Introduction

I’ve always made my way down to the rivers. Even now as I sit on my back porch, I hear the rush of the Assabet a half mile to the north, already filled with an early and surprising winter melt. Any leaf of me could fall and be carried back to the fork of the Sudbury and Concord rivers. My whole life has been a continual returning to these three rivers and my common ground—the water, fields, woods and village of Concord and now, just to the west, the small mill town of Maynard.

More and more I remember less and less, but there are still granite walls that will not change for another thousand years and still a few hills to defy development; still a few farm-stands with the same trucks and tractors parked by weathered sheds, and still a few cantankerous old souls hiding their smiles behind seventy or eighty New England winters. I wonder if they remember the kid who worked for them so long ago? I wonder what they remember? I wonder what they wish they’d kept?

This collection of mine is my way of keeping what I remember—or at least what I need to remember.. Musketaquid is the native name for the Concord River. Someone once told me that it meant “slow moving river.” It seemed like a fine and apt name to me, so much so that it didn’t bother me to discover the actual translation is “grass grown river.” The fields are now all wooded over—a bramble of Hawthorne and Swamp Maple hiding almost every view; but it still a slow moving river—and always will be. Even the Nipmucks would have to agree with that. These poems, essays, and sometimes simply memories and ramblings are what I have to add to the rivers. They are the small streams of my experience becoming a smaller part of the Musketaquid, which, hopefully, flows into some greater sea of understanding and insight. They are the good, the bad, and the ugly drafts of my life scattered in here with the randomness of the winds and tides that have driven me and carried me to so many shores—and have always brought me home.

These are the poems, stories, rambles, and reflections that have been written over a long run of time, usually close to home, but often in far off places, and sometimes simply as conversations with my students, friends, or family, but always within dreamshot of the beautiful, beautiful rivers that ramble through my home.

These words are just a part of my Thanksgiving. The rest is my life.

Musketquid

You get a little too big on rambling,

Cattails too big for their own:

Musketquid—slow moving river—

Ramble through my home—

Musketaquid slow moving river

Ramble through my home.

The snowmelt will flood out Great Meadows:

Wild geese mate up after fights,

Snappers out crossing the road

Sound like potholes banged at night—

Snappers out crossing the road

Sound like potholes banged at night.

You hear them all talk about the places,

Where the river ran fastest and clear;

At the Assabet for by the boulder,

Where the kid was found last year—

At the Assabet fork by the boulder

Where the kid was found last year.

You still got a few guys setting trap lines.

The muskrats are far from all gone;

Canoers spring all their traps

While they’re paddling along—

Canoers spring all their traps

While they’re paddling along.

Black families from Boston come fishing,

But they pretty much keep from the town—

Farmers still plowing up arrowheads

Some Nipmuck left around;

It all gets real frozen come winter;

the cattails stick up through the snow—

Musketquid, slow moving river,

rambles through my home;

yeah, Musketquid, slow moving river,

keeps rambling through my home.

Thanksgiving

I am surprised sometimes

by the suddenness of November:

beauty abruptly shed

to a common nakedness—

grasses deadened

by hoarfrost,

persistent memories

of people I’ve lost.

It is left to those of us

dressed in the hard

barky skin of experience

to insist on a decorum

that rises to the greatness

of a true Thanksgiving.

This is not a game,

against a badly scheduled team,

an uneven match on an uneven pitch.

This is Life.

This is Life.

This is Life.

Not politely mumbled phrases,

murmured with a practiced and meticulous earnestness.

Thanksgiving was born a breech-birth,

a screaming appreciation for being alive—

for not being one of the many

who didn’t make it—

who couldn’t moil through

another hardscrabble year

on tubers and scarce fowl.

Thanksgiving is for being you.

There are no thanks without you.

You are the power of hopeful promise;

you are the balky soil turning upon itself;

you are bursting forth in your experience.

You are not the person next to you—

not an image or an expectation.

You are the infinite and eternal you—

blessed, and loved, and consoled

by the utter commonness

and community of our souls.

We cry and we’re held.

We love and we hold.

We are the harvest of God,

constantly renewed,

constantly awakened,

to a new thanksgiving.

Remember the Time

Write what you know.

~Mark Twain

I don’t always practice what I preach, especially when it comes to the simple, unaffected, and ordinary “journal entry.” Much of my reticence towards the casual journal entry is the public nature of posting our journal writing as blogs that are more or less “open” to the public. It is hard for me as a teacher of writing to post an entry that I know is trivial, mundane, and perhaps of no interest to my readers—but that is precisely what I need to do if I am to model the full spectrum of the writing process. Keeping a journal is more than a search for lofty thoughts amidst the detritus of the day; it is a practice that keeps our wits and writing skills honed for a coming feast by rambling through the meat of the day and drifting and sailing to whatever port is nearest to my pen. Writing is always an odyssey, and so I have to let my mind go and journey (journal) where it will.

At the very least, a journal, filled with the scraps and pieces of our daily lives, will outlive our own lives and serve as both beacon and reminder to future generations. Once, in my days as a junkman, I cleaned out an old barn in Maynard after the elderly widower—a man I only remember now as Bob—had died. Scrounging through the Bob’s boxes for anything of value, I came across a series of leather bound journals dating back to the 1930’s. I found a journal marked 1941, so I looked up the date of the Pearl Harbor attack, eager for insight on the profound effect that day must have had on the common man of his or her time. I turned through page after page of impeccable script and learned that Bob and his family went to church in the morning, during which they sang certain hymns (hymns that I can’t remember now—but he did.)  Afterwards, they drove to Stow for dinner with his extended family. He wrote about the meal, the weather, the condition of the roads, and, in two brief lines at the close of his entry: “The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor today. I trust President Roosevelt will know what to do.” And that was it.

At first glance, I saw a xenophobic racist putting blind trust in infallible rulers. I couldn’t reconcile it with the kind and gentle old man, and best friend to my best friend’s father, who had recently passed away. I didn’t see it as a window into another time and another mindset. In the arrogance of my youthful pride, I couldn’t appreciate the elegiac beauty of his day—a whole day devoted to faith and the full circle of family.  It wasn’t until years later when I sat on the bench by the World War Two Memorial in downtown Maynard and scrolled through the scores of boys and men from this one small mill town killed in battle that I realized the full extent of my myopia.  I should have sat in his barn for days and read every word from his journals and then, maybe, I could have seen the evolution of a person through the fullness of time through the clarity of still waters.

Maybe Bob’s youthful ramblings, tempered by the death of so many of his townsmen, could have somehow transformed into the pearls of laconic wisdom that old age should bring—pearls that would fetch a heady price in the market of the modern mind. The greatest tragedy is that we’ll never know. I offered the journals to his son, but he was content to have me throw the whole lot into the back of my Chevy pickup and pay me fifty dollars for the load I scattered into the fires of the Concord dump. The irony of tossing those journals away not more than 150 yards from the site of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond remained lost on me for many years, even as I trudged dutifully to the Concord library to scour through the massive tomes of Thoreau’s own journals. The old man had done exactly what Thoreau believed was required first of any man or woman when he admonished all would be writers:

"I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A further irony is that my own journals from my years between eighteen and twenty five years old, which filled a good-sized cardboard box, were also inadvertently tossed into the same dump by a roommate intent on purging all the junk we were accumulating in our Williams Road farmhouse. The Concord dump is now a series of perfectly sculptured hills slowly regaining the shape and character of the woods that Thoreau tramped and stumbled through 150 years ago. It is a noble idea funded by the well-intentioned, but a nobler action would be to dig through the mold and dirt of time and truly find what the past has to offer us, buried almost irretrievably as it is.

Poetry is what is left unsaid. The stolid words of brevity simply point us in a direction only the brave will wander, but through the daily words of an old Italian farmer, I found a new kind of poetry. Pine Tree farm, butted against the rail line on the far side of Walden and owned by the Ammendolia’s, was one of the last of the Italian family farms that used to be scattered in every corner of Concord. Tony Ammendolia was the patriarch who somehow kept the dream alive, even as farm after farm succumbed to the teeming aorta of suburbia. It was there where I worked on school breaks and on summer weekends, picking corn at 4:00 AM before the heat of the day and hoeing seemingly infinite rows of tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, and eggplants in the long, hot afternoons where success and failure crisscrossed and intersected in a struggle to just get by. My Goddaughters were raised there, and their parents, my good friends Deb and Jack, still keep a few acres going to this day. Tony died two years ago after defying for many years the cancer he fought with the same stubbornness that he did the vicissitudes of nature in the cycle of droughts and floods and insects he faced at every turn during his days as a farmer.

Every night for over sixty years Tony would sit at his desk after dinner and write in his journal. Tony knew I was a writer and would kiddingly tease me that he was a writer too, but in a good-natured poke at my transient approach to life, he was also a farmer. I was at Jack and Debs recently for dinner and asked about Tony’s journals. Jack perked up as the proud inheritor of this family treasure and immediately found me one of the many small notebooks that Tony kept. I opened it and felt the tears well in my eyes, for it read like a type of poetry I had never read before. Tony never meandered from the scope of his own life, but his words spelled out a conviction that celebrated both the common fragility and majesty of life with sentences both sparse and foreboding: “Potato beetles got the eggplants on Bedford Street. We will not sell eggplant this year.”  “Three days of rain. Lucky, as the irrigation pumps needs a new valve.” Each entry is a sublime excising out of the ordinary: the sky, the temperature, what was done, what had to be left undone, how much seed, what was selling and what was not selling—but never a mention of the money made or not made. There is never a mention of personal angst or frustration for over sixty continuous years. Those details were best left to imagination and speculation. Some, myself especially, have to call it poetry.

Our own journals need the same attention that Bob and Tony put into their daily records so that our journals can also chart the common unfolding of our lives. As writers and sojourners in life it is our call and duty to map the expanse of our existence. We don’t need to lay our souls bare for all to see and gossip about, but we should find a place to keep a daily journal. Whether it is written in leather bound journals, spiral notepads, or saved as private or public drafts in your blog doesn’t matter, but just a few short lines each day will serve to spark your memory in a later age—and memories wizened in the vat of a thoughtful life will always produce a finer wine. Journaling is a word that has been antiquated before its time. Though fewer and fewer of us take the time to sit with pen and paper, there is still a time and a place for the spirit of journaling to continue.

Make the time to map your own quest. A friend asked me yesterday why I didn’t have a GPS in my truck. He simply shook his head when I answered, “First, I have to remember where I’ve been.” Today’s technologies offer us possibilities unimagined to our literary forbears. Our daily journals can hold both pristine images of our lives via photos, video clips, and music, and most importantly, words. The web allows us to scour the world for like-minded souls that share our particular interests with whom we can share our passions on sites like Facebook, blogs, or personal web sites.

My only issue with much of what is out there on these sites is their self-exploitive and indulgent banality. Bob and Tony’s journals seemed permeated with an almost religious devotion as they chronicled the recitations of their days in rhythm with the pattern of their everyday lives, while on the other side, many Facebook sites I have visited have a tiresome and sycophantic obsession with the painstakingly mundane and profligate side of that persons supposed interests and lifestyle. It is hard—and sometimes impossible—to wrest any kind of context out of the content. Nothing, except a prurient curiosity, keeps me interested—and that is no road to enlightenment for either side of the equation. On some few sites there are links to blogs and other artistic websites where a deeper and more invested side of that person comes through. For them, their Facebook page is simply an adjunct to their life—a social gathering place to rest and draw water with friends and community. There is nothing wrong with that, but it should never be the destination of your journey, and if you can’t see life as a journey—an odyssey of existence—then you simply can’t see.

I guess the word I am looking for is devotion. None of our lives are more complicated than Bob or Tony’s lives. All they did that is different is make time to look closely at what was important to them in the daily unfolding of each of their lives.

Take the time. Remember where you've been.

The Tide

EJ and Pipo squat in the driveway

and poke their heads through

the wheel-well and pass

a half inch socket and WD 40

to my bloodied hand.

I shout out to them:

"The transmission cooler line

is completely shot,

and the thread

on the flare nut

is stripped bare—

it turns, but won't catch,

into the radiator.

In short: we're screwed."

I can hear them giggling

and splashing in the oily cold

puddle I am soaked in.

While Pipo runs to get

the extra red hose we used

to fix the heater on the bus,

I send EJ to get the cement

we used to fix the gasket

on the wood stove.

In my sarcophagus

under the old Buick wagon,

I fumble through my pockets

and find some hose clamps

that just might work.

EJ slathers the flare nut

in an icing of black glue.

And so Pipo can use

his beloved tape measure,

he cuts me a piece of red hose

18 ½ inches long—exactly.

There is no turning back now:

I cut out the old line

and jam the flare nut

into the fitting

until it sets.

For a few minutes, everything

is dead serious.

Pipo lays on his belly

and fits the 18 ½ inch hose

to the cleanly cut ends

of the cooler lines.

EJ takes his flathead

and tightens the hose clamps,

while I keep

the damn flare nut

from moving.

And in the stale air,

beneath a 1988 LeSabre Wagon—

soaked in mud, love, oil and anti-freeze—

I am the luckiest man alive.

Winter in Caribou

I know your name. It’s written there.
I wonder if you care.
A six-pack of Narragansett beer,
Some Camels and the brownie over there.
Every day I stop by like I
Got some place I’ve got to go;
I’m buying things I don’t really need:
I don’t read the Boston Globe.

But I, I think that I
Caught the corner of your eye.
But why, why can’t I try
To say the things I’ve got inside
To you ….

You’re new around here, but in a quiet way.
How long you gonna stay?
Your baby sleeps by the porno rack
And you car’s got Michigan plates.
Winter here’s a lonely time:
snow piles, and generally a pain.
I blew the tranny on my pickup truck,
So I’m driving that rusted-out Fairlane.

But I, I think that I
Caught the corner of your eye.
But why, why can’t I try
To say the things I’ve got inside
To you ….

Pretty soon, she knew my name;
She’d say, “Hey, John-O, how ya been?”
I’d bring her toys that I’d whittled up
To hang over our little baby friend.
I felt myself all changed up somehow,
And I worked like I’d never worked before,
Dropping trees and bucking logs,
All the while thinking of that store.

But I, I think that I
Caught the corner of your eye
But why, why can’t I try
To say the things I’ve got inside
To you ….

But it all ends up kinda’ like you think it might. I got all spiffed up and headed on over to the store. I get there a little later than I usually do. I’d been home whittling up this Canada goose— little thing with wings that flap, so we could hang it over the baby’s crib and she should slap at it—and it would look like it was flying.

Anyways, I get there and Frank is behind the counter reading one of them magazines, all of a sudden I felt myself getting real small, and kinda drifting away. I could hardly even hear him saying, “Yeah, that’s too bad about Carol. She was a real good girl. But I told her not to worry none, that there’s plenty of folks around looking for work, but it would be hard to find one just like herself. Fact is, John-O, she was waiting around here for you to show up; but seeing as how you were so late in coming, and that fellow she was with kinda looked like he wanted to get going, she just wrote down this here note for you. Asked if I’d give it to you here….”

“What’s she say, John-O?”

“Not much, Frank, It just says, ...

Dear John-O.
Thanks a lot for everything you did for me this winter. It really meant a lot to me, and I really do wish we could have gotten to known each other better. But life just takes quiet, crazy turns sometimes, and you never know.”

No address. Michigan somewhere, I guess.

So I stuck my head in a Field & Stream magazine so Frank wouldn’t see me. But, like all the folks around here, he knew. It just all seemed kinda weird: Frank, over there, behind the counter saying “Hey, John-O, check out this one over here….”

Damn, damn it I
I had the corner of her eye.
But I…
I didn’t try.

Memories on a Bus

With the fuel tank hovering precariously close to empty, I back the bus into its home beneath the towering pines in our side yard. We only had one breakdown this summer, and that was easily fixed with a new bank of batteries. Not bad for a thirty-year-old icon of steel, chrome, and spots of rust. The old Cat diesel 3208 now runs just a little rough; the generator is well past the 5000 hour mark, and the tires that are slightly scuffed and worn, all remind me of where we've been and how we've returned; and while the kids erect a monstrous fort out of soccer nets and a massive blue tarp, I top off the oil, flush the tanks, and scrape the dried dirt off the mudflaps: some fine sand from the National seashore (and the minke whale swimming just offshore, just beyond the reach of our skipping stones); heavy clay from the mountain pass in Thetford Vermont that we just barely managed to get over while the engine steamed and smoked in disbelief at our audacity; the specks of field grass from Windsor Mountain in New Hampshire—flashes of the Perseied meteor showers raining out of the night sky while we laid on our backs in wet dew, heavy with mosquitoes and fireflies; crushed blueberries and wild grape leaves from the spot we carved under the power lines at Nana and Papa's house in Brewster; the parking lot gravel of every ice cream stand, town fair, and festival we happened by on side roads off of side roads; the shells, bottom paint and turpentine of the boatyard on Pleasant Bay where the kids bulked up in oversized life jackets spun the dingy comically, struggling like Sisyphus towards the mooring of our amishly plain and barnacled wooden ketch.

Inside the bus, I pull the countless sleeping bags out of the overhead bins and stretch them over the fence between ours and our neighbor's yard. They are musty from the massive storm in late July that caught the kids unaware in their pop up tent and soaked them all clean through to the bone, while Denise and I listened to them laughing, comparing, and wringing out pillow cases in the wind freshened morning. As I shake out each bag, long lost crocks and sandals and flip-flops fall out like they just won the final game of hide and seek, along with the wet jeans and bathing suits reappearing from the cocoon that for weeks on end was their dressing room—and I still hear the screams: “Don't look! Wait for me! I don't need a sweatshirt!” And EJ constantly reminding everyone: “If Fitz says it's not going to rain, it will! He can't be trusted.”

Everything in the bus reflects the magic disarray of action: books are shoved into every free corner; Nora Roberts, Hemingway, Dr. Seuss, and Jack London piled like comrades in trench warfare; Harry Potter relinquished to sharing a drawer with Reptiles of North America; Thoreau lowered to a conversation with a pile of Spider Man coloring books. Nothing, no one, and nowhere is more important than any other in this egalitarian assemblage of memory. My drawer for tools also holds the missing cinnamon pop tart that caused Emma so much distress on a hungry morning. The registration makes for a perfect bookmark for a Patrick O’Brien novel, while my coffee cup holds a universe of broken crayons, mismatched screws, and a pack of Old Maid playing cards. Only the keys—the majestic and untouchable single set of keys—remains in its pristine reserve set in the dashboard. Who could or would ever try steal our bus? Who could carry away our memories? It is as unthinkable as joy.

There is a balance and a linkage between the material and the immaterial. Our family is carried towards and away from our dreams in a ponderous conveyance built by union men and women working long days in another time and existence. They made a thing in which we are transported and recreated by the renewing power of experience. There are times on the open road when I find myself quietly thanking them for their efforts. I wonder if they knew what kind of life they were enabling as they constructed our bus back in 1977. Did someone say a prayer as they packed the grease into the bearings? Is there an initial scratched into some impossible to find crevice of the frame? Back then our Bluebird Wanderlodge was the top of the line motorhome, a toy for the rich to see America—and to be seen. Now it is more like a vestige of an old folk tune that anyone can sing—but few do. I wonder how our summers would be different if Denise hadn't spotted it sitting in the back yard of a Mack Truck repair lot in Maynard, set amongst the dump trucks and semi's just a row or two away from the junkyard?

All I really know is that we took a chance at creating a new opportunity—something that I can’t forget how to do. The bus becomes our metaphor for possibility, even while it sits in stoic patience waiting for its tanks to be drained and the water lines to be blown. It reminds me that I need to continue to create those opportunities that become the stories and traditions of our family. It reassures me that only the weak and restful are intimidated.

The rest of us simply try.

The English Soldier

There is a soldier dressed

in ancient English wool guarding

the entrance to the inn.

He is lucky for this cool night

awaiting the pomp

of the out of town

wedding party.

He is paid to be unmoved

by the bride's stunning beauty

or her train

of lesser escorts.

He will not notice

this small stone

set across the square;

His eyes will not glisten

when he hears

that two brothers

fell here,

picked out

of disciplined lines

beating

a hot and hasty retreat

back to Boston.

He will not

chasten his comrades

for leaving them

in foreign dust—

the dull and whistling holes

torn into soft

and homesick wool.

He betrays nothing.

Inscrutable—

he collects his check

and drives home.

~The Colonial Inn

Concord, MA.

Approaching Poetry

If there is anything I wish to be called, it is a poet, for poetry is the most elevated art, and apart from my love for my wife and children, it is the closest I can come to touching the hand of the truest and most present God. Perhaps to a person unmarked by poetry, my statement reeks of intellectual arrogance and conceit, but to me it is as simple as real love. It can never be a point of discussion. It is what it is. The tragic flaw of a writer is to recognize true greatness in poetry, because most of us who aspire to be poets will alway be left on the sidelines. We are astute enough to see through the swath of mediocrity that academics and effete sophists try to pass off as poetry, but we still cannot for the life of us compose verse that reaches the grandeur of what we know to be true poetry. Even now, over thirty years into my journey as an aspiring poet, I still feel like a kid standing beside Larry Bird at the free throw line, and all I can offer him is a rattling rim and my passion for the game .

Poetry is both beguiling and bewildering. It is incredibly hard to pin down poetry except to say, “I know it when I see it.” When I was first out of high school and wandering the back roads and railways of the country, I was convinced that poetry could only be the unfettered (and unedited) expression of who and what I was at any given point in time. I practiced a rambling unexpurgated style of poetry—a style that mimicked the freedom I was experiencing for the first time in my life. I filled notebook after notebook with long-winded rants and rambles. I convinced myself that every word was precious—too precious to alter or edit in any way. I hitchhiked through every state in the west; I wrote in the back of pickup trucks, along the sides of back roads and interstates, and by lonely sterno cans in makeshift camps. I can’t say that I created remarkable poetry, but I did pay my share of dues.

I carried more books than luggage, and I read with a passion I never thought possible, and I wrote constantly. I emptied my heart and soul and being as if it was my last gift to humanity, but, oddly, I never shared that poetry with anybody. I couldn’t let go of my old self completely. I couldn’t reconcile the simple Concord townie barely scraping through high school with the now thoughtful vagabond weeping with Odysseus by his ancient campfires. All I knew was that Odysseus had Ithaca to long for, while my kingdom was yet to be made. My panoply of Gods were the poets that came before me, poets who both tormented and mentored me in my own odyssey towards that kingdom where poetry lives in endless reign.

Aside from intuition, I had no idea where or how to start writing poetry. I wasn’t even sure “why” I wanted to write poetry. It was as if I had picked up a rough gem from the side of the road and recognized that it was not an ordinary stone. And so my first poems were rough and rambling. I was both hunter and prey searching for and escaping from an elusive self. Constantly transforming, I shifted between haiku like brevity and unending anthems. I thrashed in a sea of words like a drowning man manic and joyful for life. I cursed my teachers for not preparing me for this maelstrom, and I thanked them for leaving me untainted.

My new syllabus was the open road and whatever books that were handed to me by the fellow travelers and lost saints who picked up me up off the side roads and interstate on-ramps. They gave me the best of what they had, and I gave them back a naivete’ that must have resembled genuineness. Somehow they must have sensed that I did not want to just read; I wanted to be enlightened and transfixed, and so they filled my backpack with the giants of the beat generation: Kerouac, Whitman, Miller, Proust, Ginsburgh, Snyder, Brautigan, and Ferlinghetti. Older couples gave me Shelley, Wordsworth, and Yeats. In my homesickness for my hometown of Concord, I picked up a copy of “Walden” and some selected essays of Emerson. Whomever I was reading at a given time, I imitated in my writing. Looking back, I wasn’t as interested in what they wrote, but in how they wrote. It didn’t matter that I was not a great poet; I was happy to live like a poet—and that lesson has never left me.

Time and experience are relative. Though I was only on the road for a relatively small stretch of time, my life was set on a new course, and thankfully, an unwavering one. Still, all I know of poetry is that it has to be real; it has to spring from an examined life; it has to recognize the beauty and majesty of the most common of images and actions, and it has to be constructed and not cast like wild seed, sometimes laboriously, because that is the life of a poet. For both the poet and the hunter, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but only the poet captures the bird just to set it free. Only the poet smiles as the bird soars from his hand. Only a true poet smiles at anonymity. The words have to be enough.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of words in our language only a few can make it on to the page, and fewer still can rightly be called a poem. This sea of sand is your starting point. Every moment is an opportunity lost or gained. The person who does not recognize this urgency is not a poet.

If you want to be a poet, live like one.

Where Fathers Go

Moaning like a lost whale

the thin ice 

bellowed behind us

then cracked and rang

as if spit from a whip.

The sharp steel of

my over-sized skates

etched unspeakable joy

into the slate-grey,

reptilian skin 

of Walden Pond.

Our mismatched hands

gripped together

in the fading light

of a January afternoon,

and you pulled me

onto untouched darker ice 

where fathers 

should never take sons.

You circled tighter

and, spinning like a bullfighter,

you let me go—

splayed across the ice,

arms outstretched,

screaming back to you

out of the black hole 

of memory

Trawler

We leave the fog stillness
of a cold harbor town,
and cup our hands
‘round the warm diesel sound—
leave while the children
are calmed in their dreams
by light buoys calling:
“Don’t play around me.”

The kids think their daddy
is so sure where to steer;
they throw in our holds
what they catch from the pier—
they throw in our holds
their after-school days;
what our nets couldn’t drag
will still be okay.

Okay keep your head up
and take care of the home;
I’ll call you next week
on the radiophone.
You say: “Yo, Captain Joe,
on the Marilyn Joe.
Make a beeline back home
on the Marilyn Joe.

Creaking and groaning
play it for me.
We’re the whitecapped and crazy
slaves of the sea—
haul away
heave away
keep what you will;
with a fire in your belly
the holes that you fill.

We leave the bay shallows—
be a waste of our time
to drag empty waves
for a pure lucky find.
We leave the bay shallows
for the edge of the shelf
where the warm waters slide
to a cold deeper self.

There on the edge
we drift nets in the night;
we winch and we pray
and bitch for the light.
We winch and we pray
and bitch for the day—
“Hook on to the rail
and get out of my way!”

“Get out of your bunk’s mates,
and get up from below.
Get into your oilskins—
she’s coming up slow:
We’ll say: ‘yo, Captain Joe,
on the Marilyn Joe.
Bring her into the wind:
Oh, the Marilyn Joe.”

Creaking and groaning
play it for me.
We’re the whitecapped and crazy
slaves of the sea—
haul away
heave away
keep what you will;
with a fire in your belly
the holes that you fill.

We gut all the night,
and pack all the day;
count down to each man
this feast of the waves.
Some take it back
to some love they have found;
some like the wind
they’ll just blow around town.

Six days on the Banks,
our eyes heavy as stones,
we chart a course
that will take us back home.
Docked at the pier,
with our kids by our sides,
we bitch about haddock
the market won’t buy.

We’ll sing: “Yo, Captain Joe,
on the Marilyn Joe:
when will we go
on the Marilyn Joe?
No I don’t mind the rain,
or the wind or the snow—
We’ll set out the trawl
on the Marilyn Joe.”

Creaking and groaning
play it for me.
We’re the whitecapped and crazy
slaves of the sea—
haul away
heave away
keep what you will;
with a fire in your belly
the holes that you fill.

The Yankee Cannonball

I stood in a long line waiting with Pipo for his first ever ride on a roller coaster. Things that move in strange ways are a big deal to him. When he first came to live with us, he was eight years old and had never even been in a two story house. On his second day here, we took him to Floating Hospital in Boston and strode into the elevator with an insouciance, which, in retrospect, reflected an utter lack of cultural awareness for a young boy in a strange land. The door shut, the elevator moved, and Pipo screamed and clutched me in his fear. Now, eighteeen months later, he stood wringing his hands, intermittently laughing and grimacing at the thought of the “The Yankee Cannonball.”

“Will it be scary?”

“Yes”

“Will I scream?”

“Probably.”

“Will I throw up?”

“I don't know. I might.”

“You better not!”

“We really don't have to go.”

“Yeah, we do.”

I could see his head racing a hundred miles an hour. I distracted him by yelling at some high school kids who were swearing at each other.“Don’t do that.”

“Why? They shouldn't be swearing.”

“What if they beat you up?”

“I'll hide behind you.”

“Mama will beat them up if they beat you up.”

“She better. Comb your hair up so you're forty eight inches tall.”

“Oh, man!”

Leaning on his toes he was just the right height. Squeezing into the car the single safety bar held me in a crushing gut squeeze while leaving Pipo astonishingly free to squiggle and squirm. “Do people ever fall out?”

“Rarely.”

“What does 'rarely' mean?”

“It means that only kids who ask a million questions fall out.”

“Whoo hooo.”

The cars slid toward the first hill and were grabbed by the chain. He held the hand grip, smiled, and raised his eyebrows in mock fear. “There's the bus! I wish I was on the bus. I like the bus.”

“I like the bus, too.”

“I know.”

The first hill caught us both by surprise. “Oh, man.”

“Oh, man”

I couldn't stop laughing. Pipo squinted his eyes and held the bar in front of him. I think he held his breath for ninety seconds. The girl behind us used every form of the F-word ever created.“Was it fun?”

“No.”

“Want to go again?”

“No. Never again.”

We found the rest of the family in the water park. Dripping and shivering, they all ran up to Pipo and asked if he really went on the Yankee Cannonball. “Yup, but never again. No way, Jose’. Who wants to go on the bumper cars?” Denise looked at me like I was a bad father forcing his son to be a man. “He wanted to go.”

“Yeah, right. Was he even tall enough?”

“With a micron to spare. It was another one of those things he just had to do.”

Denise and I both understand that part of Pipo. When he decides to do something, he'll do it, no matter how much angst it causes him—or us. He is not so much interested in overcoming fear as he is in facing his fears. He embraces fear as an experience and not merely as an emotion. It is a lesson in courage from which we can all draw inspiration.

The Yankee Cannonball is also a perfect metaphor for the written word. The empty page looms in front of us like the rickety roller coaster. We can't call ourselves writers if we refuse to get in the car and go. We can't call ourselves writers if we don't tell the whole story, replete with every dip and turn of our inner and outer experience. We can't give in to the temptation to leap from the car at the first sign of fear, and we can't tell the story from a distance. But, that is exactly what so many writers do. They mistakenly believe that the cold reality of fact is more important than the multi-dimensional dynamic of experience. It is much safer to have opinions than to question assumptions. We want facts, and we want a sense of assuredness that we are making wise decisions in our lives, but are we always willing to take that ride with Pipo through the hairpin turns of experience? Are we willing to distill our facts through the directness of experience? Without the parable there can be no sermon.

Our lives our full of the parables upon which we can contribute an enduring legacy to the world. Those legacies are the journal entries, poems, songs, stories, novels, and essays that capture people's imaginations and fires their passion, or simply stirs the embers of a world that needs pondering. I have no problem with the well-wrought essay that presents an impeccable line of reasoning and logical argument, but if I sense a fallacy, a hypocrisy, or a lack of magnanimity, I quickly create a distance between myself and the writer who is simply out to set me straight. Seek out the writers who know of what they speak, and you will be rewarded with a truth you can cherish and turn in your mind for years to come. To become that writer you need to return to the source of your own wisdom and chip away at the stone of memory until it takes a shape—the infinite and varied shapes of literature and writing—that can be held in our eyes and opened in our hearts, and our minds.

For years I have had an idea for a novel, but I never actually sat down to begin writing it. The idea was too complicated, the characters to diffuse, the length too daunting in the face of a busy lifestyle, but I thought of Pipo getting on the Yankee Cannonball in spite of every rational fear he had of roller coasters. So I began to take an hour or so out of every day and began writing my book. My car caught the clicking chain and took me to the point where gravity took over. I am barely down the first hill, but the ride is exhilarating and real. I see the track laid out before me, and, like Pipo, I'm not sure what every turn and twist will bring, but I do know there is an end to the ride, and that is where I draw my strength. Maybe I will walk away woozy and say “never again.” But at least I will know.

Think of what you “really” want to write.

And begin writing.

The Snow

has dropped a seamlessness

before the plows and children

can patch it back

to a jagged and arbitrary quilting

putting borders to design

and impulse.

I imagine myself

falling everywhere

softly,

whispering,

I am here,

and

I am here.

Goathouse

In reaching for the scythe

I’m reminded of the whetstone

and the few quick strokes

by which it was tested—

the hardness of hot August;

the burning of ticks

off dog backs.

It’s winter now

in this garage made barn,

and the animals seem only curious

that I’d be here so late

on a cold night lit dimly

by a single hanging bulb.

They don’t bother to stir

and disturb their warm huddle.

Cudchewers, we pay each other

little attention.

The curve of the handle still fits.

The blade shines,

its edge oiled against rust.

