Time, time, relentless time.
In for a dollar, out on a dime.
–Ricardo Bods

Does one year really end & another begin? Does getting a few hundred million fools to shout, kiss & blow noisemakers in time-zone bursts make it so? As if we could kiss the past behind & start again so easily. Still, here we stand at the threshold, starting a new page, in a new file, dragging the old life along like a streamer at the back end of a kite.

The self is not the kite, let alone its tail. It’s hard to say what it is—lose the wind or break the string, & it’s not a kite anymore. Shred the kite, warp its form or let the string go, & there’s no life left in it, no tugging self coming alive along the string’s pull, that center of ungravity derived from the draw upward, wind in kite (in the box, paper, whatever form, substance & materials made of at the time). Oh by the by…sang e. e. cummings.

The writer keeps on trying to say a single real thing for a change. Between dream & abstraction, there the crotch is, plus the solar plexus, heart’s breath, throat’s mouth, the analytical nose, the dome of the mind in the rock, all ears just listening. “It is what it is,” said one thought wise, pointing. Like dogs, we try to use such cues to guess where the ball went. What ball?

I was precocious in one thing—besides bawling, beach-balls & dreaming—this being sense of how little I knew about anything, just staring in awe, gawking, not knowing the first thing about what knowing was, or understanding. Eventually, I kissed my mama goodbye & set out to see what I might from worlds “out there,” snagging hot ground balls, fly balls picked up on the run (sometimes temporarily disappearing), line drives on a leap, pop ups raining on a dizzy head. If I’d been a more gifted athlete, or natural standout at anything, I’d’ve followed a different path.

First we have to sort out our priorities. Priority #1, Get our priorities straight. Priority #1: want (& not want–yechh), with satisfaction in between, first from the pleasures of sucking, cantilation, little sucking songs, murmurs, daydreams, the transports of imagination in pictures & songs, nursery rhymes & dancing games, from mum’s lap to play-worlds spun from bits of paper; finding worlds in books, later heading outward–into the forest following animal trails, rowing stealthily along the lakeshore into secluded coves, later still far-off cities & also where no trails ran….

Ring around the rosy…we all fall down…/ Riding to Boston, riding to town…New York, L.A., San Francisco; Paris, Malaga, Tangiers; Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Pondicherry; Tokyo,   Seattle, Reno; & more , the places between, with little known names (some never learned), more at home off the beaten track, in a quiet backwater out of the mainstream, in the far back office, sun through the high window on my cheek briefly–the multi-tasking mind writing this while listening to birds chattering as if on the first day of creation, at least a young new year, as if spring had arrived early—after the pre-solstice deep freeze, with storm band after storm band .We’ have  seen such feints before. Still, we celebrate a one- day thaw, imagining spring–& the world as young as some of these birds feel, rather than as our crazy, mixed up calendar suggests?

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