Rebirth, 6 a.m., May 4
Up at 3 a.m., as on every Tuesday
for volunteer work. All loaded up now,
pulling out of the warehouse driveway
for the 20-mile weekly trip to Richmond.
900 pounds in the van,
which the guys at the Emergency Food Pantry
and I will unload in five or ten minutes.
It’s really Spring now, sky starting
to get light over the San Pablo reservoir at 5:30.
By 6, I’m back in the van for the return trip
across the miles of woodland, water and hills.
Brought my harmonica today
and as the sun rises, begin to play and sing—
And everything, everything begins
to spill out of me in music, a whole life.
Old songs with stories behind my knowing them:
Jim Croce’s “Operator,” Dr. Hook’s “Queen of the Silver Dollar,”
and the old Dylan ones like “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word”—
playing each on the harp, wailing the words
as can only be done on a day like this,
a rooster crowing to the rising sun!
As they go on spilling out, the pull
of my recent living and suffering
gets connected up with all the old parts of me
that loved and suffered before
until it’s all One
and I’m ready for more,
more life, bring it on!
All caught up now and ready.
Because when you have this kind of Wake-up,
you remember once more
that only the Love is real.
Heavy Fruit on the Tree of Today
Woke up this morning and before long,
the feeling had grown in me that today,
“Everything is gonna happen!”
That’s too much, but I felt that way!
The day seemed so filled with responsibilities
internal and external—possibilities, too—
and Barbara and I each filled with their load,
doing our best not to collide while going through the house
in the midst of our preparations.
A lot of fruit may yet come down on me from this tree.
Some of it is heavy, having grown full and ripe.
You can get killed by a falling coconut, I’ve heard.
These are not coconuts, that’s only an analogy;
but I’m writing this to remind myself:
Stay Alert, Buddy!
The Poet Defends His Integrity in a Dream
I’m at a high school,
or more likely the
community college,
and I’m part of the community,
though whether as teacher
or artist-in-residence or hanger-on
isn’t made clear in the dream.
One day, as I’m standing
out in a large field,
I see a delegation
of three professors from the English Department
on their way to talk to me. One
is a woman who mentored me once,
and I feel some closeness towards her.
They wear smiles,
but it’s clear from the get-go
that their purpose is to ask me
to tone down my behaviour and writing.
Before they’ve even finished asking,
I’m aware that they’re so out of line
that the only way to ‘speak truth to power’
in this case is to totally refuse
to even dignify their request
with any logical response.
In a minute I’m down on the ground
in just my underpants in front of them,
pounding my fists as a crowd gathers,
shouting, “Don’t take away
my poems! I need my poems!”
like a child having a tantrum.
In the next scene, I’m in the school office,
sober with notebook in hand,
the clowning at an end,
having established its point,
an existential statement
celebrating freedom of expression,
consciously enacted for the students
for whom I know I’m a role model.
I wake from the dream as energized
as if I’d won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Puzzle
Are we all
piecing together
a gigantic Puzzle?
The many nations of us,
the many colours
and ethnicities,
all religions and no religion,
every shade of gender
and every “identity group”?
It is such a great, great Puzzle,
and the developmental levels
of participants are so varied
in so many different ways!
It appears, at times, that the picture
is not getting any clearer
or closer to completion,
and sometimes it seems
people are removing
pieces that were already in place!
I do puzzles
with my preschool students
on the carpet of our classroom,
and I see how some children
are actually sitting
on needed pieces!
How at their level,
people are rarely even aware
that the flat edge of a piece
means it goes on the top
or bottom or one of the sides,
or even that two flat edges
mean it’s a corner piece.
I watch, noticing that one child
has put several pieces together
and is unable to find the ones
they connect with,
while another child a few feet away,
turned at an angle so his pieces
can’t be seen by the first,
has those connecting pieces.
It’s my job to look for such things
and bring these two together
so that they can then find
where their merged part
fits into the whole.
My job, also, to have everyone check
under their bottoms for pieces!
As I do all these things
I also try to spirit top and bottom
and side pieces into place,
as it’s too complicated
for most people this young
to really grasp.
If it’s a good day,
we finish the puzzle
and together enjoy
the feeling of completion.
True, the World Puzzle is harder,
but even with my tender-aged children
there are those who, by themselves,
some before their third birthday,
quietly know to trace a slender green stem
to the piece of stem it connects with.
Of course, there are even more subtleties in
the World Puzzle: folks more willfully challenged;
some who see “alternative solutions,”
though the thing about a puzzle is:
there may be different strategies,
but the puzzle itself remains until
all the actual pieces are connected
and the picture is whole.
Still others, a few, see
that we ourselves are part of the puzzle,
and the wholeness is here now
if we can see it.
They go about their business and try to help—
even as so many run madly around,
lost in imagination.
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image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Wikimedia Commons; image 3: Max Reif / Wikimedia Commons; image 4: Wikimedia Commons
