Everybody thinks dying people have the answers,” Ric Masten told me less than a month before he left. “I don’t.”

It would be hard to blame people for thinking this particular dying person had the answers, because Masten has spun them simply and insightfully for decades, despite the depth and severity of the questions he confronted.

The old poet was merely trying to decipher the world: “I don’t write about things I understand,” he said, “I write to better understand things.”

In the face of war he wrote, “I ain’t afraid to step in your bitter streets/ And walk away from war/ I ain’t afraid though the boulevard’s full of heat/ And hate – an open sore…But when I see all the hate in me – I’m afraid.”

In the face of cancer, he gave us defiance and candor: his self-researched medicine transformed a four-month allowance to live into nine years he called the best of his life – “I’m blessed with a constant reminder to never let another unexplored moment slip by” – and told an online audience of each milligram of medicine and each fierce bit of coping with chemo (“soreness in my pubis has almost disappeared. The electric shooting sciatic pain in my right thigh and knee is quite another story. I’m now walking with a cane, bent over and looking like a tall troll.”)

And in the face of imminent death, he gave us honesty. He wrote about suicidal thoughts and fears for his wife’s care and dying friends. And he kept shooting us straight: “Toko writes, ‘Death poems are an illusion – death is death.’/ so try as I might my attempts/ all turn out to be about life.”

They called him a humorist and a philosopher and a free spirit. They called him a songwriter, they called him the soul of Big Sur, and they called him a survivor.

But Ric Masten knew what he really wanted people to call him. “I’m an ordained troubadour minister in the Unitarian church, and I’ve got an honorary doctorate from CSUMB,” he told me while standing atop a piney Big Sur ridge near the land where he built his family’s home. A giggle glowed in his eyes, as it often did. “I want people to call me ‘reverend doctor.’ Then I’ll get business cards that say, ‘Rev. Dr. Ah Soh.’ ”

Jerri Masten called him Dad.

She was there with all but two of his survivors (his wife Billie Barbara, his other children April, Ellen and Stuart, and five grandchildren) – when her father’s chest went still 10 minutes short of midnight Friday, May 9. The family gathered in the candlelight around him and sang the piece with which he often concluded each poetry reading, the poem whose title he had tattooed upon his shoulder on a relatively recent skin-ink session with his grandson, the verses that doubled as his life mantra until the end: “Let It Be a Dance.” (To read this poem and other selected poems, see montereycountyweekly.com/831.)

“I know it sounds a little corny, with the family all around singing,” Jerri says, “but Dad was a little bit corny – and a little bit rock and roll. It was a great ending.

“When he died, I kissed his face, and walked out of room, joy in my heart, and yelled, ‘Yee haw, he did it’ – he lived in a good way and died in a good way.”

Ric Masten lived in a good way – and, just as importantly, he lived his way.

In what he called one of his proudest moments, the five-time college dropout received a distinguished fellow of the arts nod from CSUMB. “Rather than be stuck with me, a poet, for the next 50 minutes,” he told the students, “go in your mind to that activity and place where you would rather be now and ask yourself if you could earn a living doing that – there.”

He lived his dreams, which knew several iterations early – after growing up in Carmel the son of a journalist and a domineering mother (then a step-dad optometrist), he flunked hard in college, then studied art in Paris and was (briefly) a prolific painter, then jumped to theater, then moved into songwriting in Hollywood, ultimately penning close to 100 songs that included several hits. He soon shifted his focus to a more-selfless form of music – folk – which along with a spiritual yearning, led him to travel from coast to coast reciting meaningful and magnetic prose and poems that brought people to a questioning church (“They called me a troubadour minister,” he says. “And the first guy to sing his way into the ministry.”)

Ultimately he became a poet because, according to him, he couldn’t remember the words to his songs. As a poet, he said, he wouldn’t feel bad lugging his binders on stage.

