>> facebook
>> livejournal
comment here.
Coming Home, Syracuse 1972:
I see your steady gaze through the twilight. Was that a phantom smile I saw or just a passing curl of smoke at the corner of your mouth? Rain beats on the glass door obscuring the rustle of your robe as you reseat yourself and lay back even further. Why do simple gestures like this get earmarked for no reason and come to signify an entire time in our life? Is it their being unattached to the events around them that makes them eligible? When I found you alone at night sitting on the edge of the roof looking like a beautiful silver gargoyle, that was one of those times. Sitting in the car waiting for you to say goodbye to friends was another. I even knew at the time that that moment was being preserved in this way, that this empty park with no structures, the grass half scrubbed off, was being set in amber. How long is it between lives? Is that where we go when we sleep, to tend our memory, finish those conversations in our previous life, while we have already started a new one? Sometimes it feels like we have traveled many miles during the night and feel our nerves still humming with what went on in another place. When we had made it almost to your Mother's house and it was the middle of the night and there was no traffic no one to give us a ride. We stood by the pasture fence preparing to sleep by the side of the road. Gradually and then building quickly a low sound formed in the darkness, our hearts creeping to our throats as it grew, our eyes still not adjusted to the pitch black and ears still ringing from the terrific din of the Bobtail truck that just dropped us off. And then out of the darkness a white stallion rushed our position at the fence, blazing white, eyes and nostrils flaring. He stamped in place looking us up and down and then torn off again just as fast. We shared a nervous laugh certain that it was your Father dead only a week, come to inspect us. When we got back from that trip, crazy hot Texas, your friend fresh out of prison throwing rocks at the streetlight because it was making a bad buzzing sound, your Aunt's face oddly slack, still trying to keep the secret that she was your Mother, not your other Aunt as you were told, crazy Texas where the cop swore at us, get the fuck off the road, and kept driving, on that trip when we had made it nearly home and were on the raised highway that ran through the beat industrial part of Syracuse and the quivering of the road every time a truck past scared you and made you want to get off and we got off onto the empty streets below, me thinking we were going to be stranded for hours but so tired I didn't care and you just glad to be away from the unreasonable fear that the road was going to fall down, it was then when we got to the bottom of the ramp that we smiled to each other because we saw a white Plymouth Valiant just like our friend's car at home only seventy more miles away and then in eery disbelief and joy saw that it WAS in fact our friends who had just driven a hundred mile an hour to the airport, dropped someone off and then got lost on the way back out of town. Much rejoicing, the circumstance so unbelievable that our friends looked slightly unfamiliar for a moment while we double checked, could this be real. What a poor word coincidence is at a time like that. Is it easy for the Powers That Be to arrange things like this or does it take legions of Angels with Clipboards and Walkie Talkies speeding up and slowing down traffic across the whole country, arranging the motive for the trip to Syracuse, the only one in the three years we all lived there and getting you , who are not afraid of anything so jumpy about a little shaking?
"Do you know how the moments perform their adoration? Waving its row of lamps, the universe sings in worship day and night,? There are the hidden banner and the secret canopy? There the sound of the unseen bells is heard. Rapture wells forth, and all space is radiant with light? There the Unstruck Music is sounded; it is the music of the love of the three worlds? There millions of lamps of sun and of moon are burning? There the drum beats, and the lover swings in play? There love-songs resound, and light rains in showers; and the worshipper is entranced in the taste of the heavenly nectar. Traveling by no track, I have come to the Sorrowless Land: There the sky is filled with music ? There it rains nectar? There the harp-strings jingle, and there the drums beat? What a secret splendor is there, in the mansion of the sky!? There no mention is made of the rising and the setting of the sun? In the ocean of manifestation, which is the light of love, day and night are felt to be one.†-Kabir
THIS WILL PROBABLY ONLY HAPPEN ONCE.October 1991 Golden Gate Park. A white carnation fell at my feet. While I was guessing how this could happen, I was distracted by a noise I couldn't identify, very deep, building and approaching. I had just slipped away early from a memorial concert for Bill Graham and was still getting my bearings. Then another flower fell and another. I looked up, a herd of Bison were stampeding directly toward me! The next moment stretched out of time, back to my childhood, TV,...THAT'S where I heard that sound before! STAMPEDE! (quick, in case of Bison stampede...?) The Bison wheeled away. More flowers and more flowers fell, tens of flowers, twenties of flowers, all straight down at the same stately rate. The Bison definitely seemed freaked out by them, running around and around in a jerky circle in their pen. I didn't blame them really. It wasn't frogs falling from the sky but still, flowers fall out of the clear blue sky when? Oh, wait a minute. I looked back to the concert ... the Otis Spunkmeyer DC-3 was over the crowd and a gazillion carnations were getting shoved out the cargo bay. Bill Graham Presents up to the old tricks. Fooled me this time.So it resolved, the beautiful, the improbable, stubborn, headlong, charging in a hail of flowers Bill moment.
