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Blue
Thursday, January 28, 2010 V.1.5. My featured poet this week is our friend, Kevin McCann, here with four poems. Kevin says he has been a full-time writer for 16 years now. He's published six limited edition pamphlets in England. He also writes for children. And, along with Kevin, I have these other fine poets. weather note: blue Jia Jia Women of the Red Plain Mei Shaoling Three Leaves The Greens Tang Yaping Mirror Tree Coral Song of a Small Creek Me poets on every street corner Kevin McCann Photo-opportunity Gabriel Gomez Retablos Me never been to Chile KathleenFraser Seven Uneasy Songs Kevin McCann We do it... Me fog Ai Interview With a Policeman Kevin McCann She... Me the luxury of seasons Ted Hughes Crow's Elephant Totem Song Me one true thing Kevin McCann Yet Another Fractal Charles Simic Mirrors at 4 A.M. Cameo Appearance Slaughterhouse Flies Me an unfocused eye Sarah Patton Late February Trebled Spine I See Grass in All Its Complexity Me when he was a rich man R. G. Vliet Poetry (If It Must Come) Jet Plane An Old Man in the Orchard Me dark again  After making a point last week of noting how I seldom start a post with one of my own poems, here I am, doing it again. But it's a tiny little thing, so it doesn't hardly count. weather note: blue a norther, blue they call'em blue cold wind under cold blue sky  I begin this week with several poems from Women of the Red Plain, an anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women's Poetry. The poems were selected and translated by Julia C. Lin. Born in Shanghai, Lin received her BA degree from Smith College and her MA and PhD from the University of Washington. She is Professor of English at Ohio University. The book was first published in China by Chinese Literature Press in 1992. My edition was published by Penguin Books also in 1992. The first poem is by Jia Jia. Born in 1954 in Sichuan Province, she worked in Yunnan Province after graduating from junior middle school in 1971. In 1979, she was transferred to the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles of Sichuan Province. She started writing poems in 1980 and has published one collection of poems, River of Female. This is the title poem for the book. Women of the Red Plain Know That waiting is your fate Having waited through the season of summer You begin to wait through the autumn days The nomad's trail is turning browner day by day But the men still have not returned. Those unable to bear the loneliness Married again Married men who hate a nomad's life. Know That men never feel guilty for what they've done to women Born to roam on the grassland They come and go as they please He drinks (often gets into fights) He dances (often till daybreak) Married for seven days he leaves Telling the bride to give him a son So she gives him a son But still stiffening his face As if she had given him a girl He won't allow her to step into the house Doesn't know The waiting is longer than the grassplain Doesn't know if she should give birth to another nomad son To cause some other woman Grief. The next poet from the anthology is Mei Shaojing. She was born in Chongqing in 1948 and worked in the Shaanxi Province upon her graduation from the middle school that is affiliated with the Beijing University. In 1978 she enrolled in Teacher's College, but had to drop out due to illness. She returned to her former job doing promotion work in a radio factory until 1981 when, after publishing her long narrative poem Lan Zhen Zi, she was transferred to work for the Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Since 1984 she has attended the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing as well as the Chinese Department of the Beijing University. She has published several addition collections of poetry since then. Here are two of her short poems. Three Leaves Three snips of tender leaves like three green birds Proudly stand on the tree trunk The trunk sends forth only one green twig, Where three birds perch. What lovable little creatures they are! They're still singing for this felled tree. Though only three small leaves, they still shout to to the world Reminding people of the tree's full glory of spring now ravished. The Greens On this poor, bony land As fire flares in the black night, The greens also flare up the day. When will the greens Forever sheathe this yellow earth? Ah, in those days when even the sky was yellow, I've fancied A fabulous green sun. Finally, from the anthology, I have several short poems by Tang Yaping. Tang was born in Sichuan Province in 1962. In 1983, she graduated from the Philosophy Department of Sichuan University. In 1984 she was transferred to the Television Station of Guizhou Province where she works as an editor. She has published one book of poems, The Wild Moon. Mirror A precious mirror is shattered Please don't grieve, there'll be as many honest eyes