I suppose that no subject is new if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, but I don’t, so I was tickled to find this poem by Hayden Carruth that linked us in an unusual way. Who knew others had written about train wrecks? I don’t know the story behind his poem, which appears in his Collected Shorter Poems: 1946—1991, but I’ll never forget mine. On a Thanksgiving break in college thirty years ago, a friend and I decided to visit the Grand Canyon, a twelve hour drive from Palo Alto. Deep into the night we passed a sight still burned into my memory. What looked hellish to me, though, looked liberating to Hayden Carruth. Here’s his poem.
The Wreck of the Circus Train
Couplings buckled, cracked, collapsed,
And all reared, wheels and steel
Pawing and leaping above the plain,
And fell down totally, a crash
Deep in the rising surf of dust,
As temples into their cellars crash.
Dust flattened across the silence
That follows the end of anything,
Drifted into cracks of wreckage.
But motion remained, a girder
Found gravity and shifted, a wheel
Turned lazily, turning, turning,
And life remained, at work to
Detain spirit: three lions, one
Male with wide masculine mane,
Two female, short, strong, emerged
And looked quickly over the ruin,
Turned and moved toward the hills.
Here’s my poem from Love in the City of Grudges.
One Night in Kingman, Arizona
On the bungalow motel’s cave like stucco ceiling
lizards ran loose. A black-and-white RCA made
this evening’s train wreck look like vintage history.
But we’d seen it for ourselves beyond city limits:
freight cars toppled down track embankments,
still coupled on their sides. Belly smoke rose
to shroud the moon, a coal-faced monk pondering
the damage. Small fires burned beside the tracks,
as if gypsies camped to scavenge after daybreak.
Chickens soldiered through our low beams
toward desert blackness. Defying cruiser tops
spinning red, we stoked our hash bowl, knowing
we’d never see such sights again. We’d heard
radio preachers warn the sky itself would burn.
Nothing shown on TV later could tame this land.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
(Michael Perkins and I are finishing up work on The Pocket Guide to Woodstock. The sad news that Levon Helm is in the final stages of cancer means that we’ll have to drop the following passage about his Midnight Rambles written after I saw him perform in February.)
The 1960′s excitement isn’t entirely lost. In recent years, Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer, has enjoyed a silver-haired renaissance, winning Grammies for three records, and by hosting Midnight Rambles at his modern timber frame studio barn at 150 Plochmann Lane. The place feels like a large living room, with its bluestone fireplace and Turkish red carpet in the center where the musicians play to the crowd seated in folding chairs or standing up in the balcony. Helms’s first studio barn was lost in a fire. He fought throat cancer in 1996. Two of his Band mates died much too young—Richard Manuel felled by suicide at 42, Rick Danko by hard living at 55. Yet Helms is nothing if not a survivor. Born to an Arkansas cotton farmer, he joined a touring band right out of high school, met four Canadians who became his compatriots in the Band which played behind Bob Dylan and had their own magical run until The Last Waltz farewell concert of 1976. Now he takes the stage at a Ramble and sits at his drum kit in the front corner bathed in a soft purple spotlight. He has the lean-faced charisma of an old cowboy. As the musicians play old Band favorites mixed with roadhouse blues driven by a brass section and a piano, he pounds away at the drums, all skinny shoulders and flying elbows. His smile flashes, the brightest instrument in the room. The guy couldn’t look happier to be alive.
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The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
Poem of the Forgotten
I came to this place
a young man green and lonely.
Well quit of the world,
I framed a house of moss and timber,
called it a home,
and sat in the warm evenings
singing to myself as a man sings
when he knows there is
no one to hear.
I made my bed under the shadow
of leaves, and awoke
in the first snow of autumn,
filled with silence.
–By John Haines
John Haines homesteaded in Alaska for many years, beginning in 1947. He passed away in 2011. “Poem of the Forgotten” appeared in his book, News from the Glacier: Selected Poems 1960-1980.
* * *
Cabin
There’s always an injury
when we compare one thing
to something else, the tepid moon
to its jealous sister, the viscous fog
to seven years of silence.
And any word can be a knife
when thrown with care.
We sacrifice our hearts
for the quietness of books.
A loaf of bread cooling on the counter
is a wild act of love.
Even as I dislodge every spider web
in the cabin, we will still find
something caught and dying
in the morning,
eyes glistening like dew
in the back of the fireplace
where newspapers and forests
become opportunities
for longing.
–By Grant Clauser
In 2010 Robert Bly chose Grant Clauser as the Montgomery County Pennsylvania Poet Laureate. “Cabin” is from his terrific first book, The Trouble with Rivers.
