The Old Mule

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Dylan Thomas is an incredible poet, and a very fine story teller.

Grey swollen salt pond,
arched poplar, leaves
cover moss and roots
exposed. Gutted fish
hang tail-down from cord,
tree to tree, smoke
and salt – breaking acorns
and getting past winter.

This is the beginning
of a dream I had – hard
sleep, rare on this
day after day of ice
and buried north, the nip
of winter even beneath
sheets. This is Inupiat
he told me, warned me.
Point Hope, home.

Fall is here, and life on the farm is full of happiness. So much to be done. There is never a moment when all is accomplished, and thus we press ever in to the next and the trick is to be happy in that flowing turn of moments then days into seasons. I just love the fall. I spilled an entire can of irrigation primer on my hand and my skin was the color of pretty leaves, for a little while. I would rather die that way than stumble into a city sewer grate. Maybe that never really happens either.

Here is an excellent poem by a poet I was never too stirred up over. But maybe I need to dust off some books.

--

"Reverie and Invocation" by William Carlos Williams

Whether the rain comes down
or there be sunny days
the sleets of January or the haze
of autumn afternoons, when
we dream of our youth our gaze
grows mellow, wise man or fool,
we were young, the future
beckoned us.

Now we grow old and grey
and all we knew is forgotten
there comes alive in
the ash of today, memory! a god
who revives us! the apple trees
we climbed as a boy
the caress on our necks of
a summer breeze.

Come back and give us
those days when passion drove us
to break every rule.
We weren't bad, but good!
May our preachers find us
the courage still to sin so
and win so! and win so!
a life everlasting.

"Reverie and Invocation" by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems. © New Directions, 1962

Fargo
by John Updike

"The fertillest soil this side of the Tigris
and Euphrates"—so the schoolchildren
of the countryside are taught, of their land
flat as a checkerboard to the hem of the sky.
The giant sky, pale green at dusk, stays black
long after morning cow-milking time.
Wind is incessant in winter, so
that snow falls sideways, like arctic sunshine.
...
This land of Lutherans and sugar beets
thickens its marvelous thinness here at the edge
of a Red River whose windings alone
betray the rectilinear. Downtown,
parking space is no problem, and grain-fed health
rewards those God's grandeur does not drive mad.

I am moving. So part of that process involves taking down poems and notes I have pasted to appliances over the years. So I stand in the kitchen with rolls of tape and biodegradable peanuts, heaps of empty boxes and cabinets to get organized, and all I can do is stand by the stove and read poetry. The upside of all this is that I get to re-live some really good stories, since to me, all good poems are stories. Not like Allen Ginsberg (fine poet) who used to always ask: is this a poem, or is this a song. To me a good song...

Tom Sleigh is a master of story. Here is my evidence:

from The New Yorker, December 20, 2010. http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2003/sleigh-wong.html

Homage to Mary Hamilton
by Tom Sleigh

I’m driving past discarded tires,
the all night carwash dreams
near Green-wood Cemetery where
the otherworld of Queens

puts out trash—trash of Murder, Inc.,
trash of heartbeat
in recycled newspapers where
Romeo and Juliet meet.

So much thorny underbrush,
so much ice overgrowing
my windshield until frost shields a buck
behind a billboard forest

selling someone’s half-dressed daughter.
She melts into the defroster
roaring like the rich guys’ helicopters
at the Wall Street heliport,

rotoring down through skyscrapers
where torchsong lipstick smears
onto a handkerchief and starched collar.
But in my face snow blizzards

up from sixteen wheelers and
three crows clot against limbs
downswooping, omen of the augurs
that steers the desperate lovers

to a crossroads, right here. And where mobsters
and suicides lie buried
and the radio breaks into a ballad
of Mary Hamilton’s fair body,

but who’s tied it in her apron
and thrown it in the sea,
I’m the quake and shortlived quiver,
the laughter and fractured tale

of her night in the laigh cellar
with the hichest Stewart of a’.
Oh, she’s washed the Queen’s feet
and gently laid her down

but a’ the thanks she’s gotten this night’s
to be hanged in Edinbro’ town.
I’m sitting behind the wheel
of our mutual desire

when the heel comes off her shoe
on the Parliament stair
and lang or she cam down again
she was condemned to dee:

but the instant the news comes on
and drones spy down
on our compulsions, her hands
under my hands wrestle

on the wheel as my foot taps
the brakes, her foot the gas
when out of the gliding dark
I spot his velvet rack.

Last night there were four Toms,
today they’ll be but three:
there was Tom Fool, Sweet Tooth Tom,
Tom the Bomb, and me.

This is a masterpiece.

Thamar and Amnon
By Federico García Lorca

Translated By Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili

The moon revolves in the sky
over waterless lands
while summer sows
murmurs of tiger and flame.
Hovering over the roofs
metal nerves are sounding.
Frizzled air rises
from the bleating of wool.
Earth shows itself full
of cicatrized wounds,
or shaken by acute
cauteries of white lights.

