Orange orbs cut with fearful faces: Burning brightly - daily & nightly - As menacing medicine for the cringe-impaired, The ones who never get scared -- unless a banal ball, blazing & brainless, (and in a manner all but painless) replaced the head of their town's barber.
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
One foot in the river. One foot on the shore. Both feet sunk in the mud. The fisherman casts his net with perfect flick and spin, muck extruding between toes. The sling is the one quick part of the movement: quick, but unrushed. The net is hauled back, slowly and methodically, pressing out excess water while offering no escape route. How many casts per day? As many as are necessary. There are other fishers, out on languidly rocking boats, casting out in the river. And in rivers everywhere: in the Mekong, the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Mississippi Delta. Everywhere, they are casting.
When setting sunlight warms
silvery tree trunks &
mangrove reeds,
and they alternate with
deep shadows,
I finally understand
the tiger’s camouflage.
I click on Google Maps;
a pin highlights for a cemetery,
and, here, I stumble upon
graveyard reviews.
These reviews intrigue me because
it seems to me that if one is capable
of writing a cemetery review,
then one is unqualified.
And, if one is qualified to comment
on the caliber of an eternal resting place,
then one is unlikely to be capable of
posting a review.
I read one of the one-star reviews
and see that the reviewer's principal complaint
is an overabundance of "pocong."
"What is a 'Pocong?'" you may ask.
It is a Javanese ghost that takes up
occupancy in death shrouds.
Why is there a Javanese ghost
infestation in a cemetery 4000 kilometers
from Java, and -- as near as I can tell --
with zero Javanese occupants?
The review does not say,
but I love that someone panned
a cemetery based on the presence
of foreign ghosts
[and not because it is simultaneously
phasmophobic and xenophobic.]
But because it shows an unbridled commitment
to one's imagination that is usually
only seen among children.
i walk through the graveyard,
subtracting birth from death dates
to determine age at death.
there’s a correlation between
speed of calculation &
the degree of tragedy.
the faster i can determine an age,
the more disconcerting the death:
like the girl — 1990 to 2008.
the 89 year old man who survived WWII
service in the Burmese jungle
doesn’t raise as many questions.
The mountain
was so long ago.
Yet, I feel its pulse
throbbing under foot --
into my ever-loving sole.
[You thought I was going to say:
"everlasting soul," didn't you?
Do you think my soles
inconsequential in comparison
to my soul?]
Nothing is firmer or finer
than the point at which
I touch (& know) the earth,
than the point which
presses the real,
and, thus, by which I have
evidence that I live.
[The ghost feels nothing in its soles --
if such a being exists.]
These lowly old soles connect me
to all that is, was, and ever shall be.
How to pick a tree
that one can be resigned
to sit under until
Enlightenment?
If the choice is hard,
you are not ready.
If the choice is easy,
you are not ready.
If there is no choice,
perhaps, you're ready.
Waiting.
A space between.
Neither doing,
nor resting.
There's something in waiting
that lies beyond being.
An expectation without promise:
As with Vladimir & Estragon,
waiting on Beckett's Godot, or
the Old Man waiting
at Gao's Bus Stop,
There may not be a payoff.
Whatever it is in "waiting" that
distinguishes it from "being"
or "resting,"
it sucks!
All the excitement of expectation,
nullified by the possibility
that nothing will happen --
nothing good, nothing bad...
just a soul-sucking nothing.
fingers of forest interspersed with fingers of pasture -- the hidden & the exposed -- two kinds of danger: being seeable & being unable to see. is the mind fearful of being exposed the same as the mind fearful of being confined?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 