New York and the Scary Subway

New York and the Scary Subway

A lot of people are dubious about going underground in New York City. The noise, the shadows, the strange cinder- and uncleaned-bathroom-scented winds… the other people, whom you can see walking through–but maybe not… That romantic show back in the 80s, was it? probably gave a few dewy-eyed types an unwholesome urge to explore, and maybe some others, a deep desire never ever to go below the sidewalks. I don’t doubt there is a world, an unofficial population living there. In fact, it has been documented. Lowest rents there are, though the neighborhood can be rough.

There is a t-shirt: I Rode The New York Subway System and Survived!

I, however, love the New York subways!

They are spooky, but I first met them as a child, with my hand held firmly by a Grown-up, so I knew I didn’t have to be afraid: that was the habit I developed, and have kept.

The Subway is dark and dirty in many places, and there is always the thrill of the edge of the platform, and the murderous third rail always right there… Perhaps it is an urban myth, but I can easily imagine it is not, about the guy who, in the quiet of an empty station, relieved himself–I can imagine a deliberate, though sadly uneducated thought passing through his mind: Wonder if I can hit that big fat rail over there… And he could. Electricity travels fast along a saline solution. End of story.

Well.

In the late 50s, some of the cars had cane seats. The windows were like school-bus windows, and passengers could open or close them at will. In the first car, there was a little booth with the driver locked in behind a solid door, and the front door had a window, so you could stand there, watching the rush of the tunnel lit only by the train’s own headlight, until it was lost in the bright station platform lights… Later, they were black, functional, ugly cars, and still later, they were gleaming shining streamlined steel–that soon was overwritten with spray paint graffiti and gang tags. In some towns, that would just be a mess, but New York is a city of superior efforts in all fields, and the tags on the trains there constituted an outlaw, and truly underground art-form.

Some trains went up and through the street, up onto a bridgework of rails–though we still called it the Subway… some called that part just The Elevated. The El.

The oldest, deepest tunnels are round rather than angular, and their walls are tiled in white tiles, with the station names in black tiles. The last station north, or nearly if it isn’t the last, at Fort Tryon Park, where The Cloisters museum is, is so deep that you have to take an elevator out.

Whatever else they are, or have in them, the old, smelly, noisy, spooky New York Subway system has magic in it.

When I was in my 30s, traveling alone, I had occasion to descend to the old, deep tunnels, the round, tiled tunnels. I passed through Grand Central Station’s solid warm glamour, down through narrow, low corridors full of others in a rush to not-miss trains, past the two nuns who are always in a certain spot asking alms… the noise, the smell, the hustle and bustle… and there was music in the air. Not ratchety loud music, or howling horn music: it was a classical violin concerto I was hearing, and it grew as I descended deeper and deeper into the tunnels.

A young musician was standing in the lowest tunnel, playing as if no one were there, and the music reveled in the tiled acoustics! I let two of my trains go by, listening to the magic, and only reluctantly got on the third.

And that is how I remember the New York Subways.

Raw: Song and Thunder

Voice of eagle,
Voice of lark
rising through a sky
with storm clouds dark
and brilliant
the silver dashing rain
about to fall…

Harmonics
building slow
out of the mighty stones:
deep thunder
from earth’s very center
groans…

Bright song pierces
crying angel-high;

God-profundo
out of abyssal silence
suddenly
was always there…

Duet sublime
as Life and Death
are One.



May 2011

In the City

In the city
I remember green you can smell
and breezes you can hear;
Clean rain
Silent mists
Spider webs glistening
and solitude
that stretches far and wide…

In the city
I live with mostly greys,
Harsh vivid colors
slicing it in pieces;
The smell of industry
Burning coffee beans like tar;
Howling traffic
Pressing crowds,
eye never meeting eye
and solitude
a tight defense around you…

In the city
time is cut in segments
unforgiving
resistant to the slightest
alteration of The Plan:
Run…!
against the changing of the light;
Wait…!
on automated command;
Answer…!
authority’s demand
for identity and purpose;
Justify…!
your presence

As if this is a place
you want to be…

In the city.

Falling Colors

Walking in the woods of autumn fire
in my own autumn, wistful
heart to the colors lifts: All
the triumph of a spring advanced

victory of a summer lived
the flowers gone to fruit
and fruit to seed dispersing
on the errant winds that blow…
All finished now, and so
green departs the leaf and reed,

the wind whips over flaring brights
and muted shades of rust
of faded pink, of watered red,
and weeds are dead
beside the path
where I walk in autumn
of my own.

