by Fitz | Aug 25, 2014 | Journal
There is always a hard shift for me at the end of the summer, and today is that day for me. I miss the freedom of last week: I’d wake in the morning, come out to the deck to write poetry or work on my novel–but now today, I feel like I should be preparing for school, which looms around the corner next week. Wise thinking tells me to disregard my school thoughts and focus instead on the pile of wood that needs to be split, the back of the house that needs to be painted, and the yard work still unfinished.
After lying dormant for a few years, I started working again on Hallow’s Lake, a short story/novella/novel that shows more and more promise to me. The idea for the story (as opposed to having a plot) is to capture the truth about a certain place in a certain place in time. There is no antagonist aside from the cruel and unrelenting vagaries of fate. The characters deal with the common struggle to forge an identity and shape their lives as best they can. The common thread in all of there lives is the voice of a narrator–a voice who simply retells the sketches and scenes from the community that lives on Hallow’s Lake–a place loosely based on Stinson Lake in New Hampshire–which was so pivotal in my life as I grew up, and even after I “grew up.” The narrator is a young man who simply helps people out and, in a sense, is simply there to record the words, actions, and interactions of the characters.
If there is any strength in the writing, I think is in the sketches of ordinary people with ordinary demons consciously and unconsciously helping each other survive in a somewhat isolated community. Nobody’s life is anywhere near perfect and in the unfolding of the scenes, I am trying to imply that each character’s life is incredibly complex, deeply emotional, and surprisingly intellectual–with the implication being that there is no such thing as a minor character in life.
My big issue is–and has been–how to wrap up a story that does not have a linear plot or a easy to recognize conflict around which to focus my readers. My most recent thought is to simply call it poem, not a story–which would solve a lot of my uneasiness surrounding how to “release” this piece. In many ways, it is similar to Dylan Thomas’s approach to writing “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” though he at least had an abiding and enduring theme around which to hang the images, actions, and memories of a child’s Christmas–his Christmas, perhaps.
So, yes, I will put off school for at least another day…
by Fitz | Aug 24, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
At midnight I hear the cuckoo clock chiming
from it’s perch in a cluttered kitchen
locked in cadence with the tower bell
gonging this old mill town at midnight
to a deeper sleep,
like a call to prayer
reminding me that this new day,
starting in the dark of a hallowed night,
is more than just an ordinary day:
blessed by memories
stirring in palpable realness—
your soft breathing beside me
mixing with crickets and peepers
calling out into the darkness,
searching for a dream
fit to be called a true marriage—
our gift constantly opening,
revealing a mystery and a majesty
larger than the box itself—
stunning in the simplicity
of renewed, remembered,
and resplendent love.
by Fitz | Aug 23, 2014 | Out of the Forge, Songs
I teach a couple of 8th and 9th grade English classes, and as a part of the classes I make them all keep online journals that we comment on and share with each other. It’s actually pretty cool. A hot topic always seems to be the belief—or not—in God. I am usually pretty impressed by the depth of their convictions, as well as the honesty of their confusions. Although I worked for a number of years as a youth minister, and even to this day trot my kids off to Sunday school, I am still somewhat agnostic—I just can’t totally convince myself that my spiritual experience reflects an eternal and immutable truth. But I can’t doubt that I do feel a power beyond what I am and who we are. I know I’ve experienced moments incapable of words. In those times I’ve felt closest to God, but the rush of even that wave cannot be sustained on the shores of my earthly life.
I guess you have to let go of what you cannot hold on to. Catholicism teaches that hell is being eternally separated from the God you know and love and feel. That, at least, makes sense to me. And maybe that is why I can still teach Sunday School. Maybe it’s why I can listen to and love my friends who think I’m a complete fool for even being a part of what they consider idiocy. In my cloud of unknowing I wait for the parting that will let in the light—the true and sustained experience of God.
