Maya Window

Another year and more passes, and I have passed through Hawaii; Guatemala; Copan, Honduras; Puerto Rico; Mexico. . . to other places in the U.S. and through days and nights at home in Austin. It is early in March, and the sun is already warm. One day it will be 80* and the next 55. We wonder about rain.

Has a year passed?

What happened from the time of Zen gardens and paper cranes? There was beautiful Oaxaca and Yucatán-- and a far too stressful year of wading through ugliness in the work world. . . But that world is not worth sharing, when there is beauty--the Guelaguetza, the festival of sharing, in the city now ravaged by pain. When I was there in July 2005, fire rained from wires across the streets, rained down the cathedral face in the zócalo. Today they say people stay in their houses, afraid. I remember the green tiles I never saw paving the plaza, the demonstrations rupturing the placid image, the scent of trouble already in the cool morning air. Every day there is another story from Oaxaca, the land of the moles, the languages, and the people of the clouds.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial 

Hiroshima Children's Memorial 

Hiroshima A-bomb dome 

Hiroshima Cenotaph 

Visit to Hiroshima

June 29, 2004

A tiny black crusted tricycle exhumed from the grave where a father buried it with his three-year-old son, who had been riding it when "little boy" exploded, incinerating the child and some eighty thousand other people, many of them children, the vast majority "civilians". . . tattered and burned school children's uniforms. . . a charred lunchbox. . . a shadow of a human body burned on to the steps where a woman had sat waiting for the bank to open on a summer morning. . . thousands of paper cranes testifying to a child's deep desire for hope, for life, a child stricken with leukemia who would become one of the two hundred thousand to die long after the toxic ashes had settled . . . the cenotaph bearing a city. . .an eternal flame. . . a museum like a paper crane fervently dedicated to peace. . . the shell of a building propped for eternity by internal scaffolding, an edifice of memory. . .

recalls the shell of Coventry Cathedral, also bombed in the war, a cross of burned timbers retrieved from the crumbled medieval church. . . a prayer for forgiveness and peace,

but forgiveness is not the theme here, only peace,

not even a deep probing of the rationale-- the decision to bomb the city laid out in the cool yellow of official typewritten letters-- deceptively simple statements-- peace negotiated through the Soviet Union might have meant the increase of Soviet power in the region; a prolonged war, more deaths; there were no allied prisoners of war in Hiroshima -- few Americans, mostly Japanese civilians and Koreans, forced laborers-- not left unremarked is the role of the Japanese in the war, conquering, enslaving, destroying and killing in battle. . . no ledgers, no balance sheets in war-- but 200, 000 people who were not fighting a war died gruesome, painful deaths, deaths in an instant and a future, when Americans dropped a bomb on Hiroshima-- there can be no justification for that massacre--

Hiroshima pleads for an end to nuclear threat, that there will never be another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. . . or atomic tests that threaten people, like the people of New Mexico's deserts. . .

The city of Hiroshima is peaceful, quiet in a way uncharacteristic of bustling Japanese cities, subways and skyscrapers, endless construction; the river past the A-bomb dome streams tranquilly through the park, with the meditative calm of a zen garden. . .

the tears of Hiroshima

Texas Thunderstorms

Crashing lightning jars me from night, splashing splattered stars across the bed; I shudder and turn, slumping into the lulling sound of rain and sleep, sleep punctuated by shattering light and noise; I turn and breathe from an open window into the night. The storm cradles my slumber, trussing my sleep. Don't wake--the night howls. I gaze-blink past the alarm clock, the rumpled sheets and extra pillows to the glimmer on the blinds.

Saving daylight?

Daily savings time is an uncomfortable intrusion by people who are not satisfied with the gridding of natural cycles and series into manageably conceptualized units to which we are, at least, adapted, but feel the need to pull us all into more "productive" organizations of time. I think of those arguments for allowing babies to eat and sleep in their natural rhythm (parents, usually mothers, adapting to their child's heartbeat) and those for insisting that babies adapt to adult society's ordained schedules, and I feel infantilized just remarking the changing of the diurnal schedule. Why should I notice? What has really changed and why do I feel that change has occurred? Here it is a spring summer Sunday, not too different from last Sunday-- the day is moist and green, the sun subdued as the smell of showers lingers-- but now my mind registers that it is twenty to six when my body says only minutes to five, and the affective dissonance feels as palpable as rain-soaked air.

I don't like daylight savings time, although sometimes I enjoy days' lasting sunshine, at least until late summer scorches the grass. Twilight summers don't beg to be deferred, though; fireflies and starlight are not lesser cousins of the sun. The truth is I never adjust to the changed hour of rising, and so for months I push resentfully out of bed before sunlight, before I am ready, longing for fall. My father would say, "don't wish your life away." But, if it is last fall I am wanting, would I still be wishing for time to pass or would it be for time returned?

And if in wishing for autumn I wish for time returned, would it be with the knowledge and experiences that I have gained (one hopes) in the months endured during daylight "savings" time? Then I might feel I had saved something.

What is this daylight that we are saving? I have a snowball in my freezer, from the best snowfall in central Texas in twenty years, Valentine's Day. . . It looks a lot like the icy frost collections otherwise residing in that space, but it is the real thing, a bit of winter "saved," which I will visit and perhaps even spend one day when the cactus blooms. But what of this saved daylight will I have for another day, when the sun is obscured and the fine lines around my eyes more than whisper?

The day begins with birds

Flowers fall away and green leaves emerge on days like these as the sun travels across the lawn. The day begins with birds, flirting in the mulberry, quarreling at the feeder, glancing uncertainly as they fret to and from the tiny birdhouse in the corner of the patio by the great windchime. We wonder how their interior spaces must appear after so many seasons, so many generations of nesting. What becomes of the accumulation, those bits of twig and string and caterpillar grass. . .? The eggs rest on ancestry, fledglings cuddled like a new story spieled in oral history fed on regurgitated bits of earthworm, seed and beetle.