gambol

I walked our dog in Burnet Park, where she gamboled in the snow, merrymaking and frolicking just for me, to give me a smile, as she sported in the fluffy lake effect snow. No. You're right. She did it for pure dog love, total abandon, canine self, yielding to the moment and the next the next the now.

a tree, a nest, and a pool

In an ancient rite of excommunication, a bell, a book, and a candle were employed. A 1958 movie starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, with Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs, borrows those words for the title, "Bell, Book and Candle." (I wish they had used the serial comma.) Today, on Tipperary Hill, I saw a Christmas tree with needles the color of copper (a hue not unlike my dog's hair) by the sidewalk (yikes! keeping a tree till Pentecost?!), a tiny bird's nest (sans bird's eggs) on the sidewalk a block away from the discarded Yule tree, and the swimming pool in Burnet Park filled with unnameable swimming-pool-azure water but absent of swimmers.

What, if anything, are we to make of these signs?

I do not know.

monarchy; the royal oui

I am walking the dog. Is it my dog? She was. Or is. (Can anyone lay claim to owning a pet? How could this lovely, loyal friend be deemed a  possession?) We are walking in Burnet Park, Syracuse, where we have walked dozens, probably hundreds, of times. It is daytime. We now walk this route less frequently in the Time of Estrangement. October sunlight. An ample, warm breeze. We are walking up the driveway, an incline, toward the golf course clubhouse, toward O'Leary Drive, where, soon, in December, the jangling bells and clipclop hooves of steaming horses will carry Christmas-celebrating families. Riding on the wind, I am arrested. (Not the dog; she keeps going, only halted by squirrels, who are busy and in abundance.) I am gasped by the sight of one monarch butterfly riding the wind, I see it glide and loop for maybe less than 3 seconds. Then gone. Not seen. A vision in broad daylight. Monarch. From the Greek, one who rules alone. Ruling the field of vision, ruling my heart and its beats. A sacramental sign. A sign of what, you ask? Of is-ness. That. Suchness. Yes.

quiet memorial

As you enter Burnet Park via Burnet Park Drive, just off Coleridge Avenue (so many authors celebrated on Tipperary Hill's street names! Coleridge, Tennyson, Whittier, Tompkins, Lowell, Emerson, Bryant), you see a stone slab, maybe six feet high, dedicated to those servicemen who died in World War II. It is a simple and quiet memorial. It has the words "hallow" or "hallowed" on it. It has the word "neighbors" on it.

And each year for Memorial Day, someone, quietly and dutifully and anonymously, makes sure that there is a flag in each flowerpot on either side of the monument, and red and white nasturtiums in the flowerpots, and red begonias in the flowerbed in front of the marker with two or three dozen names of the fallen.

I may be wrong as to what kinds of flowers those are, but I am not mistaken regarding the devotion of this person or these persons.

December Haiku Triptych

nightsnow crunch footsteps
silent flakes falling freely
white upon silver

pawprints on parade
alabaster carpet walk
canine stain, mine too

soft wind in the pines
garlands lighting Burnet Park
festival of bright

December Night's Walk One-Sentence Meditation

On a still, snow-crunching night with bright Orion's Belt (Three Kings or Three Sisters or Three Nothings or Three Anythings, take your pick) guiding us, the dog and I walked Burnet Park and its islands of nightshade green, its light show dotting the Happy Holidays (Unnamed) landscape of snow and ice and memories of June, both of us delighting in the jingly-jangly clip-clop clop-clip symphony of horse hooves, children's voices, and five ladies with Slavic accents in a cigarette-smoke-wreathed circle bidding us good evening.

Dewatering Hole

As I strolled through Burnet Park this evening, I was greeted by the shock of emptiness, an alabaster rectangular hole with black crosses painted at the far end. The pool was empty. Stark empty! On August 19! No lifeguards? (Back at college?) No cash? Where did all the turquoise madness drain to?And what did all the kids do as they approached the railings only to find this stark absence of cerulean-emerald shimmering in the heat?

Empty. Gone.

And summer, rudely hanging around, sweating.

Nightwalk

Walked blind for a while there

Letting the dog see my eyes

Closed for R&R (rest and repair)

