Poetry in Dry Places

Hollow canned soundbites nibble at the nether distance of the bedroom.

I find it hard to take it seriously; the southern twangs of the healthcare debate.

"I don't think Speaker Pelosi's going to do that but if she did it would be a direct slap to the Democrats ... I don't see the bill being there to get enough votes on the floor."

The arcane language of power yawns from C-Span and takes on a life of its own like the drool that oozes from the jaws of a sick old dog. I can hardly bear to raise a heavy eyelid to watch.

"Doctor Gingrich has some amendments on that."

When did he become a doctor? I wouldn't let him operate on me. He's done enough damage to my brain already.

"My mother is in her 70s. She could not have gotten that knee operation that changed her life under this bill."

Oh - and there's a specific provision that mentions your mother? The below provisions exempt Mrs. Patty Bumpus of Little Rock, Arkansas.

"It may be we can sit on Saturday and move to Monday 3, and Tuesday 4 if necessary."

Or out of here altogether. Does anyone look out of the windows over the lawns and suggest going out instead for a picnic? Let's have Pims and at least we can slap the Democrats on the grass instead of the floor.

"Well over 100 amendments have been filed ... If the process had moved more quickly and we had allowed for some of the free market processs and cost control principles."

After paying $4 for a packet of rice crackers at FarmFresh I could use an injection of free market principles and cost control.

I could also use the off switch, if I hadn't lost the remote control. As the debate meanders on my soul is saved by an anthology of poetry.

Did Dylan Thomas care about heathcare as he careered over the insane cliffs of Wales, high on spirits both liquid and literary, back to his boat house?

And what would I give for someone to throw open the windows of Congress during the minutiae of the debate and let in the words of the great poet like a flood of salty estuary water in this driest of places.

In the mutardseed sun/By full tilt river and switchback sea/Where the cormorants scud/In his house on stilts high among beaks/And palavers of birds/This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave/He celebrates and spurns/His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age/Herons spire and spear.

The Pool Monkey

I love swimming pools that sparkle like blue quartz lapping on marble where the only company are statutes of Aphrodite.
Or infinity pools perched on the edge of the Mediterranean, where you feel like you are going to tumble over the cliffs of antiquity and lose yourself in the sunset.
Not that I can recall swimming in any pools like that.
Instead our reality on humid Sundays is the pool at the local state park. My memories of cocktails beside the pool of the Sheraton in Luxor recede at an accelerated rate as we approach the chain link fence, our spare clothes in the latest line of stylish trash can liners from Food Lion.
To get here we have driven about 40 minutes because we succeeded in moving into the only condo complex on this side of town without a pool.
Instead we pay $130 a month for a worker to stand outside our house picking his nose while pretending not to notice that our postage stamp sized lawn has died.
On many occasions we have deliberately averted our eyes from the almost deserted blue pool at Steeple Chase just five minutes from our home.
In contrast the pool at Chippokes Plantation State Park is usually full of ill behaved kids who have been disgorged from a nearby connurbation. Tattoos and ankle bracelets abound.
On the positive side my book on the history of ancient civilizations is in little danger from thieves.
The pool was clean on Sunday; most pools are compared to the municipal gunk fest that was Elizabeth City's public pool.
But there was a disconcerting smell wafting over from a nearby drain.
There are other hazards here such as horse flies, which are so named because they are almost the size of a horse.
There are plenty of rules about eating by the pool, using inflatables, pets and not entering the pool in your work clothes - as if.
However, the first time were were here somebody thought it was a good idea to take their monkey for a swim.
Like a surreal sequal to Jaws, the pool cleared as the frightened animal careered towards a group of kids snapping its razor sharp teeth.
The staff who are so zealous about food regulations seemed fine to give the monkey a pool pass.
The monkey incident coincided with an early pool experience for my daughter.
Now she can't understand it when she visits the pool and there's no resident pool monkey.

