Rod McKuen - Flight Plan


Wednesday 13th April, 2005		A Thought for Today God meant none of us to live without loving and being loved. This One Does It For Me! Hello Ken, Long time not writing. How are you, getting ready for winter? We have a beautiful April spring time here. I like your Flight Plan choice for today, of course. Maybe some time you can follow up with his beautiful poem "When I was Nine." As always your email friend, Elsa Marie Winter is very definitely on it's way, Elsa Marie. April is a magnificent month here so we're enjoying the champagne days before the really cold weather sets in. A lot of people agree with you about "When I Was Nine" as we've featured it here on a number of occasions. It's such a great piece of writing, though, that it certainly deserves a repeat appearance along with Rod's forward to "And to Each Season." Author’s Foreword - And to Each Season The Japanese poet Takubuku said, “Every man keeps a prisoner groaning in his heart...” This book is an attempt to free such a prisoner - or more than one - from mine. I am not sure if it succeeds. No one of us, I think, can name, let alone free, those demons - friendly or otherwise - that keep us from being the kind of men we’d like to be. My childhood, before eleven, remains elusive. I’ve yet to get it down on paper the way it was. New York is easier to write about and San Francisco writes itself, but Elko, Alamo, Ely and Caliente hardly come at all. Even when my memory has a favored day, some prisoners refuse escape. My mother, though her death was recent, is hardest of all to fit into words, though she’s crowded my head and heart more than anything or anyone this past year. Physically, in later years she got heavier, mentally, she became - even at the end - more alert. Emotionally, we touched bases without admitting there were bases to be touched. I could paint her, but I cannot yet frame the way she was or is for me in words. I believe, increasingly, that man is now essentially alone. Irrevocably so. Whether that is good or bad, or can indeed be categorized other than for each case individually, I’m not prepared to say. For myself, I am grateful for the transients in my life, whether they be Sundays when the phone’s not ringing or the odd stranger who happens by and leaves behind more pleasure than my concentration on my own needs quite deserves. Some of the lines in this book were written nearly twenty years ago and never published; that I loose them now means I find them true today. I am more and more concerned with truth, having lied my share within my life, and lately having been a good deal lied about. I am not convinced the truth can make men free, but I believe it a beginning and a final resting place. Tomorrow, though, I might believe in lies. What I want is not to be held accountable for what I said today, or yesterday, so that my tomorrows can stay open. Poetry is fact, even in its imagery. This is a work of fact. Any disguise, is a defense not known to me as yet. Clouds where clarity should be were not intended. I have not written for every man but I want to write for Everyman, because I wish to be one and the same with all my brothers, yet remain an individual. That I write so much on love must mean that it is paramount to me. It is. I have come back from a long tour just now, having loved nobody and everybody. This is for me a new beginning, or at least an end. Rod McKuen, June 11, 1972 Thanks for your contribution, Elsa Marie. Got a favorite McKuen song, poem or story? Drop me a line at ken@mckuen.com telling me all about it and I'll make sure it gets an airing right here one Wednesday soon. - Ken, Johannesburg, South Africa, April 13 Click on the Stanyan House logo to buy Rod McKuen books, CD's and lots more Click on the heart logo to subscribe to the Rod McKuen mailing list Catch Rod McKuen live! Click on the links below for details of concerts and appearances. ROD McKUEN CONCERTS ROD McKUEN APPEARANCES



		Don Adams o Samuel Beckett o Jonathan Brandis o Peabo Bryson o Jack Casady o Bill Conti o Stanley Donen o Tony Dow o Edward Fox o Al Green o Kyle Howard o Thomas Jefferson o Garry Kasparaov o Howard Keel o Nancy Kissinger o Margaret Price o Rick Schroder o Lyle Waggoner o Eudora Welty

		Genius is always a roadshow ongoing. Even when my memory has a favored day, some prisoners refuse escape. Suspense and hope are more than just a part of love - they are the head’s foreplay.

