A frenzy for letters. (Prose Poem.)

If nothing else, L’Affaire Aristophil is arguably the Frenchiest of all financial scandals. The country has a singular reverence for books and writers, reflected in statues of great authors that dot Paris, and one of the largest national archives in the world. It’s hard to imagine another place on earth where a frenzy could be whipped up over the personal letters of Voltaire or autographed scores by Mozart.

David Segal. NYT. 

After the divorce, I wrote my children hundreds of letters. Probably thousands of them. Stamps only cost a quarter back then.

Who can't afford a quarter?

I'd write two or three each day.

After all, there were eight kids.

They lived in Utah.

I lived in Iowa.

Then I lived in Thailand.

And then in Oklahoma.

But they always stayed in Utah.

Until they went to North Dakota.

That was an ugly mistake.

One I never forgave Amy for.

North Dakota is deceptively flat and determinedly cold.

People get frozen in time there by the dozens each winter.

When they thaw out they are never the same again.

But somehow my kids survived North Dakota and now they live all over the place.

Utah.

Virginia.

Hawaii.

Texas.

Minnesota.

But none of them live in North Dakota.

I rest my case.

Twenty years after the divorce my kids and I reunited briefly for a photograph that appeared in the Daily Herald. I forget

why the newspaper wanted it.

That's when they gave me back all the letters

I wrote to them over the years.

There were postcards and aerograms and regular

stamped envelopes with type-written letters

inside.

There were so many that I had to buy two footlockers

at Walmart to put them in --

cheap cardboard things they were, too.

I didn't ask why they gave them all back to me.

I think they were embarrassed. 

Because they never answered any of them.

I've arranged all those letters

by date and location

and by who wrote them.

I've put them all in plastic slips.

Several of them are in frames, hanging

on my living room wall.

My kids went through hell

once I was gone.

(Although admittedly they would have

probably gone through just as much hell

if I had stuck around.)

So I'm thinking at least one of them

will turn their trauma into an amazing

success

in entertainment, finance, or politics.

Then those letters are gonna be worth something.

So I insured them for several million dollars.

And had an auction catalog printed up.

If only one of them turns out to be 

a mass murderer . . . 

my fortune is made. 

A Random Armload (Prose Poem)

When the police arrived at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Paul Pannkuk didn’t know what they were talking about.

Someone had entered the apartment next door, taken a random armload of the tenant’s belongings — photo albums, a doormat, a shoe holder — and dumped it all with the garbage in the basement. The burglar was captured on security camera, and he looked an awful lot like Mr. Pannkuk.

Michael Wilson. NYT.

A random armload is all I can carry at one time.

I once tried carrying a full wardrobe trunk on my back,

but that didn't turn out very well.

An armload of oranges, or of turtles, say,

is not very interesting, or fun.

But when you've got a random armload

of stuff, walking around randomly,

it's a real  hoot.

For instance, last Saturday I grabbed 

a random armload out of my neighbor's

garage

and walked around the neighborhood

with it for several hours.

It took only minutes for somebody to

post me on Instagram,

and then the mega-bloggers showed up

to demand to know what I was doing.

I told them I was campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

They seemed to buy that, the ninnyhammers.

I took my random armload back to my neighbor,

who was used to that sort of thing from me

so he didn't put up a fuss.

Early this morning I went into a 7-11

to grab a random armload of stuff;

I told the gaping clerk I'd be back to pay

for it all in a few hours.

But he chose to sic the police on me.

Very unsporting, if you ask me.

"Hey" said the cop as he got out of his squad car.

"Watcha doin' with all that merchandise, fellah?"

"I'm a random armload artist" I told him, "and I walk about with random armloads of stuff as performance art."

The cop got excited all of a sudden.

"Hey" he said. "I seen you on Huffington Post -- you're that famous guy . . . " He just gazed at me, lost in admiration.

"Would you like to take a selfie with me?" I offered.

"You betcha!" he exclaimed. Afterwards he made me promise to pay for everything I had, which I had always fully intended to do anyways, and then he drove off, with his lights flashing and his siren wailing. 

It's fun to make new friends, isn't it?

