"Falling Apart"
Of the few times in my life when nothing made sense
(At least the ones I'm not repressing now), there'd been only once
I can recall when everything sank so bad -- dank crude sweat
Of irrelevance stinking so deep into me, it killed all sleep and all eating;
Waves of gloom just surging higher and higher in my chest, flooding
My lungs then deluging my head with notions of total impending doom;
No way out except to let myself drown sweetly, escaping a cruel mess
Wretchedly but necessarily, left for others less deluded to deal with...
But the operative word above is sadly "there'd," meaning the past.
'Cause the horrible present down in post Katrina New Orleans
(No homes, no jobs, no hope, no law, more vigilantes than police)
Seems -- at least from my current relative peace --
Infinitely more painful than those troubles confronting me back when,
Even if raw and real, not merely 20:20 fleeting personal trivial mishigas.
Knowing the glorious humans below a bit,
Helen, Paul, and their son Franny --
Best friends who serve(d) as mutual "god"parents
With my daughter and son-in-law for each other's family's kids --
Makes me want to scream out, Why?
New York Times
January 10, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Taken by the Tide
By BILLY SOTHERN
New Orleans
IN one 24-hour period last week in New Orleans, now a small city of 200,000, six people were murdered. Last year’s total of 161 murders probably made New Orleans the deadliest city in the United States by a significant margin. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the violence touched my life directly.
Last Thursday morning I received a call from my friend Kittee. “I have awful news,” she said, and then, very quickly: “Someone broke into Paul and Helen’s house. Helen was shot and killed.
Paul was holding Baby Francis and was shot three times. He’s still alive. Francis is O.
K.”
Paul Gailiunas — Dr. Paul, I call him — had been my physician for several years at the Little Doctors Clinic, a health center for poor people that he founded in Treme, one of America’s oldest black neighborhoods.
I had started to see Paul after my previous doctor mocked one of my colleagues about our work representing people on Louisiana’s death row. When I met Paul through a friend, I asked him directly, “Are you in favor of the death penalty?” He responded, with a smile, “Eh, I’m Canadian,” clearly feeling that was answer enough.
And it was, coming from the founder of our local chapter of Food Not Bombs and the front man for the Troublemakers (a band whose songs celebrate Emma Goldman and the idea of universal health care) in such a lighthearted tone that it would scarcely have alienated the most ardent conservative.
Helen Hill was Paul’s perfect match — a kind and generous woman who made award-winning animated films and taught art and filmmaking to children, adults, anyone who was interested. She’d spent much of the last year restoring reels of 16-millimeter film on which she had drawn by hand, and which had been damaged when their house took four feet of water during Hurricane Katrina.
She had a new film under way, inspired by discarded hand-sewn dresses, made by an elderly New Orleanian, which Helen had found in the trash after the woman’s death. The film interwove the story of the old woman and her dresses with Helen’s own flood-torn life, which took her, Paul and Francis to Columbia, S.C.
— Helen’s hometown, where she will be buried today — for almost a year.
Helen had longed to return to New Orleans, despite Paul’s concern that crime and potential hurricanes made it too dangerous for their family. So Helen campaigned, sending Paul’s friends in New Orleans blank postcards, addressed to Paul, for us to write and mail to him.
In mine, I pleaded with Paul — “We need you” — the way I do with anyone who is thinking about leaving, coming to, or even just visiting New Orleans. After what I am sure was a flood of similar cards, Paul relented.
I saw Paul and the baby a day after their return to the city, at a parade on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Francis had on a little railroad conductor’s hat, a T-shirt depicting a cartoon love affair between red beans and rice (the New Orleans Monday lunch classic), and a little sign pinned to his back, in Helen’s hand: “New Orleans Native. I Got Back Yesterday!”
The day of the anniversary was solemn but optimistic.
Everyone still had a can-do attitude. Paul, for one, could help make the city’s people well and improve health care for the poor. Helen could make art depicting the city’s life.
Others could rebuild schools, demand better levees, reconstruct their homes. It still felt as if our grassroots efforts, along with some real help from a government finally forced to make good on its obligations, could create a more just, fair and safe city. It might have been naïve, but it really seemed possible.
After wandering this beautiful, falling-over city the afternoon after Helen’s murder, forcing myself to remember why I love it here so much, I came back to my garden and picked flowers, those hardy few that had weathered the recent cold. I put them in a vase, wrote out the verses to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music” — “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground / So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind” — and drove to the couple’s house, which my wife and I had recently visited for Helen’s open studio.
On the steps leading up to their old shotgun house I set down the poem and the vase, just feet from where Paul had been found by the police, shot, bleeding, holding his baby.
On the way home, I stopped at my neighborhood bar to try to eat something. A picture of Paul and Helen, followed by one of the baby, appeared on the television in the corner.
Oh, my God. The bartender was kind. She asked me whether I knew them, and talked to me about her fears living with her new baby in a city with no functional schools, no real plan for redevelopment, and spotty or nonexistent basic services.
The TV news switched to a weather report: torrential downpours were expected to dump half a foot of rain overnight.
I drove home in the twilight and arrived uneasy and restless. Remembering the coming rain, I resolved to make myself useful to my block by digging out a sewer so backed up that the street — on high ground by New Orleans standards — floods at even the hint of rain.
I had done this many times before, having realized that my innumerable calls to the city were in vain.
I pried up the 100-pound cast iron cover with a shovel and then shimmied it from side to side until I had the two-by-four sewer open. It was full to the top with debris.
I shoveled out the leaves, dirt, Popeye’s cups and other garbage until the small brick rectangle was as clean as it was a century ago, when New Orleans first created this drainage system.
Then I set to work on clearing the cylindrical drain — about as wide as a hubcap, at the bottom corner of the cleaned-out basin — so that the rain could find its way into the city’s sewers, away from our houses, cars and belongings. I got down with a small shovel and burrowed through the muck until it seemed to open at the other side.
Reaching in, though, I could feel that beyond the drain lay more dirt and leaves, packed hard.
Indeed, it became clear to me that the whole sewer line running beneath the street was solid with waste, impenetrable to arms and shovels — that my street would flood again that night. The problem, I realized, is bigger than me.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Billy Sothern, a lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming “Down in New Orleans: Reflections on a Drowned City.”
1.11.
07
Pre 8.7.06 at http://sarnatscat.
blogspot.com/
"Impeachable"
Generally a reasonably upbeat guy
Robustly connected to well-being -- at times even joy
(Though at least one carps I tend too much toward self-congratulation);
When allowed to settle into feelings moment by moment,
I see life change constantly, flowing between its ups and downs.
