It has no name and arrives from nowhere,
eager for new adventures: the murmur and cries
of the crowded streets of Istanbul or Rome
or Brooklyn, the blazing eyes of the last gray wolf
deep in a cave in New Mexico, the sob of the wind
between the disks of an abandoned tractor
on the high plains, the homeless man chasing
his runaway grocery cart down Sunset Boulevard,
a young woman looking out from the front porch
of a duplex in Enid, Oklahoma, waiting for the mail.
It has, as they say, a mind of its own, bearing
secret knowledge, truths from another world,
transparent and untranslatable, luminous
and cryptic. It arrives almost silently, only
the slight crush of lawn grass beneath its sandals,
a surprise even though you have somehow
expected it. Your hands, rough and calloused
from the toils of the imagination, reach out
to gently shake its narrow shoulders, to tousle
its well-combed hair silvered by moonlight.
Where have you been? It says nothing, of course,
walks to the far corner of the room, and begins
to pray. After waiting for hours, you offer it
coffee and a slice of pecan pie, then more coffee.
When it leaves, you follow close behind in fear
and a traveler’s anxiety. Where can a story end?
If it arrives from nowhere, where can it end?
But then, as you pass through familiar streets,
past the clapboard houses, the pomegranate tree
just coming into bloom, the blue Buick parked
by the curb, you understand, for there is your mother
among the bird cries of the porch swing, reading
a letter from a small island somewhere in the Pacific.
There is the front door with its torn screen,
the voices of a soap opera from the radio, the creak
and whisper of cottonwood branches overhead.
This is where the story ends. And now you know,
this is also where it begins, and you lean
into the light, put the pen to paper, and write.
A howling fluorescent dream car skids off
the highway, and I wake wracked by the fumes
of sleep’s endless traffic, stumbling into morning,
night terrors with their long nails at my back.
A fury of splayed branches overhead rakes
the dawn light and claws the windowpanes.
That crazed windshield I woke to as a boy
stares out of the wreckage, radio snarling,
horn stuck, my mother’s face veiled
in what seemed to be little glass stars or red snow.
Walking the hall. Dragging it all behind me
in the same sad robe I have worn now
nine years to breakfast. Trepidation’s rags,
grim uniform of the land of dread,
the country of forgetting. Cheerios, sliced bananas.
Bad dreams. What could be more common?
Oh, I had such a bad dream. Good morning,
I’ve just been to hell, pour me some orange juice.
One wakes to the world. Where is my mother?
Where is my father? I am not myself.
Ebbets Field, 1946
I lose it in the sun sometimes, a rain
of light, spray of shrapnel in my eyes,
flamethrowers cutting through the dark.
Then suddenly the ball finds shadows nailed
across the outfield wall glamorous with signs:
the SCHAEFER beer and CAMELS of the lost.
Lost because they’ve never known the truly lost:
the bodies floating pink with blood and rain
as we waded in, rifles held like little signs
above our heads, the dead with nightmare eyes
burning into ours. When I dream of nailing
triples high against the wall and wake to dark
hotel rooms, I see them there, lying dark
as waves along the beach that night we lost
the whole platoon except for three of us nailed
flat beneath barbed wire and a heavy rain
of cannon fire. Smart pitchers know the eyes
will sometimes give away the batter, sure signs
of hitter’s lust, to break a slump, ignore the sign
from third, waive the bunt. An Okie kid the darkest
night on Guam told me this, death swimming in his eyes
and like me sick our best years of ball were lost
to the bloody goddamned war. That night the rain
stopped. A suicide attack, and we were almost nailed
to Hirohito’s cross. Shrapnel flew like nails,
and I collapsed, a kind of seizure, bawling, signs
the war was stuck inside my brain, the pink rain
that never stops. The dead. The endless dark.
A coma is a house of dreams. You’re lost
in it, no doors or windows, but then your eyes
one day open to the world again, the eyes
of thousands staring down, and those glass nails
of blinding sunlight as you take one deep, lost
in a kind of baseball heaven. The signs
along left field say, WELCOME HOME. The darkest
dreams begin to fade. Happiness comes down like rain.
