A Few New Haiku

train wakes me at dawn

a bumblebee's business end

raindrops in puddles

gull puddle squabble

 clouds reflected shape little

north america

15 November

Wide red squash top step

traditional pumpkin group

on an old-time porch

A grainy cold day

red yellow leaves like apples

clouds outlined in gold

23 November

 Thanksgiving Day

 1.

Trees apron the sky

symphony over the phone 

birds dance fanfarlo

 2.
 little birds fly off
into the symphonic sound
 my ear close to the ground

3.

chandelier shadow
in multi-colored hindu light
bums outside shelter


4.
in late november
it all goes deChirico
on shuttered cafes

28 November

The Chandler in Flames!

"The Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity"
-William Blake

CHANDLER: 

Firefighters to stay at scene of fire all night

"...two cats were also rescued from the building.
Firefighters cut holes in the roof-- 

which later partially  collapsed ..."

"'Our city is tapped out', Kehoe said..."

"Because the building has been deemed uninhabitable, 

Red Cross volunteers will try to find shelter for the residents"

The Daily Californian 23 November 2015, page 2

WOW, the entropy of the old ways of Telegraph takes another giant step. 

These apartments were and, hopefully will be again, the home of Owen Hill author and poet who has long worked at the Berkeley's early and perhaps final bookstore of note. Owen is charge of the poetry activities at the store and hosts a long-running reading series. After many of the readings especially in early years of abundant scene-making attendance friends and fellow travelers would join the poets at Owen's pad for wine and communion with his admirable and mellow cats. Poets and authors one has encountered and chatted with at Owen's include Nanos Valaoritis, Clark Coolidge, Ann Waldman, Bill Berkson, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Clark, Andrei Codrescu, and loads of others.
Owen himself has published a lively, well-received roman noir entitled The Chandler Apartments.
(Full disclosure: Under my baptismal name. I make a meta-fictional cameo in his book.)

I think back to my earliest impressions of Telegraph all the  cafes and the book, record, clothes and head shops housed on the ground floors of buildings. The architecture determined the character of the canyon of the happening street. Even Moe's sold records then in its basement space. I remember finding it curious when I arrived in Berkeley in 1979 that the little variety store near Annapurna had permanently boarded-up windows; they put a lock on the plywood door to close up at night.
But that was the Twentieth-century which it ain't no more. I am not nostalgic for that scene really--there was too much hippie detritus left from the sixties and seventies. I had just left the urban centers of Boston, New York and Providence where I'd imagined and carved out my Punk generation identity and though there was a presence in record stores like Rather Ripped records on the North-side and various South-side record shops, in-stores by Punk-era heroes like the Clash to Robert Fripp and John Cale, I found the scene in Berkeley rather hind-bound. I spent most of my time in San Francisco and moved there for a year. Back in 1979 my first Berkeley address was on Benvenue near People's Park. I was quite familiar with its history which I honored but was largely alienated by both the music and behavior I observed in People's Park on my only visit for quite a spell. Later as one becomes more Berkeley one can acquire affection for the storied and contested plot of land.
Naturally in the intervening years change and stagnation have been the order of things on Telegraph in the hot zone approaching campus. Campus itself  seems much more insular and exclusive of the community.

I certainly  hope Owen and his cats are doing well and that the Chandler Apartments are rebuilt and  that the literary side of the scene that it has come to represent for me continues to find a course for its river of words.

Come back, Chandler
Owen, come home

Canadian Thanksgiving/ American Christmas Sleigh Ride 2005

 

My first entry into the Pacific Northwest

A world of rivers ravens and trees

Thanksgiving is a time when some nostalgia is permitted, 

The Flaneur recalls his trans-Canada /trans-America train hejira 

one decade later

 My first destination was Vancouver, British Columbia

Steam-powered clocks, smoked salmon,

Aboriginal culture and inexpensive buds

Left Vancouver on a Sunday night

The incredibly precipitous tracks hidden by darkness

Dawn arrived as the Canadien was passing Mount Robson

We stopped for a period of hours in Jasper, Alberta

Made a friend on the train who shot this
a young Canadian cat from Evergreen college

