The Back Roads

Somehow, you always take the back roads.
Narrow. Twisty. The long way around.
Supposedly slow.

And yet, not. That habit you have
of driving too fast for the road
gets you there fast as the highways,

dangerous and exhilarating
both.

About this poem

A bit of history. A bit of now. Some of it has to do with roads.

The picture I used on my blog (www.quarryhouse.us) with this was taken just down the road from my home in West Pawlet, VT.

Tom

The thing is, the lesson is, I survived.
Never mind the rust or the abandonment
or the sabotage or the self sabotage,
or the wandering in the wilderness,
bars and hitchhiking in the night,
the wrong turns and the right turns unrecognized,
or the helpers and healers, the jacklegs,
quacks, shamen and priests.
Never mind the things that came undone,
and the constant rearranging of fate
or God’s insistence in letting me stew
in my own juices. Never mind
the arrows or thorns or innocent bystanders
content to watch me bleed, those who
see me as entertainment or suspect.
Never mind the constant need for maintenance,
the broken parts, the ones I could fix
and the ones I could not,
the depression, the fear, the fight,
the checkered past, a perfect target
for any who care to shoot.
Never mind all of it. The parts that recovered
and the parts that never will.
The blood shed! So much of it.
So many tears. So much lostness,
darkness and fire. The wars. The surety
that you were never made for the world you live in,
the anger
I felt, uncomfortable with it every time it rises, and
the anger
aimed at me, a thing more comfortable to you,
more familiar,
but no less weaponized,
Never mind all of it.

I survived.
I found love. I gave love.
Some things I did, mattered.
At times, there is joy.

Don’t tell me there is no God.
I know better.
I survived.

Sand. Seagrass. Wind.
You are fed.
Solitude for breakfast.

It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.

A Constant Temptation

It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.

Outside it is snowing, just a bit.
Twelve years in and it still seems odd
Vermont, cold and with its ethereal light
feels more like home than the hills and mountains
you spent your first 54 years immersed in.

It seems odd that you were nearly sixty
before rediscovering the ocean,
Maine and Cape Cod, wild, often rugged,
nothing like the sprawling sands
where you were raised. And yet, it is these seas,
not the seas of your first half century
that calm your soul and raise it
from it’s gloom.

It seems odd that the place
that sings its siren song,
calls to you, makes you yearn like a lovesick boy,
lies in a foreign land,
with a foreign language,
nothing familiar, nothing, and yet
the first time you arrived,
sitting in Saint Mark’s square,
cappuccino in hand,
the Adriatic light and salt water filling your senses
you felt more at home
than you have ever felt in your long fractured life.

It seems odd, that you are so in love
with a woman so different than the southern sirens
that surrounded you most of your life.
Darker. More direct. Challenging, yet gentle,
Struggling strong, real.
She enflames you. She calms you.
She protects you. Even from yourself.
You have never known a woman like her.
And yet, in her arms, you feel that most unusual of things,
safe.

It seems odd that at this age, you look at the places
you called home, and the places you feel home,
that make your soul feel whole, complete, possible,
and you question so much of the place and time
and people who raised you.
But only for a few moments
before realizing home has never changed.
Truth has never changed.
You have.

Transparent and Dark

The old venue reaches across the boardwalk,
its magic long evaporated,
a victim of neglect and storms in equal measure.

There are windows. high and void of glass,
the sashes lacking paint.
Rot is plentiful.

There are windows, high and dark,
perfectly clear, with nothing to see
save the perpetual night inside.

You stand below, knowing this is what others see
when they look at you,
transparent and dark,

overwhelmed by neglect and storms,
strangely unwilling
to succumb.

At some point, you realize
it is more than wanton destruction
or the need for an outlet.

There is art in it, purpose,
and messages as bold and secret
as those of the grandmasters

and you stop shaking your head
and you stop in the open-air museum
and try to understand

what lied beneath the visual rant,
People passing wonder at you standing there,
head cocked in thought,

“Silly man!”, they whisper between themselves,
“May as well understand God as this drivel.”
But they would be wrong.

God is easy. He leaves his messages in the open,
allowing us to complicated them
with prejudice and a need to control.

Art though, is hard. We lack the code
that lives inside the head of the artist
with the spray paint,

but the prejudices are just as strong.
Still, you try and in the trying,
the loud graffiti on the wall becomes yours,

at least a little bit.
And you become just a little more human
in the effort to understand.

I am thankful for the trespassers.
for those who dared breach my walls
gently but firmly, who passed through
my locked doorways carrying candles,
determined to do no harm, determined
to raise me from the dead.

