How did grammatical aspects come to be

 

February 23, 2018  (I was 73)

 

How did grammatical aspects come to be

so long and effectively unbeknownst to me

Perfective verbs express completion of action

and of course the imperfective verbs…

express the incompletion of an action

or the completion of an inaction

In iterative I reiterate the repetitive

continuous action signified by the single act

Frequentatives are habitual actions I inhabit

Desiring to be desiderative

one verb derives from another

indicating my wish to perform the action

expressed in the original verb

which I so often do

Some words sound better than they mean:

 

from this week in February 2018  (I was 73)

 

Some words sound better than they mean:

 

Disdain is sworn to scorn but falls gentle as rain

Rebuff merely needs a hyphen to provide a slight polish

The music of odium too lovely to be malevolent

Taking umbrage might be carrying too much luggage

Antipathy a balletic step backward in courtesy

Maniacal a Broadway hit with dancing mannequins 

How did grammatical aspects come to be

 

February 17, 2018  (I was 73)

 

It’s a passageway like a tunnel through a mountain

as on highway 50 when you break through

the darkness within the granite to the light

blue and the spectacle of Yosemite Valley

around you and below you welcoming your descent

beside falling water under bright sun

through bracing air to settle and walk

the floor of the earth connected again 

The boring through that stone night

is a mediation a liaison a brush with the eternal

juxtaposed with the brilliant fleeting relevance to come

History is a foreign country

 

January 15, 2018

 

History is a foreign country

they do things differently there

They don’t allow tourists

Those who live there never left

those who left never return

Everyone tells you what it was like

but no two tell it the same

Nothing there ever changes

the stories always do

Lack of equipment made it simpler

I did not say easier

What do I know I left long ago

and I was with strangers before I went

Marking the Spot

 

December 27,2018

 

         Marking the Spot

Someone whitewashed a four-foot circle

with a big X through it

on the interior side of our faded redwood fence

in our enclosed backyard

I saw it through the sliding glass door

with my morning coffee in hand

Who would or could do such a thing

We have occasionally disgruntled neighbors

none with a bent toward vandalism

nor even mischievous children

I went out for closer look

to examine this symbol of rejection or worse

some sort of un-neighborly curse

Standing before it it disappeared

as if suddenly sunken into the dry wood

I ran my astonished hand over the rough planks

leaned closer as if to see where it vanished

then stepped back seeking perspective

as with a magician’s trick and then aside

whence the circled X reappeared

Repeated movements repeated the phenomenon

until I realized it as a prank of the sun

a projected reflection of cross panes of glass

in an upstairs window of the house

twisted and arced into the insignia shown

Delighted and amazed I now felt chosen

a celestial recognition of metaphoric meaning

selected by a brightness timed by the season

I’ve now seen it many times

sought it and comforted by its consistency

wondered and amused by its portent

honored by its section an attribution

of indecipherable reason bestowed

Also a wondrous bewilderment

that I hadn’t noticed it long ago

The window had been installed decades before

reaffirming my belief in selective perception

There are things we do not see

until we need to see them

Don’t call me Ishmael

 

December 5, 2018  (I was 74)

 

Don’t call me Ishmael

I never wanted to be on a whaling ship

Imagine Ahab as jailer on a floating prison

Less perilous journeys in other stories

Ahab and Odysseus there’s a pair

used their crews as fuel

defying inscrutable laws of gods

looming on the horizon

threatening islands and leviathans

My wanderings are on particular paths

my diurnal roaming in familiar hills and forest 

Creatures I encounter keep a predatory distance

respecting the scents of territorial marking 

Call me Vagabond

Cats in the carnival game

 

from this week in 2018  (I was 74)

 

Cats in the carnival game to be toppled

off their fence by baseballs thrown

by rubes three for a quarter  Three cats

upset to win a stuffed bear your choice

of plushy colors hung about the tented concession

Cats so easily tumbled by tosses

casually pitched by the pitchman yeowling

“Three pussies down and you pluck the one

your girlfriend wants to cuddle”

You plunk down enough quarters to buy a bear

before she leads you out of there empty-handed

D.H.

 

October 23, 2018  (I was 73)

 

                  D.H.

Designated Hitter Lawrence in the World Series

sits in the dugout while the team’s afield

too slow and inept of glove to seat someone else

or so valued at the bat left here to think of that

which three or four or five times in the game

must batter the pitcher’s claim to fame

A hit is a single line

a double is a rhyme

If a triplem can cripplem

hitting home is the whole poem

Birthed so near the Nottingham thicket

you may have thought he’d stick to cricket

The fabric shreds it does not tatter

 

October 11, 2018  (I was 73)

 

The fabric shreds it does not tatter

like a wind torn banner not split

not pierced or torn by foreign force

not chafed nor worn from use

but by each who pulled a loose thread

one end to the other detached at length

The start of a fringe

a sort of decorative disintegration

stripping the weft from the warp

relieving the weave that is the cloth

The one that’s lost held the next in place

The progression of thoughts once a grand idea

removed from mind one line at a time

Death is more fearful when life is astonishing

 

from this week of October, 2018  (I was 73)

 

