Gadaffi, Diamond, and Me in the Basement

Neil Diamond can save the world…woke up this morning from a dream in which Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi is living in my childhood home basement. It is a finished basement, with a low ceiling, and it smells like the faint flatulence of cinder block.   So, Muammar, he sits there silently for days on a metal folding chair besides a vinyl covered card table with some bottles of water, Pez, and some old fashion donuts on a paper plate.  He is mostly still, looking up once in a while to reflect on something distantly beyond the corner of the basement and then he looks down to jot some notes on a scratch pad.  I’ve hesitated some tries, but I cannot engage him. One day, a song begins to play on the radio – but the acoustics in the basement are clear like I was hearing it in my head; I start looking at him (non-amorously) and I start to sing, “…hhhands - touching hands —- reaching out—-  touching me, tuh-ching YOU…” and then he stirs and turns his head to look at me, at first like an old steel shed riding mower, his engine sputters and then he kicks over and he begins to mouth the words meekly escalating into full bravado, “Sweet Caroline, DAH DAH DAH, good times never seemed so go, SO GOOD - SO GOOD - SO GOOD…I feel inclined….DAH DAH DAH…” and he speaks over the song, “I remember LISTENING to this when I was MUCH YOUNGER…!”

The Genie is out of the bottle, I recommend we start blasting “Sweet Caroline” over the war torn regions of the world - where rickety old tyrants and despots can listen and reflect and turn over like old riding mowers…. (HEY, I SAID IT WAS A DREAM!!)

Lovely Dreaming Foxes

We agreed at 3am on this one thing…we were silently pondering in the darkness; soul kisses and caress cast sparks around us like embers flicked from the flames, soft floating down in the blackness, like crying stars or what could be the eyes of lovely foxes falling asleep in the forest.  She says what I am thinking, she always does this, “I love you, isn’t enough as an expression, to convey what is going on inside me."

Lying there exposed below the weight of the cosmos, I close my eyes, imagining my curled up dreaming foxes, when she appears; clarity in crisp blue jeans, poised with hips sweeping up imaginings from the forest floor.  My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her black suede boots, as if the earth would fall out from beneath us if I were to lift her up.  Strokes of mahogany hair, with striations of brushed brass.  Her eyes seek the depths of mine making me a mystery to even myself, and they were like the hematite pupils of lions looking out from holes in the foliage of a verdant jungle. Our gaze meets gently, and then rips open the promise of time, expelling a breeze, and little parachutes of hope float off like soft threads from dandelion blooms. 

Where does our love go today my dear?  Oh, how she stood there in the frozen sparkle of air while her warm, moist breath slowly spiraled out and suspended around her lips. I could feel the spires of frost that nearly had moments on her tongue before they melt in that mouth. I love her so much, that my imagination cries for a voice – beating the chest of eternity for just a shaved second of time before it disappears into the clouds of passion.  I wanted to just walk up and inhale that mist – arriving on a voice that came on the crest of sigh after sigh…  I followed the contours of her hips, she spun around toward me and the moment flashed and froze – like a spirit swallowed up by the darkness.

Bone gripping, I shake with awareness, its presence is lulled from the shadows, sucking the dampness from our skin, leaving us brittle and shivering…the presence of another is called for.  Cold makes us lovers, narrowing that space through presses…bodies fall into the sheets…warmth from sun flees, and our bodies are drawn together.

Trails of life in the crystal powder, white nights, desert, colors seen in the moonlight, tree limbs, dendrites encased in blue crystal immortalize.

Visitation

His child smiles lovingly and with admiration at his Dad, who stands at the coffee bar at Starbucks, paused and smiling back at his son.  They sit nearly silent, but at rest at home, the single Dad with the thousand mile stare, blended with compassion; His mind passes gently over the fabric of adoration as he reflects on the lives of others he sees, wishing pieces of theirs were his, seeing his son.  His eyes glaze with pensive sadness, knowing its “visitation.”  What a cold and awful word.