Outside the rail car is untouched.
Seventy years old and it appears ready
for the next journey
as it languishes in this graveyard
of steel and aluminum.

Inside it is different.
Graffiti and abuse.
Seats ripped from the floor
and piled one on the other.
An old mattress lays at one end.

This is what happens
to travelers like yourself,
left too long in a single place.

When you dated the woman you love, you would drive
two and a half hours for coffee and conversation.
Folks thought you were mad. Perhaps so,
but it is a madness that has plagued you all your life,
this hunger to go, the place never mattering
as much as the journey

Not made of steel and aluminum,
the stillness has left you rotting from inside.
It is worse and more deadly than rust.

It is time to leave this place. To go
before your weaknesses and demons write graffiti,
break the windows and crawl out
of the darkest recesses of your mind.

It is time,
to travel east, towards the sun,
towards the sea, the destination a second thought,
the flight towards light the first.

The snow is soft in the morning light,
soft in the morning fog.
A line of trees cuts the fields in front of you.
Steam rises off the creek.

You have built a still life,
simple. Peaceful, still moving,
like creek waters under the ice.
Unseen and relentless,

a strange combination
that has become natural to you,
comfortably invisible,
happy in the January light,

happy to wait for the change in seasons,
walking, seeing the signs,
the willows turning yellow, almost green,
new growth in the wood briars, sharp and red,

color in unexpected places.

Unexpected unless you have lived
through many winters,
growing stronger and wiser in each one,
learning finally that time is not king,

Effort,
vision,
love and persistence rule
the secret life of winter.

It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.

Empty and Armed.

Early in the morning and you walk in the sand.
Near the shore it undulates, God’s art,
renewed each morning at the whim of weather and tides.

You walk in the sand. Your foot prints leave divots.
Water seeps in. Tiny ***** scurry, almost invisible.
If you look carefully, you can see their tracks
before they disappear into their tiny burrows.

You walk. The waves whisper. It is a quiet morning.
No one else is on the beach.
Just you, your God and your demons.

The demons disperse like dandelion seeds,
unable to hold on in the vast emptiness.
They become as lost as you once were.
lost in the horizon, their claws rendered useless

as you ignore them.

You become lost too. Lost in the wash of the waves.
In the long stretches of sand, in the place you walk
beyond foodprints.

It is worth the walk. Worth the ache in your aging legs.
to empty yourself. To find yourself.
To find what is left when you let everything else go
and join the demons on the wind.

It is worth the walk.
And too, worth the walk back.
For that is part of it.
You cannot live here forever.
You were not made to be a monk in the desert,
only a pilgrim.
There is a world that needs your meger talents,
and you come back to it
both empty
and armed.

You sip your coffee in a nearby diner.
The place is empty.
It is too cold outside for wandering,
even to familiar places.

Part of you is still numb,
Historic wounds still holding sway.
You sip your coffee in a strange kind of meditation,
waiting for the feelings to break like river ice.

There are flowers on the window sill.
Wildflowers in a blue vase.
A small oasis
in a life that is anything but.

You release a sigh,
and with it, tension.
You focus, completely on the still life

and feel your own heart still,
your breath slow.
You fall into yourself,

You sip your coffee,
your morning slowed to the point
you control it. Not the other way around.

There is a small smile on your face.
Today will be a day of victories.
You know it, not even knowing the battles that await you.

Still. Slow. Aware,
you are invincible.

Another cup of coffee.
Please.
I need to wake up.
The night’s dreaming has left me
disjointed.

surprised

to be alive.

It’s not the first time.
Not at all.
I’ve lived in the nightmarish dark
far too long,
far too often.
I am experienced in blindness,
swinging my sword at ghosts,
shieldless save for God.
Each day new wounds bleed.
Each day new wounds heal.

And so here I am.
A decade and more later,
a collector of scars,
a strange sort of warrior,
living in the half light.

Yours is the art of the broken.
Always patching. Always aware
that nothing and no one is perfect,
least of all you, that all things
are in a state of constant repair
and readjustment, never quite
and likely to never be quite, and so
you paint, you write, you stumble
in public, one of the broken masses
only louder than most,
less willing to hide the cracks,
or perhaps only, less able.

You have no plan.
An age of plans have blown up in your face
time and time again, mocking
your presumption, finally able
to simply be, simply do,
less a creature of inspiration
than a plugger, stuck with
your inability to surrender,
a construction worker building happiness
one mess at a time.

