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Contents

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_Title Page_

_Full-speed Idyll_

_Wanted_

Castles in the Air

The Vow

A Mantra for All Seasons

A Question of Balance

_Agapanthus africanus möbius_

Bleak House

Love Song of the Roof

Counting Coup

Dead Possum

Eb 'n' Flo

Ebb and Flow

Eight Deer

Encounter

Flight of the Beekeep

Hourglass and Sand

Hunted

I Should Get Up

Just Measure

Natural Enemies

Our Glass

Little Wash-Bear

Roadside Chicken

Tail of the Peacock

The Sword of Poison Oak

The Final Solution

The Wild French Shepherdess

The Word

Time and Water

Topa Topa

Villa on the Hilla

Visitation

Wellers and Whalers

_Photo/Illustration Credits_

_Author_

_Copyright_

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Full-speed Idyll

Come, let us embark on an _idyll_ ,

a most see-worthy conveyance.

What! A sailing ship—that is tidal?

Hold that false thought in abeyance,

as this: that it is an _idol_ ,

an object or person of worship.

Come, that is a thought you must bridle,

not _bridal_ (it's not an adore-ship).

Yet it _is_ a craft on a notion

that it is a narrative poem;

a prosy-poetic devotion

to story. You could say a proem.

But, again, you'd be wrong; that's a _preface_.

Forgive me if I'm homicidal

in making a _What, are you deaf?_ fuss.

I _told_ you—we're going on an _idyll._

And we won't be going at dull speed;

this craft won't be running at _idle_ ;

in fact, we'll be running at full speed

—without you. You're just too _i_ -dull.

##

_Wheeler Canyon viewed from the Double Dekker Ranch, Sulphur Mountain, Ojai, CA_

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Wanted

_Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down._

—Robert Frost

When I first read that, some years ago, a light bulb went off in my head. I just couldn't see it. Playing with the net _down_? Where is the poetry in that? It's as though a high jumper were to lay the bar on the ground, better yet in a trench, and Fosbury flop his way over it to a dubious world record. That was never my way. I'd been playing the game virtually all my life, and the virtue lay in this: I never once considered playing without a net. I wouldn't have dared. I looked upon it, with profound gratitude, as a safety net to keep me from falling irrecoverably into free verse. No, my way was to play with the net up, and risk my own way of flopping.

So I had played in the Ojai Valley for a year, before rising to play in the Upper Ojai Valley for ten more. As always, I played by all the rules, every day, often well into the night, with never so much as a slackening of the net. And I had a ball! Just that one. You wouldn't think a ball would last that long, but it did, being every bit as serviceable, and servable, as the day I first sent it singing over the net, returning to me as a perfectly rhyming ballad in strict iambic pentameter. Still, I had loftier aims beyond the Ojai Valley Tennis-with-the-net-up Tournament: I wanted to raise the net up all the higher, to undreamed-of heights, and I had lately begun looking for a mountain that could support me in the poetic style to which I now aspired. (It couldn't support two; no mountain could.) But I wasn't looking for a handout, or even a hand up. I'd had my hand out for years (quite the racket), and I would continue, as I had always done, to pay my way in words lobbed back and forth in artful volleys with such deftness of hand as to be poetry in motion. On the other hand, the successful mountain would need to be broad at the base so that when I'm near the end of one of my lyric flights, or way out on a metaphorical limb, I wouldn't topple it over, crushing the several poetry lovers in the one valley or the other. And it would need to be considerably higher than the endorphin high I'm on when I get the meter precise, the rhymes perfect, and the words exactly right, to allow for the genius being in me. Moreover, it would have to have all the elements in its soil and atmosphere, which, subjected to alchemy, make for true poetry. And of course it would have to furnish me a grass court in spring, a clay court in late summer, a leaf-strewn court in fall, and a rare snow-covered court in winter, whereupon, in peering over the net, I might gaze upon idyll-inspiring vistas beyond vistas to infinity, and see the sun, the moon, and the other high-flying balls coming at me at astronomical speed in all their cosmic glory.

So I mused in spring as I ambled through the Upper Valley abreast the Black Mountain Ranch, inhaling the intoxicating fragrance, reveling in the vernal beauty: the broad open pasture as flat as a billiards table, but greener, until far to west it rose gently to sweep over a renegade rolling hill, even as the riot of upstart wild mustard was doing its rampant best to turn it to a sea of yellow, shimmering against the dark green oak-forested hills under a cloud-dappled blue sky. Musing my way east, I was still glorying in it some half a mile later when the pasture abruptly yielded to serried row on row of English walnuts on hardy black walnut root-stocks, resplendent in spring leaf. Aroused from my reverie, I knew perfectly well where I was, but I was soon lost again in contemplating the rich fall harvest when it should come "knocking," by way of a long pole, fetching down those that hadn't fallen free of their dried and split-open husks; gathering the treasured lot into boxes; idle hours sitting in the autumn sun, elevated box of walnuts on the one hand, hammer in the other, steel cracking plate on two plastic dairy boxes between the knees, an empty cardboard box on the deck in front, two cats positioned at will; holding the nut between the thumb and forefinger on the plate, pointed end up, like an upside-down acorn, and with just the right blow of the hammer, splintering the shell with just enough force to keep from dashing the left and right "brains" to pieces, before sweeping them along with the broken shells into the empty box; more idle hours separating the nutmeats, bagging them, and placing them in one of several freezers, to last as long as willpower could make them last, but, all too humanly, never beyond having to suffer some months of going cold turkey before the next highly anticipated harvest came knocking.

Coming to, I was surprised to find myself come to Sulphur Mountain Road. How many times I had passed it without seeing anything beyond the pedestrian, I couldn't have said, but at once my eyes were drawn southward to a sign far down the road to where the mountain had put its foot down. It was a sign I hadn't seen before (I surely would have, had it been there). Something about it made me take it for a sign, and before the corner even knew I was missing, I was halfway down the road, at which point I could make the sign out clearly:

WANTED:

POET IN RESIDENCE

REFERENCES REQUIRED

APPLY AT THE SUMMIT

My heart leapt up so I thought it would escape me. But I had no such fear the sign would, so fixed upon it were my eyes, all the while I was deeply moved toward it. When at last I stood directly before it, I was perplexed. It didn't loom any larger in my eyes. In fact, I thought it couldn't. Its import, however, was immense. So immense that I wasn't sure I was taking it all in. I couldn't lose the feeling that some, perhaps the most important part, of its meaning was beyond my ken. So intently did I try to take in its full import that my eyes hurt. The uneven typescript lent the impression of having been hurriedly dashed off, seemingly for the nonce. Nor could I say, in poring upon it, that it was definitely one color or another. All I could think was that it was the color you'd get if you mixed together every color the mountain manifested. Yet the strongest impression, though I didn't dare put it to the test, was that it was still wet. Oh, it wasn't a sign that anyone else could see, much less read, but I read it, clearly, in the densely forested mountain's every nature. I heard it all the more clearly in the light wind sweeping down the mountain's side, soughing its way through the trees. So much did it seem an answered prayer, I tore my eyes away, and, alive with hope, eagerly commenced bending my footsteps up the winding asphalt road to such a degree of purpose that I feared I might bend them beyond the breaking point, and eased off just enough to feel safe, yet still be bent intently upon my mission. Around the first bend the forest, as if it had been waiting for me all along, so intimately closed about me that I entered, as it seemed, an immense leafy cocoon; yet into what strange creature I should metamorphose, Kafka-like, on emerging, I could form no vision. Upward I strode in the dim light with audible breath beneath huge, gnarly oaks, the larger of which, it struck me, likely oversaw the blazing of the road a hundred years since, and its later paving. Like the oaks, the asphalt showed its age, an undulating patchwork of potholes and root-grown upheavals, the whole interlaced with cracks of varying widths and meanderings. It perfectly suited me: I wouldn't have my way be smooth for anything, but rather

_To feel the earth as rough_

_To all my length._

Nonetheless, so light of heart was I that I blithely entered into the old children's game of not stepping on the cracks, with the same youthful lightness of foot, as if the intervening years were instantly swept away. But, as absorbing as it was, in no very long time, step by boyish step, I gradually ceased regarding them for losing myself in contemplation of who, at the summit, should meet my presumptive application appraisingly—and what would I say to make my case? I saw few dwellings, modest, and not many more gated driveways, soon lost in winding out of sight in the ubiquitous forest. I met no one, nor did anyone meet me, with a hail-fellow-well-met. Only a mother skunk crossing the road at a safe distance, for me, her half-dozen kittens cavorting along behind her like those of another stripe. And such was their gamboling spirit that, despite the intervening distance, the headiness of it so rubbed off on me that I trailed playful exuberance around every bend. But then the strangest feeling began to come over me: by degrees I felt myself morphing into something, though what I knew not. My hands could detect nothing; yet the feeling that I was changing into something (a butterfly—a _monarch_?) continued to grow.

When, an hour and change later I emerged into brilliant sunshine, and the road ceased to climb and leveled off, the way we do in talking beyond our emotions, I wouldn't have been hard to convince that I had broken the backs of every mother that ever was, is, or will be. Oh, and the change I had suffered was hardly less hurtful: I had morphed into a man, and maybe not much of a man, of greatly diminished confidence. But reflecting upon it for as long as several moments, I wasn't all that disappointed that I hadn't morphed into a monarch butterfly. Sure, being pretty for a change would have been pure poetry in emotion; and the godsend of free and airy flight the highest of highs. But every high has its fall, soon to come, when the instinct would seize me to migrate to the mountains of central Mexico, from which I would never return, my life cycle ended. And what mountain would be all right with its resident poet, new on the job, being a permanent nonresident? So, taking all in all, I think my alternate metamorphosis worked out for the best. Besides, where is it written that a change is only one-way? I'd get every ounce of my confidence back, and more, once I was on the job.

Looking beyond myself once more, my gaze, buoyantly unconstrained, ran up a gated driveway to my left that went straight back uphill beneath tall eucalyptus trees wafting their heavenly fragrance down on me, and most welcome. It would speak well of me if I should go into my interview trailing eucalyptus rather than skunk. At the top, a gray slate roof with matching chimneys at each end peeked over the brow of the hill like a giant stalking cat. But just because my gaze ran back down the driveway all the more instantaneously, it would be a mistake to think it was frightened. It was just eager to draw my attention to the hand-carved wooden sign at the gate that poetically proclaimed in white lettering, MEHER MOUNT. Having given me so much as a moment to savor the alliteration, at the speed of sight it ran ahead up the road which, after briefly dipping, wound uphill all the higher, momently returning with a question: _The summit?_ Hitching myself up, throwing my shoulders back, I continued, running over my talking points as I walked, till, not a hundred steps on, without warning, all heaven broke loose: the oak forest suddenly gave way, as did the whole south-facing side of the mountaintop, falling away between two large rolling hills jutting out from the mountainside like the heads of gigantic sentries a half a mile apart, before tumbling precipitately down onto the Oxnard Plain far below. Yet the strangest thing: it made not a sound that I could discern beyond that of the wind, which was perhaps not surprising since this all took place eons ago. Like a distant star that had died light years since, I was beholding the light that was only now reaching me. And soon even the contemplation of it was also in the past. My eyesight, ecstatic for its new freedom, went wild with abandon, flying down behind it, across the vast plain, out over the Santa Barbara Channel, and beyond the Channel Islands, before coming hard up against the horizon, rudely rebuffed. Not to be denied, it did a quick about-face and rushed back all the more instantly that it might once more behold the tantalizing sight it had only caught a fleeting glimpse of in flashing by. A sight-seeking missile, it zeroed in on the hill to my left and below me, locked onto the palatial Mediterranean-style villa the eye-candy color of vanilla so gorgeously spread across the top like a mirage, and blew it up in magnificence before my eyes. What high society had the privileged purview of its panoramic vista, I could likewise only imagine. Long I gazed, and would have beheld it long enough to write an elegy upon it, as to a lover, but my reverie was broken by the most alluring and terrifying prospect of all, never out of sight in my mind's eye: the job interview that awaited me.

I couldn't be late. Quickening my pace, I passed up another vista calling me like a siren, and followed the road west as it meandered up and down along the ridge. The forest now thick on both sides, the only vision I could form was of God looking down on me, like unto a gopher shyly popping up and down along its network of holes—and God up for a game of Whack-a-Goph. Only at long intervals was I able to shake that vision, momentarily, on catching a leafy glimpse, on one side or the other, of the vista tantalizingly denied me. A mile or so on, having seen few habitations, and no inhabitants, I was confronted, I might have said affronted, by a heavy steel-pipe gate with a host of denying padlocks, signaling that here the public road ended and the fire road began its winding descent to Casitas Springs—10 MILES like a dusty ten-mile fire hose. To the right was a less-imposing gate with a small, unpretentious sign, white lettering on a sky-blue background: SKY RANCH. Beyond, its rough shale road went steeply uphill before curving left out of sight. This _had_ to be the summit! The gate, intended to deny vehicles, admitted of foot traffic on both ends, and I gratefully accepted the admission. The pitched ascent never relented, nor did I, for a quarter of a mile that felt like ten. Nearing the top, winded, and seeing open blue sky beyond, the boy scout in me improvisingly made of my eyes a kind of ocular slip knot steadfastly fixed upon my feet so that, summiting, I might quickly pull the working end, and looking up—get the beauty and the majesty of it all at once.

And how I did! seeing what I hadn't seen before: almost no oak trees grew on the south side of the mountain, being hotter and drier; only sage and grasses and other low-growing shrubs and trees. The mesmerizing panorama was unrestricted from sunrise to sunset, and all the way south, beyond the Channel Islands, to the horizon. Only when I had hungrily taken it in from east to west and back again, and long enough to get an eyeful, did I reluctantly recall my bulging eyesight. Another might have had to lay low and give it time to digest its visual feast; but all my life it has ever been my good fortune that my eyesight's powers of digestion are such that it quickly processes the largest feast, never failing to make room, like dessert, for more. So I directed my empty eyesight to the road. Hungering to be full again, it saw that the road turned sharply to the right, and continued running west along the narrow undulating ridge some 150–200 feet wide. Yet it only took it in for the merest moment for its peripheral vision compelling it to look north, where it might have met an impenetrable wall of oak trees. But long before there was a law preserving them, they had been cleared just far enough down the mountainside to afford the wide-angled eyesight an arguably more enthralling panorama. In less than an instant it swept down into the jewel-like Ojai and Upper Ojai Valleys in glorious spring verdure, and up again to the summits of Topa Topa, Chief Peak, Nordhoff Peak, and the other mountains jutting sharply up out of the Los Padres National Forest, sanctuary of _Gymnogyps californianus_ , the critically endangered California condor. Although it was too far away for me to see, I had no doubt that, if the nearly extinct vulture were there, my eyesight would have devoured it at once.

When my eyesight was an hour getting back, seemingly, I saw things clearly: it had encountered at least one condor effortlessly riding the thermals for miles without so much as a beat of its 10-foot wing span, and it had to try it for itself. Spreading its pupils wide, it rode one thermal after another for mile after mile without so much as a bat of an eyelash. And though, on getting back, it offered no apology for being so late, I can't say I was all that put out by it. My eyesight might have left me standing before that heavenly vista looking after it a day and a night, especially if the full moon were out, and _I_ would have been content.

But the day was getting on, and I had to remind my eyesight that there was the far larger matter to see to: the job interview. If I got the job there'd be all the time in the world for the big picture. So, drawing its pupils back in, quickly getting up to speed, it narrowed its focus on the panoply of arresting objects around us on both sides of the road: antique, steel-wheeled farm implements, rusting their nostalgia-invoking lives away, in the open upon the grass, or upon the barren earth beneath the handful of oaks that graced the summit. Many of them I wistfully remembered, like old friends, from boyhood summers on farms: hay rake, sickle-bar mower, baler, cultivator, seeder, manure spreader, tractor, plow, disc harrow, thresher, hay wagon, and others I had never seen, and could only guess at. Yet, as if these were not enough to hold the eye, conspicuously placed along the road were standalone or random machinery parts eclectically assembled into whimsically "rust"ic sculptures. There was yet another curiosity: at a key point along the road where no eye could miss it stood a three-foot concrete mushroom, as if at attention, unless it was a mighty phallus, which, if it was, I had to think, despite its hoary signs of age, was wholly chaste. If these slowly eroding _objets d'art_ were calculated to hold the eye and keep it from running away to distant prospects, they succeeded.

Yet just ahead, as if custom-made to steal it away from them, tethered to a tall steel pole, flew a large, parti-colored kite, perhaps eight feet across, wholly unaided by any descendant of Benjamin Franklin. It variously dipped and rose and flapped and changed direction, but never failed of flying; and held the eye, which dipped and rose and flapped and changed direction along with it, causing it to fly to the western extremity of the summit. Arriving there in a heartbeat, it appetently fell upon two rustic dwellings. I pored upon them, with trepidation, for most a minute, before steeling myself sufficiently to approach. The first was an antique "Airstream"-style aluminum trailer with charming porthole windows, in remarkably good repair, which did much to repair my flagging courage. "Hello," I cheerily hailed to no one. "Is anyone home?" No one stirred or answered. And yet something was visited upon me: finding myself relieved, I realized the repair to my courage had failed.

The second dwelling had no such charm, being a less-than-antique mobile home, a trailer-park outcast, with an alarmingly large water tank on the roof that looked as though it would collapse it into the ground at any moment. "Hello," I hailed again, less cheerily, as much to warn the imperiled inhabitants. "I'm here about the job opening?" But both utterances were too late to ward off catastrophe: no sign of life. After a decent interval I rallied my cold feet sufficiently to make my way to the front, to which was appended a broad wooden deck, where, to my shocked surprise, I was suddenly greeted—by the breathtaking view. Before I could restrain it, my eyesight flew over the precipice, and down over the thickly forested northwestern flank of the mountain, over the western extremity of the Black Mountain Ranch and its eponym, and down into the east end of the Ojai Valley, fragrant with a trillion orange blossoms; nor did it linger, but swept westward over the idyllically arty community of Ojai, drowsing in the sun as it lay nestled against the majestic purple backdrop of the Topatopa and Santa Ynez Mountains. Higher yet, my eyesight, reverting to condor mode, lazily rode the thermals for miles after heavenly miles. And since there was no interviewer, and I was perfectly at peace beholding the mythic Shangri-La of _Lost Horizon_ , starring Ronald Colman, I was sublimely content to let it languidly ride, with the express understanding that it was on instant recall whenever the interviewer should appear.

_Ojai (upper left) and the Ojai Valley viewed from the Sky Ranch, Sulphur Mountain._

Almost at once, however, I was aroused from my trance by the castigating thought: how forward of me it would appear to be found awaiting him (I thought it couldn't be her) on his front deck, and I recalled my eyesight at once, and quickly retreated, relieved that I had narrowly avoided that bold impertinence that could well have lost me the job. I would humbly await him who held my fate in his hands a respectful distance back along the road, and directed myself there without delay. Where the road crested a rise, and at once declined, an oak tree on the northern side grew beside it. Yes, that's perfect, I thought. It is the absolute summit, and I have walked far and borne many a weighty thought, and I can sit and rest my aching back against the tree, and my weary legs on the ground, and muse upon the sweeping vista, and not fail of seeing him, nor he me, when he arrives.

I had only just sat down and closed my eyes for the merest moment, it seemed, when into my mind was borne a faint, distant sound, as of a low rumbling, which grew in intensity, seemingly getting closer. Perhaps it was my weariness, but I could attach no significance or meaning to it, and only marked, with a drowsy curiosity, that it was growing louder . . . and closer. . . . Then it struck me! _He's coming!_ My immediate impulse was to leap to my feet respectfully. But I was so weary, and it felt so good to sit, that I found myself thinking, the road is long, and I have time to sit a few moments longer. The low rumbling grew louder and louder . . . closer and closer . . . and just when I thought, he is about to reach the top, and rallied myself to begin to stand, I was startled almost out of my skin by a deeply sonorous, gravelly voice:

_I hope you will excuse my not being here to greet you on arrival. I've had a mountain of things to do today._

__

Shocked, I quickly darted my eyes left and right, and back, to the limits of my neck's anatomy (beyond, my neck painfully argued). But there was no one in sight. "Where are you?" I was about to brusquely ask, dashing my hopes for the job, when the voice spoke again:

_Good. You have found the absolute summit, as I instructed you upon the sign, though in my rush I may have forgotten to include ABSOLUTE. I only just got the sign up as you came along. As you noticed, and didn't dare touch, the paint was still wet._

__

He was behind the tree! Curiosity was so killing me (I must have been a cat in my previous incarnation), that I made motion to stand, when he brought me up short:

_No, no, sit. You are tired. We can continue to speak thus._

__

This was passing strange, and I didn't know what to make of it. But then I thought, he must have a compelling reason for not wanting me to see him. Perhaps he has been horribly disfigured, like one badly burned, or the Elephant Man. It would fail of all compassion and human decency to violate it merely to satisfy base curiosity.

