wild horse

he roared up from the heart of the South
with a vengeance unsheathed,
spitting fire and brimstone
drinking hard, playing hard, living hard
with a lust for living, loving, and women;
he had come out of decorum, religion, and ethics
to go to sea
and
it all went away;
he did not distinguish from good and bad,
just grabbed what was there
and
reveled in what he had,
what they had
when he was part of a they.
he was just him
not out to hurt anyone,
coming a’roaring from the heart of the South
with a vengeance unsheathed,
spitting fire and brimstone
drinking hard, playing hard, living hard
with a lust for living, loving, and women
and
the sea life turned him
into a vagabond, a gadabout,
jumping from ship to ship,
sea to sea,
liberty to liberty
working hard, playing hard, living hard

and

then the years rolled by
diminishing
his roaring from the heart of the South
with a vengeance unsheathed,
spitting fire and brimstone
drinking hard, playing hard, living hard
with a lust for living, loving, and women

until finally

he left the sea,
settling down, more or less
with no more roaring from the South,
no vengeance unsheathed,
no spitting of fire and brimstone,
drinking socially, playing for fun,
the lusts of his life dimming, dimming,
giving some thought to
decorum, religion, and ethics
he had been taught growing up;

and

he became an old gentleman of the South
who could not return home
because he had learned too much,
but
turning into a raconteur,
telling his stories to all who would listen
about
his roaring from the heart of the South
with a vengeance unsheathed,
spitting fire and brimstone
drinking hard, playing hard, living hard
with a lust for living, loving, and women

and

the listeners just smiled politely,
pretending to listen.

once upon a time, in a place far away, a time long ago,
us’n boys were old enough to drink beer
after obtaining it illegally from the store man way out in the country,
and
pee on the side of the roads with the cigarettes we couldn’t smoke at home
hanging out the sides of our mouths:
oh, we thought we were grown up
but
young enough to still believe in ghosts
or
at least some of us still believed,
and
there was a run-down log shack out on Hickory Ridge Road,
on the corner of a rock road they now call Crowell’s Lane
and
the baseball players were goofing around in a 1953 sludge green Studebaker,
when they decided to mess with George:
they told him the shack was haunted by the black man who died there

but they were young and in the South in 1959;
so it ain’t likely they said “black man”
but, as i recall we did use the proper term of “negro,”
not the now infamous slur

and
they dared George to go into the shack to check it out;
not knowing the plot, i felt sorry for George,
and
volunteered to go with him into the haunted shack,
so,
like the dunce that i am,
i asked him if he would like me to go with him;
somewhat frightened it seemed to me, he agreed
while my buddies urged me to let him go it alone;
i did not
and
when we crossed the threshold of the log hut,
the old Studebaker peeled out, gravel flying,
and
George and i were alone in the country, sitting on the threshold of a ghost shack:

a half century later, i do not recall the meat of our conversation,
but
i remember after the boys returned in an hour or so laughing as they picked us up
and
i realized George was a great guy
and
i learned more about him than i would have ever known
had i not joined him in the dare to enter
the ghost shack.

i love my iPod, and i haven’t event touched its potential. i’m getting close thanks to George Lederer (thanks, George).

Today, i didn’t work on getting all the playlists organized or recording some more of my LP’s. I had work to do. Maureen had yoga and a birthday brunch with some of her closest friends. So i went to get a few items from Home Depot and pick up something for Maureen from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Now, i don’t know how your Sunday morning radio programming matches up, but in the Southwest corner, it stinks. i love fishing, but i don’t even understand why any fisherman would listen to someone talk about fishing for three hours (of course, i don’t understand how anyone would listen to any specialty talk show for more than five minutes). My other choices were church services or religious talk shows, which all sound too pious for me, or golf talking, or some ex-jocks telling me how much they know about all they don’t know.

There is some good programming on the FM side, but i just wasn’t in the mood.