I sometimes wonder though why we are in such a rush to know God. I wonder what we’ll say to each other when we finally meet, and I wonder how we’ll act with each other. Being brought up a Christian, I’ve always imagined what it would be like to be one of the Apostles. I’ve always wondered what Jesus said to them in private to give them the courage and eloquence to go forward and make the sacrifices they made. I’ve imagined sitting down with Jesus and fishing for horned-pout in the Concord River because I figure Jesus has already returned many times over, but we just haven’t reached that stage where we look in the right places and embrace the right kind of people to find him. I’ve always wanted new words from Jesus to give me directly a true faith that I could freely live and speak, and act, so I wrote this song about meeting up with Jesus down by the Concord River in hopes that maybe someday it will happen.
~Fitz
It seems like it ain’t been a long time,
But I’m damn pleased your coming by again.
It’s been a while since we sat down and rambled
About this and that and why and who and then
You said that you had to get a move on,
Move on and leave a space behind.
So I spent a while hitting all those old roads:
Old friends and kicking down the wine.
But sure enough got sick of all the rambling;
The same stories and the way folks just are.
Who’d believe a hobo and a rucksack?
Who’d believe I really come that far?
Panning bread don’t give you much to walk on;
And I ain’t so free I don’t want nothing more.
It ain’t so hard to say what I believe in,
But what’s the sense to beg it door to door?
So I settled down right here by the oxbow.
I catch kibbers off the bank that’s caving in.
I’m sure glad you brung along your old lines;
We’ll chuck ’em out and catch a string again.
Yeah, I settled down right here by the oxbow.
I catch kibbers off the bank that’s caving in.
I’m sure glad you brung along your old lines;
We’ll chuck ’em out and catch a string again.
by Fitz | Aug 21, 2014 | Out of the Forge, Songs
Years ago, back in the late 80’s and after another extended trip to China, I came back to my cabin in Carlisle and began the process of recording some of the songs I’d been writing since I first learned a few chords. Few of these songs had ever been recorded and they only existed in vestiges of memories in tattered old journals and spiral notebooks. I booked some time in Bob Wey’s studio and sat in from of a mic and recorded songs such as this one, which I later released as a “cassette” called “Winter in Caribou” that I sold at my gigs and shows. My good friend and guitar legend, Eric Schoenberg, stopped by the studio one day and added a bit of sweetness to the this song with his playing.
Now, another twenty years later, I am collecting and curating a collection of these old and almost forgotten songs into a project called “Dogs of Concord.” Concord was my hometown and is still the place where I work and sing and “hang out.” For better or worse, it is the place that fed–and continues to feed–the creative part of my soul. It is a much different town now than when I grew up, but the memories remain the same–and that is what Dogs of Concord is trying to recapture. So over the next weeks and months, I will be adding songs from that “era” of my life into this site.
I hope you enjoy!
~Fitz
Jesse calls up this morning—
“You can come downstairs now;
You see the grapefruit bowl?
Well, I fixed it all;
I fixed everything for you.”
Everything’s for you…
“Let me help you make the coffee,
Momma says you drink it too.
I can’t reach the stove,
But I can pour it, though—
What’s it like living alone?”
It’s like living ‘lone…
“Daddy, did you ever play soccer?
There’s a girl’s team at the school;
Joe said he’d show me how;
I got two daddies now—
But you can show me too.”
Yeah, I’ll show you too…
“Remember Friday night out bowling,
trying to make the pins fall down:
One time you missed them all;
That’s called a gutterball—
Just like the things up on the roof.”
The things up on the roof…
“Wasn’t last night a dumb movie?
Them outer space things weren’t real.
Weren’t they fake and stuff?
Did you have enough?
Pretty soon I got to go.”
Soon you gotta’ go…
by Fitz | Aug 19, 2014 | Journal, Poetry
The coyotes and fisher cats
seem intent on striking
some new deal
with each other
to toy with our fears
in this gentleman’s wilderness—
patches of dense woods
dotted with overgrown fields,
riven and intersected
by highways, powerlines
and quiet, suburban
neighborhoods.
Last night it was the coyotes
who edged closer
chattering and howling
in the scrub brush
below the power line
reminding me
in staccato yelps
of the precariousness
of evolution.