He cleared his throat, not altogether successfully, as if an extra-large piece of gravel were stuck in it, and continued: _Why do you want to be the resident poet of this mountain, when there are much higher mountains than I nearby? You're not afraid of heights, are you?_

__

Now it was getting surreal: he wasn't just speaking on behalf of the mountain, but as if he _were_ the mountain. Curiosity almost triumphed, but a thought saved me: Maybe it afforded him his one justification for not showing himself, however implausible: that he was not behind me, out of sight, but all about me. Like God, he was omnipresent. How could I claim to have an ounce of feeling, and not play along? Lucky for me, his putting me on the spot with his question, _Why do you want to be the resident poet of this mountain?_ suggested an answer that I calculated would disarm him, though, as God is my witness, I had no heartless desire to disfigure him further:

"Sitting on this most beautiful spot," I enthused, "the absolute summit, I see that it is the absolute perfect height for me, neither too high nor too low. I would therefore be at the perfect height of my writing powers, and thus in perfect position to do you most proud, which position I would never have had, had you not so presciently put me on the spot, the apex of my desire." My intent was to lift him up. Yet imagine my surprise on feeling _myself_ greatly elevated, which I presently attributed to his swelling with mountainous pride. Attempting to clear his throat again, he went on:

_Have you ever poetically sung the praises of other mountains? If so, why did you leave them? Did you resign, or were you fired?_

__

"Indeed I have," I put forth confidently, "and in each case I left them higher than ever upon themselves. The truth is, I had the fire in the belly, and I was resigned to doing them proud. And I have it still. While it is not in my nature to namedrop, since you asked, and it is pertinent to my qualifications for the position, let me say only so much as I must.

"In _Baron Much-Puss Stretches His Euros,_ I recount the fantastic exploits of Baron Much-Puss, a European wildcat, who leads his close cousin, Cuz-Chimoca, a Chinese Mountain cat, up the forbidding Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest. Surefootedly surmounting the Three Steps, and traversing the sheer, hair-whitening North Face, the Baron led in clawing their way up the final summit pyramid, to stand triumphantly upon the highest point on earth. Thereupon, the Baron, widely known as a cheapskate, might have put Cuz-Chimoca on his back, and skated down the insanely treacherous Lhotse Icefall, except that it would likely have been at the expense of their lives. Instead, he reached into his money pelt, drew out four euro-coins, and tightfistedly stretched them into skis. Then, putting wide-eyed Cuz-Chimoca on his back, the Baron stretched the already thin air to the breaking point to make sure it reached him, and shouted, 'Cuz, Cuz, hold on tight!'—and down the South Face they flew at such tail-streaming speed that they got a mountain of air off the Hillary Step, touching down on the utmost peak of the South Summit, and went flying down the southern slope, got 3,000 feet of vertical air off the Balcony, and touched down on the slope just before reaching the South Col, shooting across it with such speed that they shot up the backside of Lhotse, over the Geneva Spur, and up to the summit, then down the terrifying Lhotse Icefall, clattering over the rocky Yellow Band, and back onto blue-green ice, gathering speed and shooting over the crevasse at the bottom, streaking on down the Western Cwm [koom], and up the icy face of Nuptse, then down its opposite face. In just this manner they flew up and down Cho-Oyu, Gaurishanker, Himal Chuli, Manaslu, Annapurna I and II, Dhauligiri I and II, Kanjiroba, Changla, Sunanda Devi East and West, and others of the Himalayan Range, before smoothly segueing to the Karakoram Range, flying up and down Sisar Kangri, K12, Saltoro Kangri, Sherpi Kangri, Masherbrum, four Death Zoners back to back: Gasherbrum, Gasherbrum II, Falchen Kangri, K2, finally summiting Rakaposhi momentarily, before careering down the sheer _19,000_ -foot face at the speed of fright to the mythic Hunza Valley, Pakistan, where Baron Much-Puss stem-christied to a characteristically stylish stop, sending up such a mountainous plume of snow that he created another Death Zoner, Much-Puss Kangri.

"I might add that I chronicled Baron Much-Puss's penchant for stretching (though never the truth) with such fidelity that, although I wrote of his many fantastic exploits in strict iambic pentameter, unaccountably, every line was stretched a further two feet into iambic heptameter."

_That sounds a bit like hyperbole. Just out of curiosity, not that I need it, how might you seek to poetically employ that figure of speech with respect to me?_

__

"Just so, Your Highness. Out of deep and abiding respect for you, the very model of a mountain, I wouldn't think to employ it at all. Despite the seemingly complimentary first syllable, which would flatter other mountains proud, no matter how hyperbolically I should attempt to magnify your features and heighten your esteem, it would universally be mistaken for gross understatement."

_You might try. But now that you raise the subject of height, have you sufficient meters in you, and of such high caliber, to do poetic justice to my 822? You're not a free verser, are you? I should have made sure to put that on the sign: __FREE VERSERS NEED NOT APPLY._

__

"Meter, if I might make bold to say, is my _metier_. You see, 'i' am inextricably wrapped up in it. In the dramatic narrative verse _Leopards in the Snow_ , in alternating rhyming couplets of iambic heptameter, I recount the tragic saga of British mountain climbers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine who, attempting to be the first to summit Mt. Everest, were lost near the summit on June 6, 1924. For 75 years no trace of them was found. Then, on May 1, 1999, on a rocky slope 2,000 meters above the Rongbuk Glacier, Conrad Anker, part of a five-man international search team, discovered Mallory's almost perfectly preserved body (save what goraks, crow-like birds, had eaten) face down 230 meters into the Death Zone (above 8,000 meters), his exposed light clothing in tatters. Next his breast, wrapped in cloth, were treasured letters, perfectly preserved, from his wife Ruth. If you were to give me fifteen—ten—years as poet in residence, I would sing of you in _such_ encomiastic meters as would make you, of all mountains, highest of the high. You, in turn, scorning the cheap trick of extreme cold, would preserve me, and those of my writings close to my breast, even through the sweltering heat of summers on summers without end, more perfectly than Everest could ever dream of preserving Mallory and Irvine, who are there yet, a metaphor for permanence."

_I have no little reputation for permanence myself. For what else in life would you say I am a perfect metaphor?_

"A mighty sailing ship that scorns to sail

upon the Sea of Time, for knowing true:

but gently ride at anchor; without fail,

you'll see, in time, all seas will come to you."

_Like Mohammad was forced to come to the mountain, with a smile, when I wouldn't come to him. But something tells me you would come to me in time with a simile. And I am moved to ask, in one sense, What exactly would you say I am like?_

"I'd liken you, immovable, still, to

a sentry at the palace of the Queen,

whom tourists come to see stand fixed, like glue,

fast, seeing it's his duty to be scene."

_Except when he moves not a little at the changing of the guard. When the whole world knows that none could ever take my place. You might try likening me unto something that never changes, like a universal truth. But how might you apply synecdoche to me, both part for the whole and whole for the part?_

__

"I'd sing, 'You are the _face_ of mountain might'

(Part for the whole); and then, to show your heart,

Sing, ' _Sulphur Mountain_ beat _Chief Peak_. At height,

Its Cougars trounced his Braves' (whole for the part)."

_You might add, I came out on top. That would be good. But **** metonymy; what word would you use to describe me that is closely linked to me, but is not part of me?_

__

"I'd say, 'The pen is mightier than the sword'

(Written words are stronger than brute force),

To mean, 'The _alpen_ 's mightier than the word,'

Though you are not part of the Alps, of course."

_Who needs them? What I need to know is, what perfect rhyme are you most proud of?_

__

"Heretofore," I sang out, "it had always been held a truism that there is no word in the English language that rhymes with 'month,' but I put the lie to it, perfectly:

__

'But can you rhyme a word with "month"?'

'Of courth,' the lithper anthered. 'Onth.' "

_Yes . . . well . . .,_ he stammered, as if at a nonplus, yet nonetheless somehow found it in himself to add, _you wouldn't ever stoop to using slant or eye rhymes in singing of me—would you?_

__

"No eye shall eye rime (frost) in lines I write.

The _warm_ slant ever I'll put in my rhymes

are your steep mountainsides—a perfect fright!

each eye will see as slanting paradigms."

He was silent a moment, then harrumphed, and gravely asked, _Have you any written references?_

__

"Your Highness," I offered, "I didn't quit my hermitage this morning with an eye toward gainful employment, other than, at interludes, to pore upon my sheaf of selected compositions by a babbling watercourse or sylvan scene, to see how I might improve them. The compositions, I mean. All the rest I leave to you, who can't be improved upon. And, I confess, with an eye toward mayhaps being met with a comely damsel in this stress—meter, you understand—that I might, with racing heart, sing to this bosom poetess some sweetly heart-melting lines. I could read some now to you, if you'd like, as if to her."

__

_That won't be necessary,_ he quickly retorted like feet running on gravel. _Only hold them up a little by their bound corner._

__

I held them up as he asked, along with the hairs on my neck, only too self-conscious of critical eyes poring over my shoulder. Of a sudden, a gentle gust of wind from my right deftly got beneath the first page like the proverbial camel's nose under the tent, lifted it up, and gently draped it over my left hand, accompanied by the pungent smell of sulphur, effectively masking the smell of camel. Then, one after the other, like the leaves of a calendar in a movie depicting the passage of time, the remaining pages followed, too fast, I thought, even for the most accomplished speed reader.

_I see you have some adeptness with figures of speech—but y ou wouldn't ever try personifying me, would you? That would be instituting downward comparisons._

__

"No, no, you are much too much the mountain's mountain. Who would ever believe it if I should endow a massif of your magnitude with human qualities or possessing human form. I would steadfastly avoid such condescending comparisons by employing a figure of speech worthy a mountain monarch—prosopopoeia:

'Come dawn the mountain put upon his crown

Of gold with many a glittering precious stone,

His ermine robe atop his royal gown,

The king of kings atop his gilded throne.'

_That would be acceptable, with some embellishment. Are you willing to work weekends, holidays, overtime—for no pay?_

__

"Oh no—no. Excuse me, Your Highness, for being so bluntly candid, but I could never accede to that—no, not for a second. You see, the truth is, I do not regard such 'employment' as work at all, but rather the grandest play, and consider myself the best-paid person in the world."

_I appreciate your candor. Do you have any questions for me?_

__

"If you'll permit me, Your Highness. Jesus said, _A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country_. I can't help asking if a poet is not without honor, save in his own mountain.

__

_Honor is as honor does._

__

"I am confident I could do you such honor. If I were to be so fortunate as to be offered the position, what about you beyond the obvious would you wish me to honor in song?"

_You might say that on my southern flank I issue forth a freshwater spring from out a cave. Put that in. But what I was wanting to say before parching thirst got me by the throat like an alpha wolf—it's all this talking—is that I was not always up; in fact, I was down for ages; so down that I was leagues beneath the sea, and had to suffer myself to look up to minnows. No, unlike other mountains I could name, who were suddenly thrust up into prominence, not by their own industry, but by the lucky collision of land masses, I wasn't handed my mountainous stature on a silver tectonic plate. I never felt that the world owed me a rising. Like Horatio Alper, I honestly worked my way up, slowly, shell by shell, shale by shale, eon by eon. No one gave me an inch, let alone a foot up. I have my old fossils._

__

"That's just what I was meaning to ask. Why, in all your miles I have walked, have I seen none of your storied residents? Though much I see in you that is the stuff of poetry, it's through your people that I can truly do you poetic justice."

__

_All my residents knew—it was in the air—that I would be conducting an interview of the utmost gravity today. And out of respect for me, knowing I have a certain delicacy about eavesdropping, they have politely made themselves scarce. But don't worry. When we are done, they will not fail of materializing before your eyes, as tired as they are for the mountain of looking they have done today. But now our interview is all but done. You seem a likely enough poet, though a little weak on simile. When could you start?_

__

"O Your Highness," I cried in my tears and my joy.

"May it please Your Lord, I have already begun!

Ana _pest_ I shall be in your honored employ

—But where _shall_ I reside? Might it be in the sun?"

_Anapest you are. I have just the place for you, on the 60-acre Double Dekker Ranch. The younger of the Dekker brothers was unaccountably burned out by a fire of unknown cause. And coupled with the Doppler Radar tower being installed just above him, he got to believing that someone had it in for him, and wanted him gone, and he took the hint. It is a site unto itself and a sight to behold carved out in the shape of a half-sun on my sunbathed southern flank._

__

_Arise you, then, and go now, your sunbathed site to see,_

_And a poetry book build there of rhyme and meter made_

_All gardens will you have there, two hives for the honeybee,_

_And live alone in the rhyming trade._

__

_Go you now while there is sun to see you down._

__

"But how shall I know it? Pray, whom shall I see?"

Where might my blest home of the honeybee be?"

_Do not trouble yourself with the "Where in the wood?"_

_Only go now, and things shall unfold as they should._

__

Then his gravelly voice ceased, and I sat amazed. There was _poetry_ in it!—and I would hear more. But it did not resume, or if it did it was drowned out by the shockingly loud rumbling that ensued, the ground beneath me trembling like an aftershock, though I was no less over the second than the first. But almost at once both phenomena, like a freight train just gone by and rapidly receding, began to diminish, getting less and less, fainter and fainter, and presently faded to nothing. The only sound was the light wind caressing the leaves, and the occasional flapping of the distant kite; the only feeling, astonishment. On legs that might easily have passed for rubber trees I stood and, turning, gave myself wholly, as to a lover of poetry, to the long-pent-up urge to look behind the tree, at which moment I felt the most powerful shock of all: _no one was there—or anywhere within sight_. Incredulous, I looked up the tree, embarrassed, like a sucker in a shell game, to find no human tree-dweller. Where could he have gone? From the moment his voice ceased and until I commenced voyeur, was a span of not more than a few seconds, not nearly enough time to have walked out of sight, and I would have heard his footsteps playing the dry leaves like the keys of a desiccated grand piano, the more so if he had run _prestissimo_. Looking down again, I saw that the ground behind the tree was in a state of shale-heavy upheaval, as if a hole wide enough to admit an upright man had been dug and loosely filled in after he had been planted like one cryogenically preserved. I could make no sense of what I saw—nor all I had _heard_ and _felt_. Had I been dreaming? Was I still dreaming?

The sun was sinking, and I had miles to go before I slept; miles to go before I waked? Looking intently about me one last time, I turned my back, but not my heart, upon the Sky Ranch, and began retracing my steps along and down the road. Picking up the main road again, I resumed bobbing up and down, elatedly, no longer imagining myself God's Whack-a-Goph, but the _Resident Poet_ experiencing the highs and higher-yets of creation. And a strange thing began happening: I started seeing people doing the things people do about their homesteads, and passing by in their various country conveyances; honest-to-God mountain folk who never failed of greeting me with a smile and a hail-fellow-well-met, as I met them in kind. Were any my soon-to-be neighbors? Was some small part of theirs my promised land: some corner of a foreign field that is forever sing-land, home of the honeybee? In this gauzy dream state I floated, my soles not coming within two feet of the road; and, had someone told me that I had morphed into a monarch butterfly after all, why wouldn't I have believed it? What happened next all but convinced me: with scarcely more than a few flaps as light as the air they barely stirred, I was come again to the entrance of a homestead on the south side I well recalled passing, being one of only two that afforded an unobstructed view to the south, though the vista could only be imagined, the road being lower than the rising land beyond, presided over by an old galvanized-steel barn. The weathered board fence that framed the open gateway would have been unremarkable in its faded green state, except for one brightly conspicuous feature—and it stopped me mid-flight, all aflutter: a sign I hadn't seen before, conspicuously placed at the entrance where even a love-blind poet couldn't have missed it. On a background as black as an old frying pan, bright, bold letters of melted country butter warmly proclaimed

DOUBLE DEKKER RANCH

I melted in solidarity, poring upon it unblinkingly, and might have done so for as long as it takes butter to dry. But the allure of seeing my sun-drenched promised land was too overpowering to savor it longer. Straightway, at least as straight as a monarch flies, I fluttered through the gate without a pang of conscience, prepared to argue that I couldn't really be trespassing since my feet were not touching the ground. With every beat, wings only less than heart, away in the loveable east the most majestic sight began to arise, like the morning sun, ever more above the brow of the land. Then it was in full and glorious view. I hovered there adoring it ("Most beautiful flower, Pride of the Mediterranean, filled with the sweetest of nectars"). And just when I thought it couldn't get any more gorgeous, I was smitten with its further magnificent beauty: unlike the sun, one so enamored, especially a monarch, could look directly at it for as long as one desired, and I did, and instead of hurting the eyes, it did them an Old World of good. And good it was to pore anew upon the _Villa on the Hilla of the Color of Vanilla_ , as I was inspired to name it, such was the poetry of this "Most splendrous flower of the Mediterranean." The monarch of all I surveyed, I had a further on-the-spot inspiration: _it never reigns but it pores_. And so I pored, and was only just begun dreaming upon it when I was startled out of my reverie by a voice directly behind me:

"Welcome to Double Dekker Ranch."

Turning on a wing, I was greeted by a tall, thin, middle-aged man— _who could only have materialized out of the thin air._

"I'm Timothy Dekker," he said, giving me a neighborly smile and his hand.

"Timothy," I said, returning the smile and the hand. "I'm David Madison. So don't say I never give anything back."

"I won't if you don't," he said, returning mine.

_Timothy_ ," I said again, pausing. "Well now that's a right appropriate name for a hayseed, isn't it?"

I don't know what ever possessed me to be so familiar with a perfect stranger like that. If I'd thought about it beforehand, it doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage to be so familiar, though something about him just seemed to give me leave. I might have, but it doesn't seem as if. Anyway, he laughed, so I guessed I hadn't damaged my first impression too irreparably.

"David is my brother's name," he said. "He moved away some months back. Got burned out, more by the drive up here than by the fire. That happens to a lot of people. Mountain living isn't for everyone."

"I'd never get tired of it."

"That's what they all say."

"No, really, I wouldn't. Ever."

"We'll see about that."

What did he mean? I wondered, but I didn't get a chance to for long.

"I guess you'd get tired of it less quickly, though," he said with a wry smile, "if you lived yonder."

"You mean the _Villa on the Hilla of the Color of Vanilla_?

"Hey, that's the perfect name for it," he laughed. "You must be some kind of a poet."

"Hay yourself, Timothy. It's almost as perfect as DOUBLE DEKKER RANCH. But I think of myself as more of a tennis player."

" _Tennis._ Of course! Now I know why your name, and you, seemed familiar to me. I read about you, saw your likeness, in the Ojai Valley Noose. Hanged if you didn't just win the Ojai Valley Tennis-with-the-net-up Tournament—for the third year running. But then I guess no one ever won it walking, did they?"

"I guess you'd be wrong. Robert Frost won it one year when the path he was walking diverged in a yellow wood, and he took the one less travelled by, and that made all the difference."

"That's right! I remember now. And, in leaving _The Road Not Taken_ for another day, he doubted, knowing how way leads on to way, if he'd ever be back that way again. But getting back to the _Villa on the Hilla of the Color of Vanilla_ , you ought to run right over and run that by Larry. I'm sure he'd like it so well he'd put it up on a sign at the gate before the paint was even dry."

"Larry?"

"Actor Larry Hagman. _I Dream of Jeannie,_ villain J. R. Ewing in _Dallas_."

"Tell me more about this _Villan_ , and I'll write a poem about him under that title, since you like it so well, and you're sure he will."

"Son of actress Mary Martin; sits behind a lead shield to protect himself from the Doppler Radar; had a liver transplant, perhaps due to lead poisoning; drives a Honda hybrid with the vanity plate RELIVER."

"The _Villa on the Hilla_ is practically composing itself. You might try doing the same. But where is your villa, Timothy?"

"You can call me Tim, since you're otherwise so familiar with me. It's on the far side of that giant haystack below us that some call a hilla, and others a sentry. You can just see the roof above the hilla, just as you could at Meher Mount, though my cat's only got one ear. My villa's a little more humble, but, together, Lar and I keep close tabs on who's coming and going on the mountain between us.

"Now that you mention people going, where is David's place?"

"I thought you'd never ask, meaning I always knew you would. Let's go."

He led us past the barn and up the rough shale road running west along the side of the mountain. He told me he was a high school history teacher in Parris, Riverside County, a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute commute both ways. He and David had inherited the place twenty years ago from childless Uncle Don and Aunt Marie. Now that David was gone, care of the 60-acre Double Dekker Ranch fell on a single Dekker, married, one boy. I told him I lived in a sufficiently poetic school bus, which I had converted during four years, and driven from Canada to California, back to Canada, back to California, out to Key West, Florida, around Mexico down to the Belizean border, and back to Ojai a year and a half later; that I was living in the Upper Valley on Sisar Road on the little homestead I purchased with my life savings, and remodeled over nine years; that I was single, no kids.

It was a lot to lay on one another, total strangers, and we both might have been exhausted at the completion of the easy ¼-mile walk; but, strangely, we were both as chipper as chipmunks. The mountain/man had put such an idyllic vision of the sun-drenched "site apart" in my mind, that I'd have matched mine with Thomas More's vision of Utopia any day. But as we rounded the last bend, and the road opened on the site with all the fanfare of _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ , it rudely entered my mind that I was no visionary. The charred remains of the double-wide mobile home were a stark reminder of the fire that could be seen from Oxnard fifteen miles away. Blackened debris lay upon and all about the skeletal steel frames with their tireless wheels, and profanely littered the site carved out of the side of the mountain. A huge old oak tree on an elevation behind the homesite stood stoically uncomprehending, its face burned off like so many close to ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But my eyesight only glimpsed the carnage fleetingly in passing as it jubilantly flew out over the hills and the valleys of every vibrant, living shade of green; beyond, the islands coruscating like precious jewels in a sea of lapis lazuli beneath a sapphire sky. What a poor, feeble power was my imagining! All before me was "beautiful beyond any singing of it." Cry, the beloved country!

"I could never get tired of this," I said reverently, turning to Tim. "Ever. It is poetry."

"Even looking at all this mess?"

"The work of but a dumpster and a day. And the oak, unlike the Japanese, will soon put on a new face."

I looked up past the tree to the ridge several hundred yards above where the large white sphere that was the Doppler Radar tower perched like God's own golf ball, teed up for the Almighty to drive onto the green in one or another of the valleys, each of which had the whole of beauty one could ever want, He thus scoring His wonted whole in one.

"Like Larry," Tim said as if he were reading my mind, "David was paranoid about the radar beam going over his head, like his wife, several hundred miles out into the Pacific, not always so calm, to send back images of approaching storms. He was afraid the one would give him cancer, and the other more mouths to feed. Nothing will bring him back."

