Closing Out April: What Stuck With Me

It is the last day of National Poetry Month, so today is the last day (for awhile at least) I inflict my poetry on my readers. It is only fitting that the last poem of the month ties back to a much earlier work that I ran early in the month.

When I posted Kentucky Funeral and said I wanted to rewrite parts of it, Blogville friendTerri asked what lines I would have rewritten. I replied in part: I'd rework…the description of the pallbearers (both how they were dressed and where they came from - they were people who lived up & down the holler, not exactly a "neighborhood," but clearly a community) …The pallbearers made such an impression on me that...Oh heck, I may just have come up with one of this month's poems!

In responding to a question about what I would change, I realized that what I wanted to do was not rewrite the original poem, but write a different poem about the memory.

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What Stuck With Me

Thirty five years later, they stick in my memory,
Those men from the surrounding hills and hollers,
Waiting in groups of five and six
Spaced all up the hillside
To relay the coffin to the mountaintop cemetery
Where no hearse could go.

No one group could begin to haul
A coffin that far -
        200 yards?
        300 yards?
        More?
Up an incline where the only path
Had been worn slick from the rain
And the family trips up to dig the grave by hand.

They were dressed for the weather and the task at hand:
        Hunting clothes
        Coveralls
        Work boots.
Silently, they unloaded the casket
And carried it up the hill to the top
With a terrible and swift choreography
Before melting away to leave the family to its mourning.

This was paying their respects.
This was seeing that one of their own was laid to rest
         in the good dirt of home.
This was dealing with death head on and straight up.

That's what has stuck with me all these years
     -    More than the view from the mountaintop
     -    More than the family talk that day
     -    More than the terrapin in Atheen's hands.

Just those men, silently carrying out the last rites.

To an Unknown Concertgoer

Today's poem is also based on a true event. At the March 2010 concert, someone in the audience was so struck by the soloist's performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor that he called out the moment she lifted her bow off the strings. Clearly the concertgoer was deeply moved by the performance he had just witnessed. A few weeks later, in rehashing the concert with another attendee, I mentioned that moment in reference to the virtuosity of the performer. The woman with whom I was talking pursed her mouth sharply and made the comment captured in the poem.

Over a year later, I still find myself reliving that moment. The air was still vibrating and someone in the audience could no longer hold in his emotion over what he had just experienced. I'm glad he couldn't.

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To the Unknown Concertgoer

There are those who attend to concerts with precision:
Never clapping out of turn or being the first to rise in appreciation.
And, heavens, no shouting "Bravo!"

He was not one of them.

When the last note of the violin concerto was played, he cried out
The moment the soloist lifted her bow in completion
And there was that half beat of silence
Before the conductor lowered his baton.

We could all hear his call, like a mourning dove up in the dome of the hall,
An aching, yearning "ahhh" that he had to release.
It hung in the air just before the wave of applause broke.

A patron pulled her mouth tight recounting the moment.
"Well, clearly that was not someone
Who has been to concerts frequently enough
To know how to behave."

I wish I had been that listener in the audience
    Crying out in appreciation
    Crying out at music so moving that it would break the heart to keep silent.

I wish I had been the one to not behave so beautifully.

Wrapping Up Monologues: Mabel's Story

The great English poet Robert Browning wrote many monologues, among them My Last Duchess, the one most likely to be encountered in high school. Browning was a prodigious and exuberant writer and I have often read him just to be uplifted.

He also rhymed his monologues, which even now remains a feat beyond my capability.

This last monologue is actually based on a real person, my paternal grandmother. My grandmother was an unimaginative, hardworking farmwife who came from Kentucky in the depths of the Great Depression with her husband and her little son, my dad. (I do not know whether my aunt Gail had been born yet.)

I know very little about my grandmother's early years, other than she loved school so much that she repeated eighth grade three times just to stay in school. This was back in a time in rural Kentucky when a high school education required having the money to board the student "in town."

Life was not easy for my grandmother after she married. Money was tight. My grandfather, although a strong worker, drank. My grandmother always had many health problems, all of them exacerbated and accelerated by her refusal to take care of her health. I remember her as a no-nonsense, unaffectionate woman who was always working at something: canning, quilting, cooking, gardening, gathering eggs, cleaning the house.

In the photo, my grandmother is the woman smack in the middle of the photo, her arms on the shoulders of her parents in front.

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Maggie Mabel

I loved school -
     the chalky smell of it
     the flag hanging in the corner
     the neatness of Teacher's desk.
Loved it all so much I wanted to go on with my learning,
but there wasn't enough money to board me in town
what with all the youngsters still at home and Ma's weak heart.
They let me repeat eighth grade twice more as a kind of teacher's
helper, but then everyone said "That's enough,"
and Pa was doing poorly too.

