Sunrise Service

by Richard Hartwell

From a northwest land of
lowboys, flatbeds and pickups,
unprepared for the infectious
spread of suburbanization,
he’s off the freeway and
staring down endless avenues
at 3 a.m. when all the lights
turn yellow simultaneously
as far as eyes can see, while
only searching for stability;

Swept from a Tennessee coal
mountains’ birth and adolescence,
discarded in the far west with
a saturation of children and a
life darkened like the underside
of leaves forever turned
from the sun, speckled with
rust and housing spider-spawn,
she seeks reprieve in the pre-
dawn from an ugly plastic life;

Colliding at the edge of day,
two souls coil around a
mutuality of sadness under
the soft dome light of the
overhead cab of a parked
semi sitting in the driveway;
lonely man, single mom,
a coupled moment, a rending
of sunset, assumed, as sunrise
blazes their night’s ending.

Passing Lane Ahead

by Richard Hartwell

Seen by midday light, mountains and mesas are stagnant in shimmered umber, only coming alive at late dusk or early dawn; pastels breathed from a strident-colored palette: lavender, indigo, a tinge of verdigris, before aflame with citrine, peach, and rose, as animals scour the desert sand.

Out here – Laughlin, Needles, Bullhead City – Edward Abbey’s desert solitaire and solitude has lost out to the roll of dice, diesel trucks, slot machines, SUVs, and greed. Developers, politicians and corporations have won. So many others have lost.

I would like to see what it might be might be like, say, five hundred years after the removal of man – eradicated by his own whimsy or succumbed to natural disaster. I would like to see the highways paved over with sand and sage, the casinos haunted by bobcats, wild pigs, skunks,, and other shadow seekers. I would like to se the unnatural edifices and abodes of mankind become the natural environment of the desert’s future. I would like to se the unnatural edifices and abodes of mankind become the natural environment of the desert’s future. I would like to see the high-rise hotels and casinos – their windows broken out by storms and disintegration – become the aeries of hawks, eagles, vultures, and the waterfowl of the Colorado; if it can survive the damn dam-silting of the water unwise. Yes, I would love to see it . . .

The eddied and current-shimmer of the moving Colorado moves me also. My eye is captured, hypnotized by staccato facets of its diamond chips; hundreds of carats per second streaming by with the sun angled low; hundreds of thousands of carats per hour siphoned off to slake mankind’s insatiable thirst; hundreds of millions of carats per day lost to the gulf sands before kissing the salted lips of Baja.

* * *

Wrinkled and calloused hands of an old man grip the wheel against the buffeting winds as the car runs after cloud shadows, trying to stay penumbral relative to the surrounding world. Scorched by sun splashes between islands of shade, life is only hot or cold by comparison.

On the side of the canyon road another dead wild burro thins the herd, culled by speed and inattention, both the burro’s and the driver’s. Merely another example of the onrushing clash of nature and modernity; yet he tears up at this sight of death, this death site. Sometimes, in the past, some canyon denizen erected memorials to occasional dead burros, talismans to wildness, Thoreauvian stelae. Not so much anymore. Soon all that will remain in the canyon will be the asses of the future rather than the asses of the past.

Entrances and Exits

by Richard Hartwell

           

Entrances and exits: doors opened or closed; or ones slammed behind you. It is of these that much, perhaps most, of life is made. It is entrances and exits upon which attention is riveted. All that falls between is merely dross of daily living, splinters of shattered doors.

How many times can you open a door, enter into a conversation, before it sticks in your mind that demons lurking behind it in the shadows are waiting just for you? I am revolving in my life. Spinning circles. Creating eddies; eddies flushing away the center of my being. I am tired of wasted days, missed moments. I feel expendable, except to a very few. It’s not so much a poor self-image as it is being so thick skulled that I don’t realize the door was stuck shut for a reason.

I seem hung up on this theme of entrances and exits. Many of these seem to be the moments by which I live. Not much in between seems to be of any use. I try, but my trying seems to try the nerves of those surrounding me. I wish I could find the master key.

The clock passes time much more smoothly than I. I am all fits and starts, progression by catastrophe rather than incremental advancement. The passage of time is not uniform, but is governed by the surrounding residue by which we judge how long it’s been since the pursued broke camp ahead of us.