"I don't fear the radar. Like most scientific technology, it goes right over my head. Woman, though, is a much more complex technology. Her inherent radar sends back images of that perfect storm: marriage and kids; responsibility; she the one figure of speech in my life."

"Yet you are another. And since you are, I'll ask you to answer me this: If you should ever use a simile in describing this site—and the question is, should you?—what would you liken it to?"

"This site is like the _grandest_ tennis court

that one could ever play on, high above

the common, yes, the perfect-scoring sort

in which I'm always leading 40-love.

I serve myself the ball, and I return it

to myself—the perfect courting sport:

I win each game, and have a _ball_ —and earn it,

because the ball is always in my court.' "

"Well _I_ like it. But I'll have to run it by the little figure of speech. She's the final arbiter in all things love. The net, at least, appears very durable. What's it made of?

"Beautiful, isn't it? It's an organic blend woven of highest-quality rhyme and meter from Egypt, which fabric is designed, like the pyramids, to last forever, and reserved for the finest poets. So high that no free verser could ever come close to getting a ball over it, not that one would ever try."

"That's a net positive, I'd say. So I wonder, David, if I might put a notion in your head. You said a moment gone that you had a fear of that perfect storm that is woman. I think you a likely sort, though a little weak on one figure of speech, so I would like to suggest a relationship that you need not fear: you could move your net and your sufficiently poetic bus up here, and be something like a poet in residence, with nothing over your head but the radar, the red-tailed hawks, and the open sky, free to poetize to your heart's content. You could even hang up a freshly painted shingle, and make a little jingle by the same. In return, much as if it were a ball, you could satisfy the fire department as to weed abatement, and lighten my burden, without the least we'd abatement. We'd still be the best of neighbors through thick and thin."

_"Yes!"_ I sang out in my euphoria. My promised land was come unto me! "And, Tim, I too have a thought: Since David has moved away, meaning that by law you are required to change DOUBLE DEKKER RANCH to SINGLE DEKKER RANCH, which would lose all of the former's poetry, or be subject to the severe penalties of false advertising, I could deliver you from that. See amidst the carnage the two 10x50-ft steel frames. I could make of them, phoenixes rising from the ashes, wooden decks. One alongside my bus at the back of the site, and the other right at the front, the better to pore upon the full unredacted vista. Oh, but not made of ordinary green fir which warps and cracks and causes one to stub his toes and weep, but of genuine Dek® brand kiln-dried fir. What is triple the expense, Tim, when the real beauty of it is that, my name being David as well; and because I shall go to the further double expense of building _two_ Deks, I will be—yes, you see it—a genuine DOUBLE DEKKER, and you won't have to change your freshly painted sign, and have to throw away so much good melted country butter."

"That sounds like a plan," Tim laughed. "How soon can you move up?"

The sun was near setting, throwing the loveliest shadows upon the hills and into the valleys, or I would have flown down into the Upper Valley like a nectar-craving monarch, and driven up then and there. Instead I sang out, "First thing in the morning."

We continued talking and laughing and working things out between us as the light began to fade.

"It's going to be dark soon," Tim said, "Let me give you a lift down."

"I sincerely thank you, Tim, but I think I'd like to stay and watch the sunset, my very first." I didn't want to tell him, as naturally high as I was, that any lift he gave me would be a comedown.

"It's going to be pitch dark going down the road beneath the trees. You'll have to feel your way down."

"I'll be just fine," I said, knowing that everything would continue being pitch perfect. Instead of taking the road I would fly over the trees in _such_ moonlight and starlight as there should be; for I had dreams to keep, and smiles to go before I'd sleep, smiles to go before I'd sleep.

In good fellowship we bid each other goodnight, Tim turning to walk across the wide littered expanse and up the road, I turning to glory in the sunset. Yet I was only midway in my turning when I felt the heartfelt compulsion to thank him once more, and immediately turned back, but I was speechless. _He was gone, vanished into the thin air._

__

__

I'd only closed my eyes it seemed and it was morning. The promised land in the sky awaited. Looking up, there was God's own golf ball, radiantly white in the morning sun, and just waiting to be driven. Down to earth again, my bus, not so white now, feeling the sun upon it, was also waiting to be driven. It had been waiting eight long years, not moving an inch, unless the Northridge Earthquake had shifted it that much. Firing it up, I knew it well enough to know that it was as fired up as I was to be "on" the road again, its tires fairly floating above the road the entire five miles.

Driving over the blackened debris, I parked at the front of the site where, on awakening , I might roll over on my stomach, open my eyes, and believe myself still dreaming. That afternoon a dumpster was delivered. Something there was about it that put me in mind of Robert Frost's _Mending Wall_ , so

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

and on the morn we met to put aright

the hallowed site the fire had so profaned.

We kept the wreck between us as we went.

To each the charred debris that fell to each.

And some was recognizable, but some

was burnt beyond all recognition. All

went in the dumpster, all the things it takes

to make a home, to make way for the home

that now was come, the memories and all.

We wore our fingers rough with handling them.

One by one, the camel's nose got beneath the days, and they flew by like the leaves of my compositions: restoring the services; putting up a 5-foot fence to keep out the deer, bobcats, mountain lions, bears (Before I built a fence I'd ask to know / What I was fencing in or fencing out); building the decks; making raised garden beds; raising higher the tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, lettuce, and other delectables and flowers; giving a good home to two cats and the honeybee; all the while crafting those constructions a resident poet takes pride and comfort in living in and for. Yet I never worked a single day. And the seasons flew by like the days. . . .

****

As I look out now, these many years later, upon the hills and the valleys, still lovely beyond any singing of it, I reflect, as in a dream, upon how I got here. I started out talking about tennis. Along the way I courted a mountain, and it courted me. Love at first site, we played the Us Open with all our hearts, served each other well, and had an absolute ball. This book is the net result. Do I wake or dream?

##

Castles in the Air

I've built away, away up there,

so many castles in the air

that no one longer stops to stair,

to take the steps that are not there.

The castleless as one all sigh,

"The choicest real estate on high!

_You've got it made_. Why do you— _why?_ —

build yet more castles in the sky?"

"I'll tell you: it's because I care

to do what others never dare:

the world too much for me to bear,

to nearest castle I repair.

"But, how, _how_ do you ever reach

without a stair?" the mass beseech.

By means of some idyllic speech,

I hold them, rapt: "I get to each

by singing out, 'Rapunzel fair,

let down your long, long golden hair.'

And so I climb," and leave off there,

speak no more of my heart's affair.

And oh the earth-wide hue and cry

that I've so castled-up the sky;

made them so commonplace they sigh,

and that's as good a reason why

I've built away, away up there,

so many castles in the air

that no one longer stops to stare;

and gravity has ceased to care.

##

The Vow

Day wholly bright and more than fine, the air

was morning sweet, the May sun warm and rife;

yet, pledged, I took no whit more than that share

of breath and heat, the stinting least that life

would have me have. And so I trod my way

on up, my spine a rack on which was borne

no excess stitch of meagerest array,

as well befitted one who'd so forsworn.

All spare of breath, I gained the hard-sought hill,

gazed flushed afar, then down and _near_ to see,

abreast and climbing, fixed, as with a will,

austere of dress, the upward trudge of three.

I judged, by their spare cut and measured plod,

these poorly souls to be three of the cloth,

hard climbing, in their own way, toward God,

in poverty, to which they'd sworn their troth.

I held and waited, breathless, for them there

in wonder: _What renouncing souls are these_

_who poorly seek the Nearer-to-thee air_

_to win their God, their souls' eternal ease?_

As if of highest spirits they had drunk,

there won the heights, _Hail fellow!_ ed me thereon,

a Carmelite nun and a Buddhist monk,

a Hindu sadhu, thread-thin dhoti on.

As I had done, these three their measure took

of me, judged I was of the cloth, too, but

coarse _linen,_ and then read, as from a book,

how I was from this bolt so poorly cut.

If eyes be truly windows of the soul,

as poets claim, I looked in six to see,

all jaundiced, high atop that sacred knoll,

three green-eyed souls in soul-sick awe of me.

"All worldly wealth we three renounced," the nun

sang as it were a sigh, "for blessed are

the poor in spirit—blessedness _you've_ won,

for all your cloth is _much_ the poorer far.

We seek, but you have reached perfection's state

through poverty of your coarse linen dress.

I weep to see, at _too-soft_ cotton rate,

how my poor habit (God!) is pure excess."

"I've robed myself in rough hemp till I'm raw,"

the monk bewept, "to chastely do without

fine silks and satins—but to stand in awe

of _all_ you do forsake, the more devout:

you do without means of support, a fee,

respect, a _name_ —a flame some fame-struck moth

might fly unto—so you might be, not me,

the _poorest_ cut of pure ascetic cloth."

"My dhoti is of meanest sackcloth," sobbed

the sadhu, "yet how richly overawed

am I, my dark-caste skin all ashes-swabbed,

to see _you_ —poorest swath and work of God.

Your linen screams your poor-regarded caste:

_Untouchable!_ —no sadder I does see

my soul can't ever be so poorly classed,

despite my strict life vow of poverty."

I gazed in six green windows of the soul,

upon that sacred _closer-to-thee_ mound,

I deep: "Like you, I seek the godhead goal,

and unto which is all my linen bound.

Your vow of poverty's one hill sublime,

whereas I strove up this one but to see

I've other higher, harder hills to climb,

for all my life-bound vow of poetry."

##

A Mantra for All Seasons

Lord, I wish I were a herbivore

—oh, now that spring has sprung!

I'd scorn the thistles, needles, thorns,

to taste upon my tongue

each succulent, herb, sage, and grass

—so sweet, mint-green, and young,

whose vernal flavors, long-missed savors,

nine months go unsung.

Lord, I wish I were a frugivore

—oh, now that summer's ripe!

full might I feast on every fruit

of every fragrant type,

from every branch, cane, vine, and bush,

of every luscious stripe,

and never, Lord, oh, never _ever_

whine, or moan, or gripe!

Lord, I wish I were a breathivore,

—oh, now that autumn falls!

and I could live on crisp, clean air

whilst singing madrigals.

The smell, the sight—the _thought_ of food—

my fasting soul appalls,

and turns to yeast sweet summer's feast,

till hunger sours and galls.

Lord, I wish I were a carnivore,

—oh, now that winter's young!

for snow lies deeply on the grass

—full cold her sting has stung.

Dear Lord, the living, soon I shall

not count myself among,

and wish some meat—to give me _heat—_

unto me might be flung.

Lord, I wish I were an omnivore,

—oh, all throughout the year!

and I could then eat what—oh, joy!—

my drooling tongue lay near.

_You are!_ a voice inside me sang;

its tone was sweet and clear!

Since when, dear Lord, that one sweet chord

rings gospels in mine ear.

##

A Question of Balance

__

_God, how many ants must I, godlike, kill_

_before I stubbornly break their will?_

is a raging question that nettles me still;

for still they come in a long black line,

so brashly, recklessly crossing mine,

that I swear some madness in their design

is calling the tune.

How many? O God, I've long lost count

on the dawn side of noon.

Come! soldier ants with your feelers drawn

like little ant bayonets fixed sharply on

some anticipation you're hell-bent upon;

a pawn to the antics your mandibles play,

_come!_ march to your appetite's drum—and pray!—

this ravenous morn of your dying day,

little ant platoon,

As, one by one, you pay your account

on the mourn side of noon.

Does it strike not a one of you, breath after breath,

as you stumble across fresh death after death,

to question the twentieth? _ninetieth?_

Which saith to each in a long black line,

_It's a sign!—of a force not ant benign:_

_here reigns a power far GREATER, DIVINE_

_—Turn back, before you lie strewn!_

Yet the number of dead continues to mount

on the ant'cide of noon.

And some part of me cries, _God, where is the sense_

_in fashioning a creature with no defense_

_save life hereafter's recompense?_

_A fence that may be crossed but once_

_by **** all your mortal earthly runts,_

**_No more_** _to forage on earthly hunts?_

. . . But You don't commune.

Leaving nary an answer I may recount

on the mute side of noon.

Is a forager tendered emolument

for his laying down of the formic scent

that leads to gross ant nutriment,

some compliment with which all hail

the layer of the reeking trail

that leads to hunger's holy grail

some unwashed spoon? . . .

But, like the dead, the questions mount

on the mum side of noon.

(God, answer them soon.)

Yet, Lord Almighty, hear most this plea:

deem not my words as heresy

in swearing ants pray not to thee,

to see what smallest ant can heist,

and positing there's been a tryst

between the ants and the _Antichrist_

—hold me immune!

And let not truth against me count

on the Hell side of noon,

reprising the tune:

_God, how many ants must I righteously kill_

_before I break their God-planned will?_

is a raging question that nettles me still;

for still they come in a long black line,

so suicidally crossing mine

that I toss all guilt for their mad decline

that I here impugn;

for Death never grants an ant discount

on the grave side of noon.

Yet, _still,_ in a hearse-black line they come

and, God above! the ungodly sum

I've crushed beneath that next my thumb!

falling numb on the wee spirit-lives within,

so true to their maker, their kith and their kin,

and never once asks: _Might it not be a sin_

_to cancel Life's boon?_

NO, killing of ants is paramount

on the cold side of noon.

How fast they fly on thread-thin legs!

how _strong_ to sport their fry, their eggs

so high, as though they're precious dregs!

which begs (against the human grain)

to ask: _How_ _can their pigmy brain_

_pull them through weight of carnage-pain?_

like the tide by the moon.

No countess could ever, that high toll, count

on the pall side of noon

to the madcap tune:

_God, how many aunts must I stubbornly kill_

_before my uncles get wise to the chill?_

is a relative question that nettles me still;

for still they come in a long black line

that is so mortifyingly close to mine

that I see _myself_ in their mad design

—and I'm way out of tune!

For the killing of aunts is not my account

on the mad side of noon,

causing lawyers to croon:

__

_On the precedent side, the killing of ants_

_is a lawful, unawful miscreance,_

_so it's fine—but there is an ordinance_

_stating: Aunts, if killed (no accident), died,_

_leaving nary a note of suicide,_

_would fall on noon's clear homicide,_

and I nearly swoon

thinking I might ( _"Life!"_ ) be held to account

on the aunt'cide of noon,

resurrecting the tune:

_God, how many ants must I leisurely kill_

_before all my leisure succumbs to their will?_

is a catholic question that nettles me still;

for still they come in a long black line

—in turn to eternity hordes I consign

till I'm troubled about this karma of mine

—Lord, lest it come soon,

this humble confession should square my account

on the meek side of noon,

thus sparing the tune:

_God, how many ants must I stubbornly kill_

_before I madly succumb to their will?_

is a nettlesome question that ages me still;

for still they come in a long, black line..................................

And I see (the _genius_ in their design!):

Their _numbered_ power is greater than mine

—O Lord, what a tune!

And my whole life's question teeters upon

Time's crown, like a spoon..............................................

and falls on what I now see amounts

to the down side of noon.

##

_ _

__

_Agapanthus africanus mobius_

In walking out, for want of company,

I bent and plucked a tender tended leaf

of agapanthus, lily of the Nile,

_To hold between my fingers all the while,_

I told myself, and let a smile intrude

to know I held it (all the wile in me)

the more between myself and solitude,

as one who holds out hope of some relief.

I rode the layered waves of mountain shale,

the upthrust seabed, eons old when new,

upsurfed the breaker's surface to its crest,

and stood atop the ocean floor at rest,

beholding by half-turns the sweep of sea

to south; to north, Los Padres' grandeured scale.

How small the leaf in hand then seemed to me;

how narrow-vistaed its two-sided view.

Long out of Africa, our long-ago,

dark, land-forgotten birthing place, it came,

long, ribbon-flat, thin-supple by design.

What seer would hold it held a living sign,

a truth as old as time, as in my hand

it lay, two hues of green? How could I know

by gazing on its two-faced surface, and,

by twist of thought, its truth divine, and name?

As if I couldn't stand the truth, I sat

beholding isles a muse of miles to sea.

Bedreaming so, a truth played out that stands:

Two idle hands can't long be idle hands.

They worried, turned it overmuch, the leaf.

One gave one end a half twist, held it flat

against mate end; still I held no belief

a leaf-held truth had been revealed to me.

A free-hand finger idly played at tracing

round the twisted surface of the band,

yet couldn't stop at one for what came round

each round: _one_ side, _one_ edge, _one_ truth—profound:

an idle half twist made at once _all_ _one:_

one face, one edge—one truth around it racing:

_Nothing ends that's endlessly begun._

And all this truth, in leaf, I held in hand.

In time I broke the endless circle so,

in letting it go, I might let the truth

return to being leaf that I might see

the leaf as leaf, not metaphorically.

I saw it had two sides of different hue:

bright, glossy-green above, dull-green below.

The dull was age and death I fancied; too,

the glossy-bright was life, full green of youth.

In truth, I saw my life and death as one

long _Agapanthus africanus_ leaf:

bright, glossy-green above, dull-green below,

end-joined with half a twist—yet not a show

of end in sight. In truth, all I could see

was, for the _one_ der of its endless run,

a Möbius band made of all of me,

and wave on wave on wave of my re-leaf.

And here is yours, my as-immortal friend:

you're _one,_ an endless Möbius band, too,

self-made when you, half twisted in your fear,

enjoined Death to, your dear life, not come near,

ensuring, by that deathless, fearful act,

your life by way of death will never end;

a life-eternal, self-revealing fact

that you your living self can prove is true:

Come, you've an idle finger, let it trace

around you that you, too, might know relief:

you're _endless;_ see! your life flows into death,

but to come back to _life—all new_ of breath,

as if some Oneness had your circuit planned.

It's all right, _let_ your finger touch death's face;

you'll weep to see, for oneness of the band,

and soon, your life continued overleaf.

##

Bleak House

I'd walked by it a thousand times at least,

along the mountain road atop the ridge;

five hundred going west, five hundred east,

not seeing it for the rank foliage

that long since had reclaimed it for its own.

Two rusting posts, like sentries, all but hidden,

galvanized my insight: overgrown,

a _driveway_ long untrodden, long unridden.

Looking out for poison oak, I parted

the dense wild growth, my feet slow to advance

in fear of what may leave me heavy hearted,

less the poison oak than else they'd chance,

in moving me to know what mystery

lay at its end, decayed, what history?

The more I crept beneath the dense live oaks

that made God's glimpse of earth the harder won,

and cast a pall on all below and choked

the undergrowth to ground for lack of sun,

the driveway yet lay unseen for the leaves

of latter years that further choked the growth

as sure as they do gutters fronting eaves,

eliciting homeowner's choked-up oath.

Intent, I followed in the forest gloom

the phantom roadway round, between dark trunks,

encouraging but little there to bloom;

hope least of all I felt. The haunt of skunks.

Still I was moved to see what I would see,

undaunted, let no gloom discourage me.

I felt a stalwart anthropologist

in search of _montane man_ , brute "man of oaks,"

such crude tools as he'd rough-hewn to exist

from bones of giant sloths, no Piltdown hoax;

what yet stood of his primitive abode

he'd pulled above his head on savage ground,

of sticks and mud as clime and time erode,

no wise anticipating what I found:

Upon a low rise shut to open sky

by oaken canopy as dark as thick,

and terraced round, the slope to fortify,

a single-story, solid house of brick;

a good, large house to raise a family;

but no sign of a family did I see.

No sign of life then, nor of life before

left just as is, chairs, say, to take their ease in

and relax ( _We made it_ ), when, once more,

they'd got there from a far home for the season.

Still, meekly I approached for knowing I

trespassed, yet felt myself on solid ground:

beneath leaves rustling each their stepped-on sigh,

a concrete patio, the house around.

The windows dark beneath the leaf-thick roof

were so begrimed with dust and oak-tree pollen,

north-side moss as to be look-in proof,

proof into long neglect they, all had fallen.

Rubbing one, as deep sleep from the eyes,

I peered in, walleyed; each to more surprise.

The walls were just as bare as every room

of those dear things that make a house a home,

like light and life, all emanating gloom,

an empty, death-awaiting catacomb.

The mountain had a witch once, legend said;

still, how could such a fine brick house go wanting

life, except her ghost, herself long dead,

was witching yet? Yes, what else but a haunting?

I came away with no such empty mind,

so full was it of troublous thoughts about

the hollow house I couldn't leave behind,

though in my state I left off every doubt:

the legend of the witch, her ghost, was true.

The proof was in my being haunted too.

I couldn't get it off my mind. Who owned it?

Why had it sat empty for so long,

and so neglected no excuse atoned it,

nothing that could exculpate the wrong?

Old Reiner Bay the rich, I learned, had built it

for his son, the two for years estranged.

Apart from not assuaging father guilt, it

failed to mend the rift, the breach unchanged.

Yet Reiner never lost hope; he maintained

the house as built for years; he'd see it filled

( _My son!_ ), and kept it up till, not so trained,

he crashed his plane in fog five years since, killed,

the house unkept, the more unkept the tears.

The house had been unlived in _thirty_ years.

I pushed back the rank foliage once more

compelled to go back into all the gloom,

so saddened for the empty house heartsore

so little light, less hope deigned to illume

it aching so each day for thirty years

to be a good home to a family,

a heaven haven for the near-and-dears

whom it would love, they'd love their home to be.

It wasn't rational to feel as I

about a lifeless empty house, I knew;

a thing no sane man would personify,

imparting human feelings to it; to

so let it touch my heart and have it melt.

I knew it, and yet that is how I felt.

Seeing it in gloom once more, I had

such feelings as I knew must meet objection:

that it looked unutterably sad,

the dismal aspect of complete dejection

of an orphan child who, day by day,

despite beseeching eyes, is never taken,

brokenhearted when they turn away,

and cries herself to sleep each night, forsaken.

