V E R S E and I M A G E

I just had the funniest thought: it’s the

singing of Wales and whales that I like so

much: you know, have you heard those men’s

groups, those coal miners and church people in

Wales singing: to be deeply and sweetly undone,

listen in: and the scrawny rising and

screechings and deep bellowings of whales,

their arias personal (?) and predatory at

love and prey – that makes up mind for us as

we study to make out mind in them: the reason

I can’t attain world view or associational

complexity is that when I read I’m asleep by

the second paragraph: also, my poems come in

dislocated increments, because my spine between

the shoulderblades gets to hurting when I type:

also my feet swell from sitting still: but

when the world tilts one way it rights another

which is to say that the disjunctiveness of my

recent verse cracks up the dark cloud and

covering shield of influence and lets fresh

light in, more than what little was left, a

sliver along the farthest horizon: room to

breathe and stretch and not give a shit, room

to turn my armies of words around in or camp

out and hide (bivouac): height to reach up

through the smoke and busted mirrors to clear

views of the beginnings high in the oldest

times: but seriously you know, this way of

seeing things is just a way of seeing things:

time is not crept up on by some accumulative

designer but percolates afresh every day like

a hot cup of coffee: and Harold, if this is

an Evening Land, when within memory was it

otherwise, all of civilized time a second in

the all of time: good lord, we’re all so

recent, we’ve hardly got our ears scrubbed,

hair unmatted, our teeth root-canaled: so,

shine on, shine on, harvest moon: the computers

are clicking, and the greatest dawn ever is

rosy in the skies.

++++++++++ CAST THE OVERCAST

from Bosh and Flapdoodle, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; © 2005

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January 1: The big round thermometer on the back porch reads 35 degrees Fahrenheit. A long thin coiled spring of two facing layers: each face different metals which contract differently when cooled: the spring’s central attachment a little axle free to rotate: on the axle a needle, a pointer that is able to inscribe an arc three-quarters of a circle: -40 to 140 degrees, currently 35. In 2024 when we can simply inquire of our phone, are we really meant to believe this dubious mechanical contraption?

My ear lobes, the back of my neck, and my nose hairs believe it. I zip up, pull my cap lower, and walk down the hill toward the river. Jason has pulled in and unlocked the gate. Soon more layered and downed figures arrive. Here we go, twenty-five of us, on our First Day Hike along this newest little section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail beside the Yadkin River in Surry County.

First Day Hikes have sprung up all over, parks and neighborhoods, greenways and rail trails. About half of this morning’s walkers have never before attended an Elkin Valley Trails Association event. Something new to show this old muddy river. Fresh coyote tracks on a sandy bank. In a rotting stump, a big square pileated woodpecker hole that wasn’t here 3 days ago when Jason scouted. Still-moist chips at the base of a girdled tree and bright incisor marks from the beaver.

Now we’re crossing a meadow with waving heads of last summer’s asters, dry and higher than our own heads. I’m pulling goldenrod and wingstem seeds to sow on newly bare ground around the new crossing over Dutchman Creek. Dee remarks on the beauty of particular airy feathered fronds – dog fennel, no summer eye-catcher but striking in its winter browns and grays.

Old? New? Or just a continuous flow of moments like these? I’ll turn away from my mirror. I won’t query my knees. I’ll unzip my jacket, because now we’re moving and I’m plenty warm. I’ll  enjoy a big inhale of the river-moist air. I’ll listen to the chatter of hikers and the whistle of white-throated sparrows. I’ll make myself ready to notice the next new thing before us.

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Once (there was a time when) I was attracted

to, if not attractive to, everybody, starlet

and streetlet, athlete and bellybag: afire,

I burned anything, including myself: kneedeep

in ashen brush, even some simmering fagots, I

tried to separate the heat from the flame but

gave up, pouring it all into the love of a wife

now nearly half a century old – the wife a

little older: most of those old flames (sweet

people) have flickered away except for the

corner of my mind where lively they live on in

honor, honorary doctorates circling their

laureled heads – what schools they founded!

taking what pains, with what tears, they taught

me how, roaring possibilities and tenderest

glows: love, love, one learns to love, it is

not easy, yet not to love, even astray, leaves

something left for the grave: burnt out

completely is ease at last, the trunk honeyed

full as a fall hive: when the light dies out

at last on the darkening coals, the life

turns to jewels, so expensive, and

they never give the sparkle up: this was

a fancy, and not half fancy enough and somewhat

lacking in detail but ever true.

from Bosh and Flapdoodle, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; © 2005

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My friend Anne gave me Bosh and Flapdoodle. A. R. “Archie” Ammons wrote the collection of poems in 1996, five years before his death, and his son and friends had it published in 2005, all of the poems, as they say, “exactly as Ammons wrote them.” I am always surprised by Ammons. Throughout his life as a writer he demonstrates that poetry is everywhere, and everything. There is nothing mundane or unworthy of being noticed. That itself can be surprising, especially if you have the idea that poetry exists on some elevated plane, but I’m also often taken off guard, like a snow ball to the face, by his sudden deep connections that reveal the reality of our existence.

. . . so if you are to get any passion out

of life, you’ll have to dig it out of narrow

spaces or squeeze all you have into slender,

if deep, circumstance: I myself have never

known what to do about anything: as I look

back, I see not even a clown but a clown’s

clothes flapping on the clothesline of some

tizzy: . . .

A. R. Ammons and Fred Chappell have been my enduring poetic inspirations. They are alike in that their poetry can be complex and difficult, but they both always return to the earthy assurance of our humanity. Perhaps because they both grew up in rural North Carolina, Archie in the sandhills and Fred in the mountains? This book, more than most any Ammons collection I’ve read, is personal and intimate, and of course as always irreverent, but even more than usually hilarious. He demolishes any grand notion of his greatness (he, one of the greatest 20th century American poets). He crushes any sentimentality about aging or his own approaching death. He invites, I guess he requires, his reader to just look around and really look within and stop for a minute to think about what’s going down. Yeah, it’s bosh and flapdoodle. Yeah, it’s life.

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More about Archibald Randolf Ammons HERE

Purchase Bosh and Flapdoodle from Bookshop.org HERE

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Don’t you think poetry should be succinct:

not now: I think it should be discinct: it

should wander off and lose its way back and

then bump into a sign and have to walk home:

who gives a hoot about those big-Mack trucks

of COMPRESSION: what are the most words for

the least: take your cute little compact and

don’t tell me anything about it: just turn me

loose, let me rattle my ole prattle: poetry

springs greatest from deepest depths: well,

let her whistle: how shallow can anything

get: (rhyming on the front end): I do not

believe that setting words to rhyme and meter

turns prose into poetry, and having written

some of the shortest poems, I now like to

write around largely into any precinct (not

succinct) or pavilion (a favorite word) I fall

in with: I have done my duty: I am a happy

man: I am at large: life sho is show biz:

make room for the great presence of nothing:

do you never long to wander off: from the

concentrations: for it is one thing to fail

of them and another never to have intended

them: the love nest, men becomes a solid

little (mortgaged) colonial: duty become your

chief commendation: the animal in you, older

than your kind, longs to undertake the heavy

freedom of going off by himself into the wide

periphery of chance and surprise, pleasure or

terror: oh, come with me, or go off like me,

if only in the deep travels of your soul, and

let your howl hold itself in through all the

forests of the night: it’s the shortest day:

the sun is just now setting behind the branch

of the crabapple tree it always sets behind

this day of the year. . . .

++++++++++ DRAB POT

from Bosh and Flapdoodle, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; © 2005

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