September 2009

Autumn Tempest

Two poems of the wild autumn moving in on the last remnants of summer

The earth does what it does
and always has–
Storm bellowing,
Flood rushing,
And the reeds bend;
Trees sway and sometimes
go roots up;
The waters wild
sweep the land
forgetting former banks
erasing dams
the diligent beaver built.


Storm Ponies

The tempest swoops in
off the ocean
where it trained,
charging like a heavyweight
out of his corner,
Knocks
the ancient weather vane a-tizzy,
sets the ponies running
wild in the wind;
Slaps
the last of autumn’s fire
off sashaying trees
They–and later
weather vane as well–
fly on the wind,
the ponies whipped up as wild
and rambunctious
as the lashing rains.

Squirrels
in tree-top nests disrupted
suddenly learn to fly
and small birds hide
as best they can and cats
of independent disposition
come inside

where we, close-huddled
by the stove
hope that the wood
already in the house
will be enough,
have candle lanterns ready
and flashlights close to hand,
with extra batteries…

The kids are energised,
taking it in turns,
cranking on the new-fangled
old fashioned swamp-radio
that never needs a battery replaced,
and praying for a sudden cold
and maybe feet of snow,
and make extravagant plans…

Even when the blast
exhausts itself to fitful gusts
and wanders off,
the rain drums on,
a flat percussive
shingle-drenching
crevice-seeking
drumming over-head…

Cold water fills
the hollows of the land
and saturates the soil,
drives out small rodents
from their earth;

And even the dog is whining
that, in fact,
he’d rather not go out today
but must, he must,
oh dear,
and not alone…

And the water buckets down
and drums and drums
and finally lulls
the last of us to sleep,
that flashlight handy by the bed…

The dawn comes
luminous and calm–
as if the weather
never had a single
brutal thought,
never blustered,
never raged,
never came in reeling
like a drunk,
never loosed the ponies
nor beat the land to
sodden helplessness…

The day comes on
gently, cheerfully,
the light a little harsher
through trees denuded
their columns etched and dark,
still gleaming with the wet…

Birds sing,
Squirrels scold,
Cats consider going out,
The dog can hardly wait oh boy!

The kids are disappointed
not really getting
what disaster is…

And someone must go out
and find the weather vane
then climb up the misty roof
and put the ponies back
onto the naked pole.

When I write open or free-verse poems, I hear them as if being presented by Garrison Keillor, then it always comes out right!

Courteous comments are always welcome here.

Prompt: Notes on Inchland

I began writing about Inchland several years ago, never got beyond describing it. But I know it is a place full of lives and tales, and I would love to see what stories other writers could tell about this tiny world that is really just as big as ours, however small it looks to us.

You fall asleep in the woods one day, and awaken after who knows how long, about an inch tall.  You’re in the same world you’ve always lived in, but suddenly, everything is around 60 times bigger than you’re used to.  There are people who have always been here, but too small or faint to have caught your eye—the entities of the natural world where it borders on the magical…

The Peoples of the Woods include all living creatures; those who live by intellect and use technology such as tools, and create art deliberately are considered Persons.

There are several races of Persons: Pixies, Fairies, the Fey, and Sprites are related races, as the various apes are related in the Large World.  There are also Naiads and Dryads, who are Persons by virtue of their intellect, speech and artistry, though they are not technological.

Pixies are the smallest, the nearest to your one-inch stature.  They live in the mossy root-stumps and cultivate the many varieties of lush mosses, the fungi and lichens, using these as food and medicine as well as enjoying their beauty.

They travel on foot or by hitchhiking rides with winged insects and the smallest of other animals.   But mostly, they like to stay close to home and to their gardens.

Pixies are resilient and quick, and can live many years by human standards.  They keep their health as long as the Woods are healthy; their greatest enemies are animal predators and severe weather.  They are generally mostly concerned with tending and defending the mosses, as they believe they were put here to do.

Pixies regard Fairies as potentially problematic, and somewhat arrogant.  Pixies don’t always see the point of the rules Fairies would like to impose on the denizens of the Woods, and are not always compliant or cooperative, which leads to some aggravation between them. 

Pixies fear the Fey and speak of them in hushed voices.

Pixies look at the Sprites as careless and foolish, as they don’t live long enough to ever attain wisdom, but cause little damage to the moss gardens except perhaps when their parties get out of hand.

If you take up this prompt, please share here in Comments your thoughts and explorations.

Looking to the East

It has always been a regretable thing, that American schools leave out so much of history, of our connectedness and relationships with other countries. In a few words, entire cultures are summed up and dismissed, as if they have no significance next to our own. The older I get, the more I want to know, the more I seek histories and cultures that in school I barely heard mentioned, and some, not at all.


