Reason to believe

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BECOMING MILTON

by Coleman Barks

Milton, the airport driver, retired now

from trucking, who ferried me

from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport

to Athens last Sunday midnight to 2:30 A.M.,

tells me about his son, Tom, just back

from the Gulf war. "He's at Fort Stewart

with the 102nd Mechanized, the first tank unit

over the line, not a shot fired at them.

His job was to check the Iraqi tanks

that the airstrikes hit, hundreds of them.

The boy had never even come up on a car accident

here at home, twenty-four years old. Can you

imagine what he lifted the lid to find?

Three helmets with heads in them staring

from the floor, and that's just one tank.

He has screaming flashbacks, can't talk about it

anymore. I just told him to be strong

and put it out of his mind. With time,

if you stay strong, those things'll go away.

Or they'd find a bunker, one of those holes

they hid in, and yell something in American,

and wait a minute, and then roll grenades in

and check it and find nineteen freshly killed guys,

some sixty, some fourteen, real thin.

They were just too scared to move.

He feels pretty bad about it, truthfully,

all this yellow ribbon celebrating.

It wasn't a war really. I mean, he says

it was just piles and piles of their bodies.

Some of his friends got sick, started vomiting,

and had to be walked back to the rear.

Looks like to me it could have been worked

some other way. My boy came through OK,

but he won't go back, I'll tell you that.

He's getting out as soon as he can.

First chance comes, he'll be in Greenville

selling cars, or fixing them. He's good at both.

Pretty good carpenter too, you know how I know?

He'll tear the whole thing out if it's not right

and start over. There's some that'll look

at a board that's not flush and say shit,

nail it, but he can't do that, Tom."

Listen to Springsteen sing Reason to Believe:

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What's in the frame: an ode to a master

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

first a painter, then the original street photographer and father of photojournalism

August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004

Cartier-Bresson said, "To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis."

What's in the frame

A moment is an eternal wheel

that you froze,

or the center of a wheel,

like a cigarette in a mouth,

and all around,
the world is

puffing, blowing, kissing,

touching you

with its beautiful lips.

- ruth m.

There is a photography exhibit at the MoMA of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photos shot in the U.S., which I plan to see next month. Browse his portfolio. Read the history of the Magnum Photo Agency, which he helped found. You can see MoMA's interactives about the exhibit.

Martine's Legs. 1967.

INDIA. Gujarat. Ahmedabad. 1966.
Women spreading out their saris before the sun.

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another kind of tea bag

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. . . "for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

T.S.Eliot
4 quartets
p 14

Looking in my fluorescent magnifying mirror,
dabbing dots of concealer on the bags
under my eyes as the magazine for aging women
who want to stay beautiful shows,
I suddenly feel the register in the room's music
deepen and know that my Auntie Sue is sitting behind me
on the worn chair that was Aunt Edith's. O both these women
had eye bags to beat the band.
"Aunt" Edith, my mother's stepmother
with that gene that creates these features on your face
like a nose or a mouth or a chin but that don't
start growing until somewhere after 40 about the time earlobes
also seem to have grown longer,
Aunt Edith whose pedigree and provenance I know nothing of
and never cared to because I didn't like her. But
Auntie Sue, my dad's sister, was different.
The woman had the most glorious eye bosooms
in the history of womankind,
reminding me of the women gathering tea
on the hills by the Black Sea,
their soft burlap tea bag carried in front
like one large breast
growing as they stuffed in more leaves.
I wish I'd had more time with her,
because what she carried in her eye bags was fragrant,
like that black tea, not poisoned like Aunt Edith's Chernobyl tea bags.
Auntie Sue whose humor was her pedigree and when you aimed
a camera her way said she'd break it,
whom all of us adored and never had enough of in her 92 years.
She might as well have lived by the Black Sea she was so far away
in Virginia where tobacco leaves grow but here she is, sitting behind me!
- smiling her wryness as I try to cover what we got from her mother,
and she says: One day you won't be able to cover them Ruthie
but just be sure that what you carry in them is fragrant.


*Note: On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then USSR) and the radioactive cloud it released contaminated the tea growing along the Black Sea in Turkey, which was while we lived in Istanbul. There was a tea crisis, and the tea already in stores sold out in a day.

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Wet laundry

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Grab a cuppa coffee,

or you can make it tea,

come on for a visit,

and you can bring laundry.

Marcie, Kath and Margie,

and my sister Ginnie too,

invited me to their blog

to try out someplace new,

where women of a certain age

put words and pictures on the page.

The place they have is Vision and Verb,

and I for one think it's superb!

Here's Wet Laundry at Vision and Verb.
(It's not a poem.
And gack, the one above is ridiculous,
but I am a happy slave to
National Poetry Month.)

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As if

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As if

I should have known something was up
when we told the host our name, and he instantly
gestured and led us to a table by the brick wall,
as if it belonged to us - now, always, ad infinitum,

as if we were a quiet, gray couple in Chicago
or St. Louis, who have had that standing table
for fifty years and nod to the maitre d with familiarity
every week, not just on anniversaries and birthdays.

So when I saw the exuberance of flowers and tissue paper
my husband had asked a florist to deliver - magenta and chartreuse,
bold and lusty, as if this tabletop was a declaration
of young new love, as if the bee were seducing the flower -

when I saw them, the room swam, and almost in a swoon I struggled
to take off my chartreuse coat and hang it on the back
of a chair. I said, Oh, the camera is in the car, and dutifully he left for it.
He left, and he didn't return. I waited. After 32 years,

where could he be? A siren drowned out the music, and then
one emotion was traded for another. I called him on my magenta
phone. No answer. I jumped up and ran out the door,
down the street to the parked car. Not

there. As if he, like a bee, had made his brief, purposeful visit
and left the flower, alone. Ad infinitum. I waited.
In actuality, it was no more than ten minutes. You see,
he found primroses on the sidewalk for sale.

Primroses, that I love and have not tucked into
a flower bed since three houses ago. Primroses
that were being taken inside for the night,
that would not be there after dinner. He bought four.

And as if he had died and come back to life,
when he returned to our table I was about to weep,
just when the waitress swept up to tell us
the night's specials: grouper and mahi mahi and trout,

and I told her to please go away, we needed no pretty
young women selling fish and champagne. Out of the
16,819,200 minutes we'd been together, just now we needed five
secluded on our island of love, with only the hot tropical flowers as witness.

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Standing

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There is a season

for standing.

It begins

low,

and keeps on slow.

The wind

blows

dirt from your head.

You clean up nice
and when your height

is enough

you'll get the attention of some.

Ahem. Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen.

What I have to say today is . . .

Well, I have nothing to say.

Let me just show you.

~ Ruth M.

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a Friday poem

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Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

Sunlight, refrigerated in earth.

Stored up, like breath

held - until we gasp

and catch it again -

Held in an egg, in a wing, 

in a black eye, darting

- shiny and alert.

Held in the waiting

of thirst and hunger.

Held in a gliding flight

up a hill of wind that slopes

up, then down again,

the flyer floating

back down, silent as a blade of sun

that pierces a seed

and spills life into the ground.

Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

~ Ruth M.

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