Samhain 2012

Samhain 2012 - a reading (on YouTube)

On a high, rugged hill, a ruinous castle perches, its crenellations forming a gap-toothed grin. In the donjon its hidden garrison is poised like a falcon ready to stoop upon its prey, playing draughts until their time is nigh. Inveterate gamblers, they wager on our lives.  Tonight, the portal opens.

Storm clouds mar the horizon. Bass note moans of thunder resonate below a howling soprano wind. Rain beats a cadence against rooftops like drum. Whipped into a furor by the rhetoric of the air, the sea renews its ancient rivalry with the land. Moiling up beside the water gate, ranks of waves surge forward to briefly reclaim their birthright before retreating in a Pyrrhic victory.

As the storm abates, spirits emerge through a postern disguised as a cairn-like opening, the cave of cats. Green-eyed and hungry, they creep through the savage garden, shadows against a bloody harvest moon. This one night, they knock like missed opportunity, soft yet insistent. Through a tatting of ice-worked windows, they eavesdrop on our lives.

Sheltered in warm yellow light beside a trestle heaped with bounty, we sing and eat and dance. We care not for the ancient spirits. Like the fading colors beyond our windows, we set no place for them at our table. With pastries and sweetmeats we bribe them to favor someone else's feast.

Enraged by their irrelevance, they vex us with misfortune. Their mischief comes to naught. We no longer heed the rites of kith and kin. Until they prowl the night on tiny goblins' feet, changelings of our hearth and home. It is only in that self-imposed darkness that we remember and regret.


© 2012 Edward P. Morgan III

Fighting the Tide

Fighting the Tide - a reading (on YouTube)

There are forces in this life we cannot resist, though we feel compelled to try. Some days, it’s as though an ancient, unseen god wants to show me things I don’t want to see, take me places I don’t want to go. Events turn unexpected and unpredictable. Lightning, tornadoes, threatened furloughs, benefit cuts, utility breakdowns, oak pollen, borderline migraines. Entropy in a word. A tide of distractions rises, threatening to sweep me out to sea.

When I was young, somewhere under ten, I went to the beach one weekend with my parents and their friends. I don’t remember much about how the day started out, only how it ended. It could have been spring or fall. I honestly don’t remember. Rafts of seaweed and sargasso were strewn along the tideline. Storms churning somewhere offshore had whipped up the gray Atlantic. The waves were four to six feet and choppy, breaking full force right upon the shore. The wind was stiff and steady, the water chill and white with foam. Everyone opted for the shelter of the pavilions in the lee behind the Australian pines. Everyone but me.

I started the day building sandcastles, as I was often wont to do. One by one, half completed, they fell to the advancing tide. Annoyed, I started building a longer, sturdier line to defend against the sea. I scavenged seaweed as filler instead of dredging deeper into the sand. I found the sargasso added strength to the barrier I was constructing. With each course of damp sand, I layered in more seaweed until the barricade was high enough for me to fully crouch behind. Finally, a rampart with a shallow moat and refused edges stood before Poseidon like a provocation.

The wind whipped the surf into a reenactment of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice." Dark clouds loomed over the ocean. Lightning sliced across the sky. As the rain slanted sideways, I huddled behind my open-sided shelter, which kept the spray out of my face and eyes. The tide advanced steadily, driven higher by the storm. Soon, waves were crashing into the moat, then onto the front facing of my wall. The sargasso lent the structure the integrity to take the pounding, which meant I could enact hasty repairs before my battlement melted back into the sea. Its flanks resisted being undermined even as the waves began to wrap around the refused edges. My wall seemed indestructible. Behind it, I felt invincible. I was so emboldened that I began to taunt the storm and sea.

By the time my parents came looking for me, the storm had slackened. It was time to abandon the beach for the safety of our home. The lightning had passed inland and the rain had abated to a steady shower, though with the threat of more to come. The tide had retreated leaving my wall standing and intact, only slightly weathered for its encounter. My parents thought I’d sheltered in another pavilion. Had I spent the entire storm out here exposed on the beach? Didn’t I know to come in from of the rain?