Lightning strafes the sky. The batter eyes the sign
from first and nails his right cleat to the ground. Dark
clouds loom. We’ll lose at home. To rain. Sweet rain.
Among azaleas and drooping lilies of the Nile
fagged from August’s firestorm, Betty rakes
blown trash, groaning underneath the burdens
of a life of housework, teaching high school Latin,
and lugging one day to the next the heavy stones
of worry: blind son, vanished husband, taxes,
debt, and the Dodgers, who upset natural law
when they left Brooklyn for L.A. It’s all downhill,
she yells to me across the yard, you’re not even you,
and she quotes again the line from last night’s Nova:
Every atom in your body was once inside a star.
Rising in a patch of autumn sunlight, she scans
her property: termite-ravaged fence, roof rats
gutting rotted oranges, tree roots buckling
the driveway, dry rot in the redwood planks,
crabgrass, clogged drains, her ancient bus on blocks,
UC Berkeley and peace-sign bumper stickers
from the sixties. Sunday morning she climbs in
with coffee, scones, and Seneca, her only saint.
Takes the metro to the track and puts down
ten on Trotsky’s Dream. She likes the crowd,
hoi polloi, and those horses beautiful as gods.
Later, leaves tumble down on her diminished
form while she dozes in a plastic lawn chair
as if blind to seasons. But it’s California,
green in winter and in September Santa Anas
swooping through the valley as Betty curses
the sudden news: liver cancer, her doctor says,
a month or two at most, and within a week
she’s knocking on my door, mustard yellow,
death looming in her eyes. Tonight, 2 a.m.,
in moonlight I see someone standing in her yard:
Betty, beer in hand and staring at the stars.
Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs
of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, and then,
like a rush of cranes bruising the autumn silence,
the crowd leaping up and shouting as we stride
across that green plane bright with new lime
and dreams of high school immortality.
After the game, the old men buy us beer
and we drink it straight from pitchers held
like trophies, bronze in the neon light, foam
dribbling down our shirts. There is a sadness
in their happiness, their hands upon our backs.
We are their finest days now vanishing, or dead.
And so they buy a second round, a third,
for their brave young men. Ben White puts his fist
through drywall, and Timmy Doyle breaks
a pool cue with one hand. Undefeated,
drunk, in glory we drive home. We are heroes.
Our fathers scowl, our mothers tuck us into bed.
Across the street from Southwark Cathedral
after reaching nine centuries back to touch a wall
still standing through the London blitz where the sign
says, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. THIS WAS CONSTRUCTED
IN A.D. 1136, I walk the path a certain medical student
might have taken to Guy’s Hospital in 1812 when
he was buying cadavers from the grave digger
at four in the morning as the heavy south bank fog
settled upon the shoulders of the Thames,
and having made his purchase in the surreptitious
thick night, dragging the corpse across cobbles
the way Hamlet lugged the guts of Polonius from
sudden vengeance into the murky halls of guilt.
This student assistant, a promising young man
with a brittle future and quick wit trudging through
the dingy film of the London night also wrote poems
about melancholy and the sweet, throbbing agony
of desire and beauty, but there he trod, pulling
his burlap sack over stone and muck and stair
with Southwark looming overhead like some dark god
of history, pulling death into the purgatorial rooms,
the terrifying, lye-washed, stinking, candlelit rooms
of Guy’s Hospital. Little Keats. On his death trip.
1. Dust Storm, No Man’s Land, 1952
First, the fluttering of screeching birds,
their sudden plunge and climb through manic,
spiral flights, chickens squawking in the backyard,
and then doors slamming and the air grieved
by gusts of prairie dirt as I look back
to see the sky turn sick with darkness,
a deep brown-green bile boiling up to smear
the sun dull as rusted-out tin siding
sinking now in muck, oblivion, the little
death of nightmares. I’m blind to my own body
and the vanished sidewalk where I crawl doglike
spooked by dead birds, the shock of feathers
to the touch, and scattered branches until
lighted windows begin to cleave the dust
the way a plow turns barren ground, the sod
I’m told that should have stayed unbroken,
ancient plains of short grass that fed bison
long before the massacres began. Home again,
I wake to silence like a newly fallen snow,
and in morning light a sheen as if dawn
were a kind of foil or bronze silk coverlet
lies across the room from bed to table
where a model plane has been painted gold
with sunlit dust and the floor holds brightness
the way the land itself must have one fine day
when they climbed down from their wagons
and smiled, for the wind was clean and the sky
was clear and they had come a very long way.
2. Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011
Tonight beneath a Texas sky Lear wept
and gave his grief to a river in Fort Worth,
and an audience remembering the broken
towers of New York lay down their beers
and leaned into the dark. Shakespeare in a park
where not so long ago two thousand head
of cattle bound for slaughter grazed, stared
across America’s frontier, and heard
the same cicadas’ cry, its rise and fall.
Above Lear’s absent crown the moon had paled
to little more than real estate where men
have walked. A poplar waved the stars away.
An army of cicadas sang the old mad song.
I will not sleep tonight. My children’s children
breathe uneasily beneath the burden
of a story strange and not quite clear to them.
My wife dreams the passion of Cordelia
and the stupidity of men. Beyond
the lavish lawns and bushes of the higher
suburbs loom nightmares of a phony war.
Light will soon be moving on the plains,
and bare, forked animals will rise. As long
as the cicadas sing, I will not sleep tonight.
for the occupiers
We signed our names on their old papers. . . . We knew when they cheated us out of every single little red cent. . . . We knew that. We knew they were stealing. . . . We let them think they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit.
—WOODY GUTHRIE, HOUSE OF EARTH
The teeming street, rich with crowds and voices,
huddled masses gleaming under rain and streetlights.
The human microphone, antiphonies of call, response,
and songs like ancient hymns among stone tombs
awakening once more the nocturnal gods of Wall Street.
And the old man’s tale comes back to me outside
a long-abandoned bank in Oklahoma robbed in 1933
when locusts wedged between the sandstone bricks
throbbed their little desperation song, days on end
monotonous as rotting fence posts along dry fields,
the air a wall of dust, Black Bear Creek a bloodless scar,
and the horse people of the Otoe long since gone away.
His voice hardened into something thin and brittle
for suddenly, he said, suddenly back then, he knew,
in that flat Baptist land of bad deeds and worse money
where preachers raged against all forms of sin
except the greed of the sleeping kings of poverty,
that the scabby hand of vengeance was alive
and real and moving slowly through the fields
and burning streets of little towns like this one because
the third thief placed the barrel of his Remington
beneath the bank president’s chin and said,
This, sir, is what happens when banks are built
on the broken backs of the people, while the young man
who became the old man who told this story lay
face down on the floor clutching his foreclosure notice
and thinking, who is the thief here, who is the thief?
When, when, when is what my sister mumbles now
beneath this tin-can piped-in music and parrots
squawking in the guest lounge, but what I see
is the light glancing from our mother’s ring
as she hands the coins to the organ grinder
on the corner of Polk and Main one day in Houston,
1944, her face ruined, mascara running, the burden
heavy upon her, then later, the light crumbling
through the feverish leaves of cottonwoods
in the sideyard and still the sobbing, hands flailing,
that wobbly keening of the organ in my head,
those rickety tones floating up as if from an island
in the Pacific and next morning the coffee’s perk
and bubble cluttering the air, the bacon’s sputter,
a kind of chirping, I thought, of birds, Pacific ones,
and my father surely heard them since he was there
beneath those trees with leaves like big green hands
heaped with birds, parrots, for I had seen parrots
in a photograph from Life in all their brightness,
their grand carnival of yellow, red, and blue,
their coat-of-many-colors shapes against a beach
and the vast church choir of sky and cloud that rose
above it, and so that afternoon in Galveston
my mother looked across the waves that curl
and uncurl always, looking at the sea or toward
the far edge of the sea or beyond the sea, beyond
green islands or parrots or any of that as I showed
the photograph to my sister, saying this is where
our father is, where he’s coming from, and my mother
grabbed it, crying when, when, when, when, when.
Outside, the lawn slopes and billows under chestnut trees,
acres of pampered landscape floating in a limpid haze
that surrounds the house. Dressed in crinoline, white hose,
and flocks of ribbons, one of them tosses rings, the others
wait their turn behind the drapes of watered silk. A red ring
is thrown and misses, the yellow rims around the peg and stays.
