What Coyote Wanted

Loki, Coyote:
Those tricksters
Pull me in
They make so much
Sense -- yet a second glance
Guides me, mocks me.
Tricksters make only nonsense
And I am a ranger
Law and order
The lessons of my father
The lessons of my mother
Taught me to follow my conscience
Follow my better self
For the betterment of us all
For the best, for the rest of us.
Follow Intuition
Follow the order
Within that intuition.
Maybe that’s what
Coyote wanted,
What Loki—deep
In his Utgard/Asgard heart—
Wanted.
You know,
The right thing.

Gemini at the Beach

“You KNOW you have a twin,” the woman said, walking an elderly dog in the Van Damme State Beach parking lot yesterday in response to my hello.  (I was just waiting for her to pass by, for I wanted to strip off my cold wet neoprene.). “You have a twin, “ she continued, “in SC.”

I am not sure which SC she meant, for I didn’t think to ask.  I thought, South Carolina?  (Did I hear a touch of the South in her voice?  I think so.)

Maybe SoCal or Santa Cruz?

I do not know.

She walked on, the dog pulling her.

Dream-Dram

Glenlivet: Founder’s Reserve

Almost as good as poetry
And far less labor.

I falter,
And drain the glass.

--MD

Drowning Atlantis

I need to swim.

Right now, the water-of-life goes down like water.

When I am swimming regularly, putting in the laps, day after day, I'm not so thirsty.

Right now, I'm trying to drown Atlantis.
And I am.
Drop by drop,
dram by dram,
deluge by deluge.

The King of Atlantis
Fall 2009: Sculpture mix
(glazed with Transparent Brown, Stormy Blue, & Celadon),
copper wire, and hemp.

The Betweens

The betweens.
What I tend to teach.
Each to each.

The Clay Waits

The clay waits
Life-mask
Death-mask
The sculptor can't decide
Drawing ragged breaths
This broken morning
Fixing memory in pieces
Mixing temerity with mortality
. . . .
The clay waits.

There was a crooked man
Who climbed a crooked hill
Who had been a broken child
Bound to a broken will . . . .
. . . .
Pottery unfired
Bowls unthrown . . .
The clay waits.

There is a frayed man
On a frayed course . . .
. . . .
Threadbare nerves
Nightmare curves
Vertiginous horse
Sweltering source
Fevered fear
Galloping near . . .
. . . .
The frayed man wakes . . .

The clay wakes.

--MD

slightly revised: 7/8/18
and again: 3/21/20
and again: 4/13/20

Hungry for Story

Hungry for story
I open the book
To any page
And read again
And again and again
Until I feel full
Only to begin
Again and again
The next day
And the next-next
Each day
Every day
Hungry again.

--MD

TBT: "The Sea-God Sailing"

Throwback Thursday?  Here's a poem of mine from high school that I recently (re)discovered:

THE SEA-GOD SAILING

When the wind's a howling, red-eyed scourge--
The surf beats out a dismal dirge
     And the rigging hums with a dire tune--
     There comes a-racing through mist and gloom
The lord of sea and surge.

The winter sky is fraught with grey,
In frozen heaps the storm clouds lay.
     So fill with ale your carven mug,
     In hearty gulps drink down that slug,
As he glides into the bay.

Aye, drain that mug to the king of the sea,
Before whose prow the troubled waters flee.
     To Manannan, the Celtic one,
     Besides whose ship the dolphins run,
For the sea's true son is he.

And like the wilful, wind-swept waters wide,
Indomitable as the turning tide,
     Wild and daring as the untamed surge--
     Until the oceans very verge
His sturdy sloop doth ride.

While Neptune and his kin doth sleep--
Sung in their castles buried deep,
     Indolent in the languid seas,
     Lolling in the warm, southern breeze--
Manannan storms the ocean's briny keep.

For Manannan Mac Lir is he,
The warrior of the northern sea.
     With flaxen sail and ashen spar,
     The Celtic god doth make his war
With the legions of the sea.

In anger, the wayward sea attacks,
With swell and squall and ice that tracks.
     Yet closer to the wind he leads
     And braces the ocean's white-maned steeds,
And slides across their lathered backs.

Though the spray to ice in air doth turn,
And iron and flesh together coldly burn,
     He grips the tiller like a hearth,
     Through his frozen beard shines his mirth,
And strains at stem and stern.

Through the heart of a raging northern gale,
Pelted by the sling-stones of frosty hail,
     As to futile wrath turns the sea,
     Manannan, making his way with glee,
Tightens his grip and trims his sail.

In a stinging salt-spray haze he's whirled,
At him the wrath of waves is hurled--
     Over him they break, like soldiers on a wall,
     Above him the gulls, in brazen voices call--
And with a flag, his sail unfurled, he skims across the frozen world.

He turns his prow to the midnight land of sun and sea and sky,
And sails in the gleaming snow of the ice that will not die--
     Across the world's ridge, he slowly spreads his sails,
     And beaches his boat on the barren backs of whales,
And gulls about him fly.

As the wind, Manannan is free.
He sails across the sullen sea,
     And though the proud waters permit no track,
     Mac Lir, with a cloak from a leathern sack,
Is master there, aye master, for all eternity.

--Matthew Duckworth
from Unrecognized Poems of Literary Merit
by Mrs. Covell's A-P English Class
1978-1979.

--I just found this old volume in a box in my study, recently pulled out of the garage.
Juvenilia, by any other name . . . .

Clay Figures: Dancers, Echoes, Dreams

Clay figures:
exercises in 20 - 30-minute increments.