Something to look at. (8/9/98)

Something to cast lines at from the depths of my soul.  It’s always about validation.


But what if I could give you a sense of the overwhelming emotion that I have when a song takes me high on a peak lit by a falling star.

His foot taps to a beat that could only be described as eventually Latino.
Finger on the buttons
With a pattern of taps and presses, he can take it up or down
Or replicate life or do both.

Cold smears of clouds…too far…drip horizontally from the highest peaks…
drawn Westward by the turbulent winds roaming the perimeter of the horse latitudes.
He thinks, he'd like to be bobbled in the winds as they licked acres of tundra
17000 feet above a small peace of driftwood that rolls happily
onto the discovery grounds of a blond infant with a sand bucket and shovel.

Just wanting to be loved by the consummate authority for his essence. 
The desire to share every arc of excitement from every new discovery
was evidence that he needed validation.  He simply needed to be loved.
The electricity was intense, and the deeper in he traveled
from the orbits of the electrons and firing of synapses in his brain,
the more nothingness he found.

The writer is forcing experience down a funnel into an ink well…
Rather than drink from the fountain, he records the minutes
as the music spills all over the floor of his empty apartment.,
heard, but never really listened to.
He sits there drenched, although not a note, not a word, rained on him.

The closer the words get to the paper,
The further he drifts from the catalyst.
Its clearer now he is a robber of substance
And a graffiti sculptor.
Give him a glimpse of who you are and he’ll make it his.
You can’t have it back, you may only look.
But you’ll like what you see from the outside looking in.

He reaches for the pistol,
While, far away, the matador slowly drops his chin
Purposefully lowering his brow over the top edges
Of those deep dark Spanish eyes.
The metal is heavier than it looks,
No doubt that the density of a revolver
Far exceeds that of his shiny letter opener,
Which he has just jammed through a note,
bleeding into the grain leather top of his cherry wood desk.

An olive skinned picador gallops out
In a burst of intense hues, draws back his arm and
Jams the beautifully plumed lance into the base of the neck and
the head of the great beast drops...
and from that precise spot,
A latitude line was drawn to a location 8000 miles away.
At that precise moment,
As a silver trigger is slowly drawing back.

As the pride spills out, the bull stumbles and falls in a heap
At the feet of  the Spanish hero,
The crowd rises to its feet in a swell of cheers.
that stirs the bewildered bull to struggle to his knees, without grace;
The grace with which he entered the ring.
There cheers were like no sound the bull had ever heard.

The judge, jury and executioner,
Always at the ready, even as the verdict is announced,
“guilty of stealing the meaning from someone…larceny of substance.”
The sentence, “Death.”

There is no click heard as a gunshot
Resounds in the empty apartment.
His head snaps back, and recoils forward,
gravity tilts him from the barco lounger to one knee, then tipping.
As his body struck soundly strikes the floor,
The breath of the collapsed bull rushes out
blowing soft dust
Onto the boots of the matador.

The slow motion of waving hands and hail of flying roses in the stadium
Made the execution meaningless.
The matador trembles a smile, and tosses his hat into the air,
As it fell, a smoking gun bounces once more on cheap carpeting.

Meanwhile his father cheered as the Eagles
Ran the pigskin across the goal line with only seconds remaining.
His mother sang over the phone to a disconsolate friend,
The receiver tucked under her nodded head…
The sound of chopping potatoes could be heard
As the TV shut off in the other room.

They’d get the call on Tuesday.
His friends would “ask why,”
We loved him so much.
A girl he asked out only days before
Privately reconsidered his offer…never understanding why she just
Didn’t say “yes” in the first place.
Afterall, “He was something to look at!

