Daytona Beach 22.9.05: Skull Beneath the Skin. And God?

Writing from Daytona: and now another very fierce hurricane, Rita, is approaching the shores of Texas. If two (or more?) catastrophic hurricanes hit this season, what will the consequences to the U.S. be, I wonder?

Katrina showed what a thin, illusory line exists between our “civilization” and chaos. Watching footage of New Orleans after the storm was almost like watching footage from Nazi Germany: glittering Berlin cabarets become grim Auschwitz death camps.

It may be that what these hurricanes are showing us is that, as a nation, we live a much closer step than we realize to the gaping chasm of incivility. We speak of the decline of civility as if it’s a lapse of manners—the failure to send a thank-you note for a dinner invitation.

But civility may, in the long run, be about something much deeper: the ability of people to live together without murdering one other. It’s easy to grin and bow when times are good. It’s when things fall apart that the skull beneath the grin shows itself.

If hurricanes—a series of them—disrupt the oil industry and decimate major urban areas connected to that industry, we may, all of us, see privation and need unprecedented in the U.S. in many years. And with the disruptions and dislocations, a decline in civility that surpasses anything the manners mavens have even begun to dream of.

If nothing else, Katrina and events preceding it have shown us that the robber barons of the oil industry—Bush & Co.—have themselves, not the body politic and civil society, at heart. They’ll gladly take the money and run, leaving the rest of us high and dry—or low and wet, as the case may be.

The ferocity with which Rita is arriving on the heels of Katrina makes me wonder. It makes me wonder about the mysterious spike in oil prices this summer. It makes me wonder about the war in Iraq.

How much of hurricane devastation can be predicted? I know that meteorology is an inexact science. I also know that scientists have predicted the development of a period of proliferating—and more ferocious—hurricanes.

Though Bush & Co. have pooh-poohed global warming (it’s their oil industry that is largely responsible for it, after all), could they have known more than the rest of us about these coming storms? And their disruption of oil production and delivery?

Sadly, in times of disaster, the rich inevitably find a way to enrich themselves more. They’re already doing so with Katrina and will do so after Rita. And at the expense of all of us, I fear.

And God? The biblical questions of good, evil, justice? St. Simon Wiesenthal, pray for us.

Daytona Beach 7.7.05 and 10.7.05: Flea-Free Beds, The Screamer and the Chatterer

Traveling: en route to Daytona Beach for meetings. In the company of travelers: that rather banal phrase somehow resonates for me today. The journey of life, in which we are never alone. I’m aware especially of how ever other traveler shares my aches, pains, angst—in his or her own way.

It’s consoling to think this. I look at men as fat and aged as I, and I think, “I’m not the only one on this planet who bears some pain.”

At the end of the day, every Chaucerian pilgrim has tired feet, weary eyes, perhaps an aching head. We all long for a comfortable bed free of fleas, and, we hope, without too many bedfellows. And now my pen runs out of ink.

+ + + + +

The trip: I had the ill fortune to be seated not once but twice in front of misbehaving children. On today’s flight from Cincinnati to Little Rock, I was in front of a Screamer—a carrot-topped little tyke who was already warming up in the waiting room.

There, she toddled to a bank of pay phones beside me and proceeded to pull them off their hooks as her indulgent papa watched, well, indulgently. Having taken them from their cradles, she then banged them stoutly against the sides of the phone booths. Nary word from papa, sitting splay-legged and grinning across the way.

As the flight neared, she was put into a stroller and commenced to scream, sharply and with apparent connection to her ensconcement in the stroller. The screams were absolutely ear-splitting and erratically timed, so that you couldn’t predict when they’d come and so brace yourself. They were obviously sheer theater.

And so it continued on the plane. I’d just begin to sink into my book when a spine-snapping shriek would commence right behind me. Intermittently, the shrieks would be replaced by sharp kicks, right in my kidneys.

I finally had enough of the latter and leaned back suddenly and viciously just as she launched a kick. Perhaps her father, in whose lap she was sitting, realized then I didn’t welcome the kidney jabs, because they ceased.

What can he have been thinking?

From Atlanta to Daytona, a little boy 4 or 5 sat behind us and me and spoke/sang/vocalized non-stop in a high, voluble monotone. He was a Chatterer. When he ran out of words to say, he flapped his lips in a machine-running sound brbrbrbr, or sang a version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” with words known only to himself, apparently.

His nanny, as it appeared the woman with him was, sat beside him murmuring dreamy replies and never once informing him that she could hear perfectly well if he lowered his voice 8 decibels.

The monologue went something like this:

God! That puddle is so big I’d have to put on my bathing suit to go through it!!

We’re so high the houses look like pieces in an Erector set.

God! That cloud’s a tyrannosaurus rex!!

Brbrbrbr. I’ve been lurking on the nailroad, all the liplong way.

Is it supper or lunch? When did we eat breakfast? We got up so early, didn’t we?

Brbrbrbr. I’ve been snurking on the tailtoad, all the middling ray.

Does the sea go on forever? Can I see dolphins and sharks from here?

God! I can’t wait to get my hands on that beach!!! No supper for me, just a sandwich on the beach . . . .