I have been watching a Japanese series, MAGI, about the Tensho Boys’ Embassy. This was an episode in history corresponding with the rise of the Hideyoshi Shogunate–the same period covered in SHOGUN, and afterwards. Elizabeth is near the end of her reign in England, and the Spanish and Portuguese have gotten the Pope to split the world into their possessions.  

It confused me at first, as a few months ago I read a novel, SAMURAI, by the Japanese author, Shusako Endo, which described such an embassy that traveled across the Pacific to New Spain, then onwards to Europe across the Atlantic. This docu-drama sent the boys westward to Macau, Goa, and on around the Cape of Good Hope. 

It turns out, the events of SAMURAI are derived from a later event. Both are fictionalized history. Both have been adapted to film/tv versions. 

Knowing some about the times in Japan of the first embassy, it is interesting to see what becomes more and more clearly a Christian-slanted view of the times, events, and players. This clearly colors the story-tellers’ interpretations of the Shogun, Hideoshi, and his attitudes towards Christianity’s attempts to change Japan, even make it a Christian state.

It also amplifies, perhaps, or at least focuses particularly on the Japanese persecutions of the Japanese Christians, and the European–mainly Portuguese and Spanish–missionaries. It has a few words to speak through the mouth of their Hideyoshi, regarding the concerns and fears of the Japanese ruler, about Christianity as a threat to established religions and philosophies. In fact, he comes across as almost paranoid. 

They don’t entirely ignore that the missionaries came to Japan “with the Bible in their right hands, and guns in their left hands.” It is acknowledged that some of the Japanese lords, the daimyo, converted to the one mainly to aquire the other. It is, after all, a Japanese production, and has a loyalty to Japanese history. Whether it dwells unfairly or inaccurately on the persecutions that ranged from expulsions to executions, I can’t say. 

I am wondering now, though, how focused on martyrdom many Christians seem to be; wondering what Christianity today would look like if they in their various sects had never been particularly persecuted. Even today, it is a major ‘card’ played by some Christians, to claim victimization–over, for instance, the temerity of anyone who says, Season’s Greetings rather than Merry Christmas. 

That seems so petty and narrow-minded, and bound up with the profoundly mistaken notion that the US is, or is meant to be, a Christian state. Of course, it never was–but the predominance of Christians in its early history, in American culture, made that an easy assumption to make, and to not be corrected early on. So, many Americans who have never really given it conscious consideration, still assume it, and base a lot of pernicious attitudes on it. 

Well, no religion, no state, no person is without flaw. To reach for a faith in the flawless sometimes means transcending the packaging, the promoters, even the true-believers who have no doubt of their righteousness. I have always appreciated the Celtic Christianity that was built on the foundational idea that communion between the individual and the Divine is a personal matter, that go-betweens only muddle the conversation.

Courteous comments and conversations are always welcome here.

Tolkien Tribute: Eru’s Gifts

In the cosmology created by Tolkien, there was first Eru, who created a great Music which manifested as the Universe. The Song included strains and themes that manifested as the Powers, and Eru made them the lords of Arda, tasked with preparing the world for Eru’s First Born.
One of the Powers, however, in his eagerness and impatience, created a people of his own– the Dwarves. When he came to understand Eru’s intent, he offered to remove his own creatures, but Eru would not allow these living, knowing beings to be destroyed, and granted them the right to carry on, as Dwarves are famed to do. But the Dwarves must sleep until after Eru’s own first children waked.
Last, Eru put Man into Middle-earth, and as this part of the Great Song came after the Powers had come to Arda, none of them knew how this theme went, and so Man and the destiny of Mankind is unknown to them, and Eru’s purpose in creating Man is a mystery to them, as well.

Elf-kind’s gifts–
— to be First Born, to rise and stand,
the earliest wanderers in the land
–to master every kind of speech
–to awaken, name, and teach…
–to live forever in glowing grace,
lithe of form and fair of face

Dwarf-kind’s gifts–
–to own kinship with the very bones
of mountains, metals, gems and stones
–the mastery of smithy-art
–strength of limb, firmness of heart
–to be as solid as Middle-earth
–to live long lives and value mirth

Man-kind’s gifts–
–to come to the world the least of all,
with fear and doubt, and prone to fall
–to struggle for life, to fight for learning
to reach and reach, forever yearning
and after all, the gift of Death
to bless his every living breath

Elves and Dwarves were the first holy sending
but Man-kind will last until the world’s ending.