* * *
Moving Into My Cabin
–The Catskills
Hung a Cherokee bear mask by the door.
Loaded the pencil holder with wild turkey feathers.
Gathered an armload of dead branches
for the kindling box. Picked asters and goldenrod
for the old pickling jar on the table.
Decorated the windowsill with birch bark
and bird nests, a littered shotgun shell
for a humorous touch. Swept mouse droppings
off the shelves. Shook dust from the fireplace rug.
Noticed again the smell of the cabin:
thirty-year-old logs varnished whiskey brown,
charred chimney stones, wool blankets
passed from owner to owner.
Brewed pine needle tea. Wiped owl pellets
from the porch bench. Transcribed in my journal
the song of the stream. Listened to the red-eyed vireo
owning his treetop till sunset. Lingered
over sauteed mushrooms and stew.
Studied moths on the windows,
dozens, hundreds, fluttering, crawling,
staring with eyes tinier than crumbs, yet gold,
gold as fire. Stepped outside to join moths
at the windows, my first friends.
–By Will Nixon
Sometimes I miss those days in the old log cabin on the Panther Kill. “Moving Into My Cabin” is from Love in the City of Grudges.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
In my early twenties, when my ambition to become a writer was still nine parts yearning to one part writing, I came under the sway of John Updike’s great gift for describing things in painterly detail. For years, I believed that fine writing was, in fact, this exquisite illustrating with words. Now I accept that most writers have much plainer eyes. They call a fish a fish and get on with their stories. But on the rare occasions that I come upon Updike-level observations I thrill anew to the evocative power of such close and precise description. Roaming around the brand new Penguin Anthology of 20th Century of American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, one of the highlights of my reading year, I stopped by a famous poem I hadn’t read in ages. Who has ever described a fish better than Elizabeth Bishop?
The Fish
By Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
–the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
–if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
I didn’t reread this poem when I worked up my childhood memories of a cod fishing trip out of Seal Harbor, Maine into a poem about my mother’s long stay in a nursing home after her crippling strokes. But, surely, I must have had a vestigial memory of it when I did my best to describe the fish in this poem that appears in Love in the City of Grudges.
My Mother’s Codfish
By Will Nixon
Her cork bulletin board’s crumbly
with thumbtacks and photos, memories
she doesn’t remember after strokes
confined her to a wheelchair. I Kleenex
smudges and dandruff off her glasses,
unpin the curled Kodak to hold before
her wandering eyes, tell her again
the rest of us caught nothing
but dogfish the charter boat captain
dehooked, bending their gray snouts
to crack loud necks behind gaping smiles.
He tossed their two-foot corpses in our wake,
toy models of deadly sharks below.
She sits in her lighthouse bathrobe,
my gift to remind her of Maine vacations,
but she thinks Maine is her diaper nurse now.
I tell her again she reeled in the champ.
The captain grabbed gills like duffel handles,
dumped the codfish on the deck with a thud.
It wore its hook without expression, button eyes
turning milky blind. We sponged water on its gills
to help the giant die in peace. On the dock scale
her catch hung taller than we boys stood,
squinting for the Kodak. Thirty years later,
I smile at our uniform blond bowl cuts,
but wonder about our grave faces.
I tell her again she had the best idea:
on our vacation diet of pizza and ice cream,
we had no use for such a fish, so we brought it
to Herman’s in the village that handled everything:
fishing gear, groceries, baseball magazines, the mail.
The wooden floor smelled a hundred years old.
By folding the tail, Herman squeezed the codfish
into an old-time soda chest filled with picnic ice bags.
“She’s a monster,” he said. “But we got her all in.”
His overalls, smeared with cod scales, sparkled
like a movie gown. “Shall we dance?” he asked,
gathering two boys in each arm, his beard ripe
with cherry tobacco. He spun us round the floor
and sang us whaling songs to calm our dizziness.
My mother knew them all from childhood.
I’d ask her to sing one now, but she slurps tea
through a straw. Her afternoon snack
brought by the nurse is what she’s waited for.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
The Boy Who Ate Cigarettes
Some said he lived under the Mill Street Bridge,
burning cancelled checks and lotto tickets
to keep warm. Other said he stayed
behind the town’s tattoo parlor, pushing
old syringes up the banisters, just to hear
the noise they made when they rolled back down.
When we were kids, we only saw his reflection,
a corner of his smile in the deli’s dirty windows,
a chin in the potholes that cradled spring thaw.