Blowing Bubbles

Not every memory is worthy of rescue
Each an iridescent bubble,
Bobbled on the breeze of time
Landing gently on a finger tip
A nostalgic prismatic sphere
caressed by spires of starlight
but no hero is so sweet
as to save every memory.
No memory so worthy
That it will not at some point
Release its contents
With a muted pop…
So, when our dreams are just too tired to come true,
We have to wake up
And start blowing some more bubbles.

Essay: Love is an ever unfolding friendship.

Love is an ever unfolding friendship:  Consumed the by the most poignant and desirous lessons of love, we speak of endless unfolding as we wrap around each other in this inextricable embrace.  Falling in love is not the closing of doors or a narrowing of path, but a tremendous expansion.  I think we experience love both as individuals, and in the mysterious blend of “oneness.”
 
Thirsty, but afraid to drink:  We are intoxicated  by the other’s outpouring of words – a cathartic release of those thoughts and remembrances that comprise the fear and apprehension of our past.  Strange that as we release our fears and open ourselves to possibility, it is another fear that tries to fill the open space.  What is brilliant is that we know this – and somehow, find comfort with its shared awareness.  I like sometimes being unable to question expression before it springs forth; it’s good to know that some things come naturally.   Even with the euphoric effects of love, we are sobered by the immenseness of discovery.
 
Impetuous romancers.  Many of us must seem so misguided to those that would prefer we be on their path; and that is the irony.  The guidance of others is, indeed, someone else’s guidance!  We want “us” tremendously – and as lovers, each should choose this - and so with every “I love you so” they push open a gate even wider for the other; each also open to the possibilities left by both certainty and doubt. 
 
Cool, Sad, Odd, Choices:  A life chosen alone, cannot be experienced together.  But cool that choices made together, can be experienced alone.  Sad that we are sometimes afraid to believe in gifts presented through spirit.  And even more odd that our individual choices can seem small and alone without the company of pragmatism; the logical and (not so) independent guidance and views of others.  Our choices are our paths; they have run up along side each other.  They blend, overlap, weave, and as indistinguishable as they are at times, I still believe there are three; “yours, mine, ours.”  There is also, “theirs.”
 
Undeserved explorers.  Knee to knee we huddle and kiss and breath each other at a wobbly café table, stabilized at the base by sugar packets – clairvoyants asking questions not because we don’t know the answers, but because we love to hear the other say it.  We asked what is it we want in life with, for, from another.  “Here, let me help you with that answer,” like sharing succulent morsels from a tour de force presented on bone china, garnished with delicious accessories (soulful stares, caressing touch, flowing features) .  We speak of that which we have together until we are no longer deserved. Love and fear are race companions, running out in front of the other – trading the lead position on the journey of discovery.  Our lives, our love, are like sugar packets; shims of stability in an unfolding world that never stops being explored.
 
The paradox of gradual emergence and submergence.  It is confusing to face where we are with each other, because we are forever coming from the past, and it is that to which we find reference and relativity.  This washes up against a future that rides in on a steed of words penned and spoken from the heart.

Perth, Australia

I pressed firmly into my seat, as the massive jet slipped gravity.  At 300 kilometers per hour, the runway in Melbourne fell away, music already in my ears, companionless as usual.  We banked hard to the west, rising above the smoke of widespread wildfires, breaking through into cascades of sunlight drenching flowers of billowy clouds.  I have no expectations – I’ve landed in LA, San Diego, San Francisco dozens of times – this was just Western Australia. Perth.

I inspected the Australian skies through the jet window – imaging your companionship.  And when we landed and disembarked, I could almost sense your anticipation and figure moving behind me – I turned out of the jet way, and you overtook me from like a wave making a break for the beach.  Awakened and anxious to get out into the streets, I became thirsty, but no drink would quench it.

The breezes eddied behind passing cars, stirring some fallen eucalyptus leaves that softened under my soles.  Limbs of willow trees, wagged and formed breathing shadows of you in my path.  I can smell your hair and the perfume lingering on your shoulders, but I can’t see you. 

