Myshkin as Muse

I want beauty to save the world,

for love to conquer all, for mercy 

to lead us home, like a father 

holding his son’s hand as they exit 

the chill of the forest at twilight.

This is the fire for creating things

of beauty for and with my kids,

in trying to understand them in 

their suffering and finitude 

when their composure fails them.

Understanding that they look to me

to grasp life, death, re-birth and 

all that is caught up in the power

of giving one’s life for the other, 

killing the beast that devours itself.

***

The Missing Tree

 It was the missing tree that triggered the thoughts of a time when this house on the corner anchored our neighborhood with gracious parents and their three boys.  It was the first tree my son had climbed when he was six years old and made possible with the help of the oldest boy providing a leg up.  Strange to think it may have been the only tree he has climbed in his 13 years so far considering I’d climbed hundreds by the time I was his age, living as I did in a more rural setting. 

On summer days I would drive by on my way home from work and see several boys in that front yard playing a game of some kind with a football.  My son tells me that on some plays he would go into “Hulk Mode” and act crazy mad so that “no one could stop me.”  We laugh at this now.  He was the smallest and youngest of the bunch.  He confesses that the older ones would miss tackles or he would crash into them and they would fall down as if hit by a great force, “Oh no!  Watch out, Elias is in Hulk Mode!”

Summer nights the parents of the kids would gather at the corner and talk about any number of topics: sports, child rearing, school problems and accomplishments, and how quickly our children were growing up.  Sometimes a rainbow of popsicle colors would arc forth from the front door and be dispersed to the kids to cool them off.  All of that withered away as the boys grew older and became too busy or too mature to participate in childish games.

And then a new family moved into that house on the corner and we knew an era had come and gone.  If it wasn’t sad enough that the original family had moved away, the new family cut down that perfectly healthy and beautiful tree leaving a thoroughly empty yard in its absence.


***

The Battle of Four Birds' Nests

Spring of 2018 will go down in Haney History as “The Battle of Four Bird’s Nests.”  Every year since we have lived here a robin has visited our gazebo in the Spring and built a nest tucked under the protection of its roof.  The kids love to be lifted up so they can see the pale bluish green eggs and watch the robin make forays for food once they have hatched, the nest full up of oversized yellow beaks reacting to any sound that might be their mother’s return.

If we are out in the yard she will sit on the fence, a tree branch, or the gazebo railing and chirp loudly at us as if to say “Go away!  Go away!  I have to feed my babies and you are making me nervous!”  Elias was four when it first happened and Anya has followed in his steps as a yearly witness to this phenomenon.

This year was no exception.  The robin came and built its nest in the same spot and laid its eggs.  But this year the nest was ransacked by some unknown animal and the nest unceremoniously dumped onto the floor of the gazebo.  This happened three different times as the robin stubbornly rebuilt its nest.  

At some point Anya saw some crows on the street in front of our house messing with something that she discovered were broken robin egg shells.  She was tearful and mad at the same time surmising the crows were the culprit, though they may have simply been opportunists.  Squirrels and chipmunks are active in our back yard, but the rabbits get a pass as they are not well known for their climbing skills.

Then a final nest was built in a different spot out on the cross beams of the gazebo and that one remained, but no eggs or baby birds have been forthcoming.  Today I gathered up the four aborted nests and added them to my lawn waste after mowing and clearing out some low hanging branches.  It was sad not having any cheeping baby birds this year.  Only wrecked nests and the realization that life doesn’t always go as we would like.

One Night in Korea

I spent two years of my life in Korea, not moving forward, not moving backward, only living in a kind of dream-like limbo in my early 20’s.  During the day I was with American soldiers who I had little to nothing in common with and at night and on the weekends I was with Koreans who I felt more connected to but still felt the weight of a language and cultural gap.  I did not want to return to the States after my one year tour and so I volunteered to extend my time there for my full two year commitment to the Army.  

I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish, only I did not know what the next step was to be in my life.  In this regard, I hid from my stateside-self and his future by staying overseas in a magical land of strange and exotic experiences.  Every time I went out with my Korean friends and their friends I felt special and was treated as such by virtue of my non-Korean-ness.  The experience was at once exhilarating and terribly melancholy, trapped as I was in a cage of my own making.

