I can't get Frost out of my head

Even though I have written about Frost before, this poem was on my mind today and I decided to feature it on my blog. 

Moon Compass 

by Robert Frost 

I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause
Between two downpours to see what there was.
And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,
As if the final estimate were hers;
And as it measured in her calipers,
The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face... 

Cool words in this poem:

"dimly" (How does one move dimly?)

"dripping" (Alliterated with dimly, but also

             strangely modifying "pauses.")

"masked" (Is the moon a bandit or a superhero? 

           Why is it masked? But further 

           alliteration.)

"hers" (personifying the moon)

"stood exalted" (Even though it is the moon 

                 which is exalting, "the 

                 mountain stood" seems to 

                 suggest a proud child.)

love (Personification)

Frost is awesome. Vivid imagery and a wonderful wisdom statement at the end. Frost poetry often features a person who interacts with nature. I like the person in this poem. I like the way he sheepishly sneaks out between the storms to see what’s going on. 

Remote Blogging

So here I am in Delaware, Ohio where my son is attending a soccer camp at Ohio Wesleyan University. The camp is about twenty-five miles from my home and so I have been wayfaring and loitering and drifting around this town for the last three days. Every once in a while in my

life, I have stumbled upon this opportunity which I realize some of you might not consider much of an opportunity. Sure, the day is long enough for me to drive back home and be practical and responsible––mow and weed and clean and repair and remodel and in general do work--and then drive back to Delaware and pick up the boy, but Delaware is just far enough to justify hanging out while I wait for the end of the camp day. 

What does one do when hanging out all day. Well, I suppose I could go running or biking or something athletic like that, but I do that stuff at home and this is suppose to be a break from the routine. Thus today's blog is about how to spend a good day away.

It starts with finding a good coffee shop for the morning session. Each person looks for different things in a coffee shop. For me, I

look for palatable ice coffee, free wifi, comfortable seating, relative noise control, good niches, and ambiance. I find a decent place for this in a little off-the-main-street joint. The piped-in music is quietly tuned to pop radio station that I could live without, but the rest is acceptable. So I order an ice coffee (It is always best to drink ice coffee when it's hot out. I get the coffee I want and the cooling effect of the ice.) I select a niche table--you know one of those off-to-the-side with decent lighting for reading and somewhat removed from the in and out traffic. I settle in, open the iPad, set the phone to vibrate, and read a recent edition of Esquire. I read Esquire because a coffee shop can be a difficult environment for serious sustained reading. I have time for that later. After paging through the magazine, I write my blog entry and check a few emails.

Now here's the trick for a good day of hanging out, switch up your environments every two hours or so and switch up your activities a bit as well, and definitely limit your driving. If possible, park on a shaded side street, lock up the vehicle, and go on foot for the day.

So my next stop is the public library. This is a decent walk which gets me outside and moving. I like the public library as a change from the coffee shop because I can find a good quiet niche there where I can do some serious reading. Today, having just finished Atlas Shrugged, I am eager to jump into one of the two novels I have pulled from my reading stack. One is the Gertrude Stein classic The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the other

is a newer novel called St. Famous. I will spend some time with both of them over the next two or so hours and decide which one is right for my mood today. I might also serf the web a bit and maybe even watch an episode of "Arrested Development" on my Netflix account. 

Now it's about one o'clock, and it's time to think about lunch. Usually this means a burger and a beer for me. This all-American lunch is great for a day like this. Almost every place serves it, so I can walk around and explore and find a place that feels right.

I smoke cigars on occasion and there happens to be a cigar lounge here in the downtown. For me, this is a perfect after-lunch stop. I can buy an interesting cigar, perhaps a Kristoff Criollo Lancero, and settle into a long smoke 

and more reading. Now cigar lounges are like coffee shops in that each one has a certain feel, an atmosphere that either works for you or does not work for you. This particular shop, like many, features lots of leather chairs and a big television. A DVD of one of the Batman movies is blasting. So this is when I put in the earbuds and listen to jazz on the iPod and do some more reading.  I have decided on St. Famous, but after 65 pages I'm worried that it might be a poor choice.

So now I walk off the cigar buzz and get some air as I take the long way to my vehicle. I get to camp and watch the last twenty minutes of the final soccer scrimmage. The drive home offers a good chance to talk with my son.

So goes a day of hanging out Dunbar style.

A small sort of poem

Here's something, amongst all the words that I bang out and all the diatribes I spew and all the narratives I piece together and all the rambles I jumble together, that just kind of appeared. Oh, and I liked it,


Last December when I was happy millions of tumbling drops of rain simultaneously froze in the sky and I scaled all the way up to that cloud where I curled up like a big old dog and settled into timeless sleep.

A Wilderness Site: Part VII The End

There was a big elm tree not too far into the grove that I walked behind, placing its large trunk between me and Marty. I remember the tree because it had a lover’s heart carved into it. The carving was almost grown out, and I really couldn’t read the initials inside anymore, but I could tell that way back when, some guy had brought a girl out here, and afterwards had taken out his knife and, while she watched, he carved the heart in the tree’s trunk. They probably figured it meant something special, and at the time it probably did. I started to wonder what had happened to them, the two lovers whose names where in the tree. Did they begin a new life out here by this tree, did they form some sort of union? That seemed somehow strange to think about, like suddenly I was standing in a church or on sacred ground. I guess in my mind I still believe those two people whose initials are carved in that tree are together and happy and that their children are happy, and I guess in my mind I still believe there exists a place where people are all happy and where fathers read stories to their children before tucking them into bed.