One ticket to Fremantle – a few steps off the platform, I’m sitting on fiberglass seats staring out a thick plastic window – with little stress fissures in it that channel the sunlight into scintillating whiskers; the train lurches and we are off to the port city, Freo.  I imagine our hands touching, grasping the steel pole as we sway through turns in the track.  I smile secretly with closed lips, and close my eyes – lifting my head to feel the kiss of my companion. 

I reach for you as we enter a maze of open streets – and you slip through my fingers.  I’m disappearing into passages between colonial buildings, coming out onto terraced patios, empty handed but filled with a vision of red, and white, and yellow peonies in dashed rows of tidy flower boxes.  Before me is a single drink on a black wrought iron table, glistening beads rolling down uncontrollably as the seaside air condenses on the cold glass.  I imagine your soft visage and mane, softly quivering in a breeze amidst alfresco cafés.

The bustling marketplace is filled with new faces and lively music and curios and crafts in busy blends of yet unnamed colors.  Faces are moist with a light sweat, smiling – crowds of companions, sparked and animated, with embraced arms and sacks of mutual adored memories in progress.

I turn to my missing companion – a soft face browned by the love of sunlight, lips moist and full of life that move in to fill my mouth with the quenching sensation of hope.  Her identity eludes me, but she drifts freely before my eyes, plays symphonies in my ears, and we sway through time in the exchange of our breaths. Each beautiful epiphany, electric experience, is the same bright star by which we both navigate home to a kiss.

I dreamed of our time together on the flight home to the eastern seaboard.  And when I walked out of the jet way, I was clinging tight to her memory. I was no longer thirsty.  I thought to myself, I only know she gone, when I cannot turn to her to say hello; and I mostly miss her if she isn’t here to kiss me goodbye.  My companion wasn’t missing – she was waiting.

Thanksgiving: What more could I want?

What more could I want?

I have the unchained sounds of the wind brushing through the bare trees.  And the sky just pushes by on their way somewhere south of hear.  It’s very quiet except the sounds of the winds and my fingers clicking on the keyboard.  I’m sitting in my jeep parked up against a white wooden fence that delineates the pastures, the 2 acre or so sloped patch of grass that provide the food, flooring, commode, and lint trap for the llamas and goats that live on it.  The slope easily exceeds 25 degrees, and if I were to roll over the fence 4 feet, I’d be looking down into the tree line rather than out over the Catoctins.  I guess route 340 winds out there west through that gap.  Where it’s especially clear tonight, revealing the very distant lights of some West Virginia town I again guess.  Had I a companion with me, this would be an arguable point.  But as I sit alone, no one can contest me.  The owners of the “inn” where I live are gone this evening for Thanksgiving dinner.  The other displaced bachelors that live up here at Rasberry springs are also gone off with family or friends.  So, yes, I am quite alone.  My primary friend within earshot, is the wind.  It doesn’t often shut up when it’s around.  Odd, were it not for the windbreaks offered by trees and structures, it might slide over the ground without a sound.

The air turned quite cool…and the ranks of clouds show the faded orange glow of the sunset.  I fear not turn around and see the full moon hovering somewhere over my right shoulder.  I hear the Brunswick line, probably coming from Martinsburg.

The hills and farms have gone black, all but the window lights and house lamps.  Back in my desert, the ground would have certainly been desolate and … not the worst, worst darkness.

I still see the thick streak of sunset…like a thin window …if I could peak me head over the lower lege of that streak, I’d find this expanse of gold…my whole life past, glazed over, in golden mist.  The Brunswick howls - and my mind wanders in dementia to a dinner table at Thanksgiving.  Yes, it is Thanksgiving tonight and for the first time in my life, I am utterly alone on the side of this hill.  My children are happy and playing with their friends, my wife, soon to be ex, is probably drinking wine and feeling sad.

