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Aborted Conversation with God
Most every day now, when I'm only partly awake and still lying in bed, I have some type of conversation with God. I don't mean to sound boring here, or to plagiarize - in fact I've never read the book and don't care about it. But the phrase struck me as more than obvious; except what I mean are more than some unusually revealing interchanges of words and thoughts. They have scenes, a backdrop (like a waterfall in Brazil, or a substance abuse counseling center in Nashville, more recently), and maybe another character or two, a little suspense, a romance if there's time.
This morning was more straightforward though: it was still dark, around four o'clock, and we were putting on our winter boots together in the foyer of my apartment. He had some serious waterproof insulated hikers, late model REI's I think, and teased me about the cheapies I found last year on overstock.com. We were heading out into a blustery, icy day so that I might chew his ear about whether certain things are inevitable --taxes, death, and I think something about the planet. Anyway, a good sign you're dealing with God is if you keep running up against a wall. The phone rang and it was for him, so I knocked on the bathroom door. It was completely quiet. I checked around and it seems he must have squeezed out the tiny window -- would be the only way -- and slipped down the darkened street. A post-it note on the sink reads, "Had to split, man, tell you 'bout it later."
FIRST SALE
It's 2007 and we've sold a grand piano to some outfit on Mars, our first sale of the year. We don't even know who they are -- it was an anonymous order straight off the Web, Visa I think, and they hardly left anything in the comments section, just "ASAP please, and regards". Okay, whatever, my sales lady said. Also it was needed for a concert and they'd be sending their own movers. So we started prepping the instrument, and then decided to make a national live-audience show of it. I must say I never felt so proud, and was sure to reserve the grand finale tuning for myself. We made a point of pacing about busily on the town hall stage, balancing our looks of grave concentration and easygoing patriotic mastery, sorting obscure tools, deciding on critical adjustments, checking our watches. Personally I made sure to walk the aisles and catch the cameras' views, kissing babies andÊwinking at barely legal teens. Then, DAMN!! News came down that the movers had gotten stuck somewhere near the moon, and we would have to do the shipping. That's when my grandmother showed up, bless her heart, and that trickster smile of hers. She had a DVD about some portal in Northern Alaska, a silent cosmic underground, bypassing customs, where Eskimo women carry off all manner of things on sleek, beautiful white canoes to the outermost markets.
Snow in Santa Fe -- December 2006
Total stillness, total silence -- I mean, complete! For once, I feel like I belong somewhere. Four to five inches of unexpected snow just blanketed the town overnight and into the morning, and our little side road here never looked or felt better. Even my refrigerator for a few minutes seemed to have paused from its robotic on-and-off droan, perhaps to listen to the world for once, to witness this scene, and show its respect.
Seemingly in this child-like rapture I'd veered too close to making a false idol of Nature. The guy living right across from me, Catholic no less, and his yelping dogs stuck inside for once, wanted to make sure I got the message. He'd hoisted himself over or through the mounds of snow by his door, cleared enough room to get in his truck, and is now blasting those thousand-watt sub-woofers through my fragile communion -- with snow, self and emptiness. Man over nature. I reached for my earplugs and put them in, as the heart-beat thump of bass shook the door and walls and rattled my imagination. The snow had stopped. But I dared to not grimace for a change -- not, for once, feel offended or disappointed -- and moved to a window at the rear of the house. I thought of Mother Teresa's words: "People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway."
And back in the woods, very gently, the snow was falling again.
Notes Upon Incidental Conversation with Crusty Pastor
If you cannot talk and joke and rhapsodize,
digress, doubt or elegize, rap and riff
about your religion, your faith,
the way you might do so about other things--
your job, your lovers, your hobbies,
those idiosyncracies and infirmities--
then something is missing, something
is wounded in your appreciation of things,
something remains wanting in your heart
and voice;
something is missing --
a levity in the limbs of soul --
and your ministry for God, to
all beings and things,
fills the house but half-full,
and is only of so much solace,
so much surprise and service
in this strenuous time.
Parsimony: Two-Part Etude
(i)
- I've spent three years spending no money
And still I have
shameful little
to show for my parsimony
(ii)
- "Parsimony": persimmon with a
sprinkle of cinnamon,
Or, a sprig of parsley
with cardamom?
- Afterword: Reader's Comments
a) Didn't you mean to say,
- Sparse homilies for the homely hominy?
And why did parsnips not figure in the drama?
--Wade Appleby, Boulder, CO
- Intriguing! Well conceived and frolicsome.
But why was there no mention of The Paris Symphony,
in a simian ecstasy?
--Puzzled, Daphne Nordquist, Levittown, NY
Credo
I don't care who you are
Or what you believe, or don't believe,
Your faith or your hardness of heart, or
How you got there.
In the end, readily or reluctantly,
we know the same ineluctable things.
That the parking lots are too big,
the mega-stores too many,
That the water is toxic, and the air too;
- and that we're living, or existing, on borrowed time;
that the public has been bought, hacked, numbed,
- dragged off,
That mind, love, imagination, are trademarked, privatized.
That a hundred thousand questions go unasked and ridiculed.
And most everyone I know now is lonely, languishing,
confused, walking home from the rush hour train
to a family stressed and strained
at the beginning of the close of this
vast and vicious, merciless cycle
of violence and denial.
TO DO
Deep knee bends,
Pelvic thrusts,
Sort pocket change,
Remove lint,
A turn of phrase,
Several turns of phrase,
And a hermeneutic circle.
The Veil
Between night and dawn,
between the seen and unseen,
where my eyelids first flutter and hover,
- still combing, scouting, traversing the inner skies--
Shaking crystalline, inchoate thoughts
from this tree of dreams and
swaying psalms.
Scattered Senryu (Haiku)
What would you choose if
You could have five syllables
On a desert isle?
How to know something?
Pray, breathe deep, and intuit--
Unclench striving mind
Oily morning hair
Waste-product of the dream-soul
Sweating images
Scandal and fashion
Two poles of cultural kitsch
In between, boredom
Park bench repartee --
At self, in pigeon Yiddish,
I lash back, "You schmo!!"
Noel Kaufmann escaped to Santa Fe, from the bowels of the beast, the DC region. Originally from New York (Queens) he's always loved the mountains here, and though a wanderer, could possibly stay... You can keep him solvent and happy with creative free-time, by contacting him for piano tuning and repair. Noel, especially in this moment, finds himself writing less and less in the first person and more and more consistently in what he calls, with admirable succinctness, "Paragraphs: prose poetry, philosophical musings, cultural rants, absurdist slants, epigrams and innuendos." His turn-offs are oily skin and human rights violations, and his website is http://noel.creativedojo.com (Updated: June 2007)
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