I have an instant crush on
Natasha, the 19-year-old Russian
salad chef. She tells me
Mr. Wadsworth screws
Mr. Graney’s wife
all the time,
and doesn’t bother
to hide it.

Colorado Springs, 1957

A counselor friend talks about the intersection between adolescence and “unmoored knowledge.”  Not completely unfamiliar knowledge, most likely; rather this is the moment when you begin to more personally “get” the knowledge (and it gets you).  There are miles to go, maybe decades, before the “mooring” is very firmly attached, and then, of course, you have to let it go if you want a truly mature relationship!  Anyway, this poem looks at several levels of adolescent introduction to awareness of the complexity and carnality of the world. 

As a so-called quad Scorpio, I’m still coming to terms with this.

Colorado Springs, 1957

Wikipedia will tell you that the Pachuco “youth movement” grew out of Mexico in the 1930s and 40s.  Think zoot suits and a whole life style.  Along the Mexican border, young Hispanics (as Pachucos) defended themselves from some of the white servicemen stationed in that area.  By the mid-fifties the movement had spread all through the Hispanic southwestern U.S.  It evaporated by the early 70s.

In Colorado Springs, us white kids were afraid of Pachucos, or “Chukes” (“They carry knives,” we told each other).  I suspect the local Hispanic kids–who hung together, looked different, and were not all angels–were more “wannabes.”  The homemade, commonly seen “cross and rising sun” hand tattoo was probably more of a cultural referent.  However, among whites, including the local small business community, it was the sure mark of a “trouble maker punk,” or worse.

It was only when I entered the “world of work” at 14 that the vastness, diversity, and often unfairness, of this beautiful, fucked up world began to touch me.

By the way, a “D.A.” was a “duck’s ass”, or “duck tail”, haircut. Long on the sides, coming together in a sort of V part in the back. Hispanics’ wavy dark hair looked just fine in a D.A. Some of the rest of us had less luck with this mid-50s style.

I found one of the guilty pleasures of fatherhood to be, for a time, considered by my daughter as omniscient, a virtual living Wikipedia. This can (and should) be true only for a while. All too soon, and with any luck at all, the scale tips. My daughter the culture maven, has come to know a great deal about a great deal. She is also genetically disposed to be a truly accomplished bullshitter, which makes her even more formidable. So now our word play is sometimes like a good game of chess with a respected opponent, but more often is simply an appreciative tasting of words like sips of good wines.

The Famous Flames were solid.

Eventually, the funereal four
returned with a lifeless James Brown,
gently propped him onto the stage,
curled a microphone into his hand.
Feebly, he rose, rasped into the mic,
Oh, baby, please…
don’t go.
We went insane.
We cried and shouted
in a roar that I still
feel in my
chest.

Oh, baby, please please please please please…
don’t go.

It was 1959, and the town was Pueblo. My friend and I were into black music as much as two white kids going to high school in Colorado Springs, 40 miles north, could be. We listened to rhythm and blues on the powerful Mexican border stations (the “X’s”) and haunted Rhythm Records, the only black record store in C. Springs. In a way, early James Brown was like early Elvis Presley–they both pointed us straight into the wilderness.

That night in Pueblo, James Brown taught passion. I think he changed my life.

Always a showman, he closed out his final act on Christmas Day, 2006.

The scroll spoke
in hand printed gothic
on stained cloth.
Abandoned
by the previous occupant
of my new pad
its words meant little.
Fresh from first-year
college dorm,
I hung it on my wall,
tried to live
by its meaning
for a
time.

Boulder, 1961

(No. 47 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

I was seeking hard for something to live by, and for a while, just about anything mysterious would do. Fortunately, Alan Watts fell into my life a few months later.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)

Defeated Japanese soldiers,
abandoned on a small Pacific Island,
argued over what to do,
how to find food. They fought,
killed, eventually ate
each other.

The last one
carried his ragged
childhood doll, like those laced
to kamikaze pilots. He stumbled
to a western bluff where a black
and white sunset oiled calm water.
Sitting on a broad rock, he crossed his legs
in a lotus position. His torn face filled
the screen, his gaze turned
upon some other
shore.

Each time I sit,
crossing my legs,
I practice
the same ending,
open
to the same
setting
sun.

(No. 62 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

This old Japanese “art film” (as they used to be called) has metastasized in my mind. It has never left me. I didn’t understand meditation at the time. It seemed alien, useless, foreign. Live and let learn.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)

Clouds part as we leave.
Suddenly
we are blinded
by countless suns,
each reflected from one-sided
rock mirrors polished like shields
by eastwardly
migrating grit.

Thoughts of data and warm
roadhouse vanish,

and
we skip dazzled
through
a field
of stars.

Rocky Flats, Colorado, 1963

Scratch any scientist (or anyone else, for that matter) and most will reveal a longing for bedazzlement, or re-bedazzlement. This was one of those moments you live for.

Rocky Flats is not too far from Boulder, where I was a student of physical geography. It was often in the news in subsequent years as the (frequently protested)site of a Dow Chemical plant and atomic bomb construction activities. For years since the place has been the contentious topic of hazardous waste cleanup. Weep for the Earth.

On that long ago day when the sun came out, it was near biblical. Shields blazed and blinded. Turn around and face west, up toward the crest, and it looked like a normal, vast rocky field. The stones had been polished to perfection on their west sides (from which the wind is incessant). But their east sides were normal rough surfaces–no reflection, even during a morning sunrise.