On and on and on, until we landed and the beach claimed him . . . .

Port Orange, Florida 2.7.06 and 3.1.07: Light and Dark, Constantly and Everywhere.

A tree in the back garden—kind?—of which I can see only the trunk from inside or from the back porch. It’s ornamented with the thick tendrils of an old vine that someone must have killed to save the tree’s life. The vine, running like a gray stream up the trunk, is beautiful.

There are two trunks flowing together. All is flow actually—vine and tree.

And somehow emblematic of my life, so that the trunks of the tree draw my attention. They catch every shaft of the sunlight that is so fierce here on non-rainy days. . . .

+ + + + +

The banana tree blown over by the Christmas day storm: Steve had laid it across the bottom of the trees already there. They now look like a tired old lady who, at the end of a long day, has rolled her stockings down to her ankles, as she sinks into an easy chair to rest.

Sun coming up through a gap in the trees to the southeast. The high palmetto and dark pine catch its light and obscure it. The oak tree, festooned by vines, is set afire by light.

This life: the interplay of light and dark, constantly and everywhere.

In Midwinter: An Advent Poem from New Orleans

Winter sky.
Bare branches
Backs arched up, out.
A cat licking its paws
In the yard next door.
The pink of slavequarter walls
Made nacreous by failing day.

And I.

What voice sings within me
And in the glory of shifting light
Atop the oak, amidst its limbs?

Why does the common grace
Of closing year
Return me to myself and hope
Amidst the ruins?

Out of the East war threatens.
Westward ride the Horsemen.

And I sit
Wait
Wonder.

The Journaling Scholar

The dreams we cherish most, they're like stones well-worn by constant rubbing of our hands. But black, pedestrian, not glamorous. And we keep them in tattered old felt bags, afraid to bring them out too often. Who knows when the magic will wear off, as it has with everything else in our lives?


I write this by the yellow deck light,
As I sit under my redbud canopy.
The heart-shaped leaves reach my knees,
One after another on thin, recumbent branches.
A few~~not many~~cicadas sing.
Through the green before me
Someone's yard light glimmers quietly
Like the lamp that lures the children
To the old witch in the wood.


The only breeze is from the air-conditioner motor
That just kicked on noisily, obtrusively.
Otherwise, so still it is, so quiet,
So removed from hustle and bustle.
Dogs in the distance bark dreamily,
Out of sheer obligation,
For no reason at all.

Poems from Nassau, Bahamas

Totus Mundus Exilium Est


This day:
This all-I-ever-see,
My eyes unhinged from urgency
As ghouls grin through my door:


This wind rustling wild lace skirts
Over the island, atop Fox Hill
On the monks' bare heads.


Nassau at church,
Repenting the poinciana's scarlet hair,
Palm trees welcoming whatever comes
Sundays, sun days,
Their own way,
Fronds the aboriginal shutter,
Now permitting, now occluding
Play of air and light,
Coconuts dangling in the tree's scrotum,
Emitting their musky man smell
All over New Providence.


+ + + + +

Talking Bahamian


In a word is everything.


Redolence:


Of jasmine haunting the night air
That troubles this island hilltop
While sun dies.


Clarity:


Of the crystalline moon
Suppliant before the light,
Riding on its side
To the sky's ridgepole.


Enchantment:


Of ghosts from slave coffles,
Chains clanking all the land over,
White eyes shining endlessly
In the night,
In the jasmine's bloom,
In the moon's clean edge.

Frankfurt 5.8.1998: Homeward Bound, Bound by Home

Sitting in Frankfurt airport waiting for the flight to Atlanta, which is not to board for another two hours. Thinking of how I hate endings, have most problems with them in anything I wrote. And yet I seem fatally attracted to them, too, or at least to the closure they represent. That restlessness at the core of my being, waiting and seeking for what?

Traveling to Europe this time felt like some kind of end—an end in a beginning. And now here the trip is over, and I’m asking end questions again, with no sense of where they’re going. Of where I’m going . . . .

+ + + + +

Just taking off, an hour late, to discover my pen has leaked everywhere. Hands patched with black, as is this paper.

The people behind me—man, woman—have been giggling like teenagers since before the flight began. I’m disposed not to like them because she kicked my seat with unnecessary aggressiveness several times before we were in the air. And the sexual tension between them is so undisguised, so adolescent. Graceless . . . .

He’s a native of the Florida panhandle, a career soldier and “brat,” whose “dad” was an officer. (I know more about them than I’d choose to know.) He persistently uses a “have went” construction. He’s proud to be an Amurkun, and laid it on thick when the flight attendant told him he could be nothing else with that accent.

She’s a German citizen, but speaks a flawless colloquial anywhere-cool Americanese. She’s going to “the States” because of an 85-year old somebody (grandmother?) who needs assistance.

He speaks, and she brays falsely at what he says. She speaks, and he laughs suavely at her jokes. From what I overheard, I’d imagined they were in their 30s at best. But I’ve just gotten up to go to the bathroom, and am shocked to see they’re 50 or so.

And so it goes. Homeward bound. And bound by home.