Pdlyons's Explorationsbetter than blogging – the snow is finally coming down, daughter home from school early not even 2pm, she out there making snow angels running around in the thick flurries of big puffer flakes and shes calling out to me to come out. No brainer, see ya later no offense but long after I am not here anymore what I do with her with her will still be cool. There are me ol’ boots here somewhere….
There was this guy and his wife. They ran a Texaco service station in town. Their home was just behind the pumps and a two bay garage. Sometimes they’d sell Joey and me tickets when they weren’t going, face value box seat season holders since before the monuments. One of them would always pump the gas, no self service in those days, check under the hood? Checked the oil, front left looks a little low why don’t you drive over? We’ll fill it. We were just seventeen or eighteen, both of them were white haired and not yet feeble. But his face and neck had been corkscrewed pinks and reds. And one of his hands, pearl wax white wrung out like rubber a glove still twisted. One day we asked her and she explained someone had pulled in for a fill up, tossed a lit cigarette while he was pumping. They used to have perfect triangle pine trees at either end of the house and across the street instead of a highway was the entrance to an eighty acre city park, fountains, formal rose gardens, small stone bridges arched over clear running streams. Years later another town another Texaco full service or self. Used to get my truck worked on, watched while I’d wait, his little girl and boy playing around in the driveway sometimes ride their tricycles. Now its a Mobil station and you can still get gas, no choice but to pump it your self and if you want; hot dogs, tacos, donuts, newspapers, coffee, lotto, butter, milk, eggs and you can still get a pack of Marlboro if you want to. And if any kid played in the drive way now? They’d probably get run over. Back in the day when I first met this girl she told me about how she and a friend had plans for robbing a gas station. A full service Texaco, this one on the way out of town, run by an old fellow plenty of cash from travelers to New Haven. He was really old and lived in a trailer behind the pumps stayed open ’til after dark. I’m certain I talked her out of it, we talked of other things instead like getting married and living without our families, she became my first wife and as they say one mans saving is another mans hell or I guess you’d have to say purgatory
In my dream we’re in the car. I’m driving but we’re going so fast over the roller-coaster bump that we end up airborne. I call feel it in my stomach when we stop from rising and start to fall and the car flips over. I remember thinking – I hope we turn over one more time before we land. Isn’t that often the way it is. hope for a thing to happen a certain way even though theres no reason for it to. Hope none the less because after all it might. Yesterday walked in a “new” cemetery. Did my half hour among revolutionary soldiers, immigrants Polish Italian Irish veterans revolutionary,civil war,WWI, WWII Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, believers in peace, pursuers of peace, may they all be rested in peace. There were Pollard’s and McGarr’s, names form my fathers mother. There were stone wall still puzzled neatly together and leafless trees, borders of deep New England open fields and a February sun so bright could not help envy this place of rest. If only we could alive have such space and simply still, soak up this whole moment with every sense with nothing concepted, expected or even reflected. I sat with a nine year old child – 1920 – 1929 Kathyrn M. Sherman. White stone octagon on edge. Place a tiny sea shell and a stone of sugar golden mica for her. Sat on the ground back against an old maple watching chipmunks fearless keepers of her company flit and flitter around us sometimes stopping mere inches from where I sat. I will never know how she died, how close she was to being nine or what the M. stood for. But I told her story about the wave and the ocean. You know how the wave that thinks it is only a wave and fears the breaking shore yet the ocean that the wave truly is never breaks. That while the ocean is sometimes the wave, the wave is always the ocean, it is ocean that is the true nature of the wave; except when I told her it was more like ocean spoke than wave wrote.
I’m sure not the last morning wishing to stay in bed til noon. Sometimes Feng Shui works against you – this room too harmonic too winter warm windows tall semi-circle sunrising through half pulled shades and Irish lace even the traffic sounds reminding me to five years old sleep overs at my grandmother’s she had a red dog named Tuffy and a tabby cat called Mama Kitty. Knowing the sinks full and the counter’s full of last nights dinner dishes pot n pans debris, knowing the drive through shark trooper infested school bus dunkin donut dope fiend mania awaits a further inspiration. But better coffee waits for us and there’s no snow or frozen thing this February yet. So once more into the extra-ordinary dear friend we shall encounter not mundane but wisdom, the Buddha is offered to the world through your action, so too the Jesus, the Allah, the Goddess, the Yahweh,the Krsna, the Quantum… The sacred is met through offering, the offering is made through action. Even sitting still and action. Today teachers of the road await and I once more seek mindfulness of compassion. Anyway the crows complain for scraps, the child whines, the better coffee waits but will not make itself.