No one keeps score. Their boredom is as natural as grass
and chestnut trees, or the dull advance of history from hill
to hill somewhere in the gray distances of Europe. A red ring,
a blue one, the arc the wrist makes in the throwing, the small feet
just so. Trenches hacked deep in the fields of another country,
holes where humans slept in mud, will green over, the broken limbs
of trees will flower, and the young girls tossing rings after Mass,
after the family meal, will turn and stroll across the wide, immaculate lawn.
for Sarah
Small-bones, buried in a shallow grave,
black eyes now closed that led you through the night,
flat, drumming feet now stilled below the staves
my children crossed for you. You gave them light
on wet, dim weekends. And sick, asleep for days,
you taught them care, then grief. They made a rite
of solemn words and gestures meant to raise
you to some paradiso, the mind’s embrace
of soft bodies, dark eyes, and unstained souls.
With this canto, mouse, adieu. Your sacrifice
was life encased in glass, or running through
their dreams pursued by fate’s grim mask, the face
they woke up from but now must wake up to.
In those last days you held my children close,
then let them make a world, a grace, for you.
Pale from the Hand of the Child That Holds It
The bronze angel yawns among the photographs:
father and mother wearing the bright garments
of memory, that upended Eden where their lives
seem glamorous and sleek as Cadillacs in V-Day
parades, he in Navy whites, she in a wide-shouldered,
Joan Crawford fantasy of yellow explosions on a
blue field. Her dress ripples slightly at the hips
where his hands come to rest, and a chorus line
of date palms bends in unison behind them.
The dawn shadows of the room lap across son
and daughter, dreamily retouched in their robed
graduation portraits while over them looms
the enlarged family snapshot from Christmas.
Hearing the shutter snap like a plastic picnic fork
in the father’s broad fist, they recalled summer
vacations laid out like cut flowers, the lake’s shattered
calm, the charred hot dogs, bleached swimming trunks,
condoms nibbling at the peeling boat dock. Stamped
with the profile of some nameless Victorian,
the heirloom lamp squats in the table’s center
as if this monument to domestic history could lift flesh
and blood from their chrome frames. And I, the son,
watch now how dust motes fall through lace curtains
like snow in one of those overturned glass balls
where a tree and house hang from a rounded meadow
above a sky pale from the hand of the child that holds it.
Three Prose Poems
from the Journals of
Roy Eldridge Garcia
One morning, only an hour after he arrived at the Bourse, M. Belperron, an agent de change, left his office, took a train to Deauville, and walked into the ocean, leaving his attaché case on the beach. The catatonic stillness of the attaché case affected everything. Was it just an object in the stream of events, soiled with the sweat of hands, wracked with an endless cycle of opening and closing, commercial documents placed inside, then removed, then reinserted? Or was it veering toward metamorphosis? These questions rolled over the beach in waves of such stunning tension that everything became fixed in its movements: the gulls fell and rose, the ocean pressed forward, then fell away, ripples of sand formed and vanished. The attaché case, too, felt itself yielding to the flow of the inevitable and began searching the horizon desperately, recalling the story M. Belperron loved to tell about Galileo inventing the telescope in order to see ships coming in before anyone else could, then quickly investing in their cargo and subsequently making a killing on the market. Soon a boat appeared, only a speck at first, but growing larger and larger. Opportunities were at hand. Someone needed to do something.
Aix-en-Provence, 1952
Raymone, Blaise, and I are in the Café de Flore arguing about Tolstoy’s essay, “What Is Art?” and Raymone, in her excellent but occasionally imperfect English, says, “In his later years Tolstoy enjoyed walking around dressed as a pheasant.” Raymone, I was wrong and you were right. There was something birdlike about him. Something feathery. Colorful. Exotic. And rather small. He hated the art of Shakespeare and Chekhov, as all pheasants do. They have these long tail feathers. Their art is in their ass, you might say. Tolstoy wanted to forget he was a count. Like Marie Antoinette at Versailles dressing up like a peasant in clothing of her own design and walking about in her little peasant village, where there were no peasants. Real cabbage and turnips and tomatoes, but no peasants. The real peasants were at the gates, starving and crying out for food, watching Marie walking around pretending to be them. She was closer to a pheasant than a peasant. Her art was in her ass, where one might also find Tolstoy’s aesthetic principles. It all makes sense now.
