Celtic Ray At the End of the Day

Physical changes of aging gain slowly, as noticeable as shadows of grass bending in a billowy tumbling wind on a summer afternoon. Of course, one day you'll turn around and get old. You can measure the distance of years if you nudge your pocked and weathered arm up against a teen's; hers is without a blemish, and you can make her uncomfortable staring in wonder at the elegant smooth perfection of skin. You gaze across the mirror and avert the other's query. But changes of the intellect, or soul if you insist, one's self, is even less noticeable. You always have been and are always you. One's self is immeasurable, icily distant, but nearer than air. But I see the change in me. My gnawing soul craves order--but this order is not a craven stoop to routine. No, I've now lived long enough to have polished to a warm shine the crest jewel of discrimination (with apologies to 9th century Indian mystic, Shankara). Young people coming into a more mature awareness of the wilderness of the world, the flowering of societies, will smile and reach out and quiver with fulsome desire to experience everything, to open their minds to what only blinked hovering pale snatches on hazy horizons beyond the stone bulwarks of trenchant suburban kingdoms. So they come to Honduras and with proud defiance of parental concern ride the chicken buses (old dingy yellow schoolbuses converted to public transportation you can ride for pennies) that spew and rumble through the city and into shantytowns and shuffle the poor and wary professionals around Tegucigalpa. Holding high aloft the torch that announces "Rob me!" Perhaps ungrateful urchins will throw rocks at you when you disembark to get down with the locals and eat shoulder to shoulder at a cramped cantina dimly lit and festooned with crucifixes and idealized simple portraits of village life as brightly-painted and sterile as kitsch, peasants balancing baskets, long blue shadows cast by a healthy donkey and his lightly burdened cart, laughing children, and an untattered, sober hombre brushing a guitar over a railing. Gringo, if you get robbed, you'll quickly convert it and set your mind at ease: those were just the forces of the (just) universe redistributing the wealth, and who wouldn't see the necessary blessing in that? No, I know what my soul craves, and it isn't more culturally broadening experiences, mundane practices that have the only virtue of being foreign and not undergone. Music that inspires, conversation that inspires, food that inspires, the noble rot, words that inpsire, films and theaters and performances and installations of all kinds that inspire, mountains and rivers and valleys and seas and meadows and ridges and springs and cascading storms and canyons and creatures that inspire, soliloquies, shadows, dappled light and autumnal blue pause of evening, willows and wanderings and wayward Maries, and the love of a good woman, which I do indeed have and for which I give thanks to the glittering stars in all their howling black cold refusal. But this is not routine, an ordered mundane soft march through easy expectations and familar tastes. Words that inspire ignite a passion to know more, that I am one with Socrates in that I do not know nearly enough, that more can be catalogued or siphoned, that when we speak of religion we speak of poetry, because all is merely food for a hungery soul. Van Morrison sings: Ireland Scotland England and Wales/I can hear the mothers' voices calling children, children/Come home children, come home on the Celtic Ray. Where I'm bound, hell or high water.

The Vultures and I

Upstairs at my desk before a eucalyptus speckled sky, two enormous trees sheltering the now quiet street in whose branches hours ago sat two vultures, hunched, black, and dour as old world Protestants, waiting out the rain, and I shared their patience on my walled in patio below reclining on a wooden chair with a glass of white and a New Yorker magazine while rain sprinkled my toes outstretched and not quite under the awning. But I am upstairs now and have just got a stock slowly, gently boiling: asparagus ends, fibrous chard stems, rinds of Parmesan, half a red onion, half a sliced potato, slender celery ribs and leaves, diamond-shaped spinach, dried rosemary, cloves of garlic, sizzled with butter and olive oil, and a bucket of water, strained it will be soup tonight. Sabbath was made for man, but Sundays was made for soup. In the morning I haunted restaurants and cafes of the 1930s to nearly present on 44th street in New York City via Vanity Fair, while afternoon saw me foraging for wild foods in Oxfordshire forests and Denmark’s seacoast with Jane Kramer via the New Yorker magazine mentioned above, who, when I just now left her, was scouting the sands. My imagination was far from this Third World camp of boredom my body must muddle through somehow. No, not an escape from reality; a thrusting to the inspiring mystery of words on a page, a world of meaning, creation’s throbbing spark. Fuck it all there’s nothing to do here. I welcome the storms, rain and wrack and ruin, the bubbling darkness and the pumping mist heaving over the mountains here. Reading is the door I sail through and leave this dull plain of car alarms and traffic and shopping malls that are always full. My mind warps and my soul shrivels every time I leave the house, so I elegantly order my inner world. At noon I folded the magazine, reheated an excellent chili I made days before, the very best chili I’ve ever eaten if truth be told, lightly sautéed red cabbage in water until tender and lavender, tossed it with sliced pear and radish, lemon juice, salt, pepper, rice vinegar, canola and walnut oil, and lemon zest, and poured a glass of white which I finished on the patio in the rain while the dour vultures waited for me to finish the foraging article, patient birds.