The loft is full

of Jack Mattison’s field.

There’s nothing to do —

my content is preparedness,

the simplicity of knowing.

Jonathan & Elaine McCarney

Jonathan McCarney of 37 Brookside Lane
lived for forty years with his wife Elaine;

retired now for twelve years, he spent his waking hours

wondering if she’d ever be the same—

The same as before

as the pictures by the door.

The same as before,

Christ, I’m asking nothing more.

Then there came the days

when your mind begun to haze

and you couldn’t remember

the little things no more.

It came on kind of slowly;

the doctors they all told you:

“Not to worry Dear,

it’s just a part of growing old.”

I’d laugh and say: “My sweet dear,

don’t cry and spill your warm tears—

we’re just a pair of old coots all alone.”

Then one day you went down

to the pharmacy in town;

two days later they found you

wandering around.

I put new locks on the door

and swore forever more

I’d never leave you

or let you come to harm.

So for five years I have cared for you—

cradled you and bathed you

and though my eyes are gone

my heart keeps racing on.

I know I cannot blame

but if just once you'd say my name;

My God, I dearly love my poor Elaine.

Then one cold October morning

they come taking you away—

“We’re sorry Mister McCarney,

but you can’t care for her this way.”

They took her down the road—

just another aging load.

I swore that I would be with her each day.

Your home is now on Balls Hill,

the state pays your bed bill;

my pension helps to buy you a single room.

I sit down in the chair—

so far away I cannot dare—

Elaine we’ve got to be together soon.

Then Elaine I went home

and I prayed with all my might;

I don’t know if he’ll forgive me,

there’s just so much more wrong than right.

It fit well beneath my coat—

there’s no need for any note;

I’ll turn down the heat

I’ve no use for tonight.

Jonathan McCarney, and his dear wife Sue Elaine,

were waked today at their home on Brookside Lane.

Father Clark prayed on their grave,

Mrs. Blodgett cried and waved—
wondering if they’d ever be the same

Superman

There’s a little blonde boy in a superman cape

Racing around the back yard;

Sayin’, “Daddy don’t you know I can fly to the moon;

I’m gonna bring you back some stars.

And after that I’m gonna save the world”

Cause I’m superman today.”

I scoop that boy right into my arms,

And this is what I say:

You don’t need a cape to be a hero

You’ve got all the special powers that you need

Your smile’s enough to save the world from evil

And you’ll always be superman to me.

That little blonde boy in the cape again

Says he’s gonna jump off the deck.

I say: “Little man, can’t you just slow on down;

One day you’re going to break your neck?”

He says, “Don’t you know that I can’t get hurt

Because I’m superman today.”

Well I scoop that boy right into my arms

And this is what I say:

You don’t need a cape to be a hero

You’ve got all the special powers that you need

Your smile’s enough to save the world from evil

And you’ll always be superman to me

One day he woke up and didn’t want his cape,

And we knew that something weren’t right

The doctors said, “We just don’t know.

We better keep him here for the night.”

So, I held his hand and stroked his hair

Until somehow he fell off to sleep,

Then I knelt at the window
and prayed to the stars:

God, help me own leap.

I’ve never been much of a prayin’ man;

I’ve never had a faith very clear;

But give me a sign and I’ll step into line;

Just get my boy out of here—

I’ll give you everything any man’s ever got:

I’ll give you every bit of my love—

And a prayer came back to me

In a whisper from above…saying:

You don’t need a cape to be his hero

You’ve got all the special powers that you need

Your smile’s enough to save the world from evil

And you’ll always be superman to me

That little boy woke up in a hospital room

Looking so quiet and sad.

I bring him in his cape and I say “Big boy,

How about a smile for Dad?”

And those wide blue eyes filled up with tears

“I’m not superman today.”

Well, I scooped that boy right into my arms

And this is what I said…

You don’t need a cape to be my hero;

You’ve got all the special powers that you need.

Your smile’s enough to save the world from evil,

And you’ll always be superman to me;

Yeah, you’ll always be superman to me

~written by Denise Fitzsimmons

Patty

We were coming home from church one morning and Jimmy Glennon pulled up beside us as we approached the Sudbury road lights. He didn't notice the well-dressed family of eight scrunched into our old Pontiac station wagon as he revved the engine of his yellow and black mustang fastback. I was crammed in the rearward facing back seat doling out peace signs and air horn salutes, but the scene unfolding in front of me was one of the coolest scenes ever: here was the guy Patty had a date with the night before seeming to challenge my father to a drag race, or at the very least humiliate, the infamous and fiery EJ—on a Sunday morning no less.

When the light turned green, Jimmy pulled away in a squeal of burning rubber and glorious smoke, fishtailing his car as he laid down a patch—a testament etched into the road that would last several more months of my bragging to my friends as we drove by that spot every weekday on the schoolbus number 10 That moment sealed it for me: I had the coolest big sister in town—and now I could prove it in the hardscrabble myth-making of a crowded kid-filled neighborhood. I could now glow in the reflected light of her infinite coolness, and I still live in that light, but it is now deeper, richer, and more penetrating, with a lingering and haunting pain that still leaves me numb and lonely; but, through Patty we can all be cool; we can live with a richer understanding of our dreams, our struggles, and our potential to embrace the scope of the day, and we can simply share the patchwork mosaic that she wove with the divergent strands of our lives.

When I was young, Patty lived in another age. She moved as a phantom through the house because she was like eighteen when I was eleven; she had friends who would hoist me to the top of the basketball hoop bolted above the garage door; she had friends who played guitars in the basement and pierced each other's ears, and she had friends in prison and friends who died in the Vietnam war, and she had friends that she kept for all of her shortened life—most of whom are here today. My other sisters were never as cool as Patty. Eileen, in her quest for perfection, would charge me a quarter if I didn't make my bed right; Mary Ellen would lament that I was embarrassing the whole family because of my bad pitching in little league, and Annie, who was almost as young as Patty was old, was too little to be cool and did things like take our meal orders before supper on a stolen Friendlies waitress pad. My little brother Tom never seemed to feel the need to be cool.

So it all fell on me.

I really wanted to be cool. I wanted a different and clear slant on life like Patty, but I certainly did not want to work as hard as her; so, like so many other people, I used her as my mentor—my guide through the vagaries and vicissitudes of life. And she guided me well: she had a way of making your little adventure or undertaking be one of immense importance, but, equally important, she would put her life into your venture by helping to make it become real. She knew that anything worth trying was worth doing, and so any dream could be pounded into reality; any project could be finished, and any problem or struggle had a way through, and her hand was always there to help it happen.

Patty gave me faith in all that is infinite and eternal because that was the nature and source of her energy. Need a book typeset? Just drop it off. Need a sweater? Just drop a hint. How about a party or a place to stay? A weekend at the cape? A babysitter for the weekend? How about a car? Patty would hand down her cars like other people would their sweatshirts. Patty had that rare thing: a wisdom that was not proud of itself and a door that was always open.

The more you knew Patty, the richer you would become. The best part of my going to U-Mass was the chance to live near Patty. I mistakenly thought that living near Patty would put us on equal footing. It was there where I lived, not only in the light of her coolness, but in light of her kitchen, where I would show up on a regular basis with a regular stream of spiritually and physically hungry friends, all of whom found that cool as she was, Patty was also warm and magnanimous beyond compare. It was in her kitchen where I first got to hang out with her as a friend, confidant, and cheerleader. My first night at U-Mass, we met for beer down at The Drake, a classic dive of a bar with smoke and pool tables and peanut strewn floors. It seemed strange and normal to be sitting down with her and Donald—her avowed Marxist, long-haired, archaeologist boyfriend who complimented her so perfectly and would soon become her perfect husband and partner and soul-mate until death parted their life together.

It may seem dumb, but it was like a first date for me. But, it was better than Jimmy Glennon burning rubber at the route two lights; it was better than her taking off with Tubby in an old Triumph Spitfire—and Mary and EJ panicking that she was eloping—with a Jewish boy at that. Better than when her and Mary Ellen got caught pinning up their catholic school skirts at the bus-stop; better than when one of her friends escaped from prison; better than hearing that her dorm in Southwest was the target of another drug raid; better than when her and a couple of friends hopped in the back of an old bakery truck and moved to Oregon—and EJ making me promise not to tell her mother that it wasn't a real bus. It was better because it was finally real and not just my vision of some more exciting reality. We were in a smoky bar and laughing and talking and telling stories, and she was with a guy who made her laugh and made her incredibly happy. I could feel her knitting together the best fibers of our family and creating a tapestry that nothing can undo—a tapestry that has stood the test of time.

Patty showed that small gestures are huge, and that huge actions are always doable. She would call and be as excited about her student Rodney's wrestling match as she would winning teacher of the year. She would drive five hours to have dinner with my mother, or to bring a swimming list top Alba, or to drop off a present for one of your kids. She showed how simple it is for giving to be a gift for everyone involved.

In the perfect memory of love, Patty will always live on. And we will always be amazed and humbled and grateful, and, for me, sometimes simply awestruck.

Young Warriors

Young warriors almost

enchanted with dreams,

lie strewn

like daisies against

the gym wall,

waiting.

And what we humans call

simple joy

and mud-borne pride

will soon outweigh

the many tears.

~The Fessenden Wrestling Tournament,

Newton MA, 2006

 Yardscaper

We laid the hedge bushes

along straight lines

made taut

with string mixing

cowshit and fertilizer

then flooding.

Later we’ll plan the walk—

brick path and trench

we’ll have to dig

remove the loam

too much a part

of winter buckling

and settling

with thaws.

My neighbor stops over

and says it will be

a pain in the ass

to walk around

this absurd symmetry

laughing like

we didn’t know.

 Teaching Frogs To Fly

The parting is the hardest part of fate—

The slow untangling knot still left unwound;

We pause as if the hour is too late

To divvy fair the treasure we have found.

Our words like fingers pointing at the moon;

Whose light reveals the shadows that you teach;

And this goodbye that seems to come too soon

The pulsing tide returns you to our reach.

With each soul you shaped the morphable clay

And lay to rest the fickle thorns of time;

You gave us all an ordinary day

Below some harsh summit we could not climb—

I've never asked, but I've wondered how and why

You somehow managed to teach frogs to fly.

(For Lorraine Ward on her retirement:

a good friend, mentor, and amazing boss)

Somewhere North of Bangor

Somewhere north of Bangor

on the run from Tennessee.

Lost in back scrub paper land

in section TR-3.

It’s hit him he’s an outlaw

a Georgia cracker’s son,

who killed a man in Nashville

with his daddies favorite gun.

It’s hit him with the loneliness

of wondering where you are

on a long ago railway

stretched between two stars.

Two weeks shy of nineteen

in 1992,

she got tickets with her girlfriends

for that new band coming through.

She got tickets for the show,

she said, “go on and have a night on town.

I’ll meet you in the morning at

Frannie’s Coffee Ground;”

but she met a backstage roady

from that traveling country band,

and now it’s hard to slow the pain that grows

inside a hurtin’ man.

I took one of Joe’s old Rugers

and the law into my hand.

I borrowed Lance’s Mustang

and a Mobil credit card.

I drove every pot-holed backroad

they’ve got in Arkansas.

By now there was an all points

on a Georgia crackers son

who left on Sunday morning

with his daddies favorite gun.

I heard the church bells ringing, pleading,

pulling on my soul.

I almost turned back—I couldn’t bear to go.

Twenty years of praying

and doing what I was told.

They played three shows in Nashville

and Johnson City for a night.

Two air-brushed old greyhounds

under marquee neon lights.

I followed them to every show

until I found the man

with a tattoo of Geronimo

on the back of his right hand.

I asked him about a gal he met

at Saturday night’s show;

she says that you get kind of rough

and don’t understand no.

I thought that I’d find out myself

just if that be so.

I heard you like to think

you lead your life out on the edge.

You say the way we live our lives

we may as well be dead.

But now that you believe

that you’re the God of your own land

you’ve got to walk a higher road

than any other man.

You’ve got to toe a higher line

and somehow make it real;

you’ve got to learn in disregard

to think hard as you feel.

He pulled his knife,

I took his life—

you’ve got to pay for what you steal.

Now I’m somewhere north of Bangor

on the run from Tennessee.

Lost in back-scrub paper land

in section TR-3.

No more an outlaw

than a Georgia crackers son

you will not play the renegade

trapped or on the run;

and you love the strange wild loneliness

of knowing who you are—you love

the way the patterns lay

stretched between the stars;

you know that when they find you

they won’t know who you are.

Windsor Mountain

  I am sitting in what they call “The Enchanted Grove.” There is a swarm of insects swirling—not buzzing—around my head. Strange as it sounds , they do not bother me in the least, but more so, they add another degree of sharing to the experience. The Enchanted Grove is a small patch of woods in the middle of a field, full of popple, birch, black cherry, and some long ago wilded apple trees growing in and around a good size granite boulder—around which my daughters (and a wonderfully crazy visiting artist) built a small deck last year out of pine slabs discarded from Bob’s old bandsaw mill they have here. “Here” is Windsor Mountain International Camp where we have been coming as a family the last few years. I am here as “enrichment staff;” my older kids as campers; and the three little ones and Denise as honorary and beloved guests. There is a magic here. Our old Bluebird motorhome looks more a part of the landscape than a thirty year old beauty of steel and chrome. As much as anywhere else on earth I feel I belong here. We belong here. In the same way, everyone needs to belong somewhere.

I look back on my life with thankfulness. In sum there is nothing I regret and nothing I would wish to change if it would alter in any degree the here and now. If I could excise out the idiocies, the hurt, the profligacy and the inane without mortally wounding the core of who I am and the essential beauty of this moment, I would do so a thousand times over—only a fool or a saint would do otherwise. My life has always been a confluence of opportunity and willingness, much of it down the road not taken, much of it proudly and stubbornly iconoclastic, but the greater irony is that I am here now after traveling the oft taken road—the long beat path of marriage, family, friends and common labor—and it feels (and is) more rich and real than any of the dreams I conjured in my youthful adventures. No doubt I use my stories to entertain, not out of wistfulness, but because I am acutely aware that the well of memory is more important to the present than to the past. I didn’t always realize that; I do, now; and that in itself is thanksgiving enough.

I have seven beautiful, wild, and unadorned children who run and play and fight and need to be told a hundred times to quiet down in their tent at night. I have an equally beautiful (there is no better word) strong, and loving wife who intuitively understands that family is intertwined and nurtured by a common experience; who knows in a quiet look what and who needs mending and what and who needs unraveling and what and who needs to be left alone to heal in the balm of contemplative time; and more than anyone I have ever met she knows and maps the charted and uncharted majesty of marriage, friendship, and motherhood. She knows that this camp is but another piece of the mosaic we constantly bring to the forward—a shared journey mentored to the next generation!

This is but stolen time—and I know enough of the cruelty of time to live solely in words—so I will head out to find Denise and the kids who are probably making their way back through the now darkened camp in a game of flashlight tag and dibs on tent space. The moon tonight will be the most beautiful they will ever have the chance to see—a full summer moon sparkled with fireflies and memory, family, and community.

Yes, this is where we belong.

~Windsor Mountain, 2008

The Fig Tree

I have a deal to make with my raspberries
who produce no real fruit.
and who took over the far quarter
of my springtime labor,
displacing the beans and squashes
in a sea of brambles—

those distant cousins
spread wildly from a few plants
(stolen from Patty's richer garden)
poking their prickly heads
like gophers
some distance
from their mother root;

and whose unruly sprouts
encourage their own offspring
to run amok
among my disciplined,
well-tended,
and orderly squashes,

brussels sprouts,

beans

and peas.

In church today we heard the parable
of the barren fig tree;
whose owner, mad with rage,
came to cut it down,
but whose fate was saved
by a wise and gentle servant.

Likewise, I will turn my own sins
into the waiting soil
and beg the patience of God,
that we both
may be renewed.

Concord

The people, the music

filledness of rush hour

traffic skirting puddles

work crews packing in

laughswearingmudyellowed

slickers lighting candle bombs.

My sadness the euphoric

detachment.

I love this town.

It breathes me.

The Phoenix

Rising from the ashes is one of the most enduring metaphors of humanity. It is the hope of transformation that gives us the strength to crawl in the mud and squalor of a diminished life. The animal shivers in her den with the expectation of spring, but only we can create a new spring within ourselves; only we can share in the miracle of creation simply by an act of will. That is the magic of our lives: we can do and undo all that we've wrought on ourselves and others.

We pledge ourselves to each other simply by saying "I do." We can change course with an ease that is astounding, but only if we break the shackles that hold us to the beaten ground and only if we stop pushing the unwieldy stone before us while dragging a sack of regret behind us. We never fully open our eyes. We content ourselves with living in the half light between sleep and wakefulness, and in this groggy state we chew on the bones of the day. Half starved, we look to the sky and bleakly remember the story of the phoenix.

We remember that bird not for everything it did, but for the one thing it did.

Do that one thing.

Saturday Morning

Before the pancakes,

soccer games, and birthday parties;

before the mowing and raking

and grouting the tile;

before I even glance

at the calendar hung

like a graffiti nightmare

under shelves filled

with the frosted flakes,

cheerios, and cocoa puffs,

I make a cup of coffee

and watch the slow

unfolding of the day:

Groggy and unsteady,

Charlie is up first

and knows to ask politely

if he can watch TV.

I practice a grave and stern

reluctance

and nod quietly.

He bursts out of

his warm cocoon of sleep

and sets the day

in motion, and drawn

by the faint roar of Scooby Doo,

five more painted monarchs

float down the stairs

and glide past me

unnoticed and gather

clustered on the couch.

I close my book and count out

the remaining measures

of this sacred time.

Born again into

a new day,

they will soon

come back to me

with their insatiable hunger.

Essex Bay

This house makes funny noises

When the wind begins to blow.

I should have held on and never let you go.

The wind blew loose the drainpipe.

You can hear the melting snow.

I’ll fix it in the morning when I go.

I’ll fix it in the morning when I go.

I should call you and tell you

How the frost heaves were this year.

You’d laugh and say, “Keeps the riff-raff out of here.”

You’d laugh and say, “In a funny way,

The whole place is kinda queer.”

You know, the State’s finally begun to thin the deer.

Yeah, the State’s finally begun to thin the deer.

And I know the way the tides,

They come and go and flow,

And I know the Essex River

And the clam flats down below.

But there’s something I don’t know

About living all alone

Without you ...

I sold the lot that looks out,

That looks out past the bay.

Just a pile of sand that’s worth too much to save.

We said we’d beat the greenheads

And build a dreamhouse there someday;

But I got three times the price I had to pay.

Yeah, I got three times the price I had to pay.

And I know the way the tides,

They come and go and flow,

And I know the Essex River

And the clam flats down below.

But there’s something I don’t know

About living all alone

Without you ...

This house makes funny noises

When the wind begins to blow.

I should have held on and never let you go.

The wind blew loose the drainpipe.

You can hear the melting snow.

I’ll fix it in the morning when I go.

I’ll fix it in the morning;

I love you every morning;

I still miss you every morning when I go

And I know the way the tides,

They come and go and flow,

And I know the Essex River

And the clam flats down below.

But there’s something I don’t know

About living all alone

Without you ...

The Size of Your Door

As I've been doing all summer long, I drove home tonight from New Hampshire for my weekly gig at The Colonial Inn in Concord Massachusetts—the same gig I've had for over twenty-five years. I came home to the usual scene: tall grass, too many bills, a ticked off cat, and a fridge that is stoically empty and a sink that is typically full. I put new blades on the mower, but I put them on upside down. It cuts fine, but not much higher than a putting green. The bikes—ten of them, plus a couple of scooters—are rusting in the bike rack with weeds growing three feet high through the spokes. A half finished dog house EJ started sits in the driveway with a weedwacker that refuses to run resting on its pitched roof. If there were more hours in the day, and I had half the motivation of my neighbors, I'd spend the time to make my home a castle fit for a sightseeing tour by the local garden club. Once, while driving my wrestling team to a meet, the kids were commenting on the various and tawdry mansions that lined our route back through the wealthy streets of Concord to our school. I interjected that the size of the door is more important than the size of the house. One kid seemed to get it; the rest let it drift through and out of their heads like any other of my oft spoken aphorisms.

Tonight our door will open wide. Two car loads of counselors are driving the two hours down from New Hampshire to see the show and "crash" at our house. The beauty of it is that this is not a rare occurrence. On any given night of the week people stop by from every corner and every walk of life—announced and unannounced. If my kids see a car pull up out front while we are eating, they will rush to scrunch over on their benches while two or three of them will rush to set as many plates as are needed at the table. It is just as easy to feed twelve as it is nine. When Denise and I bought our house, the first thing we did was to buy a huge table made up of thick pine slabs. A few years ago we moved it from the cramped kitchen space and put it in the living room where it lives with the fireplace, a piano, and my father’s old and memory-filled desk; all told, it's a great place for a communal feast, be it a feast of Kraft's macaroni and cheese or a spread fit for a state dinner.

Denise drove with the kids down to Nana and Papa’s on Cape Cod, so I am missing a cookout on the beach at Tom and Maureens in Orleans; but, tomorrow I will drive to the cape for dinner with them, and with Aunt Mary-Beth and Uncle Bud and another whole coterie of cousins and friends. I'm sure that on Saturday we will be with someone else, or they will be with us. Ten years ago we lost the keys to our front door. At the time I didn't realize that it would evolve into a metaphor for our life as a family. Buddha said, "They are only rich who realize they have enough."

So I guess we have plenty.

Last Snow

Is this the last snow falling

in dull rhythmic thuds

on the front porch roof?

It slides off the gangly pines

and startles a pair

of chattering squirrels.

Bothered by this latest setback—

and each other—they quarrel

and do not notice

Margaret’s wet softball,

wrapped in her new glove,

waiting at the top of the slide

for yesterday’s spring.

Molting

I am always molting;

leaving my hollowed skin

in awkward places, scaring

people and making them

jump.

They touch me and think

I’m real; then laugh

and say things like

“What a riot.”

I’m tired of this changing

of skins.

I’d rather stumble

on myself and be fooled;

and grab

my dry and scaly shell,

and feel it crumbling,

and laugh and laugh.

Shane

It’s been too long feeling sorry for myself.

It’s been too long with my life up on the shelf.

Sometimes wish that I was Shane—

shoot Jack Palance, and disappear again;

don’t have no one

don’t want no one

don’t miss no one:

living lonely with a saddle and a gun.

Some men just want to walk behind a plow.

Other men find a different way somehow.

Wish that I could be like Shane:

come this way once

and never come this way again;

don’t have no love

don’t want no love

don’t miss no love:

hell below and the stars above.

Shane, come back Shane.

Prairies dried up

it won’t rain.

You’re a technicolor cowboy I know

but I sure do hate to see you go.

Sometimes I look back and I wonder why

I can’t touch the ground or reach the sky.

Shane would come but he wouldn’t stay.

He’d empty his pistols and ride away;

don’t have no star

don’t want no star

don’t miss no star:

no destination is too far…

Shane, come back Shane.

Prairies dried up

it won’t rain.

You’re a technicolor cowboy I know

but I sure do hate to see you go.

It’s not easy living here this way.

I watch the sun come up and go down each day.

Sometimes it helps to ease the pain

to shout ‘Shane, come back Shane.’;

don’t have noone

don’t want noone

don’t miss noone:

not trying to undo what's been done…

Shane, come back Shane.

Prairies dried up

it won’t rain.

You’re a technicolor cowboy I know

but I sure do hate to see you go.

*Written by Jimmy O’Brien ©

(I’ve sung this song so much that it feels like a part of my life.
Thanks, Jimmy!)

The Beauty Closest to You

Three days of rain. I can hear Eddie inside playing his banjo like he has been every day—non-stop for the past three days. He plays the same medley of songs: the first part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, followed by Dueling Banjo's—quite a pairing. They are having a talent show in his 3rd grade class next week. My wife was teasing him that now he has to work on smiling on stage, which only deepens the intensity of his practice. His brother, Pipo, on the other hand, will walk on stage with a huge smile and just whale away on his djembe drum—and probably get the biggest applause for something he would never malign with practice. Earlier today I drove Kaleigh and Margaret over to my brother's house for a

sleepover with "the cousins."  Kaleigh (fifteen years old) was mad at herself for forgetting her favorite pillow, at which Margaret laughed back: "They have plenty of pillows, what's the big deal."

I'm amazed we all live under the same roof.

One of the beauties of my life is that I only need to listen and watch and the vagaries and variety of life pop up like the dandelions in this rain. For all of the minutes Emma will watch a spider weave its web, Charlie will spend the same amount of time chasing squirrels around the backyard like an untrained dog. If I sit long enough, Tommy will always make his way to my lap and silently bury his head on my chest, and then, as if on cue, ask for a cup of water, a cookie, or an apple, and then bolt away in unmitigated joy. 

I know, too, if I sit out here long enough I'll hear Denise say, "Time for bed," and the whole pack will scurry upstairs, but not before a quick blowing out of their ears and a kiss on their foreheads—our small ritual to keep the bad dreams away. If I go up with them. I will fall prey to the practiced endlessness of their questions, stories, and pillowfights. I need the rare serenity in our house to share an old movie and some popcorn with Denise, even if it is punctuated with my threats bellowed from the couch to “quiet down or else.” The else never really happens and only exists in the mythology of their shared childhood.

Time slips by.

Listen to the rain, and hear the beauty closest to you.

Sugaring in a Mill Town

We do not need a conjurer,

for there is no real magic

to maple sugar:

We tap the gnarled trees,

boil away the sap,

and leave only

the sweet amber syrup

and another

mess in the kitchen.

My neighbors are happy

that my kids

tap the aged maples

that line the pot-holed streets.

The gallon buckets

hung from ten penny nails

seem so

absurdly out of place

in the close-knit quarters

of this old mill town.

I watch Tommy and Emma

line up behind

Charlie and Margaret,

and EJ and Pipo

as if following a team

of quiet Belgian draft horses

shaking oiled harnesses

and stamping shod hooves,

while straining through

the soft corn snow, still

piled high before

the ides of March.

And I remember once

while hiking through

the woods of Rumney

seeing a solitary man

with plaid wool cap, turning

bucket after bucket

into an endless vat

and dreaming

what is never spoken.

I fear them ever being that alone.

Instead, they are an uncouth gaggle

of cocked heads in floppy hats

covering single eyes;

unlaced boots and mismatched mittens

dancing a celebratory homeward waltz,

embracing the sloshing

galvanized tins

like prom dates.

The girls sing

as if they own the world:

"Girls go to college

to get more knowledge;

boys go to Jupiter

to get more stupider."

The boys, of course,

turn the cheer

to their advantage.

Held together

by the gravity of tradition,

no one is ever left behind,

though, invariably,

someone starts to cry.

Later, with the house full

of steam, smoke and pungence

we stand on tiptoes and benches,

and hold the smallest ones tightly.

We jostle for space

around the electric stove

and gather

as a community

and stare for hours

into the mystery

Kampuchea

I stutter for normality

across the river

from black men fishing

for kibbers

and horned pout.

Barefoot children rounded

bellies curled

navels stalk the turtle

sunning on a log.

lonely in the field grass

lonely on the curbstones

I stutter for normality.

Not a mother

whose breasts are dry,

whose child doesn’t cry,

who sleep

on a cot

in a tent.

~The Concord River
1981

Listen & Learn

A Calm Sea Never a Captain Makes

Sometimes I hate my boat. However, hating a needy pile of wood, sail, and line is less distressing than what it teaches me about myself. My trying to remove the stubborn barnacles from the bottom-sides after eight months in drydock is a harsh reminder that ten minutes of a simple power-washing on Labor Day would have negated the hours of cursing, scraping, and crawling on the back-stabbing scree of a New England boatyard that occupied my day yesterday. Years ago I blithely and absent-mindedly watched as a friend showed me how to make a wire splice. Tomorrow I am paying some old salt two hundred dollars to splice the wire needed to haul my halyard. Damn me! I should be that old salt by now, not some humble yuppie with a romantic notion of the sea, willing to pay twice just to learn once. The list could go on, (but so could my self-loathing). Sometimes, too, we hate what we write and what we’ve become as writers because we know that we did not listen to the old curmudgeon (in my case Sister Jean Beatrice) droning in front of us in English class about the virtues of punctuation. We write and ineffectually remember that there is something missing from our repertoire of skills—skills that we learned once but cast off as detritus from a bygone age.

In my youth I learned a lot about sailing and boat building, but I never really went to sea on my own, and so my skills were not reinforced by the granite memory of experience. The dream remained alive, while the lost knowledge now looms like an apparition in the distance, like the ghost of an early death, haunting and enchanting in the same breath. I am relearning and re-remembering because I have to regain the footing of my nautical dream and make that first new turn out of the harbor.

Learning the ropes is equally true for the writer: don't neglect the small details—the placing of commas, the quotes within quotes, the run-ons, the introductory phrases, conjunctions, and pronouns, colons and semi-colons—that help you construct, repair, and clarify your thoughts and ideas and that somehow keeps together the sweeping power of great poetry and literature. They are the bolts and screws and planks that hold the boat together. Everything you've learned about writing is important and useful to the crafting of your words. It was, after all, a simple wire splice keeping me in port! If you are young, cling to what you learn and keep it close to your heart. If you are old, unearth and restore the memories you need to face the day and the empty page with confidence and courage. Build upon what you already know and sail towards your own dreams.

Ultimately, a Captain is only made at sea, not on land. As an English teacher I drive my students crazy by writing long preambles to my assignments; I hide the details of what is due tomorrow in a labyrinth of reflections, observations, and admonitions. They beg me to just highlight in bold what they need to do. I get away with it because I can. It bothers them that I just assume they want to become better writers. I write because I love to write, but I, too, have a long way to go before I can call myself a captain. The few knots I know won't serve me in every situation I will face.

The simple act of sustained and attentive writing will make you a better writer, but to combine the act of writing with the focused study of the craft of writing will make you a great writer—a writer who is truly ready to face the open sea! Too much of education separates the bird from the wing, and this is especially true in our more common ways of teaching writing. My own children spend hours of homework time circling prepositional phrases and adverbial clauses in remarkably generic workbooks. I appreciate that they are learning the elemental nature and grammar of language, but, in my cynical moments, I marvel at how lucky their teachers are that the whole class needs work on the same mechanics. I wonder if those teachers are aware that they are creating a flock of awkward flightless birds dawdling around on barren dung heaps because the skills they learn are not tested out in the moiling waters of an angry ocean. There is often nothing to show for all of their labor but a grade and a potentially higher MCAS score.

The skills we teach our students must be useful in real situations, and those students need to see how those skills have practical value in their personal odyssey as real writers. The poems, songs, stories, reflections, essays, and narratives that we write let us go to sea on our own and discover our greatness and limitations. Without an adventurous journey, it is all too easy to lose the incentive to understand the workings of the viscera that keeps our writing alive. We are all at different places as writers but the scourges of the open sea are the same for all mariners.

There needs to be a fire in your belly of your own creation, driving you forward, while still (and constantly) you listen, and learn— and wonder.

Shingles

Shingles damn things

so full of

underedges never just

quickly slopped on

whitewashed and left

never just you

poke and dab catch

the drips and

brush them back

into the grain of things.

Joshua Sawyer

I doubt I’d ever have taken this road

had I known how fallen it really was

to disrepair: driving comically,

skirting ruts and high boulders, grimacing

at every bang on the oil pan.

I tell you it’s the old road to Wendell —

that they don’t make them like this anymore.

We’re bound by curious obligations,

and so stop by an old family plot

walled in by piles of jumbled fieldstone,

cornered to the edge of what once was field.

The picket gateway still stands intact,

somebody propped up leaning on a stick,

an anonymous gesture of reverence.

Only nature disrespects: toppling stone,

bursting with suckers and wild raggedness.

A gravestone, schist of worn slate, leans weathered:

Joshua Sawyer Died Here 1860

Another stone, cracked, has fallen over.

I reset the stone, and scrape the caked earth

as if studying some split tortoise shell,

and have keyed in to a distant birth —

His wife Ruth died young; so I picture him

stern with his only daughter, only child —

speaking for a faith which could defy her.

There’d be no passing onto when she died —

twenty-two, more words beside her mother.

Still these stones and fields you kept in order,

long days spent forcing sharp turns on nature,

accepting the loose stone and thin topsoil.

A Wendell neighbor must have buried you

whispering a eulogy which is as lost

as your daughter, your wife, and this farm:

—Joshua Sawyer

I've never been down this road before;

I would like to speak with you of faith.

Don’t You Ever Let Go
of Your Soul

Sometimes yeah.

Sometimes no.

Sometimes it’s somehow somewhere in between.

Sometimes it’s somewhere that no one has been—

no, nobody, nowhere, no nothing can end.

So don’t you let go and hope you’ll find it again.