Poetry fails you.
A season of too much sameness
has left you flat, a creature more of habit
than enthusiasm, pushing through,
spitting your words out helter-skelter,
lacking grace and light,
You have little to say. Waiting for inspiration.
You need roads, strange walls and windows,
new light, the roar and rustle of waves,
museums and mansions
and strange hotel rooms in new cities.

You have spent the year plunging your own depths
and there is little new there to discover.
You are thinner than you believed. Simpler.
Your needs for survival more than met,
you need new food. You need to get lost for a while
and find your way back, always looking for fire escapes,
not to flee, but to enter through windows like a thief,
somewhere, anywhere, new.

You cannot find it
on the most recent maps.
Once you could.
A tiny dot in small print.
But not any longer.
It is too small.
In the middle of nowhere,
a confluence of four farms,
two roads,
an ancient Methodist church
and a country store turned museum.
If you happen to be there,
there is a sign.
Just one,
To announce your arrival and departure,
all in a blink. The sort of place
we make fun of,
or worse,
miss altogether.

And yet, people live here.
No fewer than they did in the day
when they rated a dot on the map in four-point type.
They are born here,
Grow up and age here.
Die here.
There is drama. Love is discovered
and lost.
Faith is found and lost.
They suffer, no fewer and no more
than a generation ago.

Your grandfather lived
on one of the four corner farms.
Your father was born here
and lay in the small oak crib
that now lives in your upstairs bedroom.
Your house, in fact, is a museum of sorts,
artifacts of generations scattered about,
proof that this place exists
not just in geography
but in soul.

Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.
A gallery with art on one wall,
a mix of truth and pain.
compelling whispers shout.
A place to learn what you say,
what you create,
matters less
than what is seen and heard.
Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.

Spanish moss hangs from the Live Oak,
a slow, beautiful murderer in the big city,
redolent of memories, blue music and smokey rooms,
drag queens crooning, a fight or two
late in the night while you sipped bourbon,
content in the corner,
listening less to the music than an internal dialogue,
devils and angels in your head
dancing a tattoo, making sultry peace with each other
as you scanned the crowd, seeking a distraction
as you courted oblivion at the stroke of midnight.

You sigh,
there is no glory in the memories. Life lived
and long ago discarded, without regrets
and without longing, happier to be in the light,
but parts of you were shaped by dark nights,
bluesy music and the grind of tinder before tinder,
a fire that never took in you,
a dead man in a plaid shirt in the corner of the bar
who somehow left more alive than he arrived.

The house is built
on posts and beams.

Thick, hand-hewn posts of local cedar,
the beams as big crossing space,
held together by a single peg
since the early nineteenth century.

You’d not know it’s age to look at it.
Windows have been replaced.
Walls torn asunder and replaced.
There is plaster and electricity,
all the modern conveniences.

But in the end,
it is post and beam.
Incredibly, solidly constructed
in such a way that space is spanned
and everything between and underneath
can be ripped out and replaced,
renewed and reworked,
becoming new again
without losing its strength.

Dark, dank, it holds history.
It has risen, fallen, fallen into disrepair.
Stones have been carted off to build their frankenhouses.
Bandits have hovered in the night
waiting to separate their Victorian adventurers from their purses.
The homeless have huddled here,
tiny fires smudging the walls in the Roman night.
Today tourists come
to gape at the circus home of the famous and fallen.

You come too
and the grotto feels all too familiar.
The dampness seeps into your bones.
The broken statue feels eerily familiar,
eerily like yourself, not quite whole.

You wait for the demons.
They live here. They always have,
even the great Augustus had them,
creatures of the night, gentle and brutal,
capable of murdering marble,
the leavers of wounds.

There is an altar in the grotto.
You are tempted to pray,
to sprinkle the holy water that seeps down the wall
into the air like some pagan baptism.

But you do not.
This is what you have learned.
The demons live within
and that is where the battle is fought,
with or without tourists,
so you can see this grotto for what it is,
a thing of history,
incapable of holding you.

About this poem

You have used the same palette for years,
mixing watercolors until they are indistinguishable,
one from the other, then washing it clean to begin again,

The plastic washes white each time, perfect and new,
bright and ready to start again, a new mix
of colors and texture, so easy

to save yourself
from yourself.

Sunlight comes through the window.
The wooden bowl casts a shadow,
beautiful, simple.

This morning, again, you are in no hurry.
Your life has slowed down and there is time
to see.

The studio has been closed for nearly two months.
It is cold there, and the paints are stiff and thick.
You turn on the heater, but it will take time
before your breath ceases to create clouds with each breath.

