by Fitz | Apr 18, 2016 | Journal, Songs
True to my words of earlier this week, I finished this song last night, and at the time, I liked it–but in the clear light of day, too much of it seems forced, especially the rhymes. But that is part of the process. I think I am almost there. Let me get my saw and chisel and see where it goes. There is a tune in my head, but the flow is certainly not how it should be
Ginny came out on the weekly to the island:
and hid underneath her shawl her unborn child.
A babe who never made it through the winter—
those storms that came blasting harsh and wild.
She said his eyes shone blue as any ocean
that somehow gave her comfort for a while.
Ginny lived alone out by the headland,
and came down once a week to get her mail.
She’d read that letter sitting out on Craig’s pier,
her blonde hair blowing out like ragged sails.
Then she’d fill a box with flour, salt, and coffee
and disappear beachward in the gale.
She came here on a ferry out of Belfast
for stranger reasons we may never know:
two cairns of stone remain to tell her story—
it must have been some fifty years ago…
To the East there is a farm that’s grown to bramble,
somewhere off the path to Ephraim’s well;
looking hard you might even see the outline
of old beds lined with stone and shells.
They say the old Indian left a headstone,
but where it’s gone nobody’s left to tell.
No one really remembers much of Joey.
He showed up in 1917.
Some say it was the gas that left him silent;
others say it’s what he must have seen;
still, he scrabbled berries, beets and parsnips
with his one arm that wasn’t blown off clean.
Joey came here missing something;
and died with so little left to show—
a slice of stone he battled to its ending—
It must have been some hundred years ago…
Jacob set his lines out every morning
before the heavy fog burned clean,
pulling off the knots of tangled seaweed—
his torn hands clutching ancient dreams.
with hopes that laid deep in the Atlantic—
though nothing is ever as it seems.
He built his shack with mud and scavenged driftwood.
His doorway a whale’s jaw bleached and dried—
and a window covered up with a seal-skin
that kept his thoughts somewhere deep inside.
He salted cod in barrels from the shipwreck
that hit the ledge in 1825.
Jacob came out here long before us
for silent reasons we may never know
when cold and dark waters filled his dory—
it must have been two hundred years ago…
Epilogue :
You can sometimes feel them in the breakers
Tightening the line in Anson’s trawl;
and other times you can hear them in the moonlight
echoed from some lonesome buoy’s call;
and they will answer if you let them—
but words sometimes don’t mean that much at all.
Maybe you’ll find them when the day breaks
in shadowed shapes and wisps of morning fog,
or hid away in lonely private places
buried somewhere deep in Caymans Bog.
Maybe once there was a story
scrawled in some forgotten Captain’s log.
All we have are words told by Nancy
in whispered words that linger hushed and slow.
No one here knows how she remembers
the queer folk from so many years ago…
No one here knows how she remembers
the queer folk from so many years ago…
by Fitz | Apr 16, 2016 | Essays, Journal
I wonder what the years have really taught me about writing and music. I have gotten so used to preaching and teaching that I am a bit looped by the thought of writing—as in how I wrote before (or how I will claim I wrote) before settling into this somewhat comfortable and safe life I have—a life that is as rare and fine as life can be, but I feel myself getting that itch to rediscover who I am as a writer. poet, and songwriter. I need to know there is a next time around and that this is that time.
In many ways, writing is an addiction for me: I come outside to my porch, or settle in on the couch by the fire, and I write—but mostly essays, journals (such as these), long preambles to assignments, and reflections that are short enough to be interesting to me, but not so long as I really need to think about what I write
And I have my book, The Three Rivers Anthology, that I can curate with a few more insertions, and I have my beloved websites, several somewhat messy (but getting less messy) sites that at least prove that I exist as a writer and a performer and a low-level scholar of how to write well.
But to write a new poem with any level of depth or breadth is…hard.
To write a song that is more meaningful than clever is…hard. I feel my age in the same way as when I jog down the road or climb on the exercise bike—like it is a necessary but cumbersome evil, and any excuse is a good excuse.
But I need to say I am working on a new folio ( I hate the term EP) of songs and not just a rehashing and reconstructing of song fragments from old journals. More so, I need to “know” that I am working on a new folio of songs. Damn good songs. Songs that reflect whatever wizened and vine-riped thoughts and ideas I still have within me.
Funny though: I really don’t care whether or not people actually like the songs as much as I need to like them. If it becomes a desperate search and a losing battle, then so will my songs be about desperation and loss.
Though I suspect the songs will be somewhat decent, and I can always force a poem to fruition—if I have the time; if I make the time.