We enjoyed cannabis cookies in the high cold thin air

I was content to move on

Canada was proving to be cold and I had shed 

The cold tolerance of my New England youth

 Eventually we reached frosty Winnepeg

A surrealistic set from a Guy Madden film

The noble engine awaits my return

 Sault Sainte Marie

A spell-binding tapestry of water sky and trees

I spent American Thanksgiving in tony Toronto 

Watching the Macy's parade on the hotel TV
Howard Johnsons in Neal Young territory

A tour of Bloor street

 Montreal so far from Berkeley

A possible point of my visit was in order to consider

Re-emigration to the land where my Mother's father was born

Charming in deed, but really rather too chilly

I had never returned since a visit in June 1972

Ste Anne de Beaupre

"Our Lady of the Harbor"

In Leonard Cohen's classic song "Suzanne"

 An ice palace deserted but for some workers

And for one bundled-up Flaneur

  After a semi-delirious evening in New York City,

Finally made Massachusetts

Staying for a week with an old hometown friend

His pad was not far from this old flat-iron building

Then on a snowy morning I got back on the trains,

Another lay-over in New York city, daytime this time,

They were putting up the tree in Washington Square
Sounds like a Kenneth Patchen poem

 Next day, the metropolitan wonders of Chicago

An early skyscraper reflected in a more recent building

Seen from the Post Office plaza in the Loop

Next morning you're in frigid Denver 

And it's early December in the Rockies

A last expression of non-stop marvels to follow

Where all the roads are snowed-in

and far away

(Excerpted from RAY Man's complete blog of the trip,

You can see and read much more, just two clicks away)

2005

Lines Scribbled on a Beach

The tide is so low it's non-existent
Water has gone far away
Sky is an ancient fabled contest
Clouds in mock turmoil rendered by Masson
Opalescent light its tinted aura
Mists soften the sun
Pelicans splash down feathered dinosaurs
Fractal multitudes of tiny birds reassemble
Into a more stable semblance of things
One mother and child have walked
Way out on the mud flats
Separate from those of us on shore
At the epidermis of the water's thin skin
High nutrition belt
Everything eating everything
Little crabs will eat the gulls if they croak
All the feeding now takes place there
All the nuclear explosion on the sun
White light beyond sight
Sudden now as the clouds thin
Sodden kite surfers down toward the lost horizon
Dry your wings
Never an inanimate moment in  bird world
Wild geese fly over low banjo harmonics
Land birds frantic in the pines
Butterfly of autumn in dark jewel tones
Entering the bumpy tunnel under the estuary
A little Chinese boy falls instantly asleep

22 November 2015

Random Observations of My Oakland

 Syncretism and superstition

Envelope the Last Supper




The Flaneur looks up from his navel to contemplate
his astounding immediate surroundings

 Everything for every need and  pleasure







 Not that the Flaneur rides again,
  necessarily
But hell, why not?

 One big Pop Culture Party,
That's all it is these days

 Not very far away
A slow motion peoples movement
Amid incessant traffic

A community garden
Sign in for marvelous fresh greens

 BART train enters the picture
Highway over the hood

Kontinue the Dream
A spray-painted graffiti-esque mural
The joy of reading and gratuitous misspelling

 Climb every mountain, everybody






 For I have been to the mountain

 I have had the whole scenic tour, baby

 From the cop boats and presidential yachts
 of the estuary

To Patriotism, hollow historicity
Police-laden pomp and circumstance







Until the last soul has been shipped
From the offices of the Public defenders









From which I make my get away,
Fear of Music 










 

Time to pull up my chair
by the curtainless window of night

Return After Thanksgiving Freshman Year

I'd come in from windy wharves of New Bedford

Bunking with Queequeg over the Pequod tavern

Cold weather mirage, new work clothes

Buttonwood park zoo low spark of high heeled rock 1967

Pet shop Bishop Stang hobby land Route 6

Aunt Lillian died my Mother so sad

 Rehab Thanksgiving in a rest home

Water-coloring over xeroxes of William Blake

As if there was some point 

Bergman death actor the elements of film

On a fence post in country road Amherst

The deliquescent foliage infra-red fur on the hills

Old things not yet erased

November's denouement black and white cartoon rainstorm

Shutters bang off fly the chimney bricks

Leaf vortex in the conquering wind

Small refuge in warm-lit chambers

The stars land on the landscape at night

Did I know anyone in the houses then?

