In Writing: Dale Hobson

Sugar season: when one of my old Listening Post essays can be boiled down into 31 syllables, it tastes sweeter.

Spring Morning

One daffodil in a vase 
on the kitchen table 
in a pool of sunlight.
Coffee in shirtsleeves
before an open window.

When you’ve lived in one place a long time, the touchstones of memory can be found anywhere, taking you by surprise, taking you back into the past between one bite and the next.

When We Were Flyers

While eating my burger, I notice a Flexible Flyer sled
hanging on the diner wall like a trophy head. A collection
of novelty teapots, a baby blue ceramic cross and a copy
of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” flesh out the décor.

Winter is hanging on, if barely; the snow’s a little wet
for sledding, at least until it freezes back up after dark.
But the Flyer, identical to one I purchased in the 1960s
with spoils from my paper route, brings it all back .

Your sister might sit upright on it, steering with feet
but well, she’s a girl. The proper method is to run
as fast as you can, throwing down the sled and yourself
headfirst upon the sled in one smooth motion.

With your face just inches off the snow, you could
almost bust through the sound barrier. When icy
you could fly all the way from Holcroft House on
down to the corner of Clarkson Ave. and Maple St.

The doorway of a dormitory made a warming hut
and the Dilly Wagon across Route 11 served cocoa.
I have no memory of trudging uphill over and over,
only the long flights down through face-biting cold

and walking home long after dark, the mercury down
below zero, across the bridges where icy river fog
rimed the elms, maples and willows, and bright stars 
hung like chips of ice around a high-flown moon.

It was too good to last. Clarkson put up snow fence 
to cordon off the hill. Either the lawyers got to them or
the dining hall made a fusss about all the lunch trays
destroyed by improvising student toboggganers.

Or it could be because every time they spread fresh sand
on the sidewalk, we shoveled fresh snow on top of it,
restoring it to its rightful purpose as a sleighway. How 
I long to take that Flyer down and give it one more go.

There is a qualitative difference between grace and its near relative, luck. Luck, for good or for ill, is bestowed randomly by an indifferent universe. Grace feels like a personal gift from one who knows your inmost desire.

Grace

Sometimes while a storm still rages
the sun shouts out from the horizon.
Sometimes the locked door pounded on
a hundred times before is found ajar.

There is no way to make it so. So,
wait for it, wait more, and love life.
A long season runs between planting
and harvest. Anything could happen.

People, and poets in particular, easily fall into thinking that the beaty of the world is created just for their pleasure. Yeah, but no.

Flowers Dress to Please the Bees

Few regard the sundew deep in the marsh
or delight in the night-blooming datura. Pity.
Even deep in undergrowth, tiny florets may
be discovered by one who bends the knee.

Flowers – we imagine their allure is meant for us,
the way men imagine women dress to please them.
But flowers dress to please the bees, the midwives
of their love lives. Our great hulks just block the way.

Just ran across a draft of this written back when I was doing an April poem-a-s-day challenge. I think it cleans up nicely.

Fluid Dynamics

The whirlpool behind Sugar Island dam
where snowmelt drops to the penstock
sends ripples back across the flow,
breaking up the reflection of clouds
trying to move east against the current.

The vortex runs white for a moment,
shredding cumulus, then resumes draining
the sky of blue. The penstock runs north
to the powerhouse, to wring the water’s
watts. What does it wring from the sky?

I once read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Heavy sledding, but there was this one bright moment when it all became perfectly clear. My hair stood on end for about five seconds, and then it all fell apart again. I am a big-time science wienie and was struck by an article in this morning’s EarthSky e-newsletter. My abstract that follows explains how 95% of everything is beyond our ken.

An English Major Explains the Universe

Astrophysicists tell us that everything we perceive,
from the end of our noses to the edge of the universe,
using all of our senses and all our high technology–
that’s five percent of what there is. All the matter 
and the light by which we see it, is less than the tip
of the iceberg. We might have suspected this all along.

Twenty-seven percent they say is made of dark matter, 
about which we know nothing except that it has mass.
And all the rest, sixty-eight percent, that’s dark energy.
And we know nothing about that except that it pushes
everything apart better than gravity holds it together.
If you think about it, we could have suspected that, too.

The astrophysicists think dark energy comes from
supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies,
is dark light that shines from dark stars, one might say.
Easy to believe come nightfall that darkness outweighs
the light; it pours out thick and heavy from shadowed woods.
But the dawn still comes to chase all the darkness away.

Being cold a lot is good for the ingenuity. There a lot of ways to get warm, both literally and figuratively. Ignore the folks from more blessed climes who try to tell you that it’s like hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop. So what.

Cold Village

I can’t lie; it’s not paradise. Winter is too long,
too cold, with more than our fair share of snow
(though not quite so much as in years past).
I was reminded of it this week by a little thing.

The thermometer went to 30 below overnight,
and didn’t rise above zero all the next day—
old-school cold. And there I was again, dressing
myself while standing on top of the heat vent. 

I worry little about the cold these days, having 
a reliable furnace and sufficient funds to fuel it.
It also helps to avoid going outdoors too much
between Thanksgiving and Mothers’ Day.

But having enough heat passes for prosperity
in a northern winter. Just ask anyone without it.
Though a woodstove and woodlot can do in lieu
of income. Nothing like cold feet up on a boot rail.

Winter got set into my bones when I was knee high.
Out sledding, fingers so froze I cried as they thawed.
Hypothermia from biking the paper route. Waking
to an icy heat vent when the coal stoker crapped out.

Which it did on a regular basis– mid-century tech
welded to a 1920s cellar monster. And walls filled
with 1800s insulation, bricks stacked in between studs.
You could hang a wind chime in front of the window draft.

These days two-incomes keep us warm and cozy, mostly,
though it’s never safe to take that for granted. For instance,
when sleet fell for a week straight in 1998 we had no power,
no cook stove, no water. And all of the trees were falling.

Everyone poor and cold again–except, of course, the Amish.
Luckily we found ourselves rich in friends, who took us in,
and warmed by the way folks pitched in and helped out
all over the North Country to make it whole once more.

It all comes back to mind, triggered by that moment—
bare feet on a warn steel grate, warm air billowing
up my bathrobe, looking out into the whiteness 
through hoar-frosted glass at the creaking tress.

While I have sufficient opinions on the management of every aspect of life, I’m afraid I will never get the opportunity to run the world according to my designs because I am always discombobulated by the coming of morning. While I’m still trying to find my glasses and put on my pants, others have already grasped the reins of power.

Light in Other Windows

Sleepless again, I look for light in other
windows. Who shares my waking — 
tapping at a keyboard, reading late
on a lonely bed, or pacing a cold floor?

What might another night hold? Each
inhabits a different village from each
when everyone else lies deep asleep.
The grocer remembers a woman’s scent;

a vet wakes up from heavy shelling;
a pregnant woman rubs her back.
For me, aging, I sleep little and lightly
as if saving up for my eternal rest.

They sleep best who lack imagination,
rise early, clear-headed, and set to work. 
Night owls waken one eye at a time, stagger
up to brew coffee, then take it back to bed.

Note: unpublished draft

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