AUGUST ELEGY

August is known for one of the most spectacular planetary alignments of the year, along with other notable conjunctions and lunar events, including the “six planet parade”.
From August 10 to dawn on August 13, six planets — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — will appear in the dawn sky along the eastern horizon. Venus and Jupiter will have a spectacular conjunction on August 12, appearing almost together in the sky, easily visible to the naked eye.

Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible without optical aid; Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a small telescope. Mars does not join this alignment in August, but the Full Sturgeon Moon will be present during the alignment, adding brightness to the scene.

Why then, can I only entertain childhood thoughts, on an August Sunday, of sad Monday sailboats leaving a rocky cover in sultry heat, and emptying piers on sad, quiet lakes? Of another summer gone — and humanity’s parade back into gray buildings to labor and study (as we must) ?

I must look up to dawn along the eastern horizon and up into the night sky.

And, once again, at August’s absolute end –Labor Day, circa 1960 — I recall the late Joe O’Donnell and I climbing the main Blue Hill for well over an hour on our bikes until suddenly we felt momenum grabbing Joe’s lead bike, then mine, and we went cruising gently for perhaps only a short time –but it felt like a good long rewarding spell — around twisting forest corners without automobiles and down to flat land, and Joe saying to me something like, “that was a great ride, wasn’t it?”

I saw Joe only very periodically in subsequent years — maybe at the subway station, coming from our respective high schools, waiting for the Neponset bus –until the day (at another funeral) that his younger brother told me he had died a few months before. He would have been in his fifties.

Again, my thoughts must be of the horizon, of the infinity of the night sky, of life. Memories are fine, but on our planet, we must stay in the present moment.

The beautiful hill, the horizon, the sky….the present moment on Planet Earth.

VOYAGE

Sixty years ago today, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, I boarded the S.S. Groote Beer, a Greek-owned, Dutch registered, Italian-crewed former Victory Ship, Dutch Immigrant ship and cruise ship-turned-student ship offering cheap transport and assorted student-style activities for about two hundred young passengers and assorted older passengers seeking the same cheap transport (including a German barber emigrating to Cleveland) back to America. She was destined to dock (as I recall) along the North River section of the Brooklyn waterfront after nine days. Since June 17th, after landing in Antwerp aboard a Norwegian freighter, I had been wandering the Continent…Paris, Barcelona, Nice, Rome, Florience, Venice, Munich, Amsterdam…Rotterdam…..

Many memories from those weeks — and from those nine days at sea.

Sometime I’ll share some of them. (I already have shared parts of the voyage over and arrival).

But now, I just wanted to summon all the drifting, shadowy feelings of Le Temp Perdu

On this dank Florida evening as darkness falls….

A JOURNEY

I begin a journey today, perhaps in deeply unsettled weather. A journey north, carrying a large doll house to a child, which is the main mission, and in hopes also of seeing my brother Ronald alive, for he is dying in a place far from where I will deliver the child’s small-world, happy gift.

Dear God, protect me and my companion on my journey. See to it that my small dog does not miss me too much. Help me to arrive safely and for the miles ahead not to be over stressful. And where my brother Ronald, who has suffered so much on his recent journey, give him comfort. Your will be done in all things.

Amen.

THE FLY

Whether male or female is unknown. I’ll speculate that it was a male. It was flitting about in that elusive way flies have when they get indoors. I chased it into the bathroom, shut the door and thought that would increase my odds of bringing him down.

But it’s astonishing how flies can hide themselves in small, brightly-lighted spaces.

Then, suddenly, I spotted him atop the edge of the mirror over the sink. I had a folded up magazine (I need to buy a fly-swatter) and knew I just could not get an angle on him. He was standing right on the edge of the bracketed mirror. And I had no bug spray.

So, I took out my my blue ceder and cypress eau de toilette. I aimed, sprayed — and Monsieur Fly quickly flew off and out of sight somewhere into the lavatory stratosphere. He did not drop dead into the sink which might have been my wish.

I actually hope he survives, and, upon safe arrival back among his peers, introduces into the airborne masses of Musca domestica of the order of Diptera, being the ordinary housefly, the transforming redolence of the finest Parisian perfumeries.

