What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?

Read Matthew 13:46 first: http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?search=pearl+of+great+price

I talked with my dad the other day. He is excited about me writing, and told me to keep it up and not let anyone bring me down. "There is something special about doing what you´re passionate about." What amazing parents I have. It´s surprising to me, how I realized I always loved poetry. And the perfect timing. The same "spirit" that fills me with poetry, and that poetry fills me with, makes me a better person, my best person actually; it edifies me. I´m so grateful for it. I think we can all find things like this in our lives, like the stones the brother of Jared chose for the Lord to touch to give him light in his vessel. I feel, for me, many important things will come from my pursuit of poetry. I feel an obligation to it as well as a supreme joy in it now. I feel a need to write almost as a calling now (not that I´m anywhere near where I need or want to be yet, but I´m converted to it now), one I´m very grateful for. I know it can be a hobby for some, but I feel/know it needs to be more than that for me. A way of life. I´m gonna be a poet for better or worse forever! Hope it´s not too disappointing to anyone. Haha. But if it is, too bad. I think it is very possible for all of us to lead our lives all the very different ways we want and be happy. And find other people who enjoy it. But I think it of utmost importance to be true to ourselves. If we are, the rest will follow. And it´s just as important to not only let others follow their dreams, but to rejoice in it with them and encourage them. Thanks to all the great friends and family who support and believe in me. Neruda wrote poems since he was like six years old. His dad was a construction worker and hated the idea of his son being a poet; he couldn´t understand it and thought that meant it was worthless. Pablo Neruda is a pen name Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto chose so he could start publishing without his father realizing it. Little did his dad know that he would become the most widely translated poet ever, and one of the most accomplished and famous. So, when your dream hits you like a seed sewn on the wind, be the good ground it takes root in and brings forth much fruit from, and don´t let persecution or the cares of the world choke it or carry it away. Let it live, help it blossom and with time it will be so established and such a part of who you are, that it will speak for itself, and birds will come to sing in its branches.

The Name Game

I'm gonna throw this out here to see if I can get a satisfactory answer, if there is one. A very serious question that has vexed me for about two years now, I think, or whenever that summer was I worked at Zinch.com and became randomly obsessed with Pacman (I found one of those little game boxes with a joystick and a couple of buttons that plugs into the TV while cleaning up to move out of Jamestown. Video games usually don't interest me very much, but for some reason Pacman had just what it took.). That summer I had a friend, Tanisha, who challenged me to a Pacman tournament. So here's the question. How do you play the name game with "Tanisha"?

Did you know . . .

A meteor can be any phenomenon in the sky (lightning, rainbow, snowfall, etc.).

And a meteor shower is a phenomenon observed when members of a group of meteors encounter the earth's atmosphere (knew that, but not the next part) and the luminous paths appear to diverge from a single point.

Sing

I came out this morning and Dona Ramona was doing laundry at the pila singing loudly and happily. I´ve never heard her sing before. I love it when people can´t keep from singing or dancing to the song inside them.

“Without giving anything away, I can say it's by the sea.”

The night before our trip to el Salvador, something happened to all the doors. I came back from watching some kids play basketball in the centro and went to use the bathroom but the door was warped and wouldn't close. The door to my room, which had always been warped and hard to open or close, swung easy, opening and closing without any problem. And the slide lock on the front door to the casita my room is in was kind of bent and hard to slide. I showed Suzana the bathroom door and she was just as baffled.

El Salvador was true to its name. We stayed in a surf resort right on the beach complete with a pool and really good restaurant . The first night I ate fresh mahi mahi caught that morning by the hotel owner. In a mushroom sauce. Soooo good. The restaurant is on a raised concrete platform right on the beach, and the waves wash up against it at high tide. Out in the surf a ways is a big lava rock formation. I'm guessing that the breakdown of lava rock is what has makes the sand black. However it happened, it's beautiful. When the water washes back down the beach it leaves sparkling trails of an almost purple or blue.