Don’t you ever let go—

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Things they got ways

of slipping by unless you hold—

so don’t you ever let go

of your soul.

Sometimes, man I’d wish

there’d be snakes in the trees,

and I’d just keep this big space between them and me—

I’d say no way Jose’ that ain’t how I’ll be;

but between right and wrong there’s this large mystery;

it makes freedom so hard, so hard to be free.

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Things they got ways

of slipping by unless you hold—

so don’t you ever let go

of your soul.

Sometimes when I hear that fate’s back in town,

and it’s working the strings of the prophets and clowns;

and you’re hung and you’re strung

and you’re brung and wore down,

and you hear, Fitz, man, don’t worry,

‘cuz here’s what we’ve found:

fate's got a chance

when you’re soul’s out of town.

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Don’t you ever let go of your soul.

Things they got ways

of slipping by unless you hold—

so don’t you ever let go

of your soul.

Karen’s Message

Sometimes I wonder why I teach what I teach. I know that I love teaching The Odyssey because I sense some eternal power that I can't adequately express in words. I know that its mix of myth, legend, and tradition has woven itself into my psyche, where it rests with the serenity of an aged oak in a field by a slow moving river. I have always been indebted to Joseph Campbell who wrote the book The Power of Myth and turned me on to this hero cycle I am hammering you over the head with everyday. He taught me to reach deeper into the mystery of myth; he convinced me to shed the blinders of cynicism and science and to accept the emotional necessity of the mythological world. But, there was always an acorn of doubt that sat in my gut like a seed sown by farmer distrustful of tradition—distrustful of the mistakes and myopia of what has come before him. Until this weekend, when all doubt was removed, as I lived through the death of my brother Tom's wife, Karen, and sat with him and his three young children as we—and infinitely more acutely, they—journeyed through one of life's awesome horrors at the bedside of a mother, wife, and friend taken way too early from the realm of this world.

On Friday, my wife came to see me at school and took me to Concord center for lunch. She knew I was a bit out of sorts after my brother called me on Thursday night to tell me that Karen wanted to come home from the hospital in Boston where she was admitted last week, and where she finally decided to give up her fight against cancer—the disease too deep in her for another round of radiation and chemotherapy to hold it at bay. She wanted to die at home with her family, without the doctors, nurses, and chemicals that have kept her alive long past the time the doctors gave her to live. Denise and I drove to town and had lunch at The Cheese Shop. She held my hand as we walked through town, trying to keep me tethered in a gathering wind of uncertainty. Though I was born and raised in Concord—and have always loved the town—I found myself annoyed with everything Concord had become: stores selling overpriced and senseless trinkets, the fancy cars driven by kids and parents tethered to cell phones, and homes and neighborhoods out of proportion to any sense of dignity. Denise smiled at me and told me to go get a haircut, which was not strange advice, as Dennis and Jack at the Stop and Blade have been cutting my hair since I was a teenager, and she knew it always put me in a better frame of mind to hang out with old friends—but it was also time for 7th grade football practice, and I had promised my team a victory over the evil forces of coach Rouse's ragtag squad.

We pulled into Fenn and I was struck by the beauty of the campus: lower schoolers playing soccer and flag football; the upper schoolers laughing as they headed out of the dining hall; teachers going back to class and study halls and meetings, and the maintenance men blowing the cold dry leaves of fall into piles that no kid is ever allowed to jump in. I was reassured by the rhythm of reality it gave to me. Denise gave me a kiss goodbye, and as I stepped out of the van her phone rang.  "It's your sister, Annie," she said, "Just take the phone with you; I don't need it." I laughed as she drove away and told her it might be the last time she saw her cell phone. I've never been able to keep a cell phone more than a month. I drop them in coffee cups; I put them through the wash, or I simply lose them into the black hole that takes the things we don't really need.

I flipped open the phone, but no voice answered. I pressed different buttons thinking I missed some new feature essential to hearing the other side of the call, but, finally, I heard a small voice trying to speak in a pleading that was more air than words: "Can I come get you? Tommy just called. Karen only has a few more hours at most." I muttered and stammered my yeses through her sobs. Where were the few weeks or days we were expecting? What changed to make this happen now? How could this be happening to Karen—the most fun-filled and together person on the planet? Why my little brother who did everything right when I did everything wrong—who had spent his life with the girlfriend he met when he was fifteen years old teaching swimming together at summer camp—and they'd been together ever since for thirty years? And why the kids getting the same call at school, pulled out of history, math, or science to come be with their mother to help her die in peace? Annie told me to wait for my sister Eileen who would pick me up at home in fifteen minutes.

I could see Eileen crying as she pulled in the driveway.  I asked her if she wanted me to drive. She said, "No. I need to be in control of something." I laughed, "That's nothing new." We talked and laughed and cried the twenty minutes to Westford. She wondered if we should be going there—that maybe it should just be Tom and the kids and Karen's parents and brother. I invoked the Yankee practicality of our father and pointed out that Tom would not have called us if he did not want us there. Plus, I pointed out, Tom has always been there for everything for everyone. Eileen laughed and said, "He does always say that it is better to be there when you are not wanted than to not be there when you are wanted," and, damn, that is so true," I said, as the first explosion of grief wracked my chest. The first of what would be many.

Nine Rosebud Lane: the immaculately kept house in the cul de sac, looked so quiet and normal as we pulled in the driveway.  I don't know what I was expecting—but I think I expected something more that hinted of the vigil being carried on within. We walked in quietly. Karen was on a bed in the living room, her mom beside her holding her hand. Tommy sat on the couch with his arms draped around Katie, Mary, and Kelly. He smiled and got up, and we all hugged. "This is what she wanted," he said. Separately, Eileen and I went over and said our goodbyes. I don't remember what I said, just that it was stupid, mundane, and somehow appropriate. Karen was past being able to respond with any kind of sign, and so I just gave way to a faith that she wanted us there—but not as much as her immediate family. A few of her close friends and neighbors passed through and cried their own goodbyes in their own ways. If Karen's breathing seemed too labored, Tommy would get up and give her some more morphine and stroke her forehead before kissing her and speaking to her as if it were any other day.

We sat and talked and told stories. Sometimes we laughed, and sometimes we cried. We took turns sitting by her. The local parish priest came by and performed last rites. He was old and Dorchester Irish and amazing. We held hands and prayed the familiar prayers drilled into us in our youth. Karen's own faith was always strong and simple and infinitely more real and unswayed by the foolish intellectual doubts of my own journey. I wasn't sure if I gave myself completely to God or if God took me into himself, or if Karen opened a door for me that I have been holding shut, but there was a peace in that room like I have never felt before. Denise and our oldest daughter, Kaleigh, came shortly after. I worried about Kaleigh, but, at the same time, I knew she had to be there—and I knew Denise needed to be there, too. And I know I needed her.

It felt strange to order Chinese takeout, but we did, and it felt like a totally natural and normal meal. Shortly after supper, as we sat on the couches in the living room, I saw Kelly, Karen and Tom's oldest daughter, stand up and go to her mother's side. Karen was suddenly awake. The family gathered around Karen as we left the room. They were all at her side: children, husband, parents, and brother—everything anyone needs. Karen was ready to go. They were there to help her let go and to let go themselves. And then she was gone. And Karen—and all of us—were reborn onto a different world, a world infinitely more rich and meaningful than the world that carried us to that moment. In the background, James Taylor was singing "Secret of Life." It just happened to be playing. It just happened to be Karen's favorite song.

Brother and sisters, Denise and Kaleigh, Kelly's boyfriend Mark, and Beth—who is as much sister as friend—sat in the front parlor. Kaleigh stood at the window, her shoulders heaving. Mark seemed alone and confused. I went up to him and said, "It is really, really good and important that you are here." He nodded quickly, holding back tears, tears that I knew he shouldn't hold back. But, we do sometimes, and we learn in our own ways. I held Denise in the way that only those bound to a vow of love can hold each other. Sometimes we closed our eyes and shook our heads slowly. Other times, we whispered practical assurances. "It's better this way." This is what Karen wanted." " Do you think we should go back in?" No one of us knew what to do, but we did anyway.

At a certain point, unmarked by knowing, we made our way back to the living room into the heart of the unimaginable grief, into a new world blessed and forsaken by pure and sustained love. It was a new world and a new way of living blessed by the sacrament of Karen's life and carried forth by the bonds of a hopeful and prayerful family. In the hugs and tears there was more unsaid than said, and in that way everything was spoken. In the unspeakable sadness there was an incredible beauty in knowing there is life after death, both for the loved one who has left, and for those who still love and live on in the inheritance of life—the knowing mystery that sustains us and brings us closer to the eternal God. I watched Kaleigh standing in the kitchen utterly alone and unsure what to do. I watched as Mary, her fifteen-year-old cousin and best friend, saw her aloneness and slipped away from her father's arms to go over and give Kaleigh the long hug they both needed. Kelly found Mark, and we all found each other in our own ways, in our own times; and, in the slow dance of love and respect, the mustard seed of tomorrow was sown.

A couple of tomorrows have come and gone. Nothing is any easier, but everything is just as important. Karen has scores of friends, all of whom need a way to share their grief and sorrow. It is inspiring and amazing how much Tom realizes that Karen is more than just his family's loss, but a loss spread over a lifetime of friendships made and never broken by a woman who seemingly did everything for everyone—and always did it right. I went down to the Strop and Blade thinking maybe I would feel better. Tom has been a regular there for forty years himself. I cried while Jack cut my hair—and Jack cried too, though he only knew Karen from thirty years of Tom's stories. I did feel better. I walked through Concord again and loved everything and everyone I saw because I knew there was nothing special that separated me from anything or anyone, and that the faults of our vanities are completely overwhelmed by love.

We are born to live and to be grieved over when we die, and the only just measure of a life is the bounty of love we harvest from death. For all of us who knew her, Karen's life is the song we will sing through the ages. For Katie, Mary, and Kelly she left a treasure of memories and guidance that they will draw from in the hardest of times—which I know will be many and lonely. For Karen's parents I can only imagine that it is the relative brevity of time before they join her that brings them solace. Tom knows he received the gift of a marriage and a friendship as real and enduring as any the world has ever seen, and he has three daughters left to raise alone in a home full of love, but I can only wonder at the darkness he must feel. I am not sure what he truly needs. I can only try to be like him and be there when I am not wanted, and hope that I am there when I am wanted.

What does this have to do with reading The Odyssey? Maybe I hope that we read The Odyssey because it shows us that there is no way around the tragedies of life, but there is a way through. Every culture has its epic poems and songs that in some way or another chronicle a heroic struggle to find meaning and hope—and a way to approach and live life—that shows us (if we learn to live in metaphor) that life is always an overcoming of adversity. Tom and his family are on their journey home after the hardest battle that life can throw at a person. It is a hero's journey, and they are all heroes. There will still be tests; there will still be monsters to slay, but there will always be helpers, too.  And there is tradition to help them. And there will always be Karen's amazing life and the shared experience of her death to sustain them.

The world lost a beautiful person, and our lives have won new meaning.

The Deer’s Cry

I wonder if you hoped I wouldn’t tell
I saw you stealing the tender shoots
grown beside my driveway;
I wonder if you know what we’re like
when we see things
we’ve never seen before.
As if the dogs weren’t bad enough.
Now all the neighbors will want
to say they’ve seen a deer
puncturing the sod,
scatting in their yard.

Xenia

Beyond Marcio and Andre’s garden, walled unceremoniously in orange highway fencing, I can hear Marcio, the camp’s Honduran maintenance man, weed-whacking around the the cracked and leaning stones of an old New Hampshire graveyard set some two hundred years ago on a hill outside the edge of the camp. Though I doubt there is a mandate from any government or anyone to take on this blessed task, I am sure it is just something he does because it is there, and it needs to be done; and, in his egoless and uncharted magnanimity, it makes this place, Windsor Mountain, a better place to be. It is this binding simplicity of necessity that sets the cornerstone of any community, while at the same time tempering and taming the often reckless flame of personal desire and the sometimes ironic interplay of freedom and responsibility.

My life is a small but jagged coastline cut into by safe and welcome harbors. These are the places that in some way, shape, or form I can call home—and “Home,” as Robert Frost writes, “is the place where, when you get there, they have to let you in.” I can’t quite figure if it is just happenstance, weakness, or some unconscious deliberation of a higher faculty I don’t know I have, but at every final tack I enter into unspoken contracts with a subterfuge of different communities—communities hammered out of malleable and enduring gold, gifted by the continuity of time and visitation, and empowered by a mystic and tidal mingling of giving and receiving—called xenia by the ancient Greeks.

If you have the means, make one place your true home, for there will always be those who, cast adrift by time and fate, will need to call your place home. None of us can start to live fully without a place to set out from and a place to return to. Like a sail without a ship, we would soon drift and sink in a tangle of sodden rags lost in a sea of unknowing. The plastic boundary of Marcio and Andre’s garden is not there to wall away a wandering and malicious herd, but to preserve a future bounty that they will share with a broader community.

Today I thank them both for lifting the blinders I might otherwise wear too comfortably. They remind me to live fully wherever you are and to leave your door unlocked, for at any hour of day or night some part or parcel of community will return to you, and it is your duty and responsibility to welcome them home. The wayward and wandering reflect the majestic mosaic of the world and leave us clothed in a richer garment when they leave. They remind me that I, too, might have unfinished business, and perhaps I need to rein in the harness of my solipsism and to strain the shackles of my practiced routines and easy assumptions.

They remind me that that at any time and any place to build ships in line with your dreams and embrace the crew who shares your vision, for the man who builds his own boat seldom ventures far from shore. To those who measure breadth before depth, my own journeys might seem myopic and mundane, but, against a rhumb-line through a sea of stars, all voyages and adventures pale in comparison and are, in truth, infinitesimally small and parochial.

I know I will never still the restlessness inside of me, but I also know that at any given time I am, at best, an imperfect captain on an impatient and unpredictable sea, but there is always a brine-worn and willing crew to point out the polestar and guide me to a perfect shore—perfect, because it is where I need to go and where I need to be. 

Right now, this place is perfect. It is where I want and need to be. It is where my family wants and needs to be. These words are only a finger pointing at a moon, tethered to the gravity of hospitality, and arcing around a world that simply tries to do what is right. We are only trapped by selfish ignorance and misanthropic righteousness. No place is so base that it cannot be made better by the giving of ourselves—and our homes—to a broader community.

Above the oscillating hum of a weed-whacker, I hear a car crunching its way up the rutted gravel road leading to this camp, and I know that, whoever they are, they will be welcomed like a gift of some ancient god. If they are hungry, they will be fed, and by giving, we, too, will be filled. If I want to share in this meal, I have to lift myself out of this chair and make my way to them.

In the end, we are only free when we care enough to give a damn about who and where we are and what we need to do. As a thought is only made real when put into words, a community is only made real when it becomes an action.

~Windsor Mountain, 2009

The Poet Goes to Work

Every morning,
before the rush hour diaspora,

we neighbors shout to each other

over the scratching

of ice scrapers

and stubborn wipers, balancing

cups of coffee, dancing

in a steaming minuet

of our morning rituals.

We start our wives' cars

and make monster faces
at our respective homes,

to the gallery of faces

at the breakfast tables.

Tom pulls on his cigar

and spits aphorisms

in an unending palate

of smoke and exhaust

and loads

his unquenchable van

with what appears to be

aisle twelve from Home Depot.

I grab my own tools

and squeeze through

the impossible space

my wife has left me

between our two cars.

I double-check everything:

Huck Finn.

This pen.

The Squirrels

are having a good year

and sense the winter more urgently.

Fat now and bellied full

their mouths distend piggishly,

carrying acorns in comic hops,

chattering squirrel inanities.

I have tasted acorns

and found them bitter

and hard to crack.

I’m afraid I’m drawn

more to soft-shelled thoughts:

This fire.

My pot of beans.

Rich Beyond Measure

I've never met a man who was truly awake. I wouldn't know how to look him in the eyes.
~Henry David Thoreau

Somebody once asked Thoreau if he would give a talk on the evils of alcohol and tobacco. He declined, stating that since he had never tried alcohol or tobacco he wasn't able to speak about the effects of either tobacco or alcohol from personal experience—and personal experience is what generates our most powerful ideas and motivates our most profound actions. Retelling our experiences inspires readers to look more closely at their own lives. An experience retold is relived through the emotional and intellectual intensity experienced by the reader. Our personal narratives are experiences retold for a reason: to recreate the emotional and intellectual intensity of the original experience.

If nothing was gained or learned from an experience, then there is nothing to write about. Your writing will be an empty exercise—a drag on you and a drag on your readers. (If you can get anybody to read what you wrote!) But, if you gained anything; if even the tiniest granule of wisdom was mined from that experience, then it is worth writing about, because through writing you can amplify that wisdom; you can cull it from the herd of extraneous clutter and present that wisdom to your readers framed within a larger revelation.

Ah, but what is wisdom? For me, wisdom is informed truth. If you don't know what wisdom is or where to find it, then you need to wake up; otherwise, you will never find what is truly yours, and you will live a life prescribed and pre-ordained by others. If you always choose the easy way through; if you limit the scope of your experiences, then you will live a life hobbled by ignorance and illuminated only by your arrogance.

The next stage of your life—high school through

college—is when you will have to start making real decisions that are full of real impact. You are going to have to look long and hard at the fork in the road and ask yourself the questions that are going to shape your life.

Don't grow old and wistful. Grow old and mindful. The only way to do that is to start now! The only way to do it is to be brave and take that ﬁrst step. In the same way you need to take that same ﬁrst step with your writing. Write about your experiences and you will gain experience as a writer, and if in your life and in your writing you keep your eyes on the road (the craft of writing) and your mind open to the journey (experience) you will become a better writer—maybe even a great writer. And great writers create literature informed by wisdom, from which we—as readers—broaden and deepen the scope of our own lives.

Live. Read. Write. Give a damn.

You will be rich beyond measure.

The Insecure Poet

I will annoy and impress you at the same time

and write a poem with a jackhammer;

and to let you know my poem needs editing,

I will cut down the whole line

of towering whites pines

that line my side yard.

And though it sounds fine to you,

I will replace the muffler

on my old station wagon

and set the gap on my spark plugs—

and drain the crankshaft,

and lube the kingpins,

and for the sake of trying

I will add on a new porch

and tear it down before nightfall.

I may even need

a whole new septic system—

one that can handle

this torrent of wasted words.

Passing cars will slow down

to see my gaudy Christmas display.

Though wrapped in insecurity,

at least one poet

will be called

industrious.

Candle Night

Street lamp ain’t throwing no shadow,

So lucky it’s a pretty full moon.

We’ve been blacked out all around for three hours,

But a crew will be working real soon;

A crew will be out here working;

It’ll be the fridge that you hear kicking on—

And nothing I’m sure will get spoiled;

And nothing I’m sure will get spoiled—

Candle night.

We ought to go sit around the table,

But my cribbage board is lent out to a friend,

So how about we lay that old card game

Where you grab all the spoons at the end?

Where you grab all the spoons, leaving one guy

Who can’t grab no spoons at all—

And that guy’s the slow hand loser;

And that guy’s the slow hand loser—

Candle night.

It happened last year dead of winter;

Some folks in the city near froze.

They found a family of six dead in Chelsea

Sleeping by an old gas stove;

They were sleeping it off ‘til the morning,

Until they had another place to go—

And the news showed the neighbors crying;

And the news showed the neighbors crying—

Candle night.

The Boat Mystery

I don't know what it is with old sailboats boats. I’m not sure of the spell cast on me, but, like a distractible child, I can't put them down. I can't tuck them away on some sensible and well-ordered shelf—and it's more true when they are old, worn and rich in rot and history. The bulging seams and weathered mast hoops bring out the irrational in me. They make me forget I am trapped in a time of gigabytes and reality sit-coms; they make me forget my classrooms waiting for their assignments. They make me forget the oil bills, car loans, mortgages and 401 K's; I forget town meetings, CCD, and piano lessons. I forget I ever tried to make my lawn green. I’m in a cloud of unknowing; my thinking is a fog of dreams rolling in under a full moon. I forget and they become me, and I become them.

Still, despite the raging voices of common sense, I forge on with my lifelong madness. I chart a course over the familiar shoals and note my log at the changing of the tides. My eye is always searching for a lost shoreline. Sometimes I can't turn away. And so it is with this old catboat I’ve been eyeing—a forty-year old, 25 foot Wittholz, owned by The East End Classic Boat Society, and offered to me for the ungodly cheap sum of $6000.00, payable in two installments. It almost seems doable, but ultimately, after the reality check, it's not; and so I live with a dream deferred. It's a dream of pulling our dory alongside a big boat; it's a dream of passing the kids up to Denise, steadying the tender as she hauls them in over the taffrail. It's a day spent fishing and jumping from the toe-rail—and then sailing on a morning tide to some other harbor or cove. It’s a firing sun setting down across Penobscot Bay. It’s the smell of coal burning down below: wet wool, coffee, and biscuits.

We do have a boat: a 17 foot Wittholz catboat, solid, tough, and pretty as all hell. I wonder why that is not enough? Why can't I be happy just day sailing around the coves and beaches of Cape Cod? The kids love it; Denise loves it. Her Uncle B built "Lolo" in his barn in New Hampshire, used it for a few years and then gave it to us. We took our honeymoon on that boat, sailing from the Cape to the Vineyard, and then back to Boston. Why do I want the bigger boat with the bigger headaches and expenses? Why would I be willing to live so close to the bone just to get closer to the water?

My life is full of the flotsam of sailing; a patchwork of memories stitched together by a common yarn: I worked as the deckhand on a Scots Zulu, a massive beauty of a ship, sailing out of Vineyard Haven: fifty tons of Scottish larch, white oak, hemp and pine tar. She’d plow like a bull through the maddened waves of the sound, splitting walls of water, upending the passengers and wine-coolers in a torrent of seawater and seaweed. Clinging to the topmasts, I’d free the jammed blocks and unfurl the ships pennant. Sometimes I would rest in that holy place, far above everything I ever was before—always looking eastward, my heart pounding. I remember coiling lines, making beckets, splicing lines and winding marlin; I remember the brilliant ornery Captain, barking incessantly at me to hop to, bitter to the cud at having to sail rich folks around the bay, struggling to finance his own dream of sailing again around the world—a dream I heard that has him now with his wife and two boys sailing somewhere in the South Pacific.

I’ve sailed since I could wonder. On White Pond in Concord, I sailed the homemade plywood sailfish my father built in our garage: all day, every day, whenever the day allowed: no life jackets, no soccer practices—nothing but childhood. Eight years old and I was leaping into the sails as she flipped, later mastering a dry scramble over the leeward rail and onto the dagger-board, posting a triumphant salute to my father watching (amazingly unconcerned)from shore.

On my beloved Stinson Lake I sailed our fiberglass sunfish until I recognized the signs of every different squall line coming in from every direction over the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I ghosted in the calms and fished for bass and trout. Even then I imagined myself going over the lake falls, down Stinson Brook to the Pemigewasset, into the Merrimac, and finally, out to the sea. Later, when I got out of school, I bought an ancient catboat in New York and sailed her to Cape Cod—me and three friends ignorant as all get out, punching our way through a raging Northeaster, laughing and singing, pretty sure we knew where we were, oblivious to our idiocy. She sank the next day in the bay near Monument beach—a small stub of mast pointing to the sky; a beach-load of tourists gathering at the disaster and gawking from the beach.

After that I bought a thirty-foot plywood sharpie and had her battered by Hurricane Bob. I rebuilt her at a greater cost than I paid for her. I never even gave her a name, just MS 5782; sailed her up Maine and back to the Vineyard. Almost lost her—and myself—in a fifty-knot squall while cutting across the Gulf of Maine. Even now, years later, I am amazed at my equanimity, shrugging my shoulders at the whim of fate, facing what I thought were my last moments.

That wasn't enough. I bought another catboat, tired in the stem; tired in the keel; and tired in the ribs. I proposed to my wife in that boat as she sat high and dry in my front yard. I never did get it back in the water—or the next boat after that. We're sailing in Lolo now. She’s a good boat. We keep her on a friend’s mooring in the water off the beach in Eastham. We’ve had many good sails, never more than a half an hour from shore. We play in the mudflats until the tide comes in, and then Denise and I drag all six kids in a line out to the boat, kicking and splashing in their Scooby -Doo life jackets. They think they're in heaven. They probably are.

You'd think that was enough. But then I'd be taken again by the dream. Shaking out a reef off Lieutenant’s Island, I'd make a sight towards Stellwagen and imagine us in a bigger boat, something I didn't have to take back to shore—a ship we could call home. I'd imagine a quieter time with just us sailing on a boat for the whole summer: maybe a scow sloop, or a small schooner; or a big beamy catboat. Sometimes I'd get practical (to my eye) and plot ways to get my Captains license and sail folks around, and not be bitter like my old boss. I'd read literature of the sea with anyone willing to share and keep logs of our adventures. We’d dive and fish and swim in the cold waters and live on clams and scallops and Pringles. I even got so far as figuring what it would take to make it a reality. It's money. It always boils down to money. It still does. But my head is always calculating for when another boat comes along.

And then this damn old catboat. I never should have let it root in my heart. I never should have made the call or listened to the man describe her—like a child or a grandfather remembered. It is something that words don’t explain. My words are only the finger pointing at the moon; never the moon itself—and that moon is arcing over a horizon. It is not a desire to get away. It is a need to get on; to get on the water and listen for the selkie; to know the tides and learn from the stream flowing through me; and when I have learned, to teach others; to teach my kids, to shout like a man overboard, lost in muffled darkness; or at the very least, to speak from my experience, though it is experience I lack. Everything I've done on boats is a transient memory; a fleeting glimpse into what can only be my soul. In the greater scheme of seafaring, I am still a greenhorn. The winds and the tides still fill me with fear, but still, I keep making my way down to the water.

I stand on shore, in awe of the mystery.

The Cabin

I have grown too familiar with these woods

and walk silently as if they’re hallowed.

Crouching down in the roots of upturned pines,

I hide in the tangle of last year’s storm,

and dart my eyes with a primitiveness —

frightened by voices that I do not know.

I could run along the trail of the deer

where it crosses the conservation path,

and sleep in tall wet grass by the river,

and hear the bass rise to the evening hatch —

then walk home, feeling through the gaps in trees,

drawn by the light and damp wood smoldering,

like I have a furball in my stomach

and need a place to be warm and covered.

There I’m surrounded by walls with gapped sides

and have thought too long and am not skittish.

I don’t dart around trees and run inside.

I’m an obnoxious drunk out splitting wood,

and scare even the jays, shaking their nest,

yearning for a disregard that is real.

Reconciling

I am like a farmer

nervously counting

his grain:

the increasing hollow

rings inside the silo.

The geese,

in their cackles of joy,

are unimpressed,

while the soil

prepares

its long sleep.

Christmas Everyday

I’m sitting here alone,

Wondering when the girls will all get home.

They probably stopped at Nana’s house to play—

I get Christmas everyday.

I’m so glad to be the guy

With three beautiful daughters

With their mother’s loving eyes;

Eyes that say more

Than any song that I can play—

I get Christmas everyday.

I never could have known

That someday I’d be watching

Four little boys get grown.

I never could have seen myself

In love in every way—

I get Christmas everyday.

My angels in the snow;

I love you more, I need you more,

Than anyone could know;

I know that everyday

The world comes out okay—

‘cuz I get Christmas everyday.

We’re sitting here alone,

Wondering when the girls will all come home.

They probably stopped at Nana’s house to play—

I get Christmas everyday;

Yeah, I get Christmas everyday.

Conversations on a Beach

Last night I walked to the beach with the kids to watch the sunset at Manzanita. After whiffleball, tic tac toe, and beach tennis the younger kids came and sat with me, leaning against pieces of driftwood gathered around a driftwood fire. We watched the other untold fires glowing up and down the long plain of sand to where it rose into massive cliffs swirled in wisps of fog. Kaleigh stood alone a hundred yards away, knee deep in the rhythmic returning of surf, her silhouette slowly melding into the coming night. I wondered what she was thinking. It was thirty years ago when I was not much older than her that I last walked on this beach and stood where she stood; where I slept by windy fires and wondered where life would take me or where I would take life. I didn’t imagine that I would be huddled with seven tired and crazily perfect kids after twelve years (to this very day) of a crazily perfect marriage talking about the difference between choosing to live simply without a lot of money, which is not being poor, versus not being able to make enough money to take care of yourself or your family no matter how hard you try, which is poverty.

We noticed the lights of the cars winding along route 101 curving slowly along the sides of the cliffs. “Thirty years ago daddy hitchhiked from here all the way down to the Baja in Mexico.” You never see hitchhikers now, and I had to tell them all about hitchhikers.

Pipo asked why I didn’t just drive my car. “I didn’t have a car. All I had was a backpack, a sleeping bag and three hundred dollars I saved from working at the gas station in West Concord. Plus, I wanted to hitchhike, and I wanted to see how far I could go with three hundred dollars.“

Always curious, Pipo continued his inquiry, “How far did you go?”

“Not as far as I thought I could.“

“Did you run out of money?“

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you do?”

“I did anything people would pay me to do.”

Margaret asked, “Did you ever beg?”

Pipo reacted with what is probably a visceral reminder of his childhood in Haiti, “That’s not polite, Margaret.”

“No, I never had to beg. I just found people who wanted some work done, and I did the work. When I had enough to move on, I started hitchhiking again. If you choose to be poor, then you are not poor.”

With his ubiquitous thoughtfulness EJ said, “You can choose to be poor; too bad you can’t choose to be rich,” as he laughed at the possibility.

Charlie wondered, “What did you eat?”

“My favorite meal was Milky Ways and Coke.”

EJ countered, “You said that you lived on baloney and baked beans.”

“That is another story.”

Charlie wanted to know how many stars there were in the Milky Way? I smiled, “There aren’t any stars; there’s just chocolate and caramel.”

“No. Really!” He laughed and got up and did a cartwheel and a handstand.

Tommy asked, “Did you have to brush your teeth?”

“Oh yes, all the time.” That was all Tommy needed to hear as he curled deeper under my jacket.

Pipo needed more, “Are we ever going to be rich.”

“We’re rich now—in kids and bedtimes and hamburgs and night-times on the beach.”

“Fitz! You know what I mean.”

“I know. We’re plenty rich enough.”

The cool wind off the Pacific drove Emma, Margaret, Pipo, and Kaleigh back to cottage where we are staying. EJ, Charlie, and Tommy stayed with me. In the increasing darkness the waves grew larger and more filled with mystery and foreboding. Charlie broke into the elongated silence, “Mason asked me last night if I would go to Toys ‘R US with him. But I said no.”

“But I thought you love Toys ‘R Us?”

“I do, but I knew you wouldn’t let me go. You never let me go.”

EJ laughed with a wisdom that belied his ten years. “You don’t have to go to Toys ‘R Us to get toys.”

“I know, but I do like Toys ‘R Us.”

Tommy perked up from his cocoon on my lap, “I like toys.”

In the true spirit of the constantly churning and changing explosions in his head, Charlie shifted thoughts, “If hot chocolate only costs a dollar fifty,  why did you get mad just because I had two hot chocolates.” That meal was three days ago, but I’m sure to Charlie it will remain in the present for as long as it remains a conundrum to him.

EJ laughed again: “Because two hot chocolates cost three dollars, and nine times three is twenty seven dollars.”

That seemed to satisfy Charlie. “My friends think we’re rich because we have a big backyard, a bus, and a boat.” He connected his thoughts quickly, “Are we going to go sailing this summer? I want to go sailing”

We have an old wooden sailboat that has been sitting in Tom Cummings’ yard all summer—and probably will all winter as well.  It’s a solid and funky old ketch designed by the equally funky designer Phil Bolger whose whole philosophy of sailing is to enable the common person a chance to get out on the water. I wondered if they sensed the wistfulness in my voice. “Next summer we’ll go sailing...” And we will, I’m sure. This was our summer to scrimp and save for this trip to Oregon. My head is still racing through the pile of bills that will meet us at the door in a few days. Somehow they will get paid, and we can always dream of somehow getting ahead of them. I turned my eyes back to the sound of the breaking waves fearful that I would lose the blessedness of the moment. Charlie brought me back. “I’m glad we are not rich. Rich people are not always happy.”

“And poor people are not always sad.” I lifted Tommy off my lap and shook the sand from my clothes, “Wow! My legs are so long they reach all the way to the ground!”

EJ jumped up, “Mine too. And my shadow is chasing me.”

“Mine too.”

“Me too.”

All of them ran through the dunes along a trail they only remember from today, drawn instinctively to the light of the fourth house on the right. I hear them counting and laughing and running.

I walk slowly onto the same street, pulling the fullness of the moon behind me.

~Manzanita, Oregon, August, 2008

The Harvest

The bruised apple never heals;

and so each day our labor is studied

and deliberate.

