Pirate Post #4

As I get ready to hit "publish" on this post I am in a hotel in Guadalajara with the Pirate, beginning a week of sightseeing with our priest as tour guide. He wants to show us around his home state (Guanajuato) while talking with us about a couple of programs he'd like us to be involved in. What an amazing blessing this is - I know we would never have come over to the mainland as tourists by ourselves, but to see these places through the eyes of a native Mexican is a real privilege. We'll be here a week and I promise to write about it when we get back.

Meanwhile, here's one of my favorite poems that the Pirate wrote for me. It's such a tender ode to a secure relationship.


The Waves of Wednesday

My porpoise wife has learned to breathe underwater
She exhales rhythmically as the little blue waves of Wednesday
Lap against our sides in the dark
The water’s warm here, under the covers,
In the wee hours before the moon insinuates it’s gravity,
And pulls our tidal coverings back out,
To be lost at sea again.

I’m thinking everything, but mostly how good
The warm mud of our mattress feels
As it squishes between my quickly evolving toes.
We used to be trout, the porpoise and I,
Back in the 60’s. Fast rainbows flashing in and out of schools
Being cool, avoiding those Vietnamese hooks
And a higher education

Without warning, an attack boat
Races across our bay and stops beside me
Its loud propeller buzzing.
I rise up, grow arms and harpoon the thing
Moby Dick-like with a deadly blow amidships
The porpoise rolls and I flipper back up to her
Hoping the alarming boat has fully sunk,
But knowing that in 9 minutes it will attack again
And we’ll surrender

I heave myself out onto the rock of my pillow
A fish out of water, mouth working noiselessly
In an attempt to produce its first words.
“It’s early” I inform the retreating flood
A cotton mouthed valedictorian, standing in the Bay of Fundee
“Umm” the porpoise replies
And slips quietly back
Beneath the softly retreating waves of Wednesday

Pirate Post #3

This poem of the Pirate's fits my past weekend perfectly - beautiful and solemn.



POEMS SENT BACK

Bubbles filled with poetry rise from
English cottages, abandoned Ohio warehouses
Mud huts in the desert, and school busses on their outings

These are the translucent spheres of emotion
Too three dimensional to stay on the page
Uniquely endowed to escape the gravity of language
In hopes of doing a somehow greater good

They hang momentarily in the air
Next to their authors who have last rights
To inspect their shifting globes of rainbows.

In this fragile state a mere touch of the finger
Can destroy, but the warm breath
Of acceptance will send them upward
Soap bubble gems on their way to heaven.

Where God, the owner of poetic chemistry
Touches these lighter than air offerings,
Reading and enjoying the hearts
Rembering their DNA, their fingerprints
All woven into all their words

And in so doing His touch gives weight
Adding to them the destiny of re-entry
Now marble size, white hot, and meteoric

Those untouched pass on
Becoming hardened outside the earth’s influence
To eventually become fuel for the
Ravenous sun furnace

Poetry sent back is like the
Person who dies, sees the bright tunnel
But is told they must return
For continued service in a postponed state of ecstasy.
So the good poetry, those that come back
When you rub one against your cheek
Always seem to have a certain density.

A kind of sadness because of postponement, But
at the same time
An ecstatic, violent beauty, which holds you
Adding miniscule, but divine weight to the reader.

Pirate Post #2

Yesterday in my Week Ending post I shared a photo that I think captures the Pirate's personality. Here's something of his that conveys it much better:


Somewhere inside me is the love of Jesus, a machine gun, and an Eskimo Pie.

Somewhere in this wonderful clutter is a undeveloped librarian,
Knowledgably arranging endless facts so other may apply them.
Also a logger, plaid, sweating, getting things razor sharp
For a good day’s work. Sometimes teacher, sometimes the grandfather,
Sometimes a novice sailor. Some kind of
Mark Twain, Steve Wozniac, Euell Gibbons guy
That preaches Ezekiel to the neighborhood dogs,
Though they seldom repent.

Going somewhere, almost certainly important
To be interested and involved with characters who aren’t.
So let his music blare, let the ice cream melt, there on the floor.
Keep that machine gun welded and by all means
Let the love of Jesus flow.

Pirate Post, Poem vol. 1

The Pirate writes beautiful poetry, and since we were recently up at the family compound where he built the house that one of our sons now lives in, this seemed like an appropriate place to start his weekly contribution to this blog.

The House I Built

In this house I built
A place still standing
Despite its deep inadequacies
I hear the stillness of
10,000 nails, clutching wood
Faithfully holding their assigned angles
Only one or two complaining at midnight.

Redwood boards
Basking in fog and sun
Fog and sun, are hoping
To be released. Straining to return
To the friendly twigs and green
Back to the forest floor.
Once my songs played in this house
They’re embedded in the walls.
This still place where sons rolled on the floor
Where now their own children
Play, and color, cry and sing
Life grinding and growing in this house I built

Today, the growers are elsewhere
On the job or swimming camp, or
The Ladies Social Activities Team
I’m alone with the chickens
To enjoy the unusually thick quiet.

You know it rather than understanding it
You feel it rather than hearing it
Forty something years later,
Sitting in this house I built
Beyond life’s buzzing
I become aboriginal.
These eternal patterns, this stillness
Helps me find my voice again.


NOTE: I don't have a photo of the original house he built, but here's a picture of the view.