Driving The Parkway

Photo by Saintbridge/Lic. Creative Commons

I.

Driving after sundown,
opening and closing windows
of an invisible world,
as if stones were slow
under the chipped and lacquered stars.
My dog’s gaze browsing places
where the sun blazed red,
a shadow moving over tall grass.

II.

The air, for a moment, green fire.
And then his laugh, pleased and satisfied
which may have been myself,
filled by the sound.

III.

Parkway praying in the Sioux garden, as if
a stranger stops to chat in the stairway.
And if the staccato voice of the radio
could hear its own frailty
in the creak of a hinge,
moonlight in the vaulted room above me.
I wondered
how a human could produce that song
and not die.

***

Driving The Parkway is a Cento of lines from the book Kissing the Ground by poet Daniel Lusk

Moment

Before Haiku class,

actual grasses whisper.

Two dragonflies dance.

Here in the Deep, Painting in the Light

Suppose the yellowness
of the yolk
affects
color at the hayfield’s edge.
A few stalks
less white suddenly,
against the snow.

White marks
were hard to see
on white parchment,
but still
at the vanishing point,
the blue of the sky suggests
a certain
sweetness
of that sweetness,
a cloud.

It’s Saturday Afternoon, You’re Not At Home

And home seems suddenly luminous against the sky. Some thing you’ve built that’s more than walls and furniture here and there. A sum. A wholeness.

This thought a cloud in front of all the beauty that is Crna Gora. The Black Mountains. Montenegro. High cliffs smashing down into the sea. Gentle sea and gentle arcing beaches.

During the season we would drive out just an hour or two before the sun went down. Death-defying blind curve mountain roads. Olive tree dance. Quiet forgotten churches earthquaked into Jenga formations and left for years, tucked in, alone. The wind there heavy with past but every moment aglow with possibility.

How to say that everything looked different, that summer? That, having decided to leave Prague and return home perhaps I loosened my grip on what had to be and let myself just be. Myself. That maybe where I was is where I always should have been. Montenegro in my heart. Of it. Where I learned, remembered, allowed myself to be one with the everything and nothing. When the student is ready, they say, the teacher appears.

It’s Saturday afternoon. You’re not at home. And that’s the thing of it. You can be anywhere in your mind no matter where you are in the physical world. No doubt your heart can be elsewhere still. Your very soul gliding in and around you in the ether.

So it’s Saturday afternoon, we won’t speak about the “should do’s,” but what we might call success is a gathering up of selves. A putting on of layers, a collecting and centering and attaching of parts. A being all of you, all the you’s all together one Saturday afternoon. A being. Content in the neverland of wherever you are. Here. “Just glad to be here.” Present in this very moment. Thought clouds passing and the truth remaining clear.

It’s Saturday afternoon. You’re not at home. Because home is just a comfortable farce. A cloak. A mishmash collection of trinkets and moments of long ago. Home is the concept, misguided, of safety. So that the dreaded immediacy of the moment, the now, doesn’t seem so powerful. So incredibly blown apart with possibility and opportunity and (inhale) change.

Home is a construct. A belief system. A castle in the sky. And you. You’re not even there. Look at you, swimming and diving in the valleys of your mind and memory. The only thing linking you to reality is the tiny point of a pen spilling ink onto this page. This page a vessel for Saturday afternoon, not at home.

Fantasy Island

When I was small I used to pull myself along the floor like a salamander. No. Not when I was that small. When I was six or seven years old. After I got put to bed I would sneak back down the hall into my parents’ room by lying down on the floor and pulling myself along by the shag carpeting. Arms fully outstretched, belly slung low, I would grab the fluffy grey-green hair of carpet and pull while simultaneously pushing with my feet. Little back fins. Sometimes I would sidle along all the way through their room into the living room until I could just see the television in the den through the french doors.

It is in this way that I became a connoisseur of Fantasy Island, even though it was past my bedtime. My bedtime, if I were extremely lucky or just pretty darn good (which I usually was) was immediately post-The Love Boat. Perhaps here lies the seed of my lifelong love of travel and my dreams of tropical island living. Who knows. Perhaps if I’d been allowed to stay up and watch Fantasy Island in more than a prone position I would have been to Hawaii by now.

Once, I got caught. There I was, nestled down deep in the shag, contently watching the beginning of Fantasy Island when SWOOP! I was air-lifted by the ankles upside down, swinging through the room half-laughing, half-crying. Busted. “Nnoooooo….I screamed……The Plane!!! The Plane!!!” It was a pretty dead-on impersonation of little Tattoo announcing the arrival of the passengers at the beginning of the show, which elicited quite a snort from my parents, but to no avail. Still hanging by the ankles, I was carried through the short hallway to my room and dumped back into my bed with a somewhat snickering admonition to stay there.

And stay there I did. Snuggled down in my bed under the streetlight’s glow on the Hardy Boys poster I kissed each night before sleeping, I would imagine the passengers’ adventures on Fantasy Island. Each of them stepping down off the plane in her deep v-neck silk blouses and wide brim hats and his crisp linen suits. And as I lie there slowly falling to sleep I would craft for myself their stories, the six-year-old version of their vacations. Perhaps here lies the seed of this very blog and all the hundreds of pages of stories and poems already written and those yet to come.

But back to the shag carpet. It was not really always about watching more TV past my bedtime. It was about the not missing something. About the companionship of sitting in the room with my parents. It was about the not-being-aloneness that would encourage me to slither along the floor, silent, until I was almost underneath the foot of my parents’ bed. Content most times just to lie there and listen to my mom turning pages until she fell asleep. Content just to hear them both breathing.