Hello literary lovers. It’s time for me to stop teasing you about my upcoming book of poetry. Book number five–A Path I Might Have Missed–is alive!
The title and meaning? I chose the title, because it is a reference to the creative odyssey I might have overlooked (but fortunately found late in life and explored through my poetry). Plus, I just like the lyrical sound of these six words strung together.
The concept? It’s a wide-ranging collection of forty-two poems, which I wrote over a period of thirty years (from age thirty-six to nearly sixty-six). My poems cover a host of universal topics–love, loss, pain, discovery, truth, and transformation–with an eye to the ever-present influence of nature in our lives.
The content? The poems run the gamut. Some are reflective, probing, mindful, and deeply personal. Others examine the challenging times we face in contemporary society. I dedicated the book to my father, Walter A. Johnson. He was an unfulfilled poet.
The format? The book is organized into six sections: buds and blooms; fog and fire; magic and music; trials and trails; water and wonder; and stones and sky. I’ve included a photo of nature with each section, images I captured while living in Illinois and Arizona.
Just click on the embedded link below to reveal the cover of the book and purchase a copy on Amazon. Also, please leave your review online. I look forward to your comments and feedback. Thank you for supporting my creative endeavors. Happy reading!
If you follow my blog, you know of my love of gardening. I am particularly enamored of desert roses (aka adeniums), their thickened stems, their brilliant blooms.
Adeniums aren’t native to the Sonoran Desert. They are succulents from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. However, they flourish in our bright, nearly constant sun. They thrive in our Arizona heat from March through November.
Now that my husband and I have lived in Scottsdale year-round for nearly six years, it’s a ritual for us to keep them indoors in our sunroom from December until mid-March, so they are protected on cool nights. Then, in mid-March, we carry them back outside to soak up the sun until the end of November.
Until this afternoon, I was the proud owner of two adeniums. One produces dazzling double-red blooms; the other has yet to bloom. (A third died a year ago. I think I over-watered it.) So today Tom and I stopped at Lowe’s for a new plant to adorn our south-facing, back patio.
As I scanned a sea of cacti and succulents, I spied this pink pearl adenium. Or maybe she picked me. At any rate, we brought her home. I found a suitable spot for her in this green, ceramic container.
She’s the perfect distraction–a gorgeous plant I might have missed–while I count the final days until my book of poetry emerges for all the world (or at least a smattering of poetry lovers) to see. Hopefully, by Easter. Stay tuned.
There was a moment on Saturday morning–about two thirds of the way through the Phoenix Heart Walk with my husband Tom, friend Todd, son Nick and his girlfriend Anastasia by my side–when I spotted this young man holding a homemade sign.
His presence and the message along the three-mile route touched me. I stopped to take his picture, hugged him, and thanked him for being there and sharing his heartfelt message.
I don’t really consider myself a heart “hero”, though our Heart Walk 2023 team I “coached” and dubbed “Friends for Life” did raise more than $2,000 in the fight against heart disease and stroke.
Thankful “survivor” feels like a better fit. Especially when I look back on that day nearly six years ago when Tom and I endured our most difficult and frightening moments individually and as a couple.
It was July 6, 2017, our collective sixtieth birthday. After feeling breathless on a humid summer day, I found myself lying on a gurney in the bowels of Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
After suffering a mild heart attack, I waited impatiently for two teams of heart specialists–actual heart heroes–to remove a blockage in the left side of my heart and insert two stents.
Fortunately, since that tumultuous day I have been able to transform my health. With a little luck, thirty fewer pounds to carry, and a lot of hard work, support, and exercise, I’ve lived longer, written more stories, and created a whole new existence in the Valley of the Sun. You can read all about our journey in An Unobstructed View.
Certainly, I’ve come a long way since 2017. Far enough that on Saturday, March 25, 2023–after completing the Phoenix Heart Walk and crossing the finish line–I stood with family and friends on the streets of Phoenix and breathed deep.
Along with the thousands of others in attendance, we “heart heroes” celebrated and embraced a sunnier, more hopeful day.
Me preparing to cross the finish line at the Phoenix Heart Walk.Heart Heroes/Survivors: Todd, me, Tom, Nick, and Anastasia
It’s March. The Christmas cactus adorning our den is definitely a late bloomer–and so am I. I turned 65 in July, but that number hasn’t deterred me from continuing to write, sing, and create.