What do you want from me when we have nothing left to say? It’s as if the conversation must be poked alive just to insure that neither of us is a quitter. Somehow I am at the point of no longer caring about labels used by others towards or about me. Many labels are true, but only momentarily. If moments are truly fluid, then labels are no longer valid immediately after applied. Each tick of the clock produces a new label that is then obscured by the next label, each piling up over one another during the course of a lifetime. I still cannot see the horizon or, yet, the exit.

Fair Deal

by Richard Hartwell       

In turn, by age, eldest to youngest,
four drew from a new- broken deck
fanned face down on the dining table.

King of Diamonds.
Fitting for the eldest son:
stockbroker by trade;
self-made overachiever;
family’s financier;
household of five;
Harvard Summa.

Seven of Clubs.        
Fitting for the middle son:
mid-level executive,
telephone company;
outdoorsman;
household of five;
Dartmouth Laude.

Knave of Spades.
Fitting for the youngest son:
chain-store vice-president;
always upwardly mobile;
family man of sorts;
household of six;
Harvard Magna.

Deuce of Hearts.
Fitting for the only daughter:
no expectations only failures;
‘women’s retail sports-wear’
sounded better than counter-girl;
counting me, a household of two;
high school diploma.

While watched surreptitiously,
high card chose first and then,
one by one, grandmother’s life
divvied up by her loving children,
with calls, raises and greedy trades.

Silently crying, so not to be heard,
I called dibs on my memories . . . and won.

And John Would Weep

 by Richard Hartwell 

No longer the laughing cantina whore
servicing Salinas and north to San Jose,
the Monterey Peninsula’s loss is acute;
gone are groves of oak, firs, and ferns,
as the soul of Steinbeck country has left.

Ravaging now are contesting diseases of
pimps and pros occupying millionaire’s
mansions, players on glitterati golf courses,
and lovers of works by arrogant artistes.

No longer are fish and agriculture the sole
core of the central coast and I sorely miss
the razed groves of oak, firs and ferns, and
the embrace of the laughing cantina whore;
as the soul of Steinbeck country is departed.

Journey of the Yellow Monk

by Richard Hartwell

Saw an amber monk today,
Walking –
            out of time and place,

Barefoot, bald, in dirty robes,
Walking –
            on a city street,

Sticking to deep shadows,
Walking –
            up against a wall,

Far away from jungle paths,
Walking –
            heedless of his feet,

Through broken glass and trash,
Walking –
            in disdain or ignorance,

Focused on his journey’s prayers,
Walking --
            Oblivious of worldly cares.

Counting Burros

by Richard Hartwell       

I count the burros every day,
each time I travel Reche Canyon:
a cutoff, one freeway to another,
a road increasingly more traveled by,
retaining still a placid, natural state,

Conducting census of wild burros
early mornings and late afternoons;
twenty-eight, a magical number,
varying day to day to failing eyes,
camouflaging grasses, trees, scrub.

Burros float in spring on an undulated
tide-pool, wild mustard, breeze stirred,
bordered by golden poppies, boulders,
yucca surfacing with floral ebb and
flow as burros graze shore to shore.

                        *  *  *

Spring births increase daily tally, then
seasons change; sere of summer into
fall, yucca flowers drop, grasses turn tan,
boulders immobile, as the count fails, the
drove melts to russet, brown, and coffee.

At times the group splits in two, I cast
eyes both sides of the road in chorus,
gaining twenty-eight, plus or minus;
but now and then totaling is interrupted;
encountering a body civilization-struck.

Shrink of count is not so much of
herd as of head, heart, soul, idyllic
scenes: meadows waving, wild,
without commuter-driven death:
contractions of herd and dreams.

Bravado

by Richard Hartwell

Leapfrogging breakwater gravestones,
embracing air from boulder to boulder,
almost never missing, still tempting fate.

Out to the end of the Newport jetty,
tagging a steel pillar set in concrete,
navigation light dimmed in the fog.

Returning back block to block,
a gurney of granite if misstepped,
first leaping then looking to land.

