My Unopened Life

lay to the right of my plate
like a spoon squiring a knife, waiting
patiently for soup or the short destiny
of dessert at the eternal picnic—unsheltered
picnic at the mouth of the sea
that dares everything forgotten to huddle
at the periphery of a checked cloth spread
under the shadowy, gnarled penumbra
of the madrona.

Hadn’t I done well enough with the life
I’d seized, sure as a cat with
its mouthful of bird, bird with its
belly full of worm, worm like an acrobat of darkness
keeping its moist nose to the earth, soaring
perpetually into darkness without so much as
the obvious question: why all this darkness?
And even in the belly of the bird: why
only darkness?

The bowl of the spoon
collects entire rooms just lying there next
to the knife. It makes brief forays into
the mouth delivering cargoes of ceilings
and convex portraits of teeth
posing as stalactites of
a serially extinguished cave

from whence we do nothing but stare out
at the sea, collecting little cave-ins of
perception sketched on the moment
to make more tender the house of the suicide
in which everything was so exactly
where it had been left by someone missing.
Nothing, not even the spoon he abandoned
near the tea cup, could be moved without
seemingly altering the delicious
universe of his intention.

So are we each lit briefly by engulfments
of space like the worm in the beak of
the bird, yielding to sudden corridors
of light-into-light, never asking: why,
tell me why
all this light?

Tess Gallagher

Things sure can change quickly.

Bought the food. Had fun shopping.
Cherry tomatoes, marinated artichokes,
pepperoncini peppers, roasted red peppers, romaine, romano,
ricotta, spinach, fresh Italian flat leaf parsley etc. etc.

And even leeks and whipping cream and
a rotisserie chicken and some yukon gold
potatoes for a leek soup tomorrow.

Brought it home. Put it up. Picked up
my son. We drove a little while (practice
time...permit last Tuesday).

I ate a late lunch and felt sick by the time
I got Wes. He'd had an off day. We didn't drive
much as I was being overly panicky and he
was overly sensitive.

I am a control freak. That's why I always
so the driving anywhere I go. I'm a lousy passenger.

That's why I won't fly. That's why I am terrified
in taxis and on buses and trains.

Needless to say, the mood left me.

It's like you walk out your door at 1
in the afternoon and it's sunny and mild
outside and you're loving it
and then the temperature bottoms out
and before 2 it's 35 and pouring rain
and sleeting and you can't get warm
and it doesn't snow (because it's not cold
enough so you would like it to get colder
if it's going to do this switcharoo on ya,
which is what you like
if the temperature is going to drop
and you don't have to drive anywhere) and your sensory
system doesn't know how to respond to all
this dramatic change, as it should because you are made
for it to respond, but it doesn't and so you just cry.

And then the damn brand fucking new dishwasher
won't work. And you;ve already decided you
weren't in any frame of mind to do the antipasto,
etc. etc. so you decide on the soup but then you are pissed
that the damn appliance won't work.

And you don't cook dinner.

And you don't open your bottle of wine

But you drink lots of cuervo and hope
you just get numb or something.

Bummer.

For no reason. For every reason. For wrong
reasons and right reasons and somewhere
in between reasons.

And there's no book I want to read right now
and no movie I want to watch and no person
I want to call or talk to except my son
but he's in his room and needs some space.

Oh the joys of living with M.

Bright sun this morning
but no incentive to do anything.
Still jobless and looks as if I may remain
that way for some time. Still, after nearly
4 months, in a state of disbelief
that I was fired. No recourse. None.

Finally made myself take a shower.
Hair is dry now, so I am going to the grocery.

And I am going to cook tonight.

I am going to make an antipasto salad,
spinach and sweet Italian sausage lasagne,
and garlic bread with grated fresh parmesan
and slices of fresh garlic.

And I am going to open my bottle of Tosca
from Chateau Thomas Winery,
though I told myself I was going to wait until
the weather got warm and the neighbors
and I could get together and share some wine
and candlelight and poetry and food on their patio.
But, hell, why not just have it now?

How can I pass up this wine this night with a description
like this:

This is an equal blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon.
The wine is dark in color with a fragrant nose of dried
fruits, such as fig, cherry, and blackberry.
Bouquets of oak, clove, chocolate, and vanilla
are accented with hints of tobacco with anise rounding
out the generous mouth-filling experience...

Yes. I shall open it. It's a perfect choice for tonight.


I can get us another
bottle of good wine then. They're busy people anyway
and the last time we had ourselves such a night
it was completely serendipitous, and lovely, I might add.

Who knows if such a scene and such a night will ever
be repeated? The sounds of the county fair, only blocks away,
floating on the breeze, my oldest son, his wife, my youngest
son, his two friends, coming and going and participating
in the conversation. The soft bubbling sound of the fishpond.
The glow of candlelight on everyone's faces making the whole
world seem softer and more welcoming. The fire lit in the
firepit, the taste of a perfectly balanced cabarnet on my lips,
the sky filled with stars and constellations whose names few
of us knew but whose light we gazed upon as we took stabs
at calling out our best guesses.

