Pantoum

I ran across the definition of a pantoum the other day and decided to try my hand at one:

The World Wide Web Spreads Its Net

The new leader of the revolution is a poet,
He waves the baton before schools of fish,
Like Billy Collins, he makes poetry accessible,
He reads the manifesto, shaking his fist.

He waves the baton before schools of fish
Singing the revolution song of the zillions,
He reads the manifesto, shaking his fist,
The fish form schools of the conventional.

Singing the revolution song of the zillions,
A predator moves in the shadow, entranced.
The fish form schools of the conventional
Among the mirrored water, learning tricks.

A predator moves in the shadow, entranced.
The new leader of the revolution is a poet
Among the mirrored water, learning tricks,
Like Billy Collins, he makes poetry accessible.

Kelly O'Neal Thompson

Copywrite 2008. Please do not reprint without express permission of the author.
(starrynight3@mac.com)

A Meditation on Being

Think of the parallel universe, of the many selves, of the eternal now moment that offers up
an eternally new past, a possible future,
Think of yourself as you might exist ubiquitous or only microscopically - but both at once-the particle in the wave.
Decide.
Decide to exist wherever it feels best - don't get caught in the moment when there are so many to choose from.
Climb the board of alternate states of consciousness; ride the great One you are; talk to yourself magnanimously, happily, eternally, with pleasure.
Follow the breath as it moves, with everything, in and out in the ever-widening, ever-tightening circle.
Do not take it, but let it take you into the dance of being, into the dance of I/Thou
You, into the holy of holiest instant, simply
Breathe and exit the vehicle of time and its travails, the hundred thousand million billion stories.
They are all yours. So be them.

Kelly O'Neal Thompson

photograph by journeysendphotography.com
Copywrite 2008. Please do not reprint without express permission of the author.
(starrynight3@mac.com)