Not a race, a challenge of agility,
missed only once, proved by a
fifteen-inch white badge of courage.

Dinosaurs

by Richard Hartwell

I spied two dinosaurs fornicating on the dining room table.  My grandson has obviously been here, but at only two it is doubtful that this tableau of cross-species copulation was intentional.  And yet, and yet.  He was, probably, “fighting” them; pitting one against the other, complete with growls and shrieks and pain.  As he tired of his game, he left these plastic monsters in their last pose, the dominant Tyrannosaur atop the alligator-like deinosuchus.

This domestic scene of dominance bears striking similarities to the struggle between his parents he sees played out daily.  But currently he’s asleep, so the dinosaurs are only fucking up his mind right now and not his life.  That will come later, during the ice age.

Airport Angst

by Richard Hartwell

God, here I am again in an airport lounge.  I’m waiting for my second wife to depart for Wichita.  I’m expecting this one will come back.  At least this time I’m not praying for a hangover to go away.  On the drive in Sally made some comment about how I hate airports.  To a great extent this is true, but like a casual affair gone on too long, it is often a love-hate relationship.  I’m thinking about all the good-byes at airports - wondering what was so good about some of them - and I’m thinking about all the arrivals at airports - wondering what was so good about some of them, too.

Sally just interjected that I was probably too drunk to remember most of my airport encounters.  She’s possibly right, but some of those encounters needed the dulling of an anesthetic.  Come to think of it, the tension between the sepsis and the antisepsis in airports creates much of their mood.  One can encounter the gleaming sterility of ticket counters and corridors and washrooms along with the depravity of hucksters and religious freaks and the truly lost and forlorn.

I conjure in my memory all the airports I have known, or at least those whose brain cell filing system is still alive, and they form a liturgy of sorts:  Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Chicago, Boston, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, El Paso, Tampa, Portland - Oregon, not Maine, Seattle, Coos Bay, San Jose, Fresno, Burbank, Ontario, Nashville, Honolulu, Lihue, Merced, Modesto, Monterey - California, not Mexico, Augusta - Georgia, not Maine, never Maine, Terre Haute, Kansas City - yes, Kansas, and not to forget Travis and Midway and Subic Bay, Pleiku and An Khe, Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, Happy Valley and LZ English, and dozens of landing zones too obscure for names where you were lucky not to get your ass blown away instead of just accosted for a buck and a paper flower pinned to your lapel.

I look over this list and realize that in over half these airports I was drunk or stoned or emotionally short-changed.  Perhaps Sally’s right.  Perhaps I do hate airports, but it’s been a long relationship, very long.  And perhaps, like a wart you constantly molest, my memories have become a part of my deformity.

Family Feud

by Richard Hartwel

It’s difficult to sleep at night when the booming anger of artillery keeps you up; the challenge and response, the tit for tat, the continuous sparring of retaliation as each side, or all, tries to subdue the raging other by force and volume.  So I enter each day already blurred by the conflicts of the night before.  Yet I am expected to reconnoiter the way ahead, to be alert, to take the point as if nothing is unusual, but tuned for even the smallest violation from the expected.

This no longer reminds me of the war past.  It has become the war present, the war future as far as I can see.  This is not my war, but their war.  It is again someone else’s war in which I am caught up.  But I am no longer so young, so naive, and I’m related to them this time, by marriage and by blood, transported across four generations.

I return from my own skirmishes each day, neither bowed nor bloodied, just worn down further with frustration, slightly bent with age and exasperation.  I pass through the perimeter into a hot landing zone each afternoon or evening, depending on the season.  The warring factions within my own compound are compressed too closely together, rubbing wrongly against one another until the heat built of the friction of their own self-rightness ignites into factional squabbles and squabbles into war.  Accusations fly.  The barely scabbed wounds of past history are scratched open.  The fresh blood of emotion spritzes the atmosphere, signaling to some a need to escalate the attack and close upon their quarry.

By each and all I’m called to bear witness to new transgressions, to recall evidence of old ones, to mediate the use of language as a weapon, to relay non-negotiable demands and refusals to surrender, back and forth by shuttle diplomacy, from room to room and sometimes spilling out of the compound, breaking the neutrality of the neighborhood.