Never again will any member of that tribe want to land on a stinking pile of dog dung, which habit gives them their well-deserved reputation as disgusting pests. And each and everyone one of them will doubtless be a big hit with the opposite sex.

This amounts to my humane and sweet-smelling effort to improve the world order at its lowest level.

NATURE, KNOX AND RISING HEAT ANNOUNCE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL OBSERVANCES AT THE LAST MILE

Few indeed. Meager light. The Last Mile faces west to the front. July 2nd, 10:21 a.m., not a single patron yet. The Mile opens at 9:00 for those souls who need companionship, hopefully not a drink. Thursday regulars were certain to show up by lunch time. The Mile’s owner Joe Barron had driven over from his summer home in Swampscott. He, bartender Deano and I ( who had some sense that I needed to stop by the way one might stop by a church) sat at a table by the juke box, listening to the rattle of the still defective right wall air conditioner, while we were being cooled only by the single left wall unit beside the bar.

I can’t tell you much about what we said to that point, having sat about an hour — except that Joe talked with Deano, who had a pad in front of him and a pencil in hand — about supplies for the little July 4th gathering among the gravel, weeds and scrawny oak trees along the back fence in the small back lot.

It has been very hot in Massachusetts, hot across the country and the planet. Joe and Deano decided to go out and look at the back lot, see what needed to be cleaned up out there. I felt privileged to join them. I was going to leave — what am I but just an occasional patron? But both Joe and Deano said, “you come, too, Greg.” I felt like the guy must have felt when the poet Robert Frost said (basically to all of us in that one poem), “you come, too,”as they went out to the meadow.

The inadequacy of the back lot for such a celebration immediately struck Joe. He said, “I want to invite everybody over to my yard in Swampscott, have a catered gathering for the regulars,” Joe said.

But Deano said, “that’d be fine if that’s what you want, Joe. But tradition says we have a little time out back here.”

I agreed. There had been a Fourth of July gathering for every year I could recall outback of The Last Mile.

Then came an intervention.

The artist Knox, (though we hadn’t noticed him working quietly on a canvass on his back veranda), sealed the deal when he surprised us by shouting down, “I’m looking forward to weekend festivities in our domain of sumac and oak.”

No. the three of us hadn’t notice Knox up above us– and I hadn’t ever noticed the sumac growing up in the south corner of the 50×50 lot. Red and obcure. I should have known sumac springs up everywhere, always in the city, as if its most unreconized and uncelebrated tree.

Then came a sound.

“Ah, listen to that chorus,” Knox said.

He was referring to the cicadas, their pulsating high-pitched buzz commencing suddenly from the few meager neighborhoods trees in that very crowded purlieu of gravel, weeds, cracked macadam and rows of old, crammed-together city houses. This, even though we were far from the verdant country. And it has always seemed to me that choruses of cicadas are like sirens announcing the rising of the heat. And the heat was rising. We knew it would be mounting through the day.

And Knox stood hanging over his veranda railing, staring off like Balboa.

And so — there would be a back lot gathering behind The Last Mile for America’s bigger than usual birthday.

I’ll be there.

SUMMER AND THE SOLSTICE DESCEND UPON THE LAST MILE

2026. June 21, 8:14. Sunset in 16 minutes. End of the longest day.

The light in The Lounge is soft, the trees outside green and full. Of course, not too many trees on either side of humble three-story building in which The Last Mile Lounge occupies the ground floor. A fellow named Chavez was at a middle table by himself. It was a Sunday night, and I counted eleven patrons. A new kid named Pascal was at the bar. He comes from Lynn. He teaches Seventh Grade over there, fresh out of college. School is out for the year.

“What’s up with the juke box,” one of the nurses asked, standing in front of the OUT OF ORDER sign on an 8×11 sheet of paper taped on the curved Plexiglas front of the vintage Wirlitzer. She’s the one who always likes to play “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion.

“Broken, Pascale called from the bar. “Getting it repaired tomorrow. The guy has to come up from Rhode Island.”

“It’s alright,” said Chavez, looking at the daylight on this, the year’s longest day, dimming slowly outside either side door, both opened for cross -ventilation, because everybody was waiting for the emergency guy to come and fix the air conditioner built into the wall next to the bar.

“It’s alright,” Chavez says again.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” said the nurse.

