Wandering

As I get older, working alone
Into the early morning
I sometimes wander
Into the light and forget
The day, month, and year.
You must tell me,
Is this Thursday?

For Becky

Rosary

Now and in the hour of our final breath
The birds arrive as they always have on Ithaca
That we might have good sailing upon the sea.

We launch under cover of a new moon
And sail into morning, forgetting
The stars that will guide us home.

Being There

for Charles and Pauline

When she said I won’t be coming back

She knew you would

And would bring such living memories

That she would forever be at rest

With you there, always

Returning with the morning light

Or when it rains

Or whenever you set off from the shore

Or gathering the warmth of a fire

You will find through her

The wild peace, the ecstatic

Harmony of color, the sacred

Loon that calls us to life

That in its leaving never departs.

The Source

Who will come and who will go

To and from this place alone?

I’ll hide this poem where once I was:

The poet gone, the source unknown.

"Scars and Bars" by Pauline Eaton

Night Song

Quiet falls like leaves

Like night, the wheels

That turn the stars stop

There is no you, only

The sound of birds

Nesting in these words

So quiet they must be true

Always Looking

Because I am always looking

To the sky as if it were a mirror

I do my best flying at night

Because I am always looking

Into your eyes as if they were mine

I know both loneliness and love

Because I am always looking

To catch up with myself

I am always late, always waiting

Because I am always looking

I cannot see what is not there

Though it cost me my life

Because I am always looking

I am blinded by the light

As a child, he had always felt close to birds. It was as if the birds revealed to him some other way of being in the world, what he would now call, as an adult, another reality. As a 6-year-old and then a teenager and later as a father and a teacher, he never stopped hoping that the birds would not fly off when he came near or, more secretly, that the birds would actually come to him. They didn’t, and he blamed himself, thinking if he had been a better person or more at peace with himself and others, the birds would naturally perch on his shoulders or nest in his beard. He scolded himself for such foolish thoughts. Then one day, while on a long solitary walk in the mountains, a bird did come to him but only to drive him off from its nest. It made him incredibly sad. When he returned home from his long walk, he slept the sleep of the dead but woke in the morning with a birdlike song in his heart. To the birds, however, nothing had changed. Yet, to this day, he still sings with the birds. Sometimes they do not fly away at once but seem to listen and join their song with his. He knew he was yet again being foolish, but now, at last, he felt strangely at peace.

A Street in the Lexicon District

Drawn by a student of mine circa 1999

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Hail Mortal

ALL COBWEB
SEES IS

AN ASS
IS AN ASS

IS A MAN
AT BOTTOM

PLAYS ALL
THE PARTS

A FOOL
LIKE

A LIFE WORTH
DYING

— it took but moments
to write / not quite
a lifetime

For Family and Friends

Download For Family and Friends 1

The photos are mostly by Ber, but the ones with Sasha are from Josh, and there is one of Rosa with a bowtie that is from Judy Bieber, Rosa's mom.

What does real even mean?

What does real even mean?

Trying to understand it
We search out pain

Or maybe it’s different in Chicago
Where Janes and Johns play craps on the L

Or in the fields beyond
Where farm girls and boys give their bodies first to the sun
And then to each other and finally to the earth they love.

We make it up as we go along. What's true remains.
Let's call it rain.

No Nonsense Poems

A Bedtime Story

Last night
Papa

Fell asleep
Reading

I didn't
Wake him

So, So Sorry

If I could find
The words

I would not
Need

To apologize
For this

Also

Sparrow

Not a sparrow
But this sparrow

That has already
Flown away.

Sorry to have missed you

You weren’t there
Or I was late

Or this was not
The place

I waited
It’s not a problem

It's just that
As I told you

I am really scared
— Perhaps another time

Leonora's Photography: 164-168

Concentriquement

Les arbres de l'étang

(..) "Sur tous mes chiffons d’azur
Sur l’étang soleil moisi
Sur le lac lune vivante
J’écris ton nom
(..)
Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté"

(Paul Eluard)

Variation on a theme

youtu.be/9FytgfMV618 (Sergei Rachmaninoff.-Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini-)

Brown and grey façade

Quel bouquet!

