Güd wrtr

The invitation comes:
Close your eyes to breathe,
to arrive, as Buddhist monks,

step by step, walk into the
nation’s capital 110 days after
setting out on their 2,300-mile

journey for peace. Some days
I wish that I had not arrived
at this too-tender spot,

my whole body a fleshy,
aching mass, mourning
for what has vanished.

The monks remind us, day
after day, that change is
inevitable, that everything

dies—and too soon adds
Mary Oliver. They teach that there
is no past, no future, only now.

I have arrived; I am home,
Thich Nhat Hanh calligraphed
in a circle again and again

before his spirit made its
final journey. He, like so many
others, taught that this moment,

this now, is where we have
all arrived. Which is when
I remember that none of us

walks alone. If I look over
my shoulder, I see a long line
of beloveds following,

stopping when I stop,
moving forward when I take
a step. I close my eyes,

breathe and feel them,
the arrived, right here,
peacefully, all of us

going on and on as one.

•••

In honor of the venerable monks who have walked over the past 110 days
from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., spreading and being met
with kindness from thousands who have volunteered to feed them,
tend their aching bodies and give them shelter and all manner of support.
May our journey of peace continue on this planet as the monks
are taken safely home, as we, forever changed, follow in their footsteps.

Though they appear spontaneous
to onlookers, pop-up music happenings
require a fair amount of planning
and set-up. Music stands

and sound equipment, tympani,
euphoniums and baritone saxes
must be transported across campus
to the library—a lot of work

for a mini concert by a jazz band
and a symphonic wind ensemble
after only three rehearsals with
some of us still learning our parts.

Oddly, I am surprisingly calm about it
crawling through rush-hour traffic,
heading east into rain, clouds spitting
on the windshield.

Dry and warm, I hum my bells part,
hoping to link the tune in my head
to my still-awkward hands as we
commuters near the Sunrise offramp,

when, against the gray sky ahead,
a leg of rainbow faintly appears,
teasing those of us slow poking
our way to wherever we are going.

Practically at a standstill, I wonder
how many of us ensconced in our cars
sit entranced by the spectacle of
the full-spectrum light show as it

blooms, intensifies, then oh, so gradually
fades—this literal pop-up that earns
our wide-eyed, wow, look at that!
admiration for those high up

in the Rainbows Department
diligently working behind the scenes,
the ones busily polishing the prisms,
shining their little hearts out.

•••

With thanks to Dr. Molly Redfield and the Folsom Lake College Jazz Band
and Symphonic Wind Ensemble for all the work (and fun!) of our first
pop-up concert of the semester.

I am like every boy kid who
races outside when he hears
a siren, hoping to catch a glimpse
of the huge red truck zooming by.

Though in my case, I am a bonafide
oldster who leapt up from the computer
like a much younger being when I
heard the telltale scrape-scrape
of the claw in front of my house
on a sunny Monday afternoon.

The blesséd yard guys had tidily
draped half a season’s worth of yard
detritus along the curb, a dull
shawl of brittled sycamore leaves,
whips of spent wisteria vines
topped off by some of my neighbor’s
tired greenery.

It all sat there for two weeks,
decomposing, each day sending me
into a tiny tizzy: Are they coming?
Did claw season end, and I missed it?

But hearing the unmistakable sound,
I looked out the front window, and
there they were—the two-man crew—
one throttling the big scraper that
scoops up all manner of debris off
our streets, and the other green-vested
driver standing in the street alongside
his big blue behemoth of a city vehicle
whose open mouth receives what
the claw delivers.

Theirs is a finely choreographed dance
worthy of Ailey or Graham, and even
after three months of collecting what our
city of trees has discarded, it still makes
for a delightful performance.

I went outside, took photos, grinning
as the green-vested man struck
a sidewalk pose, his hand raised in an
open-fingered wave as his partner
clawed up the last of the leavings.

Then the waving man performed
the pièce de résistance, retrieving a wide
push broom from the big blue truck
and sweeping the remains into a tidy pile
for the claw’s final pass before they
departed, waving like firefighters
off to save other citizens,

these servants of civility who, I hope,
get as much of a kick out of admirers
like me as I do them.

(In memory of Margery Thompson)

On the last day, before your daughter
turned your house over to people who
would go through every drawer,

as we had, pull out everything saleable
from closets and cupboards, assign
value to each item, then donate

or throw away the rest, I sat at your piano—
the creamy Baldwin baby grand that your
beloved bought you after the two of you

moved into the house three decades
ago. I lifted the fallboard over the keys
that looked back at me, unblinking.

I wanted to play something lovely,
but your sheet music had been bagged,
your binders of music and hymnals boxed,

so my fingers noodled through scales,
attempted some chords. I watched
the strings sheltered by the open lid

leap at the touch of the hammers,
and the ghosts of pianists wafted out,
those who’d sat on the pink velvet

bench and played all manner of etudes,
hymns and jazz—and on one memorable
night, my favorite Joplin concert waltz

by a famous jazz pianist whom we all
loved. And you, too, rose with the notes,
floating into the empty living room

where you hosted so many parties
and family gatherings, where last
Christmas you gave us the best gift—

you, one last time—which we could
not fit into any of the dozens of boxes
we carted away to live with us.

But we carried you with us as we
flicked off the lights, locked the
back door one last time, saying

goodbye, then turned to see you
and your beloved standing in
that doorway, as you had

a thousand times, waving us off
into our lives—ta, ta for now!—
the strings of our hearts pulled

taut, the notes dissolving into
a gentle pianissimo before they
drifted gently into the good night.