So, yes, I do try to live fully now, knowing what passes
For happiness and forgiveness comes round quickly then goes.
That said, if I sit with recent tragedies hitting home --
A young boy dies the same day his mom's diagnosed with lymphoma,
A loving couple wouldn't hurt a fly gunned down in their bed --
When "despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night
At the least sound" (Wendell Barry) with that nightmare being reality;
I sometimes seek aloneness
From a river of tears, rain falling into the deads' frozen eyes,
As my only way to co-opt abandonment:
If we live in a godless universe (yes)
Where hierarchical temples of worship
Are full of pederasty; where eighty-five percent of parishes
Report collection plate theft; where the newly appointed Archbishop
Of Poland resigns within days for collaborating with the secret police;
Why not instead reach for transcendence
Within ourselves, sisters and brothers,
Bowing to an ineffable that pinks us up -- not knowing exactly what?
After all, we're human ..
. let's make the best of it.
1.
8.06
"Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust"
I finally found the cardboard file (marked "Correspondence" as said),
That you meticulously guided me where to find by phone today
All the way from our Hollywood home down in Columbia, South Carolina;
Which took a whole half hour to unearth by headlamp tonight
Behind cobwebby water heaters and busted old boxes
Full of rat droppings in the shed below the house.
Arms heavy as dragging wet cement or a dead body, I lugged tender
Memories up 23 steps, my head hanging low, no longer distracted
By each trivial bit of ephemera that's kept me sane until now.
Can it be that this is really the end of being addicted
To receiving exquisitely handdrawn postings daily for the nine years
Since we graduated -- from by far the most talented artist among us?
She was a world renowned animator and filmmaker
Whose professional craft took back seat to no one, a human genius
Animating everyone who ever was personally touched by her.
As I reread the everyday banter and regiggle at the squiggles
And regrin at recent photos of her husband and two year-old son
Whom we're godparents to, it's impossible to realize Haley's gone.
Shattered by two bullets from an unknown's gun,
Someone maybe addled broke into their place,
Likely unlocked at 5 AM as trusting as they always were.
Good as gold:
He an MD opening homeless clinics, she teaching free kids' classes,
Never mentioning their Harvard degrees or Rockefeller fellowships;
Returned to New Orleans to rebuild from nothing after Katrina;
It's past time for the wounded father and boy (Who survived unshot,
Concealed beneath his dad) to flee the horror of it all.
Your wife and baby will do what we must tomorrow -- two-stop airline
Warriors, first in Minneapolis, then a hundred mile drive from Charlotte --
To join you at Tuesday's funeral.
..carrying as many postcards as possible.
I love you.
1.7.
06
"Not-Born-in-the-USA Southern California Weekend"
1. Saturday
Springsteen ..
. I think the name sounds Jewish,
But Bruce's actually half Italian, half Irish if I've got it right;
As if you care -- or maybe even knew before.
All of which seems absolutely foolish.
Meaning both it has no real significance to me
And that my reasoning and words are pure gibberish.
Which leads to the point (?) of this epistle:
Today I attended the most wonderful LA bar mitzvah for a boy
Born Orthodox and neglected in Bulgaria, then adopted by kind Americans.
2. Sunday
Windswept and clear,
The H O L L Y W O O D sign's block letters as white and near
High on the hill as I've ever seen,
We two stroll alongside a big puffy orange garbage truck
Whose driver suddenly screeches to a halt from its task
Of mechanical hands gripping plastic buckets, tipping litter into the back,
Then landing them all right side up outside their houses again.
The man jumps from the cab to grab some plants to his liking
From a blue trash can next to last week's now discarded Christmas trees.
Placing three on the seat next to him, eyes twinkling, mustache
Smiling at Simon; he asks "Como esta?" as his cigar smoke wafts
Past purple bougainvillea perfume into my nose -- and I suppose, baby's.
Down on Hillhurst Blvd.
, walking by the usual Sunday duel for patrons
Among the Scientology mission, Chabad, and the Anglican Church;
My knees recall what my rheumatologist told me not to do just last week:
"Don't put your ninety-fifth percentile height and weight grandson
In a frontpack. Your old joints with no cartilage or menisci
Can't take the extra twenty pounds on your bone-on-bone flat tires."
Although no glutton for punishment, I won't abandon this gift of
Grandfatherly intimacy for anything.
Rounding the last bend to home,
Simon waves to two Armenian carpenters hammering and drilling.
He greets our Asian neighbor, fulfilling a new year's resolution to clean
His goldfish pond, with a fetching pink-cheeked wide toothless grin (a lower
Incisor peeking out?) befitting the unofficial baby mayor of Hollywoodland.
1.7.06
"Powerless: Did the Animals Sing 'House of the Rising Son (sic)'?
"
Last night I passed on my
Plan of sitting with sangha
Friends at our meditation
Center, joining a session
"The Precepts: Refrain
From Killing and Act with
Reverence to All Life."
Instead, not for some random
Reason or usual laziness..
.
Going back to the beginning:
Last week the news glanced
Off me like rain beaded on an
Umbrella, when Ray Davies told
Terry Gross on Fresh Air
That he (a founding member
Of the Kinks, no longer such
A dedicated fashion follower)
Was shot in the leg down in
New Orleans chasing a thief
Who stole a girlfriend's purse.
That is, until early last evening
When our phone rang: dear
Helen'd been shot dead by
An unknown man at 5 AM
In her New Orleans kitchen,
While her loving husband Paul
Covered their baby Francis Popp
Beneath his body, sustaining
Wounds but saving his son.
From the Times Pickayune,
"New Year Off to Deadly
Start" -- "In the sixth New
Orleans murder in less than
24 hours, a woman was killed
And her husband shot in their
Home at about 5:30 a.m.
Thursday, said New Orleans
Police, who found the bleeding
Husband kneeling at the door
Of the couple’s Faubourg
Marigny home, holding their
Two-year-old son.
The toddler
Was not hurt; the husband, 35,
Underwent surgery at Elmwood
CharityTrauma Center, police
Said. The woman, 36, was
Pronounced dead at the scene.
Friends identified the Marigny
Couple as Helen Hill, an animator
And filmmaker, and Paul Gailiunas,
A doctor.
Including another murder
On New Year’s day, this latest
Violence brings the brand new
Year’s total to at least seven
Slayings in four days, though one
Of the apparent killings — a woman’s
Body Wednesday found rolled up in
A throw rug on a Lower 9th Ward St.
— Remains an officially “unclassified”
Death. In the past week, 12 people
Have been murdered in the city.
..