When I close my eyes, I can still channel 18-year-old unaware me. Tall and thin with long straight blond hair in 1975. Seated in an uncomfortable wooden fold-down chair. Legs crossed in Middlebush Hall on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia.
I was an aspiring journalism major. One of a few hundred freshmen and freshwomen taking a required business course. Bleary-eyed from guzzling too much beer and demolishing late-night Shakespeare’s Pizza, we listened to our Marketing 101 professor.
He waxed on about demographics and American consumption. We doodled in our spiral notebooks.
What I remember most is that he told us the range of consumption occurred between the ages of 18 and 65. That’s when Americans had the most disposable income to spend.
The implication was that life, purpose, and relevance stopped after that. After retirement. After 65.
Of course, these days, life expectancy–for those who live to be 65–is more promising. But nothing is guaranteed.
At any age, “seize the day” is a smart strategy. Especially in your later years when (at times) it feels like you are riding in a runaway wagon racing downhill. Even if on most days you are enjoying the freedom and wisdom that comes with age as the wind rushes through your greying hair.
All of this is preamble to tell you that I am on the cusp of publishing my 5th book. It will be a collection of my best poems. Many of them explore love, loss, identity, discovery, disorientation, transformation, realization, and acceptance–spun through the ever-present influences of time and nature.
I began writing poetry in 1993. I was newly divorced, raising my boys as a single dad, working long hours as a communication consultant for Towers Perrin in Chicago, dashing for commuter trains, grieving the loss of my father, and beginning to understand myself and my emerging gay identity.
I have written dozens of poems over the past 30 years. Stashed them in an ever-expanding Word file. (If you follow me, you know I have shared some of them here over the past four years. The act of doing that has fed the poetry beast inside me. He’s now ready to emerge.)
Yes, at age 65 it thrills me to defy the logic of my marketing professor. To assemble my poetry and share it publicly–all in one place–for anyone who chooses to consume it.
Hardly. The latest western winter storm battered Arizona last night.
It dropped temperatures, ushered in the wind, and dumped a few feet of fresh snow on Flagstaff. Sixteen inches on Prescott, less than two hours north of us.
While, down in the Valley of the Sun, heavy rains soaked our saguaros.
This afternoon, nature’s afterglow appeared. A brisk fifty-five-degree walk along the Crosscut Canal proved we are protected on the north and east by ranges adorned with snowy peaks.
Squint, beyond a woman texting while walking her dog. See the tops of the Superstition Mountains thirty miles east? They won’t stay white for long.
Tom and I get this question a few times a month–sometimes more often. In Arizona, Illinois, or anywhere in between.
We could be at the check-out counter of a grocery store, a restaurant as we wait to be seated, or on the treadmill at the gym we frequent in Scottsdale as we were on Monday.
That’s when a friendly man, wearing a San Francisco Giants ball cap, popped the question. (No, he didn’t ask me to marry him.)
In 2023, I generally smile and respond as I did Monday with “No, we aren’t, though we get that question a lot.” And the conversation ends there.
Depending on my mood–and how much I choose to share my personal story (after all, I am a memoir writer)–I have often gone on to say, “Tom and I are married.” Or “Tom and I are partners.” Or “Tom and I have been together for more than twenty-five years.”
Along the way, we have never received any open backlash concerning our relationship (nor should we). Quite the opposite. We have made more friends of all kinds because of our openness and comfort in our skins. (By the way, it took me decades to get here and I’m not going back.)
With time and reflection, I’ve realized that the question is more of an observation in the world of people we contact who aren’t able to classify the intimacy or closeness they identify between two men standing before them.
Or maybe it’s an acknowledgment on a less significant level that we have picked up some mannerisms from one another that two brothers might have in common. However, we really don’t look alike.
At any rate, I will continue to live my open life as a gay man–proudly–in my community. I will continue writing about my experiences–positive and negative–as a gay man, a husband, a father of two adult sons, a neighbor, a friend.
I will continue singing on stage with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus. As I write this, I have just completed drafting a script about five fictionalized characters living in the Phoenix LGBTQ community in 2023. Their dialogue will be the glue that ties together the music of our next concert: “Born To Be Brave”, June 3 and 4 at Tempe Center for the Arts.
