The Infinity Coil

“The Infinity Coil” sounds cool

but it really only extends as

far as my imagination lets it.

Like all adequate SciFi ideas

it functions as a metaphor that

mines for a deeper meaning as 

the curious eye skitters along the 

surface of the paperback’s cover 

reveling in the exoticized illustration.

Aliens are never really alien, btw.

They are aspects of ourselves

that we project onto the universe.

This projection returns to land

in an empty field and thrill us with 

mysterious means and motives,

fascination with their inscrutability

reflecting our own lack of insight

into the problem of being human

as we see through a glass darkly.

***

Grace Abounds

So many of us making 

such terrible decisions 

with negative effects 

that ripple through 

our families, our friends, 

and our communities.

  

Yet grace abounds 

and healing is offered 

at every turn.  

May we be open 

and humble enough 

to accept it.

***

Airport Limbo

sifting among strangers

timing the sips of coffee

to coincide with boarding

standing in lines, lines,

lines, and even more lines

switching from iPhone to 

iPad to paperback to nap

obsessing about transfers

running like OJ Simpson

through unfamiliar airports

"Leapin' Luggage!"

(exclaims the little redhead)

with no rest on the horizon

until that final dramatic flop 

onto the waiting hotel bed

***

Goodbye, Bluey

Animals can be unwitting receptacles of our thoughts and emotions.  We animate them in this way and if they are intelligent enough, they receive and reflect it back to us.  In the case of our fish, Bluey, he was incapable of such a feat in such a small bowl and with such restricted facial features, but there it is.  

He died last night and after almost five years of daily care my children flushed him down the toilet for a Midwestern burial at sea.  They insisted to depress the toilet handle together and at the same time in order to share in the momentous occasion.  I cleaned the fish bowl and stored it in the basement.  

How strange to have not had to ask Elias last night "have you fed your fish?" though the words sat on my tongue and had to be swallowed back down.  There is something sad about saying words nightly for years as part of a routine and to hear Anya's occasional declaration that there are "six people in our family" and listen to her rattle off our names to include our dog and then, rather dramatically, our fish and know that that is gone now.

The Cemetery

When I was in kindergarten my father was the pastor of the Wesleyan Church in our town.  Thelma Roberts was an elderly member that took me under her wing as a kind of godmother at that time, though there was no such tradition in our church per se.  When my mother was in the hospital to give birth to my sister I stayed with Thelma and her husband.  

Thelma had a routine that she included me in while I was there which involved walking to a large cemetery where she would visit her family and old friends.  I remember running along in front of her on the sidewalk to find a space between a brick column and the wrought iron fence that I could squeeze through.  We would then rendezvous at the cemetery entrance.

This morning I dropped my son off at a camp that is situated out in the country about a thirty minute drive north from our house.  Somewhere along those twists and turns through farmland and forests I saw a sign for Fargo Wesleyan Church.  I made a point to check it out on my way back home and found an old cemetery behind it, so I stopped.

Walking through a cemetery seems like such an old person thing to do, but I am getting on in years I guess.  It was quiet and a bit foggy as I wandered between the tombstones and markers, some dating back to the 19th century.  Two in particular intrigued me.  They were women who died in their mid-twenties and were identified as "consorts" of a particular named man.

I've had occasion to walk through cemeteries since those times with Thelma to include an old one hidden in a neighborhood that I stumbled upon in the town where I went to college.  I made a point to walk to it one evening while the sun was setting after having listened to "Eleanor Rigby" in my dorm room.  I sat on a tombstone and watched the sun sink below the horizon.

More recently I visited my grandfather's grave in the town where my parents and sisters live.  These kinds of visits are a sobering reminder of one's mortality and of the short time we have here on this planet.  I sung the Resurrection Tropar in English, then in Greek, before leaving and had the overwhelming feeling that those lying there were listening in quiet expectation.

Forbidden Words

There are some poems  

that will never find paper

perchance the pen find 

a vital organ and pierce it.

***

Green Glasses

Sometimes the brick road is not so yellow.

Sometimes it is not even brick, but more

of a muddy morass that impedes forward

progress to that Emerald City of childish

imagination and oh-so foolish expectations.

