XXVI

Infinities away already
are your very slender body
and the tremendous dark of your eyes
where once beyond the laughingness of childhood,
came a breath of jessamine prophetic of summer,
a sudden flutter of yellow butterflies
above dark pools.

Shall I take down my books
and weave from that glance a romance
and build tinsel thrones for you
out of old poets' fancies?

Shall I fashion a temple about you
where to burn out my life like frankincense
till you tower dark behind the sultry veil
huge as Isis?

Or shall I go back to childhood
remembering butterflies in sunny fields
to cower with you when the chilling shadow fleets
across the friendly sun?

Bordeaux

Poem: "XXVI" John Dos Passos from "Winter in Castile" found in "A Pushcart at the Curb" 1922.
Photo: Tony Rohrbach

living for the weekend

walking through weirdtown
two gallons of 2 percent
around the corner from Hawthorne Strip
for some reason I wanted to
scribble that
still walking ten minutes later
and the connection comical
what a pair of jugs
and hearing the crack of a can
beer being opened by a bearded man
then within a powerplay's time
an eerily similar bearded man
imbibing with a bottle in a window
two bearded beer drinkers
what a pair of mugs
the world handed me these silly things
and so I give them back
like trading rugs

Poem: "living for the weekend" Robert Lescatre
Photo: Tony Rohrbach (Rider: Matt Olsen)

Keep not Fix'd and Rooted

Keep not standing fix'd and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.
In each land the sun does visit
We are gay, whate'er betide:
To give room for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide.

During my first years in the Sierra I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean; and forgetting his age, plans, duties, ties of every sort, I proposed an immeasurable camping trip back in the heart of the mountains. He seemed anxious to go, but considerately mentioned his party. I said, "Never mind. The mountains are calling; run away, and let plans and parties and dragging lowland duties all 'gang tapsal-teerie' We'll go up a canon singing your song, 'Good-by proud world! I'm going home,' in divine earnest. Up there lies a new heaven and a new earth; let us go to the show." But alas, it was too late,- too near the sundown of his life. The shadows were growing long, and he leaned on his friends. His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be let to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping. Anyhow, they would have none of it, and held Mr. Emerson to the hotels and trails...
...In vain I urged, that only in homes and hotels were colds caught, that nobody ever was known to take cold camping in these woods, that there was not a single cough or sneeze in all the Sierra. Then I pictured the big climate-changing, inspiring fire I would make, praised the beauty and fragrance of sequoia flame, told how the great trees would stand about us transfigured in the purple light, while the stars looked down between the great domes; ending by urging them to come on and make an immortal Emerson night of it. But the house habit was not to be overcome, nor the strange dread of night air, though it is only cooled day air with a little dew in it. So the carpet dust and unknowable reeks were preferred. And to think of this being a Boston choice! Sad commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism.

Poem and Prose: John Muir, "Forests of Yosemite Park" from "Our National Parks" 1901.
Photo: Sand Dunes, Colorado: JG

beatific

silver on ivory
que pasa
big toes keep time
thoroughly comme un citroyen
and films not fantastic
realite
listening and watching
earlier, to petit jean
in his mother's tongue
still adept of mind
but poor nonethless
full perhaps only of purpose
and for that pure
like the rippling solo
of Roach
coming up broadway
like a cannonball Adderley
star falling

Poem: "beatific" Robert Lescatre
Watercolor: James Gagnon

Happy May Day!

For Karl Marx, socialism is not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. It is rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization of man's nature as something real. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.

That Marx could be regarded as an enemy of freedom was made possible only by the fantastic fraud of Stalin in presuming to talk in the name of Marx, combined with the fantastic ignorance about Marx that exists in the Western world. For Marx, the aim of socialism was freedom, but freedom in a much more radical sense than the existing democracy conceives of it- freedom in the sense of independence, which is based on man's standing on his own feet, using his own powers and relating himself to the world productively. "Freedom," said Marx, "is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it...No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others. Every kind of freedom has therefore always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, another time as a universal right."

Indeed, one can only understand the concept of socialism only if one understands Marx's distinction between the true needs of man, and the synthetic, artificially produced needs of man. The principal goal of socialism, for Marx, is the recognition and realization of man's true needs, which will be possible only when production serves man, and capital ceases to create and exploit false needs of man.

Prose: Erich Fromm, from his book, "Marx's Concept of Man" 1961.
Bronze: Starr Gideon Kempf, currently on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.