There are two half-finished paintings, so old
you have lost the inspiration that started them.
They look flat and lifeless and you cannot choose
between finishing, or whitewashing to start again.

There is a large frame on the floor awaiting new canvas.
but you are feeling small, diminished, not ready for boldness,
growing back into yourself one step at a time.
Forward. Back. Forward again.

You are uncertain. Your feelings have been overwhelmed
by your brush with death and you cannot even name the demons, if demons they are, that haunt you.
They are like ghosts, disappearing each time you draw near.

There is a chair in the middle of the floor. A garish thing,
full of bright magic. Half-finished, the color fighting
the original dark stain, the carvings crying for color.
A color you cannot feel.

But feelings are fleeting. As desirable as they are,
you learned long ago you can function without them,
and that it is the work that brings them back,
that allows you to overcome the things that overcome you.

And so you pick up a brush. With effort, you squeeze
the first bright color onto the palette. Red.
The color of passion reclaimed. The color of blood.
The color you lack.

And you paint.

It is something out of a Wyeth painting,
the old life saving station at the end of the world,
a museum now, as if no one needed saving any longer.

Maybe they do not, at least not here.
Most who come here are tourists.
They walk the shoreline,
content to go no more than ankle deep,
content with the illusion of the sea
and being there, at the edges.

There are fewer fishermen in deep waters,
those who know the ocean intimately.
Today they have instruments that predate the old station;
instruments that warn them of coming weather,
and bring them in to shore before the worst of it.

And so the old station has become a museum,
a place to remember simpler, more dangerous times,
with oilskins hanging on the walls
and rubber boots on the floors below them.
Photos of rescues past line the wall
for tourists to “oooh” and “ahhhh” over
as if no one needed rescuing today,
a beautiful lie, history. ignored at our own peril.

It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.

You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.

Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.

Ash Wednesday, and then it is Lent,
a season of sacrifice,
a reminder of Christ's own sacrifice 40 days hence.

The ashes have been wiped away
and the season begun,
barely noticed by some, for others,
it is at the heart of faith itself.

Your forehead is fresh and clean,
and your decisions made.
It is time to release the darkness,
to dance in the night,

and let your demons dance with you
before tossing them to the sky like dark balloons
for someone else to discover
after they are deflated.

Howl with the coyotes. Sing with the just arrived robins.
Wallow in the almost warm sun with the cats.
They know. Lent, for all its dour reputation,
is the almost spring, and worth celebrating.

No longer the guardian.
No longer the hero.
Simply a soldier, a pawn in the battle,
unnoticed, fighting your own small battles,
your shield and skin and soul marked,
somehow still standing,
somehow able to wake in the new morning,
stand, and prepare for battle one more time.

There are no victories,
only the tide of war, the ebb and flow.
and a determination not to drown
in your own blood,
sure now, after a decade and more,
that you will not die of your wounds.

Even the broken
have power.
It is all a matter of how, or if
you choose to wield it.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
The air here is still pure.
You can smell the forests.
You can smell the mock orange in the garden,
successor to the lilacs, now faded and brown.

You breathe out. Slowly, with purpose.
Spittles of poison leave you.
The anger. The fear. The uncertainty.
A part of you relaxes. Not enough,
but a start.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
There is peace in the Vermont air.
This is why you came, though you did not know it at the time.
For the peace. Unable to find your own,
you came to a place where peace is the natural state,
a place where you could breathe it in
with each swelling of your lungs.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
This is what you have learned,
violence in anything, even breath,
is a form of ******. Of spirit, Of your spirit at least.
You have seen enough of it in your lifetime,
and your tolerance is low. The pain and the anger
always lies near the surface. It is an act of will
to keep it at bay.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
The mountain air fills you.
“I look to the mountains from whence cometh my help”
declares the Psalmist and you breathe his words,
knowing your only real power comes in love,
in peace, no matter the world’s penchant for anger.
You refuse to make that anger your own, and so
you breathe in the morning peace
as you clutch the cross around your neck.

