Me playing guitar, circa 1974. Pencil drawing: Paul Davison
One of the good things about gainful employment is that if you stick with it long enough, they will eventually throw you out and pay you just to stay away. Retirement, they call it.
Same as I Ever was
If you had asked me when I was sixteen what I wanted to do with my life, I would have said I wanted to shack up out in the country with my girlfriend, write poetry, play the guitar, and go to protest marches and demonstrations.
Then a half century of labor, raising a child and so forth, put the kibosh on that plan. But look, here I am at 72, shacked up with my honey way out in the country, writing poetry, playing 50-year-old songs on guitar, and still protesting the same shit as ever.
A few nights ago, I had this great idea for a poem. The first line would be this pithy quote from Wendell Berry. From that, the images and the ideas to follow flowed out logically and easily. But I was busy and away from my desk. I thought, I know, I’ll write down the Berry quote, and when I have the time for it, the rest of the poem will flow back out prompted by the quote. So, I took out a bit of note paper and jotted it down.
Sadly, I was sound asleep and dreaming at the time and I have no idea what the quotation was, or even if it was real. The bit of note paper certainly wasn’t. This dream brought back to mind one the first poems I wrote for this blog back in September 2011. I dug it back out and spiffed it up a little.
Slipping Away
I dreamed of a slender young woman wearing a black caftan embroidered with coltsfoot and periwinkle.
She perched on a railway ticket counter and sang to the clerk an astonishing song. Its melody was achingly sweet.
Artful verses broke into a soaring chorus. The bridge meandered back to tonic through an odd modal twist.
The many stanzas melted away as she sang them, but on waking, the tune played on for a while in my memory.
I could never have sung it, lacking range. And now even the gist is lost, leaving only the ash of my dream, an echo of her song.
Photo: Jo Zimmy, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
After the busy-ness of summer and the sweet but fleeting glory of fall, the first snow of the season is a time to take a beat and to shift gears into a slower and sometimes claustrophobic time of year. The closed-in feeling will come later when the snow is dirtied by sand and salt, freeze and thaw, and has long outstayed its welcome. However, the first snowfall?—ahhh!
First Snow Meditation
Watching the first snow of the season, (well before Thanksgiving) waxing into sleet, it’s time to hit pause, to cancel the usual Sunday labors and offices and to cook up a mess of bacon and eggs.
Watching the field change its clothing from brown to white, watching the great down arrow of snow falling from sky, it’s time to break from morning routine and brew a third cup of coffee.
The way everything seems to slowly disappear within the snow, how it somehow settles out even regardless of what’s below, reminds me of the first time I really found a still point in mind.
The memory makes me want to stay, stay silent, unmoving, just sitting at my window with a coffee mug steaming in hand and to feel the nothingness of the snow mirrored within me.
But ahhh—if only moments of grace outlasted their moment. The furnace fan kicks on again, a semi-truck gears down for the hill, and an old song begins to play over and over inside my head.
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For years I have been working at beating back the aggressive invasive species that have taken over much of my property. I thought of it as gardening by subtraction. Get rid of all the crap and then see what I might have to work with. But this year the sun could finally reach down to ground level, and I am finding that there is a whole ecosystem already there in utero, buried in the soil, ready to re-emerge. It makes me wonder what is ever really lost.
Chainsaw Sunday
Back then Allen was always slipping chainsaws into his poems. It might have been an early love for David Budbill’s first book, “Chainsaw Dance,” but I think it was mostly Hemingway– the romance of so-called manly arts–blood sports, boxing, fly fishing, general mayhem—being no one to mess with.
But it could have been the sheer Zen of it, the impossibility of thinking while steel teeth shriek through the heartwood. Or it could have made him feel he should wear cape and cowl, superhuman feller of giants, ash-butcher and oak-splitter. Whatever a chainsaw was to him, it somehow passed me by.
I preferred trees standing, wearing their Joseph-coats of autumn splendor, or naked when winter looms, their mantles cast off to flutter at their feet. I liked to put hands on them–lopping shears, pruners, brush saws– to groom, not ruin. Allen filled up the woodshed; I piled up brush.
Now, near 50 years later, my views have changed a little. Looking at the old pasture I barely dented in a full season of hand labor, I was out of my depth, old and short-winded. Knotweed and grapevine, shrub honeysuckle and poison ivy, on the other hand, somehow retained all the vigor of youth.
I had to call upon a higher power, (electricity, in this case,) and bought a little 6-inch chainsaw and a weed whacker. That season I broke through to the river, leaving behind piles of debris everywhere, working the chainsaw to death, and burning out the weed whacker. Time to go bigger.
Twice as big, and heavy duty. This season I cleared the field, at least the half-acre the knotweed had claimed, then began peeling back the grape that smothered the honeysuckle that hid the long-fallen sumac and hornbeam and boxelder trunks. All cut and stacked in neat rows now, Allen would approve.
