Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

Looking for Words

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Restless

I should stand up
and move about the house
looking for words.
I could, and leave you here
among the books,
but I know I would find
as always, clock, glass, rag,
wood, window, hot night
glowing with trouble.
Oh, that one is new.

I ought to remain, alone,
drinking water, worried
about weather, street, darkness,
madness, fuel,
because in moving,
stirring air, shifting light,
waking shadow,
I might never find peace.

Second Draft
8.30.2009

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Restless by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a

Changes to the Blog

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If you’re a regular, you may have noticed a few changes to Metaphor. Over the past couple of days, I tried out some different color schemes, and I think I’ve settled on one, for now, that’s readable. Blogger (Google) really needs to offer a wider variety of theme templates. One can download many templates online, but a downloaded template has to be installed, which I imagine to be a pain in the ear.

There are new content links in the right column. What I’ve done there is to link up to my own writing work product here in the blog and on my primary Web site. This should make it easier to find things like my poems, without having to search or rummage through topic labels.

I am hoping to find the fortitude to turn the focus of the blog more toward my own interests and less toward banalities posted just to entertain you. I mean, stuff I had no part in creating. The whole Internet exists largely for your entertainment, and presumably you come here to find out what’s on my mind. Seriously, I’ve asked for your attention, and I ought to give you something for it. And you get enough pictures of cute pets with funny captions, right?

As always, please leave comments. I know I’m whistling in the wind with this request, but I’m sincere. If you don’t leave a comment, I can’t know if you appreciate the fact that this blog exists, or my writing either.

If you don’t care for commenting in public, that’s cool. Click here and send me a note. … Thanks.

Digging Up Words

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cemetery20051012a
An old poem from 1998, just to prime the pump, seed the clouds …

I have a terrible need to find words,
to hunt them out from underground
with the help of a good cadaver dog,
to root them up from their caverns
and tombs and stack them –
femur, backbone, ribcage, skull –
into the body of this passing day.

Tomorrow I could build another form;
Tuesday another, and on and on.
One day, I would build a thing that speaks:
I want nothing from you, nothing more…
Bodies enough for the rest of my life,
all hung on wires through the knobby spine
like tattered coats. All swinging
in a gentle breeze, all turning
then to watch me walk away.

Here’s the same poem, on it’s own Web page.


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Digging Up Words by J, Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

A Long Time Gone

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On June 10, 1991, a man in the Lake Tahoe area watched as his 11-year-old daughter hurried to catch a school bus, at a bus stop just a block from their home. He heard her scream. He looked up to see her grabbed and dragged into a stranger’s car, and for 18 years he did not see her again.

I read the story of her abduction in the newspaper, here in Santa Barbara. I remember I thought it was shocking, terrible, that her family must be heartbroken, destroyed. I remember thinking other things, including that the poor child was probably already in Heaven.

Back in those days, I kept an icon corner in my home, as many Orthodox Christians do. I cut out the girl’s photo and placed it with my icons, to remind myself to pray for her. This is the photo I had, I think, though it was grayscale and grainy. In time, I lost it or tucked it into a book … I don’t know.

I wonder how many other people out there – besides her family – were praying for little Jaycee Dugard.

I hope her road of recovery will not be too hard or too long, but I suspect the rest of her life, her children’s lives, her family’s lives, will be dedicated to that journey. And that’s not fair.

The news that’s coming out, about the 18 years that have passed since then, and the horror … I understand that there will be outrage, anger, as well there should be. There is no prison cell deep and dark and dank enough. I hope the kidnapper lives a very long time in the worst we’ve got.

But also, I’m thinking God is merciful. I am not a man of sufficient wisdom to say that I see or understand a necessary plan at work in such things. Such ponderables are beyond my ken. Just thank God she is alive today. As for tomorrow, I suppose prayer is still needed.

poor little moron

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We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old — reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

He’s right, you know; at least, he has me down. I don’t usually discuss my politics on this blog, but they are a motley stew. For the most part, change that bears at its core a sense of compassion is a good thing, because things as they are kinda suck.

