FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Good work consists of habit. Lose a day and you risk
loosing the rhythm that drives you.
The regular daily Flight Plan will be
suspended for a few weeks while I'm away helping Webmaster Ken Blackie work out the design
and content of our upcoming STANYAN HOUSE web site. I hope you'll continue landing here
ever day though because Jay Hagan and Melinda Smith have chosen two poems from a different
one of my books for every day that I'm gone.
So, something new will be here every morning. The Thought for Today and the Notable
Birthdays will continue. See you soon.
Love, Rod
Two poems from
"The Beautiful Strangers" by Rod McKuen.
Brighton Two: "A Newly Painted Bench, 1980"
Standing, waiting, smiling in the line.
You were patient - while impatiently
I moved toward you.
A touch as slight as some single
spider's,
a name scrawled in a book
and you were disappearing,
fast as the steamy Brighton night
through the crowd, out of the door, away
leaving me to go on scrawling.
We knew, My God, we knew
without the running radar eye
whose signal never stopped
even when your back was turned
and you no longer looked at me.
Knowing isn't always good enough.
One of us should have been braver.
I cannot say how long it took
for that over-peopled crowd
to one by one go home.
When I emerged into the new May moonlight
the sidewalk still held faces asking questions,
and bodies with their arms outstretched
for handshakes and hand-holding.
You were there again
sitting silently against the wall
upon a painted bench.
I could only smile
perhaps a half smile, for in it
there was deep regret.
How often I've said no by saying nothing.
Life is passing with a hundred alternate endings
I will never know
because I only travel work to work -
not by choice or even need.
Although I preach the need for one to one
I seldom set in practice my own ethic.
Perhaps on some occasions I write down
these little tragedies
so that I'll commit to memory
times and places, fancied forms and faces
not for the reader's sake, but mine.
The heart says help me
but it does not say how.
The mind knows all the ways
but will not shift from idle
into thinking.
Not knowing, I'm observed, applauded
at a distance,
even as I am reaching out.
These arms are never long enough
to reach the sighted but unseen.
I go on traveling like a bullet
on luxury liners and late model limousines.
A cadre still commands my every move,
town to town, performance to performance, -
the chance of stepping from the stage
into a pair of waiting, wanting arms
grows more remote the more I grow.
I looked at you. I looked at you,
and if I failed to stride
to where you waited smiling
on that newly painted bench,
know that I'll regret my indecision
all my life.
You were a siren calling me
to some new shining sea,
and I was too wound up to listen.
And so on Friday night,
May sixteenth, nineteen eighty,
I left Brighton once again
and left behind a form, a face
that I had come a thousand
and a thousand
and three thousand miles to find.
As I was driven through the night to London
I sunk down in the backseat of the car
as easily as the dead slip into
newly hollowed graves.
- Chosen by
MS |
