Solstice Fantasizes Read online



  Solstice Fantasizes:

  Poems & Prose

  By King J. Dykeman

  License Notes

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  The Poet on a Late Winter Solstice

  Amazing: out of the window he sees the shadow of his long dead beautiful mother,

  The gift of a perfect analemma or some diurnal motion from another planetary system?

  A phenomenon which quickly turns itself into the vision of a golden leafed weeping maple tree,

  As this tree ellipses itself through a thick medium of white beach roses to the blazing redness of a Japanese maple

  Solstice 2008

  The spaces in the old rock fence are best seen

  As the sun shines on the snow behind the rocks

  So too in this solstice the holes in my life are

  Seen in the whole as beautiful – no longer losses

  No longer weaknesses, neither bad nor good

  Only brightly white wise reflections

  What I missed and where I failed are now assets

  Relieves not sorrows - no longer regrets

  And my coming days are all gifts

  Their challenges to come as well

  Happy Winter Solstice!

  2013

  Old balls - old balls, once again;

  Another perfect analemma.

  Everything split equally.

  Why this way this day? Ask the perfect one!

  Perhaps some divine eternal force?

  Perhaps another planetary system?

  I DON’T KNOW?

  At The Break of Dawn on an Early Winter Solstice

  At the break of dawn he walks out of the dilapidated summer cabin into the cold clammy rain on the way up a steep slippery path.

  The outhouse smells more and more as he goes up the muddy dirty way, even though the sad sounding pitiful pines weep.

  Suddenly the eclipse …the axial door springs open… his wino father has come home dirtier than the path, more stinking and sickening than the outhouse itself.

  The father calls out to his son: “HAPPY SOLSTICE!” They do not know that they are at their perfect aphelion.

  THE TWO MARGRETS

  When I first came to Fairdale there were two women at the Friday night meeting named ‘Margret’ so naturally to distinguish them we called one ‘Tall’ Margret(T-M) and the other ‘Short’ Margret(S-M). They were both rich but the smaller one was bawdy and loud and the big one was snotty and kinda squeaked when she talked. . They were both sent to meetings by famous doctors: ‘Tall’ by Dr. Silkworth and ‘Short' by Dr. Tiebout at Yale. Both of these doctors believed that their patients who went to meetings stayed sober a lot longer than those who didn’t. Dr. Silkworth treated his patients with medicines in the hospital. Dr. Tiebout practiced dream therapy and attempted to influence the extreme self-tenderness of alcoholics who he referred to as “King Babies.”

  These two women were full of early program stories. Every so often T-M would tell the story of how her St Pete or Clearwater group who all at one time had the same anniversary date. When the snowbirds came down to Florida and rejoined their group someone had just celebrated a year in the program, so after their meeting they all went down to one of the guy’s large sailboat. After a while someone came up from the hold with some booze and they all ended up getting drunk. They then marched down the main street singing songs and getting arrested by the local police forces. Some of them came back the next winter and stated that they had not had a drink a day at a time since the group drank on the sail boat. After the meeting they went to a diner to celebrate the one year anniversaries.

  My two favorite S-M stories are, first, the one about her parents sending her to the Federal Penitentiary when the chauffeur picked her up for the Christmas break from a very exclusive private girl’s school in Vermont. The year before she had walked away from the Connecticut school and made her way to N.Y.C. for 3 days. The Vermont school was way back in the woods and had strict orders from her parents that only the chauffeur that brought her could pick her up for the Christmas Break. He did but then went over the road into New York State.

  S-M immediately asks him “Why are we going into New York?”

  He replied “We have to stop at Sing-Sing prison.”

  “Why in hell do we have to stop at a prison?”

  “You remember Chef Ragatony? He was convicted of making and selling liquor. Now no one in his family knows how to make the best homemade scotch in Connecticut. So your parents and some of their friends have spoken to the warden so that you can come into the prison as Chef’s niece, get the recipe and the instructions for the Christmas hootch and his brothers will make a Christmas batch.”

  “Oh! That will be fun! She squealed.” [Actually she knew already that chef had been arrested for bootlegging and that the powerhouse folks had got him off on state charges.]

  S-M loved to tell that story. And it was almost the same every time she told it.

  Her other best story was about her husband sending her up to Yale for Dr. Tiebout’s dream therapy to treat her alcoholism. She liked him and had fun writing down her memories and discussing their possible deeper meanings and the relations those meanings had on her drinking, The Dr. recommended that S-M attend the meeting close to their home. This turned out to be on Sunday morning at 10am at the big UAW union hall in the metropolis closest to Fairdale. Her husband asked her if she wanted to go there. She said sure. S-M was not only a very active society woman but also a very important socialite. So the chauffer drove her downtown to the union hall and parked the limousine. She told him to wait there. Off to the meeting she went. There was a guy making coffee, another putting out ash trays and literature, so S-M lit up. Then a bunch guys came in and sat at a couple long tables. They read some instructions then started talking about sobriety and not drinking. After a couple more guys shared the next guy started yelling at the leader. All of sudden the angry guy grabbed the leader and they started punching one another. Another guy stood up and said something, and then all the guys started saying the “Lord’s Prayer.” A few guys started picking up the ash trays

  and the furniture. She got up and went down to the limousine and the chauffer asked her how it went. She said it was great. She came home and her husband asked her what the meeting was about. She said “what was said there and done there remains there” but for sure she hoped next Sunday would be as great as it was today.” S-M always claimed if the meeting would have gone any other way she probably would never have gotten sober. S-M loved that group and by that time she was going to a number of meetings every week. Her saddest time was when the union hall meeting moved. All meetings change personality over the years and many change their character when they move.

