Hughlings Himwich

Hypnos and Thanatos

Though sleep be not death,
it is a gentleness
upon which the head
may fall. 

Sleep makes death 
bearable, even
possible.

 

Scarecrow

 

                                                                                                                                            Photo by Ber Himwich

The Scarecrow

Some say I am wise.
O what a joke!
Nothing like So-crates,
Not even a pose.
Silence is golden
Or so the rhyme goes,
Yet I will do nothing
But sing with the crows.

 

Autumn's Child

 

I see you now, child, wrapped in vines and visions,

happy to find a place to hide, laughing hoping someone will find you.

Don't call out. No one will come.

Let the wind be your voice, just as you hear mine now.

It's autumn and the leaves rustle alive for one last song before winter. 

Someone will hear the wind laughing in the trees.

They will see you in all your glory.

 

My Pick-Up Line

 

Be brave! No more sneaking around, no more affectation!
What great soul said that? Yours, of course! One soul
seeks another, that's how it knows where to go.
You and I the same, same with wings and wind. 
if you keep hiding, you may prove
you don't exist at all, no hands no feet, 
not those beautiful eyes that catch the sky
(yes, your eyes are beautiful. It's never a lie.)
no joy or grief, just an echo that dims. 
Listen! the ringing in your ear is the tolling of your soul:
it's time, it's time, it's time, it's damn well time already!
Enough of all this hiding only to lose, a soul
only knows itself as the moon --
the one becomes two. 
The less we fear and sooner than now
the more we can dance and dance our own tune.  
Let the kite go and be where it goes.
That's poetry! It's like falling in love, 
Hey there, beautiful, where ya goin?
I'm going with you. 

         (Can you tell I wrote this on a wish of a prayer?
          It comes as it goes and foregoes all despair.)

 

Starry, Starry Night

Both poetry and mathematics are forms of madness, the latter well disguised by what appears to be its rational method and application, e.g. facing west we plot a course to the third star to the left of that cottonwood where we pledge that someday we will travel. We are eagerly triangulating when a poet comes by and we dazzle him with our mathematical machinations. He seems for a moment unsteady on his feet and asks us to sit with him. We do, feeling sorry for our hyperbolics, but then, as if our diverging equations had actually driven him crazy, he begins to spout utter nonsense. He tells us we have already arrived where we seek to go and that the leaves are laughing at us. “Can you not see how the descending darkness of the evening is becoming one with the shadow of the tree?” We politely acknowledge the plain truth of what he says and, using that same darkness as an excuse, say we have to go. As we are walking off, we look back and then stare at each other: there’s no one there. We return to where we thought he had been and now, a little unsteady ourselves, sit again beneath the cottonwood, laughing ourselves into each other’s arms.

 

 

What is not there

Though I am known to God
As Hughlings, my friends call me
Hugh and leave it at that --
Grace takes care of the rest.

Though I do not believe
In anything or have any Jesus,
Yet I retain a kind of genius
For harmless lies.

It is as if during the day
I can still see the stars
Blazing out of the night
And truly see what is

not there. Some say
it is a harmless madness --
My friends though look deep
Into what were once my eyes

And all they see is night.

"O me! O life!"

 

He moved so slowly no one saw him

Disappear. He moved too fast.

O he’s still there alright, standing still

As though it were the dead of night

No moon or stars or morning fire

could burn away. O, he’s there.

He sings, we listen, and in our sleep

We wake to find him so close to hand

We could touch him if we dared.

There is no fear like fear of life.

 

Each Alone Together

 

From where I sit
I can hear the rain
And see the desert bloom

It’s but a room
Like yours,
On a street like yours

What we’ve done
To each other
Cannot last forever  

Outside a girl plays
In the rain
And gathers flowers

She sees me watching
And laughs,
She could be crying

She’s rooted there
As I am here,
Each alone together

 

Knowing and Not Knowing

 

 

My Brick at Albuquerque Academy

 

Photograph by Ber Himwich (Translaton: "Don't follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek out new paths to truth."

 

How comes the rain?

How comes the rain?
There is no sky

And yet the moon is in my eye.
What I see is a girl in braids

Who’s lost cold wet afraid.
She calls out to all who are alone.

I know her voice. It is my own.
This is not a happy poem

Yet it may blossom in a storm,
A flower marking every stone.

 

The Silence Here

 

You’ve left and I am here

With what remains,

The singing and the chatter

Woven into everything

I hear. Never has it been

As quiet as it is now

And yet so full of pain.

The silence stays,

Words unspoken, mere air,

Notes of a song unsung,

A morning and evening prayer

That you and yours may forever be

As close as the silence here.

 

Summer Rain

 

This morning air is what remains

of one I met when all was lost.

She offered shelter for a night.

I woke to find her gone, adrift

in days, she left a note: There wasn't

time to say farewell. There was

no name. Alone again, I walked away. 

Her touch upon me like summer rain.  

 

Fifty Words

 

We blindly feel our way

Along the wall, then think

To dig, but never deep enough.

On the other side, we homer on,

Some fifty words to hold against

The light. A tiger leaps through us

As if we were not there.

It mauls its prey. We break

For lunch.

 

Emily Dickinson's "I saw no Way --"

Though some read Emily Dickinson’s “I saw no Way” as a description of a crisis of faith or declaration of profound loneliness, the way to Heaven barred, it for me an ecstatic statement.  It may be that these perspectives can be reconciled.

    I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched—
    I felt the Columns close—
    The Earth reversed her Hemispheres—
    I touched the Universe—

    And back it slid—and I alone—
    A Speck upon a Ball—
    Went out upon Circumference—
    Beyond the Dip of Bell—

When I sing this poem to the tune of Amazing Grace, it seems to me to be in praise of what cannot be rationally circumscribed. There she is a speck upon a Ball, her poem, like the rhythmic swinging of the tongue of a Bell. reaches out beyond itself (beyond its lip).   I often ring a bell for my students and ask them where the sound goes.  Wherever it goes, it goes beyond the bell itself and takes us with it, escaping into silence.