I tried to make the best of the Army part without fully buying into what it meant to be a soldier.  I was the best runner in my brigade and maybe even the division, a good marksman, and great at land navigation to the extent I was the only private in my unit to achieve the coveted Expert Infantryman’s Badge.  But I had no intentions to serve past my two year commitment and the NCO’s could sense this in me and it generated friction between me and those above me in the chain of command.  I had a reputation for disappearing at the earliest possible moment of being off duty (although you were never really “off duty” in Korea).  One of my fellow platoon members described me as a “shadow” who could slip off without anyone noticing.

Part of this shadow-like behavior had to do with an ongoing attempt to immerse myself as much as possible in the Korean culture, language, and geography.  I built up a whole network of Korean friends throughout Dongducheon, down through Uejongbu, and stretching all the way to Seoul utilizing bus, train, and subway.  It was like a series of safe houses that I could crash at on the weekends.  The other soldiers in my unit were self-confined to the base itself and a small part of Dongducheon just outside the main gate that catered to the “needs” and wants of Americans.  They suspected that I wandered far afield, but I never talked of it with them in order to protect my hard won freedom that could easily be taken away if proof surfaced of what I was doing.

So, this poem “One Night in Korea” is just a glimpse of one particular night that looked like so many other nights while I was living there except for the peculiar incident of sneaking into the base pool after midnight and drowning myself in its glowing waters.  Which, in retrospect, was breathtakingly foolish but not out of character for me at that time.

I was young and free

to roam and do

what I pleased

though hopelessly lost

in a foreign land,

a soldier of fortune

looking to connect despite

incompatible voltages.

Chin-gu’s who thought

in a different language,

peering through narrowed 

eyes while chain smoking,

nighttime neon glow

with no lack of laughter,

coffee, tea, maek-ju, so-ju,

and the smell of kim-chee.

Until I found myself alone,

separated from so much 

and from so many,

wide-eyed and weary,

the long walk back 

to the barracks still ahead.

I was drawn to the glow of 

the base swimming pool.

It called to my spirit,

a beatific blue-green light,

just past the witching hour.

I scaled the high fence,

squatting Korean-style

at the water’s edge

peeled down to my boxers

and my burdens.

Time took a time out

as I balanced between

life and death,

strife and breath,

teetering

:

tottering

:

tumbling

:

all things diverging 

all things converging

my body floating

betwixt and between.

***

Pretending to Fly

Hanging dead from a string

pretending to be in flight.

Trying to catch up with those 

above me, only to realize

that they are also dead 

and it is only self-delusion 

that keeps my spot in line.

***

Just reminding myself...

... that kids are not accoutrements.  They do not exist to bolster our egos.  They deserve our blood, sweat, and tears.  They deserve every ounce of selflessness we can muster.  We do not own them.  They are not property.  We should not put them into a box of our own making, disrespecting their uniqueness and singular beauty.  

They will not ruin our lives.  They *will* ruin the lifelessness of an existence we imagine is about simply enjoying ourselves while our souls skitter along the surface, unable to penetrate into the depths of what being human is all about.

It is about love and love is not a feeling that changes with the fluctuation of chemicals in our brain.  It is deeper than that and transcends biology or circumstance.  It is about the privilege of taking on the suffering of another person.  This is something our culture does not understand.

  

Not that I am some expert, heavens no!  But I see it all around me and feel it gnawing at my edges trying to get in which terrifies me.  Our kids dangle at the precipice of our selfishness, oblivious to the possibility of disaster at arm’s reach.  

***

Charity Rolls Her Window Down

She sat at the red light 

where the man held the sign

that said his car needed fixed

so he could go back to work.

I felt the purr of my own 

trustworthy vehicle under me,

the soft edges of a robust credit card 

nestled in my cashless wallet.

She had pulled in front of me

without signaling her intent.

She had sat too long at the previous 

light, likely looking at her phone.

But when her hand extended from 

her window with a dollar bill

lightly held for the man to take

I suddenly felt all was forgiven.

That whatever she did or didn’t do 

(apart from crashing into me) 

I would accept graciously from this 

mom smiling in her rearview mirror.

***

The Plate

PROLOGUE:  This is a story my Mom recently shared with me by phone and I wrote out my version below, but then had her snail mail me her version and I subsequently combined the two by changing a few details in my account and then added parts of her account [in brackets].

