Ode to Joy (welcome home, welcome home, welcome love so sweetly...)

as inaugural as virtually possible:

I am ever so happy to return to my home away from homes - Madison, The Ape Village, has claimed me again.

The first day back was reverberant, really. It blew my expectations for welcome away, in fact - a wonderful local musician connection with Tani Diakite and a wave of warm conversation and smooth hooka smoke on a crisp late August evening.

Delightful.

But the good comes with the bitter, I suppose - and I leave my first love in these opening moments. I guess one Mr. Steve Georgiou would say, "The first cut is the deepest..." I am moving on with a half-smiling, half-forlorn look on my face and not a hard feeling harboured in my heart. I just hope that feeling is held dear by both parties - and I think it probably is.

ANYWAY, enough of the philosophising. LET'S GET SOME smoke and clay a cookin' on the poetry burner! Strap on your spurs and let's see this through!

Here's one I like with the title, Anklung.

sway in the lean
teeming

a soap cuttle catfish
sunning in the brown below the water-line

I breathe in the sediment
the organic soupy drifting
and grow anew

sway to the creak and chiming of
anklung

tic-tack
throng k-tong

and flutter of flute song

a breeze that carries music such
bound in waves
upon the shoreline

bouncing along -
two feet
one foot

floating.

sip in the sunlight
I caught in my coffee cup
haul the lobster trap up the starboard side
and gasp for air

I breathe in the sediment
but freshly minced and aromatic
sage brush
and seaweed

one foot
two feet-
break into a run and
lolling,
arms criss-cross
lumber-ing
lumber-ing
ringing footsteps on the pavement

lean back for a while
and take root
absorb one's nitrogen fixation
and look at new sprouts forming,
budding out the fingertip

tell me a story of old oak wood and smoke
a room for platters of mulled wine and cheese
blink in rhythm
to banjo - or lute
carry me back to anklung

and breezy retreat-

so still, so still, so still....

...and dreaming.


•§•

night, y'all