Cat Call

I've spent most of the working week yearning for the weekend. But now it's here I'm at a loss about what to do other than eating and sleeping, which is normally fine with me.
I've been restless today, so much so that by 1 p.m. it was time to resort to a desperate Plan B.
I located my camera and held a photo session with my cat.
Strangely enough for an animal that seems to have been here under foot for ever there are few photographs of him in the vast family archives that are dominated by our daughter.
If she's the queen of the archive, Gigi is a mere footman hanging around on the margins.
To his credit he doesn't seem to care. While Zara will pout and pose, Gigs just lulled around on his fat tummy, obligingly looking towards the lens on demand.
Gigs used to go outside to hunt but since the unfortunate revenge incident with the neighbor who trained her dog to urinate on our lawn, he's been on home confinement.
He took it badly at first but the wunderlust quickly faded from his eyes as he piled on the pounds.
For such a large beast he can be easily overlooked which is probably why he likes to engage in toe crushing antics and make the occasional lazy swipe at my wife's ankles on the stairs. Unlike previous felines I've found myself accidenally owning he isn't overly affectionate or pretty.
Perversely this makes for a better photoshoot. Naomi Campbell may make for a better picture that Kathy Bates, but I'm sure Bates is easier to work with.
Thinking about Gigs it's hard to believe that the ancient Egyptians endulged in cat worship and mummified their felines.
The historian Herodotus recalls how if cats died in a house fire, all the inhabitants of the home would shave their eyebrows.
If Gigs succumbed to the inevitable, - maybe one day he'll topple over on the stairs because his legs can no longer support his giant white furry gut - we'll all be sad.
But there'd be no mummification going down and I'm keeping my eyebrows.
And that's not just because of the few times he's slipped into our closet and displayed his affection for my T-shirts in the most unpleasant way imaginable.
But then the British have always been bemused by the notion of animal worship. When tombs at Beni Hassan in Egypt yielded up tons of mummified cats decades ago, the British explorers didn't bother to make records of the find.
They were simply shovelled up and shipped to England where they were used as fertilizer.

Bog blog

I realized something profound about the States today. I still can't belive it's taken me more than three years for the penny to drop about spending a penny as we'd say back in Blighty.
No matter how far you walk across an American city you'll never find a public lavatory.
The fact I've just realized this has led me to question a great British institution, that so many of us back home take for granted.
Indeed when a local authority in Torquay once tried to shut the town's loos, it provoked a revolt among the locals shamelessly championed by the newspaper I worked for.
So what was the big deal? Will we Brits shackle ourselves to an unpleasant anachronism just because it's always been there?
I have a lot of memories of British public toilets from an early age; few of them were pleasant.
There was the Street Toilet, a pungent smelling place normally sunk into a concrete walkway, obliquely Gothic and resplendant with its chequer board tiles, broken windows, shattered seats and graffiti.
As a teenager you learned a lot about life from the graffiti on the stalls, hence the smug expression when your parents finally told you the "facts of life."
Even more sinister was the Park Toilet, a low slung green or grey place always in the most shifty and overgrown part of a public park frequented by equally shifty men in long raincoats.
The Beach Bog was a safer but not much more pleasant proposition, where the smell of the briney sea and a nearby fish and chips stand mingled with the sharp tang of urine.
And don't even get me started on the Bus Station Bog with its baleful pale yellow strip lights and chicken wire over the stalls. The Bus Station Bog was strictly a place of last resort for the most dire of emergencies.
Inner city pubs also boast their fair share of abysmal toilets, although I am fortunate to have never experienced anything as horrendous as "The worst toilet in Scotland" as depicted in the film Trainspotting.
Rather peculiarly the British Toilet Association asserts that the UK's loos were once "the envy of the world."
Not as I recall them, although at least you can sit on them if you feel brave enough, unlike the notorious toilets of France.
The British Toilet Association says the county needs better toilets now and needs to "stop the rot."
To my mind the rot was rather well established in the 1970s.
I'm not sure why the public lavatory idea never caught on in America but I'm quite glad.
Americans refer to toilets as "rest rooms." Frankly there's no way I'd want to take a nap in any of these places.