Me?  I’m just glad for my senses and undying faith and hope, that one day, the sounds of the wind will not remind me of this moment but of something new.  Lord, bless this evening, your day is done, she was a fine one.  Thank you for the unrecognizable shapes of the clouds, and fathomless smears of cool wind that tear up my eyes and fill my nose so that I’m barely….breathing right.  Now sleep comes…damn these short days of your eastern winters.  My desert, my soul mate; only in the most deep and solemn seconds, do we truly recognize each other. 

End.

Walking My Dog "Memory"

Interesting - as everything is coming into the harbor and some things will make it to their slips, others will crash against the rocks, others will just turn around and head back out to sea.  Meanwhile, all is adrift.  Yesterday I was down - I had just these memories; like an old box of Crayola crayons can’t seem to make a picture.

Job change/no confirmation, kids on the cusp of a wave that will take them away from me, what I thought was for keeps is drifting off, my youth giving way to desires to just go home and nap, my wishing I could just talk my way into a stupor but knowing that I don’t want to hurt anyone (even for the most harmless reason).  I just want to go home - and to be honest, I have none…

So I get on a jet and I go to Oz and toast with old mates, I’ll hang out in Pattaya and long to call back the mysteries I see; I’ll dream through a jungle in Costa Rica and picture you complaining with a backpack on, I’ll go to Brazil and see my children and a mother I love running through the surf.  I just bought an international phone today - I’m sure the messages from Asia will rain down on my hopes and lost friends in the West.  One day, I wonder if I should just not return and find a girl, settle down, marry, have children - but home is forever a horizon for me.  I just need someone to slap the living shit out of me - beat me into sub-consciousness, hand me a Corona, kiss me on the forehead and tell me everything is all right now.

Money, ego, longing…Christ.  What is this all about!  Why is the bitter/sweet more sweet than bitter?

Tonight - laundry, finish the three half empty bottles of wine in my fridge - pray to stay awake long enough for a walk in my neighborhood with my faithful dog Memory, tugging at the leash, just the now and the clacking sound of its drunken footsteps; as the clothes tumble in the dryer.

Why would anyone set sail on a boat called Rock Bottom.  Yet here I am…

The sky winked a few times and the day spilled slowly and steadily out over the horizon.  Millions of people cursed it, loved it, or wished it had never come.  But, with no heed to us, the day crossed the finish line tired and worn, collapsing into the arms of dusk.

Love

It doesn’t fail

It always leads us by the hand

Faster and faster pinching into the folds of night

And we let it slip through our fingers

And watch it run ahead, disappearing in the darkness,

Leaving us itinerant under an obsidian sky

Biography

I grew up with this drive…and sometimes it was a band (skynrd, molly hatchet, journey, REO, 38 special, Dead, Rush, YES)…it was an event, fast ride, beer cans, woods, a camaro…a house party, bon fire, south jersey shore and wooded county highways from the farms to the coast…springsteen and southside johnny…slipping down the crevice between baby boomers and xgeneration.  Unconcerned, I kicked a discarded beer can whose consumer I’d disdain for ever throwing it out to begin with…an environmentalist, with a dead aim between a Genesee beer bottle launched at a yield sign somewhere along a straight road through jersey corn fields.  I hated then the money that I wish I had now…that without, compels me to reminisce.  I loathed killing then, as I took up arms to defend my country against other parents; I swore I’d shoot another man and thank God that I never had to pull that trigger to defend my country’s right be what others strive to be.
 
I wasn’t worried as I searched everywhere…I had no idea of the mistakes I’d make.  I was 12 when I wrote about always searching but never trying to find.  I saw beautiful girls and I tried to choreograph my life and its characters so that somehow, fate would land one in my arms…I fantasized of great athletic achievements…I never figured that I’d bring two beautiful children into this world through an act that I never trained for, have no skill in, and that sometimes shames me.  God sees my spiraling life and for love of his chorus of angels, He shed a tear and transcended the most magical of imagination when my children burst into the light of our closest star.  And they too will fail beautifully and be in the eyes of God when He gives life again into the world…I am in awe of my children, because in all my life, it will be the greatest creation of God that I’ll ever witness, until maybe I stand before His angels.
 