The style of the slayings — which
Took place in at least two cases
With police officers stationed only
Blocks away — ranged from a single
Shot at point-blank range to a spray
Of 17 bullets.
Some victims “had
Heroin in their hand and crack in
Their pocket,” said New Orleans
Deputy Chief Steven Nicholas at
A late morning news conference.
By Friday morning, news of Gailiunas’
And Hill’s shootings had already
Reached the Esplanade Pharmacy,
Qhich abuts the former Little Doctors
Neighborhood Clinic, the sliding-scale
Soctors’ office Gailiunas co-founded
Before the storm. Staff there talked
About Gailiunas’ unrelenting devotion
To his patients, many of whom were
Indigent.
“He went out of his way
For a lot of people, trying to make
Sure that they had their medicine,
Trying to find ways to pay for their
Medicine, and helping them get
Samples,“ said pharmacist-in-charge
Gwendolyn Charles, who has owned
The corner pharmacy for 26 years.
Charles said she’s “appalled” at the
Surge in violence and attributes it
Partly to people “who are coming
Home to the city with nothing for
Them to come home to.“ Violence
Won’t stop until everyone sees
Themselves and others as part
Of a larger community, she said.
“At this point, we all have to band
Together and do whatever we can
Do to help each other,” Charles said.
“At this moment, we don’t have one
Single witness to come forward ..
. We
Understand there is a risk associated
With that, but we do need witnesses.”
“This is not CSI,” the chief said.
“You
Don’t solve crimes under the microscope.”
Nicholas said police know people witnessed
Several of the killings, without saying which.
“We are begging all community members
to come forward,” Chief Nicholas said.
At least two of the day’s shootings were
Retaliatory, and some involved the drug
Trade, but police wouldn’t specify which
Cases. Nicholas cited “a culture, a certain
Oopulation in this city intent on committing
Violent crime. Enough is enough already.
"
Witnesses have reason to fear, given the
Historical failure of the criminal justice
System to secure convictions, and the
Ferocity shown in the past by accused
Killers determined to silence witnesses.
Asked about the spike in murders, Nicholas
Sought to portray New Orleans violence
As part of a national trend. “Murder rates
Are up all over,” he said.
But historically,
The city’s police and court system don’t
Do near as well as departments nationally
In bringing criminals to justice. Indeed, most
Offenders are never arrested, and only a tiny
Fraction of those who are arrested are ever
Convicted of crimes, according to recent studies.
In New Orleans, the lack of reliable witnesses
Has long stymied murder probes, Many people
Fear street retaliation more than they trust
The police’s ability to protect them.
In certain
Areas of the city, people live under the gun.
Between October 2003 and September 2004,
The commission found that the system convicted
Just 12 percent of people arrested for murders
Or attempted murders — a figure that doesn’t
Include the large percentage of in cases which
Police department never even make an arrest.
If there are 220,000 people in New Orleans
Now compared to 460,000 before Katrina,
The city had a 2006 per capita murder rate
Of 73 per 100,000 people.
That figure is
Destined to put the city near or at the top
Of national murder rate lists for last year.
Many of the recent shootings appeared,
Sadly, to be of a variety that has become
Routine in the city. And most of their victims
Remains nameless, unidentified by police.
The
Marigny shootings appeared to be the exception
— a seemingly settled and successful married
Couple, shot in their own home — immediately
Drew a public outpouring of sadness and anger.
Gailiunas was a family doctor who had opened
A clinic for poor people in the Treme in 2004.
They were both community activists, friends
Said, volunteering at Food Not Bombs and
Area educational workshops.
“These were
People who came here and worked for the
Poor and helpedout those in difficult situations,”
Said Robert Thompson, friend and owner of
Fair Grinds, a Mid—City coffee shop where
Hill held free filmmaking seminars. The
Couple had moved into their North Rampart
Street apartment in August, after returning
From South Carolina, other friends said.
They fled their Mid-City home during Katrina
And were trying to rebuild after the hurricane.
“They were proactive people that were trying
To help solve the city’s problems. They cared.”
“This is a huge loss for the city,” Bob added.
My son-in-law was off to New Orleans on the
Next plane; as my daughter sobbed and hugged
Their son, I answered the door bell to counsel a
Buddy trying to grasp if he was dying of cancer.
1.5.
06
Pre 8.7.06 at http://sarnatscat.
blogspot.com/
"Grendel's Ecstasy"
She drove the Volvo, got hit, fracturing his nose.
They're home now, both more than a little flaky.
Neither will allow me in the house -- or talk on the phone.
The missus won't take fluids, is quickly becoming non compus mentus.
The 93 year-old mister limps on crutches in his seven decade ENT practice.
He avoids his internist's pleas to cut back a bit; consider quitting driving.
The aging physician insists on seeing patients (can you imagine?) daily.
In his head, that's the only way not to go totally crazy...
Then one day, our storm finally breaks.
Their black and white TV turns rosy.
Music roars from silent bottles, rusty cans.
My studied blandness is replaced by compassion.
Mom and dad, don't worry: I'm no ogre.
So please just hug me as your loving son.
1.4.06
"Tempest in a Tea Pot"
1.
This cold soggy drab dawning
Before reverting to midweek daywork,
Drizzling outside collecting Wednesday, January 3 morning papers,
I finally got round to randomly put off this's and that's...
Opened a promising big UPS box from god knows where (Rutherford, CA?),
Which underneath all the Styrofoam peanuts and popcorn
Ultimately contained only four tiny corked smoky green bottles
Of presumably mucho premium Round Pond Italian virgin olive oil,
With the obligatory Season's Greetings card attached
Personally signed by UBS' Mark and Debbie: whoever you are,
I wish you'd simply reduce fees and improve banking services instead.
Then I moved on to vacuum red, blue and orange metallic plastic confetti
-- Astonishingly dreidel-shaped, amazingly razor-sharp little devils --
That papercut my fingers every time I've tried to free them
From the shag rug they've studded ever since New Years Eve,
When in a fit of giddiness, I shot 'em from a shockingly attractive
Ninety-nine cent store's spring-loaded non-exploding Super Party Popper
About the size of the cardboard tube inside a roll of toilet paper.
That done, missions accomplished as it were,
After tossing the detritus in the trash, I scavenge
The last of our garden's mint growing, wondering what I'll do
For tea the rest of the season til new leaves regroup in the spring...
2.
You know the old John Cale song
Done with the Velvets maybe early in the seventies
Before Lou Reed got rid of that anxious art-rocker violist
(And Warhol as producer too),
His tune bout lovesickness, but having no money,
He mailed himself to his girlfriend in a box from the post office?