So i hooked up my iPod and clicked to “shuffle.” i have 4700 tunes on my iPod.  This morning, i was amazed my “shuffle” seemed to hit my mood. But maybe, just maybe, i fit the iPod mood.

The playlist: Etta James “At Last;” Andrea Bocelli “Cieli de Toscana;” David Newman “Everything Must Change;” Bill Evans “Just You, Just Me;” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong  “A Fine Romance;” Eliot Fisk, Vivaldi – “Mandolin Concerto in C;” John Lee Hooker “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer;” Nancy Wilson “At Long Last Love;” Charles Mingus “Portrait;” Frankie Vallie & the Four Seasons “Big Girls Don’t Cry;” Academy of St. Martin Orchestra, Mozart “Symphony No. 35; Academy of St. Martin Orchestra;” Percy Mayfield “Please Send Me Someone to Love.”

Damn near a perfect Sunday morning. i love my iPod.

i hope you had a good one as well.

George and Sarah, i killed what remained of your Bulleit Rye, small batch, tonight. It was good, but not quite as good as Mr. Dickel’s, even his Old No 12 Sour Mash. Besides Mr. Bulleit and i have just been introduced. Old George Dickel and i go way, way back, and we have talked into the deep of many a night, as we have done tonight after my brief introduction to Mr. Bulleit.

Maureen has gone to bed. I should have. i must rise early for Friday morning golf. She does not have to rise until she is damn good and ready. i was closing up the evening, setting all for tomorrow, checking the last emails and Facebook postings, hoping to find i don’t know what when i realized i had started a poem this morning, which was incomplete. So George – Dickel that is – and i worked on it some more. Here it is, first draft, which is usually my last draft. One explanation: On old steam warships like destroyers, directly aft of the bridge was what then was called Combat Information Center, or “CIC.” It was all radar and plots in red light to not destroy “night vision” to provide the electronic picture of what was going on in actual combat or enhance the visual perception of the bridge watch during peacetime steaming, either reporting contacts showing on the radar long before they would be sighted visually, or assisting navigation during piloting coastal waters.

i consider myself a lucky man to have been at sea in the Navy before we became so sophisticated and electronic. It was a time, long gone, of a sense of self-reliance, where ship and mariners worked as one, a whole entity against the elements, especially in fog. i suspect i will make several revisions to this one. But George (Dickel), Mr. Bulleit, and i wanted to share it tonight.

fog

i arose this morning to grayness;
morning light was suffused into the grayness;
the street and driveway were gray;
the bright house paints were muted
by the cast of gray mist;
the hills, even the sky itself had vanished
in the thick gray of the fog.

at sea, fog would envelop me and my ship
as if it were a cold, cold blanket
intent on plunging inside and extracting life’s breath
from me and from my ship:
gray unto gray unto gray unto gray;
“set the low visibility watch”
and
two deck seamen fight through the darkness,
the gray darkness
to the bullnose on the forecastle
and
the stern chock on the fantail
to peer into that darkness
but
more importantly to listen, listen
for a sound, a fog horn
hopefully far away
detecting a direction:
unlikely expectations,
and
the conning officer on the bridge
just hopes there are no other lonely transits
on the open sea
or
at least spotted on the radar
in the red lit combat center aft of the bridge
to warn him of the impending danger
as the midwatch wears on into the dark night.

Yet, open ocean fog is a piece of cake
compared to entering port
in the murky mist of coastal fog,
and
the sea detail watch on the bridge
cannot see the bow, much less the channel buoys
and
the watch relies on combat again:
“radar holds us on track,
“twenty yards to right of mid-channel,
“nearest shoal water two hundred yards
“off the port beam,”
the sound-powered phone talker
repeats the words of the CIC watch officer
to the bridge watch
while the navigator stares at the chart
while his quartermasters plot the course
with their own radar repeater
confirming combat’s report
as the conn and the captain
peer into the gray nothingness
hoping to see some dark figure
that might be a building or landfall
from which they might see
through the gray fog
where they really are.