There is a storm blowing through today. The wind is stripping the red leaves off the cherry tree. I feel happy being home. Jan and I have been traveling a bunch. Fairbanks, Portland and Seattle, Carmel and Monterey. Our son got married and I read a poem for him and his bride on a beautiful warm day under some California Oak trees, then a few weeks later a read a poem for my sister-in- law’s celebration of life in Seattle. In Fairbanks Jan and her partner won second place in an invention competition for their patented process to lure seabirds and marine mammals away from hazards such as oil spills using a naturally occurring scent that mimic’s food, and we stayed with our fine friend Terrence Cole and Maureen Long where we told jokes and ranted about local politics and dying of cancer. Laughter and tears all around. Strikes and gutterballs as they might say in the Big Libowski.
Before the Falcon, Before the House Of Stones
for Emily and Finn on their wedding day
Right now, while laughing day turns to dancing night
tourists clamber up a house of stones near the shore,
Finn and Emily… I’m sorry it’s not a great shot of Emily… she is stunning… but she always is. This is the most natural smile ever captured of Finn looking happy so I took the shot. Of all his many talents smiling for a camera is not one of them… or mine really. When asked to smile we both grimace as if being tortured.
where during long winter storms, breakers
pound the coast like the bruised fists of warriors.
Stunted pines bend their backs to the wind
where falcons watch, for
helpless birds tangled
in the shanks of beach grass.
But before that, the poet levered
those stones that seemed formed in place
hundreds of meters straining
them into the walls of his creation,
while the birds of prey built
no nest at all but found only shallow
depressions somewhere on the
cliffs near shore to make their home.
And before that, the beach grasses lay where they were
germinated by splitting and binding
one strand to the next like the helix
of DNA, or the diagramed family trees of everyone here.
What I’m trying to say is this: Families are created,
dynasties in fact,
easily or with great effort on days like this,
creatures stepping off into the air, over the topography of earth
from the Gulf of Alaska
to Monterey Bay,
from the great tide pool just down the hill
to Pirates Cove in Sitka Sound,
such are beginnings of first stories told over cribs and nests.
The tide goes in,
the tide goes out,
love and biochemistry,
rocks and poetry.
Today lovers look into the tide pool and see the stars.
Today, we make time stand still
through the soft lens of our minds eye
where these children plant their feet on the ground
then glide out over the sea, where all our ancestors
await woven together somehow
yet still separate,
singing the song of the tides,
this moon,
this earth:
their entwined orbits
falling toward each other.
Always rising up… always
falling down
forever locked together
in service to each other
and in love.
For Jan’s birthday we took our skiff out to a light house near town where we played games with our friends Bob and Barbara, and watched Thin Man movies and ate chocolate cake and watched whales from the top floor, while an earlier storm blew through.
I’m at the age I feel I should put in a memorial section of each blog post. But others have gone. Buckwheat Donahue from Skagway is gone and there have been great obituaries written by his good friend Jeff Brady which can be seen in the Juneau, Whitehorse and Skagway papers. But fans of the Cecil Younger series may be interested to know that Daniel Oxley passed away two weeks ago from a brain tumor. Dan was my cousin and the model, the tone of voice for my character Todd in all the Cecil Younger books. He was a singular human being: Good, smart, eccentric and unforgettable all his life. As a young man, my father bought young Dan one of the early Polaroid Cameras, and Dan used it to take pictures of manhole covers, almost exclusively. He covered the walls of his room with them. It wasn’t until he did that did the adults in his life noticed that each one had interesting and distinct geometric patterns on them. It was the most obvious thing in Dan’s world but not obvious to many other people. This is why I thought he would make an interesting sidekick for a detective. Later his obsessions included volcanos and suspension bridges. When he came to visit me in Sitka he stood on our suspension bridge and took photos of our “long dormant, Mount Edgecumbe” for hours on end. He was beyond thrilled. How to describe it…? Overstimulated perhaps.
On the injured list, remain Jan Straley who plows ahead with her Parkinson’s disease. Her spirits are great but it claws at her mobility in ups and down days that change more rapidly and capriciously. See Peter Dunlap-Schoals fine graphic book “My Degeneration” for info on that disease.
Richard Nelson is down in San Francisco watching birds from Debbie Miller’s deck and going in for his Cancer treatments. He is not much for taking calls or answering emails so he communicates now mostly by great pulses of life force emanating from the bay area. I send him goofy photos of exotic wildlife telling him that I bagged what ever it is in my yard and asking if he has a good recipe for it.
At the top of the continent Alaska’s great historian, Dr. Cole is finishing off about ten straight weeks of chemo therapy along with the dry heaves and a daily dose of watching Perry Mason. He has now told me that he would prefer it if I called him “Mr. Mason” as in, “I swear, Mister Mason, he was alive when I last saw him!” I said I would be happy to call him “Mr. Mason” if he called me “Paul.” as in, “Paul, run out to Malibu and check out that woman’s story!” and we both started wearing checked sport coats all the time.
I don’t want to have cancer. I want to die of heart disease like Bing Crosby on a golf course in Spain. But I know, we rarely get to choose the circumstances of our natural deaths.
Shelves in Terrence Cole’s basement, with a characteristic hat and a baseball.
Here is the poem I wrote for my dear sister-in-law Linda. Her celebration of life was a fine affair. I kind of steered it toward a comedy roast of my brother towards the end…. which I couldn’t help. Linda was great at laughing at Hugh when he was being too serious or going off on tirades. She made life safe, and fun. Anyway here is the poem.
The Astronaut Chooses Her Words Wisely
Later, looking at the records
colleagues assumed she had toggled both ends
of her tether carefully to her suit,
when she pushed off from the orbiting station
with thrusters operational, positioning generators
at their unsealed status and all interior suit bladders intact.
As the void pressed in the bladders pushed back,
as the sun blared its frigid light
on everything in the emptiness.
The ship itself had skin of titanium as tender as a balloon,
where she had been the mission specialist, payload engineer
calculating supplies, and the inner atmosphere to be expended:
the fuel, the waste, the balance of all the something
against the force of all the nothing, which she ticked off
like bite marks on her pencil until the day
she was scheduled for the spacewalk and pushed away.
Her last transmission mystified her crewmates
because she had not at all been one for grand gestures.
But in her official profile she had told examiners
that every communication should pass
three tests before being sent:
was it true,
was it necessary,
and was it kind?
Later, those who knew her believed
she had maintained her three parameters,
for as she gained speed
to slingshot around the pull of that luscious wafer
she called “La Bella Luna,”
the tired technician at mission control tapped
his console to hear only her crackling voice through the relay:
“Control: I am off station.
but not afraid.
I am still in love with my damp and tangled earth,
but am not lonely now flying
into this collapsing, expanding and probably, unknowable night.”
All I really know today is that loving the people around me is all that really matters now, and that spring will come again, with or without us. If the ketamine treatment showed me anything it was that the ego, try as it might can’t change a thing when it comes to love and death.
Either that, or I dreamt it.
Red leafs on green grass.
Sea foam slides up the beach sand,
my hands down your legs.
jhs
