Carmen came into our lives right after Tropical Storm Fay. The lizard appeared a little later, but I am getting ahead of myself. Entire civilizations have been built -- I just read -- on the beauty of women, or, as in Helen of Troy or Cleopatra, the beauty of one particular woman.

Carmen is one of those beauties who makes it possible to see the beauty all around her. She walks in beauty like the night, said Lord Byron. But it isn't the night; it's the day and the hours in between the crack of dawn and the first spike of sun. There's beauty in a smile and in a snail shell. There's beauty in a hangnail, if you see it that way. I haven't and won't. But I once heard a Zen abbot say that there is no thing unbeautiful, if you see it that way.

What way?

Somehow, Carmen made all things beautiful. And her own beauty was not the lesser for it. When she saw our pond, she said it was exactly like the ponds in Australia where she is from. I don't know why but I saw the land, the trees transfigured in the moment of her saying that. The lily pads were a mosaic, the water shivered into a Monet. An anhinga flew up and its armor caught the sun and gleamed. Around the side of the house where Carmen walked, a scrubby little pile of leaf trash lay, and when she walked by, I saw a flower.

She walks in beauty, the Navajos say. Referring to Changing Woman or Mother Earth. All is beauty around her. And so it is with lovely women ... and then I saw, we all saw, the tiniest footnote to a lizard. Erik, Carmen's best friend, put his thumb next to the lizard, and we noticed how really tiny he was.

So -- to Carmen... hail to beauty six feet tall.

And to the lizard, so beautifully, beautifully small.

Tropical Storm Fay just vacated our part of SW Florida. She leaves behind her a spackling of leaves and paperwood bark pressed against our stucco walls so that they look like Japanese rice paper. She's gone now but she did make a mark, if only an artistic one on our property. We were prepared for another Charley, that monster puncher which devastated Pine Island in August 2004. Fay was a fickle, fey soft-footed lady in comparison to old Charley who punched his way into Pine Island like a wrecker's ball and left, not pretty paper, but sodden, fallen walls of houses and trailers crushed like beer cans. I wrote a poem about Charley called "Level."


Hurricane Charley tossed bass
into the sky
They came winging across the porch
not flying flew
Carpenter's level stuck in a tree
Was it level? Peter asks

__


I've seen fish swimming down the street in the runoff from a hurricane, but never seen them in the air. That was a sight to see. Fay, on the other hand, sang us to sleep with tropic music of rain and the little leaves tapping the galvan steel shutters. Mixed in with this song was the bell-ringing of oak toads. The bells and the water sounds tucked us in, put us to sleep. We woke to a green gray world, neutral and tame, with no destruction.

The power was gone. We lit our lanterns and made our coffee. Our fish, Bala sharks and Iridescent sharks -- both breeds are fresh water vegetarians with glitter coats and smooth metallic coats and the friendly manner of big puppy dogs. We love them, and in their fishy way, they seem to love us, too. But this morning something was wrong. Fay had turned off the fishes' bubble supply. They need oxygenated bubbles to breathe. Fortunately, we have a battery operated bubble-breather, and we turned it on. The sharks fairly purred over this, swimming cutting in and out of the silver jewels while we told them they were good little sharks.

All's luck, all's well, my friend the poet, Bob Arnold says. Yes, especially, if you have slept through Fay and fed bubbles to your friendly sharks and then read the papery poems on the walls of your still standing house.

The dog days of summer are upon us. I've been spending the afternoons cloud swimming. My friend, the great running coach, Fred Maas, got my attention when he started sending me photographs of him training for the Pike's Peak Marathon. Fred runs, literally, into the clouds. He's at over fourteen thousand feet. Running. Fred's 63 years old. The old boy can still outpace a deer on a mountain top and he can go for hours doing this at altitude.

