And certain pains; you sang your anger at

The cold and glaring lights.  Your song did lift

My sense of disbelief and stir my heart.

I think, ‘Oh, could this child be mine?

This pink and wrinkled fruit of my intent?

This daughter twined of flesh and spark divine?’

You lay before me helpless and content

To trust us for you every dire need

And trust my arms will never let you fall.

I ache to carry you, but must concede

There’ll come a time another voice will call.

So I will treasure your embrace today

Against that morn you wave and walk away.

(Sarah is now 21)

We walk among the piles of gathered leaves

that dwindle down to duff beneath the stark

And naked limbs, to spin in winds honed cold

And cutting numb.  The shrill guests scythe the heart.

As so your fallen father lays beneath

This shifting cloak of gold and crimson hands

That dance forever and away, that flame

Like sparks that shiver through a night on fire.

He fell so silent, dreaming as he drifted.

A scent of smoke, a voice, drift on the air

We hear a song and know we’re not alone.

A Gardener turns the leaves that he has raked

And gathered in an ancient blazing furnace,

As if the crackling, painted leaves had fed

The flame-licked furnace with their fiery colors.

The Gardener sings of spring, of lithe,

Green, teeming buds on naked limbs, of foal

And mare, caressing rains that cleanse the sky.

He laughs, and while we listen, incandescent

Shafts shoot across the dawning east and light

The trail of smoke across the wakening sky.

To catch your father as he flies, like rakes.

We cannot understand his patient earth-

Creased hands that also plant the seedling.  Let

Us walk away and leave the grave behind.

No bright leaf falls but that it does not grow

Again, nor grief be burned without the flames

Of joy.

And touches all the well-springs of that light;

Whose fragrance wraps around me dark and cool

And drifts me through the passages of night.

I call to you across the weary miles

To feel your fingers brush across my skin.

I draw to you within a moment’s silence

And find that fading warmth of where you’ve been.

I drempt we walked together of a morning

Down through a sun-splashed wood beside a stream,

And to a cottage where we slept til dawning;

And when we woke we found it not a dream.

I would that we could leave this life alone

And fidn a pllace to truely call our home.

That cuts across the corner of the land

And vanishes beneath a gravel bed

To reappear a quarter mile on.

The poet in me can’t allow that I

Discuss the aquifer below the soil

Or douse the beauty of the crystal waters

With terms of scientific measurement.

She walks in sorrow thirsting for a word;

One word of mine to tell her all my heart,

But I would have her know the thing outright.

“My love,” I say, “is like this dancing stream

That runs in hunger to the waiting sea

And dives below the soil out of sight.

So passion comes and goes within my heart;

So fickle man his love to woman gives.

The flood that rages through his veins one day

Will sink beneath the silent earth the next.

Do not despair, but know the words you need

Will spring, unbidden, forth from me–to you

That moment when you do not seek the spring

To bubble out in joyous laughter to

The surface.  Passion leaps and dives, but love,

Like water flowing to the calling sea

Increases as it dashes to the waves.

So I increase the while I flow to you,

In silence or with heartdeep longing wracked,

Above, beneath, until I join your sea.”

She says no word, but kneels down to drink

The liquid diamonds running off her chin

And leaping from her cupped, creased hand

She turns and offers me her heart-washed touch

And I accept, my heart that moment rinsed

By droplet covered fingers on my face.

And in the waking fields the wrens will sing

Dashing tree to tree on dance black wing

They shout to God abrupt, enrapt applause.

And as I stroll in peace along the lane

Beneath the arch of studded elm and larch

I hear behind the wheels of progress march

Reminding me of man’s incessant pain.

The car o’ertakes me in a burst of speed

And coats me with a mist of carbon dust.

Across the farther hill it comes to crest

A comet trailing urgent human need.

Which world is me?  In truth I cannot say.

But do my needs these fields of peace betray?

The very act would be somehow unjust.

That tie that binds you is a tie of love,

To loose, would be to shatter bonds of trust.

I could not bear the thought that I demand

Your gift, insisting that you love betray,

Or grasp the kestrel tightly in the hand

To watch her flutter, die, or fly away.

So let the morning sun-shot feathers shudder.

Remove the thong that lightly holds the wind

And rustle wings of first light’s streaking fire,

And in this moment’s ending we begin.

I know not where you’ll fly, or if you will

But where you fly, my love flies with you still.

I traveled far, and lo! I stood there too

Where Hardy stood with chiding voice

Sent thither by the sons of Earth to sue

Lord of the Universe

-”I know too well the race that on Earth trod,

By Me made to live in joy.

But they would not be creatures, rather god,

So I let them destroy

“The World I made and all in love I’d done,

For dreams of selfish glory lost.

And in the end I let them kill my Son,

To pay their folly’s cost.

