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The crows are back. They haven’t been here in years. Some say it was the bird flue that got them, but whatever is was we were happy without them. This year, however, they returned, and we were not happy to see a half-dozen of them on the front lawn, pecking away. Not that I don’t like birds: we have a number of sparrows and things flying around the yards, and I keep a feeder out back for the smaller ones.

But crows are different. I go out front to get the paper at 5:30 in the morning, and the crow walks slowly to the opposite side of the yard, with the insolent eye of the gangster.

“Sure, mister, I’ll get out of your way. But I’m keeping my eye on you.”

The crow cries sharp

                      insistently

The flock lights in a nearby tree

                       and plots indignities

                                            on nearby outdoor diners

The crow is not the lowland farmer

                      faithfully turning the field with his spade

but the Norse chief standing

                      in the prow of the raider boat

the crew carefully shipping the oars

                      and readying the swords and lances

Crow photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Corvus_brachyrhynchos_30196.JPG
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

I’ve continued my obsession with the Dream Away Lodge with this little song. My song writing career is hampered by a complete inability to sing, but hey … I don’t let that stop me! Here are my lyrics to “Dream Away Lodge”. I’m searching for the right music … I envision it as a slow waltz …

Feel free to contribute to music and/or lyrics. If chosen, we’ll split the writing credits when it hits the big time 🙂

Dream Away Lodge

(Chorus)
Follow the ghost of the Albany stage
As it climbs through the late evening fog
Swaying it’s way through the old Berkshire hills
Up to the Dream Away Lodge

Gray haired musicians play pining love songs
Diners talk while friends laugh at the bar
Children chase fire flies out on the lawn
In the glow of the dream away lodge

Chorus

History and mystery are these towns’ stock in trade
It’s the tourists that pay all the bills
When the Tanglewood crowd has returned to New York
The fiddles float soft through the hills

The roads of the Berkshires are paths through an ocean
Darkness starts thirty feet from the road
The hearts of the people are warmed by the flowers
And tied to the earth by their grandparents stones

Chorus

The simplest things can bring such pleasure. For us walking the dog is a way to connect with our neighborhood and ourselves.

Dog walking

We’re talking
Tail Wagging
No Squawking

Legs moving
Smelly bagging
Speed improving
No nagging

Morning greeting
Asphalt heating
Wet grass breathing
Neighbor meeting

Hips rocking
We’re talking
Tail wagging
Dog walking

Neon in the night

We took a lot of pictures on our trip, but there are some places that you feel would be almost sacrilegious to photograph. That is the way I felt about the DreamAway lodge.

The old county road is a narrow lane heading steeply up October Mountain, in the middle of a vast sea of the green forests of the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. These mountains are low and soft, rounded at the top, more like hills for those used to the towering steep mountains of the Rockies or the Sierras. Travelling through these hills, though, is like swimming under water in a murky pond. The thick mixed woods close in on every road, and what few vistas there are reveal no distinct landmarks to provide orientation: only a rolling ocean of undulating green.

The climb up the mountain seems endless. As the road curves back and forth, the shadows of late afternoon cover the road and steep the forest in a dark cloak, rich with the scent of broad leaf trees, thick with the oxygen of rich air, and heavy with mysteries that lie in the miles of woods.

Suddenly the road opens up to a clearing, ringed by a wall of trees, and there at the top is the DreamAway Lodge.

children barefoot in the grass
young lovers huddling on the edge of illumination
from the white light of windows
and the green and blue of a neon sign

innocence and age
untrained teenage waiters
the song of the soft guitar
the foot fall of ancient innkeepers

old pony-tailed musicians come back
to find missing pieces of their soul
while toddlers chase fireflies in the island of light
as night settles in on October Mountain

Many writing groups and workshops do writing exercises. We start with a prompt, like a random word drawn from a collection. Or maybe one xeroxed page from a rhyming dictionary. Then we are asked to spend ten minutes writing based on this prompt.

These exercises can be intimidating: especially when in a group of strangers I definitely feel the pressure to perform. But the purpose of these exercises is to stimulate creativity, and for me also to realize that I don’t have to go looking for “the big idea” to start the next poem. Some of the works that I enjoy the most come from these exercises. They might not rise to the level of finished pieces, and are sometimes a little silly, but hey, so are a whole lot of music lyrics, and we enjoy them!

Here is a quick piece I wrote in one of our Downey groups based on the prompt “Write concretely about something absurd.”

Doggie Blogger

After the death of the humans
My dog kept up my blog.
I guess I had not logged off

and typing with one nail
on each paw proved to be
a bit of a challenge,

but clearly it wasn’t that hard,
because thousands of dogs kept up
their communications on Facebook and Twitter.

