farming while her mind worked at letting go of her ailing body, that cancer that was chewing on her like a dog trying to chew up an entire elk carcass alongside the highway.  We didn't grow apart, really.  We didn't fall out of love.  Intimacy was pretty damn sweet.  But, she was leaving me way back when and I was walking a thin line of life without her back as far back as 2011, just after dad died, as if she had met her last obligation to the family that adopted her unconditionally.  It's a torture I will not recommend, but I know so many others have lived it and know more about its feel and effect than I can describe in these paragraphs.  Some others in my family, like Carol, lost husband and child in one fell swoop of the grim reapers sickle and my feelings are real for that, but distracted as I worked with Lyn to enjoy every last moment of her last wish to nurture a little farm and all it's living things.  That's who she was all her life, Nature's handmaid.

I wrote a poem last night thinking of Lyn and its what it is and will probably find this post tomorrow as I look at it again today and remember what it is the poem was trying to say.  Why it seemed to have to come out and get some fresh air.  You know, what poems tend to do; show up, mostly not to be read by many or even a few, but just to be out in the light for their time.  Like the lives we live; just a little sunshine goes a long way in a life.  I think that is all I have to say for now about this right of passage I'd gladly take out of life's formula if I were in charge.  And, I'd also try to leave more bread crumbs along the pathways of my fellow beasts so the pointlessness of it all; life and death, would not have to be so painful.

Why?

The Civil Wars Reincarnated

One day God was out walking around Telegraph Hill in San Francisco feeling kind of bored.  He was glassing the parrots with his Zeiss binoculars and thinking about the time when Adam and Eve screwed up.  No, he was lamenting that day more than thinking about it.  He sat on a park bench for a minute even though he didn't need a park bench or anything to sit on, but he was feeling the effects of living a chunk of eternity without Adam and Eve in the Garden.  Many people walked by him and it somehow made him feel even more different inside of Eternity than ever:  Kind of a warm rushing flushed feeling he hadn't really felt before.  What he had noticed over the eons was that Man had pretty much continued to screw things up.  They had continued to screw up and down sometimes too.  It seemed like there was no end to the people walking by his bench-perch (God was still thinking about the parrots I guess).

God kept thinking about all the screw ups, mostly all the wars humans had preoccupied themselves with.  All the killing of his creations that happened during wars like the Trojan Wars, and the 100 Days War, the Civil War (God! that was a real screw up he thought), then WWI and WWII and Vietnam.  He was getting woozy thinking of all the killing and mess man had gotten himself into after the Garden.  Then one of the parrots landed next to him on the bench.  God had been thinking he had thought enough about all the turmoil man had created for himself with the free will he let them take out of the Garden that time after the apple bobbing screw up.  War he decided was the worst of Man's inventions, God thought (to himself of course).  Where the hell did man come up with this idea of war?  God knew he had invented love making for humans after the first screw up so they could go forth and prosper and continue to screw up, but war seemed like a sin against love making.  So, God was thinking about that when he looked back at the parrot.  He noticed the parrot was wearing a set of headphones and seems to be tapping his foot and kind of rocking back and forth to the sound coming through the headphones.

The parrot peeled off the headphones and offered them to God.  So, God took them and pretended he had a head and pretended he didn't know what the parrot was listening to even though he knew music because he let man invent that too.  God was sick of inventing after those six hard days at the grinding wheel and was enjoying man making all kinds of things on his own.

So the parrot watched God put on the headphones and the parrot flew off to hang out with and copulate with his mate up in the trees on Telegraph Hill.  God starting focusing on the music in the headphones and smiled.  He hadn't really listened to music much before.  He had been too busy paying attention to everything at once and so he didn't really know much about any one thing in particular.  He didn't figure that was his job after setting the whole Universe spinning.  God was listening and thinking about how cool it would be if he could get all of mankind to just take a break like he was and listen to some music.  He thought about the time, a few hours back in eternity when he watched Adam and Eve listening to the sounds of their new home outside of Paradise.  He remembered the great music that Mozart and the boys produced during their time.  Then he started thinking about the not too long ago when some guys called the Everly Brothers were singing their great duets.  Then some more wars came and all of a sudden there was all kinds of new music that couples like Adam and Eve were listening to all kinds of great rock and roll and slow dancing music and they were making love too and having babies and man just kept on going.