Well, this don't have much if anything to do with that
But it does concern a beautiful new blue yellow coffee mug
One handmade by someone
Gave it to me on Hanukkah just last month, which
Came out of a maiden dishwasher voyage with her handle broke off.
After a few days getting sadder and sadder
As I watched it sit on the edge of the window sill in two pieces,
A great idea came to me ...
why not Crazy Glue them back together?
I was so excited, reuniting the tea cup in such a hurry,
I forgot to wear latex gloves or at least be very careful.
Of course the result (at least part) is now painfully obvious:
The sticky stuff stuck to my hands; even nailpolish remover wouldn't.
But there's always a silver lining, sorta, kinda --
In this case, the upside that my numb thumb and tips got covered enough
To wipe out all telltale fingerprints, thus enticing, inveigling virginal me
Into a New Year's crime spree as an eager petty thief,
Pinching fistfuls of those beautiful multicolored leftover
Spring-loaded non-exploding Super Party Poppers
About the size of cardboard tubes inside rolls of toilet paper
From our neighborhood ninety-nine cent store...
And so I write this to you, longingly
From jail -- please please bail me out of this fantasy real quick.
1.3.
06
"Tuesday, January 2, 2007"
As a Jewish kid born at the tail end of World War II,
I imagined a clear future which certainly included
Orwell's 1984 and Kubrick's 2001...
but for some
Reason unknown to me, always concluded in 2007.
Despite all the most stimulating Asimov and Heinlein
And Le Guin science fiction, even as I grew older
And should've known better, there was absolutely no
Way that I could fantasize anything beyond 2007.
So here I am, after holiday gatherings with family
And friends (one buddy who's also 61 tempted us
To follow his lead buying discounted senior movie
Tickets even though a bit underage) beginning 2007.
Yes, here we are, after the longest night, now the
Hardest morning of the year -- still slightly bent out
Of shape from celebrating way too late -- yet waking
Needing to get it together this first work week of 2007.
Rising from bed, sipping green tea, I resolve to live Plum
Village Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh's theory as practice,
Transforming compassion and love from nouns to verbs,
Encountering every being like an old friend as I enter 2007.
Though it's cold and blue at the homeless center today, I'm
Real happy reopening our clinic, assisting the sick and disabled
As best we can: Sergio's offered to distribute Christmas parkas
In the local barrio; Willy's vowed to make it to Hawaii by 2008.
1.2.07
"Sunni Side Up"
This You Tube virgin's
First act awake in '07
Was to download 2:36
Of horrific grainy chaos.
An entrepreneurial spirit's
Surreptitious cell camera
Videoed the unnicities of a
Good old-fashioned lynching.
But instead of rednecks in
Mississippi, this scene took
Place in what once passed
As the Cradle of Civilization.
Shiite street thugs stringing up
Saddam may have unwittingly
Elevated a Hitler level criminal
To a paradoxical pillar of dignity.
As Hussein's body dropped, neck
Snapped and still wide open eyes
Turned glassy beneath the gallows;
A mass murderer became a martyr.
The pell-mell dead of night rush to
Judgment and hanging was likely both
Unconstitutional and equally important,
Violated the Id al-Adna Muslim holiday.
A black ski-masked trashtalking death squad --
Looking like merciless bullies decapitating Dan
Pearl or sticking up a 7-11 store -- sullied Iraq's
Foiled sad excuse for a fledging democracy.
The complicit lamer-duck-by-the-day Bush
Gang seems inept in preventing its failed
Experiment creating an embryonic state's
Rule of law from sliding into teratogenicity.
Skanky degrading sectarian violence appears
To have won the day as Georgy Porgy LaFarge
Shouts Liberty! Equality!
Fraternity! from his
Exercycle as Baghdad burns. Et tu, Brute?
1.1.07
"New Year's Eve Morning Tunes"
Family visit and year coming to an end,
Last trip up the hill all three now adult kids learned on,
Lying quilted and capped in his dressed-to-kill flannel shirt,
Overalls and leather moccasins,
Drumming his favorite orange and pink plastic spoons,
Tongue capriciously licking bits of banana from my thumb,
Holding his blue Munchkin bottle brush
Out to touch real forest red bottlebrush,
Sometimes napping in his stroller,
Pretty much happy as a clam,
My grandson takes his bottle
As I sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to him.
My own black nanny from down south in Asheville, North Carolina
Sang the same to comfort me when I was near Simon's age
Back in Chicago's fiercely cold Decembers -- at first white with snow,
Then gray with grimy slush the remainder of those dirty winters.
As an infant, wherever Emma
(Whom we named our youngest after) was,
I felt content; I believe she taught me
How to be a good daddy..
.eventually.
This morning before my oldest catches a plane back to LA, walking
In the wood's valley, my knees ache like flat tires running on rims,
While I roll her baby through the dense drizzly misty magical fog
That wraps wet fingers round tips of the Santa Cruz Mountains above.
At the top of the street,
Looking west toward the sea,
Evergreens peak out from the summit ridge,
Silhouetted like next week's again unadorned Christmas trees.
After frequent rain, everything's turned from brown to olive and lime:
Sliding down past our house at the end of the path, the barn
Roof is covered with a blizzard of emerald grass; and wild oak bark
Is mossbacked as silky jade streamers hang from its branches.
Once with my son deep in Peruvian rain forests,
An aborigine guiding us on the Amazon
Bragged that his clan had a hundred words for green.
I'm told that up north in Alaska, they say the same about white.
A long time ago, our children came down this windy road
To our home as if it were a giant warm weather ski slalom:
They played night and day, first riding their trikes,
Then bikes with trainers, and finally two-wheelers.
Flying at warp speed,
Bad things now and then happened
To interrupt victory laps circling the cul-de-sac: our son
Broke his leg boastfully coasting, nonchalant on his skateboard.
Just as baba's milk's sucked dry,a storm blusters east from the Pacific.
Mood changed, after lowering the buggy's top to shield the tiny tot,
I pull my parka hood up and turn to crooning a way different mood --
"Blow Ye Winds (in the Morning)" -- to keep the little one asleep.
12.
31.06
"Samsara: Although I Do Understand Eichmann's Gallows..
."
Not a week after celebrating His birth,
Here the day before a new year starts,
Hangmen got Saddam, making that cruel
Tyrant arguably into a martyr for some.
No need to forgive the brute, though it
Would've been sweet to convene truth
And reconciliation like South Africa
Did after it's own bloody civil war.
Instead just one more round of tit
For tat begins in Iraq with Sunnis
Gunning after Shiites who couldn't
Resist adding insult to execution.