Still, the house was sadder yet for this:

it had no pleading eyes they had to see,

moved; no heart-rending voice they couldn't miss;

no clinging arms to hold them "family."

Inanimate, it couldn't make appeal,

heartbroken. All that it could do was feel.

Completely empty. _Thirty years._ Its childhood,

youth, its prime of life _spent_ , all alone,

old long before its time, deep in the wild wood,

unloved; no love it could call its own,

itself its own old-age home sitting by

its darkened, viewless window, mute and dumb,

the whole day, aching, trying not to cry

for loved ones, family, who never come.

The holidays were worst, each dread return,

when loneliness and heartbreak would endow

it pain and sorrow so deep it would burn

itself down to the ground, if it knew how.

The darkness never yielding, never brightening,

it prayed (I felt it) to be struck by lightning.

I stayed with it a long time so it wouldn't

feel so hollow, all alone, and get

some comfort from my nearness, till I couldn't,

drawing out goodbye with sad regret

to feel its mute plea, knowing I was leaving

it alone to all its empty sorrow

once more, hoping I might ease its grieving

promising it, _I'll come back tomorrow_.

I came each day and stayed in close communion

by its side until I had to part,

more feeling it ached for that closer union

more with each goodbye with heavy heart:

_If only you could stay with me inside,_

_and stay my emptiness awhile_ , it cried.

I felt it, and it wrought upon my heart

the more each time I had to say goodbye,

to feel, its life so empty from its start,

one more part of its heart, more broken, die;

nor did it let go of me in my leaving

it emptier, alone, but stayed with me,

as I stayed not inside to stay its grieving,

and wrought the change in me sought by its plea:

_I will! I'll seek the son out in the city_

_of Angels. By appealing to those of_

_his better nature, he will see the pity_

_of his house so long in want of love_

_its whole life long, so empty and alone,_

_his heart so touched, if it's not made of stone._

__

_Then I will come to live inside you just_

_as surely as you live inside of me._

_I'll bare the blue sky for you you may trust_

_you'll see clear through the thinned oak canopy,_

_in looking out your bright, clear windows—oh,_

_and not me only, I'll take on a wife,_

_and then will follow children in a row;_

_each day you'll take on ever fuller life._

_We'll fill your dear-loved rooms, adorn your walls_

_with treasured things that make a house a home,_

_the photos, keepsakes, voices, toys, and dolls,_

_the family life as sweet as honeycomb._

_And nevermore will you be lonely or,_

_your life fulfilled, feel empty anymore._

__

But then I saw, as wakened from a dream,

it couldn't ever be for coming day;

my life was being borne, as by a stream,

afar to tropic land a world away.

I went to see it one last time, and cried

with it in choking out how very sorry

I was that I couldn't live inside

it, end its emptiness, its sad, sad story.

I stayed with it awhile to balmless sorrow,

when at last I had to say goodbye

without the sore missed _I'll come back tomorrow_.

I couldn't, and I cried to see it cry

in anguish, and it cut me like a knife.

Like city son, I had my place in life.

##

Love Song of the Roof

_I like the sound of rain upon the roof._

You've likely said as much yourself in rain.

I'd rather say the rain is silent proof

the roof is singing us its love refrain.

It's raining now. Just listen to the sound

that's coming to us from the roof above.

It's singing to us now; hear it resound

through you, its plaintive, timeless song of love:

_Don't worry, my love, I am here for you_

_to shelter and protect you from the storm._

_You're all I live for; I exist to love you,_

_keep you safe and dry, above all, warm._

_You are why I've been here all along_

_so silent and forgotten, till the rain_

_comes down, and I sing my eternal song_

_to you in one, the loveliest, refrain,_

_that you may know it's my full heart that sings._

_Just listen, love, and rest beneath my wings._

__

__

##

_   
_

__

Counting Coup

" _These flies!_ Why _did_ God make them!" Lovie fumed,

her pitched voice rising, all for catching up with

bony, careworn hands long risen to

the fanning of the fly-infested air

about her ears. "And why do they insist

on landing on our ears—then set there doing

nothing?"

"Maybe they think they're us two

old gadflies touching down in Earizona

winters," Will made light. "We don't do much

but set there either when we get there. But

what makes you think God made them? Don't you think

they look a lot more like his, Satan's work,

the Lord of Flies? Old Farley says they're the

official bird down there."

"He'd know, all right.

But why our ears? I can't see either one's

so fetching. If I didn't know too well,

I'd say they couldn't one of them draw flies.

I've turned it over in my mind so often,

getting no return, that I'd've thrown

my hands up in the air if they'd not been

there all along— _GIT!—_ ever since the first

warm flyblown summer day. Instead I washed

them both of the infernal matter—yes,

it's his work, no doubt—and then turned the whole

bedeviling question over to my ripe

imagination."

"What did it dream up?"

"It fancied they see our two ears as one more

high-dry pair of soft-pink sea shells heaved up

all those sea-tossed years ago with all

its shale, this seabed peak we're standing on

a heady half-mile high: ' _Look!_ right beneath

our foul-smelling noses and our filthy-

sticky feet, two more—hah! some defense!

Let's _stick_ it to them, put our ears up to

these shells and hear the mighty ocean's roar

not fifteen miles (if we could only fly straight,

so it's more like fifteen thousand) south

to where the breakers break upon the shore,

the white-capped combers she could clearly see once

from here, but no more.' Well that was fine,

my fancy thought, for warm-ups. Then it took

to turning every figment loose and let

its whole imagination run amuck

—and then what didn't it see out the corners

of its lively mind's eye! saw our ears

as mirror-image aircraft carriers

tossed in the hairiest of hairy seas:

the wavy-wild Atlantic on the right,

and on the left the windblown, whitecap-swelled

Pacific, each one bobbing in a storm-tossed

sea—and just the things to count on come

to teaching all the young fries, proud they've got

their wings, their takeoffs and their landings—splash!

_You've got to time them with the pitch and roll_

_—NO, not the boiling sea, the beads of sweat_

_on deck!_ "

"I see, Love, your imagination

hasn't lost its vision one bit since

that day when it took to imagining

a life for you with me, to make me wish

it had imagined, through the years, a little

better one, for you if not for me."

"No, it imagined things just fine. It's been

a good life, all in all."

"That sounds like something

I should get in writing, so's to have

a word or two in my defense when called

up to the stand."

"What makes you think you're going

to be called up, not down?"

"I only thought

to plant the seed in his mind, just in case,

through some Jehovah's oversight, I might

not find my good name on the witness list.

To prove how good a witness I would be,

I saw back there that your imagination

clearly saw how much they all were counting

on them."

"Who is 'they'? who's 'them' they're counting

on?"

"Why, Love, I mean your fancied flyboys;

how their lot is counting on our ears.

They know that we know, when we hear their fast-

incoming kamikaze buzz, we've only

got a fraction of that time to get

our hand-flown air defenses in the air

to wave them off, and if, as we are getting

with the years, too slow, they zero in

and— _taxi_ to dead stop? why, they scorn

such flyweight flying tactics—no, they _stick_

the landing cold to perfect tens, then hold

their ground, still, almost longer than they dare

to stick around—then buzz off as expressly,

notching up another kill that they

can boast of so triumphantly among

their kind for days—their whole life—for their having

so fly-bravely counted coup on us."

"Will Sams, I guess I've known you long enough

to know, by heart, there'd be no flies on your

imagination either."

"No, I didn't

have to go so far as getting fancy.

You got to the heart of it a ways back

when you said, 'then set there doing nothing.'

I know flies are always doing something

so's to make the most of their few days

of life, the which is nothing so much as

to make our longer ones a living hell.

I only had to use a little logic

to conclude their 'nothing's nothing so much

as their way of counting coup on us."

"I only wish to that same hell you speak of

I could count now on my memory.

They've got me so put out I can't recall

where I've heard tell of 'counting coup' before."

"My love, we two are almost old enough

now to have seen the Great Plains Indians,

this earth's First Nation with their Animist

religion, holding dear life, seeing virtues

even in the lowliest of creatures.

Not alone, they saw, fell to the eagle

all the traits they so admired and worshiped.

So it was they came to look upon

that smallest, blackest, lowliest of all,

the winged pest of the plains, the 'lands-on-ear,'

and saw for all its lowness that it claimed

no small amount of native pluck and daring

to land _plunk!_ on ears of warrior

braves—even with their fearsome tomahawks

in hand—and _stay_ there even as they saw

each red man's ear grow all the redder for

the blow of the humiliation; stayed

when all reflexive instinct for the mean-

intentioned motion coming its way _fast_

was telling it to fly. And so the red man

saw it won no little honor for

the blow of the disgrace the red man suffered

at its hands he understood to be

its filthy-sticky feet; an honor that

would never die for each fly-magnified

recounting of the daring blows it struck,

the coups it counted and recounted dear,

for nights on end (all twenty, its whole life)

around the council fires of its great tribe—"

"Oh, Will, these flies are like to drive me bats!

Let's go inside where all your fancied words,

so like a mountain man, won't have to get

in line behind a hellish swarm of flies

to get my ear."

"My dear, my fancy's fires

would all be out and cold before our old

arthritic bones should get us there. Besides,

I taught my words a long time back to yell

'Geronimo!' then make a beeline for

your ear, sound-swatting all those in their path

the hell out of the way. I won't be long.

"And so the Crow, Arapaho, Lakota,

Sioux, Apache, Kaw, Oglala, Blackfoot,

Kiowa, Assiniboine, Cheyenne,

Comanche, Cree, Shoshone, Osage, Pawnee

—all the Great Plains tribes—put ears up to

the pink shell that was Mother Earth, the sacred

plains they walked upon, and was the earth's

first telegraph, to hear the ocean's roar

that was her counsel, telling them above

the distant thunder of the hooves of sacred

buffalo upon the Great Grass Ocean,

green and gold, 'Go, take, too, for your own

the "little brave"'s courageous way of landing

a humiliating blow upon

a shame-struck enemy, and make a deadly

game of it, and call it "counting coup." '

They took 'coup' from the French; their native instinct

told them it would be a 'blow' to them.

It called for bravely riding up in battle

to an enemy, at risk of grievous

injury or death, and touching him

with weaponless hand or with feathered coup stick,

notched for each life-risking coup so counted.

What each coup as much as said was, "This

bare hand might just as easily have been

an arrow or a knife, this feathered stick

a spear delivering you bloody unto

Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, were you

worthy of this honor, death in battle,

at my hand." And such was the disgrace

of the denial for the 'harmless' touch,

that coup was counted and recounted often

round the council fires, glowing in

the memory of one, and searing as if

it would scar the other one, for life.

The tribal honor system held that death

in battle was the greatest honor; yet

a brave could win much honor for himself,

and so win high position in the tribe,

by counting coup. So great was the prestige

attached to honor that the battle waged

was most intense to count the greatest coup,

as measured by the sheer pluck in the face of

one who'd kill or be killed rather than

be counted coup on, and so fiercely fought.

The victor won the honor, proudly sported

upright in his headband, of a single

eagle feather, which, if he was wounded

in the coup, he got to dye blood red.

If wounded in a hand-to-hand exchange,

He won the envied honor of a spread hand

painted red on buckskin or on pony.

One white cross sang of a daring rescue;

two white crosses, one on horseback; painted

hoof print on a pony sang the honor,

counted highly in the firelight's glow,

of one brave heart for coup of captured mount,

which honor glory he might sing of, seated

to the right of the Great Spirit, all

his days high in the Happy Hunting Ground.

"But now the Crow, Arapaho, Lakota,

Sioux, Apache, Kaw, Oglala, Blackfoot,

Kiowa, Assiniboine, Cheyenne,

Comanche, Cree, Shoshone, Osage, Pawnee—"

"Will, if I don't go in now I swear

I'll lose my wits for all these flies!"

"Love, wait.

I only want to say the honor-gloried,

legendary storied braves of yester-

year, the much historied Indians,

the Crazy Horses, Sitting Bulls, Cochises,

Big Foots, Little Ravens, Red Clouds, Howling

Wolfs, Rain in the Faces, Plenty Coups,

no longer ride the Great Plains looking to

count coup. Those days are long gone. Anymore,

they set themselves down on their reservations

counting beaucoup heaps of revenue

from Indian tax-free casinos, striking

one hard blow to those who drop the clothes

from off the backs, the food from out the mouths,

the roofs above the heads of their poor children,

on the tables, in the one-arm bandits

—down the drains the lives of those upon

whose blameless, helpless heads that we should count on

to hold hopes and dreams is counted greatest

coup, a crushing blow that strikes so low

as breaking faultless heart—"

"Oh, Will, please _stop!_ "

"I'm almost done, Love. But what modern braves

count most upon today is counting coup

without they're risking injury much less

their death, unless from the excesses born of

sudden and great wealth. They bear their notched

and feathered coup sticks in the hand upon

the long arm of the law that keeps them at

arm's distance, free of harms of taxes and

of running gambling dens. Yet far as we

can see, _for shame!_ of having fallen so low

from their spiritual life, no redder

are their ears. Yet what of our ears, Love?

We white-eyes, near descendants of our forebears

who not long before us counted coup

with forked tongue and yet more forked treaty pen.

Our ears are pink, but maybe we have only

all conspired to call them pink so we

won't ever have to call them what they are,

a deeply blushing _shame!_ of crimson, for

our taking their Great Plains, their herds of sacred

buffalo, their culture—all their lifeblood—

giving them, in fair return, some gewgaw

beads and blankets and some reservations

(which they had in spades at signing) not

much bigger, which our near forkfathers, by

fast breaking them like words and treaties, then

made smaller and yet—"

" _Will!_ I just can't stand it!"

"Lovie, wait, my last word. If I leave off

now there's just no counting on the coup

of getting, at my age, this thought that's on

the tip of my right fork back on again,

and it's a sweet one. What I started in

to say is there's another way we white-eyes

take to counting coup these days—with words.

No, not by winning battles with them (leastways

in _our_ minds) or getting in the last one,

or by touching someone with them in

one of our heartfelt human-touching ways.

Love, those ways are as old as Cain's and Abel's

old man and old lady, as the young

to this day speak of theirs, not knowing what

a blow it is. No, there's a new way that

is all the rage on boldest lips today,

and by which coup a brave can win much honor

and position in the Parley tribe.

You only need some native pluck to play,

the rules are few: At great risk of a harsh

or cold rebuff, which well might deal a stinging

blow to your defenseless pride—or kill it,

more's the like (no danger means you count

no coup)—you daringly dash up to someone,

_not a weapon in your hand,_ and bravely

reach out, well before, surprised, they have

a chance to fend you off, and boldly touch them

with the first word out your mouth—then quickly

lay another one upon them, then

another, then another, and so on

and on and on to this much honored end:

you don't just reach out, like Ma Bell, and touch

someone with some few words—you _grab_ them, whole,

you buttonhole their soul, and so you _hold_ them

much as did that ancient mariner

so hold the wedding guest, as you'll recall,

with but his glittering eye, fast holding them,

not giving them an opening so large

as they might drive a have-no-truck-with-you

through, giving them the chance to lay some few

choice words in edgewise on you, touching you

so ' _Hey,_ look at the time—I Gotta go!'ly

as to break the spell. And so you hold

them spellbound just as long as all your native

pluck and courage dares hold out, so you can

hold out for that honor you can _live_ with

—then you let out (deep inside) your most

blood-curdling war whoop, let them go, then fast

skip out of harm's way, laughing, yes, inside,

as you reach up and pluck a passing eagle,

stick that feather in your cap, and call it

_macaroni?_ Lovie, no, you call it

counting chatty coup."

"—That's right, you'd _better_

skip your hide out of harm's way, Will Sams!

But just _you_ wait! I'm going in—where there's

not so much as a fly upon the wall—

where you'll be when you catch the smell of something

cooking heavy in the air and want

a bellyful. Yet just you see if one

does not let fly and land one on your ear!"

##

Dead Possum

Dead possum on the road . . .

waiting to explode

in the hot sun,

and get that business of rotting done.

And it's a good reminder,

when a possum dies,

to place one hand across your eyes,

and the other over your nose.

Little there is of the rose

in a dead possum.

And I wonder:

_Was its nocturnal blunder,_

_its death, like thunder?_

_Was it terribly cross_

_it so suffered life's loss?_

_that it dawdled across . . ._

_and wound up possum sauce,_

_sore wounding its pride_

_it so ghoulishly, foolishly died_

_on the road?_

And yet, strange to say,

this posthumous day,

I'm not sorry I saw some

old dead possum

on the road . . .

waiting to explode

in the hot sun,

and get that business of rotting done.

Still, it's a good reminder,

when a possum dies,

to place one hand across sore eyes,

and the other over your nose.

Precious little there is of the rose

in a dead possum.

##

Eb 'n' Flo

Young Ebeneezer Waneright would allow _he_ was content

with taking life, not as it came, but rather as it went.

It wasn't most folks way of taking life, not by a sight;

but all had to admit Eb took it on the wane just right.

It suited him. "I'm satisfied," he'd answer folks, "in knowing

no one has life coming to him; all, though, have it going."

Rose-colored Florence Floodwell had it in her sweet life's blood,

the cheerfulest of optimists, to take life at the flood.

Flo never cried for sad for long, her youthful buoyant years,

for crying so for happy her accustomed flood of tears.

The full moon would so tug upon her heart that Flo would cry

a flood for the glad-tidings in a flow it brought her, high.

That Eb and Flo (as opposite as two could ever be)

should thus exert their pull on one another (gravity)

is not surprising; nor was either, in the full moon's glow,

and less than full, surprised in feeling that pull ebb and flow

so widely. "It is but the tidal cycle," each one thought.

"It's just the way Life comes and goes." And so they tied the knot.

However, Flo insisted that she keep her maiden name

of Floodwell, so that she might go on flowing just the same.

Well, that made Eb no never mind, for in it he could see

that Floodwell complemented Waneright just as perfectly

as Waneright complimented Floodwell for the love she spent

upon him, for all he was one to take life as it went.

With their exchange of wedding vows they made a compromise,

as Flo suggested (Eb saw pretty quickly Flo was wise).

As such, their married life was one of perfect ebb and flow:

they took the bad times with the good, the high tides with the low.

They took life as it came, both Flo and Eb. And when they died,

they took life as it went. As one, they went out with the tide.

##

Ebb and Flow

****

Ebb tides come and ebb tides go.

Come now! That just isn't so.

Ebb tides go and ebb tides fade;

it's just the way ebb tides are made.

Ebb tides fade and ebb tides go,

but ebb tides never ever _flow._

An ebb that _goes_ is fit to be tide;

an ebb that _flows_ is fit to be tied.

Flood tides come and flood tides go.

Go your granny! that's not so.

Flood tides flow and flood tides come;

that's how they're made—yes, _all,_ not some.

Flood tides come and flood tides flow,

but flood tides never ever _go._

A flood that _flows_ is fit to be tide;

a flood that _goes_ is fit to be tied.

Ebb tides fade and flood tides flow.

By God, _that's_ right! yea, this I know.

Flood tides come and ebb tides go.

I should know; I made them so.

##

Eight Deer

Where dusk and road's-end meet at close of day,

when most my outward eyes are charged with seeing

what of life outside the mind holds sway

upon the eyes a work-free mind is freeing,

abreast a field of tall, sere summer grass

that waved to me alone, I caught, and near,

in my own field of vision that must pass

for late fall, when all eyes were met, eight deer.

And I was honored proud for all of me

they saw in one of so mean human bearing

one who gave their kind no cause to flee

as we held eyes (we held it wasn't staring).

They knew that they had but to stay their gorse,

some fifty feet and strung barbed wire between us,

to hold my eyes in thrall, as I, of course,

held theirs, and no one held it could demean us.

__

I saw they had no fear of being caught.

_They, too, have been at their poetic labors;_

_They, too, in twilight's fall hold dear the thought_ ,

I smiled to think, _"Good fences make good neighbors."_

No one made outward motion; inwardly,

though, each was all emotion; one could tell

with one look in the eyes each eye could see,

since no one blinked for fear to break the spell.

All-youth they seemed: young bucks, their velvet drawn

on budding horns the morning dew turns black,

which horny clarions, all velvet gone,

would sound the coming of the antlered rack

on bony rack to sound the rutting morn,

to win the courtly does and sire the fawn

whose white spots so endearingly adorn

their coats, so lightly are they dappled on.

And I, like they, would glad have stayed my stay

and held their eyes in mine with twilight falling,

calling me back home this close of day,

where none the eyes there that were so enthralling.

But knowing balance best is held with motion,

I made slow movement to resume my pace

for knowing too well earth and sky and ocean

cannot stay their stay, and hold their place.

Yet candidly I held their eyes in passing,

as they held mine as frankly in their seeing,

and could not think when I was more amassing

a clearer, purer insight of my being.

Since when I ache of seeing from here on

that my own hindsight might be just as clear

as theirs, so keen, and, frankly looked upon,

as touching as the eve I saw eight deer.

_They knew they had but to stay their stay_ ,

I heard the voice upon the night to pass,

and shivered for all it was moved to say,

though warm September. Frost was on the grass.

##

Encounter

Should we two meet on the oil road at dusk

again, oh promise, _promise_ me you'll stay

the blackened trunk of a wildfire-ravaged oak,

and not, as I draw near in the failing light,

_No!_ turn, without a bark, and grunt into

a four-limbed motive trunk, a coal-black fright

to scare loud-rustling cries, in wood-bound flight,

from sapless leaf and sere black walnut husk

before your dreaded form's in darkness sunk,

to send a rush of fight-or-flight all through

that inner dark so pitched to stand the hair

upon my skin and break a cold-sweat wave

down over me to freeze my bare-limbed stroke

for fear to breast the spot—then, speeding it

to race the falling night, compel me to

go _past_ it! darting dry-mouthed, frightened glances

back over that side's shoulder every few

more wildly hasting footfalls to assure

my wilder pacing heart each time, "It's gone!"

each _faster!_ now retracing all it strode

so fearlessly, in full light, to be on

what darkness makes a fright: the oil road.