    I sing in praise.  
    Of what cannot be known -- 
    We breathe – no paper 
    Stained with ink.

 

Summer Rain

If it would only rain my words would pour forth like girls and boys too young to know shame O they are bold as I would be the rain falls I am young again dance touch while the music plays so falls the rain O she is here there are tears of joy tears songs of praise for the beauty of the day earth yields up its flowers to her hand turns to gentle thunder her body lifts and holds her laughter makes the night shudder unbinds her hair and falls to me now here now there like summer rain

Not a myth

Out of blood comes anemone

Comes the flower the maiden holds

And falls in love with death, the truth

Of spring, not the myth,

a bird that sings at night

and sings alone,

the love herself denied, a sacrifice

that makes of art a vow

be true to death in life, no signs

but discarded treasure found,

a comb for her golden hair,

a paper knife, a silver coin, 

a button missing from her blouse,

the relics of an empty house.

 

A Bullfrog

Though “First Fig” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is better suited for other purposes than “Now I lay me down to sleep. / If I die before I wake, / I pray the Lord / my soul to keep,” it has become for me a bedtime prayer:

    My candle burns at both ends;       
          It will not last the night;
    But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
          It gives a lovely light.

I know there are other versions of “Now I lay me down to sleep” but the one I know I have always known, despite the best efforts of my parents to laugh it off. I still love the poem but believe not a word. Poetry is like that. Edna’s “Fig” too. True, the candle will not last the night, but in the morning I will ‘doubly’ light another and then another, though that depends on the supply of candles and “if I wake”— meantime, such candle-burning does give that lovely light, as she says.

So, last night as “I lay me down to sleep,” thinking of the absurdity of life, of drawing meaning from nonsense, of burning precipitously through candles in short supply, these lines came to me like a serenade from a bog (pace Emily Dickinson, "I'm a Nobody! Who are you?"):

    A Bullfrog

    I laugh and cry, then laugh again,  
    And cry— it doesn’t seem quite right,
    But do you or you or you, my friends,
    Know another life?

It’s really just “Another Fig” via inspirationis magistrae millay, but it served the purpose of another good night’s rest.

What prayer or poem ushers you into that sleep from which, of course, you will wake? What bedtime words spring to mind? If there are none, there’s still time to make them up.

That’s an invitation, folks, to compose yourself and send the lines to me.

Here is one I have already received from Margie Keck, burning brightly:

    Burden me equally
    With the sublime and the common.
    The necessary honoring of both
    Is an issue of utmost importance.
    Leading to my spiritual awakening,
    The true work of my life.

 

Spartoi

 

If we were to sow our teeth,

There would come stories

To make us shudder

Like the one about a desperately

Happy old man who gave up

His love of life to become

A gravedigger and lied

To those asking whose grave

He dug, falsely saying

He was looking for treasure

But so far had found only gold.

 

Spartoi: the ‘sown men’ of Greek mythology, born from dragon’s teeth. Cadmus in founding Thebes had for good reason slaying a dragon, sacred to Ares, and was advised by Athena to sow its teeth. The genealogical line of the Spartoi ends in a great many tragic stories, those of Oedipus and his spawn among them. In death, Cadmus and Harmonia, his wife, became snakes. It does not seem to have been a punishment. It is worth noting that Cadmus is said to have brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. The result we all know well. One might ask why are snakes sacred to the gods. To understand that would be a treasure. It may be necessary like Cadmus to become one.

When I say the wind speaks to me . . . .

 

When I say the wind speaks to me

Like a lover, I am not speaking

of the wind the leaves reveal

Nor of any lover who draws me near.  

There’s neither hope nor cause for tears.

She promises she’ll never leave.  

 

Another kind of seeing

For Eve

Even if I were blind

      your golden

Voice would light

       the way, my

Eyes forever shining.

 

Surprise

                for eve

Suddenly
this morning
I knew the rainbow
to be a bird

of my soul
taking flight 
and vanishing
into cloud and sky

as I am bound 
to do, shimmering
not with color
but surprise

to be at last
not here. 

 

Wild Iris

 

for Zoe

There’s that garden

that none

need pardon.

There wild Iris grows

beneath the trees

it loves.

They catch the light

and make its song

their own.

 

How a man becomes the sea

 

The moment she touched the old man’s hand

He lost his sight, yet standing lost upon the sand

He heard the light upon the waves like keys.

She sang and let him go and like the wind he sighed.

None knows what song she sang or how he blindly

Played with light or how a man became the sea.

Thinking Along with Henry David: 1-4

1. SOLITUDE (First entry in Henry David Thoreau's Journal, Oct. 22, 1937)

To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present, — I avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor’s chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.

The Germans say, “Es ist ailes wahr wodurch du besser wirst.”

(Translation of the German: All is true through which you become better.) 

Meum Mihi

What makes us 'better' is, of course, problematic. It is not necessarily what makes us happier or wiser or less at odds with the world or more productive or whatever is yet more better (stet). As the Romans say, suum cuique, to which I would add tuum tibi, ergo meum mihi. For me, happiness is overrated. As for wisdom, I am with Socrates: he is wisest who knows he is a fool. If it were the case that I knew something worth knowing, it would still be of no use to you. Happily, for all of us, Henry lives now only as stale prase on the lips of his admirers. I would rather be elsewhere. Nor does work make me a better person. I put no stock in the Protestant work ethic. Doing nothing at all suits me quite well. What is better than dillydallying all day? When I am doing nothing I feel more a part of whatever all of this is, itself without purpose, ever in se sibi. Of course, what I have said puts me at odds with worldly ambitions and with those who would win applause. What a waste! I would rather not even be myself if I could not go dark. Henry David, my Henry David, wrote his first journal entry in the autumnal bloom of 1837.  As for me, I am writing during the plague of 2020. It's spring.   

