by Philip Monte Verde

Alpha - Sometime Later (YouTube) (Spotify)
Alpha - Somewhere Not Here (YouTube) (Spotify)

There is this man, in Sometime Later by Alpha. He is a trapped man. A thoroughly ensnared man. Entangled by a net, he struggles against drowning. He is caught in the binding force of lust, of delay, of possibility, of just maybe sometime later. And it's long. The song is long, the wait is long, and the longing is an ache. The ache takes form. It becomes this ugly green pool below our rib cages. It's disgusting, it's awful, and it's perversely beautiful. 

His words, the words of this beaten man, are half-formed invocations. They are begging prayer. I suffer with him. How can I continue to listen to this man struggling for air? I rage at my inability to claw my way into ear-buds, race with knife between my teeth down the cord to find this poor, poor soul. To find him in that trawling net beside bluefin and dolphin. To hack away at the abrasive rope that pulls his swelling body across oceans. 

If I can't free him from that net, then I wish to give him words. Words of comfort, words that bring peace. Words to help express in sentences, what he seems to struggle to say in song. 

Life is such a slow drowning. A slog of a wait to expire. That is, until it isn't. For some of us there is that breaching moment when hands penetrate the sea. When a firm palm finds a limp wrist. That moment we are plucked up by mermaids or sailors. 

For others, that breach never comes.

At the end of the album (Come From Heaven) the same melody plays, and you think it's a repeat. But a smooth female voice tells us that we have moved to the beach. Tragically belated, she sings of our friend in the net. Does she know that the boat that pulls her eyes to the horizon tows him below it? Her words are a phantom life-safer. "You were safe and warm, I was in your hands." Cruel, cruel, cruel for our drowned man. This is a song of nostalgia. The separation is permanent. Perhaps sometime later they could've been together. Somewhere, but not here.

When do echoes stop?

Can old domestic disputes still be heard in the kitchen? Can the girl make out her faint infant cries on her first day of kindergarten? Do moans remain etched in bedroom walls like cave drawings long after she has left you?

Are plaster, plywood, concrete, and brick enough to contain our shouts? Do they mingle together with the whispers of the elderly lady a floor below and the cheers from the football stadium across town? Do they penetrate crust and mantle to become fossilized time-capsules for our descendants? 

Do they rocket past clouds and satellites, Saturn and Pluto, and out of the Milky Way? Do they sail on intergalactic currents, catching in the earpieces of voyeuristic aliens? Can a pleading, praying, begging, screamed entreaty for love, understanding, or forgiveness outpace the expanding universe, reach the bubbled ether of its edge, penetrate the border of existence and land in the lap of an understanding God?

And if so, is there enough fuel for the salve we need to make it back in time?

In my hand I see:
The tropical delta.
Blood rushes downhill,
Pushing to the fingertips.

My rivulets are warm,
When they bring me to your stream.

At the beginning you are February.
Life is hidden, dormant below.
My touch creates wetness on the ice.

Slickness, the first sign.
Cracks split, a thaw.
The timeless rhythm returns.

I have been here before,
On this creek bed.
I know the walls of each shore.
The center, where the stream flows.
The center, where the boil bubbles.

Life returns to the surface,
Forcing its way through.
The first budding,
Then every color.

What was slow, runs fast.
The body unfurls as a sail.

Ice shattered, rapids blasting.

Rivers are hints of the eternal source,
That is why they lay so close to the womb.

Once resting, then restive,
The force is now unstoppable.
No resistance, no taming.
Stream out, scream out.

​

​Morning sunlight sits outside the window like a childhood friend waiting to play. It beckons me gently.

Sacred morning. Last night's silt has sunk and settled; waters are calm above. Fish and frogs whip their bodies in my mind, to be observed and described. Looking up from my mattress, I see their slick bodies in earthy tones. I see people I've known and people I've yet to meet. As I start to think of the day ahead, the marine animals become disturbed. Such moments are a stalking predator. I must relax my mind, lest I cause a whirlpool.

A chirp from a chickadee at the kitchen window and the weight of a cat on my legs are better segues to reality anyways. A tender reminder that no matter what form our thoughts assume when they get stuck in our heads, life goes on all around us. In superstitious Russia there is a saying: the end may be coming, but sow the field anyways. On the sea-bed I meditate on that. At this moment the bed is all that is confirmed reality. How long can I maintain this stillness? When will the hours of sewing arrive?

Swim bladders keep fish from becoming anchors. The chickadee who announces itself in punctuated gasps is driven by hunger. The sun that sits outside my window lights a billion people and countless more blades of grass. 

The universe's resting state is turmoil. I scatter the fish and the frogs with my movement. Better go join the action.

I have been here before,
On this creek bed.
I know the walls of each shore.
The center, where the stream flows.
The center, where the boil bubbles.

Life returns to the surface,
Forcing its way through.
The first budding,
Then every color

The Thaw, a collection of intimate poems by Philip Monte Verde, can be downloaded for free here.

by Philip Monte Verde

The great blacksmith looms above us.
His hands are impossibly hard.
An even larger blacksmith must have made him.
Some unfathomable giant who creates men not of flesh,
But of steel.

Our hard man though,
He's closer to us;
A god lower in the strata.

The fire certainly bothers him.
He becomes a machine in need of oil,
Such is his battle with hydration.

Sweat empties out of his scalp.
The squeezed sponge,
It pours down his face,
Blinding eyes and soaking a beard
That drags down on his chin.

The drips trickle down his arms,
And he wipes those hard hands
On the rigid fabric worn by men of his trade.

I tell you this so you know,
He suffers too.

But this is no act of indentured servitude.
He is no slave, but master,
Our blacksmith is an artisan.
He is a creator, our creator.
And any artist knows the sacrifices that must be made

For perfection.