My feet would swell the distance, but my heart

bade us to stand awash in man-made light,

oh not to breathe in life and heave a sigh,

but turn, confront the blackness, and commune:

"Look, should we meet on the oil road at dusk

by chance, anew, come let us pledge we two

to not let fear so come between us as

to part us, blindly, each to flee into

his own and alien darkness—rather, let us

nest between us, to supplant the fear,

some sense we're on the road to brotherhood,

a little of the essence friends hold dear,

say something like the bonding scent of musk.

Would it not serve us much the same as trust?

But then I guess ( _must_ we suppose?) too much

has come between us these estranging years,

say something like bad blood, for us to ever

trust—perhaps you're running still from what

it is that I turned into in the dusk,

and cannot hear. So let me speak unto

the night that it might be the bearer of

the olive branch my heart extends to you

in deed of trust, my words to be my bond:

From this night forth you nevermore need fear

of picking up my heady scent of musk,

nor dread what I'll turn into, drawing near,

for blackness on the oil road at dusk."

##

Flight of the Beekeep

I kept two beehives for the honey bee,

but, no, I'd better say, to keep the truth

about our several lives, that they kept me

solicitous for them, for my sweet tooth.

I placed them on a stand with sturdy legs

of one-inch angle steel on solid ground

so carefully you might have thought them eggs,

with wildly fragrant sagebrush all around.

_Sage honey._ Yes, well why should I deny

I'd reap the much prized harvest of their toil

the spring and summer through come winter? I

was wise to place their hives on solid soil.

Each hard-won drop of lapped up floral nectar,

golden grain of pollen borne as freight

back home by each unerring beehive vector,

sweetly upped by grams their golden weight.

Sere summer yielded up its sun-baked earth

to autumn, which yet parched it more, and ceded

it to winter, not cold to the dearth

of slaking rain the earth so badly needed.

Down then poured a deluge on the dust,

which soaked it up as if an age-dry sponge,

and so deep down inside it felt it must

encourage every drop to take the plunge,

and more: when it let up I looked to see

the forward narrow legs of steel sunk deep

in sodden earth—the homes of honey bee

_oh!_ wildly tilting at a slope so steep

I took fright: _They must topple any second,_

dashing bees, combs, honey to the mud;

the golden harvest on which I had reckoned,

be, next instant, one with all the flood.

My instinct was to grab two bricks and haste

to place them front the sunken legs, and lift

the stand up oh so slowly, all red-faced,

and toe a brick beneath each leg, unswift,

to not provoke the bees into attack.

I thought to prove I could, but second-thought,

_Don't chance it; suit up head to toe, no lack_

_of safety, and no bee stings, searing hot._

The one piece suit, elastics at each cuff,

the helmet's veil to suit well velcroed down,

gloves snugged off near the elbows, socks enough

pulled over cuffs to save the stung-up frown.

Hazmatted so, I leapt into the fray,

well placed the bricks, my feet, and gripped the stand,

pulled slo-o-o-o-wly up. . . . The bees, though, felt the sway,

and swarmed out bent on stinger reprimand.

But what was that to me? I feared them not,

for all they swarmed about me in a fyke;

but when my ankles felt barbs stinging hot,

each like a hammered crucifying spike,

and both my feet commenced a lively dance

St. Vitus would have died for, it so like

their dance floor was a nest of fire ants,

_Clear out!_ the blue somehow I thought a hike,

the air so clean and rainfall fresh, would be

a soul-renewing outing. I, alone,

might well have sung, "Come with me, sweet bee—see!"

But, no, I set off briskly, on my own.

The Great Outdoors! I couldn't wait to see it

—all at once, just as I dropped the stand;

one might have thought I took great haste to flee it

by the way I picked my feet up and

put each as quickly down; nor did I pause

on hearing beehives topple their sweet stores,

and smash and raise an angry swarm. My cause

came first, and first, I'd see the great indoors.

I gazed at them a good long time, but I

felt nothing for the panorama. All

I felt was on fire to be elsewhere, why

deny it? than before that Wailing Wall.

I called on Gerry, my old beekeep friend,

next day. "What color were the socks you wore?"

he grilled me. "Black," I said. There was no end

of laughter; of derision there was more:

"You blamed fool, don't you know you don't wear black

'round bees? They can't think but that you're a bear

bent on devouring all—so they attack

as one mad swarm, right through your blackest wear!"

I came away, and sought a place to dwell

where I could contemplate in solitude.

I shut myself inside my hived-off cell,

waxed thoughtfully, and spawned my own foul brood:

They stung me rightly. Truth: I _am_ a bear,

a robber baron out to steal their gold

they need to keep life heat within them there,

hived off, throughout the mountain winter. Cold

to plunder their cell stock, a Wall Street bear

who sells off their security for gain.

What more proof than your beastly ankles, where

you've had to bear, and yet still bear, the pain?

##

Hourglass and Sand

Said Hourglass, "I'd rather be _me_ , Sand,

than you who run right through me—cannot stand

still for a moment, your each grain must pass

on through me, stillest-standing Hourglass.

I wonder you cannot take your sweet Time,

and stop, see, gazing through me, how sublime

to see so _clearly_ through my glazing—grand!

a thing that one could _never_ see through Sand."

"O Hourglass, I do wish you could see

but half as crystal clearly as do we,

a mass of untransparent grains, so small

you'd not think we could clearly see at all.

And yet the merest grain of Sand upon

the run can see _right through you_ ," Sand ran on.

"Once under pressure, heat, now you can't stand

to see: an hour gone you were me, Sand.

Yes, Hourglass, confess, come to the aid

of truth that _I, Sand_ , am the "one" who made

you when I kindly chose to vitrify

myself. Now you're the lens before my I."

##

Hunted

Apant, the hunted fox, I go to ground,

secrete myself, and make no telling sound.

My vaunted cunningness, my vulpine pride,

could craft no shrewd elusion not denied;

no sly recourse to stream could circumvent

or put at loss the hound from off my scent.

That dawn, his dreadful mien so far away,

I could not hear, for _life,_ its chilling bay;

nor would I, in all innocence, have known

its certain timbre bayed for me alone;

nor even, had I heard the hunting horn,

have so perceived: the hunt for me was born.

This darker dawning came to me in time

to be, for life, its darkest paradigm:

the ending of the direful pursuit

is ever one pursued cannot dispute;

no cry could I raise he could not confute,

all plaint of _Unfair!_ argument long moot.

In calm of resignation now I see

that it avails of nothing, more to flee:

for all my fabled wile, I can but fail

to put him off my life's far-ended trail;

all hunting precedent is on his side:

the end so come, he cannot be denied.

Loud snuff, triumphant baying now without

—he's caught the heady scent of my redoubt!

One final, headlong crash of underbrush,

a lunge—and he's upon me in a rush.

Long canines rip my ravaged flesh sore proud,

then prouder for my hide, a fitting shroud.

The sanguinary rattle in my throat

tells all: a fading, less-than-sanguine note . . .

It's gone. Now all the colder digs the hound,

six deep and long, my fitting hide surround.

Once more, the hunted fox, I go to ground,

secrete myself, and make no telling sound.

##

I Should Get Up

I should get up and let the cat in,

poor, wee, darling thing!

It's mewing on the front-door mat in

C on my heartstring

so touchingly (it wants its pat in

strokes, and wants I get pet-chat in),

as I hope He'll give me that in

all my worshiping

of Him above I know I'll see,

and, from his loving cup,

drink long and deep (so heavenly!)

when I, at last, get up.

I should get up and let the "Mabel"ed

cat in (count no wrong

upon me that I've so name-labeled

it to suit my song).

It brings a tear to think its fabled

vision is so sight disabled

by the great, high door (sight tabled),

all the more to long

to see its lord in aching strife

(I know the heartache well),

who'll make pure heaven of its life

at once, or nine times hell.

I should get up and let the cat in

—oh! but should it bring

no mouse, but a _bubonic rat_ in,

where'd I be—in _spring_?

Certainly not in the chair I sat in,

getting a double astigmat in

looking up Greek and old, dead Latin

_—out_ the front door'd swing.

And what if it sprang back and _locked_

with such an awful click,

and I, by one inside, was mocked?

God, wouldn't I be sick!

Yet conscience plagues me: I should get up

in cat sympathy.

But what if it's a kitty setup

_o_ _ut_ to swindle me?

A plaguey rat would get the threat up,

make me get, it knows, a sweat up,

and, before long, all regret up,

bitten by a _Flee!_

to know the fraidy cat was I

that I had such a scare,

fear outright _it_ would catnap (sigh),

snug in my still-warm chair.

Or what if it's, to raise alarm, a

_b_ _urglar_ kitty (cheat!)

in little kitty mask to charm a

man—theft bittersweet

that it should take my chair—the harm! a

loss of ease meant to disarm a

heart it takes (come, kitty karma!)

for _its_ catbird seat.

It has a way of stealing in,

and that it not the more,

I really should, to save my skin,

get up and bolt the door.

How can I sit here cold to heeding

hungry, cold cat call

to be let in, my heart not bleeding,

not break down and bawl

that it forgot, for all its breeding,

its aloofness, and is pleading,

" _Please!_ —it's _the_ cat trait I'm needing

most, or they'll see _—_ all!"

It _cares_ for me (it plainly shows

affection in its walk,

and gratitude—and love?). God knows,

the neighbors— _how_ they'll talk!

I should get up some feline pity

it forgot complete

its finickyness too (not witty),

so is prone to eat

_whatever_ —like a _dog_ (not pretty)—

so unlike a precious kitty,

So no (seen—by all the city!)

puss on Easy Street.

If only it could get back in

and get those two— _no_ doubt,

it nevermore'd forget them (sin!)

on pussyfooting out.

I should get up and, in my rising,

let the cat in, _now._

I really should make, empathizing,

that my solemn vow,

lest I should, for my lethargizing,

come His Judgment Day's assizing,

stand before Him so disprizing

me with knitted brow,

I got up to that great, high door,

I mewling on the mat,

alone (as all my life before)

—O Lord! there's _fear_ in that:

for all my cold, indifferent sin,

_He won't get up and let me in._

O God! In no way up for that,

I should get up and get a cat.

##

Just Measure

One hundred-thirteen inches round your base,

just there where you begin to leave off trunk

to take up being root; you hold your place,

I'm moved to contemplate, by having sunk

your taproot down through sundered density

of clay that holds you earthbound, so might soar

as high and wide your leafed immensity

as root bores deep, a hundred feet or more.

I'd put your age in one more century

of years could I but bear to think what will

to lone have stood, this stolid sentry tree,

these oak-willed years, and standing sentry still;

have fed, fulfilled, on same dank earth each day;

have drunk up from the same well all these years,

not tasting lands a hundred feet away,

not taking in the sky of new frontiers,

while I, not half your years, have no such roots,

no deepened bonds that bind me to the earth

like you, attached; thus, free in my pursuits,

detached, I've wandered from my day of birth.

Soft feet of clay were fashioned not to sink in clay,

but wrought to sate a wanderer's route whims;

while bond to earth for more than half a day

is grounds for route rot of the lower limbs.

You stand, fast-rooted tree, because you must,

and for your standing I am moved to sigh

to see you still, while I, for wanderlust,

must leave you since, still long unsated, I

seek lands beyond, and otherworldly spheres,

so cannot stand to see, earth-tethered tree,

how, steadfast, all your lust-unhungered years,

you've had the greater taste of earth on me.

I want to think, in some hoar age to come,

some gauging soul will, taking my life's measure,

hold to me a life like rule of thumb,

and size me up in graduated leisure;

seeking fairest measure of me, put

his tape around my ankle, snug, just where

it leaves off leg to take up being foot

that yet a life-weight wanderlust must bear.

With care he'll take just measure of the girth

where skin and bone are at their most demure,

arriving at my life's intrinsic worth

by life's extrinsic means, and earth assure:

"There _was_ a time," [like rings, he'll read it there]

"he put his foot down, held it in committal

[he'll read it in my soul, and, to be fair,

he'll put it down]; "he stood his ground a little."

##

Natural Enemies

The rock has no known disease,

but yet succumbs to water, breeze.

These are worn away by love,

in, around, below, above;

for love has power to conquer these,

the rock, the water, and the breeze.

But what of love, is love secure?

Shall it, of all these things, endure?

No. Love, too, must fade away,

as must the sun, the moon, the day.

None from this edict may appeal;

death is Life's Achilles heel.

The rock, the water, and the breeze

must one and all die by degrees.

Love, the day, the moon, the sun

—all must perish, every one.

When these have sung their last refrain,

one thing only shall remain,

which nothing brings unto its knees:

Time has not of enemies.

##

Our Glass

I see it poised–too sweet by half!–before me, our glass

(O timeless tempter!) luring me, the same old pull;

and long to drink deep from this demitasse,

the half that brims with life, half full;

a draft to quench my thirst,

so raise it to

my lips,

ah!

in Sips?

as tipplers do?

_One_ draft! and not the first

uplifting draft—half beautiful!—

I've longed to drink, Life's balming sassafras;

nor yet the first cup that, on my thirst-slaking pull,

I found to be the _Bottoms-up!_ half (empty) of our glass.

##

Little Wash-Bear

When persimmons mature in November,

hanging down so conspicuously,

glowing each like a bright orange ember

ornamenting the now-leafless tree

like a Christmas tree bearing its gifts,

in its arms, it is beckoning me

to lift up my own arms toward them,

its gifts, so the tree might award them

to me for my thrifts, and reward them

not buying what I can get free.

California's the great horn of plenty,

milk and honey, all free for the asking;

earth's superabundance times twenty,

cornucopia, yours for the tasking,

if that is what you'd call the picking,

plucking down from the heavens the wealth

of its tree fruits by long-handled picker,

of its free fruits, no method is slicker;

buckshée fruits that promise, the kicker,

a superabundance of health.

A New York money man bought a farm

advertised in the Wall Street Journal

in the valley below for the charm

of its being eternally vernal.

And it came with two hundred and fifty

mature _fuyu_ persimmon trees,

all of which, come November, exploded:

all the fuyus with fuyus were loaded;

but he couldn't care less, he was loaded,

and they fell to the birds and the bees.

He had said I could have all I wanted,

but for me they were not the right kind;

they could be eaten hard, and were vaunted

by Asians whose sweet teeth don't mind

the tough grind that they put them through.

Though the fuyu is sweet, my idea

of the perfect persimmon is one

perfectly ripened up in the sun,

when persimmon perfection is done,

you eat soft as a date—the _hachiya_.

But beware! you cannot eat it hard

when it's lousy with tannins. _Don't doubt_

it is so astringent— _regard!—_

it'll pucker your mouth inside out.

Oh, but heed; that is how you must pick them

with your picker, in pre-ripened blush:

just as hard as a rock. If you net them

like lard in a wok, you'll regret them

so marred in the sock when you get them,

and you stick in your hand and get— _mush!_

I had foraged their gold well and wide

the known hills and the valleys around,

such that never Gold Rusher espied,

nor did ever with gold more abound.

And I stuffed every saddlebag full

with my 24-carrot-gold. Fool?

I'd a fortune in gold, and not light,

trusting Fortune and backroads by night,

I misfortuned each highwayman's sight,

on my '64 Dodge Dart mule.

In my mountaintop safe hideaway,

I laid all of my gold out on tables

in the sun, and I counted each day,

like the kings I had read of in fables,

all my pieces of gold, so to gloat

over how wealthy I had become;

far beyond every prosperous measure,

reveling in the worth of the treasure,

all affording me such immense pleasure

I possessed such a pile-of-gold sum.

Then I paled, thinking, _I could be robbed_.

_And the truth is, I've little defense,_

_all alone. What if I should be mobbed_

_by a gang for my gold affluence?_

_What if there were, God, hundreds—or thousands?_

_What if each piece of gold should be lost?_

_With no policy of deterrence_

_in my hand to prevent such occurrence,_

_with or without persimmon insurance,_

_I will pay dear, whatever the cost._

So I placed every table leg in

a cat food can of water. The ants

were defeated. And netting, though thin,

well embarrassed all birds; no chance.

Oh! but when the hachiyas were ripe,

netting wouldn't keep out _all_ the bees

that would come in a large swarm to eat

the hachiyas when soft and so sweet,

to find only their total defeat,

the hachiyas beginning to freeze.

That was my persimmon-rich scheme:

fully ripened, as soft as grape jelly,

sweet as nectar the taste buds esteem,

get them into Fort Knox quick—the _belly_?

No, at once put them into the freezers.

_That_ was my persimmon-flush dream:

when as hard as are fuyus, put _those_ in-

to the Champion Juicer, well chosen

for this sweet, treasured purpose, well frozen,

to curl out _persimmon nice cream_.

One more day in the fall sun would do it;

they'd be at their soft peak of perfection

and so sweet that I well could intuit,

they'd, inside a cheek, be delection.

I had all the insurance I needed

to rest well assured on my cheek;

and I dreamed of persimmon nice cream,

at its peak such a super-nice dream

that, when woke, I peeked out on my scheme

with such sweet hopes I _was_ at my pique.

_I'd been robbed!_ —my insurance had failed—

by a criminal gang, next to which

the notorious Barker Gang paled,

I the more to be so less than rich.

The felonious thieves had laid waste to

oh! so many dear pieces of gold

that I got out my Havahart trap,

though I knew by the halve-apart gap

that I hadn't a have-a-heart scrap

in my breast, let the truth be told.

And although it more cost me a pang,

I sore baited the trap with a ripe

persimmon, convinced that the gang

would return. I'd get _one_ of their stripe.

Come evening I put all my pieces

of gold in the "safe," and the trap

just outside my window . . . and waited,

while inside my breath was bated

for the one inside gang member fated,

and awaited the cage door's _SNAP!_

I did not know what manner of thief

I'd catch, though was sure that he had

no good one, and, were he the chief

thief, certainly it would be bad.

I awoke to the snap, and I shone,

all atremble, my light on the cage,

ecstatic to see I had caught

the _ringleader_ —and oh was he fraught

that the door didn't yield, though he wrought

on it all of his weight in a rage.

That he _was_ the ringleader was clear;

he'd no less than five rings on his tail;

a five-star career racketeer,

and he did make _some_ racket in jail!

Then, as if he knew that I'd I.D.'d him,

he sat down with his tail between

his legs, and began plucking hair

from his five-ringed tail, plucking where

the first ring— _His plan's to pluck bare_

_every ring so a one won't be seen._

_Thinks that he'll beat the rap, no I.D._

_Well, ahead he's got one bigger task_ ,

I thought, slapping my well-watered knee _,_

wincing: _plucking his bandit's mask._

And I watched with a trapper's delight

for some time—and oh wasn't he

just the portrait of raccoon frustration,

the sore trait of coon captivation;

such trait of coon self-flagellation

no coon trapper ever did see.

But I knew with him carrying on

with his frustrated antics he'd keep

me watching, conclusion foregone:

that night I'd get no more sleep.

So I plucked up my courage to move him

out of eyesight and out of earshot.

Oh, and didn't he lunge, hiss, and spit

all the way, showing me his true grit,

till I plunged him in darkness, and split,

thinking, _God, what a beast I have caught._

__

On waking with first morning light

I was keen to look in on my captive.

And wasn't he _some_ sorry sight

to see how sorely, madly adaptive

he was: he had plucked _every_ hair

from his tail, and I looked on in awe,

grimacing, that that wasn't the worst

he had done himself, feeling accurst;

he'd so pushed with his forehead he'd burst

the skin, rubbing his proud flesh raw.

He must surely have thirsted; but how

could I set him some water? wherever

I was he was there with his brow

so openly angry; he'd sever

my fingers if I were so foolish

as to stick them in front of his face.

So if I was to water-resource him,

I knew that I had to divorce him

from me, by some stratagem force him

to the back of the cage; give me space.

_That's it: I'll stick round iron stakes_

_through the cage, forcing him further back_

_with each one, for both of our sakes,_

_penning him with no chance to attack._

Rounding some up, I stuck in the first

right in front of his nose—and oh lord!

he bit it with such volition,

and such _force_ , no inhibition,

I expected he'd spit out dentition

I was sure that he couldn't afford.

And that proved to me right then and there

he was one of the bear family;

German raccoon _waschbar_ ("wash-bear")

only proved it the more to me.

He bit no more; and I set him water

to drink, though I set him no food,

since he'd crushed the precious persimmon,

made mush the delicious persimmon

so lush, that I'd well have fed him on.

And the truth is, I thought he was rude.

So I took out the stakes and I left him

in the shade, for I'd much work to do.

Come late afternoon I would heft him,

"Little Wash-Bear," to his new purlieu

when I'd take him down into the valley,

on up Sisar Canyon to where

Sisar Creek flows so rushingly near,

ever flowing so fresh and so clear

through the Los Padres Forest the year;

fine home for a Little Wash-Bear.

He could well wash his little bare hands

of all the persimmons, begin

to atone for what Justice demands,

but cannot absolve: all his sins

against me. While I might forgive,

he cannot expect I will forget

all the golden hachiya's he stole;

the idea's as old as the scroll;

panacea his cleansing his soul,

getting his little-bear hands wet.

But the sun was well risen, and I

was on fire to set the persimmons

out in the sun under blue sky.

Let the old boys all snicker _It's women's_

_work_. One more day out in the sun

then I'd tender them into the freezers.