God was getting a little nostalgic through all of this and decided it seemed man had done a couple things right after all.  Music being one of them and maybe that is what kept man and woman doing what they were supposed to do.  He was just thinking about all this when he started to listen to the music in the headphones again.  He liked what was playing.  He thought about how every generation of humans had their favorite music and that once or sometime twice in every generation since man invented music there was a duet that was really top notch.  He did some calculations and figured out that music and math were the same thing, but music made babies and math made the world go around.
  
He started listening to the music again.  He really listened and he felt his alone-ness changing to loneliness  He decided that being the one and only God wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.  All because of taking the time to listen to this specific duet singing through his headphones.  God started swaying back and forth to the songs and the chords and the harmonies and the sense of the love that was coming to him through the music.  YES, he thought to himself, this is what I invented, love, and man has figured out how to induce love with music.  God was all smiles, but at the same time he was getting all the more lonely.  Then when he was at the height of a very (almost) overpowering feeling inside his unversal self the last song ended and an announcer came on and said; "That last song was, "Dance with Me Until the End of Love" by The Civil Wars.  And that made God so warm and fuzzy inside he wanted to fly up in the trees with the parrots, find a mate and make love.  He was beside himself with this new feeling he now could feel was love.  He realized  maybe man had figured out that war was evil and love was good.  And then, God decided it was a good day to rest again.  As he leaned back into the park bench comfortable with himself and the bench, He thought seriously about letting Man back into the Garden.

Once Upon A Desert Dream

Desert Dreaming

I dreamed I went to the desert. 

Not to see Jesus,

Not to be torched by sunlight

Or to walk on the burning scorched waterless sand.

Specialists of creation arrived ahead of me.

And like me, when the sun gave up

I no longer felt alone

I was joined in rapidly cooling darkness

By strange creatures moving,

Listening, buzzing, calling wildly.  All invisible

To my desert blindness.  My fearful voice,

A kind of feigned wailing did not seem to detour

Those non-aliens so adapted to that place and

Time tested to survive where I was not.

I must have had a dream purpose for being there. 

Surely to dream through the experience,

But more to observe adaptation of the resident's

Resultant consequences of their being there without humans

For eons and going through the motions of survival.

The sand was too hot for my feet.

The plants too course for my touch.

Some animals were venomous,

Biting things and others

Lived in husk-like hide-wear.

(Try to bio-mimic those outfits for humans)

All these ‘others’ seemed evasive;

Built for speed, cryptically colored, efficient.

I was in their place to learn or perish.

I was not honed for the comfortless desert.

There were no “wheat bellies” to be found.

And as observer I was observed.

When quick enough to glimpse their forms

I did not spoil their networking.

I felt as if in a play titled, “Observer observed.” 

What I could not see, they seemed to have noticed.

While I struggled to find shade

From the kiln-sun-fire

They slithered into crevasses.

I felt like there was no room at the inn.

My dream search, night or day, was for lost myths.

Stories of my youth about the “mother-lodes”

Told by others who had once found it

Having come to the desert

As a mysterious place holding untold treasures

Prospectors prospecting,

And they tried and they died,

Trying to report finding “it”.

Many learned tongue-thickened silence.

Some found ‘the lode’ and lived to tell of it.

Then, ironically, died trying to retrace their

Duned-over or forgotten landmarks.

I did not go dreaming in the desert for gold,

But for the salve of alternative solitude.

And when the dry night air showed me eternity,

When I reached up to touch the just out of reach stars

(So deceptive the clear night desert unbleached by sunlight) 

I sensed my mind as desert;

How it could go on beyond me, outlast this man.

And too, how the desert persists,

Howls in our absence,

(Like a mythical wolf cheering it doesn’t live on the moon)

Makes fun of our technology

Takes our lives so we won’t rot elsewhere unconsumed.

Deserted, I pondered the burial rituals

Of those ancient Egyptian desert-Nile people.

Their Embalming and companion treasures entombed.

Their myths allowed them to travel beyond the desert in death.

Their art and useful creations at hand entering eternity

Lest they be reborn in a Nile-less desert future.

Long before my desert journey

They worshiped sun and water,

Could not persist without it.

Oh, the patience of ancestors

Entombed in block-stone pyramids

Their sacred myths

Kept alive by the kin waiting,

Watching and wondering.

When human ignorance of long ago

Turned Eden to sun baked sand

Man’s ineptness was revealed

In a life-form we now call desert.

Those generations of desert peoples

Created a pitiless God out of a torturous sun.

