Gray Area

[mnaz]

I lived in a season of light
but my life blood was stolen
snuffed under a heavy blanket
of damp disease...
a stoic rain spreads
through dismal evergray forests
my purpose is starting to rust
but the lifers all love the fall
the season of death

(November in Seattle)

[Zlatko Waterman]

Being a fellow "Dampster" ( born in Salem, Oregon, lived in Portland, Seattle, etc. etc.) I can dig this lament just fine.

When I took my wife North to visit my "roots" ( or is "tubers" better for the Northwest ?), one of the places we stayed was "The Grayland Lodge."

This poem is just short enough and just long enough.

Well done, mnaz.

Zlatko

[mnaz]

Thanks, Z...

..... just a particularly dark morning this morning.....

It's a long, dull winter in the Rain Belt. It always wears on me.
Others deal with it better than I do..... I tell myself that it's
"cleansing", but of course that only gets me so far.....

"The Grayland Lodge"........(how aptly named).

[Zlatko Waterman]

I like the past tense in the first part, and the shift to present later on in your poem.

I just bought the Duncan/Levertov letters. Best stuff since "One Art", Elizabeth Bishop's letters ( that lovely old drunk).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... ce&s=books


The library might have it; I splurged and bought it, being a bibliomaniac and living with about ten thousand books cramming every inch of my drab tract house.


--Z

[~K]

lovely chilly atmosphere

[WIREMAN]

can we stand the chill
we were thinkin' bout
makin' a trip out west
if I get some time in
January or February
is it really really bad
remember it's the
worst for us back east
at that time, wanna go to portland ...seattle ...and vancouver, o yes and astoria........mark

[mnaz]

Hey Mark...

Cool that you're coming out this way. I can't speak for the others, but I'm getting ready to hit the road and continue my exploration of the Great Southwest and make preparations to move down there. I'll be gone most of January and perhaps longer. If you make it to Seattle, shoot me an e-mail and we'll see where I'm at.....

It isn't all that "bad" in Seattle and the NW..... the winters are relatively mild and generally more even-tempered than back east. But there is a near non-stop onslaught of gray sky and drizzly rain from about mid-October on, that's all.....

I hope you're able to put together a good road trip!

Mark

[stilltrucking]

gray area on top of mountain east of Seattle
I think it is called Immigrant pass, what ever the weather is doing in Seattle it is always more thrilling up there. I was so sleepy I could not come down off the mountain, my relfexes to far gone to deal with the complexities of forty tons and gravity, those old Zero Hero trucks I drove did not have engine brakes, very fine art to just ride the brakes all the way down with out setting them on fire, miss a up shift or down shift and no synchormesh hard to get it back in gear. It takes an alert mind, to stay cool on the stool. SO I had to stop and grab a cat nap before I could head on down to Texas, When I woke up I was up to my buns in snow, took me hours of crawling around in it to hang the chains on three axels.

This morning I was drving just before sunrise and just after, I managed to notice the perfect light when it is day, that exact golden first soft promising new daylight, then the sun rose a little higher and it seems to fade to just another day. I thought of you and what you might have wrote of it.

hope you are having fun on your run

[jimboloco]

She said, "it's a gray area
in my left lower lung"
while i wuz tryin ta stay on message
ever since dubya's campaign
his stubborn wilfullnesss
her name is haartmann
married tha flyin dutchman
was ushered in
had to wait in bed an then
after the chaos cleared a bit
got me straggling onward
from the schleppy mess
of need and fuss
another marathon of must
compelled by trust the thrust
through it all
got her admitted
an the flying dutchman relented an left her there
last shot she sitting
bedsideward and table
with lips red blond
a survivor waiting
for healing again

the struggles some folk go thru
an we with them
me th only male nurse
it gets bumpy sometime
christina helped renee
got sputum on her scrub
top so got a surgic one
i said to them
renee should've gave ya her shirt
an renee said sure she could go topless
oh boy i says my eyes wuz poppin
outa sockets


my stepson is mr gray
went ta portland
friends waiting crumbled and
grumbled him away
waiting for 2 dayz at the airport
for a resuce ticket
to sunshine

he wants ta go back
the gray better'n milwaukee
frigid gray to cool gray
yet i mix my grays with
complimentaries from the wheel
of colors that the great colorist made
ya can see them in the skies if yer eye
ie trained
yellow-purple grayz
when tha sun come up low
below the flat stratus
red-green grayz when it go down agin
an blue-orange grayz thru th fog
at hi noon

sunshine alwayz makes me happy
and the best psychedelic landscapes
in the sonora desert

[stilltrucking]

While schlepping through the gray area between life and death
suddenly everything turned white
the mountain shrouded in white clouds
winter was my season of death,
But, if i had my druthers I would prefer the spring.
April seems like a good month
cruel with the promise of a new life

the flying Dutchman and eighteen wheels
raindrops on my windshield
tear drops on my steering wheel

Shades of Gray

"For much of my youth I wrestled with this apparent mysteries in a world that science had white washed and black washed. Scientists had rounded off gray things to white and black things and then forgot about the rounding off and saw only a world of whites and blacks.. The world is so much simpler if you can always cut the universe in exactly two pieces if A or not-A always holds. Modern scientists and philosophers would put a 1 or a 0, TRUE or False, next to every sentence in this book"
From Fuzzy Logic