That's Chloe: The Dancer in front
(sculpture mix; copper cobalt oxide; copper wire);
I can't recall the name of the pit-fired dancer behind her.
Maybe I didn't feel I could give her a name, for she has one of her own that she may not have shared with anyone, frankly.

I do recall the exact session at the ASUC Berkeley Art Studio with the art teacher having us work on with a specific model, and then we had to turn and put the head of the person to our left on top of the figure.  Funky exercise.

Such exercises always reminded me of Charles de Lint's stories about Jilly Coppercorn, but specifically about that story in which she's painting from a "pochade box" outside to remind herself about perspective, to remind herself not to get too immersed in the details.  De Lint offers up -- through the character of Jilly Coppercorn -- a quotation from Monet that I've never tracked down (in terms of authenticity, for I trust de Lint) but that I hold dear, allegedly from Monet to Clemenceau at Giverny:

"Your mistake is to want to reduce the world to your measure, whereas by enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged."

And isn't that such a common mistake?

But -- if we want to shift to beauty -- what are those lines from Elvis Costello's "Ghost Train"?

"Look at the way she dances --
One foot speaks,
The other answers."

Lyricism of a different sort than wry puns and such.
______________

Myself: unsettled, or itching to get some work done.
Something like that.
______________

"Hampered by the clothes she wore,
By the dirty looks they kept in store"
--old song circling in my head.

Identity Issues

That sharp sweeping black
fin and that shiny solid black
back moving through the water:
porpoise sighting from kayak-
back a mile-and-a-half-and-change
out in Half Moon Bay.

The porpoise wasn't surging
with that sinuous
up-and-down
mojo that I'm used
to viewing -- to feeling --
so I wondered if
I'd observed a faulty
identification.

Motions and emotions,
shall we say, mixed.

I'm a diver, you know,
neoprene-blubbered,
rubber-finned and masked,
and -- yet -- I didn't bother
to dip in, didn't slip free,
but kept to the yellow
deck of my kayak,
tasking myself with ill humor.
Swimming with any marine
mammal is awfully
awesome, but a shiny
black back cutting
through the salt
could be a great
white joke.

--MD




P.S.  My kayak-partner JP reports that there'd been a caution posted for kayakers (that we missed before heading out) that a 12-foot GWS had been sighted the last few days roaming the area just off Pillar Point Harbor, so that may not have been a porpoise, actually, after all.

SEA-DOGGEREL II

Here's an old poem of mine from the early-90's, from graduate school days. I happened upon this ditty the other day and I still like it, so I'm sharing. Can you figure out how I was feeling about that dissertation, can you? I hope you like it.

SEA-DOGGEREL II

I load the cargo in the vessel

But there's a hole in the hold.

A shanghaied stevedore

With a sheepskin pedigree

Caught walking the plank

Towards a higher degree:

I load the cargo in the vessel

But there's a hole in the hold.

Hear the tenor in the vehicle:

Out of time--out of tune--

A Bluebeard raising Cain

Between the moon and a harpoon.

There's a ruse to refusal

And a goad to bestow;

I load the cargo in the vessel

But there's a hole in the hold.

Do you get the sinking feeling

That waiting won't control?

You load the cargo in the vessel

But there's a hole in the hold.

Why won't words

Why won't words

Why won't words

Do as they are told?

--Matt Duckworth

P.S. Sometimes, I can hear Elvis Costello singing these lyrics.

Running Aground Off Withaven Cove

Or, Time-Travel: 1988. Can you call it juvenilia, if you wrote it at age 21 or 22? Here's a poem I rediscovered while rummaging through old boxes in storage; I was supposed to be culling the past, and here I am, not or not yet. Listen: I'm not sure what I was trying to get at then, and there are phrases that make me cringe now, but I like how it all sounds, like the rhythms and the singing (yes, singing) still.

Besides having read my Melville, Stevenson, Coleridge, London, and such, I must have been reading John Gardner's The King's Indian at the time. (Also, "grim" sure shows up a lot; why? Was that my stab at "serious"?)

A slightly different version was published in Byzantium: Vol. III, by the Associated Students of UC Berkeley back in 1988. I'd written it a bit before that. I'm not claiming any merits beyond modeling exuberance by posting "Sea Doggerel" here.

SEA DOGGEREL

The hard deck heaves; the sea flames white.

The troubled crests shudder against the night

As the sky tumbles into the surge.

Melville stalks tavern planks, turning

A page--as the sea-swells do--and stark Ahab

Turns to in his mind. He drinks the mild Mermaid wine

And sets his words in stalwart verse, carefully

Weighed as an Emperor's gaze, falling far

Fathoms deep. (Through crusted hulls, clear songs breach,

The black and white leviathans of the deep.)

The untiring winds hurl us on. The old ropes snap

And flap and straight-a-way crack. The storm is strong.

"Land ho, ahoy!" a salt-washed sailor cries,

The clerk in tar-cloth, narrowing his eyes

At these winded shores of Withaven Cove.

The ship lists, to port, as his mind does rove

Where he hangs aloft ere Nowhere's icy rim,

Dangling fast from the mind's mainmast limb.

Aye, this shallow ship is shot, it leaks,

The broad beams split, and bald rats starving

Pace the hold, planking painted

With grim phosphorous--that stinking ship glow.

The salted clerk--no whaler, no mariner he--

Fears the great white birds that fail to flee.

Fall waters gnaw the windy shores. Siren

Songs call and the Christian seaman

Moans and rings the old church bell.

Ding-dong, dong-dirge, the cold

Swell's surge and the drowned man's bones

Shake and swell to fill the tones.

Words, grim words, are a seaman's lot,

The rotten grog that the Devil's wrought.

When the storm's aloft, it's grim advice

That whaler's bones be but hump-backed dice.