An unchanging God until Man re-minded himself after It.

Awake now--writing this narrative poem

I know we cannot change fast enough,

To go wandering the desert as our permanent home.

Adapt or die.

I killed my desert dream. 

Like the storied myths of desert visions

Other desert wanderers and seers perished or

Crawled out and told of unbelievable things. 

Humbled by their inability to sustain a desert life

By way of these myths, I am keenly aware 

Of riparian- and savanna-man’s limitations.

Home again in Montana and the lush system of not-desert

I find common fellows who are more like me

Then any others anywhere I've been on earth--Americans.

And what I share with them is more than Man’s

Frailties, strengths and emotions.

The same magic seen in the desert beasts I dreamed;

(Skills to survive in place, places that make us all different)

I too am a magical animal; one of waters and less angled sun,

Of trees and soils filled with nourishing wetted life.

A place where rocks, drought and exposure

Challenge me to re-create myself

Joyfully while skillfully testing death.

Wild elements and situations foreign to domestic life

Renew me, send me back ‘home’ bravely pushing against time.

Time and chance create change--

A useful tool, often taken for granted, more often scorned.

We have short memory of places hostile to our well-being.

We remember homes where we loved and co-mingled.

Homes filled with lessons of courage to continue

And games of reasoning and love to sharpen

Against time our amazingly adaptive man-code.

A unique code passed through kinship to ward

Off ever-changing risks to our being

Human.

Seeking Council with Muse Artemis

Seeking Council with Muse Artemis

  

Will you come to me now, Artemis,

Out of  your dark obedient forest?

There, where you are content and powerful.

My view of these piney Bitterroots

Are frightfully bold for this mortal’s eyes.

You take advantage of hills

As if they were scattered stones

For your playful fashioning of gigantic cairns.

My River has a frozen sheet over it again.

It’s heat released high into the canyons.

Frosted air crystals flit about wind-torn.

They shimmer, daylight rainbowing them.

Winter sleeps under white snow-covered ground.

I wait for a full spring moon

Not ringed mysteriously like this February one.

I feel anxious for summer already.

My hunger for food is satisfied.

Aloneness sits close by,

Watching.

It is not a time to hunt, as you are known to do.

I too hunt alone.

You could be guiding me, mythical Huntress.

My hunting dog knows you Artemis.

She doesn’t “speak” of you, but knows your

Presence when running ahead of me.

She hunts for you and that is why she runs.

I too, was once a hunter like you.

I notched arrows like you.

I killed and said grace over the meat.

Though I want to be present

I am past too.

And future is drawing options

Of landscapes for me to imagine.

You, Muse, sit silent somewhere

Wildland surrounds you securely--

Unassuming , coy Goddess.

Are you upset with this mortal?

He only tries his writing to learn.

I do not write to take down

The holy or well meaning.

My words must be too vague

They stumble over things looking for

Universals that might please you.

I cannot climb the mount

To your world--so unlike mine

So unknowable and immortal like your siblings.

My life is of a definite time

A time-aged and disfigured life.

Unlike you, I cannot watch and wait musing.

Nor play roulette with hope?

Hope is too mundane, too captive for this mortal.

What do I call the anticipation I feel?

Tell me the words.  I’ll put them down here.

Ought I not imagine an expected pleasure?

No!  It need not be “desire”. 

That would over-power me now.

What is pleasure experienced in the silence of aloneness?

Do I want or need simple conversation to be a-mused like you?

I’ll gladly take conversation;

If the ending is resolution,

Agreeing to terms of endearment

Is more than enough, Muse.

Does this aging mortal have to be slain

Upon your alter on Olympus?

Offered up as sacrifice for offenses?

Show me how to get there and I’ll come.

What if I run away?  I am afraid.

Yet, if I could run away

My every ounce would circle back seeking answers.

I have grown old and understanding

Of my time waiting alone these many days.

You can afford your Olympian pursuits ageless Goddess.

I expect your silence, your anger, and some frustrations

With mortal men such as I.  We earn them.

I am willing and able to cast away from Life’s shoreline.

I’ll go into exile on my windless Odyssey if you will it.

It might be a cure for my lost mate.

Our contract now finished, my psyche

No longer tempered by being alone,

No longer afraid knowing aloneness so well.

  

Courage seems so far away so unneeded by a Goddess.

I ponder manly work and succeed in doing it.

Yet, it feels like function without form.

