.     .     .     .     .

Weekend before last I laid down the mattock and dug with my hands.  Scooping up dirt to mold a shallow campfire pit, I lifted something soft.  An underground fungus, the sort that pigs sniff out?  Rare petrified bear scat from a wilder epoch?  What?

I opened my hands – a toad, inert in its hibernation.  It cracked one eye the smallest slit and looked up at me.  “Just five more minutes?”  I found a safer spot between the beech tree roots and tucked him in with moss.

.     .     .     .     .

Adam & Eve Orchid

Jalalu’ddin Rumi
(translated by R.A.Nicholson)

If there be any lover in the world, O Moslems, ‘tis I.
If there be any believer, infidel, or Christian hermit, ‘tis I.
The wine-dregs, the cupbearer, the minstrel, the harp and the music,
The beloved, the candle, the drink and the joy of the drunken – ‘tis I.
The two-and-seventy creeds and sects in the world
Do not really exist: I swear by God that every creed and sect – ‘tis I.
Earth and air and water and fire – knowest thou what they are?
Earth and air and water and fire, nay, body and soul too – ‘tis I.
Truth and falsehood, good and evil, ease and difficulty from first to last,
Knowledge and learning and ascetism and piety and faith – ‘tis I.
The fire of Hell, be assured, with its flaming limbos,
Yes, and Paradise and Eden and houris – ‘tis I.
This earth and heaven with all that they hold,
Angels, peris, genies, and mankind – ‘tis I.

.     .     .     .     .

Mom French’s home is still overflowing with books.  Every Newberry.  Every Caldecott.  Racks and stacks of Bill Peet, Wallace Tripp, Richard Scary, Tomie DiPaola.  When we took our kids to visit it was a marathon of reading on Grandma’s lap.  Before Margaret and Josh themselves could read they could name each book’s artist with a single glance.  Thirty years later, Saul knows that when he and Dad go to the used book sale at the library, they are going to come home carrying a huge sack of books.

.     .     .     .     .

The Fairies
William Allingham (1824-1889)

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We dare n’t go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather.

Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music,
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen,
Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back
Between the night and morrow;
They thought she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag leaves,
Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite?
He shall find the thornies set
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We dare n’t go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather.

Copied from a well-thumbed edition of Volume 1 of CHILDCRAFT, (c) 1954 by Field Enterprises, Inc.  Mom French gave each of her seven children a set of Childcraft books when they left home on their own.

.     .     .     .     .

A true story: When Mom French finally retired after forty (fifty maybe?) years as Aurora schools librarian, she still returned as a volunteer to read stories.  We’re not sure just how she arranged this, but one Saturday night she loaded the car with books, put on her Mother Goose outfit – pointy hat, shawl, wire-rims – and drove to downtown Cleveland to a bar near the Cuyahoga River.  While the longshoremen raised their beers, she read them nursery rhymes, poems, and bedtime stories.  They begged her to come back again.

Mom, in each story we read and in each one read to us, we will always hear your voice.

.     .     .     .     .

What did astonish me today, though, was realizing that Saul knows all the words to the song.  I was impersonating a fly on the wall with a magazine while he built a little Lego house and had all his Lego men come visit.  The entire time he was working, he sang.  Say Hello to folks you know / and everyone you meet.  Or sometimes just recited.  Hey Ho, the mistletoe, hung where you can see.  With an entire village of different voices, tempos, timbres.  Somebody waits for you / Kiss her once for me!  Sometimes tuneful little boy soprano, sometimes gruff, briefly importuning, and when he noticed me listening quite loud and raucous.  All the Holly Jolly variations.

.     .     .     .     .

A four-year old is a highly evolved little primate.  He knows just how far he can boss Pappy around before he’s crossed the line.  He can ask for ice cream a half hour before supper and convince Pappy the request is not at all unreasonable.  He operates on the rock solid premise that simply wanting a thing fully entitles the person to get it.  Or, and this is much more likely, he knows all the rules full well but also knows from experience that with the one-hundred-and-first request the rule might shatter.

But what happens if I sometimes call the little anthropoid’s bluff and just laugh?  He laughs too, and we go on to the next game.

.     .     .     .     .

I bought Sarah Lindsay’s book Primate Behavior at a reading she gave in Southern Pines this year.  Reading it is like an archeological dig: each poem must be read carefully, brushed with fine bristles, held up to the sky.  No bulldozers, please.  I’m still working my way, layer by layer.  I’m discovering that there is unrevealed depth and complexity to us hominids.  I wonder, how did Lindsay get hold of my family tree?