As there are shattered pieces. Tree One felled tree. Its remaining life Desolate and solitary Is half anguish, half anger. A tree forgotten by men, In spring on its bleeding bosom Yet struggles to put forth A new patch of green. green boughs; green leaves Now smile, smiling at the axe's sharp blade... Coral Whatever the season You've never dreamed of flowering, bearing fruit. You are a root for eternity: Orange-red color of the sea's blood veins... You lie in the sea's depths, Knowing only to offer your grandeur, Oblivious to your own beauty. Song of a Small Creek I'm a duckling's cradle, I'm a young girl's looking glass, And I'm fond of calves Drinking my sparkling water. The wind whispers to me: "The ocean is beautiful, won't you come play with me?" I reply: I won't, for I'm fond of calves Drinking my sparkling water.  Guess I've been watching too much TV again. Making me think somebody ought to be able to do something about the mess this world is in, and maybe it's me. Maybe not. poets on every street corner i was going to write a poem about what i would do if i could run the world but sitting here now i realize i don't know what to do either except i'd like to see rain every Thursday and sunshine and blue skies the rest of the week except in the winter when there should be snow and blue skies and children skating on iced over ponds and cows in the fields blowing clouds through their noses and palm trees on beaches for those who don't like shade and big waves for the surfers and clear clean streams slow moving between tall green trees for us who prefer to float and people learning to shake off bad times like dogs shaking off wet a big shake beginning with flapping ears passing on down to big shimmy shakes of their rear butts like a mixmaster in overdrive and no icky things in dark corners no snakes and no spiders and no poison lizards or animals who like to eat people and no fatherless children or old people rotting in isolation and inattention and no one dying of diseases they couldn't afford to cure and no backaches or migraines or rashes in hide-away places and no people who eat too much or people who never get to eat as much as they need and no drunkards or drug addicts or gangsters who shoot children from their cars and no priests, preachers, ayatollahs, rabbis or other parasites on the human soul instead poets on every street corner proclaiming truth and love and silly songs for all who will listen and people who will listen to all the poets on all the street corners and return their love and maybe throw money and no republicans - that should be at the top of my list instead of here at the bottom  Here's my first poem this week from featured poet Kevin McCann. Holy Redcoats Batman, I just realized, with Kevin, that's Brits two weeks in a row. Photo-opportunity As the sea-lion hauls himself up Onto this platform where he'll cavort For Two Shows Daily and a bucket of fish - Clever dick similes Swim through my mind: He's a Slick grey piping bag With Eyes like sultanas, Bewhiskered as A Victorian toff Who swings round like Some loose gantry... While I pose with my new book He closes the distance between us hot breath Scouring my throat bares teeth that could pare Flesh from bone and in eyes brown as kelp: I float.  I have an interesting piece now by Gabriel Gomez, form his book, The Outer Bands, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2007. Gomez is a poet, playwright and music journalist born and raised in El Paso. He received a BA in Creative Writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary's College of California. He has taught English at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, the College of Santa Fe, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Santa Fe. The poem I'm using is from Section II of the book, titled 20 Retablos. In fact, the poem is the entirety of Section II, 20 pages of short poems, none longer than a page, some as short as one line. As I transcribe the poem, I will designate page separations by use of a series of dashes. Blank space on the page seems to me an important element of this poem. I will try to duplicate that effect here. It is helpful to know that the Spanish word "Retablos" refers to Latin American devotional paintings. 