Unlike Etta

a short story
at Loch Raven Review

...now we are three and the older man tries to chase away my sadness cause he hates crying. Got I hates crine. C’mon, boy, it’s all right. Only it sounds like he says it’s all rot. I’m exhausted and wet and pained and I’m in and out, sometimes hardly doing my own walking but I think I know where we’re headed when we are joined by a young man who moves so fast it seems like I blink and he’s behind me and I blink and he’s at my side and I blink and he’s up on the corner under the street lamp kind of yellow now, long like the lamppost, and he makes me dizzy so I close my eyes hard, shake my head then reopen them and he’s in my face saying something strange like How you justafine or How we justafine or We justafine and you walking clean now but like a dead man later man. Way you taking him Arnie, shit, like he can’t believe it. “I’m sorry,” I mutter and close my eyes again and leave them closed, let the men carry me some, waiting to reopen, hoping he’s gone like a lemon in a slot machine, gambling and I win...Read the full story.

My Beautiful Oubliette

a new short story
at Aether Avenue Press

I find the dark imperious, tyrannical, ambiguous, infallible but capable of kindness. It has many personalities. During each of the seven days of each week I can see light breach the seams and cracks above and I know how the days pass and the week. I sleep and wake and live in the breach. In it I can judge the quality of the days: bright day, gray day, dark day. All week I wait for the one hour when the latch releases and the hatch door falls open and in flows refracted sunlight like a flood of ghosts. Somewhere up there is an opening to the sky. Right there, to the infinite. For that hour, maybe less, once each week, light pours in, at an angle, through a hatch, down into the dark of my oubliette... Read the full story.

 

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Gritted bread on the Cumberland

It's been a long time since I've done this. It's not that I haven't read wonderful passages in books. It's just that things have changed and my time has changed and I have changed on the inside, for the worse. Not even sure why it is happening now but this vignette from Seedtime on the Cumberland struck me as so nicely written and I wanted to share it. I love this book and this writer, Harriette Simpson Arnow, whose most famous book I guess is her 1954 novel, The Dollmaker, which I have but haven't read yet, except the first chapter, which left me breathless. Seedtime is nonfiction, deeply researched but she also has a personal connection to its subject matter, having grown up and been a teacher on the Cumberland. It's about the first white settlers along the Cumberland River in what is now Tennessee and Kentucky, who arrived, cleared fields, built cabins and forts, killed and were killed by many Indians, between the early 1700s and the early 1800s. Arnow is factual and non-judgemental about the effects of white settlement on Indian hunting grounds. She discusses the white violation of treaties and the bloody brutality of the conflict, but never says anything against the native peoples for trying to maintain their ancient territory. Much of the information she found was in inventories of settlers killed while farming or hunting. It's amazing they kept coming. But they were unique and many famous Americans were among them or soon born of them: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, Presidents Polk and Buchanan. This passage is from near the end of the book. It's about corn, the crop that sustained everyone. When she refers to "The War" she means the Civil War:

Usually by mid-August and often earlier, the grains (of corn), though soft enough to be cut by a hard thumbnail, showed no milk. Then it was time for gritted bread, the first bread many settlers had. During my first year of teaching, this on Cave Creek of the Cumberland, my landlady one day remarked the corn was hard enough for gritting, and a body needed gritted bread. I had heard much of gritted bread, especially during The War when yearly the guerrillas stole the corn as soon as it was hard enough to grind, but I had never eaten gritted bread, and I wondered aloud how it would be.
     Next afternoon, walking home from school, the landlady's children hurried, jumping up and down with giggles of anticipation, and soon I learned Mom had a surprise for Teacher. We found it -- Mom on the back porch hard at work with corn and gritter. The gritter was much like that used during the Revolution, a heavy piece of rectangular tin punched with a fairly large nail so that small jags stuck out after the fashion of an oversize nutmeg grater...
     Like so many of those "simple" things done in the early days, it looked to be a job for a child, but when I tried it I first gritted a thumb and two knuckle joints, thus ruining a batch of meal with blood; then, fearful for my hand, I produced meal at too slow a rate until Mrs. Blankenship again took over and got enough for the supper's bread in short order. She gritted meal for me all fall, for it was good; baked  with buttermilk and eggs, it was a little like spoon bread, but not quite, nutty and sweet, though of course with no sugar, only the taste of the young corn. Poor corn growers had often in the early fall to turn to gritted bread, but others with never empty corncrips had it every fall because they liked it.
                                                         -Harriette Simpson Arnow
                                                          Seedtime on the Cumberland, 1960

To you, in a sack from Briga

Found poem:

 

To you, in a sack from Briga (likewise to myself)

                 Account of wheat 
                 measured out from that which

                 I myself have put into the barrel:

to myself for bread, 5 pecks

to Felicius Victor 
                 on the order of Spectatus, 
                 26 provided as a loan

                 to the oxherds at the wood, 
8 pecks likewise to Amabilis
at the shrine September
to Crescens on the order of Firmus, 3

likewise to father

to Lu the beneficiary, 6

to Felicius Victor for twisted loaves
to you, 15

to legionary soldiers on the order of Firmus, 11

to Candidus, to you, in a sack from Briga

to you

to Lucco, in charge of the pigs, 3

to Primus, slave of Lucius, 7

to you

to Lucco, for his own use, 9

              likewise that which I have sent

              in the century of Voturius 
to father, in charge of the oxen

              likewise within the measure

              likewise to myself, for bread

Dyspepsia's Pangs

Bottles of Hostetter's Bitters were discovered in a recent excavation on the Bowery. Apparently they tend to find lots of these bottles when excavating around the locations of 19th Century saloons. It was 47% alcohol, (94 proof) and contained coriander and anise oils, vegetable bitters and lots of sugar. Looks like the stuff was marketed for about 100 years starting in the early 1850s. Below the bottle is the brilliant and gloomy text of an old ad for it.