.     .     .     .     .

Primate Behavior

What was she looking for, the woman two days from
the end of a wasting death
who told her nursing daughter, “Shave my legs”?
Or the hospital-ridden one
who, coming out of ether, could only keep saying she couldn’t
be comfortable
without her panties on.

If one of us slips on ice, he or she
checks first for an audience, second for broken bones.
We are the apes
with mirrors inside our heads.  We pick our noses,
we fart and enjoy it,
but this is rarely mentioned.  We make fun of outdated clothes.
We listen to music.

In a thick place of mountain bamboo the
gorilla mother
croons and cradles her young one in her arm.
With her other large hand
she catches her own dung and eats it.
A hum of insects and green wet rot.
The father beside her sleeps.  Is it eight-thirty Monday?
His lower lip hangs on his chest.
Alone at her golden oak table
the young lady licks her finger, dots at the grains
of spilled sugar,
and licks it again.

Close to the Pole, where daytime stretches
like taffy
and icebergs move in vast and moaning herd, a furry man
scrawls a few notes in Norwegian.  He cannot carry a tune,
but he can make stew.  He has thought of little else but stew
and warming his feet for weeks.  Realizing
how dirty his face is, he tells himself:
I am here for no personal good, but to help make maps.
I am civilized.  See the word Forward is drawn on my heart.
And he throws some dried fish to the dogs.

from Primate Behavior, Sarah Lindsay, Grove Press, © 1997 by Sarah Lindsay

Sarah Lindsay received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently lives in Greensboro.  Primate Behavior was a National Book Award finalist.  Lindsay’s latest book of poetry, Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), was selected as a “Favorite Book of 2008″ by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine.

.     .     .     .     .

There’s the knock.  John is here!  Hugs galore, then he sets up his screen and fiddles with the old Super-8 projector and little reel-to-reel tape player, frame by frame and inch by inch so they’ll sync when he throws the switch.  Dim the lights.  Action, sound!  Grazini Christmas.  A new tradition is born.

.     .     .     .     .

How many years, John, did you make that pilgrimage to the Frenches’ to set up your projector?  Your audience gradually shrank as the sibs moved on – Minnesota, New Mexico, West Virginia.  Some years I had to work on Christmas and we didn’t make it north.  A few years ago you sent us a Grazini DVD and man, did those memories come rushing back!  Now this season I’ve watched GC twice already, once when you sent me the YouTube link and once with my Mom after showing her how to add it to her Favorites Bar.  Margaret may be getting tired of me going on and on about the amazing story boarding and cinematography accomplished by two teenagers learning on the fly.  Linda has reminded us how she had to trail you guys around downtown Cleveland all day until it was time for her thirty-second scene.  But most important, John, is the lump in my throat – I still get it during that closing scene.  Every darn time.  I know what’s coming, I can recite the dialogue, one might say the message is so simple as to be obvious, but I still choke up.

.     .     .     .     .

Readers, it’s time for you to watch Grazini Christmas.  In 1972 two high school seniors, John Mlinek and Dave Prittie, made a movie with a handheld Super-8 camera, a portable tape recorder, and scissors and tape.  A hero for our time, Grazini-Man searches for the true meaning of Christmas.  The film is literally a family tradition – watch for Linda as the little old lady and her brother Skip as the blind scam artist.  Much of it is shot on location in Cleveland; that’s the real Higbees Department Store Santa (the store security guard chased them out once he figured out what they were up to).  The closing scene is set in The Church in Aurora, where Linda and I were in the high school youth group, just a block from Linda’s parents’ home.  Tradition.

How is it possible to “make” something a tradition?  The word means that which is handed down  – doesn’t that imply that a tradition must seep into you from the past, that it requires years and years of gestation before its birth?  Maybe John hadn’t created a tradition the first time he knocked on Linda’s door with his projector, but I’m willing to say that by the second time he had indeed.  I think the secret is more than the family context, the predictable jokes, the backstory.  I think this little film connects with something primal – at some level we are all of us always searching for meaning, whether we can articulate it or not.

Thanks, John.  Got to go now.  Getting ready to premier Grazini Christmas on the big flat screen.  Linda says, “Hi.”

.     .     .     .     .

