Haunted Sabbath

Again I wake on a clear blue Sunday
morning in the Christ-haunted United
States of America and join the throng
--if twenty percent can be considered
a thronging--that passes through the wide doors
of its tired multitude of divided
denominations, all of which lay claim
to the same Jesus, who doesn't transcend
their ceaseless bickering, their politics,
conservative exclusion, liberal
inclusion, their prosperity preaching,
their doomsday teaching, their self-righteousness.


I go wakeful into this Sunday night,
which is also Halloween, preached against
this morning from thousands of pulpits
while some souls starve, commit soul suicide,
seek peace, belonging, comfort in trouble.
After two thousand Christ-haunted years,
what does it mean to follow? to serve?
This Halloween night I left the lights off.
I sit in the dark, an old cat purring
on my belly, listening to the clocks tick
in syncopation, listening to the dogs'
reverberating barks in outer dark.





Well, that about does it. I didn't make a poem every day of October, but by my count I went 21 for 31, which I guess isn't a bad percentage. I learned what I hoped I would learn, that I can write something almost every day. Not that it's going to be good, necessarily, but--for a man who fancies himself a writer--anything is better than nothing. At least I can create something most days that's potentially worthy of rewriting and rethinking and rewriting again.

Thanks to those who read these and put up with my musings.

Untitled

I met him twice or thrice, this man, my age,
who died beneath a clear October sky,
a Sunday in New Mexico. He was
the husband of a good woman, father
of two near grown girls, and left his home
in Pennsylvania to go hiking
those arid plains and hills, not intending
not to return--not even suspecting.

His good wife and I, when we were twenty,
together with a busload near that age,
traveled Europe for a summer--mid June
to early August, from London east to
East Berlin, south to the isles of Greece,
then west again to fly home from Madrid.
We saw each other often in the years
that followed--her wedding and my wedding,

reunions at her place sometime back and
then again this past summer in DC.
In DC, I remember her joking
with her best friend from that trip, saying they
would leave their husbands and live together
in some small village perched on the white cliffs
of coastal Italy where she and he
could escape from their American lives

of struggling businesses and sexual
politics--a moment of levity
in a happy time that I hope neither
of them will remember and taste regret.
I found a note from her in this morning's
email. The message in soft blue letters
read that she and the dead and their daughters
"had excellent goodbyes with no regrets."

I think about how wide this world and how
we move through it, separate but connected.
That Sunday when he died and she answered
the call that carried the news, I was on
the road in Illinois, in Kentucky,
in Tennessee, at table with a friend
for lunch in Nashville, alone for supper
in Knoxville, home with my wife by midnight.


I've been working on this one for the last few days, in between student advising appointments.

White Noise Sleeper

I think I started needing noise to drown
my ringing ears after those loud, loud nights
in the club with the band when the music
roared out of us and blew back the '80s
stylings of the dancers and drinkers at
45 Cherry and Douglas Corner,
small clubs in Asheville and Nashville.
Ear plugs were unheard of. I wailed, "Whoa-whoa-
whoa-whoa," and the band--Mark, Gene, Danny, Steve--
thundered the E that opens the intro
of "Rain on the River." In my twenties,
then, I had my hour--and more--on the stage,
fronting that storm like the wind that led this
morning's gale-force elemental attack,
the rain hissing sideways, smacking the house,
that wind roaring up out of the southwest
to fell a neighbor's pine tree three doors down.
Like the fuses the band blew out one night
in a high school gym, the power went out.
It was still out when I climbed into bed.
In my fifties, now, my ears still ringing
with life, I lay in the absolute quiet,
awake the long night, no white-noise defense
against days of youth and loud, loud music.


Listen:
http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_rain_on_the_river.mp3
Lyric:
http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_rain_on_the_river.htm

Marriott to Motel 6

In three nights spent
at the Kansas City Marriott,
I saw nothing like the man--
with the yellow-stained white
mullet, standing shirtless
in the doorway of his room
and smoking--seen
upon my late arrival
for a one-night stay
at the Motel 6
in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.


Busy days make for short poems!

Lunch in Kansas City

Melody serves my steak and beer
at Ted's Montana Grill:
"Kansas City Strip"
(bison cooked medium,
bleeding a little),
Corona Extra,
salt-and-pepper onion rings,
"vine-ripened tomatoes" (so called).
All is good
when it comes,
except that the tomatoes
are little more than ghosts
of tomatoes,
except that I feel
vaguely guilty
eating bison.

