Reading from my computer, at the Wikipedia site, “…if a story has a character arc, the character begins as one sort of person and gradually transforms into a different sort of person in response to changing developments in the story.”

And reading from my heart, at some ineffable depth, the moral of the story is that we shall all come around to our best selves, maybe in the twinkling of an eye, or maybe over millenia, but we prodigals, all of us, have a welcome waiting.

6
Wave born of water,
Mother Ocean sets us free.
Sunlight brings us home.

 

 

As per Original Design, our gratitude and blessings for its balance, alignment, measure, equality, and perfection.

7
Bird’s wing on the left,
another on its right side–
Juxtaposition!

 

My little dog Bobby, explores his world. He’s almost two years old. He’s still learning. His curiosity is as pretty as a flower blooming in some old wooden boat hull.

Here around the Roughdraft Cabin, along the banks of Waterhole Branch, I don’t strap a collar around Bobby’s neck. He’s not on a leash. I keep an eye on him. In the long shadows of a late afternoon I could see him down the hill, fifty yards away and safe. Then the big owl who’s the boss of this stretch of creek called for twilight to settle into the tree tops.

The owls in these woods have a wing span of maybe five feet. Suddenly I wondered could such an owl take flight with a twenty-pound dog. I was about to whistle Bobby home, when the smart pup settled the issue himself.

8
Sing, Who cooks for you?
Barred owl’s voice from a branch.
Little dog runs home.

 

 

I’m reading a book by a Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, whose contemplative works I discovered during my Catholic phase. It’s called The Naked Now, and is an invitation to see as the mystics see, those women and men in any age and from all religious traditions who share a gift for not peeving about the past or fixating on the future. It’s a mystery to me how they do it.

15
Tick-tock, clock, tick-tock.
With ears to hear the works, makes
time’s tricks convincing.

 

 

My immunity to the winter cold has gone south like so many honking geese. Time was, when I’d hie off to the beach in January, and on my birthday, deck out in my swimsuit and run into the frigid surf. And, so what if my breath got sucked into the bottom of my lungs and threatened never to come up again.

Now just thinking about it makes me draw up my shoulders and stroke the chill bumps on my arms. My grandfather used to say, “I don’t hold my heat so well anymore.”

Driving down the road the day before Christmas, I saw up ahead a rotund, balding man who was somewhere north of 60 years old, strolling out to his mailbox wearing shorts, rubber shower shoes, an open Hawaiian shirt layered over a wife-beater. It was in the low 40s outside. He threw up his hand as I passed, smiling at me warmly like I was an old pal.

And it occurred to me that even the hard truth of a thermometer is still sometimes a matter of perception. But I wonder can I really change my mind about being cold?

Sounds harder than an amiable discussion with my friend Bruce about our divergent views on politics without wanting to push him face-first onto a fire ant mound.

On the other hand…

23
A knock at the door.
Winter wind comes in the room
for a fireside chat.

24
Gray and foggy morning.
Cold clouds settled on wet ground.
Coffee warms my cup.

25
Cold snap turns the leaves,
frogs and lizards burrow down,
hearth fire’s smoke goes up.

 

 

Seated opposite each other in a cafe booth, a man and a woman had cell phones in their hands in front of their faces. They stared expressionless at their screens, thumbs poised, or moving. A thousand miles away from the real-time moment in the cafe. I let the scene dissolve and come back into focus. I imagined them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing one Samsung Galaxy between them, laughing at a family video posted on Facebook.

26
Old woman, old man,
sitting knee-to-knee in chairs.
Both of them asleep.

 

My fourth grade report card had a note from the teacher to my parents.

I have it in my desk, a trophy from my childhood. The teacher wrote, “Sonny hits snags in arithmetic, closes his mind at times, and reasons only one way. He denies that two plus two equals four. He will have troubles in basic math until he trusts the way numbers work.”

The teacher’s prophecy still holds. And yet.

I fell in love with a number because of the way it works.

In a required college math course, the teacher explained that when you add together the digits in some number, and keep doing it until you reach a single digit, that number is called the digital root. Say, 346257. 3+4+6+2+5+7=27, and 2+7=9.

Now, she said, do the multiplication tables with a 9—times any number. The digital root of the product always adds up to a 9. Try it.

It boggles my mind even more that multiplying 99, or 999, or 9999…times any number has a digital root of 9.

Crazier still, to me, is if either of two multipliers has a digital root of 9, the product has a digital root of 9. Like 72×3=216, and 2+1+6=9. Or, 324×902=292,248, and (yes) those numbers add to 27, which reduces to 9.

It doesn’t work that way with any other number. Not 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, or 8s.

The weird behavior of a 9 makes me love the number.

