Kerouac, coffee and the original scroll

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road—the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

--Song of the Open Road/Walt Whitman

Rush of wind like water
fresh from east window
soft light, budding trees
sweet LaCoste perfume.
Inspiration.

Wrinkled cotton sheets
sandy brown rhinoceros skin
fall into soft flannel.

Newspaper,
hot coffee, dark roast French press
boiling shower
then,
Kerouac.

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Kerouac.
What you did to stretch your mind, was it worth it?
47-years seems not enough.
What I’d give to talk to you.
Remember apple pie, ice cream and Iowa,
The boys from Minnesota,
Denver and the middle of the night on the way to the coast?
You may have arrived but did you every truly get there?

Air like sawdust, raw road nights, the sun red at three.  Your poetry is mine.

What you said about “the last thing,” that’s what I think about. We keep trying but we never get it, that’s what you said, right? Hemingway and wineskin's and swimming in the ocean, and eating and making love and sleeping and writing under the shade of great trees in Africa.  That must be part of it.

Kerouac.
There must be a softness in this life.
There are comfortable places from my youth. The back of the Charger in somewhere North Dakota, dad at the wheel, mom leaning over the seat to check on me, one window rolled down.

Whitman says he wouldn’t want the constellations any nearer.
I remember the creak of the camper door, bonfire to the left, cottonwood wind, stars and thunderstorms and stories told deep into the night.

Grandma says I’d be crazy to be alone.
I asked if she ever thought of it,
of finding someone again.
She paused.
I don’t know if she feels like crying,
her face and eyes tightened for moments.
“No, I was too old,” she said with a lost look.

Kerouac.
I remember this conversation when, breaking apart,
trying to save the fibers of my soul,
the old priest said
“You are ok now, all there is is the air around you.”
I remember thinking,
nothing can get me but my thoughts,
nothing but my thoughts.

Move, move, move, you are always in motion.
Back and forth across the quilt that is America,
how else would you know red baseball hats are standard
wear for North Dakota farm boys,
or Wild West Week in old Cheyenne,
or a badlands blizzard?

You said everything you’d ever known or ever would know is one,
like the earth and logs and sand that flow from Montana
to the gulf in the life-pulsing Mississippi.

You said there is a purity in motion.
Help me wonder, is there grace in standing still?
Was your life pure being, or was it altered? And what about Neal?
Somewhere comes the voice, “Everything will be alright tomorrow, alright tomorrow.”
It’s always tomorrow.

Kerouac.
They guy playing the alto that night—the guy that got IT, the guy that filled our emptiness with substance…you knew all along, didn’t you?
Our passions are such a fleeting secret.
We all are one.
As you say, “the road is life.”

So in North Dakota when the sun goes down and I sit overlooking the restless Missouri watching the wide sky over the western horizon
and sense all of that raw open land that summons my curiosity
and sense of adventure and I think of all the people in between where I am and where my thoughts end, and in the badlands I know by now the purple-pink sky must be meeting the jagged tops of sage-clay buttes, which is just before nightfall blankets all of us and darkens the Little Missouri and other forgotten places and nobody knows what the next day will bring to any of us besides another day grown old, I think of Jack Kerouac, I even think of his mother alone in that apartment and the son she lost too soon, I think of Jack Kerouac, I think of Jack Kerouac.


Jack—“I cried for all of us. There is no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all this.”

Night Run

While you were watching tv, reading, tucked in
sleeping
I was breathing midnight air.
Legs stretch out ahead
sinful soul pounds pavement
hopes, dreams, lazy lies of the day
escape my mind like
stars moving behind clouds.

Streets abandoned but for the delivery driver,
the hooded figure walking a dog,
stoplights twitching.
I hear my breath, my footsteps, my now quiet conscience.
Two miles becomes four.

On such a solitary night
I feel the hearts of many.
Running in darkness, blurred by shadows,
faceless, nameless, free.

"The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France:"
--Night Drive
Seamus Heaney/Opened Ground

Life everywhere is life

Cottonwood leaves emerge from melting snow,
elm leaves, meditative pools of water,
viscid mud,
hills numbed brown
sky rife with geese barking for home.

Have you seen the shapes of those leaves?
Perfect scattered puzzle pieces,
prairie carpet.

The river moves south, suspicious brow
raised, water churning rippled with natures sparklers.

Trees remain skeletons-
branched arteries interrupt blue sky
so soon to change.

Meanwhile geese continue in triumph—
wave after wave against feathered clouds,
voices rise up with life and hope.

Do we ever sing this way,
move with such purpose
so sure of where were going?

I know enough to immitate,
to listen,
feel breeze against faded face,
to spot deer tracks
stretch toward the sky
and allow my voice to join
this gallant flat noted symphony of life.

"Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external."
Fyodor Dostoevsky/Letter to his brother Mikhail

Return to the Tamarac

“So now, Beowulf, I adopt you in my heart as a dear son.”--Hrothgar
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney translation


My grandma grew up in northwestern Minnesota. Her mother, my great-grandmother, was a city girl moved to the farm.

I have a picture of this place in my mind. Grandma says it was a two-story within walking distance of the Tamarac River. Her bedroom was the top floor. The north facing window looked out on the river. To the west a large window opened inward at the middle like saloon doors. Imagine the sunsets, breezes, stars and thunderstorms that come alive from that view.

Grandma’s company is a safe place when my soul is tired and restless. So is the image of the farm, and the life that went on there. They didn’t eat much beef because grandpa wouldn’t slaughter a cow. He didn’t like the way it trembled for so long after. So that job fell to the boys when they got older. And they seemed to think it ok.

They did have chickens. When grandma was little they took one chick inside the house to help it heal. Grandma says after she had healed and grown and started to lay her eggs she would climb up the steps to the house and lay them inside—right in the same place they had taken care of her.

There was a goose, too. As a gosling it injured its wing. Great-grandma, the city girl, took a needle and thread and sewed up the wound. No kidding. Then she put the goose in with the chickens to help it heal. She feared the other geese would play too rough.

A bond developed. Every morning one hen would walk down to the river with the goose. While he swam, she would walk back and forth pecking away at the shoreline.

They moved the house into Stephen years ago—a new one stands in its place.
The view isn’t the same. I wonder if anyone even notices, and if the thunderstorms smell as lush, and how often in her mind grandma walks down to the river to pace the shoreline before she turns back toward home.