Where’d your gardener go?
Has he left you lone?
Clouds began to show,
He packed up for home
Snowflakes fall
Snowflakes fall
Raise your tender shoots,
Now the winter’s gone
Beat back to your roots,
Your first bloom withdrawn
Rise once more!
Rise once more!
Slow at first to
Show your green and
Glow, your roots must
Grow deeper still
Till you press yourself against the rock;
Your thousand fibrous fingers lock
A shoring up of stem and stock;
Sure mooring in the tempest’s knock
Eyes of high passersby
Wouldn’t notice you;
Signs of glories now nigh
Only faint and few
Till the dayspring streams,
And the gardener’s dreams
Break as morning gleams
These are only demo-quality stripped down arrangements, recorded on a hand-recorder, but I figured it would do to post at least something since I’ve been promising an album for a while. Not all lyrics and titles are final, not all songs will wind up acoustic. I’m working on recording the real deal, to be released when it’s done.
1. Chozo
2. For the Birds
3. Shadowland
4. Adrift
5. Breakfast with Godzilla
6. Wake
7. All Clear
8. Nostalgia Dogs
9. Easter Song
10. The Fight
11. Midnight Snack
12. Veggie Soup
13. Go On, Be Still
All recordings, music, and lyrics copyright Anthony Hall, 2009, except lyrics on 3 copyright Anneke Majors, 2008
In a box, among the papers I have collected and forgotten,
Bound in a white jacket, with a cut and glued spine,
Are the pages that shamed my youth.
The text says:
You are not in control and never will be;
God hears your cries but will not apprehend or change your heart;
There’s nothing you can do but
Surrender to this and
attend, attend,
attend.
II.
Attend,
attend,
attend.
Never talk across.
(If you are here at all
You don’t know better what he needs than he)
Sweet understanding, patience,
No one raise a challenge.
For one hour each week,
(Or if Dan wants to talk that long again, two)
Sweet understanding, men who know!
For two hours (sure!)
Each week,
Attend, attend, attend,
And never grow.
III.
Disintegrating,
The treasurer confesses that he took the till,
Paid for a prostitute down in Provo.
Disintegrating
– what should be done?
Never talk across.
The thief’s consoled.
I never put a single dollar in that basket.
IV.
What “you are, you will always be,”
and “Always would be.”
And what’s the difference then?
The number of the sober elect is four,
Four percent,
The same number, I later learned, as those who never
attend, attend, attend –
at all.
We are ninety-six percent condemned.
V.
Oh, but I believe in miracles.
That God’s almighty hand being flesh
Commands all flesh –
All nerves, receptors, channels, pathways, veins,
All cells, all chambers, neurons, muscle smooth, muscle skeletal and
Muscle of the heart –
Reaching in between a beat
He tunes in fine degrees
Re-turning will with will.
In fine degrees, by our release and say,
When we cry out,
“Oh, my God –
Please hear me. Please hear me, oh my God.”
VI.
At ninety-six
I will be someone I don’t know now,
I will meet a stranger.
This is surrender;
What I would always be, I will not always be.
VII.
“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”
They all did a lot of thinking,
A lot of talking too.
Talked only to each other, men circled up, facing backs to
Wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers.
Put the real world off outside.
Then during the week they thought, again
Did the things they talked and thought about so much.
Came back to think and talk
But never talked across.
A hundred fatal monotonous monologues.
Strain to believe.
Circle up, again, the end,
Attend, attend, attend.
IIX.
Convention time again.
Attend, attend, attend.
This year’s workshops were so good we barely grew at all.
We sat, stood, ate with men without the answers;
Men just like us, just exactly like us, who understand.
In three days you are guaranteed to learn and change nothing
All the time with other men (and some women, too!)
Who, just like you,
Never have any answers.
We always get to ask a lot of questions, though.
We always wish this week would never end
– Because,
After all is said, you’re not done:
Don’t forget step XIII
Shackin’ up is never easier
Than when you’re with a thousand people
Thinking, talking, and never not doing all the things
They never don’t not want to do.
IX.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
And then he said:
“For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.”
If I judge you then to be crass, and false,
Protecting your own anger, rage and spite, and hate,
And harboring a grudge,
I do not falsely judge.
Then, only truth shall be my judge.
Though I have spoke before in wrath,
For I am broken, man,
The sin is mine, and though we all will sin again,
I will not cloak my sin as you have always done.
X.
I will sin again,
And so will you,
But will the sin always be the same?
Paul never said he would always be Saul.
Conversion, change, God’s transmutation,
Changed his will to gold.
It was on the road to Damascus.
He saw an angel, and Christ sitting on the right hand of God.
At that very moment, abruptly as a blacksmith’s hammer.
Those were the days of miracles,
And so are these.
XI.
I had not been for years.
I left their circle.
I felt deep shame, still, and wondered why
If it was right to attend, attend, attend,
Each time I’d gone I’d died inside?