The cats began to participate too,
although they were more lurkers and stalkers
than active participants.

Keeping hte computers running
did not seem to be much of a problem,
although the dogs had a little trouble

getting into Best Buy
because the automatic doors wouldn’t open
since the electric eye was set so high.

The biggest breakthroughs took a little while.
The pawgometric mouse was first,
and then, finally, the development
of bark recognition software.

There have been a rash of tuba thefts from the band rooms of the LA Unified School District. Tubas are expensive, and this loss is sorely felt. It underlines, however, that TUBAS ARE HOT!

Thumbing through photographs, I came across the pictures from our trip to Barcelona last year. I’ll work at sharing  some photos (and some poems.) this weekend.

Barcelona Beauties

the motor scooters buzz and weave
around the cars on cobbled streets
and park double wide on broad side walks

young women wearing helmets
bare shoulders and spaghetti straps
shopping bags between their feet
fly past the high rolling wheels
and almost touch the motor bus

I’m working up my narrative of the “Myth of California.” For this young boy in New England in the 1960s, it was hot rods, music,  a magic land, a lighthouse in the distance …

I’d love to hear your image!

—–

California Dreamin

in New York and San Francisco
rooms filled with smoke
as the beat poets worked their magic
with alcohol fueled inspiration

while in my corner of the world
there was snow in winter
or softball games in the church parking lot
as the light softened on a summer evening

and always the woods
hilly           laced with decaying stone walls
glades of sunshine
pockets of cool cool dark
and in our damp cellar in December
“If every body had an ocean”
floating in from the AM radio.

cars were the way out
my closet filled with Hot Rod Magazine
way before I could drive
pages full of dripping chrome
metalflake paint

         sunny

                    top down

                              California cars

two long low dragsters
poised at the starting line for Winternationals
mountains in the background
at a place called Pomona
men in shirtsleeves and sun sun sun

around the corner
on a brilliant July day
on the old road past our front yard
comes a bright red Triumph sports car

          gleaming

neighbor’s older brother driving

          shirtless

                    dark dark tan

                              back from California

“We’ll all be plannin’ out a route”
I folded over the Time Magazine
to a picture of a dozen long haired boys and girls
at a stop sign in Santa Barbara
captured with their thumbs out

          and started the car

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:T-Bucket.jpg T-Bucket hot rod. Photo taken by Morven at the weekly Garden Grove, California car show on Friday April 23, 2004. 07:17, 24 April 2004 . . Morven (71959 bytes) (T-Bucket hot rod) {{GFDL}}

“Beginning in the 1970s, the precipitous decline of the area’s manufacturing base resulted in a loss of the jobs that had allowed skilled union workers to have a middle class life.”
          Wikipedia, “South Los Angeles”

In the Los Angeles area, the period of heavy industry which existed in the Northeast for a couple of centuries was compressed into about sixty years, starting in the 1920s and ending somewhere in the 80s. People migrated from all over the country to work in the auto plants, tire plants, aerospace factories and steel mills.

I worked in the Bethlehem Steel plant in Maywood, California from 1973 to 1982, at the tail end of this period. There were blacks from the deep South, whites from Oklahoma, Latinos from all over the Southwest, Native Americans from the reservations of Arizona and New Mexico. A toxic, dangerous, truly vibrant melting pot.

Lost

Ford Pico Rivera
GM South Gate
GM Van Nuys
Firestone Tire plant 1928
     the mocking skeleton still visible
     as an Egyptian fort
     off the 5 Freeway

Bethlehem Steel
Slauson Avenue Maywood
Alcoa Aluminum
     rest in peace1994
North American Rockwell
Kaiser Steel Fontana
corrosive dust in the air
and union jobs for everyone

A desert Southwest saying is that “water is worth killing for.” Just off the I-10 in Palm Springs green golf courses drip damp with irrigation and green lawns are rimmed with bush after bush of perfect roses, while safely out of sight to the south the Colorado delta turns to mud and fishermen caught out by low tide crawl-swim on their bellies through a half mile of muck to reach the shore.

We come to the high desert to hear the echo of the ancient earth, to feel the heat beneath the April sun, and to witness the renewal that distains our hand.

Link to Desert Flower Photo Pics

Desert Lights

In the hills
of Joshua Tree,
A rough trail
among the rocks and creosote
yields a black stink beetle

digging through the armor
of the hardened ground,
baking in mid April,

while beneath relentless sun
the blooms of flowers
shine like supernova.