Going Green Lantern

 I rode my bicycle to the office today and in Arizona that shouldn't seem too strange this time of year. The boys of summer are all here in March specifically because the weather is close to perfect. I suppose the idea is that it is better to practice the game under beautiful blue skies and 75 degrees than trying to deal with bad hops off of two feet of browning, melting snow. Something about riding my bicycle is vivifying and has the effect of a two-wheeled time machine. I get a desire to drink chocolate milk and open a pack of baseball cards, read Flash and Green Lantern comics under the covers with a flashlight and head to the churchyard for a pick-up game. Somehow the limitations I've uncovered in recent years seem less real and I get a desire to roll up the cuffs of my blue jeans. When you consider the idea of this blissful delusion of youth is combined with a present burst of exercise, the scenic beauty of the desert rising into cloud-covered mountains and the future useful intention of planetary goodness, this is a dynamic climax of perfect proportion.

                 Somewhere in all this transcendental beauty there has to be a fly in the soup, a infernal naysayer waiting in the bushes for his nefarious opportunity to jump out of the obfuscating bushes and say boo. The quipster will bring forth any number of unholy pitfalls, contrived mantraps and sophistical potholes. Today I don't think I'm going to let him trip me up. I don't think I'm going to let the Eternal Objectioner push me off the Cliffs of Doom. I think, along with Wyatt Earp, I'm going to tell him, 'Come on, skin that smokewagon and see what happens'. Maybe it's the wind whistling by my drooping ears or the happy connections I make with the past when I'm two-wheeling but I feel empowered to defeat all the negative forces of modernity, the regressive cries of  hopelessness and existential attitudes of what difference does it make.

                  One of the unintended benefits of trying to make sense of the way we live now has been learning the nascent adjustments of being a single motorized vehicle family. Deconstructing unnecessarily complicated schedules into what is essential and useful also has brought the joy of a simple thing like my bicycle ride this morning. Half born out of necessity - the need to get to my office, and half-born out of love and consideration - empowering Kathleen with the choice to use the car or not. It would be nice if these were all intentional kindnesses, sometimes we just stumble into goodness accidentally. I mean to say that secretly I just wanted to escape on that bike this morning, to feel the freedom of human-powered flight, to recapture a far off youth and fight off the denizens of evil wherever they are,

In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight Let those who worship evil's might, Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!

The Clearing Storm

Little Bird

Pere Redux

 Pere’ Redux 

I am a stone worn flat and smooth,
with endless rolling along the ocean floor,
Long years have left my edges ovate,
tossed towards the passionate shore;
Picked up and carried carelessly,
in the hand of a wild-eyed boy;

to be skipped several trifling times
across foreshortened waves;
returning to the oblivion of aquamarine,
beginning inexorably, all over again,
the scuttling tumble of wave action
being further reduced and rounded.

Implacable beatings of waves on the beach,
Relentless, percussive, hypnotic;
Elusive, beckoning, just beyond reach,
Subtle, possessive, symphonic.

Last night I dreamed a dream of you,
It was a dream of sand and grass;
My days of stone washed back and forth,
by currents of chance, removing direction;
Pressed on and tumbled tirelessly,
towards a shore alluring, endlessly receiving;

And taken to be warmed and dried in your arms
as a worn, weary, smooth, flat stone,
That you lay beneath your head
on a stretch of ramshackle beach,
Under a weak and fading sun,
still finally received and unremarked.

J LR6.16.09