snow-capped peaks
late April
the middle fork
Flathead Valley
Lake Five
I do not know where home is
perhaps I've lost my way
What if I drive south
find a desert
with tarantulas
chase them around with my camera
or perhaps a crocodile
or sleep in the car
in Death Valley?
I could
I could try
See what it feels like
find out what happens
just for kicks
because I'm far from home
and not sure where home really is
where it's been
My mind some hobo on a journey
called life
over mountains, through valleys
overcoming death, watching loved ones die
traveling with my animals
stopping for gas
beads
arranging rocks
leaves
a hobo on the road
what if I keep on going?
The neighbors noticed the girl
with disheveled hair
sitting in the yard surrounded
by waterfowl
her camera out recording
and snapping still photos
of the birds for hours
They wondered what she did
who she was
what she was doing here
with her birds and her dogs
all of them emerging from
a vehicle the week before
to a day of sunshine
and now this rain
snow mix she walks
her dogs in
despite the cold
her hood pulled tight around
fly-away hair
only her large sunglasses
show where her small face
resides
finds her wearing
capris
always the hair
sticking up at various angles
somewhat black, somewhat red
where ever she goes
On the road
I could do without
a hungry human companion
stopping for food
or a toilet
or complaining of cold
or heat
or stench
from waterfowl droppings
I could do without
an exhausting human companion
deciding where to go
and what to do
and how to do it
and when to do
whatever it was
maybe I had decided
internally
not to do
but
found myself doing anyway
I could use a little solitude
just me with
my birds
dabbling in water dishes
in their crates
or stretching their necks
to nibble on the thread
of my hoodie
as I drove
casually
along Going-to-the-Sun Highway
on a half cloudy, half sunny
late April afternoon
The rocks in McDonald Creek,
red, blue, caramel
designs
layers
contrasting
each other when piled
together
for my lens
yesterday
as I photographed
hunched over
in a black hoodie
Across the creek
I heard two men talking
--their voices carried
"There's a black bear over there."
"Sure is."
I knew they meant me
and I wondered
where they came from
why were they there
fishing in
this catch-and-release
stream
where they'd
mistaken me
for a black bear
Perhaps, I thought,
in that moment
I was a black bear
until I lifted my head
"Oh, it's a girl," one said.
But along that bank
of my ancestors
I felt superior
like that bear
they mistook me for
existing
my heart beating
because my great
grandparents settled
along the same bank
over one hundred years
ago.
I think I was the entertainment
for at least one woman
yesterday
when I visited Glacier Park
with my passengers:
two dogs, three ducklings, and a gosling
I stopped at the shore of Lake McDonald
so my duck could take a stroll
when a ranger asked,
"What are you doing with that duck?"
And I replied, "Taking a walk."
And he said, "What kind of duck is it?"
And I told him, Cayuga, named after Lake Cayuga in New York
a special duck created in the U.S.
And he said, "Can it fly?"
I said, "No."
"Are it's wings clipped?" he said.
"No, she's too heavy to fly."
All of this as a woman in a van
sat, engine idling, watching the show:
a girl with a duck in a place one hopes
to see grizzlies
"Are you taking it for a swim?" he said.
"The water's too cold," I said.
"For a duck?"
"She's a pampered duck."
I continued down to the shore
my duck padding behind
until she saw the reddish sand
and buried her bill in it
then stood erect, excited by
the vast lake
touching its coldness
probing for whatever
making cereal with the sand
when wild ducks skimmed water
in the distance
and startled her
she ran toward the car
her head cocked toward the sky
as a large raven swooped over
and she ducked beneath the car
ready to return to her laundry basket
in the front seat
as the woman in the van drove away
Whitetail graze on grass
grown over your bone
fragments which lie
atop soil layered over
charred remnants of trees
burned in multiple fires--
one in 1929
that took the house
in the photo that I keep
with that recognizable
mountain that I use
as a point of reference
when I try to position
myself like the photographer
of your childhood house
You would never know
your cremains
would be sprinkled
together
with your husband's
on the ground beside the outline
of an old driveway
in the shadow
of that mountain
that I now stand beneath
breathing fresh air
wondering
if the rocks in the creek
might be the same
rocks you picked up when you were ten.
I tried to think of you
just a young girl
putting your small hands
in the icy cold water.
I tried to think of you
walking to school
right there
next to your house
that small school house
now a gift shop
for tourists of the park
with your trousers on
being sent home from school
for 'ladies didn't wear
trousers'
Morsels of pride got in your way
as you wound around the topic again
telling me I was open to anything
and not to speak my feelings
or present, yet again, another viewpoint
that backed my argument
--that ever-so-recurring argument--
about what I should give
without complaint
Decades past I thought the rain falling on my face would never end--not for me and not for my loved ones. Yet, here it is, the highway revisited, the same old highway I've traveled to reach today from yesterday--a time when I lived in oblivious wonder, stopping at all the reservoirs.
And I once thought, too, that powerful thoughts could keep rain from falling, wheels from turning, time from catapulting us all into the future. Time would stand still. We would resist time and event in order to feel rain fall on our faces forever.
His heart was as golden as this, before and after it started and stopped beating.
