What's going on, Albuquerque?

The Sunday Poem: Joseph Bottone... And Then We're Drawn Away

"It was during this time I hitched a ride to California and stopped in Bernalillo, New Mexico where I read in the Placitas Village newspaper "The Sign Post" of a new community forming, gathered around Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, alternative communal housing. I decided to spend a few days….
During this time I met Larry Goodell and. . . he suggested we create a poetry magazine of New Mexican poets and named it "ORIENTAL BLUE STREAK"after the gas station I worked at part time and where this photo was taken.

Placitas then, was a stopping place, a Mecca of many sorts of seekers and pilgrims, artists, famous and notorious, wild people of a New Jerusalem, came and went, all gathered at the Thunderbird Bar where we danced, talked, shared ideas and dreams. The dear faces in the photo (Larry Goodell, Kell Robertson, Gene Frumkin, Bill Pearlman and others with myself standing at the pump) were some of the poets presented in the "Oriental Blue Streak Anthology", now a classic.

  An adventure in a dream we so dearly loved."

Joseph Bottone is the featured poet this morning at Sunday Chatter.

And Then We’re Drawn Away

Am I lost at sea or am I burning

Who can I ask in this sweet asylum of joyful craziness

Was that voice a night bird

Was what I saw real, another man’s loneliness
a rice cake, a stone?

A little grey fox comfortable in the daylight of our presence
trots towards the house now that we’re gone
‘I can steal a bone or a rice cake’

And then other things happen
and we’re drawn away

Poetry submissions are welcome. Email theditchrider@gmail.com.

2 members like this

Comment by Margaret Randall on January 27, 2013 at 8:29am: Absolutely wonderful poem, Joe: brief, full, perfect. Even more than just the poem, the poem with the photograph and introduction bring me back to a long ago time here when poetry settled in Placitas like it had come home. In 1964 I was living in Mexico City when Creeley invited me up to read in the village. It was magic. When you think about it, Placitas is one of the few places that has transformed itself with the years but retained poetry at its center. Some of the poets are gone now, but the Duende Poetry Series continues the great tradition.

Comment by Aaron Greenwood on January 27, 2013 at 12:20pm: You never know what a poet means without thinking about it. She could be musing, her thoughts fluid and provocative. Her target may be no one in particular, yet when she provokes, I take her lines as an invitation to think. Poetry is a dialog. That is the case with this poem.

And then other things happen
and we’re drawn away

Without those two powerful lines, this poem would not have the same energy and clarity. The lines take a reminiscence into reflection and poses questions.

“Other things” always happen and pull like a tide. Sometimes we choose to resist, or go with the flow. Sometimes we sell out finding it is a way of breaking free. Sometimes we stand alone. No matter what we choose, there is always yin yang. The pull of that tide is aways there.

The introduction gives the poem context of time, but not meaning. The poem stands alone, yet this intro gives a direction for reflection – birth of a counterculture. I like Paul Simon's lines:

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call

And so they were, but I disagree with many of my contemporaries' view on the value of 1960s. I see the 60s as the birth of a new middle ages, perhaps just as dark and just as violent this second time around. A new time created by our “best and the brightest” who couldn't leave well enough alone and let seeds take root.

We shall see.

Back then, I was a soldier who went to war, a medic and paratrooper to be exact. I spent many years afterward in the counterculture. That was not an unusual juxtaposition in those days. Kris Kristofferson completed US Army Ranger school also becoming a helicopter pilot. Jimmy Hendrix served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. It was a time of experimental flux but it doesn't exist anymore, except in the laments of the old. I think we burned village to the ground and replaced it with a slum.

Good poems provoke thought.

Comment by Dee Cohen on January 27, 2013 at 3:16pm: HI Joe, Both the photo and the poem have the power to stop time. I really like how the words doubt themselves- could this have happened? But it did. And you were part of it. Thanks for sharing this. Dee

Comment by Don McIver on January 28, 2013 at 2:26pm: Really lovely, simple, yet complex poem. So good to read this and hear you yesterday morning.

Don