 

2. Spring

Oct. 25 (1837) She appears, and we are once more children; we commence again our course with the new year. Let the maiden no more return, and men will become poets for very grief. No sooner has winter left us time to regret her smiles, than we yield to the advances of poetic frenzy. “The flowers look kindly at us from the beds with their child eyes, and in the horizon the snow of the far mountains dissolves into light vapor.” GOETHE, Torquato Tasso.

Spring before spring

Henry David wrote this journal entry in late October.  It must be that the autumnal bloom of leaves, the chill air, crisp and aromatic, the silvery breath escaping his lips, makes him think of a spring before spring, which to the poet’s eye is always arriving in all times and places. It is the poet’s gift to us who might otherwise forget that we are always beginning, recreating the world for ourselves and others. Feel the wind on your skin like a kiss. Spring is here.

3. Virgil

Nov. 18 (1837) “Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles” is such a line as would save an epic; and how finely he concludes his “agrestem musam,” now that Silenus has done, and the stars have heard his story, — “Cogere donee oves stabulis, numerumque referre Jussit, et invito processit Vesper Olympo.”

Vesper

The line that would save an epic is from Virgil’s Sixth Ecologue, Pulsae referent ad sidera valles: the struck valleys echo to the stars. The trees, the rivers, the valleys, and stars are the musical instruments upon which the poet strikes his song. Yet, significantly, Virgil’s words are not from his Aeneid. He elevates the "agrestem musam" to the heavens. When all the epic clatter of arms and shouts of heroes have passed away, the pastoral poem reasserts the prior authority of nature’s rhythms: Evening rules even unwilling Olympus and the stars remain as they always are, night and day. 

        From Eclogue 6

        ille canit: pulsae referunt ad sidera ualles:
        cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre               85
        iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo.

        he (Silenus) sings: the struck valleys echo to the stars:
        until to gather the sheep in the stables and to tally their number
        he bid and, Olympus unwilling, Vesper advanced.  

        agrestem musam: rustic muse

 

4. NAWSHAWTUCT

Nov. 21, (1937) One must needs climb a hill to know what a world he inhabits. In the midst of this Indian summer I am perched on the topmost rock of Nawshawtuct, a velvet wind blowing from the southwest. I seem to feel the atoms as they strike my cheek. Hills, mountains, steeples stand out in bold relief in the horizon, while I am resting on the rounded boss of an enormous shield, the river like a vein of silver encircling its edge, and thence the shield gradually rises to its rim, the horizon. Not a cloud is to be seen, but villages, villas, forests, mountains, one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The atmosphere is such that, as I look abroad upon the length and breadth of the land, it recedes from my eye, and I seem to be looking for the threads of the velvet. Thus I admire the grandeur of my emerald carriage, with its border of blue, in which I am rolling through space.

We belong to nature

It may be that Henry David is thinking here of the divinely-crafted shield of Achilles. There is, however, great irony between what Achilles' shield depicts and the hero's subsequent slaughter of Trojans. Certainly, strife and death are present in the scenes Hephaestus creates but these take place within a balanced cosmos: the shield’s rim is Oceanus, the sun and moon crown the heavens, there are two noble cities, one at war and another at peace, and there is a young boy plucking his lyre, his song “so clear it could break the heart with longing”:

    and what he sang was a dirge for the dying year,
    lovely ... his fine voice rising and falling low
    as the rest followed, all together, frisking, singing,
    shouting, their dancing footsteps beating out the time.

There is nothing depicted on the shield Hephaestus has made that even remotely approximates Achilles’ murderous rampage, against which the Scamander River protests:

   “Stop. Achilles! Greater than any man on earth,
     greater in outrage too—
     for the gods themselves are always at your side!
     But if Zeus allows you to kill off all the Trojans,
     drive them out of my depths at least, I ask you,
     out on the plain and do your butchery there.
     All my lovely rapids are crammed with corpses now,
     no channel in sight to sweep my currents out to sacred sea—
     I’m choked with corpses and still you slaughter more,
     you blot out more! Leave me alone, have done—
     captain of armies, I am filled with horror!” (XVIII, Fagles)

There is no irony of any sort in Henry David’s description of his rustic shield, though one may wonder what protective purpose his may serve. We know he abhorred the intrusion of the ‘machine in the garden’ and the ‘discordant drumming’ of urban life. If this imagined shield is to provide any meaningful protection, it must be that the pastoral landscape he surveys serves to recall Henry David to himself and fortifies him as he engages in the necessary business of everyday life. Just so we may carry within ourselves Henry David’s rustic shield! It will protect us against all harm, not because we cannot be bruised or broken or put to death as Socrates was, but because we have within an inner resource that cannot be touched. We belong to nature.

 

Natura naturans

It hit, which is another way of saying ‘it happened’, whatever the pull of gravity or the water rising over the banks into homes built on the flood plain or the constellations in their peculiar but inevitable configurations countenanced. It hit like a hot iron let stand too long and so became a sort of dark commentary de rerum natura, ironic, steaming with the smell and heat of compost, natura naturans. And so she left him and traveled near and far until she came to where all the trouble had begun, the yearning, pure and simple, without an object or home, without knowing, and there things stood as they had always been except now she was on her own for the first time and became somehow heedlessly clairvoyant, stirring up memories and desire and crosstalk among the young and the old, sounding more like the bleating of goats and howls of wolves, each on edge for what would happen next, though it be but more of the same. It hit, which is another way of saying, everything and nothing changed. 

Windflower

 

Come with me, two

three jumps but

don’t look back.

Lately angels

have been falling.

The garden is rank

With anemone.

 

 

Leaf Fall

Follow the path
of leaf fall,
the short cut home
twixt sky and dream.

