I like mountain gear. Always have. Your life depends on it so it’s no place to go cheap.
This is the gear you need for five days of mixed snow and rock route in the North Cascades. Weather permitting, we will do the north ridge of Forbidden Peak. If the weather gods are having a bad hair day or two, we will move over to the drier side of the range and do something else.
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Inherit my smile, my thundering joy
a tone ring of banjo, a remnant of sin
that you may sing like a blues woman
We are not what we imagined
penny whistle marks
on southering gales
You with almond eyes
who listens like the biblical Mary
to what leans in from far Cassiopeia
taking a pounding in the waves
you are meant for greatness of heart
like the lion-hearted woman who gave you to us
(First published by Dead Snakes.)
Tell me I’m late.
Tell me the house isn’t burning down.
Tell me again how selfish I am.
Clouds carry rivers across the sky.
Marines carry their dead home. Always.
Do you carry more than a hat and gloves?
I live in Portland, Oregon where you can hardly swing a cat without hitting a poet. Here are a some poems people have written on the sidewalks in my neighborhood.
“Action is eloquence.”
–William Shakespeare
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Tagged action is eloquence, literature, religion, shakespeare, spirituality, william shakespeare
Where Whitman
called you lover
Bukowski called
you fucker
They both meant
the same thing
“The only thing a skinny-legged woman is good for is to run get a big-legged woman.”
–bluesman Sonny Terry (1911 -1986)
Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
“Dad, I get all the dating advice I need from my brother. At least he went to high school in the same century.”
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We cleaned out my late mother’s safety deposit box yesterday. It was a bracing reminder of the brevity of life. Things that were so important they needed to be held for decades in a vault with four feet thick walls now seem like a collection of things squirrels hide in trees and then forget.
Posted in journal
What’s the news, I ask?
hoping for a different answer
than 1280 gun deaths
since Sandy Hook.
The earth is all that lives.
And the earth does not last.
We sit in a hillside, by the Greasy Grass.
And our little shadow lies out in the blades of grass until sunset.
–Sioux tribal poem
Is this fruit or biscuit?
I was rugged,
I was drugged,
I was good blood.
I was a protein, a vein,
Like a lemony demon,
I was no stranger to strange fruit.
Like a finger dipped in ginger,
Like a bound wound,
Like a banquet,
Like a bouquet.
My dying mother
loves watching television
with the sound off
The TV becomes a train window–
compressing life into fast snippets
bite sized kibbles
infusing the moment
like lavender in old black tea
She laughs at it
points out things I can’t see
reads the news crawler proudly
the way she used to read signs
on the highway out loud
driving everyone else
in the car crazy
The TV highway goes
wherever she wants it to go
past president Obama’s son
and the car with bright feathers,
the endless river of bright words
never fails to amuse her
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.
–Robert Frost
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The world from earth to sky shows itself hostile to genius.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh, the lies I have told to my own energies!
There isn’t time for good taste.
Never be ashamed of the strange.
–Theodore Roethke
I told a great artist today how her art affected me. Betty LaVette, the great lady of soul, was on a panel at Wordstock in Portland, talking about her new memoir.
I told her after the panel how electrified I was by her performance at the 2012 Portland Blues festival. I had seen her friends and contemporaries, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, but never understood what soul singing meant until I heard her sing. Her singing is full of humanity, generosity and unlimited depth in what the human voice is capable of expressing.
She held my hand, kept saying “oh baby, thank you baby,” the way we all do when someone has really listened to us from the heart.
Posted in journal
In the New York Times today — somebody found a 4th century papyrus fragment that says Jesus had a wife.
Well, no shit.
Who did he kiss repeatedly in front of the others?
Who was the only one who had the stones to stick by him all the way to the cross, to his burial and beyond?
Who saw him first as risen and was given instructions to tell the others?
Who pissed off the other apostles so much they eventually whined to Jesus about loving her more than them?
And his typically acerbic response:
“why do I not love you like her?”
Who so irritated and threatened Rome with her prominence that the 6th century pope Gregory declared her a prostitute?
Like they say, true love endures all things.
And if anybody knew true love when he saw it–and was a man in full–it was Jerusalem Slim.
–Burl Whitman
Life –
I am of both of your directions
Somehow remaining hanging downward the most
but strong as a cobweb in the wind.
I exist more with the cold glistening frost.
But my beaded rays have the colors
I’ve seen in a paintings —
ah life, they have cheated you.
–Marilyn Monroe