You breathe out. slowly, with purpose.
This time, this breathing, is a girding of arms,
for the anger still lives beneath the surface,
and you will never **** it. It has a life beyond your own.
Your own pain and experiences will never leave you.
No amount of breathing will expel it,
so the trick is to breathe it out, just enough
that it can become a thing controlled,
put to work, harnessed by love, power
to wrestle the darkness around you.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
Unsure of the battle, but sure of the cause,
sure of the value of every soul you encounter,
even those who weld their swords seeking
submission and blood, blended by their own anger,
unfamiliar with history and gospel. You breathe in strength,
the power of sunshine over the quarry.
You breath in the words of your youth
and they become sinew and muscle.
God in you. finally. Again.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
You need this renewal. Every day you need it.
and that is in ordinary times. Today
you need it more. Your weakness,
your easy anger is not a thing to be purged,
only a thing to be controlled. There is work to be done
and work needs its fuel, it’s passion,
a flame fed, but not too much. You breathe more of it out,
feeling your soul calm, knowing when to stop,
in that place between peace and war inside yourself
where change without carnage becomes possible.

Someone lived here once.
Families were raised.
Gardens were grown.
Animals, pets and livestock, wandered about.
Clothes hung on the line.
There were children and lovers and hopes,
bright as sunflowers.

Once. Not now.

Now, the neglect has driven them all away.
What was it? Poverty?
What was it? Broken hearts and trauma?
Too much to survive?
Greener grass waved in front of them,
a temptress,
and no one left to fill the walls anew.
Eventually, always, an abandonment.

It’s a cute little house, well situated
in a post card colored field.
Still savable, but you have lived here long enough
to know how this story goes.

You have restored a few homes in your day,
brought then back from the brink,
none of them a perfect restoration. Few are.
But enough that there was life in them again.
Gardens and hopes bloomed anew
and the paint shown bright. The rot removed.
They became homes again,
not merely houses, waiting to fall.

But you cannot save them all.

It is the lesson you learned in your own restoration.
There is only so much of you
and you will use it as well as you are able.
restoring those closest to you
as you work on yourself.
It should be enough,

but still, you mourn.

It sits at the foot of the leather chair in your living room.
A car, carved from a single piece of wood
when your father was just a boy.
Nothing recognizable, simply a design
in the mind of a child too sensitive for his time and place.

There is a ribbon taped to the bottom with old cellophane tape.
Third place. A national award from General Motors,
a contest created to awaken young designers,
and set them on a path of creativity and industrial design.
It took. You have the drawings your father made,
all swooping fenders and steel lines.

They beat much of his heart out of him in that time and place.
They made him tough and hard, his brokenness disguised
as strength and rough corners. He tended his wounds
with alcohol and anger.

But his desire to create never left him. Sober, he was brilliant,
an innate understanding of things and possibilities
punctuated his life and through him, mine.
He died just a few short years ago.

We have choices of what to remember. What to keep.
I choose things like this car that sits unobtrusively
at the foot of the leather chair. I choose made things
and they surround me like an aura, even
when they go unnoticed by those who merely come and go.

The scaffolding stands next to the stucco wall.
A maze of pipe and connectors, splattered
with a barrage of old paint.
Thick boards span the space from brace to brace,
strong enough to hold you
as you do the work.

There is nothing glamorous in it,
the scraping of old paint,
the replacement of rot,
it is hard, sweaty work.
Slow. It is slow.
It takes a long time
before you can celebrate the results.

It gets worse before it gets better.
That is part of it.
Each step, particularly at the beginning,
is an act of faith.

There will be surprises.
Any place with history will have them,
buried under the paint and plaster.
And each surprise will take more work,
detours. No need to plan or schedule.
You just do the work.
Day by day,
until it is done.

The faithful are always rewarded.
The old can, indeed, become new.
To an outsider, it seems like magic,
but you know the truth:
it is work.

The first time I visited, I walked the streets at night,
past closed stores and brightly lit restaurants
with their specials proudly displayed in the street.
The smell of onions, meat and seafood grilling
wafted into the street. Temptation.

I could hear the bay, soft waves and wind.
In one dark corner, a bar, the Grotto.
Faintly, I heard music, raucus Southern rock,
out of place at this end of the world New England spot.
I smiled at the dichotomy. Temptation.

There was a time, long ago,
when bars were my second home,
much as diners and dives are today.
I would sit in the corner, and listen,
and watch people through the smoke.
I don’t think I ever picked up a woman in a bar.
I never got quite drunk. but I loved the atmosphere,
loose and sad and unrestrained, for better or worse,
an alcohol fueled honesty.
As I walked by, someone opens the door to leave
and you can smell the smoke. Temptation.

I made my way through the town. And back again,
giving each temptation a second chance to lure me in.
And why not? Why not surrender?
There is nothing in any of these doorways
that would reduce me to sinner status.
Well, maybe a little gluttony, but momentary, no more.
My soul would survive that.

