Smoky Colts

[Written 2018-09-07 in reply to a cartoonist who portrayed our San Diego 1968 high school mascot, the Crawford Colt, as a pot-smoking hippie horse of a type that would have more likely been found in the San Francisco Bay area at that time.]

Horse of many colors,
wreathed with smoke that issues from
a controversial "weed"
while your one bridge burns behind you:
you are but a fantasy
of what our Crawford might have been
if "Diego" had instead
been a "Francisco" farther north.

Yes, our mascot frolicked here
in fields of fragrant grass,
but chewed and swallowed,
not inhaling.  Did we stronger grow?
Or did we too in later years
adopt that pony's happy grin
and wave a peace sign while enjoying
transcendental bliss?

Black and white

When I was young, I saw the world
with one binary eye
in which all things were simplified
to right or wrong,
up or down,
aligned or unaligned,
ordered or di so rd er ed,
logical or emotional.

I'd roll a car window
either fully up
or fully down;
any position in-between
would make me feel uneasy
like a task left incomplete.

The same was true of lane changes.
I preferred to signal the change, and then
quickly jump to the new lane
rather than glide.

Likewise, success and failure
were absolutes, far apart.
Anything less than a total success
was a nagging failure
which demanded either a perfect fix
or a deep burial.

When my younger brother and I,
just children,
were given kits to be assembled,
just so, to make them work,
I finished mine and then I offered
to do my brother's too
not seeing that
the object of the kit was not
just to produce a working toy,
but to instruct and then reward
the student who succeeded.

Besides, I was certain that
I could do a better job;
I viewed him as unqualified
to do the task, and told myself
that it was right to save him from
the sadness that I knew he'd feel
when his attempt did not succeed.

He let me do the work
but my result did not conform
to my exacting code
that tolerated nothing less
than perfect operation.

I was crushed,
and felt enormous guilt
for having ruined his new gift
(although he really didn't care).
To fail was bad enough
but to destroy his property
was for me unpardonable,
a sign that I had overstepped
my bounds, and had,
in my enthusiasm,
damaged something valuable.

Those same feelings engulfed me
years later
when I tried to perfect the alignment
of my own toy telescope.
Instead I misaligned it;
it produced a double image
that I could not correct.
I put the toy away
and did not open it
until long years had passed;
until the pain had dulled.

Later I confessed these things
to a therapist who diagnosed my ills
and tried to help me change the way
I saw the world.
His medication helped me cope
but our discussions did not change
my attitudes about myself
and how I felt
about authority;
about responsibility.

It's not surprising that my views
determined my career.  When shown
in school a demonstration of
a small machine that, on its own,
counted up in binary:
zero zero,
zero one,
one zero (it carried the one!)
one one.
I was enthralled.
Seemingly alive, it knew
how to count from one to ten
and signalled its accomplishments
with lights that accurately indicated
a zero or a one
with no grey areas in between.

If I could build machines like that
I saw that I could place my soul into
a world where everything proceeded
logically and without fault,
endlessly predictable.  And if I
built it well enough
it would do its job forever
and would never fail.

But perfection was my bane
in many jobs
where getting products out the door
was more important than
making them so perfect that
they would never fail.

I worked long hours,
leaving my wife
and my child
home alone,
failing as a father while
practicing perfection that
no one really wanted.
And so my marriage failed,
breaking when in therapy
I told my wife
quite truthfully
I feared her accusations more
than I could return her love.

Today grey skies are overhead,
and grey hairs grow upon my face.
A grey fog clouds my brain
which still sees life as dangerous
and fears to take a single step
which might result in failure.

The failures of my past outweigh
the chances for a new success
that the present often brings.
"Not today", I say,
and close the door.

[2nd edition, 2018-11-19.]
[3rd edition, 2018-12-19.]

Kitties gathered by the window

(a song parody inspired by a friend's photo of his cats
 crowding the window above the kitchen sink on a sunny morning)

♫
Shall we gather at the window
Where so many paws have trod,
Shining in the morning sunlight
As we're warmed by the pure grace of God?

Yes, we’ll gather at the window,
We'll warm ourselves and let our bodies simmer
In the sunlight streaming through the window
Content in the sweet love of God.
♫

Between heaven and hell

We were born
in a temporarily safe place
poised between heaven and hell
at the bottom of a gravity well.

It has taken us 4 billion years
to wake up and realize where we are
(or where we seem to be,
for we have three-dimensional eyes
in a universe that may have four,
or many more, dimensions).

We are short-lived instances
of a self-replicating pattern
that has repeatedly and randomly
been crushed and flattened.
It's a wonder we are here at all.

Our odds for survival were greater
if we were able to see, understand,
remember, and adapt,
and so we grew a brain,
slowly and relentlessly,
until we reached our current level of consciousness.

It's pretty clear that we won't stop developing for a long time,
for we have many faults and weaknesses,
and we are quite vulnerable
both to the natural extinctions of our past,
and the man-made extinctions of our future
powered by the same understanding
that we thought would save us.

We are still apes with clubs,
defending our territory,
intent on surviving on a planet
that we still believe has
only limited resources,
with not nearly enough to share.

And so,
two trends vie to control our future:
the growth of openness and understanding,
and the growth of power and fear.
We do not know which of these will win;
as I said, we are still evolving.

We are like a plant that eagerly
spreads its leaves and grows upwards
to gather the sun's energy,
while it simultaneously, but begrudgingly,
develops a root system to anchor its growth.
We may be fine
as long as the wind doesn't blow too hard
and we don't grow so tall that we topple
under our unsteady weight.

For myself, I am content
to exist in this minute
and to share
what understandings may come to me.