Going through motions to feel alive.

Is not the circular life of a mortal

Labor for Death’s conclusion?

When guided by you Artemis,

The folly and foils of life

Seem joyful lessons to me;

This mortal among other survivors

Some more fit than I attracting

Your attentiveness.

I have aged beyond being durable

That is outside my resilience now.

Once a hardy youth

Being insignificant is not troubling now.

Existence without purpose  

Has become an expected impression of reality.

Should I throw in my will-towel

Accept assistance of community

In essence, ride with death nearing non-existence?

Have I done enough in this long time of living well?

Do I accept another free ride on life having known fulfillment?

Or while easing into conversations with Death  

Relax resistance to Its ever-present workings?

Or push against Death’s daily wager

Linger somewhat longer

Before conceding to Earth’s recycling,

Before giving back this fully nourished body,

Porter of my tingling soul-mind?

 This year, I seem to be atoning in a Purgatory,

A place or myth conflicting with personal common sense.

Show me a place-word that describes

Suffering for atonement on Earth , Artemis.

A word, my muse, of use in the life I now live.

I will accept these human penances concretely

If they are needed for another loved life.

I write loudly, my muse, alive in a body

Saturated with senses and thumbing through thoughts

Casting symbols in ink upon pages--

Lines for my last act and final scene.

Tell me Artemis:  What do muses do?

Abandon some mortals for others equally frail?

Leave it to the last mortal to resolve life alone?

Oh, the variety of fellow souls

The freely wandering bipeds

Confused by the mess man is in.

Mankind too frayed to mend in all it’s time thus far.

Were you there when we came down from the tree of life?

Were you entertained by our folly?

Am I to start anew;  begin again?

Searching.  Endlessly searching.

Is there no fable or moral you can lend

To aid my wanderings through mind mazes

Sorting trial and error for a way in-out?

Or does life’s mirage split by sensual prisms

Shine through always tattered 

Life so bright and dark at once.

Will you encourage another chapter be written?

So my play; my comedy, my epic

Again ends as tragedy?

Ha!  The varied and divided colors flashing life-light.

Even the wayward moth can see better than I.

Some waves I just cannot sense,

Some light I cannot to be drawn to,

Some fire I cannot be consumed by

Though I feel that is what life is--

A slow burning against the bulb of perfect decoy light.

I seem now unable to choose,

Maybe I am that light blinded moth-life.

Maybe all mortals are this way--the same beings,

Mindful, yet confused, 

Willed, always playing roulette with choices.

How then, do I course myself?  Flee on?

How do I feel powerful into the coming

From the present aloneness?

Oh, Muse of Moonlight, Night-wind of wildlands,

I feel wandering is man's ludicrous pathway.

I do not know the written symbol forming the scent of Completeness.

You, symbolic protector of all animals, are now guide absent.

You, always more than this thinking mortal man.

This man a ghost lost

In a village of strangers.

Come again.  Show me words to final Way,

And I will ink another moment of being

To this momentary page.

When Now Becomes Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

January 31, 2014

I took a long mysterious trip down memory lane today.  Friends held my hand and it was inspiring how 1974 came back to life so clearly in specific ways.  That year I was married to Lyn, Jessica was born, friends from the Air Force were still visiting Lyn and I in Kenai and our soul mates Susan and Raymond were so close to us we didn't know if we lived in separate houses or if we had two houses we lived together in as a family.  Today as the memories of that time rushed to surface like a fish after a mayfly, and the friends and kin of that time:  Lyn, Jessica, Steve Leyden, Jim Hallock, the Carrs, Sharon, Mike, others at the Air Force, new friends at the hydroponics research facility in Kenai, etc.,  I felt as if I was there again.  A picture sent to me by Steve placed me back inside the body and age I was then and it was like I could not get out of that body to put on my older man, my widowed man, my orphaned man suit back on and into the present day-moment.  I was texting and FacePaging and emailing and singing out to the survivors of that time who would respond and the feelings I had for them 40 years ago were alive and well within me as if they were root memories sending tendrils all over my body and stimulating my brain and tingling my heart.  You know the term, surreal; yes, it was surreal.  I renewed myself with Steve and Susan and Jessica today as we chattered via the Internet and it was as if we were all sitting in a room and living the "back then" as it was happening.  I saw myself in Steve's picture as a 26 year old, Steve was 19.  Susan was probably "jailbait" that year, or at least she looked it, but her and Raymond were all but walking up the hill to their marriage vows about then of shortly afterward.  Lyn was 23 and lovely of course.  And she was the center of the universe again today, as she often is when I mentally deal with letting her  be dead.  Ha!!  Fat chance.  As long as my head works in the fashion it did today she lives it seems.

