ANOTHER YEAR

                          For The Previous Year

  The Whole I's Parts

Anaxagoras says "the things that are

in the world are not cut off from one 

another as with a hatchet. In everything

there is a portion of everything."  *

Magnified

asterisks

are constellations

as a telescope 

reveals

atomic nebula

stairways 

to heaven

Mobius strips to Hell

and a sand grain

on my beach

a mountain.

Quote from Russell: Wisdom of the West.

                  For The New Year

      Faith

I’ve never found an arrowhead,

one flinty chip f history.

Young Thoreau, they said, if he walked by

some farmer’s fresh plowed field, could just

stoop down and pick one up. As if

the spirit that had shaped them drew them

up to his attention. Stoney bread crumbs

no birds will eat, these points and flakes

led him from the town into the

saving woods and wilderness, marked

the path to a wildness which might

save us all. His faith led him on

to find what he believed. We find, 

he said, what we’re prepared to see.

A BIT OF FAMILY HISTORY

Thus Was The Tongue Of A Dog Made Useful*

The beggar lay at the rich man's gate.

The rich get richer saving crumbs,

letting beggars hang by their thumbs.

Let the dog's rough tongue grate

the sores on the body of the poor

who lay in pain by a rich man's door.

Safe now calmed by the Heavenly choir

you forget he who left you by his door  

sent his dogs to sooth your sores. 

He burns now in the Devil's fire. 

You don't wet a finger to damp his thirst. 

Who'll say which of you is worst?

  *Cotton Mather: Marginal Christi Americana (1702)

Cotton Mather officiated at the marriage of Thomas Chute

and Mary Curtis in Boston several years before they moved to         

                          Maine.

INVEST IN TIME

With the days getting shorter and me getting longer, it's a little boring around here by the pond so I've decided to occupy myself with a business venture:  Invest In Time.

It may sound a bit risky at first, but no more I'm sure, than having your body frozen and stored until sometime in the future the body can be revived and repaired — in fact much more probable, and safer, I'd say.

All my customers will need, and risk, is a few hundred dollars and faith in the future — and it's really no more complicated than compound interest. The customer will deposit their money with the business, Invest In Time, Inc The company, IIT, will guarantee to hold the fund, earning compounded interest, for as long as necessary until a functional system of time travel has been developed. 

It should not worry the investor that the time period would perhaps involve a century or more for two reasons. (1) By that time the original invested fund will be very substantial indeed. (2) At that time the investor will be transported from the time of the investment to the new present, age (of his or choice) and physical health unchanged. Time Transfers, in they chose, can be returned to their original time but no financial refunds will be allowed.

I of course plan to make an initial investment myself. The legal corporative  documents will provide the mechanism for moving the business from generation to generation.The next time I meet with you I may have the necessary papers so that those interested can sign up and join this venture. 

It may have occurred to you that I am assuming our political and economic system will persist for the period of time required.  If I can encourage a large enough number of people to join the venture I am sure they all will try to do their best to make sure our system does persist.

Robert M. Chute  CEO/IIT     

  Celebrating Dr. Who's 50th.

A NEW FOUND MEMORY

The poems tells most go the story.  The rest you will be able to read in the book, Excuse For Being Here, which Just Write Books will soon be releasing, a mix of Thoreau inspired poems, prose text on Thoreau, perhaps too much of my own biography. The poem tells the truth: a vision of the room in which my father slept in the summer, in the main house keeping a close eye and hand of The Chute Homestead: that vision of the bed, the pillow, the blod spot did appear as I revised the Emerson poem but I don't think my father died of TB, however real the blood spot was.

            Found Memory

2013: I find, read, consider revision

of a poem written 25 years ago.

Emerson Spends A Restless Night: 1831

He woke to her cough, felt the tense

curve of her back, the sharp contraction

of her chest. The dark was all enveloping.

Curtain open he could not sense separation 

from bed-chamber and moonless space.

He knew at the first cough, knew as if

a  window opened and November's

cemetery chill suddenly swept in. He

could not shut his mind to his mother

saying "use cold water for a blood spot

or the cloth will be forever stained."

But in the morning Ellen folds, hides

her handkerchief, an offering to this

new divinity whose mark she knew 

the coldest water would not wash away,

and in her journal wrote "I am the grave's. 