Hostetter's Bitters
Dyspepsia's pangs, that rack and grind
The body, and depress the mind;
Slow constitutional decay,
That brings death nearer, day by day;
Nervous prostration, mental gloom,
Agues, that, as they go and come,
Make life a constant martyrdom;
Colics and dysenteric pains,
'Neath which the strong man's vigor wanes;
Bilious complaints, -- those tedious ills,
Ne'er conquered yet by drastic pills;
Dread Diarrhea, that cannot be
Cured by destructive Mercury;
Heralds of madness or the tomb;
For these, though Mineral nostrums fail,
Means of relief at last we hail,
HOSTETTER'S BITTERS medicine sure,
Not to prevent, alone, but cure.

Poem by Osip Mandelstam

Monument to Mandelstam in Russian city where he was exiled

Seamus Heaney called the wonderful Russian poet Osip Mandelstam "the Lazarus of modern poetry." His life's heartbreaking end in a Stalinist purge is something I think about frequently. The Soviets suppressed his work after about 1928, but the burial was premature; his wife Nadezhda, who wrote the inspiring and generous memoir, Hope Against Hope, hid some of it and memorized some of it and so it survived and is now appreciated, even in Russia, as some of the greatest of the 20th Century. Much of it is very difficult, even beyond comprehension for me, without notes. Sometimes whether I can get anything out of it depends on the translation, of course. But much of it is bright and filled with meaning expressed in concrete images. (By the way, Mandelstam wrote lively prose as well.)

This title-less poem (many were given only numbers, not titles, this one was #8), translated by James Greene, is one of the bright and beautiful ones. To me, anyway. I like the idea of uniqueness unto eternity. I especially like "I am gardener, flower too..."

[8]
What shall I do with the body I've been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?

For the calm happiness of breathing, being able
To be alive, tell me where I should be grateful?

I am gardener, flower too, and un-alone
In this vast dungeon.

My breath, my glow, you can already see
On the windowpanes of eternity.

A pattern is imprinted there,
Unknown till now.

Let this muddle die down, this sediment flow out.
The lovely pattern cannot be crossed out.
                 - Osip Mandelstam, 1909

Poem by Samuel Beckett

Beckett tends to go over my tiny head housing its small brain. But this one, run across frequently in John Montague's anthology The Book of Irish Verse, brings me pleasure, especially the notion of squandering courage, even as I am still figuring it out. Let me know if you can help.

Gnome
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through the world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning
                      - Samuel Beckett

Poem by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew, British, 1869 - 1928

This one is in the vernacular so let me translate a little to get you started. The first line is saying "Some said because he wouldn't speak." The fourth line means "He must be bird-witted." In the second stanza, the fourth line means he would "sit and talk with his shadow." The sixth line means "And there ain't no memory on the place." The poem is easy to read if you go slow the first time and just go with the sound.

The poem like the poet, Mew, is beautiful (okay, maybe not physically, but give her a break, she was a great poet who killed herself by drinking Lysol) and sad. It stands out for me of course because of "the spider's lace" and the "whizzle and race of the dry, dead leaves." 

But mostly for its subject, old taciturn Dave, so obscure, an object of some scorn perhaps, who here is allowed to have been talented in his work and especially to have loved, even if the thing he loved, nature, Arracrombe Wood, wasn't inclined, or able, to love him back exactly. Maybe that was the point.

       Arracombe Wood
       Some said, because he wud'n spaik
       Any words to women but Yes and No,
Nor put out his hand for Parson to shake
       He mun be bird-witted. But I do go
       By the lie of the barley that he did sow,
And I wish no better thing than to hold a rake
      Like Dave, in his time, or to see him mow.

       Put up in a churchyard a month ago,
'A bitter old soul,' they said. but it wadn't so.
His heart were in Arracombe Wood where he'd used to go
To sit and talk wi' his shadder till sun went low,
Though what it was all about us'll never know.
       And there baint no mem'ry in the place
       Of th' old man's footmark, nor his face;
       Arracombe Wood do think more of a crow --
'Will be violets there in the Spring: in Summer time the spider's lace;
       And come the Fall, the whizzle and race
Of the dry, dead leaves when the wind gies chase;
       And on the Eve of Christmas, fallin' snow.
                                -Charlotte Mew (1921)

Mother's Day - a poem

Mother's Day

3 springs running the sisters

planted a dogwood in the yard

and 3 summers running it died barren

The 4th spring they gave her red

and white cut flowers meant to die

Today the koi have left L.A.

They are coming north in tanks

When they come they will have come to heal

her mind. 50 summers on 

the sisters truck solely in the perishable.

                                      - J. O'Brien