But it was not tabula rasa. Phlox and raspberry I let be, morning glory, and in the shade a thick thatch of periwinkle. Some sumac survived under vines. And new discoveries– surprise lilies popped up, a pear-leaf crab apple emerged, black cherry, white oak, dogwood, a few big-tooth aspen.
And there, where the knotweed insured nothing else grew for 40 years, the long-patient seeds and spores of the old cow pasture began to emerge, resurrected by sun and rain– marginal wood fern, evening primrose, burnweed, soapwort, white clover, great mullein, dwarf mallow, purple foxglove.
Not all native, but abundant, diverse, once tumorous growth was cut from the field. Though I have no need to graze cattle, the wild whitetails will be glad of the browse. And windrows of slash and twig will hide hare from owl, give shelter and shade. There should be enough raspberries to share with bear and bird.
All through my long life, nature has cared for me, body and soul. Well past time to begin taking care of her. The chainsaw sings out as I work back toward the stone wall in the shadow of the pines. This Sunday, I cut away the dead so that the light might fall upon the quickening soil. I pour out my sweat into the offering plate.
Each year, a few weeks after school let out, we would overpack one of a succession of enormous station wagons and drive a thousand miles west to Indiana. Hobson relations were liberally salted across the state, and we would manage to see most of them while doing the rounds. Corydon, Freelandville, South Bend, Indianapolis, Vincennes. From the decades of distance, they meld together–Indiana, where it was always July.
July in Indiana
It’s 85 degrees at midnight. I lean out the window seeking a breeze. Peepers sing to the dark, to the corn, and the blacktop, and the rising moon.
In town a dog is barking at nothing. Farther off a hundred freight cars racket the rails, the engine blaring through each deserted crossing.
I find my Dad here in this pile pranking around with his brothers. In the curled photos he’s dashing and spruce in Army Air Corps khaki.
And there’s Mom, war bride-to-be, reclining as Odalisque, adorning a field of alfalfa, with a shy smile for the man behind the camera.
Here’s my brother being bathed in the sink of a 12-foot trailer– what married students lived in in Bloomington on the G.I. Bill.
Skip ahead and there’s sister in a cowgirl dress and there’s me, sporting droopy shorts and a look of toddler anxiety.
Then three generations: grandma and grandpa, seated, backed by a wall of sons and daughters-in-law. A moat of grandkids surrounding.
An odd lot of memory remains of those summers, a few weeks each year of Midwest swelter. They blur together now into one:
Bare feet burning on blacktop, swimming, drive-in movies, endless fried chicken, corn smothered in butter, homemade ice cream.
Every evening, thunderstorms boiled up out of the west. We’d rock back and forth on the porch as the wind turned damp and cool.
That America was easy to love. A thousand miles west of my life, it could have been another world. But I had to run away into the Sixties.
After, I rarely returned to Indiana. Once to take Dad to his 50th reunion just before he died, once to take our daughter to great-grandma’s 90th.
But on a sweltering night I will find myself back there, when trees flash vivid, lightning-lit, and the heat yields ten degrees in five minutes.
I’m back there when the night train wails for mile after mile. We meet again in mind, quick and dead alike, and the long years since come undone.
Photo: Ricardo Montero, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
My resolution for the NewYear is to get together with other poets and artists more. I’ve been having a dry spell since I finished my manuscript “The Other Village.” Before I retired, I had a weekly writing assignment to keep me engaged with writing. Then through COVIID and beyond, the new book manuscript went through its several versions. The last time I dried up happened after finishing my first book, “A Drop of Ink,” and casting it adrift among the small publishers who obstruct the sea lanes of contemporary literature.
At that time, 2010 and 2011, I joined up with SLAP ( St. Lawrence Area Poets) and that helped get my juices going again, or at least accompanied me through my rejection slips. Well, SLAP is still around, which proves that the world keeps turning regardless of whether I am working the crank or not. So I’m going back to their monthly gatherings at the SLC Arts Council. I looked back through some of the poetry I wrote to fulfill SLAP assignments and found the following from 2011, which holds up pretty well, I think.
Clouds
First, the ancestor cloud, stratus, the lattice of DNA, recording each previous incarnation back to the amoeba. Here remain mother and father, instructing the body to grow. Here is Aunt Anne’s eye and Grandpa’s jaw.
Second, cumulonimbus, the thunderhead of memory, each impulse, each sensation of the body, every turn of thought a mote of condensation, a nexus of charge that accumulates tension, building up to lightning that twitches out in action.
Third, the cirrus cloud of culture, wispy memes of attitude and style, the ghost of every book ever read, the music and images, flat phantasms, instructional manuals, interviews with the dead, this collective upload to eternity.
This is the way the water circulates, rising and falling, and rising again. This is how we distinguish ourselves, becoming one thing and not another, a discrete chunk awash in anonymous stew. Any shape can arise when watching clouds.
If you have watched the progress of the laborious construction of an intricate Tibetan sand mandala, seeing it be swept away can be a little traumatic. “No! Wait! Oh well–so it goes.”
