4.3.2023 – when everyone is

when everyone is
gone, who is left, at what point
future merge with Death?

Who is left when everyone is gone?

He watched Diana’s yellow Volvo disappear toward Traverse City, the faulty muffler putting along after the car disappeared, somehow as lonely as a dog barking far away in the night.

Who is left but me standing on the porch on a June morning, and able to see a green leaf fall, for the first and last time, fifty yards away.

Am I here if I abolish the input of my five senses?

Sure.

There’s still two hundred pounds of standing meat ignorant of the leaf.

The sense of compactness alternated with the banality of worrying about one leaf out of trillions.

He had felt a similar sorrow when an area of forest had been flooded long enough to kill the trees — as a child he had talked to trees until a neighbor kid had caught him and told everyone.

Water had always been a question of too little, enough, too much.

His thought processes lamely trailed off, then returned to the porch.

At what point did changing his future merge with eternity itself?

Death?

From Warlock by Jim Harrison, (1937-2016) New York, Dell (1981).

3.30.2023 – suspicious neatness

suspicious neatness
spongelike ramshackle craftless
continuously vile

Adapted from the complete first sentence of Jim Harrison’s Wolf: A False Memoir.

The sentence describes upper lower Michigan as well as upper Michigan.

The sentence, one long sentence, the opening sentence of the Wolf, is two pages long.

Mr. Harrison admitted he did it that way because he could.

The sentence reads:

You could travel west out of Reed City, a small county seat in an unfertile valley with a small yellow brick courthouse and a plugged cannon on its lawn next to a marble slab with the names of the World War One and Two dead inscribed in gold and the not dead plainly inscribed with the suspicious neatness of cemetery script, those who served, farther west through fifty miles of pine barrens dotted with small farm settlements often of less than thirty people, or merely a grocery store and gas station adjoined by a shabby aluminum trailer or a basement house with the first and perhaps second stories awaiting more prosperous times, the stores themselves with little and aged stock — lunch meat, bologna pickled in a jar, Polish sausage, tinned foods covered with dust, plaquettes of fish lures, mosquito repellent in aerosol cans, live bait and a pop cooler outside the door — but not many of these — a narrow road through mixed conifers, cedar and jack pine, some stunted scrub oak, birch, and the short-lived poplar, a pulp tree usually living less than twenty years and clotting the woods floor with its rotting trunks and branches, and west through the low pelvic mysteries of swamps divided invisibly from the air by interlocking creeks and small rivers, made unbearable in spring and summer by mosquitoes and black flies, swamps dank with brackish water and pools of green slime, small knolls of fern, bog marshes of sphagnum, spongelike and tortuous to the human foot and bordered by impenetrable tamarack thickets: in short a land with no appreciable history and a continuously vile climate, lumbered off for a hundred years with few traces of the grand white pine which once covered it, an occasional charred almost petrified stump four feet in diameter, evidence of trees which rose nearly two hundred feet and covered the northern half of the state and the Upper Peninsula, razed with truly insolent completeness by the lumber barons after the Civil War with all the money going to the cities of the south — Saginaw, Lansing, Detroit — and east to Boston and New York; and the houses, even the large farmhouses on reasonably good land, sloppily built, ramshackle and craftless compared to Massachusetts or Vermont; west to Lake Michigan then to turn north along its coast to the Straits of Mackinac, cross the mammoth bridge, travel west another three hundred miles through the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula and then north again into the comparatively vast, the peopleless Huron Mountains.

From Wolf : a False Memoir by Jim Harrison, (1937-2016) New York : Dell, 1981

3.15.2013 – stacked against what we

stacked against what we
think we are: impossible
to surprise ourselves

From:

The days are stacked against
what we think we are:
it is nearly impossible
to surprise ourselves
I will never wake up
and be able to play the piano.

In the poem The Theory & Practice of Rivers as it appears in the book, The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems by Jim Harrison, (1937-2016), Clark City Press, Livingston, Mont 1989.

While I have to agree with Mr. Harrison, I still wake up and hope to play the piano and I don’t even have a piano.

3.13.2023 – almost wondered

almost wondered
devious, subconscious means
could settle down safe

Adapted from the passage:

Macon leaned back in his chair with his coffee mug cupped in both hands.

The sun was warming the breakfast table, and the kitchen smelled of toast.

He almost wondered whether, by some devious, subconscious means, he had engineered this injury — every elaborate step leading up to it—just so he could settle down safe among the people he’d started out with.

As Mr. Thurber wrote, Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The Grizzly and the Gadgets

A grizzly bear who had been on a bender for several weeks following a Christmas party in his home at which his brother-in-law had set the Christmas tree on fire, his children had driven the family car through the front door and out the back, and all the attractive female bears had gone into hibernation before sunset returned home prepared to forgive, and live and let live. He found, to his mild annoyance, that the doorbell had been replaced by an ornamental knocker. When he lifted the knocker, he was startled to hear it play two bars of “Silent Night.”

