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Tammany Creek Road

11 Thursday Sep 2014

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One sorrel horse. Gelding. 

Twenty-two years old.  Grade.

Twelve hundred fifty dollars.

 

Tammany Creek Road, it winds

Through hills as soft as breasts,

Dotted with cows and calves–

Spring days, you see them born,

Dropped to the ground in glistening sacks,

Mama’s licking too calmly, you think,

As their eyes try to focus on a new world.

 

She pulled a rusty 2-horse straight load

Along the road that winds through hills

As soft as breasts, pulled onto the gravel drive,

As steady, and slow, as resolve.

 

Resolve:

I’ve never seen a woman cry so unashamed,

Over a horse, in front of strangers.

I’ve never seen a horse look so long

Up a road, for a woman to return.

 

John Steinbeck Inspired: Potato Harvest Northern Maine

04 Thursday Sep 2014

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potatobb

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

 

Assignments, Orders,
New places and bases
Every two or three years.

Our birth certificates read like travelogues:
Washington, Alaska, California, Idaho
and Maine.
We were from everywhere,
For a little while.

Place.

Loring Air Force Base.
Nineteen eighty one.
Fall Break.
Potato Harvest.
Aroostook County.

Rickety re-purposed buses
Arrive in five am fog,
Loading groggy kids in flannel shirts,
Blue jeans, stiff leather boots,
Mismatched hats and gloves,
Too large for our hands.

Tradition.

Squat farms in provincial towns:
Caribou, Limestone, New Sweden,
The landscape of Northern Maine,
Ripe with French Canadians,
Large Catholic families,
Working hard to keep their homes.

This is what I remember:
Scrambled eggs in bacon grease.

Legend:

A man
Picked over two hundred barrels,
In one day.

Wicker baskets
Placed between our legs,
We were faceless kids
Picking and tossing
Newly flushed-out spuds,
Some tight and ripe,
Others half gone with rot.

Instructions:

Dump them into barrels,
Tag them with your number,
Wait for the tractor
To plough another row.

Twelve: my number.
Thirty: the number of barrels I filled.
Fifty cents: the pay per barrel.

Legend:

A kid, a picker, fell asleep in a dirt row.
He was run over by a tractor.
He died.

Maybe that wasn’t legend.

Memory.

Without lies,
There’s no poetry.
Without lies,
There’s no hope.

River Gods

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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     I do not know much about gods;  

     but I think that the river

     Is a strong brown god –

     sullen, untamed and intractable.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

 

Nothing makes you feel more alone–

Yesterday’s twenty miles of river

Calculated today, a lifetime.

The hunting bird, you said eagle,

Then, you said Osprey,

It was an Osprey.

Great beautiful white-winged thing

Hunting the Spokane River

For the one that jumps too high,

Makes itself too known,

Dares to release itself

From the swelling under-swell.

 

Listen to T.S. Eliot read Four Quartets.

The Stricken Ones

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

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I remember what it was like
To be unstricken,
To think my life would go on,
To think I was owed a spot here,
And that spot was permanent.

Once your body lets the thing
Grow, you understand something else,
That mercy comes in miracles:

The Canada Geese overhead are miracle,
The smell of your son’s hair is miracle,
The arms of your friend wrapped ’round you,
Saying, it will be okay, is miracle.
Love is a miracle.
That we can be loved is a miracle.

I asked only that I’d see my son graduate,
And I did. That is a miracle.

I am a stricken one.
I was stricken long ago.
I’m part of the great finite,
And I’m part of the great forever,
So in need of mercy,
So thankful for miracles.

My Mother’s Breast with Cancer

25 Monday Aug 2014

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Think of yourself motherless
In this false, frail world.
This world where you don’t touch blood,
Or suffering, or death, but hope
Someone will be there to touch yours.

She pulled my hand to her bare breast,
Cupped it underneath,
Rested the heft of it,
In my palm:

Do you feel it, she asked.
I feel it, I said.

I feel it.

Dreams of Storms and Geese

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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The storm came, like so many storms,
More dark, more swift, more rain.
Before that, the first migration,
Canada Geese in mid-August clouds.
I wonder if nature follows news
Or news follows nature.
We quiver with uncertainty,
Our frail choices to live boldly.
Etta says, We get on our knees,
Pray for help, sometimes we gotta,
Just help ourselves.
But it’s hard missing,
Each one gone too early,
Disappeared into our dreams.
He’s an old man, he’s crying,
It scares me. Am I scared
Or sad, or terrified?
He’s an old man, he’s crying.
Says his brother stole his–
He says, his inheritance.
He’s an old man, for god’s sake.
Does it ever get easier?
And when did I start to envy geese?
September fifteenth, two thousand one.
When they fly by, I escape.
When they honk, I worship.
I think that’s what I wish I was–
As buoyed, as certain, as free.
This is what he said,
Before he was gone,
But only in their dreams
can men be truly free.
It was always thus
and always thus will be.
Why are we so afraid of leaving?
It’s much worse to be left.
We don’t know; we’ll never know.
The storm came, faster than we knew.
It did things, storms don’t usually do.

An Idealist Short of Ideals Turns to Weaving

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

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Weaving, the taking of all things
Gently in your hands,
Resting strands between fingers,
Feeling silk and heft,
Crossing what is,
With what comes next.

There is a rhythm to weaving,
It sounds like this. Steady.
Unhurried. Like your heart.
Hear it beat?

That is the beginning. And the end.
And all that’s in between.
It’s rest. Everything that’s beautiful,
In this world, starts there.

