Tall Grass & High Waves
PoemsBy Gary B. FitzgeraldAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Gary B. Fitzgerald
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4389-8031-7Contents
Principia.........................................1Change............................................3Floating in a Brightful Place.....................5Produce...........................................7Careless..........................................9Understanding.....................................11Evil..............................................13I Know You Hate Weeds.............................15Cyclone...........................................17Stormy Thursday on the Farm.......................19Important Things..................................21Things Will Fail..................................23Small Temples.....................................25Old Anger.........................................27Point.............................................29Free Will.........................................31Irish.............................................33Downgrade.........................................35Duplicity.........................................37White Fences at Dusk..............................39Bad Luck..........................................41Tax...............................................43Dragonfly.........................................45Grace.............................................47Fields............................................49Halloween.........................................51High Waves........................................53Late Spring.......................................55Living Specie.....................................57Trees.............................................59(Human) Nature....................................61Tall Grass........................................63Change............................................65The Climbing Party................................67Last Poem Today at Sunset.........................69Moving forward....................................71Sleep.............................................73The Antiques Store................................75The Plan..........................................77Senility..........................................79Initiation........................................81Last Light........................................83Long Slow Family..................................85Don't You See?....................................87Good Day..........................................89Revolutions.......................................91Shame.............................................93Old Fight.........................................95Writing at Night..................................97Older.............................................99Expecting.........................................101Wolf Moon.........................................103Lonely Fossils....................................105Time..............................................107Roller Coaster....................................109Funeral...........................................111For You Not Yet...................................113
Chapter One
Principia Big things never just suddenly appear! Only that instantly conceived, the small, is suddenly here, a flash in the pan soon to disappear. Big things approach slowly, rise ominously over hills, are seen from far away. They forewarn their arrival. Hide if you think you can. Big things come into view with deliberate intention changing everything.
Big things change big things. Small things are rolled over by the new. Small things surprise, milk that spills. Big things give us time to run. Always look toward the hills.
Change
That nasty old bastard who moved in next door cut down all the trees! Cleared that beautiful little woods along the fence between us, ruined my view, stole my privacy! Chased all the birds away.
Harvest moon rising tonight. Balanced on horizon, huge and bright, it illuminates the damage even more. But full and red, a magnificent sight, filling the pasture with ethereal light.
Never noticed it before for all of the trees in the way.
Floating in a Brightful Place
I feel like a little molecule of paint floating in a brightful place, painted, perhaps, by a master because I'm basically blue with a little red on the edges, a splash of green and a touch of gold applied with great care and with love. And I feel so alive here floating around, spread on the canvas of life, but the surface is beginning to dry. I float like a tiny atom of color, trapped between the canvas and that no longer liquid drying hard above.
Produce
Mushrooms and lemons, the bland and the bitter. Apples and artichokes, the easy and hard.
Cherries and peppers, the sweet and the hot. Corn stalks and melons, the tall and the short.
Mandrake and squash, the occult and the plain. Roses and roses, the beauty and pain.
Careless
So overwhelming these mundane things, these relentless daily problems that torment. Sometimes they seem almost cruel, even intentional, and with life and death at stake it requires, should we survive, that we not be careless.
But not really so significant, all these things, these wasteful, pointless things once seeming so important, for the most essential things are never guaranteed and, after all, we may pay our debts, to our ownselves be true but still we end up dead.
I suppose I've become somewhat careless. So maybe today I won't pay the bills, won't get a haircut or go to work and go to the beach instead.
Understanding
When just a child I sat in shock, in fear in the corner in the hall, hiding with my brother from what we heard, we saw, the violent, hateful anger of our own parents, screaming, fighting and I didn't understand. Growing older I forgave them, for they were only human, after all, and it appears that all of us are damned. But still I did not really understand.
And now I feel like a child again when I hear about the Congo and Sudan, Iraq, Columbia, Afghanistan and still I do not really ...
Well, maybe I can. We're only human, after all. So only human, I grant You, but still this question for You: after tigers and eagles and whales, the wolves and the kangaroo, after elephants, porpoises and swallowtails, is this really the best You could do?
Evil
Of sunlight and moonlight what can I say? One shines in the night, one brings us the day. One reflects in the darkness but the one in the deeper dark brings the light.
Of electrons and protons, what said of their way? One positive, one not, one shall follow, one stay. One spins toward the yes but that spun towards the no brings the balance.
A strange symmetry here on the planet of life, for easily, if no moon, only dark in the night. But if no night and no moon to rise in the sky, then no day to divide the when from the why.
If no danger, no struggle, no reason to fight. If no equal opposing, no wrong to make right.
