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 

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                 

Göran Rosenberg tells the truth about memory

It is still a time, although perhaps less so than it was 10 years ago, when new or young authors choose to write memoirs instead of novels based on their early lives. It has always struck me as a purely commercial decision, and probably a correct one, in this time of "reality" shows and embarrassment celebrity. These memoirs, sometimes by people too young to have done anything, or who the only thing they've done is get addicted to heroin or alcohol or sex, are right smack in that category of the scripted reality of humiliation and embarrassment. 

And because memory is unreliable, and perhaps also because they were drunk or high or fucking so much, they get things wrong and sometimes this gets them in trouble. Whereas if they had changed a few names and worked their imaginations a bit, there might have been come grumbling from the real-life models for their characters, but there'd be nothing much anyone could do about their dissatisfaction.

Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg has written a memoir of his father in which early on he explores the truth about memory. Through a series of coincidences, evil and otherwise, and questionable decisions by others overwhelmed with horrific responsibilities in the ghetto of Lodz, Rosenberg's father survived Auschwitz, was re-united with the woman he loved, who also survived the camp, and then re-located to a relatively welcoming Sweden. You might think he was lucky, but the heavy burden of what he lost, his history, culture and people, in the end proves too much for him.

It is a beautiful and painful book which I read while traveling in Turkey this spring. To me, it is restrained in the telling and the writing, as any book about the Holocaust, especially by one who did not experience it first hand, perhaps ought to be. The facts themselves can provide whatever emotion and drama you need.

All this is just an excuse for me to post a great passage from early in the book, about memory. A Brief Stop is beautiful, occasionally poetic, occasionally it reads like the script from an early experimental film, like that one with all the ants and the hand:

Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I'm not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I've put them together correctly. I'm not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven't yet named and therefore don't yet have a word for?

Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.

Other words may come later. Words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feat, the lethal cold burning against their skin.

Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with shattered fragments of language.
                                                    -  Göran Rosenberg
                                                        From A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

The saddest poem I have ever read at 4 in the morning

Trees & ghost trees on the cover of the Russian anthology

Couldn't sleep last night. I did drift off once, but came back wide awake, so got up and went to the next room. Earlier I had been reading a biography of Chagall. It was 1920 and he'd been driven from Vitebsk by the machinations of his enemies in the art world there. The Civil War was raging. There was little food in Moscow. People were starving. The daughter of the great poet Marina Tsvetayeva starved to death. I fell asleep, woke up, grabbed an anthology of Russian poetry at 4 in the morning, I had to be up for good at 7. I found the section on Tsvetayeva and around 4:15 a.m. read the saddest poem I have ever read. I have no idea if it is about her lost daughter. But I imagine it is.

To Kiss a Forehead is to Erase Worry -- 
To kiss a forehead is to erase worry --
I kiss your forehead.
To kiss closed eyes is to bring sleep -- 
I kiss your eyes.
To kiss lips is to give water -- 
I kiss your lips.
To kiss a forehead is to erase memory -- 
I kiss your forehead.
                         - M. Tsvetayeva
                           Translated by John Glad

Bereft of purpose, void of use

Depressive poet James Thomson

Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can life still live on?..
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.

           From "The City of Dreadful Night"
                      Section II
                      1874

I wouldn't say this passage from Thomson's (perhaps better known as "B.V.") long poem "The City of Dreadful Night" describes the effects of depression as universally as Antonio's speech in The Merchant of Venice (See: Such a want-wit sadness makes of me); but...sometimes...  Born in Scotland, he was for a time a schoolmaster in England, where he did most of his writing. He suffered from what in those days was called "constitutional melancholia." He was addicted to opium. But he was an interesting poet, sometimes called a British Poe. He wrote a book about Walt Whitman. He may have influenced Melville. He died homeless, two years after "City of Dreadful Night" was published. (See also: Line from poet James Thomson, aka B.V.)                                                                              

Two spring poems by Jeffers

Last week, after spending an entire morning, a weekday morning, creating the preceding post, the one about Joan of Arc, so that 12 people would read it, I felt a potent combination of guilt and futility. It really is not something I should be doing, except maybe late at night instead of watching stupid TV before bedtime. ("Promising myself before bedtime to contend more urgently with the problem. From nothing, nothing comes..." - opening lines of a poem by R.S. Thomas.) 