Gone now faded polaroids

Shooting stars just outside peripheral vision

Insights now into half-remembered tales

Age passing for wisdom 

This dam, this falls, this gorge in darkness, 

This purgatory chasm

To make passage in an unexplained mental geography

Knew it as it took place, recognized it as future reflection

Natural land and water ways sound-tracked with music

Hallucinatory universe of manageable proportions

Painted wigwams filled with small fires scented smoke

Float over the inverted lake

The upside-down sky as seen by the mountain's eye

Tomato automata in the darkness of the park

An imaginary drawing room there

From some nocturnal garden--anonymity
The hungry owl led me through a moonlit glade

14 November 2015

Water-color
 early 1970s

re-discovered this painting in a long-neglected box a few weeks ago

It re-surfaces in this poem, an attempt to recall the young mind

 Mass psychosis, or a restorative breather in the march of doom,

 a psychedelic way of life, a dream of co-existence in the living world

Drive-by Shooting in Oakland

 Downtown mid-morning

The Flaneur's fleeting views of street scenes on the fly

 The ghosts of auto row,

First they smash the windows

Then they graffiti the boards

Oakland Technical High School,

A movie set in my universal picture

 The Bee-Healthy honey shop sells bee-keeping equipage,

My blessings on them and on the Halal market

 ONE LOVE

At Kingston 11

An impromptu soccer field

Tournament Saturday

Cool jazz niche called Birdland

Dogs bark but the bus rolls on,
Bye-bye, Birdland

September-October 2015

Woodshavings

Hibernian in Hibernation

 I have to fashion a machine

to get outside earth's atmosphere 

to see the hard knobs of the universe

unadorned, as they really are

so my own signal is clear

to all exogenous worlds

Sea chest with polar bear pelt

launched as an escape craft

milky way spills into it

narwhals sawing logs, asleep

the root-embroidered paths

through the darkening wood

towards a place lost to memory

all the poems I wrote

went up in smoke

some got trapped in the stove pipe

the ghost of one poem

comes back down

and sits in a chair

at midnight the poem is still there

in the morning

it's back up nowhere

skittering gulls

vigorous over the wet rooves

rain clouds at last

white gulls in sunlight

before gray cloud past

a mansion of ashes

 blood-stained trees shoulder

the glen of distant children

saturation-green field

Keepsakes

November was a haunted calendar of fraught objects I returned to with an ellipsis to indicate that all obsessive objectification stretches off infinitely so why elaborate? It is enough to see and acknowledge the possibility of becoming obsessed in such a manner, to the see the availability of the fetish is be made fetishistic. Who goes there now? Few alive could conceivably remember the the personalities and circumstances. Why stir the ashes? The dignified importance of formal photographs of people long-buried and no longer recalled, the pains taken to create small monuments at the grave site, landscapes devoted to obsolescent reliquaries of the formerly important and now firmly forgotten, is mere vanity, is all vanity indeed.

When a dish has meat in it, no matter how good it may be,

it still has a smear of the charnel house about it

dark clouds Hindenburg the hills

a plane flies slow and low over the ghetto

hoovering up powdered phone calls

November 2015

Stolling Oakland's Past

Certain details recall for me the actual old Oakland 

The one I first encountered thirty-five years ago

This has been here for a while now,

what one sees everyday becomes sacred

 The languorous lumbering lakeside

 Across the water,

into the weeds

 The vicinity of the lake

Unstable and subject to turbulence

 Oakland,

Spleen and ideal

 Modern urban center

With reverberation from Tobacco Road

 Terminus,

The epic of Pacific Coast culture

Gets dark early,

A little chilly out

Nice night for a movie