Summer... Late Afternoon...

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You’d think there would be nothing new left for me to discover on my familiar ride along the north side of the river out to the ocean and then back home again along the south side of the river, but I can’t think of a day when I didn’t find something new... down by the river or just about anywhere else on earth. What an amazing planet this is. The tidal estuary at the mouth of the river was stunning today. In spite of intervention by humans who insist on pushing rocks and dirt around, the river mostly goes where it wants to go, and the patterns it makes all by itself with water and mud beat anything constructed by man. I had been mesmerized by the beauty of it all for about an hour this morning and had snapped a few dozen pictures before I rode back toward home thinking how the natural world almost always beats anything we can make. Then about halfway between Ocean Beach and Old Town I came upon a man who was taking rocks from the river bank and making a “construction” beside the bike path. I asked if I could take pictures. He said he hoped I would. I told him I was amazed. He said that’s why he did it.

When the Day Is Clear

It is on a day when the morning is clear and clean
with sunlight falling unfiltered onto green earth,
and especially on trees bursting with rising sap,
that I see my death ahead like a black hole in space
waiting to suck me in and erase the evidence
of my existence in the universe.
Gone, finished, done with like used toilet paper
with no reason for further consideration of any kind
is the way it will be handled by the living,
which is the way it should be.

But until it’s time to step to the edge
and slide away never to be seen again,
I want the sunlight to fall full force on me,
to make me glow like new leaves on the sweetgum tree,
to turn me up and on to every breeze that passes,
to draw the sap up again and again
so no spring, summer, autumn or winter is wasted on me.
I want to wake every morning with the expectation
that a friend will meet me in the early light,
perhaps beside the beach
where we can walk happy dogs together
and talk of life and love.

Through time and space I move
unafraid of the blackness that waits for me,
that blackness which makes more brilliant the light
and butterflies and mocking birds
which I can see and hear and feel today.
I manage to avoid the hole
because I know it’s there.
Death is something I can see ahead.
It’s the hidden traps that unnerve me.

When I was filing the poem I wrote yesterday, I found another on the same subject that I had written back in 1990.

A Poem

A poem is just a thing on paper
To the bereft and busy soul
That has not been moved by circling hawks
Or marked how light at sunset skims
The tops of willow trees along the river.

These cloud pictures are worth seeing larger: Click on the image to enlarge it.

A Poem Is Nothing

A poem is nothing more or less
than words mostly on paper
unless
you are in love or hope to be
in love
or have seen how the light breaks
above the row of billowing clouds
fixed as if forever
over the eastern mountains
but then of course maybe
you’ve just seen a child cry
as she watches the man go
without looking back or maybe
a withered old woman sleeping
on a park bench by the river
in the early morning

I’m a volunteer this week and next in a summer program for children in a section of my city called Normal Heights. How’s that for a name of a section of San Diego. Photography is the subject of my workshop. I have never before “taught” children as young as five, so I went into the first day with fear and trembling. I needn’t have worried. The children are beautiful and bright and earnest. They can’t wait to get their hands on a camera, but they sat quietly and listened intently as I talked with them about how to use a camera to “write with light.” Tomorrow they will take “serious” portraits of each other. The children will be paired and charged with getting a respectful, positive portrait of a partner. I hope they see some of what I see.

I see the future in these children, and the future is tea colored. Some Americans are having difficulty coming to terms with that reality. Of course, I was reassured when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States; but my relief didn’t last long. For reasons that I partly understand, the President has been outmaneuvered by the newly invigorated extreme wing of the Republican Party. I don’t know how he will fare in next year’s elections. I don’t know if the Tea Party crazies in the House of Representatives will be reelected. I can’t imagine that Grover Norquist will lose his influence. The children I will be seeing every day for the next two weeks will lift my spirits.