20 Retablos A still life motivated from the instant flashing Her hands warming in her pockets, re-balling tissue in a hard rhythm. Circling a name for her sun disturbed shadow of conch simplicity to an animated form spilling a ribbon of paths to the spearing sorghum. A final dust lifting under and after the weigh of dew whispering the act of skin. Her name, I once recalled, meant unraveling in Spanish. -------------------- I learned that there is always food at the reckoning of tragedy. Paint eagerly represents a woman as still life, diffused through hundreds of movements by her painter. Put trees through a window behind her, offer a texture circling of blue shadow stir- ring in pools of tea colored sand. Her name will come in a lipped octave slope saying the impulse to point at what you mean you'll want to say. -------------------- the face and legs have dropped to the imagination the legs became deeper with marble when rising toward the pinched waist I learned to smoke behind the San Fernando church. We smoked faros that looked like joints, so we imagined that too. The church was named after a saint that had suffered patiently through a com- plicated and unreasonable death. -------------------- smeared the tillage with tidy summary the soil re-occurred for miles under the fashioned horizon losing its light to the opposite page -------------------- similitude to the shifty ochre light marching heavily upon us the ocean kept re-occurring on the beach in the form of a wave There were several interesting horizons. -------------------- we now remember its cells lifting from the rosy sepulcher spilling in a wave, a repetitive signal announcing it coming to pummel the ground The ground re-occurred through everything. -------------------- creatures pilot through a highway their language is untranslatable the road they carry is shaped with a foreign math -------------------- the metaphor became easy to denounce once it was known that there are no small children depicted in heaven the sun became an anterior math an inconceivable exegesis -------------------- a woman squinting through the double sided mirror a woman walking separately -------------------- diffused with so much water then hardened into form -------------------- -------------------- lifting and dropping -------------------- -------------------- -------------------- you mean for me to stay here enter willing -------------------- like rock candy -------------------- -------------------- of rain dissipating slowly over the walkways and the cloistered verandahs. Then an eventual puddle found your skin and lifted small dimples on your arms and neck. Over the mass of earth is the river, which all the traffic is under with an insoluble thirst you back was neatly paragraphed by your blouse I came around you like the movements of a flood -------------------- Doldrums jerked with fog memory kept re-occurring even from that place, where I had never been, seemed natural in transplant every place I'll call it media luna -------------------- here was another American who had married a Mestiza woman he raised and indefinite number of pigs with his wife his truck was dolphin blue  I was taking a new world map up on the wall by my computer and, for some reason, Chile caught my eye. What a strange looking company, I was thinking, skinny and long, like an anorexic California. never been to Chile never been to C h i l e but would love to go some day to that s t r i n g b e a n country s t r e t c h i n g all the way d o w n the P a c i f i c co ast of Southamerica to near Ant arcti ca - down there to Tierra Del Fuego which means Land of the Fuego in Spanish and i'd surely like to go there someday  Here's a poem by Kathleen Fraser, from her book il cuore: The Heart, Selected Poems 1970-1995, published in 1997 by Wesleyan Press. Fraser, born in 1937, grew up in Oklahoma, Colorado and California. She was Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University for 20 years, and, with fourteen books of poetry published, was Director of the Poetry Center, founder of American Poetry Archives, and editor of the feminist/experimentalist poetry journal HOW(ever). She lives part of each year in Italy. Seven Uneasy Songs 1. What I Want Because you are constantly coming to begin, I suggest solutions and am full of holes. See through me when my back is turned. A hotel is the notion of entrance by thought. Your love is constantly a solution, criminally full of no difference when my back is turned. I read your thoughts because you are constantly changing and coming through me when my back is turned. And I want something for something, constantly. Coming. 2. To Start At a tremendous speed my throat makes its door slide. Open. Pure guesswork...I have lost the other side of me. You'll see. In teeth dreams there are only three wrong guesses. A surprise doesn't exist. Just a guess against the door. To think is simultaneous. I'll take another network. of teeth (by pairs) as my answer. Stars, Anymore. 3. Amid Mouths More and more rushes out at night high on the still pooled joyful "do not" Blood cells desert for signs inside me. A narrow ledge. The buoyant with furry necks, more and more * We are what is that the rare elegant necks (more of them) look attentively at a baby us. They peer over the wooden boat but it is shore starts to roll. Flapping seaward, the heron ascends each wing rained thin. * That I snap (but watch the little light) just open up the dark see. A wonderful move these very gently whites amid mouths. <4>Growing Up In a box I marry and grow firm. I fly to complacency where hair runs by the ankle I pull Mother's dress: "Come down out of each other's knees!"