WHEN I WAS NINE		1. When I was nine or part of nine we lived in Scamania, Washington. Our cabin sat beside the highway so near that we could hear cars whiz past us and trucks grunt up the incline late at night. Behind the house for miles grew every kind of tree. My private forest that another boy never once walked through. I’d be sent for firewood and first come home with flowers hoping I could please my mother half as much as I believed my foster father could. Never knowing and not to know if wild bouquets made her as happy as red roses later did. Because my new found forest was my own and my own only, gradually I came to read it like a scholar poring over books, muttering to himself at certain passages. I muttered back at squirrels and held long dialogues with birds, fully sure I spoke their language. Positive their answers came in kind. None ever contradicted me. 2. It must have been toward the first of spring when I first saw him a mountain lion sleek and soft pretty as Rousseau might make him, threading through the wood padding slow before he saw me then stopping as I had to look me up and down. Perhaps it was the first time I had been surveyed by microscope or microscopic eye. All that afternoon we sat not twenty feet apart, regarding one the other till he loped off in search of weasels or a place of water. I stayed there still until the darkness took the afternoon. Then I went home, never speaking of the incident till now. Thereafter by unspoken pre-arrangement he would follow me from house to school and again from school to house, remaining always just outside the clearing, invisible to anyone but me. The distance narrowing, yet still he prowled his private path and I the man-made trail where few branches gave obstruction and only now and then a leaf would rustle or a twig would snap. I grew to know the sorrow in his eyes though never why; but afterward I sought the same, soft sadness in the eyes of strangers I would have for friends. Perhaps that is why my understanding friends are few they lack a certain sadness that betrays the truth. 3. In mid-October the first long rain began and pings of water speeding down to pots from the leaking roof had turned from pings to plops. The mud-caulked cabin We had found abandoned and turned into our summer home would surely fall that winter, maybe even with the season’s first hard thirst. And so we left even as it rained determined to be gone before the snow could catch us. The model-T had long ago been traded off to pay the grocery bill so now we hitched to California. My mother with her thumb up and her pretty smile got us back down crooked roads through Washington and Oregon, along the California coast and finally to Nevada. We must have been a spectacle. She out front as slim as summer, her husband with my brother in his arms beside her and me still looking off behind hoping I might see a lion’s friendly face. A sad-eyed lion pacing out an even pace keeping his distance but being there in case that one the other needed one the other. 4. I wonder if I ever told her or if my mother ever knew the first companion I called friend was an animal of gentleness whose eyes I’ll long remember. Did she know that I had special dispensation and protection? Or why a lion, not a lamb? When my family out of kindness kidnapped me and stole me from my forest friend they stole my childhood too. Though I would still climb trees and later fell them as a stopgap on my way to now, and seek out jungle animals (and maybe even find a few) it wouldn’t be the same again. 5. A mountain lion in a forest is by all accounts a curious event, but he was there. And written here between these lines is what gentleness he taught me and some hardness too, the way to make my way alone, though never how to find a friend and lose him gracefully. Most of all my lion showed me that though the forest’s padded green is a different color from the green of its thick trees man and lion different colors too can share the same dense jungle if their eyes have kinship and they respect the distance that brings them close. And the closeness that insists on distance. Since that time when I was nine or part of nine, looking after lions has occupied the front part of my head and the best part of my time. No journey’s been too far too make if I thought lions lived there. And I always look from right to left every time I’m passing down a new road anywhere. But forests now fall down around us the way that autumn rain did when I was nine in Washington. And I suppose what lions there are left hike the higher hills. It must be so for those that prowl the city pavements come so seldom anymore that they can walk among the populace unnoticed. - from "And To Each Season", 1972

Webmaster: Ken Blackie o Birthday research by Wade Alexander, coordinated by Melinda Smith
Poetry from the collection of Jay Hagan o Sound & Fury: Dr. Eric Yeager o Editor at Large: Bruce Bellingham

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