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Craig
Firefly
Kyrgyzstan
3793 Posts |
 Posted - 02/02/2008 : 07:47:03
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He sat at the bar on one side of the cantina, hat pulled low, as if not wanting to be recognized. Watching in the mirror as other men came through the door, he occasionally looked over his shoulder. A habit acquired from years of being on the run.
On the other side of the cantina was the small cocina, where lunches and and hot plates were served to those coming off of the trail. There at the counter silently sat a seasoned man, grayed from his years of working his ranch and riding the trails. In front of him was a large bowl of chili.
Bursting through the door, the three young vaqueros came. Cowboys just off the dusty trail, they were full of youth and vinegar. Their first cattle drive, the first real time away from home and on their own. They had conquered the world and nothing could stop them now. They were just paid, had money and were full of self-proclaimed knowledge. They had nothing left to learn, and knew all…or so they thought.
The boldest of the three sat down at the counter, looked over and said, “Hey there old fella, you gonna eat that bowl of chili or you jus gonna look at it?”
“Naw, I ain’t gonna eat it”, came the reply.
“Well then, if you ain’t gonna eat it then slide it on over here!”
The bowl was slid over the smooth counter. The young cowboy ravenously started to eat it. “Man, this is pretty good!” he exclaimed. “We never had it this good out there with old man Poteet! We were lucky if there was any meat in it at all!”
Just as he was getting to the bottom of the bowl he came across a gruesome discovery. There, in the bottom of the bowl was part of a rat. What he had just eaten was involuntarily heaved back into the bowl. He sat there somewhat shocked and stunned over what had just happened. He could not fathom what had just occurred. He stared in disbelief at the once again, full bowl of chili.
The quiet man that had given him the chili got up to leave but not before giving the young cowboy a pat on the back and saying matter of factly, “Yeah son, that’s as far as I got too,” as he walked out the door.
On the other side of the bar, the stranger grinned as he slowly shook his head at what had just unfolded on the other side of the cantina that dusty afternoon…
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Edited by - Craig on 02/02/2008 12:30:24 |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:29:50
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| McKenna starts the evening off; "What happened to the young lad who was called into service by his country in 1942?..." It's warm in the Day Room and many of the assembled are yawning. "Who cares!" Martin Avery grunts under his breath, not quite out of ear shot of McKenna's first line. Martin Avery is new to Sunrise. And the latest member to join the Friday evening Creative Writing Program. He insists on being called 'Doctor' by dint of his DMV degree. He uses words like "convey" and "peruse." He taps his watch with his fingernail when he lectures the Staff on "the virtue of punctuality." McKenna pauses and blows his nose loudly. Art Huffington feigns a stumble, but not all the way to the floor. His silver-tipped cane gets him back on his feet just as Robber Barron's tanned knees pass by. Robber is a full-time employee now. Her hair is still purple and spiked, her chipped nail polish, black, but she wears a clean lab coat and laces her Doc Martens. And she shows up mostly on time. Several of the residents wave their Memory Books in the air. Both McKenna and Avery voted against "Memory Books", and Huffington pantomined a gag. "I need help with Atlantic City," Alma Cottswold cries. Miss Jersey Shores 1944. Avery drums his fingers on the table. McKenna says, "Excuse me, but I have the floor..." Robber passes the drink tray around. Apple, cranberry, Sprite... Here's where "peruse" comes in. |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:32:18
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| In the orchard of temptation, the contrary sky. The woman in the white dress, breathing. Silk underneath. Hear the rustle. And palms. Full fronds of them waving. Sky, a brazen blue the way he likes it. |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2008 : 15:36:29
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| She's telling the story. "Keep going," he says, watching her hands move against the clay, the shadows on the wall, the wheel spinning. "Golt earrinks," she says, imitating Sophie Rubel, "golt earrinks he give me all the time. Make me fly!" He's still watching her hands. The way she flings the wet clay from her fingers when she says 'fly'. The pattern on the wall behind her. A spattered rainbow. |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/04/2008 : 00:43:45
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The driver of the stagecoach was dead, no doubt about it.
