Poetry

A haiku By Jon Ferry The first light of dawn the Last Post on the bugle blow us all away

We love what is elusive. We chase what is far. We spurn a steady neighbor for some distant star. I know a woman who grew up beside a farm owned by an upbeat guy with great looks, brains and charm. Yet, she never believed him when he said he would help her raise a family filled with all things good. She thought he was too local, too rooted in the soil. Life with him, she felt, would be one of labor and toil. She preferred a remote shot at the sky-high life to a lasting stint as a grounded farmer’s wife. Instead, she wound up hitched to a big-city man who said she reminded him of an actress at Cannes … without a shred of evidence for his smarmy claim that she was Tinseltown-bound and destined for fame. But it wasn’t long before she twigged to his lies and his shameless compulsion to romanticize. She confronted her hubby, swallowed her remorse, and lost half her money in a bitter divorce. Whether it’s dopamine or the fantasy gene, we’re all susceptible to the Hollywood dream. The farmer, though, never lost his smile, and made his dough working his land for a top movie farming show. He now lives with the neighbor who shunned him before, embracing the best of both worlds ... and loving both more.

The children of the inlet live by the sea with eagles, gulls and herons for company. Thirst for crawly crabs and coins pulls them along the pebble-strewn beach without fear ... or inhibition. They splash in the blue-grey waves and dance in the breeze, while eying a horizon of brilliant ease. Sure, at times they sense the wrath of nature’s extremes, whether in the form of storms or full-on jet streams. But there are mountains to view, boulders to leap ... and patches of crushed, cream shells that are ankle-deep. Then, there is the immense, gentle tug of the tide, the sun and moon’s variant of a free ride. And rarely comes the day when curious kids say “the shore’s boring, I’m heading downtown to play.”

When I listen to The Donald speak, I'm convinced that what he needs is not so much an active kill switch as an editor in the know … who can expeditiously turn his torrent of superlatives and relentless repetitions into a dusting of fine snow. I’m not saying the person needs to be a hero who can make him over as Churchill, Shakespeare, Steinbeck or Jean-Jacques Rousseau … just a worldly, workmanlike wordsmith able to filter out Trump’s most glaring lies, contradictions and blows that are alarmingly low. As a cub reporter, the folks I used to loathe most in the world were the editors kneading my brash bombast into healthy dough. But now that those stalwarts have gone the way of the poor dodo, I miss them … like I miss sweet reason from those in politics’ main show. In life, you may not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but what you say or write can always use more polish and glow. And editors are the barbers of prose, stylists of poetry, tailors of well-fitted writing ... and urologists of word flow. For want of a horseshoe nail, it is said, a kingdom was lost. For want of editors, we’re at sea ... or trapped in some farcical hollow.

There's a watercourse on the way to paradise that's unlike most other worldly streams. It glints with the sheen of a million nuggets, and it's named The River of Golden Dreams. A mellow fellow is floating down the river on a rudderless raft bloated with air. He soon winds up in currents so vicious he doesn't seem to have a hope or a prayer. As he gets sucked into that boiling eddy, the bubbling water begins to enter his lungs. He's a hair's breadth away from drowning when at long last his savior comes ... in the form of a sleek black panther lithely patrolling the riverside. The cat thrusts his paw into the whirlpool, scooping up the man before he dies. From then on in, the floater keeps sailing along the gold-flecked stream of life. He's acutely aware, though, a dream without focus is like a weekend warrior without a knife.

A haiku summer comes in a panting dog, and goes out a cool, back-to-school child

The world is full of puzzling things: IKEA assembly instructions, The Laws of Cricket, the Irish border backstop, Trump's tariff war on American farmers, quantitative easing, convertible debentures, drivers who refuse to use their indicators. But there is a class of confusion that's simply off the Richter scale (which itself is rather puzzling). I'm not referring to the colors of national flags or the fragility of modern shopping bags. I'm talking about women. Yes, you, of what used to be known as the fairer sex. Why is it you're so fixated on chocolate, flowers, shoes, boring cars, tiny dogs, dolphins, unicorns, horses with or without flowers... and horses dressed as unicorns? And men? What is it with your infatuation with video games, single malt whiskey, over-powered cars... and girly-looking women? Besides, if girls can be boyish, why can't boys be girlish? But the biggest puzzle of all: Why are dogs so fetch-obsessed?