But I am not here for these things. I am here for peace,
and I turn away from the noise and walk towards the pier.
Most of the fishing boats are gone, at work during the night.
The ones left bob on the waves.
Work lights flood the decks. Ropes are deftly coiled.
I breath in the air, A mix of salt
and the remnants of yesterday’s catch.
In one of the smaller boats an old man mends nets.
He nods. I nod back.

It has been a good trip. Tomorrow I drive home.
There is the one last temptation. To stay.
But I will pass by this one as well.
Living at the end of the world has its charm
but those I love and those that love me
live five hours away. My life is not my own
and I would not want it to be.
As beautiful a temptation solitude can be,
in the end, isolation is the enemy.

You have learned this the hard way,
and dense as you are, you rarely make the same mistake twice,
no matter the temptation.

The house sits at the edge of the woods.
Long abandoned the forest has taken over.
Vines tendril through nooks and crannies.
The door hangs on one hinge.
In the center of it all, a tree has grown,
pushing its way through the roof,
The ironwork has rusted.
The floor has collapsed.
And the mortar between the bricks has fallen out.
Bricks litter the floor,

Evidence
of what happens, slowly,
from the first moment of surrender
to the last.

“You should write about the fear,” she said.
“It’s six months out, and perhaps less raw.
People are fearful now, and it might help.”

My hand drifts absently down to my belly
and the collection of six scars.
I barely remember the fear of the time.
Shock is like that.
It was one day at a time, at times
just one hour at a time
for months before, and even here, now
months after.

Not so much the fear of dying.
I have danced close to that drear druid
before. He is no stranger to me
and I lost my fear of him when I was but eighteen.

It is the manner. The pain, the possibility
of months and years of being so unable,
of the loss I might leave behind, those ripples
of how much less I might become, and have,

and never knowing that in that less,
there might be more, something different emerges.
It was only being able to feel the moment
and the moment being this terrible thing
that could **** me in little descendant notes,

the possibility that I would be robbed of the joy
in a woman newly discovered, children newly launched,
in a lack of possibility stolen by mere survival.

That was the fear. And part of it still lurks.
The recovery so strong, so good, and yet still,
so incomplete and you wonder, despite the progress,
despite the rehab,
despite the still day to day work of it all,
how much of you will return
and how much will not,
and more importantly,
what you will replace the missing parts with,
how you can calm the ripples of loss
and replace them with something more,
waves of power and joy.

It has been so long. So fast.
Images blur the windows in the early morning.
A glimpse, a flicker to grab your interest
and then it is gone. Towns. Factories.
Stairs to….. you know not where.
It is already gone. The whole ride a tease.

You were made for slower travel,
to see things in depth,
never trusting the flicker of them,
with the ability to stop and see the details,
the grain of the wood and the nails and pegs
that hold things together, or the rot
teetering on the edge of coming undone.

You wonder how much you missed in faster times,
what you lost in the journey, in the blur
of airplanes and hotels and what city is this today.
A lot. You are sure of it.

But you do not fret. You have become poor
at self recrimination. It is a fruitless task
full of weight and chains. Somewhere between
the self loathing and the blur of travel
is the life you lead now, journeys made
at a speed that allows you to see the landscape
and seasons change before your eyes.

In the markets of Venice, snails writhe,
not merely fresh but alive, clambering
one over the others as if they know
their garlic and oil-infused future.

Fish lay on the tables, tails whipping,
eyes open and aware. Shrimp, legs dancing
a jitterbug in wooden bins in the morning light.
It is all a bit disturbing and fascinating

to someone like you accustomed
to shrink-wrapped perfection, every thing you eat
packaged and perfect, safely dead and cleaned,
no momentary discomfort in the actual act of dying.

Ah, but the taste that night! as you sip your white wine
and dine on scallops freshly pried from their shells,
the snails sauteed. As if the rawness itself
drew created a whole new perfection.

This is what you have learned in your years
of allowing strangers into your life. Broken strangers.
The dying. The inconsolable. They are less pretty,
none destined to be a perfect Instagram vision.

They die. They struggle.
They flail like snails in the market, determined to live
when the world around them prefers shrink-wrapped perfection.
They are uncomfortable to be around

and yet, strangely beautiful, Real. Raw.
The few who survive are always scarred.
And yet, you feel a strange allure, somehow made more
in their brief flicker of survival.

It is a strange thing, brass, half compass, half sextant.
No one in the antique shop knows exactly what it is.
A fascination, surely an instrument of navigation,
it belongs on the deck of wooden ships,
not here in the byways of a small town in a small state.