Locally his First Night Monterey appearances were frequently the most popular components of the many-layered events. He published 23 books, right up until his death. The latest of his franchise of drawings and paired poetry, Ric Masten: Words and One-Liners, came out this month; Going Out Dancing: Poems will appear June 6. His art reiterates the revealing eye that appears in his poetry. Meanwhile, he continued to spurn fancy wordplay by necessity, and for potency. “I’m not trying to impress you with the ways I push words around,” he says. “I’m trying to reach you with the experiences that have marked me…we aren’t that much different.”

Masten wasn’t much different less than three weeks before he would leave his body like he was on another cross-country tour (“I’d have a hard time leaving here to go on tour,” he said, “but when I hit the corner of Palo Colorado and Highway 1, I was gone”). He lay in his bed on a Saturday afternoon, with a dream catcher woven through a turtle shell above him, a lifetime of portraits looking on, and the scent of wild Palo Colorado herbs in the air.

The conversation swung from art (“All you have to do is experience something and it’s ‘art’ ”) to religion (“It’s easier to kill than convert,”) and settled on dying: “I was born during the Great Depression. Wouldn’t it be great to make it to my birthday [June 20] and die during the second great depression?!”

The candor was there, too, as always. “Morphine is great – I have no pain, but a dead face which I don’t like – it’s hard to eat, I don’t know where my mouth is.”

His eyes still leapt; his hands still swooped and his laugh still danced.

“I now understand what my doctor meant in that first meeting [after he was diagnosed with cancer], ‘I promise you a graceful end.’ That sort of moved me down the road a little, put me back in the human race, where I’m better off.”

Then conversation came back to him and his audience. He paused, smiled, and then fixed his lively eyes upon his audience again.

“You have a heart I’d be happy to be carried around in.”

The Masten family plans a public memorial on Ric’s birthday, June 20. Details will be available at www.ric-masten.net

LONELINESS © Ric Masten

standing by a highway

waiting for a ride

a bitter wind is blowing

keeps you cold inside

a line of cars is passing

no one seems to care

you look down at your body

to be sure you are there

sitting in a hotel

staring at the wall

with cracks across the ceiling

and silence in the halls

you open up the window

and turn the TV on

then you go down to the lobby

but everybody’s gone

and this is loneliness

the kind that I have known

if you’ve had times like these

my friend

you’re not alone

so you leave the empty city

and go down to the shore

you’re aching to discover

what you’re looking for

the beaches are deserted

in the morning time

a solitary figure you walk

the water line

come upon a tide-pool

and stand there peering in

and when you touch the water

the circles do begin

they lead to where a seabird

lies crumpled on the sand

so you take a single pebble

and hold it in your hand

and this is loneliness

another kind I’ve known

if you’ve had times like these

my friend...

you’re not alone

you come back up the beaches

at the end of day

and see how all

your footprints

have been washed away

no... nothing is forever

we are born to die

so may I say I love you

before I say good-bye

I must say I love you

before I say good-bye

LET IT BE A DANCE © Ric Masten

Let it be a dance we do

May I have this dance with you

Through the good times

And the bad times too

Let it be a dance

Let a dancing song be heard

Play the music, say the words

And fill the sky with sailing birds

And let it be a dance

Learn to follow learn to lead

Feel the rhythm, fill the need

To reap the harvest plant the seed

And let it be a dance…

Everybody turn and spin

Let your body learn to bend

And like a willow with the wind

Let it be a dance

A child is born the old must die

A time for joy a time to cry

So take it as it passes by

And let it be a dance…

The morning star comes out at night

Without the dark there is no light

And if nothing’s wrong then nothing’s right

So let it be a dance

Let the sun shine, let it rain.

Share the laughter, bare the pain

And round and round we go again

So let it be a dance…

THE DIRTY WORD SONG

It’s only fair to warn you

‘Bout the next song you hear.

It gets a little nasty and could offend your ear.

You’re gonna find the language a trifle strong

‘Cause I’m about to sing you my dirty word song.