Leonora's Photography on flickr

We must breathe to live

We must breathe to live

Until we weave ourselves

Into wind and breathe no more,

A grace we did not know we

Were living for — or think of

Rain and weep no more.

The Disappearing Katharines

No one knew if Katherine was one or many because each time she vanished she came back as a totally different person who yet called herself Katherine and somehow knew things about us that only the true Katharine could know. We would perhaps have overlooked the startling changes in her appearance and personality (now like a sly cat, another time like a valkyrie or a damsel in distress) if only there had not been so many Katharines (this last time she had returned with a faraway look in her eye and raven black hair that had previously been unapologetically red) or if she had not insisted that she was in fact always the one and the same Katharine. Well, she has now vanished once again. We all wondered who she would be when we saw her next. Perhaps a prima ballerina prancing about in piping-hot-pink pantaloons, prating on and on about some pearl of wisdom so priceless that it was actually worth nothing at all. We knew at least she would not be like us, blessedly familiar, wearing the spring grass down to a well-graveled path.

The Man Who Couldn't Love Someone Like You

He had once been a happy man. He had loved everybody, boys, girls, old women who thought themselves still vibrant and sexy, and old men with dangerously foul breath. He found lovable what others considered obscene, like protruding teeth or flapping ears or a nasty-looking scar across the forehead. He even found drooling as attractive as sweat. He couldn’t help himself. Others thought he was delusional or simply a dirty old man, until one day, he suffered a head injury, having slipped off a ledge while ogling sagging sunbathers. After he recovered, where he had once celebrated every blemish as a joy to behold, he now found crippling fault. His constant refrain was, “Who could love someone like you?” He said this whether the person was overweight, stuttered or blinked too much or had dull brown hair or had one too many eyes. He reserved a special place in hell for redheads, whom he previously had loved to distraction. Some fondly remembered the “dirty old man,' but now putting their full faith in what had before been but a naive myth, claimed he had once been a lovely human being. They asked him what had changed and he said, “I woke up.” One day he took a good look at himself in the mirror and saw the faults he found in others in himself: unruly hair, yellowing and missing teeth, wrinkles that made his flaccid face look like a prune -- he even thought his skin had turned dark purple. So be it, he concluded, and banged his head as hard as he could against the glass. This time he didn’t wake up. Those who had originally thought of him as a dirty old man felt somehow vindicated. They said they had known it all along. “Plain as the nose on your face,” they said. Others, more simply, blamed it on the mirror.

I sit and knit and smile

ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΧΡΗΜΑΤΩΝ ΜΕΤΡΟΝ

I sit and knit and smile
They think me dim

I cut and weave each thread
They merely measure

Theirs by mine.

Have you been traveling alone

In the dark? You know

We’re all here –

It must be so.

For Halie

You should may want to deflect those who want to know the ‘exigence’ of any particular poem. That includes me. It’s best for each person to understand the images of your poems in terms of their own experience first. You have a gift for expressing personal experience in images that allow others to discover themselves, e.g., my eyes were hollow /before you made them bleed – these lines are absolute magic – may be best understood by the reader responding in kind:

Out of dust and despair

Comes the thunder --

It’s all a veil of tears

And a lust for life.

I know that your poetry is true because it always inspires me to respond in kind. That may never work as a definition of poetry in any dictionary, but it’s true to my experience. Reading ‘true’ poetry inspires ‘other’ poetry. The creative movement of mind of the one transfers to the other. One reads ‘true’ poetry in fear and trembling, for it asks of you to literally and metaphorically put your life on the line. It is a severe test, one that I sometimes decline, for I would otherwise burn to ashes or, as you might say, “bleed” to death. It’s a fearful thing to write a poem or what I have written here.

The reading aloud of a poem is what lights the fuse.

Ber Himwich Photography 395

Temple Grandin, February 20, 2023 Peralta, N.M.

Sooner the better than never

He sd setting up his sail

Better get going or else

What? I’ll never tell.

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.

"Now I Understand" - Linda Gregg

Three words
A lifetime
Who can speak them?
I cannot
this morning's night.
Can you?

Stoned

Medusa was butch

but wore sunshine

as if it were hair.

Where did the snakes come from?

