Flight #177 / Seat #7C - where I'm bound/I have been released

the final part of the trilogy,
re broken lives,
some finalized,
some revitalized,
some, their score,
incomplete

~~~


on the road again,
crossing the continent,
from sea to shining sea,
from one set of Eastern grandkids,
off to see the wizardry
of the West Coast variety

six hours six minutes,
flying high time, weather's fine,
a voices inform us, that will be
our mutual time of peaceful co-existence,
on this particular traversée journey

I've done harder time,
30 years ++ with no parole,
except for poetic verse,
them words,
I learned to parlez-vous parlay

never been afeared of flying high,
even amidst the wickedest black pitch,
tar and feathered thick, which is all the
ovaltine shaped window of the
exterior world, cares to reveal
at thirty thousand feet

the oxygen level in the cabin,
as it usually does,
says hey!
feeling heady boy,
so get good, so get ready,
write us a poem, a new shiny toy,
another of your airborne verbal medley

I've got little upon
to expound,
currently limbo'd
tween fresh, death-revived,
past memories of imprisonment and release,
by the jailers of L'Ancien Régime
and
the soon to feel,
happy anticipation of
Frisco fresh young lives re-greeting us,
long distance visitors with joyous screams,
loud, clear and that may cut
the muddied gloom internal,
like a pair of welcoming,
gleeful, liberating scissors

my windowed widowed refraction,
directs my carpaccio-thin guise
to pierce onwards a well trod state of
deeper reflection

noting that we will soon be flying over
water poisoned Flint,
in the state of Michigan,
just missing by an inching,
Paul Simon's sung request,
his "all come to Saginaw" dare

yet, I don't know where I am,
though the course trajectory
pilot-officially programmed and set,
ticketed firect  through to
San Francisco

nonetheless, my internal organs all feel lost,
misplaced and turned down around,
passing directly over cities heard of
and yet never seen or footed,
can I still claim to have been there?

same question differently couched,
providing this passenger's headache,
I was there, of this world,
for the almost forty years plus,
though I wasn't really present,
merely accounted for,
finally learning that "freedom"
is just another word

and though the Angel of Death,
scheduled, made a pre-flight pick up,
he left part of me behind
and on board,
to pick up after,
steward some of his and my
messes

the eyes, the brain, the whole noggin,
search for secret signs,
potent portents, turn indicators,
that this gloomy doom,  cloud thicket,
this too shall pass,
this last shared repast of shards,
this,
my so long now song
an au revoir to
"sad eyed lady of the lowlands"

noting that I am outbound and seated,
on a bunch of lucky sevens, flight and seat,
could be my luck is youthful changing?

where I'm bound
I can't tell,
I'll let you know when I get there
when I know, how I'll know,
I don't know, maybe some
extrusion of new words will speak,
at landing time, a different voice,
where and when I'm bound,
that will cry out

"now unbound,
at last,
at last,
I have been released"**

~~~
2/11~12/2016
started while over the Great Lakes, Michigan, and Wisconsin;
completed over Tahoe, Carson City, & Sacramento

I recently came across my first journal of poetry,
written in my early forties.  A tumultous time in my life, I kept a hand-written journal and the poems flowed.  It began on a (recovery) escape~vacation to Mykonos and many other Greek islands.  Unable to sail, (stuck on Mykonos by fierce winds that grounded even super tankers),  I wrote to pass the time.   Even then, I dated my poems, noting when & where the poem was composed. Themes were employed, that twenty years later, reappear (to my surprise) frequently, in my poems of today (by example, "The Wind of Correction").  Even then, I wrote long, way too long poems, some good and some awful ones. Judge this, one not too harshly, judge it as a first endeavor, simplistic, crude and heartfelt.

What seems to have triggered poetry to be the outlet for my emotional upset, as a father of young children, in the midst of a bitter divorce, was a Greek poet, Cavafy,  that I must have stumbled on during my visit
and a particular poem he wrote in 1908.  I include it the notes in shock and awe, for it unconsciously informed my "style" and seemingly, or unseemingly, still does.


The Geometery of Greece
(His Very First Poem)

~~~

the geometry of Greece
is the perfect intersection
of clear blue sky,
right-angled to azure waters,
with puffs of white clouds
to mark off distances

only
the wind is non-linear,
like feelings,
the wind,
it washes and caresses you,
envelopes and wraps you in
its totality

what it all means is this:

all that I know,
all that I love,
have, got and given,
is leaking and pouring and leaking
from the rectangular shape
what I
now know as,
now call,
my previous life

so now,
the winds of my true self
direct me on a course
that can be plotted
but one day,
one island ahead

no long range planning
on the sailing waters of Greek isles,
the wind does not permit it

the perfect line of the horizon
is not anymore a limiting
boundary

rather,  
the sourcing place from which
the wind comes,
that buffets,
to and fro
throws,
carries me forward,
and ever backwards too

this horizon line
that I sail towards,
neither marks nor closes in,
it is always there,
to be sailed to,
ever anew,
to renew

~~~

August 6, 1993
Noon
the Isle of Mykonos

~~~
for our children and their children
~~~

the reason we say so oft,
in whispers emboldened,

I love you

to our children
is not the utility of
its summarizing brevity

no, no.
it is because

the eloquence of simplicity
supersedes any other poem
we could ever write...
~~~

July 26 2015