All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Foundation of House in Floodplain
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Foundation of House in Floodplain
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Fairy Lanterns
At the funeral, my uncle
Had grabbed his son’s hand
From the casket and wouldn’t
Let go. I waited, next
In line, suddenly turning away
And bursting through the chapel door,
Tears streaming down my face,
Perhaps the first time I ever sobbed
For anyone else. I paced outside,
The door suddenly too heavy
To push open, until
A funeral director kindly
Opened it with one hand and motioned
Me inside. Of course I went back inside,
But I don’t remember anything else.
Three decades later,
At Rose Hills, my uncle
Searched a few
Difficult moments for
His wife and son,
The headstones all flat
On the ground. As I gazed
At L.A. below, I couldn’t
Remember any time passing.
Had I continued pacing, lost
Among the headstones,
For thirty-three years?
Was my uncle weeping beside
The graves because his son
Had unexpectedly returned,
But overweight now and bald--
Or because I now resembled
My father, who died three
Decades ago? Had he kept
The house the same, hoping
This day would arrive? I
Was always just a few
Hundred miles away.
Suddenly I knew why my uncle
Was crying again:
For thirty-three years,
We couldn’t find
Each other. His tears
Were also for his wife
And his son, yes,
But as he cried, I was, happily,
His nephew and his brother
And his son, no years ever
Having passed, none of us
Ever lost again.
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Kings River, above the Submerged Car
KINGS RIVER MEDITATIONS
A cute girl, possibly
thirteen, legs crossed,
eyes closed, twenty feet
from the Kings River,
remained totally unaware
that my friend and I
were gawking
at her. Grabbing
a smooth stone, the size
of an egg, my friend
lifted his arm, muttering
curses at her, and I
lunged to stop him. Two
years older and stronger,
my friend just frowned
in disgust and dropped
the stone, stumbling off.
The girl never stirred.
And I never got the nerve
to ask her what
she was doing. I finally
scurried away, infatuated,
never to see the girl
again. Cross-legged
by the Kings River, almost
forty years later,
close to the spot where
she had meditated,
I remember a photo of me
and my friend holding up
with pride a necklace
of fish. That same
morning, forty years
ago, I had spotted
a car in the depths
of the river and shouted
for them to come see.
No matter how excitedly
I pointed, none of them
could perceive the faint
shadow of the car
beneath the glittering
surface of the water,
so no one believed me.
Our fathers both died
a few years later,
my friend gone
to some other state.
The hood of the car
has surfaced,
caught on a rock, tilted
like a stiff, flat tongue.
I close my eyes and empty
my mind, hearing the water
rushing by and then
nothing at all, everything
gone but my awareness
of the void. But then I feel
and see a sun in my heart
and a golden-equal armed
cross on my forehead--
I open my eyes, surprised
that I had so quickly
forgotten the people
and the river as I
gaze at bending reeds
And slippery stones
And rushing water....
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
TAG BY THE RIVER
They twirled me around
ten times at the edge
of the campground,
then scattered—I
swayed a little before
lunging at them, each one
vanishing into deer brush
by the river, the water
roaring into a still,
deep pool, then
sweeping around a bend,
a phoebe chirping, barely
out of my reach, on a twig
above the shining edge
of the pool and the rapids.
Tempted to forget the game
and swim across, the water
smooth for a stretch,
then pitilessly raging,
I glimpsed my brother,
fifty feet away, scrambling
as if his life depended
on it, and I sprinted
after him, twenty feet
away before he
disappeared into
the brush again, and I
gave up. Again,
I had failed.
As I leaped
across a stream,
my friends seemed
so distant, impossible
to tag. Two feet away,
the water raged, the sun
kindling my ribs,
the river and earth so
peaceful that I felt,
for the first time, one
with the bushes and trees,
aware that my soul
was ballooning, connected
with something vast, unseen—
the great spirit of the earth,
I imagined. I no longer desired
anything else. My brother finally
found me and scornfully
asked where I’d been,
and we marched back to camp
where I glimpsed in the distance
the shining edge of the still pool
and the pitiless rapids.
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
INITIATION
Rumor was the older scouts planned to strip us
down to our underwear, cover us in molasses,
pour cornflakes all over us, pee on us,
and throw us into the swift river
at midnight. Instead, after dark
they lured me far beyond
the campground and ditched me.
No moon. No flashlight. At first,
I inched forward, striving to avoid
holes, rocks, fallen branches. Hopeless,
I finally listened for the river
and lurched toward its dull roar until
I found the mossy outhouse at the edge
of the campground. Exhausted by a day
of sprinting here and there, truth
be told, l knew that I would not have lasted
until midnight. Truth be told, I didn’t understand
that being ditched was the real initiation
until forty years later, when once again
alone in the darkness, I recalled
locating the silent camp and crawling
deep into my sleeping bag, warmed
by breath and body heat--so deep
I wondered for a moment if I might
suffocate while I slept. I woke, hearing
my Dad outside the tent asking my friends
where I was. Ready for a new day,
ecstatic that my worst fears had not
been realized, I was like someone
who could not be hurt for long, who
would always find his way even
on a moonless night. If I could
relive that moment so intensely
that I would experience all without
bitterness or regret, letting go
of whatever does not serve me,
would I be like an eternal child
or some god in a perpetual dance?
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
MANGLED BRIDGE AND ROSY CROSS
Scrambling down a steep slope, I knelt before
an Ithuriel’s spear, a rattlesnake rippling
by my boot before I could even leap, lizards
scampering through dry leaves, the river crashing
through the canyon below me. Once I flew over
unstable stones in the river bottom, struggling
to keep up with my brother and our friends. Today
I surveyed each inch before even taking a step.
I found the skeletal steel frame of a washed-out bridge
clinging to a megalithic stone in the middle
of the river, and I remembered: Forty years ago,
a friend blurted out a story about a collapsed bridge,
and without another word we had dashed through
the river bottom to find it. That day I had felt clumsy
and weak (the first signs of chronic illness), and I
just couldn’t keep up. I had been ditched before
on a moonless night and in a cave, but never
abandoned in broad daylight. I was eleven
again, but I'd found the bridge and they hadn't.
Unlike them, I had continued to wander through a forest
of symbols, the bridge for a moment a ghastly symbol
of the past forty years. Somehow, I felt the same,
as if I had entered a timeless domain. Our fathers,
who had fished side by side that day,
both died a few years later. Forty years before
in this same river bottom, my Holy
Guardian Angel, my daimon, more than once,
had spoken to me of events to come, decades
in the future. Nonplussed, I had forgotten
the voice until the events transpired.
The perplexing, unpredictable angel
is only my soul, whose voice transcends
space and time, in this quiet river bottom
and in meditation. Today I closed my eyes,
a rose blooming in my mind's eye, at first
blood-red on a cross of splintery wood,
then the petals changing colors, each petal
representing a path on the Tree of Life,
the cross an unfolded cube of space
and time. I could have been anyone
these past forty years, and this forest
would have hardly changed, yet
the rose cross blooms inside me
and perhaps eternally abides, a symbol
of the soul in timeless grace, the river
lost in time until I opened my eyes again
as a snake was slithering between
dry, slowly curling hands.
All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins. Two of Pentacles: ...