Photo Essay: Evening fog in Provo.

Blurry branches

that don't move:

cotton lights.

Secure and warm.

Dissolved and indistinct.

A modern family.

Nominated:

Best Carfax Abbey

look-alike.

Muffled light

wilts at

the effort.

The indistinct

feeling that

colors are bleeding.

Focus

is a matter

of opinion.

Fog works

with light:

but no consensus.

Photo Essay: The thin red line between mountain and heaven.

01/02/2020

The thin red line

between mountain

and heaven

02/01/2020

Tossing the light

back to me.

Thanks, mountain.

01/30/2020

I would like to drink

an ice cold

mountain.

01/29/2020

The heights we

scale may take

us too far.

01/28/2020

The mountain

needs a good

wash.

01/27/2020

Sifted mountains

hold no answers

today.

01/26/2020

Layers of

dull

yesterdays.

01/25/2020

Too lofty today
for doing
laundry.




01/24/2020

The mountain

turns its back

on me.

01/23/2020

Where

all men

stand equal.

01/22/2020

The fog
ate
the mountain.






01/20/2020

Gray

is the Switzerland

of colors.

01/21/2020

I dreamt

I was a mountain

in the mist.

01/21/2020

A gauze that wipes away

the blood

of sunset.

Crazy Henry Gets Married.

I hadn't seen Crazy Henry in a while. His iguana had gotten sick. An iguana, I might add, that he insisted was a monkey, not a lizard. So anyway he took the thing down to Guatemala in the hopes that the tropical heat and moisture would cheer it up and cure it of whatever malady it had.

Crazy Henry called to invite me over when he got back from Guatemala. He sure sounded cheery and was definitely not suffering from any kind of malady, so I walked over and gave the old 'shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits' knock on his door.

When he opened the door he gave me a big bear hug, which was something he had never done before. We were close friends, I liked to think, but not very demonstrative. 

"That's called an abrazo" he told me happily. "They do it all the time in Guatemala."

"You about cracked a rib, there, junior" I complained in mock irritation. I was glad to see him, but his apartment smelled different. It reeked of vanilla beans.

"How's the iguana, I mean the monkey doing?" I asked.

"Oh, he died on the way down there" he replied. Crazy Henry did not seem at all sad about it. He paused, rocking back and forth on his heels like a kid waiting to announce that Christmas was almost here, and then burst out: "I got married down there!"

A small brown woman came out of the kitchen and smiled at me.
 "This is Mariana!" he said excitedly. "Mee moo-hare!"

"Mucho gusto" I said to her politely. Her smile widened into a grin; she had a gap between her upper front teeth like the Wife of Bath.

"She owns a sunken pirate ship" he said proudly. "Wanna help us get the gold out of it?"

************************

Turns out everybody in Mariana's village knew about the pirate wreck -- it was right off the beach, and most of it was exposed at low tide. But it was overgrown with sea nettles -- you couldn't get into it without being slashed and stung to death.

"My boss wants me back in two weeks, or else" I told Crazy Henry. "This is just a wild goose chase."

"I've already taken care of it, with good old Yanqui know-how" Crazy Henry assured me. "I'm gonna bring in a school of sea goats to eat the sea nettles."

"Sea goats" I said flatly. I already had a terrible rash from the heat and humidity, and was covered in white zinc oxide ointment. I couldn't take another minute of Crazy Henry's fooling. "I'm gonna go lie down, take a siesta" I told him. "Good luck with the sea goats."

Mariana kindly brought me a plate of warm empanadas as I lay suffering. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up I could hear what sounded like the entire village screaming their heads off. I went outside and saw that the old pirate wreck was completely denuded of sea nettles. And the villagers were streaming out to the wreck with sacks and jugs and tubs and quilts and anything else that would hold some of the treasure. By the time Crazy Henry and I got out to it, the only thing left was a brass bell and the oak steering wheel, both black with age and salt water.

*******************************

Back in the good old Estados Unidos I got a raise at work and Crazy Henry and Mariana ran a food truck that served empanadas. They parked it every week day in front of the county courthouse and did a roaring trade. 

I kept the brass bell and Crazy Henry kept the steering wheel. 

Mariana went to an orthodontist and got that gap in her teeth fixed.

When Crazy Henry brought home another iguana to raise as a pet monkey, Mariana roasted it for Sunday dinner and had me over for a slice. 

"Tastes real good, for monkey" I couldn't help saying to Crazy Henry.