But I love a 9 even more because it has showed up in my life in meaningful ways. Two examples: the address of my Over the Transom Bookstore was 9 North Church Street; and the address of the Wolff Writers’ Cottage is 9 North School Street. The latter is the address of a non-profit I founded called the Fairhope Center for Writing Arts, a little bungalow to use as a retreat for writers-in-residence. When the site was chosen, the address of the abandoned building was unknown.

I also love the shape of a 9. Make a big 9 in the air with your finger. Do a single line starting with the tail, or start with the head. See?

So, of course, I decided to include 99 poems in this chapbook. With each haiku having seventeen syllables, that’s a thousand, six hundred and eighty-three syllables, of which number the digital root is 9. How does that work?

I’m still not a math head. But at least the number 9’s got a piece of my heart.

9
There’s a thing with 9s
I don’t really understand.
But I love them still.

 

When I drank whisky, I drank Scotch whisky. Blended. Seems I prefer things that are blended. Friends would sometimes present me with a gift of expensive single malt scotch, and I would share it with other friends while pouring into my own glass from a bottle of Dewar’s.

I like my religion blended, too. Born to a Baptist mama, and from there added some Presbyterian and Quaker, a little Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism; during my Methodist period I applied and was accepted to seminary; I’m a cardholding Catholic, and raised my sons Episcopalian; and, these days I’m not going to church in buildings.

I also like a blended literary experience. Stephen King’s writing and Cormac McCarthy’s, some Tolstoy and some James Lee Burke. Same with philosophy and music and art and politics. Same with a sunset, clouds and some blue sky, too.

And—well, the point is made.

I’ve been absent from this page for a long time finishing up a little book of light verse, called Syllables Go By, a kind of blended take on the Japanese haiku genre of three line poems having five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five syllables in the third.

I added a narrative prelude with each haiku, a form called haibun, a name made up in the seventeenth century by Matsuo Basho, Japan’s haiku master, whose best hits always include:

An old silent pond…
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

And another one from Basho that I like. I don’t quite get the last line. Which is part of the fun.

Why, just this autumn
I have suddenly grown old—
a bird in the clouds.

And, one more from brother Basho, also for fun. Notice how he kind of fudges the syllable count by borrowing one from the second line and loaning it to the first.

A rolling cloud—like
a dog pissing on the run—
dense winter showers.

A child can write a haiku, and, indeed, some of us were first introduced to the form when we were kids. Maybe that’s the secret charm of the form. But, haiku can be also taken to the level of art, as Basho and others have done.

In a real haiku poem there is regard for kireji, and punctuation, and point-of-view, and focus on nature and careful intention toward cutting—a sort of gotcha moment in the last five syllables. With senryu poems there is a focus on the human condition that leaves off references to nature.

Into an aging and cork-stoppered great barrel of fun, I’ve blended all that.

Because of my thing with 9s, I include in my book 99 of these spare poems that are images of my thoughts in seventeen syllables. I will post some of them here on this page. And if only one of them works for you, then I am grateful and blessed.

 

Syllables Go By

My little dog Bobby jumps on the bed and curls up in a sleepy ball, hardly budging when a box of muesli falls from the counter and scatters my breakfast on the floor. He is at ease indoors and content to be just where he is. Or is he?

1
Little dog sleeps late
upon his master’s pillow,
dreaming daylight hunts.

 

 

There are stories of devoted dogs who mourn the death of their masters. Sometimes taking up a vigil at their graves, deeply aware of their absence. I wonder, might an animal also have a sense of not only what is gone, but what is soon to come?

2
Christ on a donkey.
Hosanna’s ride a blessing.
The small, sad beast weeps.

 

 

There is vast energy and motion in love, a background of intention, that is sometimes rendered in tiny moments.

3
Water’s blue green deeps,
go rolling toward the seashore,
planting sand-kisses.

 

 

When Jesus asked us not to worry, because he had overcome the sorrows of this world, and, further, that the things he did we could also do, it seems to me he was talking about our common origin within the mystery of creation. We all share in one life, breathe one breath, that rises up from the ground of being, from our very souls, untouched by “the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

5
Spanish moss shivers.
Cold wind blows through the oak trees.
Roots lie still and dark.

 

 

Dag Hammarskjold is counted by some as a modern mystic, but his day job was Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961. He died in that office at the age of 56, killed in a plane crash on his was to cease-fire negotiations during the Congo Crisis. He kept a journal that was published posthumously as Markings. In the year he died, on Whitsunday, he wrote in his journal, “I don’t know Who — or What — put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”

10
Possibilities
finding purchase in a yes
become miracles.

 

 

Perception is the root of all and everything in this world. When judgment ceases, this world is overcome.

11
Rooster’s up at dawn.
Owl looks for breakfast at dusk.
I cannot decide.

 

 

We talk a lot about the weather, and the weather pays us no mind. But when we listen to the weather, there are songs and stories to hear.

