Blue Heron standing in the shallows: Stick legs Knot knees Twig toes Do you always have one leg raised Or is that the way I want to picture you? The way your body curves Into your long neck Curls into your head Pointing with your beak. Immobile elegance Poised to strike Pierce Capture Eat Immobile elegance Still Outside of time Do you always fly by yourself? You are solitary But The steady, slow wing pace Makes me think you are flying in place Makes me think you don’t know alone When you are above me You are so many things A seamless assembly of geometry Cylindrical Linear Curved Body Legs Wings Straight and curling Never bent or crooked You are dignity Except that one time: I surprise you in the small pond So close to the trail My hiker quiet feet don’t warn you Anna’s dog-pad paws hush on the packed dirt You jump up, water thunder wing crash But The trees are close around you The escape angle steep Up You labor, heavy strokes Slap the air Unsteadily ascend Somehow find a hole in the canopy Escape from me With my hand reached out toward you Trying to bring you back And It’s too late let to tell you that I love you
Blink Instant
Too much
Once of Hope
This is a poem that came from a student mistake, writing “once of hope” instead of “ounce of hope.”
How an ounce of hope Becomes a once of hope That once of hope lasts to this day Is in these words Is in every page I've written This endless dream Started with a pencil Scribbling inside the blue lines On them Across them This true belief Belied by reality Given the smallest sustenance 10 dollars Poems in print Stories imprinted in the cloud Yet the once of hope endures It was hoped so strong Multiplying from the ounce of hope It once came from
Dear Ask Boz
What is Charlie Brown’s sister named?
You probably are thinking of Sally, Charlie’s well-known sister. But what you don’t know is that there is another: Charlene Brown.
Charlie Brown’s father tried to hide it, but his son was a terrible disappointment to him. He never knew a young person could be so anxious and so bad a everything. It was clear right away that Charlie was destined to be a failure. And his father felt helpless to do anything about it.
Until he came upon the obvious solution: start a second family. Mr. Brown created the identity “Johnny Teal”, and found a woman on the internet. Soon they were married, and his secret wife gave birth to a girl. They named her Charlene, and they raised her to be the exact opposite of the half-brother she would never know.
Charlene excelled at everything Charlie failed at. She became a feared hitter in baseball, and a fearsome pitcher. She was dominant in her relationship with her peers, and they respected her to the utmost, while craving her attention and approval. And as far as successfully kicking a football, well, we’ll let this excerpt from Charlene Brown, the first nine years tell that story:
Charlene takes two steps back and one to her left. Her friend Lou von Furr calmly places the football on the ground, puts his finger on the puckered tip of the ball, and turns the laces away. Her eyes raise to the target, then drop to the ball. Charlene Brown stutter steps, planting her left foot as her right leg swings back. Her foot punches through the ball, and her legs scissor up as air explodes from her mouth. She lands, slightly bent, so she is the same height as Lou coming up from his crouch. They end up with arms around each other as, perfect again, the ball flips high through the uprights.
From the sideline, Charlene’s father, pride shining on his face, can’t contain his excitement, exclaiming, “Whhoomp wooowhomp waaaaaahh wont want woooooooh!”
All of Mr. Brown’s hopes for the future are focused on his secret daughter. He knows that Charlie will live at home forever, claiming to be a competitive esports gamer while leaching off his parents. Charlene promises the possibility of success and riches, or at least not endless disappointment.
Avoid the Beginning of Evil
When I decided to launch this website, Henry David Thoreau had a talk with me. He reminded me of a time he had three pieces of limestone on his desk, and became “terrified” when he realized he had to dust them every day, so he “threw them out the window in disgust.”
His punch line was: “It’s best to avoid the beginning of evil.”
Thoreau is showing his sense of humor with some hyperbole, but his point is strong: consider the new objects and projects that you take on carefully, and think about the amount of work involved in maintaining them.
Metaphorically, Thoreau’s limestone represents any task or duty that demands our attention and work. As I say in Tao of Thoreau, when we start something new, we need to be “ready to bring the energy and focus required.” I thought about this a lot as I designed bozbozeman.com.
I’m launching this site at the end of the school year, which can be a stressful and exhausting time. For this blog to succeed, I need to produce and post content so people who like it will keep coming back. I need to find creative ways to promote it so that it grows. This is a lot of work; moreover, it is work that I will have to sustain for a long time for this site to become successful.
Then I realized something, so I said this back to Thoreau: “The limestone was decoration. You didn’t want to waste your time on something you didn’t have to. Writing is something I want to do. And with a website, other people can read my work, which has always been my goal.”
I didn’t see Lao-Tzu there until he said, “That’s right.” I looked at him, and he spoke in that calm voice, echoing with centuries of wisdom: “Do you work and step back. The only path to serenity.”
Thoreau didn’t have anything to say to that, so I guess I have avoided the beginning of evil.
Unplug
What do you do to unplug? Leave a comment!
Would I Choose to Bloom?
Click on the first image for a slideshow of this poem.
Choose to Bloom
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Self of Steam
A student once wrote that she had
“Low self-of-steam.”
Even as I circled it in red
and wrote the right words
I felt like correcting it was wrong,
and a vision emerged.
I see this self-of-steam
as a different version of her
and her words not a mistake
but a revelation.
She is describing herself, amorphous,
a vapor caught between window panes.
Continue reading
Mark Bozeman 