The Days of Chardonnay

07 Thursday Aug 2014

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The 80’s were Chardonnay
I’ll have a Chardonnay, he said,
She’ll have the same.
We served it slightly chilled
From a cruvinet, all brass
And shiney. Wearing black pants,
White shirts and ties, we poured gold,
A days wages, sometimes two,
As they’d sip at lonely tables
In dark corners. We came and went
As quietly as ghosts, taking orders,
Delivering food, changing linens
And crystal. We placed forks to the left,
Knives and spoons to the right,
Folded napkins like tents,
And at the end of the day we clocked out,
With cardboard timecards, then walked
Emptied, dark parking lots to our cars,
Under slightly chilled, star spattered skies,
Lingering nights filled with elusive dreams,
Pockets bulging with a few dirty fives
And a whole bunch of ones.

half-gone and important things

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

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half-gone.
everything seems half-gone.
he was among statues,
our gatherings,
a shadow on the road,
now he’s not.
once, I thought,
if I were to lose him,
i’d be gone.
now, i know
i’d be half-gone.

important things.

some fires burn slow,
allow you to wander in dreams,
a ghost of rooms and things;
they’re supposed to be important,
you think, but can’t remember why.

Sacred Moments

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Once, and only once,
I felt a swift beauty–
A flutter, a whisper of wing
Against my bare arm.
I sat alone, encircled
By sunshine and cigar,
The beating of wing upon skin
And the bird, no bigger
Than a honey bee, a butterfly–
A hummingbird mistaken of me,
As I of him.
He danced, suspended,
Hovered over white petunias
Like spirit, or all of spirit
I wanted to know:
No maxims, no morals,
Only something as profound
As God, as miraculous,
As if he’d spoken,
Or moved the pencil
I’d dared him to move.
I sat for a while, still,
Hoping he would come again.
He didn’t.
Because that’s life, isn’t it?
An eternal flight of song–
A brief touch of this or that thing,
Sacred moments–
Out of our control.

A World That Killed John Lennon

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

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Everyday, I try to find peace
In a world that killed Lennon;
Not only peace, but poetry.
The skies are open here, broken
Only by straggly stands of Ponderosa,
And, from my place on this earth
I can see the Red Tails hunting
Over the fields, and two crows
Gathering at the barn, for what—
To eat something that’s dead there?
Or, the thing I choose to believe,
A kindred reconnection of souls.
Today, I don’t want to know
The truth. It’s too hot.
Almost 100 degrees and much of what
Was on the verge of madness,
Has gone wholly to madness.
A husband entered a building, killed his wife.
Another man admitted doing the same
Only a short drive away.
Israel is at war, again, with Hamas,
As I sit and read The Atlantic, contemplating
The creative, communal genius of rock stars.
And, trying to find peace in a world
That shot John Lennon four times In the back.

The Mystery of Trees, Cats, Crows & Coyotes

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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When our black cat lay dead

at the foot of the crooked mailbox,

her sister circled nearby in the trees.

Three days later, she too was gone.

I thought I’d heard before,

cats will disappear

when someone dies.

Often, in trees near our house,

we see hawks, hear crows,

sometimes, they fight.

There is a madness in the trees;

it resembles our own madness.

Like the funerals of crows,

their gathering in trees,

their communal mourning,

their many scold calls.

Have you heard them?

They go on like that

over their dead.

Coyotes also gather in sound;

their howls manic and frantic,

the way we imagine demons,

if there were demons.

There is a place in the trees

where everything disappears:

cats, crows, even coyotes.

It’s a dark mystery we dream,

the sounds coming to us on wind,

through lonely skies,

and brutal, beautiful trees.

The Most Beautiful Thing: The Barn Sparrow

13 Friday Jun 2014

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There is a barn sparrow

Who continually sings

One clear note.

I hear him every day

Above all the other bird sound:

From the deck of the house,

From the garden,

From the dirt road.

And, below where he sits on the fence,

Two cats criss-cross

Back and forth, leaving the barn,

Returning to the barn,

One half-hearted jump

From the beautiful singing boy.

But that’s not the most beautiful thing,

This is: He sings to lure us away

From their nest inside,

Built into a light socket above a stall,

A nest filled with the newly hatched,

And their mama tucked with them,

Her protective wing wrapped round,

Keeping them hushed.

I wanted to tell him I knew,

That I saw him flying away from it,

Landing on one wall,

Then the next, and the next,

Singing and tempting me slowly

To the outside fence,

But when I got close enough,

He flew away,

And when I followed,

He flew even further,

Until I was so far from the barn,

I was no longer a threat.

He gave me one last look as he perched,

Tipping with the wind,

On a scraggly branch of Toadflax,

Then he flew back to his fence post,

And continued his song.

 

 

 

 

 

The Barn at Night

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Have you ever felt the quiet,

A sundown that steadies your bones?

I stood for a moment as the horses ate grain,

Big, bold geldings as gentle as whispers,

As noble as gods:

Old Red, his eyes blurred with cataracts,

My horse, the orphaned-pinto,

His breath always in my hands,

And the arthritic gray herd leader,

Now totally white with age.

Some people hope for castles,

As for heaven, I’d prefer a barn.

Chasing Birds

03 Thursday Apr 2014

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Every spring,

when the birds come back,

the cats disappear,

and I wonder if they’re dead,

or gone wild,

chasing magpies and robins

until they’re so far from home

they either don’t know,

or don’t care to return.

There are cats

who come back to me in dreams,

and I wonder if it means they’re alive.

There are theories of dreams,

that they’re infinite

pieces of our perceptions,

some hidden, some obvious,

but jumbled together as we sleep

and experience sweet things

we never thought we knew,

or horror we didn’t know

we could imagine.

Often, I wonder which is real,

if the cats in my dreams

are as much themselves

as any of us living can be,

and, if we are all,

always chasing birds, 

wandering further and further

from some home.