Dirty words, dirty words, I’m gonna say a few

Real dirty words like…..doggy poo!

You give a boy a pencil and put him in the hall,

Turn your back on dirty words

Appear on every wall.

But force him to talk naughty for an hour each day

And you’ll take all the fun of dirty words away.

Dirty words, dirty words, boys talk naughty

They say dirty words like……potty!

When your second grader starts saying dirty stuff,

Swearing like a trooper,

Well it’s time to call her bluff.

She likes to think she’s being obscene

And she doesn’t even know what the dirty words mean.

Dirty words, dirty words, she swears like a trooper

Saying real dirty words like……pooper!

Wouldn’t it be awful if people didn’t swear,

And when you banged your finger

You’d just give a silent prayer?

If suddenly the dirty words all were clean

Would the poetry improve in the men’s latrine?

Dirty words, dirty words, be glad we got ‘em

Real dirty words like……bottom!

I wonder what would happen

If no one were profane,

If no one could remember a single dirty name.

I wonder if they’d scribble on the bathroom door

Filthy dirty things like hate and war.

Dirty words, dirty words, there’s no excuse for

Filthy dirty things like hate and war.

WHAT AM I DOING HERE? (folk song lyric)

When you’re taking that vacation

Out in the countryside,

Don’t stay too long there in the wilderness,

‘Cause a man seems kind of small

And a mountain awful tall

It could make you look inside yourself and ask…

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

And what am I doing here?

When you’re driving in the country

Keep a-stepping on the gas.

Hurry, hurry, hurry on your way.

If you slow down to a walk

You might hear the country talk

You might hear the country laugh at you and say…

Where did you come from?

Where are you going?

And what are you doing here?

Keep the radio playing

And turn the volume up.

Keep your transistor plugged into your ear.

If you listen and you’re still

In the silence of the hills

You might hear things you wouldn’t want to hear…

Like: Where did you come from?

Where are you going?

And what are you doing here?

Leave your litter in the forest

And scattered by the road

So we can feel a little more at home.

The telltale signs of man

His papers and his cans

We see them and we think we’re not alone…

But where did we come from?

Where are we going?

And what are we doing here?

Are we going to keep a-running

From the questions that we fear

Until we bring the whole thing crashing down?

And on the day we disappear

There’ll be nothing left to hear

The burning sky ask the barren ground…

Where did they come from?

Where were they going?

And what…

Were they doing?

DEMIAN’S MIRROR

At a corner table, alone and afraid,

Holding a book upside down.

Like a bird come from nowhere in a dead tree,

I’m sitting there looking around.

And I spied a stranger gazing at me

Through glasses with gold at the rim.

I saw my reflection looking at me

As I sat there looking at him.

Look in the mirror, Demian’s mirror,

Come see yourself in my glass.

The face it was ageless, a boy in his teens,

And old man a hundred and three.

The face of a woman or was it a man

Whose eyes were fastened on me?

I beckoned the stranger to come over to me,

Somehow I felt we had met.

I asked: “Do I know you?” He smiled to himself,

Said: “My, how quick they forget.”

Look in the mirror, Demian’s mirror,

Consider yourself as I pass.

Look in the mirror, Demian’s mirror,

Come see yourself in my glass.

We studied each other in that dim café

And I tried to guess at his race.

“What does it matter?” he said with a shrug.

His spectacles flashed in my face.

I asked his religion. “Christian,” he said,

“But I am an atheist too.

Sometimes a Buddhist. Sometimes a Jew.

But right now I’m looking at you.”

Look in the mirror, Demian’s mirror,

Consider yourself as I pass.

Look in the mirror, Demian’s mirror,

Come see yourself in my glass.

He told me his story, talked of his life.

His words made me laugh, made me cry.

It was so funny. It was so sad.

His life was exactly like mine.

We sat there together till I fell asleep

And when I awoke he was gone.

And all of the mirrors were smiling at me,

And out in the street it was dawn.