With every glimpse of black teeth, singed lips
flipped cigarettes, he spit white ashes and soot.
The grownups blamed him for those mornings
when the fog never lifted, when the yellow haze
made us cough, hid the sharp edges of street corners
and stop signs. I saw him, finally, when I was 13.
Crouched on the pipe fence near the pool hall,
he blew smoke rings my way, reached out
to touch my hair. He caught a strand, tugged.
Donora, he whispered, as if murmuring
a lover’s name, as if I was someone he knew.
–By Karen J. Weyant
Karen Weyant teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. I’ve really enjoyed her chapbook, Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt, which won the 2011 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. It includes “The Boy Who Ate Cigarettes.”
* * *
A Natural History of Cigarette Butts
–Devil’s Notch, Catskills
Deep in prickly briar wands unclawing leaves
for May lies an open pack of Parliaments,
revealing nibbled foil, cigarettes tightly packed
yet trimmed of every filter. Did a mouse
harvest cotton for its nest? If so, may we
call this hope? My mother smoked,
smoked and had a throat scar like a nipple.
As a child to shame her into quitting, I ate
her Parliaments in front of guests and choked
on filters. I coughed with terrifying dryness,
until a man bent me on his knees and pounded
on my back. She thought I was dying.
One by one I pick them from roadside gravel
or straw-like gully grass woven down by runoff:
cotton filters wrapped white or caramel.
All morning I’ve collected trash in this notch,
where larger garbage should fill my yellow bag.
My mother quit but I can’t seem to stop.
–By Will Nixon
The Catskill 3500 Club for peak baggers such as myself who climb all 35 peaks above 3500 feet has taken responsibility for picking up litter along several miles of the county highway that runs through the Devils Notch. One day I was the only club member to show up for this chore. At least I got this poem out of the experience. It appears in My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
(At this year’s Woodstock Writers Festival Gretchen Primack will teach a workshop on Friday, April 20th and lead a panel discussion on Saturday, April 21st. Tickets are selling fast, so don’t hesitate.)
On Gretchen Primack, By Will Nixon
Many people, I suspect, never venture past their own backyards, which in my fortunate corner of the world, the Catskills, are often bordered by woods. What is this fear that keeps them out of the forest? Are they wary of “No Trespassing” signs (a plague in my area)? Getting lost? Running into a bear or, worse, a psycho hillbilly out of Deliverance? Whatever it is, I had it myself when I rented a backyard writing cottage in the little hamlet of Cottekill. Beyond the lawn lay what was, in effect, a huge park, many hundreds of acres of woods that had once been the site of cement mines. They would have been easy to explore on abandoned gravel roads that passed through clearings for old mines, which looked like office floors carved out of bedrock layers but sloped steeply downwards into blackness. It was fascinating, a ruined landscape recovering with scrubby bushes and white pines. Yet in two years I only walked back there once, habitually hopping in my car, instead, for a quick drive to nearby trails, including those at Williams Lake which passed similar mines. What kept me out of my backyard woods? That the property was owned by Iron Mountain, a company that now stores documents in the mines? I doubt it. Not that I don’t notice “No Trespassing” signs, but I have to live my life. I doubt that I even would have admitted to being afraid of walking in my back woods, but the fact is, I never did. Sometimes on sunny weekends I heard the neighbors popping off at rifle practice. Never having used guns, I’m made uneasy by hearing gunshots. Then one day, venturing into the woods to collect kindling for my wood stove, I came upon a horrific sight down by the trickling stream behind the neighbor’s house. What made it horrific, in part, was that it seemed so uneventful. Half a dozen Canada geese lay dead on the leaves, their long black necks now useless handles for their bulbous bodies. Had they been shot? Poisoned? Slaughtered on the spot? Or killed elsewhere and dumped down the slope? Their necks pointed uphill in the same direction, a clue of some kind. But I didn’t investigate. I backed out of those woods in a hurry.
Nothing has described the feeling I had quite like Gretchen Primack’s poem, “The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods,” which appeared in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, edited by Laurence Carr. Gretchen didn’t back away. She wrote one of the fiercest, boldest, must unnerving poems I’ve read. I admire it tremendously, while I’m still scared by it.
The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods
and there was a dog, precisely the colors of autumn,
asleep between two trunks by the trail.