Let them fall by their own counsels

Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have rebelled against thee.
Psalm 5:10

The counsels of the wicked are a snare unto their feet.

They stumble into chasms whenever they do meet.

But righteous men and women, when they meet together oft,

are guided by the Spirit as they speak in tones so soft.

The arm of flesh, the cunning mouth, how little they achieve.

But humble pleas to God above great miracles do weave.

The Good Luck Cafe.

(Dedicated to Tim Carman)


On my way back from The Hamsters I stopped at a roadside place called 'The Good Luck Cafe' for a piece of pie and a glass of milk.
But once I got inside I was enveloped in a Sysco fog that made me realize just how hungry I really was. Bunny and Phillip don't really feed you much at The Hamsters, although their bath towels have the highest thread count in the continental United States. So I glanced eagerly at the menu. Sometimes these little out-of-the-way places feature unique and tantalizing dishes, specialties that only the locals are ken to. 
The waitress brought me a glass of water and laid a paper straw next to it. One point in their favor. The sun set over the Borgo Pass as I asked her to recommend something good.
"The ham and chicken lungs are real good" she said.  
"That a house specialty?" I asked.
"Well, the cook made up a big batch before he started drinking again -- it shouldn't be too bad" she replied, reaching into her apron pocket to quiet an obstreperous ring tone. 
"What is weasel pie?" I asked her.
"Oh damn" said the waitress as she looked at her phone. "It's my boyfriend. I'll be right back, sweets."
I took a swig of water, surreptitiously sliding the paper straw into my coat pocket. I had a feeling that paper straws were going to become a collector's item one of these days.
Another waitress bustled up to my table. She only had one arm.
"Sorry about that, sir" she said to me. "Doris had to take a little break, so I'll take care of you. My name is Tracey."
Her name tag said 'Hilda,' but I hadn't the heart to contradict a one-armed girl.
"What is weasel pie?" I asked again.
"It's a chicken pot pie with sweet potatoes instead of red potatoes" she replied briskly.
That sounded safe, so I ordered it -- along with a side salad and a glass of iced tea.
"We're all out of iced tea" said the one-armed waitress cheerfully, "would you like a glass of hibiscus juice instead?"
"No thanks, water will be okay" I told her quietly. 

In about five minutes I had my weasel pie and salad, served by yet another waitress -- this one looked like Barbara Bush, and hummed softly to herself. 
"Thank you, ma'am" I said to her. She smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
Halfway through my weasel pie I found a Kennedy half dollar. I called Barbara Bush over to complain, but she pointed out that it was actually a Sacagawea dollar. So I wiped it off with a paper napkin and put it in my coat pocket with the paper straw. This was turning out to be a profitable little excursion.

At the counter the cashier turned out to be Doris with the boyfriend trouble. She looked grim, so I didn't bother to tell her the weasel pie was pretty good. Next to the cash register was a glossy black bowling ball on a small pedestal. 
"Rub it for good luck" said Doris brusquely. "It belonged to Billy Barty, the dwarf bowler. He was my granddad's brother."
The ball gleamed with some kind of polish, so I gave it a rub.
"Where's the genie?" I asked Doris with the boyfriend trouble, but she just looked at me with a face like a pan of cottage cheese.
 The glass counter next to the register, which is usually filled with stale gum and candy bars in places like this, was filled with cans of Barbasol shaving cream instead. Must be a lot of truckers come here to eat, I thought to myself as I gave Doris a twenty dollar bill. I looked around. Nope. There was an elderly couple sharing a bowl of chili, several middle-aged women in a booth sharing a copy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and two cops eating hamburgers. But no truckers. I shrugged and took my change. Going back to my table, I left the Sacagawea dollar for my tip. 

Outside in the dark I noticed that the gravel under my feet was actually crushed coral. It released seaweed and rotted fish odors as I stepped on it. And next to my car was a blue plastic barrel full of cash. A hand-lettered sign on it said "TAKE ALL YOU WANT." But I took out my wallet and put a twenty in the barrel. Then I set the whole shebang on fire.
That's the kind of hairpin I am.

Made known unto them beforehand.

Telling them of things which must shortly come, that they might know and remember at the time of their coming that they had been made known unto them beforehand, to the intent that they might believe . . .
Helaman 16:5

Believe in God and all his ways

and worry not of future days.

Each particle, the very beams

of sun and moon, and all our dreams,

are known to him before their time;

our future with him is sublime.

Hold fast, though earth and heaven shake;

the morrow with be Christ's daybreak.

The Chandelier Maker.