“Nothing working tonight,” said some guy I’d never seen before, sitting with a guy I’d see in the Mile from time to time named Crowley.

“One thing’s working,” said one of the nurses sitting at the table the other n urse had left on her trip to the juke box. They were all drinking either beer except one and she was drinking a Whiskey Sour. “This one,” said one of the nurses who was drinking a Budweiser from the bottle. She pointed over the table where she with other workers(nurses or nurse’s aides or something like that) fresh off their weekend shift at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Care Center.

“Alright, it’s alright,” said Chavez, insistently. “We are at Stonehenge. (I detected a Hispanic accent now.) We are at Bethlehem at the hour of birth. We are on Everest at sunset. We are here, on our last mile.” He rose, his chair screeching on the wooden floor, and went quickly out the side door, shouting, “I must go to the beach, to the ocean, the open water, see the horizon. I must see the earth lurch away from Mother Sun,”and he disappeared out under the maple trees, his sneakered feet touching the cracked and gradually cooling sidewalk where the day’s heat had settled on a gutter littered with wrappers and flattened plastic bottles, and where it was lingering still.

(I swear I spotted, one day not long ago — and despite the city’s massive street-sweepere trucks having clean up after the annual snow melt — remnants of brown fallen maple leaves mixed in with fresh springtime deposits of debris. It made me sad, for those leaf remnants had been green this time last year, then gold, then fallen unnoticed in the fall. I was noticing them now. And I looked up into the new leaves on those scrawny urban trees, casting their modest degree of shade. It is the stubborn oak leaves that usually linger, not the maples. But they were here now, and good to see, as summer in the city commenced.)

The air conditioner guy pulled up in his white panel truck by the door Chavez had just gone out.

The artist Knox, at his usual place on the usual barstool, sketching on a pad next to his half-drunk Blushing Monk, said without looking up, “He’s four minutes late,” referring to Chavez. ” Sun set at half past.”

The air conditioner guy came in out of the June gloaming with his tool box –and was greeted by a round of applause. He bowed, then he asked, “which one?” (Because the other wall air conditioner by the nurse (as noted) and directly in his line of sight, was working, though rattling a little.

“This one,” Pascale said, pointing to the dead silent wall unit by the side of the bar. “But Joe (he was referring to Joe Barron, the owner, probably at that hour in his home along the ocean in Swampscott), “he’d like you to take a look at that one, too.” Pascale pointed across the room to the rattler sticking out of the wall. Pascale, to demonstrate its inoperative state, picked up the little white remote from udner the bar and gave it a click, raising its temperature, but also its noise, to the amusement of the nurses.

“Geez,” said one of them. “Now I’m going to have to find a sweater,” and she laughed heartily. a sweater on a day when heat stroke and exhaustion were probably the order of business at their workplace.

The nurses, previously chatting among themeselves, one of them in a Red Sox blue cap, resumed their chat, cool now, talking abover the rattle of the old machine on the fortunate side of the room. (Truth was, nobody elsewhere in the room, sitting over their drinks, seemed to be noting the heat much. I had my ice water, after all. )

“I shall be delighted,” said the air conditioner guy in belated response to the request for his skills. He was, so far nameless, but exhibiting all the characteristics of a moonlighting Summer Stock thespian.

Ah! I said inwardly to myself — I who had by chance, but out of habit, come to the Mile for company on this muggy and uncomrotable day (only to find the place stricken with a dysfunctional appliance. ( I didn’t care about the juke box. I swear no one plays that much. This is, much of the time, the Last –and Silent — Mile.

Cool air would return soon to The Mile, but the outer darkness was finally gathering and thickening.

There was a glow. Yes, the gloaming. Pascale had kept the lights dim. He’s an art student. I counted eleven people in the place. I was at the bar in front of a glass of ice water.

8:39 The longest day was, yes, darkening.

Summer was here.

I went out on the front sidestreet, lthen walked to the side, looked and saw no sign of Chavez. The beach was down there. He’d be at the beach, standing in what light was left. Over my head, birds were still twittering among the maple leaves. They would be sleeping soon.

About this Chavez. We don’t see him often at the Mile. Probably a member of Lynn’s modest Chicano community, but a soulful guy –with Stonehenge, Bethlehem and Everest on the mind. Even Public Works people have their private works and reveries. (Yeah, I know he works for the Public Works Department over there. Don’t know what he does for them, exactly.

