The Right Column
Big Sur

Keep 
Right on
Learning
hard to know this:
Heart ache
bog below
the ledges of
young-man 
daring doo
   That poem
  needed music
    to dance on the ridge 
      at the edge of the cliff
    leeping out to a high spruce
      and shimming down
     into the abyss of
      the lower belows.

  With the blade of a knife
     he carved her name in the tree
      ah, but it was not to be.

  Somewhere in the high above
   he toyed with a memory that he
          ought to have had
    but it didn't come
 and he couldn't see her face anymore
        glowing like the coals of
            a dieing fire.

  And then with the sudden wind
     as he got needles stuck all in him
   scary a crow from it's nest,
      sliding down thirty feet,
          branches breaking the whole way
    he found himself in a hollow
      where he'd never been before.

  So, then, for the rest of his life
      he can go there again
   that boggy place,
     shoe gets stuck deep down in it,
      trailing mud into the kitchen.

   It was a Saturday when he went back there
     many years later
       it was his cousin who was showing off,
    shimmying down the tree.
   "I did that, too, Doug, I did it too.
        and it's a pretty hard thing
    to have had to have to do
       got mud up inside
            of my shoe."

  But what did Doug care?
      He's got the fire in his heart.
  He survived the descent
     and then climbed on back up to the ledge
   where his older cousin stood peering down
      calling out his old-guy warnings.

  "It's crazy, I know, to do it. 
       But it's what the girls wanna see." says
                  the older cousin.

July 6, 2010