The rifleman pushed him over the side, and sunk down into the
area below the seat, taking the reins from the man. He
hadn't come all this way for Mary.... to die in the road like a
wounded animal. Pray !! Pray that these horses can outrun
the savages that were getting closer and closer with every
hoofbeat. The last passenger had gotten off the stage miles
back and his weight was all the horses had to pull. He only
had to make it to the ravine half a mile away. There was
safe haven waiting for him there. Friends - - with rifles of
their own. "Heeeyahhhhh!!" he yelled over and over, snapping
the reins as he screamed. He knew one thing for sure. All
he had to do was make it back to safety and he would never be
in a spot like this again. For all the times he had wanted to
stop living after Mary had died, this wasn't one of them. More
than anything, he wanted to live !!! The horses were running
the life out of their chests and the ravine was getting closer.
By a miracle of the greatest kind, he could see that he was
going to make it. Rifle shots screamed around his head, with
the bullets finding their marks. Just as suddenly as it had
begun, it was over !! The Indians were turning back. Not
knowing what the ravine held for them and losing a few braves before
even getting really close to it was not a good sign. And, Indians
weren't known to jump into a battle without knowing who the
enemy was. And so, the rifleman made it . . . back home, and
back to his Mary. He was going to "see her" for one last time.
When that pilgrimage was done, he was headed into kinder, sweeter
territory. He was going to live for Mary . . his love . . his
sweetheart. He would stay busy, working for causes important
to her. And, he would raise their son !! Mary had wanted her boy
to grow up to be just like his father. The rifleman had made her
a promise, and he meant to keep it. He would not let her down.
BGee
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/04/2008 : 23:28:58
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RIPENING
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead. We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs
of this world.
Wendell Berry
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewbury |
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/09/2008 : 00:01:50
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What we all need most urgently now is to realize that transience
is not separation -- for we, transient as we are, have it in common
with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together
in one being where separation is...unthinkable.
Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing
but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future?
Don't such poems continually address inside of us, in addition
to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable?
I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small
that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and
now: Where it surges toward us, there we are the dead and the
living all at once.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters On Life
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewburygatherings |
Edited by - Doug L on 02/09/2008 00:11:33 |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 18:15:43
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| Air 77, water 59. The children wait. Lashed to fiber glass islands. Feet dangling overboard. Always looking over their shoulders. Where the sea lifts and settles. Their worlds are green. Are rolling liquid when they snap up and ride in. Conquerors of the water world. |
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 20:16:41
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There was a train. I remember there was a young girl,
maybe 17 years old, aboard the train. She was sitting
in a window seat, next to me, looking out into the falling
dark, where twinkled the lights of farm houses against
the dimming colours of the sundown sky.
In a room built into the barn of one of those farms that
she saw the lights of, there was a man about forty, a
farmhand who'd come to live there seven years before. Never
married, he'd meandered his way across the prairies, taking
work, then moving on again. Then he took work at this farm
and on his third day was injured and lost most of two fingers.
He already had a scar down his left cheek and another from
back surgery, so he wasn't worried about losing part of a hand.
The family that owned the farm treated him well, offered him
free room and board despite his not being able to do much for
a while. Out of loyalty, he'd stayed on. He had learned to be
useful, and had come to know the family like it was his own.
On this evening, he is restless in his room, reading a book called
My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Antonia is the spirited daughter
of Russian peasants who came to Nebraska to homestead. They
miss their homeland dearly. It is a book he read before, when
he was very young. A girl he spent six months with had given
this novel to him. It was the only thing he had kept from the
time they had lived together, a story they had read to one another
when they shared a housekeeping room in Sintaluta.
He had a hard time reading on this night. He walked outside
and lit a cigarette, and out on the ridge overlooking the
valley he could hear the train go by on its way to Melville
before it veered northward to Saskatoon, where he'd lived
after leaving the woman who'd given him the book. Going back
inside, he filled the kettle with water and turned on the hot
plate. He felt chilly, and was going to make some coffee. It
wasn't cold out, but he felt cold, so pulled his jacket on and
wondered if he was catching a fever.
As the train slowed on its way into Melville, the girl next
to me flicked on the overhead reading light and from her
purse took out a black and white photograph of a man. She
looked at it a moment, then looked at me. Your boyfriend?,
I said. "No," she told me. "It is a man who knew my mother,
before I was born. It is a photograph my mother gave to me."