Behind me, I became aware Pascale flipped on the Mile’s overhead light illiuminating the sign above the door — and the neon Rolling Rock sign in the left front window. It was two colors, perfect additions to the Summer Solstice dusk….

(Red) Rolling

(Green) Rock

Pretty.

Chavez’s draft, half drunk, sat on the table inside.

I think it was a Molson Canadian.

My ice ice water was waiting for me on the bar as well.

FIRST LINES AT THE LAST MILE

There is a book club made up of guys who drink at The Last Mile. They meet off-premises around the corner in the brick apartment block, first floor. I can’t name the guys now — it’s a guy’s group, ladies invited(occaionally a few will go and enjoy it) . And its held in Ronnie Belecavitch’s apartment. It’s the apartment where his Lithuanian parents lived until the day they died. They meet on a Monday night. I stopped by once and heard them talking about From Here to Eternity. It was interesting hearing Sticky Sammartino elaborate on the interaction of war and memory and rememberiing a cousin of his who was at Schofield Barracks when the Japanese attacked.

But I drove by the Mile one night and saw cars parked nearby with bumper stickers that were tributes to the value of poetry. I parked and, very curious, went in the side door, saw Deano at the bar (working a night shift for a change) and he smiled and I went up to the bar and he said this guy Balin came in one night with a bunch of other guys, a rarified, arty kind of group of the kind that occaisonally search out The Mile for its underground reputaiton has a captivatingly obscure dive. No one, including Deano, knows exactly know where they come from — and nobody felt like asking them. They were welcome as the flowers in May, as is anybody who wants to stop by the Mile.

It was also nice seeing fresh blood out at those tables. I didn’t want to scare them off. They all, according to Deano, had ordered some serious drinks and on this night, they were having a ‘first line’ contest. This much I know because I asked.

Deano was, as always (in the tradition of good bartenders) affectingly indifferent and accepting of the newcomers, but telling me, “I don’t know first lines or last lines — or the first thing about poetry except maybe, “roses are red, violets are blue…”

“‘There, that’s a first line,” I said. “Go over and join them. You’d fit right in. It’s a slow night. I’ll mind the bar for you.”

“Thank. And no thanks,” Deano said. Among the absurdities of all I said was the idea that I could run the bar for him.

First Line Contest’,” I mused out loud. “Interesting. You gotta know your poetry to know random first lines.”

No doubt abut that, Deano agreed. Kind of like people who know baseball statistics.

Turns out they come in every Monday night. I guess it kinds of gives a little touch of flavor to the drab start of the week.

“They drink, they spout poetry,” Dean said, “I hear ’em over here. They get louder, like all drinkers, the more they drink. I hope nobody decides somebody’s cheating and starts a brawl.”

We laughed at that. I saw a Boston Herald headline: POETIC PUNCH FEST IN FAMOUS REVERE WATERING HOLE. (By the way, Deano told me somebody was doing some research and found out the Mile is actually partly in East Boston. I’ve got to look into that.)

Somebody sitting near the table came up to the bar with the last remnants of their hamburger and had overheard the ground rules — whoever identifies the first line get to takes a drink. “They’re getting good and warm over there, he said.

Otherwise it was an ordinary night at The Last Mile.

Deano swabbed the bar. A few guys were watching the Red Sox up on the Sanyo flat screen over the bar. They were over toward the front window by the red glow of the Rolling Rock neon sign facing the street and fairly close to the front door. They sat where the polished oak bar curves, a world away from poetry.

The poetry guys were along the back wall betwen the juke box and up against Knox’s Last Mile mural (which, when they weren’t concentrating on poetry, drew the interest of a few of these arty patrons. I was wondering where Knox was hiding. Probably upstairs in his apartment/studio. He’d have liked this bunch.)

I sat down on a bar stool and Deano, without my asking for it, served me up a cup of black coffee. I heard the knit-cap guy blurt out a first line. He had a gray beard and the knit cap was crunched down on his head, strands of gray hair poking out from under it. He appeared to be the ring master I was suddenly surmising that these guys must come from Cambridge — and this knit-cap guy must be the guy named Balin.)