Regardless, I was happy to be looking at that heart instead of at Marty. I didn’t know why he wanted to delve so empathetically into the topic of our father, but I definitely wasn’t interested in defending against this new maneuver. I much preferred standing by that tree trying to read the initials and the date inside the carved heart.

When I walked back to the campsite, Marty was shirtless and barefoot. His tattoo and his fatigues were the only unnatural things on his body. “I’m going down to the lake. There’s some beer in the cooler and food in the trunk.” I did not recognize the message behind Marty’s words; I only heard what I wanted to hear, and so often in my life I have come to think back on that nurturing comment as the beginning of Marty’s final monologue––as Marty’s way of tying up the loose ends. For Marty, I am convinced, truly believed what he was going to do was the best solution, that his disappearing would save everybody from suffering. His look right then before he left––he had a cigarette in his mouth and he looked real solemn––was unusual, barely contained, like his whole persona could collapse at any minute and like he might actually cry. I averted my eyes and looked back at the trees. “Hey, Henry...” I did not look at him. “People do stuff that doesn’t make sense sometimes to anybody but themselves. Eventually you got to forgive them for it.”

I did not know until about six months later what had really happened with Marty and the army and that married girl in New Mexico, but when the ranger woke me up and started asking questions about Marty and a missing boat, I somehow already knew––just like I knew Marty had been trying to tell me things, important things, before he disappeared over the water, and just like I knew Marty was just like our father, and just like I knew I was too.

I saw my father years later at Mom’s funeral. Somehow he had found out about it and showed up out of the blue. Marty was wrong about him though. He never did have a new wife and more kids or anything. He showed up old and alone and looked kind of sad and awkward, and, as a favor to Marty, I put my arm around my father’s shoulder and told him it was all all right.

A Wilderness Site: Part VI

At our camp, I ate a powdered donut, and Marty poured me another cup of coffee. I was still a little disoriented from everything, but I could feel myself pulling it together and re-establishing my identity. Marty must have sensed this also, because he stood in front of me at the picnic table and said that he wanted to talk. I didn’t really want to talk right then, but I was reluctant to further an image of my incompetence by looking like a pouting kid.

Marty wanted to talk about our father. Neither of us had seen nor heard from him in twelve years, and whenever someone asked about him, I became somewhat unnerved. I really did not like talking about him. I guess back then I felt rather conflicted about my father. I knew I wanted him around, yet I also knew I hated him for leaving us. So I learned how not to think about it, and like most people I became reasonably good at repression. Marty had the same feelings that I did, only he liked to talk about them, and he never let me get away with remaining silent about the subject. Like two familiar opponents, the strategic dynamics of our conversation was almost intuitively present. Marty, the aggressor, would push: I, the defender, knowing silence to be ineffective in equalizing the onslaught, would say only enough to pacify Marty, to allow him to realize that my defenses were too strong for his attack. The game had been played enough times between us that I knew what I couldn’t get away with, so when he would push me to talk about our father, I would express some smart-ass comment about how the man was a no good son-of-a-bitch or something. And Marty, being as familiar with the dance as I, expected my derogatory comments and usually let it stop there. But this time something was different––Marty’s attack seemed more abstract, more conflicted. “Yeah, I guess he is an asshole. You know though, sometimes I think I can understand what he did. I mean, he was only fifteen when I was born and nineteen when you came. Hell, I couldn’t’ve done it either. I couldn’t even be nobody’s father now. Look at me.” Using the table top as a seat and resting his feet on the seat board, Marty was sitting beside me now. We both looked out into the grove of trees which separated us from the cold water of the lake. The tops of the poplars waved in the breeze from off the water, and the blue sky of the open space over the lake peeked between the boughs and the thin upper branches. Ever since that day, I have always preferred looking at trees when I talk about something important. There is something soothing and safe in sitting beside someone and not looking at them when you talk. Marty wanted to look at me though. I could feel his eyes gazing at me. And even though I know now how desperately he must have wanted me to look at him, I continued looking at the trees. “I mean a guy wants to be somebody or to do something with his life before he gets saddled with kids. We all got to look out for ourselves, don’t we? When a man gets himself stuck, he either has got to find a way out, or he’s as good as dead.”

“I hope the bastard is dead.”

“But maybe he’s got a good family now. Maybe he’s got more kids now, and he really loves them. Maybe he goes to their little baseball games and coaches their mini-basketball teams. Maybe he reads them stories at night and tells them he loves them, and maybe he really does. Maybe he really did want to come back and be with us some day, but as time went on and things happened, it just got to be too big to patch up. You know, at first he probably just couldn’t take it and he took off, but in his mind he always thought he would come back when the time seemed right, only the time never seemed right.”

“The times been right for a long time.”

“But people got to do stuff sometimes. I mean sometimes when your life just ain’t right, and you know it, you got to do something about it or you just collapse.”

I stood up, tossed the dregs from the bottom of my cup onto the smoldering embers of the fire and walked away from Marty and a little ways into the woods. I knew I was conceding defeat, that this desertion was another sign of my immaturity, that I was not ready to be Marty’s fellow man, and even though I wanted none of that to be exposed, I could not remain sitting there listening to Marty’s compassionate lines about a person whom I hated and longed for with such equal passion. Maybe maturity is sitting through things like that. I guess that that was the line drawn between Marty and me.