When you're there,
you'll be right here,
safe with me. 

 

Nighttime in the Lyceum

Before the light changed and I forgot

the rules for how to see things as they are,

day was day and night was hidden in my heart.

The High Ridge

   
   The mist on the mountains lifts

ghostly greens glimmer

   and a new day darkens the valley

far below—your fingers tracing

   a line across the high ridge

that runs just above my eyes:

   I hold my breath—a sudden

swoop of wind and wing

 

The Oracle at Delphi

 

    He saw the child in the woman, wild, innocent, mischievous, vulnerable and a nuisance to herself and others, not unlike how he had been when he was six, but try as he might, posing before his nemesis the mirror, he could barely conjure up the feeling of what it was like to be so young. Then one day, seeing his students for the first time after cataract surgery, he became unaccountably double or rather blind-sighted, seeing each of them as younger and older than they actually were, side-stepping reality, if you like, but yet somehow getting it all right. There was Sally, for instance, with flowing red hair, freckles, of course, and a smile that betrayed her awareness of how beautiful she was. Now, however, he saw her crying for papa when he would leave for work and crying again for papa when he departed this earth. She would in time become the sort of smartass, assertive woman, ever and anon unsparing of her smile, who would one day become his boss, if he were to live so long. And then there was Leo, a tortured face hopelessly entangled in his own arms and legs that would flop about like Udon noodles, his hands and feet dangling precariously at the extremities. Now, however, he saw Leo as an infant, well-composed in his mother’s arms, being rocked to sleep to Ariel's own sweet music in his mother's lilting voice, Where the bee sucks, there suck I and Come unto these yellow sands and Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, complete with all the dings and dongs of the bells and the strangely soft crowing of roosters, and it seemed to him like riding on a bat's wing, and then, at almost the same moment, he saw Leo as a father, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, having finally realized the benefit of his mother's theatrical training, with one daughter clinging to his leg as if it were the trunk of a tree, complaining that it was her turn, and another, younger, smaller daughter whom he was dangerously throwing up in the air and having to lurch to catch in the nick of time, dragging along the first daughter who refused to let go of his leg, and miraculously not a trace of fear in the eyes of the at-risk child. After all, papa was strong and now he could dance. He could even feel Leo's future strength and grace in his own arms and legs, and, naturally enough, found himself, the teacher, 73 years of age, intending on his next visit to ask his doctor to approve a disabled parking permit, now waiting like the other students for class to begin. He heard himself announce an in-class writing assignment: they were to write about a childhood memory and then trace how that memory was like an oracle -- you know, like at the Oracle of Delphi that we all learned about in the sixth grade. So embarrassing, his student-self was thinking, surely the old man can do better than that. All that Greek mythology was just a boatload of malarkey. Still, he knew he could hit that assignment out of the park just as he had actually hit a home run when he was thirteen, his team losing by three runs in the championship game for interstellar glory. It had been the bottom of the ninth inning, two outs, bases loaded, etc. He had even been disciplined enough not to allow his minuscule batting average of .023 or that he was leading the league in strikeouts to shake his resolve. The coach, not wishing to tempt fate, gave his butt a good smack, keeping his exhortation brief:: “It’s just another at-bat, son.” Of course, he was totally making all this up, but on the other hand, he had imagined this moment so often that the fantasy had come to substitute for any known facts. Indeed, everything he wrote for that assignment was a shameless fabrication, yet he knew that, like Odysseus, who was himself a skilled and inveterate liar, he could find within himself the resourcefulness to take on any Polyphemus he was likely to meet and prevail. He noted with satisfaction how he had worked words from their class vocabulary list into his essay -- stellar words like nemesis, precarious, anon, inveterate, and malarkey and, coming soon in lines yet to be written, peripherality, baptize, and charlatan -- and was confident that he had hit yet another home run, though he was also aware that his teacher-self, spying on him with annoyingly persistent peripherality, was laughing at his student-self who had just previously sneered at mythology. Nevertheless, despite this handicap, he believed he had in fact become like his students or, as matters stood, like his fellow students, fearing as they did that he would finally be discovered to be a charlatan, a nobody, and so consequently baptized himself a true student of the game, always striving to learn new tricks to beat the system that, despite all his best efforts and those of his classmates, would still win out in the end and beat the crap out of each and every one of them.

 

One and done

You sit across the page, spelling

Your name like mine

Except it rhymes

And no one suspects you are lonely

Or looney or so hungry

you could eat this paper,

folding it into a star

popping it in the microwave

where you and I and the universe

will be one and done.

What's left to say

He was watching the parade
The clowns, the words, the trumpeteers
And in his dream he was awake
Or he was awake and dreaming.
He closed his eyes.
No matter, he heard the drums.
He opened his eyes a second time
And saw himself marching
Now to a different tune
A martial cha-cha-cha
And wet his pants.
There is little more to tell.
The daily Tribune records
That during the St. Jude Day Celebration
Saturday passed and a forgotten man
Had died, shouting blessings
Upon one and all. 

The dead don't talk

I know why

the dead don't talk

to the living:

it hurts

to remember

and we stopped

listening

The only true word I know

I don’t know how you know you have to make a change. You just do it and think about the whys and wherefores later. And in any case, I would only be making it up to sound like I wasn’t crazy or something, as though I actually had reasons for doing what I did. Maybe it was the rain. Who in his right mind would throw a few things in a backpack, leave his car and bank account behind, and just set off walking in the rain?  That's what I did. At nightfall I found a place along the side of the road to sleep, but I couldn’t stop shaking.  It didn't stop raining until early the next morning when the sun came up as though for the first time. 

I had started out in Rhode Island but hitched rides that left me the next night in Georgia and the next day I was in the panhandle of Florida, walking down some back country road that would take me wherever I was going. I really had no idea, but I was going and I was going to stay gone. I know that this all sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel that way then. It felt right and for the first time in a long time my head was clear. 