And first sweltering day I would scream

to the old farts, "Come over!" the team,

and eat my persimmon nice cream

in front of the sweating old geezers.

So once more I set them all out

on the tables, and covered them all

with the netting, and then went about

the chores that are mine come the fall.

When the sun fell below the oak trees

the persimmons were ripe to perfection,

and I smiled on the sweltry-day pleasers

as I tendered them into the freezers,

and thought of the old Ebeneezers,

and the ghost of nice cream not passed.

But the afternoon, too, was ripe

to forget about their coming drool,

and see to my hot captive's gripe;

and I saddled and readied my mule.

When I looked in upon him I saw

he'd tipped over his water can, owing

to rage, no doubt, and was hotter

to see me he'd well like to slaughter,

if he could, that he had no water,

though he'd have plenty where he was going.

So I brought round the mule, and I lifted

(a bear) into its trunk with no lack

of space, which that stubborn mule'd shifted,

no elephant, from front to back,

Little Wash-Bear, lunging and hissing

and spitting; then I closed the trunk

so he wouldn't see where he was going;

so he couldn't be cagily knowing

his way back, so wouldn't be showing

up some day with all the more spunk.

Then I rode the mule down to the valley

three miles, up the highway a mile,

then another mile up Sisar Alley,

then up Sisar Canyon a while

to the point where the Los Padres Forest

begins, and whose end's not in sight,

to where Sisar Creek flows near the road,

where Sisar Creek ever has flowed,

the timeless riparian abode

of Little Wash-Bears day and night.

He could wash all his wounds here clean,

and his food so fastidiously,

but most urgent of all his hygiene,

wash his soiled little hands of me.

He would grow back his ringleader tail,

the five-star career racketeer,

pilfering all the trout from the creek,

robbing acorns right out of the cheek

of squirrels with felonious cheek,

and from me he'd have nothing to fear.

So I opened up wide the mule's trunk,

and I set him with care on the ground,

and he seemed to have lost all his spunk,

gazing wide-eyed, suspiciously round,

as slowly I opened the door

that had closed on him with such a _SNAP!_

But he made no attempt at escaping;

only stood at attention, still, gaping

around at the strange forestcaping.

_It's a trick; it is one giant trap_.

So I backed off some paces and stood

and watched him, to see what he'd do,

as he peered all about the deep wood,

his befuddled, lost mind in a stew,

the bolder half screaming out, _GO!_

the frightened half screaming out, _DON'T GO!_

while their tending to overlap

got the two halves into a flap,

one arguing, _Better the trap_

_that you know, than the one you don't know_.

Though from where he was he couldn't see

the creek he could _hear_ the water

flowing down so invitingly

so coolly, and he was hotter

for lack of it, and it sore knitted

his openly raw, angry brow

without knitting it, aching to wash it,

dip it in, let the cool water slosh it;

then thought, as his fear rose to quash it,

_Well, I really am up the creek now._

But his thirst worked upon him the more,

as well as his hunger and rage,

eyes fixed upon the open door

—then at once he was quit of the cage,

Little Wash-Bear, his pink, hairless tail

like a possum, upon the run

toward the fast creek in the forest,

in more ways than one he was sorest.

But I'd sleep well that night; I'd get more rest.

The freezers were full. I was done.

##

Roadside Chicken

I've done some loopy things to challenge fears;

played Russian roulette with a German Luger;

but for sheer pluck I guess nothing nears

the evening I played chicken with a cougar.

I was riding homeward on Shank's mare

upon my evening walk going up Long's Hill,

and wondering what crazy thing I'd dare

myself to do next for a frightful thrill.

Soon up ahead roadside I saw a dog,

his back to me, intent on something dead,

a roadkill like as not, he thought to hog.

Well it did not scare me one bit. Instead,

I thought, _I'll sneak up on this cur while it's_

_engrossed, and frighten it out of its wits._

I put my feet so lightly down I couldn't

hear them. Luckily the breeze was blowing

downhill in my face; the dumb beast wouldn't

catch my scent, oblivious of knowing

what was coming. Closer, I began

to see that it had some prize canine tail:

much thicker, furrier, and longer than

I'd judged at first glance, on a larger scale.

Well, looking past the tail I saw the cur

was on the same large scale: its long hind legs

were sinewy, and strong. _Great!_ _They are sure_

_to set him off, surprised, like powder kegs,_

I sniggered in the fast oncoming night,

and envied the dumb beast its coming fright.

The closer yet I saw, to see a portion

of its side, its back was deeply swayed,

its thick forequarters strong; more, by this torsion,

saw it was most unroutinely made,

its forepaws huge and strong, but more than that

about its physics I could not have said,

for yet it showed me, grossly being at

its unseen roadkill, no glimpse of its head.

Then, somehow, though I swear I made no sound,

nor had the breeze conspired to blow uphill

my scent, it sensed me, turned its head around,

and in that instant all my blood went chill,

as I the quicker wished I was in Yuma,

instead of locking eyes with a large _puma_.

_O God, dear God in Heaven—NO!_ I prayed.

_I take it back. It's perfect! I'm so scared!_

_I couldn't dream of being more afraid,_

_or hope for fear to leave me more white-haired,_

as on I walked toward those fearsome claws

I knew could tear my soft flesh into shreds;

toward that head (I shook) whose frightful jaws

could crush my skull as I crush butterheads.

My every instinct screaming at me, _STOP!_

I kept on walking, fearing ( _I could die_ )

no fear would ever seize on me to top

it. Yet I sensed, _It's more afraid than I_.

_If anyone blinks, it will be the one._

_At any moment it will cut and run._

But it just looked at me without a trace

of fear, as if I posed it no least threat,

a look of calm indifference on its face

the while I was continuing to get

more tremblingly close; then it calmly turned

and walked ahead of me, then nimbly took,

a steep bank in its stride, as if it spurned

to walk with me, one frightfully forsook.

But luckily for me I wasn't out of

the woods yet; I'd a dreadful mile to go,

and it would soon be dark, no chance to scout of

every height I feared it lurking ( _low_ )

from which it might leap, seize me by the hairs

stood up upon my neck, and end my cares.

And what a stroke of fortune, too, I knew

how feared it is for pouncing from a height,

to sink a fang in, sever clean in two

the spinal cord in one quick fatal bite.

And _no end_ of such heights along the road

from which to mete out death, shale bank or oak,

keep me from ever reaching my abode,

fear meting out to me that other stroke.

I scorned to run from it by keeping to

the middle of the road, but right beneath,

so I might, as I'd steeled myself to do

in looking up, look fear right in the teeth.

One big one was I'd quickly reach my place

_safe_ , lose the rush, and so I slowed my pace.

I shook with each slight crackle in the brush,

my hair stood up on end. _I'll not survive!_

My heart leapt to my mouth with every rush

of pure adrenalin, to feel _alive_.

I willed myself, although it stopped my breath,

as jumping out of planes no way comes near

for rush, to linger in the face of death,

and pluck its hoary beard to challenge fear.

So I'll be on the road again tonight

in mortal dread that I will see and hear

the cougar/puma for the double fright,

the rush each moment, _live_ in mortal fear

that it will eat my heart out savagely,

as you eat yours out, safe, to envy me.

##

Tail of the Peacock

****

Turned out of doors for a cloudy mind,

for weather more clemently inclined

I had to trust, _al fresco_ ly,

to what of meteorology

befell to me along the road

when, for such inner rout,

I had, for my cloud-capped abode,

to get my weather out.

My mind had been too long in books,

its eye worn out with searching looks

for inspired tropes of imagery

( _Eureka!_ ) to rain down on me,

come down (from all my lofty airs)

—divine-write inspiration!

Yet rained, my mind's condensed affairs,

no such precipitation.

We plied the road, my mind and I,

under an altocumulus sky,

each anxiously eyeing (weather vain)

for the slightest heavenly sign of rain.

But the drought went on, we both parched on

to the crest of Writer's Block Hill

where I gazed on defeat, while my mind fixed upon,

at my feet—a heaven-sent _quill!_

_Oh, and, Master, no quill of a drab bird design,_

_but a **beauteous** quill, down write-divine!_

_Only look!_ my mind effused, _at its **length**!_

_Three feet of blest pre-scriptive strength._

_It's a gift—a godsend—come from above_

_(or behind)—from the male peacock._

_What a song we could fashion! what words of **love**_

_With this quill—the best on the block!_

__

_Master, take it in hand, this feathery pearl,_

_Master, look in her face—she's the **loveliest** girl._

_Look! how slender she is, how sensuously_

_she sways—and she's one **blue** eye like me._

_Can we take her home—O master, **please,**_

_what beauties we three would write;_

_endless fluencies of euphonies_

_—one eternal fanciful flight!_

__

Its every cloud broken up and gone,

my mind raced the more rhapsodically on:

_Master, what bon mots we can't summon by will_

_could be flowing—non-stop—from the tip of this quill,_

_well dipped in a well of indigo ink_

_we would keep by our writerly side;_

_you'd not have to scratch while I try to think_

_—there'd be **more** 'fore the ink has dried!_

I tried to rein in its accolade

without raining too hard on its paean parade;

but it's ever the way with the poetic mind:

you give it its head and it serves you in kind.

_The quill is not up to the modern speed,_

I put it in mind to say;

_and you hardly see a one of its breed_

_in the hand of a poet today._

__

_The computer now is all the rage_

_for getting one's belle lettres on the page,_

_still hatched in your old cerebral place,_

_no offense, then written on cyber space._

_For all of the fanfare given its tail,_

_though quills of a noble size,_

_no peacock has done a thing but fail_

_to win the Nobel Prize._

_Oh, Master, it's true, I know of one_

_who struts and frets he, too, has none._

_But, Master, oh surely such a quill_

_could fashion a tale, if you only will,_

_as tall as any that's gone before,_

_nay, **tallest** of any of these._

_I know it would fit through the swell head door._

_Can we take it home, Master— **please!**_

I'd have heaved that quill by the side of the road,

tore my mind away, and homeward strode,

but I'd racked and flogged and belabored it so,

these cloud-capped weeks, I just couldn't say no.

I clutched it in hand, and my mind heaved a sigh

that I'd stopped just shy of the brink of

idly tossing it by, now I've got, thought I,

that peacock's tale to ink of.

##

The Sword of Poison Oak

Above the old, worn galvanized steel barn

upon the hillside just above the road,

an old live oak that Betsy couldn't darn,

as she'd stitched thirteen states up and bestowed

new life upon the land stood guard of all,

its arm stuck out above the road to freeze

those on a power trip, and poised to fall

upon them like the sword of Damocles.

My only power was of locomotion,

so was granted passage every day

to pass beneath it, powered by the notion

walking clears the mind's cobwebs away;

so late each day I put in motion strong legs,

making homeless all the daddy long-legs.

[King Dionysius who had a horde

of wealth and power and great opulence,

had hung above his throne, point down, a sword

by thread-thin _horsehair_ , to convey the sense

of constant fear he lived in for his power

all so envied, coveting his all,

rejoicing, in their lust, to see it lower

over his head, scheming for its fall.

Young Damocles was one who'd be so rich,

and said as much to Dionysius.

"You think so?" said the king, "Then I will switch

with you. Here, sit upon the throne." And thus

when Damocles, admiring the joint,

its opulence, looked up he got the point.]

One evening, passing underneath "the sword"

that lowered over me like stormy weather,

my mind chock full of cobwebs, my reward

for all day tossing meters, rhymes together,

I somehow found cramped web space for the thought,

_I don't recall it hanging down so low_ ;

then idly put it down to being not

yet clear of cobwebs as to rightly know.

My mind clear on return inside an hour

it seemed the lower yet. I wondered, _Could it_

_be telling me that I have too much power_

_of words?_ I wasn't sure I understood it

hanging threateningly overhead

—by just a hair? God, was I all but dead?

I paled and got from under it as fast

as Damocles. That night I had a dream-

cum-nightmare, and a fitful night I passed:

_I_ falling in the oak's eyes in esteem

when right before my eyes a large-humped camel

passed through a needle's eye, a beastly trick,

while I, a grossly powerful, rich mammal

(the power of words) _could not_ , too grossly thick.

I woke in sweat and passed a troubling day

to think I'd fallen in the oak tree's eyes,

though just a dream, so rightly shouldn't weigh

on me, yet did, to cut me down to sighs

to know, at day's end, I'd more powerfully,

fall yet the lower in its scrutiny.

I'm punctual; "Atomic Clock," they say

who know me, and who set their watch by me

to see me walk by the same time each day,

and by me fine-tune their chronology.

But this day I was hesitant to face

the oak tree till I was some seconds late,

and just as hesitant to up my pace

with trepidation passing out the gate.

Then all at once a loud, resounding _CRACK!_

rang out ( _God's back has snapped beneath the load!_ ),

I fearing I would have a cardiac

to hear and see **_cr-RASH!_** down on the road

the oak tree in one great leaf-shuddering mass

even I with all my power could not pass.

__

At once I felt the blood drain from my face

as if a vein had opened and it pored,

to realize the tree fell through _that_ space

in time I _should_ have passed beneath the sword.

Had the tree set its own chronology

(its rings) by me, and failed to calibrate

that I'd be late through hesitancy— _me_ ,

and by my tardiness I'd so cheat fate?

I couldn't stop to analyze it then

for weight of the responsibility

that, in the absence of all other men,

I felt was justly meted out to me:

I had to clear the great and leafy mass

with naught but muscle power so all could pass.

I hustled back and got my loppers and

a bow saw, and returned and set about

the task of cutting all the mass by hand

for chain saw that I'd have to do without.

I lopped the branches off at hasting pace,

and tossed them to the roadside; for my pain

they whipped about and slapped me on the face,

and all of me, again and then again.

When, shortly, Rie, first lady of the land,

drove up, I asked her to inquire of Felix,

if home, if he'd lend a lopping hand,

which she did by appealing to the helix

of his ear; and soon we were a pair

of lopping fools for all we weren't aware.

When Felix, who'd been sound asleep, was woke

enough, he eyed a leafed vine intertwined

amongst all. He asked, "Is this poison oak?"

I locked upon the leaves, blanched, and opined,

"It looks like it," And then I felt the fool

to not have seen: the leaves were not alike:

I should have. I'd been to that hard-knocks school

for weeks post my first learn-the-hard-way hike:

The oak tree leaves were spiked, the poison oak

leaves smoothly lobed, it pained me to recall,

the latter's sight sufficient to evoke

pained memories of all _urushiol_ ,

its volatile oil does to skin (it's _bad_ ),

we both burned badly knowing we'd been had.

The damage had been done; no use to quit.

We lopped the branches off with arm's-length care

and tossed them by, and set out to commit

to saw the limbs and trunk to log size where

we'd power to move them, but for largest limb

I called the sword; and yet despite my thesis

that by rights it should, the task so grim,

the sword refused to cut itself to pieces.

It struck me then, as it had not, the sword

was not the limb—it was the _poison oak_.

The limb had not intended to have gored

me; only bear to me the poison stroke

to cut me down to sighs, to see too late

it's coming down on me. I'd but to wait.

It isn't like a burn you're hotly warned

about with fire and flames, and straightway earn

with pain, burnt flesh; but like a woman scorned,

and hurt, inside is doing a slow burn.

A day it steams and smolders, then erupts

in itching, angry red streaks, inflammation,

colorless bumps, then the more corrupts

in weeping blistering (like her damnation).

I wept that all kept getting worse and worse

for hours, then days on end in timed release;

nor when it kept on getting verse on verse

did I succeed in getting blest surcease.

A poem to a woman; this endeavour

often works; to poison oak not ever.

Day three I felt so bad with yet the pace

of itching, blisters escalating, but

far worse on seeing Felix, _God!_ his face

so swollen that his eyes were all but shut.

I felt pained for all he was going through;

the sword was out to get _me_ for my power;

yet couldn't keep from cutting him down too,

and making _my_ sole retribution our.

I wished that I could make it solely mine,

burn yet more slowly than a woman scorned,

relieve him of the suffering my design

had brought him to, my own face so adorned

I couldn't further swell as yeasted flour,

and put it in a verse, for all my power.

I suffered pain of guilt and poison oak

as no man ever suffered so for weeks,

the while I bore the heavy double yoke,

in mind, _Relief comes to the one who seeks._

The wisdom that came down to me, received

from God knows where, and prefaced by _They say_

is that the maddening itch would be relieved

by suffering a long, cold shower's stay.

It's false; I found you must take it as _hot_

as you can stand excruciating pain,

anesthetizing your skin on the spot

for hours before you feel the itch again.

That other itching, burning, far, far worse

because for life, must wait another verse.

##

The Final Solution

_What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?_

_Only the monstrous anger of the guns._

—Wilfred Owen, _Anthem For Doomed Youth_

They must have known their distant angry chatter

would draw me past the gate to take the road

they'd churned up late to turn the shale to shatter,

and spurn the clay churned mute beneath their load;

they must have known that I'd as mutely follow;

that, in their wake, my footfalls would be bent,

up through the old-growth oaks, the gnarled and hollow,

to scale the mountain's final pitched ascent.

What _had_ the back and forth of all their chatter,

like heated swap of partisan politics,

the incense of their highborn subject matter,

to do, up there, with all the outcast bricks?

Heaving the upchurned way they took before me,

I gained, by ache of limb and labored breath,

the brick-lade summit where, to blunt inform me,

they spoke to me, by angry turns, of death.

Yet ears, alone, they raged, could not be trusted

to impress death on me, ghastly spoken;

furied treads would _show_ me how they busted

the huddled bricks, and left them crushed, death-broken;

yet rampaged not alone in their mass-killing:

as lethal treads, in death just as complicit,

stood still their ground in league, as close as willing,

to feed the angry treads all they'd solicit.

A pang of youth-fled years ago (come back now!)

when first I'd pitched that loneness in my heart

upon the mount neath old-growth oaken black bough,

when from the mass I'd wished to dwell apart,

I chanced upon the bricks, stacked, silent-banded,

all huddled close, and felt for them as one

who too has kept, amassed, his silence, stranded,

apart the world the world cared not to shun.

How many years before had they been cast there?

What numbered thousand souls were there amassed?

Who now to weep their fate, less in their hearts care

in empathy, for they so long outcast?

These questions, more, like life-spent leaves had fallen

unanswered on my earth in questing tiers

as they so late of oak and long earth-sprawlen

amassed upon the moldering sum of years.

And like all so composed, when life is ended,

wherein is massed a life of pent-up living,

slowly decompose that held suspended,

releasing it in timeless backward giving,

so too these leaves that dropped to lay and molder,

in questioning, upon my questing earth

were moved to break down as the years grew older,

and yield, in answer, all their pent-up worth:

Some five and twenty years long past their number,

the whole of their foredoomed, hard-casted kind,

were put at auction— _Sold!—_ to disencumber

an L. A. brick works in a bankrupt bind.

Who snapped them up for pennies on the dollar

was Reiner Bay, the wealthy German who

owned half the mountaintop, who then turned hauler:

"Convoy them by eighteen-wheelers crew!"

The bricks, all sizes, colors, shapes, were all

deceived: he'd led them to believe that they

were all going to good homes, in solid wall,

hearth, chimney, fireplace, he vain to say,

"I mean to build a Master Race of houses

upon the mountaintop—of purest brick,

for purest race of man whose wife espouses

'The Master Race,' (his frau's words). 'Solid brick.'

"So load them up and truck them to the top

of Sulphur Mountain, the internment site

where you will be directed where to drop

the pallets to the concentration height

of three high, three deep all around the road

that rings the site, a solid, high brick wall

around a camp so that each outcast load

cannot escape 'There's no escape—at all!' "

His will was done. But then he went to war

with his Race-Minister of House Construction,

which proved fatal: their sworn pact (both swore)

was dead. Dead end all Master Race production.

Days massed to weeks, months, yet no liberation

for they atop the leaves long fallen, rotten

atop the mountain came, no blest salvation;

the bricks an unwept, huddled mass, forgotten.

What must have had to pass, as did the years,

each seeming a more merciless deferment,

in they who'd been so long hard cast, for tears

no builder-savior ended their internment;

only eyes that wondered, then were gone,

as swiftly as the wildfires none condemn

for burning wooden pallets they'd been on

for years, their sole support, from under them.

Voracity unsated, yet another

wildfire raged, born of a hotter fuel,

and different bent, intent on burning other

than the bricks, and need an age to cool.

He flew his own plane, Reiner Bay, and had

the angry treads bulldoze a landing strip

atop the narrow ridge (all thought him mad),

which dropped like _"Death"_ from Death's cold bottom lip.

But, German, he'd self- confidence to burn.

He'd landed, lifted off, Red Baron ace

(it wasn't yesterday he'd come to learn).

But then the morning fog rolled in. His face

paled—he was flying blind! _Too late_ he turned.

The mountain face was there, and his was grim

as wildfire raged around his all and burned

his life, his sole support, from under him.

His son got all his worth, but didn't share

his scheme, his mad dream of a Master Race

of houses; yet, like him, he didn't care

for all the bricks, lament their outcast case.

He only cared for one race: mad pursuit

of lucre, and what he so lowly rated

were low-caste bricks. No, nothing to dispute.

Subhuman, all must be exterminated.

The concentration camp they occupied

was mountaintop-prime; wealth would follow cost

of the desired estates he'd subdivide

when he had carried out the holocaust.

He trucked in angry treads, the juggernaut

to crush all life from them that naught could save.

The rich would come, not knowing they had bought

and built upon a mountaintop mass grave.

O God, had you moved raging treads to waken,

with sound of death, a world that soundly slumbers,

all might have rubbed their eyes and seen, so shaken,

they huddled, massed, had safety not in numbers;

seen, too, outraged, the mass so long outcast

apart the world, their godforsaken all,

their every hope lost, huddled, tighter massed,

together to be their own wailing wall.