If I’d only known for sure where you were…I remember being that adolescent drinking just one more beer thinking it was necessary…either to swing that spotlight on the delayed frame movie strip of my life, or get me just a little bit higher.  I never knew there was a worm at the bottom of the bottle…I didn’t realize what I would remember about those stolen beers was the thin tinny taste of the aluminum can.  Meanwhile, you leaked into my heart;  keeping me from a tragic dosage of wanting too much.
 
I didn’t know the writing would get better, and mean less.  You were dancing, draped in flowing terry cloth on the other side of a lonely door hidden in the shadows of the corners of my cavernous mind.  I’m not sure how I became half of who you are to me; who I am to you, considering the garden stone walls between us.  Hewn rock, hoisted by Herculean men, stacked, thud into the rich soil…seared with moss, a cancer of roots.  What gave us, you and me…these time encrusted borders so thick that we never heard each other scratching at the surface of the great divide.  A divide that now paves the ground we tread…our dance floor.
 
I tripped and feared being alone; I fell into the dull pattern of searching for a face with the dream.  And I forgot about the dream, but it didn’t forget me.  I listened to the words I thought were meaning in the songs I never thought would come…and the music keeps playing and there is no end to the melody, no loose string in the harmony, yet the end is found in every new beginning.
 
I just know that I failed in everything I set out to do alone and had I not, I’d have never understood.  I stand hear before you, wounded, faulted, jeered, less than perfect from all its angles…and I realize the miracle that cements all this together is that I indeed stand here before you. And all you want me to do is love the life I’m never expecting…I hope the unexpected, finds you.

Several Friends Stopped By...

Several Friends stopped by in my dark hour. There I was…in the hole:
Apathy – looks down into the hole, with those big blue eyes to ensure me everything would be just fine…, she shrugs, and she wanders off.
Sympathy arrives – peers over the edge, eyes red and puffy – and issues quivering words of lament…sniffles and withdraws - he’s gone
Charity – shouts down that things could be worse, suggests my donation would help, so I toss up the change I find deep in my pockets
Empathy – stares over the hole anxiously - the spreads a broad smile and jumps right in with me!
Enlightenment – shakes his head smugly and throws down a flashlight so I could better see my troubles…just lots of dirt…the batteries die
And after some welcome solitude, Free-Will shows up…silently lowers down a thin and feeble string with a note that reads simply… “YOU CAN FLY”  

And so I did.  And as I looked down from above to scan the terrain, and saw holes everywhere.
So, I started cutting strands of string…and writing notes… Here’s one for you…

Byzantine Kiss

Her whispers writhe upward, warming my lips
Chased gently by thoughts, and fingertips
Which pulse over keys, sewing words onto fields
Of love thirsty parchment, tenderly peeled
From shavings off banyan trees, twisted in time
Woven from tangles of roots and vines
That glimmer and glide on the twirls of her hair
That coil around dreams as they swirl in the air
And reciprocate whispers that blend into sighs
Reflecting like moonlight in opening eyes. 
Honey silk visage and java, like brindle,
Eyes like flint against frizzen, will kindle
Fire in the heart, calling men once missing
To a resplendent nexus, of lost souls kissing.
Arcadian journeys of body and mind
Sing from fathomless depths of space and time.
Geography traversed by her steps, sublime
Bearing piedra de ijada from a far eastern mine.
Electricity leaps in passionate arcs,
from skin to skin in dendritic sparks,
That strobe over rhythm beneath the sheets,
as lovers listen and friction speaks
in syncopation with shuddering breaths,
from sodden mouths that sweetly press,
And I close my eyes in synchronicity,
but even closed, it’s her I see.
Tasting the salt of a single tear
A harbinger, for the moments near.
High on the hum of hopes embrace
as rapture and destiny hasten the pace,
I open my eyes to watch her go,
but once inside it starts to grow
into a poem unleashed in my heart,
By a byzantine kiss, after lost lips part.