What changed as the day wore on and I tried to imagine myself sleeping tonight?  Not much.  I was essentially locked into the then that was chatted about.  That time was the foundation of who we became and it affected and charged our courage when we walked away from those first intimate friends outside of the college dorm or the hometown or the family reunion.  We were on our own then.  Lyn and I were making our family and Jess was proof of it and Steve celebrated that by visiting from Elmemdoff Air Force Base.  Susan wrote again today of the deep influence Lyn had on her life and how she continues to reinforce her acceptance of Lyn's philosophy that you take what you get and call it good enough.  And you love the one who loves you and rides shotgun at your hip.  I kept seeing Jim Hallock with us too and complaining to Steve that he had abandoned the "tribe".  He has misplaced us and his unknown whereabouts to us was upsetting me.  Well, at least until I admitted that I'd have to be upset with Lyn then too (and I know I am some days when I need her) for her whereabouts are unknown to us now too.  Did I mention it was a surreal day?  Yeah, guess I did, huh?

I was reminded a while ago, before I started writing this post of something Steinbeck wrote in his "Travels with Charlie" (Copyright;  1961, 1962).  I am rereading that book in anticipation of my summer on the highway with Tess.  Steinbeck was lonesome on his travels with Charlie and at one point admitted that the only way to deal with "aloneness" was to be alone.  I know that and nodded when I read it.  It felt good to have someone as honored by me as Steinbeck is as a writer to write something of his guts that matched my guts.  Humanity, you know.  Universality.  We all have to concur aloneness at some point by facing it; by being alone, until we're ready to be with others and accept aloneness when it arrives again and again.  And each time it does show up we get stronger in living with; when we just go off and be alone with it's hull, it's empty hull.  It's non-ness. 

Something else Steinbeck talked to me about in "Travels..." that hit home even harder and I feel is more pertinent to this conversation I'm having with myself and anyone who chooses to read along after I post this blog-note.  He said that, "Only through imitation do we develop toward originality."  When I think of my grand kids I have to concur with him.  When I think about us young and restless one's in Anchorage and Kenai back in 1974, I agree with him again.  I believe the power we young adults felt in our friendship then, growing as it was between us, within us, around us we imitated some of the special and new the traits of our new found "adult" (away from home) friends.  We did some "absorbing" of those personalities into ourselves. We somehow knew after we separated how to become "original" and live our separate lives encourage and strengthened by the acts of imitation these dear pals we had been living closely with, no intimately in a genuine way in order to ward off the "aloneness" we felt being really away from home and on our own for the first time of our new age lives.

I want to quote something else from Steinbeck here before I end this epiphany if it's fair to call this post such an awakening.  Steinbeck is referring in "Travels...", (page 100 of my version) to a note he made, "Relationship Time to Aloneness" to himself.  He writes on, "And I remember about that.  Having a companion fixes you in time and that (my emphasis) the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together.  A memory, a present event and a forecast all equally present." He writes this as if he's aiming it right at me, his future reader 50+ years later.  I have to work to interpret this for myself and you might read it differently.  For me, he is reminding his readers of a discovery on his traveling alone.  He misses his wife.  And when he is with his wife-companion he senses time, life actually, as in present tense.  NOW.  Normally we all strive for this in our daily lives and state it often I think, "Hey, live in the present", or something like that, right?  That is possible when you're with someone, alongside your mate, in the company of another compatible companion. 