Clyde the Fraud Dog

There is such a thing as a dog-person and I am not one of them. I have had only one other dog, other than Clyde, in my life - that was Angel, a small German Shepherd mixed breed of mutt. Angel was the puppy we got for my daughters when they were elementary school age and she came to be one of the family.
Angel had a litter of pups and we kept one that we named Decker - for that wild part of me, for he was a wild dog. Sadly, Decker was but a pup when the girls' stepfather and I divorced. Decker went with Bob. We got custody of Angel, who lived to have yet another litter; puppies we had to give away (actually we sold them for $5 each, as people don't want free puppies; you get a much better rate of response if you set a price on them.)
Angel became part of our family lore and I still cherish the photo of her wearing sunglasses and lounging with us on one of our family camping trips. Angel is gone now and my daughters are grown up with families of their own. Once in a while, one of us says, "Remember Angel?" and then we tell a story - like about how she allowed Jennifer to put doll clothes on her and lug her around, legs up, like a baby and never complained. Poor Angel. How she loved us!
She was aptly named Angel, for she loved us like one and took our well-being as her personal mission; not a guard dog by any means, but a lover - with the eyes of a doe; seriously, we could have named her Bambi.
Clyde the Fraud Dog came by his name due to his last-minute reprieve and rescue from the dog pound and sure death - or so we were told.
We were new to Alaska - cheechakos as they call greenhorns here - and it was around Christmas time. We had lived here about four months and were headed into our first winter, the darkest part of the year, when we met Clyde at a potlatch (Alaskan for potluck dinner) given by one of our new Alaskan acquaintances, Shelly Gill.
Shelley Gill is a well-known children's book author in Alaska and elsewhere, but before that she was famous for being one of the first women to run the Iditarod in the seventies; she writes about the adventure through the eyes of her lead dog in her children's book, "Kiana". She's a colorful personality and she's the one who introduced us to Clyde.
Clyde, Shelley claimed, was a "Newfie"; well, "half- Newfie" anyway, some kind of a "Newfie-mix"; meaning he was part Newfoundland. The reason they had Clyde, she went on to tell us, (and making a pest of himself besides), was that Shelley's daughter, Kai, a volunteer for the local animal shelter, had brought him home with her a few days earlier (it could have been weeks, but you know how stories go) to "save him from death row". He was about to be, to use the euphemism, "put to sleep". They had no room for another dog, but - Shelley sighed and shrugged - what's a mother to do? For the moment, we learned, he was allowed to sleep on the porch with absolutely no house privileges allowed.
I admit that, at the time that we met Shelley and thus, Clyde, Wayne and I had been discussing the possibility of getting a dog. Wayne was generally against it- his argument was that a dog would be a huge responsibility, would tie us down, and would prevent us from traveling. Did I say he was "generally" against it? Let's just say he wavered once or twice and a waver is good enough, as he'll tell you, for me.
"Give her an inch; she'll take a mile".
Further, I was, most likely,homesick. (Do you know how far Alaska is from the contiguous lower 48 United States?) But rather than admit that I felt adrift, I fantasized that a dog would provide the familiarity and sense of stability that seemed to have left me since our move cross- country to Alaska.
True, I am a "wild girl" and a true-blue Decker, and "running off to Alaska" at mid-life seemed exactly the sort of thing that I would do. But there is another side to me that is deeply rooted in my family and, though I had not lived closer than a thousand miles to them for twelve years prior to moving to the Great Land, I had foolishly believed that their proximity would be just a matter of getting on an airplane.
Once here, stakes and all, leaving Alaska can be a hefty undertaking.
When we lived in Southern California going out-of-state was a simple matter of an hour's drive to the airport and a relatively short flight to anywhere in the country. Try flying out of Alaska. Basically, taking expense, time, and coordination of connecting flights into account, it can take two days to get anywhere. Being the gypsy hearted girl I am, with our move to Alaska I began to feel claustrophobic as I progressively processed the enormity and ramifications of our decision to move here. But here I was in the biggest state of all - a state that could contain over half of the United States within it, a state very remote from anything I had ever known - when I met the Fraud Dog.
What does this have to do with a dog?
Everything.
A dog, I imagined, in my homesick condition, would make us complete. A dog would provide a sense of family, something that, really, I have missed since I was eight years old and we moved - away from my Grandma Decker Saltsman - "out west" to Colorado - where I was to live the next thirty-one years of my life.
I was to forever miss my Grandma, although we took trips back yearly to see her. I missed the every Sunday dinners at her house, the multitude of aunts and uncles and cousins, the farm she and Pa, my grandpa, lived on, the pump where I got, in a tin cup, drinks of the coldest best water I ever tasted, the hen house, Grandma's gardens, the barn, the 'forbidden' grain silo that we kids played in anyway, the animals...but mostly, Grandma.
Now, in Alaska, I found myself imagining that our house and acre and a half of land could be a little bit like Grandma's farm. I even went to hang a tire swing on a tree, before I realized that most of the trees in our part of Alaska that had swings featured life buoys, not tires. So I got a bright blue life buoy and Wayne helped me hang it from a branch on one of the huge birch trees on our land.
You see how perfectly a dog fits into this scenario. The only thing I was missing, beside the dog, was a fresh water well - and that I was not going to get. Too much arsenic and copper even if we could reach underground water. Then again, I was also missing the hen house and the garden, but Wayne would take care of the garden part - he's a real green thumb and the hen house, I decided, remembering how dirty chickens were, I could do without.
We didn't have to have a real farm, I decided - being "out in the country" was enough. (We live 4.1 miles from town.)
Clyde, at nine months old, was big. Huge. A perfect Alaskan farm dog, right? For some reason, the idea that he was Newfoundland, even if a mix, appealed to both Wayne and me. I looked up the breed on the Internet, even went so far as to join a list-serve. Before long, I had ordered a book on Newfoundland dogs from Amazon. All this after only one meeting with Clyde, who had rushed me with all the enthusiasm only a puppy can have, and solidly licked my face. Which I hated, by the way. I hate being licked by dogs. Somehow, though, Clyde's big red floppy tongue did not offend me. His big, clumsy puppy body quivered with joy; his enthusiasm for making friends overshadowed any reservations I could manufacture.
Wayne, the Scrooge of Dog-Adoption, was - rather quickly ( and suspiciously, I now think) - won over, considering that he still insists it is my fault whenever there is a problem with Clyde (like having to find a kennel or a dog-sitter when we want to leave, even for a weekend, or like when he does something embarrassing, like barreling full speed into a 78 year-old visiting guest and knocking her over.) Within a week or two of meeting Clyde, we were on the phone to Shelley, "We'd like to adopt Clyde."
"Come and get him!" Shelley pinned us down for a time and date immediately.
We should have suspected when, before we even got half-way parked in the driveway, Shelley immediately showed up at the door of the truck and shoved a befuddled Clyde, all the then sixty or so pounds of him, into the passenger side and on top of me. I was too love-struck to notice and, evidently, so was Wayne, for regardless of how much he loves to remind me that getting Clyde was not his idea, he allowed that big lug of a pup right into my lap, his truck, and our lives.
So we had ourselves a Newfie - we thought. But Clyde the Fraud Dog, about nine months old when we got him, stopped growing at around eighty-five pounds and stayed there. He didn't double or triple his size, as we expected, and as a Newfie would. If we squint just right in the light some days, though, he does retain just a hint of the helmut head that Newfies are famous for - but Clyde the Fraud Dog is not much of a Newfie, it turns out, at all. He doesn't even drool. But he is black. He is big. Just not as black and as big as a Newfie.
Anyone who has ever been to Homer, Alaska knows- just look around - there's one in the back of every pick-up truck - a big old black Labrador dog. With the exception of his slightly curly fur and the big white patch on his chest, we suspect that Clyde's parentage was largely Labrador - the classic dog of Homeroids, if sheer numbers tell the tale. True, Huskies are popular here, due to the Iditarod, but they're runners, so most non-mushing folks get themselves a big ol' black Lab. We see them everywhere. That increases the odds, we tell Clyde, that he doesn't even have so much as a lick of Newfie in him.
"You're a fraud dog, Clyde!" we tell him.
We have to hand it to him- pretending to be a Newfie - instead of the everyday run-of-the-mill token black Lab so common around here - got him off death row and into our hearts - hey, how's that for a Fraud Dog? Clyde the Fraud Dog, we call him.
Nope. I'm not a dog person. But Clyde does have one sure Newfie trait - he's a people-person.