When nobody answered his knock, he turned the doorknob, which said “Happy New Year” in a metallic voice, and a two-tone gong rang “Hello” somewhere deep within the house.

He called to his mate, who was always the first to lay the old aside, as well as the first by whom the new was tried, and got no answer. This was because the walls of his house had been soundproofed by a sound proofer who had soundproofed them so well nobody could hear anybody say anything six feet away. Inside the living room the grizzly bear turned on the light switch, and the lights went on all right, but the turning of the switch had also released an odor of pine cones, which this particular bear had always found offensive. The head of the house, now becoming almost as angry as he had been on Christmas Day, sank into an easy chair and began bouncing up and down and up and down, for it was a brand-new contraption called “Sitpretty” which made you bounce up and down and up and down when you sat on it. Now thoroughly exasperated, the bear jumped up from the chair and began searching for a cigarette. He found a cigarette box, a new-fangled cigarette box he had never seen before, which was made of metal and plastic in the shape of a castle, complete with portal and drawbridge and tower. The trouble was that the bear couldn’t get the thing open. Then he made out, in tiny raised letters on the portal, a legend in rhyme: “You can have a cigarette on me If you can find the castle key.” The bear could not find the castle key, and he threw the trick cigarette box through a windowpane out into the front yard, letting in a blast of cold air, and he howled when it hit the back of his neck. He was a little mollified when he found that he had a cigar in his pocket, but no matches, and so he began looking around the living room for a matchbox. At last he saw one on a shelf. There were matches in it, all right, but no scratching surface on which to scratch them. On the bottom of the box, however, there was a neat legend explaining this lack. The message on the box read: “Safety safety matches are doubly safe because there is no dangerous dangerous sandpaper surface to scratch them on. Strike them on a windowpane or on the seat of your pants.”

Enraged, infuriated, beside himself, seeing red and thinking black, the grizzly bear began taking the living room apart. He pounded the matchbox into splinters, knocked over lamps, pulled pictures off the wall, threw rugs out of the broken window, swept vases and a clock off the mantelpiece, and overturned chairs and tables, growling and howling and roaring, shouting and bawling and cursing, until his wife was aroused from a deep dream of marrying a panda, neighbors appeared from blocks around, and the attractive female bears who had gone into hibernation began coming out of it to see what was going on.

The bear, deaf to the pleas of his mate, heedless of his neighbors’ advice, and unafraid of the police, kicked over whatever was still standing in the house, and went roaring away for good, taking the most attractive of the attractive female bears, one named Honey, with him.

MORAL: Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

3.10.2023 – still, how strangely still

still, how strangely still
water is today, not good
to be still that way

Adapted from the poem, Sea Calm by Langston Hughes as it appeared in The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) .

How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way

Langston Hughes was just twenty-four years old when his debut poetry collection The Weary Blues was published in 1926.

The first line of the introduction to The Weary Blues reads, “At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty -three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes.“

Back in the day when I worked at WZZM13 TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I remember a newsroom discussion about travel and places to go and places gone to and plans to go to other places.

I looked up and said in what my wife calls ‘My Hoffman Voice’, you know, the voice you develop in a family of 11 kids if you ever want anyone to hear you – my kids say it cuts through concrete – my Mom said it was just like my brother Bobby’s (who was a baseball coach for 20 years), “I live in house 1 mile from where I grew up, 1 mile from the hospital where I was born and 1 mile from the cemetery where I will be buried.”

Then I said, “Oh am I depressed!”

At the time it was all true.

I lived near Kent Country Club on the North End of Grand Rapids.

It was less than a mile from my childhood home on Sligh Blvd.

It was about a mile to Butterworth Hospital where I was born.

And it was less than a mile from Fairplains Cemetery where my grand parents and parents are buried and where, most likely, I would end up one day.

I was about to turn 50.

Since then, I can say that I have enjoyed a picturesque and rambling existence.

Someone looked at my life and said it was still, too still.

And then that someone decided that it was not good for my life to be still that way.

I am reminded of a silly movie starring Steve Martin named Parenthood.

Mr. Martin watches his life come apart at the seams with the flu, bills, car accidents, kids fighting, job loss and everything else and is ready to lose it.

When his Grandma comes by and kind of in passing says:

You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster
Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride.
I always wanted to go again.
You know, it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened,
so scared,
so sick,
so excited
and so thrilled,
all together.
Some didn’t like it.
They went on the merry-go-round.
That just goes around … Nothing.
I like the roller coaster.
You get more out of it.

The movie was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

These two guys wrote a lot of movies.

One of those was, A League of Their Own where baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, says:

It’s supposed to be hard.

If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

The hard… is what makes it great.

It is not good
For water
To be so still that way