...and and "fresh lines" (linen). Is nothing the strength of my wings' chain? * The grass learned again how often the body leans in a clearing (and another one breaks in on the pleasure of her stare) but it seemed the time. * I just wanted a soft green family. Remember your family? My family sadly grow less. It's more difficult with maps zipped inside. Show my face in pink silk. A simple box. 5. Going Through his giant photo body. heaven's blue sea. I am leaving and will close my tongue * To and fro men (particularly) grow windows. Horizon. In. * Trees open in the neck & his mother's thumb appears in the lentil heart flood. 6. If Suppose we are a fragment, a perfect night of immediacy in vital places. Up here I am the disguised flower and you are where it came from. To allow the hidden. So slowly, my body. And wouldn't you begin to make friends with it? I can wait. 7. That Didn't That didn't come down but quietly (to touch) as wheat grown. And shoes in water. Here. A curving brown light didn't drop down all around. No center. No field where that touch seemed firm, almost. San francisco, 1972)  And now, our second poem from featured poet Kevin McCann. The piece was first published in a short pamphlet called I Killed George Formby (erbacce-press). We do it... A writer or, at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better : "Whom do you write for ?" - W.H. Auden We do it For that broken child, Eyes still brimming reflected pain, We do it For all the mad ones And for those who are caged and sane, We do it To unravel the nightmares And the laughter that lullabies pain, We do it For all the first times Words made our pulses beat, We do it For desperate drunkards Trawling for love through the streets, We do it For the flotsam Washed up on the shore, We do it For the clumsy And the over chatty bore, We do it To leave a hand print On the dark cave wall, We do it Because we're high-wire dancers Always about to fall...  Here's a short, early-morning piece I wrote last week, fog fog shy curtain mist disperses light in crystal halos souls alight souls aloft rising to meet low-searching clouds  My next poem by Ai is taken from her book Vice - New and Selected Poems, the winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry published by W. W. Norton. Born as Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas, in 1947, Ai, who describes herself as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism. Among her previous collections of poetry, Killing Floor won the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets and Sin was selected for an American Book Award in 1987. Interview With a Policeman You say you want this story in my own words, but you won't tell it my wan. Reporters never do. If everybody's racist, that means you too. I grab your finger as you jab it at my chest. So what, the minicam caught that? You want to know all about it, right? - the liquor store, the black kid who pulled his gun at the wrong time. You saw the dollars he fell on and bloodied. Remember how cold it was that night, but I was sweating. I'd worked hard, I was through for twenty-four hours, and I wanted some brew. When I heard a shout, I turned and saw the clerk with his hands in the air, saws the kid drop his gun as I yelled and ran from the back. I only fired when he bent down, picked up the gun, and again dropped it. I saw he was terrified, saw his shoulder and head jerk to the side as the next bullet hit. When I dove down, he got his gun once more and fired wildly. Liquor poured onto the counter, the floor onto which he fell back finally, still firing now toward the door, when his arm flung itself behind him. As I crawled toward him, I could hear dance music over the sound of the liquor spilling and spilling, and when I balanced on my hands and stared at him, a cough or spasm sent a stream of blood out of his mouth that hit me in the face. Later, I felt as if I'd left part of myself stranded on that other side, where anyplace you turn is down, is out for money, for drugs, or juste for something new like shoes or sunglasses, where your own rage destroys everything in its wake, including you. Especially you. Go on, set your pad and pencil down, turn off the camera, the tape. The ape in the gilded cage looks too familiar, doesn't he, and underneath it all, like me, you just want to forget him. Tonight, though, for a while you'll lie awake. You'll hear the sound of gunshots in someone else's neighborhood, then, comforted, turn over in your bed and close your eyes, but the boy like a shark redeemed at last yet unrepentant will reenter your life by the unlocked door of sleep to take everything but his fury back.  