Privilege and Waking

Sometimes I feel like I am in one of those novels like FARENHEIT 451, where I am one of those proud citizens of one of the world’s best states–suddenly having to confront the evidences that it is not. Comes the waking, the gradually realizing that in fact it is one of the ugliest, most abusive, least honorable of states… That its promises are lies, its ideals are hiding terrible truths, that its justifications are disingenuous, and ultimately that its actual effect on the rest of the world and its own citizens is pernicious. That it’s greatest potentials are held back unrealized, unrealizable, by the sludge in which it stands.

All that is happening now in the bright light of day has always gone on, and all the good things–opportunities, wealth in sufficiency, benefits of technology– have been only for a select few. Being one of those few, I didn’t see it so clearly before, always thought that the suggestions of it as aberrations from the norm. I believed that what was true for me was true for most.

The current social and moral crisis is not Trump’s doing, he is the product of it: The champion of the absolute worst of what America is. Trump is simply the mirror of America’s own, long darkness that has gone so long shoved back into closets and cellars, has for so long been laughed off or ignored in the light of better things… That has finally floated to the surface and demanded attention.

The sludge we stand in is the composite of our weaknesses unaddressed, our debts unpaid, our problems minimized and ignored. But, as stories will have it, Truth will out! What is real will always, eventually, outlast and outmaneuver the glamours, the distractions, the glib contrivances we use to evade the unpleasant and inconvenient. “Reality is that which, when you ignore it, doesn’t go away.”

These kinds of stories seem always to resolve in either annihilation of the individual and national soul, or in revolution. It depends on the courage of the participants and the unwillingness to be devoured by a machine.

Courteous comments and conversation are welcome on all I post here.

We Might Have Been Friends

Who told you
who I was?
Who cast the shadow
of their own bitterness
across the vision
of your honest eyes?

Who was it
that suggested
hurting me
with your disdain
was the proper thing
to put me
in my place?

Who was it,
made you feel
so small
that to feel big at all
and safe
you must diminish me?

Does concensus
of like-persuaded views
convert
delusion into truth?

Does being wrong
together
make the wrong
a right?

How do you weigh
the cost
to your own soul
of burning witches,
gassing Jews,
bombing populations
who occupy
the ground you want?

And, in the end,
when you
and all your pals
have gathered
to yourselves
the sum of everything
you thought
I wanted,
how will you see
yourself?

I’ve heard that the 20s are the cruelest age, because their social power has grown but compassion has not, nor the realization of how great their effectiveness on the hearts and souls of others: They have not realized yet their power to cause real pain.

But the dynamic of scapegoating comes into play at an earlier age.

I had the experience of being targeted by Laura, Susan and Margaret–three unkind, pettily vicious girls who made my life as much hell as they could, when we were classmates in 7th grade. At the end of the year, they had the gall to come up to me, and say, “We didn’t mean it, we’re sorry, we really like you…” by way of being magnanimous. I asked, “So what was wrong with the rest of the year?” They did not take that well, and went huffing off, happy that I had made it all my own fault.

Bullies make wounds that don’t heal, that make crippling scars that never go away. For years, I thought they, or people like them, were still on the fringes, watching, sneering, condemning… It took me many years to stop caring what they thought or said or did. It has reverberated through my entire life.

Sometimes it is the power of one person, focused through the lens of the many. And so we have Jonestown, and the Little Bighorn, and Aushwitz and bombs in Belfast, and genocide in Ruanda, Somalia, and eastern Europe, and women starving behind their veils and doors in Iran, and soldiers marching steadfastly into the guns of other soldiers pointed at their hearts wherever in the world armies face off, and in all the places where someone believes their own righteousness supercedes the lives and free souls of everyone else.

I hope that the effect of this poem will be to open the eyes of some nice-enough, decent-enough people who get caught up in that dynamic, because they are casual members of a clique that has opposed itself to some person, or ethnicity, or idea, but they have not fully realized or taken responsibility for the effects they are part of. Respecting the most powerful, the guiding personality of the group, they accept without much discrimination that what that leader says and does must be all right. They cede their own morals and ethics to those of the Alpha, and ignore their own better judgement.

It is in our nature to make cliques and to use the power of the many against the one who shows weakness or difference. Humans do it, just as do chimpanzees, rats and sharks. Some animals seem incapable of transcending their instincts. But primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas and ourselves, have proven the ability to rise above primitive urgings, to consciously choose a path that embraces compassion, and perceives the longer-range benefits of altruism.

This is a choice that must be made by each of us, independent of our clans and cliques. It is the mark of our humanity, our integrity, and the measure of our maturity as human beings, that we have this capability to choose. It is, perhaps, the one thing that makes us more than just “animals with pants.”

2006