Ten dollar Chevy

I lost my tape to a shuttle driver in Nashville and never got it back. Then there was that journal full of grandfather poems abandoned in a London taxi. But none of this comes close to the time Martha left her boyfriend waiting in a phone booth on the freeway outside Eureka as she sped away or should I say lurched in that ten dollar Chevy with no windshield and only second and third gears. She never knew how vital it could be to have reverse in the palm of your hand. No reverse gear. So she kept going all the way to the Okanagan Valley and blended in with the seasonal tribe of apple pickers. Left that Chevy in a ditch outside Spokane and hitched into the next stage of life wondering if George had ever figured out she wasn't going to make it back. Maybe he was still there smelling the salt sea air talking lobster pots and 19th century engravings with the local booksellers. Or maybe someone else turned up, someone with a windshield and reverse, to give George a warm bed and a BLT at midnight. Maybe George metamorphosed right there in that northern Californian phone booth like Superman flowering into an indestructible arrangement of blues and reds with flashes of yellow. Maybe a lightning bolt took George out. That sort of thing happens, thought Martha, as she kept moving forward, reaching for another apple and another, not caring when or how things get ripe, only filling the boxes, filling her pockets, filling her heart without remorse, filling her life with the Okanagan autumn before all the leaves would most certainly fall after the first frost.

Avocado

When I first heard avocado trees take eight

years to bear I reckoned I’d be sixty-plus if

I planted one right now a daunting notion

meantime a volunteer tree between our place

and the barn kept growing we puzzled

over its identity the first few years then knew

it to be an avocado maybe a seed started

by a child using a glass with toothpicks holding

aloft the fruit’s center thrown aside the long

root tailing into tap water while two dark

green leaves reached out of the crack long

before we arrived then say four years ago

flowers showed on what had become a shade

tree we’d pruned and shaped agreed to leave

in that corner thus when the first fruit arrived

delighted we opened it up but its watery

bitterness put us off too bad we said not

the good kind and now I’m sixty two lived

here nine full years resigned to another

decade before we’ll find the right variety

though this one bears so much our children

now grown bringing their children two born

this year and a third two years ago

walking between here and the barn over

numbers of fallen avocadoes opening them

up they tell us you have delicious avocadoes

you know and so we do we’re told they’re “goldens”

so many we have to give them away like

everything that comes like a gift without

waiting just as our life here started green

and promising while we planted not knowing

how time would keep us guessing before flowering

before setting the fruit down before us

The sober Capricorn moon

The sober Capricorn moon needs a little magic
in her life bent as she is like the bow of the
huntress at rest there in the small room her
arrows spent the night long pierced with
bright places where she pointed and aimed
now heaven itself strained across our minds
by her careful weighing and selecting all
however but her own fate perhaps surrendered
to a gin and tonic half way between five and
six at each day's end though never after
having dined. She served fruit cocktail
I remember, from an ornate Chinese bowl,
green, I recall, with intricate stories
suggesting themselves in the glaze
but then everything she reached into
seemed to have a pattern one never
noticed until she began and she usually
began far beyond the beginning as we
mortals know it. You know, I suppose,
of what I speak. I hope you do, because
the night is cold and she is far away
in her small room, and close enough
to the television screen to touch the captions
orchestrated by a deft touch of her remote.
I hope you do know what I mean. How the word
was in the beginning a sound so close
so intimate so akin and simultaneous its utterance
brought us and everything else into existence.
You know. That word. And the huntress
sober tonight, needing a little magic in her life.

Her soul came all this way

A baby is a baby is a baby till she
turns toward you as the two of you
lie there on Sarah's beautiful quilt
spread out on the floor of the big room
looks at you, she does, with a look
you don't understand, so close she
takes the back of her hand delicately
across your face, the corner of an eye,
the place where the nose rises up
and down until finally her fingers
turn touching your lips searching
inside that space that moved apart,
closed up, opened again, that time
you said something, that time your words
spoke a sound an articulation of
slow music she seems to remember as if
her soul came all this way from
somewhere deep inside and yet out there
somewhere all at the same time
just to touch you

Cello

I don't know what to say——your notes go deeper than my toes, your face with more curves than a ballerina juggling oranges. Yesterday the rain was only a thought. Today it is still a thought. Clouds descend in the night and take us in. I dream about you. You strike a chord. Your long neck dances in the shadows. One song after another thrusts itself across your bow. All across the planet we listen to your high rise harmonics, your castles in the air, your dungeons quiet with the mummified past in chains, your walls wet with thoughts of tomorrow——across the ocean your skittering flight catches white caps and your lips kiss the piano keys at such a rate there's no stopping you now, there's no resisting your zither lips...the vibrations are too much. I feel old in your presence. My heartbeat races after you but I can't keep up and it's still daytime, somewhere. How many minutes now, your hand has been holding my pulse. Yes, okay, I'm alive, but I've forgotten how to breathe. I'm on my knees still standing before your long low smile——everyone's head's turned and the staircase is spiral

Makana

Makes me smile thinking back on Makana's performance at the Kahilu Tuesday night. How masterful, yes, but how balanced, with a great deal of respect paid to Sonny Chillingsworth, his kumu. Makana sent out maybe four of Sonny's trademark songs, with a little talkstory explaining Sonny's other life as an opera singer and Sonny's nickname as The Waimea Cowboy, before giving us that extraordinary portrait of Sonny himself performing Kaula'ili with precise, clipped strumming and fretwork, whole-body waves, head-snaps, jerks, and the rhythm of the horse in the hammer thumb on the open bass string——and Sonny's heartfelt moralizing——this acknowledgment of Makana's own influences expressed with grace and humor, so Hawaiian... Meantime the rest of the concert filled to bursting——think of all those smile muscles and sprinkle in some tears of sheer joy——with songs like Pu'uanahulu, Hi'ilawe, Ku'ulei 'Awapuhi, Makee Ailana——how did he do it? Sometimes his head thrown back in song as his fingers danced like wave-chasing crabs, back and forth, up and down the shoreline of Evening Star, his guitar. Now his fingers fly over the frets——we know them now as the bones, the iwi——while his long, long notes rise up into the dark flying grid of the Kahilu.

