Unearthed

For too many years, all through the late 2000s, I was obsessed with a website and organization called EDAN, which stood for Everyone Deserves a Name. It is probably still out there but I had to stop looking at it. EDAN's site had 2 kinds of lists. One was a state-by-state list of missing persons, usually with photographs -- sometimes those awful, speculative, age-enhanced photographs -- and details of their lives, along with the "circumstances of disappearance." It was eerie, and also endlessly mysterious to me to see how many people there were who seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, suddenly, never to be seen again. If the person had been missing a long time, then in the picture they might have a period haircut or jacket or dress -- from the 60s, 70s or 80s -- and it was as if they were frozen in time.

The other list was of unidentified bodies found across the country, with the little that was known of the deceased, and how he or she was killed. Sometimes the state of the remains did not allow for much description. This list also had computer approximations of what someone might have looked like based on their skeletal remains. These reconstructions all looked alike to me, humanoid as opposed to human, and I don't see how they could have been helpful. Sometimes there was only a piece of clothing to describe. A blue fleece jacket or striped socks. Sometimes the personal descriptions were very precise because the person had just died. Often these were homeless people, or migrant workers from Central America who had been hit by cars while trying to cross a busy highway near San Diego, or who had died in the Arizona desert. Sometimes they would post a photograph of a tattoo, just a segment of an arm or leg, and I would think about the day they got that tattoo, the impetus, the design decision, what they paid, who they couldn't wait to show it to, if the killer noticed it.

"...found in a field by a farmer plowing."

I remember it seemed to me that many of the bodies had been found by plowing farmers, in late winter or very early spring. They had been unearthed, and I always thought that "unearthed" could be a word meaning, to die, to leave this world, this Earth. But sometimes I thought the living were really the ones who were unearthed, for a time, while we're alive, because we had made ourselves separate from the earth, from our origins, like we were too good for the mud and muck we came from. 

There are people who are convinced that there was a serial killer at work in Galveston, Texas, in the mid-80s. In something I read about it, a police officer said that, whoever the killer was, he was "raising one boatload of hell." I remember thinking how evocative, even precise, that phrase was. I could picture rising out of the earth, out of some dry farm field, a giant boat loaded with evil death. I remember thinking how this killer really was bringing into this world a kind of hell for his victims and their families. It seemed to me that a lot of women in that part of Texas were being found in fields by farmers and that they had come to a sad unearthing. I wrote this brief poem, which you should try to read as if I hadn't told you all this.

Unearthed

Always the unidentified remains.

What was once us

is again the alien other

whose circumstances of reappearance

are her circumstances of disappearance,

by the laws of earth and heaven 

terrestrial, mineral, like all the women

killed in Galveston Texas

in 1986

by someone raising

one boatload of hell:

found in a field by a farmer plowing.

Killing the Haybuyer, 1916 - found poem

In the early 90s I worked at a wonderful used book shop in Rochester, NY, called Small World Books. It still exists, but in a different location in Rochester, still run by the same great book man, my friend, Rocco Pellegrino. (Let Rocco give you a youtube tour.) As always at used book shops, we would find interesting things in old books and once I found a post card with a simple message from Mildred to Mabel that seemed to me somehow melancholy. Also, read a certain way, a bit sinister, although I'm sure I was making that up. Fairly sure. Probably the melancholy, too. I adapted it, for a bit of rhythm and meaning, into this old poem (Sackets Harbor, by the way, is a village in far Upstate New York, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario):

Killing the Haybuyer, 1916

Dear Mabel,

When are you coming down?

When you come will you bring your hoops?

I want to borrow them for a week.

Am going to finish that diary I started last summer.

Mother says tell you to bring down that white waistcoat

and she will put new sleeves on it.

Did you go to church yesterday?

Fr. Baldwin is here killing the beef.

Also a haybuyer.

Father went to Sackets Saturday.

Taylor’s found a ring.

Mildred

Western New York, winter, 2014.  Pic: Rocco Pellegrino

Thomson's Woodbrook and the poetry of Kavanagh

From my last trip to rural Ireland.

Many times while reading Woodbrook, David Thomson's beautiful memoir of his ten years in rural Ireland in the 1930s and 40s, I was reminded of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (see Poem by Patrick Kavanagh), which so often described the inner lives of Irish farmers. Thomson writes about how financial troubles often meant that men in rural Ireland would get married quite late in life and sometimes never. They would end up, like Macguire in Kavanagh's famous poem, "The Great Hunger," living with their mother most of their lonely lives. In a happier section, Thomson's description of the preparation, anticipation and final pleasure of a post-harvest barn dance at Woodbrook brought to mind very specifically Kavanagh's poem "Iniskeen Road: July Evening," which I will put below an excerpt from Woodbrook about the Harvest Dance.

I knew one man who walked thirty-three miles to get to it in one day and thirty-three miles home when it was over. Some came in traps or on sidecars, a few on horses or sharing a motor-car or ass-cart -- old people that is -- but mostly they were young and had bicycles. The assembly of bicycles, traps, tethered horses, jennets, asses made it seem like a fair held at night...

