1978: Pre-Dive / Nostalgia

Summer 1978: 

My mom called me Fearless Fly with this state-of-the-art prescription mask on my face. 

I was getting ready for my first open-water dive, earning my C-card, the next day up on the Sonoma County coast.

Note how tan my hands and forearms are. I was spending hours in the pool every day.

Hubris, Desired

"Resolve me of all ambiguities."
--Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus"

--a line I had pinned to my bedroom door, so that I would see it each day upon waking and exiting, in undergraduate days.

"Ice-Diving in Hudson Bay"

ICE-DIVING IN HUDSON BAY

When we dive down in those cool and crystal
Blue waters, clumsy with our double wetsuits,
Steel tanks, and that thirteen feet of frozen sea,
Will we worry whether the ropes rub raw
On the rough-edged ice--safety-lines snapping,
Drifting from the ice-hole as we lose our way?
Perhaps, as we dive, swimming along stiff walls,
Sea-carved corridors, chill labyrinths of ice,
Our lamps might dim, or die, leaving us to grope
Blindly in that deep and dark, sightless world?
Will we wonder, what if--while we blindly swim--
The ice-hole freezes over, trapping us
Forever until the slow spring thaw?

Or will we be just like that Captain Hudson
And his young son, boating out on those quiet waters
Of the new-found bay, watching their tall ship sail
Beyond winter's ice.  A grim Captain-Boatswain yells
Hasty farewells from the fleeing crosstrees.
Winds bring their cries across cold, shifting seas.

--Matthew Duckworth

A fragment, a figment, from my youth.  Winter 1980: Poetry-Writing with Carl Dennis.
Undergraduate work here that I'm enjoying with hindsight.

Keith, my buddy Keith, was my partner in imagination, diving beneath the ice.
Fare well, rest well, strive well, my friend.
I miss you.

--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 . . . .

Vintage: "To His Lady"

Here's a decidedly vintage sonnet: October 6, 1983
          First Assignment: Sonnet
          Prof. Richmond's English 117S: Shakespeare

TO HIS LADY

I shall not wander in twisted conceits,
Nor cultivate crazes best left behind,
Nor waste vain efforts procuring young sweets,
When virtuous love composes my mind.
Good thoughts, better words, most excellent verse--
All features to furnish (with wit, with tact)
Fond feelings that now I merely rehearse,
Motions I go through, scenes I enact.
My stage-craft flourishes, though plotting's a ruse:
"Love is a masque where we all play our part."
What use for the scenery, when lacking a muse?
What use for the masque when the muse lacks a heart?
You'll grant I never saw a goddess go:
Down with the masque, my dear--on with the show.

--Matthew Duckworth


(I was cleaning out some boxes in the garage this afternoon when I happened upon a very old box filled with very old assignments--oh beloved undergraduate days.   Prof. Richmond actually read my sonnet aloud in class, which pleased and embarrassed me to no end.)

The Salt Embrace II

Or, In The Locker.

When I was a boy, I wanted to find the Elephants' Graveyard, the ruins of Atlantis, and Davy Jones' (actual) Locker.

Once A Boy

Memory Alley . . . .

Batter Up! My Dad As A Young Man

R.I.P.  Dad.  The anniversary has rolled around once again.

My father was always a ball-player.  And, he has "Duckworth" written all over his face.

Barry Lopez: "River Notes" and Questing

I have been crippled by my age, by what I have known, as well as by my youth, by what I have yet to learn, in all these inquiries.  It has taken me years, which might have been spent (by someone else) seeking something greater, in some other place.  I have sought only you.  Enough.  I wish to know you, and you will not speak.  

--Barry Lopez,
from River Notes: The Dance of Herons

I can't say enough how much this slim volume mattered, how much it made complex, made even more emotional and even more intricately verbal my relationship with nature and story, when I first discovered River Notes in Moe's Books of Berkeley, CA, so long ago in 1980.

On this recent rereading -- and River Notes is a book I reread more or less each year, haphazardly, piece by piece over all the months of the year -- I realized how much his chapter "The Salmon" prepared me for the art and artistry of Andy Goldsworthy and for so many of my own efforts in clay amidst sea and creek.

I've witnessed this writer giving a talk and reading one of his stories at least once --"The Mappist," at the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael -- and I took this rather intimate opportunity (such a small venue, a somewhat select gathering) to thank Barry Lopez for his body of work.  I'm glad I overcame my natural diffidence to do so.