This could be the rain of the last decade and not today.
Like a day in nineteen seventy something when my granddad hauled a backhoe from Port Townsend to Malo. Like that day.
It's written in Chinese in the rain on the windshield...words I cannot read. Perhaps it says something about yesterday.
Long have I been a passerby of boats on many highways, with them, and them--all gone now.
I saw the rain in my own mundane way without catching a glimpse of the fragile future.
And as it passed in its ordinary way, it could have been any other day in any other year.
That's when a thousand wet rainbows marched upon the window pane, telling me I'd not seen all there is to be seen.
As golden as he was I could not see him clearly through the rain.
What it is that warms the earth warms it in a flash of time too large for us, yet so quick we do not understand.
I was always traveling away from you, following my own tracks of ignorance.
My impression is of a place where I belong more than I belong where I am now.
For a moment I thought you were streaming through the windshield, but it was only Nikon stopping time, again.
In the November 21st online edition of the Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer I looked up the King County Deaths where it read:
PASOMDEE: Chatchawal, 43, of Newcastle, Nov. 12.
Au’s name, printed in a column titled Deaths, caught my breath for a moment, causing me to question, again, the simple passing of time and its effects.
I had recently come across an acrostic poem I wrote in a creative writing class at Highline Community College in 1994. Below is a full revision of that poem followed by a follow-up, another acrostic poem, written about the moment I found out Au was gone, on November 12th, 2008.
6 AM on the South Jetty at Cape Disappointment
Cast in the rising mist of 1994
He spins a lime-green jig
All morning in the cold,
Tossing back and forth.
Chinook and silver run, mostly,
Helming foam and froth—
And he whips the pole
When the reel exhales:
A king is on!
Laughter warms him.
Pulling and slackening line
As the king dives deep,
Slows, then leaps high,
Out of salty ribs, he
Moves down the rocks,
Dips his net—
Eager, young, happy with
Evening still distant.
6 AM as Winds Assault the Streets of Newcastle
Cancer took him November 12, 2008—
Held me silenced—as wind
Assaulted the streets of Newcastle.
Then his sister, that moment,
Called to say:
He’s gone.
Au is gone.
Was he real? I
Ask—though I am a part of his
Laughing smile.
Promises we’d made, in youth,
As he laughed, I laughed—
Some day, we said, we will be
Old, together, and laughing
Maybe in the countryside
Drinking Thai tea,
Enjoying our lives,
Evening still distant.
Labels: Au Pasomdee
In the deep shushing still
slow motion time
running, running by
In the forests of regret
lost "should have" time
faded as a blank forever
In my dream I held your hand
warm soft flesh as real as real
veins coursing crimson lullabies
In death you have vanished
sparks to weightlessness
lifted drifted wandering ash
If I call out you do not answer
nor wake to sunny days
no warmth, no cold, no solitude
And I still hover in memories
fading fast and present-tainted
as time keeps running, running by
In loving memory of Au Pasomdee
While photographing parts of nature in a burn area last week I found Puff the Magic Dragon, like a jigsaw piece--the fictional missing link--flaked off the bark of a charred pine tree. I lifted him from the ground and placed him neatly on the tree--as if he had never fallen to the ground. It was obvious to me, when I first saw him, that he was none other than Puff. Yet, had he been in his rightful place, firmly attached as a layer of bark, as part of the pine tree from where he fell, then I might not have noticed who he was. Or would I? Contrasted with the charred background of the tree from which Puff was a part, he appeared in full jigsaw form, camouflage-less and bare, apart from the corresponding chips of bark that once concealed his apparent shape.
So, too, are miracles merely camouflaged in the midst of a greater, more sensical whole. But when detached from rational meaning, from the system in which they survive, miracles become miraculous events. Viewed as stand-alone occurrences, miracles dictate much of how the average human being lives, copes, and explains that which is thought to be unexplainable, except by some miracle. A miracle, therefore, is nonsense as it is defined and explained, believed and worshipped.
Miracles are products, like Puff the Jigsaw Bark Dragon, of a greater whole that makes sense in and of itself. Seemingly microscopic to human reason, miracles are part of a system both logical and illogical. Miracles may be great for morale, which may serve as their only valuable purpose, other than a way to explain the otherwise seemingly unexplainable, but miracles have an explanation, though the explanation may remain forever elusive to human understanding. How many people want to mentally digest such a concept?
The pine tree grows as a species, adapted to its environment, sloughing off bark as humans slough off skin cells. Jigsaw puzzles are a human invention, merely a work of art. Puff the Magic Dragon is a fictional character. I happened to be photographing a burn. I have a mind fascinated with small parts of objects. I found a piece of bark that fit a schema for Puff in my mind, so I went with it. Had I been someone else, perhaps I would have seen something else, or nothing at all.
Everything is made from small parts all moving around, yet dependent upon each other. If a hypothetical tumor in my gut withers and dies, stumping medical experts, the answer is there, in my gut, in the cells working away inside my body. It is not a miracle.