Here's the third piece this week by Kevin McCann. Kevin is our feature poet this week. She... Took photographs (guard towers) Made notes (barbed wire) But finally (gallows site) Just stood (medical block) Fading Into row Upon row Of nissen huts And rising up In front of her This butterfly, A tongue of fire, Wings beating back The silence, Rhythmic whispers Urgent, A final prayer Rises up To be caught In a web In a gap In the wire.  I grew up on the Texas-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, a river delta usually lush and green due to the irrigation from the Rio Grande River. It is just a few miles short of being the southernmost point of the U.S. mainland. Florida is the state just a hair further south. The climate of the two places is very much alike - except for occasional blips in weather patterns, there are two seasons, hot and dry and hot and wet. Even no living 300 miles north, it's not much different except that it rarely wet does more often get cold. There are seasons here, but one, summer is very long and the other three are very short, so short some years as to be easily missed. The next poem is and expression of my dissatisfaction with that state of affairs. the luxury of seasons the morning is damp and dark, with a smell of smoke and sweet cedar - we will drive north today into the hills where rain has filled the creeks and stock ponds and where soon as Spring arrives the hills and valleys between will be green and alive with the slow and steady grazing of sheep and spring lambs - new life in a new season --- we will not see any of that today for the days of freeze last week have left dead and withered pastures that will be carpeted in all the bright colors of wild flowers in March, and we will go into the hills to see that as well when that time comes for it is a luxury for us, people of the far south, to see the continuing change of seasons - to know through our own eyes, that the drab shroud of winter will be followed by the bright and color of spring, to know that spring, however beautiful, is, in its time, prelude to winter - death and resurrection and death again, cycles, the way it is for all that lives, knowledge easily lost in the tropics when every day is twin to the day before  Now I have a poem from Crow - From the Life and Songs of the Crow, a very small book of poems by Ted Hughes. Crow's Elephant Totem Song Once upon a time god made this Elephant. Then it was delicate and small It was not freakish at all Or melancholy The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful - they showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations - We envy your grace Waltzing through the thorny growth O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness Lift us from the furnaces and furies of our blackened faces Within these hells we writhe Shut in behind the bars of our teeth In hourly battle with a death The size of the earth Having the strength of the earth. So the Hyenas ran under the elephant's tail As like a lithe and rubber oval He strolled gladly around inside his ease But he was not God no it was not his to correct the damned In rage in madness they they lit their mouths They tore out his entrails they divided him among their several hells To cry all his separate pieces Swallowed and inflamed Amidst paradings of infernal laughter At the Resurrection The Elephant got himself together with correction Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones And completely altered brains Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise. So through the orange blaze and blue shadow Of the afterlife, effortless and immense, The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense, And opposite and parallel The sleepless Hyenas go Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof With a whipped run Their shame-flags tucked hard down Over the gutsacks Crammed with putrefying laughter Blotched black with the leakage and seepings And they sing: "Ours is the land Of loveliness and beautiful Is the putrid mouth of the leopard And the graves of fever Because it is all we have - " And they vomit their laughter. And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.  Next, a little meditation on how much less we usually know than we think we know. one true thing growing up in a bi-cultural milieu i learned a lot of dirty words that i never really knew the literal meaning of that's why as i've grown older and more cautious, i've restricted by cussing to English fairly certain that when i call someone a double-duped-willy-whacker, i know what i'm saying and mean it it is the way of many things in modern life, superficial knowledge hiding greater ignorance of the deeper truths of living it is a truth, i think, that truth has many levels, and try as i might, it seems i never get much past the basement and sometimes despair that i'll ever learn the real of anything but i keep trying, part of what this exercise is about, writing day after day, thinking as i write, hoping, someday, i'll reach the mezzanine and know at least one true thing  And now here's our last poem from featured poet, Kevin McCann. Yet Another Fractal After being adored by ants For the honeydew Excreted from her back, She's cocooned inside their nest Until, silk shell splitting And resurrected as a butterfly She totters outside, Her new wings unfurled, They curve on the air, Spinning each breeze To a twister That'll wring trees leafless, Rip off rooftops, Stampede waves crag height While Fundamentalists explain : Our God is angry! Our God's in pain! (Yet again.)  Appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007, Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1954 at the age of sixteen. Retired from the University of New Hampshire, where he taught American literature and creative writing, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and held a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant from 1984 to 1989. He is also a winner of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Here are three of his poems from his book, Sixty Poems, published by Harcourt in 2007. Mirrors at 4 A. M. You must come to them sideways In rooms webbed in shadow, Sneak a view of their emptiness Without them catching A glimpse of you in return. The secret is, Even the empty bed is a burden to them, A pretense. They are more themselves keeping The company of a blank wall, The company of time and eternity Which, begging your pardon, Cast no image As they admire themselves in the mirror, While you stand to the side Pulling a hanky out To wipe your brow surreptitiously. Cameo Appearance I had a small, nonspeaking part In a bloody epic. I was one of the bombed and fleeing humanity. In the distance our great leader Crowed like a rooster from a balcony, Or was it a great actor Impersonating our great leader? That's me there, I said to the kiddies. I'm squeezed between the man With two bandaged hands raised And the old woman with her mouth open As if she were showing us a tooth That hurts badly. The hundred times I rewound the tape, not once Could they catch sight of me In that huge gray crowd, That was like any other gray crowd. Trot off to bed, I said finally. I know I was there. One take Is all they had time for. We ran, and the planes grazed our hair, And then they were no more As we stood dazed in the burning city, But, of course, they didn't film that. Slaughterhouse Flies Evenings, they ran their bloody feet Over the pages of my schoolbooks. With eyes closed, I can still hear The trees on our street Saying their mood farewell to summer, And someone at home recalling The weary old cows, hesitating, At long last growing suspicious Just as the blade drops down on them.  Decided I'd start making plans for my 107th birthday. an unfocused eye been thinking about my birthday coming up next month, reading all the medical news, thinking, with everything going on, if i can make it another ten years i can probably hold on for another thirty or forty, and what would that be like, sitting here at 6:30 am at a hundred and seven, having my breakfast, eggs, burnt bacon, dry toast, wondering if i would be bored enough by then to call the game on my own, blow out the candle and light the fire - i don't think so cause it seems the older i get the less bored i become, not that i was bored before, as intent on the world then as i am now, but less driven now to be an actor in every play, more content now to watch or not as the feeling moves me and it is wonderful how much more there is to be seen through the unfocused eye so here's my advice if you, like me, live to one hundred and seven - ignore the forest and find see trees in all their multiplicity take your eye off the ball and enjoy the game as it so widely passes  My next poems are by Sarah Patton, from her book The Joy of Old Horses, published in by Scopcraeft Press of Portales, New Mexico. Patton has had poems published in Open Places, The Little Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Slant, Atlanta Review, Defined Providence, and other journals and has won several awards. Late February The sparrows don't know what they're watching, a purse of bones, a bag of feathers, terrible windows trembling with tears and roses, you all stone and singing roots, I slow in my savvy bones, the way the chairs won't move, and your eyes reflect me as if sending me away. The trees have lived it all and will stay to live it again as will forsythia already bearing yellow stars on its arms. Gaunt fingers probe the iron sky for a fissure through which to thrust a root. Trebled Spine Sparrows, like grass, have won the world without resorting to gunfire, common leaves orchestrate light's score. That the dog cannot bear to be alone is what we've done to her, and what we've stolen from the dead is a tribal gathering in my wilderness. Speak to me of the little deaths, trebled spine of the whipping fish, of the little murders that go unpunished, and stippled spine of the thrusting trout, of sorrow rocking grief against the dark in a cold season. Tell me how the bones sing and the fever will not break. I See Grass in All Its Complexity I think of butterflies stealing salt from a crocodile's eye, of violets intact in wind but broken by the wild light, I see grass in all its complexity, desire's long pilgrimage back to dust. Fly with me, beautiful long-boned bird unfolding from salt marshes of fire and snow, I've seen it all, finches and flowers, blood-red tulips soaking a bandage of white wall, night wound into its depth like a sleeping cat, caught in my eye, the scales of light balancing roses until every rose was weighed for glory and new measures found.  