Tunnels and Light

The light mist hanging clammy on the eucalyptus trees towering across from this upstairs window of a late Sunday afternoon heralds, somehow, the end of our short journey away from Tegucigalpa. I want to begin at this ending because of what it means to be here: how to be here. The desire for psychological order required to come home is hotter and more acute than I remember in the past. A clean, well lighted house eases the rocky transition from freedom and experiences to whatever you call this: our daily life. My mother and father used to cushion their return by allowing an extra day before going back to work, and I never understood the value—mistaken, I thought when young—of chopping off a whole day from our holiday, but I understand now. We relish so sweetly our time away from this rather boring, barbed-wire strewn city that our sour return would sink our souls if we didn’t prepare for the inevitable plunge. Part of what we dread is what we know we’ll encounter until our next flight: our reality is narrowed into tunnels, and they aren’t very interesting ones. One tunnel takes us from our townhouse to work; that same tunnel returns us again. Carrie has a few tunnels that take her and a friend exercising. I have a tunnel bi-weekly burrowed to the supermarket, La Colonia, via car and back again. Occasionally a tunnel opens to a restaurant, but these are more diversionary than destinations, for the food here is fair, not spectacular, nothing to sweep your mind away from the tunnel’s gritty gray walls on the drive home. Some of the tunnels are pathetic and I wouldn’t a few years ago have thought I’d ever catch myself coming out the other side: to PriceSmart, even a WalMart in a mall. But if we don’t get outside every once in a while we’ll go effing crazy. But it’s only to a narrow, enclosed destination, then home. There is no wandering curious in an open downtown plaza, because there’s nothing interesting there. There’s not hopping from bar to bar down leafy streets because the bars of flashing lights and laughter don’t exist. What exist are shopping malls and chain fastfood restaurants. People are everywhere walking around, standing around, sitting around, strolling around, to where and why I don't know. And besides there being nothing interesting to do or see or hear, the city has the added benefit of being crime-ridden: robberies, murders, and kidnappings. I must have killed a beloved fair-haired, charitable Bulgarian princess in a past life… We took a four-day weekend and vacationed on the island of Roatán, in the Caribbean Sea north of Honduras fifteen minutes by plane. That you can lift off Tegucigalpa airport at 7 in the morning and have a coldie in your hand and toes in the white sand by 9 is nothing short of miraculous, and manages to justify the daily grind (side note: Honduras has spectacularly good local coffee from plantations a few hours from here in the Santa Barbara mountains; thank Zeus for small dark rich mercies). Having received our open water diving certification in Thailand, we were eager to submerge again, and for two days we floated down 60-70 feet of crystal clear Caribbean to bob and bubble in strange coral canyons. Sea turtles sailing gracefully, rainbow spangled fish, and a massive grouper curious and plodding who followed our group a ways, sometimes gently cruising right under you unafraid. We slithered along a high coral wall that dropped to sand below us, and the sand ran out toward a deep and dark sapphire emptiness like an undulating unfolding crest of a galaxy. Out in the air our days were spent lounging and reading. When not eating, sleeping, diving or swimming, I followed Patrick Leigh Fermor in his Between Woods and Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland, as he wandered in the early 1930s the sweeping plains of Hungary and sipped plum brandies with pre-war estate dwellers on horseback who welcomed the Ovid quoting merry young man from England into their libraries and grassy hillsides and wildflower dappled meadows. Looking up from those pages one afternoon I quietly watched a golden retriever pawing through the shallows peering after minnowy translucent fish, and his intent was as severe and patient as a hungry stork among reeds at softly hushed twilight. Occasionally the amiable dog would wade and paddle out a bit, turning circles and biting at clumps of water. I watched him do this a few times over the course of our stay, and couldn’t figure what this exercise provided him. When on vacations what often I most miss is doing my own cooking, for invariably in these regions I’ll have some criticism of the food preparation and presentation. A few times within this past year I’ve made soups that I would humbly rank as good as any fine eatery could manage, and better than many. But what I cherish most are the mornings Carrie and I would swim before breakfast, upon waking. Shoals of sea grass gliding underneath us as we breast-stroke out to a sandy patch and stand on toes. Gazing below the surface at our bodies, the water was clear as air, in Carrie’s simple and apt phrase. The day had begun, and we were together and free.