What if the road circles in on itself like

some weird movie twist that takes some

time to unfold, but then makes us gasp in

surprise at what should have been obvious?

There is that hindsight thing, but it is all

hindsight, is it not?  Time moves in only one 

direction and drags us along behind it in

our touristy clothes and green-tinted glasses.

***

The Pop Can Cannon

Of all the dangerous and ill-advised things concocted in the late 70's and early 80's, I have to say that my favorite was the pop can cannon. I don't remember what grade I was in at the time, but sixth seems about right. At that time we visited my aunt and uncle and their three kids in Columbus, Indiana which was an hour or two drive from our town. Their oldest was my cousin David and he was in High School. He had his own newspaper route and a moped which meant that he was practically an adult in my eyes. He is the one who initiated me into the secrets of the pop can cannon.

In those days pop cans were made out of a metal significantly heavier and stronger than aluminum. The cannon was comprised of four such cans connected end to end with duct tape, three of which had had their top and bottom removed with a can opener. The fourth can attached at the bottom only had holes punched into its top and a single hole punched into its side at the bottom. A tennis ball was loaded into the top and the tube shaken until the ball rested on the perforated top of the bottom can. The next step was to squirt lighter fluid into the single hole in the bottom and place your thumb over it to prevent any vapors from escaping. The metal tube was then shaken vigorously for a few seconds.

[At this point I simply need to pause and say that I was a fan of anything that involved lighter fluid when I was a kid.]

The moment of truth came in the form of a lit wooden match. The bottom of the tube was placed firmly on the ground and in coordinated fashion the thumb was removed as the match was put near the hole. It did not need to be right on it because the fumes were quickly escaping from the hole and the flame instantly combusted it making a tremendous booming sound sending the tennis ball rocketing into the sky out of sight for at least a few seconds. You had to have your hand to the side of the hole with the match held at its end or a column of expelled flame would find your fingers.

To reuse the cannon you had to blow into the hole after it cooled down and evacuate any lingering vapors that were left over from the burnt gas. Failure to do this would compromise the explosiveness of the next use. My cousin told me that he and an overweight friend had engaged in a cannon war. He assured me that one shot had hit his friend in the chest and knocked him clean off of his feet. I was duly impressed! Incidentally, he was the cousin whom I'd followed out into the woods for a bb gun war and gotten some welts for my troubles (he was a very good shot).

So of course when we returned back to my town I created my very own pop can cannon and introduced my friends to its wonders. Some time in the next few years pop cans transitioned to being made of light weight aluminum and the era of the pop can cannon went out not with a bang, but a whimper.



***

When it Rains

when it rains

it sometimes pours

open windows

shut the doors

hear the sounds

feel the floors

more is less

less is more

when it rains

it sometimes pours

***

The Step Between

It was there and I could feel it, 

the step between.  

I had sensed its presence before 

in moments of great fear or anxiety, 

but had not known what to do about it.  

I was not even sure what "it" was, 

but I knew it was 

the step between 

and I knew I needed to access it now.  

The hit was coming at high velocity 

to knock loose my soul.  

Time downshifted and 

put reality into a tailspin.  

That was when my foot found 

the step between 

and became a pivot point.  

I did not disappear so much 

as become inaccessible 

to the laws of cause and effect.  

I stepped into his anger 

and found a world of hurt 

coursing down through his extended arm, 

emanating from a fevered brain.  

What had we done to be in this situation?  

(What had been done to us?) 

I felt time telescoping back 

to the very moment 

of sinking our teeth 

into that hard cold apple 

of knowing instead of loving.

***

Brother's Keeper

I was feeling the ennui of a late summer afternoon that can be particularly poignant in a fourteen year old boy living on the edge of a small town.  Friends were unavailable and shooting hoops by myself in the driveway had run its course.  

My Dad had recently bought a dirt bike for some inexplicable reason and it was sitting unused in our small barn.  Knowing him, it was something that likely had come onto his radar at a good price that he could not resist wrangling down even a bit further to justify an impulse buy.  It was a pure off-roader with knobby tires, no lights, and no license plate.  It was not mine, per se, but other than my older sister's boyfriend, there was really no one else to ride it.