We work long days and walk home

tired, throwing apples

as far as we can.

The Only Fishing Pole

Because Charlie caught a huge bass

that bent and strained

his pole into a perfect arc,

the beach is now emptied

of every child
who, in a tumble of collapsing chairs

and dibs and hosies,

race in scattered packs

in opposite directions

around the pond,

tripping on spruce roots

and ducking below

brambles of blackberry.

They stop in an impatient line
just before they reach EJ—

the patient, ancient weaver

helping his little brother,
untangle rubber worms

and six pound test line

from the bulrushes

that encircle and wade into

Pete’s small farm pond,
dug laboriously

into an ornery Vermont hill.

Everyone now thinks
the pond is full of larger fish,

but with only one fishing pole,

everyone must wait in line

for their own

greater victory

over a common day.

Searching for an Alibi

Here I am out on the road again

and it feels longer than it was back then;

when I was younger, man, it saw me through—

now it don’t do

what I want it to—

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I—

I’m just out searching for an alibi

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I

I’m just out searching for an alibi.

Drinking tea in some dirt village square,

I start to wonder what I’m doing there;

in hard worn skin and gentle peasant eyes

there’s nothing left that I can idolize…

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I—

I’m just out searching for an alibi

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I

I’m just out searching for an alibi.

I tease the children and drink with the men,

and we’re all glad that I’ve come back again;

and we all laugh about our crazy lives—

I feel the woman—just to feel alive.

I've got no time ‘til the train is gone,

I’ve got no time, but I can’t get on.

I know there’s no way

to check the speed;

but, I know the motion

is all I need...thinking—

Where were you

when you had the chance?

or do you shrug it off as circumstance?

Where were you when you felt inside

some other soul you could realize?

Where were then—

where are you now:

looking back forgetting how?

But look into the eyes of other men—

everywhere the same thing happening…

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I—

I’m just out searching for an alibi

Too ra loo ra loo ra lady I

I’m just out searching for an alibi.

~Southern China

1989

Danny, Jimmy, & Me

Mrs Roeber never seemed to let Jimmy go outside, which, to my thinking as an 11 year old, was why he was so smart.  Most days after school, I’d rush two houses down the street and get Danny Gannon to come out and play. Then the two of us would go to Jimmy’s house next door.  If Mrs Roeber answered, she would always be polite and say something like, “Jimmy needs to catch up on some science work. Perhaps he can play later.”  If Jimmy answered, he’d usually be out of breath from running upstairs from his basement “office” and plead with us not to give up on him—or at the very least go out back and talk to him through the basement window. 

So me and Danny would sneak out back and lay on our stomachs on the pokey grey gravel outside his basement window. Five feet below, Jimmy would be doing his work at his workbench (which, in all honesty, was a pretty cool place).  I always wished I was smarter, so I could  do his work for him and get him outside to play. I was better than Jimmy at a lot of things, but those things never got graded, and most of those things you couldn’t appreciate until “later in life.”  But, to my Tom Sawyer way of thinking, I preferred being outside and average to being inside and smart.  Danny was an outside kid, and smart, too, and that always troubled me, but not enough to let it call my inside/smart: outside/not smart philosophy into question. Danny’s voice was always the one that tried to tell me that the sledding jump was too high, or that branch would not support my weight, or those snakes would bite, or that we couldn’t run faster than a nest of bees we just destroyed. 

Once we got Jimmy outside, he was like a mad scientist: ”We’ll, just have to see how high Fitz can go on his sled,“ or, ”I’ll distract the snake so Fitz  can grab it from behind,“ or ”Bees have been clocked flying at 80 miles per hour.“ Looking back, we probably seemed like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, and we did tend to go our different ways as we grew older, but we always still manage to reconnect somehow, and it doesn’t seem like we are a day older. It’s kind of hard to put into words because Danny and Jimmy might not be the best friends of my daily life, but they will always be the best friends I need.

Just thinking of the three of us together is like a window opening to a cool and welcome breeze. And the coolest thing is the window is always there. It might be that the only thing we actually had in common was living next door to each other, but still, we made it work; we made it real, and we made it last.

No choice. No problem.

The world could live this way.

Poets & Politicians

Inside of every poet

there is some craziness

like a magnet attracting
and repulsing

the same breath.

Taylor Mali could probably write a really cool poem
about the snowblower sitting in my driveway
on this warm spring day,
but I bet he wouldn't know
how to start the damn thing—
he'd think it was a rototiller or something,
and I would have to shout,
"No, no! Out of my strawberries!"
and in the blue smoke of the ensuing chaos

Mary Oliver would return
from her long walk
past old cloth mills,
carrying trinkets
of broken glass—
shards of memory
and distant longing.

She will be surprised to find Seamus Heaney
drinking beer with Billy Bulger,
quoting Homer, and lamenting the exodus
of the Irish from Boston.

The shadow of Emily Dickinson would move slowly
away from a broken pane
in the eave of the attic room
in a wave of whispering lace.

Robert Frost squinting disdainfully
would tell me to just
slow down, take a breath...
and throw all of this away.
(He is already annoyed
by Walt Whitman's incessant celebrating
with some guy in a bucket truck—
and my kids chalking up the driveway.)

For some strange reason,
Allen Ginsburgh is crying on my back step,
while Gary Snyder sets up a pup tent
beside my garden,
and Jack Kerouac shoots hoops and wonders
what his mother is cooking for dinner;

Shakespeare's friends are plastering
posters on telephone poles,
while Shelley swims across
the Assabet River
and holds a painted turtle

over a cold eddy.

Billy Collin’s dances to a scratchy jazz record
and thinks he should write a poem about it.

Wendell Berry helps Taylor
snowblow my strawberries,
and Wordsworth walks away 

through a crack in the fence,

and Basho just laughs
and laughs

and laughs.

Widower

Forty acres, I got no takers,

On a farmhouse and myself:

A leaning barn, a pickup car

And Readers Digest on the shelf;

Well I’m up for sale

Like those old hay bales

We hucked up in the loft;

Winter nights ain’t long away

When the pumpkin gets under the frost—

Rooster crows, and Grandpa wakes alone

Every morning;

Rooster crows, old Grandpa wakes alone.

There’s no apple pies when the kids come by,

“Won’t you set on Grandpa’s knee.

You’re daddy, he was a little boy

When he fell out that Maple tree.

And your grandma cried,

God, he nearly died,

But your daddy and me, we just laughed.

Grandma got her bandaid box

And hid all his favorite scratches…”

When they go, I’m feeling low

Again, pass the hours—

When they go

I’m feeling low again.

Those days in town I’d go screwin’ ‘round,

Saying, “Babe, I got things to do.”

“Yeah, you better go, Josh, don’t be slow.”

But damn her, she always knew;

She knowed so well she could always tell

What been bugging me too long.

Feeling now like a milking cow,

Drier than the old bone marrow.

So if you hear, Babe, hold me near

And I won’t mind tomorrow—

So if you hear, Babe,

Hold me near tomorrow.

If you hear, Babe,

Hold me near tomorrow….

A New Journey

Because I can imagine myself sailing in a twilight breeze across Pleasant Bay, I will put up with these days of gluing, screwing and painting, varnishing and rigging my old sailboat. Sometimes I wish I had the money to just buy a boat that doesn't need so much of my time, but like anything else in life that steals my time, I must figure it's worth it—and it is. I do a lot of other things with my time where I don't have the same clarity of purpose. It is a rare moment of quiet in my house; the kids are all off with Denise somewhere, and though the grass is absurdly high; the van desperately needs an oil change, and the gutter is hanging by a twisted coat hanger, I sit here and force a few words out of emptiness. A part of me wants to show the folks in my writing communities that I practice what I endlessly preach to them—face the empty page! But it's not that simple; I've been doing the same thing for almost thirty years, seldom with any goal but the action of writing itself.

Is it worth it?

Everything that I write returns to me obliquely. I've never written for a publication; I've never even tried to get anything published, save for a small book of poetry and a couple of CD's. I'm a whiz when it comes to writing recommendations, and I can write a decent song or poem for any occasion, but I still can't say that I write out of a labor of love or because I have some over-arching goal. I write because it gives purpose and meaning and clarity to my life. It stills me when I need to be still, and it roils me out of my ignorant slumber when I need to wake and see the light of day. Used wisely, writing humbles my arrogance and helps me open my arms and doors when I might otherwise retreat into a self satisfied shell of complacency. It is worth a long day on the water to be there when the wind and tide help beat the way to a new harbor.

But something is gnawing on my bones. I remember reading a line from some philosopher (I can’t even begin to recall his name) who wrote: "That which is not sustainable cannot continue." I sense that with my writing. Maybe I have fished too long for kibbers in the mill pond. I walk past the reams of books in the book store and wonder how many of those books were worth writing—or are worth reading? I wonder if there is something greater in me that I dissipate through my private ramblings and now through my semi-private blogs. Maybe I'm standing too close to the target and need to step back and string the bow that Odysseus strung in the hall; I need to slay the curse of mediocrity and grab the gift of life and match it with the power of words—the words that swirl in the dark eddies; that bear down on me from distant thunderheads and clang and crash; I need to turn my small boat out of the safety of the bay emboldened by what I know and find that further shore.

Easy words, but never that easy.

Mike Mulligan & Mary Anne

Bring the kids upstairs;

read 'em Sam I Am:

Mike Mulligan

and good ol' Mary Anne.

Say a quick prayer

and turn out the lights;

blow out their ears

to keep their dreams alright.

Now it's just you and me

in our quiet little home

watch some CSI,

and nuke some Newman's Own;

and you figure out

who murdered who

way before

I ever do.

Then you hold my hand

and you fall asleep.

It’s just another way

for love to keep.

There might be a way

in some other kind of life,

but in this life here

you got to love your wife.

So always hold her tight

and always let her know

though the rains will fall

and the winds will blow.

because the sun always shines

from higher up above;

it’s just a simple reminder

about the power of love.

I take the little ones shopping,

but I never know

all the different kinds

of Cheerios.

I buy everyone candy

just to keep 'em all quiet;

but I’m afraid they'll instigate

a supermarket riot.

So close your little tiny eyes,

and I'll roll you to a dream

aisle nine

is full of natural ice cream.

If Momma were here,

well, she might not approve

of our new understanding

of what’s necessary food.

But that's alright

‘cuz I know she'll smile;

it's just another way

to keep love for a while.

In the quiet of the night,

in a window framed moon,

do you wonder why you married

this crazy old loon?

Yeah, I'm crazy for you,

and I want you to know

that love has been planted

and I’m watching it grow:

up into the heavens

past the moon and the stars,

but it all began here

with who you are.

You are the love of my life.

You are the beating of my heart.

You married me,

so I hope your smart;

and if you stop in the middle

of the things that you do

just think of the man

that just loves you…

There might be a way

in some other kind of life,

but in this life here

you got to love your wife.

So always hold her tight

and always let her know

though the rains will fall

and the winds will blow.

because the sun always shines

from higher up above;

it’s just a simple reminder

about the power of love.

9/11/04

It is so quiet still
three years on,
wondering why

he didn't hold her
longer, knowing
one more kiss,

one more sip of coffee,

one more search

for the missing bookbag,
would have kept her
from rushing
to the train.

Dogs of Concord

Hey, babe,

You’re leaving now, I know.

Just please don’t slam the door,

Please don’t slam—

The night is hardly….

Damn, she’s gone.

I’ll call tomorrow

And see what’s on—

One more bottle

And then tomorrow straight and narrow,

Yeah, tomorrow straight and narrow.

What’s a man?

But a pile of plans

Getting sidetracked

In some no-mans land;

I think I’ll call up old Joxer,

‘Cuz , he understands—

He understands—

And we’ll meet downtown,

And have a few:

Hey, them’s the stars;

Ain’t nothing new—

One more bottle

And then tomorrow straight and narrow,
Yeah, tomorrow straight and narrow.

Sometimes it seems

I believe the lies

I’ve lived and fought

Some hard won life;

Now there’s nothing left to show

But a string of alibies

Nothing to show—

Yeah, I tried to tell you,

Still, you hung around;

Now this dog in Concord

Is all you’ve found—

Just one more bottle

And then tomorrow straight and narrow—

Yeah, tomorrow straight and narrow.

Nobody Told Me to Read

“The Odyssey”

Some of the words you’ll find within yourself;
The rest, some power will inspire you to say.

The Odyssey, ~Book 3, Lines 29-20

Nobody ever told me to read The Odyssey—and that was the greatest educational travesty of my life. I first read it after High School while working at Colonial Motors in West Concord. I didn't "get it" any more than the most confused among you, but what I did do is "feel it." I felt its primordial power and emotional bareness; I felt another world, another age, and another human journey come alive inside of me. It made me feel that I was a part of long and unbroken lineage of humanity searching for truth and purpose in a world—especially my world, a world not always blessed with clarity and opportunity. I had always been the kid in the back of the class staring out the window dreaming of a better world—and scheming a way to get there. I liked to read, and we read good books in school, but I only lived in those books for the moment. Good books were like a party with a great group of friends: fun, exciting, and memorable, but not life changing. They died, most of them, the moment I closed the book; but, The Odyssey changed my life. It showed me that wisdom is not learned, it is cultivated by deliberation and attentiveness.

I say this and you might wonder why it is not changing your life. (Hopefully, on some level, it is changing your life.) You might wonder if you are missing something everyone else is getting. You probably wonder why I feel it is worthwhile to read this book during your 8th grade year. Why don't we just watch "Star Wars" or"24" or "Wizard of Oz?" Why? Because "Star Wars, "24" and "Wizard of Oz" are archetypes; they are variations of experiences infinitely more real; they are built on the backs of hundreds of books and movies that came before them: but, The Odyssey was built on human experience; it was created out of our most primal need for the wisdom, hope, and guidance that will get us through life. The Odyssey doesn't give us the tools we need to tackle the problems of life, it simply shows us the heroic nature required to deal and cope with the setbacks, sorrows and tragedies of every life. Bright-Eyed Athena might not be at our side helping us through the day, but The Odyssey shows us that Athena comes in many guises and seldom reveals her true self, and that we, too, need to accept wisdom at opportune and inopportune times in its many forms and guises.

As much as we are taught to stay away from strangers we still must turn our ears to the words they speak—for it might be the very truth we long and need to hear. We might not have a six headed monster on one side of the hallway and a deadly whirlpool on the other, but we do have to make tough decisions where the outcomes range from bad to worse. Don't despair or even allow for frustration. If you wonder what is going on, then you are doing the right thing. Please, keep on wondering. I hope you wonder; I hope you wonder about who you are and where you are going; I hope you wonder about the problems of life; I hope you wonder where you will find the strength, the wiles, the courage—and the desire—to face these problems with insight, cunning and perseverance. This is what Odysseus had to do; and, if you are to grow towards your individual greatness, then this is what you must do as well. If songs are to sung about you, then you must be the hero of your own odyssey through life.

In a few short weeks you will have defeated me. You will leave my classroom a pillaged wasteland of poems, projects, broken pencils, essays, reflections, ballads, cheese-its, comments, short stories, blogs and granola wrappers. Maybe you will burn your Huck Finn mini series, shred your twenty writing mistakes, meditate—literally—on your haiku book, delete your website, disown your blog, and refuse to listen to ballads, write clear opening sentences and/or paragraph your thoughts; you will throw-away your active reading sheets, erase your margin notes and refuse to admit you know where a comma goes; you will dangle and misplace modifiers and use lusciously disturbing adverbs and insipid adjectives at will. You will forget when Kat died, when Huck tricked Jim, and when "Leaves of Grass" finally ended.

It might feel like you forgot everything you are supposed to remember.

But you will not forget The Odyssey. It does not happen.

In Reply to Einstein

*God casts the die, not the dice.

~Alfred Einstein

I am cold down the neck,
turtling my head

to showers of ice

that fall

dancing and skidding

on skins of crusted snow.

I hold my breath when I step,
inflating hopes of a weightlessness,
and so be undetected
to the play of gods

who froze the night’s rain,
and set up this morning
full of shining and busting—
gambling on rolls,

and chance patterns,
only their joy can see.

The Threshing

I trace her charging through the cornfield

shaking the timbers of the ready crop

startling up the blackbirds,

and surprisingly, a jay.

It’s the jay who startles me—
who with two quick pulls

wrests itself from the transient green,

screaming back from its familiar scrub of oak

at the frightening impermanence.

The corn still holds the coolness

of an August night.

I’ll lay in that coolness until I feel

the teethy madness of Mark Duffy’s combine

charting back the careful symmetry

of the spring planting—muddied hopes

bloating udders of meager herds—

somehow managing the dream alive.

I really don’t wish to be the sileage

of his desperate Holsteins—

the off-taste

they’d accept with a begrudging equanimity,

waiting out the emptying

of their ponderous sacks.

But still, even after all these months,

I practice the strangest exorcisms;

you have become strangely

peripheral to it all.

I will tell you when I know, what it is like

to be scooped up in a strangers dream,

shredding every part of what I am.

Maybe then I will recognize myself

in the stubble of this field,

and will find a dignity in remembrance—

enough to take our hound for another run,

and retrace the joy

she hides from me now.

A Summer’s Voice

If the only birds that sang were those who sang well,
the woods would be a very quiet place indeed.
~Henry David Thoreau

Nobody I knew went to a camp. Summer mornings we hopped on our bikes and rode in huge packs to the nearest playground where the town ran a recreation program. I thought we had to go, like it was a state law or something. Mostly I remember playing baseball—hours in the hot sun and dead grass of right field at Willard School, spitting in my glove, swaying heroically, petrified at the thought of Donny Costello hitting a line drive towards me. Some days we’d hop on a bus and drive to swimming lessons where we’d stand shivering and poking each other, waiting our turn to do the frog kick above the disgusting muck of Warner’s Pond. On really special days, some guy would come from a museum in Boston and let us pet a hoot owl, a boa constrictor and a de-scented skunk; one time he even dissected a baby pig. That was very cool. But the longest part of the day was always baseball. Year after year of Jimmy Buell always pitching from the mound, and the big kids always getting to choose whatever position they wanted. I don’t remember growing old because I never got to choose. Twice a summer we would go on a field trip to Whalom park in Fitchburg. It’s the only time I remember singing. Mostly, we’d scream 99 Bottle of Beer on The Wall at the top of our lungs followed by Had A Peanut and On Top of Spaghetti. And my sisters and their friends always sang You Are My Sunshine. Boys didn’t. Because, mostly it was baseball.

Everything else musical in my life came from Dale Dorman and WRKO, and from the pile of albums in our stereo cabinet. But I was fine. Everything I knew about music I loved. I just didn’t know that much—until I turned fifteen in my sophomore year and got a job at a summer camp. My three older sisters worked at Camp Sewataro in Sudbury MA, the next town over from us. I got a job there for fifty dollars a summer as a boating counselor. I almost didn’t get the job because when they asked my why I wanted to work there I said, “For the money.” But my sisters worked there, and they were very responsible; so they hired me.

At first, I didn’t do much to distinguish myself as a counselor. One morning I fell asleep in a canoe and tipped it over. That news spread fast, especially the rumors as to why I was tired enough to fall asleep in a canoe. Another day I laid down on the dock and pretended I was asleep. I was trying to make a point to some kids to get their boats back to the dock more quickly; but to Steve Conroy, the massively huge and imposing camp director gazing at me from a distance, it looked as if I was just lying down on the dock. Another day I was paddling around with Kathleen Sullivan, a really cute junior counselor, wooing her on the far side of the pond, but too far away to notice a group of wild campers throwing rocks at each other on shore. Big Steve saw that too. Thank God I had sisters who toed the line. As mortified as they were that I was their brother, we were a good Irish Catholic family, so they stuck up for me. So I kept my job.

At the end of every day some very dorky guy would get up in front of the whole camp—and it was a really big camp—and sing some very dorky songs. I was way too cool to join in, so I’d sit in the back and pretend I was singing. I did the hand motions because my sisters made me, but in an exaggerated way, so I was still cool. At least I thought so, (or I hoped, to the junior counselor girls). Luckily, most of my screw-ups happened during the first session of camp. By the end of the second session I was a “true” counselor. I had a blast with the campers, made peace with Big Steve, and even made my sisters proud. Alba Taylor, the owner of the camp, admitted she was glad she hadn’t followed her instincts to fire me. I even started to sit with the kids and sing the dorky songs. I even liked the dorky guy, but I never actually “liked” his songs.

The next summer there was a new guy at the camp. He was an eagle scout (a term I had never even heard before) and taught woodcraft. He was as massively huge as Big Steve and could juggle sixteen pound shot-puts. I did my best to ignore him. He seemed to ignore me as well. I noticed that his campers were always doing these way fun things: like building rafts and teepees, and cooking over a campfire that burned continuously through the day—and singing, always singing: clapping songs, cheers, all stuff I’d never heard before. The more jealous I became of his popularity, the more I ignored him—until after the first girls overnight.

The whole day after the girls overnight (which I wasn’t at) I had to listen to everyone, especially my sisters, talk about how awesome the new guy was; how he took charge and led three hundred campers and counselors in over an hour of singing; how he juggled fire and sang hilarious songs that nobody at our camp had ever heard before; how he led the counselors in skits that the kids were still talking about, and the kids—the girl campers—were now marching around camp, singing and shouting cheers at the tops of their lungs, gathering around in circles and singing the sweetest things you’d ever hear—and talking about the woodcraft counselor, of course. The boys, myself included, eyed them warily. I was hoping the boy’s overnight would be my place to shine, to finally put to rest the ignominy of my first summer at camp. I would be a leader and an example for all. But, I now felt resigned to being a mere subject and serf of the new king.

The boy’s campfire was lit by the new woodcraft counselor in a spectacular never before seen display of campfire prowess. I think he shot a burning arrow into it or something. All is saw was a pyramid of fire leaping into the night air. It didn’t help that he called me by name to come up and help him light his torches just so he could wow the crowd with his juggling talents by juggling fire and cracking jokes and singing a really funny song. It really didn’t help when he said he recognized me from a high school football game, where his small town of Maynard beat the pants off us rich kids from Concord. (He didn’t mention that this small mill-town bred enormously large children, most of who went on to play division one college football.) I got a few laughs at his expense by imitating him behind his back. While a skit he organized was going on he praised me for being so quick on my feet and suggested other ways to make fun of him during the next song. He also pointed out a few kids that looked nervous about staying overnight and told me how to get them involved, at least enough for them to forget they were scared. At the same time, he drafted a few lazy counselors out of the back row and “encouraged” them to take the lead in a cheer (easier to do when your muscles are barely held in a tee shirt). All of a sudden it dawned on me. He wasn’t showing off, and he wasn’t out to one up me. All he cared about was putting on a show for the kids, with the kids, and because of the kids. He was simply an extension of a tradition I never knew existed. I jumped on the train: This was the childhood I never experienced. It was “camp,” pure and true.

After that night, I got myself a banjo and learned three chords. I found two counselors who played the guitar, another kid who played the violin well enough to call it a fiddle, a tall skinny counselor—I can’t even remember his name—played the washtub bass, and anybody else with gumption, spunk, a big heart and/or a loud mouth could join us on juice jugs, bongo’s, shakers, rain-sticks and anything else that made noise. My little brother, Tommy, (now a counselor, too) and his friends clapped and cheered and danced and gave courage to the reticent. We called ourselves “The Sewataro Jug Band.” Anybody could join, regardless of talent or disposition. My older sister, Patty, Eileen, and Mary Ellen, took the lead roles in every skit. Our home became the unofficial headquarters of camp preparations. It seemed like the whole neighborhood, none of us whom ever even went to a camp, were now working there. Great droves of us would bike to camp everyday. My little sister Annie became the only one of our family to ever actually go to camp. I kept learning and singing old folk songs I learned from the records in our stereo cabinet or found while scouring the seldom-visited shelves of folk music at the Concord Public library. The big fire juggling, hatchet handling eagle-scout led us in everything else. He organized our enthusiasm; he gave hand motions to every song I learned, and he taught us the tricks of the trade that somehow captured the heads, hearts and imaginations of any crowd of campers, no matter how loud the thunder, how large the hail, or how long and hot the afternoon.

That was thirty years ago. That guy, still one of my very best friends, is simply known as ‘The Rogue’—a master magician, juggler, storyteller, and treasure chest of camp lore. I wanted to write a book about camp songs. The only research I did for this book was to sit down and remember—and the memories came in a great flood: I remembered the numerous performances during camp, after camp at the 117 house on Friday afternoons, the hundreds of note-cards filled with set lists, outlines of stories, words to songs we heard at pubs or parties, or from another camp counselor, or gleaned from a late night session with Barry Lyle—another gem of a person and caretaker of a mother lode of camp songs, Native American stories, and the history behind everything. Everything that was good—everything that worked in the unforgiving forum of reality, I put down on paper—and so started my first book of camp songs. I didn’t include the tried and failed—that would be another long and wonderful book. I only included those songs, stories and cheers that worked for us, or that we saw working through the gifts of others willing to bear the torch of tradition, who brought with them the best of the various camps, cultures and traditions they came from.

I hoped when people sat down with my book they would say, “I can’t believe he didn’t include such or such a song!” Because then I know you know: You know the summer camp is the last stronghold of our oral tradition. It is the last place where music is being passed from one generation to the next through the magic and power of memory. It is the last place where kids hear and sing songs simply because they are good and fun and relevant to their lives, and not because they are packaged and promoted by an industry disinterested in the moral and emotional growth of children. The summer camp is a gift: a small world of children led mainly by an even smaller group of young adults. These children and these young counselors are our future. It is our responsibility to preserve and continue everything that we intuitively know is good and healthy for them. The camp experience, and camp songs in particular, fill a part of our lives with joy and remembrance; it is a happiness we carry throughout our lives. It is important that our camps and schools and homes and communities continue to create places where children can experience the traditions that came before them; It is important that our we engage ourselves and create the opportunity to express and continue these traditions.

We’ve got to keep singing. Every camp song I sing is part and parcel of those persons who led me to those songs, who guided me, who inspired me, and who put up with me: I am eternally indebted to the bus drivers who put up with 99 Bottles of Beer; to my parents who had us do everything together, who packed us in station wagons, who squeezed us around an impossibly small square of formica, who shaped, cajoled and created an amazing repertoire of memory; to the Taylors, the owners of my first camp, for not firing me and for setting me free; to my brother and sisters who went through, and still go through, everything as a family; to every camp, club and tavern owner who lets a folksinger through their door; to Big Steve who showed me boundaries, and potential—and kindness; to Jimmy Buell who stood on the baseball mound for six hours a day—for us, a bunch of kids from a huge and crazy neighborhood; to all the great counselors who’ve been there with me, who sang and still sing with me, and who continue to do the good work with kids; to my friends who’ve heard every song, story and joke way too many times—and still smile; to Hatrack and Seth who have almost made a musician out of me, whose love for music is matched only by their love for family and humanity; and to Wally for being the bearer of the torch, who is down in the trenches to this day keeping the traditions alive.

And especially to Rogue and Lyle, the true masters. But above all, to my wife Denise, who I met at summer camp, who took in this wandering soul and who shares a love that is as rich and real as any dream imagined…. And to our own kids: Kaleigh, Pipo, Margaret, Eddie, Charlie, Emma, and Tommy who show that love and family—far more than words—are a great adventure into the known and unknown; who encourage me to grow up, and to not grow up; and who laugh and sing and play and play and play….

And to you who may be curious enough to remember your own songs sung on a warm dark night and so continue the rhythmic cycle of a summer’s voice.

Line in the Sand

Back when the first Iraq war was starting I was working at the Fenn summer camp, which sits under the flight path in and out of Hanscom Air Force base. During lunch break I watched as plane after plane took off loaded with soldiers took off for the distant war. I remembered that president Bush said he drew a “line in the sand,” which was one of the reasons for the war. Shortly after, I heard from an old student of mine who had joined the marines after high school. He was flying over to Iraq to fight—something he didn’t quite expect when he first joined up, but he was willing and able to go; however, the fact that everything got so real so quickly got me to write this song:

I’m trying to smile in the belly.

I’m doing the best that I can.

We’re all flying over to find out

Where they’ve drawn that line in the sand.

But there’s something strange about going;

I wish Ackles would just sing a song.

I feel kinda’ tired, but I guess he’s just wired—

I can’t believe this flight is so long.

So roll us out of your belly,

Spill all your fighting men out.

Me, I’m mostly just wondering

What this desert war’s all about

We were lucky on Friday

For a chance to shoot pool—

One last pass for a night:

Setting up racks, slapping each other’s backs,

Maybe this time we might get to fight.

We might get a chance to blow off some pants

And do what they’ve trained us to do.

But, here on the plane it don’t seem the same,

Now that it’s all coming true:

So roll us out of your belly,

Spill all your fighting men out.

Me, I’m mostly just wondering

What this desert war’s all about

I called everyone I could think of,

My little nephew kept asking me why;oo

Mom and Dad both came down

To a motel in town,

To wish their youngest goodbye.

I told them both to quit worrying,

That we’ll all be flying back soon.

I didn’t mention my sister

Had told me she found

Dad crying alone in his room.

So roll us out of your belly,

Spill all your fighting men out.

Me, I’m mostly just wondering

What this desert war’s all about

We’re grunts and we’re finally airborne.

Ackles is singing a song.

It’s one I don’t know,

Kinda’ quiet and slow,

But everyone’s tapping along

Yeah, I’m trying to smile in the belly.

I’m doing the best that I can.

We’re all kind of anxious to find out

Where they’ve drawn that line in the sand.

So roll us out of your belly,

Spill all your fighting men out.

Me, I’m mostly just wondering

What this desert war’s all about

Fallow Fields

The rain falls,
The grass grows,
Nothing is done;
Nothing is left undone.
~Lao Tzu

Every seven years, in biblical times, a farmer would let his or her fields lie fallow, which means "to let rest or remain untilled." It was the farmer’s way of giving the soil a break from the unrelenting harvests that came in the years before, and to give the nutrients a chance to replenish in a natural way—not forced by the hand of man. I feel the same way when the spring break comes up: I need this time to let myself lie fallow before another journey of obligations begins. It doesn't mean that nothing grows—only that what does grow is meant to grow. During this time, I need to let the weeds of my interests sprout before the dictates of work and money and obligation. I need this time to get back in touch with the core of my dreams and to distill the essence from the fruit of each day. Only from nothing can we see the possibility of everything.

On these days, I rise earlier and work longer—but, I only work at what I love. I trek with the boys to the mill pond and tease the horned pout and bass from the cold dark waters. I walk with Denise around Tobin Drive while the kids dart around us on squeaking bikes, roller blades, and skateboards, and I know that I am the luckiest man alive. I clamber around our old sailboat and scrape and sand and paint and varnish. I hammer back the loose boards of winter; rake and sweep the yards and gardens; I grease the wheels and change the oil, and I plant the early peas and radishes. I spit in my glove and catch Pipo's fastest pitch or Margaret’s longest throw. I kick back Charlie's rugby ball and collect worms with Tommy; I race Emma to the rope swing and back; I saw boards with EJ and try not to worry as he nails them to branches too high on swaying trees; I "hang" with Kaleigh and try to remember who and what I was at seventeen and try to let her know and feel and understand that dreams do come true—but only if you grab on to those dreams with both hands and ignore the drumbeats of those who tell you what you need to do and when you need to do it. Sometimes, Denise brings out popcorn, and we simply sit and watch and wonder.

The beauty is simply in the being. Nothing is done. Nothing is left undone.

And time grows from the soil of the day.

The Slob

The first thaw is dirty

exposing dishevelment

in wet piles

of lost gloves and chicken bones

it disconcerts

in its abruptness exposing

irrelevant truths

and frauds until

the poet grows paranoid

that no one will listen

to a slob.

Halfway to Boston

I should be down with Tom,

Playing softball now

At the Rideout playground.

My beer money’s in:

Four cases if we win,

But I ain’t hanging around—

I’m halfway to Boston, I know,

But I don’t know where I’m going.

I know I’m up for leaving

These days and my ways all behind,

So sometimes, yeah, sometimes

I’ve got to go where nobody knows me,

So sometimes, yeah, sometimes,

I just go.

I should have called someone,

But some things don’t get done;

They’ll find some extra man.

We laid two driveways down,

And a sidewalk for the town;

And some lady bought ten tons of sand—

She said, “Son,

Put it all over there,

And be careful my lawn doesn’t tear;

And watch out for the rose-beds,

And keep an eye on the wire overhead….”

I said, “Lady, Chris’ sakes, lady,

It’s only a goddamn lawn.

Here’s you fourteen full wheels—and I’m gone.

I met Anne the other night:

White Pond by the firelight;

She’s an old friend of Dan’s.

Too much love is too much pain;

Too many times the same,

She cried, holding my hand.