Jim Harrison

…still smelling like Athit, I found myself awakening in first class next to the recluse, Jim Harrison.

Jim Harrison was planetary from the moment I saw him. He is a thick and somewhat round man, dense enough to have his own gravitational pull and orbiting moons. From the corner of my eye, I can make out that unruly salt and pepper hair, blown back in disarray like Tea tree branches on Rottnest Island off Perth. Add to that a thicket of mustache, with different shaped teeth jutting down, like tombstones out of bear grass. He needs some grooming and some detangling. His eyes remind me of stout cement nails, beset in a tan round face. It’s leather and creases are like that of an old fashion catchers mit. In his eyes are little hematite beads, lens caps on film projectors rolling polyester film from the early 60’s. His left eye roams blindly, while his right tries to console a childhood injury that left him sightless in that one. His clothing this day is reminiscent of that which you’d find hanging wearily in a dark storage closet. His light brown T-shirt is a bit too small stretched over a hemisphere of abdomen. Over that he sports a rust colored and distressed suede jacket, with gnawed fringes on the sleeves as I recall; or so I seem to imagine. I’ll bet that in his pockets are a couple of old well pressed diner receipts, a turnpike ticket, and crinkled cellophane candy wrapper from, like, 1970.

Sitting beside him, I can hear the pitter pat of a mouse running on a squeaky toy Ferris wheel turning in his mind. From drink or lost years, he slurs slightly through stories about Jack Nicholson and that genre of people (Hunter Thompson, Dennis Hopper, Jimmy Buffett, and a few others.) He speaks with a bit of disgust about the Hollywood scene; having just returned geographically and mentally from a movie director’s office in LA, says that there is no money in being an author, but screenwriting, well there’s a living… Aspiring screenwriters are coming out of the knotty woodwork, with lolling tongues and pointy pencils (that’s not exactly what he said, but so I like to imagine it). I don’t get the feeling he’ll be putting out another book – but I hope to see some poetry.

What would I say to Jack Nicholson, who I ran into walking along the bay in San Diego years later? About this chance meeting with his friend Jim Harrison? “Hey Jack, I went out for barbeque with your friend Jim Harrison when he came through Tucson…he told me what a fucking nut you are.” When I ran by Jack that sunny day, I just said “hi Jack,” which seemed to startle him…he lifted his head in bewilderment and tried to spot me from under his shades.

Jim Harrison and I drank booze and made up a story for the flight attendant…you see, he was an underwear model and I was his agent…this went on for the entire flight. He disappeared while disembarking – ending up somewhere in Patagonia for a retreat. That day, I went home and Googled Jim Harrison. And scanned excerpts from his book, “Legends of the Fall”…and it made me think about Thaksin and Athit and Nicholson…

TREE RINGS

 

Our moments collect in concentric rings about the nexus
Of a first embrace, adorned with Autumnal colors and scents -
We lovers blend, cupped gently below the stir of flecks and dapple.
Each leaf high up quivers in the bouquets and knows when to let go,
Fly and fall to earth.
 
Whispers from a rustling canopy climb down the bark encasements
Of these tall and somnolent trees, thirsty leaves that clatter and kiss,
Wink awake – brilliant - hold our gaze and suspend our hearts.
In a pirouette amidst the amity of recollection and premonition -
We shimmer in an iridescence of saffron on copper - remember this.
 
Moments light up, each one, for just an instant, the last of our lives;
Each conveniently the beginning of forever and forever smiles at us.
Rippling across the cycles of solstice and equinox, we radiate –
A nostalgic procession toward unmade memories, like tree rings.
We fly and fall in love.