At that particular moment the motorcycle seemed to be the answer to my boredom.  I wrestled it out from among the bikes and a riding lawnmower onto the concrete pad in front of our barn.  The road in front of our house ran to the end of our neighborhood where it transitioned to gravel  and snaked out into the country which was mostly comprised of fields and farms with scattered forests.  My plan was to explore that country road and find some field to tear around in and jump some small mounds if I could find them.

Knowing me, I did not likely check the gas or the oil and I definitely did not put on a helmet.  The kick starter was stiff and I did not weigh much which made getting it started difficult.  After several failed attempts I pushed it up our side hill and then jumped on as it rolled down and popped the clutch.  The engine rumbled to life and I headed back up the hill and down the road.

The gravel road undulated over hilly terrain as my dirt bike spit out rocks left and right from the knobby tires.  I would accelerate up each hill as if trying to ramp each and every one and coast down the back side.  After about a mile of this I came upon a break in the fence which opened to a large expanse of wild grass and what looked to be some bumpy patches like ski moguls.  It was just what I'd imagined I was looking for.  I pulled into the grass and in the distance I noticed a house less than a mile away.  

I wondered who might live there, but then remembered I knew whose house that was.  It was a poor family who had moved to our town in the past year or two and they had two girls near my age.  One was in my grade and one was a few years back.  They were the butt of a lot of jokes due to their extreme poverty.  Things like the clothes they wore, the odor that followed them, and their unkempt appearance were ridiculed.  The youngest had it worse of the two.  She had a droop to one of her eyelids and was made fun of mercilessly for it.  She was also the first to be found with lice at our school and sent home.  The older one was pretty in a kind of feral way but still a pariah.  I remember hearing a boy (who was actually man-sized due to failing a few grades) in the locker room say, "man, if I stuck my dick in her it would probably fall off."  A few years later, after we'd moved to a different town, I heard he'd been arrested after robbing a gas station on the town's main drag.  He had taken the cash, jumped back on his motorcycle, and rode south on a spending spree.  He was quickly caught by the police and became the butt of jokes himself.

I knew where they lived because we had once driven to their house to invite them to church.  I remember my Dad stopping the car a little ways from the house and walking up to their door while I stayed in the car.  From the looks of it I imagined the inside of that house was something just short of being uninhabitable.  I'd heard stories of what little they ate or the oddness of their diet.  To my immature mind they might as well have been a family of aliens newly landed in an empty field trying unsuccessfully to integrate into the local town.

***

At this point in writing this recollection I called my Mom and mentioned I was writing about the particular incident that is yet to be described.  She said that my grandpa (whom we called "Poppy") loved to visit with this family and couldn't have cared less what other people thought about it.  She told me that he'd asked the father if there was anything they needed and he'd told Poppy that they needed something to take a bath in, so he bought a large metal washtub for them at the hardware store.  He also would bake pies to take to them (he owned a bakery when my Mom was a child).  Mom said they thought Poppy hung the moon.

***

With these thoughts running through my mind I noticed a cloud of dust rising up off the road in the distance coming from the direction of that house.  Someone was coming!  I thought it was an angry farmer coming after me for trespassing on his property.  I could  just make out a pickup truck making it's way towards me and I hightailed it back to the road and flew back the direction I'd come.  It felt like the truck was bearing down on me and I had the motorcycle at full throttle.  

I crested a hill and came flying down the other side, but at the bottom I ran into a cluster of potholes which ripped the handlebars away from my hands as the front wheel whipped back and forth violently.  I suddenly found myself flying through the air superman-style .  I landed on the gravel flat out and face down with my arms extended above my head.  I slid for a bit and then got up dazed but with the wherewithal to walk to the side of the road so the pickup truck would not run over me coming over the hill.

