Window

bob black

March 22, 2016 at 7:56 pm

LOVE!

UNCLE DAVID YOU MUST BE SO PROUD TODAY! I AM SO SO SO HAPPY……FOR LANCE IS A FATHER! :)

I wrote him this afternoon…and you know, of course, his son has your name also, purposefully :)

this is what i wrote today for him at Facebook…accompanied by the poem i wrote and published last year, specifically for him…
well the David Alan Harvey workshop/world grows and grows…

much much love to all of you :)

Once, on a hectic and tumultuous rooftop in NYC, I fell in love with a man. And now that man is a father.
Amid the squalor of too many biting voices and a rooftop that bent to the echo of gravity’s lethal tug, his presence and warming smiling held me firm rather than giving way to the sway of the drop. Since then, he has, as a friend, anchored inside me. And though I haven’t seen him in years, his voice and humor and strength has been often, though he knows it not, a source of strength. I call him my friend and at times of difficulty has been there for me, if even a small note. Today, i want to celebrate his own gorgeous life with his partner Ashley, as they bring into the world their son, Levon.
I am so happy and proud of you brother Lance Rosenfield and your powerful partner Ashley Morton! And I can not wait to sing a few songs for your son, as I know i am just one of many who feel that into all our lives he shall shine as you have done for so many of us, far or near.
Prepare him for that day brother, for his drunken uncle may sing a bit off key, but it will come from his heart. The home from which all of us are centered.
I am so happy for the 3 of you.
May the world light up in song.
Uncle David Alan must be aglow as well! smile emoticon
for now, let this be my gift to the 3 of you:
with love and respect and admiration brother!
biggest of hugs
-b
==================================================
True Grit and the Ghost Drover
“Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.” –Cormac McCarthy
“We must each of us bear our own misfortunes.” –Charles Portis
I.
Daddy’s body bled dust and scattered it everywhere like red clay,
marked up our lives like black-spit shine and saddle soap staining,
all he touched and spoke of: the rambling before the gate, the whiskey needed like a prayer before the falling into the shoot and the madness of his stories:
the bull and the rose and the anguish in his limbs for his family far from the rodeo.
When he returned at night, dark scampering over our beds and crippled,
he would hold my pillow as if it were a 1700 lb. bull in a bucking hysteria
and he would not relent, for love understands neither strain nor burden,
for I could see through the burnished blur of sleep what that holding-onto meant.
He was with us and even if sloppily, he untied his stories and corporal ache
into my ear and through the dreams as if delicacy knew nothing of weight.
No matter the sweat or sway of his addled head, he spoke to me before sleep.
Daddy always pulled his breath against what lay close
as if one word was assurance. He lived by that and all those scars.
He rode bulls and drove steer and buckled his body as economy and homestead.
Often in the morning, when Mama was sunburned by the acreage of his exhaustion,
he scare-crowed his way cross the kitchen, conjuring scent and tangled in a roped saddle, sticking to the splotches with which he worked the corners and creases of our home and his intentions,
thumb-smoothed away like callus indentations softened to the quick, bitten.
In the morning, the romance gone and his words like tobacco spit to leather shine
the meat of his palm and the way he held my chin like a steer’s bronze nose ring
kissing me good morning, as if my jaw were a branding brow.
He could not let go. But this was a marking of love and worry
and it was hard work and he knew that and the hope crept like a flashlight pointing in the dark, lumbering and my heart broke each morning.
But Daddy’s indolent pace was the grace of flight
just as his games to count the bruises that laddered their way along his forearms were an education in destination and devotion.
Do you know the number of callouses and chalking that mark your life?
A lesser man would have shied away from the trundling that came with grime
and rope burn and broken teeth and the flair up of the night.
He gave me that, not the ghost of a man but the earth and the dirt and the cavern.
The stretching of the threads of his body that made sense.
His voice at night through exhaustion while I wrangled with sleep
or the counting of the time he hugged the bull past the counting
that rattled like the wind that comes tonguing its way black and devious and forlorn from the top of the bowl-shaped hill shadowing its muzzle over the land.
Who does not bark out mad at the night?
Who does not find themselves in a corner all patched-over and whelped,
splintering from a high the park’s broken bones and hollering cattle?
Daddy taught me to be unafraid.
We fight the rusty tin of spine from the years of being thrown:
beast or land or river-run or death come as lasso.
The shaking in the trailer, the hunger from mouth to thigh, the words that shift
and shave us.
Call it love.
II
Once in the morning, a small clover of blood printed my pillow.
He must have told me a story before he fell to sleep, words replaced by clot.
That was harder to wash away than the crinoline sheets or the wan morning.
What ghost is so durable?
III
And we are born into the shape and space of a place from the moment our arms and legs waddle, suspended beneath the bulb of our parents’ breath, clothes-pinned in a fraction of a moment as if we a wire strung impossibly across an empty room, unmoored and levitating. The cattle and the midnight dreams.
IV
Once a boy in the back of a pickup, our bodies tender from the rust and the swelter and the lugubrious language of the land rising around us,
spread his fingers across my eyes and said:
“Look at the sky and count your way home. How much blue is there between my fingers and the front porch your daddy built from his broken body?”
I could not answer him.
But I was delirious and alive.
So I took his fingers into my mouth and that was the way I measured the distance.
And you?
IV
After Daddy died, I took to the prairie and bicycled the dust into the shape
of a fan: weathered the angles of dust and detritus into a conjuring.
And in that small stir up, I swelled a small bruise of memory,
part beast and part throwing, and I sang out to the fragments and the muck.
But it was so much more than those short words.
He had taught me to be brave and to count not syllable but markings.
There are no ghosts, no drovers, no loss but what the skin and earth give.
Grit as cartilage, true as twine and strap and song.
Thumb that as a bruise on a pillow.