I feel it is my duty to demonstrate that two men–a gay, married couple–don’t have to be blood brothers to love each other.
Especially in a country where some want to remove the books of gay authors from the shelves. Or try to erase the checkered history of our country on race relations because the truth is threatening to some. Or ban drag shows, because they view them as recruitment activities for current or future generations.
Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now. But Tom and I aren’t brothers. We’re a gay couple living happily in 2023, and there are lots of us out in the world.
We’re making significant contributions. Loving our families. Loving our neighbors. Loving our friends. Loving the legacy, which we are leaving for future generations of children who need to know the truth about the past and the present. That there are all kinds of people in the world loving each other. And that’s just as it should be.
You and your buoyant love, deep caress, soothing sparkle.
You are my quiet cove, splashing symphony, ever-gliding channel.
With every stroke, you steal me away from the din of demands.
Your flow–lapping up and racing by with no questions–surrounds me.
With each passing whoosh, you lead me by the hand and whisper.
“Float with me now in these reassuring moments.
This is where peace, promise, and repetition reside.”
On February 5, 2023–after nearly a three-month hiatus due to cooler-than-normal weather in the Valley of the Sun and a litany of other interruptions–I swam laps outdoors once again in our community pool at Polynesian Paradise in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“Dogs have no idea how wonderful they are.They walk all around us and make the world a better place.”
***
On a chilly, but sunny, Thursday morning in Scottsdale, Arizona, this was Yumi’s thought of the day.
How serendipitous that our instructor should choose these two sentences as inspiration for Tom, me and six others on February 2, 2023, as we stood on our mats and began our weekly seventy-five-minute journey into yoga.
On Ground Hog Day fifteen years ago our basset hound Maggie crossed over the Rainbow Bridge.
When it’s your pet, you never forget the highs and lows long after the calendar pages have come and gone.
The frolics with Kirk, Nick, Tom, and me in the lush green of our backyard … the comfort of her velveteen elongated ears as I stroked her coat … the gnaws and crunches of rawhide bones and petite carrots as she gobbled up another evening snack, after racing to welcome us home at the kitchen door.
Then along came that sad-and-snowy suburban Chicago morning in 2008 when our dog endured another–particularly horrible– seizure.
After the shaking had stopped, she looked up at me with resignation from the tile of our kitchen floor without the energy or inclination to lick the maple syrup off a breakfast plate.
Soon after, Tom and I scooped her into our sedan, arrived at our vet’s office, and whispered goodbye to her as she sprawled on a blanket on the floor.
***
Today, seventeen hundred miles and a lifetime away from the northern Illinois home she patrolled and dominated, I recall the “glue” and comic relief our dog provided (through her warm fur, misshapen front legs, and bellowing howl).
She was the antidote for our non-traditional family: two men (in a loving relationship just doing our best to coexist in a less enlightened world) with my two sons zooming in and out of our life as they grew.
Our dog simply demanded our constant attention and stood by our sides witnessing it all.
It was the love and companionship of Maggie and the litany of her daily adventures–walks, feedings, treats, medicines, rabbits, squirrels, accidents in the hall, and countless cuddles–that magically connected us all.
Certainly, from 1998 to 2008, our dog made our world a better place.
Love and loss are universal human conditions. If we feel the first, we can’t escape the grief associated with the second.
I wrote You Everlasting in December 2009. It was a gift for my eighty-six-year-old mother.
I remember the surprise and delight on her face that Christmas Eve, after she slowly unwrapped the framed contents in tissue paper cradled in her lap.
“You wrote me a poem,” she said quietly.
In 2016, three years after she passed, I published the poem in From Fertile Ground. It is a book inspired and informed by grief.
Today, on the tenth anniversary of Helen F. Johnson’s death, the time is right to share it again.
The imagery of flowers, trees, and animals comforts me. The verse provides much-needed continuity from her past existence to the reflections and influences that live on inside me.
The poem reminds me of that wise, nature-loving woman, who carved a resilient path for me to follow.
I still feel her presence today and can smile with the knowledge that, though she left on a frigid-in-Illinois, January morning in 2013, I carry the warm memories of her in my Arizona desert life in 2023.