And so round and round goes the
Wheel of death, as we waste time
With such appalling revenge that
Only further dirties tainted souls.
Why do we so need to foul our
Uneasy nest with this repulsive
Provocative act that'll merely
Sow new seeds of violence?
Wouldn't the three main sects be
Way better off initiating healing
Processes than feeding already
Ghoulish spirits of tribal vendetta?
..
.Just thought I'd ask.
12.
31.06
"Squirreled Sweaters"
I am a cardigan, Izcayo alpaca from Bolivia.
Beautiful earth tones -- green, tan and brown -- if I do say so myself.
A father and son haggled most of three days over me in La Paz.
Ended up a few centavos one way or the other.
The Indian merchant in the open air market was pissed it took so long.
The dad read Grapes of Wrath aloud when they went to sleep that night.
Haven't been worn a lot in the decade since.
Mister keeps waiting for when he's wearing a solid color shirt underneath.
I just lay softly in a clear plastic bin sealed to keep caterpillars out.
A snazzy Uruguayan 100% Pima cotton pullover rides on top of me.
He's heavier and flashier and gives the air of being much more expensive.
Brags about his bright patchwork of yellow, blue, pink, and black squares.
Says the master's missus urged they buy me in a fine store in Boston.
That both were sobbing after dropping their firstborn at university.
That the wife convinced him consuming was a good way to change moods.
That the sweater was a distraction for a day or two, dulling the pain.
Then's sat above me back home in California ever since I arrived.
Always pulls rank that he was purchased five years earlier, the snob.
Neither of us gets out of the box much.
Our next door neighbors complain about the same problem.
To my left, two Kirkland brand cashmere sweaters speak Italian, I think.
One brown with a cool ivory neck line, the other black and white.
They can't understand our Spanish so well, but they're new to the closet.
The man's youngest daughter bought them two days in a row at Costco.
Evidently when the parents visited her at college last spring.
All of them got a kick out of getting such good stuff so cheap.
It tickled the family that the baby taught Pops how to enjoy shopping.
Which leads me to the point.
Over this winter vacation, our owner's become much much bolder.
Getting on in life, now without tennis or jogging, he walks in the woods.
A buddy gave him aluminum poles to ease knee pain hiking up and down.
He's worn the crummy old puke-olive moth-eaten jersey to my right.
Perhaps because she's so easy to grab and put on as a third warm layer.
The one with a torn Harrods label, "Real Shetland wool from Scotland."
Been there forever, for some reason never made it into a container.
And off they go out on the trail in the forest almost every day.
I think I'm beginning to understand:
Whereas his wife always smells fresh as a daisy
(Seemingly free of glandular odors in every circumstance)
My master himself is a terrible sweater --
Always wet after the slightest exercise.
So it's not so irrational for him to pick the yukkiest sweater to put on.
And to tell you the truth, the rest of us are very hopeful:
That miserly Scrooge wore a hoarded handsome gray zippered slipover
On Christmas eve may suggest we'll all get out more come the new year!
12.30.
06
"A Brief Asynchronous History of Highway Blues Revisited"
Back in '25, blue Burma-Shave signs began
Lining the highways of our lower forty-eight states
With billboards' sequentially rhyming silly doggerel.
"Ridiculous," I thought even as a kid in the fifties,
Riding in the Buick's back seat all the way from
Chicago, Illinois to Los Angeles, California.
.
..A few winters ago, we was playin' in Jamaica
When a Rastafarian cabby sez, "Mon, guess who they
Found in a hole?
Saddam hadn't shaved for months!"
I suddenly recalled that Burma-Shave ad,
"The bearded Devil / is forced / to dwell /
In the only place / Where they don't sell / Burma-Shave."
.
..We're told Shiites may hang Hussein as soon as today
To get rid of him before Islamic holidays intervene
And Sunni insurgents load up for all hell to break loose.
'...
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" /Abe says,
"Man, you must be puttin' me on"/ God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?
"
God says, "Out on Highway 61." '
..
.The U.S.
Blues Highway stretches
From New Orleans through Memphis, and
From Iowa through Duluth to the Canadian border.
Highway 61 is featured in deeply American blues --
Bessie Smith met her death on that lonesome road;
Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul
To the devil at its crossroads (a Howlin' Wolf song);
Elvis grew up in surrounding housing projects; and
Martin Luther King was murdered at a motel just off it.
.
..As a teener in Hibbing, Minnesota real near Duluth,
Jewish Bobby Zimmerman traveled that way on the radio.
...
Highway 61 became freedom, movement, independence;
A chance to get away as Dylan did in "Like A Rolling Stone."
The next year, Blonde on Blonde's "Visions of Johanna" astonishing
New poetry riffed Bob's hallucinogenic off-center '60's Amerika
Into verging on seductively merging with older mainstream Europe:
'But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel..
.'
..
.Two years ago, wily Iran
Built a new highway through the desert of western Afghanistan,
Past an ancient trading post and the Taliban onto the outside world.
They strung a high-voltage power line
And laid a fiber-optic cable, marked with red posts
That provides telephone and Internet access to the region.
Iran has set up border posts against the heroin trade.
Kabul projects include a new medical center and a water testing lab.
Iran's ambassador says, "This work is in our national interest.
"
The modernization comes with a Burma-Shave-ish yet serious message.
Every 5 to 10 miles, road signs offer quotations from the Koran.
"Forgive us, God," declares one.
"God is clear to everyone," says another.
A graceful mosque rises roadside,
With a green glass dome and Koranic inscriptions in blue tile.
The style is unmistakably Iranian.
All of this is fruit of Iran's drive to become a bigger player
In Afghanistan, as it exploits new opportunities to spread
Its influence and ideas farther across the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the rise of Hezbollah, with Iran's support,
Demonstrates the extent of Tehran's sway in Lebanon, and
America's toppling of Saddam allowed her expanded influence in Iraq.
.
.. Georgy Porgy, you've become almost a sympathetic figure to some who
Understand how blue you must be underneath, what with seemingly no one
On your side of the highway you've blundered into such a damn bloody mess.
12.29.06
"Stares at the Chelsea Hotel"
While kinda, sorta mouseproofing house, staircase, and roof,
(Just underway before a now-cruising grandbaby visits),
I and my wife plus our kids and their S.
O.'s listen to others
Honor Leonard Cohen's songs for a night: all Canadian
Sisters and brothers, but more to the point, their sons
And their daughters, and theirs -- maybe three generations
Of Wainwrights, Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Anthony, etc. --
Each celebrating the Montreal poet whom I knew I'm Your Man
Alright forty years ago next week .
