SATURDAY 18th & SUNDAY 19th
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Rod on Maui, August 2003.
Photo by John Scoggins.
©2003 by Stanyan Entertainment.
A Thought for Today
Love must be the best life has to offer for most of us are
miserable without it.
THE WEEKEND WATCH
MORNING COLLECTION
In the
half-light
we saw the swimmers
coming from the darkness
carrying the boy’s body low,
as though its weight
was bending all of them
into the same submission.
As though the boy
was pulling them down now
the way the sea had pulled him
to herself.
He was of course
just one more lover
of the gray-blue water.
A muscled boy who swam
a few yards farther out
each day.
But so young.
I wonder what he said
as he went down
that final time,
here I am or let me go?
I know the sea eats up
the men who love her most,
the way a killer queen
must finally one day
reject the troops
who fought for her on battlefields
and fought with her in bedrooms.
I am not afraid.
I’d go down gladly in a whirlpool
if I had ridden all day
on a friendly wave.
But one so young
colorless, not even gasping,
too dead for even lonely.
A conscience cannot even wonder
why.
For the sea
it was a little murder
done with might and yet no malice.
But with a poor repayment
for a man whose only crime
was to love the wild blue water
that in a single swallow
tore and took him.
The sea gives up the living
as it does the recent dead,
at will it casts off what it will.
The ocean has a lesson
for our own lives
and those we take responsibility
toward.
Push forward she keeps saying
till your life is bare upon the shore
until you’re naked to yourself
and God.
Yet the Christian and the Godless
are often washed together
and broken on the rocks.
To wade the water is to learn.
You’ll gain a guideline,
a watermark just like the sea
that tells you how far you can travel
and still come home in certainty
and safety.
Morning people
tracking down the shore
retrieve the best
and see the very worst
the sea sheds on the beach.
Hold on to me
and I’ll become your enemy,
let me go and I’m your friend.
The ocean says that every day
a thousand and a thousand times.
And every evening,
her words having pounded
in our heads all day,
we repeat them
to each other
as our own.
So it is
that we confuse her speech
her language spoken
wave to wave
and tide incoming
with those sentences
complex and simple
we spit out
as dialogue invented.
The sea invents,
we rearrange.
The sea takes out a patent,
we infringe.
The sea holds copyright
to all the most important works,
speaking tongues that even time
won’t modify or use.
To those of us who’ve listened
the sea’s the only teacher
teaching, and without a copybook.
Often she demands a bitter prize,
a head to batter on the rocks
limbs to wash upon the shore
and though we wonder why,
it is the only question
that she leaves unanswered.
- from the British edition of "The Sea
Around Me," 1976
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ROD McKUEN
CONCERTS
ROD
McKUEN APPEARANCES
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SATURDAY 18th OCTOBER
Chuck Berry o
Pam Dawber o
Mike Ditka o
Jesse Helms o
Miriam Hopkins o
Fannie Hurst o
Klaus Kinski o
Lotte Lenya o
Wynton Marsalis o
Melina Mercouri o
Martina Navratilova o
Laura Nyro o
Anita O'Day o
Lee Harvey Oswald o
Waldo Salt o
George C. Scott o
Vincent Spano o
Inger Stevens o
Bobby Troup o
Pierre Trudeau o
Jean-Claude Van Damme o
Wendy Wasserstein o
Dawn Wells o
Rebecca Westphall
SUNDAY
19th OCTOBER
Jack Anderson o
Robert Beatty o
Amy Carter o
Divine o
Sean Garrison o
Jean Genet o
Omar Gooding o
Lloyd Haynes o
Jennifer Holliday o
Evander Holyfield o
John LeCarre o
John Lithgow o
Tony LoBianco o
Walter Mathews o
Peter Max o
Lewis Mumford o
George Nader o
Troy Parker o
Robert Reed o
Jeannie C. Riley o
Johnny Stompanato |
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Invest in your country by investing in your friends.
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality
impossible.
Being without love
too long makes us ready as the rose . . . to be caressed and then be ruined by the rain.
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MIDNIGHT SAVIOR |
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Have you come
to save me ?
Very
well.
I’m teetering
between the earth
and hell.
I’ll gladly take salvation
over pot and pills
and cheap red wine.
I’m grateful for your arms
but open up a little more
so that I need not love you
out of gratitude
but only for yourself.
Let me lie against your belly
inhaling all the night air
you let out.
Let me reach inside you
slow and easy, deliberate
so that your anatomy
will be my primer,
your sighs now heavy
my own northwest wind.
Let me probe
a secret place
no one else
has so far touched.
Allow me this small favor
to pull you to me from the inside,
to live inside you half of every night.
The star-filled half.
Don’t be discouraged
if I fumble or become inept.
I’ll try again,
now slower still.
Then moving to your face
your eyes will dazzle me
as our mouths match,
the insides probing
one another’s insides.
Slide next to me. See,
no position is uncomfortable
or wrong.
Such space there is between your back
and each new morning.
Such emptiness
my body and the sunlight
cannot fill.
I’ll try, I will.
Remember that you caught me
on the heels of what I thought
was love.
- From "The Sea Around Me, " 1976, 1977 |
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