Feeling the gravel as much as hearing

That bat swoop nightward

Dwarfing the traffic growl on Avery Avenue

What nerve those summers I worked with blind kids

Pretending I knew their ways

Eating night in monastic rooms

Tonight interrupted by outlaw golfers

Playing the green in youth's faithful madness

Stealing glee from the jaws of the coyote chorus

Sirening in their municipal asylum

Or merely partying Friday night

As beams from a skybound plane

Single me out wincing wonder

The Chronicles of Onan

Looks like Onan had some kind of field day. The ground at Burnet Park cleared and grubbed, scraped raw. Where the sumac and brush were. Stripped bare. But down toward the corner of Coleridge (yes, we also have Tennyson, Tompkins, Lowell, and other streets so eponymously named) evergreens were planted with stakes and wires to keep them straight. But back to Onan and his field day. Seed spread like a storm. A swirl of grass seed scattered over the freshened land. A feast of fecundity in waiting. Like insulation blown in. Teal paint. Snowdrift. Seeds. Seeds. Seeds spilled hurled thrown cast broad cast over the naked earth. The spilling of the seed as if in some kind of helter-skelter rampage, even splashed up against the bark of pines. Seed that does not look like seed but rather some cellular fabric dried snot greenish blue carpet. (Not nearly equaling the seminal production of unfettered youth. Ha! Nor arousing the Puritan guilt of finger-wagging dogmatists.) The seeds sleep. And wait. To whom will it matter if and when this protean blizzard ends up as dog-shit-riddled lawn, eye-catching landscape, dandelion heaven, emerald bedding, a fitting reverse tribute to Onan and his would-be offspring? (Seems this seedy syntax simpers and simmers as the wriggling ravings of an old man envious of tidal seminality.)

Diurnal Emission

It's been said, but can't help being noticed.

The eruption of spring.

In one day going from bud to blossom.

The redbud's lavender on the spiny fingers of branch.

The shock of the new: walking in Burnet Park, along the curb, a dusting of lavenderpinkpurple confetti-ish snow. From what from where?

The crabapple a few hundred yards away, casually blizzarding, I guess.

Photos?

Never.

Could never capture this new upon new upon tawny stale breath of wintergray.

The syntax of spring. The grammar of glory (grammar and glamour are related etymologically).

Deo gratias.

Snapshot

On a hillock by the park's entrance, a three-iron shot from my back door, stands a cluster of pines, in the city confines, and at the foot of these pines a bed of needles burnished a burnt sienna, beckoning me to lie down in their autumnal comfort, their soft cushion with last year's fragrances and brittle repose, so yielding, so inviting.

But I keep walking.

LIFE, continued

I've told you before of the graffito LIFE in Burnet Park, once there, then gone, scrubbed, scoured, painted over.

I saw LIFE again yesterday.

LIFE moved (to at least two places) over on Hiawatha Boulevard, Syracuse, not far from the imagined world of Destiny USA. Emblazoned in uppercase letters amid industrial detritus, debris, and abandonment.

I was grateful to see some LIFE yesterday. It gave me some hope.

Today I imagine LIFE was there, a little elusive, shrouded in twilight, but I did not see it directly.

I was cast into twilight. I am bathed in twilight.

I am living in a zone of twilight.

But LIFE awaits. . . as a statement, a fact, not merely posed as a question.

Lights Alive

Entering Burnet Park, at the top of Syracuse's Tipperary Hill, I noticed the presence of absence.

Missing were the strings of festive amberish-whitish lights draping several mature trees. More accurately, on closer inspection, many of these strings of lights remained on the trees but were unplugged, unlit. To paraphrase Hemingway, a clean, unlighted place. Darker, moodier in the night wind.

Higher up the winding drive, gone was the banner of lights, high up between two tall trees, announcing HAPPY HOLIDAYS, demurely (or cowardly) declining to declare exactly which holidays, as if the secular gods would gripe about the explicit nomenclature of the God-incarnate In Nomine Patris feast.

Some lights still shone.

Within the gates of the pool, an image of a toy train illuminated the space between two lifeguard stations, tall seats, sentinels overlooking a white and snowless empty pool, bereft of the excited jeering and obscenity and glee (mostly in Spanish) of its frolicking residents.

Back near the zoo, some trees or streetlights had, what?, snowmen or holly or candy canes brightly shining.

Sirens in the distance got the coyotes or wolves stirred up at the zoo, singing their own eerie siren songs.

In the distance, downtown, the Niagara Mohawk building (I'll never call it the NationalGrid building) and M&T Bank were wrapped in lights of green.

Spotting a skateboarder, with shorts on, passing me, I circled back to monitor him, wondering if that was a spray can in his hand.

Did he paint the now-gone LIFE graffito?

The echoes of his skateboard antics forced me to conclude, no, for now, he was too busy just skating along, skimming the surface, riding the landward wave.

Life, The Serial

On my misty, coolish dogwalk tonight, I noticed that the graffito of LIFE with the "i" dotted with an "x," on a small electrical utility shed, was gone.

LIFE, vanished, without a trace.

As if LIFE were but a dream.

I miss LIFE.

Where'd it go, now that its resident surface is scrubbed clean, freshly painted, pristine?

Can LIFE even exist on such a pristine surface anyway?

LIFE, I was just getting to know you. I was on the cusp of what you wanted to tell me, who put you there, and why.

Now, it's like starting over.