.. and have forever since.
12.28.06
"Nonagenarian Parents"
Spying on him slip soiled undies up, then, little by little,
Lift her blank body down off the john .
...
now I recall
A once red-haired, freckled, smiling young woman: the mother
Who taught me how to toss baseballs, hit tennis backhands and
Tidied my bottom while Dad was busy far away in hospital or lab.
Today, maybe eighty years since he vowed
Never to drop his guard like my grandfather did badly, perhaps thirty
After an older brother went missing on retirement day, found in his
Car near a freeway only when Chicago's snows thawed; he tends to
His wife with love and compassion that make me cry -- not totally sadly.
12.
27.06
"Paleontology: Recalling the East West Bipolar Express"
1.
Fetid India,
Celebrating end of autumn's
Wondrous pagan Hindu Diwali,
Festival of Lights Christmaslike
(Not your mama's Hanukkah or Fourth of July)
In claustrophobic Varanasi,
Holy City of Lights,
Where outrageously painted sentient beings
Dance and play
Amidst mounds of sacred cow shit,
Naked bathers glance mercifully,
Brushing teeth in blessed Ganges waters
As turbaned corpses and feces
Float by next to dog and cat heads and entails
While humans burn on gnats lacking use permits.
2.
My surname's Sarnat,
Ellis Island changed,
Originally Sarnatsky
In the Polish Pale ghetto
Dedicated to persecuting ungentiles.
First name Gerard began as last name Gesundheit,
Which between two world wars
Maneuvered toward French from German --
Then even worse than oozing Jewish --
But that's a whole 'nother story.
Next door in Sarnath
The enlightened Buddha first preached:
When signing me in, the hostel adds an H
That demonstrates unusual reverence
To one wrongly honored as hallowed.
3.
The world's religions converge here.
Moslem Ramadan just ended.
Throw in some Sikhs.
And Christians.
(And an empty synagogue.)
From all corners of India,
Striving to make Varanasi the final resting place,
Men carry their dying and dead
On cars and rickety spines…
Some ditched beside the road.
Have faith, brothers and sisters,
Welcome home
To samsara's bitter born-again abyss
Or nirvana's eternal sweet kiss.
End of suffering -- or more time in earthly thunderdome paranoid spaces?
4.
Funeral pyres burn relatives,
250 per diem
Saved from rats,
24/7/365
(Including all holidays),
And although modernity
Has apparently brought progress,
Most families still profess
Millennial old-fashioned wood
Remains their favorite,
With newfangled electric cremations
Only a passing eclectic sensation
Before hot ash leftovers
Drift down the same river
As their grandmothers and fathers fancied.
5.
Yesterday, I flew back to California,
To bury a gentle friend's casket in Los Angeles
(Coincidentally my Dad's namesake, born on my birthday),
His pail finally wiped clean
After way too many nursing home years.
By the finish
When ninety-two
His personal plumbing and wiring
Had deteriorated
Faster than his lifelong house's pipes and electricity.
Both special and simple in private and public,
For widow, family, friends and those he didn't know,
He was consummately admirable and loved --
Though his head wasn't preened for American Burningman
Or Asian forehead tilak-marked as a devout sadhu.
6.
Peering outside
As we stand to chant
In the valley of the shadow of death,
Late afternoon LA summerish winter
Flickers hallucinatory sunlight.
I swear deep inside
My two eyes, a third sees
Infinite points in a zillion lines
Form rainbowed diagonal strands
Of a magnificent spider's web.
Over a matter of seconds --
Oscillating fits and starts in the balance
Of on and off dusky illumination --
Bernard's soul is reclaimed
By a great invisible antipodal bardo.
12.
26.06
"Did You Know Borat Keeps Kosher?"
I just read it in Sacha Baron Cohen's
First out-of-character Rolling Stone interview.
However, what I really want to confess now's
That we've had our ups and downs, Christmas and me.
Often, as the faux Kazakhstani says, "It is nice, I like very much."
Other times much more difficult.
..
As a kid, my little sister and I met round the tree at midnight.
Ogled gifts but were disciplined enough to touch though not open
Til morning (which also happened to be our parent's anniversary).
Don't recall knowing much about Hanukkah but believe I knew I was Jewish.
And so it went in a 90% post WWII trying-to-assimilate Chicago community.
This continued indefinitely including after we moved to LA when I was ten.
Didn't get bar mitzvahed or anything like that.
Only entered synagogues for others' events.
Was quite happy having the extra time for baseball, basketball, etc.
Somewhere along the line, the lure of eight nights of presents got to us.
So we added on a Festival of Lights menorah.
Sometime in high school, all that vanished.
At college, I ate fish on Fridays with my Catholic roomy.
Never heard of Hillel.
Held endless bull sessions about the Eucharist and Veronica's cloth.
Did Easter with his family in Philly.
Even fell in love with a blond guitar-playing folk singer Germantown pal.
Who entered a convent then left to join me in my Cambridge dorm.
Got thrown out of school briefly when we were caught.
During med school I celebrated Russian Orthodox Easter
With my roommate down at his mom and dad's place in Pasadena.
Very different from the old Ashkenasi West Los Angeles neighborhood.
I still yearn for the scrumptious homemade nut and fruit filled kulich cake.
The next year I met and married the only child of Orthodox Jews --
Although she was Berkeley FSM and Viet Nam War bred too.
I got used to Shabbes/Havdalah candles, challah, spices,
And Manichevitz -- which I actually gradually learned to enjoy.
When children made the scene,
They received traditional religious training.
I learned enough transliterated prayers
Hopefully not to embarrass them on the Bimah for their bat mitzvahs.
Dear friends are with us over the holidays.
We joked a lot about when we took our babies to Disneyland
One Christmas 'cause we imagined it'd be empty
With Christians gathered together back in their homes.
As B.
Sagdiyev jokes in his movie, "Not!"
Maybe the most crowded day of the year.
We learned our lesson:
Brought in Chef Chu's carryout on the eve last night,
Watched the tube's classic hilarious Christmas Story
About chop suey restaurant dinner after a neighbor's dog ate their turkey.
With that said, they're flying home to Santa Fe on unbusy Xmas.
Lots of luck!
While our three kids do Christmas with their SO's families,
My wife and I'll lay low; perhaps take in a movie after a stroll.
Even my meditation center's closed today, sitting and dharma talk canceled.
In any case, Merry Christmas!
12.
25.06
"The Night Before Christmas and All Through the House..
."
On this day of the eve of our season's greeting climax, I experienced
Firsthand a personal ethical dilemma between thinking global, acting local..