Not all is past; I watch in helpless horror

as the monster, that which stands its ground

and feeds (I cry, "O holocaust ignorer—")

the half that makes the ghastly clattering sound

of death ("—do you not hear? do you not _see_

their huddled, helpless, massed, unpitied all,

so hopeless—that it could be you or me?")

so shaking me that I shrink to recall:

When they came for the oaks I spoke no word,

I not an oak myself; and when they came

for the black gold, again I wasn't heard.

But I did speak up for the bricks: _"The shame!"_

The word went out. One mountain man who knew

the owner of the angry treads implored

him, "Let us save them, _please_ , if but a few

who've never sinned, as we, before the Lord."

He put it to the scion, and he sighed

to suffer stoppage of his holocaust

for bleeding hearts because some old bricks died,

hearts caring not for all the time _he_ lost

in ceding us _one day_ to haul what we

could haul, but only when we'd all signed waivers

he bore no responsibility

should we be crushed by capstones, blocks, or pavers.

A hasty convoy, as such we were small

that hauled away from open gate to closed

all that our trailers, pickup beds could haul,

until the scion was no more disposed

to suffer us more; he would not extend

his waiver longer; he would not relent

to our appeal, and in the bitter end

we'd saved less than a heartbreak five percent.

Not one in twenty saved; a Schindler's list

of Schindlerjuden I could not accept

in heartbreak of the nineteen we had missed.

Anew the angry treads crushed, and I wept,

_"I'll lay me down before the juggernaut_

_and let it crush all outrage out of me,_

_my head and heart and soul the counterplot,_

_embodied empathy that sets them free!"_

I didn't lay me down, I only cried,

"I'm but _one_ in a careless world of ones!

Alone, how can I stop the genocide;

save them the 'What can _I_ do?' world shuns?

A world not wont to see how its castaways,

their few small hopes and dreams crushed out of them,

in exile and in sorrow end their days,

their lives, and none to sing their requiem.

The leaves are falling, life-spent, all around me,

in silence, free all rustling rhetorics

as every sound yet mute unsounding tree

weeps empathy for all the fallen bricks.

Why can't we have the heart of falling oak leaves?

Why can't we have the pith of oak trees all?

I can't bear one more such that so aggrieves,

yet still more heavy sad leaf-questions fall:

What passing time has swelled their mass of sorrow?

Only a quarter-century of years;

only a world unmoved that seeks to borrow

from careless world before its lack of tears.

What passion dwells for these in their death rattle?

Only a wild indifference that spreads.

What passing bells for these who die as chattel?

Only the monstrous anger of the treads.

##

The Wild French Shepherdess

_Au Claire de la lune_ on her lips,

rank weeds in her wind-wild hair,

new swing in her woman-child hips,

all ardor for those in her care;

no thought of a young shepherd lover

whistling sweet love air of old,

as she guided her flock in the dawn light,

all care for her flock in the wan light,

no other, for her never-gone fright:

the wolf getting into the fold.

She'd never yet laid eyes upon

the wolf, though she'd felt his eyes

upon her, and knew that they shone

bright lust at the sight of the prize,

as he lay secreted awaiting

for an innocent lamb to stray _where_

—and she knew that she couldn't gamble

watching less—for a lamb might gambol

where she— _too late_ —couldn't scramble

to save it, for all loving care.

So she was all eyes as she led them

all over the broad mountainside,

to the springs and the grasses that fed them,

where all the day long she would bide

and watch with abiding love only

of shepherdess for ewe and ram,

then lead them back well before night full

to safety, when darkness makes frightful

the wolf, for the lack of all sight, full,

her fear, with a dear precious lamb.

The safety she sought was a cave

with a low, narrow mouth that lay hidden

in brush, that with crowding, would save

from the low, narrow mouth that lay hidden

in brush, all the sheep in the fold.

Even then she could not retire

until she had kindled such wood

as she'd gathered returning, such wood

as the fold had borne back, such would

get going a ring of fire.

Now let the wolf howl without

for all its defeated desire,

in pacing the fire about,

its howl pitched ever the higher

with the rising of the moon,

its hunger the brighter burning

for the tender, sweet, innocent lamb,

the tender-meat innocent lamb,

the teat-tended innocent lamb,

with ever more lustful yearning.

She never a night did sleep

but with one wide-open eye,

for the fires she had to keep,

out of fear, and not let die.

Come dawn, on leading the fold

from the cave, she did not dare

not keep her fright-fire burning:

_Shut the mouth up tight now, spurning_

_all entry_ — _do, lest on returning,_

_you find the wolf's made it his lair_.

So she passed her days and her nights,

wild shepherdess, young of year,

alone, mid the wild mountain sites,

alone with her fold and her fear.

Yet one day as she was replacing

the weeds in her wind-wild hair,

she spied mid a stand of wildflowers,

handsome, a youth mid the wildflowers

gather in hand, he did, wildflowers,

and she sighed, deeming him fair.

The more to increase her wonder,

he wasn't the fancy of sleep,

a wild fever dream she was under,

and it made her heart's blood leap

when he gazed up, smiling in meeting

her eyes—and the more wonder yet—

he was making his way _toward her_ ,

undertaking his way toward her,

no mistaking, as if he adored her.

How more wonderful could it get?

Though the way before him was steep,

he strode in heat as of summer

to come, as though nothing would keep

him, flushed, in his ardor, from her,

she flushing the more as he reached her,

and stood there, atremble, panting,

bearing in hand wild lupines,

_For your wind-wild hair, wild lupines_ ,

_your fair, wild hair, wild lupines,_

weaving some there. Enchanting.

Speaking low as he wove them, _They so_

_compliment your wind-wild hair,_

_as the blue of the sky makes glow_

_the Heaven it makes more fair_ ,

he held her soft eyes and smiled;

her softer hand, too, as they moved

as one, like a pack, the day,

sun warm on their backs the day,

as one, like a pact, all day,

and their wild, young love was proved.

She so wanted it not to end,

but twilight presaged the night

—and there was her fold to defend

—and there was her mounting fright.

_There's a cave I must reach before dark_ ,

she disclosed. To her shock, he _knew_ :

_Your flushed face aglow by the fire,_

_these nights, I've so come to admire,_

_that my own must show I desire_

_to see you safely to_.

And he helped her to gather such wood

as they went in the gathering night,

as, he knew from his passed nights, should,

with sparking, be firelight

soon, saving the fold, such fires

as the hungering wolf would damn,

if the beast had such a word

in his breast, such a beastly word,

she least of all such a word,

herself the most innocent lamb.

Arrived, there was only the fire

in their hearts, gone that from the skies,

and it would have been night entire

if not for the light in their eyes,

by which they beheld each other

in rapture of each other so

that neither so held had the will

to let go, not getting their fill,

unwilling, unbreaking until

in rupture he said, _I must go._

__

_But I will return before long,_

_my word and my own watch to keep,_

_the fire in them both burning strong,_

_that you may close both eyes in sleep._

_But not before first growing wide_

_for the fire in you it will spark_

_when I whistle your tune in the moonlight,_

_Au Claire de la Lune in the moonlight,_

_soon hearing it's I in the moonlight,_

_not the wolf whistling in the dark._

As the wolf wouldn't do out of dread,

he fearlessly skirted the fire

in coming to her as he'd said,

blood red, in the heat of desire,

as her own, yet a heat neither thought

was such as to warrant remarking

as on fire they burned in the cave

one fervid fire, yearned in the cave,

one desire interned in the cave,

now higher for all of their sparking.

Yet neither, close, kept up the fire

at the mouth of the cave that night,

for the fiery, impassioned desire

that burned with a much stronger light

within; yet for all the wolf danger

in the darkness without, they'd no fright

as he held her and whispered pure moonshine

in her ear, kissed her lips in the moonshine,

a wild French kiss in the moonshine,

and the fire in her mouth burned bright.

And she heard the wolf howling without,

and it stood up the hairs on her skin,

and she cast her wild eyes all about,

for his sounding that he was _within_.

And she felt a whole new world of caring,

a woman, no longer a child,

and she lost all sense in the hold

on her feelings, all sense uncontrolled,

that the wolf was so deep in the fold

—and she was wild.

##

The Word

The sage said, "In my hand I hold

the greatest story ever told.

Now if, to you, this book were sold

(no matter if you're young or old)

if you could ever be so bold,

its precious pages, to unfold;

and if your eyes could be cajoled

to take to heart each word of gold

(and saw thereon its virtues scrolled)

—there, all of life, you would behold!"

__

He held it up for all to see,

but none went down on bended knee;

nor did one, save a poet, tarry

to buy the sage's dictionary.

****

****

##

**   
**

****

** **

****

Time and Water

If you are sick in body,

today or any day,

drink lots and lots of water.

All ill will quit your clay.

If you are sick at heart

from grief that makes you pray,

drink draughts of wholly water.

Heartsickness cannot stay.

If you are sick in spirit,

your soul is in dismay,

go to the well for water,

and wellness must obey.

Don't worry if it doesn't

cure you in a day.

with time and lots of water,

all things shall go away,

though you should drink no water.

##

Topa Topa

_A Holy Light_

If it could pour its light down through a hole

in Mayan temple roof to solely shine

on _one_ spot on the temple wall, _one_ sole,

so making of that spot a holy shrine,

upon the longest day of Mayan year,

as it had done for centuries, the sun

guessed it could pour at once its light (no fear

of failing on its summer solstice run)

down through a hole in galvanized steel roof

of one old barn whole cultures west and north,

upon a painting on one wall (sure proof

of longest day)—this holy light pour forth

but on _this_ work, while all was gloom nearby,

so solely as to galvanize the eye.

If it could galvanize one eye, the sun

guessed it could do as much with four; and four

fixed on that rustic work of art; each one,

two older and two younger, could but pore

upon that spotlit oil on canvas, lit

with holy light, in wonder of the scene:

Why poured this light on this one work—on it

alone—while, round the barn, the light routine,

this longest day, was gloom? What could it mean?

"It's Topa Topa in her pink of life,"

my older-eyed new neighbor said (he owned

the farm uphill). "She gets that way, the wife

says, when she gets herself all sunset-stoned

for all the setting sun pours on her face

for one pink moment. It's a fleeting sight

we get a treeless view of from our place,

we higher-ups; but then it's gone and night

begins, and we turn eyes to firelight."

"Yes, Topa Topa. I remember how

I thought it such a funny name when I

first came up here a child and saw a plow

pulled by a horse named Nelle who seemed to sigh

with each few plodding steps; behind her came

my Uncle Don, his footsteps furrow-bent.

'Behind him, _that_ stone face goes by the name

of Topa Topa,' Aunt Marie said. Spent,

she sighed and spoke no word of what it meant."

"The Chumash named her Topa Topa; say

that it means 'village,' but that can't be right.

She looks like what she is, let sunlight play

upon her broad, flat face, her native height

of forehead warm: a stone-faced Indian,

a Chumash princess turned to mountain wide

by their Great Spirit, flushed face to the sun,

so, loving Chief Peak like a rock (he sighed),

she'd know he'd once more, close, be petrified.

"And now your Aunt Marie's so lately gone

and laid to rest deep in the furrowed earth,

she following his steps, your Uncle Don,

they leaving no brood they could pass their worth

down to, the place is yours; and since the two,

Chief Peak and Topa Topa, are as good

as in your own backyard it's up to you,

now, to look after them, as look you should,

except you can't for all the upstart wood."

" _Of course!_ I knew that something wasn't right

in coming up here after all these years:

back then a look north filled the unchecked sight

so full of them they left no room for tears.

The view from right outside the barn as you

looked north out through the gate was best—so wide

that you could drive a wide-lens eyesight through

without its wide sight touching either side,

and get your redskin lovers fully eyed.

"Your eyes were so hopped up to get the view

they never stopped to look both ways before

they crossed the road—and it's a wonder, too,

no one was hurt! They dashed across to pour

their gaze beyond the shoulder's edge that _dropped_

precipitously down the mountainside

so dizzyingly—still they never stopped,

but shot _high_ over valley floor and wide

to drink their fill. I swear, Will, _I_ 'd have died!"

"I know. They used to come from miles around

to sit and paint her faces she puts on

with sun and shadow; their shop was the ground

beyond this wall they set their backs to. Don

it was who brought this wall and all the rest

up here in old-barn pieces hauled from Taft

out in the desert, in one trip, to test

his mettle, more his trailer's spindly shaft,

Marie's nerves more (she swore that he'd gone daft).

"She liked this painting best of all she'd done;

she thought she'd got her makeup on just right

this time: the very pink love-flush the sun

gave blushing bride anticipating night.

The others wanting love's pink brush she gave

away or painted over till they got

so thick they seemed old lovesick brides who crave

to make up for each loss-of-beauty spot

by troweling it on, loss-overwrought."

"She'd be there Friday sunsets, and she'd cry

to see me come up weekends. She'd be glad,

and hold me. More than once she told me I

and painting were most all the love she had

in life. Yet on cold wall no work of all

hung in their home to warm the dawn, entice;

yet here her best hangs on this old barn wall

with none to look ( _How lovely! pink precise!_ )

upon her face but spiders, bats, and mice."

"The Bats can't look at her no more than could

cold Don. He wouldn't have it in the house.

He said that he'd be damned (one knew he would)

if he was going to sit there like a mouse,

dumb, looking at some likeness on the wall

of something he could see by stepping out

the door—and get the color _true,_ the sprawl

of it. Besides, the Chumash held, devout,

that it was bad luck, and was true, no doubt.

"But slowly, with the years, it got so Don,

for age or plain indifference, let the view

go all to seed. He'd kept the trees down on

the mountainside beyond the gate so you

could see her, Topa Topa, her broad face

turned to the sun, her lover at her side,

his own face turned to Heaven for the grace

of her, in thanks, so great was Chief Peak's pride

for the Great Spirit's daughter for his bride.

"The seeds grew into saplings, then to trees

which, wanting their own view, were forced to grow

up higher, ever higher for the frieze

of leafy looky-loos a head below

they had to keep a head above to _see;_

they couldn't let the trees below outpace

them. For each up-thrust leafy eye Marie

let fall a tear for all the leaf-filled space,

in time, completely hid the sunlit face—"

"The _sun!—_ that's it, Will, don't you see? The sun

is giving us this summer solstice sign

by pouring all its light down on this one

spot on the wall in longest-day design.

So proud is it of how it paints her rose

at sunset that it longs to point out to

us two with its light finger how it shows

her in her best light, in its point of view;

the triumph of its brush stroke, color true.

"It can't help pointing out the more she gleams

with each succeeding hue to more enthrall

adoring eyes, the more and more it beams

with pride that goes before its sunset fall.

It wants for us to see once more for _real_

the lovely sunset blush it puts upon

her too-long-hidden face the trees conceal

so jealously from sight. It's calling on

us to reveal the bride-flush it has drawn

"upon her face each sunset, as it's done

these years. But, Will, the leafy eyes between

have all conspired to not let our eyes run

to her, so her each blush has gone unseen

to fade into the slowly purpling night,

our green eyes foiled of any chance to cross

so _high_ above the valley for her sight,

and rush it back to us in double cross;

just greener grow for every unseen loss.

"But, Will, it doesn't have to be the way

it's been these tree-choked years of letting go.

An earnest will could change that in a day

by resolution's and the axe's blow.

On meeting on the shoulder, will in hand,

we'd make a team for felling, you and I.

The younger, I'd put shoulder to the stand,

and, standing, fell each where it stands so high

against the backdrop of the northern sky.

"Above, you'd throw the choker down to me

within a mile or two so I might fetch

and snug it round the butt end of the tree,

yell _'Fire in the hole!'_ so you could stretch

the yard line taut and yard it up the hill

with tractor might across the road, in yoke,

an old hand, to be bucked up with a will,

no more to stand and all the hillside choke,

except against the winter sky, as smoke."

"You'd change your tune to _'Fire in the old!'_

to see me, Sonny, fell a tree to where

I drop each backwoods fall guy's jaw down cold

to see with their own wide eyes ( _"HO-ly_ _air!"_ )

the clear and perfect tree-shaped hole I leave

for anyone who wants to look right through,

and get a sight they so long to receive

of all the beauties, ages old, in view

against the backdrop of the north-sky blue.

"If I've stood on this mountainside and kept

my trunk as plumb as any tree this hand

has ever felled, feet planted stagger-stepped,

and never felled myself, this trunk can stand

her one more time—and match you tree for tree.

You'll watch for, as I give you stroke for stroke,

my falling trees while I as carefully

watch out for yours and, since no get-it joke,

together we'll _watch out!_ for poison oak.

"But we might save ourselves the work and do

the work of nature with a well-tossed spark,

get _all_ the sunset colors for our view

that just as flamingly bring on the dark.

We'll swell to think that _we_ so lit her face

just by the spark of our tree-clearing whim

no less than, in another time and place,

Vesuvius poured over, down her rim

at staggering high cost to life and limb.

"But always it has been the way with fire,

when given its head, and gets blazing hot,

to burn with still more fiery desire,

and scorn to listen to our higher thought:

'Now look, just burn this section here and leave

the trees on either side to frame the view.'

It has to burn the _all_ to make us grieve

—despite we went to all the trouble to

discover it. There's gratitude for you!

"Don't talk to _it_ of beauty! You can't tell

it anything; it thinks there's nothing quite

as beautiful as that infernal hell:

a wall of fire roaring up a height

of mountainside, a firestorm of sparks

and smoke and flames and fear—all life in flight

before it that can move; such leaves and barks

as can't, feed and become the hellfire light

before they're charcoal grays and ashes white.

"Yet somehow, though it's swept the southern side

some half a dozen times, it's been its fate

no lightning, 'bug, or spark on tinder dried

—for eighty years, since 1928—

has set it off upon the northern face

to set to running buck and doe and fawn,

so panicking the run-on-bank mad race

for buck and dough in bank they fawn upon,

it brings another Great Depression on.

"And I can't say as _I_ am not afraid:

I see you're so fired up to see her face,

I fear should you set on the northern grade

the least of your two matching feet you brace

upon some rock, that strike would surely burst

out into flame—and burn _all_ far and wide!

But then I guess, since that would be a first,

we could appeal it, and not be denied,

the lack of precedent upon our side.

"So, Sonny Boy, we'll have to meet as you

propose, upon the shoulder—only I

won't stand to be above the fray; we _two_

will stand against the stand against the sky;

two rubbing shoulders, elbows, side by side,

down to the bone you've got against the base

of every tree that spreads its foliage wide

and high to take up all the viewing space,

two downing trunks on down the northern face."

"I see her now, Will! _Yes,_ and they will come

to sit once more and paint her with the sun

full on her face, the trees all out of plumb

by ninety-plus degrees, the deed well done.

A picture! On each side they'll clearly see

her wooden frame and know we bucked the laws

of growth not with the axe—they'll see that we

cut, trunks all teeter-totter in good cause,

her Picturewindow out with our seesaws."

"This wall and Topa Topa's sunlit all

in pinkish oils your Aunt Marie mixed true

to capture her are all that stand, a wall,

between us and the thing that we would do.

So let us get in full this longest ray

of sun we'll have all year, we sun-obsessed,

beyond this wall, relax this longest day

and get this longest night our longest rest,

so all tomorrow we might fell our best."

_The Fall_

The sun was in its fresh-pressed easternmost

array of sunday-go-to-meetings; on,

the finest reds and golds that it could boast

to meet us on the shoulder with the dawn,

we who'd arisen with it, fresh, to meet

the challenge we two fellers were beset

with ("Challenge, Sun; Sun, Challenge . . ."). Greeting heat

beneath the sun soon made us sweat to get

before its westernmost down-fall, all met.

As earth held fast the trees, as trees held earth

as fast, we held each other, Will and I,

in common bond, for all our trunks were worth,

to keep from falling off the mounting high

that we were on. So firmly held, we fell

to felling weed-tree western hollies and

black walnuts; fortune fell our way as well

for no protected oaks stood in the stand

that fell to his, as to my own, fell hand.

The sun arose hot overhead and then

began its long, slow down-fall in the west,

but what was such heat to two felling men

when passioned heat of felling fired each breast.

We sweated ( _watch!_ ) for heat of poison oak,

the shady, most deceitful kind that twines;

that burns without a wisp of warning smoke;

that snakes up in the trees on hellish vines,

the fellest of his body-swell designs.

We worked from east to west in going down

in fealty to the slow, self-felling sun;

kept pace so we, with fiery glowing-down

of sunset, might see, too, our felling done.

So it befell. Back up the mountainside

we clambered, on the fallen, up the steep,

to _see_ we'd cut a view a landscape wide,

a heaven high—a mountain vista deep:

a range of sight that made our glad hearts leap!

Beyond the cut the treetops fell away

down into the broad valley miles below.

The eyes long kept tree-bound, for the buffet

before them, leapt into the grand tableau,

and, swift as light, swept down above the trees,

above the grazing heads grass low, head high

who felt the swift yet gently ruffling breeze

and sighed (they knew, so raised no gazing eye),

_Two eyesights more—to her—are flashing by._

And like the heads they grazed so narrowly,

no wild eye stopped to look both ways—all _flew_

across the country two-lane, arrowly,

that cuts the east–west valley clean in two,

to buzz yet greener pastures as they climbed

up into sunset-shadowed foothills low,

then higher ones, all stunning-prospect primed

to view the ever-mounting sunset glow

( _Soon now!_ ) the evening star of the light show.

Then, eyes and curtain rising up as one

act, _there she beamed!_ her blush a mountain wide,

her face suffused with evening-just-begun

flush, Chief Peak proudly glowing at her side.

That we might see, and love as much, their sight

of her in her pink moment, love-replete,

our eyes _flew_ on their swift-returning flight

straight back most faithfully, retriever fleet,

and dropped it proudly, gently at our feat.