Individually, none of us will be here very long;
collectively, some of us may survive.
It's all a matter of balance.

In memory of my father

Soldiers of the 96th,

we are your families.
We are your wives, sons, daughters,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren,
and all those who bore your children
or share your bloodline.

Your legacy comes down to us
in books, in movies,
and in black-and-white photos
that show ordinary men
working, playing, taking a break,
training in the snow for a war in the Pacific,
and sailing thousands of miles
to places that had no Kansas wheat fields,
no Iowa corn,
no Ozarks or Appalachians;
places with strange names like
Buri, Dagami, Shuri, and Medeera;
and with hills and ridges that we gave our own names to
and would long remember in our dreams and nightmares:
Hen Hill, Conical Hill,
Hacksaw Ridge, and The Big Apple.

So many of you never returned,
reaching your end in rifle fire,
a hail of machine-gun bullets,
or an exploding shell.
Those of you who did return
were not the ones we had sent overseas;
you bore their names,
but you carried dark secrets
that you would not share with us;
secrets that clouded your thoughts during the day,
and spawned terrible nightmares after dark --
Nightmares so real that you might mistake your lover
for a Japanese soldier
and find yourself shouted awake
with your hands at her throat.

We could not condemn you later
for drowning those demons in alcohol,
or silencing them with a bullet.

But amazingly, some of you
chose to live, love, and work again
in the country that had sent you away.
Look at me; nearly seventy years ago,
one of you chose to marry, build a home,
and create and support a family of five.
Only two of us remain,
but we remember,
and stand in awe at what you accomplished.

Despite your pain, you worked 72 hours a week for 20 years
to support that family and watch its children grow.
You stopped only when the oil company that sponsored you
declared you too old to be of service to them.
Deprived of your ability to serve others,
only five years passed before disease took hold of you
and slowly erased your mind and memories
over the next eight years,
until nothing remained.

Your ashes sit atop a high point of land
that now looks westward across the same Pacific
through which you sailed to hell and back.
Your devoted wife, my mother, sits close beside you
under a stone that proudly proclaims your union and service.
I hope to join you there some day.

Few will notice your memorial
among the thousands of other stones there,
but it is my hope that some will remember you,
as we do here today.
Soldier, leader, husband and father
we thank you for your service
and your inspiration.

Life after the unicorn (part 1)

I walk there twice a day, knowing, as always, that the result will be the same.  These creatures have too little time for adventurers such as I.

And yet I persist.

My doctors tell me not to think about it; to broaden my horizons and give the real world more time.  Their reality is not mine, for I know what I saw, and I cannot, and will not, forget.  For who could forget, if they had been there, with me?  The rustle of the leaves, as if a respectfully muted wave of applause had accompanied the breeze that had softly risen and brought with it the clarity, the spiciness, the electric certainty and realization that a moment unlike all others was about to unfold.

I had experienced something like that once before, in a clock store a world away, where the small bell that hung over the front door announced my arrival into a softly ticking room of scent and sound, where the smell of seasoned wood a thousand years old combined with the slightest hint of machine oil to cause me to suddenly stop and stand in anticipation and readiness for a singularly rare event.  The door closed silently behind me as my numb hand let slip the handle, and as the street noise faded the experience intensified to become a world where nothing else existed; there was only I at the center of a universe where that scent and sound emanated like twinkling starlight from each golden messenger who now stood, immobile and facing me, to present a single truth in unison.  Improbably, all said exactly the same thing:  it was two seconds before five, the moon was full, and it was time for them to sound.

And sound they did, until I stood among a choir of cathedral bells proclaiming that yes, this was the time, the moment of momentousness, where everything else fell away and there were only the loudly proclaiming bells stridently marching through an ancient rhythm that pierced my consciousness from all sides.  My breath had caught in my throat, and I felt my body yearning to breathe while my mind said, no, not now, stay, stay here, and just be.  It was only when the darkness rushed in to eclipse me, and I felt myself falling forward, that I gasped and broke the spell, while still, with mouth agape, I sank to my knees and turned my head slowly to see, hear, smell, and taste the cold, sharp importance of the event.  I had passed through much more than a physical doorway, and was now worshipping at a celestial altar.  As the last bell faded, I rose shakily and staggered out of the shop, into a man-made cacophony that beat upon me and demanded that I return to the reality I had left just moments before.  Yet I knew then that I would never fully return.  The veil had been lifted, briefly, just for me, and in the days to come I pondered and struggled with the memory.

Perhaps you will understand, then, why when she appeared, my reaction was not fear, but acceptance and satisfaction.  The curtain had risen on the second act.  The four polished hooves ascended into impossibly pure and perfect legs that supported a regal frame and a graceful neck that lifted my gaze to be dropped into her eyes.  Those eyes had seen millennia pass, had seen empires come and go, and yet they were now focused on me.  They saw everything, all my failings, all my yearnings, and all my hopes.  There was nothing for me to say; I simply bowed my head and silently waited for her to speak.

Rock Lover

I saw you climbing heavenward
Silhouetted, flesh on rock
Poised between your life and mine.
No eagle, I, nor even flea;
My leaps are tightly kept within
A heartbeat, catching my dry throat.
Did you slip? I gasp.
My eyes would turn
And run away
But love constrains me here
To wait, and wait again.
You love the rock far more than I.
Your lover, cold and grim
Suspends you as you toy with death
Feints a hand, then laughs to see
You scramble to regain your grip.
You've never held me quite so tightly;
Must I then become a Fate?
Atropos, my scissors poised
To slice the rope that binds you there
To bring you back to me.