It’s expected that I’m left unscathed by each attack, each thrust and parry.  It’s assumed that the flak and shrapnel and bullets, the fire and concussion of each battle, simply pass overhead.  They don’t.  Each day I add new cuts and abrasions to the scar tissue of my thinly disguised armor, new punctures to my fragile ego, new stress fractures and traumas to this emotionally sated syndrome.

Like any prolonged combat, the waves of heightened action are followed by troughs and trenches of relative quietude.  Like any seasoned conscript, I take advantage and try to cat nap in these valleys of hope, trying to tune out the dull thuds in the distance; turning their dark voices of angry despair into the white noise of peaceful oblivion, before the fatigue of battle etches my soul too deeply with wounds which never heal.

Elements

by Richard Hartwell

The majestic northern coast of California lures me still,
as do the entire coasts of Oregon and Washington
in all their various guises:

fog-shrouded wedding of earth and water
wicked expectancy of air and fire
placid and playful rollers
foam-whipped adversaries
piers and piles and pyres of rock formations
left alone except for the view of gods
both above and below the sea
coast of pines and fir and myrtle
to twist the stealthy fog when come ashore
promontories that beckon
sacrifice or suicide or saints
salt that clings to nostrils
far inland beyond other lost senses
crowds of clouds gathered
portent of inundation
losing individuality
loosing tumultuousness under compression
entire heaven becomes gray
lambasted by billowed winds
granite and lava rock sculptors
mating of water and earth wind and fire

Monuments

by Richard Hartwell

Monuments,
Rise like mesas from a sea of snow.
Arabic,
Splattered like the tracks of birds on marble.
Prayers,
Spirited like steam curling from hidden pools below.
Vistas,
Seen in my memory from the high desert Islamic Cemetery,

While desert lilies fight off
the snow, the wind, and death.

Onward

by Richard Hartwell

Every evening we are poorer by a day,
but richer by a memory;
every dawn we are poorer by a dream,
but richer by an opportunity.

It is this forward shift, this change,
this inevitable variability,
that is mankind’s lodestone;
for, without change,
or the expectation of change,
or the vision of change –
without this or these,
what is life worth?

Unrest is the mark of existence;
variation is vitality
not fulfillment or satiation.

Mankind needs need and
pursuit of the far country;
arrival is not a goal, only
passage is of genuine worth,
its challenges fulfill mankind.

Forward motion is all, whether physical
or intellectual or emotional.
Mankind is made for movement,
not entropy and stagnation.

Nearsightedness

by Richard Hartwell

Increasing nearsightedness,
In fast advancing age,        
Can be of great benefit.

No longer do you see
Serpents in the grass
At the garden’s far end,
Blending, blurring with a
Surrounding palette,
Forming only background.

Eyes can distinguish
Shades, hues of color,
But so little of form,
Thus forcing, focusing
On the immediate,
Aware what is before is
Seen with greatest clarity.

Concentrating as it recedes,
Continuing to distinguish its
Shape amidst amorphous
Background, surroundings,
Something said in praise of
Beneficial aspects of
Such narrowed vision.

If I can clearly see only
What is just before me,
There is less possibility
Then that I will trip,
Fall over the obvious,
While admiring the ethereal.

Addicts

by Richard Hartwell

I have three sons who are addicted,
addicted to their age and ages.

One son is addicted to pills and morphine,
chemicals that extend his day, so he
can do all that is required of him.
Or so he tells himself.

Another is addicted to sex and the
wiles of a young woman, so much so
that now he’s addicted to a young family,
a job and a nine-to-five routine
that seems to extend to the horizon.

The third son is addicted to music, raves,
the ravages of body piercing,
inflicting on himself the pain
his words inflict upon his mother.

I have three sons who are addicted,
but then it seems to me we are all
addicted sons ourselves or, rather,
sons of addiction.

Woodshed

by Richard Hartwell

Mossy wooden shingles on a peaked roof,
naked and exposed on the underside with
no ceiling, concrete slab for a floor, probably
poured in the late forties or early fifties,
about the same time as the eight car garage.

Chipped, weathered forest green exterior,
long, narrow, and the moodily dark interior.