Attend,
attend, attend,
They all attended, everyone I knew
(every one, it’s true)
Each group the same, each Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday,
And as I’d sit there watching Lost,
(knowing now that was absolutely the best thing I could have done with my time,)
The voice would climb up deep and red from hell:
“If you don’t go tonight,”
and
“Then what you always were,”
and
“You will always be.”
XII.
But oh, I believed in miracles,
And God sent angels in my way,
Just like he did for Alma, just like he did for Paul;
These angels, I could shake their hands is all.
XIII.
The final step, my step thirteen,
Is finally to walk away
And work, and work, and work.
Work on yourself.
Work on your voice, work on your love for others. Work on your prayers, and knowing
God
Who is everywhere, and all things are a path that can lead you to Him,
Because that alone should be your happy destiny.
Work on forgiving yourself, forgiving the fathers you remember by the lash.
That thick white book with the cut glued spine,
Don’t work the steps that never work.
If your heart is good, you have worked those steps already.
Attend to all the small things.
Attend church, attend your wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers.
Attend, attend,
Attend to Christ,
Who won our broken beings with his blood.
The dream before the dream I just awoke from—penultimate but still within the accessible part of the ephemeral queue of norepinephrine-free memory—took place in a class, a religion class. Our teacher was teaching us extemporaneous rhyming (also known as rapping; possible waking-life genesis in the title-text of this), which in the dream seemed in keeping with the ironic theme of last week’s lesson, from a different teacher, on how to lie. (Maybe poetry is just how to lie in style.) He explained to us that anything can be rhymed, anything at all, although sometimes it’s a little tricky (abuse to word boundaries, for example). We would say a sentence and he would reply with a rhyme. I showed him, though: I ended a sentence with “silver”, after also considering “orange”. He was stumped, of course; these are in the list of famous rhymestoppers. Then I really showed him (this is still in the dream) and came out with this:
[Da DA da DA da silver,]
They put her on The Pill, Ver-
sion 2.
The dream after that was more pedestrian: He is following the concrete-lined streams—the correct path, where the stream is lined on both sides—down the cataract to the fountain where she will choose, by taking a key from a rack, her true love (is it the fellow who this, or the fellow who that?) and he hopes against hope that he’ll be the one, and finally she lets him know that the pictures on the keys represent, not different men, but different aspects of all-him, every one. At the same time she lets him know—”My name is Tor” (rather than Jill, or Julie, or Jennifer, or whatever he had assumed)—that she herself is also someone he had once dismissed or overlooked.
I’m sure Stephanie Meyer could turn these into a million dollars each.
Someday, old and baggy-sad
I’ll slip on air,
land on earth,
shatter shoulder, hip or pelvis,
plant my bones and sprout a stone above the ground
Or I will wear so thin and slight that light
will fade me out completely
I will then address all shades and spots as
brothers, nieces, long-dead mothers
All things old and treasured,
patterned silver, china, linens
doctors, deacons, soldiers, fathers
tucked away, brought out and shown
on holidays
The wheels I rode up dusty roads
turn over, down, dip low again,
revolve
bow, splinter at the spokes, crack
collapsing under load of threadbare gown
and plastic tubing.
Portered of all other cargo long ago,
I bear through black dream night no burden
but memory –
a crying child, a shame-faced fight,
dignity, cowardice, cold water, red leaves,
silver-white streets slick with morning rain,
unanswered prayers, unknown replies,
all sin and honor,
Big hands, tar-stained,
that lift and throw me high, aloft,
The girl who sat in front of Max one row over could crack her knuckles in five different ways. None of them seemed to work for Max. He watched now as she carelessly grasped two fingers at once: she was about to do the double crack. He followed her actions with his own hands—secretly, under his desk—but twist as he might, his own performance remained a noiseless pantomime of the brief staccato across the aisle.
Alone that night in his room, he tested a new resolve. He must just never have tried hard enough. The simplest method seemed to be a straight-out pull, gripping around the second knuckle to crack the third. He chose his left middle finger as the most promising candidate. Pull once . . . pull again, harder . . . nothing. If he was honest with himself, though, he still wasn’t using his full strength. The third time he braced his wrists against his ribcage, elbows to the side, eyes to the ceiling, and pulled out and back with his whole arms and shoulders. Pop!
No. This was wrong. His hands had flown apart, and there was the finger, still locked in his right fist, and there were the four remaining fingers of his left hand splayed two to a side and shaking. In a panic, almost without thinking, he rammed the middle finger back onto its stub: with a snap. And there it stood again as though it had never left—except, that is, for a bright, thin ring of blood all the way around, circling the place where seconds before his flesh had given way to emptiness. Bewildered, he stroked the length of the finger, front and back, and felt every touch. The finger still curled and extended in unison with the rest of the hand, or in a ripple, and it wiggled side to side at his brain’s command. He licked the blood clean, where he could reach, and stared. It stung a little: almost like a paper cut, but he imagined that he could feel the sting all the way through.
For the first time in his life, Maxwell began to suspect that he was not entirely human.