More than likely it will mean stealing time and carving it not out of the day, but out of myself. I will need to shed more of my teacher shell (and it is, often, a shell, not a conviction or a mandate—though teaching seems to be the way I will have to live for some more years. Fenn School is good to me and I am good to it, and unlike Odysseus I am not ready to cut my ties to luscious nymph Calypso!).
I am not ready to leave my Thursday nights at the Colonial Inn, for it is my solace and my platform and my way of keeping music alive in me and sharing through me and remembering through me.
I am not ready to reimagine how or why I live. I am BLESSED beyond imagination at my good fortune on this earth. My family—Denise and kids and friends—will always trump any moment in time and place. I need them and me to know and feel and truly experience that my love is unalterable and immutable in the face of any vicissitudes.
There is no Fate in my love for who I am, nor will be a marionette in a choreographed dance—unless it be that I am fated to joy, simplicity and a genuine humility to my Graces.
I just want to tap into what is left in me and to give lasting and ineffable form to the moiling juices of my heart and soul and being.
So please, be with me, humor me and share yourself with me on this journey.
by Fitz | Apr 9, 2016 | Essays, Journal
A lot of things in life fall short of the mark, but thoughtfulness has never let me down. For some forty years I have faithfully kept journals of the wanderings of my mind—most of which is lost in some way or another, but the effect hangs on like a sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam: it proves to me that I am real and not lost; it creates substance out of what might otherwise be ephemeral ether lost to the vagaries of procrastinated time. In the meandering evolution of my words set to page is left a lingering mark etched into a marble wall of time that can never be sandblasted clean.
Simple reminders that I am what I am.
It is almost frightening to know that who I am is freighted with an urgency to continually change what I am. The irony is in how tightly I must shut my eyes to see clearly into myself. Stripped bare I am a meagre and skeletal portrait of a man—a shaky scaffold of dreams and desires connected inextricably to the pulsing aorta of reality.
Life. Ineffable life.
But it can not be any other way.
I am doomed and emboldened to speak the voice that barks and sings, laments and praises, and shouts and drones the inexcusable and intransigent me in glorious triumph and ignominious defeat. I need to see my reflection in stark contrasts: I need a barometric gauge to sense and measure the depth of the coming storms or easy weather. I need to know when to set anchor or set sail.
And all I have is words to guide me.
Words and love are all that is real to me, but it is only words that I question. I do not question my love or unequivocal devotion to Denise or our children or the eclectic diaspora of extended family. I only struggle with the constructs I create. I question my words because they are not created for me—they are created for you; hence, they are weighted by all that preys upon me: vanity, desire and a mania for a purposeful and meaningful life—the very stating of which is almost an anathema, a self-aggrandizing denial and abnegation of human empathy!
Stripped of words I can only utter and respond to what is palpably real and connected to me. I protect my own in spite of all else. Viciously so. And that is good and right and is built into me, and it is unerringly built into me by the hands of a creator beyond my understanding, enough so that I question my reflection on any still waters I see. Beyond faith. Beyond the myopia of circumstance. Beyond anything we share. I am left with words.
It simply is.
I write because I know no other way, but I have no illusions that my path is leading to a greater source. I am constantly humbled by the misdirections I follow. I am less of a guide than a foot soldier commandeered to go foot-first into the minefields of a greater field laced with weed and flower. My solace is that I am still alive—that somehow I have navigated well enough to be where I am—safe, secure, and almost retired into a golden age. I covet my joy like a child his or her inheritance of perpetual splendor. I cannot count or measure my blessings; I can only pass them on.
So I close my eyes at night and expect an infinite dawn.
And so can you.
by Fitz | Mar 18, 2016 | Essays, Journal
I wonder why Trump is not flipping me out? I wonder if there is some bigoted, ignorant and right-wing element that lurks inside this folk-singing, poem writing, neo-socialist shell of mine.
Maybe it is not that hard for me to make the empathetic reach to feel at least some of the heartbeat of angst, alienation, and pissed-offedness of a broader than we think sub-segment of society that is—or at least feels it is— being intellectually belittled by the righteous arrogance and condemnations of people who know better, who are not white trash racists and who occupy a moral high ground that they preach from with smug self-aggrandizement.
Yes! Trump is a horrible choice for president. He is, to my mind at least, a pompous, opportunistic ass who is rife with contradictions and simplistic approaches to befuddling issues, BUT there is no denying he is also a populist voice who provides an outlet—and now a platform—for those who don’t feel represented by the political establishments (left and right) or the omnipresent media and who don’t feel heard in this present moiled and muddied times.
We will not win over the votes of “Trump Nation” by a constant drumbeat of belittling diatribes that only serve to fortify the “wall” they are building around themselves. All of us are prey to misguided ideologies, and I am convinced that Trump’s ideology is especially misguided, even dangerous, but in the end, we are an amazing country of many voices, many points of view and a thoughtfulness that is often astounding. We are, however, sorry listeners whose first instinct is to tribalize into competing factions.