This woodshed, east of the upscale house,
home of black widows and tarantulas; a
place of creation and repairs, seduction,
molestation of memories, and misery; a
place of reconsideration of nightmares.

            *     *     *
She used to tame the tarantulas,
teaching them to climb her arms,
to transfer hand over hand,
fascinating me, transfixed
by her dexterity and calm.

Once she also sawed and carved,
then whittled a toy sailboat for me,
with brass eye connections for
mast and boom, shrouds and stays,
all manner of tackle, and cloth sails.

Those were the days of creation,
days of a joyous youth spent there.

The days of seduction, molestation, and
misery, were days when only she was
there to receive what she could not
combat, too young to refuse or refute
a frequenter to the shed for discipline.

The cliché of a spanking in a woodshed
was all too real for her, but carried too
far by a father, her adoptive father, who
went from slaps behind to caresses before;
who went from correction to her despair.

She never spoke of this sin against her,
she did not need to, for her clothes and
glum demeanor disavowed summer; I,
though much younger than she, could see
beyond dead tarantulas and broken spars.

Tortured toys, stabbed spiders, and reconsideration of nightmares,
ended by open beams, her avenue of escape from hurt and shame.

Good Indian

by Richard Hartwell

I am from Oklahoma City,
At least my father was,
Off the reservation and into Christianity;
Raised a Bible-Belting Baptist with Spirit.
I am from a land of unbroken horizons,
Starry skies, heat with high humidity; now
with Grandfather’s hatchet, memories, and love.

I am in Vietnam,
At least my body is,
Burdened with weapons, boots, and rules,
Weighted down with the profanities of death.
I am in the jungle, humping through mud,
Humid horizons of mountains and swamps,
Water above and below, a baptism of shit.

I am going to heaven,
At least my soul will,
Native to this land and real American heritage;
On moccasin feet, I slip slyly in, to sit, and
Pray to go to a happier hunting group, back
To see the great eternal plains and to hold
Quiet dialogue with our great forefathers.

Lower Coos River

by Richard Hartwell

The river meanders towards Coos Bay
in almost bayou-like curves and twists,
sinuous as ribbon candy, but deadly:
old hulks, grounded and rotting, on
ox-bow bars; mooring piles driven
into the mud, barely identify the
river’s current course in the fog.

At night even intermittent lights,
reds and greens, can’t mark the
channel in the blanketing fog,
ricocheting glows confusing:
you’d be aground before they
came into view, all except for
old-timers, noting the widening
vees of river current on each pile,
as the patterns of geese change,
more adept than local guardsmen.

Farther down, the river gains
depth and breadth, becomes
madam to upstream whores,
welcoming inbound, as lumber
freighters crowd the GP and
Weyerhaeuser docks, and tugs
churn up such wakes that low-
lying islands are constantly
swamped, scattering shore
birds out over the broad
expanse under the bridge,
over the bar, and out to sea;
as salt tears mix with sweat.

Spring Is Subversive

by Richard Hartwell

Spring is subversive for so very many, insidious even; it slyly stalks out from winter until it leaps full-blown onto fields of wild mustard trimmed on edges with poppies and desert lilies.  Where I live spring is more devious, often tricking roses and fruit trees with warm days, yet nights hovering nearfreezing, lulling blossoms and buds into premature birth and early death, letting those innocents shrivel and drop.

It is difficult to know which is better, if not best: to delay the salvation of spring, often elongated into April or even May, but knowing then that the season is real, not some conjuror’s trick contrived; or, to embrace early signs of spring, allowing resurgent hopes of incarnation, even knowing it is likely a manifestation only meant to tease and titillate desiresf or winter’s early end.

I have lived in lands and climes of both extremes and known the joys of fulsome spring erupting forth into elysian cornucopias, as well aso ther times knowing that winter’s disasters have ended, marked by trickery of first rose buds or nascent plum blossoms; I have been both pleased and tormented by mere tastes of spring in February as well as meals of sated spring in May.

If given choice, I would option for the possible deception of a too-early spring, not wanting to know what is behind the seasonal drapes or the illusionist’s cloak; thus, I await the annual surprise of spring.  Early or late, I anticipate a transformation.