August 20th, 1958 / Mercer County

On a long, still, heavy day
when a kiss tasted of salt
and sweat and the low sun
pressed the cotton to their backs and breasts
and ran in rivulets down their necks,
I filled my lungs with dog days
and sang my first breath,
raised by the smack of
a well-intentioned Baptist hand.

I came up out of the tobacco fields covered
in small red welts like chiggers under my skin,
tiny bugs of fear and paranoia that itched
for the calamine lotion of Ebenezer Baptist Church,
and I shouted out the hymns
(would you be free from the burden of sin)
while the ladies of the congregation
gave each other permanent waves
and stitched together patchwork pieces
of Vacation Bible School and come-to-jesus fabric,
biscuit-making, jam-canning women who won prizes
at fairs for their ability to produce perfect pie crusts,
while their men traded feed secrets
and hunted with howling coon dogs.

In the pitch-black country night
I lay under those redemption quilts chanting
the Twenty-third Psalm while all around me
the evangelical crickets jumped and sang,

and even they, it seemed, knew God.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats

More Dispatches from Kawagoe: Fuji Achieved

Due to exhaustion, lack of trail signs and the momentum (both physical and mental) of descending mount fuji, I climbed mount fuji more than once... My collegue and I decided to start at the first station instead of the fifth station. We are two men who wanted to massage our egos by saying we took the long route. However, the long route takes you through the forest whereas the short route starts at about 5000 feet, which is at the tree line for fuji. So we got to see some beautifuly forested areas before the barren mountain scenery took over. At first we were really dusting the guide books suggested amount of time it takes to ascend the mountain. Sometimes we walked the numerous legs in about half the time, others shaving off about a third of the time suggested. But we realized we were taking the long route and by the time the altitude and exhaustion set in we would need the extra time. Indeed we did. So before we left the forested part of the climb night had set in. But we were confident and kept our pace. Then the rugged mountainous part slowly began to appear. By the time we hit 9000 feet both of us were tired but we still had enough energy. Then at about 10,000 feet I hit a wall. It took me two hours to go a distance I was covering in one hour. The altitude and exhaustion was huge. I had been climbing for seven hours and I know the sunrise would not wait for me so I kept going, taking many many breaks. Finally I reached the top at about 4:00am sunday morning after nine hours of climbing. It was thrilling to be able to sit down and watch dawn turn into daylight at just under 12,000 feet. The top is not all that exciting. It has a crater and that is about it. So with out much to do we decided to leave, knowing that a long descend and a three hour train ride back to kawagoe where in our future. So we were walking and walking and walking when we noticed that the seventh station did not look the same as the seventh station that we had seen when we climbed up the mountain. So we asked some people and sure enough we took a wrong trail. We looked up the mountain and saw the station that we needed to be at to transfer to the correct trail and gasped. We needed to backtrack about 90 minutes and 2000 feet (from about 7500-9500feet). Neither of us was in any shape to re-climb a portion of the mountain but if we didn't we would seriously jeopardise our ability to get back to kawagoe. So begrudgingly we backtracked, found the right trail and quickly left the mountian. So I climbed mount fuji and I will probably never, ever ever do it again because it is two days later and I still feel tired, sore, exhausted, dehydrated, bruised, blistered, and sunburned. rich

Flight to New Orleans

Imagine seeing the heart clearly,
(when it used to be a ghost town)
like light,
moving through two panes
of unmarred airplane glass.


Before I knew of air travel
I could sense a flight plan forming,
could smell it, like a weather pattern
building up against the banks of my southern river;
cold fronts in my father's house, runways inlaid
with pieces of my mother's broken heart,
tornado warnings in my brother's eyes,
and when the storm hit
I flew up,
without license,
without instruction,
into the crowded night streets,
looking for lovers and strangers
to reflect me in the wet pavement,
to postition me in the blackness,
tethered, as I was, by invisible threads
of nothing,
to nothing.

I saw life beyond me, the shape of it,
the perfect cinematography of steam
whistling from a boiling kettle,
the heavy pulse of taxicab traffic,
the mottled flesh of a blood orange,
and I craved what I could not touch in myself
like a ghost who does not know she has died,
and the geography beneath me never changed,
never moved me,
and I was twisted into thin lines like neon,
colored only by the fragile glass around me.

I filled the log book with names
and kept track as best I could but
whole pages turned brittle and yellow,
and I tired of the plot, thickening,
like a forgotten stew on a cold stove,
and more's the pity, I found I was hungry
and could not,
as my ectoplasmic self,
consume enough vice to forget
how to breathe.

I dropped altitude and banked
over New Orleans, a parish that was used
to inclement weather, living below sea level,
and beautiful decay.
I re-entered my body at thirty-three thousand feet,
over the Atchafaylaya Basin, when I saw
the golden risingsun ribbon of the Mississippi,
winding its way toward the delta,
and as my heart settled back in between my ribs
I was aware
that I was no longer
afraid of landing.