Whose father does not canter away, in reckoning?

for: Lance Rosenfield and now for his son Levon Alan Rosenfield as well……..

2 thoughts on “Window”

bob black
March 22, 2016 at 7:56 pm

LOVE!

UNCLE DAVID YOU MUST BE SO PROUD TODAY! I AM SO SO SO HAPPY……FOR LANCE IS A FATHER! :)

I wrote him this afternoon…and you know, of course, his son has your name also, purposefully :)

this is what i wrote today for him at Facebook…accompanied by the poem i wrote and published last year, specifically for him…
well the David Alan Harvey workshop/world grows and grows…

much much love to all of you :)

Once, on a hectic and tumultuous rooftop in NYC, I fell in love with a man. And now that man is a father.
Amid the squalor of too many biting voices and a rooftop that bent to the echo of gravity’s lethal tug, his presence and warming smiling held me firm rather than giving way to the sway of the drop. Since then, he has, as a friend, anchored inside me. And though I haven’t seen him in years, his voice and humor and strength has been often, though he knows it not, a source of strength. I call him my friend and at times of difficulty has been there for me, if even a small note. Today, i want to celebrate his own gorgeous life with his partner Ashley, as they bring into the world their son, Levon.
I am so happy and proud of you brother Lance Rosenfield and your powerful partner Ashley Morton! And I can not wait to sing a few songs for your son, as I know i am just one of many who feel that into all our lives he shall shine as you have done for so many of us, far or near.
Prepare him for that day brother, for his drunken uncle may sing a bit off key, but it will come from his heart. The home from which all of us are centered.
I am so happy for the 3 of you.
May the world light up in song.
Uncle David Alan must be aglow as well! smile emoticon
for now, let this be my gift to the 3 of you:
with love and respect and admiration brother!
biggest of hugs
-b
==================================================
True Grit and the Ghost Drover
“Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.” –Cormac McCarthy
“We must each of us bear our own misfortunes.” –Charles Portis
I.
Daddy’s body bled dust and scattered it everywhere like red clay,
marked up our lives like black-spit shine and saddle soap staining,
all he touched and spoke of: the rambling before the gate, the whiskey needed like a prayer before the falling into the shoot and the madness of his stories:
the bull and the rose and the anguish in his limbs for his family far from the rodeo.
When he returned at night, dark scampering over our beds and crippled,
he would hold my pillow as if it were a 1700 lb. bull in a bucking hysteria
and he would not relent, for love understands neither strain nor burden,
for I could see through the burnished blur of sleep what that holding-onto meant.
He was with us and even if sloppily, he untied his stories and corporal ache
into my ear and through the dreams as if delicacy knew nothing of weight.
No matter the sweat or sway of his addled head, he spoke to me before sleep.
Daddy always pulled his breath against what lay close
as if one word was assurance. He lived by that and all those scars.
He rode bulls and drove steer and buckled his body as economy and homestead.
Often in the morning, when Mama was sunburned by the acreage of his exhaustion,
he scare-crowed his way cross the kitchen, conjuring scent and tangled in a roped saddle, sticking to the splotches with which he worked the corners and creases of our home and his intentions,
thumb-smoothed away like callus indentations softened to the quick, bitten.