And there were in the same country shepherds
abiding in the field, keeping watch
over their flock by night. And, lo,
the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them:
and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not:
for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy
which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David
a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you;
Ye shall find the babe
wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude
of the heavenly host praising God,
and saying, Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-15 KJV

.     .     .     .     .

Click to watch Grazini Christmas, written produced and directed by John Mlinek.

.     .     .     .     .

Voice?  Voice, you say?  How did a little stuffed plush critter come by a voice?  Well, from his conception Blue Rat has been designated as my ward.  When it’s play time (and it’s always play time) and we pull out the fuzzy animals, plastic figures, Lego men, Saul commands, “You talk Blue, and I’ll talk all of these.”

Because they all have voices.  Mappy the Hamster doesn’t have a mouth – he sort of mumbles.  Pinky Pie (purple kitty with pink nose) is high pitched and squeaky.  Lego pirates and space men are appropriately gruff and swashbuckling.  Saul “talks” all of those.  I get to talk Blue Rat.  He just looks like the kind of guy who’d be most comfortable chomping a Coney Island while he ogles the girl rats on the boardwalk.  So every afternoon when Saul whips him up a sandwich (plastic pancake, tomato, fried egg), he gustos it down and says, “‘Ey, Baby, dat’s deelishus.”

.     .     .     .     .

Voice.  (Prepare for a big leap here.)  Voice.  When you read, don’t the characters speak in your mind?  Pitch, accent, cadence.  When you write, don’t you imagine and invent a persona for each creature?  Their voice?  How they say is as important as what they say.

One of my favorite little books is The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell.  The whole week I was at the Zoo last summer I carried copies and gave a couple away.  The Bat Poet discovers the voice of Owl, Chipmunk, Mockingbird, and they are all true.  In the end he discovers his own voice, and we discover how odd and wonderful it is to live in the bat-world.

Here are a few stanzas: I hope you’ll borrow or buy the book yourself.  Is there any end to the voices we may speak?

.     .     .     .     .

from The Bat-Poet, Randall Jarrell, pictures by Maurice Sendak, copyright 1964 by The Macmillan company, copyright renewed 1992 by Mary Jarrell

Owl
. . .
The mouse beside the stone are still as death –
The owl’s air washes them like water.
The owl goes back and forth inside the night,
And the night holds its breath

Chipmunk
. . .
Curled at his breast, he sits there while the sun
Stripes the red west
With its last light: the chipmunk
Dives to his rest.

Mockingbird
. . .
A thrush is singing, then a thrasher, then a jay –
Then, all at once, a cat begins meowing.
A mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one’s the mockingbird?  which one’s the world?

Bat
. . .
The mother drinks the water of the pond
she skims across.  Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
in moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night . . .

.     .     .     .     .

New York Times book review of The Bat-Poet from 1964.

.     .     .     .     .

Last week when I reminisced about my Granddaddy, Pee Wee Griffin, Seaboard Airline Engineer for some fifty years, among the many comments I received was Kathryn Stripling Byer’s: The song of a train passing has haunted many a Southern poet’s work.  Haunted, that is indeed what we are.

Yesterday I caught a snippet on public radio by a Civil War historian at Duke.  He describes Governor Graham dragging his heels about secession; as much as a third of North Carolinians opposed war.  The Duke Prof then tells about pulling into a barbecue restaurant in Kinston recently.  During the War, General Pickett encamped at Kinston on his return from a disastrous attempt to recapture New Bern from the Union.  In Kinston Pickett hanged twenty-two North Carolinians he considered deserters, though most of them had never sworn the oath to the Confederate Army.  Pickett was later accused of war crimes and fled to Canada – the historical point being that allegiances, honor, and motivations are a lot more complicated than South vs. North.  When the Professer parks at the restaurant and looks down the row of cars and pickups with Stars and Bars on their bumpers, he just shakes his head and says, “You don’t even know who you are.”

.     .     .     .     .

Who are we, anyway?  That’s why there’s poetry – that we may discover who we are.  I’m pondering again the form an essentially Southern poem might take. Remember in August I suggested such a poem must include Place, Past, and Culture.  Our identity is complex, but a poem’s complexity lies in its brevity.  What sense most perfectly evokes a memory?  The sense of smell – impossible to describe, complex and heavy with nuance, a simple odor may transport you to a time and place you thought you’d departed forever.  I want a poem to do the same, to be vastly more than the sum of its words, to cause the reader to gasp and sigh at the same time.

