Again from my little haiku book…

The best-selling poet in the United States is a man from Persia who died about seven hundred and fifty years ago. He was a Sufi mystic with a really long name, but most people call him simply Rumi.

Research my claim on Rumi’s sales rank. I know it sounds bogus, what with the field of candidates including Whitman and Frost and Dickinson and Angelou and others. But ask your smart phone.

On the other hand, read a little bit from A Year with Rumi edited by Coleman Barks and see why he’s such a big hit these centuries later. Rumi included in one of his poems these lines, “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. But don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer…”

And I get it. While sleeping and dreaming peaceful, the world is okay. Then, upon first waking, with what we know about this divided world, there’s an almost reflexive response to sigh.

But if we’ll stop our minds, and put aside bookish big ideas for a minute, we can sort of reboot with some basic gratitude. Glad for another chance at loving, smiling, and something beautiful. We can reclaim the day.

Rumi suggests taking down the dulcimer. There is also other music to be made. And we are all self-taught to make it.

 

28
Now I wake me up.
Dreams recede into cool dark.
Light changes everything.

 

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.