Perhaps these words will prompt memories of your own loved ones, who are gone but never forgotten.
***
You Everlasting
You are the comfort of nature. Eternally pressed.
The first magnolia petal of spring.
The last gingko leaf of autumn.
The determined orchid that flourishes.
The lingering annual that endures. Perennial.
You are high and low tide. Remarkably present.
The hidden, tranquil meadow.
The crackle and thump of fresh melon.
The dancing firefly in a warm Carolina sky.
The soulful howl of a January hound waiting by the gate. Undeniable.
You are the simplest wisdom. Gracefully proud.
The tender touch of summer days that melt but never fade.
The breaking dawn of blues and greens forever in my memories.
The resilient path carved and captured in my heart.
The polished gem of hopeful dreams. Everlasting.
In December 2008, one year before I gave her the poem, my mother enjoyed another holiday celebration with her family in Illinois.
When Tom and I moved to Arizona in 2017, we were immediately impressed with the library system here in Scottsdale.
It consists of four library locations spread south to north through our community to cover the ever-expanding patronage of transplants from other places. Each is a book lover’s haven with artistic touches built into the architecture to reflect the landscape of the desert southwest.
Closest to us–the main facility–is Civic Center Library in Old Town Scottsdale. It’s a place my husband and I frequent to browse the stacks for something new or familiar to read. In the past, before Covid, it’s also where I participated in the Local Author Book Fairs.
What neither of us anticipated (until last fall) is that on a chilly-for-the-valley Monday–the twenty-third day in the twenty-third year of this millennium and five-and-a-half years since we called Arizona our permanent home–Tom would realize a lifelong dream there.
He would begin to lead a free, eight-week film series and discussion, stand in the Civic Center auditorium in front of sixty attendees (friends, acquaintances, neighbors, relative strangers, and film lovers) and share his deep knowledge and passion for iconic films from 1967-1977.
It’s an era characterized in the American film industry as the New Hollywood. A period of controversial, counterculture attitudes that would personally define and shape his love of film and its ability to combine art form with social statement.
But as I sat in the front row to watch Tom welcome library patrons and see the first installment of the series (A Decade Under the Influence, a provocative documentary chockful of film clips and interviews with directors, writers and actors from that era) it was Tom’s moment that mattered most.
He has always imagined the thrill of owning a small theatre. Of showing films from that era–and classics like the Best Years of Our Lives from our parents’ generation–to inform and entertain those who may or may not be familiar with them.
We don’t have the financial ability to do that. But we do have friends and connections in our community (thank you, Glenn). In this case, they aligned magically to put Tom in touch with library management and help make his dream bloom and grow in the desert.
During and after the program Monday evening, I could feel the buzz in the auditorium. Many came up to thank Tom for sharing his film expertise and personal anecdotes. Not to mention a handy dandy packet of fun facts and background information about the films, which Tom happily prepared and the library staff copied and distributed.
I expect that many of the sixty who attended will be back for the second film on January 30. They’ll certainly be there to see Bonnie and Clyde, the jarring, graphic, and spectacular film about the Barrow gang and Depression-era Texas.
I imagine they will also return to hear Tom’s film insights.
***
Note: If you live in the area and would like to attend, the film series runs from 3 to 6 p.m. on Monday nights until March 20, 2023, at the Civic Center Library, 3839 N. Drinkwater Blvd. Registration not required. Space is limited.
The program is a free eight-week class about original, creative films from the Hollywood renaissance. A look at how filmmaking evolved after relaxed censorship and rating systems gave filmmakers freedom to explore new subject matter and styles of cinematic expression. Discussions and screenings each week are led by Tom Samp. All films are recommended for mature audiences.
Schedule of Films:
A Decade Under the Influence (January 23rd)
Bonnie and Clyde (January 30th)
The Graduate (February 6th)
Easy Rider (February 13th)
Midnight Cowboy (February 27th)
M*A*S*H (March 6th)
Five Easy Pieces (March 13th)
Annie Hall (March 20th)
On Monday, January 23, 2023, Tom Samp welcomed attendees to the first installment of a free eight-week film series–The New Hollywood:1967-1977–at the Civic Center Library in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Mark Johnson Stories 