A sad end to the freak show

There's nothing like a celebrity death to bring out the worst in journalists.
And there are few celebrities bigger than Michael Jackson.
So when news of Jackson's death started to filter through, the usual newsroom antics weren't far behind.
Bets were discussed on whether Patrick Swayze would also die on Thursday making it a trio of Farrah Fawcett, Jacko and Swayze in one day.
There was consternation that Jacko's white gloved supporters would be out moonwalking en masse on the streets, or that there would be a tsunami of wailing in Japan.
The usual puns on Jackson's songs were soon up on Facebook - Beat it, Killer, 20 percent off the Jackson Five etc, while one writer was taking odds on Madonna also shuffling off her mortal coil.
It didn't take long for the first Jacko jokes to follow.
There was so much tweeting on Twitter it apparently ground to a halt.
Nobody seemed to be sad about Jacko's death, except perhaps greedy plastic surgeons and a man famous for bending spoons.
I'd like to say I didn't join in and was above it all but, you know how it goes.
But now that it's all over Jacko's death has left a queazy feeling in the pit of my stomach because it casts an unpleasant hue on our sickly celebrity-obsessed society.
Long before his untimely death Jackson had ceased to become the kind of celebrity anyone aspired to be.
He wasn't like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean who were still uber cool when they died. He was a grotesque corruption of one of the most talented artists of the 20th century. He didn't seem to be black or white; male or female, man or boy. In his later years he appeared to have dropped in from Mars.
Nobody who shed a tear to the melodies of Ben at a school disco could ever equate the prodigious talent that was the teenage Jackson with the porcelain freak show who slept in an oxygen cylinder and dangled a baby from a hotel window.
But surely it's an indictment on us all that instead of caring about putting together the tortured pieces, we bought the popcorn and sat down hungrily waiting for the the final chapter of the macabre show to unfold like the crowds who came to see the hangings at Tyburn.
Martin Bashir's famous interviews brought home to us how disturbed and out of touch with reality Jackson really was.
But they also shed light on something else; the sinister nature of Jackson's relationship with his father Joe who thought little of beating, intimidating and bullying his kids towards perfection, sacrificing Michael's childhood for fame and fortune.
By the time Michael Jackson brought out the album Thriller in the 1980s, the perfection blueprint seemed to have worked. Jackson could sing, dance and perform like no other artist in the short history of pop.
Pity it was exactly what dad ordered; an act.
And when the cracks began to show they weren't just in the face Jackson tried to create to look less like his father.
They were to split a brittle human being into a million pieces, all of them hurtling groundwards toward a gaudy Neverland where child abusers stalked the Carousels.
Not that anyone cared. The intervention strategies we see every day on reality TV don't seem to apply to the famous. We watched appalled as Jacko's kids were paraded round with their faces covered. And nobody did a thing about it.
The Jackson tragedy should be a lesson to all of us who push and punish our kids into being the superstars we never were.
It should bring it home to us that being ordinary is nothing to be ashamed of and everything to aspire to.

