Sunflower For Shel

Yesterday two French tourists were taking pictures on the dock. They asked me if artists live here. I said, sure, many painters, sculptors, writers, and photographers live here, though it isn't a requirement. The idea of having to be a card carrying artist, as a requirement, did amuse me, however. But this place, this way of life, clearly attract artful people- like the women who asked the question while holding cameras, like Shel Silverstein - one of my favorites, who once lived in the balloon barge behind this sunflower . . .  like the gardener who planted and nurtured the beautiful sunflower for all of us to enjoy.

Floating Self

Photo by Daralee

This photo of Ben and I (that's me on the left) floated up over Facebook from long long ago, from our old friend Dee. We were juniors at the University of Redlands studying in Salzburg and my world was changing in more ways than I ever imagined. Not yet 21, I was able to drink beer for the first time, and not just any beer but the world's best, in a bier keller 200 hundred years old, with my last name on the wall in a poem that I couldn't understand. I met my lovely wife-to-be Phyllis. Had a best friend, Kelly Cole, who ordered his dad's records  everywhere we went so that Nat King Cole's work would always be in stock - and Kelly would be my first friend to die of AIDS just a few years later. Traveling through Europe, I began to notice the bigger picture outside my own small limited world. I tasted the adventure of travel, knew there was no going back to the way I was before . . . and now, through the wonder of the internet, as the old image of myself - in those glasses, with that hair (!) floats back to me, I see my younger self possibly looking into the future, and I say "Hey, buckle up. It'll be a bumpy thrill, but you're gonna love the ride, gonna love where we land." Ah yes ~ This life afloat ~

Skiff Garden

Feline of South Forty

Underbelly

At Low Tide My Neighbors Get Crabby

Beauty At Low Tide

Reflex Love

Best Dock Find Ever

Here Comes Karl

Translated From the Original

Anytime you translate, a little part of you goes into someone else’s creation.

That’s just the way it is. It’s like seeing faces in a plank of wood. Your eye catches the eyes, the set of a mouth, shape of a head in a plank laid by an erstwhile carpenter.

Sometimes you wish you didn’t see these faces.               You can’t help it. 

It’s part of your shape too, 

 the way you look at the world,

  and the way the world looks at you.

So even though you don’t speak Tungesa, and even your spellcheck wants to auto correct and turn it into something that trades more in its orbit, limited as it is . . . you find the Original Portable Tungesa Dictionary in an antique store on Main, one that’s never open, but happens to be today, though you are the only one inside, with a basket that says please leave a contribution, we’re trying out the honor system today .

 And you think, it’ll be my honor.

You only have a twenty, and there is no change. Briefly you consider leaving nothing, or just a note expressing your thanks, knowing there was a time when you would have done just that, or worse . . . you would have walked out with the book, and whatever else you could carry, whether you needed it or not, especially if you needed it not. Because need wasn’t part of it. Well, maybe a small part. But need had little to do with the object you stole. Need ran deeper then, though then you didn’t budget for such thoughts.

Then was a long time ago. You were a person you barely remember now - like hearing an echo that you started way back when- finally come booming back

around, bouncing off the walls of a deep canyon in a voice you don’t understand,

or recognize. 

But a face is there, sealed in your head as if from a picture, and so you leave the twenty and walk out with the Original Portable Tungesa Dictionary under your arm.

You return home, and study the poem of markings on a yellow page, and you open the dictionary to search for the meaning of each stroke.

And you discover it’s a poem written by a hunter who has given up the hunt, given up all weapons, given up even the desire to hunt, but not the desire to discover . . .

And at the bottom of the page in script  faintly familiar, you recognize two letters.

Initials.

And they

are yours.

gb

The Dishes Can Wait

I walk into the kitchen after dropping my wife off at work and eye the dishes in the sink and the pan, with scrambled egg crust, on the stove. This is my routine. Up at 6:00, feed the cats, make the coffee, read the sports and horoscope, wake up my wife, take her coffee in bed. We sit downstairs on white chairs and watch the water, stroke the cats, and rise slowly into the morning like sunrise. 

Sometimes color reflects off the houseboats across the channel and creates brilliant rippling reflections in the water. Then we go upstairs and look east at the sunrise over the masts of docked sailboats coming up across the bay.

I ask what she likes for breakfast - we settle on eggs or oatmeal or chicken sausage with fruit and toast and another cup. I ask what she wants for lunch, & when she needs us to leave to get her to work on time. Then she's off to shower and dress while I make her lunch and bag it, then I make breakfast and call her down, we eat - and then off we go, sometimes calling one of our children on speaker phone using her blue tooth in the blue prius. 

Over the Golden Gate Bridge we drive, through the  Eucalyptus forest in the presidio, past the mansions of Pacific Heights to Kaiser on Geary with its buses and taxis and people of all shapes crossing the street on their way to work, or to see my wife, their nurse.

And when I return home, I pour another cup, and wash the dishes and then my day begins.

But not today.  Today I think about my friend who texted me yesterday,  asking how one finds time to write: in the morning he has inspiration but no time, and in the evening he has time but no inspiration.

I text back: sometimes one must be a thief. And steal time.

I think about that as I look at the dishes and think about my life. 

And so I decide this morning to change things up & write this down - for me, for him, and for you.

This morning, the dishes can wait. ~ gb

Butterfly Effect

Beet Poetry

At the farmer's market, I buy yams from the smiling Greek woman with six kids who sells produce from her family's farm. She's a poet, but  doesn't write. The way she displays her family's vegetables and cheerily speaks with her customers about her sister's new baby born prematurely, or which potatoes are good for mashing, she reminds me yet again, that not all poets write, and not all poems are written down. Poetry is in the eye, and ear, of the beholder ~

Looking South

Did Someone Wake Up on The Wrong Side of The Cutting Board?

Tai Chi At Sea

My friend Neil took me for a sail on his 39’ sloop. Watching him sail is like watching a tai chi master at sea. He moves lightly and with grace. A flick of his sailor’s wrist and braided line coils around the winch; a quick pull and wrap and the main is stowed. Up and down he moves with ease and trust, at one with who, and where, he is. And me, novice at sea, at the helm, doing yeoman's work with metaphor.

Leap of Faith

Down By The Spit

The Garden Dock

    A little Madness in the Spring
    Is wholesome even for the King

    Emily Dickinson

Ahoy Pierre!

Felines of South Forty