These days, I have no taunts left in me. My life feels like the flotsam and jetsam tossed up from Poseidon’s angry sea. When each crisis ends, I am reminded of my mortality. I can sense the time that’s been washed away, the sand that’s slipped through the hourglass and drained beyond the shore. I wish I could reclaim the days I’ve lost in some sort of time renourishment project. But know that I can’t.

If I’m not careful, my feet get mired in a sandy past as the water swirls around them, each wave sinking them deeper until it takes the strength of a colossus just to break them free. Once I get unstuck, I backfill as much enjoyment as possible into my life by doing the things I long to do, and seeing the people I love to see. Games, puzzles, movies, books, art shows and explorations, coffees, wines and dinners. I purposefully layer the positive memories with everyday sand to reinforce the bulwark behind which I’ll shelter when I turn to fight the rising tide again one day all too soon.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Lughnasa 2009

Lughnasa 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Lughnasa. English Lammas. The sun slowly fades from its solstice peak. Its journey is like a river; the water constant in its swirling, only the landscape changing as it slides by and day follows day.

The first day of harvest dawns with soft, shadowless, silver light creeping through the windows. By the river, a low furnace burns among the trees whose leaves dance a pantomime against the silver-orange light that forges another smoky dawn.

The spirits of the neighborhood gather to accept the offering of Lammas bread I lay before them, a small sacrifice to the guardians of this suburban demesne. With fluttering wings and fanned tails, young blues dance a ritual challenge against the reds, duns and grays for control of the unending seed. A red-shouldered juvenile frolics in the morning sun, chasing fallen pine needles before clutching one as a prize as it ascends to an oaken perch.

As I turn toward the water's edge, the summer sun embraces me like a lover long away, the humidity crushing all the breath from my chest. Nestled among the sage in this sere and shattered season, a lone purple blossom recalls an ancient rain song with an echo of storms to come.

The river is a still, black mirror marred only by a patchwork stain of lily pads, reflecting the cypress knees that tremble from supporting a dark green canopy of sky. Islands of tall, straight pines scattered across a green sea of pasture form the only topography along this stretch of watery highway.

Lightning skitters and shies along the horizon as cloud bottoms blur, merging sky with sea. Closer now, the lightning dances among the clouds, flashing their petticoats as distant elders grumble their disapproval at the provocative display. As the rain sheets down, the voice of the river rises from a hoarse whisper to a thunderous roar proclaiming its rebirth.

The edges of the world become as sharp as shattered crystal in the sterling twilight that follows the landscape cleansing rain. As night descends, the moon plays hide and seek among the clouds, its light occasionally spilling onto the water like heavy cream overflowing a large pewter pitcher.

By the equinox, thousands of migratory birds will form intricate line drawings of shallow waves cresting upon the river's wide and sandy shores. On a bluff overlooking the water, a mound of stones creates a low, dark chamber with a narrow passage leading in from outside, a cold womb where the dead are reborn from within. Towering trees guard these ancient ruins where gods once wept. Only blind men dwell there now, unscathed by its fallen beauty.

Each year wends along its own journey. Some happily burble while others crash and tumble over cataracts. A few become silent mirrors upon which we can reflect, with no two images looking exactly the same. Enjoy the journey, wherever it may take you. The river might not pass this way again.


© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Summer Solstice 2009

Summer Solstice 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Shadows slant from north to south as the sun continues its annual progress, a celestial pilgrimage through this sublunary realm.

The morning whispers in pearl white velvet as shadow cardinals dance behind the blinds. Outside, a knot of butterflies chase through the grass like a cloud of mischievous faeries playing tag on the wing. From ground level the lawn looks like a jungle, the ants a distant tribe of hunters pursuing their quarry high into the canopy. Elite arachnids in bright green and orange uniforms parachute down upon unsuspecting prey. Tiny wrens twitter warnings against each intruder lurking behind the morning leaves.

