In Writing: Dale Hobson

As a young reader I was strongly bitten by poems such as “We Are Those People” by Robinson Jeffers, and novels like “The Man in the High Castle” by Phillip Dick. The darkness and chaos of the last few years brings to mind their cautionary prophesies.

The Fortunate Village

All my long years I dwelt in peace.
The bombs fell ever elsewhere.
No gun pointed at me. My town
knew no heaps of rubble and glass.
Its siren wailed retail not wholesale
disaster — chimney fire or stroke.

Nice to think that war might remain
over the horizon: Korea, Vietnam,
Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine —
anywhere but home, this bucolic bubble 
bought by blood and treasure. But
elsewhere exists nowhere, in time.

It’s Newton’s third law of motion;
only luck defers the equal, opposite
reaction to drones, missiles, bombers,
napalm, the Trail of Tears, the slavers’
lash. What rough beast awaits —
or worse, already tracks our scent?

This dark America, bloated into empire,
learns to love its lies, harkens to hate.
Its hoarders heap up wealth, heedless
of the heated stares of the huddled poor,
the vengeful glares of humiliated foes.
They wait only for the wheel to turn.

Note: unpublished draft

The geese and the leaves, the last few weeks before winter conquers all have always been tinged with melancholy for me. Veterans Day commemorations conflate in my mind with the autumn Moratorium days during the Vietnam War when we marched by the thousands and read the names of the dead all through the night among the fallen leaves. We’ve moved on to other wars since; it seems sometimes we always will.

Armistice Day

All day warbirds prowled the horizon – F-35s
from Burlington, Reaper drones from Hancock.
A distant rumble, or a shining dot at the head
of a streak of vapor. Who’s the target, walking
now unknowing underneath the crosshairs?

The winds war too, pushing sun, then cold rain.
Squadrons of geese assault cloud battlements
rising south of town; their clarion cries carried
over miles of forest and river say, “We’re leaving;
snow will bury leaves that lie now where the fell.”

All day more rise up; flotillas pack the river:
Canada geese, snow geese, quitting cornfields
to fill in behind the throngs flown ahead south.
Cranes, swans, ducks, heron: all know to be away.
A starling murmuration twists over new-baled hay.

At Bayside, at the end of the river trail, little flags fly
on veterans’ graves, crops grown up on battlefields
of this century and the last. Once World War II vets
fired salute, and boys like me crowded in for brass,
later I marched instead, naming aloud all of the dead.

The vets who now salute and I share a graying age,
done with battles, with labor, autumn cold in bone,
lucky really, to be above the stones. The calling geese,
the fallen leaves, now we know in keener ways. Once
we go beneath the stones, stones alone get final say.

Note: unpublished draft

In the last few years, objective circumstances have not been particularly joyful, and yet joy breaks through regardless. That is because joy has nothing to do with circumstance.

Looking at Light

Pain carves deep so the body might survive. Clear cause, 
clear effect, lesson learned. But not so with joy, which arises
when it will, responding to the look in someone’s eye,
to late light on the bay, to a far hillside in peak fall color.

It transforms the everyday, awaiting only one’s awakening.
It comes not from outside, rather from within, arising
from attention, from opening to the moment. Look at that
light where tiny motes of dust are dancing. Just beautiful.

Note: unpublished draft

My night vision is getting too poor to enjoy this form of meditation from the driver’s seat, but there is a special form of peace to be had running down a smooth empty highway in the middle of the night. It is one of those times that rhymes with every other time you’ve looked out into the night from a moving vehicle, from childhhod ‘til today.

Driving at Night

Driving at night is the American form of meditation.
While a far-off station plays music low on the radio
the mind freewheels, sorting out the day then
putting it away. 

Conversation in the car at night is like Quaker meeting,
where long spells of silence create space for one thing
that really needs to be said, then after miles of reflection
comes the response.

The car at night is asylum, personal space, intimate.
The hectic routine melts away, making a way
straight and smooth as this four-lane highway
through the heartland. 

Note: unpublished draft

Somehow I never managed to share this poem from “Light Year” on Facebook or in this blog. I come back to it now because it is central to the themes of my work-in-progress, “The Other Village,” a volume of poetry focused on the village and town where I have lived since 1957. It is more personal than my more descriptive pictures of life in the village over the decades, taking a look inside my family life. There are a few other previously published poems that fit into “The Other Village” as well. I guess it will need to be titled “The Other Village: New and Selected Poems.”

Elders on Sunday

When the elders come forward to lay hands upon
their newest sister, the pews are left near empty.
The congregants, grey and white as seagulls, lean in 
to hear the vows spoken, just as they have been
spoken these past two hundred and some years.

After service, coffee hour and cleaning up, we come
home to our empty nest in four acres of second-growth.
The archaeology of a working farm is broken up 
by beech and pine, buried under sumac and vine, 
the dug well plugged with stone and rusted roof tin.

We settle on couch and chair with silver laptops open,
me to edit an article, and you to post our little news
to the feeds of friends. “Coffee?” I take your nod
to the kitchen, fill the filter with local roast and lean
against the sink to wait for water to whistle.

Watching our neighbor wrestle his pick-up, upsized
for the life he used to lead, onto the road to town,
I re-litigate this choice to stay put, rooted at the edge
of rootless America. Here in this house a little too big
for us, outside this village a little too small for us.

In the ’70s, we were ready to go. You proposed,
“Cid and I could go Army on the buddy plan; you
and Allen could live on base,” or, I countered, 
“We could move the whole shebang to Montana 
while Allen does his MFA and I set up a little press.”

We once thought a commune might raise a batch
of kids all together, but then we bought this place
instead — and baby made three. The collective
scattered, the whole world moving off it seemed,
while we stayed put to settle this nest.

You worked OB-GYN and I ran press on campus;
you nursed on campus and I worked freelance,
changing jobs instead of place until the girl grew, 
went off to sink her own roots into city streets.
Natural for her to go; just as natural for us to stay.

Each year the students come and go like geese,
pilgrims passing while we keep faith, keep house
from falling into the cellar hole, keep going to 
high school musicals, gallery shows, meetings,
church suppers, the movie house, the co-op.

“I have no thought of leaving. I do not count
the time,” as Sandy Denny sang, except now
and then, while waiting for the whistle, waiting
for the brew to trickle through, before returning
to place this mug of coffee by your side.

Bonus track: Sandy Denny singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

Note: published in “Light Year” 2019 Liberty Street Books

During this time of seemingly non-stop bummers, of disease and unease, dreary with fear, a little drop of joy can feel like a revolutionary act.

Into High Country

When I head up into high country my doubts
stay back in the valley. For miles around me
a green kingdom of corn and clover extends,
bounded by barns and sugarbush. Up above
another world hangs, continents of cumulus
broken by bright blue seas of sky.

The next turn runs up the High Peaks, up into
the world of wind where cloud shadows dapple
the shoulders of mountains, where bald summits
of granite shine. If God so loved this world,
why should I not? Having never seen God, 
only creation, it’s all I know of sweet shalom.

Note: unpublished draft

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