Basketball John

 Basketball John 

I tried to trace today, the beginning of the

Love for basketball

For in Sopchoppy

All I wanted to be was Walt Dickson

Halfback for the Yellowjackets gridiron 

I recall going to a basketball game

In the old native rock gym

The mighty Jackets taking on

The Crawfordville Panthers

Maybe that was the planting

Of the seed

And by the time we moved to

Monticello

Daddy built my first goal and 

Backboard in the back yard

To which Walt and Bart Starr

Aspirations 

Turned somehow to wanting

To be a Hondo Havlicek Celtic 

So when the Fourth grade A

Was scheduled to play the

Fourth grade B at halftime

Of a Monticello Tiger game

I was the go to man

To face the talented 

Bobby and Butch Plains twins

Marc Bishop and I did the

Best we could

And when half time came to an end

I was high scoring man on the losing

B team with three points

Sinking my first free throw ever.

The love of hoops was fully born

The next year when we were to

Move to Wilmore, Kentucky

Just twelve miles south of

Mecca Lexington 

The epicenter of basketball

A Wilmore Cub

I became a Rupp Runt

And have been ever since.

In the shed hangs the original iron

My father hoisted in long ago

Monticello

The goal still glows hot

From years of swishing.

Burning Suwannee

I was stoked yesterday when Kirsten at Conyers LP gas called the Gallery and said she was coming to pick out a piece for their business to go over the mantle for their grand opening. When she came, I did not prompt her as she picked out Burning Suwannee. 

Oceans balm

 Oceans balm

Once when our oceans were calm

We’d walk for miles out to sea

Out there where shore began to recede

We’d apply the soothing balm

The tide would abide by our side

Say, not today will I rip

At our ankles, the fish won’t nip

For today, let’s let a calm abide

The sons would pass in search of waves

We’d point them toward the horizon

Til they were specks on boards riding

In calm with us they would not stay

We lately dwell near the edge of calm

Watch the sea for what may return

Miles from shore many lessons you learn

Hard the sea and yet, soothing the balm.

Black Jesus

 Black Jesus

Hey bro, ya'll come hang with me

I don't swim but I walk on the sea

Come Friday, if y'all get hongry

We'll cook us up a mess of fish ASAP

Fest in the shade of the palm trees by Galilee....

Chill by the 55 homer drum warming

May even turn some water to suds

for that game on Saturday...

The cedars

 The Cedars of Cemeteries 

This particular cedar is in the Oaklawn Cemetery in downtown Lake City. I am moved by any old cedar in any old cemetery, especially when, in the long, slow, tenacious course of time, they over grow  their boundaries.

Jumpy

 Jumpy 

Soon after moving to Williston from Kentucky in 1967, my father planted a sweetgum and maple tree between the parsonage and the Methodist church. As a hurdler in 7th grade, I would jump the trees coming and going from church on Noble AV. We moved in 1977, the parsonage and sweet gum are gone but the maple remains. My dad called me Jumpy as a boy, an appropriate nickname.

Wee John

 Wee John

Big Shot was recently asked the origin of Wee John. This was his answer: When Big Shot was Wee, like 3-6 Wee, he had a little plastic friend who really wasn’t plastic but in order for the adults to leave them alone to their designs, little man played along.

And so they were content and little man got little big shot out of more than a little jam or two. Now when it came time for little big Shot to move from Sopchoppy to Monticello with his family, little man was no where to be found. Little big Shot looked all through the house, the yard, the sand pile, even across the street at the river bank. No little man. Little man just didn’t want to move. And so he stayed in Sopchoppy where he remains to this day. Wee John is the figment of Little man, though a poor, plastic figment of a real replica.

This is a drawing Little Big Shot made of little man in case you happen to see him.

Take me home

 Take me home

I said I’d get around to updating the veiled eulogy to my mountain mother from Crumpler, West Virginia, so now she awaits the Greyhound for the journey home, just as we did Summers to see Grandmother and all the Orander family, now all gone on, except David and Donna Lynn.

Edge of

 Edge of Fairie Wood

In the din of shadow deep

Quietly abide lest you awaken

The slumbering fairies sleeping

Lest into their spell you be taken

Casting o’er you so mysteriously

The spell of becoming a  cypress knee.

No telling

 No telling

Johnclarestokes 

You know, there is a place in earshot

Of the roaring, where it seems time forgot

Or at least, you can get there legally

For lately, it seems, every place is privately

owned, reserved for those who seldom

venture along, for they have usually a 

multitude of homes, and we who in cheap

kayaks roam, aren’t welcome, unless we

by some quirk, know them, and usually,

we don’t, or wouldn’t care to.

So I’m not telling

Where the thousand cypress knees

Are dwelling

Lest the call goes out to the realtor

I must own this place

Make haste.

Yellow flies

Yellow fly’s the time 

There were long hours spent on the porch

Tin roof shading from the Florida sun 

The silence interrupted by the wire swatter

From beneath in sand the ants would come

Carrying below the high porch the silent

ones who moments before sucked blood

The itching persisting into the evening

As the moths circled around the bare

yellow bulb swaying to the rocking

Mosquitoes waking for the evening shift

The fly swatter of little use to defend

bare flesh from the incessant assaults 

til we’d have to retreat to the front room

the high tongue and groove ceiling above 

with the long wire white bulb extinguished 

to sleep as the cicadas in sand emerged.

Homewood

 The longer grew our memory of home, the greater the boards, brick and tin took on a perfect mend. The December air in the slits, once as a siren, now but a gentle wind. The November smoke from the chimney, once billowing the black soot, now but a lazy waft upward, the April rain pelting awake upon the leaking tin, now a lullaby in our tender sleep. The front porch the only relief from the July heat, now a siesta in the creaking swing.