Remembrances: Robert Ford Dakin

Today would have been my father's 100th birthday. He has been gone three years, and I still feel frequent urges to call him for comfort and advice. I will miss him always. I love you, Daddy.

Remembrances: A Dream Killed by Progress

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As a boy, I wanted to be a gas station attendant when I grew up. I liked the snappy beige uniform with your name embroidered in red over the breast pocket where the tire pressure gauge resided.  I loved the gas company logo on the opposite pocket, and I coveted that military-style black-brimmed cap.  

I wanted to be asked to “fill’er up,” or to “put in a dollar’s worth” and listen to the pump’s hum as I scraped smashed bugs off the windshield with my squeegee blade.

I envisioned how I would expertly brandish a cloth-cradled dipstick before the trusting eyes of the proud owner of a shiny late model Packard, Studebaker or Hudson, to prove conclusively that his oil was a quart low and then smoothly punch the gleaming spout through the top of the can before deftly pouring its contents into the hot, clicking engine.

I wanted to keep the change. I wanted to jingle the coins in my right pants pocket, while gazing down the highway, awaiting the arrival of the next customer, first seen climbing through the shimmering heat to roll over the rise, sunlight flashing from the chrome.

But sadly, by the time I was grown and ready to launch a career, the sign above the pump read “Self-Service Only” and my dream was nothing but the relic of a longed-for past, where simple aspirations were enough upon which to build an honest life.

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Remembrances: A Prophetic Dream?

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Awhile back I dug the journal I kept in 1991 out of its corrugated slumber and posted an excerpt from it somewhere on Facebook. Today being Thanksgiving, and I having some time on my hands, I thought I’d see what it was that I had written on this date, nineteen years ago. I found that I had made only one entry on November 25, 1991, and that it had recorded a dream. This dream turned out to have almost uncanny relevance to what’s going on in our world today—as though the echo caused the sound:

[Notes: “CUMC” is Cornell University Medical College, where I was employed prior to moving to Ohio in the spring of 1991. As for “the Sheraton” reference—I worked in a Sheraton hotel restaurant in Ann Arbor in 1968-1969. There was an employee locker room there.]

Nov. 25.

I awoke this morning from a dream in which I was about to leave a building that looked like CUMC. I was stopped in the hallway by a short, fat security guard who asked me where I was coming from. I said I was coming from the employee’s locker room (the Sheraton). He gave me a look that indicated that this was the wrong response for some reason. He told me to turn around and spread against the wall. I feel shame, but no guilt. I haven’t done anything. Having tried to comply with his demand, I find that I can’t position my feet properly – they get tangled up and I can’t seem to get them into the proper position.

The message of this dream would seem to be that compliance with fascist coercion leaves a man without a leg to stand on. You might want to keep that in mind, if you’re ‘flying the happy the skies’ over the holidays.
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Remembrances & Writings: 19 years ago today...

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Although I have since filled whole notebooks with extensive excerpts gleaned from readings, the last time I kept a daily journal of my thoughts was during the year following my move from New York City to Ohio, 1991. I was not working that year, but was serving as a house-husband and as a caretaker for my two daughters—toddlers at the time. I was able to read a lot, play my guitar a lot, write a lot, and think a lot.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my thoughts as handwritten in a spiral notebook, nineteen years ago today:

November 9-10, 1991

We are made into objects by peer pressure, commercial advertising, social trends, and prevailing ideas (such as political correctness) – all of which, however, we feel ourselves to be immune to because no direct confrontation with other people is involved. An honest self-assessment will show that there are many gaps in our “immunity.” All of these things conspire to contribute to our sense of alienation, and tend therefore to make us schizoid.

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Envy is the ultimate form of bad faith. It causes us to hate our whole world without recourse even to conformity for relief.

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Our free will is always in conflict with our situation.

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When a man announces that he’s going to be “completely objective” about something, he’s either lying (he’s really about to be completely subjective), or he’s acting in bad faith (he’s about to tell you what he thinks you want to hear.)

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Remembrances: You Are There

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"All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."