When I had started out I had only a couple packs of cigarettes and about twenty dollars which paid for coffee and more cigarettes for awhile. The kindness of strangers supplied the rest. Folks who picked me up were curious about what I was doing and where I was going. What interested them most was that I didn’t know. They saw my sorry shoes, shook their heads, and gave me money for a meal at the end of the ride. One man said he had never picked up anyone before but now he thought he would the next time he saw some young person thumbing a ride. It had somehow been interesting. I told him that was a bad idea. 

I went wherever a ride would take me and that’s how I found myself in a small West Virginia town, where an old preacher picked me up and took me home for a meal. He showed me with pride the wooden casket he had made with his own hands and how he was all set for eternity. He called it his boat. It was really no more than a crate, though its dimensions where about right for a coffin. I don't know about eternity. What I was really curious about were the huge old books that were lying on the casket as if to keep the lid on. He said the truth was in those books and I could see for myself if I wanted. The first one I opened had the picture of a  young woman, tied to a stake, her breasts exposed, looking up at the heavens ablaze with lightning.  I swear her whole body looked like it was electrically charged as though she were having an orgasm or something. Beneath the picture were the words, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” I turned over the page and saw the words "I ad crucem!" scrawled over the English text. I knew what those words meant alright: "Go to the cross!"  On another page was the picture of some wild man who was having a crimson X branded into his chest. After that I was in a hurry to go, but the old guy kept me there talking about how half the town was dying of cancer because everyone was marrying their own kin and goin’ to hell. I got the crazy idea that he was about to ask me to nail him and his books up in that crate and set him adrift. I told him I had to go. He wanted to know why I was in such a hurry. I  told him someone was waiting for me in Winchester, which was just across the state line. He said he would drive me there, but I just walked toward the door and thanked him. I closed the door behind me and didn’t look back.  

My next couple of rides landed me in New Orleans. I was beginning to realize that though everything was new to me, I was not quite a stranger to the folks I met. In New Orleans, I fell in with others about my age who looked just as lost as I did. They had liberated an abandoned house, worked at odd jobs and did drugs at night. When I didn’t partake, they became suspicious and shortly came to the conclusion that I was a narc. I had never heard that word before but its meaning soon became clear to me. They said my story about going wherever the road would take me just didn’t add up. That wasn’t the last time I was suspected of being a narc, but later it somehow didn’t matter. They could just think whatever they wanted. The first time, however, it was a shock. I had been glad to have a place to crash for a few days, but they told me I had better leave.

I ended up spending a month or so in New Orleans, making some money by working out of a day load outfit that sent out sober men like me on jobs that paid ten dollars a day. If you didn’t quit the job – loading, unloading, throwing bricks out of boxcars and digging holes – you got paid at the end of each day. In the late afternoon after I was paid, I felt like some goddam saint. Cripples, men with no legs, drunks and drifters like me were lined up along the sidewalk with their hands out. One fella, mounted on a board with rollers, had no arms or legs, just a cup. I had a simple rule. I would give away half of what I made and keep the rest. It was more than enough for my needs. They would call me father, though I was younger than they were. Maybe I looked older because like them I had grown so thin. A fellow worker had his own room where he let me sleep on the floor and he knew all the churches and other places where a person could find a free meal, though sometimes you had to pay by praying after you ate. I didn’t like that and said so. I ended up basically stealing the food before the praying started. The problem with that was that they were on the lookout for you the next time. At night, I wandered the French Quarter looking in the jazz joints and at the girls who looked right through me as if I weren't there at all. I can't say I blame them.   

I forgot to tell you that before I left to nowhere in particular, I had been a desk clerk at an otherwise respectable hotel called the Pilgrim Inn that catered to a certain class of working girl. They were all somebody’s daughter and they sent the money they made back to their families. Some paid guys who protected them and would beat them up to keep them in line. I would take payment for rooms from the johns and take them up in the elevator first and then the girls. It became routine. I liked the girls, but they all thought I was queer because I hadn’t done anything with them even when they offered for free. They would laugh and ask me if I knew which hole to put it in. I didn't mind. Everything had been going along fine until one night I was arrested along with the girls in a police raid and spent the night in jail. The next day they just sent me home. The hotel's lawyers had worked something out. The girls had to pay a fine. After that, I felt like I almost belonged and everyone treated me as if I were one of them. Then one night a little later I got beat up really bad by a guy who demanded to know where a certain girl was and when I wouldn’t tell him, he came around the desk and let me have it. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be afraid or even feel any pain. I was kind of numb or stunned I guess. After that, the girls treated me like a brother, which I guess I was.

After I had saved a little money in New Orleans, I set out again. I had heard from others about riding the rails. It was fast and straight but they also told tales of railroad bulls that discouraged me. I thought hitching was safer. My first ride, a long sleepy cruise through the night, took me to Texas, a little west of Austin. It had been a sweet ride; the stars out the open window seemed to pump their light right into my veins. My very next ride, however, changed everything, but I have written about that before. I don't really want to go into it again except to say I came out whole after a man tried to force me to have sex with him and maybe for the first time in my life I had been brave. That was then. What I really want to talk about is Richard whom I had met a year before all this craziness began, never saw again, and miss every day of my life. Before we parted he gave me a small carving, made from an odd piece of wood found on an east Texas beach. He had used only the sharp edge of a stone. It was like something out of the prehistory of man and had three faces on each side, one emerging out of another.  It is the face of every man I meet. For forty-six years I have kept this carving with me. It really is Richard's story that needs telling, not mine, though maybe his is in some way mine as well. You see, he taught me the only true word I know and he taught me by example and it cost him dearly.  He was the most honest person I have ever known and the bravest.   