He's got me beat, Fred does. But I've taken his logo, Cloud runner, to heart. I am in clouds up to my chin -- in my pond. I swim through them like a newt. Fred eats clouds; I drink them. And I come out of the water grateful to be alive, thankful for taking the weight off my feet, proud that I am still a swimmer, a paddler, a poker of noses into the water lilies. You gotta love it. You're weightless. Incorporeal. Bodiless. Fish come and go. Turtles breeze by. Clouds make a tapestry through which your body arcs like a whipped cream diver. You surface with a lily pad on your head.

A man said the other day, "Aren't you scared of gators?"

"No," I answered.

"Why not?"

I said, "One time I was on the Loop Road in the Everglades and there was a Miccosukee family, a mom and dad, and they were bathing their baby, and there were two alligators cruising right around them. Never bothered them."

"Well, I think you should be afraid of alligators," the man said, and left it at that. He wanted me to be afraid, had a vested interest in it.

To myself, I said, "Cloud swimmers don't die from gator bites. They just melt away at a good old age."

At least, I hope so.

I have been in New Mexico for the past ten days. My wife Lorry is from there, my brother Sid and cousin Peter live there and I was a New Mexico boy for twenty-some years. Going back is coming home. And waking to coyotes in the early morning, hearing them spill their sad, mad delirious song into the fading stars, and then to be fully awake and to smell the juniper and the pinon in the cool high desert air of Tesuque where we once built an adobe house and raised two children, all this is more than coming home -- it's being born again in heaven.

And it gets even better because here we are, all these years later, with grandchildren running around the chamisa bushes and looking for horned toads. They don't find any. Instead, walking in the dark, we run into a bear who starts coughing. Bears cough, the Navajos say, because, well, it's a bear's nature to cough. They brought coughs into the world, the storytellers tell us. Nuthatch, sweet little ash-winged bird, brought gray hair -- another Navajo belief.

Well, Nuthatch must've been working overtime on me because when I lived in New Mexico my hair was brown and now it's nuthatch gray for sure. You learn so many things in New Mexico. Doesn't matter how seldom, or how often, you visit the place either. You learn. I always thought ponderosa pines smelled piney but my relative and life-long friend Alice said, "Smell the bark, it smells like vanilla." Then someone else chimed in, "Ponderosa smells like rootbeer." I sniffed the bark of one towering tree and it actually smelled like a rootbeer float with vanilla ice cream. "What if rootbeer bears were looking for vanilla shakes, would they scratch their backs on this bark?" I asked my seven-year-old grandson Taj. His eyes darted around trying to think of an answer and then he saw my cousin Peter wearing a pair of shorts. Peter rarely wears shorts because he says his legs are too pale. Taj studied Peter's legs for a full minute. Finally, he asked, "How come you're having half-white legs?"

We all laughed at that one.

Later Taj said to me, "Rootbears drink rootbeers?"

We took the family to the Santa Fe Plaza to visit our dear friend, Ross LewAllen. Around the corner from LewAllen & LewAllen Gallery there is a shady spot where children and adults are invited to sit at an easel and draw pictures with felt-tipped pens. Taj sat right down and drew a great blue mammoth with a comet crashing through the sky above him and an armadillo digging a hole below him. He signed the picture and just then Ross LewAllen, storyteller in silver and one of the best watercolorists in the world saw Taj's work of art and began to praise it. Ross' daughter Laura, the other LewAllen of LewAllen & LewAllen and a great jeweler in her own right, was there and she also praised Taj's work.

Soon Ross and Taj were making a deal, a trade of sorts. Ross disappeared in his upstairs studio and came back with a red mastadon painting he'd done and he traded it with Taj for the blue mammoth, and both of them smiled. I could see, however, that Taj's sister Anais was a little jealous. Ross was going to hang Taj's artwork in his upstairs studio and post it on his website and Anais, who is Taj's twin was left out of all this magnificence. We went upstairs with Ross, Taj, Mariah (our eldest daughter and twins mom), and Shai, Mariah's eldest daughter. Lorry and I followed.