You could get lost in so much foam and never go home. I can hear it whispering on my shoulders like a sleepy lover. I wanted to slide out over its brilliance on a yellow surfboard at sunset and ride waves colored like flowers. Supposedly it's one of the best spots for learning to surf, but the waves were so rough while we were there that they weren't even offering lessons. Our second day we hit the beach to do some swimming and found out just how rough it was. I love playing rough with the waves though. I like diving right at the base of big ones and feeling all that energy bless my whole body and then stand me back upright. Or letting it slowly suck me towards it, and then, right before it crushes me, “sliding home.” Or jumping over top and crowd surfing. Sometimes I just take 'em straight in the chest and try to keep my balance. I had a flashback to when Aaron and Nate and I used to sit on the beach right where the waves would break, whenever there was bearable shorepound, and play chicken with the waves.

The rhythm of the waves gets down inside you. I let it move me for hours, singing, “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I'm feelin'.”

We met a couple of fellow travelers on the beach that had come to try and surf but weren't confident enough to go out under the current conditions. One guy (Bryce) was traveling with his girlfriend, and the other (Gabriel) was traveling around with his son (maybe 12 years old). We ended up meeting up with them on the beach almost everyday to hack the waves together. That first day Andy and I decided to leave and get lunch around one (it was like a two minute walk down the beach to our hotel) and they decided to stay a little longer. Leaving an angry sea can be harder than leaving a love-sick lady. Just ask Ruben Dario (I guess she was after his money though). You're not getting out until she lets you go. I think it took me half an hour to work my way back up to the black sand. We got our stuff and then realized we hadn't said goodbye to Gabriel and Bryce, who were now standing and talking in ankle-deep water. We were in middle of saying our goodbyes when a big surge of water rushed up the beach. I had my shirt in my hand and lifted it over my head to keep it out of the suddenly-waist-high water. “Keep that shirt hight and dry,” Gabriel said. But then I saw their faces and turned around to look. The backlash came fast and was even worse. I was the only one left standing. Andy got dropped hard and he had his moral (side bag) on with his camera and some of my books in it. Luckily he didn't get hurt too bad, and he has a really good moral so nothing got wet. I know it shouldn't have been funny, but I couldn't keep from laughing.

The next day we rented boogie boards. Gabriel said his place wouldn't even rent them with the waves like they were. But we gave it a go. Didn't work out so well though. I was trying to coach Andy a little on how to catch a wave, it was his first time to the beach, but I was barely keeping my own neck above water. The one good wave I caught left me naked on the rocks. No joke. But my strange ability to never bruise endures. We ended up leaving the boards behind because, oddly enough, it was easier to work the waves without them.

The beach was so beautiful at night. I got so caught up considering the great lily of the sky, I had a hard time going in before midnight. More like one thirty. I met all kinds of interesting people that way, including the security guards who I'm sure usually got tired and lonely on those late shifts. At least they seemed grateful for a new face and good old conversation. But I figure they too might often prefer solitary stretches alone with a world of beauty. So I never kept them long.

One night I was looking out over the beach from the edge of our hotel property. There was a crowd of people playing soccer a little ways up. Just past them the town's little stream ran down the beach and emptied into the waves. Just beyond that a senorita came walking down the beach in a white dress. There were two flood lights further down that cast solid parallel beams of light across the water all the way up to where she stood, staring out at the sea. The moon left a lazy trail of light in the sand around her. It all made for a spectacular, surreal scene. She just stood there in her white dress looking out at the sea. Every now and then she bent over and fiddled with something at her feet, and then stood back up and kept staring. I couldn't help it. I hopped down and started walking towards her. But when I got to the bank of the stream crossing the beach I got swarmed by the soccer players, many of which were drunk, but still friendly. I never made it to where she was. I noticed there were a couple of men and kids waiting behind her just out of the water's reach. Once the drunk soccer players left me, I stood on the edge of the stream for a few seconds watching in confused awe, and then walked back over by our hotel and searched for colored sea stones and got my feet wet. The wet sand feels so good on bare feet. Why don't we fill our houses with some kind of non-stick wet sand instead of carpet? And walls with lightning horizons.