When they arrived it was the mother and father of those poor girls and they looked terrified.  The woman got me into the cab and the man pulled the motorcycle off the side of the road.  She wrapped my head in a dirty bandana and asked me where I lived.  They drove me to my house and walked me up the back steps.  My Mom said I was pale as a ghost and my face was covered in blood.  The woman kept saying "We thought he's keeled!  We thought he's keeled!"  My sister's boyfriend later told me that as they were cleaning me up in the bathroom he had to pry a sizable rock out of a huge gash in my forearm which made him feel like he was going to throw up.  In the ER they removed some small pieces of gravel from my forehead and got me stitched back up.  My t-shirt was relatively intact with a few holes, but when they removed it my chest and stomach were completely covered with abrasions.

Well, my boredom was at an end and it took me quite some time to be able to ride a motorcycle again.  It must have been several months later that my sister's boyfriend offered to give me a ride back home from my Dad's carpet store on his motorcycle.  I was hesitant, but then climbed on and clung to him keeping my eyes closed most of the way while my heart raced down the highway.

And those precious people in their beat up pickup truck with their worn out clothes and missing teeth became something more than an abstraction to me.  I'm sure they had no idea that Poppy was my grandpa.  In a simple and straight forward way they became their brother's keeper.

Here's a picture of me 

sometime after the accident when 

 the swelling had gone down
and many, but not all, of the cuts 

and abrasions had disappeared:

Season of Darkness

The sun broke the curve of the planet and momentarily blinded him in his slow descent through the outer layers of the atmosphere.  Below him was a roiling darkness through which light could not penetrate effectively but rather bounced along its surface looking for a way in.  As he approached what appeared to be the boundary between light and darkness tendrils of ash began licking at him as they separated from the clouds below.  He flew through them quickly to render their dissolution with the whoosh of his passing.  

He was nearing the point of penetration when he sensed a surge in the electromagnetic charge of some nearby clouds.  He watched with a bit of interest and curiosity as the lightning skipped  through them in a game of tag that sought him out as someone to be “it”.  He was not completely sure he could absorb such a thing without consequence and so dropped into the darkness like a heavy stone in a muddy pond.

***

The darkness of his immediate surroundings was nearly absolute except for a pale light emanating from the small orb that flitted about his head. By its light he found the building he was looking for, its silhouette a dark gray on the only slightly less dark gray of an ash-filled sky.  The front doors were long gone and its interior absorbed what meager light existed making for a blackhole that he felt drawn to.  His feet pushed through ash like drifting snow that dwindled as he entered the building.  The foyer was littered with detritus blown in by a cruel wind that could not touch him inside the shimmering bubble that surrounded him like a translucent egg.  

He sent the orb forward a foot above the floor to guide his steps.  Overturned chairs and furniture created a kind of maze or obstacle course.  He ignored the side passageways even as dark shapes flitted in his peripheral vision amongst the shadows.  The sound of his footsteps began echoing which gave the aural sensation of a much larger space.  

This was the room he remembered.  It was the common area of his former town library where he'd spent time reading, writing, and looking for love in virtual worlds through a screen the size of a standard piece of paper as a much younger man.  He headed for the corner with the book shelves, hungry for old habits, and entered an aisle.  A skittering sound well above him on the high ceiling gave him pause but only for a brief moment.  They were here, but they were everywhere weren't they?

The orb circled playfully around his head until he made it stop and float in front of his face.  The bubble took in the shelf closest to him as he stepped toward it.  A few rows of once dusty books lay within his reach, spotless now having passed through his protective perimeter, if not yellowed a bit and smelling of time.  It was an old pleasure that his senses remembered more keenly than his actual thoughts and memories could capture.

The book had heft in his hand, so cumbersome a thing, yet so satisfying.  He gingerly opened to the first page and read, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."

***

A whispery sound slithered down the aisle and into his ear.  The orb immediately positioned itself between the reader and the sound revealing a shadowy creature with barbed limbs groping in front of its clouded eyes standing at the end of the aisle.  It was a miserable thing that begrudged him his light.  

“Whyyyyyy” was the sound he heard as it extended an appendage to tap the air at the edge of his glowing shell.  He had not heard them speak before (if that was what this was) and he waited for more, the book still lying open on his palm.  

The creature began bobbing up and down in a motion that began to accelerate in frequency making a rattling noise.

“WHYYYYYY” it suddenly shrieked, energizing the darkness.