And now we witnessed another of those little miracles that sweeten life and it was all in the nature of good fun and friends and relations and, best of all, love. Ross is a very generous man, a spiritual being. He gave Taj a rust-colored mastadon bone, a piece of tusk and a fang that looked like it was busted off a T-Rex but was probably taken from a javelina or wild pig. Taj smiled like an allosaurus. But Anais's face got longer and longer and sadder and sadder until Ross said, "Here, Anais, this is for you -- a shell phone!"

What it was -- a conch shell to which Ross had attached a cell phone antenna. Anais grabbed it like a purse snatcher and latched it to her ear and started babbling like crazy. I leaned near so I could hear what she said and it went like this --"Hello? Yes. Good. Yes, good. Okay, I gotta go now. Yes, good to hear from you." Anais, shell phone cupped to her ear, listened. Then she said in a loud voice, "Stop talking to me, Ocean, I gotta go."

And so we did, off into the bright New Mexican sun and the desert land that was once, yes, Ocean.

"Silence slithered back and forth between the line" is from Trent Zelazny's soon-to-be published novel Unknown Destination. He's a terrific writer, like his father but different. I couldn't get his book, or his slithery line out of my mind last night because we were having another one of those storms that makes living in Bokeelia interesting. The slithering started at midday.

I saw a black racer weaving its way between the palm trunks, picked it up and let it slide through my fingers. In the olden days here on the Gulf when farmers wanted rain, they killed a snake and hung it in a tree. We are still in a drought, the weather experts say. I let the shiny black racer slither back and forth between my fingers for a moment or two and then released it. Walking into the house, I looked to my left -- another black racer! The second snake was lying straight as a black marking pen on a palmetto trunk. I could've sworn it was smiling at me. But snakes do that anyway -- smile, I mean. Cats do too. Both permanent smilers. I smiled back at the racer.

What did the serpent smile mean?

Heavens, it meant rain. And it wasn't long before the scowling skies dropped some heavy leaden drops. All through the night our Great Dane Zora, a Katrina survivor, moaned and trembled over the lightning which lit up the entire night white as a Russian steppe. I trembled too -- once -- as a thunderblast rattled every door and window in the house. I swear, hurricanes are not as bad as these great Midgard thunderstorms that sit over your house for hours on end spitting lightning through forked tongues. Midgard, remember, is the Norse deity that encircles the earth and is, well, you guessed it, a big snake. Big snake indeed.

Zora starts knocking books off shelves when it thunders. She tries to crawl into the two foot space between the fridge and the kitchen counter. This is not an impossible task for a Great Dane because they are double-jointed. One of our large Great Danes, Zeb (we like Z words) squeezed, or rather, slithered (thanks, Trent) through a cracked truck window once, without breaking it and with no injury to himself. I am talking about maybe a foot-and-a-half space.

Zora is happiest during a storm when Lorry and I are sitting on the couch in front of the TV. She noses the set until we turn on the Sirius music station and find some contrapuntal music by Bach. If Bach's not available, she'll listen to Scarlatti. While the harpsichord is running up and down invisible stairs, Zora backs up and parks her huge butt on my lap. Then you're supposed to do the "Tellington T Touch." That's Linda Tellington Jones's almost-sleep-inducing, hypnotic style of doggy backrub, or horsy, or froggy -- hey, it works on anything that's alive. Look her up, Linda's an amazing lady, a whisperer. Met her once in New Mexico and she showed me the T Touch and I've been doing it ever since. It works on Zora.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Lorry gave Zora six Stress Tabs, too. All natural ingredients like carrot powder, ascorbic acid, beef liver, citrus bioflavanoid complex, heperidin, ginseng and vitamin P. (What's vitamin P?) Mystic stuff that works, that calms this doggy down.

In a few minutes, Zora, the trembler, stopped trembling. My left foot fell asleep. As well as my left thigh. Have you ever had a 150 pound Great Dane put all of her weight on your foot and thigh?

I limped back to bed at 3 AM. Zora was already on our bed, head on pillow, asleep.

And that's the last time I smile at a snake on a cloudy day.