One night I sat on the edge of the hotel's concrete barrier, dangling my feet and writing a little in my notebook. I sat there for awhile. Then another resident of our hotel came back from a walk and stopped next to me. “You alright man?” “Yeah, just enjoying the night and writing a little.” He told me that earlier a surfer got washed up on the lava rock and almost killed, but Jesus, one of the waiters, went out and saved him. He asked me about what I was writing, and what I was up to in Central America. Then we got into a long conversation about poetry. Turns out he's a high school English teacher and teaches a poetry class. And he's studied Spanish literature. He said he wanted to do comparative literature but he would have had to pick up a third language and he wasn't up for that. So he did English. We talked a little about the future of poetry, and how I wish there were more people that enjoyed long poems like Larry Levis and Octavio Paz used to write. About the lost art of attention. I gave him a few recommendations of people to read. A few quotes he really liked. He showed me the only tattoo that's ever made any sense to me. It was a line from one of Neruda's veinte poemas arranged in a ring on the inside of his left arm: Juegas cada dia con la luz del universo.

One night I was up wandering around the beach under the moon. The security guards kept telling me to stay close, so I kind of did. Eventually this Salvadorian man wandered over holding a wooden paddle wrapped in fishing line, his index finger tugging on a strand trailing way out into the surf. He was fishing for some fish whose name I don't know in English. We talked for awhile and then he asked if I wanted to try. So he got me all rigged up and let me loose. I tried casting as far as I could but it was hard to tell where it ended up. When he finally dragged his line in it had an eel tangled in it. He started talking about how someone had told him that kind was poisonous. I think it was just a normal eel, but it was completely tangled in the line, and he didn't want to take any chances, so he just cut the line and let it die on the beach. It was really sad. I pulled mine in hoping there would be nothing on it, and then cast it back out one more time. Andy came around about then to see where I'd been. And there I was fishing with a couple of natives. He laughed and said, “Your life is so random.” I fished a little longer. My fellow fisherman asked me if I had any pretty American girls I could lend him. I said, “I thought you were married.” “Yeah, but I love to fish and often hop from beach to beach.” I looked at him and said, “That's a metaphor, isn't it.” He just laughed and we kept fishing.

I ate mahi mahi three times, lobster once, and these really good kebabs with beef, chicken and the biggest shrimp I've ever eaten. Fresh squeezed orange juice everyday. And fantastic banana splits.

I stayed out in the water so long one day, my eyelids start to chafe from the salt.

El Salvador is overrun by butterflies. There were these solid-colored ones that would dance around the restaurant tables. All yellow, all wing on the wind. Deborah, one of the students living in another town, said that she read in the Lonely Planet that there are such-and-such thousands of species in el Salvador, and half of them are butterflies.

One night I left our hotel and walked down the dirt road to the restaurant next door to sit and watch the water. There were a couple of tourists sitting off to my right. To my left, the joint's owners and family and friends playing cards under a single dim light bulb. I sat on the low wall that met the beach and dangled my legs. Soon I was getting swarmed by little hermit crabs. I picked one up and let it crawl all over my hands and arms. Amazing and frightening all at once.

A couple of evenings I stayed in the water long enough to see the sunset. It was always worth it. The last time was unreal though. I stood and faced the ocean. To my right a soft, lovely sunset painted the horizon and spilled into the water and over the sand. To my left a huge storm cloud was rolling in with thunder and lightning. It was the craziest cloud I've ever seen. I stood there and marveled at the divided sky, soaking my feet in the warm ocean water, when cold rain began to fall on my shoulders. People started running past me to find shelter, and I just stood there and let it soak me. After awhile I walked back to our place and used the beach shower in the rain in the weather's contagious spirit of excess and extravagance. Then I jumped back onto the beach with a shirt and my camera (shirt to cover the camera) and took some pictures. That was a good night.

