FLIGHT PLAN

Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99

A Thought for Today

April is April and you are you. Never diminish yourself and your importance by being anything but 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 "Come to Me in Silence".

Vacant Lot

Coming through
the twice-cracked concrete
in the vacant lot next door,
a sprig, not quite a tree
but strong and growing stronger
surviving where a house
                 could not survive.
The house was trucked away
                            last Summer
board by board and brick by brick.

I never knew the family living there
as I've not had communion
with most communes
                 congregated on the street.
Anyway, a sprig -
                   not quite a tree
is more sociable than any family
save a family of grass.
Not as friendly
as a well-loved animal,
but equal to the task
of being loved
      and loving.

                          - Chosen by JH                            

A Fist Full of Snow / For J. D.

We must know each other
                 free and freely
the way we both pretend we do.

Your bowels and brains
must be as sure for me
as both my eyes.
You neck
as near remembered
as a home-town atlas.

Because I need familiars
I need you as a fact,
an absolute and not an act.

Passing through the sheets
and climbing down inside of you
even though you give back
one for one and more
some questions linger still
                           as questions.
Have I traversed
or gone climbing
down a shaft so new
that none, , not even I
have charted it before.

Have we been apart so long
that there's no getting back ?
Was there a curve
we didn't go around together,
one embankment one of us
             did not foresee ?
Worse - has someone else
been hiking down your highway ?

Change is change
unaccountable
but nonetheless surprising.
I had hoped
all our surprises
would be planned
             together.

There is
some silence here
like dead wood
         in the wood.
Moving only
          when it's prodded.
Silence made of snow.
The way the early Summer
is constructed out of rain.

This quiet is not of easy making,
but necessary all the same.

You move off
and I'm stopped still
arms akimbo, open wide
one tight fist remains,
contracting and expanding,
expanding and contracting
                 full of snow
full of water / full of snow.

                           - Chosen by MS

"Come To Me In Silence" was published in 1973 by Simon & Schuster. While "And To Each Season" my first book published by S&S was an attempt to come to terms with my mother's recent death, this, the second, was an exercise in exorcising demons - old and new. RM