He calmly laid the book down on the shelf and walked back out into the center of the substantial space, found a table, and climbed up on it.  Movements were now all around him just at the edge of his light, random dots of unwinking circles and restless limbs.  He could feel their malevolence like a self-pricking wound.  When it seemed the room could no longer safely bear him and their presence in such close proximity he opened his mouth wide and the glowing orb entered into him.

The glow was now coming from him as he pressed his palms together for a moment and then pushed them outward and upward, the circle of light expanding and pushing all before it in response.  The dark things scurried and fell over themselves trying to avoid contact with the growing brightness.  When it seemed there was nowhere else for them to go he collapsed his fingers into fists and a brilliant flash of light obliterated all signs of the creatures.

Darkness once more enveloped him except for the small light dancing in the fore leading him from that lost place.

***

The Accordion

Breathing in, breathing out, to control

the anxiety of a spinning clock that sends

my children careening into the future,

their world expanding, mine contracting,

like accordion music that fills my heart

with a beautiful but melancholy melody.

***

 

Between Town & Country

The neighborhood I grew up in sat on the southern boundary of a town of 2000 souls.  If you looked out our front picture window you would see rows of houses stretching northward towards the town square several blocks away.  If you stepped out onto our second story back deck you would find yourself looking out over cornfields disappearing into the distance only interrupted by patches of trees and the silvery gleam of the Co-op silos.

Being perched between town and country provided two different kinds of adventure for my younger self and my neighborhood friends.  The town side was accessible by bike, but the country side could only be explored on foot.  Disappearing into the cornfield required a buddy system where one boy would have to climb onto the shoulders of the larger boy in order to peer above the cornstalks to judge direction and distance.

At the corner of our neighborhood sat a horse barn and corral.  In the summer between my second and third grade year another boy and I decided to explore this barn and try and interact with the horse.  We crouched on the outside of the wood-slat fence and coaxed the horse to come over and visit with us by offering it some long grass.  Eventually curiosity helped overcome my fear of such a large animal and I climbed the fence to enter the corral after the horse decided it was through with us and had entered its stall in the barn.

I wanted the horse to be outside and walking around with us and so I came up with a hare-brained scheme to lead it out of the barn.  I found a long piece of baling twine and entered the stall where I tied it around the horse's neck.  When talking to it and tugging the twine did not have the desired effect I did something remarkably stupid.  I tied the other end around my wrist and knotted it so that we were inextricably bound together.  I tugged on the twine a little harder when suddenly it bolted.

I found myself whipped off of my feet and then under the horse where it drug me out the door and around the corral.  I could see its back feet thundering towards me and feel its front feet pounding near my head as I bumped and bounced along the hardened dirt and gravel on my back.  I was terrified, but there was nothing I could do about it until the horse stopped.

When it finally stopped running and stood still I was lying on the ground with my arm up above my head still tied to its massive neck.  I got up, dazed, and frantically tried to get the twine from around my wrist.  I talked as soothingly to the horse as I could with my quivering voice and even patted its neck a little to try and calm it so that it would not bolt again.  Tears burned my eyes as I felt a kind of hopelessness ascending in my throat the longer I stood there unable to free myself.

When I finally got myself free I ran to a short concrete wall that surrounded a raised area in the center of the corral and jumped up onto it.  My friend was there waiting for me, eyes as big as fifty cent pieces.  We were safe from the horse there in the circle, but still inside of the corral.  I don't remember whose idea it was, but we started throwing rocks at the horse as it ran around and when it finally ran back into its stall we hightailed it for the fence and climbed out of the danger zone.

Only then did I calm down enough to take an appraisal of my injuries.  Other than what felt to be a broken or jammed finger I felt relatively unharmed.  My friend went home and I slinked back to my house, ashamed of what I'd done.  I told my Mom I'd hurt my finger, but not how I'd done it, and it turned out to be nothing much.  When I later took off my shirt in my room I found the perfectly symmetrical outline of a horseshoe print in the middle of it where my chest had been, like some kind of sport's team jersey.

It was the first of several such incidents in my life that I look back upon now and wonder why I am still here.


***