“I have four poems for you, ” he said to the gathering, “all part of a sequence. ” There were — I counted — seven guys.

“First of the first lines,” the guy said, Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…

“Perhap?,” shouted one fellow. “Why did the poet hedge his damn bets? Is it or isn’it it?”

“Two, said the poetic interlocutor, ignoring the guy and going on. In my beginning is my end.

“Well, there’s a short life,” said some guy with a decided South Asian accent and a giant pilsner of beer in front of him. “Some little bugger squirting out of the womb only to expire.”

“Shut up,” said a short African-American guy. You’re getting disrespectful — and bloody stupid.”

“Three,” our man went on, I don’t know much about gods but I think the river is a strong brown god.

“Old Man River,” offered a guy wearing a scalley cap and, in contrast to everyone else I was hearing, manifesting a strong Boston accent.

“And Four,” said the man, ignoring that guy, too, and pausing for dramatic effect like they do on trivia night, which they don’t have at The Last Mile. (And I was thinking, is this the dawn of a unique kind of high-minded trivia night?

“Four, the guy said, for an even deeper effect, Midwinter spring is its own season.

“And sadly past,” said someone.

“Now, said the main guy in his knit cap, standing at the head of the table. “These beginning are the beginnings of poems in a famous cycle.”

“Too easy,” said one guy.

“Beginning to end,” said another wag.

I didn’t wait for the big reveal. I was back on the street and getting into my car, a bit of an ocean nip in the air. I remembered from reading it and liking it in English class in high school that the first poem ends in a neat inversion”

“In my end is my beginning.”

So much for beginnings and endings. As I came out front of the Mile, I saw the nurses going in, those regulars.

I wonder if any of them know any poetry. I know one of them once told me she tended to a dying man who’s last words to her were, “the fire and the rose are one.”

Maybe, if she and the girls sit close to that table, she’d finally find out how those words wound up on the lips of a dying man who was obviously also a dyed-in-the-wool lover of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

THE GIRL AT THE FESTIVAL

Knox, the artist, sitting at the far end of the bar at The Last Mile Lounge (it’s his usual perch), drinking coffee for a change — bad coffee, he’d say — feels a breeze at his back. The side door has flung open. A breeze alright, a spring chill. More like a wind has blown the door open on the screen door. Deano, the bartender, goes to close it.

“No,” says Knox. ” Leave it.” He’s turned on his stool, hands on his knees. “The sun is out. It’s spring. “

The wind won’t last, I’m thinking. Meanwhile, the open door has shed some light in the dark lounge.

There’s no such thing as May wind, one would think –not usually. You think of April as windy. But here’s a May wind. And I’m thinking: let’s just enjoy it, just as Knox is thinking…it probably the only wind out there. Knox seems to read my thoughts. He says, “it’s probably already blowing out to sea. Farewell, May wind.”

Everybody thought about that. Goodbye to a fortuitous wind, shedding light, stirring spring sensibilities. Not an ill-wind, far from it.

“It’s coming in the middle of things, too” Knox says. He meant the middle of the month. Indeed! It was May fifteenth.

“This isn’t just any month,” says Knox. “It’s the month of May.”

Somehow, we all knew what he meant — about May. He turns on his stool to look at us all.

“I’m thinking and seeing visions, my friends, and I’m seeing Spring….Spring flowers — girls. Why, I knew a girl who was born on this date. May Fifteen. The exact beautiful middle of the month. Beautiful girl, too.”

He sang then.. (Yes, Knox sings occasionally, a nice tenor):

Beautiful girls….
Walk a little slower ….when you walk by me
Lingering sunsets…
Stay a little longer with the lon–ely sea…

Knox, absent any further lyrics he could recall from that number, settled into a little barroom oration….