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2016/03/song-for-richard.html

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2010/04/this-i-believe.html

Photograph by Her Himwich 

Time of life (with apologies to Zeno)

I have reached that time when I measure my life not by the years but by the months. Thus, I lengthen my life. I say to myself I may have only 6 years remaining, but 72 months is another lifetime. Soon, I will do the same with days and hours, then minutes and seconds. Each new measure will push life’s horizon back to a safe distance. The question is, of course, how long can I get away with this sort of time-chopping. Theoretically, forever. 

Death makes strangers of us all

I met her first in high school. Her name then was Alice Cyan. We dated and did what teenagers usually do, being full of hormones. When we went off to college, we wished each other luck and that was it. I met her again in law school, though her name now was Francine Bedower. She didn’t remember me, but I knew her the first moment I heard her laugh. It was like wind rattling through dry leaves.  She was beautiful. I mean, really beautiful, statuesque, as they say.  I slept with her once then, but so did almost everyone else. We didn’t see each other all that much and, though we graduated from law school in the same class, there was really no reason to stay in touch. When I met her the third time, her name now Townsy Harper, she was working for a law firm in San Francisco and I happened to be close by. We would meet for drinks. She was divorced, had two kids, a daughter and a son, and a lot of cats, but no dogs. She had made a point of that, no dogs. She had grown so thin I almost didn’t recognize her, but she knew me. She reminded me that when she and I were dating back in high school, her father had died and that’s why she liked me. That puzzled me a little, but okay, that’s as good a reason as any I suppose. Then she  stopped coming by. When we met for the fourth and last time, I was in the hospital for what I was assured would be a routine colonoscopy. Her name was now Sally Caulder, same last name as mine, though spelled differently as it turned out. It startled me at the time. She was stooped over, staring down at me as I lay there, waiting my turn. I had recognized her right off, that same laugh, but tart. When I asked her who she was now, she spat her name Caulder in my face and told me she didn’t know me and that she never wanted to see me again, biting down finally on "asshole" but seeming to look through me like glass. I can't say I blame her. After all, as I was soon to learn, she did not have long to live either.

Still alive

It was the long, cool time between sleep and waking, nestling in the morning light like a fledgling, though by the counting of the clock the world outside was buzzing, he impervious to its insistent question, What now? What to do if not everything at once? He remembered the previous night when he had talked himself to sleep, giving himself to the Oblivion that soon enough would put an end to all the questions, the time when there would be nothing at all to do and the chance to forget, giving himself to the future with nothing on his mind but the GIVING AWAY, the questions no more than the flutter of leaves just outside his window that was more like the chatter of children than a farewell. And now in the eternal Before and After, he lay there in the half-light and was glad, surprised to be still alive. 

(112020)

Oranges

He was determined this time not to cut his fingers as he sliced the oranges.  He would focus and keep his fingers well away from the blade.   He remembered all too well how previously his blood had flowed onto the oranges and pooled on the plate.  He knew it wasn’t just because he was getting old, fading into memory and the lure of the trees and his first kiss.  She had been as nervous as he and had closed her eyes.  Now all he could think of was feeding her oranges and the taste on her lips.  And suddenly, she had bitten his lip, making it bleed. And then, more softly, she was feeding him. She was delicious and he . . . . he was lost in the trees.  He put the knife down and wept.  

Out of Time

 

When they removed the tree they moved the place
Or rather the place became a barren field
Where light through the green, still moving shade
No longer marks the ground like rain. 
And yet here I am with you,
Your face bent over mine the air
rippling with laughter the tree
covering us in its bright shadow the earth
yielding as we fall out of time. Out of time?
What is left but song?
Listen! the ringing in the air, this rain
These tears hammering out the tune, time and place.
He, she, and all you love, draw near. 

 

Will-of-the-Whipped Mathematics

 

4 Days to the End of the Trimester Not Counting the Weekend, 14 Days if you do.

(I use a value-added-time-bending-will-of-the-whipped binominal equation, (x² +1)( y² + 2) =10 where x = Saturday and y = Sunday. It works for me. After all, numbers are just numbers. They are there to use in accordance with the mechanics of General Relativity. ‘Generally-speaking’, I am for anything that ‘extends’ time on planet earth. I hear time elsewhere approximates zero.)

 

now east now west

 

now east now west

the road has a mind of its own

and my feet obey

 

the rest of me stays behind
treelike

 

above

the sky grows gentle

 

MY HEART OPENS

the road goes on

as if not knowing

which way is best

On Rambling

 I well remember my father asking, What's the difference between a ham sandwich and an elephant?

 The Answer: Neither one can climb a tree.

That's where the trouble started. 

 

11:50 am: (Here comes the judge): You are charged with rambling, Mr. Himwich, of wasting your students’ time. Kazi has registered the complaint. You may question him. Kazi, is it really just rambling? Yes, it is. Am I rambling now? Yes, you are. Why do you think I ramble? That’s what old folks do. Perhaps I should just shove the work down your throat from the get-go and live with the regurgitation. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Me neither, that’s the point.

11:52 am: Judge Jo: Mr. Himwich, can you explain what 'rambling' is? It’s like trying to find the long-playing groove, getting down with the soprano, learning again how to dance. Glenn knows this well, see him stretching and contorting his limbs into a knot, pure negative capability, I don’t hear no one complaining about Keats. Holy Nijinsky, that man could dance. You’re saying ‘rambling’ is poetry and poetry is dancing? I call it keating, birding, peck, peck, now here now here, modo huc modo illuc, gurgling on air ---  Are you 'rambling' now, Mr. Himwich? Does a rooster roast chestnuts? Is the moon to the earth as Jack is to his Beanstalk as green is to soot? It's like tying yourself in knots just like Glenn is doing there or breaking out of a cage. 

11:54 am: Judge Jo: Glenn, is that what you call dancing? You look like a jellyfish about to explode. Haven't you've learned anything in this class? It's good for the soul, inside out or outside in. It's all the same. I call this move, Knot again, Knot again. 

