Archives for 0

I was standing by the window that early morning, just like I did every morning in those years. The sky was often dark and cloudy, the window streaked with last night’s rain. In the evanescent glow from the street lamps I watched the same impossible nightly show, the one where the hooligans in their gangster Borsalinos, their thirties Packards, their dolls and their dames all fought it out with Thompson sub machine guns amid snarling, teeth-bared violence. I asked whoever it was that I was with to have a look. All they ever saw was an empty early morning street, parked cars, the occasional wandering dog, distant headlights that created shadows dancing in the mist.

One morning, just like all the others, in the midst of the recurrent St. Valentine’s Day massacre outside the window, three runners came by. They were talking as they moved easily through the gunfire, laughing in the early morning rain; they were getting ready for the day.

I watched them from the living room window as they went around the corner, and then I ran back to the rear bedroom window where I could see them turn down the road to the beach. Their laughter hung in the breeze. The sound of their footsteps echoed through the house, like the whisper of an unseen tide.

I turned from the window, caught sight of a pair of scruffy runners on the closet floor, ancient mud dried to dust around them.

Window patrol, Charlie, she said, ain’t nobody there.

She shook her head and motioned for me to come back to the couch or the kitchen or wherever it was that we were getting high that morning.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Last week I did a three-hour meditation
on my past lives.
(no laughin’ matter).
I remembered tall grass,
rocks, wind.
Always wind.

Mountain fastness,
Frozen passes, river banks,
red with sunset.
Far off, the fires of home.

I am always not yet there.

These pasts remind me
that there are markers to follow,
Pathways in the foothills, the blowing grass, past misted lakes,
Now I am born Wolf.
I am so very tired.

The sun was gone when I wakened
to an uncertain night.
My guide asked me what I had learned.

I told her that in the beginning,
as in this fleeing moment,
I am here alone.

I step into the relentless now.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Some Nights

I dream some nights that I am running alone
Along a remembered mountain ridge
The air is cool, redolent with wild sage and cinnamon.
Breath in and out, footsteps, echoes, heartbeat
My cadence of renewal.

I run with ghosts.

Dawn breaks distant over the eastern ridge
The sky is all purple fire and promise.
The End of the World Cafe below is always closed, the faded neon spreading like dirty rain
The highway is empty, save for the big rigs “rolling fast, rollin’ wild” on the way to somewhere not here.

You know, at least I hope you do,
That,”I never meant to do you any harm.”

On the ridge trail patches of wild mountain thyme are
luminous in the rising light, there are flickering movements
on the edge of my vision. Horizon in every direction through jack pine and second growth alder,
ghostly silver under a waning moon.
My dream world is sere, clean and spare.

I hear the far off sounds of dogs barking.

Night slides into day on the ridge line,
Dirt and distance, dust and sweat
The spiders and the snakes, the dope driven demons of my nights are gone for awhile.
It will be all right. I will be all right. I am all right.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Turn the Page

water over the dam
milk is spilt
river done flowed
horse is gone,
barn door closed
story’s been told.
That’s all she wrote
been there, done that
had the biscuit
burned that bridge.
the bird has flown,
that dog won’t hunt,

turn over a new leaf
turn the page
it is a new chapter
a new day breaking
it is always always darkest before the dawn
what’s yours will come to you

and, “It’s all over now,
Baby Blue” – Bob Dylan said that.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” Muhammad Ali

Another sleepless night, or more accurately, not bad until sitting bolt upright at 3 AM as if all the snakes in my mental basket had gotten loose, making sleep impossible. I have learned to wait this out like waiting for the wolves outside my “window” to pipe down and go home until tomorrow’s festivities.

I get up, walk around the house, do the necessary bathroom things and make coffee. So begins the routine debate: Go to the gym? Walk around the block? What hurts today? Blah blah…. Don’t be a wimp. Damn, if only I were married, she would get my ass out the door, if only so she could go back to sleep. It was once that way. Not now and not for a long while.

By now the wolves are long gone, the snakes are back in their basket, and the day is mine to do what I will do. Today that means jazz: Hank Mobley, a promise to myself to write something and to get my sorry butt out of the door. The first part is under way, with the help of both Muhammad Ali and Hank Mobley, along with my vague feeling of being “in the game” when I get out the of the door, under a night sky filled with stars and drifting clouds. The streets are quiet, empty — my time of day, as it has been for nearly all of my life. My own cathedral, a holy place.

Running, now walking, before daylight, feeling it. What is “it”? Maybe being alive, being connected to things greater than myself, maybe something “simple” like looking for my words. If I don’t show up for the grunt work, work my way through the night snakes and demons, there is no dance to dance under the Ali’s lights. So it is on me to get well and get back at it.

My life depends on it.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.