.
1. Ho hum, what me worry?
"Norovirus Outbreaks Grow In Bay Area Region"
"Four residents of a San Jose nursing home have been isolated
To their rooms to prevent the spread of the highly contagious norovirus.
It's the same virus that lead health officials to quarantine 576 elderly
Residents at three San Mateo County nursing homes in recent days.
The four residents at Skyline Health Care Center have been asked
To stay in their rooms until they recover from vomiting and diarrhea.
Meantime, the senior citizens in the San Mateo County facilities
Were told to avoid common areas and eat meals in their rooms.
The county's quarantine was imposed as a precaution after 85 people
At the Bonnie Brae Terrace facility showed flu-like symptoms of the bug.
Norovirus is a group of common viruses that frequently show up during
Winter months in settings such as cruise ships, schools and nursing homes.
According to the CDC, norovirus spreads through contaminated food or
Liquids, contaminated surfaces or direct contact with those infected.
Garza said there have been 320 cases of norovirus in San Mateo County
This year, compared to 166 cases last year and 123 cases in 2004.
'We are looking for it, so maybe we are finding it more,' the official said.
The outbreaks come on the heels of cruise ship disasters in Florida.
The world's largest cruise ship was held in a Miami port Monday for
Intensive cleaning after a second voyage sickened 106 people."
2.
Should I be selfless, come to the rescue of those below, but
Risk my own -- including my daughter's baby -- getting sick?
What I read in the papers above vanished from consciousness 'til another
Shoe/stocking stuffer dropped like a thud through old St. Nick's chimney.
Amidst all the good holiday cheer, this morning
Came an email cry for help urgently needed...
"Dear Sangha friends,
We live in Redwood City near the Insight Meditation Center.
Five of us are stricken with gastrointestinal distress,
Plus a mother and a sixteen month old, not as yet sick.
The baby has a whole (sic) in his heart.
Two of the ill people were in the emergency room last night.
We need household help today and probably tomorrow
To help the weak and with household chores.
You will be no doubt expose yourself to whatever we have,
So please consider this carefully.
Mom and child need a place to go to stay healthy.
Please call if you feel you can help in any way. Sincerely, RCohen.
.."
3.
So where do I stand --
Or what would you do in my shoes?
I called Rachel, Harry, Jacob, and Aron's home, and
Told them I'd like to assist but can't risk getting my family sick.
As a doc, I reviewed precautions to prevent spread and how to treat
Symptoms, and gave them the Health Department's FAQ website.
Then I offered to pitch in for a visiting nurse and motel room for a
While until everything blew over -- and wished them a Happy Hanukkah.
Thanking me profusely, Harry said they'd get back to me later today
After deciding what to take me up on..
.and with that, a Merry Xmas to all.
12.
24.06
"All Ye Know and All Ye Need to Know"
Dear colleague,
Bob Levy MD,
What is it that
Makes us docs
Want to be poets?
To free ourselves
From ridiculous notions
Of scientific truth -- to
Glom onto beauty's healing
For just a moment?
Although lots try
(e.g., eZAAPP, the e‘ZINE
OF THE ASSOCIATION
OF AMERICAN PHYSICIAN POETS),
Few make it.
Two come to mind:
The above Dr. Keats left the apothecary biz to write fulltime.
"Ode on Melancholy" begins, "No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd by nightshade,
Ruby grape of Proserpine; make not your rosary of yew-berries.
.."
But our twentieth century role-model,
Family doctor William Carlos Williams,
Rarely gave clues he practiced medicine.
The closest was in his prose "Autobiography,"
That described "the thing" – never really named.
12.23.
06
"Good News Bad News 2: The Other Side of Relief"
Hunched over, waiting, hoping the news is good,
Not here as a doc, just as a friend and supporter,
We're finally ushered into one of those tiny claustrophobic rooms
Where a Stanford med student and resident tromp in and out
Poking this and that ad nauseam but not knowing alot regarding
What really matters -- the biopsy report following last week's surgery.
Eventually the boss man enters, greets her with a smile it's all right,
No words needed. After a collective sigh of relief and a few perfunctory
Questions about where to get the best outside pathologist's second opinion;
High fiving, alive for the first time in days, we fly back through the lobby,
Toning it down a notch, not to insult or depress all the sick bone marrow
Transplant patients wearing those weird Star Wars HEPA filter masks.
Back home, out of nowhere, an email's arrived from Shanghai.
A buddy informs me he's gotta hightail it back quick, his tests came out
Unexpectedly bad, his physician's advice is a second round of chemo,
Then radiate the lymphoma pronto. It occurs to me maybe she, not he,
Got the last get out of jail free card or correctly called heads on a coin flip
-- 'Til I recall Einstein's line about God not playing dice with the universe.
12.23.06
"American Patriot Bah Humbugs Christmas Hagiography"
Honestly, Abe had it all:
A truly great nickname.
Humble midwestern roots.
Undeterred by failure after failure.
Said what he thought, brief yet elegant.
A face only a mother could love -- and a nation.
Christlike, dying in his prime for me and you.
Sure, maybe history's treated him too kindly,
Letting him get away with suspending habeas corpus and all.
But unlike Jesus, doesn't evidence remain (even photos)
To prove this saint was also really human?
12.22.
06
"Simon's Nine Months Birthday on the Winter Solstice"
Mama, today's the day I'm exactly half and half.
Half in, half out. Nine months in you, the same out here.
So far it all seems pretty much peaches and cream.
Dada, can you please tell me which the whole milk was?
Isn't it semi funny to celebrate being perfectly equal
On the shortest day, the longest night of the year?
3.21.06-9.
21.06
"Solstice Shadows"
..
.Afterwards, I served at The House of God, as Boston's Beth Israel
Hospital became famously known. But let's not jump too far ahead.
..
My life's work began (and my life likely will end there),
Back in the shadow of the House of Death.
Its Cancer Research Center chimneys
Still spew out the blackest, thickest, most horrific smoke.
Yesterday, I sprang a friend from that building's crab grasp,
The pathology report reading, "Not Hurthle cell carcinoma."
Back home, we celebrated her new hope in an odd way,
Watching Ophul's show about Nazis, the Shoah, and Auschwitz.
This morning, following the second longest night
Of the year, I required a flashlight to pick mint from the garden for tea.
Dawn lit the redwood wild oak forest
By hot tub time with my mermatron.
(Years ago, fainting dead away from wet heat, retching with a very slow
Heart beat, I was ambulanced down to Palo Alto -- surviving intact, I think.