If I look deep enough into the window of night halos of kitchen light my own grey head and moving past that, who am I? The word play domino impressions, fragile memories fluctuating body soft hearted emptiness? And oh this morning, always morning hardly silent always noiseless belief is who I am restored repaired dutch boy diked, band-aids cabbages kings strings and ceiling wax. What I was taught must I be ever? Some days begin like this; dark windows beyond my reflection seeing nothing remotely me. This is the day of daffodils or maybe tulips? Small brown bag thirteen bulbs to bring to the cemetery. To plant for my mother and for my father. Does the flower seem less sweet because we know it someday will fade? There is no place I know thats still and yet to observe movement must not the observe stand still? This I know for sure; it’s earlier in the morning than I like and I still need to get up get dressed right now or else the day will get away.
first of all is a cool name
second there is an irish connection
and third but not last nor least – they have impeccable and courageously good taste when it comes to poetry
the link below will provide ample and beyond a doubt proof of same
http://www.boneorchardpoetry.blogspot.com/
four newly published ones by pd lyons
Slow as a screw cap wine morning dark faded into rain blocked sunrise. Chug of the coffee making scents of redemption and awareness fills my kitchen. Unlike the rest of the world Friday is the hardest one too many days dragged wake-ups are not really awake when you’ve not slept. Now among the shadows forgotten aspects of our truth. Hamlet the shadow of Summer’s dream. The eighteen year old girl sentenced to life for murder of a nine year old girl when she was fifteen. Tried as an adult. No blood ever found on her or her clothes. No murder weapon recovered. Her sixteen year old boy friend, interviewed six times by thy FBI, failed polygraph, none of that allowed to the jury. Fifteen year old in jail for three years before convicted, denied application to continue education, innocent until proven guilty. Eighteen year old Tibetan girl Buddhist nun under Chinese occupation. Practitioner of compassion for all beings. Sits down outside the abbey in a pool of gasoline – lights the match in protest, light upon atrocities, atrocious act among atrocious acts. She and all who immolate are terrorists, seek only to disrupt the lawful Chinese government and it’s people. This is the morning shadow of the night before. Coffee the shadow of the cheap screw cap bitchy white wine slowing me down into crow sound shapes emerged from darkness into grey dawn.
BEIJING, Feb 12 – An 18-year-old Tibetan nun died after setting herself on fire in protest at Chinese rule in Tibet, activists said on Sunday, adding to a fast-growing list of self-immolations in ethnically Tibetan areas of China.
Chinese army troops moved in after Tenzin Choedon set herself alight at the Mamae convent in China’s south-western Sichuan province, said Kanyag Tsering, a monk in Dharamsala, India, where the Tibetan government in exile is based.
“Soldiers surrounded the nunnery and sealed it off, and nothing more is known of the situation inside,” he said.
Activist group Free Tibet also reported the burning, saying in an email that the nun died after being taken away by Chinese security forces on Saturday night.
No other details were immediately available and the report could not be independently verified. A member of staff with local police said “we do not have any information about this” when contacted by telephone.
The nun’s convent in Aba county, east of Tibet, has been at the centre of pro-Tibetan protests in recent months. She is the 22nd Tibetan in less than a year, and the sixth this week, to set themselves on fire, Free Tibet director Stephanie Brigden said.
“We know many more Tibetans are willing to give their lives and Tibetans are protesting in the streets,” she said.
The self-immolations are a small but potentially destabilising challenge to China’s regional policies, and the government has branded those who set themselves alight as terrorists.
Activists say China violently stamps out Tibetan religious freedom and culture in Tibet, the mountainous region of western China which has been under Chinese control since 1950.
Protests by self-immolation have become more common in Tibet and in restive, ethnically Tibetan regions of China and at least 14 Tibetans are believed to have died from their injuries. Exiled Tibetan leaders say they fear a crackdown in the region to coincide with the Tibetan new year on February 22.
“We have reports that hundreds of convoys carrying Chinese military personnel with automatic machineguns are moving towards Tibet,” Lobsang Sangay, prime minister of the government in exile, said last week.
Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Abhishek Madhukar and Sally Huang; Editing by Ed Lane and Ben Harding.
© Reuters Limited.
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