Happy Birthday, Markus Hellesjo! 

Old September

An old friend tracked me down, wrote to say hello.
He's living on the edge of the sea in Victoria. I think
he still runs into Sandra now and then. Jim travelled
to Greece a few years after we did. There's a line in
my song, The Summer Of St. Augustine, that goes
"On rented motorcycles, over red clay hills we flew,"
and that comes from a story Jim told me about riding
around Crete on motorbikes with his partner, Denise.

The bed below the bed below
The sky beyond the sky
The you before the you I know
The I behind the I

There's a baby squirrel hiding under the tool shed.
Black, frightened, alone. She goes flying every time I
take out the garbage or a bottle to the recycling bin.
Today, on the way home from work, I bought some
raw unshelled peanuts, left a few handfuls on a paper
plate near the shed. I put a bowl of water there, too.
I realize that I don't know what baby squirrels like
to eat or drink.

Never the less and never more
The kindness I can't kill
The life after the life before
The one I'm living still

I saw ten minutes of Fried Green Tomatoes today. I
liked Mary Stuart Masterson in that, as Miss Idgie
Threadgoode, her wildness and her full heart. I saw
the scene where she went to the dead tree and slid
her bare arm into the hole where the beehive was.
Hundreds of bees landed on her as her arm came up
with enough honeycomb to fill a glass jar. She was
wearing a white shirt, walking in grass up to her thighs.

The girl behind the woman's face
The virgin and the wife
The innocence beneath each trace
The wear and tear of life

Harald was telling me of one of Tone's music students,
just a boy, really. Harald sent me a Nick Drake song this
boy had recorded with Tone. I wrote back saying it was
very good and that I could tell the boy had listened to
John Lennon singing Across The Universe. Harald wrote
back in disbelief, asking how I could know. Know what?
It turns out that the first song this boy ever learned
was Across The Universe.

We are walking on a ball
It's late and much too soon
Leaves don't practise how to fall
The sun lights up the moon

I stood in cities old as the wind. What is it, pal, that brings
feelings up in me when I stand beside old churches? I like
people best when they look at me and say nothing, when
their eyes melt with recognition. Poets must be gypsies
who never learn to beg. Long after storms things still come
ashore.

Sometimes I wake at four in the morning and call up the
Birdwatchers line to listen to yesterday's sightings. The
woman who records the message has a lovely Irish accent.
I imagine sitting with her on the far side of the lake, the
two of us waiting there together, one pair of binoculars
between us, tea in a thermos, not a single branch moving
as the dark water brightens, shade by shade.

The dark below the dark below
The light believes the light
Nothing now is all we know
The day receives the night *

DL

* The lyrics printed here are from a stream of rhymes
which I'm presently sorting into a song with the working
title, The Bed Below The Bed Below