Paris, 1953
A language has to be found . . .
—RIMBAUD
The language of the future had invaded the desert. Its colors were magnificent: rose, indigo, emerald green, an excruciatingly pale yellow, an orange pure and bright as a bird-of-paradise, other unnameable shades and hues running together, and a black so unyielding that it threatened to engulf whatever it touched. The animals welcomed the new language, inviting it into their lairs and tunnels in the rocks. They found in it not so much a warmth as a familiarity, as of something buried and forgotten and then recovered unexpectedly. Perhaps, they thought, this is the way their gods had spoken before the great silence. But the other inhabitants of the desert had become accustomed to the silence, woke to it each morning like a second sun, and so the new language, even though keeping a polite distance from their houses, vaguely disturbed them. “It’s that purple nonsense along the edges,” offered one. “No, no, it’s the sick yellow that gets under my skin,” said another. They could not agree, but when the night embraced the language, first one shade and then another, and commenced its dark song, they knew a change was coming. Sure enough, in the deep, thickening mauve of night they rose like sleepwalkers from their beds and began the exodus, covering their ears against the chorus that swelled around them.
Liberal, Kansas, 1960
Elvin in agony: tonnage of a full body
slam, shoulder into gut, crunch of cartilage
and bone, or still black dot of a perfect
spiral thrown level in the flat, receiver
spun around, held, then ground against
the grass now turned to stone, a hip bruise
thickening from pink to burgundy, then black,
that cruel idyllic meadow ribbed with grave lime,
white arms of the goal posts cradling the sky.
But at night Elvin liked to drink, zoned into
the stereo’s blue glow among piled laundry,
bottles, books, photos of his mother looking
like Dolores del Rio as she posed on the beach
or beneath an umbrella held by a grinning,
drenched Elvin. With John Prine, mi primo, el poeta,
he sang about the hole in daddy’s arm, where
all the money goes, and we kept our distance,
knowing all he wanted was the bleak purity
of an empty, darkened room, that blue light
summoning him somewhere off the common path,
somewhere serene, undemanding, a little sad,
like the song itself, like something heard and felt
from far away, or like the celestial trance
in Isaacs’s Maria that we read in Spanish class.
He brought his mother’s language and
his father’s name from a Texas border town
and could recite, drunk or sober, and usually
drunk, that poem by Machado that begins,
Si yo fuera un poeta
galante, cantaría
a vuestros ojos un cantar tan puro
como en el mármol blanco el agua limpia,
and ends, . . . vuestros ojos tienen
la buena luz tranquila,
la buena luz del mundo en flor, que he visto
desde los brazos de mi madre un día.*
He loved the sound of it, light, then heavy,
then light, like rain, he said. Strange talk,
which we heard but did not listen to, like
the crowd’s hunger, their murmur and cry
at games, or some sort of code or riddle
spoken in a darkened corner of the bar,
a lover’s veiled, whispered confession beyond,
as they say, translation.
But then someone said,
Enough of the mother tongue, Elvin, speak it in English,
and after the ambulance left with the guy bleeding
from both ears, we just sat quietly and drank
and let the mystery roll on, pour down, like rain
pelting chickens in the backyards of south Laredo,
gutters filled with children playing in the mud.
Though small, a beast. And those few times
he sacked the quarterback, looming over him
like a god in judgment, the jubilation,
the chenga this and chenga that, was a bit, well,
excessive, a little weird, madness bubbling
into childish glee, roaring, arms waving,
and it worried even us. What the fuck is it
with Elvin? we would say in wonder, fear,
and admiration.
Me gusta? You think
I like it? I don’t like it, he once said,
shunning as always the easy comraderie
of boys at war. The last game, a loss,
was the worst: an implosion of brick and glass,
Elvin’s venganza—forehead, fists, cleats pummeling
the locker doors, slung helmet nailing
the fullback, Bitsko, just behind the ear,
this whacked-out, unholy, purple rage
goading everyone to tie their shoes, fast,
Get the hell out, now, Jesus, he’s lost it,
everyone splitting, stone silence even
from the coaches, just crazy Elvin screaming
to an abandoned locker room, cursing God
and all His saints, punching the block wall
of a world mute as concrete, and the blood trails
running to the drain were still there Monday.