trapped in the past

It occured to me the other day that I am sinking into yesterday.
I only need to say "yesterday" and I think of the sad chords of the Beatles song. And when I think of sinking, I imagine the fabled bogs on Dartmoor and the tales my parents used to tell me when I was on holiday there about Old Uncle Tom Cobley who loaded his friends on the back of a gray mare cum makeshift taxi service on the way to Widecombe Fair.
Widecombe Fair was one of those jolly japes that ends in tears. All the people on the mare mysteriously disappeared - my parents speculated they were sucked up in a bog - but on a ghostly night out on the moor you can still hear the "old mare in her rattling bones."
Dartmoor can be a bleak and windswept place but I miss it to bits.
I have fond thoughts of the weak sunlight on the day I followed a flint strewn path by a clear stream up the escarpment into trees that radiated the reds, oranges and yellows of fall. And the pictures I took of the gnarled trees that had bowed to the wind on the edge of the bare moor.
We stood there smugly in our fake Barbours admiring a distant church tower and heard the peal of bells carried by a hestitant wind on one of those timeless afternoons.
The girl I was with then drifted away later like one of the grey tinged clouds that race across the rocky tors and are a distant memory 20 minutes later.
I don't think about her much now and when I do my thoughts are most pervese.
I find myself wondering what happened to the Italian-bound leather wedding album that cost about $3,000. I mean what good are such fragmented memories to anyone?
Is there a day of the year when someone somewhere brings it out and lights candles for all the failed marriages since Adam and Eve started bickering over fruit?
And how could all those weeks of agonizing about cake colors and who to invite have ended more than seven years later with a phone call that went something like: "How's the cat?"
"He's dead."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't."
And the line went deader than a feline for ever. Just like that. And now I can never think of the conversation without conjuring up an image of Paul Daniels in his faux magician weaseldom.
"You'll like it. Not a lot but you'll like it."
- I'll like it about as much as a dead cat but what is dead can't be made undead nor said unsaid. I think that's my problem.
Dartmoor on the other hand is less easy to erase. It has a lowering presence and majesty.
Back in the day when I was consumed with enthusiam about journalism and its infinite possibilities I went up to Princetown to take pictures of the hulking great Victorian prison whose granite walls cast a shadow that even a sunny day can't dispell.
The jail, like the prison project I labored on at journalism college, speaks to my past but says little of the future.
Back in the 19th century desperate prisoners would attempt to flee the prison's damp and cavernous spaces in ankle chains only to be cut down by the wind on the moor, flurries of snow and those lurking bogs.
I fear the past is becoming my ankle chain too.
I have worked at places where young reporters have looked at me blankly if I've mentioned Duran Duran. When the Reflex was number one in the charts, the only reflex they were aware of was a twitch in the birth canal.
And to the Ipod generation, the charts are a meaningless concept as alien as a granite prison anchored to a moor.
It used to matter to be Number One; but then I suppose it used to matter if your suit of armor was properly oiled.
Mention Top of the Pops and Pan's People - the dance group my father used to be overly attentive to in the five minutes before he was slapped by my mother - today and you might as well say: "I went to school with Emily Bronte - nice girl, a bit gloomy, though."
I'd like to say I'll get over my obsession with the past but it seems to be getting worse.
Today in 7-Eleven I found myself muttering the words of a Doors song and I can't get enough of the Stones every time they are played on the radio; I end up thrashing my arms around in my car, gathering more strange looks as I veer across the Interstate.
The Stones aren't even my generation but I think I need to buy their cassette.
And every time someone talks about Jon and Kate, Kirstie's weight or Cher's daughter's sex change, I alternately want to disappear into my shell or scream.
Then my mind goes into overdrive. I want to find a way I can turn the conversation to Napoleon's ill fated retreat from Moscow but start talking about 1812 at a party and everyone looks at you like you're a freak.
It's worth persevering to my mind. The next time you are wedged in a kitchen sipping watery Millers between two crushing bores in baseball caps who are jumping up and down about the Steelers' latest win, try loudly interjecting with an observation about how Hannibal made a key strategic error in the Second Punic War. It's worth it for the reaction.
Because let's face it - the past beats the present hands down. There were great movements, ideas and thinkers all cast in the foundry of constant fear and the spectre of suffering.
Today's generation has it all at the push of a button. But by being visually richer we are spiritually poorer. Somebody else has given us the imagination thing and we have burned our own imagination out on the X-box.
Meanwhile the answer lies unopened on the library shelf.

Cruel Summer

It's been a June of bouts of unremitting heat and leaden skies split apart by thunder here in Virginia.

During such months you have to wonder about those madcap adventurers who made the trip across the Atlantic more than 400 years ago to simmer in a mosquito-infested swamp at Jamestown and to freeze and starve in between unedifying episodes of cannibalism.

To me the New World remains a bewildering and unforgiving place at times. Away from the cities the trees seem taller and more savage than in Europe, the brackish waterways darker, more mirky and muddled. I feel if I look over my shoulder I will glimpse heavily tattooed people flitting through the half light of the forest and spirit demons exorcised with their drums.

Where man has left his mark the cities of Virginia can also be unforgiving on the eye, sliced up by hulking, concrete freeways that divide rich from poor and strip malls that are vast Saharas of cracked concrete and testaments to prosperity lost.

Faced with the slabs of downtown Newport News and the sickly, sulphorous residue of the coal dumps at the shipyard that linger in the nostrils for half a mile up the Interstate, it can be easy to lose hope like the souls in the ghetto to the east, who live and die prematurely on the wrong side of the tracks.