Which reminds me of something I saw on the freeway yesterday. There was a white van in the slow lane, going slow, and bearing on its back end, in large lettering, this:

Slow Driver
Please Be Kind

And I thought What an amazing idea. He’s not arguing for his right to go slower than the rest of us, or insisting that we’re all going too fast, or in some other way saying bite me. He’s just asking for kindness. It’s something that in our culture – no, we don’t actually have a culture – in our population, we don’t seem to value highly. Unless someone is kind in some very heartwarming way and it winds up on the news, we could scarcely care less.

In my life, I have adopted the phrase Gentle hands, kind words, which I thought was a quote of Albert Schweitzer, though it does not Google well. So I don’t know. But it has become a mantra for me, which I apply to my relationships with small animals. You are not a small animal, so if you cut me off in traffic then Heaven defend your ass.

I’m kidding. I have a phrase for you, if you stumble upon the thoroughfare and cause us all some calamity:

Poor little moron.

It’s the same thing I say of myself when I mess things up. Like the time, not long ago, when I was trying to make myself a blueberry smoothie with my blender. I put in the ice and water, the low-calorie mix, the blueberries, and hit ON. But had a forgotten the lid. Kablooie! All over the kitchen. Poor little moron.

It has a ring of pity or sympathy, right?  I think it’s something my grandpa used to say. And it reminds me of the Nasrudin jokes I’ve heard from Coleman Barks. That’s the best I can do. But sometime in the future, we should ponder this one from old Doc Schweitzer:

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

no events scheduled today

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I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers like to share timely or funny, or otherwise somehow hopefully interesting e-mails that they receive. I can do that. Here’s one I received early this morning, while I was still asleep.

From Google Calendar
To Kyle Kimberlin
date Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 4:44 AM
subject You have no events scheduled today.
mailed-by calendar-server.bounces.google.com
signed-by google.com

See, every day I get an e-mail from Google Calendar, with my day’s disasters … I mean events. And that’s it, the whole e-mail. It’s rather impersonal, but wonderful, I think. There’s nothing in the body of it today, because – and this is rare – it’s a weekday and I have no events scheduled today. So today I have the luxury of going all Zen on you, as follows:
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead.
Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. 
Do not walk beside me, either. 
Just pretty much leave me alone.
Got that in an e-mail this morning, too, from my cousin. 

Capacity

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If you stand by the well day by day
and let your bucket slowly down
and each day it rises
with a little less water
you might after time let a black
bird build a nest in your heart.

 

I mention this problem to a friend
as he stands under a plum tree
eating fruit, letting the juice stain
his shirt, watching a dog sniff grass,
and he sends me back
to the well with a smaller bucket.

8.23.2009

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Capacity by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

stories

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“You’re a different person when you’re at work, at home, out with your friends. Over the course of your life, your sense of self and where you belong in the world changes. In my case, it was fairly radical. I started out in a fairly poor working-class home, my dad was a construction worker. Now I’m living in a nice suburban community, and I’m a college professor. Identity is a creation that we’re all engaged in. We’re all novelists, putting together the stories of our own lives.”

— Dan Chaon, on His New Novel ‘Await Your Reply’ – WSJ.com.

Well. Can I get a plot twist over here? I can’t even seem to buy a vowel. My story is just plotting along like it’s being written by Franz Kafka, on a bad night of booze and barbiturates, with Charles Dickens and Hunter S. Thompson. Can I get Franz to pass the project off to Garrison Keillor?

I’m joking. He says we write our own stories, doesn’t he? Hmm. Turns out I might need another writing class after all.

Not A Man

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This is a draft. Feedback welcome. Click Comments at the end of the post, or send me an e-mail.


Sometimes under the paling sky
of false dawn, under his threadbare tree,
his tarpaper roof, under his faded
blue blanket, he dreams he is not a man.
He is a creature – an afterthought
of God – made of light and the awareness
only of its own motion, flying over
deep water, casting itself into the ditches
between waves.

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Not a Man by J. Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.