Много лет тому назад

That means, a long time ago.  There were many things, a long time ago, as many as there are today.  That’s a fact.

Thinking about…

I’m thinking about taking the train down to Warburg today.  I cleaned the apartment yesterday, so it would be best for me to avoid living here all day in order to preserve order for at least twenty-four hours……

Why the hell do I use ellipsis so often?

Maybe because this is how I see myself-

Poetry and its Ramifications

if you’re really honest in your poetry, you leave yourself wide open to criticism, you hurt other peoples’ feelings, you hurt your own.  I am that kind of a poet. A poem is a linguistic manifestation of emotions.  I don’t share the tranquility I feel when ironing a shirt or loading the dishwasher, but I do give you glimpses of both the mania and the depression associated with the beginning and the end of human relationships.  The middle is something we all know.  It’s usually the reason for the end.  Today, I’m going to give you two middles, which one would you choose?

 

I. Mountains, rivers, country roads
Barflies, bards, and bats in the living room

we never sail or fly together
but our canoe is well-used
as is our tent and our bank account…..

II. Conversations on a country path
Coffee, pastry, language lessons

we never went to Paris
but we know the Rheinland well

III.  M Street and a mountain lake

The rest of them are too short to describe, although numerous.  These three suffice to describe the way I’ve lived my life at the middle points of relationships.  You may have already read the beginnings and the ends, or may have experienced them.  Fire, ice, and other cataclysmic nouns, surrounded by adjectives rich enough to make you pray before a porcelain god….. 

I still haven't gotten a clue

Which is different from not having a clue.  Something about the Heforder Vision pageant is still unclear.  There is most likely an underlying Catholic reason for this.  With all of my time in Catholic schools and all of my reading of Catholic literature, I am a Catholic by birth only.  My friend, who was ordained a Catholic priest in the La Salette order and spent 11 years in the service of the church, but who is now a Mennonite and a counselor in a hospital, once told me my thinking was too intellectual for me to be a practicing Catholic.  I've been thinking about this, since I am really not a practicing anything.  The closest I come to religion is meditation, and that is not something disciplined, and results in short stories and character sketches and flights of fantasy, more so than any spirtiual enlightenment, unless love alone is enlightenment.

I took Thomas Merton's mantra to heart, some forty or more years ago.  God is Love.  God is Life.  God is Light.  For me, these are the three most important elements of existence.  We all think we understand the first (a notable exception shall remain unnamed). The second needs no explanation.  We experience it, and then it is gone, unless we believe otherwise.  The third is, for me, finding and sharing knowledge and experience.  And so is my religion.  Higher power.

Waiting for the clue...

I'm sitting around my intellect, drinking writing, while brewing a pot of my own fiction.  I've moved into Paolo Coelho's world for awhile, befriending his mystics and pilgrims and teachers and trying to find my own.  My old friend Marion has become a Zahir, in Coelho's sense of the word.  I see her in places we've been together and places where we've not.  It's not an obsession as in Coelho's book.  I don't seek her out, but by the same token, I'm not seeking to remove her from consciousness.  I wonder about my motives.  Possibilities include loneliness, love, lack of ambition, and lust.  I don't really feel lonely, except for conversation on something other than football, wurflen, or skat and put in half an hour to an hour at Giovanni's to satisfy the minimum requirements of human contact.  It may be lack of ambition, because of the amount of ambition I'm using in travelling, research, and writing.  Her memory keeps me company there. It may also be love, but something akin to the Platonic. And it could just be all of the reading, two to three books a week, most of which entail some form of man-woman relationship.

The thought of a new relationship has occured to me, and although I've met some attractive and intelligent women in the last few months, I haven't felt a real attraction to any of them.  The course ahead is to wait for the omens, follow the signs, let it fall into my lap.  If it doesn't, then life remains uncomplicated.  The perfect solution would be for her to just say let's go back to the way we were.  I could handle that quite nicely.  A good friend who likes to walk and travel and learn.

White Russians

Au Lecteur (thanks Baudelaire)
thanks to chance (not the gardener, but the phenomenon) i have encountered several russian, byelrussian, and polish women over the last few months.  this is for them.

dark eyes
bright eyes
smiles too which disarm
would they would as well disrobe
my russian is too shy to ask
perhaps i should speak to them in english

it is of interest to my readers
that the older i am the more interesting
to younger women
if you are young
(for now, that means over thirty and under fifty,
although both borders are acceptable)

i am not seeking love
but will accept it
if the wind is right
and the sea is calm

dark eyes
and accents that make my german
seem almost perfect
sit with me in the cafe, my reader,
sit and drink them in