You could say I'm a gamblin' man. I make my money wherever I can. I like to buy low and sell high, and intend to do so until I die. Mr. Market, he's such a hard master. He gets you to climb aboard, then drives you faster. He knows where you are vulnerable. He'll bash you right under the table. You're up one moment, then you're down. He treats you like a stupid clown. He's your pimp and you're his whore. He's always got you wanting more. Some folks they won't play the game. They sit tight to avoid the shame. But you can't win, if you don't take a chance or appreciate life is one big dance. Pull the lever, roll the dice. Shake that pinball, slake that vice. You won't drink from the lovin' cup when your bones are broken and your number's up.

Write for the living, not the dead. Make it new, as Pound said. Strip it clean of all pretense. Avoid straddling the proverbial fence. But use your guile to let it smile… and maybe sit in the sun awhile. Give it bling; have it sing. Be part of the tireless string of those who’ve drunk from the muses’ fountain spilling forth from Parnassus mountain. You’re the fly dancing on sparkling water… creating buzz in the great hereafter.

If I am the saucer, you're the cup. And if you're the bolt, I am the nut. If you're the coffee, I am the cream. But when I'm the engine, you're the machine. So you're the salt, well, I'm the pepper. If you're the climate, I am the weather. Let me be the horse, then you're the rider... or the saddle... or the rough cider. Together, we are gin and tonic, thunder and lightning, straight and ironic... knife and fork, hammer and nail, hugs and kisses, wind and sail... bacon and eggs, in and out, bangers and mash, flood and drought... shoes and socks, Jack and Jill, down the slope, up the hill. Peas in the pod, we go together like fish and chips or birds of a feather. We are oven and knob, butter and scone, two ingrown minds thinking as one. Patting our backs, finishing sentences, we're there for each other... with zero pretenses.

An owl flew onto our deck the other night, giving us both a momentary fright. The Northern Saw-Whet Owl was rather small, but it had clearly suffered a bad fall. My wife picked up the owl and kept it warm to ensure there was no enduring harm. Its densely feathered body and yellow eyes were a fluffy little bundle of great prize. She laid it in an upturned cowboy hat where it soon morphed into an acrobat, swiveling around its upright head as if returning swiftly from the dead. It plumped up its body, shook its tail, then leapt onto the balcony rail, and looked me directly in the eye ... suggesting it had bigger fish to fry. Some say the owl is the wisest bird; others feel it’s an animal to be feared. Certainly, it’s known as a fortune forecaster alerting humans to death or disaster. I believe owls are agents of change in an unseen world just out of our range -- one that rarely intersects with ours, despite wielding superhuman powers. I hope to meet the owl again some morning when I can learn more about its warning that we blinkered humans see only a slice of all that takes place in the spirit life.

When we have virtually no privacy, when our every twitch is monitored by over-staffed state functionaries and social-media busybodies on round-the-clock lookout for "inappropriate" comments, there may be a place to flee to... not too far from the nearest city, nor too deep into the unknown. To get there, you'll leave your vehicle beside a pothole-pockmarked highway to ford a stream not too wide or narrow. Then, you'll have to clamber up a trail through dense, evergreen forest en route to an elk-friendly plateau... where sits a cabin camouflaged like a solitary, tawny-beige cougar or over-stressed chameleon. Amazon will never deliver there, nor FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. No tax collector will ever find this home, nor any summons-bearing agency. Wild animals will offer companion care and dawn birdsong elevator music. The picture-window view will be of woods, mountains and grasslands. The perfume will be fir cologne. The log shelter will have a side entrance and a tunnel for lightning-quick exits. It will withstand almost anything from nuclear attack to cancel culture, and be perfect for COVID-19 quarantining or drafting sweetly reasonable poetry. But no political snoops will be allowed, nor snotty scolds prone to virtue-signaling. This will be a nosey-parker-free zone.

How do I know I am aging? Well, that's not too amazing. There's the white hair, for one thing, and the skin color fast fading. Yet I hauled myself up the mountain and right back down again without too much intense pain in my legs, heart... and boiling brain. The uptight people I met on the track, well, some could've used a good smack. But one cheerful animal made up for that... a super-friendly whiskey jack. It was here, it was there, on my foot and in the air. There's no creature that can compare for making you feel like a millionaire. The tough, gray-and-white bird, whose name's based on a native word, is viewed as being somewhat weird by most humans in our mundane world. Call it camp robber or Canada jay, the whiskey jack loves to play, even on the coldest day, treating every food as its prey. Whether hanging upside down, or hopping silently around, this avian optimist's a trickster clown who never ever wears a frown. Climbing atop that tiring peak, my weary bones had begun to creak... until I witnessed the sheer cheek of that fearless, feathered freak.

