Untitled Poem by John Bauman

Let me put it to you like this.
It’s like this:
      (                  )

(oh, yeah. Insert a goofy sound above)

Peepers?
They put it like this:
      (                  )

(I mean “peep, peep, peep…”)

You, there!
You have to go through time
      …and, uh, space.
You have to.
No, I don’t.
I can just be here and now.
There’s no time like the present,
      for existing.
Life is cool!

What’s your name?

Um…to make a long story short:
      I was born, I did a bunch of things
      and I’m here now.


-John Bauman

Cairn of broken sticks

"Building this was exciting. It looked like a nest at first but I had this idea of an egg-shape. You can see it from the road nearby if you are lucky and perceptive and I think that if you are lucky and perceptive there should be something mysterious and a little grand waiting for you to discover. I like the moment when I see something beautiful and so strangely organized that you wonder, 'what did this? it must have been some crazy guy!' In a way I guess I am hoping that when other humans see it it may cause them to think, 'some human did that, definitely, only people are that cool... I'm a person.' I also like that this particular work had anthropomorphic overtones, it looks like a witness or a guardian."

-Jeremiah Griswold

Ninja star ferns

"So I was thinking, 'I gotta get out of my head and into my hands.' If you know what I mean. I was walking in the woods a lot anyway. This was the stuff, this was the place, the stream was filled to overflowing and rushing on by. 'I like whirlpools,' never entered my head. Its a little weird how I'm guided by whatever it is, but I have yet to actually plan any of this."

- Jeremiah Griswold

Whirlpool ferns coming from the tree

"I think I could have done more with this, I guess there is still time. I actually like working with stuff that goes away, sometimes very quickly. Seeing what I can do with what's available. I played a little with texture and color here. It was raining like hell at the time. I saw this tree which had fallen across the stream in the winter and there was this perfect yoda-hut hole in the base of it. I have been thinking about decay a lot recently, and life. The tree had died but there were these mushrooms growing out of it and beetles eating the bark, it was going back into the ground and so I guess I just went with that."

- Jeremiah Griswold

Random Access

He watched his own enormous fingers
through a magnifying lens
as they sewed,
sewed, in morning light
stitches even-spaced and fine.
One by one each little square of fabric
took its place within his quilt.

Afternoons, in a darker room,
he wrote instructions for computers
                If cursor within area numerically defined
                                then show text, “Which color?”
                                else if p = q
                                                beep
                                else, nothing
                End if.
flawless labyrinths of logic
encoded in a language he had learned
that freed him from an office man’s routine.

The pattern of the quilt equaled the pattern of his mind.
He wondered if, night after night,
you slept under his intelligent design
you could navigate your life
edit and undo
change the hue of any pixel you disliked
because you had been wrapped in random access
all the time you dreamed.


- Ron McAdow

Music House

After an unthinkable calamity befell him
the forest closed in.
Animals stared through his windows.
Turkey, woodchuck, raccoon, squirrels, deer.
A bear.

To avoid their black-eyed gaze
he shifted every inside wall.
He spread the hidden space—
the house's vacant shell.
He boxed the windows,
made a hatch,
installed a ladder.
His headlamp darted
as he scrambled up and down.

Between the walls he wired a squad of speakers
to fill the place with Berlioz and Bach
On the outside of the inner wall
he penciled a chronology of fire, fuel, physics—
a labyrinth in cursive,
vine-like strands of science,
weapons, transportation.

His branching maze of technological advance
reached the time in which he wrote
and proceeded on past digital
into a holographic future he foresaw
in which meaning is set down in patterns
like vast arrays of crescent shadows on a pebble beach
or galaxies of stars.


As music floated that idea
he painted, on the inner surface of the outer wall,
hungry people at an endless table—
it went all around the house and joined itself.
His characters compared their histories of love—
the strongest agitations of their hearts
                crushes and rejections,
                lust and fear.
He drew, year after year,
gestures and expressions
and laid on color
until, somehow, he found his labor done.

He returned the inner walls to their original positions.
He looked out his windows
                addressed the animals
                repelled the forest
                invited visitors
                listened to them talk
                listened to music
                listened to rain.
As visitors talked, he watched and listened.


-Ron McAdow

Introducing: Ron McAdow

I went to a Montessori Junior High school, and Ron McAdow was my teacher. I remember him as a guy who liked nature, wrote and was generally friendly. Back then, I read this novel he wrote/was writing, called "Good Medicine". The only thing I recall about it now is that there was the discovery of popcorn in it.

These days Ron is a poet, and conserving land via the Sudbury Valley Trustees. I learned those things through the internet. Also, we are friends on Facebook.

I think it's funny how time and life work, like these streams that divide and sometimes come back together and sometimes don't, but it's really hard to say where they will or won't end up. And one day a piece of the past comes flowing back to you, and the thing that was hard to realize until that moment is that the piece has been on its own adventure, and moving forward, just as you have.

Links:
Ron McAdow Poems
Sudbury Valley Trustees