Songs of Waiting for Winter

I. These Are Sparse and Windy Times

These are sparse and windy times
Troubles lurch asphalt, gutter, curb
Wounded weary horsemen bending
Sucking water I used to withdraw
From a well no longer recognized
As mine

I’ve patched these jeans, sang wispy
Wintery themes, loved her wrongly
And she died on a windowsill, her skin
Like dust swept away, delicate bones, hands finger
Diaphanous and shining strings of blue afternoon,
Flushing the pheasants curled in grasses blackening
The sky, their rise heralding an evensong
My piano used to know

These are amber and gracious times
Won’t the metal in the crankshaft
Slurp the oil and run hot wire round
Soul machinery, hum and sparkle, roar
And rattling up the railroad leaping
Bloodstream fire spitting across
The face of withering criticism, sailing
O’er your fields of flowers anymore?

Burlap bag in a searing wind
Indigo-dusted butterflies, voices
Of autumnal repose soften
Curl and dry and lose their scent
Like rosemary left burning in a pan.

II. Emblems

Remember
The grieving leather, the edge of sorrow
Unsheathed and slicing thin gray cinders,
A whirl of dust curling,
Blown with abandon, wheezing ambition
Embodying in breathless moments airy emblems
Signs to shuffle a soul on through, and on you go
Enduring windless valleys and sterile, crumbling
Peaks moonlighting as tender dreams long unfinished

And unyielding to sinking limestone scrapings
Abandoned—by you? Ignored—
This remember is your passion played
The heating blood of letters and emails turning
Like milk sour in the fridge
Cool balm of remorse and yet
Flung to ether and lodged in files and waiting
Humming for resurrection in soft glare

You the audience, you the player, you
The drinking dogged fawning critic fingering
Ointment dip and puff and smear
Along the mirror’s fault lines, desire
Pray, whisper, remember
And still growing established
Once
You were inside, you saw and spoke
And the reflection, suspended, held.

Tethered

Tethered, indiscrete, fawning, a soft sigh
Moored, undulating, the sea’s abandon quelled…
A hand gloved in a spray of salt
Sullies not your flesh
I brush the pallid cheek
So frail
A trembling face many thousands
Of years old and still
We touch
To brush away longing
Wiped away
Threads of desire like unkempt servants, paler slaves born
Of illusion nourishing cries from the master
Of illusion and shadowy silken songs draped
To smolder funeral pyres—
Soften the landing of a child
Whose name, finger burning black
Traces thick smeared ash, guards,
Whispering, speaks to the passing fire…

Isn’t the gray smoke burning the sky from idiot fires
Down far below cupped in this pitched and pocked hand
More breathless than any weary sigh
Poor and naked of aim, belittling trust in fellow man,
Eyes soft of wonder, thrusting an easy welcome
Enough?
I have nothing to offer any of this
Anyone, even you—
I imagine the idiots dancing, spellbound,
A spectacle of hot love in the jungle night
Denuded, burned…
Embers rising bloom as stars
Guiding me overland night into night
Dawn receding like the fire below
I smell burning and crackling, ashes and ink.

The Terrible Distance

Slept fitfully last night, so after school came home to rest. Two large parrots in cages in the mansion across the street squawked and screeched, a warm wind blew through the guest bedroom, Tigger the cat finally settled in, and I proceeded to nap. A knock on our neighbor's gate rattled me awake. More knocking. Then the rattling was on our gate. Rising, glancing out the window, I noticed over our garage door wall a pickup, engine running, a long bar strapped from the bed over the cap--what turned out to be metal slats used for automatic garage door openers. I had made no work requests with our landlord. The knocking continued. A bit annoyed, I went downstairs, peered through the hole. No one. More knocking, lighter this time. Brushing aside annoyance was trepidation: is this a ploy to rob the house, do violence to us? We're always overly cautious, as enough violent crime and robberies have rolled into our lives as stories and email warnings and worried gossip at school. Hesitantly I unlatch the door. A worker in plain clothes greets me, and I return the greeting shyly, wary. He begins in quick Spanish something, and pointing to our neighbor's house. I don't even attempt to comprehend (terrible distance number 1), and say--in English no less--that I don't speak Spanish, which isn't exactly true, but I felt impatient and untrusting. He then turns to halting but easily comprehensible English, explaining that Raquel, the neighbor--did I know her? (no, I reply, which also isn't quite true)--she'd evidently called him over the weekend to fix her garage door. I guess she wasn't home. Still wary, I shrugged. I couldn't help him. Quick thoughts shot through me: he wants inside to see if he can go over the wall to fix the door! Right. Or: does he want me to let him in Raquel's gate? Right. When I first had opened the door, I looked into his eyes--they were tinged with red, and I was immediately suspicious. I looked into his face again as he was trying to explain his dilemma, and I saw that he seemed sincere; he had a job to do and wanted to do it. I continued being unhelpful, not even thinking to suggest I could tell Raquel when she returned that he'd stopped by. No, I kept my distance and ducked behind suspicion. As no alternative presented itself, he finally declared "Bueno" as in, well, okay. Then he said goodbye, and added "I'm sorry!" to which I responded in kind and quickly as I closed the gate managed to offer "That's okay!" to his apology. He was a good-natured, friendly man, someone doing his job, and he was brown and probably Honduran, and I kept my distance. And now, with shame, I'm feeling the gulf. At what point and under what conditions do I lay my bets the other way, offering a few pieces of scrap lumber for a bridge of trust?