“Frank Sinatra died on this date,too,” Knox said. “He sang that song from time to time — a song for somebody approaching the prime of their lives, or just past it. A time when you want to savor life….In fact, I heard Sinatra do it in Vegas, and it begins, the prologue of the song, anyway…”as I approach the prime of my life…” He wasn’t in great voice that night. He was well past his prime. “

I didn’t know Knox was such a Sinatra fan. I thought he went for opera. But our Sinatra moment was dying out, along with the wind. Then, ole blue eyes got a reprieve. Not many people at the Mile, middle of a Friday on a May afternoon (a few weekenders would come in after five) — but some guy got up, a guy nobody knew, dug down deep for a quarter and played ole Sinatra on the juke box. Frank was soon singing something that made it feel like spring was giving way to summer. I’ve heard so much Sinatra in my life, all those love songs run together. But it was good, just flowing out at us, that melody, those lyrics and melody that, believe it or not, I can’t recall.

“Too bad he never cut a song called “Spring Wind,” somebody said. For when the spring wind, comes blowin’ in from across Revere Beach…”

“Blowing candy wrappers, cigarette butts,pigeon feathers” somebody said, “right off the beach, right into my backyard. Beautiful!”

That was another guy, sitting by the door over his burger and beer. He was done eating, just sitting, thinking, obviously, thinking in real terms about real life. Who needs to think about real life in spring if you can avoid it? I didn’t know the guy. That’s when I realized we were all guys that afternoon –and, except for Deano and Knox and me — all strangers.

“Whatever,” came a voice. ” Wind like that, this time of the year, blows in memories,too, along with all the city junk.” This came from some guy by the other side door. That door was open. You could see out onto the sidestreet. From the way the new leaves on the few old trees out there were fluttering in the muted sunlight, I’d say that guy was feeling a wind at his back, too. Feeling that Spring Wind.

“That’s my thought,” he said, sitting over a glass of red wine. (I’ve got to like a guy who stops into a corner joint in the middle of the day just for a glass of wine. He must have been having memories.

“Don’t we always wish it would stay May?” I said. I was glad at that moment I’d stopped into The Mile. It was a good time and a good place to be having thoughts like that, which must have been what the guy with the wine was thinking.

And it was just about at that moment, that the whole mood and the memories shifted from wind to women — or girls. It started when Deano put a question to Knox.

“How old is that girl now?” Deano asked him, referring to the girl he’d known whose birthday it was. “Are they still — alive?”

“Don’t know,” Knox said. “She was nineteen when I knew her. She’d be seventy-seven now. Can’t picture that. She was lovely. Hope she’s still beautiful.”

“Depends on how you define beauty,” Deano said.

“She wasn’t your Maltese hairdresser, was she?” I asked. (Knox, as you may know, had told us this story of a Maltese hairdresser who broke his heart. He’d painted her portrait and it hung now on the corridor wall leading to the toilets. It’s still there, all marked up in antic ways.

“No,” Knox said. “No, this was another girl. Fresher. My girlfriend for a while.”

I guess Knox always had lots of girls on his mind, and, on this May day, lots of memories, but just one girl. He looked like he was seeing this one girl, this one old girlfriend, and he was going to paint her as soon as he got back upstairs in his studio — from his May memory.

“This one girl in particular, I dated for most of a year, Knox said, breaking the silence. “We met…. at The Festival.”

And that was the moment visions seemed to begin circulating like a floral aroma mingling with the odor of stale beer.

Everybody — there were maybe seven of us in the Mile — wondered, what festival Knox had in mind. Knox was well-traveled. It could have been anywhere in Europe, even eastern Europe, North Africa, Asia, anywher in the U.S.. But nobody asked. Yes, it was strange, but nobody asked — yet I’ll bet we all could see a festival somewhere in the world at that hour, ferris wheels turning, lights strung across the darkness, happily milling crowds wandering in an out of booths full of figurines or fruit in May sunlight — a festival going on somewhere in the world where it was night and moonlight — some festival in all our lives.

Just imagine seven guys with memories of a festival — with memories of a girl, one girl at that festival. Like Mangan’s daughter at the festival in Araby.

“We had a beautiful time at The Festival,” Knox said.

It was 2:01 p.m.. May 15, 2026 The middle of a spring month in the middle of our lives. There wasn’t a guy in the room under forty.

A roomful of silent middle-aged drinkers and dreamers after Sinatra has stopped singing — dreaming of a girl.

A girl like a vision, inside a vision of a Festival.

And music, we heard music, too. Not Sinatra, just music. Because another wind swept up the sidestreet and into both doors and like some Towar of Babel of music, each guy was hearing his own tune in this time in his life….