The bus ride to and from el Salvador was beautiful. I love long bus rides. Lately I've been thinking a lot about “coincidence.” I've been thinking that maybe the “uncanniness” in movies isn't so overdone after all. Sometimes you take a corner and cross a bridge and the muddy river comes into view just long enough to see a dark-skinned kid wearing bright red briefs jump from the banks and enter with a splash. Sometimes there are miraculous rescues. Sometimes your sister's car tips and rolls and she comes out untouched. Sometimes birds fly overhead at just the right moment. Sometimes a girl walks beneath your bus window wearing a shirt that says, in English, “Love Exists,” when you most need it.


Breathcatching Moment

In Santa Clara there are a number of homeless people that wander around drunk asking for money. Some of them are old couples. It makes me wonder what happened. Did they lose everything to debt and modernization? Were they abandoned by their own children? Yesterday I passed one of them on the way home from church. This time it was the old lady. She was sitting on the steps of a shop, gathering herself like she'd just woken up. When I walked by she looked up—her face was covered in scabs and crusted blood, her nose obviously broken—and smiled the most sincere good-morning smile. There was a distant, hazy look in her sunlit eyes, like she was just coming to from a good dream or a deep memory of happiness, which overflowed with her into the present and ended up pointed in my direction. For a moment she looked as tender and blessed as a loved mother. I felt weak in the knees, wanted to fall down and honor her “muchness”, to praise and thank her for what she'd unwittingly done for my own hopes. I know God lives.


Today Ramonita came up to me and grabbed my hands so I would lift her. So I tossed her up a few times and put her down, and she started to tickle me. We often play a game of who can keep from laughing the longest, or rather, who will laugh first. “Cosquillas,” she said, drawing the word out as she tickled me. “No tengo,” I said through clenched teeth. “Las vendi en el mercado.” “Por cuanto?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Cien quetzales cada una. Son buenas cosquillas.” I heard Suzana laugh out in the hallway.

I think I felt a small earthquake at like three in the morning.

What is up with the doors?

A Calcined Yellow Ocher

I woke up early this morning and stepped outside. The wind was going crazy, it was great. I spent a little time reading and looking through the old dictionary I bought in Antigua. I found a some phrases that I really like taken out of context, one of which is the title for this post.

lightsome
a continuous or intermittent signal for guiding navigators
a calcined yellow ocher
a sudden stroke of fortune
the existence of an ion or subatomic particle
the quality of being like

I went to breakfast and talked with Ramonita and Tat Lu for a bit, and then, because breakfast wasn't quite ready, took a shower (what else is there to do when breakfast isn't ready?). About halfway through, I realized that the songs I was singing kept morphing from one to the next all on their own. I started with Amos Lee "Keep it Loose, Keep it Tight," (actually woke up with that one in my head) and moved to Bob Marley. These two Bob Marley songs kept getting mixed together:

Rise up this mornin'; smiled with the risin' sun.
Three little birds perched by my doorstep
Singin' One Love! One Heart!
Let's get together and feel all right.

Then I caught myself singing "You're all I ever needed, oooo baby you're the one!"
And then, "That's why I'm eeeaaaaaeeeeaaaasyyyyyyyy. I'm easy like Sunday morning."

Singing Kalai in the shower is usually inevitable, but people are likely to think you a lunatic.

I had breakfast then, which was good and they gave me bread! I felt so good the whole morning. I actually had the feeling of being on the Oregon coast just beaming in me. Who knows why, but it felt great. I washed my hands at the pila and watched the light come through the peach tree leaves, noticing how light green they were, and thought (stating the obvious as usual), life is worth joy.

It was pretty cold this morning, and there was lots of wind. When I first put my hands in the water from the pila I was shocked by its iciness. It reminded me of wading Diamond Fork in Utah and dipping my hands in to gather pastel river stones. I remember once when we were hanging out on in the river at Zion Canyon, I reached down to lift a bigger stone while asking Andrea (her dad is an entomologist so I guess she's got bugs in the blood)if she thought there would be any nymphs in the river. Just as the last word was out of my mouth, I turned the stone over and heard Andrea shout, "wait!" There was a huge nymph on it called a helgamite, something like that, which is supposedly fairly rare, especially for that river. I love that river. Nice cool water running right through white desert sand, and sweet gnarled trees along the bank.