11:56 am: Judge Jo: Tell us, Mr. Himwich, how did you come to believe in the value of rambling?  Well, one day, I overheard Emerson de Boot say to Riley the Wise: “Ask him about what he had for dinner last night and he’ll start talking about the moon, his son’s photography, the screaming of lobsters in the pot -- better yet, ask him if one plus one is one or two and soon enough class will be over and we’ll all get A’s,” and I thought, well, if that all it takes for my students to be successful, I would give it a try. Is it working?  Clearly. Just ask Riley.

11:58 am: Well, Riley? I first thought he was just senile, hanging on to his teaching career by the merest of margins, but having tried rambling for myself and getting A's on all my papers, I've become a true believer. He calls me 'the Wise' because I play the game the right way, with fiddlesticks and buttered rum. The man's a genius. He told us so himself. 

12:00 am or pm: Mr. Himwich, Aiden de Bomb here, aka The Weary One, do you remember me? Yes and No. Which would you prefer? If yes then no or vice-versa. Do you get my drift? Drifting, drifting, let the river of time and mind take you away, the answer will come upon you long after you've forgotten the question. I understand now, it's all about applying the indefinite dyad to a singularity. One size fits all. 

11:58 am: Judge Jo: Do you have any witnesses, Mr. Himwich, who can give us an intelligible account of rambling? Is Aaron here? He rambles better than I do. He could teach the class. Aaron, do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth? The truth, what’s that? Animal, vegetable, mineral? I love playing twenty-questions. Like the Ancient One says, the questions are more important than the answers, it’s the meaning of life, keeps the merry-go-round spinning, your neurons jingling and flashing off and on, and it's good for a laugh. After all, the show must go on and where we would be if---Judge Jo: That’s quite enough, Aaron. Is there anyone else who has something to contribute? Hinano, what’s your take on this question? I don’t have much to offer, but I can say that in the esoteric philosophies of the Far Far East aka Shangri-la, drifting or what you’re calling rambling is what those who are thought to be wise call the touchstone of existence itself. It’s like ringing a bell and following the sound wherever it goes until at last all you hear is a thunderous silence. Did you learn this from Mr. Himwich? No, I just drifted into his class and stayed. He calls drawing poetry and lets me get on with going nowhere. Are you saying his rambling is meaningful? Maybe.

11:56 am: Tarik, what do you have to say? I have no opinion. I do what I am told to the best of my ability, even if that means just staring blankly at the screen. I recommend it. It's a circus. 

11:54 am: Oliva, you haven’t spoken yet. . . . .  . Olivia, I can see you. You’re sitting right there in plain sight. Answer the question. You haven’t asked me a question. Haven't you been listening? For the umpteenth time, Is rambling a waste? Is it a bad thing not to listen when you are trying to think things out for yourself? The man lets me write and that's all I really care about, but I can say his rambling is like the migration of the sandhill cranes, like drinking beer and eating ice cream for breakfast. You’re rambling, Olivia. No, I’m not. I am writing the great American novel on dying violently again and again after you’re already stone-cold dead and I can tell you there’s not a bit of rambling in it, just a lot of distant howling. 

11:52 am: Judge Jo: Kazi, do you still want to press charges? Judge, the old man has concocted this whole charade just to whistle away the time: "I can name that tune in four notes, more or less." I never charged him with anything, but he is guilty, guilty, guilty and he has infected his students with his own silliness. He’s even going to make me play a clueless waif in this clown show.  Don't you get it? I am talking to you but neither of us is here. None of us are. Not even the old man. It's just ju-ju beans to him, what he calls creative writing. I call it dementia. 

11:50 am: Judge Jo: The Court finds the accused innocent of all charges lodged against him by this clueless waif. I don’t know about the rest of you but I got an essay to write by the end of class on what’s the good of life and if I don’t get it done I'll turn into Rasputin, whoever that is. I know exactly what to say: To ramble or not to ramble, that is the question, . . . and the answer! Essay done and time to spare! A+

Journey to the Shore

 

The song is beautiful; the singer gone 

The best of us are lonely and forever in love 

Maybe not tonight but soon this silence 

Though there is a chill in the air Ono still purrs

The girls chatter happily.  Who can help but smile

Sea and sky are one.  So too the sand 

In the distance, I hear a voice.  An echo 

Words. Distant thunder 

No two alike.  This night and day 

Alone at last: earth air fire water

 

HUMBUGGERY

 

If I could have found the words, I would have stopped teaching on my own. Telling my students that I really didn’t know what I was talking about and that they would have to figure it out on their own, just like me, 74 years old, fifty years into a teaching career, still standing in front of them like a ricket-racked escapee from a home for wannabe poets, spouting nonsense that they benignly mistake for wisdom --  like the world is our soul inside out, a psychedelic mirror only an ardent Narcissus could love – none of that worked. The students knew I didn’t believe there was such a thing as a soul but they still thought I was onto something.  That much was true, I was after something that would put me on the Road again, some meandering mumbo jumbo by which I could convince myself I really did know something grand and true and set me off wandering again in this dismal November rain. If I could find it, I could quit, since there would then be no point in going on with this charade. Teaching is all about searching for meaning. If you ever found the key to it all, you could bid your students good luck and goodbye, your last words as you walked out the door, “See you in Tulsa.” Didn’t they know that the writing I assigned them was a thinly contrived excuse for me to find the words? You see, while I was hired to teach these innocents, to have them read the golden oldies so that they could discover what had oft been thought, but ne’er so well expressed, I instead had them write and wrote along with them. But here’s the kicker – If I did somehow find the words, the writing assignments, the whole house of cards would collapse and I would be a free man. The students would be on their own and no doubt some of them would become teachers someday, throwing sand in the eyes of their students and making them dream.
     But then it happened – not the words yet, but one day Daisy What’s-Her-Name realized she really wasn’t learning anything and complained to the administration – her parents, she said, were paying good money for her to attend this school and here was this sad excuse for a teacher telling his students not to let school get in the way of their education. His teaching was nothing but the worst sort of humbuggery, the sort where the humbugger tells you to your face that what he’s selling is bogus, though she used other words like fake, senile, lost. She may have mentioned dementia. It was like they had suspected this all along. The next day I was gone, the memory circuits of the institution simply deleted me and rebooted. It was as if I had never existed, let alone ever taught at the school. I was on my own, but now the words came to me unbidden – it was surprising because the words sounded like a question and I had all this time been looking for something else (I confess some small part of me, some primitive generous impulse, was calling out to students who no longer even knew my name – it’s a question, ask the right question and you can get on with your life). Abjectly kneeling before a beaming Aristotle, I asked, Why me? Why not a zombie? and was good to go. 

