A little change in pace.
Sometimes people ask me, why do you write so much prose?
Doesn't it get in the way of your poetry?
And of course, it does to a certain extent.
Can't do both at the same time.
But I think ultimately, in the long run, one at least
hopes enriches the other.
Where else would I get lines to steal,
if I steal, if I didn't have books to review, huh?
So I thought I'd read a short piece of prose on windmills.
I hope it's not too sentimental and full of schwarmerei.
I've tried to anchor it a little bit in history
and relate it to our own city.
Maybe some of you who drive on Campbell
noticed that to the West, no, the East of Campbell
there's a windmill.
It used to be.
Maybe they pulled it down.
I think they pulled it down.
In a neighborhood between Speedway and Grant.
And I remember the first time I saw it really shocked me,
because it took me back to all the windmills in my life.
Sometimes things once most familiar
can shock us more than anything else when they reappear.
If my favorite dog from childhood
came scampering up the front walk,
she'd knocked me off my psychic pins.
I suppose it's that way with most of us.
Take windmills.
The other day, as I was walking back from the drugstore
through our perfectly sane and urban neighborhood,
I noticed one, rearing over row of mulberry trees
a few blocks away, flashing its circular hand at me.
What it was doing there I have no idea.
Perhaps its owner, an appropriate technology freak,
had rescued the old arrow from a junkyard where it lay,
a former starlet rusting each year further into its demise,
carting the prized jumble of struts and gears home.
Over weeks of delighted work he polished them up,
re-erected the delicate structure toward its past glory
while his skeptical wife watched.
Now he sat smugly inside while the well-greased machine
hummed water through its house.
His house.
It always helps when something for nothing comes with art.
Or so I imagine, more likely, since wells
are rare in the city.
Some tinkerer had done this for private pleasure.
Creating a whimsical centerpiece for his backyard garden.
Perhaps, after all, it whorled connected to nothing.
Still, he had chosen wisely.
Pointing authoritatively he can explain its workings
to his visiting grandchildren.
At night he can lie in bed listening
to its comforting thrumming and feel
all is right with his world.
Maybe art connected to nothing is the best of all.
In any case, one glance and my psychic legs buckled.
They did so, partly because of the windmill mythology
that most of us pick up along the way.
Undoubtedly, this mythology predisposes us
to carrying windmills around in our heads.
A mystical summum bonum out there
in the gauzy fringes of our consciousness.
A mythology, furthermore, grating
into nostalgia for something that in fact
never really existed in most of our lives.
All the better, that makes the most unassailable of nostalgia.
For instance, we know that there are windmills
by the ocean in Holland faithfully pumping water
to save the placid country of cows and cheese
from floods, while children in wooden shoes
watch surrounded by tulips.
Now, that's certainly unassailable.
An ultimate good for our largely chaotic world.
We know also that a deluded but well-intentioned Don Quixote,
hyperventilating on romanticism, tilted that down.
And that adds an essential chuckle to our romance.
And last, granting us our historical nexus,
scholars assure us that it was the windmill, ranking right up
there with barbed wire and the six gun, that
marched across the Great Plains and made settlement
of the arid lands possible.
There are other things about the whirling blades in our heads,
having counterparts in a quite practical reality that we
may or may not know.
That windmills first turned in Persia,
as early as the 10th century.
Looming assertively, we can imagine,
over peach orchards and Persian rugs
to further gifts from an irrigated desert land.
That Europeans so loved their windmills
that they wove names--
Michael and The Dog, I find especially endearing--
into their thatched sides.
That in fact benevolent windmills
became so essential to life that they outnumbered churches.
Just think of it.
Thousands and thousands of windmills whirling
across the landscape from hilltop
to hilltop, as far as the eye could see.
I find this a bit spooky.
Dutch landscape paintings of the 18th century
almost always include a prominent windmill, sails
tensely still over the flat scenery of minuscule cattle
and somber polders.
Sometimes taking up as much as 3/4 of a canvas
is the sky, vaguely congealing, getting ready to do something.
What else can the artist do with such Euclidean landscape,
one might ask?
But of course, there's more to it than that.
In the symbology of the day, the windmill
was the human soul, partly waiting
to be moved by a divine wind.
To be inspired, that is, breathed into,
as if arms, once set a whirling, will in
turn revivify the tiny figures held frozen over plow or butter
churn.
Thus the link between men and landscape
charged with divine potential.
Call it what you will that gives Dutch religious life
its intensity, but that most of us, living without windmills,
can only wish we could imagine.
Yet, I should confess at this point
that my direct experience with nonpolluting grinders of grain
and lifters of water has been limited.
I'm not one to take a wrench-in-grease bucket
and set some farmers bladed cattle trough pump aright.
Admittedly, my experiences are almost accidental,
but that too can make relationships all the more
keen.
Years ago, as a teenager working in an isolated ranch
alone, and more caretaker than cowboy, I found the windmill.
My one transcendental connection to a wider world
beyond the limited horizon of mesquite scrub and cactus.
Scrambling up to its platform after sunset,
I could see a dew drop of green light shimmering.
Ah, another wracked soul out there, maybe 15 miles away.
The windy nights, me in my flying Dutchman mode,
when the galvanized blades really
started ripping only inches from my ears
and the whole antique tower started to vibrate.
I felt I might take off into a sky blossoming madly
with desert stars.
Be taken, as it were, bodily into heaven.
A decade later, only slightly more sobered
and living in a Midwestern town, I fell in love with a windmill.
It was a dilapidated foolish affair in the neighbor's yard.
Unused and leaning dangerously over his back fence,
as if yearning to run off and start a new life elsewhere.
Day after day it filled my second story study window.
Its own perfect portrait.
When a monstrous crane came out of nowhere unannounced
and in one bite lifted it away, I
said nothing, but sorrowed over the changed
view, as one does for a lover who has lost a front tooth.
So when recently hiking across England's South Downs
I emerged from a youth thicket to face twin hilltop
windmills named Jack and Jill, I felt a breeze
stirring my bones.
I couldn't help but declare with Emerson,
who thrilled on another bright April afternoon,
this world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.
And passed on.
A cowardly act?
Perhaps.
But I give myself this one luxury,
my relationships with windmills are neither rabbinical nor just
lyrical.
I carry them pure, adventitious in my mind.
Passed on as I did the other day when our neighborhood
windmill was gone from its place over the mulberries.
A structural defect?
A clause in the building code?
Maybe I'd imagined it all to begin with.
I didn't ask.
Didn't ask any more then.
I didn't rush to pound on the owner's door
the first day I saw it, to get the lowdown on this project.
It didn't matter.
Nothing can replace that sight.