And being only human we were flush,

then, Will and I, for such a feat well done.

We spoke no word to break the evening hush

(sighs didn't count), and felt ourselves at one

with her on whom we gazed. We only turned

our eyes away when every blushing light

had left the bridal face for which they'd yearned

these longest years, entrusting her lost sight

to Chief Peak and the June-soft summer night.

Come dawn we bent our eyes upon her sight

less stiffly only than we bent our will

to choking and, with main and tractor might,

man-hauling all the fallen up the hill,

across the road, then bucking up the maze

of leaf and limb scarce life and limb constraint.

As set the sun, we sat, done in, to gaze,

in muscular but no eyesore complaint,

on blushing bride they'd come again to paint.

_The Second Coming_

Those days are gone now, sorely, long ago;

the painter-sun has risen and has set

upon eight canvases its longest glow

since one sole challenge and two souls were met.

Nine longest rays have poured down through a hole

and lit the face up one cannot forget;

nine longest days, which ninth seeks to condole

with one soul who is left to long regret

that only one will watch this ninth sun set.

A long-lived son went down with longest night,

no more to rise bright eyes up with the dawn,

and have their sight, in sky-high sunset flight,

fetch back the blush it loved to light upon.

Yet standing on the shoulder I divine,

as every year, a presence; in his pride

of work I feel Will's shoulder rubbing mine

and all his spirit chafing at my side

and hear his voice in welcome evening chide:

"It's high time, Sonny Boy. They've grown back up

their high-flown heads with all their leafy eyes

to where we're bound to meet here come sunup

if we're to keep _our_ eyes upon the prize.

You never see them creeping up by day;

their scheme is 'If we inch on up by night,

a leaflet at a time, as is our way,

our cunning night-growth, in the sunset light,

and _all else_ will be lost upon their sight.

" 'Then they won't come to paint _her—_ anymore!

forget they ever saw her clever scene

in pink—and come to think our many more

green faces bright are all they've ever seen.'

But you and I saw through their dark night scheme

and, side by side, laid low their every leaf;

from dawn to dusk we made a felling team

that longest day, and brought their scheme to grief,

and saw _her_ blushing next her lover-Chief.

"It wasn't long; the word got out by crow

and flew on wings on down the mountainside;

they heard down in the valley far below,

and all through the surrounding country wide.

But I don't know as one of us can say,

and if he could I guess he'd be most proud,

when up the winding road, day after day,

flocked droves of the scene-driven painting crowd,

which magpie of us two had crowed most loud.

"So, Sonny Boy—your Aunt Marie it was

who called you that for all you were the son

she never had, and longed for, and because

you brought the sun into her life with Don—

it's high time we met on the dawn once more,

and, one by one, fell down the steep decline,

that is, if you think you're not still too sore

from being beat last time; think your hand's fine

and fell and man enough to keep with mine."

"They'll make a falling _noise,_ you there to hear,

Will! And I'll bet they _stay_ knocked down this time.

We've had to knock them down now each third year.

This time will make the fourth—one more than prime.

Once, 'Three times is the charm' was one saw you

Could count upon—"

"you might have known since Cain

and Abel, saws are just as subject to

inflation as a sawbuck, and see plain,

that last third time, they'd get back up again.

"Times were in the beginning trees did stay

knocked down; then one yew chanced to hear the first

curst motivating speaker up and say,

_'Yew CAN get back up! Yew CAN fight!'_ That burst

so motivated all its chlorophyll

it got up and infected every tree;

and ever since that day it's been downhill

for me and you—and up again—each three,

as I suspect it's always going to be."

"I hear the falling noise you make, Will—clear!

And won't we clear the air again, come dawn!

Where tree boles stood, but tree _holes_ will appear

we'll see our way clear through to see to fawn

on her. I'll have your back, as you'll have mine,

and so we'll trade—we fell our very best

when we've our own to work with—spine for spine.

And while we're at it, felling without rest,

we'll see our way clear to trade jest for jest.

"But, Will, _shhh!_ here's the evening's first that's made

her way up through the brush and found the place;

she's got that wild _before-the-colors-fade-_

_to-night!_ scene-driven look upon her face

of sunset painters everywhere. Here, let

me do the talking just in case (you know

how women are when they hear _voices_ yet

they're not part of a séance)—yes, _hello!_

you're just in time to catch the pink-light show.

"Drive right on through the open, eyesight-freed

gate—no, there's no admission, well except

there's never been one but does not concede

she's _beautiful_ as ever eyesight swept.

It's good you got here when you did; had you

been some few moments later you'd have found

yourself parked down the road a mile or two,

and, for the sea of easels on the ground,

cramped _standing painting only_ room all round.

"As things now stand, you've got your pick of spots,

except for one, and time, once set up on

your choicest-but-one of all painting plots,

to get her yet-unblushing portrait drawn.

That's well, for when the sunset starts to pour

upon her face its warmest setting light

so roseately you'll have scarcely more

than one pink moment fading into night

to get the makeup she puts on just right

"with Sun and Shadow. Now if Will were here

(I often feel he is) I know I'd feel

his elbow in my ribs, hear in my ear,

'Now don't forget to tell her of the glow

she puts on nights so brightly with Moonlight,

her beauty rising to its height when, full,

the moon, in fullest glory, rises right

behind her head, as full as possible

of its full self, so pulls its strongest pull

" 'On moonlight lovers everywhere. Then she,

well thinking it a feather worthy of

a princess, reaches up right handily

to where it hovers glowingly above

her head, and sticks it in her headband made

of freshly woven evergreens—upright

it rises, pulling, all moonlight arrayed,

her mounting beauty up to its full height.

So moonlit, she steps out into the night.

" 'Yet we know some as hold she _keeps_ her place;

but them as know know she, with her free hand,

picks up her bridal train with princess grace,

so that its many folds and creases planned

to look like foothills and footvalleys won't

be soiled by dragging on the moonlit ground;

so gracefully that those who live there don't

but think that it's the nightly dream come round

of flying—dreaming not they're bridal-gowned.

__

" 'I gave up trying to make such believe

that in her other hand she holds the hand

of proud Chief Peak, as in the moonlight we've

seen, as they moonlight-stroll across the land.

And everywhere they go in full spoonshine,

the dreamers smile for all the rustling breeze

wafts in their dreams the heady scent of pine

she trails behind her, headiest of trees,

to make dream pining, sighing lovers these.

" 'Since bride and groom are on their honeymoon,

and never tire of strolling all aglow,

and know no bounds for being in a swoon,

what aren't the lengths of love to which they go!

Yet _she_ knows better than to carry on

too far, and turns his chief-pique head round so

they're sure to get back just before the dawn

in time to lay her train down soft and low,

so seamlessly no parting seam does show.

" 'There's times she goes to polar-cap extremes,

and makes up with the most contrary glow:

upon the shortest day she brightly gleams,

her hair made up with Winter Solstice Snow

capped off with Shiver-Gray Storm Clouds as cold.

Bride-young for life, she does this with a view

to making up like she's grown hoary old.

And, Sonny Boy, you won't deny it's true:

I've seen her made up so more years than you.' "

"That's pretty much (the color's mostly right)

how Will'd have painted it, with words he brushed

upon the canvas of your ear to light

it up with all the color your heart's flushed

with, 'seeing' by its glow how good they make

you feel. It makes me pine that he's not here

to dab them on, paint over all the ache

of loss, once more, his words all warm and clear,

and blot out that one sunset of last year.

"His farm above, Will always liked to brag

of being in the class of 'higher-ups.'

He thought so highly of his high-class gag

that he was fairly in his higher cups

of cheer to get it off, so I don't doubt

he's pouring down upon us from on high

his longest ray of light and pointing out

how low the setting sun is in the sky;

high time each one was set to draw a sigh.

"They're coming through the gate in droves; the rush

for choicest plots is on—you've picked the best

but one to get the unobstructed blush,

the bride-flush that uprushes from her breast

with setting sun, beside the cherished chair

and easel splashed with pink—how green they'll be!

to see you, catbird seated, painting where

they'd be, right next to beaming Aunt Marie

(she'd not be late for any blush she'd see);

"against the wall on whose inside the sun

late poured on Topa Topa in her pink

of life that scarcely lasts for more than one

brief moment (gone), so you're afraid to blink

for missing that one, so you look to see

her coming, brushing on one face love's prime

blush, holding, crying, 'Sonny Boy'ing me.

We're (Will insists on my not painting 'I'm')

expecting her, full color, any time."

##

_ _

__

_Former estate of Larry Hagman (J. R. Ewing of_ Dallas _), Sulphur Mountain, Ojai, California_

Villa on the Hilla

The Villa on the Hilla

of the color of vanilla

had a larger-than-life villain

whose complexion turned vanillan,

thanks to drink that killed his liver;

but a new one from a giver

(gave his ghost up), in a week,

made rosy each vanilla cheek,

within the Villa on the Hilla

of the color of vanilla.

Life was rosy cheating fate,

reflected in the license plate

upon his little hybrid flivver

( _All is vanity!_ ): reliver.

But each rose must one day fade,

although so cheekily remade.

His Villa mirror _would_ disclose

(he paled) the bloom was off the rose!

The diagnosis was a chilla:

Doctors: "You could not be illa:

you've been given a new liver

by a no-good Indian giver—

God." He blanched, that Villa fella,

his new liver wasn't wella.

Now the Villa is more empty

than he ever could have dreamt, he

in the hilla neath the Villa

of the color of vanilla.

****

****

##

**   
**

****

Visitation

Too few were the days of autumn;

still fewer the brandywines,

long heirlooms a long age before,

maturing on withering vines.

The sky was as clear as an alp stream

babbling over its rocky bed,

when suddenly shadows passed over—

great darkening shadows passed over—

passed over with great sound, moreover,

of air rushing over my head.

Where they flew, my sight and my hearing

had to follow (as if they could choose);

they couldn't not see and not hear;

these were not actions they could refuse.

They flew to the shale ledge above me

long formed in the Pleistocene,

where they all came together in sunlight—

met together as one in the sunlight—

as my two eyes there met, in their one sight,

the largest birds I'd ever seen.

Their wingspans, coal-black and as wide

as a basketball hoop is high,

with a few braking beats of the air,

brought their other ten feet from the sky,

huge talon-toed feet; but the feature

that most captivated my eye

was each wing bore a two-digit number—

all ten wings the same thing, a number—

above and below wing a number

that man could identify.

Their heads were as bald as a vulture's,

one orange, three yellow, one gray;

and their bald eyes, a bright brownish red,

looked from a primordial day.

_Gymnogyps californianus_ —

California condors. But why

come to _me_? They were carrion eaters—

rare, near-extinct carrion eaters—

and were they to carry on eaters

they must consume _dead_ flesh—or die.

They peered on me—blackly, so like

Poe's raven from Pallas's bust

high over his bedchamber door,

that it shook me—with ravenous lust?

Did they sense something fatal about me?

Was I soon to draw my last breath?

Was I moribund, and didn't know it?—

So morbid I couldn't help show it?—

So mortal I couldn't forego it

the more?—did I owe God a death?

Else why had they come in such numbers,

so close to oblivion,

when a born Californian might go his

whole life there without seeing one?

Then, as if they had borne me their message,

and feeling themselves unencumbered,

they spread their great wings to the sky—

their wing numbers clear to the eye—

growing s-m-a-l-l-e-r . . . I _saw_ (how they fly!):

so, too, were my winged days numbered.

##

Wellers and Whalers

_Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape like a camel?_

_Polonius: By th'mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed._

_Hamlet: Methinks it is like a well._

_Polonius: It is back'd like a well._

_Hamlet: Or like a whale?_

_Polonius: Very like a whale._

_—_ Hamlet. Act 3, Scene 2 _William Shakespeare_

__

Then in her sixty-ninth year, Agnes Baron,

"outside man"-cum-"Witch of Sulphur Mountain,"

who for thirty years had put the care in

caretaker, was in dire need of a fountain

of pungent sulphur water from her tap;

and that's just what she put on Sam and me

and Rusty, Bob, and Chuck: unscrew the cap

upon the wellhead, see what we would see.

We saw. _Somehow_ we five would have to hump

300 feet of galvanized pipe filled

with water up, and thus fetch up the pump

gone wrong for some smart alec to rebuild.

_Don't worry,_ she said, sensing we'd some doubt.

_I've got the way we'll do it all planned out._

That cold and foggy winter morning she,

upon her small, old Caterpillar tractor,

led us down the thirty-odd degree

dirt road the rain-soaked ¼-mile (a factor)

to the wellhead. Right beside it stood

a tall pipe anchored to a nearby tree

with dodgy rope, which gave to me no good

impression of the pipe's security.

But then I guess that our ad hoc committee

didn't exactly give the rope, the pipe,

the tree, the wellhead any kind of pretty

good impression that we were the type,

we five all being lifelong city dwellers,

pale white-collar roughnecks, to be wellers.

But we were all that Agnes had, and she

was satisfied, and set forth to explain

the whole routine, gave each of us to see

the roles we'd play, again and then again.

High up the pole a cable passed down through

a pulley to the well pipe, and to which

the cable was attached by hooking to

a screw-on eye that served as cable hitch.

The cable's other end hooked to the tractor.

Agnes, inching it ahead, would haul

the pipe up slowly, its great weight a factor,

with the rain-soaked soil, so it would crawl.

When she had hauled the pipe up twenty feet,

we'd unscrew that length, hook the next, repeat.

Our roles were this: As soon as Agnes hauled

up twenty feet, Chuck signalled her to stop;

Sam fast would get a grooved steel plate installed

below the coupling, signal her to drop

back some to slack the cable; nimbly Bob

would shinny up the pole, unhook the cable,

fetch it down in freefall slide, a job,

for which he, being skinny, was most able.

Rusty and Chuck both would then unscrew

the pipe, and lay it down, and Chuck would then

unscrew the eye, and screw it fast on to

the next pipe, hook the cable on ( _Amen_ ),

while I would loosely coil the three wires coming

from the pump. Who knew they'd soon be humming?

The first was hardest; pipe and pump and water

weighed three-quarters of a ton. The little

tractor reared up, and appeared to totter,

slipping, then inched forward in committal,

Agnes working the controls, and seeming

an old cowgirl in a rodeo

upon an equally old mount, still dreaming

of winning the gold buckle even so.

But inch by inch she got the first pipe length

above the head, Sam quickly shoving the

steel plate beneath the collar; then the strength

of Bob and Rusty went to work to free

the pipe, the water pouring out upon

them _cold_ , but they just laughed, went welling on.

Chuck screwed the eye on fast, got cable hooked;

then Agnes took the slack up to the sounds

of tractor rearing up the same (I looked

through fog), though all was less a hundred pounds.

The treads more slid upon than gripped the mud;

but once again the little tractor that

could got it up, came down with a wet thud,

as we all did our jobs, much as the cat.

Except for one thing: we did not come down

with a wet thud, not even Bob or Rusty;

we were _up_ (some of us lived uptown);

nor wet behind the ears; not even musty.

We were high as kites, we city fellers,

roughnecks now—yes, honest-to-god _wellers_.

We hauled up three more lengths of pipe, each one

the faster, easier, our team the tighter.

Less five hundred pounds, but _half a ton_

remained to fetch the pump, our hearts the lighter.

Agnes hauled the next up, Sam all poise

to slam the steel plate under, when the rope

that held the pulley pipe broke with a noise

that left the doomed well pipe without a hope.

The tractor lurched ahead and pulled the well pipe

so far out of plumb that a loud _SNAP!_

at once made all below the break a hell pipe,

sounding like a mini thunder clap.

Doomed instantly to such infernal use,

at breakneck speed, at once all hell broke loose:

I was just then coiling up a wire

when, in an instant, all of them were wellbound,

with the well pipe, snapping, lashing fire

and brimstone, fiendish cat-o'-nine tails hellbound,

whipping, singing with a hellish sound,

demonic frenzy, all toward that hellhole,

doing their damndest to wrap all around

me, drag me piecemeal down the six-inch wellhole.

Wire whipped through them, was I still ten-fingered?

One can't trust what a deranged mind sees.

This hell unleashed, the others never lingered,

leaping for their lives up in the trees.

But of an odd mind, I upleapt _a sailor_ ;

in that instant I was in the whaler.

Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick had bitten

Captain Ahab's leg off at the knee;

sore, else in him snapped. _I swear. Be it written:_

_Ahab found him in his hellish sea,_

_and was as good as, long forsworn, his vow_

_—lo! sunk his harpoon in. . . ._ That time had come,

and Moby Dick welled up before the bow,

the hated white leviathan in sum.

Harpoon in both hands, body arched, his arms

stretched high above his crazed head, all his might

so concentrated in the fatal harms

his leg intended, Ahab took the fight

to Moby Dick in one thrust; as it fell

in deep, he spat curse, _I'll see thee in HELL!_

__

So stricken, lashing his colossal tail

flukes, Moby Dick flew forward with igniting

velocity, line rising to a wail

as it ran through the grooves—ran _foul_ , affrighting

Ahab, and he stooped to clear it, cleared it,

but the flying turn flew round his neck,

and Ahab knew he was right to have feared it,

when, at once, he found all breath in check:

As silently as Indian Thuggees

garrotte their victims who emit no note,

as fleetly and as mutely as you please,

was wide-eyed Ahab shot out of the boat.

The white whale sounded; thus the tale ends well:

true to his vow, Ahab saw him in Hell.

Precisely then the wet well deeply sounded,

the hell-pipe striking bedrock, I the paler

than the whale; the instant it resounded

through me, I was shot out of the whaler,

landing at the wellhead. All so shaken,

we called it a day. That suited me.

Our necks unwrung, the finger census taken,

we retired to Agnes's for tea.

There I reflected ere I had begun:

while both pursuits were lively as could be

I thought that I would not pursue the one

or other as a livelihood, though fee

be all the whales or water they well pay,

except perhaps to write of them someday.

#

Photo/Illustration Credits

Cover

Bearded men lounging–Shutterstock 484242544

A Mantra for All Seasons

Fractal Kaleidoscope, Mandala—by EDDArts from Pixabay

Four Seasons Pizza—screenshot

A Question of Balance

Ant Trail—free clip art

_Agapanthus africanus möbius_

Mobiüs Strip—David Benbennick from Wikipedia

Agapanthus-blue-tuberose—JacLouDL from Pixabay

Bleak House

Forest-green-trees—Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

Castles in the Air

Castle in Clouds—Sarah Richter from Pixabay

Counting Coup

Comanche warrior counting coup—unknown artist

Dead Possum

Dead Possum—Shutterstock 45976360

Eb 'n' Flo

Illustration—Prawny from Pixabay

Ebb and Flow

High and Low Tides at Bay of Fundy—© Samuel Wantman / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 & GFDL

Eight Deer

Shutterstock 1272832429

Encounter

Bear—PublicDomainImages from Pixabay

Flight of the Beekeep

Beehives—Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

Hourglass and Sand

Desert Dunes Algones—Falkenpost by Pixabay been loaded

Hourglass—OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Hunted

Fox Hunt—Alexandre-Francois Desportes from Wikipedia

I Should Get Up

Old Man illustration—Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Just Measure

Old oak tree—Csaba Nagy from Pixabay

Little Wash-Bear

Raccoon—Darkone from Wikipedia

Hachiya persimmon illustration—Amanda Newton from Wikipedia

Love Song of the Roof

Mikeledray from Shutterstock

Natural Enemies

Song Khon Waterfall—Martin Puschel from Wikipedia

Roadside Chicken

Puma—Ian Lindsay from Pixabay

Tail of the Peacock

Peacock Feather—No 272 447 from Pixabay

The Final Solution

Bulldozer crushing bricks—David Madison

The Sword of Poison Oak

Poison oak—unknown, screenshot

The Vow

Mountain Chapel—Heidelbergeren from Pixabay

The Wild French Shepherdess

Shepherdess with flock—George S. Barnes

The Word

Samuel Johnson reading—Ignace de Clausen

Time and Water

Greenland Fjord—Heidelbergeren from Pixabay

Pump on rock—Kaserai from Pixabay

Hourglass—S. Sepp via Wikipedia

Topa Topa

Topa Topa—Brad Spurr

Villa on the Hilla

Villa on the Hilla—David Madison

Visitation

Juvenile condors feeding—David Clendenen of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Condor in flight—PhilArmitage

Colored condor head—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

_Wanted_

Two Sulphur Mountain vistas—David Madison

Wellers and Whalers

Well drillers lithograph—unknown

Illustration from Moby Dick—Isaac Walton Taber

#

Author

** **

Canadian by birth, expatriate by climate, David Madison is a **fabulous** writer. But if you've read **Ms. Spinster's Novel Grammar** , you already know that. Each of the 330 tales illustrating a rule is written in the manner of a **fable** , "a short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point, often employing as characters _animals_ that speak and act like humans." He is a permanent resident of Belize, which, being situated below Mexico on the Caribbean Sea, is fabulous in its own right. But one look at a map will undeceive you: it is nowhere near as fabulous as he is. When he's not being fabulous, in one sense, he spends the remainder of his waking hours answering the question _What qualifies you to write a grammar book?_ His ready answer, marvelous for its concision, is that he has some five more years of school learning than Mark Twain, and far fewer cats. While those two seeming disqualifications are sinking in, he is quick to emphasize that he correctly said far _fewer_ , not far less cats. 

#

Copyright

Copyright © 2020 David Madison

Smashwords Edition

Written by David Madison

Cover by David Madison

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy excerpts for classroom use, or others who would like to obtain permission, should send their inquiries to the publisher at dmadison@spinlady.net . Scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. Thank you for respecting the author's rights.

David Madison

P.O Box 257

San Ignacio, Belize

Central America
