FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Thank your partner, your friends and your God every day,
just for the privilege of being here.
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'm gone.
So, something new will be here every morning. The Thought for Today and the Notable
Birthdays will continue. See you soon.
Love, Rod
Today we choose poems from Pastorale and The
Sound of Solitude, by Rod McKuen. J.H.
After-Hours Acrobatics - from "The
Sound of Solitude"
July 3
I light one candle
with another's flame
and getting up to leak
I look across at you
still curled and sleeping.
Coming back I start to pass
a mirror,
I stop. Stand back and see me
naked in the candlelight.
Was I ever beautiful,
ever young or wise
deserving of your arms or others'?
Head-on is even harsh by candleglow
love handles bulge on either side
of what was once an unfilled frame
that I hung hopes on,
never excess flesh.
My frown attacks my own reflection.
I turn full body
knowing even funhouse mirrors
are kinder than three-quarter views.
A single movement straightens back
and shoulders
and tucks a stomach into place.
Not good. Not good enough.
This copy of reality
is as sorry as the warped original.
I look at you a second time,
hoping I can dive beneath the covers
before you catch my silhouette
against the wall.
My pulse thumps loud enough
to blunt the metronome
of cicada
calling the cicada.
Safe. I hit third base
and
slide to home.
You only turn and grumble in your sleep.
I do not go back to sleep.
All life is spent erecting barricades
that none of us can get through
when love finally comes.
- Chosen by J.H.
I'll Fly Northward - a song lyric from
"Pastorale"
I'll Fly Northward
go there with the birds
where I can't be hurt
by smiles or even words.
I'll fly on strange wings
as lovers often do,
I'll Fly Northward
fly away from you.
I'll fly toward
the dark and distant hill
beyond the edge of everything
where nothing is the only thing,
the only void to fill.
I'll Fly Northward
following the sea
where I won't have to trust
in anyone but me.
I'll fly beyond the reach
of anything that's new,
I'll fly northward
fly away from you.
- Chosen by M.S. |
Beginning Again
- from "The Sound of Solitude"
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January 2
The eternal magic of eternal things
sends the dreamer out into the world,
brings him home again.
One wind makes another.
Recent rain reminds us of a rain ago.
Sunshine is the same each time
seen through different eyes,
felt on different skin,
it is still a wonder and a prize
as love and loving always is again.
I begin today. In life, in love,
in everything
the same start I had every yesterday
not concerned with where I am,
where I have been,
only where I go and to what end.
Does rain provide a resurrection
or plow a final resting place,
does love once done inhibit love,
life once lived stop life
from sprouting from a dying limb?
These must be winter questions
since answers only come when winter
comes again.
Some songs do not exist without the singer
certain rhymes are trapped and lost
on certain pages
but these are only songs and rhymes.
Eternal magic still rampages
on the inside of eternal things.
Fire. The river. Plum and cherry blossom
and the vigilance of all the visions
the dreamer carries back from traveled worlds.
I have been thinking about
the absence of love.
How useless April or December is
without another ear to turn to
or another's eyes to see
a certain wonder exactly in the way
it came to us.
A little melancholia for the final act
a bit of excess baggage shuffled off
an old coat traded in for new.
Nothing is quite
what we think it is.
Clichés become so for good reason,
the best contain a universal truth.
It is never wrong to want,
but you cannot have everything--
where would you put it?
- Chosen by M.S.Harper & Row first published
"The Sound of Solitude" in 1983. |