***

My Mom tells me she recently found an old plate in the back of a kitchen cabinet that has special significance for us.  It has survived for over forty years without being broken, given away, or misplaced.  Since it came into her possession in the mid to late 70’s she has moved at least three times which can be hard on a large fragile plate.  And when I refer to it as “large” I may be misattributing to it the status of “plate” when it is in fact a “platter” but I will keep calling it a plate.  She told me the story behind the plate last week when we talked on the phone and it conjured up only the slightest bits of memory in my mind, though some of the details have been revealing themselves to me the more I roll it around in my head.

The story goes that I was outside shooting baskets one summer day in ‘77 or ‘78 when the basketball bounced off the court and onto our back porch hitting the charcoal grill and knocking off a plate and breaking it.  My Mom was waiting for my Dad to get home to get the grill started and was unaware of what had happened when I came back into the house looking sheepish.  I disappeared into my room and she heard me shaking money out of the wooden trolley bank my Dad had brought back for me from a business trip to Chicago (or was it San Francisco?).  She tells me she yelled down the hallway, “You better not be getting money out to buy comic books or candy!”  

[The first thing that came to my mind was he was going to go down to the Drug Store and buy more comic books.  I always thought they were a waste of money, but he was always excited to find a new one.  He came out of his room and I assumed money was jingling in his pockets, so he passed me and I followed him out on our deck.  As he descended the stairs I hollared like a raving lunatic “If you think you’re going to the Drug Store to buy more comic books you better think again!”]

I would not let her anger dissuade me from my course of action and when I returned some time later I had a large decorative plate in hand that I presented to her to replace the one I’d broken.  She tells me she felt bad about yelling at me and later learned that I’d ridden my bike to an old flea market/antique store on the town square where I’d found the plate and was able to work out a deal with the owner [Linville Ferguson] to purchase the plate with whatever money I had on my person after explaining my situation to him.

[I sure didn’t get mother of the year award but I was very touched by what he had done.  Many years later I shared the story with some of my friends and brought the platter down from the top shelf for them to see (I do not use it because I am afraid it might get broken).  I sat it before them and they stared at it like it was the Holy Grail.]

She found this quite amusing and now considers it an heirloom of sorts that may have been the first glimpse of a future that did not include me leading a life of delinquency and irrectitude.

We finished talking on the phone about this particular episode in my life and she suggested I should write about it as I have been accumulating stories from my childhood that have been finding their way onto paper (figuratively speaking... I type them into my iPad) the past few years.  She has put the stories that I’ve printed out and mailed to her in a binder that she requested from my Dad so that they are all in one place and can be easily grabbed if her house ever decides to catch on fire.  

I proposed instead that she write down this story because she remembers it more fully than I do.  She could then mail it to me and I could edit it and add my perspective while typing it into my iPad.  She loved this idea and when I called her yesterday she said that it was almost finished.  I suggested as part of this project she have someone (probably one of my sisters) take a picture of the plate on their phone, front and back, and message it to me so I could create a title image for the story.  Seavor ended up being the picture-taker (thanks Seavor!) and now I am just waiting for Mom’s story to arrive in the mail.

***

EPILOGUE: when the picture arrived on my phone yesterday from Seavor I looked up “CANONSBURG” from the stamp on the back of the plate and learned it was a decorative china company near Pittsburgh that started in 1900 and became defunct some time in the mid to late 70’s.  As a kid I imagined it was some priceless antique that I’d somehow miraculously convinced the store owner to release to me at an exorbitant loss after hearing my heart breaking tale.

Wheel inside a Wheel

The circle of the dome is 

the Father 

at the center of which is 

the Son 

and (con)descending is 

the Holy Spirit,

a wheel within a wheel...

rotation - procession - connection

***

Isn't that Funny?

Humor 

like water 

douses the 

flames of despair.

Humor

like salve

heals the

languor of living.

Humor

like a knife

can be 

wrongfully used.

Humor 

like a hole

is a place

I can hide.

Isn't that funny?


***

The Easter Egg

God is Dead

It snowed on God’s tomb 

this blustery April evening

as we carried it around our

church in a swirl of snowflakes.

“What?” you say, “God is dead?!”

Well, it was necessary as we are

all dead and He has come

to show us the way back to life.

***