Wade out.
The water is white swift.
Throw yourself headfirst
into the cool rush.
Let the cold, cold water
cleanse your secret sins.
jobe
An actor pretending to eat on the stage of the empty theater. The woman who rushes in from the wings has forgotten her lines. O palace bathed in moonlight! The wild-haired woman with her mouth open; the false Prince reaching for his toy pistol.
Charles Simic
I must have slept after all.
We might call it sleep, but I wanted to rest my mind,
Not just my body. Instead,
I read long into the night. Outside,
The full moon of August was high and glowing.
My body was reading but my soul was outside,
Walking in the yellow moonlight.
Then I woke up with a start in my reading chair,
The book was on the floor where it fell,
I must have slept after all.
Outside there was the first corner of sunrise,
And a new day. The moon had yet to set,
And so the sun and moon passed each other
At the corners.
jobe
I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.
Benjamin Franklin
What I Did In The Moonlight
I planted my grief
in freshly turned earth
A tree grows there now
You should see the size of it
I filled my wheel-barrow
with all my pointless regrets
I put them out by the curb
A truck will pick them up on Thursday
I spent some time following my cat
She led me all around our yard
stopping to rub her face in mint
I rubbed my face in mint, too
The moon shone on and on
climbing higher above the park across the street
"Who can stay awake longer?" I asked her
as she began her long arc back down
jobe
My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
Naked, your feet
are sleepy dream people,
whose faces you almost recognize,
their smells are imaginary clouds,
imaginary rain squalls.
Inhale, exhale, walk slowly.
jobe
We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
O Death, I wait only for your quiet knock on the door.
It is late at night and I suffer for my sins.
My sleep is fitful and I dream that I am buried,
but still alive, my mouth and nose are filled with dirt
and my lungs ache for a single breath of air.
I am dead, yet alive, and totally alone.
Waking up, I turn on all of the lights
as if the darkness in me could be driven out,
but I have always known that can never be.
I watch the clock, even though time means nothing
and most of my life is now behind me.
O Death, I wait only for your quiet knock on the door.
I cannot seek you out, but I will not turn you away.
jobe
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
Aristotle
You are taking a walk beside the river. Look at the water, is it not more beautiful than the sheen of a diamond? Like tomorrow. Like love. Like the slender hands of the angels under starlight. The trees drink your most kind thoughts and are silver in return. They reward your faith with a new name. It is full-on winter and you can feel the cold crispness of a possible heaven with your nose and your ears. You feel a love for what might be a god and you look up at the sky, even though you know that the divine is inside of you, in your own golden heart. In your own diamond soul. A red eared slider slowly eases into the water without a sound.
jobe
Information
This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.
David Ignatow
Let me tell you something I know
perhaps a tough thing to learn
when your child dies you are ready to die too
life loses meaning
maybe you can come back to yourself
and maybe not
but that first moment of realization
is like a bullet my friend
just like a bullet right in the heart
I know
jobe
Written on a Wall at Summit-Top Temple
Staying the night at Summit-Top Temple,
you can reach out and touch the stars.
I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.
Li Po, 701-761 CE
Chanting the names of the intelligent things
Light of the universe,
give us the names of all the intelligent things.
Write them out with stars in the winter sky at night.
Whisper them in the music of an ice-cold creek
flowing swiftly over white rocks. For our part,
we will memorize the names and tell our children,
who will later tell their own children.
Generation after generation that chant the names
of the intelligent things, that thank the light of the universe,
and, in fact, move through their nights and days
giving thanks. For so we should.
jobe
(earlier version previously in Chiron Review)
The ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see the land.
Thich Nhat Hanh
My wife and I have been getting our taxes done by volunteers at the Davis Senior Center. For free. And I find that cool, even though our taxes aren’t all that complicated anymore. Math. Who wants to do that? My wife is concerned about stepping up the process and getting them turned in. April 15th is only a week and a half away. Not me. How do we even know if the Feds still have enough workers to process the taxes of a nation of 350 million people? I have my doubts.
Until today (Thursday the 3rd as I type this) I had been doing the physical therapy after my knee surgery at home, with a therapist coming here. Today I started going to the ‘PT’ area at the hospital in Vacaville. It really wasn’t that bad at all. The doctor, yesterday in a separate appointment, put the stop to some of my activities. I had been driving, walking with a cane and skipping the walker, even doing some shopping. Surprise; my knee is swollen. I am officially limited to the house and the hospital, and only with my walker. They don’t want me really walking for another month. Pardon my language, but heck. Shoot. I think I’m ready to handle 3rd base or shortstop. Maybe after the All Star game.
I was a SF Giants fan way before I ever moved to San Francisco in the late 70s. Willie Mays and Willie McCovey sold me, you know. As a Giants fan, one is against the Dodgers; that’s just the way it works. I am not one of those fans who actually hates the rival team. I look at it like sportsmanship. You respect the traditional of the rivalry. I even very much admired the Dodgers announcer, Vin Scully. The man was a baseball poet. But what I have going on now is very different. I am finding it very hard not to like the Los Angeles Dodgers. They’re a fun team to watch. Mookie Betts is sort of amazing. Don’t tell my friends back in San Francisco, but I really wouldn’t mind that much if they went back to series this year. Ssh. Just between us.
I like most sports. Not golf or pickleball. That’s not sports; it’s just people having fun. Nothing wrong with having fun, but Blackjack isn’t a sport either. Or bowling. I really like bowling, but it’s not a sport if you can do it well while stoned. Football (including soccer and rugby), basketball, track and field, skiing, lots of stuff are fine with me. But baseball is #1. Vin, Mookie, and the two Willies.
I’ll be back on Tuesday, early. Ummm, make that early on California time.
jobe