Cold Hands

Maybe it's the wind in Kansas City,
where I'm writing from, maybe October,

anticipating my chilly winter,
maybe the distance that this night finds me

from one who holds them out of love, out of
habit or fear that I will disappear,

slipping away in the darkest passage
of the path, or that gravity will fail

and then one or both of us will be flung
from the world to spin off into space.

But these hands hold on, grow warm as I write
and the blood surges to my fingertips.

Good Stuff

South of the dogleg in downtown Marshall,
east side of Main Street, in part of a large
building that was, many years ago, home
to a thriving Chevrolet dealership,
Jon and Amy run Good Stuff Grocery--
on the east wall a tall rack of good wines
(and on the back side of that, the kitchen),
in the northeast corner a small section
of chips and cookies, a cooler of beer
(good beer: Java Stout and La Fin du Monde),
beneath the cash register, candy bars
(Snickers, Mounds, Almond Joy, Butterfinger),
left of these, along the north wall, the bar
of dark polished wood, where sit two sisters,
young, blond, drinking with the village loafer,
who sits between them, grins and strokes his beard,
through the western wall of glass, the last glow
of daylight mingled with the first of night.
Along the southern wall, where once hung tools
(sockets and wrenches for fixing Chevys)
now hang the works of local folk artisits,
and in the southeast corner, near the wine,
is the performance space--a piano,
a PA and mic, a small guitar amp,
a tip jar--where Friday or Saturday
evenings, I'm sometimes found--with guitar
pressed against me, lips near kissing the mic--
singing to my friends and friendly strangers,
while Jon keeps the bar, Amy the kitchen
(chili $3.95 a cup). Good stuff.


(for Friday, 15 October)

Here in the middle of the month, beginning on the 15th, life stepped in and stopped the game, put me in the penalty box. Five for fighting--Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? I've had ideas but no time to write. I hope to get back to the October game tomorrow with at least one poem, maybe a couple of make-ups.

Haiku

white half moon--lazy
liquid eye of a god in the
October night sky


Long day. I thought about writing something about Wal-Mart, but I didn't have it in me tonight.

Open Mic

I didn't hear the poets
at the Open Mic tonight
--a previous engagement--
but imagined them there
in the smokeless colored light,
the weave of the microphone
too strange and too close.
I imagined, too, the poems
that they read or recited,
careful words about fathers, mothers,
wives, husbands, children, strangers,
flowers, beer, politics, skies,
the homeless couple walking
slowly toward their tent hidden,
for now, in the trees beneath the Interstate,
walking in the cool October twilight
that is like a warm quilt
compared to the coming winter
out of doors, the mixed martial arts
studio, in which the red-
and-black-uniformed lawyers
and construction workers and
secretaries try to beat each other
into submission,
the train's call along the valley,
the white noise of wheels on the highway,
the roar of jet engines that
murmur from thousands of feet
overhead, the children's voices,
speaking Spanish as they play
in the sand of an abandoned
volleyball court, the singsong
rhythms of the night bugs.
I sat and watched and listened
--waiting for my previous engagement--
to some of what the poets spoke
into the weave of the microphone.

Columbus Day

I try to put myself in the shadows
with them
as they stand beneath the trees
at the edge of the beach,
naked
and brown, black eyes
watching
approaching sails as white as bone.

In our speech we have no word
for "sails,"
and bone has never risen
out of the horizon of water,
never,
except, perhaps, in
stories
or in dreams. But there! Look!

The bones collapse upon themselves.
The beast
has birthed a child into the sea,
and on its back rides ghost
or god.
It comes, and we murmur our
wonder
to each other in the shadows of the trees.

Neither ghost nor god he wades
ashore.
Covered with color that swirls
around him in the sea breeze,
a white
man stands upon the sands
and shouts
gibberish to something in his hands.

He thrusts a spear into the beach,
piercing
our heart with fear. Atop the spear
more wind-whipped color waves--
red, white--
white, red--and, unknown to us,
forfeit
were our lives and homes and futures.

Why Does a Squirrel

Why does a squirrel,
halfway across
the leaf-scattered asphalt,
with a car approaching,
stop--
freeze--
turn--
and scamper back
the way it came,
dead in the path
of the oncoming monstrosity,
instead of running onward
--the coast clear--
toward the prize
of a safe
destination?

Answer that and
then run onward
(if you can)
to this question:
Why are so many of us
like these squirrels?

Sabbath Servant

So out of sleep and creature dreams, arise
before the east awakes with light, arise
soul stiff and hungry, body longing, lost, arise
in spirit and in truth, arise
in spirit and in truth, arise
and sing.