In the morning, the romance gone and his words like tobacco spit to leather shine
the meat of his palm and the way he held my chin like a steer’s bronze nose ring
kissing me good morning, as if my jaw were a branding brow.
He could not let go. But this was a marking of love and worry
and it was hard work and he knew that and the hope crept like a flashlight pointing in the dark, lumbering and my heart broke each morning.
But Daddy’s indolent pace was the grace of flight
just as his games to count the bruises that laddered their way along his forearms were an education in destination and devotion.
Do you know the number of callouses and chalking that mark your life?
A lesser man would have shied away from the trundling that came with grime
and rope burn and broken teeth and the flair up of the night.
He gave me that, not the ghost of a man but the earth and the dirt and the cavern.
The stretching of the threads of his body that made sense.
His voice at night through exhaustion while I wrangled with sleep
or the counting of the time he hugged the bull past the counting
that rattled like the wind that comes tonguing its way black and devious and forlorn from the top of the bowl-shaped hill shadowing its muzzle over the land.
Who does not bark out mad at the night?
Who does not find themselves in a corner all patched-over and whelped,
splintering from a high the park’s broken bones and hollering cattle?
Daddy taught me to be unafraid.
We fight the rusty tin of spine from the years of being thrown:
beast or land or river-run or death come as lasso.
The shaking in the trailer, the hunger from mouth to thigh, the words that shift
and shave us.
Call it love.
II
Once in the morning, a small clover of blood printed my pillow.
He must have told me a story before he fell to sleep, words replaced by clot.
That was harder to wash away than the crinoline sheets or the wan morning.
What ghost is so durable?
III
And we are born into the shape and space of a place from the moment our arms and legs waddle, suspended beneath the bulb of our parents’ breath, clothes-pinned in a fraction of a moment as if we a wire strung impossibly across an empty room, unmoored and levitating. The cattle and the midnight dreams.
IV
Once a boy in the back of a pickup, our bodies tender from the rust and the swelter and the lugubrious language of the land rising around us,
spread his fingers across my eyes and said:
“Look at the sky and count your way home. How much blue is there between my fingers and the front porch your daddy built from his broken body?”
I could not answer him.
But I was delirious and alive.
So I took his fingers into my mouth and that was the way I measured the distance.
And you?
IV
After Daddy died, I took to the prairie and bicycled the dust into the shape
of a fan: weathered the angles of dust and detritus into a conjuring.
And in that small stir up, I swelled a small bruise of memory,
part beast and part throwing, and I sang out to the fragments and the muck.
But it was so much more than those short words.
He had taught me to be brave and to count not syllable but markings.
There are no ghosts, no drovers, no loss but what the skin and earth give.
Grit as cartilage, true as twine and strap and song.
Thumb that as a bruise on a pillow.

Whose father does not canter away, in reckoning?

for: Lance Rosenfield and now for his son Levon Alan Rosenfield as well……..
a civilian-mass audience
March 22, 2016 at 9:28 pm

Congrats Dearest LANCE…!!! another Baby BURNIAN, I am a proud civilian…

and now I will continue reading BOBBY’S post…see ya tomorrow ,hihiho

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