Suddenly, a gray stillness descends as though the world outside has paused for breath. Thunderheads obscure the horizon. Stormbound light casts long, double shadows directly south. The sky grumbles in strobed slow-motion with unheralded flashes of freeze-frame anger that capture the world in thunderously burning violet. Raindrops ripple and shatter the world's reflection in the mirror of an ancient pond.

Green leaves glow against a slate of purple clouds as the downpour trickles away into torrents of slanted sunshine. An indigo silhouette swoops in below the rooftops, an iridescent shadow with an offering of bread rinds it sacrifices at the hanging pool. At the bottom of that restless, rippled basin, in a spot of sunlight no larger than a silver dollar, a thousand summer dreams swim free.

As the sun melts and runs into an orange lake, a lavender sky oozes through the trees as evening slowly slips toward night. Beyond the field of twinkling, midsummer lights, the voices of the dead call as whippoorwills, a reminder that this time is brief and must not be forgotten.


© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Storm Watching

Each morning for days or weeks, the ritual has been the same. Rise at 4 a.m. and check the models, the Nikkei, the Footsie, the DAX, the CAC. Where is the center of circulation now, over Europe, over Asia, headed back toward the United States? What is the downward pressure on the Dow?

The economic forecasts sound like symptoms of a global pandemic: liquidity, inflation, stagnation, Asian crisis, Japanese malaise. It's too late to reinforce the mortgage supporting our home, too late to install shutters of bonds across the windows, too late to bury caches of cash beneath our mattress. We will have to manage with the stocks we have on hand. We track the numbers like coordinates, trying to read the futures like tea leaves lingering in the bottom of a cup or tarot cards spread purposefully across the kitchen table.

The storm approaches rapidly, intensifying quickly as predicted by ancient oracles named Opal and Charley. Technology collapses and the lights go out on the NASDAQ. We light candles from the S&P as short trading is suspended. The storm rages, pounding a hail in letters against the windows, LIBOR, FDIC, P/E, GDP, FMOC. Outside, Washington Mutual saplings snap off at the roofline while hundred-year oaks crack in half from rot or become completely uprooted. Lehman Brothers, Morgan-Stanley, AIG. Can our cherished elms of Main Street be far behind?

Like water, the markets seek their own level, exploiting any uncaulked crack or crevice as they descend. Like storm-driven rain, they flood toward the basement as they run down interior walls, collapsing the bone-white tower we've constructed floor by floor. As each layer of resistance pancakes, we shudder and pray the next support level holds as the Fed shores up its bracings. From pulpit and soapbox and tree stump, our leaders seek to assuage us with readings from the Book of Katrina: "...and, yea verily, none among us was endowed with divine foreknowledge to know whither this storm would strike."

Outside the Great Temple of lower Manhattan, a pitchfork-toting mob gathers to ignite oil-soaked stacks of corporate paper as makeshift torches, threatening to set the structure further ablaze without casting a single pail of water. Do they not realize, or just not care, that half the population huddles inside the sanctuary, mostly elderly, their parents and grandparents? That their communities can no longer bond a promise to repair their crumbling infrastructure, or raise fresh levies of frontline defenders to combat their other, now forgotten mortal fear? That master craftsmen can no longer employ their trades? They content themselves with prying up chunks of broken roadbed to smash the plate glass of other people's houses, as though their own aren't constructed of the same frangible framework of debt.

We cower inside our shelter praying the roof stays down, praying the windows don't bow to the eternal pressure, praying the panicked mob doesn't batter through the door. Why do we always look to the Almighty for salvation from any man-created crisis? Is God fully invested in the market? If so, what would Jesus own? Is that his wrath I hear overturning the money markets in the Temple, or just a tornado peeling back the rafters? Should I dive for the basement and pull a tempered sheet of Swiss gold over my head until the storm abates? Paralyzed by indecision, I clutch a rosary to redeem my financial sins, counting out the beads of my losses one by one as I recite the liturgy: There is no God but Wall Street, and Warren Buffet is its profit.

