Sunburst Amber Fractions and A Hat Full of Rain

A magnetic north of the heart draws me back again. It’s all rain and wind in my beloved Midwest where dusk is augmented by a beautiful amber-orange sunset. It means fires are raging in the west and people are getting hurt.

I’m reading, Let It Be Told In A Single Breath, by Michigan poet Russell Thorburn. He prods me to take a slow, big breath before speaking. My yoga training opened the wisdom of this act, and now, I'll tell it in a single breath and in my northern tongue where the Ojibwe have influenced my wild outlook.


But my telling will be, as Emily Dickinson counseled, slant or in burnished red angle.


This slant tells of coffee and root beer, motorcycles, music, and slow-motion videos of grandchildren appearing ever so resilient in ligament and laughter. We’re all on a journey, delicate and mysterious, held in place perhaps by rubbery ligaments only.

This trip north has placed me back on sidewalks I traversed in my youth when a long-haired, three-piece rock band from Flint, Michigan sang of the Grand Funky Railroad Closer to Home. Aging in slow motion, I grow closer to home and deeply grateful as the years go by.

For a long time now, I’ve used music and prose to navigate my life: guitars, drums, banjos, fiddles, mandolins, and lyrics, like this favorite by Tom Waits, an important anthem to someone like me who sucks at Capitalism.

“Money’s just something you throw off the back of a train. Got a head full of lightning. A hat full of rain. And I know that I said, I’d never do it again. And I love you pretty baby but I always take the long way home.”

A radio jock at WOJB is spinning lyrics and strings on the world’s wide nets, and at least one song aggravated a listener. He or she sends a complaint letter to the station. I read their letter and jagged penmanship posted on the bulletin board. “Please, Please, STOP playing “Daddy’s Girl,” and “Yankon On My Johnson,” on Saturday nights.” The note leaves me in laughter and tears.


Go ahead and obey the rebuke if you must, but I’m going to keep listening to bawdy songs on guitars and sitars, pedal steels, and drums because they are, “Unburdening a sound like wire waving end to end,” to quote Thorburn. He spins another line, an oracle of poetic musicality, “…the drumbeat tight rocks of the arroyo / and the tom-toms of the beating down sun.”

I turn, turn from the beating down sun to the rain and the wind when I read the words of an Ojibwe writer. “Sometimes I go about in pity / for myself, and all the while / a great wind carries me across the sky.”

Carried about and caressed by inner and outer winds, accompanied by flowers stretching upward in a gentle rain, I’m partially unburdened of pities and threats perceived and real.

I turn, turn, turn again with the rain and the wind of Dylan’s "Percy’s Song," and its background story of a corrupt Judge's sentencing.

Dylan concludes the song. “And I played my guitar through the night to the day / Turn, turn, turn again / And the only tune my guitar could play / Was, ‘Oh, the cruel rain and the wind.’”



Through all the travel and travail, I relish the humor my years have granted. A pause to enjoy new poems and then turn, turn again in the rain and the wind. Looking up from my book at this campus coffee shop, a nearby sign draws my attention, but I can’t unburden the damage to my eyes the years have wrought, so I walk over to get a better look. “4 out of 3 people admit they are poor with fractions.”

Is that posted for me? Maybe. But seven-tenths of the time I adore and crave adventure. It feeds my mood board, and as they say today, my “data mining” for prose.

Soon, with a couple hundred others, I will mount a wind lifting an airplane to carry us across the sky and back to Arizona's desert heat. I've no choice but to trust Deltas directional gyro will accurately compute fractions of the magnetic north and map an accurate flight plan.



Trusting science, but loving mythology, I can't help but imagine Pegasus, bearer of lightning and thunder, riding up there too with the rain and the wind.

The forecast predicts another muted, and breathy, sunburst-amber atmosphere for my ride home. For a couple more days though, my hat will catch this Midwest turning in rain and wind.