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FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Love is such a gift that no one can write a proper thank
you note for receiving it.
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
Today's poems are chosen from "Too Many
Midnight's." By Rod McKuen.
The Keeper of Dreams
Sometimes I wake up early,
then looking at the clock
I try to sink back into sleep
and pick up the interrupted dream.
Not always easy but I try.
Dreams are tickets
through the longest night.
If I could
I'd steal from time
every summer that we ran through
every Sunday we slept in
each May morning we imagined
God has made for our eyes only.
Then I'd divide them all by two
keeping half, and giving half to you.
If I had my half of all those summers
to thumb through
maybe the keeper of dreams
would
help me dream up
all the other seasons.
The keeper of dreams.
The lender of hope.
Wherever he is,
he'd better come here soon
to hold me every bit as hard
as he's held back the dream.
- Chosen by J.H. |
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James Agge o
Floyd Cramer o Alexander Dubcek o Robin Givens o Jimi Hendrix o Caroline Kennedy o Bruce Lee o David Merrick o Bill Nye o Eddie Rabbitt o 'Buffalo Bob' Smith o Fisher Stevens o
Cornelius Vanderbilt o Mona Washbourne |
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Whistle Stops, Revisited |
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And still I go out slowly.
Out of habit, more than caution.
I pause at every landing
between the sets of stairs.
Finally I reach the door
then like a pale-skinned bather
testing water at the seaside
on the first warm day
I scrutinize the night
most carefully.
Will the dangers of the dark
be less plentiful this time
or still outnumber
all those small rewards?
I have been impatient
in the past
and in all past lives
but if age has not made of me
a man agreeable,
still I'm less demanding.
So much beauty walks
along the sidewalk
open
and inviting.
Where once it hid upstairs
beyond the halfway open curtain
or on the porch behind a fan,
it now fans out around us
like connecting lily pads
that float along the edges
of forbidden
pools.
And so it is.
We must continue looking.
Not always just to find,
though that is a way to force ourselves
to join the others at the curb.
For me at least,
I think I am more concerned
that if I lower my binoculars
or once forget to dust my telescope
I'll lose my place.
There are always others.
Some with needs immediate.
Some who wait their turn.
Some with needs far more essential
to their heads and hearts than mine.
Some who do not, will not look at me
even if I trip them with a smile
or nudge them with a grin
and some who spring
like springbok from the underbrush.
Who does not go home alone
more often than with someone
seen and needed?
But there are those who take in love
as easily as umbrellas close.
Perhaps they have more practice
in the art of catching others' eyes
Could be their standards are relaxed
or put off
out of need.
Far from thinking ill of them
I wish them well.
Cities and the city street
conspire to hold dark secrets.
For some of my life
I have been helped and harbored
by that knowledge.
Not only me
but those I met or knew
or never meet but wished to know
have found a willing confidant
on certain city streets.
The canyons that surround them
have protected one and all.
But did protection
ever really worry me?
Not honestly,
except perhaps when I was growing
and stayed within the shadows
from the bully,
until I learned that bullies
all have three dimensions too.
Even in the taking
the meanest give back something.
A lesson maybe.
That kind of fear
has long been absent,
replaced by new rejections.
Do I now enjoy the solitude
I always fought so hard against,
or do I go on marking time?
No excuses seem appropriate.
But I have had helpers
those who were compliant
in the deed.
Shoo! Be gone! I wish to tell them
for I am making ready for a journey.
Not one, I think, but many.
I'm aware that I've been
hiding.
Too long to remember.
And I will not deny
I helped create
whatever outward image
the world
or even those
who after hiking through the
subterfuge
and finding me, still have.
But I never meant it
not really
what I wanted most
and still go seeking
is accessibility.
The same accessibility
I hope those coming
through my life and near to me
will find I have
or try to have.
I cannot live up to an image
but then who can?
Even Image Makers
sometimes slip on their own turf.
I've gone skating sometimes
on ice so thin
I thought the next glide
up ahead
would pull me down
and spirit me away.
But I nearly always
got back home to safety
some way, always, just in time.
Like Buck Rogers in the serials
or both the Hardy Boys
I made it to security.
The perils soon forgotten.
The breaks and bruises
on the inside,
some too long in healing
will with some new feat
accomplished
some new derring-do well done
finally heal themselves-
or so I keep pretending
even when each new experience
seems like a millstone, not a milestone.
The walls I scaled
for whatever reason
I leapt up to like a cat.
Only once
did I jump down hard enough
to break both legs.
Guidewires high and thin
were always mine to walk along
without provision or a net,
I rode the ridges
wise enough to be a westerner.
When caught pretending anything
the lie of pleading learning,
was never disbelieved.
In truth
I am a learner
though I seldom read instructions,
I write the check to pay the fee
and pocket the permit.
I'd rather hit apprenticeship head on.
Only by working can we work
only by practice is life lived.
Only by loving do we become
fit to love.
I confess.
I should have gone out more.
I should have crossed the street
and left the block more often:
had I done so
I'd have less to wish for
I'd know more
of what there is to know.
If I'd traveled
without Sunday to Sunday
work to work
I'd not ever have the need
For some one, something new.
I would have found--
if I had taken the time to do so
some body in all the somebodies
that I could have given
this locked-in, often useless thing
that I pass off as life.
Given and corrected,
straightened up and straightened out.
Because it was not made for me,
but for someone,
it often doesn't fit.
I stretch it too far sometimes,
and there are times
I fail to give it room enough
to grow
as lives will grow when left alone.
All that could have been
corrected and set right
If I'd gone traveling
and wrote more notes
instead of taking cards
and address slips
that never quite survive the laundry.
What did I learn
when I did go traveling?
That I could die an easy death
or live a life most bountiful
if I could lie forever motionless
within some known or unknown arms
that wrap me up within the kindly night
and leave me for the morning's mischief.
I am only one more man
trying diligently
and with as little desperation as possible
to make it safely through
but one more day.
Life is not unlike a whistle-stop.
Better hurry. Catch the train
or leave it.
And within each life
are dozens more
of little pauses,
breath catchers,
time takers,
tin woes,
death.
- Chosen by M.S.
"Too Many Midnights" was first published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon
& Schuster in 1981. |
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