“Oh, Adam’s son, don’t cry in bitter voice,

Nor blame me for the evil done.

It was your race that made the fateful choice

To walk the Earth alone.”

And crumpled under sheets of drencing pain

Who turned away from dark and cloud-locked truth

I hope to bring you now a healing rain

To ask you now to place your faith in me

To trust the future holds some better light

Believing love this time will stay, not flee

And trust the shimm’ring vision as true sight

I cannot promise days of endless bliss

But rather pledge a love so stead’ly paced

That it will drip like rain pavement ticks

And gently lap in rhythm through your days

To love small, once in each unfolding day

Until the decades wash our lives away.

My father and I watch a streak of pearl sky between the blue-grey sea and the blue-grey bank of cloud hanging above Dana Point like the bottom of a skillet. A man who once ran a half acre lot around a large suburban home like a personal arboretum is now boxed in by four walls in what was once a master bedroom of a beach house with a postcard view of Capistrano Beach arcing up the coast to Dana Harbor. A hospital bed, a small television, family photos and a recliner fill this bedroom and are all that’s left to him, and twenty-four hour nursing. My father had a stroke last April and the busy, do-it-yourselfer who walked a mile a day, became silent for the most part, an enforced contemplative bound to a wheel chair. He remembers everything and I thought that the sight of the lights winking in the growing dusk over the harbor might trigger the heart of the traveler that he never lost. At least I wonder if he has lost that heart; he has lost so much else. We talk, with long pauses in between. I don’t feel awkward—we often did so before the stroke. But then his mind was quick and his subtle wit even quicker. Now the pauses are for him to try to finish simple thoughts and observations. I must face the fact that a large part of the man who raised me is gone, irreparably. Sometimes I finish his sentences for him. He sees the lights of the harbor and of the campers along Doheny Beach. I know it’s in his blood to be out there, and maybe beyond.

He was always a traveler, a wanderer, though he limited his will to be running down any road to family vacations and provided responsibly. His wanderlust never moved him to the point where he left behind the people he loved and just vanished for a year or more. His great grandfather was that kind of man, though. He wasn’t happy just leaving Wales for America—he had to go to the California Gold Rush and the Civil War as well, the first time packing his family off with an uncle while he went to California and had adventures. The second time he got the wounds that eventually killed him and left his wife a widow in her mid forties.

Not my Dad. He was never the loner. Dad went on his first trip with his parents to Zion National Park. He never told me what he thought. His feelings were on display in the photographs he took, which were breathtaking. Through his color slides vast cliffs soar against brooding skies and thick silent forests carpet the hills that roll into the laps of snow-capped Rocky Mountain peaks. People say that the photographs of Ansel Adams are almost a religious experience to see. They are right, but so are my Dad’s. And I’m sure the feeling that comes out off any such photograph has to be put in it in the first place. My Dad couldn’t sing in church, never sang a note; but his photographs are a visual chorus of awe and wonder and excitement. He was a artist on the drawing board before his body failed him, but nowhere so much as through the lens of a camera. And photography required travel. Over the years, almost every time his job allowed we were out and away, wandering as far as the east coast.

I think the will to wander never has left him. It’s a hunger really. I know. I have it in a heavy dose. When I was a young man, I gave it free rein.

In 1975, when I was still nineteen, uncertain of whom I was or where I belonged in the huge and confusing world, it occurred to me that my life was a blank page and all I had to do was write on it. I was a story I would make up from scratch. In all the grey years of childhood, there was one bright set of memories, like the Technicolor world Dorothy walks into from the black and white world when she enters Oz in the old MGM classic. My Oz was across the Colorado River, a land my father ventured into in the brief vacations, which were the oasis of color in my black and white childhood. Arizona. New Mexico. Utah. Colorado. It was an incantation. Just to hear those magic names made my heart race–I felt alive when we were there, and heading back west to recross the Colorado River into California was always a cold bath of reality in my memory.

So when my grandparents’ generosity granted me my first adult freedom, I turned east and looked beyond the river to the place in my childhood where for a few weeks a year I had not been just the awkward boy at school. I went to Northern Arizona for my college years. There I had seen mountains that cut the sky, great thunderstorms that pounded and glittered with lightning. I had a reverence for this land something like the Indians I was always reading about. The lonely forests and deserts drew me and fed my elation and depression with the sound of nothing but wind blowing over miles of forest. It felt something like home, and yet, as I lived there longer, it also called me away to somewhere beyond. But I found that the joy it promised was always illusory; the shining light just at the end of the highway always recedes before you get there. You have to be where you are right now or you are never anywhere. Still, today, when my heart is troubled, I want to drive somewhere, anywhere, perhaps where there are quiet woods.