13
Rain falls on the roof,
a mother’s sweet lullaby.
I go back to sleep.

 

 

Wherever I go, there I am. Still, sometimes, there are places I would rather be.

14
It’s cold in my house.
It’s soft and warm in my bed.
I sigh and get up.

 

 

Cloudy puffballs form a pattern like fish scales scattered across the sky and promise a change in the weather. Meteorologists know why sailor’s sayings are true, why a red sky at night is a delight, and why at morning it’s a warning. My grandmother was neither a sailor nor a weather girl on the television, and yet she understood things the sky had to say. She’d not even stop sweeping the front porch to let us in on what was coming our way.

18
Pale moon, thin halo
Catches a single bright star.
Tomorrow it rains.

 

 

I walked my little dog Bobby outside on a foggy, moonless night. A reflection from the porchlight echoed off the ground at my feet, revealing fallen stars.

32
Fog enshrouds the night,
cold damp breath blows away stars,
crystal dewdrops shine.

 

 

One year for the observance of Lent, I gave up reading. That was hard. Another year, I gave up watermelon. That was not hard to do because watermelons are not available until the summer. When once I sat in a pew and listened to a sermon about Lenten sacrifice, I wondered what the priest might himself have in mind.

36
Forty days of Lent
replicates the sacrifice—
priest gives up his church.

 

 

It’s hard to be an animal these days. So many roads to cross with so many cars going so fast. Even if they do have this uncanny ability to cross at right angles, and never run a long diagonal to get to the other side of the road, they still have it rough. Then there’s the one about the slowest of them all catching a big break.

54
Making funny sounds,
pickup truck chugs to a stop.
Turtle crosses road.

 

 

With that super-power called omniscience, He had to know we’d mess this place up. And yet.

55
In the beginning,
God’s odd intention to love
what shall come undone.

 

 

All of my perception is constructed and maintained by personal preferences. I often hope for seeing that’s not so lopsided. Like, when I look at you, if I couldn’t see you, maybe I’d see you better.

62
Love sees all while blind,
unknown to not-this not-that,
no degrees or kinds.

63
Love is like itself,
undivided, outside time—
its rhythm its rhyme.

64
Love counts one as all.
Moments in eternity
rise upon the fall.

 

 

I can be hypnotized by a great blue heron wading in the water, it’s movements so very slow and deliberate, like silence in motion. And there is often a heron who visits this stretch of Waterhole Branch. I usually see him—it has to be a male because he is so huge—somewhere along the very same 30-yard bend. Then one evening when the sun and sky were magnificent together, blue palette and flaming pigment, with night already coming out of the ground low in the underbrush, the giant heron glided overhead, now even a whisper from his flight. He was just high enough above the trees to catch the sun’s yellow beams streaming through the live oaks.

66
Autumn gold twilight,
great blue heron flies overhead.
Silent wings on fire.

 

 

Almost every time I am outside, and present, when I am mindful, and not chasing thoughts across other universes, I am rewarded by some small but magnificent act in nature’s grand theater.

76
Leaf chasing leaf down.
playful like two birds falling.
they land side by side.

77
Woodsmoke rises straight,
damp air is still and cold tonight.
Harvest moon looks warm.

78
Oak leaf floating by,
elongated and narrow.
Or maybe a boat.

79
Clouds follow the sun,
sunset horizon ablaze.
Masterful brush strokes.

80
Smoke on the water,
early morning mist curling.
It was cold last night.

81
Young cypress grows there,
character beyond its years.
River laughs quite near.

And sometimes insight is gained outside. Like this last poem, no matter how great, how cool, how lovely our egos would coax us to believe we are, there’s always some other opinion close at hand.

 

 

When I saw the hawk, the starlings were moving in his direction, murmuring, flying together like gathered and drifting smoke across a harvested field of cotton, toward bellied power lines strung between bare poles like so many tall crosses in a row. The raptor was a heavy dark spot in a small copse of gray trees on the edge of the field, and it reminded me of a cat that knows it has won the mouse and lays down for a minute to watch it struggle before the kill.

87
Murmur of starlings,
flying together as one.
Hawk stares from a branch.

 

 

For all of our very human endeavor there is a silent Presence, which, even in its passivity, seems more powerful than all our locomotives and tall buildings.

95
Farmer works the land.
Sailors on ships work at sea.
Clouds keep watch above.

 

 

The story of Saul of Tarsus walking on the dusty road to Damascus is, to me, like the story of Siddhartha sitting underneath the Bodhi tree. Both men were of one mind one minute, and the next minute were transformed by some immediate renewal of their minds, even getting new names in the switch, Paul and Buddha, respectively. I am given hope that it’s never too late, as I see clearly that I’m not there yet, but running out of road.

99
The thief on the cross
proved grace is not time-bound,
only love-released.