What do you do when you are 17 and live back up a holler
with younger sisters all prettier than you?
They got the curly hair; they got the smiles that lit up their faces.
Me? I was built square and solid, close to the ground, my hair thin and frizzy.
Even when I was happy, I viewed the world
with a grim look of no expectations.
So when that tall, rangy boy came courting me, I didn't say no,
no matter what I thought.

We started out like so many others with a lick and a promise of
better things to come.
Jim'd drive if there was gas or else ride the mule
to where he was cutting wood for the day.
I stayed home, cooking and cleaning.
I tended the garden,
put up canned goods, quilted every scrap I could find, gathered eggs,
and scratched out our daily bread from that shallow, rocky soil.

When the Depression came, we didn't so much as feel it, times already being
bad in the hills. Then it got worse.
We eked out a life until our boy turned three,
then Jim came home and said we were headed to Ohio,
where the farming was better and
he could surely find work.

And that was that.

While he tuned and patched our old Ford, I sorted
and packed the household goods,
my face already hardened to the future.

Olives

This monologue is based in small part on half-remembered phrases and lines from a poem that was destroyed in the Great Shredding. I had drafted a poem about a family feast in an olive orchard. When Bobby showed up in my head a few weeks ago to tell me his story, that scene slipped itself into this poem.

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The Sweet Memory of Olive Oil

We went over there just that one time -
my old man taking Mama
back to the village she'd come from in '45
after the war ended.

I was just a little boy, an Americano
in my striped tee-shirt and
Red Ball Jets.
I was tired from a too long plane flight,
thirsty and fretful from a long hot dusty road. 

Soon, Bobby, soothed my mother.
Presto, Roberto, presto.

Then we were there.
The farmhouse perched
on the edge of the village
and all these people - zias and zios -
all come to see their Maria home.

I remember best the feast -
what else could you call it?
To my five year old eyes, the table went on forever,
famiglia on both sides.
Nonna sat at the head of the table,
her white braids a crown on her head.
The sun, dappled through the grape leaves, the dry baked earth air,
The whole thing set to a hum of bees.

I can still taste the sharp bite of the salt-cured olives,
the sweet sop of olive oil on the pane.
Stories and laughter passing back and forth across the white tablecloths,
platters passing up and down the long stretch of table.
The drone of the bees back and forth in the air,
the pasta surely made in heaven.

The day rolled over to night and I fell asleep,
carried away by the very stars themselves.

We never went back.
Mama lost touch with her sisters after Nonna died
and I don't know the name of the village,
let alone the way to it.

I wake sometimes and
sit up in bed,
the smell of baking earth caking my nostrils,
the hum of bees loud in my ears.
I call out for Mama, call out for mia nonna.
I call for my famiglia gathered again under that grape arbor
before remembering that was 60 years ago
and I'm old enough to be a nonno myself.

Next to me, my wife stirs. 

"Go back to sleep," I tell her, patting her shoulder.
"It was only a dream."

Beach Monologue

At many points, most of them low, in my younger life, I fantasized pulling up every stake I had and setting out to somewhere else. Somewhere else was where I didn't know anyone and didn't have any connections. Invariably, my dreams would take me to some nameless small town tacked to the New England seacoast. I would get a job at a local restaurant (never mind that I at that age was an apathetic waitress at best), rent a sparely furnished room in someone's house, and live my life.

In my fantasies, my new life was always idyllic.

This monologue is the flip side: a "what if?" written for that tempestuous young woman of yore.

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On the Beach

So it has come to this: a sparse, bare cottage -
Oh, let's be truthful, a shack really -
that rents cheap in this little beach town gritty with sand and hard times.

I piece together a living: 20 hours at the library,
10 hours at the grocery, odd jobs here and there.
It keeps the lights on, but it's
nothing to write home about, if there was anyone left to write home to.

I eat simply and sparingly, out of concern for both my
health and my pocketbook.
In the summer, I grow a few tomatoes
off the back deck and feel rich beyond compare.

Most of my needs can be met at the Salvation Army store next town over.
I don't know about my wants anymore.

I have to think a few minutes to come up with how long I've been here,
almost but not quite having to count on my fingers.
I was young, of course - who isn't, setting off on a quest? -
and I knew - knew deep in my bones - that I was the one with
the golden touch, the quicksilver pen.
Five months, ten months, and I would have a fat manuscript of poems
that would out-Frost Robert Frost.
So I chose this little town, well off the tourist track,
and settled down to write. 

I would write the best stuff of my life up here,
fueled by the eternal promise of the ocean.

Ten months stretched into twenty, and then twenty more. 
After sixty months, I stopped counting.