)
We've lived nicely in these foothills above Stanford for decades, gradually
Working our way west from a first ticky tacky freeway apartment.
When med school began, I was so excited riding my bike (stolen before
Lectures even started by some knowing the ropes better) to campus.
After a hardass freshly-minted biochemist Nobel Laureate told us
To line up for microscopes, I raised my hand to say, "I don't have to.
.."
In those early days after the school'd moved from San Francisco,
The Dean of Admissions was eager to sign up fancy Ivy Leaguers.
At least in the sixties, regardless of whether we did any pre-medicine: he
Didn't seem to care if I hadn't come through that demanding circle of fire.
"..
.Dean P said a 'scope wouldn't be necessary, since I'm here to study
Psychiatry and social psychology," I spouted off (and became an internist).
More than figuratively grabbing my ear, the irate professor heatedly
Explained the new reality that made it clear equipment wasn't optional.
It appeared I'd naively bought the slick recruiter's
Big rock candy mountain fibs -- hook, line and sinker.
No different from a 6'8" high school ghetto basketball boy
Told he didn't need to attend classes or do exams.
Things got better, playing hanky panky investigating
Body parts in the gross anatomy closet with female students.
But the semester was a disaster, almost failing Biochemistry (coincidence
Or payback?), accused of taking tests on LSD (not) by the faculty Senate.
Spring vacation, considering dropping out,
I hitchhiked to Canada to checkout draft-dodging.
For a while, I inflicted a second arrow
Adding gratuitous suffering onto my mandatory pain.
Eventually things worked out, and I got down to basics -- organizing
Against the Viet Nam War, causing trouble at Oakland's Induction Center.
Waylaid a bus full of marines, nonviolently -- except when plainclothed
Police (FBI?
) ripped us off a motorcycle and beat the **** out of me.
Almost got to spend those med school years
In The Big House instead.
Learning medicine was mostly cool.
Mentors were mellow (classes on the lawn) and adventurous (guess).
Once in a blue moon, whacky grinning Linus Pauling'd brown bag lunch
Next to me in the HEENT lobby, kindly offering Vitamin C from his stash.
One Thanksgiving or Easter (always on-call, holidays blurred together)
A gentle teacher paid a home visit to my sick wife without having to ask.
What I remember best was covering my head walking between buildings
To keep ravens from dive-bombing my then red hair for nesting stuff.
I wonder if that's why my baldspot's so large?
But back to the subject at hand.
..shadows of death were everywhere.
Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Kent State, Cambodia.
Referred into Stanford from all around the world for rescue. I recall:
.
..Resuscitating that rubbery Arabian
Little bubble baby chock full of squishy lymphoma.
...
Being unable to console a demonized Peruvian dying of leukemia;
When he passed, he left a portfolio of Satanic drawings to fuck me up.
..
.In the ER, telling the wife of a doc admitted with an MI to meet us
At the CCU elevator; he was gone by the time I wheeled his gurney out.
.
..In the cath lab, as a favor, a cardiologist having his rhythm converted
Asked me not to anticoagulate him: he died of a stroke on the table.
...
The asthmatic black girl whose mother I told would be all right -- just
Leave it to me -- having to break impossibly bad news a mere hour later.
..
.My microbiology partner (whose mother threatened to disown him
If he didn't burn his draft card) dying of connective tissue disease.
.
..The older med student, a woman with a family,
Whose breast cancer recurred -- metastatic -- at the end of year two.
...
Returning to Stanford for senior residency after two years in Brookline,
A close cousin with terminal brain cancer was admitted to my service.
Breaking the made-of-sterner-stuff rules, I pleaded with my chief
To remove me from the case, having to make a horrible decision.
Which he did.
With the greatest reluctance.
The asshole.
.
..Years later, by then a professor and attending physician,
I admitted my own patients to Stanford Medical Center, often to die.
...
Sometimes my friends. A colleague with AIDS back in the early days.
(Singing Joanie Mitchell's "Circle Game," holding hands, part of me died.
)
And sometimes it's family
That flirts with death.
When my baby daughter was recovering post-appendectomy, the only
Place I could sleep was the roof; I almost succumbed to pneumonia.
Inlaws have died and almost there.
My wife had a close call with a rockhard lump that luckily wasn't.
The last few Christmases, I've been the good shepherd to dear ones
Staying with us while their loves were in the quaternary care hospital.
Older now, not caring for complicated hospitalized patients,
When I visit, it's a busman's holiday.
Stanford's grown large so fast since my day
That it looks like its on steroids.
I carry stethoscope in hand
More as a passport than a badge of courage.
So far good news' prevailed.
Last year a healthy newborn Nicholas arrived on His birthday.
Every language imaginable decks the halls with boughs of holly, fa la
La la la, la la la la. Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la.
12.21.06
"Darkly Equanimous Urban Living"
Relax, mind, be still.
Muscly brain, rest soft and light, ignore all the bustling cars.
This frosty morning's now austere cold-cocked body,
Besotted by last night's lingering dreams of erotic Khajuraho,
Balks at sitting its achy knees tripod on the frozen temple floor.
While bemittened feet float on lotus zafu pillows,
My bemused chassis, lying knit to the chair under saffron covers,
Glides ramrod straight from up high to deep below, almost
Like a ragamuffin's boxed coffin sliding off Varanasi's Sar-gnats,
Ice melting right down into his funeral pyre's next-worldly fire.
I snap out of unjoyous unrapture in time for walking meditation.
Here in downtown Redwood City, a five-point buck,
Seemingly direct from those old Hartford insurance TV ads,
Freezes in front of a most gnarly white barked sycamore to stare me down.
Was it Jeremiah who said, "Your bed's too short, your blanket too narrow"?
12.20.06
"Feigning Grass-Is-Always-Greener Gains"
Walking along sunglassed, hairbanded, handmittened, parkabundled,
Up and down December wild oak grove muddy forest lanes,
Nicely supported by my nifty new Hanukkah gift from the kids,
A shiny brace of blue Leki Pathfinder hiking poles,
I suppose it all projects a picture of my vigorous health,
Able perhaps to leap Kilimanjaro in a single bound -- or less.
..
When what's really so different from if I were again still just limping,
Abstaining urbane light and nimble aluminum to retrain balky knees,
Deigning instead to navigate the treacherous rainy hilly terrain
With my long gone grandma's two intensely scuffed unarcane
More mundane simple old grainy heavy brown wooden canes
That she once inanely explained to me (then an unlistening teener)
Were the main bane of her waning later years' lame existence?
12.19.06
"Busted Not"
Doing Borat a second time
The young bovine in line
Ahead of me said benignly,
"Three seniors.
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