It's seal is set upon me."— and I,

suddenly, or think I suddenly remember —

the blood spot on my father's  pillow

in one of those 1940 years so long ago.

I know I've told you they didn't tell me

he was ill or what the illness was, that,

brought home, I don't recall the funeral

although I must have been there — and yet —

and yet that blood spot has not washed away

as Emerson's mother says "I told you so!"

and Ellen: "Death will have it's offering."

NEW MOON FOR AUTUMN: Oct. 7

         Where Winter Is

December thirty-first we go to bed

at the usual hour. No paper hats, 

no horns

to toot at midnight. 

Others may claim a year ends

a year begins but it's just winter 

settling in.

The movable feasts that mark the cycle 

of our seasons are the night 

the pond freezes

          the day the ice goes out.

The gray cataract skim turns

fall to winter in one night.

Then the year ends.

The ice sheet softens like a wafer

soaked in wine

the pond opens like

a sleeper's eye. That day

the year begins.

In between

winter's more another place than another time.

No Julian or Gregorian reform

can patch the cycle here.

Winter

is its own world where roof ice 

grins at the moon with crystal teeth

shadows strike sun-bleached snow

as an archer's arrows.

      Patience

wears winter out.

      Falstaff's Option  

The meadow mouse stood as tall as it could

on three of it's very short legs, stood it's ground, 

considering a blow to our cat's nose.

Every hair on its body erect to seem as big

as a meadow mouse can, but was still smaller,

relatively, than I would be facing a lion

on the African veldt. The blueberry bush

over their heads became a spreading tree.

Our little cat was too young to realize

its responsibility.Wisely the mouse decided 

to run, discretion the better part of valor.

More Desk Drawer Mining

           Maine's Millennium

The heavenly sheriff might yet come

his great white horse maned with fire

come at a ghostly gallop down route nine

from Calais to Cape Porpoise to Kittery

past nested farms coastal cities country towns

where selected friends and neighbors

would disappear as simply as silently as they

lived yet always being there if need be

good mute faithful all with books in

balance some capital intact as father taught

deciding now after consideration and in 

fairness to give the Messiah a second chance.

          Dark Continent

Searching still for the Nile's source

we sample substance niaga, climb

the rhinencephalon to take a sight

on distance stellate ganglia where

flows the encephalon, where all

the natives still point south reciting

names of ancient cities sung of

but seldom seen. Will we ever reach

that fabled palace where the queen

of consciousness rules supreme

without a fixed address or throne?

Hippocampus, hypothalamus remain

points on our map with precious little

in between. What, we wonder rhymes

with amygdala? Wise men whisper:

you must follow your own star, follow

as your time unwinds bushing each

new pattern of colored sand away

you'll be swear when you arrive. 

REVISION TIME ; CLEANING THE BOTTOM DRAWER

Some of you will perhaps be old enough to remember Burma Shave roadside signs.

                 

   Roadside Requiem

   Here lies the body

   of Harry Chaplin.

   The tree has fallen

   that once, as a sapling,

   went on a hay ride

   with Rudy Arness.

   Didn't he notice

   when she lifted her dress?

   Sign follows sign

   each marking a year.

   Each telling how Harry

   didn't make out here.

   Don't worry, Harry,

   limp in your grave.

   They all forgive you —

   BURMA SHAVE!

(and, generated by a news story about accidents on a French highway..)

Flicker Fusion Frequency

Sun  through  leaves  if the leaves  if  the  breeze

would   blow   there  might  be  meaning Sun  on   water sandy  bottom  flickering Heart  

beats  under the body's  weight  eight  standard   leads  octopus  out

There  is  a  pattern on the screen.

The  cerebrum  intervenes

Someone is saying it softly over and over 

the heart beating beneath the bodies weight

sunlight stammering through the leaves

eight standard leads octopus out

spider tight

center line in the highway flashingπ headlights    

Light reflected from poplar trees planted

with such care precisely apart

my flicker fusion frequency  crashing me

the prisoner after torture saying  yes  yes  yes

sunlight endlessly

stammering through the leaves stammering

I didn't mean  mean   mean    mean

Forget  forget  forget  the train wheels say

climbing

forgive  forgive  forgive they say

descending

Planted so precisely the poplar tree trunks flashing

flashing  binding   blinding     bound

by eight wires why

don't I think of you

as I'm dying? Please

be a tree   a tree    your leaves   shimmering