Just returned from a long, wonderful trip to Southern California
where I soaked up a big, fat dose of sunshine, friendship, and family. The malls, rush-hour traffic, and the general, all-around sense of everywhere people-ness more than gratified me.
The first few days, I felt like someone beamed up warp-speed to an alternate universe - popping eye candy. I come home with five senses overflowing -
brain brimming with color - the orange and blue of California in its' multiple shades -
from peach tan to faded cerulean, Sunkist orange to blue man blue- red light/green light/yellow - on and off ramp - Mini-Cooper and Hummer, black beamer, white Jeep, then silver, Toyota 4runner, Lexus, Mercedes, F150 and gas prices falling like Humpty Dumpty...diesel smell of gas and rubber, the low, slow brown of pollution hovering sun heavy on the horizon, the blonds bleached natural and spray booth tan -
the ten, the fifteen, the six-oh-five, the J. Paul Getty
a favorite Van Gogh painting, discovering Fernand Khnopff's "Portrait of Jeanne Kefer"... girl-child bonneted in soft charcoal, an entire world behind a pale blue door she leans against...
then homeward - the familiar trudge through airport security, an aisle seat,
disembarking -just enough time for a Hudson News stop and another magazine in Seattle before the long darkening ride over the Pacific and the jostle down fast approach to
Anchorage where it is cold and gray-lit night- where we stand waiting for the shuttle -
home still five hours by car and a hotel bed away-home still there standing square
against the bay, home a gray box lit the color of fireweed lingered into violet...
the mountains smudged ink among pink dribbled sky... the tides and glaciers, all their coming and going....how twilight and soft they will be.

Untitled Poem

Mark Doty's post of a photograph of a stone sculpture on his blogspot http://www.markdoty.blogspot.com inspired me to post one of my poems:

Untitled

I polish his bones with my hands,
crumple his face
like sheets of soft paper.
Only his ice blue eyes remain,
Cracked porcelain marbles
I roll in my mouth

until they are petrified wood,
caramel rivers of sweet
flowing through blood;
and the pores of my skin
open like flowers
to his sun-soaked tongue.

Kelly Thompson

©Kelly Thompson - All Rights Reserved

Then The Tide Will Turn

Clyde and I take Jeremy's Trail again, down to our favorite perch on the bluff overlooking the ocean. The tide is coming in and the sun, which rose at 8:44 a.m. and will set today at 4:54 p.m., is making its short climb above the Grewingk Glacier and the mountains across the bay. It's a high tide coming in, almost 16 feet today.