The weather sometimes stopped us from fixing the date ahead. We would decide in the morning to have the dance that night. Tom, who was a good accordionist and leader of the band, would then be out most of the day on his bicycle gathering the players. One of the fiddlers lived at Ballyfarnan, seven miles to the north; and the best man on the squeeze-box, the old type of melodeon, at Croghan, five miles to the south. Drums and tin whistles were nearer. We would stop the Dublin-Sligo bus which passed Woodbrook gates at about two o'clock and tell the driver to spread the word along the Sligo road. The news would pass from farm to farm at dinner time. No private invitations were needed.

                                                                                 from Woodbrook by David Thomson

Now the Kavanagh poem I was reminded of. (I have never been able to figure out what the Selkirk reference is supposed to mean exactly, like it as I do...)

Iniskeen Road: July Evening

A friend I made on an Irish walk one day.

The bicycles go by in twos and threes --
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing. 

               - Patrick Kavanagh

                 from Ploughman and Other Poems

 

David Thomson's Irish elegy - Woodbrook

Cover of my Folio Society edition of Woodbrook

I love an angry memoir as much as the next angry person, but sometimes you just want to be enveloped by love and kindness. Woodbrook came to me at a good time. Thanks, David Streitfeld, for the recommendation. An elegy to a country, a family and a girl he loved, the thing that struck me most about Woodbrook was author David Thomson's warmth and generosity, how he found the goodness and strength of each person he met in his ten years as tutor to the children of Charlie and Ivy Kirkwood, and as an extra hand around their farm and estate in County Roscommon, called Woodbrook. The book is full of great, eccentric characters, fascinating diversions into Irish history and, in passages, a kind of erotic infatuation. Whenever the object of Thomson's obsession, the Kirkwood's daughter, Phoebe, enters the picture, everything seems to stop and go dark but for a spotlight on her, her clothing, her shoulders, hair, facial expressions, scent.

In a way, this memoir represents the other side of William Trevor and John McGahern, to me the twin towers of late 20th Century Irish fiction, particularly the short story. Their stories and characters can be beautiful and full of love and lust, but there tends to be a spirit of lamentation more than elegy. Fine with me. But Thomson is different. He lacks bitterness, utterly, even about this story's sad end. (Okay, there is a certain bitterness toward England for its historic treatment of the Irish, but of course that is unavoidable.) 

(See also: Thomson's Woodbrook and the poetry of Kavanagh.)

To pick an excerpt is difficult. Should I pick one that shows Thomson's love for Phoebe? Or his admiration for her parents? Or his insight into the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the Ireland of the 1930s?

This is about Phoebe's mother, Ivy Kirkwood, and the difference between her and a family aunt who lived on the estate, but who longed for more of a social life:

Ivy liked being with other people and was full of curiosity about them and their furniture and houses; she had a distinctive kind of beauty and enough reserve to make her seem mysterious. Everyone wanted to get to know her better and her engagement book, like her card at every ball, was filled too quickly for her liking, but she was less dependent on all that than Topsy had ever been. She had had a better education, her musical talents had been fostered, she could read with enjoyment and knew how to choose books that were not boring or stupid. Her loneliness in childhood and the unhappiness that grew between her and her father had uncovered resources within her which did not need stimulations from outside. The dances, games and rushing about that Topsy always longed for were to Ivy, who had too much of them, a tempting distraction from activities she valued more.

                                                        - from Woodbrook by David Thomson

Further reading/listening:

A Raidió Teilifís Éireann documentary about Woodbrook the place

Seamus Heaney on his friend, David Thomson

Knives With No Handles

Knives With No Handles

Out of the after-quiet of harvest

the empty heavens of a taut remark,

the sure drought of a raised hand --

foggage and dust across a brown field.

Still for a blood harvest we sing --

you in your frenzies, mine this disjointed

JimO’Biad (with the dust and squandered hay,

our voices flung by wind) --

to soothe what doesn’t scan,

to make a richer field for planting,

only to return to the old domestic atmospherics,

familiar weather patterns feeding a seasonal harvest

feeding a sun-glinting scythe of hurt producing -- what?

Time to think is like time gathering knives without handles. 

                                                            -J. O'Brien

*Foggage is the dying grass left after harvest or grazing season is over.

 

Self-Criticism in February - Poem by Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers' home in Carmel, Calif.

This is a re-post based on the season. The first time I posted it, it was because a Yevtushenko poem had brought it to mind. This time it's the turning of the calendar finally from what always seems to me to be the longest month, into the month of the title. I've always loved this title. And in the poem, I like that the speaker seems to win the argument with himself. I love the accusation "It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately." The poem is from the 1930s, but surely like Jeffers' "present time," ours can seem as if it is "founded on violence" as well.

Self-Criticism in February

by Robinson Jeffers

The bay is not blue but sombre yellow

With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam heads

And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.

You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours

Would feel the equal beauty of the blue.

It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.

But the present time is not pastoral, but founded

On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not

Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.

Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,

And people like phantoms -- how often life's are --

And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction --

Alas, it is not unusual in life;

To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now

For the worst fault: you have never mistaken

Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.

Then what is most disliked in those verses

Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing

That God is love, or perhaps that social

Justice will prevail. I can tell lies in prose.