 

Sweet Mary

 

Sweet Mary down on the farm

took my hand and led me on
down to where the river wept
and lay with me while I slept..

Now it is of her I dream, 
lost forever in the river’s tears.

 

I never meant no harm

 

And don't you know it,

What will be always was

And don't you know it,

What was wasn't. 

It's like when we say,

I never meant no harm

But hurts before

The man the boy strikes

Down the father, cold

And stiff beneath the stone.  

 

Call it love, an irrational equation

 

        2(y² – 9) = 2

 

 

 

Discussion of the 'Irrational'

HH: David, is this just a stupid equation? (I was fiddling around trying to make a mathematical expression for love): 2(y² – 9) = 2 / Call it Love.

DM: I wouldn’t say any equation is stupid, but I’m not sure exactly why that one would evoke “love”. There are equations that yield graphs that are quite distinctly heart-shaped, though
.

HH: Does the square root of 10 result in an infinite, non-repeating decimal?

DM: Indeed it does.

 

HH:  So then, what is the value of ‘y’ in this equation?

 

DM: y would equal plus or minus root(10), to be sure.

 

HH: Would it be fair to call this an ‘irrational’ equation?

 

DM: You would definitely say its solutions are irrational, but it wouldn’t be standard to call the equation itself “irrational” since the numbers actually appearing in it are rational.

 

HH: I am looking for a little poetic license. 

 

DM: With poetic license, one could definitely refer to it as an “irrational equation."

 

    (DM is Dr. David Metzler)

 

 

Love is so strange

 

Every time he looked at her he scowled.  She finally had enough and asked him what his problem was.  He said, “You’re so beautiful.  I can’t help myself.”  She didn’t understand. “But your face is so ugly when you look at me?” He didn’t understand and, of course, all the while he was scowling and making himself look ugly.  Finally, she asked, “Can you smile?” and he answered, “I thought I was.” “No, a smile looks like this,” and she smiled for him. He scowled. Then, for some reason, she kissed him. When people see the two of them together now, hand in hand, he scowling and she smiling, they wonder aloud, “What an odd couple!" Love is so strange.

 

Faulkner's Poetic Style / Orpheus in Black

For those not familiar with Faulkner's writing, this passage from his short story "Pantaloon in Black" will serve as an introduction to his genius. The context is that Rider's wife Mannie has died and he is returning home to what is no longer a home and, in a fleeting moment, very much like when Orpheus helplessly tries to embrace the ghost of his beloved Eurydice, she bids him farewell. Rider and Mannie are a black couple, living in the Mississippi of the 1940s. With Mannie's death, Rider understands that his home, rented from a white man, was never really his. With the collapse of this illusion, Rider's world and the life he had hoped to build with Mannie comes to an end.  Again, very much like Orpheus, who was consolable, his singing now making those same mountains and trees that once echoed with the beauty of his song moan with heart-wrenching elegy. The Maenads put an end to it, dismembering him with their bare hands, and tossed his head into the Hebrus river, where it continued to sing. A kind of lynching. Rider's story also continues to haunt us -- it seemingly will never stop. The comparison of Rider to Orpheus does nothing to sanitize Faulkner's story because it is part of our own history. The mark of Faulkner's genius is especially upon the sentence that begins, "She was going fast now,  . . . " The sentence ends with the verb "was' and has no grammatical subject, which seems appropriate to me, the barrier between life and death being invisible just as it is between the present and the past.. 

     Then the dog left him. The light pressure went off his flank; he heard the click and hiss of its claws on the wooden floor as it surged away and he thought at first that it was fleeing. But it stopped just outside the front door, where he could see it now, and the upfling of its head as the howl began, and then he saw her too. She was standing in the kitchen door, looking at him. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right, his face fixed too not to alarm her. “Mannie,” he said. “Hit’s awright. Ah aint afraid.” Then he took a step toward her, slow, not even raising his hand yet, and stopped. Then he took another step. But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. “Wait,” he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: “Den lemme go wid you, honey.” But she was going. She was going fast now, he could actually feel between them the insuperable barrier of that very strength which could handle alone a log which would have taken any two other men to handle, of the blood and bones and flesh too strong, invincible for life, having learned at least once with his own eyes how tough, even in sudden and violent death, not a young man’s bones and flesh perhaps but the will of that bone and flesh to remain alive, actually was.

     Then she was gone. . . .

 

(Italics mine)

 

Advisory

 

Advisory for our Times

You're not a talking head to me
Nor I to you, I hope. The eyes
Are not the window to the soul
Without a body. Thank God for
Our bellies and ourselves.
We are knees arms toes and hands,
The grass gives way beneath our weight,
Our feet leave telltale signs
Of where we’ve been are going . . . .

Imagine a world in which a hug is forbidden
For fear of infection, body to body. Imagine!
Hugging your mother father sister brother
Can only take you so far – your soul
is going elsewhere.
                                Look to your right
Or left, there is another body, another soul,
Who desires nothing more than
Not to infect you.  
                             Do not believe it!