Elvin in the hospital that night, singing,
luz del mundo en flor, que he visto
desde los brazos de mi madre un dia.
Adios, gringos, his words as he walked
toward the bus at season’s end. Back to
Laredo, his mom, a job at the stockyards,
and whatever storm was raging in his head.
I don’t know. You tell me. Rain, he said
* “If I were a poet / of love, I would make / a poem for your eyes as clear / as the transparent water in the marble pool. . . . Your eyes have / the calm and good light of the blossoming world, that I saw / one day from the arms of my mother.”
after a photograph by Sant Khalsa
Pausing here, the anchorites of grain:
woman, girl, a paper angel
seated on the elevator steps
where dust from a caliche road
whitens the woman’s boots. The horizon
is their god of open spaces.
The angel mouths silent hymns
to pass the time the last workers
bore upon their backs.
Mice scuttle through the tool shed.
A JOHN DEERE sign rattles on its post.
Across the field, a wind-scoured house
still hugs the ground
someone’s grandson disked
before the land was sold, before
the family moved to Kansas City.
Below the steps, farm cats doze in bunchgrass,
the angel lifts its wings,
and the girl takes up its song,
May the circle be unbroken,
by and by, Lord, . . . her voice lost
in the toiling winds that rouse
the sleeping earth,
then lay it back on the shoulders
of the highway that led them there.
The Men on Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, 1975
At 6 a.m. they gather like chattering housewives outside the Goodwill store
and wait for the latest shipment of women’s wear to arrive.
They are larger, especially their hands, and happier, too,
than you had imagined, as if clothing were luck, or the hems of dresses
they so love to touch held money or the answer to their one secret prayer.
Close up, you see the shoulders hard and broad under silk,
and the strong forearms for lifting sofas or luggage.
Their talk is quick and clever, like the banter of co-eds
waiting for dates, or excited children whose father
has been away but has suddenly returned, arms filled with gifts.
Soon the yellow truck arrives, the truck
that says GOODWILL in big red letters, and they press closer,
making those cool, sexual sounds of anticipation.
When the doors open and the chrome racks are rolled into the alley,
they do not become the wolves you might expect but rather
stand shyly by with their hands raised slightly
as if waiting for permission. The way the clothes come into their hands
is memorable, like an athletic feat, the outstretched fingers
and then the ball suddenly, delicately, there. With the whispers
and rich commerce of blouses, skirts, and lingerie
passing deftly from one large hand to another,
it occurs to you, they know each other’s sizes,
they come often, every Friday morning before the traffic and tourists,
before the homeless across the street have thrown off their newspapers
and risen to the tasks of the new day on Figueroa Street.
You leave then, and later, strolling back to your hotel,
you see them lounging in pools of blue neon,
laughing and singing bits of popular song while seated languidly
along the curb in feather boas and satin jackets with padded shoulders.
And as they look up with the bright eyes of the outcast, fear
strokes the back of your neck, for you are the outcast now,
remembering the strangeness of stadium lights burning the sky,
the rattle of shoulder pads, the drumroll of cleats on pavement,
and the crowd rising and crying out in its great hunger
as you step onto that field of agony and endless promise.
for Patti
Drunk now, you turn on some Billie Holiday
and dance with your wife, who is drunk, too,
because you called ahead. You say, I have written,
I have taught, among those who have not.
Ah, she says, but you did not wear a tie,
your shoes walked around unshined,
and your beard refused the loyalty oath.
Worst of all, your poems were blackballed
by the DAR. You have failed, my friend.
Your friend has her hand on the small
of your back, and you are feeling better now.
The voice of a woman who knew more pain
than any ten professors sings of love gone
wrong and the grace that follows loss.
The changes in a twelve-bar blues are open
doors to her, every chord a new way out.
On a diminished seventh love, she says, love,
and you pull the blinds, and begin to dance again.