To be honest, I thought that this would be longer, that there would be an alarm clock and a shower, a building, a steeple and all the people, a message and a prayer. Maybe it will be longer one day, but for now it captures something, a moment, as well as I can capture it.

Strange for Marshall

Here are 10 things that I wouldn't have seen
in Marshall back in 1968:

a Wi-Fi coffee shop where Leonard Baker's Home Electric
used to be—his son now buying a Saturday morning cup there;

a collection of people my Papa might've called hippies
and long-hairs, celebrating and singing themselves;

a steady stream of wheels and jerseys and tight black shorts
that Pat said the sheriff's deputies should wear;

a new bridge across the French Broad, a bridge
without an intersection in the middle;

a high school where the rooms in which we took algebra
and English have been turned into studios for artists;

a bistro in the old Rock Café selling pizza and pasta
and imported beers and good wines;

a courthouse missing a statue of blind Justice,
the statue atop it lost to last winter;

a pirate watching the cyclists, a cell phone talking to one ear,
a live parrot on his shoulder talking to the other;

a small grocery and pub in the old Chevy dealership,
where music is heard every weekend night;

and me—51 years old, big of belly, gray of beard, earringed
and pony-tailed, writing and enjoying a cup

on a sunny October Saturday morning.


Marshall, like so many other Appalachian towns, was dying when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s. But then something very cool began to happen. A person, or a group of people, in these towns began looking for some way the the place might survive, might not only live but also thrive.

Today Marshall is a mix of old and new. The old hardware is still there, as is Penland's department store. The Home Electric, where my folks bought their appliances, is now Zuma Coffee, and the big building that housed the Chevy dealership is now apartments and a neat grocery store called Good Stuff. When I play there, if I understand it rightly, my stage area (not elevated) is in the garage portion of the place, where the cars and trucks were serviced.

Friday, 10/8

I slept in the room where I slept growing up,
slept not in the same corner or in the same bed,
but with the same indirect morning light
through the window, the same hill rising behind.
In the years when my uncles and aunts were children
here (some of them at least), the room slept two,
and the children (some of them at least) were conceived
there. I didn't think of this as I slept last night.
Nor did I think that my grandfather died
in that room—when he was 86 and I was 9—
as did his older brother, the fabled Uncle Joe,
back in the '40s. I slept with this history
without thinking about it. Instead I thought
about sitting on the bed and writing songs,
about wrestling on the floor with Danny,
about the first time I heard "Sweet Home, Alabama"
on the radio late one Sunday night,
about once sleeping with my wife in the same corner,
in the same bed where I slept growing up.

Thursday, 10/7

Granddaughter sings loud
in the back seat, laughing in
between silly songs.


Another haiku for a busy day.

October Evening

The warm sun of an October day

fades into color that blooms

from behind the low mountains.

The blue sky pales in the burst

of fading light and darkens

slowly, east to west, into the night.

Written in the car while sitting in the parking lot at Cherokee Church, waiting for band practice to begin.

[Is There a Draft in Here?]

I'm listening to an atheist,
whose ideas are reductionist,
his knowledge of humanity seems flawed.

The host is being kind
to let him speak his mind--
that morals come from science, not from God,

who blessed his folks with slavery,
supported them in knavery
and killed those who opposed him with great ease.

The scientific morals of
the atheist are devoid of love
and leave us all less human by degrees.


Some potential in the topic, I think, but this is a weak draft. One thing such a poem might ultimately say is that somehow without God what is most human in us is gone.

No Human Bones

At the Gray Fossil Site
the record of life here
in these foothills goes
one hundred thirty-five
feet deep. All of it,
except the surface
dug by road-building machinery
(to discover the first skull)
or walked by farmer or
lover, is untouched
by humans.

In spite of the power
of the sabre-toothed cat,
the power of the Tennessee alligator
(the skull discovered first),
in spite of the violence
of their hunger and will,
how peaceful must that
one hundred thirty-five
feet of vegetable and bone
gone to earth
have been as,
over four-and-a-half million years it
shifted,
sifted,
settled.


My seven-year-old granddaughter is visiting our house for a few days during her fall break, and we spent part of this afternoon at the Gray Fossil Site. So this not-so-good poetry effort grew out of that. I almost went preachy on this as I was writing it out on a sheet of paper but stopped myself. As you can tell, the between-the-lines suggestion of the poem is that Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw," was a different kind of violence than that which humans use to destroy one another, physically, socially, spiritually, economically, culturally--the violence of ideology (religious and political, in particular), of greed, of us vs. them, the self-righteous "I," the conspiratorial "THEY." None of that inhabited those prehistoric swamps, fields or forests, because none of us were there to bring these things to that world.