My Bohemian mother and my Venetian father began my training in prisms and soda glass when I was too young to realize how dangerous refracted light could be -- poisonous like mercury or antimony. When you look into too many bent rays of light all at once, common sense is replaced by hubris.
But when that doleful knowledge finally came to me I still pursued my fatal course. You can judge for yourself from my narrative if I really had any choice in the matter.

Both my parents were artisans with Mussehl and Westphal, the chandelier company in Neenah, Wisconsin. You have heard of the company, even if you think you haven't. Besides chandeliers, they made glass ashtrays -- almost all the glass ashtrays that Americans used from 1899 to 1977. Heavy and square, with beveled edges, those ashtrays are indestructible and feature in many domestic violence cases. President Eisenhower gave them to every Ambassador in Washington for Christmas each year during his long and prosperous administration. I have one that I keep filled with sand in the kitchen. It has a tiny flaw in it -- an embedded bubble. I'm told it's worth more than a Rembrandt.

Neenah was a wonderful town to grow up in. My immigrant parents never really got the hang of English, but I grew up speaking it perfectly, had a deeply freckled face and a bicycle, and reveled in the endless green lawns and avuncular shade trees that lined the streets, spaced in military order. I drank milk and ate apples. My teeth outshone the whiteness of a ballistic missile. 
In his spare time my father made stained glass windows for the town's Lutheran churches. I helped him deliver them. We were a close-knit family, the three of us, and as soon as I graduated from high school I began working at Mussehl and Westphal, bending and polishing the ormolu pins used to hold the crystal prisms together. 

My mother wanted me to get out of the business. She created beveled facets on the finest of Bohemian crystal and Murano glass -- which caused her laughing blue eyes to turn pensive, and then muddy and sad. She begged my father to send me to West Virginia to work with my cousins in the Marble King factory. Marbles were safe, she said; they did not corrupt the light. My father's only reply was "He must hang his own chandelier first -- then he can go where he pleases."

When my mother went blind my father took her on a long visit to her hometown of Blatna, where she bathed her eyes in lake water until they turned green. When they returned I had become head foreman of the plant, and I made them retire with full pensions and benefits. 

When the royal family of Oudh ordered a five ton chandelier for their palace in Kashmir I laughed out loud with joy. I would supervise the building of it, the world's largest chandelier, and then I would retire from Mussehl and Westphal, a hero, to live in a cottage on the banks of the Fox River, and fish for sturgeon to feed to my mother. She longed for sturgeon the same way Rapunzel's mother longed for lamb's lettuce.

But then I met the daughter of the royal family of Oudh, Sakina. She had a beaky nose and imperious eyes. Her breath smelled of pandan. She came to the factory in Neenah to pay for the work with rubies and small bars of gold. She watched me and my workmen place each beveled crystal in a mathematical progression that was five hundred years old, until all five tons were dangling in front of her dirty face -- for she never washed, but kept her features swathed in kohl tattoos. She was proud and haughty, and I hated her. And then I loved her. I had the workers disassemble the five ton chandelier and pack it in crates stuffed with excelsior to ship to India. And when the crates were put on board the ship, I was there with Sakina. Sakina was in my arms, and, as soon as the captain married us, in my bed. When we arrived at her palace in Kashmir she was already pregnant with our first child. 

There were no competent craftsmen in all of Kashmir to help me put up the chandelier, so I had to train a dozen palace lackeys -- it took two years before I dared start on hanging the chandelier in the palace reception room. We had only just started with the base tier of crystal prisms when fighting broke out on the border. All of my skilled workers were sent to the front, and killed. I couldn't face training a new crew, so the chandelier, the five ton chandelier that was to be the wonder of the world and my ticket to fame, remained a half-constructed shambles. Then the monsoon came with terrible wind and malignant water, collapsing the roof of the reception room, burying my chandelier under plaster and lathe. Sakina sneered at my grief, calling me a tradesman who could never be a prince. So I left Kashmir and went back to Neenah, to banish the soft, insidious, tropical air from my lungs, and breathe in the crisp, clean, scent of pines again.

While I was gone my mother regained her eyesight; she and my  father then moved to West Virginia to design toothpaste marbles. I could have gone to join them, but who wants to fiddle with taws when you can build dazzling pyramids of crystal and light several stories high that cost millions of dollars? My name would be on each glittering pendant, as it already was in the ruins of the palace of Kashmir where my wife and children were patiently picking out bits of crystal to sell as diamonds in the local bazaar.
I'm still waiting for another prince from Muscat or some plutocrat from Nob Hill to commission something colossal. This time I will make it with Ciocca glass. This time Sakina will come back to me and admit she was wrong. This time . . . this time . . . 
There is no 'this time,' for I am going blind, like my mother. 