An iris in my garden this morning

I think about that futility this morning as I type up these two poems by Jeffers and this little intro. I was going to post "Gale in April" because today it is still rather newly April and we have had a little storm or two, though nothing you would call a "gale." But the truth is, I have always liked "The Maid's Thought" because of its unexpected description of mating deer and for, of course, "it is time for us now/Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies..." Certainly it is a spring poem, full of calm and color and desirous life. I will put "Gale in April" below it. It might not look great on your phone because of those very long Jeffersian lines.

My creased Tamar, plain-looking but important

"The Maid's Thought" and "Gale in April" are from Jeffers' breakthrough collection from 1924, Tamar & other poems, his first collection in which he had found his voice, and the one a few critics discovered and soon he was famous for awhile. Jeffers paid for the publication of the book himself. There were 500 copies. Most of them ended up in storage at his home, called Tor House, in Carmel. Mine has a crease in the cover that makes me think it was at the top of a bundle of others and tied up with string, and so is one of those that sat in Tor House for a long time. I like to think that anyway.








The Maid's Thought

Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliffs, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
The pencilled ones on the hill;
This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips
Blow out their silky bubbles,
But in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does
Scalded by some hot longing
Can hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect
Love but they crush a flower;
Shells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.
O it is time for us now
Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies
To make that burning flower.
                                            -Robinson Jeffers
                                             Tamar & other poems
                                             1924

Gale in April
Intense and terrible beauty, how has our race with the frail naked nerves,
So little a craft swum down from its far launching?
Why now, only because the northwest blows and the headed grass billows,
Great seas jagging the west on the granite
Blanching, the vessel is brimmed, this dancing play of the world is too much passion.
A gale in April so overfilling the spirit,
Though his ribs were thick as the earth's, arches of mountain, how shall one dare to live,
Though his blood were like the earth's rivers and his flesh iron,
How shall one dare to live? One is born strong, how do the weak endure it?
The strong lean upon death as on a rock,
After eighty years there is shelter and the naked nerves shall be covered with deep quietness,
O beauty of things go on, go on, O torture
Of intense joy I have lasted out my time, I have thanked God and finished,
Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness,
Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed
From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor.

                                                    -Robinson Jeffers
                                                     from Tamar & other poems
                                                     1924

Joan's leap at Beaurevoir

Contemporary woodcut of Joan being led to prison

Back in the strange days of the poetry and the second sight, I'd hoped I might write a poem about this. But the muse absconded before I could do that. (Please come back, I need you, I love you.)

I still think about it, though, about Joan's leap at Beaurevoir, about the one time she went against her voices, as I continue to consider the great saint often. I re-read the trial transcript, always anticipating the questions about Joan's escape attempt from the tower, when contrary to the apparent urgings of Saint Catherine, she exited the window, perhaps 60 feet up, possibly using a homemade rope, which broke. Joan was knocked unconscious, and her leg was damaged in the fall. She was recaptured quickly. (She'd tried to escape before. In her cell at Beaulieu she'd pulled up loose boards, let herself down to the ground floor, where she found herself just outside the door to her guards' room, and the keys by the door. She was caught just as she was about to lock them in. But she was irrepressible.)

Despite the great pain of knowing its outcome for Joan, the trial transcript is inspiring reading. As W.S. Scott says, "Her patience, her good humor, her religious faith, and her common sense -- a quality which so strongly marked everything she did and said -- never failed."

All of that is here in this very brief excerpt regarding her escape attempt at Beaurevoir:

Concerning the tower of Beaurevoir:

She answered: I did not do it out of despair, but in the hope of saving my life and of going to help a number of good people who were in need. And after leaping she made a confession and asked pardon of Our Lord. And she believes that she did wrong in making the leap.

She said also that she knew by revelation from Saint Catherine that she had received forgiveness after she had confessed. And it was by Saint Catherine's advice that she had confessed it.