From men who stared.

(In the earliest descriptions and images of Medusa, there were no snakes. She was just stone-cold beautiful!)

In Memoriam: Pauline Eaton

No Flame But Words

for Michaela

What’s left to say?
Just this

In the rain
There are sparks

Of dark fire.
Do you see them?

They are like roses.
Do you see them?

Do you see yourself,
Burning shamelessly?

How will you begin
When there is no end

To the night
Or the burning?

Think of a bird
On a branch

With no wings of flame
But words

To set itself on fire
And sing

Of the night
Of the rain

That will not stop.

Without that song
There is no morning light.

Ber Himwich Photography: 392 - 394

Hold True

In Memoriam

for Nathaniel Bowie

When we return there will be an empty space

That we will fill with true memories

Of one devoted to what we devote ourselves:

The life of the school, service to others,

Kindness, a look that says I will

See what I can do

And then do it.

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

"That's the face of a man who has seen it all."

Photograph by Ber Himwich

“That’s the face of a man who has seen it all.”

Not so. There’s more to come
And it’s not all suffering loss
The mind shedding all

That is not nailed down
Eyes vacant still
Focused on what no one else can see
A sky so blue the light so full

That you can speak only
In single syllables silently
To the coming darkness
As though it were a friend

Passing onto another life
Where there is no sky
But the sky we have become
When at last we have seen it all.

Download Martin-luther-king-day-seminar

Believe in Love

Resources for Discussion: All Quiet on the Western Front: Novel and Film

Blackjack!

for Halie

Now I sit me down to stay

until I’ve said what I meant to say

when the leaves were green

and the birds perched on my shoulder

(how now the withered leaves look like me

and there’s but a torrent of crows

that always get the singing wrong).

Enough of that! Say what

you meant to say, your one last wish,

(a benevolent stranger bestowed three on me:

the first I used for a good night’s sleep,

the second that I would see another day)

to see her soon, is about to be

but poor poetic dust that covers all.

The crows remind me that’s not

all I want to say (their song may not be

pretty, but they are wise).

I cough and tell them to stop

their cawing or go away. They say they will

if the twenty-first line of this not a song

says it all. I miss you. And still they caw.

Leonora's Photography: 159 - 163

Missed opportunity - Occasion manquée

A walk in the park ♫♪ youtu.be/TmRUQpqKqBU (Bob Dylan - Country Pie -)

Autant en emporte le vent / Gone with the wind

Serendipitous Urban Abstract

Pondering

Leonora's Photography on flickr

PoetryMatters 118

The Song of Songs

He thought of her as if she were with him, but the truth was that she was gone and she was not coming back. The last time they spoke on the phone, she had told him. And that was that. Still, he thought he could hear her voice, singing the song she had written for him, her father, though as it turned out, she had been, on that early autumn day, more in need of the song than he. It had been a song of farewell, though it seemed now, as he listened to the light falling around him, a lullaby like the one his own father had sung for him when he was a child and if that mockingbird don’t sing, his daughter’s words now restless and unsettled like that of a mooncast muse or like living with and without regret. He thought if he could just remember the words of her song or snatch their meaning out of the call of birds that had never abandoned him or feel their rhythm in the outflow of his heart or see the flash of her eyes in the flickering of the candle on his desk, she, the singer of the song, would be there for him now. Without knowing where the words were coming from, he began to sing. He sang of all he loved and all that he would be leaving behind when his own time came. Mostly, though, he sang of the sea, the song becoming the gentle rock and slap of the boat, following now only the river’s stream taking him out. He too was not coming back.

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?” Now he didn’t understand and, of course, all the while he was scowling. 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, scowling and smiling, they say aloud, “What an odd couple.” Love is so strange.

Somnium

Somnium: Out there in the stars a drum is heard and they draw near the soft body and nearer the other one within, softer now, slows, now sleeps. The moon hangs in the sky. We find our way there. First, a hand and only then the eyes. What do they see? The moon hangs in the trees, wind weaving the light. There’s a burst of autumn colors, then the tears come. We dig in the dirt and find seashells, bones, roots. Still, the drumming, leading us on. You close your eyes to listen, then wake to find yourself alone, pawing at all that’s not there, the drumming now too distant to know if it is anything more than a lonely heart.