I have connected this idea, loosely, to another idea I have about neurology and living creatures (animals). Everything is part of a puzzle, I have decided. Much like the puzzle piece that is singularly Puff, fallen from a pine tree, I am a mozaic of puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece is made up of smaller pieces, and so on. At this point I am not interested in how small they become, though I know they may be infinitely small. I am not interested in how these pieces are created or whether or not a being in the likeness of Homo sapiens sapiens created these puzzle pieces. None of that matters. What matters is how the puzzle pieces work and the understanding I can derive from conceptualizing their complexity in a simpler, more logical way than explaining them away through miraculous events.
Imagine a huge stain glass window. I see octagon shapes of various colors framed by leaded glass. Each piece fits into the whole. Each piece contains smaller octagon shapes and these shapes contain smaller shapes. Now imagine an infinite amount of the huge stained glass windows; they are everywhere. Prolific. Yet none are the same. Each stained glass window contains the same basic octagon shapes, all in the same places, for the most part, but they are all arranged differently. Perhaps some of the octagon shapes within the stained glass window are colorless, blacked out, or fused, but you can tell that all of these stained glass windows came from the same blueprint. The question to ask here is whether or not there really is a blueprint. Or is there merely a progression of changes, all unique individual occurrences happening continuously over a period of immeasurable time. Who are human beings to lay the law and impose structure on a processes they themselves have misunderstood?
Now, imagine that each octagon shape serves a basic purpose, but some of these purposes can be fulfilled through a combination of different octagon shapes working together. While in many cases one octagon shape can fulfill a purpose, it is not guaranteed. In fact, there are many octagon shapes that have characteristics divergent from the majority. The blueprint calls for blue in one octagons present in all of the stained glass windows, yet this blue color is not the same exact shade or tone in any two of the octagons. In fact, many of the stained glass windows contain green, yellow, clear, gold-flaked, or spotted octagons where the blue is called for in the blueprint.
The blue octagon is the code for speech. The darkest blue octagons have the strongest code. The spotted octagons have a code, too, but the code is spotted, not blue. What does this mean to the stained glass window as a whole? Unless we understand the operation of the entire system we will not be able to explain, except to observe that speech is absent. But what if speech is not absent? Some would label speech, in this case, as a miracle. Another stained glass window may have a dark blue octagon in keeping with the blueprint, yet speech is absent. Isolated, a prescribed defect in a blue octagon appears, like Puff, to be something, yet when lost in the mosaic of octagons in the stained glass window, the defect is undetected, except to someone who is looking for it, or has a concept of Puff, and stands at the perfect angle in order that the light defines the shape of a magic dragon on the side of a tree, just one piece of many parts of bark.
When the light shifts in its natural ways, shining through the stained glass windows, each stained glass window projects a pattern, a kaleidoscope, ever-changing, infinitely perceived by the human mind as the human mind peers within without a working knowledge of the microscopic parts. Limited by our sense of sight, we humans assume what we see defines the whole.
For example, Jasper is nonverbal. She rocks her body back and forth and flaps her hands while gazing out the window at the raindrops falling from the fire escape. She can do this for hours. Her family was told that she would never speak. When she is given a plate of food it must contain peas and potatoes, but peas and potatoes cannot touch; they must be divided by three long string beans, yellow in color. Jasper is a stained glass window. When the light shines on her a kaleidoscope radiates: she tastes; creates; imagines; dreams; realizes; hears; hurts. Inside of Jasper the octagons are functioning just as they function within everyone else. Some of Jasper's octagons match the blueprint, others are unique. The difference is that Jasper's octagons have a different way of responding to the light as a whole. The outside message, the light penetrating Jasper's octagons, diverges from the blueprint to an obvious degree.
But in Jasper's octagons there is a pattern that creates a hot glow. If Jasper's stained glass window were discarded the stained glass windows would grow cold and crack. Though the stained glass windows that conform to the blueprint, regardless of their subtle uniqueness, function as they were intended (by whom--a random engineer?), they leave no room for creativity or unexpected diversity. They are within factory specifications.
Are they miracles? Or, is it a miracle when suddenly a stained glass window, once categorized as defective, when held up to certain light, appears to fit the blueprint? Do we hold the window under prescribed light so it looks the way we want it to look?
If you correspond with someone via the internet and then later find that this person is nonverbal, how does this change your view of that person? Should it change your view of who that person is? After all, what makes a person who they are? Is it their appearance or is it the inner beauty and experience that only they truly experience, yet, are sometimes able to share with the outside world if the outside world realizes that not everyone indulges in the spoken word as a form of communication and relation?
I am a stained glass window. I am made of many parts. Some of my parts follow a sort of blueprint that is present in the general population. Some of my parts differ by various degrees. For example, the octagon responsible for my skeleton contains a code for asymmetry; therefore, one half of my body is larger than the other and this defect required surgery in order for my jaw to line up painlessly and in a way that allowed me to chew food functionally. Another person may contain a code for long bones. This person may be a super model, according to human society, or the way we humans choose to "see".
It's not a miracle. We are all made up of misunderstood and/or mysterious parts that, when placed in the light at various angles, during various times, may display the same or different.
Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story: #102 The Ecstatic Shanti Perez: "oticed until she was in her 30s. Now Shanti raises turkeys and chickens, p"
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