As if heeding my beseechments, the winds pause momentarily and the markets draw a single breath. Have we found the bottom or is that a second wall of wind and water darkening the horizon? As we wait for the all-clear siren to return to our investments, stormchasers prepare to spin up an H-60 to survey the homeless devastation of stilts and foundations and free-running breaches from the air. In the months ahead, experts will dissect the footage in minute, statistical detail to determine whether retrenchment has spawned recession. Economic psychologists are left to assess whether depression has poisoned the general mood.

Regardless of the outcome, the sun shines brightly this morning. Outside, one neighbor tends his lawn as he does every Wednesday. Another oversees the pavers being set to replace her torn-up driveway. The mail arrives with the same assortment of useless advertisements as any other day. Men and women head to work in the morning, children to school, the elderly out on their walks. Recent rains have revived the grass out front. Hibiscus and alamanda briefly bloom, providing a final splash of yellow, white and orange before the dun of winter sets in. Blue jays and mockingbirds flutter and squawk as they renew their annual, territorial war. Signs of recent excavations to conceal acorns dot the garden as squirrels continue their autumn preparations just like any other year.

Our youngest cat chases a feather on a string for hours before rediscovering the real birds sitting in the birdbath just outside the window, just as we cast our gaze back toward our portal on the real world instead studying the artificial glass that reveals only prophecies of doom from Bloomberg and CNBC. As mourning doves settle back on their perches, we are tempted to interpret their doleful cooing as lamentations for everything we've lost, forgetting that, just as their white brethren, they serve as joyful reminders that all storms pass and life continues uninterrupted just within our reach.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Feeling Fay

Or is that fey? After this weekend, I get the two confused.

I am waiting here to see what this storm will do, where she eventually decides to go, left, right, near, far, dead-ahead, engines full, damn the torpedoes, full stop. The models are making me dizzy. And does anyone else lie awake at 2 a.m. in mortal fear of being wiped out by the middle name of a notorious tele-evangelist's wife so desperately in need of an ironic queer eye intervention?

For all the blogs I've read, all the models I've studied, and all the analysis and discussion to which I've listened, I've found the experts seem to have missed the most telling predictive statistic of all: the perishable to comfort food ratio.

Before I explain, a full disclosure: This is a personal tracking model, not meant to guide anyone but FEMA and the criminally insane in whatever passes for their emergency storm preparations. This is one in a long line of models I've found to be mildly predictive only to be discarded for an unspecified draft choice at a later date, as I'm sure this one will become early Wednesday morning.

First I had the George W. Bush a.k.a. "Bring 'em on" model. In that one, the probability of landfall is inversely proportional to the individual desire of me and my friends to see what would happen if it did. I highly recommend this model to renters, the very young and anyone who has an evacuation room on retainer and speed-dial in the Atlanta Marriott Marquis and is already on the way. Oh, and the more than adequately insured, if that endangered species hasn't been entirely snuffed out by the good hands of Allstate around their neck as our good neighbors at State Farm enthusiastically cheer them on. This model worked really well at keeping the storms at bay in Florida through the seventies and eighties, at least until they did the transgender surgery that transformed half the hurricanes into him-icanes and David left me without power for ten solid days. Though that did teach me the powerful lesson of doing laundry BEFORE landfall. Key safety tip, half a score of sultry days in un-air conditioned as the natives and settlers experienced it Florida really leaves one wanting for a fresh and clean change of underwear each morning.