Sign that will, down that pill, you're leaving today ... or tomorrow. Gawk at the sun, have gobs of fun, dance a ballet, show some bravado. Make amends with lovers and friends, pick a ukulele, do a little vibrato. Drive a Ferrari, go on safari, wangle your way up Kilimanjaro. Take a hike, drive the last spike, sail to Montego Bay, soldier like Pizarro. Ditch that bile, widen that smile, the Last Chance Cafe is your El Dorado.

If I ever got to rewind my checkered life, it would be back to when I was 20, herding horses on the Teton Mountains, high above the historic White Grass Ranch in Wyoming’s jaw-dropping Jackson Hole. My daily routine as a ranch wrangler was to roll out of bed in the twilight, grab a waiting pony from the corral and ride out to round up other ponies overnighting in some alpine meadow. My mount was a slick black steed called Shilling, and we were soon zigzagging up the trails, our ears pricked for the bells of grazing horses drinking in their last moments of freedom before we wrangled them back down home. The peaks soared thousands of dizzying feet without foothills to interrupt the view. The mist rose from the valley floor where the Snake River twinkled, the moose wallowed and the speedy pronghorn antelope roamed. It was fall, the elk had started to bugle, and the leaves were turning from green to gold. We halted by an aspen grove between two worlds: above, the wild one with cliffs thrusting skyward, underneath, the warm one, sunny and mellow. I had everything to look forward to -- a college degree, a promising career, and a young woman who could overlook my awkward stance and adolescent angst. She didn’t care if I hit the mother lode. But even then, I knew I’d never be richer or sit taller than in that saddle, surveying the waking earth steaming in the mist below. Nor would I feel freer than by those aspens -- at one with my horse and at peace with the globe.

The trucker said that he didn't see Sam coming in the midday sun, as his semi-truck made the slow turn on the road to Yellowstone. All he heard was the savage screech of the tires of Sam's superbike, followed by a gurgle that sounded like the draining of a plugged pipe. Sam died, they said, as he had lived, with the pedal to the metal and the breeze in his nut-brown hair... brimming with youth and in fine fettle. Nobody who knew him at all was shocked to read in the paper how the bearded and eccentric former corporal met his maker. They always suspected that fate would take him before his time as he joked of wild women to date and sheer rock faces to climb. Early on, Sam took his classes in a remote, one-room schoolhouse. But he received his real education at his family's outfitting business. An expert hunter and horse rider, he was clearly the outdoor type. Yet, he often struggled to handle the straitjacket of winter ranch life. So, like his grandfather before him, he signed up with the U.S. Marines... until the routine there wore on him like an oil-soaked pair of jeans. By then, he'd sharpened his skills as an all-round carpenter, heavy-duty auto mechanic and senior martial-arts instructor. And the local cops found nothing wrong with his motorcycle, of course. Sam had died doing what he loved, riding his shiny V-twin steel horse. Raised in rugged big sky country, he was hooked on life's extremes, always faithful to true friends, always pursuing big dreams.

Thousands of miles from the Holy Land, it’s all too convenient to moralize. So all I will do is count my luck and denounce vile warmongers’ damned lies. War may be a necessary evil or a way for society to advance. Yet it's a crime against humanity, a failure of civilization’s slow dance. For thousands of years, historians say, there’s been conflict in the Middle East. But, as Thomas Mann noted, war’s just a coward's escape from the problems of peace. Killing a boy on his fifth birthday or shooting a 90-year-old in the head does little to further anyone’s cause. All it causes is further terror and dread. Talk all you want about the glories of war. Ignore its maimed victims and their screams. Don’t forget, though, one inalienable truth: The end rarely justifies the means. Would-be warriors find as many pretexts for war as they do for stiffing their brother. There’s nothing, of course, holy about it. It's a sickness … a virus like no other.

Perched like a stork spreading its wings, the lithe young man with the baseball cap performs his supple Tai Chi movements as if unfurling an elongated map. Some gremlin has just killed the lights of this the sunniest of summers, clouding over the seaside landscape with a collage of threatening colors. But stork man doesn’t appear to care, publicly shedding his anxiety on a grass ridge across the inlet from the flare of the oil refinery. He’s telling us what other movers and forward thinkers have all along: The soft and flexible will always get to conquer the hard and strong.

As anyone with deceased parents knows, death is as slipshod as departing snows. There are bills to be paid and bangles moved, paintings appraised and taxes approved, rugs to be shaken and silverware racked, attics emptied and fine china packed, as each generation’s forced to contest with the mess that the previous one's left. Now, we’re not talking here of pollution or the fallout from bloody revolution, but of the remains lodged in the bones after the dust is cleared from our homes ... and what we’ll pass to a daughter or son when our own cluttered day on Earth is done.