The little jobs I took for "color," for "authentic voice,"
became the daily routine
until I grew tired of collecting rejection slips and food stamps,
and looked for work that would at least allow me to eat.

It's been almost thirty-five years since I shuffled off the coil of my hometown
told mom I'd make it, she'd see
turned down the hesitant proposal from the old boyfriend
and drove north just like Stuart Little.
A lot of tides have come and gone. I look in the mirror
and see my mother's lined face staring back out at me,
see the silver laced through my hair.

I still walk the beach, picking up driftwood
and other wave-borne oddments for my room,
not even bothering to scan the horizon for my ship that never came in.

Looking Back

Starting today, I will be posting four monologues by characters who have shown up in my head to talk about their lives. These monologues, like most of my other poetry, are triggered by images or phrases that I see or hear.

Today's monologue was triggered by an article about the "new" small farmers and the social, physical, economical, and practical hurdles they face. I'm a huge proponent of supporting and bringing food production back to a local level: this is not a commentary scorning that movement. But the article reminded me of earlier "back to the land" movements and those who eventually gave up on those earnest plans. This is about the small picture of relentless hard work and great sacrifice to follow a dream, and what is left if the dream dissolves. 

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Looking Back

Looking back, we were all so earnest,
gathering for our monthly potlucks
of rice and beans and lumpy breads.

Squatting in the cold March mud
to thumb in the broccoli, our breath
small clouds hanging in the damp, chill air.

And the knitting! My god, the knitting!
We did it endlessly, when we weren't
spinning the wool, or the honey. Sweaters
and shawls and gloves and hats: small wonder
we didn't clothe the sheep themselves in wool wraps.

The chickens, the pigs.
The chickweed, the pigweed.
Hauling the slops to the pigs, the pigs
to the butcher, the pork chops to the freezer.
It never stopped.

What was it then, that changed? What was it that made us say
"that's enough," and scrub our hands raw at the sink
until every trace of soil was gone from under our nails?

It wasn't the goodness of the first tomato of summer
or the soft down of the chicks
that did us in. Heaven knows those were gifts,
plain and simple.
It was something more basic.
One mud-tracked rug too many,
one more torn fingernail,
all five grain casseroles and no desserts at the potluck.

Something as little as that.

We sold off
the chickens, the tiller. Gave up the lease and
moved back to the rhythm and hum of the city.
Never looked back, never kept track of the cost,
plus or minus. What good would have come of that?
Nothing but heartache and some tallies on a sheet of paper.

No, better to leave that door closed: the knitting unfinished,
the herbs gone wild,
the heart gone to seed.

Childhood Moments: Easter

When my sons were little, we sometimes went to an upscale Easter brunch. At one such brunch, an adult wearing a large bunny outfit was greeting small children. This was during the years when Sam was terrified of anyone, especially an adult, wearing a costume. The Easter Bunny was over to one side, with a ring of children around him, so Sam was comfortable with proceeding to our table. Midway through the meal, the Easter Bunny started circulating the room. At some point, he came up directly behind Sam, who was intent on eating, and placed a large paw on Sam’s head. Sam froze, the color draining from his face. Ben, in an act of big brother protectiveness, hissed “Sam! Don't. Look. Behind. You.” The adults waved the Bunny off, the moment passed without further incident, and that morning remains a favorite memory of mine.

Other memories are not so pleasant. One such moment occurred with Ben and Easter when he was in first grade. Religion, like so many other topics, was one more landmine in the household. As a result, the boys grew up with no religion or discussions of faith and spirituality. Easter, even in its most commercial and non-religious form, somehow also ended up on the non-observed list.

Just days ago I posted a sonnet about how life is only a one-take proposition. All the same, what parent out there hasn’t replayed events from their children’s childhood and winced? The moment captured below, in contrast to the day of the giant Bunny, is one that eighteen years later I still wish I could take back and make right.  (And for those who wonder when they get to the end, yes, Sam got one too.)

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Easter

Your 1st grade classmates were talking
About chocolate bunnies
And Peeps
And hunting for colored eggs.

Peter Cottontail was hopping into every one of their homes.

You came home, all of seven, and asked
Tentatively
If we celebrated Easter.

“No,” said your dad, “we don’t believe in Easter.”

You hung your head to hide
The disappointment
But I heard you whisper,
“I believe in Easter.”

You never mentioned Easter again.
You never asked to dye an egg.
You never asked for a chocolate bunny.
When Peeps came home from the grocery,
You ate them without comment.

Easter was never on your calendar.

Over the years, I would hear your small
“I believe in Easter”
And yearn to give it back to you.

This year, I packed a box 
With chocolate eggs and a surprise or two
And shipped them out to you,
A long overdue visit from the Easter Bunny.