Death is more fearful when life is astonishing

a daily wonderment fit for an eternity

magical existence with unfathomable end

purposeful continuance gloriously new

unfit for sleep if not for dreams

When the nurturing protectorate retires

infirm aged or disinterested

preoccupied perhaps gradually

or suddenly educated in disintegration

the cost of maintaining existence

taxes the intellect into reconsideration

of even more awesome realms

Translating Tao as the way

 

from this week of September, 2018  (I was 73)

 

Translating Tao as the way

whether the actual path through leaves

across bridges and the rip rap below the cliffs

or as the method the gait and pace

or the resolution of polarity the practice

a pursuit of personal perception of highest good

a view of one-ness the uni-verse

the single poem one line solitary word

inclusive of all before distinctions were created

All the droplets that comprise the flow

the stars from here a milky way

the visible yet incomprehensible reality

the non-dual nature of suchness

intuitive indivisibility

spontaneously disciplined liberation

from separateness yet I resist the other

as the other repels me as well

our sameness antimagnetic

 

Change in perspective is what makes home home

 

from this week of September, 2018  (I was 73)

 

Change in perspective is what makes home home

Away possibilities are expanded

Imagination can get the best of you

the vision of becoming something else

Fast-forward role playing entices belief

Immediate time restraints are temporary

commitments reworkable

finances merely financial

Reality is home being home

In more complex ways than realized before

Playing Guns

 

from this week in September, 2018  (I was 73)

 

         Playing Guns

If the barbed wire didn’t give

The fence post did

Stomping between the barbs

the wire sagged

or pulled the u-nails out

leaving a gaping eye to step through

onto iron mining company property

Even so I caught my pants

and tore a three-inch rip above the knee

along with the skin on my left thigh

not real deep but enough blood

to pretend it was a bullet wound

that just grazed not severe enough

to keep me out of combat but scarred

enough to remember the ersatz battle

sixty-five years later

Hard to have a small meal when you’re hungry

 

August 13, 2018  (I was 73)

 

Hard to have a small meal when you’re hungry

still hungry after the meal and blaming the one

who gave you a small meal when you were hungry

and both knowing they had more to give

After they were not hungry they had leftovers

they kept for themselves while you were still hungry 

Those who gave you none now lost to your thoughts

while the ones who gave you some seem somehow

the ones who created your hunger

I heard a Hawaiian lady she say

 

June 20, 2018  (I was 73)

 

I heard a Hawaiian tita she say

Pele erupt so furious

ovah ovah-population

Too many people try live here

moving in from all ovah but den

I think of five hundred hales destroyed

belong most of them to locals living

here all they life and wonder why

she pick on them allatime

The ones probly love her best

Of what sort are you or I

 

from this week June, 2018  (I was 73)

 

Of what sort are you or I

in the variety of the various

in which division of the divided

of what breed of the unbred

In what race do I run

for what class do my qualities qualify

Am I of a clique or coterie

a specious specimen or of legitimate specie

Is my family of a tribe a caste or clan

which might know what I am

of what character or persuasion

To what estate might I lay claim

and by knowing might lay blame

 

 

A lack of distinction resides in contentment

 

April 5, 2018  (I was 73)

 

A lack of distinction resides in contentment

an acceptance regardless of circumstance

a flexibility in adaptation

a quick study in the use of new tools

or satisfaction with the old hardware

interchangeable this or that’s

 

Lack of purpose lurks in contentment

the inaction of perfect satisfaction

satisfied with un-satisfaction

willing to let the fence lean

Listening for logic instead of thinking it

other brains just as good

William Saroyan wrote of fractals

 

March 10, 2018   (I was 73)

 

William Saroyan wrote of fractals

fractal Assyrians the whole race of them

present in one young Assyrian barber

in San Francisco in 1932 the whole of them

compressed not condensed in the barber

He went on to fractalize the Japanese

from the particular farm workers he knew

growing up in Fresno one at a time

perfect representations of their race

The human race extrapolated in each person

and in his Armenian uncle his own troubled people

troubled by nature and the un-named enemy

that slaughtered so many in fractalic wars

that man by man were all mankind

The infinitely complex pattern self-similar

across divisional and multitudinous scales

driven by the recursion of each of us

He explained the human geometric

forty-some years before the concept was

How did grammatical aspects come to be

 

February 23, 2018  (I was 73)

 

How did grammatical aspects come to be

so long and effectively unbeknownst to me

Perfective verbs express completion of action

and of course the imperfective verbs…

express the incompletion of an action

or the completion of an inaction

In iterative I reiterate the repetitive

continuous action signified by the single act

Frequentatives are habitual actions I inhabit

Desiring to be desiderative

one verb derives from another

indicating my wish to perform the action

expressed in the original verb

which I so often do

Some words sound better than they mean

 

from this week in February 2018  (I was 73)

 

Some words sound better than they mean

Disdain is sworn to scorn but falls gentle as rain

Rebuff merely needs a hyphen to provide a slight polish

The music of odium too lovely to be malevolent

Taking umbrage might be carrying too much luggage

Antipathy a balletic step backward in courtesy

Maniacal a Broadway hit with dancing mannequins