Next came the Fools and Small Children a.k.a. "Where Angels Fear to Tread" model. Ok, I never tested this one on hurricanes specifically. But initial results seemed quite promising as I listened at the back door a few months after we'd bought our first home as a freight train rolled one hundred yards behind the house around tree-top level before slamming down into the power substation half a mile away and sending pretty green and pink fireballs reflecting off the low and looming clouds, one of seven tornadoes that spun through the county that day. But once I saw the custom modifications to the house I'd just moved out of with its cinderblock wall bowed out as though following a French curve, and its garage to sliding glass door through the living room now a breezeway with its porch still intact and screened, I set this one aside with a full field testing. Scares me and I'm fearless.

Now I've settled on a new predictive tool, the perishable to comfort food ratio, a corollary of the preparation to paralysis principle. It works like this. You see a storm develop in the basin, so after a few days of constant panic on every station you watch you start tuning in to see where the weather experts think it might go. Or, if you're really lucky, an expert you know nails an e-mail to your electronic door every few hours when you've just convinced yourself after the last one that if you ignore it, perhaps Ms. Martin Luther and her hurricane reformation will eventually go away. It worked for a few generations of popes, didn't it? As you watch the black center line dance just left and right of your current coordinates in a personal cone of uncertainly over the one weekend you'd hoped to kick back and relax before the other four bowling balls you have in the air simultaneously come crashing down on your head, you think, hmm maybe I should do something to prepare. The problem is, you know the more you do, the less likely the storm is to actually affect your location.

This is a model rich in irony. Flood insurance due to kick in next Friday? Oow, three points toward landfall. Hurricane windows ordered but not installed? That's a five point deduction, mister. Have all your wood and shutters pre-cut though buried under the pile of donations to Friends of Strays in your garage, that's one point in your favor. Full tank of gas that you didn't have to wait four hours in line as they raised the prices ten times at twenty-five cents a pop while the state price-gouging inspector topped off his personal fleet of SUVs at a discount? Another point. Larder stocked with military-grade surplus rations designed to survive the nuclear winter? One more against landfall. Have enough camping equipment and shotgun ammo stockpiled in the back closet to turn an Army Ranger green with envy and send Dick Cheney's logistics officer to note your precise location for a midnight raid to restock the Vice President's secret bunker? Sure, take another point. A whole house generator that you had to fight off a pack of eight other rabid homeowners from a co-op and their children Florentine-style with only a bonsai potting spade and a cast-iron garden rake during a hurricane-preparation tax holiday weekend? That's two more to your running total. Finally, spending two hours pulling all the brick-a-brack, whirligigs and potted plants from your porch and yard then digging out your pre-cut shutters from the detritus you've buried them beneath since 2004 instead of watching Olympic sports you didn't know had been invented but are suddenly consumed with a burning desire to see the medal ceremony for just so that you can hear what the National Anthem of Balukhastan actually sounds like nets the same three points you will lose by sitting on the couch until midnight to see if the Tamil True Hollywood Story athlete gains the first ever synchronized shuffleboard bronze for his country in Olympic history despite being afflicted with dengue fever and the overwhelming case of steroid-induced munchies that caused the diplomatic incident with the prime minister elect of India during the opening ceremony that has now led to the inexplicable civil war in nearby Myanmar.

And you can blow that hedge simply by going to the grocery store for a few last minute food stocks, and loading up instead on five pounds of fresh Alaskan sockeye salmon on sale for a tragically deep discount while thinking, what are the odds that we lose power for more than two days like we did after every storm in the 2004 season, even the ones in the Pacific? That type of catastrophic maneuver is only fractionally compensated for by the two jumbo cans of Hormel chunk chicken-flavored meat-like product and the last box of stale Triscuits whose seal is broken that you purchased anyway, you know, just in case.

But the real test comes when you get home with your largess and weigh out the total amount of perishables in your freezer, with double points for steak and any fish for which you paid over $10 a pound, against all the cookies, cupcakes and chocolate you splurged on and started sampling on the drive home to comfort you through the coming multi-day power outage that inevitably comes with any rain more severe than an afternoon thunderstorm, and, you know, to keep your energy up for the ensuing couch potato marathon as you wait. You may add to that the half-gallon of ice cream you just have to eat before the Florida Flash and Flicker melts it to the consistency of coffee creamer perfectly convenient for your cold morning cup of instant Joe from your overflowing supply closet. Bet you didn't know that Starbucks made an organic, free-trade, free-range, freeze-dried blend specifically for the Pentagon, did you?

