DUNG FLOWER
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MONSTERS
While fixing sliced apples with yogurt, messages arrive for david@ghostmail.inf. The Inbox, attached magnetically to the refrigerator, holds small slips of paper for the shopping list.
This method has advantages. Messages are brief. For instance:
Show me anyone whose years, months, moons and days are not numbered.
Maybe civilization will die in its sleep.
Method actors in a global sitdis.
Good old boy, old boy, old.
Call them compressed files, expand at will. But the hourglass of words can't fit galaxies through the eye of a needle. Suns, planets, dark matter or other dimensions scarcely qualify. Not even a clue.
Nonetheless, two front yard birds and Bushy Tail suddenly arrive as if on . . .
Demonstrating how the mind, a rhyme machine, fills in.
Through a crack in the fence, just a sliver, a neon bit of rose appears, amplified in evening's slanting light, a scattering of wood shake roof shading out to dark monkish brown. Those good old boy things, as civilization dreams.
October country slumbers through recollected hills, colliding with a digital thermometer at 96 degrees. October pumpkins, make-believe monsters standing guard at bowls of candy for witches, kids dressed like computers.
That crack is a brown dwarf lens for the red planet called “rose”. Bushy tail comes closer, tentative along the rock border, looking quizzical. OK to climb into the feeder?
Old boy? (Kind of freaky when humans talk right at you, but he's getting used to it.)
We live it. Animals here who cannot conceive the inconceivable are awake. Sounds of muffled traffic, TVs, jets overhead, clouds in a clear blue ignorant sky, leaves falling one by one and a small white feather drifting slowly. Hot hell bare feet burning. A fly investigates my thumb-beat in tides that pulse rhythmically -- protocol for david@ghostmail.inf, delivered to my shirt pocket.
Lady Hummingbird is perched on the cable TV line, grooming and watching me write. In a presumed reality, the moonscape of habitual thought, one can trace gulley washes, well worn routes to survival.
Squirrel climbs the inverted scroll work candelabra post, right to where sunflower seeds are in the inverted base, conveniently a shallow dish. And the front yard birds arrive. And a younger squirrel with scrawny tail, who stops by the water dish. The place is getting crowded.
Back there on the moon, where craters mock the waters of life, having moved on. What use were they? From a distance it seems beautiful, illuminating even Plato's cave, where shadows play on a back wall over bright colored graffiti
And an orchid at sunset.
JOSHING
My sister replies: “Summer will end.”
Not yet. Halfway through October the country’s in a heat wave.
Tabitha stops wide eyed at the living room door and will not come out to sit. Yesterday's mossy shingles, soft dark monkish brown, are gone.
Muggy air while sitting. There was laughter, joshing and bickering, though I wasn't paying any particular attention (not hard since I know three words of Spanish --but I do know work.) We hear the backup beeper, the distinctive ping of a diesel engine. A plane flying low in the overcast sky. And the sound of nails being ripped back, along with sheets of roofing paper, softly crackling.
The trees know it's time for fall. Leaves are dropping like hammers and Skil saw cuts.
I sweep the patio clean, making a small addition for the compost. And the reason? Not that it will accomplish much, but after all it seems appropriate. There are sutras and temples and our back yard
Coffee is coffee again. When all the noise is over Tabitha will come out, and squirrel and the birds, though they too were wide eyed, will return. Summer will blend.
CALAMITY
Two forces of Yin and Yang are Consumption and Creation.
Birds eat seeds and sing, not too much or too little. Some humans appreciate the songs and bring seeds; others ignore birds; some talk to them. Birds don't get fat, but humans do. Big fat birds are shown in cartoons that entertain humans. Real birds can be trained: “Polly wants a cracker.” Humans can be trained as torturers. Somehow the logic of it breaks down.
Speculations are not found in seeds. Mr. Hummingbird arrives, hovering by the brim of my hat, then on to the feeder. A leaf blower is dusting off our neighbor's brand new shingles. For the moment, to balance out green tea, I have to visit the compost.
Big dove wings in like an airliner, overshadowing small front yard birds. Young squirrel is next, for a drink from the water dish. The logic of it is, with all this company, who needs an ocean cruise? Retirement is a category. Who needs all the stuff that ends up in landfills to poison the earth and people, stifling the air and cramming freeways? It is pathetic. What the world needs but seems to have no use for is simply right here. The Yin and Yang of it can't be packaged and sold. .
Wool gathering? Then show me the edges of the universe.
The sound of one hand clapping? Clap!
It's not happiness or unhappiness. And it's not a big deal. When the time comes, it's nothing to do with time.
They're all looking at me and I have to refrain from speaking. This moment of our climate calamity wears a benign face. There are ancient stories, of times before we got clever enough to tip the balance. A picture (in black and white of course) of the first telephone exchange, rows of women with patch cords. And then, in living color, the first bomb at Hiroshima. Assorted Capitol buildings. Multilayered freeways.
The dove in the feeder is ousted by a climbing squirrel, who then pointlessly returns to the ground. All the world in the imagined compass of this back yard. Having escaped the compass of time, cruise ships, usefulness of Tin Bang considerations . . .
Clap! Good old boy!
FENCE VINE NEWS
What goes around brings a crowd. First one bird listens, learns, and drinks from the water dish. Then a squirrel. A dove shows up to get some seeds. Then another. Then front yard birds, a crowd of twitter bits, two squirrels now, four doves, but no partridge in a pear tree since there isn't one in this back yard.
There is Tabitha, however, who comes to sit, and quite still – usually. How quickly the crowd scatters, with a flapping, clattering racket.
She's the only animal left now, besides this gnarled reporter who chooses descriptors for sound more than sense. But come to think of it, I rather like “gnarled.” It really does do the job for arthritic index finger joint knobs. The word is used for bristle cone pines hundreds of years old. These are pleasant thoughts stirred up from subconscious sediments such as everyone has. Great reaches across fictional planes of time. White hairs, now showing on my head in much finer lines than Picasso would paint, make a venerable sage, and I also like them because venerability is such a joke. Laughter the best medicine. Such as anyone knows.
A leaf clatters onto this sheet. As the breeze stirs, my pen runs out of ink. One might imagine the rate of increase as letters disappear . . .
The new pen is blue ink, brown leaves are its subject, sound its substance. Venerable philosophies have arisen in just this way. Anyone can know this.