But it was a coyote, paws pink
with a clean-through hole in the left,
and a deep hole in the back of the neck,
dragged and placed in the low crotch
of a tree. But it was two coyotes,
the other’s hole in the side of the neck,
the other with a dried pool of blood below
the nose, a dried pool below the anus,
the other dragged and placed
in the adjoining low crook, the other’s body
a precise mirror of the first. The eyes were closed,
the fur smooth and precisely the colors
of autumn, a little warm to my touch though the bodies
were not. The fur was cells telling themselves
to spin to keep her warm to stand
and hunt and keep. It was a red
autumn leaf on the forest floor, but
it was a blooded brown leaf, and another, because
they dragged the bodies to create a monument
to domination, to the enormous human.
And if I bore a child who suffered to see this,
or if I bore a child who gladdened to see this, or if
I bore a child who kept walking, I could not bear
to live, or to feed that child, so I will not bear one.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
(At this year’s Woodstock Writers Festival Gretchen Primack will teach a workshop on Friday, April 20th and lead a panel discussion on Saturday, April 21st. Tickets are selling fast, so don’t hesitate. Here’s an introduction to Sonia Sanchez who will appear on the panel.)
On Sonia Sanchez, By Gretchen Primack
At the recent Split This Rock poetry festival in D.C., Sonia Sanchez gave a reading and led a discussion, and there was a workshop devoted to her work. It may not surprise you, then, to learn that Split This Rock is a festival dedicated to poetry as a tool for social change, poetry as a progressive act. Sonia is in her seventies now and has earned the right to sit back and think proudly of what she’s done to raise consciousness through her work, but she’s hardly sitting down, much less back. She’s still in the thick of it, as we’ll see on Saturday, April 21st.
In 1999, Beacon Press published a new and selected volume of Sonia’s poems called Shake Loose My Skin. My friend Eulalia gave it to me as a present, and in her inscription she wrote, “Some kids read to escape. When I was little I learned to love reading in order to survive.” Sonia has helped many women like Eulalia, who grew up in the projects of Philly and found a haven and a voice through Sonia’s work. She’s helped untold numbers of people from all backgrounds through her decades of teaching and her writing alike. Here is an almost unspeakably beautiful poem of Sonia’s, an anthem for Eulalia and a huge inspiration for me. Look especially as how she uses line break as disorientation here.
On Seeing a Pacifist Burn
this day is not
real. the crowing of
the far-away
carillons ring
out direction
less. even you are
un real roasting
under a man
hattan sky
while passersby flap
their indecent tongues.
even I am un
real but i
am black and
thought to be
without meaning.
Reprinted from Shake Loose My Skin, Beacon Press, 2000
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The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
(At this year’s Woodstock Writers Festival Gretchen Primack will teach a workshop on Friday, April 20th and lead a panel discussion on Saturday, April 21st. Tickets are selling fast, so don’t hesitate. Here’s an introduction to John Murillo, who will appear on the panel.)
On John Murillo, By Gretchen Primack
There’s something unassuming about John Murillo’s beautiful poems. When it comes to political material, he’s more on the Joan Larkin side of things than the Alix Olson side. There’s a positioning that seems personal, but the more you read and think about the poems the more you see how far the poet’s looking outside of himself. “Sherman Ave. Love Poem” is a great example of that. What could appear more personal than a love poem? But John’s crafty. We’re a little thrown by the mention of a street sweeper to open a love poem, and then we’re a lot thrown by what happens next. But by the end, John has made us see that the sound of a broom on concrete and the sound of a page turning in a prison cell and the sound of a woman climbing over the railing of a slave ship are painfully, strikingly connected. And love? Well, see what you think….
Sherman Ave. Love Poem
A street sweeper rounds
the corner, headlights
stretching a mans silhouette
across the cool brick
of a brownstone. A window
rattles, creaks, lifts open
from his rib, and a woman
steps through, pushes
off the ledge. Doesn’t flail,
doesn’t scream, or scratch
at passing brick. Mid-flight,
she lies flat, spreads her
swollen shadow onto
a fire hydrant. She is sure
as gravity. The man
crossing the street, all rib
and open eye, clutches
his Koran. Read in prison
how pregnant women
would dive from slave ships.
Thought then, and believes
Now more than ever: this is
the one true act.
Reprinted from Up Jump the Boogie, Cypher Press, 2010
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The Hudson Valley Poetry Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
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Walking Woodstock
Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town
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#1 Paperback Bestseller of 2009, Golden Notebook, Woodstock, NY
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Love in the City of Grudges
Poems by Will Nixon
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Abbie Hoffman on the Woodstock Festival
(From Abbie Hoffman’s Woodstock Nation.)
If I had to sum up the totality of the Woodstock experience I would say it was the first attempt to land a man on earth. It took an awful lot of people to pull it off, but pull it off we did. Welcome to the Aquarian Age.