We’ll hang our hearts on the tips of the moon,

And we’ll dance to the laugh of the loon.

We’ll hang a hammock on two distant stars;

Only astronomers will know where we are;

And our eyes will light up the nighttime,

And they’ll blink, and they’ll close, and be gone:

Nothing lost, nothing lonesome—nothing wrong.

In Cambridge I’ll grab the T,

And let go of some other me—

Let the lights of the city kick in.

If all I am I was today,

I’d just of stayed and played,

And hope we’d win it again.

But, I’m halfway to Boston, I know,

And I don’t know where I’m going.

I know I’m up for leaving

These days and my ways all behind,

So sometimes, yeah, sometimes

I’ve got to go where nobody knows me,

And sometimes; yeah, sometimes, I just go.

Reflection

I did a short stint in college right after high school. My head and heart were way too restless to stay more than that first semester at Fitchburg State College. I was studying how to be a shop teacher, but I couldn’t stand the courses. It was kind of ironic, as after twenty years of the twists and turns of life I did take a job as a shop teacher. A job I still have. At the time it wasn’t doing do much for me. But I had this English teacher—an older, proper sort of woman—who one day bluntly told me that I should be majoring in English, and not shop. She said I obviously loved reading and had a knack for writing and that was the direction I should go. That professor saying something nice to me; I think it was the first positive comment I had ever heard from a teacher.

I took her seriously enough to quit school. I got a job at a gas station in West Concord. When the weather warmed I did some paving work for Shoemaker and Jennings, and worked some for Jack Mattison on his dairy farm, and for Mr. Mendy in his strawberry fields. In the gift of memory those were pretty fine days. I’d work all day, go to the library after dinner, and then hang out with my old high school buddies down at the Elks or Ho-Jo’s late at night. At home, even later into the night, I’d fill up hundreds of pages writing in spiral notebooks. I felt like I was under pressure to catch up literature wise, and so I started with the Iliad and ended up with Jack Kerouac. So much of my insides were changing, but outside I was still Fitz—with all the encumbrances attached. I was still living in my old hometown. Pretty much the same, I imagine, to everyone who knew me.

Looking back I’m amazed at how much my friends let me be. They never asked me what I was writing or what I was reading. They’d tease the hell out of me when I was there, and defend me when I wasn’t. I wonder a lot about how many poems and songs I lost from those days, writing them on the fly and then jamming them in my pocket, or leaving them in the back seat of Lana’s Falcon, or I’d use them as a dipstick rag, which I did more than I care to admit. I used to always think it didn’t matter, that my writing wasn’t much good anyways. Every so often I’d get away—I had to get away. Almost like I needed to try myself out in front of a new world. I started out just going in to Boston. I ended up here, with this song called “Halfway to Boston.”

Teaching

My teachers could have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

~Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

This is the Sunday morning when I wake up and think it's summer, but it's not. The bulge in my briefcase is the pile of exams that need to be graded by tomorrow; and there are the advisor letters that need to be written, the academic comments to write, and an ever burgeoning list of details and tasks that make up the end of the school year. But, everything will get done—and done in less than two weeks. In every occupation there is a push season—a season where we struggle alongside of Sisyphus to push the boulders of demand and expectations to a lofty summit. It is when the ball keeps rolling back down to our side of the mountain that the internal struggle begins, and we ask ourselves if this is—or should be—our fated slot in life.

Last weekend I sat by the blaze of our backyard campfire talking with Jerry Moss, a good friend of mine and a long time teacher at a local high school. His sage words of advice to a younger teacher with us was, "You can't just like teaching; you have to love it." I've thought about the pithy implications of his words all week; moreover, I thought about my frustrations and struggles through the past year, and I do have to say, even with all the balls still in the air, that I really do love teaching.

I love teaching because whenever a pack of kids come through my door, I still feel that surge of duty to "improve the nick of time." Every class is born as an opportunity to reflect the joy and the miracle of life through the simplicity and sincerity of our actions. The kids remember what we do, and we remember what the kids do, and together we carry away the sifted ore of education transformed by the magic of alchemy onto the enduring hope of possibility and progress. These are more than just vain thoughts; they are, to me, as real and inexorable as the morning and evening tide.

Like a lone sailor on an empty sea, no teacher can outrun the storms of progress, though we try. In the next few days I have to submit my curriculum documentation: a fairly dry affair of the texts and techniques I use during the course of the year in 8th grade English, which, in theory, should reflect why I do what I do in the classroom. I am told by the administration that it will help me grow as a teacher to document and reflect upon my curriculum—as if they have know how much or how little I have already reflected. The wise and practical part of me says to just do it and be done, while the fire of the poet and iconoclast in me wants to rattle my chains, if only to embolden and express the wild left in me. The documentation is one of my Sisyphean boulders because I can’t say what I really want to say; I am forced to use a lexicon that is created for me—an academic style that describes much and reveals little—and is read by remarkably few. There is no place to say what I really want to say. There is no part of the rubric seeking out my soul. There is no place for me to say that I simply try to encourage my students to stand at the abyss of knowledge and leap, or that I urge them to take the rough stones of words and build a wall to shore up the sands of time, or to weave, with the skill and guile of Penelope, gossamer threads out of the maelstrom of changes in their inner and outer lives that will stand as a their unique testament and tapestry to eternity—even though that is exactly what I try to do.

If what I teach does not add to my students’ sense of wonderment, then I have failed as a teacher. If I can't prove to them that making their subject agree with their verb is an "essential skill of life," then I have failed as a teacher, and so I do agree that we teachers need to know why we teach what we teach, but our curriculum needs to explode out of the depth of a real life lived fully and competently, not simply culled from a tome of expectations crafted by a distant board of overseers. I won't put in my curriculum documentation that sometimes I stand in front of my students with no clue what I'm going to say next; I won’t brag that sometimes I simply rely on the hard and unfailing wisdom of experience to put the right words in my mouth.

I worry that we hire teachers based on their degree of education and not on the degree to which he or she has lived. There was very little in my resume when I was hired by our headmaster. He took a leap (very much unlike him) based on his gut intuition. Shackleton rarely spent more than a few minutes interviewing the men with whom he embarked on his epic journey. He simply sought men that he knew could stand up to the vagaries and vicissitudes of difficult and evolving situations and who could redeem the possibilities of every moment and help keep the adventure—and the community—alive and focused on their mutual goal. Our students need to sense our wonder and our faith in the shared mission of the school; otherwise, there is no soil or food for their own wonder and faith.

The teacher who loves to teach knows that teaching is a desperate and forgiving affair: desperate, because we pack the bags of our students as if they are never coming back, and we are convinced that each of them is embarking—at that very moment—on a difficult and trying journey. Forgiving, because there is a certainty that they will return tomorrow, and we will have to accept them back into our fold in all of their innocence and arrogance. In this sense, we are all children and soldiers, and none of us are ever fully prepared for the battles or tranquility of the classroom (much less life) and so we hone our wits and open our arms, and we accept with equanimity the evolving and revolving reality of what is real and enduring, but not that which is forced or proscribed by a distant oracle. I love to teach, and I know that I can't get that boulder over the hill unless I continue to grow and learn, and accept, and defy. I know I need to grow in experience; to learn with humility; to accept with humor; to defy with understanding, and, above all, to live in the center of possibility.

Every child, every action, every memory becomes the paradigm of possibility and hope—and so, yes, I do love teaching.

The Enigma

Black Pond is not as deep

as it is dark, dammed

some century ago

between ledges of granite

and an outcropping

of leaning fir, huckleberry,

and white pine.

For years I have paddled and trolled;

swam, fished, sailed and sometimes

simply tread water

in the night

trying to pierce

a dark, prickled sky.

Why is is that only now

have I made my way

towards the source,

through the tangles

of bulrush, loosestrife

and sawgrass hummocks,

to this place where

I am utterly lost

and happy

to finally be

as far as I can go?

~Black Pond
Windsor, New Hampshire

The Rain

Listening to the rain

sog the leaves

once crisp and windblown;

now matted, layered

mold and richness

humus

future of the soil

Calvary

It seems like it ain't been a long time,

But I'm damn pleased your coming by again.

It's been a while since we sat down and rambled

About this and that and why and who and then

You said that you had to get a move on,

Move on and leave a space behind.

So I spent a while hitting all those old roads:

Old friends and kicking down the wine.

But sure enough got sick of all the rambling;

The same stories and the way folks just are.

Who'd believe a hobo and a rucksack?

Who'd believe I really come that far?

Panning bread don't give you much to walk on;

And I ain't so free I don't want nothing more.

It ain't so hard to say what I believe in,

But what's the sense to beg it door to door?

So I settled down right here by the oxbow.

I catch kibbers off the bank that's caving in.

I'm sure glad you brung along your old lines;

We'll chuck 'em out and catch a string again.

Yeah, I settled down right here by the oxbow.

I catch kibbers off the bank that's caving in.

I'm sure glad you brung along your old lines;

We'll chuck 'em out and catch a string again.

Reflection

I teach a couple of 8th grade English classes, and as a part of the class I make them all keep online journals that we comment on and share with each other. It's actually pretty cool. A hot topic always seems to be the belief—or not—in God. I am usually pretty impressed by the depth of their convictions, as well as the honesty of their confusions. Although I worked for a number of years as a youth minister, and even to this day teach Sunday school, I am still somewhat agnostic—I just can't convince myself that my spiritual experience reflects an eternal truth. But I can't doubt that I do feel a power beyond what I am and who we are. I know I've experienced moments incapable of words. In those times I've felt closest to God, but the rush of even that wave cannot be sustained on the shore of my earth—this life.

I guess you have to let go of what you cannot hold on to. Catholicism teaches that hell is being eternally separated from the God you know and love and feel. That, at least, makes sense to me. And maybe that is why I can still teach Sunday School. Maybe it's why I can listen to and love my friends who think I'm a complete fool for even being a part of what they consider idiocy. In my cloud of unknowing I wait for the parting that will let in the light—the true and sustained experience of God.

I wonder why we are in such a rush to know God. I wonder what we'll say to each other when we finally meet; I wonder how we'll act. Being brought up a Christian, I've always imagined what it would be like to be one of the Apostles. I've always wondered what Jesus said to them in private to give them the courage and eloquence to go forward and make the sacrifices they made. I've imagined sitting down with Jesus and fishing for horned pout in the Concord River. I've always wanted new words from Jesus to give me directly a true faith I could freely live and speak, and so I wrote this song about meeting up with Jesus down by the Concord River.

Juxtapositions

Sometimes reality gets the best of us. My reality right now is to sit by the bedside of my mom for the last few days of her life. It is both horrible and beautiful, and sad, but meaningful. For me, it is strange how I go about the most common of pursuits while sitting by her bedside: watching the Pat's game, working up a comma test (which I am sure you are going to love) and laughing with my brother and sisters about the shared memories—and some (up until now) unshared memories. On Friday she said her last words to me: "Will you go with me?" I said, "I'd love to, but...I got a pile of your grandchildren to raise the way you raised me." Her very last words: "OK, then; bye.”

And that was it.

Later on Friday she silently rubbed my arm as I sang "Red River Valley" to her. On Saturday she moved her finger a few times while I held her hand and said a rosary for her—messing up the prayers and words as I have for the last fifty years. Today she is all but gone, yet somehow for five weeks she has defied every person who looked at her and said, "Soon. It will be very soon."

But it will be soon. Soon enough for me to have rushed home at midnight, just for some internet access to let you know that I have not forgotten about you. I do wish I could be trawling the rich waters of your blogs to see and comment on what you have been writing. The earnestness and honesty of your words is a powerful antidote to sadness—a needed reminder that life ebbs and flows in the pulsating rhythm of the universe. I will not be in this week, but I will post some work for you on Tuesday that should get you through the week. I'll be back soon and we can dive into The Odyssey—that book of books that has so shaped the course of my life—the book whose very foundation is the power and love of family.

I am one up on Odysseus. He never got to say a fitting goodbye to his mother—a mother who died grieving for her long lost son. Though you might not be in the habit of doing so, give your own mother a hug, and free up some words to show her your love. You'll never regret it, and when the time comes when you are in my shoes, you will have already created a beautiful memory—a gift that will sustain you in the hardest of times.

Geese in Winter Corn

I see you in the mornings

filling Mendy's field

steaming breath chewing

corn stubble bothering

each other sleeping

between rotted stalks spiked

to a cold bareness perturbed

by your own idiocy.

I have an urge

to run among you,

and forcing you to flight,

I’d know the bird

your wisdom follows.

The Bottom Line

Around my cabin they are dropping trees—

the tall white pines that sentinel these woods,

that crack and thud before being dragged

to the landing, and then bucked and loaded

onto a top-heavy pile of harsh truck.

Every so often the machines will stop

and I'll hear the loggers gam and cuss:

"Ah, for Chris’-sakes, these have all got heart-rot."

Pissed, probably, they went and bid so high

for what the mill owners will just laugh at.

The slash is piled high and the ground scarfed.

I dip my pen and turn back to my work.

Piecing together the best of our wood

none of us will make a killing today.

Garden Woman

I woke today and had my tea

and at the window spent the morning:

the same scene I’ve seen so many times

is each day freshly born;

from the ground I turn each spring and fall

come the flowers they are blooming;

you disappear among the weeds—

you are the garden woman.

Long ago you learned to know

the passing of the moons:

to pull the seeds before they’ve sprung

squirreled in bowls around the room.

I laugh to think how many times

I’ve tried to coax a dying flower

to give one more unfolding

to return some precious hour.

I love the hand that weaves the land

from sunshine knits to flowers;

who waters rows of thirsty souls

until they find their hidden power;

but the roots will hold and time will grow

and leave moss upon our stone;

and with every passing season

the mosaic of a home.

When you disappear the sun will bear

how the wind has shaped your beauty;

how in long walks through ancient woods

we stepped both sides of cruelty

but the tree’s that lean all mean to fall

to give space to free the breathing;

and working through the tangled land

where hope is filled with meaning.

Yeah, I woke today and saw the way

you see the light of morning;

from the ground that pulls us down

there’s a new life freshly born in.

From the ground I turn each spring and fall

let bloom with beauty blooming

the blessed weeds and bowls of seeds:

I love you garden woman.

Stones, Words, & Walls

Language is the gift—as well as the tool—that allows and enables us to appreciate, understand, and express the complexity and nuance of our inner and outer lives. Our language builds upon itself, and it evolves, as we evolve, to breathe the newest air of the universe. The right words bring clarity to chaos and echo long enough that those who listen will be enlightened, and those who read will be entranced by the mysterious alchemy of a shared language—and it is this sharing of words that we need to focus on. We need to let the words we use bubble up from the broth of shared experience, and as like minds congregate, you will find your audience as much as they will find you.

I worked for a number of years building stone walls for John Bordman—a brilliant and ornery yankee curmudgeon who was insistent that every wall be a testament to eternity—in the hopes that I could learn everything I needed to learn about this “piling on of stones.” From early on in my apprenticeship, he would leave me at a site for hours on end to pick through a mountain of stone trying to find the stones that would "fit together" to make the wall. I placed my stones and squinted at them from a distance (just like John) to see if the hand of gravity (and not the vanity of man) had placed the stone. Invariably, when he returned, he would calmly and quietly destroy ninety percent of my day's work. As critical as he was of society, he rarely crushed my fragile ego by criticizing my efforts. Instead, he would say things like, "Damn hard to find good stones in this pile!" While in the same breath he would add, "But, it's all we have to work with." He would then go on to craft a magnificent wall—a wall that will last for centuries—walls built out of the material at hand, walls that only a true connoisseur of stone walls will appreciate.

It didn't take long to figure that building stone walls would take its toll on both the body and the fingers of a fledgling folksinger; however, in my world of metaphor, I carry those same stones with me as I struggle to build a song, a poem, a story—or this. Words are the stones we work with; and the more stones in our pile, the more we can build the wall of our dreams; but, equally important is the reality that a pile of good stone does not make a wall—as a thousand new vocabulary words won't make you a better writer. John Bordman never went out and bought more stone just to have more to choose from; instead he always bought good stone in the first place: stone from walls that edge the fields (and what once was fields) all over New England—hand-picked stones culled from the wisdom of his experience: big, solid, interesting stones, already weathered by the storms and vicissitudes of time.

It's not so much that we need a lot of obscure words as much as we need good words—and we need to recognize good words. If our experience of life is limited and shallow, our big words will only impress small minds, and they will alienate the truly wise. We need the experience of words used well: words used in elevated writing; words used in great speeches; words we hear and read and feel in meaningful ways; words that we see actually working to bring sense to the senseless. A truly extensive and effective vocabulary is built on an attentiveness to precise language. It means embracing the world of words used well; It means turning off asinine TV; it means measuring a book by the possibilities it presents, not by its rank on the best seller lists, and it means discussions informed by wisdom and decorum—not polemics or politics. If you are a writer, it means entering your writer's space with an open and disciplined mind. It means learning the craft and recognizing the art of writing well.

Hay Baler

There’s a bitchiness

in ourselves the baling

twine knotted caught

in the feeder somewhere

the field tedded dried

spits of rain

and thunder telling Paul

who only works here

to just give me

the Goddamn pliers.

What Pumpkins Are For

As much as I swat I love

this bothering incessance

of mosquitos in still air

after warm rain.

Standing in the throaty exhaust

of the old Farmall

I urge the dogs

to make the trip with me,

down to the community plots

where I’ve planted nothing

but brag patch pumpkins

and a string of river bass,

if only to sit

on their immensity

in the moon cool nights

of hoarish fall.

Skip died this past spring

shoveling out winter’s heavy manure,

and so I plant her garden

with the talk of August tables:

tomatoes, corn, beets, cabbage —

ostensible things

I’m sure she’d agree with;

though planted, I figure,

somehow not quite right.

It’s just weird to think

she finally can’t

do anything about it.

But that is what pumpkins are for.

~In Memory of Skip Anderegg

Weekend Custody

Jesse calls up this morning—

“You can come downstairs now;

You see the grapefruit bowl?

Well, I fixed it all;

I fixed everything for you.”

Everything’s for you…

“Let me help you make the coffee,
Momma says you drink it too.

I can’t reach the stove,

But I can pour it, though—

What’s it like living alone?”

It’s like living ‘lone…

“Daddy, did you ever play soccer?

There’s a girl’s team at the school;

Joe said he’d show me how;

I got two daddies now—

But you can show me too.”

Yeah, I’ll show you too…

“Remember Friday night out bowling,

trying to make the pins fall down:

One time you missed them all;

That’s called a gutterball—

Just like the things up on the roof.”

The things up on the roof…

“Wasn’t last night a dumb movie?

Them outer space things weren’t real.

Weren’t they fake and stuff?

Did you have enough?

Pretty soon I got to go.”

Soon, you’ve got to go….

The Time and Place

of a Writer

    This is the time—the dog days of summer—when writing can become more of a chore than a pleasure. The hot days and humid nights don't always lend themselves to creative and articulate thought; plus, the day is always full of enticing and entrancing possibilities. Because writing is part and parcel of my daily life, I need to create a time and a place to write that works for me no matter where I am or what I am otherwise doing.

When I am at summer camp with my family (which this year is a good part of the summer) I set aside two hours each morning from 10:00-12:00. Those are the hours when I am not teaching any classes or running any activities. I also know I can find some cool shade beside our bus to work with my laptop. Maraoghini, a Jamaican drummer at the camp (and an author of many books on drumming) found me there one morning and said—somewhat ruefully because his morning time is spent caring for his child while his wife worked at camp—that he wished he could find a time and a space like I had, so I invited him to join me everyday. And so he now comes over every day with his four year old, Amry, who happily plays for two hours with my five year old Tommy. Even at their young ages, they both seem to sense that this is daddy's time as well, and though they spin around and through us with cars and trucks, planes and songs, they are as welcome and unobtrusive as a pair of butterflies searching for a sweeter nectar.

For the most part, Maroghini and I work quietly and intently, though I relish the moments we take to share with each other what we are thinking and writing. Sometimes it is only a simple comment or question, but often it is evolves into deeper and refreshingly philosophical talk that often shifts the direction of my writing.  When the lunch bell tolls, it always seems too soon, but it is as equally sacred as the time we spend writing, so we stop what we are doing, regardless of the point we are at in our writing. This stopping point gives me the remainder of the day to think about the direction of my writing, and it often gives me new ideas and phrases that I can weave into my writing piece when I return, which is usually after the kids are in bed and Denise is happily settled into her precious reading time. 

Later, the dark hours of night add a mystery and magnificence to my writing time, and, as in the morning, I sit outside; the only difference being that I sit under a single lit bulb with only the moths and mosquitoes to keep me company. Sometimes, Denise will join me for a short while to give me a needed and always welcome break from my work. She is always amazed that I can sit out there as she swats and shoos away my aerial friends. Her invariable toast before heading inside is usually, "I don't know how you can stand it out here," but, as best friends do, she understands why I am out there, and she always gives me that time and space I need. She understands that writing is my "work" as much as anything else I do, though my paydays are measured somewhat differently.

Writing is work. There is no way around that reality, and until we realize and accept that fact, we will always be somehow disconnected from our potential as writers. Few of us have the nerve to call our boss and blithely say, "I just don't feel like working today" and expect a sympathetic and encouraging response. We go to work because we have to, and, hopefully, because we enjoy it as well—but it is still work and our responsibility nonetheless, and so we go to our labors through the thick and thin of life. Many of my friends think that I write because it comes naturally to me. What they don't always get is that I go to my writing "unnaturally." With seven kids to raise and enough side jobs to make the taxman suspicious, I have to carve my writing time out of an already busy life. I love the summers because it is easier carve those hours out of life, but I try—and need—to do the same even in the most compressed unfolding of the year.

Creating the time and space to write is the first step towards becoming a successful writer. Don't measure that success by the beauty and volume of your writing pieces; rather, measure it by the yardstick of time. Do you put in the time that you need to put into your writing? Are you ready to slog through the mud when the words have to be pulled from that same muck and then be polished to some semblance of a gemstone? I have learned from experience that when I am fatigued by a writing piece, it is perfectly fine to put it aside and work on some other batch of words. If the house is full of kids and friends distracting me with their exuberance at a time when I need to be writing, I won't try to force the moment, rather I will use that time to proofread, edit and revise—because every writing piece benefits from revisiting for structure, content, and form, and it doesn't need long stretches of reflective thought to accomplish.

Find a way to create the time and place to be a more efficient and productive writer. Use that time completely. Resist the temptation to be finished; otherwise, you will be finished as a writer

Morning Coffee

Tommy must have been here before me:

there are plastic dinosaurs

positioned on my chair

in various poses of intimidation

and courtship.

The Brontosaurus,

who somehow made it

to the top headrest,

rears on his hind legs

and tries to reach

the spider plants

growing in styrofoam cups

on top of the piano.

The lazy triceratops,

trapped on an unsure leather arm,

circles and stares warily across

at T-Rex

who roars and roars and roars

in magnificent moodiness

and waves his absurdly tiny arms

in the primal morning mist.

Before I sit,

I gently lift Barbie

from her soft safe canyon.

I am surprised by her serenity

in such a difficult time.

I settle myself delicately

into this meticulous playground

and make an offering of myself.

And now,

do I dare disturb the universe

with something

as impalpable

as a poem?

No Dad To Come Home To

Rain’s falling outside of Boston—

Thank God I’m not working tonight:
I’ve got six of my own,

And a stepdaughter at home,

And a momma keeping things right.

I wonder if they’re at the table

With their puzzles, their papers and pens?

When I get off the highway

And pull in that driveway,

Will they run to the window again?

Daddy’s home, daddy’s home, I can hear you,

Though I’m still eighteen miles away.

This old station wagon’s

Got a muffler that’s dragging,

But everything’s going my way.

Momma put your head on my shoulder;

Let me hold you tight to my heart—

You’ve had a long day at home;

You’ve been working all alone—

Everyone’s doing their part.

She says, “Kaleigh is up in her bedroom.”

But she can’t really figure out why.

I find her upstairs

In an armload of bears,

And she looks at me softly and cries,

Was I sad with no dad to come to?

Did it hurt he was so far away?

Did I sit by the phone

And wait for him to come home

Like Margaret and EJ today?

Little girl, you can cry on my shoulders,

Though I can’t really say how it feels,

But if one thing is real

It’s this love that I feel,

And it’s one thing nobody can steal.

You had Nana; you had Papa; you had Mama—

And your momma was with you all day.

With her Ram pickup truck

And a boatload of luck,

You found me and you asked me to stay.

Now you’ve got your brothers and sisters.

You’ve got a step-dad trying to write songs;

You’ve got a momma who knows

How to make that love grow

Like them summer days coming along.

So, how about tonight we go dancing

Through every store in the mall.

If the kids don’t make scenes,

We’ll have food-court cuisine,

And wind up having a ball—

And if the kids don’t make scenes,

We’ll have food-court cuisine,

And wind up having a ball.

How about tonight we go dancing….

Catboat

Old boat I have used you

grown dry and checked,

heavy on your timber cradle,

tired of all the bullshit

and messing.

Ripping the glass cloth

they laid on your keel

I felt the power

of a labored birth;

and now the stagnant smell

of years of damp-rot,

patchwork, and messing.

Neither am I proud

of your plywood deck,

knowing too well

I wasn’t built

for ease of maintenance.

We repair each other

to our barest hulls,

and strengthened

work from there.

Hymn #1

God I need you near;

I’m a child and full of fear:

I call to you to come to me

and get me out of here—

to wrap me in your arms;

to hold me in your arms—

to wrap me,

to hold me,

and keep me away from harm.

Somehow I understand

how Job’s a holy man:

no need to see; he just believed

you held him in your hand—

and he always stood amazed

in a world gone half crazed;

through the mystery of eternity

he bowed his head and prayed.

That morning as I prayed

you took his life away;

you called us in to live again

in joy beyond the pain—

and from everywhere above

there flew the ancient dove:

within the storm

faith was born

and joy became of love;

and love returned to love;

and love became of love.

George Writes His Essay

Why am I the poor smuck saddled with a teacher who insists on finding meaning and metaphor in everything we read? Like The Odyssey: I mean, the book is full of random everythings. Like just when Odysseus starts to figure something out (and I have a half a clue what is going on) he breaks of into some wild story with a hundred new characters. "Oh," says my teacher, "that is a literary technique used to build the scope and sweep of the poem. It is the hallmark of an epic literary work." If that is the case, then I have a crazy old uncle—a guy who never knows when to stop talking—who is probably a direct descendant of Homer. Yeah, from now on I'll call him "Uncle Epic." The only reason I half like the book is because I actually believe that I'm supposed to like it—or at least appreciate it.

I can't imagine that every English teacher for the last 1500 years or so is wrong. Maybe they've all been hypnotized by the Siren's song of conformity. I liked that part of the book: Odysseus getting his crew to lash him to the mast so he could hear the Siren's song, but still not do something stupid like get lured away by Siren herself. "Stairway to Heaven" probably had that effect in the 70's when it first came out. Jeez, I'm as bad as Homer. Listen to me getting off track—and I shouldn't get off track because this foolish essay is only one of six assignments over the weekend.

SIX!

Ohmygod...there was that six headed monster in the book, too. So life does imitate art. I'll keep repeating to myself: "It's only an epic; it's only an epic; it’s only an epic;…" And if I don't do my homework, then I'll probably have to work in the yard. Oh no! That's simply a metaphor for the whirlpool that almost sucked in Odysseus' ship, How does a kid find his way in life? Monsters on the right, whirlpools on the left; so many Gods plotting how to make every day miserable. My teachers think they’re Gods sometimes.

Or at least they act like Gods.

Oh, for one bright-eyed Athena of a teacher to understand…

God, I'm probably going to fail this essay because I'm using the "I" in my "voice!" Not to worry. I'll just rant and rage and think and write, THEN I'll go back and change everything to the third person—you know, the guy we never really get to meet. Really, it's like going on a date with a mannequin.

Somewhere in here is my thesis statement. I hope my teacher finds it. I hope I find it. I wonder if I just write what I know he wants to hear if he'll go easy on me. It works you know; I tried it once. [Actually, I just looked and I couldn't find my thesis statement. But, if he read this far and hasn't flunked me then maybe he'll read more. That would be kind of fun: Write something that keeps looking like it's leading somewhere wicked profound and then say "April Fools" at the end.]

I wonder if my teacher would find meaning and metaphor in that?

I love these short paragraphs. I'm already well over the minimum of five paragraphs. I really wonder who the first teacher was who ever coined the term "Five Paragraph Essay;" There's probably a statue somewhere. Ha, and the statue is holding a copy of The Odyssey in one hand and a gradebook in the other. LOL:) (Sorry, I thought I was texting…)

O.K. time to start writing: The Odyssey survives not because of what it is, but because of who it is. Figure that out for yourself my dear teacher—my teacher, who at this very moment is leaving to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum for a day of "much needed" rest and relaxation, while we slave like oarsmen in a tempest over his stupid assignment.

New Bedford Whaling Museum! If he comes to class on Monday and even mentions Moby Dick, I'll quit school. I swear I will. I really don’t need him. I can make my own journey through life—and all because I read The Odyssey in 8th grade English class.

Where was I? This has got to be at least 500 words!

Ice Storm Artist

A lone artist made a rhino
out of limbs and branches—
the detritus
of the great ice storm of 08.

Its skeletal mosaic
standing sentinel
beside the washed out ruts
of the gravel driveway
reminds me
of the blanket of ice
sheeting over everything
west and north of 495.

A lonely gargoyle
on a New Hampshire side road:
its sad, gaped mouth,
formed out of gnarled limbs
torn from a tangled canopy,
tries to tell
another side of the story.

Pascal’s Wager

In the dark of an early morning

I fumble the beads awkwardly,

reaching to the nearest and most familiar God,

never sure of the sequence of prayers,

and only obliquely in consequence.

I think more of the old man

I bought these rosaries from,

his staring in contempt at the party officials

politely wishing me good morning

outside the church door.

My roommate, Ren Qi Wei, laughs

when I leave each morning,

and speaks the few words of English he knows:

"Fie Xi Meng, the bed bugs have bite you."

I laugh too. I'd tell him it's only a sacrament

that underlies an inner grace —

but I have no idea how to say it.

I always want to continue the 'Our Father':

and deliver us O' Lord from every evil,

and grant us peace in our days,

and in your mercy keep us free from sin

and protect us from all anxiety.

I can still picture John Tortorello—

the unrepentant and unlikely altar-boy—

sticking his finger in the chalice

while Father King held up the bread

thrilled to a pounding heart to know him.

For thine is the kingdom

and the power

and the glory

I look for God in the night sky:

there's a nervousness I feel

finding and staring towards Orion

like I'm young and staring at a welder:

"You'll go blind, you'll go blind."

Then you find you don't.

Before sunrise Linda stops by

and we ride our bikes

down the wide flat streets,

in the heavy smell of sulphur —

the daily stoking of small coal stoves.

A song about Mao Ze Dong broadcasts

from tinny speakers, strung

like paper cups throughout the city,

tentacled into every dirt

and clay hot alleyway, stenched

by cabbage and nightsoil.

We stop in a park and buy

a bowl of warm bean whey, richened

with sugar and a doughstick.

I tell her I love the grease

of fried dough. She smiles. I know

she will soon break into talk

I'm not in the mood for.

I kick a soccer ball back to some kids.

They stare awhile and laugh, reciting:

"Thank you, thank you,"

and then charge back behind each other.

I try my own words,

but they only steam

into the cold morning air.

A horde of women

appear suddenly,

sweeping packed dirt —

students bang at each other,

playing ping-pong

on concrete tables,

over bricks laid end to end;

the 'Lao Ren', the 'Old Ones',

wrapped in heavy quilted blue

slap thighs and chests, and then

hold their arms open, breathing

deeply, slowly.

Little kids squat off the sidewalks.

My voice, trapped in viscera,

is guttural and chokened—

There is no now and forever.

I am a fraud in a foreign land

and haven't the faintest idea

what grace really is.

~Beijing,

December, 1981

Zenmo Yang Ni

I lost the time I hardly knew you,

half-assed calling:

"How you doing?

Laughing at my hanging hay field;

I never knew the time

that tomorrow'd bring,

until it brung to me.

Yuan lai jui shuo: "Zenmoyang ni?"

Xianzai chang shu: "Dou hai keyi";

Xiexie nimen, dou hen shang ni.

Xiwang wo men dou hen leyi

Dou hen leyi

Dust has blown and snow has covered;

Shorter days been passed by longer,

Poplar trees have dropped their flowers

And spread them on the ground

And then the leaves unfold

Just like I told you so…

Chorus

Love you, damn you, see right through me.

Eyes are scared, a soul is healing.