I'm sad to say that alcohol consumption actually weighs in on the non-hurricane provision side of the equation. The more you drink pre-storm, the more likely it is you will need to stay frosty as the roof peels back from your only retirement investment and your neighbor's garden gnome slams through your front picture window to raid your dwindling supply of D-cell batteries. Though, oddly, the more you've consumed, the more likely you are to survive the Wizard-of-Oz-esque, we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore-but-I-sure-wish-I-was-wearing-ruby-slippers-anyway tornadic event only to be rescued by the Coast Guard three miles out in the Gulf drifting on your neighbor's stained and sagging mattress in your wife's anniversary-only, special black lace underwear with the local Geraldo clone from Fox News covering the event live from Chopper 5 for Bill O'Reilly the full national feed. But that's a whole other formula.

And there lies both the beauty and bliss of this particular model. The more you do, the less likely you are to need it. But count on that, and, Wha-Bam, the next thing you will remember is waking up with Katie Couric interviewing your neighbor's garden gnome who has miraculously carved someone else's insurance claim number into your suddenly overgrown and weed-infested lawn with pruning shears in a crop circle reminiscent of "Signs" while you sleep under a lean-to constructed from the last intact piece of your roof sheathing within one thousand yards until the postal carrier wakes you to sign for the return-receipt final-notice bill from FEMA enforceable by Homeland Security for the truck-load of ice, gasoline and generators they dropped off to your neighbor three doors down who proceeded to black market it at prices that would shame a rogue Halliburton buying agent in the Green Zone under your name.

Yeah, that will probably be me you see in my fifteen minutes of fame next weekend.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Fall Equinox 2007, two days early

There is a bright white quality to the light this morning. The sun sparkles as it filters through the leaves of the oaks to the east. The morning light is even, the colors in the garden pure. Lavender petunias, yellow alamandas, red impatiens. The fuchsia of the final myrtle cluster. The white of a lone rose. All untainted by the pink or orange or gold of dawn.

The dark clouds have lifted, the storm has drifted north. Last night's rain has washed summer from the air, at least for one morning. When she returns, her heat will be half-hearted as though she knows her days are numbered and she can no longer bring herself to give her best. We enter the time between, the twilight of summer before we throw our windows open to embrace the fall into night. The dying embers of a once raging fire, warm, no longer blazing.

The morning is full of motion. The wind sways the branches of the myrtle as though they are bobbing for apples in the bird bath, or seeking to shed the clusters of berries that replaced their flowers overnight. Pine needles, brown and sere, spiral down to carpet the lawn. The chimes on the porch ring a five note harmony. The air is dry, the sound carries like carillon.

A year ago, I sat on the porch trying to capture the sounds and scents of another equinox two days early. My desire was to write, to keep writing. To mark the cardinal points of the coming year, to celebrate their midpoints with words. Eight messages were my goal. At the winter solstice I got caught up in someone else's adventure and poured my energy into that instead. The remaining five still flew from my mind, sometimes on battered wings, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes barely taking flight. But they held the air if not always soaring.

That small accomplishment inspired other messages, other musings. They are my experiences, they are my expression. They are my visions, sometimes confessions. They are exercises to keep my mind from dwelling on what might have been, what might yet go wrong. They are the ones I feel are good enough to share. Some days, they are the only thing I write. They are my commitment, one taken a year ago, in similar light, in similar weather.

So this morning finds me savoring that pure white light as it casts clouds of flame upon my desk after passing through the red and orange glass panel in my window aptly titled Serenity. I hope the coming equinox finds you as peaceful and content.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III