In Writing: Dale Hobson

I have long used a hand-colored detail of the so-called Flammarion engraving as a visual identifier for my website and for my nascent publishing company, Liberty Street Books. But I have never before written an ekphrastic poem using the piece. Mischief managed.

Universum

The face of the sun and the face of the moon, stars hung
like lanterns from the rafters of the night, these we know.
The homely village beside still water, the fields and hills,
everyday furnishings of everyday life, these we know.

But then, in dreams, or on our knees at the edge of who
we are, the world lets slip her veil and we are shown
wheels within wheels, the many-layered onion of chaos,
transfixed by flames and clouds and rainbows of eternity.

Who would believe it? What words contain such vastness?
Only stare agape while the vision runs until the vision fades
back into an ordinary eye, a quotidian journey, and silence.

Note: unpublished draft

I’m a little behind the season with this. I kept going back to it, revising, revising revisions, dropping stanzas, rewriting the closing more than once. Now bluets, daffodils, and hyacinths are blooming too, in the churchyard and around the village. But this is about the very first of the little resurrections.

Easter Rising

Nothing in bloom but a few snowdrops and coltsfoot:
the first along a sunny wall in the yard and the latter
on the river trail that runs from the graveyard into town.
Though neither is native to this sparse North Country
upland, it’s easy to see why settlers planted them here.

When winter drags on then slumps into mud season,
itself a pallid purgatory, who can wait for trillium,
for apple blossoms, for lilacs that still are weeks away?
In the language of flowers, the snowdrop spells hope. 
And they are said to counteract poison. Can you feel it?

Bluet, daffodil, hyacinth, iris, tulip, day lily, tiger lily.
It’s not so much their blooming as knowing that they
will bloom, each in turn — an Easter faith each spring 
renews, thawing out the stony heart of winter — saved, 
as Mary Oliver once said, “by the beauty of the world.”

Roots stir the dirt, groping down toward water, stems
break duff, groping up toward light. After the leaves, buds
that bloom, blow, and seed. What is this if not salvation?
Whether it be angel or heron so high above the foothills,
the sun, buttery as coltsfoot, has created a new morning.

Note: unpublished draft

It’s such a relief, when coming back to town after a couple days away, to find the house still atop the cellar hole, with no trees come through the roof or any evidence of fire damage, that it takes a while to notice that some miscreant drove onto the yard, flattened the mailbox, and then drove away. Who does such a thing and why, I wonder…

Dead Mailbox Daydream

First thing I noticed was tire tracks in the grass,
then the flattened and shattered mailbox, door
flopped open like the lolling tongue of roadkill.
To be clear, this object was far past its prime.
It fell apart before and was fixed up (by me)
with 100 feet of clothesline and granny knots.

Later one of our contractors, once done laughing,
put it back right with screws, nuts, and bolts.
Though its best days were long gone, nothing
excuses summary execution, going hit and run.
As I pull a hardware store replacement from
the back of my car, I picture the awful moment:

A drunk at the wheel of one of those trucks
puffed up on steroids, with thumping bass,
a pair of truck nuts a-dangle from the hitch,
a diesel with vertical stacks and extra lights.
While chair-dancing to a lame country tune,
he spills a 5-hour energy drink, swerves off-road.

Digging in the new mailbox I picture his future:
seas rise, diesel costs a $100 a gallon, he swaps
the grandiose relic for a rusty bicycle . Or perhaps
for a guitar so he can play lame country tumes.
Or maybe he fills the cab two feet deep in dirt
to make a cold frame and eke out early produce.

But I could be totally wrong, showing my biases,
I think, as I pound the post into loosened soil.
It could have been some old fart taking the back way
bask from the reservation smokeshop where he ate
two gummies while parked in his primo ’67 Valiant.
They were coming on hard as he hit the s-curves.

He could have hallucinated spectral leaping deer
and chose to kill my mailbox as the lesser evil.
He could have stopped to clear his head, waiting
for waves of visual rushes to abate, but suddenly
the sky filled with UFOs from horizon to horizon
and he fled. I forgive him. It could happen to anyone.

Note: unpublished draft

It’s hard to start living a larger life again after more than a year of hyper-vigilance. But things are starting to look better, and the return of spring certainly helps. It also helps if you haven’t been in it alone.

Second Spring

The fever lingers like the aftertaste of too-long winter,
but tamped down now across this half-vacc’ed nation.
We begin to gather once again, gun-shy, in little groups,
and try to reweave the ripped warp and weft of living.

A yellow-green haze of leaves unfurls, trillium bloom,
apple petals. The river runs high with upland snowpack.
Still I blink at the too-bright light. It’s a hard awakening,
as after dreams of fleeing faceless pursuit, ears ringing.

What this life (to which I cling with fearful fervor) will be
is yet to be. The tide is slack; who can tell whether next
it rises or falls? All I know is you are beside me, sleeping,
as you have for half a century. I am rich, at least, in this.

Whatever else comes, we will get up and have our coffee.
We will talk a little and pore over the headlines, sharing
the best bits and the worst. Having made our little plans,
we’ll walk out together, however hesitantly, into the day.

Note: unpublished draft