I Know You Hate Weeds
I know you hate those rabbits that sneak into in your yard, leave pellets all over the lawn. But they'll eat your damned weeds!
I know you hate the coyotes slinking through the pasture like thieves in the night. But they'll eat your damned rabbits!
I know you hate it when the rats go running past, and especially the snakes that eat them. I know you hate all these others interfering in your world, that you must live here with them.
But it was theirs in the first place. You are the thief in the night.
Cyclone
The typhoon is now upon us, after long approach the storm arrived. And those not heeding warnings have not survived. Now no hiding from the fury for which, unplanned, we suffer the payment our failures demand. No turning back the seas that sweep us off, drown both those who saw it coming and they who scoffed. No stopping the hurricane winds stripping the forest clean. We pay the tribute of the damned for ignoring that foreseen.
Stormy Thursday on the Farm
These flower-spattered acres swell in soft green undulation, follow the wind like the sea, rollers and spindrift of foam-flecked weeds waving in tall grass. The trees in the distance in this violet light look far and obscure, like an approaching mountainous shore.
Behind and above this misty arboreal island, a threatening, frightening conflagration of purple thunderstorms rising in afternoon anger. It reminds me of the South Pacific, of summer on the Caribbean.
I sit at the old bench in the yard gazing over the fence at aquamarine pasture, remembering the ocean. I see the horses in these wind-chased, storm-darkened waves of blue-green and think of dolphins.
In wavelength, green and blue very close, drift and blend past, into each other as the prism of time and memory turns one field into another.
Important Things
I am anguished by these pending momentous decisions to be made that will in short time change the course of my fate and all that matters. Decisions to make about my life, my work, my future, new directions that will rearrange the very structure of my world. Who knows what can happen with change, unbalancing chance? Maybe failure or even death, I fear. Important decisions must be made and worry me to tears and tatters.
But wait! Look! In the pasture ... a deer ... And over there, by the pond ... the ibis are back this year.
Things Will Fail
Physics and bacteria conspire to deconstruct the solid, even non-things still real, still extant, become squalid, ever more unsubstantial: ideas and thoughts and understanding. Time conveys the quantum of entropic deterioration. It makes bread hard and old meat smell. It makes things die. It makes things stale. Only our loss of concentration is the end to this demanding. Then the bell rings and we stand for the anthem.
Small Temples
Amazing, these brown castles growing, raising themselves up from the tiny jungle of my back yard; grass, a little too high from the rain, too wet to mow, and now all these lifting mud temples, rough hewn bumpy crawfish towers poking up everywhere in a soggy sea of neglected green.
Here and there also an ant hill, carefully tended like the pyramid of Cheops. Looks like an aerial photograph I remember having seen once of the temples and pyramids in Guatemala, or the ruins of Angkor Wat, lost in jungle, rough brown towers raising themselves up from the verdant uncontrolled wilderness.
The big is small. The small just the same.
Old Anger
The night came out that day, all the black restrained by reason, the anger and the sorrow, all angst suppressed released. The swifter current of my emotion broke the dam, a drama so ungraciously provided by the recently deceased. And now, the fear of my own late season, this tardy rain, like thunderstorms consuming an unsuspecting blue, corrupting sunny turquoise into gray. A downpour of worry and distress has flooded all the fields of who I am.
Point (advice to budding poets)
Make one. Then disguise it. Make them all try to figure it out. Be witty and clever and erudite. Make sure they get too frustrated in the searching to really get it.
Many references, too. Some obscure, so they appear to reflect a cultured mind. Be scholarly and ever more unclear. Offer a gift but hide it, something they will never find. Tie it much too tight to unwrap. Lock it, without a key, behind a door.
To the sad word-bound this will be a joy ... another literary puzzle to struggle with and pass empty time, but to the rest of us such a bore.
Free Will
Genes do not move like Cubists in blocks of shade and shape, or even like an Abstract Expressionist's color splash from place to place, not threads arranged carefully in a blanket. Not a tapestry planned, but rivulets of woven hue, the random journey of the blood, the reach of branch and root, trickles racing in many directions from a leaky bucket cutting lines into the mud.
The veins and tracks of life and love, of birth and genes and we make their own paths, and the lives that make these cuts, the travesty of birth and love and life, the meandering of the dead, drain from a fairly leaky bucket.
Irish
I've always been proud of my Irish for deep within me is the love of all things loved by the Irish: fine horses and music and poetry, pretty girls and a windy sea. But I'm no more Irish than you are, just a mix of many things ... Scottish and Dutch and German, a little Welsh and some Cherokee.