I came to know this fellow in the mid-80's, during the oil bust that is probably forgotten now by just about everyone but those of us who happened to live in the oil patch at the time. I thought of him after hearing the song. when he was a rich man the only difference between the men and the boys is the size of their feet and the price of their toys Guy Clark - "Men Will Be Boys" heard that song last night reminded me of a fella named Sonny i knew back in the 80s a west texas roughneck/cowboy - for a while, the right place, right time kind of fella all of us would like to be - got rich in the oil boom, then lost it all in the bust - it was about the toys he told me, he who dies with the most wins, and he had had the most, fancy car, fancy boat, big house, and a Dallas cheerleader girlfriend - he'd lost it all by the time i knew him, first the boat, then the house, then the car, then the girlfriend, and he was left, alone, looking for a job, living in a $40 a week motel driving a rattletrap car looking for any kind of job he could find - ended up working the overnight shift at a 7-11 convenience store - turned out he had one talent one thing he could do better than almost anyone else - finding oil and putting together deals to drill for it - kinda tough on that kind of fella when it costs more to drill for the oil he can find than anyone wants to pay for it  Here are three short poems by poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright R. G. Vliet, from his book Water & Stone, published in 1980 by Random House. Born in Chicago in 1929, Vliet lived much of his early life in Texas, eventually obtaining his masters degree from Southwest Texas State College, now Texas State University. He taught school in several small school districts in Texas for some years, then went directly from teaching in 1955 to Yale University School of Drama. Although much of his work centered around Texas themes, he did not live again in the state until six months before his death in 1983. After a year and a half at Yale, he left to begin his own writing career with a string of award-winning plays. He published his first book of poetry in 1966 and his first novel in 1974. Writing while ill with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, he completed his last novel, Scorpio Rising, just days before his death. Poetry (If It Must Come) must come never kept, but unkempt and dragging weed up from the sea, must be bulbous-eyed from old astonishments: a crank species meant not actually to be seen. Yet sweaty fishermen hauling continually from need sometimes fetch it up: it flops, thumping the decks, croaks - the fishermen think they hear it speak. More certainly it squeaks, being slung in insubstantial air and with all a dizzy ache behind its gills. Its claws, which must drip antique moss, gesticulate: it knows a city that is only deep below. Jet Plane Tail tailing like a ghostly pheasant's, or Phoibos charioteer: smoke streaking off the axle. An Old Man in the Orchard at midmorning, knowledgeable, a use of pruning shears. the uncut grasses touch his knees. His strawbrimmed hat: an ordinary quietness. Why am I so joyful? Of course I think of bees, fruit trees and bees and sun on leaves. It is the earth's fruitfulness. A bent old man, and the limbs sagging with globed oranges.  Some might see this as an unusually dark poem for to end on, but I don't think so. What could be more illuminating than beginning to see the universe as it really is. dark again it was dark last night, and, so far, this morning as well and commuters flow past on the interstate like bright bubbles in a predawn stream of moonless, starless water coursing through shadowed hills, high to low, caught in the tide of gravity that pulls the wet ever down from hilltop to salted sea, like the commuters pulled from their beds to skim the river and rapids of this new dark day, ever down, from timeless dreams to the ceaseless grind of rush and restless ruin, life passing dark to light then, always, dark again  That's it. Until next week remember all of the material present on this blog remains the property of its creators. My stuff is free for you to borrow if you'll just say where you got it. I'm allen itz, da boss of dis bidness. |
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