Therefore, the SOUTHERN SENTENCE POEM MUST BE SEVEN LINES.

Why seven?  When I as a doddering old man kiss my great-grandchild, I will have held or been held by seven generations of my family.  There are seven Southern waters: spring from rock fissure, clear trout stream, green piedmont river, dam & lake, blackwater meandering, sound, shore.  Southerners more than many are subject to the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues.  Don’t forget the seven bridges road in Montgomery, Alabama.  But most of all because I think seven lines is just the right length.

.     .     .     .     .

So here’s another attempt:

When the train whistle blows
through the Yadkin Valley
we lay down our plastic toys,
lean across the porch rail
until the last beckoning
has trailed away, and I become
my grandson, wondering.

.     .     .     .     .

Place – Yadkin Valley; Past – becoming my Grandson; Culture – porch rail and, of course, that lonesome, haunting train whistle.

Leave me your Southern Sentence Poems here or on our new Facebook Page.

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]]> http://griffinpoetry.com/2012/11/25/when-the-train-whistle-blows/feed/ 22 griffinpoetry Fort Macon, NC Yadkin River, Elkin, NC Sanitary Fish Mkt & Restaurant, Morehead City, NC Pine Knoll Shores, NC Doughton Park Tree #1 http://griffinpoetry.com/2012/11/18/pee-wee-and-the-seaboard/ http://griffinpoetry.com/2012/11/18/pee-wee-and-the-seaboard/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:10:00 +0000 GriffinPoetry http://griffinpoetry.com/?p=1030 ]]>

I lived in five different states while I was growing up: different schools, different friends and Scout troops, even different accents when I talked, but there was at least one constant.  No matter how far the drive, we spent one week every summer at Granddaddy and Grandmother’s house in Hamlet, N.C.  Granddaddy was my namesake – Grandmother always called him by our first name,  Eugene – but the men he worked with on the Seaboard Airline Railroad for over fifty years knew him only as Pee Wee.

I believed Granddaddy completely when he told me the reason he was bald was that all his hair had burned off shoveling coal into the fierce throat of those monstrous steam locomotives.  He worked his way from fireman to engineer and ultimately flew massive diesels from Raleigh to Columbia SC, a leg of the Orange Blossom Special and the Silver Star.  We would go downtown to the Hamlet station to see him off, maybe eat ham and grits and biscuits in the Purity Café at 5 a.m. In those days Hamlet was the hub of passenger and freight lines – you could actually call it “downtown.”  Dad and Bob and I would wait along the tracks to wave goodbye while the porters helped people aboard.  I’d always jump about five feet whenever the air brakes released.  Never got used to it.  Then Granddaddy would nudge the throttles, and the diesel growl would rise from basso to baritone.  The brakeman would make one last inspection, jump up and grab a handrail, each car would clang in succession as the couplings took up the slack, and the line would begin to move.

When I turned thirteen Granddaddy figured I was finally man enough to ride with him in the engine.  Seventy miles an hour through the Carolina night, headlight flaring down the rails and gyrating light sweeping alongside to catch a deer as it leapt across, side door open while summer rushed past, I couldn’t even talk it was that intoxicating.  Did I get to sound the horn?  I can’t remember, but I do know Granddaddy let me pee out the side door when there were no crossings ahead.  That was 1966, the year before Granddaddy retired. I’m not sure my little brother ever got to make the trip.

.     .     .     .     .

My Dad (Eugene Wilson Jr.) still goes back to Hamlet for Seaboard Festival every October.  The one year I joined him I bought the Seaboard belt buckle I’m wearing as I write this.  My old HO set is in boxes in the basement.  It’s been years since I last danced along the ties to follow the tracks below our house out to the edge of town.  But every once in a while I take Saul downtown in Elkin when the switcher is swapping out big hopper cars of wood chips for ABT or Weyerhaueser, of corn for Wayne Farms or Perdue.  We listen to the throaty rumble as the big diesels wind up, we hear the whine of the wheels as they lean into a curve and the clunk as they cross the points.  The engineer fires us a short blast of horn when we wave.  Man, there’s just nothing like a train.

.     .     .     .     .

This poem by Scott Owens closes his book, Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina.  It’s a collaboration with photographer Clayton Joe Young; every poem, every image evokes memories in danger of fading.  As Scott writes in Reading the Weather: These are the simple truths.  Not nostalgia, not a maudlin attempt to memorialize something that never was, this book just shows us who we are and how we got here.  If you’re lucky Scott has still got a few of these books.  Call him today and buy one.