Or maybe no one heard it but me, though everybody seemed to be listening.

THE BUGGY GRAY BEAST OF MAY

May day. Gray days.

First there was May 1st, now, May 2nd, 2026

Twenty-eight days will follow (I pray, I truly pray)

Reminding me of what Macbeth, in a despairing mood, said:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow…

Too bad. In May, I think of flowers. But here comes gray. Then there will be heat. We are in the middle of a drought here in the Tampa Bay area. So, with the gray, everyone is hoping there will come rain. No such luck.

There is both gray and sun today. Not sun. I prefer the gray.

‘Hello, Gray, my old friend…’

Seems like just yesterday I was saying hello to you.

You come slouching again, May, a rough beast this year, your hour come round at last

Time flies. And speaking of flies…

The lovebugs (Plecia neartica) are here, climbing the restaurant window. They fly conjoined, the female dragging the male who must walk backwards everywhere. And, like all insects, the female would seem to walk aimlessly. Which might explain why the male insect could care less. His fate is not going to be a happy one. He is dragged until the females lays her eggs, whereupon he dies.

The Myth of Sisyphus has nothing on the reality of the poor love bug. The mythical character pushes a rock only to have it roll back down the hill; the male lovebug has no worth life after mating — only to walk backwards and die.

Somedays, I feel like I’m walking backwards.

At least the female lovebug flies and takes the male with her. Do they both flutter their wings for maximum lift? Does the male get to tell the f emale, “hey, I’m sick of walking, this is pointless. Let’s take flight, babe.” (Can you hear Sinatra? “Come fly with me, come fly, come fly awayyyyy….”)

I wonder what they eat? Or do they just get eaten? (Can’t you just hear the male screaming, “hey, idiot, you’re headed right for that Toyota’s front grill!” Maybe in flight, he get to pull her around. But, as with all living things, the female’s probably the only one who knows where she’s going? But — where do they go, on land or in the air, that makes a damn bit of differnce. Do they have parties, these Airborne Pilgrims of Pointlessness?)

The lovebugs swarm over Florida every May and September; small, ant-resembling. I first visited Florida in May. Moved here the following September. The lovebugs greeted me both times.

They are my friends, therefore, these black (rather than gray), reviled, unwelcomed members of earth’s lowest class of living thing.

Yes, they welcomed me. I guess I should welcome them. Too bad they aren’t beautiful, which is what you would expect from something called —a lovebug.

Love can be ugly. But I’d expect a bug with peacock majesty. No such luck.

At the restaurant…

I ate an egg cooked medium. Outside, no flowers anywhere. They say it’s a good time to plant petunias.

SO LET ME SUMMARIZE ..AND RHAPSODIZE:

The lovebugs swarm/ the lovebugs smear/ the lovebugs swarm and smear

Which means May’s for car washes.

Rain and thunder come, briefly, at 2 p.m.

Soak the Florida Room carpet.

Briefly interrupt the drought.

So we hope for rain, we hope for flowers.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Hello, May. Hello, Lovebugs, so many living and soon to die.

(I saw one, all alone, very lost, crawling across the restaurant floor, having flown in through an open door.

Looking for a mate, that bug, no doubt.

A very bad place for that.

I gave that bug very poor odds.

Too many shoes, no mate in sight.

I wished it luck. Speaking of which

Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby in May ritual as certain

as lovebugs coming to Florida.

Golden Tempo.

Which reminds me

Of time’s Leaden Tempo

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace…

I think I’ll plant a petunia.

BRIEF APRIL FLIGHT

There is a bird outback, species uncertain, pecking at seeds that have fallen to the ground.

Where will that bird sleep tonight? A nest, of course. Birds make nests, though we rarely see them. I rarely see them, anyway. Will they sleep in the sand? Bob Dylan, you recall, became famous, asking in song, in that high nasal tone of his, How many seas must a white dove sail…

Sail, not fly. Interesting choice of words. It works, actually, being eupamistically better than “fly”.

And Bob goes on to ask where the white dove’s flight will end…

…before she sleeps in the sand?

“She”. Better than “it.” Better, too, than, “he”. Plummage or other characteristics can give away, to the trained eye, the sex of a bird, and this is no less so with a dove, but we don’t know about Dylan’s “white dove” and, I’ll bet, neither does Dylan — but the word “she” has a softening, peaceful touch — that female touch (though, in suggesting thus, I risk being declared “sexist” in the year 2026).

