It was not the first bottle of milk, but one of the first. His mother begins work in a few days; today is a welcome to the world for this five-month old boy.

What he wanted: Milk, Mother, Maternal, to receive ’til sated, to sleep on the breast. What the world offered: his mother’s milk, father’s arms, to accept or not accept the blessing available, to be sated or not sated, to sleep satisfied or not sleep.

The mind is like the body in that it settles over time: these joints, my joints, supple yet some of their spring is past; I dare say the arc of my body has moved beyond its height; and I find my thoughts these days are as informed by a personal history as they are by the all-possible present, gravity being the agent of change.

These thoughts. They are gently urged to earth, so that what was once a bright green fancied flight flutters down to a slightly darker summer tone, or to September’s dust, not somber yet but… sobering. I knew (when first I stood) that gravity pulled on my frame, but hadn’t yet understood how the gravity of time, experienced and therefore set in the stone of my bones, made New in my eyes less likely, almost an act of will: I refuse to allow the prevalent physical violence of Brazil to invade the relative peace of Barcelona, and I resist – to the best of my abilities – the psychological violence of the United States, as it places the beautiful circle of my family and friends under siege.

There is a certain rapid-fire, reactionary mindset at play during times of great change. The intransigence of weight at velocity: the more mass in is motion, the less its ability to change direction.

(Aside. Since everything is in everything else, use anything as a metaphorical lens to make big things smaller, and small things bigger. When considering mass in motion, please apply this lens to our notional [sic] politics, corporate belligerence, world-as-our-battleground stance. Of course it will fall apart. It is a train that can’t escape the track, can’t escape its wreck, no matter how gradually its approach.)

You may have read the children’s story of a perfectly beastly boy who because disoriented, wandered into a cave, fell into an enchanted sleep, and turned into a dragon. An unpleasant combination of events.

Upon waking, he frightened himself nearly out of his wits: the left hand moved, a claw!, the right hand moved, another! So, he was surrounded by a boy-eating creature. He ran – scuttled in fact – out of the cave and to a pool of water, which reflected his true nature.

Muscular I took the tiger’s tail in hand As his stripe in terrible elegance flashed Into view, in the sun, in the tall, tall grass Me at my prime – just past my prime – and confident I owned the gift of taming still…

But still

Tiger is tiger, and man is man And man, I did the best deluded can ‘Til he ran away and away he ran. I looked around to reassure me, friends Had each eluded the talon’s tear

I am up late working, as is the case so often this year, when personal and business projects demand most everything I’ve got (and I give it). To make sure this tired self doesn’t oversleep, I set the alarm, so this daily cycle of which I am proud (and somewhat repulsed) to be champion might repeat, again, and again.

I see myself a very clever and determined machine. I know success to the right may be failure to the left. I know this is a passage, not a destination. I’ve got the muscle; I’ll climb this mountain.

In response to a friend’s question: “What kind of Mark would you like to make on this world?”

I was selected to participate in a poetry workshop some years ago, with British war correspondent & poet James Fenton. He held strong opinions, no doubt informed by atrocity and explosion, and his work ranged from doggerel to deep, from limerick to libretto. His writing was always clouded by a shadowy lining, even when he was being flippant. I was riding my old BMW motorcycle to an event down the Mississippi river road, and he – not being much for tame avenues – thumbed a ride. Indochina, he said, rode bikes a tenth the size of mine, with three times the cargo; I had spent time on Java, so I shared his appreciation of smooth pavement, limited traffic, and 900cc of German engineering.

She lay like fallen leaves. As if a breeze brushed them, her wings fluttered odd angles; and I watched them reach for my breath, through the glass she thought was air.

The sound of her impact had stopped my work. Odd sound: where had I heard it before…?

…?

Oh… ?  Oh… oh, no: the unexpected crush of accident, as the sound of two cars colliding at some distance, muffled by the safe walls and windows of your home. Muffled by the fog of trauma, an uneasiness slowly rises in the heart; it becomes urgent as the memory becomes clear.

It may be that, in the beginning, there was intimation of the end: certainly one point connected to another, even by the crooked line of time, share an intimacy as close as any two lovers, perhaps closer. It may be that, when I started out, I had a plan, and that plan imagined an associated arrival.

But while there are some – maybe there are many? – who consciously describe a future in their minds, to then steadfastly walk in its direction, tinkering with the facts as they stray (until, with a flashing grin of satisfaction, and the pride of the accomplished, they arrive where they revisedly said they were going, often at a distance of years and miles from their intended target), I am not one of them. I arrive as errantly as any other, but rarely hold intention consciously, either trusting the currents of the world to sweep what is valuable in my path, or mistrusting my own dim vision to light up enough of that forward way, to set a heading far into it.

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