There, I've gone preachy anyway.

1st Black Cat

black cat at sunset
stretches in wide strides across
the road that leads home


This isn't the poem I intended to write for the first Sabbath in October, but if I read the rules of the October Game correctly, the first black cat of the month must be represented in the game of the day that it is seen. I suppose I could've written a Sabbath poem that included a black cat somehow, but it's been a long day. I was up at 6:00 this morning and at church for band practice by 7:45. We played the 8:45 service, and then I taught Sunday School. After that, I left to pick up my granddaughter to bring her home for a few days, so I've been driving almost half the time I've been awake today.

So, most likely, even without the spotting of the black cat, a haiku is about all I was going to be able to muster today anyway. The haiku is a Japanese poetic form consisting of only three lines--the first made up of five syllables, the second of seven and the third of five. It's goal is not so much to make rational sense but rather to place an image in the reader's mind.

I think it probable that the haiku form will appear a lot in this October Game.

At the Blessing of the Pets

they sat in semi-circled folding chairs,
the people and their pets—eleven dogs
from small to large, the larger on the floor,
and two suspicious cats, still as Christmas mice,
unsure if they were to be blessed or turned
to chew toys, limp and lifeless, slobber-slicked.

The spirit of Christ's church prevailed, and war
between the species didn't come to pass.
The fertile, crescent seating arrangement
inspired the people to mythologize
their pets into small gods—or maybe themselves.
But no . . . damn imperfect hermeneutics!

To take another tack . . . the hour filled
with touching stories of abiding love—
of Anni the cat, an anniversary
gift from a husband, now gone, who never
wanted a cat; of Candy, a small bitch,
defending Master as he lay abed

dead and defenseless against EMTs;
of little Missy, child of the childless
couple that adopted her the year the man's
father died, who somehow had her grandfather's eyes;
of Sebastian fireball; and of Magic,
who sawed in two a man's wooden heart and

put it back together again, beating.
There were tears, and the people sang their hymns—
"All Creatures of Our God and King" and "All
Things Bright and Beautiful." Beautiful, but
not all peaceful, for like a preacher's kid
the preacher's dog would not behave.


Five stanzas of six lines each, mostly in iambic pentameter. Certainly nothing great, but maybe a decent first draft.

I sang at the Blessing of the Pets this morning in the Gathering Space at Cherokee Church. Having done this last year as well, I didn't think it a silly event. But initially I wondered at its importance, given the dire straits our church finds itself in these days. You can catch a little of that in the playfulness I tried to put into the first lines of the poem. I served mostly as background music while each person introduced her or his pet and told something about it. Each story was, in its way, amazing! These little beasts come to their people in surprising ways, much like God is said to do. And they do wonderful things--gifting joy in times of sorrow, mending broken lives, encouraging the strong to be stronger, the lonely and bereaved to be comforted.

Mythologized into small gods? Maybe that's not too far from the truth.

October

Overhead,
clouds graze, fat and lazy, across the bluest sky—
torn between the fading heat of the sun
on one shoulder and the cooling kissing
breeze on the opposite cheek, I'm
ecstatic that the haunting daytime crickets have
returned to be soundtrack for brilliant dying leaves.


A simple acrostic, in which the first letter of each line spells a word. Admittedly, not a great start to the game, but a start nonetheless. The basic idea came to me this afternoon as I walked across the parking lot at Barnes & Noble, the sun burning down on my left shoulder and a cool breeze puffing at the right side of my face. October is one of those in-between times, the evening of the year, sort of a month of twilight.

I had a couple of other things I considered writing about. First, Jimmy Carter. Today was his birthday 86th birthday. Today's Writer's Almanac had a couple of interesting details about him that I thought worthy of a little poetry--for one, he was the first US president to be born in a hospital; for another, his family used to bring books to the supper table and sit there eating and reading in silence.

Then we had the opening ceremony of ETSU's centennial celebration this morning. Not a bad show. My favorite part was the bluegrass band. But I was also impressed by a kind of haunting video in which old photographs from the university's history were alternated with color shots of contemporary life on campus. The haunting part is seeing, for example, a black-gray-white girl walking out of a campus building--like Burleson Hall--and slowly she is backdropped by the red brick of the building and surrounded by colorful students talking on cell phones and listening to iPods.

I also had a physical this afternoon, which I thought I might write about. It was a complete physical, and since I'm over 50 years old, it included the finger treatment. But I didn't really want to go there, especially since I was so late getting around to trying to create something.

Regardless of what Blogger's time stamp says, I'm posting this at 10:57 pm. Day One of the game completed, if not that well played.