But, then Steinbeck strikes a note for me, that again I have to agree with him on fully.  "As aloneness settles" he writes and I have been in the state of settling aloneness for almost a year now without my mate who is not anywhere to be found.  And what happened to me today in communing with my old friends from Anchorage and Kenai is confirming.  My entire day was a condensation of the past, the present and the future.  I could not separate out these "times" into separate tics of the clock.  They all became one.  And it is a state I have felt myself in for some time now.  Not knowing if I'm here in the now, living in the past or planning like hell for a future that feels better than so many days in this state of settling aloneness.  This past year I've acted out being 100 years old and that future was an experience in reality.  Just as this writing now at age 65 on this computer is real, yet still part of my forecast of being 100.  And I've painfully relived a life at age 26 with my Kenai pals.  Which today was a dose of joy and sorrow.  Joy in their memory, while sorrow was somewhat overwhelming in not being able to relive that wonderful time.  And yet, I've also, for some time now, lived many current days in some kind of a fantasy with a friend of about 25 who I cannot imagine is 40 years younger than me by the calendar we call "real" time.  It's really not all that fascinating from the standpoint of my emotional health.   I might very much like to act on the opportunities being her age might present.  And I will tell you, dear reader, this has been a struggle for me.  A twist of fate that has injured me some days and caused me to write to her as if I am living her age.  Realizing all the while that a romantic relationship is completely wacko (she coined the phase "batshit crazy" which I love and know I am in real time and real life).  And during this phase of my grieving for Lyn, my living a life in the past, present and future I have been bounced around like a beach ball in bad surf not being sure which person I am; the 26 year old, the 65 year old or the 100 year old. 

I had to write this post tonight.  Not every post do I feel this way.  Tonight, however, needed to have this post see itself against white paper and let me talk it out.  I needed to tell companions about it so I might be closer to imitating a real life and therefore, like a child growing out of imitation of all that is around me new and exciting.  Ah haa,  I might just be edging forward to a new originality for myself.  I don't believe in hope.  Some of my pals know this about me.  Yet, I do know that February 14th is a New Year for me and a full year without Lyn.  And if I cannot hope, I can be glad to have this revelation today that without her companionship and during my settling into "aloneness" for this past year, I may have just arrived at explanation of why the loss of a true kindred spirit as Lyn was for me, I might find himself in a kind of "batshit crazy" state of mind.  A state of some serious mental business.  A mindset defining itself as that state of consciousness where the mind cannot discriminate between a life lived in the past, one in the here and now and one forecasting a life beyond the present. 

I find it amusing that we draw the line between normal and loony based upon being able to know that the past and the future are non- existent states of the mind, while the present is all we can really experience.  Yesterday won't be back and tomorrow never gets here we're told.  Yet, I have lived in all three at once this year and it has had a tendency to wear me out emotionally.  And I fear is has probably worn out a valued friendship or two that were once solid and true.  I'm ready for my dues to have been paid.  I mean, if I'm likely to go on living for a while,  I'm ready for the bill to be taken off the books.  I see no reason not to live on and live with all the gusto I've known my entire batshit crazy life.  Especially now that I might have struck on some understanding of how the mind deals with grief in opposition to relative time.  I have to believe I've just lived through Einstein's theory of relativity where space is curved and time may only be 60 seconds per minute to the minds of the "sane" traveling together on earth at less than the speed of light.

"Hey, bartender, pour me a double, will you?"

The Wisdom of Making Ice

The Wisdom of Making Ice

Riverside.

The floods of other years

Have created a scour-shelf for me

To sit on and ponder the cobble

Deposited since God knows when.

I’m here on a colder day then usual.

I want to listen to the river

As it forms ice floe

And floats them like saucers down a whispering glide.

A distance above and below I see riffles.

They are chattering away I know.

Probably talking to Norman Maclean

About the foundation of time

As the riffle-words crawl out

From under the rocks

Like the stoneflies will

In another week or two.

Here though, heat is a ghost rising

As the ice forms.  I know the formula.

I’m a scientist and measure such things

As how much heat is given off

When water changes to ice.

I’ll say 144 BTUs per pound of ice.

That is probably a sacred number in mythology.

No one else in Hamilton, Montana cares about that.

They should be here now though

To hear the ice maker speak

During this 20-degree day and night water parade.

Unlike the riffles, the glide speaks gently and is reassuring.

Now and then a platter of ice runs against another.

“Clink” such a collision said.  I wonder what that means in River-Talk.

Its simple words are not literature.

The riffles speak in parables.

Glides speak in romantic subtleties.

“Hush” is the main suggestion

And I heed it as I watch from my perch.

A bald eagle flies upstream not 50 feet from me,

Perfectly intent on the business of looking for anomaly.

“Hush!” The ice slides by again and commands.

I reply, “I was only watching the eagle, but you heard me”.

“Hush!

And I obey.  Here alone, the workings of the aged connections

Of this place are not altered. 

Should you and I, my love, take watch here

The river might glide by and hold its tongue.

In that case, I would lean over to you

Place my chin on your shoulder and whisper,

“Hush”.