["Salome": danced & photographed by J. Facciani]
Once , when a romance was unraveling I brought home a lobster for my sweetheart. She wasn't there. I put it in the deep side of the sink that was covered by the drainboard. I went out. I call much later, she was home now, screaming THERE IS A DEAD LOBSTER IN MY SINK! The water had drained away. How sad for my misguided love offering. I was overwrought, it was a sign a bad sign. I wrapped the lobster in foil, it took on the shape of an Egyptian mummy.I felt guilty about letting it die, didn't want to chuck it in the garbage. Only burial would do. But where? I took it to the roof and sailed it off to the garden below, then went and began digging in the spot where it landed. I went down almost as far as I could reach and then hit something...a small box! Inside was an Anhk and a tiny Hekmet charm.Then up came bones... for a moment my mind went to dreadful possibilities and then...of course, someone had buried their cat here. I put everything back and then added the Lobster-Mummy.Two weeks later when I departed for the last time my Sweetheart threw a bowling ball after me which bounced once and then crashed into the neighbor's door cracking it in two.
[www.willardfuller.com]
BERKELEY 1983:
HERE IS ONE I'M NOT SURE I BELIEVE. I went to see Willard Fuller . He was billed as the man with the gift of healing teeth. I didn't even know how to be properly skeptical of this claim, how do you 'heal' a tooth? Well, Willard did it by telling corny jokes [....so Baptist even the creek in the backyard was Baptist ] to loosen up the New Age audience, who you could tell were a little nervous bring in the same room with an honest to God Christian. Then he said, as he did every night, "I feel such enthusiasm here tonight, I'm going to ask ALL of you to come up and make a line." We did and one by one he put his hands by our jaw and said a phrase [ In the name of Jesus be thou every whit whole ] I felt a nice cool vibration, that's all and sat back down. There were about a hundred of us so this took a little while and then here and there you could here people exclaiming quietly and there'd be a little stir as others gathered around with flashlights.... right, flashlights and mirrors, not your usually equipment to bring to a seminar, and yes it did feel weird going to look in a total strangers mouth. SURE ENOUGH gold crowns were appearing in peoples mouths. One woman from Finland had healthy teeth or gaps where one had been removed, no fillings.......and one great honking new, mirror finish GOLD CROWN that looked like it had been fashioned by Brancusi, an Angelic Art Deco abstraction of a tooth, four forms, gathered in a rectangular pattern meeting at a shallow dome, top center. The woman was wide eyed, in a calm daze. The New Agers were kind of frowny, puzzled, asking great questions like 'you sure in wasn't there before?" No one was especially happy or having a conversion experience. So much for miracles, wasn't working visible on this crowd. Nothing dramatic happened to me. TWO MONTHS LATER I am in bed trying to go to sleep and my wisdom tooth is killing me. I am in no mood, very irritated, "oh fuck I gotta go to the dentist no money', that space. Go to sleep.Next morning..... No tooth!. GONE. My tongue is fishing around for it. Nothing. No soreness or any evidence that it was ever there. Now it was my turn to be puzzled.... I had experienced healing before but it was of the "my back feels much better after that massage" variety. I thought it was funny that it happened even though I was so crabby and slightly miffed that my reaction was mild shock and 'what-the...???' I haven't even told that many people This story is kind of a conversation stopper.