Paint yourself a wall of feeling

And bring the world around

To the way you are;

It would be a better start.…

Chorus

Knowing time's no great arranger

It's getting hard to 'see you later';

I'll never meet another stranger

Knowing there is something

That we all could know—

You got to let it go…

Yuan lai jui shuo: "Zenmoyang ni?"

Xianzai chang shu: "Dou hai keyi";

Xiexie nimen, dou hen shang ni.

Xiwang wo men dou hen leyi

Dou hen leyi

This is my somewhat rough translation:

[Early on I just said, “How are you?

Now I always say, I’m doing awesome.

Thank you, both of you, you are in my heart

I hope we will always have happiness.]

*The folks in this song were a couple named Li Xin and Zhang Hong Nian. They were both artists in Beijing in the early 1980's where I was attending the Beijing Teachers College. During winter break I tried to visit the parents of a friend of mine. They lived on a commune outside of Shanghai, but, as so often happened back then, my bus was stopped by security forces and I was not allowed to continue, as we were traveling through a "restricted area." At that time in China, there was only a handful of Americans in the whole country. I didn't have a lot of money to start with, and most of what I did have I spent on things like cigarettes, whiskey, peanut oil, and fabric to give as gifts. Since the police would not let me go to the commune, I foisted my huge bag of gifts on an old man who had met me in in Shanghai and was to be my guide. The Chinese passengers on the bus (mostly peasants and factory workers) harassed and berated the security men for being rude and petty and for not allowing me to see the all important state secrets: like how many water buffaloes they had in their district.

  So, I had to go back to Beijing to a virtually empty campus. The great irony for me is that this rich American was pretty much broke with three weeks to kill (and survive) before school would start again. With no one to hang around with at school and precious little money to spend, I became something akin to a vagabond wanderer meandering the cold streets of Beijng in the winter. I remembered meeting a young a couple named Zhang Hong Nian and Li Xin very briefly earlier in the fall. They had an apartment in a concrete building just north of our campus. I found them, and they took me in with huge open arms. And so I hung out with them and their artist friends for the next couple of weeks.

  It was a pretty cool time in my life: I helped Li Xin's mother—a still fiery follower of Mao Zi Dong— open a hot dog stand; the first one in all of China. She railed against the communists who had lost their spirit. She told me passionate stories about her and her husband and The Long March. She took me to a secret disco she had organized in the warehouse district where a huge crowd was waiting for me (who would much rather be listening to Woody Guthrie) to show them how to dance disco style. I think it was my first experience in performance art. With my new friends, we walked the cold, dusty, and coal smoked streets of Beijing, eating yams cooked over fires in barrels and haggling for scarce chicken and cabbage. I met Chinese poets and writers and thinkers who somehow managed to survive and smile amidst a completely humorless political system. I sat with Zhang Hong Nian for a complete day as he changed a scene in one of his paintings from farmers with sun baked faces to coal miners loading coal into carts (smiling of course). The party officials who had commissioned the painting thought the sun baked faces implied that the farmer’s lives were too hard.

  I lived enormously because of their friendship. Li Xin had a wisdom and sincerity that remains unmatched by any other in the thirty years since I spent that time in China. She knew—she simply always knew. It was never that she had an opinion about something. She just spoke directly from her heart— softly, humbly, with a smile if it needed to be tempered, or with an icy directness if it was a truth that had to stand.

  I apologize if a native speaker of Chinese hears me singing the chorus of this song. As it was, I had a hard enough time speaking a full sentence much less find a way to make them rhyme. I spent an awesome and inspiring year in China from 1981-82. I went back again in 1989 and spent a good part of the winter in Beijing, but left a couple of months before Tiananmen. Things had changed. I had changed. Li Xin had died from cancer. Zhang Hong Nian moved to New York.

  It was eerie for me as I knew that the whole scene in Tiananmen would end badly. I learned from my artist friends eight years earlier about the tenuous balance between freedom and survival. I knew that the same leaders were still in power, and that they would not flinch in the face of a challenge. But political leaders seldom listen to artists. If they did, it would have ended differently: Li Xin would have found the middle ground and pointed to the truth all around them. Zhong Hong Nian would have painted flowers bursting out of the guns. It might have ended differently.

If any of my old friends from those days find this song let me say: Xiexie nimen—thank you all again.

Making Do

In the lower field

I pulled a carrot

in clothes clean for work,

and suddenly was made glad:

squatting down

in a misty fall rain—

in the brown grasses

softened by death—

I tell Mitzy and Daisy,

the two old labs,

sitting politely,

heads cocked quizzically—

‘We call this making do.’

Listen or Not

I slow down when I see the fog and the breaking morning sun over the Concord River. I feel the wet fields slopping up my old leather boots—boots I haven't laced on for years; boots I used to scrape and oil on many a quiet night in my cabin by the river. I feel a bit foolish now in my tweed jacket, sipping my morning coffee, listening to Imus in the Morning, trying to get to school with enough time to figure out my day, throw together some lesson plans, grade and comment on some papers and re-read the chapters of Huck Finn we will be discussing today in class.

I step on the gas as a car pulls up behind me. I smile and grasp what little I can of the remaining beauty. I am content with a small rush of memories, but today my shoes will remain as dry as my thoughts. I will be there for recess duty; I will tell wild young boys to tuck in their shirts; I will probably drone on about the overuse of adverbs and linking verbs, but I won't ask you to do what I want you to do. I won't open the door and say, "Go! Run to the fields, kneel in the mud and poke the ground; ask yourself questions you've never asked before; listen to no answers but your own; taste the sweetness of the indian cucumber and the tartness of the fiddelhead; call the birds and the trees and the rivers by name, and climb the tallest tree you can find and call for the wind to bring you the news from Acton and Maynard and Monadnock.

Don't be afraid to be lonely and lost; don't be afraid of tomorrow, and never run from yesterday. You are the inescapable you drenched in the beauty of today."

The great dichotomy is that I want you to listen to me, but I'm also afraid that you will.

First Day of School

Up three times last night

her lip still quivers,

her stomach

still hurts.

In the big chair

by the window

I hold her and watch

the high school kids

racing down the street

laying out rubber, squealing

around the corner.

My words hang

as if strung from

a paper mobile

in an empty room:

You'll be fine.

It will be fun.

We love Mrs. McNamara.

I hear sirens

and don't let go easily—

angry at time and idiocy—

amazed I'm alive myself.

I gently stroke

her neatly pleated hair

and wipe her cheeks

and brush the new clothes

she picked herself

shopping with Mama

at Wal-Mart.

I hear the deeper horn

of Maynard's biggest firetruck

and the staccato wail

of the new ambulance

we voted in last year.

We are not comforted by words

but by sound—

by practiced motion

in the liturgy

of a familiar parish.

You'll be fine.

You'll love Mrs. McNamara.

Time held

in abeyance.

Concord Country Club

I think we feel

sorry for each other.

I am singing folk songs

at the Concord Country Club

pool party,

and an old high school

buddy walks in

and puts his sun glasses

calmly into his

neatly pressed pocket.

I smile and nod

and tighten my lips.

He waves back,

nodding and stretching

his Roman chin,

as if pointing
towards something important

across the room.

With practiced tact
we avoid each other,

both of us thankful

this song is so long.

Metamorphoses

It’s something I‘ve hardly ever thought of:

this simple and rattling old diesel

has always gotten me there and then some;

and so at first I think this sputtering

is just some clog, and easily explained:

some bad fuel maybe, from the new Exxon,

or just shortsightedness on maintenance.

I’ve always driven in the red before,

and these have all been straight highway miles —

(Except for that short trip out to Zoar Gap

to catch the last of the late season trout,

surprised to find them still rising, sipping

my high hackled Humpy’s and Coachman’s

from dark pools in glazed and shimmered twilight.)

But that was nothing and of no account.

I drove Tuesday down to the town meeting,

and argued about the new town landfill

and proposed cutbacks in school athletics,

and then to Sears for a fifteen amp fuse.

At any rate there is no way around it.

I can only smile sheepishly, glad

that I’m really not in any hurry.

Still I feel like a fool out flagging trucks,

gesturing for help I can’t give myself,

hoping that my lines don’t need to be bled,

and I would have to spend that time thinking

of some way to explain this empty tank

to someone who probably knows better:

You know I always thought that maybe

something like this could happen to me —

but not now, not yet.

Life Ain’t Hard—

It’s Just a Waterfall

You say: “Hey,”

I’ve seen your handprints on the wall;

you're so damned afraid it’s going to fall;

then you let it go and it didn’t move at all;

and you find life ain’t hard, it’s just a waterfall

You say, “Hey,”

who are you to say that you’re the one

to go telling me just where I’m coming from.

You can have your cake

but don’t frost me ‘til I’m done.

I can’t be fixed and I can’t afford to stall;

because life ain’t hard it’s just a waterfall.

Sometimes it happens we,

we like to play the one-eyed fool,

so we can act like we don’t know what to do—

but it’s a sad-eyed mask

and it’s never really true;

I’ve seen you backstage at the hall,

trembling before the curtain call,

and you know life ain’t hard; it’s just a waterfall.

and you feel it how

it’s coming at you now

and you feel it how

it’s all around you now—

and you’re loving and you’re feeling

maybe mixed up

maybe stealing

a little time

I’m just amazed

that somehow we keep dealing...

You and me we spin, we drift

we're daring to be free:

in a mirrored calm time echoes

like a sneeze—

just when you think it’s all a dream:

everything you are has already been,

just when you think you’ve seen it all

a boiling wind comes screaming in a squall

and you say life ain’t hard,

it’s just a waterfall—

yeah, life ain’t hard; it’s just a waterfall—

life ain’t hard; it’s just a waterfall.

Redemption

Finally, the tall green pines standing sentinel around this cold and black New Hampshire pond are framed in a sky of blue. After a month of steady rains, foggy nights, and misty days, I am reborn into a newly created world—a world that finally answered my prayers: no more trying to find that elusive spot under the camper awning that doesn’t seem to leak; no more running across the wet field dragging Tommy bouncing and laughing like a half-inflated beach toy towards a smokey campfire: and (almost regrettably) no more endless scrabble, card games, monopoly, and shallow books. This fresh blue morning barks out the possibilities of the day: Here is my rope-swing. Here are my trails. There lie my waters….

The window is small and the day is large. I shouldn’t even be here teasing words from an empty page when I should be embracing the possibilities of today. As Thoreau said: My life is the poem I should have writ/ But, I could not both live and utter it. The ignorant and lazy part of us might want to rally around Thoreau’s sentiment and say, “Amen to that,” but we would miss the irony and wistfulness of our collective predicament: like kids balancing on a plank set on a log, we scramble back and forth to find that sweet spot on the plank, that place of perfect balance between the forces of yin and yang—but, if we find that spot, we allow ourselves only a few moments of self-indulgent awe before searching for a more elusive and demanding challenge. To live fully, we must be bored quickly by the easy and mundane. We have to set a larger plank across a bigger log. There is no legal limit to how many balls a juggler can have in the air. We are only captive to gravity and the sun ticking its way towards the horizon. 

I need this blue sky to let me see the horizon and the infinite juxtapositions between the earth and sky. I need to be reminded that my page will always be empty if I don’t embrace the day that comes before it. I need to rush headlong into the blinding light. I need to fall and get up time and time again with a contagious and courageous rhythm, and I need to remember to spend my day and not simply save it, as if I could redeem it tomorrow.

My life and my words are my final redemption, rushed and woven imperfectly into the rags I wear.

Waiting

It’s not like a poem

to come curl by my feet

on this morning too beautiful

to describe,

though I am looking

and listening

and waiting:

A rooster crows

above the low hum

of morning traffic;

the trash truck

spills air from brakes

and rattles empties into bins;

my neighbor hammers

his endless projects

with meticulous efficiency,

so I try to do the same:

Slowly sipping coffee

from an old mug

with a broken handle,

I cast a trusted lure

into a familiar hole

and pull these few drops

of dark, still waters

into my boat.

In the Bog

There is a humility in the bog

forcing an acceptance

of things close by.

In the tall

grass by the river

there is no vantage point —

no dry place to check

realities. My meditations:

the placing of my feet

and the black snake startled.

Ghetto of Your Eye

I wrote this song back in the winter of 1989 in the dining car of a steam driven train, somewhere along the Trans-Siberian railway, after meeting a group of Russian soldiers fresh from battle in Afghanistan—that poor country that has been a battleground for way too long.

We stare together hours
at the snow whipped Russian plain—
rolling in the ghetto of your eye.
We share a quart of vodka
and some cold meat on the train—
you know too much to even wonder why;
I see it in the ghetto of your eye.

He turns to me and asks
if I’ll play a song about our war.
I know the war,
no need to tell me more—
asking with the ghetto of your eye.
So I play the most of Sam Stone,
in words he cannot understand;
still the tears fall as from a man—
falling from the ghetto of your eye.

I pass to him my guitar:‘Man, I know you’ll play a song;
something where nobody plays along—
no, nobody play along.’
His friends they gather ‘round
and put their arms around
the shoulders of the soldiers of the war,
their cold and crazy mountain war.

His song is barely spoken;
it’s more a whisper in the night:
whistles blow, trains pass each other by—
riding in the ghetto of your eye.
And Pasha, the young soldier,
whose strange and childish smile,
breaks down wailing like a child:
He tears his shirt; the shrapnel is all gone:
“Pasha, boy, the shrapnel it’s all gone—
Pasha boy, the shrapnel is all gone.”

Drunk to hell I leave,
and then I lay awake all night
waiting for the sunrise on the plain—
cold and snow-whipped Russian plain.
Songs of love and brotherhood
blow like rags of empty wind—
blowing through the ghetto of my eye;
building the ghetto of my eye;
staring from the ghetto.

The Concord Town Dump

When I was a kid it was the dump. 

Every Saturday morning my father and I would pile a week’s worth of trash into the back of our Plymouth Fury station wagon and head the to the Concord town dump. Back then the dump was a place of perpetually burning fires and massive heaps of discarded metal: bed-frames, lawn mowers, refrigerators and two centuries worth of bicycles. They would only haul the pile away when it reached mammoth proportions, when they'd lift the tangled webs of metal with a crane that looked to have crawled out of Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. The crane had a massive magnet that somehow shut itself off and dropped the whole load into the truck with a deafening and fatalistic screech, though I could never figure out how that magnet shut off—much to the chagrin of my crew cut engineer father—something to do with a solenoid, I recall. I'd sit on the bumper and guide him as he backed up to the hottest fire. I'd then start casting everything in to the pit—I mean everything, whether it could burn or not.

My father would leave me to my primal sport and go talk to the other fathers (and very rarely, mothers) who were always gathered around talking: politics, the war, cars, sports, or just handing out schedules and town meeting agendas. As they talked about everything under the sun, I'd find some classmate (there was always a neighbor or classmate at the dump) and we'd heave hair spray, spray paint and empty almost turpentine cans into the fire just to watch them explode. Occasionally, after a really good explosion, someone would scream at us miscreants, but we'd just nonchalantly holler back, "Sorry, didn't know it was in there," and the adults would go back to their talking, and we'd go back to our heaving and blowing up of things. I sometimes wonder how anything gets resolved in Concord now that they no longer have a dump. I wonder where everybody goes where they can talk on an equal footing with their neighbor. We all need a place to meet and speak and converse in brave and honest dialogues, no matter what the venture, time or place—and so it is with our writing community in class: We've got to get out of our metaphorical cars and say, "How you do?" to our neighbors, even if we don't know them from a hole in the wall.

So, I like to think of our class writing communities as the Concord Town Dump because it is good to have a place where everybody can gather and get the news from a common place. Words matter, and in the end it is through our words and actions that we will be remembered. We are all an equal cog in a wheel of writers, and without your blog there would be one less of “each other's” blogs, and so our community of writers would be diminished by an infinite degree—the degree of your potential.

You will be measured and remembered by the words you leave behind. Words are remembered because they are memorable, not simply by virtue of being spoken or written down. A good writer strives to craft writing that is memorable for the reader, and a good writer will do so in the same way that a cook tries to make a meal that his or her guests will remember fondly—a meal that will make them want to come back again and again. We will go to that restaurant as often as we can, and we will read every book that writer publishes—and we’ll go to the best blogs in our community time and time again to see what the writer—hopefully you—has produced today.

There is another small scale (and often frustrating) irony that comes into play: the best writers are rarely the most widely read or popular writers. Henry David Thoreau's books were scarcely read by his contemporaries in his day. He spent four or five hours every day writing in his journals and crafting his now acknowledged masterpieces of literature, with only a handful of people ever laying eyes on his lifetime of labor.

But Thoreau continued to write because he believed in the value of what he was writing—and you need to believe in what you are writing, not because of what he or she or me says about your writing, but because you believe in what you write; because you believe that writing is important and necessary and needed; and because you've felt (or will soon feel) the power, majesty and mystery of good writing, and learning to write well is a mountain you are willing to climb. From that mountaintop you will let the world see what you see and feel what you feel, and you will be a part of the great cycle of searching for meaning that keeps us human. You are much more than a kid wanting to be a better writer; you are the beginning of your greatest potential.

Keep writing. It always pays off.

Is this the poem that needs

to be sung?

Is this the poem that needs to be sung,

and could catch you raptured in a flytrap’s deception

without considering the predicament?

I am not ready for this. I hope you know that.

A thousand times I shout the woods around my cabin:

the trees that lean and my attraction to happenstance.

At times I miss the howling and am consoled

by the coyotes who tear

both carrion and garbage, circling in reticent packs,

yelping a strange fervor for survival.

I ran over to my neighbor’s farm

when he shot a young male,

and we drank beer and poked at it saying:

“skinny little bastard” a number of times.

'It could have been me,' I said:

crawling with a curved back

under your strung wire

testing the line between us.'

He shot it using a thirty aught six with a light scope,

emphasizing the gun over himself,

and I wondered if, at least, that was good.

We laugh and accept each other

in the most peripheral of ways.

Do you?

A poem I guess never needs.

It is difficult to approach complexity,

most of the time only seeing what it does,

and what we calmly point to as truth

is just a weariness with fraud.

Rooted from tendrils and runners

we recall a greater fertility,

and crowd each other with weakened fruit,

becoming an untilled ground of cousins

tangled in feral heroics.

Not necessarily vague;

I’m just haltingly convinced of something,

and being a qualm, it is with myself —

There is really very little I know about you.

Things just get a little weird sometimes

going through fewer and fewer transitions,

knowing I'm not a coydog.

Supermoon

Last night the August supermoon

reminded me of the fickleness

of time and how

substance becomes shadow

and memories begin

to etch themselves

immutably

into the hardness

of what is

already lost

The Dying of the Light

There’s an old man in the corner

Drinking three shots with his beer,

And he’s talking to his buddy,

But there’s no one even there.

While George here’s nearly crying,

Christ, he’s turning forty four—

It’s been a wasted life, and it ain’t alright,

There’s more behind me than before.

Then he raises a glass

To a world gone past

And he toasts what he could have been—

“I’d be willing to bet

She wouldn’t have left,

If I could do it all again.

“I swore I had the handle.

I had the throttle in my hand.

Now I look back in the mirror

At a blurred and desperate man.

I could have bitten off the matter.

I could have squeezed it in a ball,

And rolled it at the question—

But, that’s not what I mean at all

There’s nothing to mean,

So here’s to dreams;

I’ll just sleepwalk out of sight;

And I’ll never let on

I know that I’m gone—

The King of the beggared night.”

But, it’s more than losing women, John,

And it’s more than you or me.

And like it or not I’m all I’ve got

And I’ve screwed eternity

I’ve slipped away from years of days

And I don’t know where to turn;

I kept the fire inside me;

Now there’s nothing left to burn

This much I know

There’s nowhere to go,

So here’s where I’m going to stay—

Another poet who fell

To a comfortable hell

With nothing new to say

“But, if you’re right

And it’s black or white,

And you’re either up or down.

Then the deck is stacked;

There’s no turning back,

And you’re stuck for another round.

Aye, that’s the rub, take off your gloves,

And take one shot at the night—

And rage against,

And rage against,

The dying of the light

Aye, that’s the rub, take off your gloves,

And take one shot at the night—

And rage against,

And rage against,

The dying of the light.

And rage against,

And rage against,

The dying of the light.

Mum

I ran into an old friend one day after visiting my mom, who was entering what we all knew were her last days or weeks. Struggling for words to express his sympathy for both myself and my mom’s condition, he said, “Mary is not the mother you knew.” I guess in a way, none of us are ever that person whom we knew. Every day is a new contract with a life that simply—and often painfully and poignantly—comes with new terms and conditions that we have no choice but to accept and embrace with dignity, grace, and wisdom. No matter what life threw at mom, she accepted the terms put before her; and the world—and especially our world—was always a better, more loving, and infinitely richer place because of her; and though at the end she was not the person we remembered, she was always the mother we had, and she somehow managed to make everyone around her feel “mothered” right up until the very end.

She hated whenever I called her “Ma,” but, still, she was always “Ma Fitz” to anyone whose own mother was displaced by time, fate or distance. Even the toughest kids in town knew that as soon as any one of them placed a foot on Fitz territory, the rules of Ma Fitz were all that mattered. But, along with those rules came a woman who accepted anyone, anytime into a house already crammed with kids. We learned early and often that it is not the size of the house that matters, but rather, the size of the door—and like loading a dishwasher—there’s always room for one more.

On a Sunday night, some months ago, I walked into my mother’s room at Concord Park, and without thinking, I went straight to the refrigerator. It’s the same mechanical motion I’ve made every day that I’ve walked into her kitchen since I was a little kid—no matter where she lived. I didn’t even know what it was I was looking for, but I knew that mom had to have something in there for me.

Maybe I am hungry to know that Ma will still feed me. The refrigerator from my childhood—bursting with unending trips to Stop and Shop, Triple A, and  Star Market is now a small countertop square in the corner of an uncluttered kitchenette. I open it and stare at the small bottle of ginger-ale, the pint of milk, the dainty plate of cookies and the half a sandwich, and drift back into the memories that persist and gnaw and flow out of that small space.

I still expect to see gobs of grapes, oranges, and apples; chocolate pudding, leftover tuna casseroles and Shepard’s pie, Appian way pizza, kool-aid, custard, baloney; and eggs: pickled, deviled, scrambled, and boiled; and potatoes: fried, mashed, hashed and rehashed in the unending evolution of necessity. But sometimes, when times were harder (times that were never actually mentioned but were full of green stamps and coupons) mom made potato buds: dry flakes with carnation instant milk and two tablespoons of butter, mixed into a pudding-like potato that was a perfect place to hide the peas, beets, boiled onions, liver, cod and other scourges of an Irish Catholic childhood; food that kept us at the table long after dinner, stubbornly poking and dabbing the edges with tears and a fork until someone—and rarely mum—relented in their stubbornness. And when we were really young and the milkman came everyday, we pulled out the whole milk with cream tops in glass bottles with paper caps; EJ, our almost epic father,  would paw the top shut and shake the heavy cream back into the milk itself, exhorting us to imitate his practiced perfection—which none of us could do—and someone always spilled the milk on the cracked formica table and vinyl chairs, and he always screamed, “Every night! Somebody has to spill the milk every single night!”

And then after the mopping rags, dinner resumed in the chaotic recollections of the day; fights about whose night it was to do the dishes and who didn’t mow around the trees, who got seconds last night, and who got a C in penmanship, and who shouldn’t get two hydrox cookies for dessert because they weren’t smart enough to hide their peas in the potato buds!

And we sat in the same seats: I had little sister Annie on my right, always holding on to her waitress pad from Friendliest that she used to take our drink orders and would nod her head and say “thank you very much” and move on to the next of us; and little brother Tommy on my left who we could always get to laugh (and eventually spill his milk) even when he had no clue why he was laughing; and my big sisters staring across from me: Eileen, with her studious perfection and black and white perception of right and wrong, who for some reason Mum put in charge of making sure my bed was made and my room was clean—and who fined me a quarter when it wasn’t, but still I took her to Russo’s on my birthday when I could only bring my best friend; Mary Ellen with her CCHS sweatshirts and unending commentary on everything good, bad, cute or not under the sun—a gift she keeps to this day, and who came to every game I ever played and made the scrapbooks I would never make; and Patty, so old I hardly knew her, until she died so young that I can’t forget her….

And in the overstuffed kitchen, dad’s back was crunched almost against the basement door, and mom was pressed against the dining room wall—the room with the walnut table and eight matching chairs that we never seemed to use—like a museum stuffed with bone china and silverware that we polished every Christmas, bought, I’m sure with the green stamps and coupons.  We could live without the dining room; but we lived and grew in the kitchen. We gathered in that kitchen everyday like chattering birds drawn to a stubbled and time-worn field—and out of that space we were reborn each day.

Every morning mom poured the Wheaties, boiled the oatmeal and cut the grapefruit while we listened to Joe Green in the BZ copter mumbling unintelligible warnings about tie-ups at the Alewife circle and sang along to “Watch me wallabies feed, mates, watch me wallabies feed.” Dad would grab his briefcase and we’d all try to be the first one to scream “Bye dad!” in a cacophony of competition, and, as if on cue, mom would sneak behind me and hold my head while I jerked convulsively, and she’d rub a warm wet cloth across my face and straighten my clip on tie and try to force down my cowlick and pick at my ears until I was fit to be presented to Sister Jean Beatrice—and, by some sort of convoluted math, to God himself.  And then she’d sit in her chair, quietly, and write her own mother a letter.

Marion Fahey, 84 John St. Dalton MA. Every single day she’d write her mother a letter.

One of us could get the letter paper; and one of us could get the envelope; one of us would get to lick the stamp; one of us could put it on the letter; one of us could carry it to the mailbox, and the last one could lift up the metal flag. I never knew it was a ritual of perfection—a continual journey into the heart of the mystic love of family. You never know, but still, you remember.

Over the past few years, Alzheimer’s has slowly chipped away at the edges of her memory, but never to the point where she lost any of her true self.  One day she’d remind me that it’s my childhood friend Danny Gannon’s birthday, and on the next day she’d ask me who my pretty children are…and like polite grandkids they would dutifully tell her their names once again, except for Tommy:  “You know me Grandma, I’m Tommy!” and who’d crawl on her lap and ask for a kiss—“Not that kind of kiss—a chocolate kiss.” And she’d smile and say, “Of course, I know you. You’re Tommy.”

I’d go to see her and we’d look at ads for cars in the Boston Globe.  She wanted a Toyota. “Your father loved his Toyota.” I smile to her, “That’s because Toyotas were cheap, and dad loved cheap.” It didn’t matter that she would never drive again. It didn’t matter that we would have the same conversation the next day. It didn’t matter that soon she might slip into a cloud of unknowing. It only mattered that she was there and in the magic and mysterious majesty of memory, and she will always be here.

We all remember mom, Mary, Mrs Fitz, and Ma Fitz in our own ways, and I know all of you remember her for what she did “for” you. Maybe she knit you a sweater, or sewed a first communion dress for you, or showed you how to quilt or bake or fry or can, or freeze. Maybe she made you dinner, washed your clothes, gave you a room for a few days, weeks, or months or a place to come on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, or any common night when you were hungry for love and acceptance. Maybe she played bridge with you, or took you to White’s Pond, Stinson Lake, Tenney, Waterville or Cannon, or took you to dinner at Russo’s, Friendlies or Jimmies, or drove one or two or three hundred miles to be with you on a special day—or on any given day—when life was too special to go uncelebrated or too crushing to be alone. Maybe she taught you how to be a mother, a friend, a wife, or simply a good person. Maybe she let you marry one of her children and then loved you more than her own kids. Maybe she taught you how to never yell, but just give you that look. (Only Patty seemed to have mastered that look…The rest of us find it easier to yell.) It is easier to remember Mrs. Fitz than to be like Mrs. Fitz.

Sometimes God takes one to touch and teach many. Today is that day. God has blessed us by putting mum into our lives, and though our memories grow from different soils in different gardens, we live today through a shared memory.

Nurture those memories. Hold them. Cherish them.

Thanks. Mum always loved a party.

After Eighteen Years

At midnight I hear the cuckoo clock chiming

from it’s perch in a cluttered kitchen

locked in cadence with the tower bell

gonging this old mill town at midnight

to a deeper sleep,

like a call to prayer

reminding me that this new day,

starting in the dark of a hallowed night,

is more than just an ordinary day:

blessed by memories

stirring in palpable realness—

your soft breathing beside me

mixing with crickets and peepers

calling out into the darkness,

searching for a dream

fit to be called a true marriage—

our gift constantly opening,

revealing a mystery and a majesty

larger than the box itself—

stunning in the simplicity

of renewed, remembered,

and resplendent love.

Weeds

Somewhere locked

in this choke of weeds,

spread like a mangy carpet,

is the hardened vine

of Pipo’s Concord Grape

he planted in an eager spring

three years ago.

Gasping for air and sun and water

perhaps it has found some way

to hide from my flailing hoe

and the bitterness of my neglect.

Maybe it has buried itself

below the transient roots

of witch grass, sow thistle,

and cockleburr

and is simply waiting

for another spring

to burst forth

from fresher ground.

Give a Damn

This is my first year of teaching English, and already a horizon of discontent is looming. In another place I would probably need a bodyguard. Today, I not only assigned my eighth grade class the first five chapters—37 pages—in some book called A Guide To Writing Essays, but I also told these students the same thing I told their parents: that nothing is more important than the ability to write a good essay; that essay writing is a skill that will save them time and again in this great adventure called life. I then went on about how educational, fun, and rewarding it would be. I teased them with tales of how they would discover huge deposits of original thought and creative speculations—rough stones that they would craft into a wonderful creation called The Essay. They were writers, each and every one of them, and I would prove it to them. I think some of them believed me—even I believed me! I’m sure some of them saw through my pontifications and secretly wished to be placed in another section. Their parents were, I’m sure, aghast at my naivete, but they simply looked at me with stoic resignation, accepting the fate of their son to be the proving ground for an old shop teacher run amok in a classroom.

But, here I am now, two months into my new career, and I hate teaching essays. It’s tough to admit, but I despise the core responsibility of my job—teaching this venerated form of writing. I can’t help but think we’ve taken an essentially organic miracle called the mind and decided to treat it like an erector set—a series of blocks and connectors which, if put together properly, sometimes creates something that resembles something. That “something” is occasionally a remarkable piece of writing. Like once or twice a semester.

I am not alone in my fraud, although I feel somewhat lonely fessing up and questioning this sacred truth. We tell our students that the ability to write a good essay is indispensable. We warn them of apocalyptic days ahead when the effective and formulaic writing of essays will be the final arbiter of their scholastic abilities. We extrapolate from larger than life stories that a single well-written essay will get them into Harvard, help them find that certain job, elect their candidate, even find their mate! Persuasive, narrative, critical, expository, analytical, reflective—it is the essay “form” that marries itself to almost any situation. It is the Holy Grail—the top end model of the English curriculum in almost every school in the country. It has pushed the snarling beast of grammar and syntax into the corner where it belongs. If poetry is not completely banished, it has become, at most, a quaint holiday in the Berkshires—a pleasant place to spend one or two days away from the rigor of a real curriculum. Even the best of literature is laid out on the table, awaiting the essay’s sharp, incisive and generally misguided probes. A well-written essay, we are told, is the genius of insight weathered into granite. It will outlive you and your children, and many generations after them. If so, why have I never heard of a single great writer who proclaims, or proclaimed themselves, to be an essay writer? Why?—because it’s like saying you cook awesome hot dogs. Or you’ve never been outside Rhode Island.

Is there something weird in me? Am I missing something? Perhaps I’m a bad teacher, or lazy, or misled, but, this “essay writing” doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I’ve tried. I’m still trying. (I am, in fact, writing this—whatever this is.) I’m am side by side in the trenches with my students. I see them tense up when I simply utter the words “thesis statement.” When I follow up that tired command by preaching the virtues and efficacy of outlining headers and adding supporting facts a bitter teaching reality settles in—like an unwanted guest—they notice, but they don’t really care. They don’t find it slightly interesting. The majority of the students drift slowly away. A few are completely shut down. The grade grubbers are in a purgatory between obligation and exasperation. The smart ones are making mental notes that they will never be a teacher like me. The hibernating perk up when they hear the word “conclusion,” but they soon discover that it’s only a cruel hoax, an excuse to have them start back at the beginning—and the meek, all of us, surrender to the vicious cycle of introduction, body, and ending. The bookshelves are stacked with the detritus of years of literary massacres. Students and teachers eye each other like creatures that eat their own. Only the threat of vocabulary keeps them at their desks.

You can’t be a teacher and believe in fate. There has to be a belief in the transformative power of the moment. The French teacher at our school told me that the word “essay” is derived from the French verb essaei, which means “to try.” I like that. There is something in those words that awakens a spirit of hope and freedom in me. I can try. I’ll try valiantly. I’ll try to show you that I give a damn about what I say and think and write. I’ll try to show you that I love the sounds of words and the nuance of sentences. I love that words are woven into a magician’s tale. I love that every gaggle of words is essentially a story. I love that I am moved to tears by a good book or an old poem. Love! If that is not true understanding, then something is terribly awry. Here! Here are my tears.