Wayne d. Thompson,Photographer
www.journeysendphotography.com

We sit by a stubborn alder on the crumbling hillside and soak up rays on this clear November day. A neighbor's dog shows up, trotting down Jeremy's Trail like she owns it and Clyde runs to greet her. She's an old dog, a white fluffy breed, and I tell her to go home, as I know her owner won't be happy she's come this far. She does and Clyde throws a short whine of complaint at me, looking at me like I just took away a favorite toy.

I tell him he doesn't need no stinkin' dogs to play with - he's got me and we wrestle a little, which makes him very happy. We keep him on a short leash for a variety of reasons (one being that dogs in Alaska who chase moose get shot) and sometimes I feel badly for him that we don't have another dog. I guiltily explain to Clyde why he can't run off to play with the three new dogs that just moved into the house across from us. Clyde just looks at me and I admit to him that it isn't fair that he doesn't have a dog of his own to play with. I promise to campaign for another dog with the other member of our pack, my husband Wayne.

Clyde says, "Good luck!" and we settle into the damp leaves on our little clump of dirt beneath the sun and above the beach. I think about the election and the world celebrating Obama's win. The sense one gets when doing a puzzle, that satisfying click of a piece finding its place, seems to have taken place; I feel a sense of myself as an American more deeply than I can remember in a long time. It's as though a part of me has come home, a part of me I didn't know was missing.

Forty years have passed since 1968 and my fourteenth birthday: June 5th, the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Forty years since Martin Luther King was assassinated. Forty years since the 1968 Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Forty years since I was a girl, facing my future.

I didn't know how much we Americans lost that year. I didn't know what lay ahead. I was a child on the brink of adulthood and I couldn't understand the world I lived in, how it would effect me to grow up in the aftermath of such loss, in the midst of the turmoil of the short years that followed. I couldn't know then how much history would play a part in the creation of my own life in the years ahead.

All around me I heard slogans like Make Love, Not War, Do Your Own Thing, Power to the People, What If They Gave A War and Nobody Came? Question Authority, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out and even God Is Dead, an announcement attributed to the Beatles.

In 1969, I was fifteen and a man had just walked on the moon and he was an American. I was fifteen and 250,000 people had just marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. I was fifteen and 400,000 of my peers would soon attend a rock festival at Woodstock.

I was fifteen. I believed anything was possible. Before I would turn sixteen years old, four students would be shot dead and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. .

The blows just kept on coming. Like many young people, I was swept up in the tide, a wave of millions of young people (the Babyboomers), and I, like similar teenagers and young adults, did not understand that I could not live my life as though nothing mattered and not suffer the consequences. I did not understand that I was not independent of the context in which I lived. And neither, in retrospect, I think, did many of us. With so many others of my generation, I rejected not only the Establishment, but all authority.

I came of age during the sex, drugs, and rock and roll revolution. I was a believer. But the leaders who might have made a difference, the leaders who had both the vision necessary and the wisdom to counsel a generation had been killed in the streets. Who would lead us after that?

And as I went out, at the age of fifteen, to "find myself," as I proclaimed my civil rights and that of others, as I sought the freedom to dress, act, and live as an individual in a free society, a democracy, did I, could I, understand the greater "we" - that I was a part of? Did I understand that it was not about me, but about "We the people..."?

I don't think so.

But many did and do. They are the "invisibles", the worker bees, the unsung heroes and, without them, November 4, 2008 might have never come. They were there then and they are here today. They are teachers, social workers, firefighters, welders, mechanics, factory workers, nurses, doctors, preachers; they are soldiers, miners, carpenters, electricians, orderlies, secretaries, police officers - and they are the unemployed, the underemployed, the underclass, the middle class, but they are also the elite, professionals, the wealthy, and they are in poverty. They are every race and every creed. They are first generation, and beyond, immigrants. They are gay and straight. They are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim.

They are voters. I am one of them.

Clyde licks my ear, reminds me that I am his person and he is getting thirsty. It is time to head home. The air has gotten crisper, the sun a little lower in the sky. The tide is beginning to turn.

Proud to Be American

"I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has." Abraham Lincoln