Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Life isn't made up of great sacrifices, it comes from
little smiles and thoughtful kindness.
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 "Lonesome Cities," by
Rod McKuen.
Manhattan Beach
I've taken a house on Manhattan Beach
working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend
and brought some girls and some books.
The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer
and now they menace me stacked up on the floor
staring
back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I've had no visitors.
It's hard to sleep
though I try breathing with the waves.
It only makes me think
of our own breathing counterpoint.
At first I missed the traffic
then the telephone.
Finally I call back
a hundred more familiar rooms
and sink down past the pillows eye.
It makes me think I ought to try to buy
Songs and safe surroundings I know best
and keep them in a half-packed suitcase
for sojourns such as these.
Katie keeps me company
and brings back fantastic things
from her daily runs along the beach.
A weathered stick
a bottle with no
note
assorted other dogs.
She has, I fear, bad taste in canine friends
(the kind you say I've lately had in people.)
Still, lying by my bed at night
she smells like all the seas I've known
and that's a comfort to the sailor in me.
Will I see Capri again?
Hydra is just a name now
though once the big boats
filled the
harbor
and young Greeks made me dance
while up above the Suco-Suco
a boy of fifteen stretched himself
and caught me thinking ten years back
regretting not the gone-forever mornings
but wondering only how I'd live
another afternoon.
I nearly died that August.
Some fever made of lamb no doubt
or nightly walks along the harbor.
I stayed alive on summer squash and Coca-Cola
and wrote no songs.
No letters came that summer either
and I was down to eighty drachma
when I left the island.
Still I would go back
but not to Athens with it's tear gas for the masses
and bayonets -
the
buckshot of the upper classes.
Naples is the asshole of the world
(ah, but there's Capri.)
Majorca still has buggy rides
that take you to the sea.
Outside Katie's barking on the beach.
She's found a seal
that wants to
play.
- Chosen by
JH
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