What more can you possibly need? No, damn you and damn me; I don’t need your essays—I need you to essai; I need the miracle of your mind to give itself to the miracle of language. I need you to be an unwilling heir to tradition: I need you to get rid of the erector set; I need you to get rid of the artifice that stands between you and your understanding. I need you to answer whatever question I throw at you with that greatest gift of our creation—words.

We know beauty when we see it. We measure the power of words by the feelings they evoke. We measure their clarity and freshness as we would a mountain stream. We are led on small and great journeys by storytellers. (What writer is not a storyteller?) We are carried to those deeper wells, and from those unplumbed depths we invoke the source of all courageous originality and our common humanity.

We can learn ourselves, if we essai—if we try. To try is to care. In the end, you just have to give a damn.

Hostel

We sit in quiet circles

and talk with coffee butt

endlessness stumbling

on the unfamiliar humbled

by inexperience.

Outside the constant

whine of motorscooters

beating the lights avoiding

each other.

I suddenly think of Willie

walking his Maine woods;

30/30 crotched:

stamping a butt —

rustle of deer

whir of partridge

~Taipei, Taiwan

Why Read The Odyssey?

Think hard, reach down deep in your heart and soul
for a way to kill these suitors in your house,

either by stealth or open combat.
You must not cling to your boyhood any longer—
It's time you were a man.
[Book 1, Lines 338—342, The Odyssey]

Read well; read deeply, and read often. Three short phrases sum up the greater part of what is basic to an understanding of a complex and evolving world. To read well you need to read closely, to think imaginatively and to allow yourself to be challenged intellectually, emotionally, culturally, and politically. To read deeply is to search for meanings, morals and messages within the images and actions within a text . It forces you to decipher the metaphors that cling to the twists and turns of plots, or it prods you to understand the spartan logic of a philosopher's mind as he or she lays out a reasoned reflection on the conundrums and constants of life. To read often and well is to place reading before the lesser pursuits of the day. Second only to the feeding and sheltering of the body is the feeding and nurturing of the mind—and there is no greater food than a piece of great literature!

Not all of you have the courage to read a good book, and that is a travesty only to yourself. Some of you have already blocked the gates to the greater reservoirs of your mind. How can I teach you anything? How can I expect you to be moved when you are anchored in your safe and shallow harbor? If you are not touched by a book, then don't touch it—don't wound eternity with an idle mind. "But," you say, with exasperation; "you give us these books; you force us to read them. How can we be touched when we are force-fed what to read? How can there be romance when there is no passion? What teenager does not want to rebel against the directives and edicts of a misguided teacher?"

Therein lies the rub: "Misguided!" What if the teacher is not misguided? What if, on the contrary, he or she is very well guided by life, instinct, and vocation? How could you then, not listen? Why wouldn't you listen if there was some measure of hope that this teacher could guide you to a greater understanding of life than you ever dreamed possible. I know that at a certain point in my life I let Henry David Thoreau be my teacher, and only then did I realize that it was cynicism and laziness that kept me from accessing the opportunities created by reading the great works of literature, and so I began a thirty-two year adventure of reading—a journey where I still feel that I am barely out of the harbor! The first book was The Odyssey and I'm damn sure it will be the last—if I have any control over it. Life is too precious to chatter and blather with fools and strangers. If you are unwilling to face the challenges of The Odyssey, go back to your face book page and gossip with the idle minds of your generation—and mine, for that matter.

If you are afraid to become a man, then don't become one.

The Scent of Aqua Velva

I wish you could be here Saturday

So I could remember you

impatient for things to begin,

shaking your head at some knucklehead

who forgot some something or other.

I wish I could see your tears

spring in joy, and pride, and love

from the depths

of a hard-fought life

given to family and friends.

But I really just wish you were here.

Denise came to your grave yesterday

and wrote a beautiful letter

to you while

sitting on this simple slab

placed among the common headstones

of neighbors, shopkeepers,

teachers and fireman

and only occasionally someone

we don’t know—

all of them
born into a time

when this town

had a place and a way

for everybody.

You never tried to be different;

you just were.

I’m glad Denise comes to you

and ties to know

the man she’s never met.

She noticed the new flowers

Mum, or Patty, or Eileen,

or Mary Ellen, or Annie—

or maybe even Tommy

must have planted—

the fresh watering,

a silent prayer,

the clinging of life and tradition

above your final grave.

The flowers seem so ironic

your practical bent would have us

planting peas or beans,

squash or corn—

or nothing.

We should just do

what you would do

in our oversized yard:

drive to Vanderhoofs

for a sack of lime and fertilizer,

spread it neatly around

the untamed grass

and call it done—

and simply accept the inevitable

witchgrass and dandelions—

like us:

the weed flowers

that bloomed and spread

in the imprint of your footsteps—

Damn. I really do miss you.

I am lost in the directness of your memory—

the spaded and turned topsoil

of remembrance

dug deeply

into some rift in my heart.

Loved by so many

your life needs no labor

to stir to life.

In the simplicity of loss
and the limitations

of words

I just wish you were here.

Your voice—never hushed,

abashed or conflicted—

carries over this congregation.

The scent of Aqua Velva,

Old Spice, and Brylcream mixes

into this awesome moment—

this day,

this goddamn power

of memory.

Once Burned, Twice Shy

This is perhaps the biggest thunderstorm that I haven’t been in. The lightning is flashing and bolting to the ground, and the thunder is booming in every direction—ough it is all five miles away. Here there is no wind or rain. The sky is bright directly overhead, but the tall pines on the far side of the field are backdropped in roiled dark clouds.

Strange. There is a shift in the clouds. They are coming towards us now from the northeast….

I had to run from under the comfortable shelter under the awning of our RV and take some “shelter from the storm” as a huge gust of wind and pelting rain came at us from this strange direction. Just as suddenly, it shifted again and renewed its course to the southwest leaving me perplexed and dampened.

Writers often do the same thing with their writing. They build up a storm of unimagined intensity and create a looming confrontation between the opposing forces whom have been long at battle in their story line. Readers sense the impending conflict that will finally resolve the richly thickened plot; the wind whips, lightning flashes, thunder crashes and...

The storm takes a new direction—blows all hell and fury in another direction—and then returns to its insidious and relentless march to the sea (in New England, all thunderstorms march to the sea!) but the reader is no longer in the path of the storm; they are stranded like a desperate mariner on a now lonely shore watching the clouds boil away over the horizon. The writer, still caught up in his or her storm, assumes the reader is still with them anticipating the coming climax, but they are not. They’re more like me; they are left wondering why the storm took that irrational jog to the southeast, because that is the rational response to mystery—to ask why. There is no reason—aside from perhaps a schoolmasters admonitions—at require us to wade through the muck of tortured writing.

Most of us are rational and surprisingly intuitive, and a good writer needs to recognize and respect that reality. Good readers are like oft jilted lovers wary of another disappointing affair. They know when to put a book aside and find another writer, one who won’t let them down. They love the reward of a well-written story, an inspiring essay, or a compelling narrative; they love writers who consistently provide that reward, and they return to those writers over and again with their time, attention, and money.

A good writer is not in love with his or her own writing. They are in love with the process of writing well, regardless and because of their chosen genre! I will read and re-read Patrick O’Brien’s endless repertoire of naval sea novels, not because O’Brien’s novels are masterpieces of literature, but because he consistently provides a rewarding reading experience for “me” as someone who loves stories of naval battles! O’Brien found his niche, and he found his audience. It is an audience that he respected and worked tirelessly to please before passing away (sadly for his devoted audience eager for more novels) at a ripe old age. Though O’Brien will never be placed among the pantheon of “great” writers, what he aspired to do, he did well, and certainly well enough for me.

Thoreau once said, “Measure a man, not by what he is, but by what he aspires to be.” My readers are, by and large, writers who aspire to be better writers. In the greater scheme of things, I can only give you bits and pieces out of my own insights, experiences, and aspirations. I am only the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. You will only reach the moon through your own labors.

Dealing with Ether

Trying to only see

what is in front of me

my eyes are continually drawn

away from this page

and the work left to be done—

my labored words etched

and scratched away

like fleeting mosaics

in dry sand.

I need a windowless cell

to work the alchemy

that shapes the palpable

from the ether of thought.

It is hard to imagine

any poem more important

than the massive bolts of ash

dry and brittled

in an overgrown field

waiting to be split and stacked

into a perfection of form

and preparedness.

15 Marlboro Street

Another night of playing,

And I’m driving home alone;

I make the right at Verrill farm:

Two miles and I’m home.

I pull into the driveway

To the red cape on the right,

But the porch swing’s the only thing

That waits for me tonight.

You won’t be sleeping on the couch

With the phone still in your hand;

No half-sipped Lipton iced tea

And burnt popcorn on the stand.

Only the old stuffed chair

In the corner of the room,

Where I close my eyes and count the time

To an ancient lonely tune:

I need you here beside me

Like the winter needs the spring

Like the flower needs the seed

To give life to everything

Like the breath we share between us

In the whispers of the night

Like the love that flows unending

When we hold each other tight.

This house, it speaks a language

From every hinge on every door;

And we know the sound of every kid

By how they run across the floor;

We know the sound of every round

Of every battle lost and won;

But I need you here to let you hear

The unsaid and undone.

You know, I tried to sleep alone last night

But I was kept up by the moon

Making shadows and shapes

That danced around the room;

I tried to hold you tighter

Than I ever held before,

But I woke and found, scattered ‘round,

The pillows on the floor.

So, I’ll leave the doors all open

In case you sneak back on the moon

And find the red cape on the right:

And me waiting in the room;

Or I’ll catch you in the windows

Filled with wispy thread;

And pull you gently down

Onto our downy bed.

And I’ll lose this empty loneliness

In the beauty of your eyes,

Tangled in the love

And sleeping by your side—

And I’ll whisper softly to you

And you’ll know that it’s for real,

And you’ll know that you are everything

Of every thing I feel.

I need you here beside me

Like the winter needs the spring

Like the flower needs the seed

To give life to everything

Like the breath we share between us

In the whispers of the night

Like the love that flows unending

When we hold each other tight.

The Fallacy of Philanthropy

I just spent a long day deconstructing our backyard. EJ sold his alpacas, and so our fenced in pasture and barn can now return to its suburban origins as a shed and a yard. The good fence posts and wire we saved to give to another kid’s dreams or another man or woman’s backyard farm. Some friends stopped by and said I could probably get “good money” for those posts and wire, but I gather I’d get a better bargain giving them away and practice a poor man’s philanthropy. Maybe someone will etch my name in a cedar fencepost like they might a school lobby or a hospital wing, and someday those posts will get thrown in some early spring fire and a warm soul might think, “Who the hell is John Fitz?” and maybe someone will remember the backyard farmer in Maynard who gave away a few fence posts and a couple hundred feet of livestock fencing.

I guess you go to give what you got and not make a big deal of it. The other day I drove up to New Hampshire to move our old bus out of the camp. I didn’t quite trust it to make the 100 mile trip back home, so I planned to store it at a campground up the road and deal with it in the spring. I wasn’t eager though to pay the three hundred dollar storage fee. As I pulled out of the tote road and on to the main road, a local logger, Pat Hines, stopped and asked me what was up. After I told him, he barely hesitated and said, “Hell, don’t pay three hundred. Park it at my place and spend the three hundred a better way.” So I eased the 1978 Wanderlodge into his side yard, which was about thirty seconds down the road. He smiled and said, “Looks good to me. See you in the spring.”

There is a fallacy surrounding philanthropy. Few people would venture that Pat Hines is a noted philanthropist. We might mistake Pat’s magnanimity as being simply a good deed, kind gesture, or a random act of kindness—but we don't call it philanthropy. It made me wonder at what point in giving is something philanthropic? It made me think of the hoopla surrounding the benefactor of our new school library. I know him well enough to know that I doubt he really cared that his name was going on the new library, but we put on quite a show to show our thankfulness. In my mind, Pat’s gesture was an equal if not greater act of philanthropy because the gift was as spontaneous and real as any I’ve ever seen. His extra space on the side of the yard is really no different than the extra block of stock some financier might own. 

Working in a private school my very living is, in many ways, dependent on the large scale giving of donors to the school, and I do appreciate when the wealthy share their wealth, but there is a part of me that wants the words of the Gospel to ring true in practice and have us not let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.  Hardly a day goes by in school where we are not recognizing some group or individual for their gifts of charity, money, time, or donations as if goodness can or should be measured on such a scale.  

When our son Pipo first came from Haiti, he joined me at a benefit concert at Gaining Ground, a small farm that grows food for the poor. When I explained to him the purpose of the farm, he simply asked, "Why don't they just give the farm to the poor?" and that is the problem: we simply cannot and will not strike at the root of our problems. As along as we love our "stuff," there is going to be great disparity, which requires philanthropy to right the ship of society lest it capsize and sink. In that sense, philanthropy is the antithesis of its intent. It is a means to survival and perpetuation of the status quo.

As often happens, I digress....I started out just wanting to thank Pat for letting me put the bus in his yard for the winter, and I just want to be sure that somehow, in some way, the small gifts of everyday philanthropy can somehow gain an equal rank and an equal praise in a common time and for those “doer’s of good deeds” be recognized as benefactors and philanthropists.   

I barely know Pat Hines, save to wave at him when he’s skidding timber out of his woodlot, but we have mutual friends and I know his kids and that was good enough for him.  

And good enough for me.

Thanks, Pat.

The Last of the Boys

Come on over here

and I’ll buy the next round:

cold beer and some shooters

for the boys on the town;

Darby ain’t drinkin’

so let’s live it up

‘cause he’ll drive us all home

in his company truck

Jesus Christ, Jimmy,

man you say that you're well;

I say we drive into Boston

and stir up some hell;

put a cap on the weekend,

a stitch in the night,

watch the Pats play on Sunday

and the welterweight fight.

That’s all she wrote boys,

there ain’t any more;

that’s why we’re standing here;

that’s what it’s for.

That’s why we all go on working all day

busting our ass for short pay:

~Hey...

Wally there thanks

for the call yesterday;

Yeah, I do need the work

but those people can’t pay;

they're all pie in the sky

with their heads in the clouds

the high-talking yahoos

that fill up this town.

Fill up this glass

one more time there old man;

sneak one for yourself

I know that you can.

Nick man come here;

come on tell me it’s true—

you won the college bowl pool

and the trifecta too.

—Chorus

Rogue what you say,

come on tell us the one

about the dog and the bull

and the ministers son;

you told it to Willy,

who told it to me,

who told the whole team

down the alley last week

Well it’s hard to believe

you’ve been married since June;

It seems just yesterday

we’d go piss at the moon—

piss at the moon

and somehow we’d get by

with a pocket of cash

and a piece of the sky.

—Chorus

It seems kind if strange

the quiet of the room,

everyone had to be

leaving so soon.

It seems kind of strange

they got families at home;

I’m the last of the boys

I’ll have one more alone.

One more rye Howie;

straight up is fine;

I’m okay to drive home,

I’ll just take my time;

keep all the change;

you treated us well;

I’m just trying to figure

if this is heaven or hell.

Heaven or hell

or some pitstop for man,

where we all just pull over

and do what we can;

you do what you can,

and you hope that your right:

I’m the last of the boys

to tie one on tonight.

That’s all she wrote boys,

there ain’t any more;

that’s why we’re standing here;

that’s what it’s for.

That’s why we all go on working all day

busting our ass for short pay:

~Hey...

Jay

Sometimes words pale beside the greatness of a person—especially someone as great, as kind, and as memorable as the man we know as Jay, Sergei, Serg, or Mr. Samoylenko. The strands of his magnanimous life reach into the hearts of all of us—so much so that I fear my own words can only speak to a limited view of the man you know and love so dearly. I grieve as a friend and colleague, and as hollow as I feel, I can only imagine the crushing sense of loss to Seija and Lisa who mourn a father and husband—for it is Lisa and Seija who empowered and graced every action and gesture of Jay's life; and to Amalia and Constantine, who lost a son as real and faithful as any the world has seen; and his stepparents Steve and Karen who embraced Jay into the renewed lives of their families; and to Marina who lost a dear brother, a confidant, and sometimes, I’m sure, a savior; and to his nephews Chris and Allie, and niece, Molly, who remember an uncle would always be there to help and guide them through the steady joys and inexplicable vagaries of life, and to Aunt Irene and cousin Alex and the rest of Jay’s extended family who complete the circle of relatives gathered today to remember and celebrate Jay’s life.

The rest of us are Jay’s friends—a loyal and motley crew of students, teachers, carpenters, tutors, farmhands, academics and anti-academics, bikers, business men and women, store clerks, woodworkers, lumberman, mathematicians, townies and assorted other high and low life characters who were enriched, enlivened, embraced, and accepted for who and what we are (and often were) through the deeply egalitarian nature of Jay’s abiding acceptance of the world, the people, and the community closest to him.

I know that many of us feel robbed by time and fate because we reaped a greater share of Jay’s help and guidance than we have had the time to repay in kind; for though Jay was truly a self made man, he never tried to make his life his own; he made our lives a part of his life, and it is there where all of us—family and friends—share the expansiveness of his love and devotion to always being there when we needed him; and in the simple act of receiving his gift of time, talents, and presence we share a common bond during a hard and uncommon time.

However the news of Jay’s death came to each of you, I’m sure it came hard, unexpected—and beyond comprehension. Out of habit, I tried to put words around what had happened, but for several days everything seemed beyond putting words on a page; instead, I relied upon and leaned upon the shoulders of friends. These words are a mix of starts and stops that I can only hope somehow captures a slice of the fullness of Jay. So many of you know Jay in different, but equally compelling ways. But, I am sure that Jay—the man who spent at least three struggling and laborious hours on each individual advisor letter or recommendation—must be smiling at my own struggles to find and contain the myriad elliptical orbits of his many pursuits and passions and friendships.

Everyday, I have tried to squeeze out some words to give any kind of solace, meaning, or context to what happened to Jay. I answered the million questions from my own kids about the kind and gentle man who won't be by for dinner like he has some many times before—and Pipo (who worships the ground Jay walks on) struggling to add one more thought and make one more connection, exclaims, “Man, now I will never be able to get math!” Sometimes I just sit and can’t think, but I also smile when I remember all the times Jay and I plotted and planned our next twenty years together in the woodshop: half English/half shop—half math/half shop; you show up for practice today/I’ll show up tomorrow—and always figuring out ways to find enough jobs on the side to make enough money to get our kids through school, make tractor payments and house payments and truck payments and unexpected everything payments—and still get to be school teachers in this school we both love, with these students we both love, and with the faculty we “mostly” love—but we’d never, ever, let the system fool us; though it probably did fool Jay without even trying, for though Jay was easily the most brilliant person I knew, he was also a gentle and loving saint who accepted the good and bad, and hardship and heaven, with equal magnanimity. It seemed all the same to him to repair the barn roof on a freezing and windy wintry day then drive 200 miles to be with a sick friend in Vermont as it was to get on his beloved bike and make a quick loop around Concord and back to the farm.

In this way, Jay always did what needed to be done, but he also had his “to do lists”—and to prove it he had a daily planner so filled it looked like the rough draft of Thoreau’s journal. I have to laugh at the sheer audacity of his approach to the number of hours in a given day: Jay did not simply find the time to do things; he seemed to create time out of some primordial substance—some rare element that only he could find and work his magic alchemy: On any given day he would wake early and do whatever chores needed to be done on a farm full of horses; he’d come to school and teach math and shop classes; sneak home at lunch to help Lisa unload some 8000 tons of hay; come back to school and drive his beloved and raucous JV tennis team or cross country team to a faraway school that Star somehow felt didn’t need an airline to reach; he’d then come back to school and make it over to the Lynn’s or the Crowley’s or the Reed’s, or Billings, or Grants, or Antonitis’s or all of them and half of CCHS to tutor in math—and life; then maybe come by our house for a plate of spaghetti and a couple of stories; and then make it to Concord Academy to pick up Seija who would be staying late to study at her school, and finally back home to Lisa and the warmth of the family and farmhouse he loved so dearly.

As diligent as he was about the details of his obligations to, and the respect he had for, community and tradition, he also had his own eccentric slant on things—a slant that illumined an insightful and iconoclastic thoughtfulness about everything life could put in a person’s way. Jay would start so many conversations by resting his chin in his palm, begin nodding slowly and say, “What I can’t figure out is….” But then he would slowly work out a meticulous solution to a particular problem of life with the same ease that he would lead kids through the elegant mathematical formulas scribbled on his whiteboard—and somehow he fooled you into thinking that it was you who figured out the problem, and he just happened to be there; for Jay was a teacher who taught kids, not classes; he was a friend who came to you, not the party, but above all, he was a husband and father whose every motion of the day was meant to help Lisa and Seija, not himself.

And Seija—I don’t need to tell you about the awesomeness of your dad; I can only say to you and show you what I have heard and seen from him. Every day I would make my way over to the shop to teach my fourth grade shop class, and I would plop myself down on the couch in your dad’s office and plead with the crowds of over-eager boys lugging planks of pine and poplar, tape measures and dangerously sharp hand saws to your dad’s office door, and I would plead, “Can’t you just give me my Mr. Samoylenko time?” Because there has always been something soothing and calming about simply hanging out with your dad. Usually I’d start by telling him my latest joke, and he’d always laugh—just because it was a joke, not because he got it, for as I’m sure you’d agree, with his utter lack of guile or deceit, your dad could never tell a joke for the life of him.

And as I sat there, he would rearrange your picture on his desk and weave you into the narrative of his day:

And I have never heard a father tell so many stories about a daughter, or worry about every detail of a daughter’s life, or to put so much faith in a daughter’s ability to amaze, for he not only loved you and adored you, but he admired everything about you—and it was so much more than stubborn fatherly pride; it was an awe of everything you are and everything you have accomplished—and everything you will be. Your dad may be a guiding polestar, but you are his universe—and that will never ever change.

And Lisa—Jay will always be the husband and friend that only you knew in his completeness, and as with all other reports of husbands to their wives I should probably measure my heaping of his praises with other healthy doses of reality, but I know, even more than his love and commitment to you, was his faith in you to get through all the challenges of raising and keeping a family, keeping a farm, and keeping it all together, most especially in this most trying of years. I remember coming in the shop one morning right after your leg was broken in a riding accident, and Jay was shaking his head: “Oh, goodness gracious, [this being the coarsest language Jay would ever use] there is no way Lisa is going to stay in the house and rest her leg the way she should.” Later, after going home to check on you, he came back into the shop shaking his head again and laughing in his understated way: “Lisa was in the barn teaching a lesson.” He said it with such a natural and affectionate pride in your spunk and determination not to be sidelined when there was work to be done or challenges to be met. Working together you built an amazing and beautiful farm, and in the same way you, cultivated, nurtured, and sustained an amazing and beautiful family.

  During the past week and a half, I have had so many friends say, “Though I didn’t know Jay well, he was just so comfortable to be with and talk to and be around.” And, even if you feel like you did not know him well, he knew you. It doesn't matter if he only taught you in one class or coached you in one sport, or stood with you around the horse ring, or built that horse ring with you, or guided you through quadratic equations, Jay knew you—he knew the deep and intricate subtleties of what made you be you. He also had a gift for remembrance and a love for telling stories about life and friends (often some very funny stories about his friends) and so it is an even larger myth that we shouldn't laugh and tell our own stories today—for, more than anybody, Jay would not want somberness to rule over this time together—though neither would he ever want to be the center of attention and have stories told about him that he couldn’t deny, refute or challenge with his laconic and self-deprecating wit, but it is hard for me—and I am sure for you—not to remember this really fun, interesting, and engaging guy who somehow managed to make every day with him a better day for us.

With every story told there are a hundred unspoken. I wish we had the time to tell them all. We will live better and more perfect lives if we remember Jay not simply as an amazing man, but as a parable to guide the actions of our own lives; for out of the tears, the hurt, the anger, the confusion, and utter sense of loss, Jay will always rise as a beacon and inspiration as a good person and good friend who lived a good life for good reasons. Sometimes the world takes one to teach many, and that is too true right now, so I know I will always be a better person because of Jay. How can I not? How can we not?

Jay was a seed planted in our lives, and it is up to us now to bear the fruit of Jay's life into eternity.

Don’t Do It

I was eighteen and designing a production line for making stepladders at Fitchburgh State College—the only college I could afford, and probably the only place that would have me. I remember thinking, ‘Man, this ain’t no life for me.’ I barely had a working idea of what life meant, but I was pretty sure it meant I didn’t have to do something without any meaning or purpose—and I certainly didn't want to spend my life designing a better stepladder.’

But, what did I want to do? Did I have the courage to even make a change in my life? If I had read The Odyssey, I might have known what to do; I might have known that I was on a heroic journey and that my call to adventure was the churning confusion in my gut, and I might have known to look for a helper and an amulet to get me over the threshold—that no quest is real until you realize that you cannot go it alone.

My helper was my English professor. I can't even recall her real name, but she was old and sweet, and so we called her Aunt Bee—and she was sweet enough to ask me to stay after class to meet with her one day early in the fall. (Although I was petrified she was going to have me expelled for charging five dollars to any kid in my dorm to write their English papers for them.)

Instead, she held a paper in her hand that I had written, and a paper in which I actually cared about what I wrote. The day before she had told us to take a walk through the city and then write about the walk. Most of my classmates stayed in the dorm, laughed about how naive Aunt Bee was, and wrote some insipid scrawls that they thought would qualify as an essay—or they tried to get me to write an essay for less than five dollars.

But I took the walk. I wandered through the poorest streets in Fitchburgh; I sat on front steps with little kids and old men; I sat with drunks and dreamers, and I wondered. I wondered if my walk was actually real, or if I was even real, and then wrote some story about a kid who couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming or even which state of mind he wanted to live in. Aunt Bee shook this paper in my face and said bluntly, "You shouldn't be an industrial arts major. This [shaking the paper even closer to my face] is your gift!"

Never once had anyone told me I had a gift of any sort, except perhaps for whittling birds out of scraps of soft pine. I don't think Aunt Bee knew how ready I was for a change—any change. I seemed to take her off guard when I responded, "Okay. So what do I do?”

"Leave this place," she answered.

So I left.

Never had a decision been so easy and so hard at the same time.  It was easy because I knew in my heart that Aunt Bee was right, but it was hard because my parents thought I was throwing my life away—and I was: I threw my old life away and charted a new course into a world of words and literature—a world that I really knew nothing about.

That decision in 1976 is the reason I am writing this to you today. It has been the proverbial long and winding road, but I have never been let down by a book or hobbled by anything I wrote, even though much of what I've written is pretty dumb and forgettable.

There was very little academia in my new journey. I learned to write by writing.  I learned to write better by listening to what people thought and felt about my writing. I joined some writing workshops where each week each person would bring in some poem or story to share with a circle of other would be writers. I learned what worked in my writing and what didn't work—at least to the small universe of my writer’s circle. I never thought I was a good writer, and so I was never really bothered by what people said. I just thought, 'Cool. I guess I should change this….'

Even after a few workshops, I still never thought I was a writer, until I one day a friend introduced me to his friend by saying, "This is Fitz. He's a writer." I protested that I was not a writer, and my friend just said, "Then what the hell else are you?"

"I don't know. An apple picker, I guess," for at the time I was picking apples with a crew of Jamaicans in a New Hampshire orchard.

"At any rate, Fitz is a better writer than he is an apple picker.  That much I'm sure," my friend said, sealing the deal and sealing my fate—a fate which, by and large, has been good to me.

But be careful, for you, too, might become a writer; and once you become a writer, you can't turn back; you can only turn away. Such is the power and allure of writing. If schools really knew what happens when a kid becomes a writer, they would ban the teaching of writing. It's like giving a ten year old the keys to a bad-ass car; it's like pointing across a canyon and screaming, "Jump!" It's like opening the window and pointing in every direction and saying, "This is all you need to know and everything you'll ever try to know."

Writing is unfettered and audacious freedom.

Don't do it.

On What Remains

There is something that always remains

that held this dry boat

through a long hot season,

hauling sweetwater from deep taproot—

gorging the supple mane.

I chase your crazy dance

of one leaf falling—

its final defiant uplifting

before settling, yielding

to the slow current

of the gentle river.

The wind, blowing in from Great Meadows,

is traced in a rippling, catching

the brittle cupping

of your curled topsides,

powering you before the gale,

leaving a wake

that Slocum would be proud of.

I jump at the chance to fall

into familiar language:

‘You’ll never grasp the wind’—

raw feed of sailors—

though you can know what it does:

hold it, spill it,

sometimes just hunker down,

leaving it still

as immutable as desire.

Today it is a simple broad reach

to the Merrimac—but be careful:

the current is wicked at the breakwater;

and there’s no bottom that will hold

around Isle of Shoals.’

It is hard sometimes

to have to always love the wind.

Do you have any idea

what I am saying?

It is as sensible to me as an acorn.

I am the man constantly risking absurdity

chasing you along the banks,

shouting practicalities

and heedful warnings.

Perhaps it could as well be a recipe

for a simple bouillabaisse.

Water is dear to me and I don’t know why—

another traitorous element

that carries you away.

(You see, I need to think it is just

as equally beyond your control.)

I chart a fear within you

that I would swamp you

with one clumsy step;

that we’d be spilled

like burdened fisherman

from a Gloucester dory,

thrashing about in brackish water,

forgetting how well we know

how to swim.

Though I have succeeded well

in the ways of blinding oneself

I am still as expectant

as the starkened oak

waiting out the carrying

of another seasons young.

After it all,

when you are some leagues away,

I’ll sit on the banks,

and with the messiness of a child

I'll fashion the silty clay

into a strange and sympathetic audience;

and I’ll speak to them

in a surprisingly real and honest voice,

and tell them the story

of how the wind and water

conspired to take you away—

and how,

in the wake of everything,

the river recovers itself.

Everything always does.

Though something always remains.

The Busdriver

While we parents talk

about a dog who died,

the schoolbus stops

further up the street than usual.

The kids energized

by the unexpected

run from John and Helen’s mailbox

and make a surprisingly dutiful line

closer to Dell and Dawn’s

towering catalpa.

Backpacks swaying, marching

in mock rhythm,

they squeeze two abreast

up the massive narrow steps

and bump down the aisle

to their usual spots,

then flatten their faces

against the cold windows

and wave to us

in robotic ritual.

“No wonder.” Someone laughs,

‘Sharon is not driving the bus.”

And we laugh and wave

at the new driver

and eye him carefully

and watch in uneasy acquiescence

until he makes

the predictable turn

onto Sudbury Road.

Harry Loon

I never expected

To see you in town,

When I think of your bullshit

About us hanging around—

About being a townie

With no world to overthrow—

Hey, there’s Harry Loon,

Ah, what do you know?

Who called you a bastard?

Don’t you pay it any mind

Because who don’t remember

To forget about the time

We laughed in the alleys

And you told us where to go—

Hey, there’s Harry Loon,

Ah, what do you know?

Sometimes I wonder

About the years and where you’ve been,

And all of your big ideas

And all your big friends,

But now all you tell me

Is that it’s damn friggin’ cold—

Hey, there’s Harry Loon,

Ah, what do you know?

But don’t you go worrying;

You can hang around my place.

I just bought a ski-doo,

Hey, what can I say?

Just like you’re saying:

“It’s damn friggin’ cold—

Hey, there’s Harry Loon,

Ah, what do you know?

Dear Huck

Dear Huck

Is there room on the island? I just got back from four hours of singing in a club. I'm tired and kind of grumpy. I'm not sure why. Maybe it is all the moaning and complaining from my 8th grade class about my weekend assignment, which they say is too much and too tough, but I need a break from everything. You've got it made: you sit around all day, catch catfish and drift logs, and talk with Jim. Hey, I could even deal with the rattlesnakes. Sorry about Jim and the snake. I know you didn't mean for Jim to get bit, but it was still pretty stupid—and mean— though I know you thought it was going to be funny. It's strange how easy it is to screw up. Like with me, I wasn't meaning to get a bunch of my students mad. I really didn't think that taking a walk in the woods and sitting for twenty minutes was a big deal. And, I didn't think reading a good book for an hour was work at all. I actually thought it would be fun and interesting.

I hope I have time to walk for a half an hour this weekend. You probably walk around and sit whenever you want to sit; and you think—I know you can't keep from thinking. You're always thinking. Man, you've got a lot to think about—more than I'll ever have to think about, because your thinking is probably mostly worrying, and Jim's worrying is probably worst of all. If you get caught you'll be whipped by your Pa, but Jim will get whipped and sold down the river.

