It is the gloaming in steady rain
striking the windshield, windows,
that metallic sound of rain
hitting the car’s roof,
fog rising in random valleys.
Sense the constancy of beauty,
take a bill out of my mailbox
that provides no gloaming,
nothing haunting, no fog
letting me wonder where I am, might be.
I will pay the bill tomorrow.
This evening’s beauty, this
will not leave, this sense of being
given what I can never pay for.
-Byron Hoot
I was in Franklin. The last landmark
before Oil City where my grandparents
and Aunt Fern and Uncle Ted lived.
Where Thanksgiving and Christmas
dinners were made, served, stories told
about hunting and churches. Where sets
of dinnerware and silverware were stacked
on shelves and in drawers. Where garage
sale items were treasures waiting for
the right antique buyer who never came.
Twelve miles I could have driven
to Halyday Run Road, driven up
the hill to the two houses side-by-side,
a mixed history too long entangled.
Looked at them from the road
seeing in and feeling the charged air
between Mom and her younger sister,
Mary – one married to a preacher,
the other a mistress. There was always
a storm in the air. Dad would say, when
the dishes were done after breakfast,
“Well, we’d best be going.” And gram
would wrap her homemade cinnamon rolls
for me and offer them like a peace offering
as we’d leave. Mary and Mom a cold embrace,
me dreaming of the deer antlers and bear
skulls and rifles at Uncle Ted and Aunt Ferns’
house, the men all hugging, Aunt Fern watching
with those sad eyes and gram smiling –relieved,
pleased, dismayed – it was hard to tell.
I didn’t drive those twelve miles between
Franklin and Oil City; I’d driven them before.
-Byron Hoot
I am 71, find I think more about time
than I talk about it. Think only in the spiritual
realm is “in my end is my beginning” true.
Know you and I have the double-edged
sword of flesh and blood, heart and soul,
that grace of imagination. “Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow. . . Even Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one
of these.” I feel the stick of a Zen master
across my heart and soul and mind.
Consider the nature of time as I know it –
sunrise to sunset, moonrise to moonset.
Waking, dreaming. Think 10, 15 years then
think again – a year has no meaning,
only what can be held, given away,
all and everything beyond duration
except for remembering.
-Byron Hoot
He was standing at the end of my bed
on my left side in that tan shirt, brown
pants, brown belt and shoes. With that
grin reassuring and unnerving.
“Dad?” He’d been dead 32 years and I
was in a hospital. A disturbing
surprise; he didn’t say anything and
disappeared. And I was thinking of
conclusions of a thousand choices I
didn’t know I had made and how they now
presented themselves as inevitable.
The way I was of him, my children of me,
the stories I told, how the past had come
to here and now and how the future
would come out of every here and now
and how all I wanted was to get well
enough to leave but not before my time
thinking how time and eternity like
a double-entendre and how careful
I should be in choosing what I say
and do and looked again to make sure
Dad had left alone.
-Byron Hoot
hootism: one little bite can change everything.
I am leaving in the dream and I
don’t know where I’m leaving
from or going to when I hear,
“Here and now to here and now”
as if that means anything.
Think of pictures I have taken
of landscapes and know there
is no possibility of repeating them –
everything from where I’d stand,
what I’d see, the frame of time
that no second, minute, hour
can hold exactly would be different.
And so would I, repeat, “Here and now
to here and now” look outside, look
in, get that wry smile my dad would sometimes
get when he preached speaking for God.
-Byron Hoot
I am arriving where I can say, “I see
some sense to my life.” The past
making sense in ways that only
time reveals. The vision a reward,
the reward unabashed in what it gives.
The sense of right and wrong the trail
of a snake leading out through
some eastern gate of a paradise that
doesn’t exist. A tolerance I would not
have given myself ten years ago.
I am ambiguous about the word “regret.”
I’ve had a few utterly true and useful.
I know how moments were fulcrums
opening and closing doors I could not,
like Psyche needing help to overcome
the tasks Aphrodite had given her.
Now, I see my mis-interpretations,
see now what I was blind to,
no longer hearing “this is this and
that is that” that echo forming a harmony.
Something like forgiveness enters,
some alchemical transformation
changing ignorance into knowledge,
the promise of the beginning of wisdom –
possibly next year – when I turn seventy-two.
-Byron Hoot
hootism: freedom without responsibility is anarchy.
I drove through the Laurel Highlands
yesterday and was tempted like
Rip Van Wrinkle to go into the mountains
and not come out. To let time pass
on some road beyond the mountains,
to not see change but in the cycle
of seasons the words linear and time
untranslatable in valleys and streams,
fog lingering in hollows, caught
by the tops of trees. But I was on
a road taking me to where I live,
where stories have built a home,
a place of refuge, a place to go to,
a place to see my children
pulling into the driveway. The mountains
receding in the rear view mirror.
Home only forty miles away.
-Byron Hoot
The lake was calm and the blue sky
and slight breeze created a time
of perfection where everything fits
together and we fished missing strikes,
catching one or two, releasing them.
And we fished as if there was nothing
else to do. And there wasn’t, that grace
of being present slow and easy, deep and wide.
Later, we left not because we had to but there
were back roads to drive, deer and turkey to watch for.
Pulled into the driveway, sat on the porch, had a beer,
listened to the birds, talked in-between the silence of words.
“Think this could be paradise?” I asked.
“Could be, Dad,” he said and smiled.
-Byron Hoot
It is not clear who the villain
is in the story of The Fall.
Is it God wanting things to remain
as they are? Is it the Serpent who
knows too much of a good thing
is no good at all? Those afraid
to accuse the cosmically divine
point the finger to Adam and Eve.
They were, as the saying would
come to be said, between a rock
and a hard place. And who’s to know
if those other two did not say to each
other, “Betcha!” and waited for two
truths to collide. The fact that we are
drawn to a paradise that lacks freedom
and a freedom that lacks paradise cannot be denied –
the evidence called history describes.
And who among us has not heard,
“Walk with me” and “Eat of the tree”?
And know the echoes of our answers.
-Byron Hoot
The containers I put my experiences
in are rotting. The condensation
of blood and tears have blurred
all demarcations and the words
beginning, middle, and end have
no meaning. The artificiality
of separation has left and the intensity
of meaning is moving through me
like The Sword of Solomon as the truth
of lies reveals and reveals and reveals.
I show my wounds to myself
and say, “I believe.” Whisper,“So this is how
it feels to wear a seamless robe.” Bow slightly
at the reflection in the mirror.
-Byron Hoot