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Your thoughts welcomed: irodak47@gmail.com
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Remembrances: Still Boxing Backwards

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I opened a copy paper box that was sitting on the floor of my closet the other day. This was a box full of stuff from my desk in a previous office. Amongst the stuff was a CD-RW with "R.D." scribbled on the index. I had no idea what might be on this particular disk, so I popped it into the computer to find out. In there with all the spreadsheets, drafts of correspondence, and other detritus of the daily grind at my former position, was a word document designated as "Hell." This turned out to be the draft of a poem that I must have created during a lull in a bad day at the office. I kind of like it--"unfinished" though it remains--so I thought I'd post it.

The drawing is another from my high school art class days. My daughter saw it as I was preparing to scan it into my computer and told me that it was certainly the Gollum. Apparently she saw a resemblance to this creature that I drew way back in the day and Gollum as created for the movie version of LOTR. Since I made the drawing at least a year before I read the Ring Triology as a college freshman, (and have never seen the movie), any resemblance between the drawing and the Gollum, is purely coincidental. I think that it does make a nice accompanyment to a poem entitled "Hell" though.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHELL

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe smothering solitude of hell
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpunctuated only
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby the incessant dread
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxof an arrhythmic ringing--

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe unwanted dead
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxcalling up to mock--
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxphoning in the bad news--

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbut those blessèd dead--
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthose whose voice
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxone ceaselessly desires--

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxeternally silent

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxin an impossible future.

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Remembrances: La Rochelle

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I intuit that there are readers out there who have been muttering to themselves, “When is Rodak going to lay off with the doodles and give us another poem?”

(Huh? What’s that, you say? You’d rather chew sand? Well, FU2.)

The window through which the picture below was shot provided this poem with one of its central images. The words are addressed to another beautiful Jewish woman (not “Leah”), who was a pivotal figure in my life.

Before the Fall

Sweetly androgynous birds of dawn
on dawn’s light float,
on tiled roofs, sea sky.
Our eyes and lips
for making words alone,
our meaningless song, before the fall.
Our soles flinch yet
from the crushed shells’ bite.
The taste of wine renews
the garlic sauce, orange light,
blue beach umbrellas, moules,
the musky night.
Sand from our shoes
sifts onto the floor. Time

lounged in breathless windows,
where mosquitoes sang love songs.
My joy, my frenzy, passed for disease
or drunken charm.
Don’t let this image come to harm,
nor question now
what it is was that, then, you knew for sure.
It is far too late to live again,
and Friday’s smile for Wednesday’s love
makes a month of Sundays real.

Memories, scars, so pretty
once the wounds have healed.
It is we, yes, perfect,
completely formed and poised before the fall.

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Remembrances: In a Sense, Abroad*

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...and I think that I took this next one in Egypt. It’s hard to remember after all this time. I call it, Horses, Sand, and Colored People:

I seem to recall that our little native guide (spoke terrible English; never heard of Right Guard) tried very hard to make a big deal out of those raggedy-ass stone structures in the background there. Sheesh! This photo was taken over thirty years ago. That stuff is probably looking really shabby by now!

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*cf., this classic
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Remembrances: Boxing Backwards

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“Boxing Backwards” is the title that I gave to a collection of my poems, mostly composed after my move from New York City to Ohio in the early 1990s. The words are taken from a line in a poem, (to which I link you here) which I ended up not including in the collection. It was not that I felt that the poem didn’t work. Its exclusion was based upon my decision that the tortured syntax and neologistic compounds used in the poem (originally titled “In Retrospect: 1994”) clashed with the style of the bulk of the works. Structurally, this poem is an example of an experimental form that I created and used in the composition of a dozen or so other poems which were included in the collection. Its form is based on a strict linear syllable count, repeated in two stanzas of twelve lines each. The syllable count forces word choice and presents the poet with interesting problems of creative composition.

The term “boxing backwards” functions for me on a couple of different levels of meaning. In a pugilistic sense, if one finds that life is landing a series of sharp jabs to one’s chin, while one flails ineffectively, unable either to counterpunch or to mount a defense, one is soon on the retreat—“boxing backwards” into the ropes. On a more immediate level, with reference to the afore-mentioned move from NYC to Ohio, “boxing backwards” suggests the unpacking of the corrugated cardboard boxes into which the treasures and detritus of the life one has left behind had been packed for the move. As one opens the boxes and digs down through layers of documents and other items, one travels “backwards” through time and the boxes, deluged by memories of things past.

