In Writing: Dale Hobson

EarthSky News explains Genesis

In the beginning,
after the Big Bang,
stars in clusters
formed invisible
to one another through
dense hydrogen gas.
Space was opaque.
And darkness was upon
the face of the deep.

Starshine slowly ionized
the gas, turning it clear.
First one, then many
glimmers could be seen.

Bubbles of transparency
merged to encompass
whole galaxies until
a whole galaxy was
small as a pea inside 
a hot-air balloon
by comparison.

Later (a hundred million
years later) the bubbles
had all merged –the whole
universe transparent
to the light. Fiat lux.

After years of benign neglect, I’ve been spending time and money in the nurseries and garden tool departments of the hardware store. And I find that working in the garden feels satisfying solid in comparison to the airier pursuits of art.

Sun on the Garden

The part that makes poetry has lain sleeping, and now
(after COVID again) tumbleweeds blow through my brain.
So instead, I dig and plant and water and mulch and weed,
thinking of nothing much under the late spring sun, except
how the names of flora make their own kind of poetry:
lobelia and marigold, shrub rose and geranium, salvia.

That would make Adam the first poet, I suppose, sitting
in the Garden of Eden naming all the animals: “Platypus, 
I shall call you platypus.” — and all the others, an arkful
of the newly named for Noah to salvage from the flood.
I name them to myself as they come to check my work:
robin, rabbit, chipmunk, butterfly, black fly and whitetail.

This is the power of word. To name it is to see it, to bring
its smell to the nose, just as the mind mimes each story
even as it’s told, or as we twitch and mutter to dreams.
So small the difference between word and world, a thing
thin as the skin that separates me from thee, a mere tissue.
Yet call it what you will, flesh in fact is fact, and word is air.

I wave the hose head back and forth like a magic wand or
a maestro’s baton, calling up water from below the bedrock.
But one only tends a garden, encouraging life. The maestro
creates no symphony, no matter how dramatically he waves.
The flowers know what powers the upthrust of their lives.
They turn its way each day as it tracks across the skies.

While helping a friend clean out her house in preparation for a cross-country relocation, another helper asked me if I had ever published a particular poem in one of my books. I had read it live on-air for the January 2008 edition of NCPR’s then-monthly arts program, Open Studio, and it had stuck in her mind for 15 years.

As it turns out it has never been published and it has particular resonance for me at this moment when I am finishing up a new volume of poetry, “The Other Village,” and am in search of a publisher. Having  finished the draft and ordered the book’s contents, I find I now have nothing but tumbleweeds blowing through my cerebral cortex.

Continuing Resolutions 

A New Year Poem

Having put paid to another Christmas
(save for the bill-paying), I look down
my list for the next bulleted item
and find nothing–blank paper–
a snowfield of pending ambition.

But, to my credit, I have done nothing 
this year so egregious as to cause
my wife to deposit me at the roadside
with a duffel bag of dirty laundry
and four thousand used books.
Nor has my daughter felt the need
to change her name or block my number.
The long strands of life remain tied.

And I have worked through
another whole year without my boss
having to close her office door
upon a final quiet conversation
before my laptop and I are cast out
to wander the virtual streets 
of Second Life, at loose ends.

The kitchen renovation did,
at ruinous expense, come through 
this year to resolution, but, by the time
the rest of the house is made as fit,
it will all need to be done again,
world without end.

And if my book-in-progress remains
unprinted, still, it grinds on toward 
publication at a steady glacial pace.
One can see how, given inexorable pressure
from new work behind, it must calve off
eventually from the vast shelf
of unsolicited manuscripts to join
the other bergs of words that obstruct
the sea lanes of contemporary literature.

Therefore, in the new year, I will not 
learn Chinese. No villanelle will appear 
below my name in The New Yorker.
I will manage to soldier on without
a BowFlex body, and ballroom dancing
will remain, for now, beyond my ken.

In lieu of a bill of particulars, I propose 
this series of continuing resolutions:
to keep my family close, to do my job, to keep 
the roof above the cellar, and to always
enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

I started this poem Sunday, before snow fell upon the daffodils of today’s haiku. But even a foolish hope is better than none. I have this notion that wisdom is more for the brain, whereas the heart is given to folly. And that’s a good thing.

Young and Old

My father, when dying of cancer at 67,
(younger than I am now), confided to me:
“I’ve never felt older than 19 in my heart.”

It explains how I too never feel quite
grown up. And my uncles the same: men
in the chassis, boys beneath the hood.

My heart felt older when I was younger,
laden with worry and drink. but many
sober years has returned to it some youth.

It’s good, I think, for the heart to be
a little stupid.  A soft breeze blows; daffodils
bloom. I cherish a foolish hope winter is over.

I may never make it back to feeling 19,
but then my teen years were not my best —
except for taking up this life with you.

Were hearts not a little stupid,
how could we have lasted?

Snowflakes are fallng
on seventeen daffodils
beside the old well