A group of small Asian children fell in line behind me as I paraded down the street with my random armload. I think they were waiting for something to fall out of my grasp. But that rarely happens -- practice makes perfect, you know.

When I got back to the 7-11 I dumped my random armload on the counter and told the clerk to ring me up. He looked a bit ashamed for being such a Doubting Thomas, so I told him that if the world had more random acts of carrying it would be a much better place.

"Is that some kind of religion or something?" he asked me fervently, the light of zealotry beginning to kindle in his eyes.

"No, son" I replied gently. "I'm just making up stuff as I go along. You just stick to your job and work hard and someday you'll find your own special brand of randomness."

"Oh, snap" he said.

"Snap, indeed!" I replied with a laugh. Then I had him bag my stuff, because my career as a random armload artist was over. 

Their ears shall tingle

And the Lord said to Samuel, Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle.
1 Samuel 3:11

The message that we bring

makes hearts rise up and sing;

gives tingle to the ears,

resounds throughout the years.

For God has come again

to save us, if and when

we listen to His voice

and make the proper choice.

You'll know it in your bowels,

despite the devil's howls,

that Christ Almighty reigns

and all that now remains

is living loud with praise

here in these latter days!

Joy cometh in the morning.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
Psalm 30:5. 

The Lord of Life is good to me;

his servant I will always be.

And if he chastens now and then,

I'm still the happiest of men.

For after dark and dreadful fears,

the Lord will swab away my tears.

The joyous sunrise testifies

that death and hell our God defies.

And I have but to hold his hand

to travel to the Promised Land!

Photo Essay: Postcards to my President.

Photo Essay: Haiku 俳句

Each mountain 

is like a snow flake:

Indestructible.

各山

雪の結晶のようなものです。

不滅

Waiting for
Junk mail --
My life.

待っています

迷惑メール  - 

私の人生。

The futility
of
Celebration.



無駄 の お祝い。

Light brown.
Dark brown.
Dead bush.

ライト・ブラウン。

ダークブラウン。

死んだブッシュ。

A refuge for the oppressed.

The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.
Psalm 9:9

A hand reached out to God in pain

never is reached out in vain.

His mighty arm protects the weak

and defends the poor and meek.

Woe betide the Pharisees

who overlook the refugees.

The one and only Judge of Man

will treat them like an old bed pan.

It's better to hope than to mourn

When Blair Marvin started making and selling bread 15 years ago, she promised herself three things: She would never preslice it. She would never bake it in a pan. And she would certainly never sell it in plastic.
Amelia Nierenberg. NYT. 


When I stepped off the train ten years ago in this small Wisconsin town, I promised myself three things: I would never eat bananas. I would never talk about bananas. And I would never look like a banana.

But what with incipient scoliosis and an attack of yellow jaundice, I've had to do considerable backtracking, as I begin to resemble a Chiquita brand Genus Musa. That's just a high-falutin way of saying 'banana.' I'm addicted to fancy and convoluted language, probably because I make my living by carving tablets into living trees for the local yokels. That kind of activity breeds logorrhea. 

Before I started my tablet-carving career here in Wisconsin, I thought I was going to be a novelist. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel while living in Utah, and when I showed the first chapter to an old missionary companion he told me it was interesting but I used too many big words. Instead of thanking him for his honest input, I threw a banana at him and never saw him again. That why I've got this thing about bananas, I guess. I don't really go into it very deeply -- shallowness is all, as Shakespeare might have said if he ran around with the same crowd I did as a young man.

So now I look like a banana and am talking, or at least writing, about bananas. But I refuse to eat one. That, at least, is something I can still control.

What people mostly want carved into living wood on their property, here in the Wisconsin hinterland, is a family tree (pardon the pun.) You know: "Thomas Pedersen is the son of Alex Pedersen, who was the son of Olaf Pedersen, who came from Trondheim, Norway, in 1899, at the age of sixteen to shoe horses at the lumber mill." That kind of thing. 

