No guarantees

Who was it that said, no guarantees? When it was first used, and under what circumstances? Imagine sitting around the hearth fire, stone walls singed with smoke and facing the empty spit, mid-winter, the world outside dressed in white, blinding even in fog. The stomach protesting under the fur parka, you stand at the ready with spear in hand but with nowhere to go, except forward into the snow where an uncertain future awaits: either the full belly or the full sleep of death. The cold coagulating your dreams into the shape of ice crystals, and stars bursting in your veins. But the insistence of the empty belly makes itself understood in no uncertain terms. It wants out now, regardless of the risk, taking tentative steps into the cloud-white snow where you sink into the purity of winter, the light edging its return. The days widening by an infinitesimal fraction each day. You step forth anticipating the kill, for to kill is to live. But there are no guarantees, only the hunger and the cold. Soon the snowmelt will bring the game back to your door moving you into action.

1/6/06 Writers' Group

Every note counts (better wait than never, said the dyslexic)

It was a slip of the eye, I misread a sticker. Too tired to untangle its confusing message, I went along with it, laughed at the inner joke: Vote for Note. But then today, all my  notes, votes, vowels, nouns and verbs are a play on the syllables of the tongue—to the point where my eyeteeth are more like seeing-eye-dogs in the braille backwaters of the mind during the day after the night before Little Christmas—The Epiphany. Every note counts.T ell that to the drab female blackbirds whistling drills in the marsh. Today the sea and sky were brilliant beyond belief, everything righting itself after the storm. She sang her haunting call, it penetrated a place somewhere beyond language—a drowsy awakening and collapsing of time. I was 4, I was 12, 19, 30, 45, 53 in that marsh, listening to her plaintive song. The realization that every note counts, whether song, or mnemonic device, or word-counting notes in the marsh. For a moment I was that drab bird clinging to saltgrass, singing every note, making it count. I voted for her continuance.

1/6/2006 Writers' Group

"Cactus Heart" photo tryptic for SSU's Art from the Heart show

"Cactus Heart" photo tryptic for SSU's Art from the Heart show, the date says 2006, but this may have been a later entry. It didn't sell. I have another heart that did sell, aquarelle on morillaboard. I guess this was too weird.

Mabli, Neil, his nephew David, and I visited the USS Hornet in September, 2006 (I think). The middle image is a pipe assembly from the ship. The cactus was from a school garden in Fremont where I was teaching poetry (probably 2005), the kiwi was from the Monterey Market, super cheap because of the so-called deformity.