I am Romantic enough to treat the right stretch of wood or highway in the right light like a sacramental. Yet, ironically, like so many, the place that I find that peace that the highway promises is more often found before the Sacrament in some silent church. C.S. Lewis always viewed life and faith as a sort of retrograde motion: we are always longing and searching forward for the thing that is behind us. The trick is to ignore your heart, turn around and find it behind you. Often what I long for is as simple as what looks like bread in an ornate box in some stuffy little chapel. There are thousands of them, unobtrusively dotting the landscape—little churches, dark and dusty smelling. They will differ but more often than not, the world you enter when you go through the doors into the palpable silence is the same. Most are filled with religious art all too often revealing of devotion in the artist but not skill, and old spider webs flutter in open, ornate-shaped stained glass windows. A single candle burns in a red glass holder and maybe there is a little smell of mold. The leather on the aged kneelers is cracked and needs replacement, and when I kneel I can feel the leather welt cut under my kneecap. A few candles wink off and on in a curling, cast iron holder underneath the Virgin of Guadalupe or some other saint. I collect dusty little churches like this, up and down the coast of California and even as far away as Wales. My heart yearns to the woods, to find something, someone, a Someone whom, oddly enough, I find by the flickering candles of a hundred dusty little churches.

And He’s there. I always think He’s waiting in that quiet, perhaps not so much for what I will say, but for me to struggle for just enough inner silence to listen. Sometimes it’s very hard to do. Too often I’ve found a greedy comfort in motion, in watching the broken white line click by me. But even as I grow older and begin to see more and more of the hollow vanity of that feeling, the highway still can be a comfort.

I think I can safely say my father’s last road trip was to attend my brother’s wedding in Zion National Park a couple of years ago. I did all the driving and even then, he wasn’t able to walk as far as he’d liked—his back bothered him and his wind wasn’t what it used to be. But we roomed together and he enjoyed it immensely. He’d had a couple of “TIAs”, that is, baby strokes already and I can clearly recall thinking that somehow this trip would be his last, especially when he spent a good bit of one of our breakfasts together telling me about the first trip he’d ever made to this place. Call me superstitious, or maybe it’s just that I suspect that there really is a Great Novelist writing all our lives, but when he began to speak of his first trip I was certain he’d come full circle. Maybe he knew it is as well. I remember as I drove away from the little village outside the park where we’d stayed, that for a moment I felt to leave would be to leave something behind forever. I shook off the feeling. The sun was out and filtering through the tall, rounded cottonwood trees in the valley and the Virgin River could be heard, singing in its bed. I often get this feeling when I have to leave a beautiful mountain hideaway for the city one more time. But one cannot stand still. I drove away.

My father and I listen as Dana Point descends into a calm darkness and the lights wink like those prayer candles. For more than forty years I’ve been getting to know this man who begat me. When the double stroke hit him over two weeks in April all my thoughts were of how much of him was lost to me. When he talks, the right side of his body fails him and the right side of his mouth slurs his words. I have to listen, sometimes to extrapolate from what I heard him say and what I know he’s likely to say, in order to understand his sentences. His keenness of mind is gone, I fear for the rest of his journey on this side of the river. Perhaps neither he nor I will ever find a home this side of that river which we all must cross someday, in a place that is so alive with color that it makes this world seem like an old black and white movie. Perhaps. God willing.

But his stare at the lights of the harbor is unbroken and I can feel his spirit yearn out of the wheel chair. I wish there was a way that I could take him wandering again, but his body will not cooperate in the venture. He has but one long journey left, and I sense it will be sooner than later. I really want to take him to a small, quiet deserted church somewhere, but he was raised Protestant and I don’t know if he’d understand. Yet, I remember his reverence when as a boy I traveled with him and we’d stop in some old Spanish mission along the California coast, Santa Barbara, or maybe the deserted silence of San Antonio. Maybe that’s the journey I need to make with him now. Leave all words behind and all apologetic notions and just wheel him into a small chapel where the candle burns in the red glass holder, and see what the One who is always there in the bread might say.

Still, it’s not so much I want a parade, but when you produce something good, you want it to get out there.  I also paint watercolors and I can frame one up and give it away.  It will go on a wall and achieve its purpose.  But books require the publisher and the marketer and the agent to get out there.  I can sell a few to friends and family, but in the end, well, it’s not much of a fate for something I believe would have sold well had it been on the market twenty years before.

John Keats, the poet, was lambasted by his critics all his short life and lived off the goodness of his friends as he had no income.  He died in Rome thinking himself a total failure.  On his headstone he permitted only to be written, “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.”  Only a century or so after his death was he discovered and proclaimed a great poet.  One creates art and sends it blindly into the world.  Still, it would be nice to know it hit its mark.  Unlike Keats, Dickens was a roaring success with his first effort and never lost his edge.  Still, there is a quality in Keats that Dickens never touches.

Ultimately, I leave the last word to Eagles co-founder and drummer,  Don Henley:  “I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free.”