On the Death of Small Towns: A Found Poem
from the Seymour Daily Tribune, Seymour, Indiana
Our little town grows smaller, and news from last week was spare. Here is what I have to pass on.
Mrs. Josephine Baker of Elizabethtown and Mrs. Inez Loyd of Seymour called at Winklepleck-Weesner Funeral home this past Monday to pay their respects to Kelsa Cockerham.
I telephoned my oldest daughter, Mrs. Jan Stevenson, at La Porte, Texas, last Thursday evening to wish her “Happy Birthday.”
Sorry to hear of the death of Wayne Hendershot of St. Petersburg, Fla., who passed away at Bayshore Hospital there. His grandfather, the late Eliza Hendershot, built the house that we moved here to. Wayne used to drive a huckster wagon owned by Raymond Wilson of Surprise. He drove through the community one day a week with about everything you would find in a store.
Mrs. Frances Hockstetler of Brownstown visited her daughter, Mrs. Marlin Timberlake, last Saturday to help Marlin celebrate her birthday.
Sorry to hear of the death of Riley Perrin of Lexington, Ky., who passed away at Central Baptist Hospital there Jan. 3. He was the son of the late Dan and Fannie Scott Perrin of Brownstown. Dan ran a shoe repair shop there for many years. I knew Riley when he and his wife were here with his parents for a while just before Mrs. Perrin passed away.
I received a telephone call Tuesday evening from my youngest daughter, Mrs. Michaelee Nolen, from Anderson.
I read Dorothy (Perrin) Burns, of Ft. Worth, Texas, has been in the hospital five times in the past year. She is the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Dan Perrin and a sister to Riley Perrin, who recently passed away.
I attended the funeral of Kelsa Cockerham at Brownstone First Christian Church Monday.
Heard a flock of wild geese passing overhead on its way south Jan. 21. It was dark and I couldn’t see them. I stood and listened till I couldn’t hear them anymore. They surely knew
this cold was coming.
My Chevy in gray primer, raked, coils cut,
lake pipes rumbling, and I’m gliding past
Debbie Lee’s house, then the football field,
summer bindweed snaking up through
chicken wire, yard lines blown away,
the fullback’s father who hasn’t been right
since Korea waving from his porch swing,
then 3rd Street and the tin-roofed farmhouse
like the one in Oklahoma filled with lives that
made my life: my father tall beside his Ford,
my mother shy, leaning into him, leaving,
and now it’s me, MOSELEY’S 66, JIM’S DINER,
drinking with the Imhoff twins from Hogtown
who leave next week for boot camp, and good-bye
to Main Street, the PLAZA, SHORTY’S RECREATION,
PAUL’S CAFE, where I bussed dishes and fell
in love with the waitress named LuAnn whose
light-filled hair came down one night for me,
but already I was gone, abandoning the lisp
of wheat stalks, deep fall into star-heaped
summer nights making love in the torn backseat,
quart beer bottles floating in the Cimarron,
cemetery’s circle of Civil War graves where
we smoked our first weed and sang hymns,
and the library on Kansas Ave., returning late
again The Story of Philosophy, Farewell
to Arms, Winesburg, Ohio, The Razor’s Edge,
Spinoza’s Ethics, read but hardly understood,
who am I, what is a life, what is a good life,
the old questions, words that burn like headlights
lifting fields of red maize out of darkness and
me out of darkness three days after graduation,
sobered up, friends hugged and scattered,
COTTONWOOD LOUNGE in the rearview mirror
while ahead wait Plato, Aristotle, Dante,
Shakespeare, Keats, Melville, Dostoyevsky,
Fitzgerald, the blue lawn, the green light,
and a New World called the life of the mind.
for professors Frank Nelick, Dennis Quinn and John Senior
for Elise Paschen
My sister led me by the hand
to the only movie house in Fairfax, Oklahoma,
where cottonwoods leaned over red-dirt streets
and the Osage lived in square houses.
We sat straight up in back-row seats,
our faces pale among brown skins.
We listened to strange syllables, stared
into dark eyes. We were surrounded.
The awful hush came crashing down
when an ancient phonograph
began to grind out Swan Lake.
From the wings the tallest woman in the world
stepped the way, I thought, a deer would
when it is alone. She raised her arms
and parted clouds. Her body
swept like rain across the broken stage.
