Like many people, I was born naked. Also like many people, I was born poor. I don't know that I was born a poet, But I began writing poetry in my late teens. My tastes ran the gamut from American Transcendentalists to English Romantics. My favorite of the latter was John Keats. Of American poets, I eventually settled on Walt Whitman.
In my early college days, some of my juvenilia was published, Here are a couple of samples:
AN ANT'S ACCOUNT OF HIS OWN DEATH
by Donald C. Traxler
While I was crawling on the ground
Beneath a crumb of cake,
I heard a mighty, thunderous sound,
And the earth began to shake.
At once the sky turned black as ink;
The sun was hidden from my sight.
The last thing that I saw, I think,
Was one word--"NEOLITE."
I am dating myself here, but in 1963 everyone knew that "NEOLITE" was a brand name for shoe soles.
Here is another, from the same year:
SYMBOLS, SHAPES, AND SIGNS
by Donald C. Traxler
History began with symbols, shapes, and signs
which together made words, and the words made lines.
Xs, lines, and circles in the sand of the beach,
carvings in a cave where the tide won't reach;
scattered, scrambled wedges in baked clay bricks
were made with sharp styluses instead of sticks.
Heads and hands and crooked lines and facy snakes and birds
filled the pharoahs' tombs with pharoah-pleasing words.
In China letters came from jagged lines and hooks,
and characters were made to look the way a spider looks.
And when you come to read old Aesop's fables,
you'll find the ps are rs, the the ps are crooked tables.
And far across the ocean where the sun's so hot it boils,
the Mayas made their letters out of bas-relief gargoyles.
The Arabs of the desert use their sickles, knots, and dots
to decorate their frescoes and their alabaster pots.
History goes on with symbols, shaped, and signs
which together make words, and the words make lines.
Ah yes, those were the days. I wrote some pretty long poems, and also some long, pretty poems. But something in me will no longer allow me to do that. I guess I've become a minimalist poet, for better or for worse.
I remember, in those early college years, wondering why people couldn't walk around on the street without clothes. I just couldn't understand it. Those of us of the Asperger's persuasion tend to have a hard time with social injustice.
I was very thin in my childhood and youth. My need for body acceptance and my love of lying naked in the sun caused me to become committed to the idea of nudism / naturism. In high school, my mother had disapprovingly called me a "nudist" because I slept nude,.I still do, but the term no longer has any sting. Both in Spain and in the San Francisco Bay Area, my wife and I were in the habit of going to nude beaches, a lovely and liberating experience. I also meditated nude, and did yoga nude, even leading a group for the latter on the Internet. Nudity became an integral part of my life, both waking and sleeping.
(to be continued)
Text and images © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.