.     .     .     .     .

Rails

Every child should have one, a pair, really,
a matched set, set apart just the right width
so that one foot pressed against each one
leaves you stretched out about as far
as you can go, unable to move, feeling
almost trapped, almost actually in danger.

And every child should walk them as if
that’s what they were intended for,
leading out of town, around the curve,
along the river, revealing the backsides
of people’s homes, clotheslines and refuse,
the yards you weren’t supposed to see.

And every child should learn to balance
atop the railhead without the constant
unsightly tipping from side to side,
should be able to step exactly the distance
between the ties consistently, almost
marching without kicking up ballast.

And every child should have a bridge
they go under to hide and look
at dirty magazines and smoke cigarettes
and place coins on the rails to flatten
and see if this could be the one
to cause the train to leap the tracks.

And every child should know the lonely
distant sound of late night travel
when bad dreams have kept them awake
wondering where they come from, what
they bring or take, and where when it’s all
done they might return and call home.

© 2011 by Scott Owens, from Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina.  A Collaboration Between Photographer Clayton Joe Young & Poet Scott Owens

.      .     .     .     .

Scott Owens has undoubtedly written another poem in the time it took you to read this.  Or else he has taught another workshop, planned another poetry event, posted another online journal.  Does he ever sleep?  If he does, I am certain that he dreams in verse.  Scott’s poetry covers faith and agnosticism, abuse and parenting, alienation and existentialism, loneliness and collaboration, entrapment and liberation, personal relationships and self-sufficiency, the disappearance of a rural American South characterized as both pastoral and violent, and the possibilities of redemption as his characters attempt to make sense of an often seemingly senseless world.  Check out his blog, read the journal he edits, buy his books . . . tell him Bill says “Hi.”

.     .     .     .     .

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The year before I’d spent a moonless night on a grassy knoll in Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  While cold seeped into my backbone and breath frosted my beard, I had watched hundreds of flares and streamers, an utterly silent celestial bombardment without any crash and boom of artillery.  This year, though, Bill and I had an unwelcome guest.  Luna hovered at our shoulders, the sun full gold across her face.  Her glow overpowered all but the brightest meteorite flashes.  We had to trust that the stars were falling, but only at long intervals could we see their spark.

.     .     .     .     .

My friend Bill Blackley is a moon-bright sky.  His poems are the flash of meteorites.  When you meet Bill you will be warmed at once by his bright charm and quirky wit.  You’ll immediately sense that he never met a stranger.  Within the first minute he’ll have you laughing at one of his stories, or he’ll be listening to your own life story with deep compassion.

That’s the illuminated Bill.  In the darkness, artillery crashes.  I first met Bill in July, 1978.  He was Senior Resident, I was a green intern.  In all the years since then, though, I don’t think I would have ever really known him if not for his poems.  Oh, the charm and wit are there; so many of his poems reach out their hands and just welcome you in.  But read on — the crash and conflagration show through on nights when the moon has failed to rise.

.     .     .     .     .

These two poems by Bill sneak up on you and bite.  An Auger Bit may fool you into thinking it’s a simple reminiscence of the good old days, but its key word ends the first line — son.  The speaker is teaching his own son, and the time they share among the tool bins also redeems the speaker, son of an alcoholic who has broken the chains and freed his son.  Freed himself.  The title itself grabs me — what cutting edge and piercing point can we read between the lines?

I love to play with the title of the second poem, too.  Time Piece, it’s a piece about time, not only how we measure time but how we live it, and live through it.  And once again there are hidden teeth here.  The poem counts milestones of regret across the years, the loss of an heirloom, anger over being a victim of theft, feelings we can all identify with, but then there is the soul scorching image of peeling the watch from the arm of the dead soldier. Our measly hours:  this poem struggles, as we all do, to create some meaning from our years and at the end to discover some peace.

.     .     .    .     .

An Auger Bit

Let’s rummage together son
this pawn shop aisle, bins
stacked with monkey
wrenches, pulleys, winches
C-clamps, pliers, bastard files
blue snap-lines and ball-peen
hammers antiquated by electric
drivers and laser levels.  Your granddad

once worked wooden handles, oiled
calipers, turned them on shipyard steel
in Charleston harbor and launched
battle cruisers.  Let’s gather

chisel, plane, hacksaw and slot head
Yankee driver in memory of when
he holstered a yellow folding rule
a blunt pencil in his shirt pocket
before hocking his tools to quench
a thirst for a Four Roses.  Let’s mine
bins until we find a gauge calibrated
to plumb whiskey’s undoing.