A pirouette pulled the moon down low,
and when she leaped, the tide came in.
Around us rose small sighs and moans.
We watched an old woman weep
and hug her shawl. When the music stopped,
we saw a storm of people, hands held high,
and heard the sudden thunder of their cry,
TALLCHIEF TALLCHIEF TALLCHIEF,
the rumble of their feet against the floor
like a thousand buffalo beneath a darkening sky.
Obed Theodore Swearingen, 1883–1967
This is for O. T. Swearingen,
who loved bluegrass music
more than oil in the ground,
who played Moon and Forty-two
and shot rabbits farther than I could see,
whose constant friend was silence,
who was a stranger in church
and seldom spoke of God
but who one Oklahoma morning
looked down on me, hand on my shoulder,
his head crowned by the sun.
Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe
churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck,
hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boot as I gaze
from the rig’s north side upon treeless, dustbowl No Man’s Land.
The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread
a great swath of indigo along the horizon, sinking to something
like the blue-black of threaded iron curling off a machine lathe.
Below, random bits of scarlet here and there bleeding through
a silver-gray band of town lights under dust and slung like
an oil rag over gas stations, bars, a doubleheader at the ball field,
workers’ homes on the outskirts and lost farms scattered just beyond,
the house of my grandparents lifting then into memory behind
the burnished clods of plowed fields. And so five decades later deep
in the thrall of time’s continuum, here I stand among the Rothkos
in Houston, city of my birth, thinking of the lives that came before
in all their colors—bruised blue fingernails, hands and wrists
gray with grease, jeans streaked with rust-red Panhandle clay—
and the lives that followed: my children, eyes blue or hazel, that peer
now into the darkening clouds of a mind drifting toward the far
horizon of colors, one upon another—kadosh, he might have said—
what the light gives back, and finally, what it doesn’t. Kadosh.
I am thirty-two, thirty-two times have I passed before the day and hour of my death, as one passes by the door of a house that one will someday live in, without even a thought of glancing at it.
—JULIAN GREEN, DIARY, 1928–1957
It’s just a house. And standing on the sagging porch,
peering from the screen door through cramped, unlit rooms
to the sun-struck kitchen in back, I can finally make out
odd hunks of darkness drifting up—a dining table,
four chairs that weirdly look at first like monks at prayer,
flecks of some reflected distant glow or fire
scattered from a couch’s plastic cover, the white keys
of an upright piano in its thick Victorian silence.
A small house, postwar, working people surely,
their lives of work buried in the vague odor of oil and sweat
rising from the carpet, whose green swirls twist into view.
A strange light begins to fill the front room’s lace curtains,
falls like a fine dust, like mortality itself,
upon the Blue Willow dishware and the family photos
arranged around the Motorola’s wire antenna.
And now so faintly, so terribly, voices float
from the kitchen, women’s voices flute-like and sudden,
then little bursts of laughter, a flurry of whispers,
a sharp No!, and there he is, there he is, a small boy
standing in the kitchen door, surprised and smiling
the purest form of happiness, then walking quickly
toward me in his white T-shirt, jeans and blue
Brooklyn Dodgers cap, those bright hazel eyes looking up
and hands spread wide and raised against the screen
of the door, pushing, pushing hard until it opens,
its rusted spring creaking in that long cry that sounds
like a question without words, and I walk through.
Poem
(from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest)
(2003)
The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.
—FRAGMENTS
How in Heraclitus
ideas of things, quality, and event
coalesce—sun/warmth/dawn—
the perceiver/perceived, too,
not yet parsed, not yet,
and then the great Forgetting,
knower and known, love and beloved,
world and God-in-the-world.
But then it comes upon us: that brightness,
that bright tension in animals, for instance,
that focus, that compass
of the mammalian mind finding
its own true North,
saintly in its dark-eyed,
arrow-eared devotion.
A kind of calling, a via negativa,
a surrender, still and silent, to the heart’s desire.
So in the cathedral of the world
we hold communion,
the bread of language
placed delicately upon our tongues
as we breathe the bitter air,
drinking the wine of reason
while lost, still, in the mysterium of Being.