The passage above spoke to me when I was a mere youth, not even 20, and speaks to me now, a bit over 50.  I like the appositive defining of age in terms of knowing, in terms of what we don't understand and of what we do, as well as the sad, even bitter tone.  Loss breathes through the passage, through most of the book, and Lopez's voicing of that theme, that truth, caught my ear, and the ear of my soul (if you will), even if I didn't--perhaps, still don't--truly understand wherein that sense of loss resides, takes form.  Recently, I have read an interview with Barry Lopez in which he reveals that the writing of River Notes, though a sequence of fictional narratives, was deeply informed by the death of his mother.

The book takes us from the seaside, the mouth of the river, upstream until we reach the headwaters, the source.  The last chapter, be warned, is entitled "Drought."  I'll hold off saying more, for I'd rather awaken curiosity and intimate mystery.  I have taught two chapters in particular a dozen times, I think: "The Bend" and "The Rapids."  Here's another passage from "The Salmon":

There is never, he reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion.   And as he worked among the rocks in the middle of the river he thought on this deeply, so deeply that had his movements not been automatic he would have fallen off the rocks and into the river and been borne away.

In the summer light, even with the coolness of the water welling up around him in the air, thinking was all he was capable of; and this distraction left him exhausted and unbalanced so that at the end of the day the physical exhaustion he felt was something he lowered himself into, as into a hot bath.  He pondered gentleness often.  And he tried to pry (hefting the stones, conscious of the resonance between the idea in his mind and the work of his hands) into mysteries which remained as implacable as the faces of the stones.


Thank you, again, Barry Holstun Lopez.

River Notes: The Dance of Herons
A Bard Book / Avon Books: New York,  November, 1980.

Voyage-charm: sculpture mix; floating blue glazing; matte finish.   

Reading Dickens: Reflection In Action

Today I started reading Dickens' David Copperfield for the second time in my life because of something novelist David Corbett shared in a speech at Marin's best bookstore Book Passage last week. I am realizing that I haven't read this novel in more than 30 years, not since undergraduate days.  I am enjoying the opening puzzle about "the hero of my own life" and the bit on "meandering" also on the first page, but then I encountered this paragraph on early memories, on the people who tend to have such strong powers of memory, and on the other qualities that such people tend to possess, and I found this passage resonant. I certainly have retained my "capacity of being pleased," which is no small thing, and I wish the capacity of being happy in life on all.

Here's the passage:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

--Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Ch. 2

Oddly enough, or not, I feel just a bit closer to the novelist and to his autobiographical narrator too.

B-SIDE

Lyrics from an Old Notebook (mid-80's vintage):

You need to imagine Early Elvis Costello crossed with The Smithereens here, if you want to be kind.  Oh, and you have to recall vinyl records, especially singles, with A-sides and B-sides.


B-SIDE
I'm here breaking records
While he's out stealing shows
The anger doesn't bother me
It's just how much she knows
I've been hanging around now
Till I feel like packing it in
It's not a case of do-or-die
But more like where-and-when


These things I discover
Make it easier to decide
He's her A #1 Lover
I'm just lying on the b-side


I need to break her records
I need to break her heart
But like a fool I'm waiting
Because I loved her at the start


These things I discover 
Make it easier to decide
He's her A #1 Lover
I'm just lying on the b-side

--MD



(Until a few minutes ago, the second verse had a full eight lines too.   Here is the part I just cut:

I give her all my money

I give her all my love

Still she goes out shopping

Hopping in--I know--his hot tub

Pretty lame, that hot tub line, but I wanted . . . well, who knows now what I wanted then?  I do think the lyrics still work, after all these years, as a rock and roll song, particularly with those four lines excised.  Now, if I could remember the tune in my head at the time too . . . .)

Time-Travel: A Mere 34 or So

Or, 2 X 17 versus 3 X 17.

I was probably 34 in this shot, and I looked like a child, don't you think? That's Motley as a kitten! She's 17+ now.

Here, I'm 51 now, and you can read the trail of years in the lines and in the gray and white on my head.  I've gotten quite a bit of sun here too, but that's all good, a sign of summer and outdoor activities.  Slather, slather, with the sunscreen.  (6 feet tall and 170 pounds, so that's not so bad; I've dropped 19 pounds since December 30th.  And, I could be in a bit better muscular shape, but that's what summer's for too.)

Just keeping track.

Book review or preview or tempting taste to be posted manana.