Young, Beautiful and Stupid

Back in high school and even into college, I spent my summers at Camp Timber-lee serving in various capacities. Those were formative years for me, and I met friends there who are friends for life. A few years back I put together a set of CDs containing music from the era that more or less served as the soundtrack for those summers -- at least for myself. As the era of Facebook has brought me back into contact with many dear friends from my Timber-lee days, I thought I'd share the "liner notes" (ha!) I wrote for that set of CDs. And here they are:

Picture if you will a bright summer Saturday. It is hot — 90 degrees or so — and there is a stiff breeze blowing from the west. It is nearly noon, and the last of your kids has hugged you and walked off into his future and your past. You have 24 hours before the next crew rolls into camp. Depending on your disposition, you have a choice ahead of you: grab lunch at the lodge and go immediately to bed to catch up on some much-needed sleep; load up the car with a change of clothes and your favorite tapes and head off to spend the night at a friend’s house a couple hours away; cash your check at the office and head into Whitewater or Elkhorn with a load of laundry; or, if you’re lucky, take yet another shower and begin preparing for your big date in Lake Geneva tonight.

Or maybe it’s your night off. A tense wait at the dinner line leaves you fearful that your relief counselor is going to beg off for the night, but to your relief he arrives and leaves you free to explore the Wisconsin countryside as you see fit. Sneak into the Lodge long enough to grab a pear or an apple for the road, and make your way to your trusty LTD, Caprice, or Chevette for a few hours of automotive abuse on Phantom Lake Road. After sundown, you and a few friends will head to Lauber’s for ice cream and general hanging around. Later, you’ll take command of your cabin once more. When you’re sure your kids are asleep, you’ll spend a few hours talking, laughing, and eating cheese and summer sausage in the village center chalet with some fellow counselors and your village leaders. If you’re in Oak Ridge, you’ll laugh at Rat Patrol when you take the back trail to family camp for a load of Coke, Sprite, or Barq’s root beer from the pop machine to replenish your supply.

Whether it’s the weekend, your night off, an hour or two stolen while your co-counselor watches your cabin for you so you can spend some time by yourself, it’s likely that you’re accompanied by music that will come to mark these days as some of the best you will ever know. There isn’t a soundtrack to those days, but I hope these disks come close. Some of these songs may cause you to flinch in embarrassment; others may yet be living healthy, active lives in your CD player or car stereo; still others are very specific reminders indeed of certain moments you will never forget. (U2’s Spanish Eyes will forever bring back to me a car ride shared with Paul Robinson, Jim Fritzsche, and Jim Perry back from Lauber’s late one night.)

We were young and stupid: why didn’t we ever pause to consider whether we were really equipped to do what it was we were doing at Timber-lee those summers? Now that we’re all so much older, we know that this is precisely why we were so perfectly equipped.

Remaining

Some words are as old as God—
meant for things barely remembered,
or assigned to wonders
seldom seen.

     Think of stopped
     watches
     buried beneath
     the pike;

     night dissolving
     in aurora
     quietly above
     the final miles
     of dead-ends.

There are songs that have only been sung
in imaginations of men
long dead,
whose bone-dust
stays in graves
that flute
the tired meadows.

There is a world there
left open, always,
slipped beneath
the mundane
daylight of
ladder-climbing
and fencelines.

The pathway always cuts away
from even fields
of fine and fertile soil;

and fades from
forever-lit cities
and monuments
hoping to commemorate
the past self,
the future self.

There, when eyes
have ceased insisting
on life’s plentiful lies
and settle—defeated if need be—
for the muddy, cricket-chirp truth,
then there is the silver script;
lost words of a beautiful tongue.

And we are wondrous again,
and fearfully made.

As few as we may be,
and lower than the angels
with our landscapes sweetly fading,
the wind is always new
on redemption-white, cold winter nights.

And in the middle of what once
I named nowhere,
I sit and watch the owl-wing clouds
fanning fire and ages
through a tired flesh
that stretches over the sky.

It is a pilgrimage in sitting still;
epiphany in remaining—

watching the old order
pass so quietly away
with eyes wide
and left behind.

Poor Man's Pockets

I have a poor man’s pockets
full of roadside monuments;
the sparrow-speak of
seraphs’ wings sewn into my soul

with Indian tobacco,
pocket watch tickings
slow so near
the mass of heaven;

a bedroll full of ashes.

I have collected recollections—
tire-iron frenzy
in the valleys nearing dusk;

Kerouac ghosts
in troopers’ eyes,

passersby
as angel as
damselflies

beneath the bridges;
breathing down the corridors
of wide expanse,
weak invincibility
made perfect, whole, and round,
and all these things made new
beneath a Jesus-feet sky,
crucifix power-lines
glowing in the sun;

the grace of fire
frightening
spiders
from my sleep,
mandibles
of old hard breaks
away,
glamorous lies
fading in the blood-red flames
that flare behind closed eyes.

I have a brimful of life
pouring over
duct-tape thin-worn boots,

shimmering wilderness years
through great cities,
overland all night
to dawn;

empty pockets
inside out
and mopping up the wonders.