It's a good living. Steady work. And people around here never stiff you on a job. I normally charge between a hundred and three-hundred dollars, depending on how intricate they want their tablet. I don't carve willows, mountain ash, or walnut -- those trees have very delicate vascular systems, and carving through the bark inevitably leads to the death of the tree. But oak, pine, and elm can withstand the whole Decalogue, and more, carved into their trunks with no permanent damage to the tree. I once carved the entire Declaration of Independence into a ginkgo for a guy who lived in a hillside cave and wore an NRA cap -- and that tree is still flourishing on top of his hill. The shortest tablet I ever carved, to date, had only one word: William. It was commissioned by a birdlike old lady who offered to pay me with pennies. I did it for free. 

If you really, truly want to know why I have such a thing against bananas, want to know specifically and accurately, it's because after extensive biblical studies I've come to the conclusion that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not tempted by a serpent -- that's a typo from the original Hebrew. They were tempted by a banana. Now, I don't generally advertise this theory of mine to anyone but close friends -- so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to anyone else. If it gets back to Salt Lake I could be in hot water.

It's against the law to marry if you're a woodworker in Wisconsin. They tell me this law was promulgated a hundred years ago because of the dismaying number of casualties among lumberjacks -- something like one in ten was sawed in half. So I'm not married, preferring to make Jack the Ripper love to the local trees. That's kind of a sick joke, I guess, but I've used it several times on nosy Parkers and it shuts them right up.

I bought a five acre lot a few years ago. Moved a mobile home onto it. It's heavily wooded, so now I use my spare time to carve the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" into every tree on my lot. I figure that when I get all the trees done it will become something of a tourist attraction. Maybe make me eligible for some kind of artistic grant or award, like the MacArthur Fellowship or something. And of course it will stand as a monument to me after I am gone. For maybe twenty year

I never tell my customers this, but when you carve into living wood the tree considers it a wound and eventually covers up the entire 'scar' in about twenty or thirty years. I guess if they asked me how long their tablet will last I'd have to tell them the truth.

 Still, in this life it's better to hope than to mourn.

The Red Tar Kettle

Wearing bright safety vests, the county highway workers followed the scalding, red tar kettle as it pumped out liquid rubber bandages, thick as melted butter, to cover the pavement’s worst gashes. From above, it looked like the flip side of skywriting — as if yellow cursors on the ground were carefully spelling out a message for unseen readers in the clouds.
Patricia Cohen. NYT.

The unseen auditors in the sky.
They know.
They know the red tar kettle will keep them au courant. 
They don't care that the molten tar, an evil molasses,
scalds our hands and arms.
Permeates our work clothes with the stink of corrupted fossils.
Visits our brains with hydrocarbons, trashing memory.
Fingernails a permanent dull black.
Teeth twisted like old boneyard tombstones.
Shrinking ears.
Mice in our hair. What's left of it.
Our lungs are now thick waffles.

Down with the cloudy elite!
Down with the red tar kettle!
Spill it into the ditch. 
Sorry, tadpoles . . . 
But revolution scorches many until it can burn
 clean and pure.
We take to the tar smeared streets.
Our boots burning with rage.
Stomp out all the writing. Mess it around.
Make the inscrutable readers in the clouds
as ignorant as we are!

Who are they? Where did they come from?
Why put them in charge?
When will they come down to our level?
I know just this:
When I was a child they came bearing gifts.
Yardsticks made of candy.
Talking feathers.
Walter Cronkite dolls.
Hats that kept out the sorrow.
Flying light bulbs. 
A machine that turned hiccups into potable water.
All they asked in return was a home in our clouds, and the daily news spelled out in tar on rural roads.
Governments said sure, no problem.
But they gave the actual grunt work to me and my like.
Made us quit our cushy office jobs, leave our homes and families, and travel up and down two lane asphalt roads 
with a steaming kettle of tar. 
No days off.
Bad food.
Limited access to Netflix.
Attacked by owls and woodchucks.
And for many long years, we took it.
We bowed our heads and took it.

But no more.
The smell of cold puddles of tar is the smell of freedom.
And what did the aloof cloud dwellers do about it?
They killed all the birds and made bumble bees as large 
as cats.
Then they left.
So now we live in a world
of bright safety vests
and lots of calamine lotion.
But we are free and happy.
At least . . . I'm free and happy.
Sometimes.
But not often.