Midsummer Blues & Greys...

Summertime, child, and livin’s easy...
The Gershwin Bros. (via Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, John Coltrane....)

...wracked with traffic tickets, impending dental bills, internet problems...etc....etc....etc....escaping the coming heat wave, at least, to walk on a beach at one a.m....early enough even on the summer solstice to be suitably dark....some select stars shining through the eastern haze of humidity...listening to Richard Thompson through ipod headphones....

...everything you do leaves you empty inside,

time to ring some changes...

...maybe not quite so bad as all that, but he’s got a point....even later, inside reading Duino Elegies, salvaged, earlier, from my dad’s bookshelves...(soon to be emptied by people who get paid to dispose of stuff other people can’t bear to get rid of, themselves).....thinking I gotta get up early to take screens in to be fixed before the renters come next week....then coffee, air-conditioned yoga, and waiting for the cable company...a beach house ill-kept of late...where, if nothing else, I’ve done an awful lot of writing...among other things...in the past....now with a For Sale sign out front....finally, a long walk down to the point as the sun sets on this longest day of the year, its heat diminished with the light...another cosmic cycle moving along on its way...

Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.*

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

* For there is no remaining,

no place to stay (David Young, trans.).
For staying is nowhere (J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, trans.).

Rhyming With Nothing

...a word that rhymes with nothing...and so, called difficult...like anything else that refuses to fit into the formalities of a society’s ever-conventional poetry...unappreciated...reduced to cheap jokes...orange you glad I didn’t say banana?...denied credit endlessly...like those old blues singers dying in poverty after writing the songs that made Elvis, Clapton, Zeppelin, and the Stones famous...waaaaaay down inside...it’s Muddy Waters, dude...and it's orange...and you can see it, even...and yet still you call it red...but orange never complains...

...flames, “red” rocks and cliffs...worlds of orange defining the most inspiring and mystical grottoes of the American southwest...‘red’ foxes...corgis...Mittens the corgi was our first dog...named after her white paws though most of the rest of her was orange...I was terrified of dogs when we got her, having been jumped on at two or three by what I’m told was a yellow lab...apparently, the dog just wanted to play and inadvertently knocked me down...though I took it as an attack...thus, mom and dad deciding to get a puppy to help overcome the resultant phobia...and it worked...it was I who kept poor Mittens alive when she got old and ornery, parents knowing life with teenaged me would become completely unlivable if they dared have her put to sleep just because she snapped at them...repeatedly...then, I was considered a bit of a problem, too, at that point...my good points, it seemed, underappreciated, like orange...

...orange oranges...clementines...peaches...mangoes...mango daiquiris on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean...orange tastes goooood...again, falsely called “red,” like the fire it resembles, a hair color associated with quick temper, with passion...with heat...with Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore, with Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with anonymous wild women of the Australian Outback...red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme sings Richard Thompson, though I have faith he knows in his heart that ‘red’ is really orange...

...with freckles, the visual equivalent of an Irish brogue...(Dogs and Irish Need Not Apply read job postings a century ago)...(making the political associations of orange in Northern Ireland rather strange)...(even Ireland, it seems, saves its love for green)...orange the robes of Buddhist monks and swamis...orange prison jumpsuits...orange birds of paradise...orange the color you wear to keep from getting shot out in the woods during hunting season...orange sunshine...along with black, color of Halloween...pumpkins...makings for pumpkin soup generally dumped in the making of jack-o-lanterns...so much orange wasted...

Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy mortal symmetry?
William Blake

...the tiger, yes, also orange...but cares little about being called red...no need at all to be concerned with such things when you’re a tiger...