Third Worlding

I don't know whether I like the Third World. That immediate experienced notion at once demands commentary. How can one "experience" the Third World as one can, I suppose with a little imagination and enough time spent, a city like Paris, or Walnut Creek, or Ben Lomond? This amorphous concept of regional measured economic development one can no more experience than one can freedom. There is a general milieu of time and space I can call my experience so far, but of course living here in Honduras and previously in Syria are two very different cultures in significant ways. What I find similar I guess clings to me like burrs through a wild field. But what is this "experience", or this continual experiencing? It is the durable residue left from the clash of expectations and reality. One could, I imagine, expect reality, which is another way of "living in the moment" or Buddhist "mindfulness" or even the Christian "doing the will of God" to lasso all these ways of being loosely into one rodeo. Easier said than done. For if we are in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua for Semana Santa, or Holy Week Easter, on holiday, and have already bought bus tickets round trip from and back to Tegucigalpa but have yet to reserve specific seats back across the border, and with righteous foresight decide to call Trans Nica bus company in Managua five count em five full days before day of departure...and on the first day ring after ring no one answers...and on the second day no one answers...and so on...and nowhere on the Trans Nica website can one reserve seats...and even, desperate, emailing and texting a good friend Spanish-speaking in Tegucigalpa asking, pleading, she please visit the office where initial tickets were purchased, and when no one answers the phone there and the office is closed, and is still closed subsequent days, your expectation of a bus company who caters to travelers who actually travel on holidays actually being responsible to be OPEN stumbles, slips and crashes into the reality of that bus company not being responsible at all. The kind and helpful hotel manager, Andy, suggests we go through a travel agent in town. Office, you guessed it, closed, and no office hours listed. So how do our First World expectations meet Third World reality? Slap a credit card down for a flight out of Managua that afternoon. Done. What about when reality outstrips expectation? Playa Majagual, 12 kilometers north of San Juan del Sur on a dirt road through poor farming villages, an uncluttered gently swaying beach winding from a rocky cove sweeping south into tidepools, roaring tumult of Pacific ocean waves, the swirl and pump of clear saltwater currents, that briny wash and foamy spray of pure sea, and only rickety surf shacks, a few poor houses of Nicaraguan peasants, shady overhanging trees to soften the burning sun, sea-moist air and the sky throwing a spray of clouds across its pale canvas, and it's all ours, mi amor y yo, and we swim and splash and bounce in the waves hugging and tossing us, and we read, Carrie, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and me, Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, and we rest and sun and swim all afternoon, and it's free, and so are we.

In Yahoo's Empty Halls, You Can Hear Your Footsteps Softly...

When I think back at emailing, how distant and personal and almost charming it seems. Now that everyone congregates in the bustle of an ever-crowded noisy room called Facebook, no one communicates anymore on a personal level. Why, personal emailing is going the way of letter-writing. In the same way that the universe is speeding ever faster expanding away from us, so too does emailing seem flung away into the past like an old newspaper, gaining ever closer to letter-writing as a forgotten but endearing pastime. Facebook allows us to "communicate" with and hear from a larger number of folks at once. But we don't communicate anymore; we announce, we pronouce, we rant and rave and share, then pray for admiring comments. Ironic, as the amount of time we spend on Facebook is probably only a fraction of the time it would take to compose or read a letter. Imagine the long afternoons spent meditating on thoughts of the recipient to whom you compose a letter, pen and paper and a warm slant of afternoon sunlight. For a short time, that person was soley in your heart. No more. Facebook offers the single voice what a big city offers a solitary drifter: crowds and crowds, a slaughterhouse of humanity, a welcoming indifferent invitation to loneliness.