The Bus Ride.

When I turned 66 I became convinced, because of my reading of Zen Buddhist books, that every time I went to bed I woke up a different person the next morning.
I wasn't sure if I liked that or not.  I mean, how different was I each day? Could I wake up one day as Harold Stassen, or Nancy Pelosi?

So I didn't sleep well anymore, after that thought screwed itself into my brain. Usually I'd fall asleep while reading in my recliner at night and then wake up around midnight and have a snack and then write poems to my ex wife until the tears came, then throw myself on my bed, exhausted, and wake up at 8 or so, and get ready to go to the Senior Center on the bus they sent around at 9.

But one day the bus driver was a substitute who didn't know anybody, so I had to give her my name to write on her clipboard. First I said I was Marilyn Monroe, which got a laugh from the other geezers on the bus. Then I said my name was Elmer Fudge. The driver gave me a ferocious frown, unless she was suffering from the sudden onset of enteritis, so I thought I'd better give her the last real name I remembered myself as. But the name didn't sound right to me. I worried that I was being subsumed by a koan.

After I swam in the pool and ate a cheese danish with a glass of orange juice, I went outside to get on the bus back to my apartment. But there was a crowd around the substitute bus driver, with everyone shouting contradictory suggestions and giving confusing orders. 

I listened, growing so angry at the stupid remarks by people who didn't know what was going on and only wanted to say things to seem knowledgeable that I finally went back inside to sit on the vinyl couch by the gas fireplace and wait for night to fall or to become invisible or turn into a marble statue. But all that happened was that some gabby old lady sat down next to me to say the bus driver was making two trips, and I would be on the second trip. I grew to dislike that gabby old lady intensely in a matter of seconds, because she punctuated every other sentence with a meaningless laugh. 

The bus did not come back for forty minutes. The front desk said the substitute bus driver had gotten lost. While I waited I collected several brown rocks with purple stripes or bands in them to put in my coat pocket. By the time the bus got back the heavy rocks had torn holes in my coat pockets and rolled around on the sidewalk, making an ominous chalky noise.

Everyone spoke Spanish on the bus but me.
The driver went in the opposite direction of where I lived.
A small red light kept flashing silently above my head.
And suddenly I knew that my name must really be Tod Williams, and that I had taught scuba diving out in Hawaii on Wailuku Beach for years before retiring because of sand in my craw.

Everyone was dropped off before me. I was the last person on the bus, and the substitute bus driver kept scowling at me. She never forgave me for that Elmer Fudge crack, I guess. I could see her frowning in her rear view mirror. I had to use the bathroom pretty bad when we got to my place, but as we pulled up I realized this was not where I lived. I told the substitute bus driver, she asked me well then just where did I think I lived -- this was where she had picked me up that day. So I got off, thanking her for her patience and kind understanding. She whistled the Whiffenpoof  song back at me in a very insulting manner.

Once inside the apartment building I pulled out my key, but didn't recognize it. Was I having a stroke? Had I died and gone to some existential Camus world? I hate asking myself questions, no matter how many times I've been reincarnated -- so I put the key in the first locked door I came to, and it opened right up.

Inside I found pleasant tropical plants scattered tastefully around some heavy leather furniture that looked so inviting I had to sit down. Next to my chair was a bowl of chocolate covered raisins. As I ate them I felt lighter and younger. A young woman in a black cocktail dress, with a yellow poke bonnet on her head, came into the room and played the harp for me.

"Who are you?" I asked her when she had finished playing When You Were Sweet Sixteen.

"Just as you please" she answered me, then softly walked into another room where I could smell grapefruit. I followed and found myself in a sun room where miniature lemon and orange trees flourished in glossy brown clay pots. The wicker furniture was painted white. When I sat down I heard a brainfever bird. When the men with the white dinner napkins finally came, I was ready to go with them. You can't fight your fate.   

I will make thy food become sweet

I will make thy food become sweet, that ye cook it not . . .
1 Nephi 17:12

Before I touch my daily meat

I pray the Lord to make it sweet

so I may travel on my way

with cheerful countenance today.

So many lack a decent meal,

are forced to beg or even steal;

fast offerings I will increase

in lieu of any elbow grease,

or else a pan of muffins I

will place out for the passersby.

I