.     .     .     .     .

A Time Piece

Two-finger blow a kiss
goodbye to dad’s graduation
watch left for easy
pickings on a beach blanket.   So long
to the self-winding Seiko rolled
in gray sweat pants outside
the handball court where
a thief slipped my treasured piece
into his pocket and beat it
while his lookout grinned.  Bon voyage
to the green-rimmed Swatch
a kid sticky fingered
from my pool locker .  C’est la guerre
to the radium-dotted Bulova I peeled
off a National Guard soldier in Vietnam
and airmailed, along with his scorched
effects, to Altoona.  Adios
to a fourteen-dollar Timex I tossed
to a co-worker when presented a fake Rolex
at my retirement gala.  Gods chuckle
at us mortals caching batteries, winding stems
and punching in our measly hours.

[first appeared in Cave Wall Issue #3, Winter/Spring 2008]

.     .     .     .     .

Bill Blackley is a retired family physician and a full time advocate for the public’s health.  He has saved you and me and a good percentage of our state’s population from cancer and lung disease through his relentless research about and opposition to biomass incinerators.  He has also promoted the literary health of our state’s youth as director since its inception of the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series.  AND . . . ten years ago he made me take over as treasurer of the NC Poetry Society, which has promoted my literary health (although it didn’t quite save me from cancer). Bill, I owe you, old pal!

.     .     .     .    .

I have a friend like that who wiggled poetry where I just couldn’t quite ignore it.  About twenty years ago Anne Gulley called: “Bill, the Friends of the Library is sponsoring a poetry series, and I think you should come.”  “The last poem I read was Walt Whitman in college.  Well, I think I did try to write Linda a poem for our twentieth anniversary.”  “There, you see.”

When I took German in high school our teacher, Herr Watt, spent as much time narrating all the Wagnerian operas for us as he did on pronunciation and declension.  He insisted, “This is important!  It’s part of your allgemeine Bildung*.”  Maybe it was curiosity, maybe I recognized the need to beef up my allgemeine Bildung, maybe it was a sheepish feeling of being undereducated, but I went to the series: six Sunday evenings reading contemporary poets I’d never heard of like A.R.Ammons and Sharon Olds.  Holy Zeitgeist, this was writing as fresh as today’s Washington Post and a couple of orders of magnitude more compelling.  My brain fizzed.  Thanks, Anne!  And the very best part was the instructor.

Joseph Bathanti drove down from the mountains for each of those Sunday sessions. So calm, so coaxing, another friend who just naturally expects more from you than you even expect from yourself, he held out a handful of seeds to the squirrels of our curiosity with confidence that we’d come.  When we read Ammons’s Hymn I shuddered to discover language that melds lyricism and physics, imagination and biology, the particular with the cosmic.  I had to discover more of this stuff.  I’m still discovering.  Thanks, Joseph!

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Last month Leighanne at the Foothills Arts Council called to see if I’d like read some poems at an event she was planning.  Music by “Not Your Usual . . . ,” wine by Grassy Creek, eight readers, she titled the evening BEAT!  If there are going to be beatniks, you can’t neglect Allen Ginsburg, so I decided to read America, but I also wanted to introduce folks who don’t know his work to our newest NC Poet Laureate – Joseph Bathanti.  I re-read Joseph’s newest collection, Restoring Sacred Art, and finally chose to read Your Leaving.

What grabs me about this poem (besides the razor sharp dead center descriptions) is the complexity of the characters, artfully revealed in just a few lines.  There’s the father laughing drunk the night before his daughter’s wedding, then next day standing stoic in his “mourning suit.”  Marie, giggling in a muumuu with her bridesmaids, is transformed, “perfect in all the ways a bride desires to be.”  Mother, one moment stern and organizing, the next moment lost “on the edge of her bed, still in her house dress.”  And of course there’s the little brother, angry at the cousins and the loss of his bed, but struggling with a greater loss as he begins his “apprenticeship as an only child.”  Ambivalence, conflict, longing, revelation – reading these lines is to walk into a new household and become part of the family.

