White Mountain Deep

It may be sky but it might be the wind, 

leaving the tent at night in the cold and then not for long. 

You have to get up to hear the coyotes
 howling in the cross riffs and minor notes

across the stars interminable. 

I wade through the night chest deep.

 Turn, restless, turn again. Left side, right side,

 back, hope to get escape with dreams, 

wake minutes later, there is no watch, 

but if you can get beneath, like the covers, 

the sleeping bag, the red Hudson's Bay blanket,

 the shirts over feet frozen at the bottom of the tent,

 then the wind can dance its pile drives,

 strokes of mountains leeward can be the dream.

The wind shakes the tent, shakes the aspen high up, descends. 

I wait to be lifted off the ground, figure to figure out something in the event, 

but then it blows off, new meaning to zephyr. 

Blow wind, crack the wind of Pentecost shake the house. 

It shakes the mountain now, 

the elk feel it, don't cry, or can't be heard. 

The wind extinguishes everything but itself. 

I know the power of fire and flood, but air is not benign.

  It blows the elk, coyotes and bear to shelter. 

It doesn't blow the stars.

  Under the tree I play them back on the closed eye screen.

 They are bright now. Orion rises late in fall. 

I count on it to bring the dawn, figure it is maybe three AM,

 which gives hope with an air mattress 

and a foot warming wife who accepts them into her thighs.

What does the foot that gets to Nirvana say to the one behind?
"Just one more step."
What does the foot in Nirvana say to the one behind?
"There's no pain hereafter."
What does the cold foot say to the hot?
"Remember me."

 What does the hand say to the foot 

when the cold foot hotfoots it into the warmth?
This goes on through the middle of the night.

 

Red Antares stares at the mountain. 

The meadow to be alive in gold is dark.

 All is light. All is bright.

 The shadows of dawn, the chow's ears,

 the smoke of the fire, coyote song,

 elk breaking notes over their knees 

for the fire of dry aspen, 

even the lonely men in their pickups 

who patrol the back forest 

where we have gone to escape the pipe lines 

and blasting sleep. 

They can't see an elk in the wood but our boys track them,

 manage not to get gored by the climacteric of want.

 The want. The eye patch. The meaning of cold. 

The trunklessness that lies fallen from fires a decade ago.

Connect and Disconnect

Silence of the disconnect. They used to say turn on, tune in. Pierced by the piercing of streets, days strayed, slept in this tune. Tuned in to what? The instant thought that says look, the handheld array. Then comes the boom, a wreck of tons of steel. Cars collide inept. Silence is not quiet. There are two. The one above the boom and the one within the thoughts that deafen. Then there is a silence that makes three.

When you lay upon your roof at night and hear the roar, see the aura of lights, it sounds like a savage celebration just far enough away. You know the two states, yourself on the roof and the maelstrom below. Descend and you will not remember the one you left. Boom, the two are one, the roof disappears. The disconnect makes separate states appear only from afar, separate from the flare. It is Las Vegas, Vanity Fair vs Solitude, Silent Thought. Thoughts are noisy enough as it is. Drown them without noise.

The two states are like the soul come to communion, come with cares, sounds, thoughts, at the best, the highest part of the connect, dreams, plans, intentions, not that the worst are left, they come too but why give place to them, they're the same as hopes and fears. This is the state of the connect.

Only disconnect! Disconnect from sound and dreaming, wondering, staring, surely by now the cell is off, Ipod still. While Beethoven is playing his Opus in A and VanGogh tramping down daisies in a blue field with a yellow sky, disconnect. While the UN is streaming live video, forests are burning, ER's are teeming, what's in front of your eyes? They are closed. The ears cannot hear. You forget yourself.

"Into the Wild" Parent-Child Crisis

In Into the Wild director Penn has a moment occur before our eyes as the boy's eyes in death cut to an imaginative reunion with his father and mother with the imagined query "whether if this reunion happened would they see the same thing I do (as he dies)?" This is all ironic, since Penn shows that the boy poisoned himself by using the wrong plant and because he couldn't cure a moose he had killed, these together cause his dementia. Abstracted these are ignorance and weakness.

Ignorance and weakness describe the young, which is all the more ironic since the body was discovered in the middle of August by moose hunters, adults who knew what they were doing, but two weeks after the boy died. Keeping the boy alive is a history of parenting, it is being in the right place at the right time. He was not. Penn says in his interview that this victim of himself had thus reached the wisdom of middle age, that is, he got to the level of Sean Penn one supposes, but it is all talk that he learned that happiness is sharing with another person. He didn't learn it. He didn't do it. He went to live in Alaska by himself, away from his family. Learning is changed behaviour. These are just words, no realization of being. He died alone.

To make us feel better about it, that all is not sacrifice and deprivation, the film is also about twirling in the cosmos. The boy raises his arms at least four times, twice on top of the bus. It looks like a substitute for praise. He is worshiping the universe? Con trails show in the sky, again and again, his answer to "prayer?" But the repeated images of the gold wristwatch on his arm are saying, "I may be a hippie, but I'm holding on to my watch." Time and material are not wisdom. Wisdom is knowing you don't know. Who said that?

In this romance at the end he wants to cross the creek to go home again, but it has become a river that traps him "in the wold" (Anglo-Saxon). Survival instincts need health and strength, prudence and a care for detail not the high skeptic. So many others are blamed for our own misery. Why not blame yourself? "No," the class said, "it was my dad."

Maelstroms come with a context and change of scene, these children found dead in their rooms at night OD'd, boys siphoning gasoline with a vacuum cleaner who receive third degree burns over 40% of their bodies, rear ending cars in front of them in the right hand lane when they check their cell phones. The noise in their heads, the bottom-deafening depth charges that steal their consciousness as they turn  those who love them into deadly rejection for the gifts they have been given. There is no silence here but noise. It is media generated. One goes to China, buys a dress, is kidnapped through a door in the dressing room and has her kidney stolen. It is the noise. They are unaware, ignorant and weak.

Another drives downtown with a friend, listening to Itunes from the garden of Eden on the box. All is one. We are safe. Two "immigrants" approach at a light, guns drawn, pistol whip them. These are the true events happening around the boy I protect. Med techs inoculate for bacterial meningitis from shared spit, but not for late night texts in bed, vid games, emails and photos of the flesh. Listen to baseball, a radio or read, but make your bed offline, silent.

Here is a postscript on parenting. We have pretended we didn't know how. But we do. Compare it to a neighbor who runs a limo company and fills your parking lot with his overflow. Your lot is not posted. It has never been. One wants to operate on a neighborly basis. So go over to communicate this, but met with calumny, put up signs real fast, contract a towing company and see to it cars get towed. Guess what? They don't park there anymore. That's respect. The way to demand respect for boundaries works in the real world and in families. Idiots run the psychology department. They are afraid you will “alienate” your children but so  if they are injured they get to treat them and if they die the psychology department gets even more money. Stand up. If the children don't like it they can let you know. You can be tested. After all, mortgage rates won't rise. You can make thousands, millions on your home so don't hold back. Buy now, save later. This means die now, pay later. Another take of this on The Road.