My Irish is only an illusion, just a name (though perhaps a touch in the soul). I'm just an American mongrel like the rest of us, like that other illusion, that game we play every day of who and what we are or want to seem to be and all but moral mongrels.
Downgrade
I recognize that sound ... that wild whisper of freedom.
No, I guess not. Just the drone of a truck upwind on the highway down the mountain.
But I know this sound ... that soft voice sweetly singing.
Well, maybe not. Just the constant loud roar of the neighbor's brand new fountain.
Still I think can recall the sound, remember that whisper.
Singing from long before. The sound of alone, a song gentle though stark.
Ah, yes ... now I remember ... the wind through the pines in the dark.
Duplicity
Double lives are lived, poor creatures, and doubled yet again. One lives in the future and one in the then. One lives in the here, one in the when. Like a little trout stream that's here where you are but gone on each end. A sparkling surface but gloomy depths.
Like a sunny day, the sparkling blue but the murky bottom still a part of you. One flows clearly past, one hides like the trout. One life to be tasted like honey. The other chewed up and spit out.
White Fences at Dusk
White flash of fence line from cloudy gloom to sudden sun turns 3-rail bright with a cast of evening's reddish light then back to grayish doom, fence line hiding in the thorny vines and the Passion flowers growing through you.
Bad Luck
It isn't just the ambient burden of surviving every day, this daily toil and toll that every beast must pay, but all these extra, unsought worries, unplanned and sore unneeded, that by the sower of misfortune in the soil of life were seeded, the opportunities the cruelty of happenstance stole, the obstacles encountered as we worked toward our goal which, by the time that we arrived, had packed up and moved away.
Tax
At first the sacrifice of beasts, stylized at Lascaux, a celebration of the life that fed us painted on the stone. Then the sacrifice of men that led us to Religion, ritual sculpted, like Apollo, into dogma, in solid glistening stone. Now the tax comes in the tithe, in obeisance, donation, gifts, offerings, the cost of going to God, the sacrifice. Blood, then, of the chosen to slaughter, the most innocent of the pitiful lambs, but always the price. Soon the tax for simply having been.
Dragonfly
Cat caught a dragonfly. Fast! Hunter caught her prey, ran off with it. I got up to retrieve it but I heard the crunch. Too late. I saw. Good God! The poor thing was still alive.
Good God ... I just realized everything dies alive, in bed or in jaw, the prey that feeds the hunter or the souls that pass us by.
Grace
We have always been aware of the others. This we carved in the rocks, painted in the caves. We heard and we replied to those who spoke when gone, who came to we who were left behind, who cried. We have always known the field from which all things grow, from which all were derived, on which all stand. We saw and learned and so sanctified to grant ourselves a straw of hope, to grasp for grace imagined as observed in those who speak without word, to carry us on as planned until we, as well, have died.
Fields
So maybe God is a field, a waveparticle field, a spacetime energy field, a field of consciousness, expanding in all directions, growing rich with souls, extending in multiple dimensions with a host of ultimate goals.
Proclaimed by many bells which rang, a multitude of faithful voices sang. But which came first, the consciousness or the Bang? Which came first, the field or the flowers in it?
Halloween
Anoles flashing green, out late this warm fall evening, stalking corners of the porch in the last of the day, running through vines still flowering in a wilting sun.
Tree frogs out early this gentle twilight, sharing the porch ceiling with the little lizards, seeking the same, last of the light and last of the prey, both desperate to prepare, recognizing signs of a year now done.
Despite the life clinging to the warmth that remains in the dying day, the unyielding cold approaches. Nectar moths and butterflies joust for the last lighted blossoms on the last warm dusk of the year. An evening between summer and winter, between now and there, a commingling of creatures from day and night in this time dividing dark from light.
A roosting crow cries out and threatens a slow, magnificent owl, unhurried, unperturbed, sailing by silently like the rising moon, floating above and beyond his reproaches. The day defies the dark. The night denies the day.
High Waves
The wind tore the mainsail and the rope broke, swung the boom and tipped us. I lost the helm! We floundered, so I'm sorry. Then, lifted by the swell, I grabbed the wheel again, made her steady and got her back on course.
The sea clutched the keel and swung her `round, crossways to the current. We lost the jib but were righted by the well, again corrected. So I'm sorry, but you must trust me with my ship. I have no control over this ocean, you see, nor the flotsam and storms spread upon it.
But I know her pitch and roll, can name her every line. You haven't sailed the seas I have, don't know my charts so don't pretend to read the compass. The tack she sails is mine. I know her every rope and the cargo that she carries is very precious. I carry my own life's hope.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tall Grass & High Wavesby Gary B. Fitzgerald Copyright © 2009 by Gary B. Fitzgerald. Excerpted by permission.
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