She asked where I was travelling to, and I told her that I
had business in North Battleford. I introduced myself, and
told her that I had a son her age. And you? "I am going to
Saskatoon, to see if I can find the man in this photograph.
I think he is my father." There was a silence then. I didn't
want to pry, so I didn't say anything. After a minute or so,
she said, "Nice to meet you, Jim. My name is Antonia."
DL
http://www.myspace.com/mickeynewbury |
Edited by - Doug L on 02/10/2008 20:22:15 |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/10/2008 : 20:57:17
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Someday, Doug, someday !! I have to meet you someday.
BGee |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/16/2008 : 15:28:10
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It was seventeen years ago this spring.
I told her we needed to go for a ride.
As we crossed the reservoir,
I said,
Do you ever think about the minutes
just before a moment that you will remember
the rest of your life?
She laughed and said, No, honey, why?
I said, This is one of them and I
began to tell her about Martina...
I'll never forget that laugh...
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 00:07:02
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The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious
and rational disordering of the senses. Every form
of love, of suffering, of madness, he searches in
himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and
keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable
torture, during which he needs all his faith and
superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the
great patient, the great learned one among men. For
he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated
his soul - which was rich to begin with - more than
any other man! He reaches the unknown, and even if,
crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his
visions, at least he has seen them!
Jean-Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 07:42:22
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The Druid named Nancy
[He belonged to the Judyism sect and everyone knew him as Nancy]
got to his feet like an old VW Bug tirejack;
that is, squirrely, off-center, and never sure if it'll stay up.
"Ya see, Rev, back in my time, 2008, I'm about four hundred years too late;
so, if this is really 1817, then I'm getting a little closer to where I belong.
A druid is never gonna really belong anyway;
we're different, to say the least; we live in caves and in the rocks,
[that's why our little group is called the Branch Rockettians, or Rockettes].
We have abandoned All to the Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but the Truth.
Here, let me read this to you. It's by a guy named
Archie McLeish, and maybe it'll explain the way it is in my time....
"There is, in truth, a terror in the world, and the arts have heard it as they always
do. Under the hum of the miraculous machines and the ceaseless publications
of the brilliant physicists a silence waits and listens and is heard... It is
the silence of apprehension. We do not trust our time, and the reason we do
not trust our time is because it is we who have made the time, and we do not
trust ourselves. We have played the hero's part, mastered the
monsters, accomplished the labors, become gods-and we do not trust ourselves
as gods... We know what we are. In the old days,[like now] when the gods were
someone else, the knowledge of what we are did not frighten us. But now that
we are gods ourselves we bear the knowledge for ourselves. Like that old
Greek hero who learned when all the labors had been accomplished that it was
he himself who had killed his son...."
Hey, Ralph, wake up,this is good stuff...
YOU ON THE PORCH,TOO...I SEE YOUR EYES CLOSED...
Sorry, but I get a little zealous, Rev, when I talk about this stuff,
maybe that's why they call us zealots. All I know is that the older I get,
the more it takes to fill my heart with wonder,
and for me only God is big enough to do that, anymore..
I'm not lovin this life, especially the kids that keep tugging at my robe wanting
to know if I'm OBI WAN KENOBI.. But once you enter the Gate, the die is
cast..."I said to the man at The Gate, "Give me a light that I may walk
safely into the unknown." "He said to me, "Go out into the darkness, and put
your hand in the hand of God, and it shall be to you better than the
light, and safer than the known."
Like Jesse Colin Young said, Darkness,Darkness, be my pillow....
