22nd & 23rd January, 2004
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Photograph by Donna Marie
Bergeniao 11/11/2003
A Thought for Today
Love is the bed you imagine others lie in, when you find
yourself alone.
FROM the¨BOOKS
THE ART OF CATCHING TRAINS
1.
I came through the clothesline maze
of childhood
in basketball shoes.
Up from the cracked cement of sidewalks.
Long hair blowing in the breeze
from barber-college haircuts.
I moved into the country
knowing love better than long division.
Tricking out with women twice my age
we acted out our own French postcards.
Dr. Jekyll in the schoolyard,
Mr. Hyde behind the barn.
After school the trains,
their whistles known by heart.
Pennies flattened on a rail
and dresser drawers with matchbooks
from every northern town -
thrown by unknown travelers
who never waved back.
I knew the U.P. right of way so well
that gandy dancers called me tow-head
till they learned my name
and engineers would sometimes whistle
down the scale
on seeing my arm raised.
Baseball's just a sissy game
to anyone who's waved at passing trains.
You learn from hobos
the art of catching trains.
Locomotives slow at trestles
and whistle stops
to hook the mail.
Diving through an open box car
you lie there till your breath comes back.
Then standing in the doorway you're the king
as crowns of hills and towns go by
and nighttime eats the Summer up
and spits the stars across the sky.
How did I come to know
so many lonesome cities
with only pennies in my pockets ?
I smiled a lot
and rode a lot of trains
and got to know conductors
and railroad bulls by name.
From Alamo to Naples is a ride
that took me nearly twenty years.
But here I am,
my cardboard suitcase traded in for leather.
2.
Now a traveller
under the gray-black Winter sky
moving down the mountain by torchlight,
I've come to find
a gathering of eagles.
Not for the sake of mingling
with the great birds,
but only to justify
a thousand streets walked end to end.
Ten thousand evenings spent listening
to the small sounds of the night
in station after station.
Not every town in Switzerland
has a golden Gondelbahn,
but there are other ways
to climb the hills
and reach the lonesome cities
of the world.
Riding friendly bodies
you can inch your way to Heaven
let alone the far side of the room
and who'd deny that brushing elbows
in certain
streets
has not produced for every man
at least one vision of Atlantis.
For me old habits don't break easily
I wait for trains.
Sometimes I feel I've always been
just passing through.
On my way away, or toward.
Shouting alleluias at an unseen choir
or whispering Fa-do's down beneath my breath
waiting for an echo
not an answer.
Everybody has the answers
or they'll make them up
for you.
Just once I'd like to hear
a brand-new question.
What about the trains you ride
do they go fast or slow
would I recognize your face
clacking past the poplar trees
if I were stationed on some hill ?
If I did I'd know you
by the look of nothing in your eyes,
the kindred look that travellers have,
the one that says a tentative hello.
If while riding down the rails
you see a boy in overalls
along the railroad right of way,
wave as you go by.
Signal with a frown
you too are going down
the same road.
Small boys need encouragement
the freight trains in their minds
will only take them just so far.
Be kind
for small boys need to grow.
- from "Lonesome Cities" ©
1967 Stanyan Music Group & Rod McKuen
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THURSDAY 22 JANUARY
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Olivia d'Abo o
Sir Francis Bacon o
Birch Bayh o
Bill Bixby o
Linda Blair o
Lord Byron o
Sam Cooke o
George Foreman o
Balthazar Getty o
D.W. Griffith o
John Hurt o
Michael Kelland Hutchence o
Kris Kristofferson o
Diane Lane o
Piper Laurie o
Steve Perry o
Ann Southern o
Kathy Stewart o
August Strindberg o
U. Thant o
Joseph Wambaugh
FRIDAY 23
JANUARY
Richard Dean Anderson o
Humphrey Bogart o
Princess Caroline of Monaco o
Dan Duryea o
Sergei Eisenstein o
Gil Gerard o
John Hancock o
Rutger Hauer o
Ernie Kovacs o
Jerry Kramer o
Edouard Manet o
Ellen Mimran o
Jeanne Moreau o
Cecile Ousset o
Marty Paich o
Franklin Pangborn o
Anita Pointer o
Rosa Ponselle o
Django Reinhardt o
Chita Rivera o
Dr. Laura Schlessinger o
Randolph Scott o
Brendan Shanahan o
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) o
Swen Swenron o
Tiffany-Amber Thiessen |
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To love, you need not
even be two. One man can love and love honestly if he expects no return on his investment.
Love is only as strong as you make it, but always as weak as
you let it become.
Impatience can be a virtue if you practice it on yourself.
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THE COST • January 3
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A maple leaf lies
frozen in the ice,
its edges curling upward
as if to say release me.
No skater on the pond looks down.
Not even January sun
keeping pace with each blade runner
pauses in its ride toward the dark.
A light snow falls. Another frost.
A later layer on the pond.
The pristine leaf is lost
or held forever in an ice age coming.
I know that if I walk the bridge
connecting riverbank to riverbank,
a letter will be waiting in the box.
Or turning past the maple tree,
I will see the bench
you sprang from in the summer
to chase the crows from out the garden.
I am in no hurry to encourage memory.
I put off taking even one step forward,
knowing every forward step leads back.
Meetings end in partings.
Sunrise moves to setting sun.
Clouds dissolve and re-evolve as clouds.
Every hour ticks toward the start
of one more hour
and another after that.
Even progress stumbles, disappears,
reinvents and reappears.
The price of life is death.
- from "The Sound of Solitude," 1983 |
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