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Your Leaving
for Marie

The night before you married,
Pap’s godsons from Detroit
got him drunk and I had to help
wrangle him upstairs, so mad

I threatened to punch them.
Married men, cement finishers
with mortar grey hands who spoke
broken English with Michigan accents,

they wore Bermuda shorts, undershirts,
black socks and tennis loafers.
My outrage made them laugh.
A father marrying off his only daughter,

his best girl, after all, is entitled
on the eve of the wedding
to drink as much as he wants.
Pap laughed too,

but he felt sorry for me.  Like them,
he figured I was still innocent.
We laid him in my bed.
Mother wouldn’t sleep with him,

“stupid drunk
the night before his daughter’s wedding.”
She blinked the porch light off and on
to signal you in from kissing

your fiancé in his red MG,
the first Protestant
to marry into the family.
No wonder Pap got drunk;

it was you last night home.
Your bridesmaids slept over,
cosmetic kits and high, spun hair,
spit-curls scotch-taped to their cheeks,

rustling aqua gowns lounging
from the mantel on cloth hangars.
the six of you stayed up all night in muumuus,
laughing and eating popcorn.

Downtown, the groom and his ushers cheered
the stripers at the Edison Hotel.
I had nowhere to sleep,
so I crawled into your empty bed, and began

my apprenticeship as an only child.
The next day, Pap got up
and donned his mourning suit.
The girls descended the porch steps

in single file, heads bowed
over nosegays as the photographer
stilled each for posterity.
And you, only twenty, behind them,

without hesitation, disguised
in wedding dress and veil, perfect
in all the ways a bride desires to be,
the repeated click of the camera

documenting those first irrevocable seconds
of your leaving once and for all,
while upstairs Mother san on the edge
of her bed, still in a house dress.

© 2010 by Joseph Bathanti, Star Cloud Press, Scottsdale AZ

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A couple of years after that Friends of the Library series Anne called again.  “We’ve arranged a Saturday morning poetry writing workshop at the Arts Council.  I really want you to meet Frank Levering.  And Bill is going to be there.”  A whole new story – estrangement, reconciliation, inspiration, new friendships.  Anne, you can’t quit challenging me!

While I was trying not to step in the bear scat on Albert Mountain two weeks ago, the Foothills Arts Council held opening night for Anne’s show Mythology–eyes, which will be up through most of November.  Her oils, from almost pocket-size to wall filling, are for me a little like that Ammons poem.  Rooted in closely observed and rendered beasts, landscapes, they branch and soar into surreal planes that challenge me to see, to think, to discover.  Thanks, Anne!  My allgemeine Bildung continues to accrue.

Here’s a photo of Anne cloistered in her Cabinet of Curiosity, and me reading Your Leaving at the FAC.

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*   Allgemeine Bildung = general culture, or education – Google the phrase for 17 megahits.

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Why have they come?  Why have they driven hundreds of miles of highway and another twenty of Forest Service gravel to this Deep Gap?  Why have they tracked down my friend Mike Barnett and persuaded him to share with them everything they will need to know to spend a few nights on the trail? Why forsake comfort for mist, rain, steep switchbacks, cold nights, hard ground?  Why have they come here?

Now they huddle at the trail head – Judy, Nora, Cathy, Gloria, Joan, Nancy – median age 65 (just a wild guess, Ladies!).  They pull on fleece and rain gear because we’re already above 3,000 feet and it’s mid-October.  Mist condenses on the leaves and drips like rain.  The plan is to hike the AT for three days with everything we need to survive on our backs: food, stove, water & filter, tent, mummy bags, and lots of layers for nights just above freezing.  We’ll reward ourselves the third night with a short side hike to Albert Mountain and hope to catch the sunset and sunrise from the 5,280 foot summit and fire tower.

That sunrise seems a long way off as we hunker down for the first night half-way up Standing Indian Mountain.  It’s pitch dark , a “hunter moon,” first new moon after equinox, but what does absent moon matter when we are engulfed in cloud with thunder echoing ridge to ridge as lightning strikes the summit?  Kids, I just want to let you know that your grandmothers are some tough-ass mountain women – they wake up the next morning joking that the howl of wind and rain had caused them to miss George Clooney’s surprise midnight visit.  And the only complaint I hear is when Joan comes back from digging a cat hole just as the mist lifts to reveal a nice rainproof privy not twenty yards from our camp site.