[] Rev Buckman |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 17:21:35
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| "Those things can trap you on an escalator," Ramon says. I was checking out at Costco with a pair of turquois Crocs. "Oh, yeah," he continues, "tear your leg off. Those ridges there... They match right up with the grooves at Penny's. Check it out." "I'm only wearing them at the beach," I say. "Sure," Ramon says, "should come with some kinds warning, though, but that's today. All the babies in flip-flops." "Probably just a California thing," I mistakenly offer. "Hey, I was born in Anaheim in '87 and I had to wear corrective shoes!" Ramon says. "I remember wearing something called Stride Rites. Ankle high with laces," I say. "Well, you're a lot older than I am," Ramon says. "No doubt," I say, "swipe the card." |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 17:30:19
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| Once upon a time in a cold coastal town under a truly blue Blues sky, there lived a fey mischief-maker and his mascot, Raven's Eye. In the sanctuary of a dream he stayed off Van Ness and the corner of Third. One long night and ten thousand days. A thin blanket and a pallet. A perch for the bird. Now it's quarter past midnight when he stumbles in and thumbs a flared match to her Marlboro. She's sitting on the floor wearing sunglasses. He's hung over in his dark leather coat. He puts the perpetual coffee pot on. Shakes the salty stars from his hair. Smoke rings rise in O's from his serious mouth. Sparks blister her fingernails. They're so dangerously alive between two bridges where the past and the future converge. "Ah, the spread-open fan of memory..." he says. She says, "The longing...the scrim of alarm..." |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 20:06:50
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He lights his sixtieth cigarette of the day.
He looks up at the three new paintings from the west
directly above his head and salutes.
As he blows the smoke out he coughs a little and bows deeply,
one hand to the floor, palm up, fingers cupped.
'Tis hard to do while looking up and smoking...
Only try it at home....
Rev B |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/17/2008 : 23:45:38
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" I don't miss my mustang now." Whatever made him think of that
in the middle of a midnight ride down Route 66, basically headed
to nowhere, he couldn't imagine. But, in his mind, he knew that
thoughts didn't come from nowhere. Something in his brain was ticking ... mustang...mustang... and he had picked up on it. His
rifle lay on the seat beside him. He prayed he wouldn't need it
tonight, this night of all nights. Not tonight, Lord. Please.
He still had a long way to drive, but only if he came to a gas
station pretty soon. The stars were drop-dead bright, like they
were on a cold night with no clouds. ... mustang . . mustang . .
He hadn't passed another vehicle in many, many miles, but .. suddenly .. it was like an eighteen-wheeler had dropped from the
sky . . . right on his tail. What the heck !!!
BGee |
Edited by - BarbraG on 02/18/2008 22:41:35 |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2825 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2008 : 11:25:55
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Nightmare of darkness.
Moonlight revealed thru the single slat of a wayward blind.
Barely understood visions.
Moment of a kiss.
Baseball suspended in mid-air arc.
Running, always running without movement.
Dire fears of encroaching madness.
Morning just before full waking...
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BarbraG
Windchimer
1825 Posts |
Posted - 02/21/2008 : 23:27:55
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The walk along the beach with the eclipse of the moon covered
in red was a bit unnerving. It was as if an omen hung in the sky
foretelling of disaster to come. Being used to seeing the moon
at night in its wondrous beauty and its comforting presence, I
wasn't ready for the appearance of it last night. I stayed. Stayed
with my moon in the universe because of all the nights it had
stayed with me. It looked as if something unholy was sucking
the life from it, inch by inch. The thought came to my mind . .
"what if my wonderful night light remained in this present state . .
covered and cold, with no warmth radiating down to the earth."
How would I bear the nights ... alone, without my beautiful moon I
had grown up with and waited for every night. I had heard it
was going to be "beautiful", but it wasn't .. not to me. I won't
put myself through this event when it happens again. Next time ..
will be different. I made myself a promise..
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2197 Posts |
Posted - 02/24/2008 : 16:49:11
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| The first few hundred years they lived on the coast of Durrow where everything he predicted came true. The village folk gathered around him at the old stone well. Tom and bold Dana from Grail. Wee Liam the bootmaker's son with his broken brogue. Maeve with the fly-away coppery hair. Bright Niamh the scullery maid. The Spirit twins and the Fortune Teller's muse. (Oh, yes, the Fortune Teller must be inspired too.) They all stood with their shoulders touching when they saw his dark shape appear. A dangerous man some mornings crossing the mist-bound moor. A scepter in his hand when he landed by the stables where the horses were stamping. How the trees stepped out of his way. How his breath lit their fragile branches. Eyeshine. Cheek and chin. Salt smears on his forehead. A cloak of seaweed to his shins. Soothsayer, he, with his summing-up eyes...his powers of divination. |
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The Nightly Vigil