I had Billy Collins sign the page of the poem I read
them that night. I had left the book sitting near
the candle and red wax dripped down the page.
I shared the story with Billy. He said: Glad to hear
the book's getting some use.

Ha! Then he smiled, and I smiled, and he signed my
book on that page.

I feel a little better now. A little more hopeful now.

*******************************************


Part One: LifeXXXII


HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Woke this morning to clouds

again

Didn't get excited until I put on my glasses
and saw the snow flurries. Cloudy and snow
flurries I can do. Would really like accumulation.
We haven't had any this winter.

So, in a happier mood, I decided to search
through the fridge for leftovers to use in this
morning's breakfast (I hate wasting food
and no one here eats leftovers except me
unless I cleverly sneak them into something).

I found:

a baked potato
1/2 red pepper
roasted asparagus

And I had other things, so I

diced the potato
chopped some scallions
sliced fresh garlic into thick pieces
chopped the red pepper
chopped fresh cilantro (fresh is the only way
to ever have cilantro)

I added all that to some olive oil and cooked it until
the potatoes were browning and the garlic was soft
but not overly cooked. It still had that wonderful bite
to it.

then, I

beat up (I'm so mean and testy some days) 5 brown organic eggs
chopped the leftover asparagus into small pieces
chopped more scallions and cilantro
grated some provolone

So, I had scambled eggs with all that yummy stuff in them
Oh yes, fresh ground black pepper and a bit of sea salt too.

I even added a touch of cinnamon to my coffee and some
Frangelico hazelnut liqueur.

All because of a few snowflakes. Which makes me think of
something Leonard Cohen said on a documentary
I watched the other night. He said:

Every time you grab at love, you will lose
a snowflake of your memory.

Alas, the sun has come out and the snow has stopped.
Well, if I can't have the snow, the sun will do just fine.
Been too grey here lately, as it always is here in winter.

*******************************************

Organic eggs, fresh herbs, few processed foods.
I eat healthy, but I am thinking about a comment
I made to a friend of mine who also ate very healthy,
nearly all organic or homegrown food. It would amaze
me when she would lash out at me for drinking a diet
coke. She'd tell me all the awful stuff in a diet coke
and how dangerous it was to drink many of them
and so on. And she'd eat all that healthy food
but she'd:

snort coke occasionally
smoke pot when she could get it
drink whiskey fairly often
drink beer (about a six pack) nightly
trash her lungs with unfiltered camel cigarettes
do some mushrooms if someone had any

Here she was, this tiny little thing, all of
100 pounds soaking wet at 5' 2".
Never gained any weight drinking all that beer.
Stayed relatively healthy despite a few colds
from all the cigs (at least 2 packs a day).

Maybe the healthy eating helps balance out some
things. I just know I didn't like the diet coke
lectures. The skillet calling the pot black
kind of thing, or is that the pot
calling the kettle black or is it the kettle
calling the pot black? I'm not very good at cliches--I have
a knack for turning them all around or leaving
out key words--though I have been accused
(years ago on Melic) of using some cliched words in my poems
now and again, so I must know something about them.

Anyway, I don't know what she's doing these
days. She left me. Like people often do.
I, who loved her so and was there for her
in so many desperate hours. She found
someone else to wear my shoes.

Yes, we are all expendable. I know. I am finding
that out more and more each day.

***************************************

Here's to food!


Osso Buco

I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow,
the invaded privacy of the animal
prized out with a knife and swallowed down
with cold, exhilarating wine.

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach--
something you don't hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife's laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table
with a hot, companionable cup of tea,
feeling like one of the friendly natives,
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son.

Somewhere a man is crawling up a rocky hillside
on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent
carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;
and elsewhere people of all nations stare
at one another across a long, empty table.

But here, the candles give off their warm glow,
the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by,
the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now it plays on the blue plates,
the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

Billy Collins

Cat Power - Living Proof

You won't see my daughter's face in this one, but she's the one who jumps the hurdle. She and I both like Cat Power and have seen her a few times. She was in this a year or so ago. One more video and she gets her SAG card.

Sammy Kershaw - Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On

Ok...I guess I get some bragging rights. This is my daughter. She does not wear cowboy boots ever, does not listen to country music, rarely wears blue jeans, and doesn't hang out at Honky Tonks, but she does live in Nashville and a producer friend of hers told her to audition, so she did and she got it and she had fun. The next video I am going to post is more her style. It's coming up.

Warren Zevon- Keep Me In Your Heart

This one from the man who said, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." He lived life full throttle and died the same way.

How little it is to ask in dying "keep me in your heart for awhile."