There is no reason to panic. Trump is not going to derail our nation, even if he wins the nomination or even if he wins the presidency. Life, democracy and our nation will move ahead, and perhaps even be better and stronger for it. This a time for dialogue with each other—and dialogue needs ears that hear, and hearts that feel and try to understand, not simply mouths that roar.
This is an opportunity for the greatness of democracy to act in an enlightened, passionate and compassionate way and to look at our own personal flaws and biases as deeply as we look at those of our perceived enemies , who are, in reality our brothers and sisters—a family joined at the hips in this noble experiment that is America.
And we should never turn our backs to family…
by Fitz | Dec 25, 2015 | Essays, Journal
I am not sure what Christmas really is anymore. I am almost afraid to think of what Christians are going through in the lands of the original Christian faith. By dint of place and time, I grew up in the Catholic faith, and try as I might, I can’t ever escape the roots of my Christian faith—though I am never absolutely convinced it is faith. It is, however, my means to a more spiritual life. I cannot kneel down in a church and not feel humbled by my “humanness.” It is the only place where I am completely contrite and real and searching.
I would love for more certainty. I would love for my faith to rule out all others, if only to be sure of my way through the Skyllian straits of life where every decision is based on uncertainty. I live within the weakness and greyer shades of heart and intellect mixed with an enduring hope that God works beyond the limits of my understanding—for what I know is always overshadowed by what I do not know. It is my restless soul– a battle that does not rage, but simmers beneath my surface, and what simmers is an overflowing broth of searching and acceptance.
A true God could expect nothing less.
My kids—all seven of them—gathered on couches and chairs around the TV last night and watched “Elf” together. I stood (yes, stood) watching them sprawled amongst each other laughing and simply being the family they are and was astonished that they are the fruit of mine and Denise’s creation. I did not need a re-reading of Genesis or a prayerful recollection of the Gospel of Mathew to know that we are more than bits of atoms and amino acids. I did not need anything more than the tears that streamed out of the depth of a magnificent and overwhelming grace and gratitude to accept the paradigm of a continued rebirthing of life and purpose.
The paltry presents under our tree are simply seeds—reminders of an enduring commitment to what we started as a family some twenty or more years ago, a nano second and molecule of time, that makes everything—everything!—as real and palpable as faith can be. It is our faith, in all of its myopic and blessed beauty! It is not a refutation of other faiths or a stubborn clinging to tradition; it is just who we are and what we aspire to be embedded in the culture of our lives—an instrument of God playing out a unique and enduring song that we sing with whomever is close at hand, regardless of the chorus we sing with. It is our collective soul that sings and rings of possibility—and within that myriad of possibilities are those chances we can’t afford to let slip by.
But they do slip by.
The animosity of righteousness blurs the boundary of our universal human decency, and so the quest to be right overrules the common sense of enlightened acceptance of differences. Here it is a fairly benign bigotry and self-centric claims of higher understanding above a more common ignorance—though it seldom really is. In the Holy land it is a bitter dogfight won or lost in brutality, subjugation and indifference to the human cost. We drop bombs and calculate in the cruel calculus of war what is acceptable loss. The warring factions in the Middle East brings a closer look at an equal depravity that seemingly knows no bounds.
Watching “Elf,” a Hollywood movie by any measure, I was struck by the ending. Nothing survives without a common song sung in common spirit and a belief in the unbelievable. The “reality” of Santa Claus in our home is never a point of discussion. There is no finite point of belief or disbelief. There is no age for our children that demarcates the real from the unreal. Santa is not a bringer of toys. He is the clarion song of reason in a world that is losing its reason. In the panoply of faith, Santa is an adjunct of Christian faith enacted in an enduring way, and while manipulated, distorted and blasphemed by commercialism, he still retains a power that we cling to because we have to believe and any diminishing of that faith diminishes the promise of a humane humanity.
Perhaps Santa is showing us that the giving of gifts supersedes the receiving of gifts, and all any of us can do is to give what we are able to give, and the larger that circle of giving, the larger the effect on the world. There is no true resolution in the dropping of bombs, the massacres of people of a particular faith or self-styled recitations of myopic arrogance. Herds of people are culled from the planet by the innocuous circumstances of fate.
Christmas is an action more than a belief. It is not just some enduring tradition perpetuated by ignorance. It is a stoppage in time, a resetting of the clock to a more infinite time, one that only God seems to understand, and if we don’t stop, the current reality will not stop and the tailspins of history will spiral in devolution and degradation in a return to a baseness that deflates and kills the promise of free will, which, in the end, is all we really have.
If you do not believe in Christmas, at least believe in the promise.
It is a reasonable start…
