Summer Is Dead

Finally, the weather shifts. I love October--only in this month do cold, gray skies and rain seem appropriate. Now I can feel justified driving to Martins and picking up a gallon of cider (Kercher's October Gold is the best). The enormous pumpkins on the front porch have stopped sweating. The trees behind my office are green and gold; not gold trees and green trees but both colors on the same branch, evenly mixed, evoking the clothes of a jester, something carnival anyway.

Rejoice. Autumn has risen. From here on out the days will grow garish and crisp, and then into the leaden dusks we'll slide...

The Rant

This is nothing new to anyone who has had even the remotest contact with the internet, but I'm moved this morning to proclaim just how much I loathe email forwards that supposedly contain outrageous or fascinating "facts". Almost invariably they're a mishmash of exaggerations, skewed statistics, or outright fabrications that have been circulating the internet for the past ten or fifteen years. The gall of these inflammatory lies is irritating... There is always a vague yet recognizable "source" named (CNBC, Oprah, or my personal favorite, "scientists") followed by some hokum editorial statement such as "You won't believe this but it's completely true!" Morons receive these emails and, lacking any natural defenses, quickly become infected, swelling with uninformed emotions until they burst and release duplicate copies of the virus to everyone in their address book, at which point the disease finds a few suckers more and circulates again. If you're unfortunate enough to be in the address books of more than one of the infected, you can have your inbox bombarded with the same ridiculousness two, three, four times a day. Perhaps even worse than the pseudoscience are the email forwards stuffed to capacity with hyper-religious content or patriotic sentiments so grossly intolerant and perverse they'd make Dubya blush (I've been involuntarily subjected to a number of email "stories" that end with a message which can be approximated as "learn how to speak English and love Jesus or else stay out of my country!").

Okay, that's my rant.

Translation

You, whose name means "honest child"
and I named for a god
of war

might enter peace
talks to
prove how apt your denomination

and how I live mine
down, leaf & stem twirled
between

harmless thumb & forefinger,
light steps
over holy ground,

wafers of diplomacy set on
my tongue
abashed to speak with you alone.

A One-Gin-&-Tonic Night

The workshopping session at The Bucket went well, I think--though I probably should learn to raise my hand and wait to be called upon. Then again, three cheers for juvenile enthusiasm, right? So, I took everyone's comments into consideration and revised my poem considerably tonight. I think I've punched it up a bit, but please feel free to comment (Note: The two If's in the later stanza are supposed to be indented, can't figure out how to make that work on the blog though):



Tempus Fugit


Is it safe only to look
at the now?

I have heard you expound
the evils of the backward glance,
how unwolflike
the clouds of futile If's.

Then, no clarion,
a horn on a pole in the distance
warned against the skies:
wait to unfold
my map,

do not number the eggs,
do not dwell on the wishbone
wondering if it should have been spared.

It leaves now
the only plot of relevance allowed.
If
I listen to that horn.
If
I don the pelt and fangs.

Softness, rather
lays me lengthwise into both
the lost days and the coming.

I look into them,
Time's limpid pools
and count koi
heedless of prayers and regrets, yet
weaving both together

and in my hand
a string,
a key,
a kite with an infinite tail.

On the Last Day of September

The backhoe rested its muddy treads on firm earth beside the soybean field. Days before it had gone back into the woods to dredge a fetid bog, and a dried cake of muck clotted the massive steel belts, turning them a pale brown. Resting there, driverless, its arm like the neck of a dinosaur rose up and crooked down to the bucket with its pneumatic mandible. I walked around it, confident as though it were dead, the little cabin locked tight and another padlock on the gas-cap. The weight... The weight was a soundless presence under the blue sky. The very silence of it exuded a form. It neither shifted nor creaked in the stiff wind but resolutely slept. And as I rang my knuckles against the bucket it did not ring back nor make any sound... only resolutely slept. And for that it seemed the machine was not meant to move at all, a statue only, something incapable of motion, a bone of the earth cracked and thrust up into the sunlight, or the fossil of the first mammoth redwood trunk that grew for a million years and now had weathered away every weak ring and fiber, leaving only this craggy relic of its most impassive heart. It was a stone arch in a desert valley. Immobile, and never meant to move. It shrugged off the wind and was. Beautiful and uncaring as the stone breast of a mountain. The treads could have been a single fused mass, rigid as bricks and mortar, welded vertebrae. I hoisted myself onto the machine's back for a moment, enjoying the vantage of the rippling soy--bronze, but nothing like a statue--but I must also have felt the remnant ghosts of violent mechanical life remembered in the metal, for I suddenly grew disquieted and climbed reverently back down.

We made this beast, it works for us. But in the snarl of armored hoses and the bucket's toothy maw lies the harsh truth. This was a creature of the Inanimate, made to rend and demolish without pain or regret, to do the work of fifty heartless men. Or fifty with a purpose. Or one building a world. Like most awesome, inhuman beings it was only safe in its dormancy--awake and roaring it would return to existence a dangerous toy. Later that evening a lone man with a flatbed trailer arrived to take the backhoe away. We all stood in the driveway, safely distant, watching it rumble toward its perch, where it teetered briefly on the trailer before folding itself once more into sleep, a dragon gone to roost. And when the tiny mammal crawled from its head the others clapped their favor for him, filling the dusk with transient sounds, constructed by fragile, fluttering hands.