  We bought our first house a few years later and I went to meetings around my new house 20 miles or so away. I stopped seeing and hearing the two Margrets. I wish I stayed around because I would like to tell both of them thanks one more time. I do not even know when they died.

  Mudslide

  I felt a rumble; heard

  A strange rumbling noise

  Felt the car getting a push

  I step heavily down on the brake

  Then on the gas pedal

  Smelled burning rubber

  Feel my right hand held to the steering wheel

  My left hand is braced against my ear

  There is a an air bubble caught in the zipped up sleeve of my rain jacket

&nb
sp; The back window has a part of a tree with blasts of rain and mud bursting over the back seats

  I am sticking this phone down my jeans into the crack of my ass,

  If not there then try the air bubble in my sleeve jacket.

  THANKS TO WHOEVER FINDS THIS PHONE.

  THANKS TO ALL WHO LOVE THIS BEAUTIFUL LAND OF OURS.

  II

  …I must have been 5 or so when my Uncle Buck picked me up at the Everett Train station with his kids in the big car: Buck Jr., Ruthie, Kathleen and baby Alex. These were my favorite cousins. My other highly regarded "Uncle" was going to be there too. His name was Jack but he wasn't really a cousin but so much older that we called him "Uncle". Jack was a lumber man who started helping with the cutting then became a slider getting the logs to the river and then a miller at the lumber yard. He was a kind of "John Wayne' for us; strong, handsome and sure of himself. And his wife was like a beautiful movie star!

  It was raining lightly with the sun peeking through every so often.

  Uncle Buck took a fast turn up the steep gravel mud driveway with rain water splashing off on both sides. He pulled up to the garage doors. There it was, a huge boat rope with a giant knot hanging down from a tall Douglas fir which swung over a fast dropping hill. We jumped out of the car, Buck Jr and I, on the way to the rope. Uncle Buck yelled "Wait a minute"! Everybody stopped when Uncle Buck shouted. "Get in the house and change your clothes before you ride the rope". In and out we were. What excitement was this, sailing over the steep dropping hill of rain water and mud, getting so tired that you eventually fell off the rope laughing and trying to keep the dirty mud off your eyes and out of your mouth, all the while struggling up the hill with the gang laughing at you.

  I am sure I pissed my pants, I was wrecked. It was the first and one of the best highs I ever had. And the bruises were beginning to show as I showered.

  ... The next morning I was really aching but couldn't wait to get out to swing on the rope and crash into the mud slide, experiencing the pains and the unique pleasures of crashing into the pine needles on broken branches and sharp sticks, laughing all the way.

  I told my Aunt and she informed me we were going to Mass, then to the Everett train station to send me back to Portland to go back to school on Monday morning.

  As time has moved on I have begun to understand the perverse pleasures that this first mud slide gave me. The rush of the endorphins, throwing myself with laughter and escaping the fears, resentments and realities that I was powerless over. Every fiber was alive, independent of outside conditions and of what was going on about me. I was the creator and the cause of all that I felt.

  III

  A number of years later when I was at one of the Blackenbournes’ summer Potlucks right outside of Seattle, I asked Buck Jr. whatever happened to “Uncle” Jack. He quizzically replied “Who?”

  Ruthie jumped in and said “Uncle Jack” wasn’t his real name. He was a lumberjack married to a Blackenbourne cousin. All lumberjacks were called that by Dad. Seafares considered themselves superior to lumberjacks; like the Army’s Green Berets’ consider themselves better than the Navy SEALs or Army parachuters consider themselves better than Army heavy or line infantry or Navy fighter pilots better than Army fighter pilots.

  Dad says that “Uncle Jack” was an angry barroom fighter, a ladies man, yet our cousin married him and they had a couple of children but drinking and philandering was too much for the Blackenbourne cousin and she finally went back home to Seattle.

  “Jack” was more in love with the lumbering man’s life, to the excitement of it all, the unpredictability, the fighting, the roughness and most of all with the rush of the Stillaguamish river and the absolute beauty of Snohomish County.

  The three mothers of the six children born from him all left for an easier life.

  To enjoy the next verse please download Powerlessness.

  Eightieth Birthday 1

  Plenty to do. Passion to do it.

  Survived two bouts with Lymphoma,

  In my early seventies, but back it came.

  Had a stem cell autonomous transplant at 76.

  Tough recovery, retired at 78.

  As a number of younger friends died,

  Became secretly ashamed of my survivals.

  Car wreck, bone broke, five months in a cast.

  No driving, having to ask for rides for everything.

  Hate asking, hate more loss of autonomy,

  Having to ask for help with dizziness, fatigue,

  Falling down, knocking over coffee pots, etc.

  Love writing, going to meetings,

  putting together new and old ideas.

  Loathe days of nothing!

  Like now.

  What can I do?

  Age is cureless!

 

  To read Birthday 2 please download Powerlessness

  TWO DAFFODILS-ONE WHITE, ONE YELLOW

  EARLY THIS MORNING TWO DAFFODILS, ONE WHITE, ONE YELLOW ARE STARING AT ME FROM A SMALL VASE INSIDE THE KITCHEN WINDOW. WHY ARE THEY DELIBERATELY FOCUSED ON ME?

  THE GRAY RAIN IS POUNDING AGAINST THE OUTSIDE OF THE WINDOW. SO WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

  AM I SUPPOSED TO GO OUT AND GET THE PAPER ON THE DRIVEWAY?

  OR MAKE MY WIFE A CUP OF TEA?

  DAFFODILS ARE DANGEROUS, ESPECIALLY EARLY IN THE MORNING!