All the Worlds in Each of Twelve Hours (fragment)

~~~

Even great diesel engines cannot last forever.

     They have to give out in the end
     with a fierce finality,
     usually near ruined steelworks,
     liquor shacks in bad ends
     of towns.

There might be a long walk
through tall grass,
fields of wreckage
where nothing parts
to allow passage.

     And life is full of climbing
     and tetanus.

You find yourself in the strangest
places,
     waving to imaginary companions
     to avoid armed robbery,
     begging hot showers off of
     motor inns.

You learn to drink whiskey.

You force upon the tired world
     improbable miracles:
          the night’s last sober man
          loves God
          and has been where you are going,
          tells you where to sleep;
          a woman you know
          worries about you
          and decides that she is in love;
          an old man in a bar
          warns you about bears,
          offers you a gun.

~~~

Spirit Moves

What can I say?

     The grass leans that way
     and light pours between.

     Dusk shakes shadows
     from the hours.

     In empty houses far from towns,
     curtains breathe
     through open panes.

          And suddenly I am home.

     I invest myself in being led
     to certain strangers’
     doorways;

     in lying unnamed with my days
     across a grandfather’s grave.

          And suddenly I can fill anyone
          with lamppost light
          that shivers like leaves
          near bays;
          with the patience
          that carefully wears
          all lives from slate.

          And you recall
          moonlight over church roofs.

               You smile in my distance.

     Wind pushes smoke into my eyes,
     and I can live in quiet persistence.

Heading East

These nights come to us
in waking dreams,
where American freightways
disappear before halogen
can find them.

We strike our recollection
on the anvil of distant
storm fronts,
break open the great sadness
of time’s passage
to find six or seven words,
then silence; the smell
of distant shoreline, rainfall.

These towns are dying on the
onyx chain of suffering
roadbed —
the faulted pavement of troubled tributaries
bypassed by larger streams.

Still the dim, gold light
of faltering mainstreets
remains amazingly bright,
and we pass through
until a world of twilight
fades into creosote again.

Distant lightning
has called us further out
into the ionized air,
away from cities
where forced light
paints with murder and with shadow.

Two comets hang
loosely over great plains,
and the arms of the galaxy
are thick with entropy
and slowing spin.

     We think of orbits;
     the rotation of storms;
     and ages end in the
     miles behind us
     where the roadway
     dies into a faint red glow,
     and taillights in the rearview
     are Perseid showers
     that dip below slight rises.

Every memory flickers and waves then,
blinks out into static
between each station.

We have spent the miles well
and lost the moments wisely,
launching our eyesight upward
from the road into the
edges of storms,
and then starlight,
the dead radio silent of
all ghost-green time,
dying signal near the sea.

East Kill Valley

After a thin lifetime,
the only center is
light reflected from often-safe bays,
and in the distance
the horrifying onyx of
the open sea at night.

There are silent times
of gathering worn fabric
to the sternum;
of keeping warmth.

     There is a single, new moment
     that rises up and surrounds
     the sudden knowledge
     that there is still unalterable,
     unspeakable sadness left
     after all wrong gods
     have stepped from shadows
     to be felled by grace.

And you find yourself standing
on coastlines, unvoiced
beneath a turning sky,
and you are as empty
as the dark between the stars.

And in that moment —
in that same, ancient, wave-weathered
moment —
you want nothing more than to
turn away from
the ocean you have found
opening up at the end of every trace.

You want nothing more than to
turn inland,
find deep-valleyed
graveyards where uncertain, distant
ancestors lie
and say,
     “I have been where you have been”
     and,
     “I feel your bones
     beneath my feet.”

How All Things Are Made New

A pond suddenly awakens,
takes notice of the wind
breaking moonlight over its surface.
A circle of trees grows inward
toward a center.

I spill whiskey beneath a table lamp,
find something otherwise unseen
reflected from the hallway.

I am kept from one conversation
too many,
and so it is that I am traveling
over mountains,
see the bruised treeline open up
into thin air,
collect an age of words
in that broken-throated moment.

A ring of galaxies abruptly
tilts its face-plane earthward;

rafters in firelight throw
crucifix shadows against a ruined wall,
torn curtain;

a linen closet door is left open
in the middle of the night,
and all moments rearrange themselves
into one endless orbit.

Creation paws at your
crumbling doorframe
until you notice,
stand up to see
what is the matter.

Storybook

Trees whisper.

You sit by a lake
or an ocean at night,
and the world of moments
you have not yet lived
is strangely familiar again.

There is an ancient story
like that,
where an old man
finds his way to shores
by mistake,
knocks on the unfamiliar door
of a darkened coast-house
and his son,
for decades estranged and given up for dead,
answers and welcomes his father home.

Or a young girl
walks into the
storm-swept waves
and is never heard of again,
until she makes it back
to town for a funeral,
and in the cool summer evening
beneath the trees
she remembers that she is that girl,
and in knowing this is saved.

You know stories like that:

     The fragrance of full green leaves
     after rain
     reminds you that you
     once believed in heaven,

     or the sound of your feet
     on a gravel road
     at twilight
     makes you suddenly want
     to cry
     or talk to children.

This story is yours.

     Look; if you go outside
     and find trees, or water,
     or tall grass,
     the wind will murmur it.

     The world wants to tell you
     why it is so tired.