Month: August 2013

Closing Up The Cabin

Closing up the cabin means dreaming of summer for nine agonizing months.

Perfection, my sweet oblivion to mortal miseries,

Consistently washed from my mind,

Crickets scrubbed my soul clean,

Tree frog and owl compositions layered upon inland lake melodies.

 

If risen moon, wax or wane, full or slice,

Lake surface reassured Luna

‘Yes, you are fairest of them all’.

I never heard fish leap through light on lake

But satisfied snaps against the surface confirmed,

One less moth bumping against the yellow porch light tomorrow.

 

An early fishing boat slowly making it’s way along the shoreline

Will no longer wake me with gentle alarm just before sunup.

Screen door, rusty spring hinge,

Squeals each time it’s opened

Smacks loudly in memory long after WD 40 can is empty.

 

Time will once again run on demand,

Not by who’s swimming where,

Softball tonight at the recreation center,

Volleyball on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,

Bingo for Baptists on Friday nights at the Catholic Church downtown.

 

Friends halt along the shoreline and sit on piers,

Feet flipping water on relatives for the last time this year

Old Adirondack chairs filling quickly,

Hammocks sway, jealously guarded

Tree swings, one more push please?

Afar, latecomers clicking like rosary beads

Heading towards the altar of the lake front fire pit.

 

Offer thanks to the Milky Way and heavens above

While kids eat S’mores, weenies on a stick,

Parent’s off a bit, literally, with canned beer iced in a galvanized tub,

Latest tall, long fishing tales,

Best expectations for the Packers-Badgers football season

Argued between flatlanders and cheeseheads with setting sun flaming through tall trees.

 

Most of the boats are on trailers, or scheduled for pick up and storage.

Owning a cabin means turning off the water,

Draining the pipes,

Deep sigh as you drive up the road,

Squeeze an artery clogged

wheeze a bit as you blend into homebound traffic

and live a bit of forever in the past.

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Ninety Miles an Hour

Instead of stopping when we could we went right on …

Flash back – I’m seventeen, trying to cut my hair like Mick Jagger’s.  Dylan wails on my record player. I’m wearing white jeans tucked into black ten inch high mod boots and my mother hates me. Plum incense burns in my bedroom, and I’m drunk on Earl Grey Tea bought from the Crate and Barrel in on Wells Street in Chicago. It’s hard to cut hair with a dull paper shears while bobbing my head and not poke an eye out. I’m one of the last two virgins in Old Town, my friend Teri, being the other. I don’t know about her, but all the weed I’ve inhaled was second-hand. Half the time I thought dudes failed to use deodorant. I was dense, but it was the first place that accepted me and I kept going back.

I loved it. We’d sit on the floor in John Brown’s Leatherworks in Pipers Alley and listen to stories as he’d play guitar. My shoulder was next to Brian McGuinn, Roger’s brother. Man, I wanted a leather Byrd’s cape from John. Eventually I did buy one, but mine came from Marshall Fields, not Johns.

I didn’t make it to the Democratic riots at the Hilton Hotel although a friend borrowed my tambourine. I caught the news footage of him as he brought my beloved flower painted instrument over the head of a cop in the viewfinder of the CBS National News. Me and Teri, wound up on a documentary about  leftist groups, Remember, Nixon was paranoid.  They staged the entire thing. Producers went into the coffeehouse basement and brought up protest signs that predated us by several months, if not years, and asked up to pretend to paint them. They chose us because our hair read clean on the light meter. The crew admonished us not to look into the camera. Teri looked up, her boss caught it when it aired, and she got fired.

I never went to Woodstock, I went out and bought a horse instead and that left me flat broke. I still prefered the scent of fresh cut hay and horse sweat over live music and flower children

But I’d learned early about wiretapped telephones, FBI files, innocence, protest, and the friends you keep. The nicest people could be running at ninety miles an hour thinking no one can see them. Fifty years ago the government kept watch on who and what they wanted on their radar. Nothing’s changed much except the technology.

http://www.jango.com/music/Bob+Dylan?l=0

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/daily-prompt-speed/