It has made its own journey, certainly.
Was it stolen, lost, moved?
Did it come here of its own intention,
or is it the debris of a life come undone?
Your mind is full of questions
and there is no one to answer.

You sigh. Its polished brass curves sing to you
and it is a sad song, a mournful song of lostness,
of too much time spent floundering in a sea
far more kind than you deserved, for you survived
as you were cast from wave to wave,
from foreign land to foreign land, and in the end

it was grace that brought you here, not navigation.
Time and currents and wind, conspired to bring you home
when you could not find the way yourself.

At the midday tide, the boats are tied and secure,
survivors of another night gathering fish.
The small village has gone quiet,
save for a few tourists.

You are one of those tourists,
happier off the beaten path and familiar photo ops,
content to sit at the tiny coffee house for hours
and simply watch the ebb and flow of the town,

to hear strange language all around you,
to sit still enough, long enough
that you fit in, and disappear in the landscape.

You once wanted to be famous,
before you were broken, shard by shard, eroded
until only the shining shell, that brittle shell
was left, and easy target, easily shattered.

Easily shattered and painstakingly put back together.
Forget fame. Forget the stars, you are content now
just to be alive, a man with roots who travels,
more content to listen than talk, finally aware

other people’s stories matter more than your own,
a container for others’ pain and sadness and salacious tales.
You have become the keeper of secrets,

sipping coffee here at the edge of the Northern Sea,
happiest when alone with the woman you love,
sipping coffee and holding her hand across the table,
watching, always watching, for the next story.

A duck cuts the water, leaving a thin wake in the quarry.
It is silent. No wind.

You have sat here for a pair of hours, emptying yourself
of questions, of vitriol and doubt, waiting patiently

to see what is left.

Mostly, I preach to my self. Talk to myself.
I write what I need to to hear. Self talk,
out loud. So often painting colors
like emotions, spilling out,
water from a dam overrun by storms I cannot name
in the normal scheme of things.

I sit with them, the storms,
longer than more sensible people.
I get wet. Disheveled.
The wind blows me like a scarecrow in July.
I sit with them. Madman in the rain.
But how else do I know if it is a storm
or a shower?

A storm blows in from the east. You can smell the rain.

In an hour or less, it will be here
and unpredictability will reign. The seas will roil
and flotsam, so well hidden by the water
will be tossed on the beach like ragdolls.
And the driftwood around you, dry
from yesterday’s sun, will drift once again.
The landscape will change.

It has been a season of storms,
the kind of storms that rattle windows
and leaves behind damage, ripping at roofs,
tearing away foundations, unrelenting, terrible storms,
one after another. You have survived them all,
but just barely, your faith and those you love,
have not let you flail for more than a moment,
when the winds were at their worst.
Your landscape has changed. And changed again.

The earth is a solid thing, so they say, but
that has not been your experience.
It is a wild thing, uncontrollable, a raging mix
of beauty and betrayal, a seething sea of madness,
waiting for the next wave, the next gust of wind
to tear at you and test you and see
whether you hold fast or fall, A test
of your ability to not walk, but dance on the water.

The tide is low and you can see most of the boat’s ladder,
slimy and green below the high tide mark,
dry and growing brittle above,
subject to sun and salt each day, no matter the weather.

The ladder is the way up, the way out
from the fishing boats that populate this pier.
No matter the undertow below,
no matter the direction.

There are other materials that might last longer
than the locust wood used to make the rungs and stringers,
materials less susceptible to the slow death
of the seaside docks,

But the wood ladder remains. When it fails,
another one will take its place,
new wood gleaming for a week or two
before turning grey,
the persistence of weather taking its toll.

But the wood has a certain feel. A realness
that resonates to these men of the sea,
a trueness to who they are, and the all too real
world they live in.

It will remain their material of choice,
a thing you can run your hand over
and feel the truth of life, that it comes
and goes, that age takes its toll,

and maintenance is everything.

Maybe Remembered

Some call it art. Some do not.
Prattle perhaps. Scribble.
It shows up in the night.
It is read by strangers and friends.
Passers by.
Bits of it resound. Maybe remembered.

It fades with the weather.
That is the nature of it.
Circumstances that resonated a week, a season,
moments that made it all resonate
before it fades.

In time, someone will paint over it.
Maybe you. New words. New poems.

Every day you do it. Every day.
Grateful anyone reads. Always surprised.
Still. Still surprised.

There was a time you wanted to be famous.
Not that poets and artists from obscure places
end up on the Tonight Show. You never were
the most realistic crayon out there.
But you had dreams, some of them borrowed.