As I stated at the conclusion of a recent post, having become increasingly dissatisfied with dissecting the present world, where very little that is good—and less that is worth discussing—is happening, I have instead turned to the past. I have been going through the physical boxes stored in my closet—boxing backwards—and building blog posts around the items found therein.

As some of my Facebook friends have already seen, one category of “treasures” found in a box of very old items was certain pages torn out of some of my college notebooks (1965-1969), the margins of which are adorned with pencil, felt-tip, or ballpoint pen doodles made while obviously paying less than rapt attention to the words of my teachers. I will, for awhile, be using some of these doodles to illuminate selected blog posts. The doodles will most likely have nothing at all to do with the content of the post of above which they appear (as the one on this post does not); they will be art for art’s sake.

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Remembrances: In the Desert

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Below is another poem from the Rodak archives, composed for the same woman to whom this previously posted poem was addressed. This one is obviously more appropriate to her then still embryonic vocation as a rabbi:


Song for Leah

Leah, my face in your eyes,
dark stars, flashing on and off,
as night more slowly turns to day
than love devolves into sorrow.

Leah, your name is lovely
to my tongue. I do not hate you.
Though I loved your sister first,
I cherish all that you have borne for me.

Leah, your lips are dry,
chapped, as if in fever.
But your proud brow is cool,
smooth as a patriarch’s proscription.

Leah, is it your own?
Or is it Laban’s will,
rising like Sinai
behind your eyes?

Leah, time's bright eye
has focused too acutely,
parching love’s most tender flesh,
leaving my heart a desert place.

Leah, you show me out.
You fix the latch.
You shoot the bolt.
Life is a caravan, departing unladen.

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The photograph, taken during my travels to the Holy Land, back in the day when “Leah” was more recently in my life, is of the desert near the Dead Sea.

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Remembrances: 520 Linden Street

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The following piece of juvenilia is distinguished by having inspired the primitive watercolor sketch which accompanies it on the page. The picture was, in turn, inspired by the neighborhood in Ann Arbor where I lived for three or four years as a grade-schooler. The house was at 520 Linden Street. Linden ran between South University Street, where my school, Angell Elementary, was located, and Geddes Avenue, which ran alongside the cemetery. The street was lush with tall elm trees then, just before the great Dutch elm disease plague that swept them all away. The backyards of many of the homes were graced with fruit trees; cherries, apples, pears. There were at least a dozen kids around my age living in homes on Linden, and also on South U. and Geddes. In the summer, we had it made in the shade, playing all day beneath a canopy of green. My several years on Linden Street were the happiest of my childhood. They ended in the summer following fifth grade, when we moved to Muncie, Indiana.

The house at 520 Linden still stands, apparently little changed. The families are all gone, however. Due to its close proximity to the central campus of the University of Michigan, the neighborhood has long since become a student ghetto. A look at the contemporary Linden Street, is provided by Google Maps.



Hymn

There are gray days when the trees drip crows
And the cries of dark birds fly over the hills
And into the towns, like the words
Of the locust eater, out of the wilderness.

Roaring seas of boiling black tumble in
To fill the empty bowl of the morning.
The belly of the sky is green with storm.
Shadows of branches, shivering with leaves,
Twist at our feet, writhing in the lightening flashes.
Then rain combs the grasses.

Afterwards the ground is wet
With the waters of the broken storm.
The odor of worms rises from the loam.
For all this praise the empty sky.



Amen, amen.
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Remembrances: Sinner Man

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The woman for whom the following poem was written—over thirty years ago—was a dancer, an artists’ model, and a poet. She lived alone in New York City, in a walk-up apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Her building stood in the Westside Manhattan neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen, where rats rumbled along the gutters of 9th Avenue; where streetwalkers plied their trade from dusk to dawn, beckoning without hope from the urinous recesses of darkened doorways.

Bacchanal

sad the thrill-thin blood
of sober being
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sister, sister
incest appeals to an only child
x __________

the canine tooth of doggèd love
can’t bite itself
and requires an assassin—
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tear out the throat of my urgent cry
drink the blood of reason’s walking corpse
and revel, drunken, in the mess you make—
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then sleep your sleep
in the bowels of a finished thing
x __________


A little over a year ago, I learned that she whom I am remembering here is now living in California. And she is—are you ready?—a rabbi.

A rabbi. Wow.

How cool is that?

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