Our second night we stop at Beech Gap, a saddle between peaks with a good spring and level tent sites.  The stars burn cold as diamond just above our shoulders; we are wearing every layer of clothing we’ve carried.  I ask, “Why?  Why did you go to so much trouble to put this trek together?”

Judy was the instigator.  She told Nora she wanted to hike at least one stretch of the Appalachian Trail before she died.  Nora replied, “Gee, I know someone who’s been taking kids on high adventure hikes in the mountains for twenty years, and his sister-in-law Carol is my good friend.”  Nora called Carol, Carol called Mike, and Mike said, “OK.”  (I still haven’t asked him why he said yes!)  Wheels began to turn.  It began to look like Judy’s promise to herself that she’d have something big to to tell her grandchildren would be fulfilled.

Nora invited others, and Mike’s wife Nancy makes six.  One had hiked with her family as a child and wanted to recapture that feeling.  One walked miles every day and wondered if she could handle the challenge of doing it uphill with a pack.  Another had become concerned about her stamina and embarked on a course to improve her fitness; now she wanted to kick it up a notch. One had never experienced mountain wilderness.  All of the women had come with a frank openness to experiencing something new.  Something challenging.

There are plenty of obvious physical challenges to spending a night on a mountain.  Just deciding what you’re willing to carry vs. what you’re willing to live without can become a metaphysical exercise.  Then there’s the trail itself.  Where will I find water?  Will the spring be dry?  How many uphill miles before my buns turn to steel?  How much huffing and puffing before I have a heart attack?

Physical challenges are obvious, but they are illusory.  I may be thirsty now, but I will drink later.  When the trail is steep, I walk more slowly.  I stop and rest.  Tired and sore?  Leaves are falling that I may scrape together for a bower.  Strange noises in the night?  My companions are close by.

I’m guessing there are still more reasons we’ve come to these mountains that none of us have yet spoken.  I’m certain there are reasons we couldn’t even have named until after we took this walk together.  There are reasons we’ll discover only with days and weeks of contemplation to come.  A taste of wildness – remote, unforgiving, pristine, elemental.  An assurance of self – I made it, I persevered.  Connection, unvarnished and unabashed – each one of us making our small offering to the survival, and the joy, of the group.  And a much larger connection – wind, trees, slopes, stars . . .  we are part of this living realm and can’t exist without it.

Why have we come here?  That’s exactly what we’re still discovering.

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Final question: Why did Mike ask me if I’d like to come and lend a hand as general schlepper, filter pumper, water boiler, story teller?  Because he knew as soon as the word “mountains” left his lips I would be saying, “YES!”

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Forever Mountain
Fred Chappell

for J.T.Chappell, 1912-1978

Now a lofty smoke has cleansed my vision.

I see my father has gone to climb
Lightly the Pisgah slope, taking the time
He’s got a world of, making spry headway
In the fresh green mornings, stretching out
Noontimes in the groves of beech and maple.
He has cut a walking stick of second-growth hickory
And through the amber afternoon he measures
Its shadow and his own shadow on a sunny rock.
Not marking the hour, but observing
The quality of light come over him.
He is alone, except what voices out of time
Swarm to his head like bees to the bee-tree crown,
The voices of former life as indistinct as heat.

By the clear trout pool he builds his fire at twilight,
And in the night a granary of stars
Rises in the water and spreads from edge to edge.
He sleeps, to dream the tossing dream
Of the horses of pine trees, their shoulders
Twisting like silk ribbon in the breeze.

He rises glad and early and goes his way,
Taking by plateaus the mountain that possesses him.

My vision blurs blue with distance,
I see no more.
Forever Mountain has become a cloud
That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.

This is continually a prayer.

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from The Fred Chappell Reader, St. Martin’s Press, (c) 1987 by Fred Chappell

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A brief postscript: Mike has told me several times of his instructions to Nancy that his ashes are to be strewn from the top of Standing Indian Mountain.  By noon on our second day the mist had lifted, and we ate lunch at that summit with glorious views of the autumn-hued ridges extending to an infinite horizon.  Mike, I hope it’s years in our future, but I can’t think of a better spot to lend the flora a little potash and calcium for all eternity.

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Our true home lies outside, deep in the wilderness of forest and mountain, river and desert and sea, the source of our being and the destiny of our great meandering blundering dreaming journey through time. Like Odysseus in his wanderings, we are homeward bound whether we know it or not.
Edward Abbey

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