During the day, the oil refinery by the water puffs out steam clouds like a Yellowstone geyser. At night, its floodlit pipes and metal towers brighten the black skies like meteor showers. And as it powers and pollutes this thirsty world, it dazzles the senses... like a double-edged sword.

Before climate change, before child safety, there was a boy racing head-first down the hillside on the icy snow with a crispy hum. Before helicopter parents, before helmets, the boy piloted a homemade sled through local woodland as if tackling the Cresta Run. Before stifling fears about damaged brains and busted bones, the boy embraced the snake-like turn like he'd not ever had more fun. Before the current worry over scarves caught in sled runners, the boy cannoned into a tree trunk as if blasted from a high-caliber gun. Before earnest doctors issued solemn media warnings about collision risks, the boy's crimson blood dribbled onto the snow as if his day was done. But the scar on his jaw still harks back to a cheerier era before cellphones and paramedics . . . when a boy flew as freely as a stray missile into the setting sun.

When all is well and truly over, or as near as it'll ever be, you, we and our family will rise and go to the mountain with a thermos of hot tea. And we will hunker down there among the stately Douglas-fir, the reddish western red cedar, the croaking, jet-black ravens and coyotes howling insistently. And we will mark out the cabin we'd always planned to build on this deer-grazed patch overlooking that broad valley beside the vast, restless sea. And we will hug each other there, not to tempt fate, but to retrieve those flighty sands of humanity that drifted away through months of separation and anxiety. And we will embrace this location where the camera lens is turned less on ourselves and more on the mind-bending nature around us in all its bewitching livability. And we will remind each other, as the sun sets and full moon rises, that this is where we long to be, thanks to all alongside us who overcame terrible adversity. And we will raise a mug to those who battled the killing machine known clumsily as COVID-19, putting their lives on the line in the name of our security. Then, staring at the heavens, we will toast all the gods of the present and past who gave us this moment in this dazzling, star-lit territory... this stairway to eternity.

There's this garden that I know where dogwoods flower like snow... and crisp boxwood hedges define its deer-proof edges. It's where sunflower and zinnia compete with fragrant lavender for the attention of a landscaper as picky as any trim carpenter. It's a garden with a vegetable plot giving the average sod a shot at mounds of muddy potatoes, beans, squashes and tomatoes. There are rustic rock beds filled with tulips, crocuses and daffodils brightening this stone-walled home like a mosaic from ancient Rome. And how about the sculpted grotto with the timeless Latin motto of the perpetually pining lover: amor vincit omnia? A well-protected lily pond prevents darting koi being bombed by patient herons and birds of prey immersed in their own ballet. There's a lawn for playing croquet or simply whiling away the day, shaded by a weeping willow doubling as nature's teary pillow. Apple-cheeked children, meanwhile, have built a makeshift pavilion to help them ditch the adult world and play with their youthful herd. Gardens are life's great levelers for lords and lowly commoners bold enough to dig dirt, pull weeds... and plant its most fertile seeds.

Perfection may be a perfect word, but it causes a lot of imperfect things: a perfect storm, a perfect murder or that hollow feeling when the bell rings. I quit my own pursuit of perfection long ago when it nearly cost me my life. I was so busy trying to be flawless I almost lost my health, my job and my wife. My perfect mind was always a tortured one. So was my perfect body. Now I strive for 80 per cent of my goals and think it a miracle if I can achieve 20. I never carved a perfect turn or baked a perfect cake. And coaches who tell you to give 110 per cent, they really need to give their heads a shake. The ancient Greeks’ pursuit of perfection still makes for useful university fodder. But the Germans’ obsession with the perfect race led millions to the slaughter. There is no such thing as pure perfection. All we can do is to try our best in the best of all possible worlds, and stop forever beating our chest.

Don’t judge a book by its cover is what we’re always told. Yet that’s what we always wind up doing, blowing hot or cold. Whether candidates seeking office or movie stars chasing glory, we always assume the best or worst about them, not their real story. We look at their hair, assess their jawline and nose. We size up their accent and eye the brand of their clothes. Then, confusing their outer with their inner being, we pigeonhole them based on the skin tone we’re seeing. We’re drawn to movie puppets squeezed into tailored suits or image-obsessed dictators mouthing platitudes. We crave the packaged look and the political gobbledygook. Plain speaking is as popular as a skunk or smelly octopus. Honesty, modesty and rationality are all fine qualities. But they’re foreign to those who convince us their policies will lead to the land of milk, honey and TV reality. We, meanwhile, continue to skate on a sea of superficiality.