I. The Mandala
Grain by grain the monks sift down a dwelling place for Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
Its walls, pierced by four doorways, are made of faith, effort, memory, meditation and wisdom.
Its doors are comprised of four precious jewels: of love, of compassion, of joy, and of equanimity.
To the east of the Enlightened One rages hatred. To the south moans misery. In the west, ignorance.
To the north, a green distillation of jealousy seethes. But the vajra fence of the Dharma hems them in.
After weeks of painstaking labor, the monks chant prayers, burn incense, and clang bells.
They break out cheap foam rubber paintbrushes and sweep all the colored sands together in a jug.
Leading scores of us across town, they offer the sand up to the river, send up prayers among the honking geese.
The undoing done, the long snake of the procession dismantles itself into ones and twos to wander home.
II. Ephemera
Ironically, I was given a glassine bag of mandala sand so I might forever recall my lesson in impermanence.
I placed it on my home altar, under the benevolent gaze of my white porcelain Guanyin, next to my sutra book.
A poet friend of mine had given me another tiny glassine bag. In it was a bit of soil filched from Allen Ginsberg’s garden.
But the best thing was, Ginsberg’s ashes had been spaded into the plot. So, the dirt held a little soupçon of poet.
I mix them together, the Buddha in the sand, the beatnik in the dirt. A little bit of them will go a long way, I pray.
Now the ash of my white pine incense falls into it, too. How it all mingles together, an olio of awakening mind.
Budding lilacs hooded with snow. Photo: Dale Hobson
I’ve written about my poetry “junk drawer” before, how it is sometimes possible to weld pieces together into something good (or good enough, anyway). But no matter how often those unlikely mashups occur, the junk drawer seems to stay as full as ever.
False Starts
Yesterday, snowdrops pearled the bulb bed and daffodils raised up their green spears. The maples were russet with tiny leaflets, the lilacs freckled with yellow-green buds.
But now it’s gone back to black and white, each bud and bloom hooded with snow, all the limbs like chalk on a blackboard of cedar, the grass a white map drawn in rabbit tracks.
This cruelest month, season of dashed hope, is, ironically, Poetry Month. Think about it. It’s as if someone could see in my desk drawer all those promising openings now abandoned.
Photo: Ben Osteen, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
There is a cruel streak in American culture that recognizes the utility of keeping people insecure, that wields power by making sure that the bottom is as far down as possible, and that there is no sure way to avoid winding up there. This is one of the reasons so many are reluctant to engage with the homeless, as if misfortune were a contagious disease.
Gratitude
“Never give your money to bums and winos,” Mom taught me, “they’ll just go spend it on another bottle.” True enough, often enough, but then she had been raised up in ungenerous times, the Great Depression.
“There but for the grace of God…” never occurred to me even though, ironically, I was an alcoholic myself. But I was torn by my Puritan upbringing, which taught me I should give to the “deserving,” but pass others by.
How can I tell? Which one huddled in which doorway deserved a handout? I wondered, just as if I deserved every middle-class advantage of American culture–and which deserved nothing, just as if my own sins were less.
Some years ago, I visited David, living then in Manhattan. His idea of a walk around the neighborhood was chatting with all the homeless, most of whom he knew by name, and giving each, unasked, a little cash before he walked on.
I was dumfounded. This was not how the world worked. I asked him “Why give to all? He asked me if I liked to ask for help. “Well, no,” I replied. “Neither do they,” he said. “I see the need; why make them ask when I know it’s hard?”
It was kind of a conversion experience. Afterward, I would keep a little cash on my person, stopped feigning interest in something across the street as I passed beggars by. I made my living in public radio, paid by tin cup, mostly.
I recently learned that David had to be nudged toward epiphany, too. His mom, refugee from pogrom, world war and Holocaust, once rebuked him for passing a beggar by. “What,” she said, “are you crazy?” and turned back to give.
I don’t often sweat the big picture. I’m more focused on the small and nearby. But some nights I don’t sleep well and then night thoughts connect the dots for me and I hear the voice of Afrofuturist poet and jazzman Sun Ra say it in his outside voice: “This Planet is Doomed.” All I can say is “Hope not.”
Open Winter
All night the wind worked its way, transforming snow into snowmelt, showing here a patch of muddy soil and there a broken limb of pine.
The tracks that deer left in the yard grow wide as if Sasquatch roamed here. Ice fell from eaves, unremarked, as icebergs calve off from Greenland.
I would say winter gives way, had it ever really taken hold. I worry when the weather goes strange, when the wind chime bells all through the night.
And they say I’m right to worry, not just for this winter in this place, but for all the winters in all the world. Our powers might grow Biblical, but we are no angels.
The West and the North burn each year; in the South what doesn’t drown flies off on the wind. Some say pay no mind–it’s natural, or it’s Jesus, or just in your head.
Assholes. I feel an awful future coming, like an asteroid that dogs Earth’s orbit. It’s more a matter of we know not when, and but a slim chance that we know not if.