Thamar was dreaming,
birds in her throat,
to the sound of cool tambourines
and moon-bathed cithars.
Her nakedness on the eaves,
sharp pole-star of palm,
asks for snow flakes on her belly
and hail on her shoulders.
Thamar was singing
naked on the terrace.
Around her feet,
five frozen pigeons.
Amnon, slender and concrete,
in the tower gazed at her
his loins full of foam
and his beard of vibration.
His illuminated nakedness
was stretched out on the terrace,
with between his teeth a murmur
of newly struck arrow.
Amnon was gazing at
the round and low moon,
and he saw in the moon his sister’s
very firm breasts.

At half-past three Amnon
stretched himself on his bed.
The whole alcove suffered
with his eyes full of wings.
The thick light buries
villages in the brown sand,
or discovers momentary
coral of roses and dahlias.
Water from the well, oppressed,
blossoms silence in the jars.
On the moss of tree trunks
the stretched cobra sings.
Amnon groans between the cold
sheets of his bed.

The ivy of shivering
spreads over his parched flesh.
Thamar entered silent
in the silenced alcove,
colour of vein and Danube
troubled with remote trails.
—Thamar, efface these eyes
with your steadfast dawn.
My threads of blood weave
flounces over your skirt.
—Leave me in peace, brother.
Your kisses in my shoulder
are wasps and light breezes
in a double swarm of flutes.
—Thamar, in your turgent breasts
are two fishes calling me,
and in the tips of your fingers
are murmurs of sealed rose.

The hundred horses of the king
neighed in the courtyard.
The slenderness of the vine
resisted the sun in squares.
Now he grasps her by the hair,
now he claws her dress.
Tepid corals draw
rivulets on a golden map.

Oh, what screams were heard
above the houses!
What thickness of daggers
and ripped-up tunics.
Along the sad stairways
slaves go up and down.
Pistons and thighs play
under suspended clouds.
Around Thamar
gypsy virgins scream
and others collect the drops
of her martyrized flower.
White fabrics redden
in the closed alcoves.
Rumours of cool aurora
vine-tendrils and fishes change.

Amnon, enraged violator,
flees away on his pony.
Negroes aim arrows at him
from ramparts and towers.
And when the four hoofs
were just four echoes,
David, with a pair of scissors,
cut the strings of his harp.

"Thamar and Amnon" by Federico García Lorca, from THE SELECTED POEMS OF FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA. Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili, copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

Source: The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1955)

Edward Clark, “Painting Sacré-Coeur from the Ancient Rue Norvins in Montmartre, Paris, 1946, from The Great LIFE Photographers.

I remember standing on the second floor of the University of Oregon library and pulling a seldom dusted Snyder copy off the shelves, reading axe handle or Japanese pastoral backwoods, or Big Sur with an unreasonable arc of transcendence, and about that point (though earlier, I imagine) I decided that good poems are as important as the mulling of seasons, quiet discussions of the almost arrived, rumination of where and how. Good poems are that, at least. Huddel is a good poet.

--

"She and My Granddad" by David Huddel

My grandfather—who died in 1970—
the year Sexual Politics was published—

called objects—screwdrivers, blow torches, trucks
—and sometimes even abstractions—winter,

pain, time—by the singular feminine
pronoun—she or her. For instance he would say,

I reckon she's coming up on quitting time,
or (of a favorite hammer), I guess

she ain't nowhere to be found. Kate Millett,
asked about the future of the woman's movement,

said, How in the hell do I know? I don't run it,
to which Granddad—at war with Gradmama all

my life but drawn to women, always polite—
would have said, Yes ma'am, can't nobody run her.

"She and My Granddad" by David Huddle. Reprinted with permission of the author

Bent Creek Pond, 1987

This is the best year, we drive
past the gravel in to grass
near a water edge with button-
brush and grasses giving way
to an evening’s worth of sitting
back checking out, but really
worrying about your thin
summer dress and maybe you
thought of me. But either way
your chest filled in good air
and you shake hair from your
face to look out beside me
and it is summer, July almost, so
tonight may be just hours, but
those hours rise to a chorus
of something much longer, held
up taller than the fall of a night
lit by bright stars, arranged by
coon dogs in pens and water
frogs, maybe oaks, and the pond
breaks in small turmoil on a moss
rich bank, eased with the low hum
of two people sitting close, watching.

Beautiful day, first of may. Setting out plants in the garden and everything is fine.

--

Poem by John Hodgen, a great poet.

Clay County

Just past Kellie Mae's Klip 'n' Dip Beauty Salon
and the cement slab, cinder blocks, and rusty tin roof
of the Lawtey Grace Community Evangelical Church,
and behind the saw grass and scrub brush along Pitchkettle Road,
a young black girl stands dawdling with one foot behind the other,
her toe digging rhythmically into the red clay of her driveway,
her heel wagging cozily like a cat's tail, a metronome,
as she talks to a young man on a motorcycle,
his red helmet still on, true biker of love.

And just before the buckwheat field that opens lonely as grace,
the field with the massive trees in the middle, shattered by
lightning,
a slender roan horse feeds under its basilica of broken branches,
because he knows that is the place
where the soft tufts of grass
taste the sweetest.

"Clay County" by John Hodgen, from Grace. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.