•••

And in memory of so many who played Margery Thompson’s lovely Baldwin piano—among them Rev. Harvey Chinn and jazz pianist Bob Ringwald, who so memorably played from memory (as he did everything on the piano) “Bethena: A Concert Waltz” by Scott Joplin.

…my whole self
saying and singing what it knew…

—Denise Levertov from “Variations on a Theme By Rilke”

•••

At the end
may my whole self rise

saying and singing
what it knew

after a life in which
I mostly did not know

or did not think I knew
that I could have

lifted out of myself
at any time

or no time
beginning anew

flush with abundance
with the last breath

so full of song
so full of light

To see the sea run from clear aqua
to darker turquoise to genuine navy.

To watch it grow storm cloud gray,
then blacken like cooled lava.

To have the genuine birds’ eye view,
the top-down perspective of below,

the one rowing, anchor at the ready
should there be a desire to heave to,

as those in flight decide when to touch
down here or here or over there,

whether by need or whim—who’s to say?
To fly over is to overlook, not take in

the unnecessary or fret about what
might lie beneath. Which might also

look like forgiveness. Which is,
of course, another word for love.

And for a moment, looking at this photo,
I feel whatever part of me that travels
without my body wander into wonder,

transfixed by the symmetry of concrete
pillars topped with soothing arches.
But it doesn’t look like the I-80 I know.

And then I remember the enormity
of this continent and the east/west
interstate that stretches wide

its elastic arms. So I look it up:
This cathedral lives in an Ohio national
park, spans the Cuyahoga, a word

meaning crooked river that my western
tongue mangles. It runs beneath a
turnpike (a foreign concept in California),

anchored, for the moment, in snow,
which does not visit sea-level valley cities
like mine. But I cannot stop looking at

the shapely curves, the strong columns
that look as if they’ve stood as majestically
long as any medieval cathedral.

Which makes me peer more closely,
searching for a hooded monk, perhaps
carrying a battered lantern that he

will light on his rounds as the short day
fades, before he climbs the bell tower
to pull the ropes and set them pealing,

as the strong pillars gentled by light
do the job they’ve done for ages—provide
much-needed, rock-solid stability—

they hold and hold and hold.

Janis Ian (who spells her first name
the “correct” way, according to the woman

who gave it to me) sang that she
learned the truth at 17. I believe her.

But, at 67, this Janis is 17 again—
another odd truth. For instance, I’m back

in band, the only girl percussionist, playing
orchestra bells, whose ringing steel keys

I knew well at 17. My teeth are being
straightened again, voluntarily this time,

with molded plastic hugging all 28,
instead of tortuous clamps and wires.

I’ve also lately dug out the ModPodge,
dabbing blank postcards with watercolors,

affixing stanzas of my poems. At 17,
I decoupaged images and words cut from

magazines onto clean cardboard tubs
in which rainbows of ice cream once lived.

And later this spring, I’ll play in a band concert
honoring America’s 250th birthday,

50 years after my bandmates and I struck up
patriotic tunes for the nation’s bicentennial.

Just as I’m trying to wrap my (now gray) head
around the half century ago part, I chuckle

at the time machine that’s put me here
in my spacey poet brain (also part of 17),

picking up mallets and a gluey brush,
preparing postcards with abstract washes

of color and typed words and who knows
what else to fling me backward across decades

to land in the frame of that skinny girl
percussionist with braces and aching teeth,

who directed the pep band and edited
the school newspaper, scribbling daily,

hoping she’d be a Real Writer someday,
someone who wanted to live a creative life,

without understanding that she, lucky girl,
already was.

Gratitude is the confidence in life itself. In it, we feel how the same force
that pushes grass through cracks in the sidewalk invigorates our own life.

—Jack Kornfield

•••

The essence that nudges tiny green bits
upward, searching for light and air
through the smallest sidewalk fissures,

by any name or none, elicits wonder
in me on every walk, as though such
a phenomenon is a rarity,

as if tiny growing things don’t find
ways to enter the world. But I also
think of the ones that don’t or can’t,

the prodigies that didn’t take root,
the ones stopped before they could
appear. Which makes me stop

mid-stride, bend and touch the bit
of life coming through. Which might
be taken for a weed and plucked.

Which, I, too, have plucked, and later
wished I hadn’t. So nowadays I give
the little plants that can a Yay, you!

before walking on, mindful of
the marvel that any of us seeds
landed and grew and thrived,

that, despite everything,
we have somehow flourished
in these lucky, lovely lives.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

—David Whyte
(from “Start Close In”)

•••

At first it is lending a hand when she
needs to take the small step up a curb.

Later, as her steps become shorter,
her balance iffier, she reaches for your arm,

and you provide it, hoping that you
are steady enough for her.

And when she can no longer take any
steps, you watch your sister lift her

from her favorite spot on the sofa and
slowly waltz her—onetwothree, onetwothree—

to the hospital bed that she doesn’t want,
in the family room facing the TV,

her constant companion during all her
waking hours. It is then, sitting the vigil,

that you think of her gradual need
for assistance, that, as her sight dimmed,

as her body failed, she rarely asked for
help, but you learned to read her gestures—

the outstretched arm, her hand reaching
for yours, which she had never done,

as far as you could recall. But she must
have held your small hands in hers

when you and your sister began to try
your own steps, holding hands

while crossing the street,
a daughter on either side of her.

And near the very end, you grownup
girls cradle her bird-boned hands

in yours as she readies for flight,
no more walking necessary,

her wings appearing just in time
to lift her into mystery.

•••

(for Donna, in memory of our mother)