FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
No more important advice exists than "Think before you
do."
The regular daily Flight Plan will be
suspended for a few weeks while I'm away helping Webmaster Ken Blackie work out the design
and content of our upcoming STANYAN HOUSE web site. I hope you'll continue landing here
ever day though because Jay Hagan and Melinda Smith have chosen two poems from a different
one of my books for every day that I'll be gone. So, something new will be here every
morning.
The Thought for Today and the Notable Birthdays will continue as well. See you soon.
Love, Rod
A Poem and
selected prose from "ALONE" by Rod McKuen
I liked the way this forward to the 'Alone' book sounded and thought it set the mood for
everything we think about Rod and his poetry. J.H.
Forward to "Alone"
What follows in this book is a collection of poetry and prose that touches on a number of
subjects; they have, however, the umbrella - I might have said electric blanket - of being
written of and about the state of alone.
Attempting to define alone is futile, the symptoms and the end result are always
different. It is enough to say that if you believe yourself to be alone, you are.
Seemingly, there is almost no way to set about with any success to circumvent or avoid its
coming - even as you see it approaching in the distance. But most often alone can be
reasoned with and it passes. Someone comes by and makes it pass. If not, take it as a
partner. We've all known worse.
Alone is not the end - or it shouldn't be. In truth, it is a starting place. One more
square one for reaching out.
I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason
they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be,
because I try to find security within myself.
Though I believe very strongly in social intercourse, mentally and other wise, the man who
detailed the advantages of masturbation as not having to dress up, being certain not to
disappoint anyone, done on your own time and at your appointed place, and, best of all,
meeting a better class of people, did have a point of view hardly arguable.
Alone, like love, regardless of what the primers say, can be a noun, pronoun, adverb, or
adjective - depending on its use and the extent to which it comes, stays, or returns to
your life. Darkness and retreat have more than once been my cover. By now I've traveled
deep enough into the darkness that hiking back through any clearing is a journey not taken
without some thought.
With growing frequency I now plan nightly outings in the morning, awaiting them through
the day, and with approaching darkness work myself into an apathy that a closing battle
line could not penetrate. I am never sure what I miss by staying home. Doubtlessly, I've
avoided disappointments that might have chipped away a little more of my self-confidence.
Possibly on one given night I missed the silver apple that, bitten into, would have
changed my life.
I chose the shadows, they did not choose me, I stay here securely not just because I feel
plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I
can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.
Don't ask me how it might have been, or what it could or should have been like. How
different all my days would be if I'd strode securely into public sunlight. More and more
I take the sun alone - always at the edge of the clearing, close enough to the wood to
crouch low or retreat at ease should the beautiful enemy pass by.
I have never said I liked always being alone. I have said I like it better than being with
just anybody. The need to merely touch someone I've seen, or imagined, can be so great at
times that it's as close to madness as I ever hope to come.
The brushing of two minds, or hands, or bodies together. Even eyes focused at distance can
make the loneliest of us all alive and full of hope - momentary or otherwise. And I have
known two minds and bodies seemingly compatible in every way to meet in love and be so
alone together you would swear they'd never met. We do meet each other over and over every
day. But centuries can seemingly go by before two people meet in some special way that
causes an end to their individual loneliness.
Much of this book is new. Since I go on being the same man trying to find the answers to
some of the same questions, some of these poems will be newer to me than they are to you.
Other poems were written years ago, but never shown or shared, and some are taken from
other collections. If I have to describe them, personal and private come to mind. But
those words, too, have been for me nouns, pronouns, verbs - far more than adjectives.
If these pages are so personal and private, why let them go ? Why not ? There is a chance,
however small, that some one will read, understand, even stop and turn in my direction.
To repeat myself, sometimes someone passes by and stops; then you're not alone. Some of
these words are smoke signals.
- RM - 1975
Afterwards & Afterthoughts
When it's over, love, someone's birthday, the big game or the funeral, words not only come
to mind that would have been said earlier if the brain was always working, but
recriminations and prayers for replay fill the mind and work it overtime. A conversation
in the head long after every chance has passed is not unusual, more the rule.
After every loss, or what we term to be our losses, a hundred master plans are planned, a
dozen avenues we might have taken, had not a certain road been blocked, stretched out
before us like a city map.
Finally the afterthoughts afterward are lost like all the melodies that had no meaning and
the memories did.
- Chosen
by MS |