I also randomly remembered watching thunderstorms from our screen porch with a bowl of red grapes.

Snippets of ridiculous conversation
So I bought a thing of chocolate milk but the refrigerator it was in didn't seem to be on, and you can't ever trust the expiration date. But I gave it a go. I started opening it(it was a carton like the kind from the school cafteria):

Me: "I hope it's not warm and gross."
Andy: "Probably not warm, just gross."
(...)
Andy: "Bird crap!"
Me: "On your foot?"
Andy: "No my pants." Searches for the bird with his mouth slightly open.
Me: "Don't look up."

Then he starts throwing rocks straight up in the air to try and spook it off the pine branch but misses of course, and I end up getting showered with pebbles.

Later (Sometimes I mishear people. Or, often my brain will provide a quick list of all the words that are close to the sounds that were said, and I'll pick the most random one.):

Me: "Is there a water fountain in the Muni (equivalent of city hall)?"
Andy: "No."
Me: "There's a bathroom sink though, right(just joking of course)?"
Andy: "I actually did that in the ocean (mission) once."
Me: "You drank from a bathroom sink in the ocean once?"

Later:

Me: "I love the sky."
Andy: "You love this guy?"



I really do love the sky though. It was very impressive last night. The moon was almost full and the clouds made a meandering river of the sky. I want to write the sky. I like how Levis writes about the sky.

"I can understand Borges´s love for Buenose Aires, how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hands."

"muttering a language whose sound had winged lions in it, and birds cut into a wall."

-Walcott

Try to teach a Spanish speaker the difference between snickers and sneakers.

I heard Ramonita´s mom trying to teach her the difference between sheep and bee (oveja, abeja).

We went to a fiesta in Santa Maria to watch the crowning of the town´s beauty queen. They invited queens from the surrounding towns and cities too. Their traditional clothing was amazing, and lots of them wore wooden crowns carved into birds and lions and flowers. Too bad neither of us had our cameras. We also went the next night to watch a band and fireworks. On the way home the first night Andy started ranting about how the chicken here is always bony, that it can´t be that hard to take the bones out. “In the States we grow boneless chickens like seedless watermelon.” I laughed all the way home. I kept imagining live boneless chickens. I think I was delirious with seuño and hunger.

“They” say the most important part of a sentence, or a poetic line, is the end. Read just the last words of each line from “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” by Derek Walcott. They alone convey completely the soul\voice of his poetry, and are interesting enough on their own to hold my attention:

Together

Earth

Tongues

Up

Slopes

Streets

Sill

Until

Weather

Light

Sever

Drew

Ropes

Hear

Cries

World

Drawing

Eyes

Sleep

Light

Hill

Knew

Cawing

Chough

Concern

Belong

Love

Birth

Ones

Houses

Voices

Suns

Pause

Peace

Long

Or another poem:

Appease

Peers

Sphinx

Dream

Peace

Droop

Place

Stiffen

Drop

Drinks

Race

Pen

Begin

Rut

Leaves

Lives

Better

Academe

Just

Oeuvres Complѐtes

Or another if you´re still interested:

Canvas

Dissolves

Leaf

Wall

Settles eyes

Tongue

Further

Landscape

Rigour

Wall

Immortelle

Annunciation

Orange

Lantern

Frame

Green

Ache

Gnaw

Canvas

Smoke

Cloud

Pierce

Canvas

Commas

Rise

Feet

Dragon

(etc.)

“and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?”

I find it very interesting that these two poems are placed right next to each other in Mary Oliver's selected poems:

Magellan

Like Magellan, let us find our islands

To die in, far from home, from anywhere

Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,

Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.

Let us be heroes, or, if that's not in us,

Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?

And what is death but a refusal to grow?

Magellan had a dream he had to follow.

The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

And when the fever would not set him free,

To his thin crew, “Sail on, sail on!” he cried.

And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.

And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Going to Walden

It isn't very far as highways lie.

I might be back by nightfall, having seen

The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.

Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:

How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool

To miss a day away in the cool country.

Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a Green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.