So much about words! But words –on their flight — can land smoothly, or crash.

Sea, sand and time. A dove. An answer “blowing in the wind.”

Beautiful, evocative thoughts, images, words.

But not necessarily, at least where white doves are concerned, ornithologically correct.

But such things don’t matter where song lyrics or poems are concerned. Poems and lyrics have their own flight path. I see what the songwriter is saying. The poet, too, when Wallace Stevens writes of the “gold-feathered bird”.

But it occurs to me to ask:

Do birds ever sleep in the sand? I read that some species do sleep in the sandy shallows — to avoid predators. The white dove (the symbol of peace), apparently must, like all of us, fear her enemies and is probably subject to battles and all-out wars that erupt among avian species. I know that bluejays, lovely as they are with those layers of blue, have been known to raid nests (not, I’ve read, a constant practice; just a survival strategy when food is short. And isn’t that what causes many wars? Shortages?)

How far does a white dove fly – or sail – on any given day?

I’ve read that a carrier pigeons can fly as much as 400 to 600 miles in a day. In 1982, the skeletal remains of a carrier pigeon were found in the chimney of a home in Bletchingly, Surrey, England, believed to have been among the 250,000 carrier pigeons trained by volunteers of the British National Carrier Pigeon Service and provided in World War II to the invading British armies during the 1944 D-Day invasion. Attached to it (we’ll say “her”) leg was a red cannister containing an encripted message believed to have been intended for a Royal Air Force Bomber Command. She likely had flown from the heart of Nazi-controlled Europe on her vital mission carrying her messager when other forms of communication between armies were deemed less reliable.

The message in the cannister was addressed to XO2. Whoever that might be. It was, as noted, encripted and has not, to this day, been de-coded.

(One could only wish it had said….Commander, how about you lay down your arms, and, for God sake, don’t send over any more bombers. These German guys told me they’re damn weary of war. When I left them, they’d flocked — like birds of a feather — into a beer hall./ The last I heard them, they were singing psalms, getting loaded..

Unlikely, of course.

We know no one at that point was weary of fighting. Pace, Bob Dylan, they weren’t about to ban any cannon balls. Who uses cannon balls anymore? Rockets, missilnukes, missiles, drones….those are our modern weapons of choice.

The poor bird never completed its mission. One can, of course, fantasize that during her long flight over the North Sea or maybe over the White Cliffs, her little pigeon’s heart grew dispondent with advancing the purposes of war; that the white dove in her longed to sleep in the sand. No telling why she died, ( broken heart? homesickness? –or why she chose a chimney for her final rest carrying her final message. Perhaps, despite her presumed keen sense of direction, she’d become lost. Lost and despondent.

And somewhere, a bomber commander, code-named XO2, stood waiting at the aerodrome for a message from the front that never arrived. He probably died wondering why he never saw that small gray-feathered spector winging toward him out of the blue.

But, of course, I’ve gone from orthonological reality to bad poetry here. Skylarks, Nightingales, Crows, Flamingoes, Mockingbirds, Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” whose “fire-fangled feathers dangle down”. They’ve all had their turn as poetic motifs in the hands of real poets. Why not the lowly carrier-pigeon, service her country? Or even just those wobbly-footed, head-bobbing urban dwellers devour peanuts in every park, now and then summoning enough motivation to take flight and deposit white streaks down office windows, earning them the derogation “flying rats”?

How long does any bird live?

I’ve read three to ten years, depending on all those factors one can imagine — weather, predation, disease, hunters. (I once failed to save the life of a cedar waxwing that, drunk on some purple variety of berry, crashed into a store window, maybe seeing itself, thinking she’d found a companion, or mate, and rushed toward it. End of story.

I could go on about birds. Continue my flight.

But I won’t. And you should be glad.

Except to say — how blessed it would be to be able to fly!

But how blessed to know we are likely to live more than ten years.

Wallace Stevens gets to close us out, for he wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” A)mong twenty snowy mountains, and among many other places. And he gave to the lowly pigeon the honor of concluding his famous poem, “Sunday Morning,” writing how at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.