The odd thing is how many you made happen.
not yours. Yours got lost. Your grafitti painted over
with billboards and a need to be loved.

You broke of course.
It’s what happens when the best of you
is painted over.

And that brokeness was the best thing,
the darkness made you real.
Made you, you. That child you remembered,
gleefully painting mindless color,
capturing what was lost.
Capturing what was found
picking up the scattered words
and re-arranging, a happy puzzle,
and angry puzzle. Everything immediate
or poor history. Feelings. Nothing more.

Graffiti.
You make it.
And walk to the next wall.
Never famous.
And happier for it.
The moment is enough.

There is always that chance
that you have forgotten;
that the week of neglect,
of pretending to be a vegetable,
and putting your spiritual disciplines aside
have rendered you mute.

It has happened before.

But then the tide comes in
and the tide goes out,
and a new miracle parades in front of you,
ripples in the sand, abstract art
from a playful creator,

and you remember.
again.
And begin
again,
knowing that no matter what is erased,
something is created.

You stumble on the picture, one of the cats,
the one who started feral,
skinny and covered with sores, crying out
from across two yards, hiding in the brush
and underneath the carcasses of old cars,
until slowly, oh so slowly he came closer
to your outstretched hand. Days. Weeks.
A month. More. But he came.

And here he is, fat and fluffy,
owning his house and yards to both sides,
thoroughly domesticated, hardly remembering
his time of sores, bleeding and hunger,
sure of his place in a world that loves him
unconditionally.

You stumble on the picture,
and think less of the cat than your own life,
and the woman who reminded you that love is
what you believed it could be
later in life than you imagined possible.
If you were a cat, you’d purr.

Some things you just sit on.
You let the anger flame high and bright,
but you wait, lest the fire consume you
as it has done so often in the past.

In the configuration you have learned the power of silence,
how it protects you from the worst of yourself,
how it prevents flammable words
that burn everyone they touch.
Deserved or not, you have lived as anger’s roadkill
too often.
You will forever bear the scars,
and the silence is your protection,

Silence is also the enemy. It isolates. It does nothing.
There is no healing in it. Left in place too often
it becomes a weapon.

Somewhere in between it the simmering.
A righteous anger of promises unkept,
lies more common than truth, faith
abandoned in the name of fear and someone to blame.

How is it we are still fighting these battles?
How is it that we, a nation capable of the impossible
cannot heal the rifts and illnesses of spirit
to live up to the promises we declare
on our holidays and sacred places?

I cannot quench this anger. No longer.
There is work to do and even unsure what it is and how,
the simmer burns. Even with the wet balm of time,
the simmer burns.

As you have aged, you have slowly lost your fear of fire.
It still lives but you have learned you will survive it,
that despite what your emotions tell you,
you will not be consumed.

So bring on the fire.
This can no longer be a thing that flashes
and is forgotten.
Let it burn, and I will burn with it,
light in the night, living with an aggressive love
that too many will hate.

Selah

The colors are a bit garish.
No two quite the same.
Not refined. Strong. Loud.
A bit of madness thrown in.
All the makings of a masterpiece.

It is raining. A January rain come early
on the cusp of a new year. Cold,
but not cold enough for snow.
Everything is mud.

It has not been the year you wished for.
So much ground to a stop, to a broken crawl.
A year dedicated to survival and fighting
of new fears. A lost year.

Children have grown up without you seeing them.
Friends have died, alone. The church lies empty.
There have been no journeys,
too few explorations.

Too much of your time this year has been spent in mourning
and you are tired. Plague, Cancer
and the worst cancer of all, isolation,
have left your mind muddled, and yet….

And yet… it has not been a wasted year.
Around you, you have seen a shift. an appreciation
of true value, of each other, of the precious things that matter
and the things that do not.

You have remained in love.
Your faith has grown stronger as your body has grown weaker.
Your demons are more polite. At times, the battles
turn to afternoon tea and crumpets.

“This too shall pass” has become our mantra,
and it is beginning. You can just see it, the light, the hope.
It is a vague thing. Vague as mud. But it is there,
snippets and shots and whispers.

It is as if we have been asleep, in a bad dream,
and we wake to the same dream, foggy and cold.
Vague. Uncertain.
The ground is slippery.

But it is the cusp of the new year.
The days grow longer. There is change in the air,
sweet as lilac in the night. A thing you cannot see
but you know is there.

And you, tired and worn, are piling the wood.
It is time for a bonfire. For warmth.
To become a beacon, calling the lost home,
including yourself.