Sorrow lingers down here in the streets with numbers but no names. My landmarks are the half remembered scenes in the half light where the only color is the yellow of incident scene tape and the blue lights piercing the gloom. I measure the distance of the blocks by the footfalls of the marchers who come to remember the prematurely dead.

The candles and makeshift photographs taped to cardboard are a world away from the solid war memorials that occupy pride of place in every English town but they share a common heritage that seeped into the bloody ground.

Many a time on a homicidal intersection I have yearned for a peaceful stream and an English meadow. Grantchester with its sleepy homes and bunched willows draped over the flowers of the water meadow, seldom seemed so alluring. The Old Vicarage where Rupert Brooke wrote of the lilacs in bloom, never so unattainable.

Brooke, the flowering of English youth, died on a Greek Island, in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England, on the way to one of the bloodiest theaters of World War I.

The longer I am away the more easily I slip into the Arcadian/American view of England as a place of antique steam trains, Shakespearean theaters, old maids riding through the mist and sleepy afternoons caressed by the sound of leather on willow.

It becomes more convenient by the day to airbrush from my mind the ugly asphalt of the A12 and the tower blocks of Barking, of walking the gum strewn gauntlet to Blockbuster past the crack addicts and hustlers and the schools of the East End with their grubby walls and high steel fences.

But for an island so densely populated England is yet to give up its gentle charm and the countryside is seldom further than an hour away.

On the days when the storms muscle their way up the James River, sucking the oxygen from the sky, I am increasingly far away recalling the gentle contours of Wenlock Edge and the clouds that rise like pleasure balloons over the escarpments on a Sunday afternoon.

It's becoming increasingly hard to forget about those blue remembered hills.

My work station

I've always found "work station" to be a strange expression.
It makes me think of trains whirring in and out, a bustle of commuters and routes that go places.
Whereas my work station doesn't involve anything much going anywhere.
Instead of direction there's accumulation and inertia. There's a mountain of papers that threatens my keyboard like a mini Aberfan. Sometimes they slide into my arms when I am on the phone and people wonder why I sound like I'm wrestling with a baby seal mid conversation.
Sometimes it's hard to find the old gray phone under the detritus of my desk and when I find it I have second thoughts.
The receiver is probably clogged up with the germs of reporters long since past; I try not to hold it too close to my ear.
If Aggie MacKenzie of How Clean is your House? fame were to see it she'd probably squeal in that high pitched Scottish voice of hers, take a swab and present me with a petri dish that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Although I tell colleagues, tongue firmly in cheek, my desk represents a new generation of one stop filing, that I can put my hand blindly into the abyss and pull out a gem of information, the truth is more random. Rather than the stat I'm looking for on arsons in York County in 1973, it's more likely to be the remains of last October's chicken sandwich.
At least I didn't request mayonnaise.
I console myself with the thought there are women with more disordered handbags. Like a former colleague called Christine who used hers to house a collection of chicken bones dating back to the mid 1700s.
I'm told such behavior is not the norm for women.
Some days I pledge to have a purge, motivated - if nothing else - by a desire to find out if my desk is a lurid shade of bubbegum pink under those papers, or just gray like everyone else's.
Desk clutter isn't a new problem for me. Crowded desks have followed me my whole career, like an old friend, or an alarming stalker. I never know how they get there.
When I was working as a features editor in England, one of my colleagues invited to my work station, on a one way ticket from hell or Hellesdon, a neat Nazi who ran an operation called Clutter's Last Stand.
The spurious context was it might make a decent feature.
Mrs. Clutter - I can't remember her real name but am haunted by her bob - ritually humiliated me for the best part of a day and made me get on my hands and knees under the desk while she assaulted my hind quarters with a vacuum cleaner. I was getting alarmed by Mrs. C by the end of the day.
Two months later she called me up and asked if I was interested in a follow up visit. As papers cascaded onto my lap I told her there was no need to because the desk was still immaculate.
Maybe my desk needs another Mrs. C in its life. It's tired and lackluster and needs someone to whip it into shape with some Vim and a vacuum cleaner attachment.
But there is surely something noble about its decline. When I look upon my desk from afar my eyes mist over as if I have stumbled on a relic from an antique age.
In an oblique way it makes me think of Shelley's poem Ozymandias.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.