Child's Play

When Selina saw the children at play, she wished that she could tell them and make them understand: Don't grow up. You'll never play like this again. Your feet have roots, your arms branches that reach out for the light. The birds talk to you as friends should, and you give them shelter. They, in turn, give you wings that will take you far away from this time and place. When you return and other children gather around you and ask why you look so sad, you will tell them a story, not yours of course, nor theirs, but of some other children whom time forgot, children whose wings became leaves and whose feet were rooted in the ground and free.

Ber Himwich Photography: 386-391

PoetryMatters 115

Charles Eaton on Memory

. . . all of the reality that is available to us is reflective, subjective, and dynamic. To find a metaphor that might express something of what I feel/think, I would look at memory as this astonishing phenomenon that trails brightly behind us through time. If it were to be cut off within perhaps the first ten minutes of its life, we would be afflicted with the horror of a never-ending present. As it is, this multi-colored banner streams out behind us with its unique patchwork of successes & failures, defeats & wonderful victories, joys & sorrows, pieces of fabric that have been shredded/ripped/rent & segments repaired by the tender care of healthy recall that knits together frayed strands until they are stronger than woven steel.

In 1964, Pauline was in the Harrisburg hospital with our one-year-old daughter, Jane, who would die of Leukemia within a day or two. Pauline picked up Jane and held her closely in her arms—and then began to weep silently. Suddenly, Jane pressed her little hands against her mother’s collarbones and pushed away so that she could look directly face-to-face. Then, after a quizzical gaze, Jane lowered her head, tucked her head tightly against Pauline’s neck, relaxed her body, and patted her mother on the back.

I was not there. This is not my memory. It is Pauline’s. But she gave it to me and I am now the designated custodian of its continued life. Not only that, but my borrowed memory is so strong that with no effort at all I can feel Jane’s questioning gaze, her small head tucked against my own neck, the special perfume of her baby’s breath and head, and the touch of her hand patting my back. The very thought makes my throat ache. Is that a figment of imagination? Is it the dead strand of confabulated memory? No, no. This is what reflective, subjective, dynamic consciousness is all about. Is it a subjective artifact? Well, of course it is. Every human experience and memory is.

Death is an objective fact, but Death as we experience it is partially a sham. It truly is. It is a construct of the subjective mind. That is why the experience varies so dramatically from person to person and event to event. The sharp sting of death is as real as real can be, but there is one opponent which, if invited, always defeats Death with a salve that gently melts the stinger into a lingering ache in the throat, and that is a concoction of Love and Memory. It sounds like a commonplace that is easily gained and cheaply bought, but the price is high and may include the offering of a full heart.

Pauline Eaton's Credo as an Artist

Pauline’s Credo from “CRAWLING TO THE LIGHT”

Only one who has a personal religion, a unique view of the universe,
can be a true artist. -- Friedrich Schlegel

The purpose of life is spiritual growth.
We are evolving souls.
We participate in the on-goingness of creation.
We participate for the purpose of extending opportunities
        for growth in each other.
We MUST participate, because this is when we are most in
        God's image--that of creator--that this I why we, in turn,
         were created.
Life is being born again and again.
We are meant to evolve into pure love, that love is the
       attractiveness and inter-relationship of all.
We are the indwelling of God in matter.
We are made up of energy participles and soul stuff in the
        same patterns built in all that exists from the atom's core
to solar/stellar systems and beyond.
Joy is experienced in the creative act of birthing being,
        meaning and order out of non-being, meaningless, and
        chaos.

In this sense, we are all artists or called to be such.
As an artist, I believe my role is to continue making connections
and 'real'-izing my place in the FΑΒRIC OF ALL THAT IS.
I attempt to paint this.

hhimwich is the author of all poems and other writing unless indicated otherwise.

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David Chalmers: Fragments of consciousness

The New York Review of Books

Poetry 180

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Concentriquement

Les arbres de l'étang

Variation on a theme

Brown and grey façade

A walk in the park ♫♪ youtu.be/TmRUQpqKqBU (Bob Dylan - Country Pie -)

Autant en emporte le vent / Gone with the wind