In Writing: Dale Hobson

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.

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.

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 50^th 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.

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.

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.

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.