Influences I

Introibo ad altare Dei...and if you recognize the antiphon which kicks off the Tridentine Mass, then you're showing your childhood religion and your age at the same time; or else you're a James Joyce fanatic. Hard to believe I served Mass as an altar boy before school, before the age of nine. Influence number one?

Well, I was already addressing my angel most nights, sensing his presence, too, whilst sensing a kind of bisexuality in that holy invisibility. After all, there was the long hair and the long dress-like apparel we saw the priest wearing. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed working out the sheer numbers of people, animals, not to mention the weather, all things God is charged with managing, well, creating, then, now, and in the future. I knew the direct line to God notion was rather tenuous, let's put it that way. So I addressed my angel.

So there's a lot there in that early influence, a plethora of Greek and Latin, the superstructure of Catholicism in our lives, the lives of the saints, the authority of the priest coinciding with the humanity of the priests whom I got to know and work with as an altar boy—by the way, never any hanky panky, mostly positive, only one cranky curmudgeon, with one devoted pastor in the old sense of one who looks after his sheep, taking us to Weston-super-Mare on field trips, rehearsing the various kinds of services with patience and wisdom—which brings me to the profound theatrical nature of the Church service.

The church in which I served, still there as far as I know, is called St. Mary's-on-the-Quay, Bristol. Right there you have an early grasp on hyphenation! Right there you have a sense of Bristol's own history, with the word "quay" weighed and qualified over and over till I understood Bristol's romance with ships. And in the architecture you have the Greek columns, Ionic in appearance, although the structure was built in 1840. Those columns loomed monumentally to my eight year old self. When I revisited the place years later, everything seemed smaller, though the echoing of single steps upon the wooden floor within still rang out. A Palladian symmetry one finds in theatre in no small way. Most of the theatres I've worked in were Palladian by design. The concept of the "fourth wall" that separates audience from players, that of the proscenium arch which frames the drama, was intimately familiar to me in form and function by the time I was five years old.

Backstage was the sacristy, where we got ready, put on our costumes, and on Sundays, for high Mass, readied our ceremonial candles.

I was fascinated and gratified to read George Bernard Shaw's comments in his "Our Theatre in the Nineties" regarding the origins of the Christian Church, "founded gaily with a pun...where you must not laugh...giving way to that older and greater Church to which I [Shaw] belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness."

In that same essay comprising "The Author's Apology"——you can find it in Shaw's "Prefaces" 1906——one significant influence in my life dovetails beautifully into another when Shaw writes: "...if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." The context of that manifesto-like statement is that Shaw notes how play-going in London may well have replaced church-going, which is fine, he says, if only the theatre took itself seriously. I took Shaw so seriously that I look back in wonder at how I left it, how many years it's been since I was a stage door regular, and what the devil——what the angel!——am I doing about it now. I could say I'm doing my best to chronicle the things I experienced while I did the work in the theatre. But somehow I know in my heart of hearts that's not enough. Once you've experience the power and possibility of the theatre, and you believe in it like I came to believe in it, there's not a day goes by when you don't say to yourself you owe it to the community in which you live to make it happen. That is another topic entirely.

Church and theatre as early influences come easily to the fore, that's the point here. And with that, a fascination with audience. What makes them work? In the I Ching one finds Thunder over Earth in the 16th hexagram, an arrangement of lines where one strong line makes its way into the fourth place, a shift in balance, so to speak, a shift heavenward... Wilhem writes "This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance...is the law of movement along the line of least resistance..." Wilhem goes on to describe the birth of theatre in his commentary on this hexagram. Finally, he quotes Confucius, "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." For me, that's a sparkling jewel set in the ocean of book called the I Ching. "It is good to organize helpers and to set people in motion," writes our friend, Blythe in her version of the I Ching at this point, where "thunder comes resounding out of the earth."

I suppose I've come to this island in the Pacific to get as far away from theatre as possible, in order to "see it". That is a generous perspective written after the fact of moving here, but there's a truth in it that I recognize.

At a very early age I saw the activities in the church where I was a backstage regular produce an effect on the audience, though it ranged from season to season. Christmas Mass was a power to reckon with. Day in, day out, yes, yes, yes, we will go through the motions, speak the lines, carry the heavy book from one side of the altar to another at the given point, tinkle our small bells at the raising of the host, but the nature of worship seems to depend so much on props and a kind of duty to a trinity of powers, the higher power being worshiped, the medium power of the church mucky-mucks, and the low power voltage of the handful of worshipers who attend daily Mass. Come Christmas, all that changes. The colorful vestments come out. The number of acolytes is more than quadrupled. Four times that! Who are these guys? Never seen them before! And they're all bigger than me! And the congregation? No room at the inn. They're lining the streets, squeezed into the portico, pressed against the inner walls of the church itself where the Stations of the Cross threaten to knock them on the heads...where were you people last week? last month? This was a tremendous influence on me, to see this show of strength from both sides of the divide, coming together with intonations, concatenations, bells, books, candles, colors red and gold, incense for the divine, voices raised in glory...you just want to shout out, Oh My God! And I guess you do, at various points in the proceedings. And I'm just a pipsqueak in red and white, not the usual black and white of everyday Mass, but I'm "in it" and it's terribly powerful, this coming together, this Enthusiasm, as the I Ching rightly points out. Oh the collection baskets are full on Christmas Day!

Early influences...