jopomojo

Sunrise off the interstate syncopates our Montana sojourn waking up in Billings to the music of regrets merging into a melody of love’s momentous consolation in the family of things, in shared memories and plans, in the motel breakfast buffet, in the foibles of friendship and the knowing what not to say when politics and friendship collide. At the Wyoming state line meadowlarks begin to sing in earnest with cricket chorus, and the smell of wild flowers — despite horrific history — triggers a beatific vision of yin and yang united like the rolling hills and sky carrying us past Sheridan through a landscape rife with ghosts to get the car washed in Gillette on the way to the Devils Tower.

Sunrise separates the night from the day. And on this day I'm driving away from the gray with lightning and hail at my back and the music of the mysterious mountains before me, the imprint of the constantly changing dance of light and dark and meaning and chaos playing out like a piano scroll made of dark pavement and painted lines and rumble strips keeping me in line. I repent of my too harsh judgments of friends and loved ones in this election year even as I turn my back on them to drive away. I wish them well as I hold my lover's hand and smile at the golden glowing horizon calmly racing towards me at the speed of music, changing, changing, changing, changed.

The family of all things, as Mary Oliver put it, is where we struggle to find our place. When I think of my father's love and the legacy of love he left, I see myself standing there. Then I think of my mother and her grief in the wake of him disappearing across the distant horizon where the river empties itself into the ocean and the sun sets for us all. But then I think of this dawn, this sunrise on the river where I stand among the wild geese and ducks who seem to acknowledge my place in a new way this morning, moving around me with ancient love and welcoming me even as they send me on my way to where every movement is a standing still in the family of things and where I will claim my proper place to give love and receive it.

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Inwardly free of sorrow, the sun radiates its fullness to the sheltering morning as the verdicts of wisdom shine forth and the dull-wittedness of the deceptive is revealed in the sudden early light of summer speeding into spring, and the location of dawn on the eastern horizon inches to its maximum point in the land of the midnight sun. I wake from a solid sleep with the aching bones of old age hinting at my youthful mind that I, too, am approaching that point where the fullness of life turns back to glide towards the grave and the pigeons of morning celebrate the alternating sun and cloud and wind and rain as one journey ends and another begins, as poetry speaks to marrow, free of sorrow.

The abysmal morning carries me on a current of dismay at abyss upon abyss, and yet the river of friendship continues to flow toward the Sea — I must believe it does and that these many changing lines must point to a place downstream past these eddies of confusion and propaganda to where the river turns again to flow toward the places I love, west past Umatilla, The Dalles, Hood River, Multnomah Falls, the criss-cross bridges of Portland, Astoria, the Sea — to join with the sunset and ride the roller-coaster of dangerous water over the bucking bar of November and into the calm but terrifying Sea.

The bent branches of dawn sway to the music of the sun, finding the right moment in the moment of sunrise to face the day's trials and awaken with joy.

As promised, I circled back around to fill in my gaps in Writer Pilgrim by So Elite’s month-of-May song-title poetry challenge — and got my entries in just before the clock struck midnight on May 31, 2024.

So I’m reposting the letters I’d missed along the way: A, B, Q, R, S, T, U, and V. I followed the rules and limited myself strictly to song titles (with some poetic license applied to capitalization and punctuation) and I made them all into fourteen-liners, which you might therefore call pseudo-sonnets. I also created, as best I could with what’s available, Spotify playlists that correspond to the poems.

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The lake, the youngest daughter, receives the light of the sun who is, at sunrise, the father. My pondering of the I Ching this morning tells me to tread lightly down that golden path.