It makes me feel stupid to worry so much about how mad some of my students are right now. I bet some of them will stay so mad that they won't get anything out of the assignment; they'll just be mad the whole time. I'm sorry if some of them don't seem like they care about you in their letters. They have busier lives than you. Seeing as you have so much time on your hands, maybe you should write them a letter. I would, but I'm afraid they'd tear it up before they read it.

They're really good kids, but I worry sometimes how they'll handle the really tough times in life. I mean, my assignment ain't tough like you got it tough; it'll just take some time—and I don't imagine Jim has had free time in his whole life. I guess where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Sorry for the long ramble. I'm wicked tired. I really don't want to go to the island. I was just saying that. Tell Jim, hi. And be real careful because it ain't so nice here either sometimes.

Good luck. You’ll need it.

Sincerely,

Fitz

Big Sister

When the kids

polish the fireplace mantle

with Pledge and handi-wipes,

they hold a small frame

of Patty and me—

the only picture we have

with just each other.

In silent reverence

they turn it just so—

so I can sit in this chair

and remember the love

that was never

actually spoken
but gestured in every action
in countless days.

And in the same way,

during quiet walks,,

down cracked paths

through winter deadened fields

I see the hand of God

lifting, turning and holding

you before me.

You seem to be everywhere I go.

I am drawn to your memory

by a common house sparrow.

Forty-Niner

In the heavy-eyed morning

I read and re-read

the pile of birthday cards

scribbled and crayoned

and stacked on my crumpled bed

by kids more eager for this day

than their old man.

I lure them to my bedside

with tales of precious gold—

and then snatch them

and hold them at arms length

kicking and squealing

and slowly lower them down

into the tickle monster.

(I need to be sure that

forty nine years

can't kill the magic.)

After they scatter into the day,

I think of my own father

holding me high in disbelief

at some Boston Catholic hospital—

his first son after three girls.

Out of so much memory

I don't remember

any of his birthdays,

and neither, perhaps,

did he remember

his own father,

except as the same

engulfing presence.

Long in their graves,

we are all fathers now—

closer now than we have ever been,

Finally sharing

in the same

meticulous repetition

of creation.

Dream

When the money don’t come

Like you thought so before

That it might do.

And things pile on things,

You don’t seem to get done

What you’d like to;

Yeah, things pile on things

Pile on things, piling on you.

You work; you get paid;

You come home and you say,

“Hey, Babe, I love you.”

You work; you get paid

And you say, “Hey, Babe,

What can we do?”

We can dream, we can dream,

We can dream, we can dream

What we want to.

Yeah, we can dream, we can dream,

We can dream, we can dream all day

What we want.

You got your blue cross,

Your blue shield, your car loan,

And your rent’s due—

And now you’re blue;

And the mailman brings Ma Bell

And you swear to God

You don’t know anyone

In Honolulu.

And the money don’t come

Like you thought so before

That it might do.

I know sushi won’t kill me,

But it hurts when they bill me

For raw food.

I’ve got quarterlies and ten forty’s

W two’s and the bad news is I

Voted for you.

And the things pile on things

And you don’t seem to get done

What you’d like to.

And you laugh and you cry

And you try so hard

Just to be you…

And you laugh and you cry

And you try so hard

Just to be you…

But the money don’t come

Like you thought so before

That it might do.

And you work, you get paid,

You come home, you say,
“Hey, Babe, I love you.”

So, we dream and we dream

And we dream, and we dream

What we want to;

Yeah, you dream and you dream

And you dream, and you dream

What you want to;

Yeah, you dream and you dream,

And you dream and you dream

What you want—

But the money don’t come;

And the things don’t get done;

And I work; I get paid;

I come home and say, “Hey, Babe,

I love you.”

So I dream and I dream and I dream….

The Mystery Within

EJ wanted a banana tree for Christmas

so that early morning

brought a plastic bag,

a few meager roots

and no directions.

I bought some potting soil

and a square cedar box

EJ placed deliberately

by a westward window.

He gently splayed the roots,

pressed the soil,

and smiled and shrugged

with his calm and gentle

equanimity.

For years now

the tree has lived and died

in a cycle of births

and deaths

on meager rays

of a distant sun,

cups of water,

leftover Gatorade, cold tea

and the remaining milk

from bowls of Fruit Loops.

New England is not kind

or welcoming to anything

not from here, practicing

a stoic and mystic

indifference to all of us

transplanted bodisattva’s

who somehow persist

in spite of everything

and our tender shoots

harden into a pithy bark

and we manage to survive

on the mystery within.

Ad Poeticus

I can still hear the great expressions

of surprise when the lights go out:

the rustling of drawers fumbling

for candles, and children’s joy

breaking in squeals, bouncing

on strangers’ beds, clutching

small fists — blind now

to stern and judging eyes.

The walls of this hotel are thin plaster,

and the rooms full.

Most all of us are travelers

tired by long train rides

in hot bunks with lukewarm cabbage.

Still I sense a greater continuance:

more cynical belching of soft coal smoke

pouring from unsatiated bellies,

from wheezing brickstacks of old power plants —

undisturbed by problems in distant lines,

and down whose gullet is forced the dark fuel

torn in gashes from quiet emptied earth

quiet emptied earth

(I shake my head slowly:

sounding, quacking, calling

from cattail blinds,

drawing stray fowl,

warbling a strange prolegomena

towards a tentative coherence.)

In what is otherwise darkness

I can see the sparking wires

dancing like maddened snakes

lighting only the smallness

of a rounded hilltop

trimmed bare —

neither rhythm, or convulsion.

I am drawn that way

until my heart pounds out of me,

gushing whale’s blood on pitching decks,

sensing the idiocy of approach,

knowing no other way.

~The Lihua Hotel
Beijing 1989

Swimming under Water

It’s strange how happy I am to see the drizzling rain. Last night I went out in the cold of midnight to cover the boat. I wasn't happy that the weather was calling for a morning burst of snow, for it meant another day of waiting for spring. My visions of painting and scraping in the warm sun of March is not quite happening. After prepping the boat, I sat on the porch in a beat up adirondack I made years ago. Our porch—and this chair in particular—is my refuge; it is my lonesome valley, bouldered jetty, and foggy moor all in one. It settles the world for me, and it is a rare day that I am not renewed to some degree by the simple act of sitting in this sacred ground and letting my thoughts blow and settle in a pulsating philosophical diaspora.

I could, or maybe should, fix this chair, especially that it now leans so precariously to the right that I must lean left when I sit down. The effect is even more pronounced because of the old outboard motor leaning against it. Beside me, too, is the snowblower and bags of wood pellets for the woodstove. And then there is the battered clawfoot bathtub in the driveway, which I wrestled out of the back of the truck yesterday—and that was about as far as one man was going to move it. It is another warm weather project: strip off the old, and layer on the new. This, I imagine, is also the job of a philosopher.

I often wonder about the job of a philosopher. I wonder if being a philosopher is to simply think wise thoughts—or is it to organize these thoughts into a logical system and publish them for the world to accept or cast off? The problem with "spreading the news" is that it requires formality and discipline because the varied and vague thoughts must be wrought with some precision into the confines of mere words—and words that aim beyond the realm of words and into the construct of pure intellect are misread as often as they are internalized and ultimately understood with any vestige of the philosopher’s true intent and meaning intact; but, as I tell my students everyday, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," and so the least a philosopher can do is write—as simply and magnanimously as possible—to convey the subtlety of his or her thoughts to those who need to understand; otherwise, it is just philosophers writing to philosophers within the incredibly narrow confines of academia. The end result is usually a logic so dense as to be painful to read and, in the end, rarely worth it, for it is as much dry sand as it is rich soil. For me it is like trying to tie the wisps of a spiders web back together or clearing a muddy puddle with my hands.

We are all born with blinders that focus and shape our individual (and collective) vision. I have grown comfortable in my myopia, and so I find myself falling back on the notion that "where you stand, depends upon where you sit," which is probably why I like this chair. Born into a New England stoicism, I appreciate a laconic response to life. I have lived and worked broadly—if not deeply—and have come to love the wisdom that comes from listening to those who live in simple work and generous gestures, and by opening myself to this mosaic of insights and asides, I find myself living, in a palpable, if limited, sense, philosophically. 

Once, back in high school, I was picking beans at Pine Tree farm with John, a long time Italian farmhand, I complimented him on how quickly he could pick a bushel of beans. Stopping his stooped and incessant labor, he replied, "You reada' the books; I picka' the beans." 

I return to that moment as often as I can, if only for the reminder that I cannot hold wisdom.

I can only use it for short bursts, like a kid swimming under water.

Evolution

The coyotes and fisher cats

seem intent on striking

some new deal

with each other

to toy with our fears

in this gentleman’s wilderness—

patches of dense woods

dotted with overgrown fields,

riven and intersected

by highways, powerlines

and quiet, suburban

neighborhoods.

Last night it was the coyotes

who edged closer

chattering and howling

in the scrub brush

below the power line,

reminding me

in staccato yelps

of the precariousness

of evolution.

Waiting for a Poem

It’s not like a poem

to come curl by my feet

on this morning too beautiful

to describe,

though I am looking

and listening

and waiting:

A rooster crows

above the low hum

of morning traffic;

the trash truck

spills air from brakes

and rattles empties into bins;

my neighbor hammers

his endless projects

with meticulous efficiency,

so I try to do the same:

Slowly sipping coffee

from an old mug

with a broken handle

I cast a trusted lure

into a familiar hole

and pull these few drops

of dark, still waters

into my boat.

Power Line

Today I drive the power line;

Beat the truck in the four wheel ruts,

And tell myself, Christ, I’ve had enough—

Down timber come down,

Yo, Jack Timber, coming down

We cleared the whole damn power line.

Straight up the hill and down until

We filled every damn saw and paper mill

Down timber come down,

Yo, Jack Timber, coming down

Two miles up on the power line

A white pine grows, even though

The bark’s been sprayed by an orange glow

Down timber come down,

Yo, Jack Timber, coming down

A chain saw echoes on the power line.

Drive the wedge, and the tree will edge

Until the lines are laying dead ahead

Down timber come down,

Yo, Jack Timber, coming down

They’ll send a crew up the power line;

Fuckin’ guy, and they’ll wonder why

He dropped the tree on the power line—

Down timber come down,

Yo, Jack Timber, coming down

John Adams & Me

From the deck of my sister’s house on the Oregon coast, I can see the breakers lumbering in as the heavy morning fog slowly burns away. In true west coast style, I brewed a coffee that is strong and pungent and will guide me through my own morning fog. I was reading until late last night in David McCullough’s book, John Adams. John Adams is an interesting character with whom I feel a marked affinity at every turn in the book (a book which has way too many turns!). Maybe it is my distance right now from New England that creates the affinity. I am certainly not a very political person, but I relate to Adam’s need for, and dedication to, his family, his love of walking the countryside, and his practical working of the earth closest to him—an earth replete with stone walls, fields, orchards, rivers, wood-splitting, and escapes to the sea—but most importantly, his escape to “quill and paper” to better expose his vanities and commonality, and to find a pathway to express the depths of his speculative thinking. Though he often lived low, he always aimed high, and that is the demon and angel I wrestle with everyday.

With summer almost over, there is as much undone as done. I feel like a waterbug that has skittered across a great expanse of time and water without breaking below the surface to exploit the riches below. There is no new batch of songs, no folio of poetry, and precious few chapters in Hallows Lake, my own—and only—labored attempt at fiction. I can console myself with ten or twelve decent essays and narratives written in support of the writing communities I oversee during the summer months, but not much creative work, which, ironically, is the strongest suit in my deck of writing cards. Writing is still the time that is stolen from the day and not the purpose of the day itself. My own purposes and instinctual priorities, like Adam’s, are the myriad responsibilities of the lifestyle I lead, but Adams took his life further, wider, and deeper.

As a public figure, Adams was prodded and coerced by the dictates of a needy public and the enormity of the political upheavals of his time, while I am only inspired by a vague sense of my potential and a mysterious need to put words to the narrow confines of my own experiences and my own sense of the world closest to me. At this juncture in my life, I wonder if that is enough? I wonder if I need to put myself on a larger stage and summon the courage to place my life in front of a larger audience and let the chips fall where they may? A week from today I will be back in the classroom in front of sixty fourteen year old boys who I need to inspire to somehow give a damn about everything I ask them to do. My monologues need to be reinforced by a model of hope and action. Too often it is true that we teach what we do not do ourselves; too often we only build a scale model of our true greatness out of brittle plastic and weak glue that can only weaken over time, and too often we don’t answer the clarion of our own callings, and so we sit, smugly satisfied with the diluted reality of our lives.

What we think is only made real through what we say and do. The waves rolling onto the shore in front of me now are barely perceptible to the boats fishing out of Nehalem Bay. The power of the water is only evident where the water breaks and crashes onto the beach. No one is here in Manzanita content to simply look beyond the horizon. We are here because the sea meets the land in a continual expectation of beauty and awe-inspiring power. We walk the beaches in search of both the detritus and bounty of the sea. If that sea gave us nothing; if we weren’t convinced there was not more to be had here than from the confines of our own yards, we would just have stayed at home and gathered the glory of our own gardens. I have to set to sea and trawl the infinite stew of what I carry within me, and I have to take myself to where those words curl onto a more public shore. I need to take my garden to the sea and spread my wares upon the waves and let the beachcombers gather what they wish to keep.

It is not the history of John Adams I am after. It is his unflinching and steady spirit.

Deception

Because he fished
in mountain stream
with tied fly
he’ll never bait
worm to barbed hook
won’t mess
with shallow topsoil
and grubbing.

“Naw,” he says,
“It’s like camping out
in your backyard.“

I drop worm
and sit maybe
bump it on the bottom.
He casts setting
dry fly on calm water:
the back cast
and the set.

But today it is my fish
small perch
we’ll bring home
fry in flour and egg
give him shit—
his split cane
and frigging oiled line.

Pruning

These trees have driven so many friends batty,

wedged in unstable crotches, embracing

hollow, heart-rotted limbs, reaching tentatively,

maddened with indecision.

From a distance your gestures

are very lobsterlike—

waving a last embattled claw,

as if dueling some carnivorous kin

and are backed into a battle you cannot avoid.

You are disposed towards duality.

I regret what I had told you earlier.

I should have had you attacking the orchard

in a swathlike way, eliminating extremes,

rooting clean at the base the suckers growing

straight up, or down, or in, or across —

the only disarray being strewn limbs

and the slender, whippish water sprouts.

The kids could then follow you

with feigned workishness,

filling the truck they love to drive,

heaping tangled piles down below—

piles that we’ll burn on an eager Sunday,

lighting a tindered-dry Christmas trees

and lobbing gasoline bombs,

heavied with chainsaw oil,

ducking behind flannel arms.

We as talked earlier of a nebulousness

and then defined ourselves in that direction.

It was you who wanted this job,

eager to join the winter pruning.

You were attracted by my talk

of using nothingness,

of anticipating space,

and being at the point of decision —

bridging innumerable futures.

I laugh seeing you now

apoplexed by the tangible,

contorted by inexperience,

frustrated by the tangled gnarl

you are caged in.

The hardest part is always

the leaving out—

begrudging mediocrity,

leaving what should be.

Jim Dandy & Fine

My windowpane’s cracked

And there’s a dime on the floor;

Re-rereading old letters

Shoved under my door.

I got one from a guy

He’s an old friend of mine;

He just bought a used chain saw

But he don’t know what kind;

It’s got a fourteen inch bar

And cuts those old apple trees,

Yeah, his wife was real happy—

Then damned apple trees.

I got one from a gal

That I met years ago

In a cold winter’s cornfield

Making angels in snow.

She says that her days

Have been slipping on by;

She’s been thinking about me,

But she doesn’t know why.

It gets me to thinking

About the friends that we have

And how living without having

Is a pain in the ass;

It’s a pain in the ass

And it’s pretty damn low

To go bitching about people

You don’t really know.

If you don’t really know

Then you can’t really say,

And thinking without knowing

Just gets in the way.

There’s a neighbor of mine

And when he mows the front lawn,

He sings Red River Valley

Like it’s the world’s only song.

Then he puts his grass clippings

In a hot compost pile,

And he put’s all his living

Behind an old smile.

I bet the world wonders

If we love her at all,

And I wonder is she wonders

Why we ain’t on the ball,

But I bet she most wonders

Why we can’t act like friends

And why living without wanting

Some loving don’t end.

So I’ll grab me a pencil

And write an old friend of mine

And say I hope things are going

Jim dandy and fine.

Yeah, I’ll grab me a pencil

And write an old friend of mine

And say I hope things are going

Jim dandy and fine.

The Proof of Words

Never measure the moment until it passes. Seth’s wife Sue called the other night to tell me that the thunderstorms flashed around Nashville all day, and so the airlines canceled Seth’s flight.  He was down there wowing the Nashville elite with his amazing musical skills at a music convention of some sort. She said that Seth had called to see if I would cover his gig at the Inn. I figured a Monday night at the Inn would be a pretty dead affair, but I also figured it would at least (almost) fill the fuel tank on the bus, and Seth was in a jam, so what the heck. It was as I imagined it would be: a few tables of people having dinner, seemingly unaware that music was a part of the fare as well—and me unaware as well of what the night would bring me.

After thirty years of playing in pubs, I still hate that feeling of imposing on people who are just out for a social drink or dinner. I still think long and fretfully about my first song. Every night in a pub scene like this feels like a first date. You can win or lose the crowd quickly when those first notes hit the air. The only person paying attention to me as I set up was a young boy of four or five years old. I know parents like it when their kids get attention, so I started with “A Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.” He liked the parts where the fox grabs the grey goose by the neck, and especially the part where the fox and wife cut up the goose with a carving knife. Because he laughed, the adults laughed; because he listened, the rest of the crowd did as well. It's the same scene I've relived many times as a small potato folk singer playing in the same small pub I've played in for over 25 years. Something always happens to "redeem" even the hardest of nights—but tonight brought a different redemption.

A couple in the far corner requested “I’ll Fly Away,” and I grimaced as I reached back into the depths of the songs I know; I shook my head slowly, feigning limited knowledge of that beautiful classic gospel tune—a tune I’ve probably sung some 3000 times. By bar standards, it was a hit! And so that small crowd of people stuck with me the rest of the night through the good (and not so good) of my repertoire. Between songs, I queried each table about where they were from and why they came to the Inn. “To see you, of course,” became the polite, mocking, and endearing reply.

When I finished the night, the last table sitting was the couple in the corner. They invited me over and we talked until closing. We started out talking about folk songs and lyrics that rose above the ordinary— lyrics that somehow capture the raw parts of our psyche. One of them said, “You only know what you think by writing it down.” As a writer, that hit me in the sweet spot. That phrase hooked me in like the fox on a chilly night hooked the young boy. I asked them: ”What do you mean by that.“ And the magic began….

I don’t remember his or her name, though I know I wrote them down on a napkin somewhere. Jordan, I think, is his name, and Sally is her name. I know that he is as a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He said that William James first wrote the phrase, and that both his own research and his teaching validated that what James wrote is true—you do only know what you think by writing it down. The three of us talked and talked and laughed and wondered aloud. I don’t remember everything, but I know that I left inspired by their words, their collective wisdom, and their gift of friendship freely given. I came home thinking of words and how words are needed to fully understand both joy and sorrow.

There is something palpable and real about words put down on the page that give those words life and meaning. Meaning is born out of expression and not simply reflection. The seed is sown in the depths of our private meditations, but the plant—and so the fruit—is borne of giving form and shape to those meditations. You can’t point to a newly sown garden and say, “See what I’ve planted!” You must first put in the labor to make those seeds sprout and flourish, and only when the field is rich in fruit and flower will the gardener share the bounty of his or her labor. Jordan said the added bonus is that research has proven that writing about the joys and sorrows of our lives will make us more physically healthy! 

Writing helps us overcome our fear of the unknown. It creates the necessary distance from what is hard and troubling in our lives, and it helps us to see the monster within from a safe place.   Perhaps you know that your fear of bees is related to stepping into a bees nest as a child, but you’ve never written about that experience, and you have never truly reflected on that time in your life. Through writing you may not overcome your fear of bees, but you can put that fear in perspective, and you can sense the rational from what was once irrational. This is not to advocate running for a pad and pencil every time your life gets tough because tough times need time—sometimes a long time—before they can be fully expressed in words. Knowing when you are emotionally ready to write about a tough period in your life is part of the process, and so writing must be a part of our lifestyle and not a medicine reached for only in times of need. Through regular writing we will know when we are ready!

After my father died following a long illness, it was a cathartic and rewarding exercise to write a eulogy for him. I was in many ways prepared for his death, and the process of writing was easy, and the words about my dad flowed out of me like a mountain stream. But when Patty, my idolized older sister, died suddenly, I was devastated. There were no words I could speak. No one even asked if I could write a few words about her. I couldn’t. But, with the balm of time far enough behind me, I now find myself writing about her often—she was my earliest mentor as a writer! Now I share the fullness and joy of her life as if she is an old friend who still lives beside me. I laugh when I talk about her as if she is in the next room. I know now that the magnanimity of her life did not die with her early death, but it is relived and reborn in the words I write.  The memories, which were once so bitter, are now filled with a poignancy and meaning that give an added depth to my own life.

In the same way, writing about the common experiences that bring us joy celebrates what is most real and eternal in our own lives. It shows us that we are on the right path, and it helps to keep us on the right path; it gives us a moral and intentional framework on which to drape our lives. I always marvel when I read my wife Denise’s blog. It is full of stories about family life in our house. She somehow manages to find the enduring meaning in a passing moment or inspiration from an offhand comment from one of our kids, and she always stays focused on a powerful theme. When I am tired, grumpy, and out of sorts, I go to her blog, not because I am seeking comfort, but because I am energized and informed by her words. When I am full of hope and optimism, I go to her blog because it keeps that optimism and hope alive. Denise is proof of the power of the moment. There does not have to be a lag time when celebrating a joyous moment as may be needed for a more difficult time. If it’s worth a picture, it’s definitely worth a few words, too.

My conversation with Jordan and his wife was cut short by Subas, the bartender, flicking the lights on and off in mock annoyance. There were goodbyes with assurances of future visits—visits I am sure that will happen. Time and experience are relative. What I gained from a closing time conversation in a small town bar seems out of proportion to the time spent talking. 

But maybe that is the proof of words.

Denise

There is something about coming home

to this empty house, yesterday’s

heavy downpours scouring

clean the already

weathered deck

where I sit

wishing for,

wanting,

you.

The Gladdening

My life is small today
doing the things
I only notice myself.
I am reminded tonight
of a rhythm in my motion,
tapping out a cadence
to nothing in particular.

Simple Things

There is a heaviness in this morning heat as I sit and sip my morning coffee. From my back porch the half moon hangs in a hot dull blue above the soft green of the trees lining my yard. On the street, the trash truck is beeping incessantly in reverse. (Why, I don't know.) The muffled traffic on 117 seems more distant than ever before. The yard is as the kids left it: the mower parked in front of the soccer net, trucks scattered in the sandbox, towels hanging on the porch rail; and the balls—footballs, baseballs, soccer-balls, basketballs, and whiffleballs—grow like fungus scattered on a feral lawn. The kids will return next week. I can already hear them screaming as they jump out of the bus. They will disperse like a flock of startled grackles into every corner of the yard; they will try to catch up on everything at once. Every ball will be chucked to a new home; the swings and the slide will be tested; the blackberries will be gorged; the cats will be chased under the shed; the sprinkler will go on—and so will life as we know it as the beautiful panoply of seven kids returns to their other Eden.

It is strange to be here alone. Denise and the kids are up in their other paradise at Windsor Mountain. I came home yesterday to do a couple of shows and pad the bank account before I head back up later today. From there, we'll load everyone on the bus and keep going north for a weekend in Vermont with cousins and friends on Pete's mountain tree farm. We'll climb the mossy waterfall and fish for bass in the pond, and roast and sing around a massive campfire. We'll flip pancakes and make challenges and boasts for 'capture the flag', and we'll climb the small peak and look south and lie about how about far we see: “There, past the far mountain, I see Maynard, and I see Gramma Mary knitting on the porch—and there's Soren knocking on our door. He's yelling, “Where are you? Are you ever coming home?'” In the mid century of my life, every memory becomes a blessing—a host offered to a loving and waiting deity. In every moment there is nothing more that can be done. We simply are what we need to be.

Summer for us is a time to live and relive every moment. It becomes a tapestry that we hold like a child's blanket throughout the rest of the year. It is the promise that we repeat to ourselves when dragged back into the rituals of our other life. We wait in expectation of the returning dawn. We gather our scrapbooks and laugh at the memories. We go back to the pond. Tommy paddling around on a surfboard singing, “Merry Christmas, I can swim.” EJ caught in mid air trying to back flip off the rope swing, his body a tattoo of bug bites, scrapes, sunburn and muscle; Margaret celebrating her first headfirst dive, the wet jangles of bracelets she wove during some craft’s class glistening on her ankles, wrists and neck; Emma squatting at the edge of the dive tower peering in her solipsistic intensity into the waiting abyss of joy; Pipo neck deep in the pond counting out the seconds he can tread water: “One- two-threefourfive six!” Kaleigh, bedraggled and smiling after two weeks of paddling and climbing and becoming a young woman, is surrounded by friends who think she's the coolest kid on the planet—and Charlie—everything to Charlie is joy: seven years old, his long blond hair in dreadlocks, soaring higher and spinning wildly off the rope swing as if gravity only applies to the timid. Always near, always one clutch away, Denise leads them everywhere: cheering, brokering, warning, and loving—and loving, too, every second of every summer day.

Nothing we do is grand. No place we go is uncommon, but in the steady flow of simple actions we flow into the greater sea of common, ordinary joy—and that is all we need. It is all anyone needs.

As you write, don’t forget to celebrate the common and the ordinary. Don't wait for inspiration. Don't wait for something extraordinary to write about. Simply look around you and within you. Weave your own tapestry out of the life you live. If what you see gives you joy, it will give others joy to read about it. If what you do is hard and moiling, let your writing capture that toil, and we will live more fully and think more deeply through your efforts. We often travel too far to see too little. Let your own backyard—the life that you know best—be the place where you begin.

In the end, we can only write well what we truly know.

Start there.

Raccoon

I’ve stopped the chinks

with newspaper and rags

wedged tightly

against the wind blowing

cold three days now.

I feed the fire and curse

its hissing and steaming

mixing green oak

with sticks of dried pine

calling myself

Raccoon

grown fat in the suburbs

sleeping in hollowed elms

waiting for the lights

to go out.

The Fisher

To cast far is to cast well.

I’ve always believed that

the biggest fish are just

beyond my range

and lie in dark water

I could never swim to.

But experience is the wisdom

that has me now casting

closer to shore,

nearest the reeds

and overgrowth — a subtleness

geared to result.

It’s still early in the season

and the beaches are lined

with jars of worms

and salmon eggs —

talk of bag limits

and hatchery trucks.

I’m glad though to see

the lines

with hooks and bobbers

already hung up

in limbs of overhanging oaks —

caught there by kids

who swear and pull

and fall on their ass.

They see my fish and ask

where they are

and how to catch them.

I tell them

they have the right idea

and to just keep

humming it out there.

Canobie Lake

Going to Canobie Lake is always the turning point of the year for me. It is like some primal signal that It is time to turn away from the school year and towards the future.  Obviously, it is my hope that you learned some useful skills this year, but, more importantly, I hope that you have gained a deeper sense of the power and importance of words—and that you will tap into that power in whatever way you need or want over the course of your life. I want you to know that I am always around as another set of eyes for anything you write over these eight or ten more years of school—and many more of simply life—that you have ahead of you. Sometimes, it is simply good to hear from you. This year, this is the last you will hear from me. My last echo...

Life will change you, and you will change your life. Be willing to change. Recently, I heard from an old student who hated whenever I assigned a "creative" writing assignment. Last year he won one of The Groton School's Creative Writing Awards. Another student who started playing guitar in the shop—and who refused to sing a single word—just released an impressive debut CD of original music. The point is: don't be limited by what you feel you are today. Though you might only see a small stone; there is always a universe of possibilities! You just need to be brave enough  to cross the threshold; you have to accept that no songs will be sung about you if you avoid the pain and suffering and struggle of the heroic cycle, which is part and parcel of every life lived to the fullest.  

Your life is the epic poem you are about to live, so live! Don't be remembered as Pap, or the The Duke and Dauphin, or Himmelstoss or Kantorek, or a nameless suitor, or even a vain and impetuous god: be remembered as a man (because that is what you are) who responds to the stirrings within yourself and who recognizes these stirrings as the wisdom of Mentes and who acts as if guided by the power of bright-eyed Athena. This is the power that entwined and empowered the actions of Jim and Huck and Paul. Trust in our own individual wisdom is the power that sustains greatness.

Friendship is a metaphor for caring, persistence, constancy, and courage. Become that metaphor and you will never feel or be alone. Be like Paul Baumer and be willing to risk everything for your friends. Be like the kings and swineherds of The Odyssey and welcome strangers as the friends they should be  for friends will always be true and faithful even when society is not. Be willing to carry or be carried across and through the battles of life. Don't leave these friends you have made; don't lose touch with the cast of round and flat characters who make up your life today or you will become that flat character remembered only as a fleeting scene or footnote buried in the plot of a dull and uninspired story. 

Your life is a young poem, and it is the soil upon which your future will grow.  Cultivate your mind as you would the garden you need to survive. Remember that poetry is the greatest fruit of your being. Poetry is not always a pile of written words; it is the ability to see like Basho. Life is never a single image.  It is an image and an action given new meaning by the twists and turns of how we take it and act upon it; it is the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes that we pair together to create deeper meaning and purpose and sustenance. 

Be prepared to sit and let the moon reflect off of you. Nature is the greatest teacher and the only one who is always there for you and who is always waiting. Though you can't enter the same river twice, you can always sit on the banks and be restored—but it will never happen unless you walk to the river—wherever and whatever that river happens to be. The classroom is only the finger pointing at the moon—not the moon itself.

Above all remember. Remember everything. Memories and thoughts only truly exist when put into words, so craft carefully and treasure dearly the words you create. Nothing gold can stay….

Give a damn.

Many Miles to Go

I see it in your eyes

and in the ways you try to smile;

in the ways you whisper—I don’t know—

and put it all off for a while;

then you keep on keeping on

in the only way you know:

you’re scared of where you’re going

and who’ll catch you down below.

We walked down to the river

to the maples hung from shore

where we talked and laughed

and skipped the stones

that spoke of something more:

five skips for tomorrow,

six skips make a year;

ten skips and forever

there will be nothing left to fear.

And it’s one step and you turn;

two steps and you know

there’s many steps that make a mile

and there’s many miles to go.

There’s many miles before us,

and there’s many a hard won day

and too many lies that tell you why

and keep you from your way.

We dangle over darkness,

over depths we’ll never know:

making faces at reflections

and wondering where to go—

and wonder where the river goes,

and where it all began;

or to just jump in and sink or swim

for we both know that we can…

And it’s one step and you turn;

two steps and you know

there’s many steps that make a mile

and there’s many miles to go.

There’s many miles before us,

and there’s many a hard won day

and too many lies that tell you why

and keep you from your way.

So don’t fall for your reflection,

for what should be left behind;

a day has never come and gone

without giving back some time

there’s time for what we know,

and there’s time for moving on;

this ain’t the time to let slip by,

for it whispers and it’s gone…

And it’s one step and you turn;

two steps and you know

there’s many steps that make a mile

and there’s many miles to go.

There’s many miles before us,

and there’s many a hard won day

and too many lies that tell you why

and keep you from your way.

Returning

I close the book one last time

and the night closes in on me.

There is no Athena,

no pact of peace,

and I am no king.

I am suddenly alone,

curious,

and free.

Humbled by the day,

I face the darkness

with a strange and enduring calm,

ready to make my way

back home again.

New England’s Older Side

Folks around here

they like to say:

You up there, got funny ways—

It's just they way we are

On New England's older side.

It's just the way we are

When you come around.

Open minds

don't open mouths

You wonder what you're screamin' 'bout—

It's just they way we are

On New England's older side.

It's just the way we are

When you come around.

I shot the dog '

cuz he took mad;

Sort of like that wife I had—

It's just they way we are

On New England's older side.

It's just the way we are

When you come around.

It's snowing heavy,

uncommon cold;

I think I'll plow out Kate and Joe—

It's just they way we are

On New England's older side.

It's just the way we are

When you come around.

The kids are gone;

I live alone:

Poison ivy and granite stone—

It's just they way we are

On New England's older side.

It's just the way we are

When you come around.

Contact

For readings, writing workshops, or performances,
please contact Fitz directly:

Email: Fitz@johnfitz.com
Phone: 978-793-1553
www.johnfitz.com

John Fitzsimmons
15 Marlboro St.
Maynard MA, 01754