The fire can not be dimmed,
Nor the hammer swung with less furor,
And the day remains necessarily long.
Have sympathy, friend, empathy if you can.

The creator knows.
He knows how our skin feels when it touches the flame,
How our blood boils,
And of the callouses that form.
As time passes, he turns our body,
As the world turns,
And he hears our screams.

He places us on the anvil,
Which so resembles the executioner's block.
He takes in the fear we give off.
As his creation, this is as significant a moment for him,
As it is for you.

The blows will hurt, they have to.

But we must be strong,
Strong as his aged arms.

We must not break, 
In order to become better.

And when we are lifted whole from the anvil,
And dunked in the cooling tub,
Our relief is contagious.
As we bathe in water,
The smith reaches for a glass of his own,
And mutters a satisfied toast.

When he picks us up again
We catch the light.
Not the flame that warped us,
But the very sun.
We glint that solar magnificence back.
We shine, the blacksmith smiles,

And we are so much more.

To me the mountain has always been more utility than beauty, as a step-stool is. To be sure, my eyes have lingered over many hills, especially over the blue humps you can see way out on the southern skyline from Cobb's Hill or Highland Park. 

I wrote of the wheat field as metaphor for life, and we do walk from one patch to another, searching for better bites. The mountain, to me, offers an escape in perspective. Climbing above, you see more than a bird's eye view, if not quite a God's eye view. The wheat field spreads out before you, and I mean that literally and figuratively.

In the literal sense, you have the view of the valley. In Montana, we walked a short trail to get a clear view of the Flat Head Valley. The city of Kalispell, straight ahead, was only part of that view. To the north I could see the break in the Rocky Mountains that was the gateway to Glacier National Park, and even imagined an ancient river rushing down. To the south was the beginning of Flathead Lake, stretching far out of view. This wasn't just a pretty panorama though. In the valley, on the street, and on the crown of our heads, storms fall. Amid rain, our world is rain. But take the high road and you see that it is only raining, say, over by Farm to Market Road, and not at the airport. In our wheat field, at any given moment, we may be stuck in a barren patch. But go up, and look down, and you see the possibilities.

Figuratively, I am in love with the symbolism of the mountain-top. In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted "Wanderer above the Sea and Fog." Below him are the symbols of Germany, it's geography, before there was a Germany. The man in the painting, the wanderer, is reflecting on his self, and his would-be country in arguably the most significant era of change in human history. In this case on the mountain, you don't see what is literally true. Neither Flathead Lake nor the sprawling footprint of Brighton. Rather, all your hopes, your fears, your loves, and your past come rushing up the hills as rising fog. Ideally, the fog clears and you get a view you can understand. Then you can, as the Allman Brothers say, "climb down off the hilltop baby, get back in the race."

Ten Years After - "50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain" Spotify YouTube
My Brightest Diamond - "To Pluto's Moon" Spotify YouTube

Beyond measurement is anathema to the human mind. It forces us to wrap our heads around what the Carl Sagans of the world say we cannot fully appreciate. In 1969, Apollo 11 dipped our toe into the universal ocean. As far as cosmic scratches at the surface are concerned, it barely even registered.

At best, immeasurability, the extent of how on our own we are, is a scary concept. But it's one we can ignore with Netflix, Kleenex, and Xanax. For those suffering under the fresh rip and tear of loss, the vast openness can be a bacterial infection. Two artists in particular captured the panic that size and space can cause.

One year after the moon landing, Ten Years After put out “50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain.” Musicians burying deep distress in the soil of an upbeat tune are one of our oldest traditions. In this jam, the artist entreats his lover on Jupiter to raise him up from Mars. He yells to his muse all the things he wants to know, and what he wants to be; begging to be heard over the screams she has directed at constellations.

Forty years later, My Brightest Diamond found that her darling vanished well beyond Mars and even Jupiter. In “To Pluto's Moon” she tries to lasso our red neighbor and search behind it. But that darling is already at the edge of our solar system, leaving a ghostly trail at Pluto, the last outpost.

There was a man of South Asian descent at the Atlanta airport, waiting at your gate. Indian you presume. His hair was that silver color dark hair changes to through time and travel. As if it patinas like copper left in the air and rain. You know he isn't from Atlanta because of the corduroy pants he wears, loose but not baggy, as befits a man of his age. Those aren't the pants you wear in the South, no matter how old you are. Rochester doesn't have too large of an Indian-descent population, but here he is at your gate. You've been away for a week and you miss the rich, textured tap water of home, and the bite of the wind when it strikes your cheek. This old man, he's dressed for that. Clearly.

What first drew your attention to him was his hands, and the thick blue vein that ran over the top of brown skin. You wonder the story of those hands. Did they belong to an American immigrant? When they were younger and more round, did they grope at muddy Ganges soil? You could see them losing the baby fat and lengthening, and then gripping around a plow, or perhaps more likely a pencil for tests. A test to leave India for school in America, and then a test for American citizenship. Perhaps those hands proudly gripped a red, white, and blue flag with the pride of new citizenship, like you've seen them do on television. Surely they gripped flower stems for a wife, the wife's hand, their children, their grandchildren. Maybe he was returning home to that wife now, alone where he left her in their modest South Clinton Ave house.

If only you were the kind of person who talked to strangers, who had the ability to get them to open up the way your brother can. You could watch the relaxed curl of his fingers as he told you about the crowded markets in India, about how even though he loves America with all his heart, sometimes he misses the country of his birth. You of all people, weary traveler, understand that feeling. But that hand reaches down and fingertips find the handle of rolling luggage, right where they left it. And off he goes to another gate, into the fog of memory.