Asked if she had been given a heavy penance, she said that she herself bore a large part of it in the hurt she received in falling.

The transcript

Such a want-wit sadness makes of me

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself...  

                     The Merchant of Venice  
                     Act 1, Scene 1 

Shakespeare knew.

These are the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, in which that very merchant, Antonio, describes his condition to his friend, Salerio. It is a perceptive description of a certain kind of depression, with which you feel a thing like sadness but which isn't actual sadness - you have nothing in particular to be sad about. (Although this condition often causes you to mine thoughts and memories that increase your sadness, it tempts you to inflate things or deflate things as necessary, to see the bad as worse and the worst in everything.) As Antonio says, the feeling wearies you; you are sure it wears on your friends and family, your co-workers and your neighbors. Certainly it wears you down physically and emotionally, but you cannot trace its origins in any very satisfactory way. Whatever it is and wherever it came from, it clogs and slows your mind, robs you of whatever spirit and wit you might formerly have possessed, and just makes you feel generally dumber than you used to feel. 

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, surely he was capable of describing this condition perfectly without ever having experienced it. However, it's what ensues that makes me think the author may well have suffered himself from depression. As the scene progresses, Antonio's friends try to cheer him up, despite his suggestions to them that it's futile, that "I hold the world...a stage, where every man must play a part,/ and mine a sad one." Still, they keep trying. "Let me play the fool," says Gratanio, "with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come." 

Again, Shakespeare might have understood or imagined, accurately, that this is what happened with certain sad people who cannot be roused from their condition. But it has for me the feeling of lived experience. Because it is what happens. Loved ones and other kind people see you in what looks like sadness and try to help you. They want you to feel better and so they do for you the things that for them would lift them out of a bad mood or a melancholy day. But it doesn't work the way they had hoped it would.

Antonio's friends try to show understanding, try to help him make sense of what he is feeling. They suggest to the importing-exporting merchant from Venice that he is worried about his ships at sea, laden with his goods. But he tells them he is not worried. Only Salerio, inadvertently, says something that rings true. "Your mind," he tells Antonio, "is tossing on the ocean." Salerio means that Antonio is imagining his ships in peril. He's wrong, but as a description of Antonio's state of mind, probably he is not far off the mark. One way or another, Shakespeare knew.

Pregenital impluses in need of negation

I've found myself reading old anthropology texts, nearly 100 years old, as a friend pointed out, ones which I'm told marked the beginning of a change in the attitudes of anthropologists who studied contemporary African and other native tribes. Previously, these academics had seen the communities and nations they studied as inferior, primitive, superstitious and irrational in their beliefs about life and the natural world. But beginning in the early 20th Century, in part with the book I'm reading now, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, that began to change. The author, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an Oxford-trained anthropologist, lived for almost 2 years, in the late 1920s, with the Azande, of what is today the new and troubled country of South Sudan. Back then it was part of the Republic of Sudan, under the colonial rule of the British, in cooperation with their protectorate, Egypt.

In writing about the integral role witchcraft played in the lives of the Zande people, Evans-Pritchard made no judgements. He described, explained, worked to give context and perspective. His answer to those in the West who might think it was absurd for the Zande to believe that every death was the result, not only of a natural cause, but always, in addition to that, witchcraft, was to quote a Zande friend: "Perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are."

Anyway, all this is to introduce a passage I ran across, not from E.E. Evans-Pritchard, but from Norman Brown's Life Against Death, that, though written later, echoes those earlier, condescending attitudes of anthropologists and that, full of dated jargon as it is, amazes me in its opacity, although I admit that I have not come to terms (by negation) with my own pregenital impulses. But I am trying.

Archaic man is preoccupied with the castration complex, the incest taboo and the desexualisation of the penis, that is, the transference of the genital impulses into that aim-inhibited libido which sustains the kinship systems in which archaic life is embedded. The low degree of sublimation, corresponding to the low level of technology, means by our previous definitions, a weaker ego, an ego which has not yet come to terms (by negation) with its own pregenital impulses. The result is that all the fantastic wishes of infantile narcissism express themselves in unsublimated form so that archaic man retains the magic body of infancy.

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