one for halloween

A swatch from a story called "Ghost Writer" which is part of a connected series of stories from a collection entitled Leesville. This particular story is largely nonsense (the others are rather serious) and concerns the arousal of a ghost from a grave precipitated by the vandalism of two naughty little boys--Timmy and Tommy. Seems they were going around switching grave-site flowers--a no-no as it turns out. For their misdeed, they are cursed to never sleep well again. The man whose spirit haunts this story is Wallace Persons and he figures prominently into the the rest of the series. The language here and throughout the tale is intentionally absurd--vacillating willy-nilly from archaic to juvenile to, at times elsewhere, dead serious. Pun tolerated

. . . and next the vitriolic specter swooped like a hawk, icy rain and howling gale no matter, translucent except for seething, vermillion eyes aflame from the effrontery of the switched flower; and it found Timmy huddled weeping by the cloven dogwood and Tommy running like a coward toward the church, and it snatched them by their napes and dropped the two boys on top of each other beside his erstwhile tomb. The naughty boys held each other, crying a thousand pardons of the perturbed spirit. To paraphrase, they cried:

“Stay your wrath most mighty and least worm-desiccated ghoul of beauty and pathos. We are but sheep who have gone astray and would pledge perennial servitude wouldst thou but grant such a delicious wish and wouldst not make a delicious dish of two humble, yes naughtiest of the naughty, but reformed childes. Once eternally soporific now boundlessly honorific spirit, hear our pleas, witness our compunction, grant our lives though already so cursed ne’er to sleep well—though curse it may sound, ne’er such a blessing would it be if bestowed in the stead of tortuous devourment or worse, shudder e’en to speak it into this terrible night lest words come true by mere virtue of their utterance, a thoroughgoing ass spanking. This we beg, though justice weigh against us, with extreme faith in thy mercy howeversomuch our wretchedness dost recommend our asses to be thrashed, our ears a’boxed, our nipples tweaked now to port now to starboard—we beg.”

All this petulant palaver Timmy plead on behalf of the both and he fancied that he was winning over the ghost’s beneficent nature until Tommy, poor bubble-headed waif, added, “Can you walk through walls and stuff?”

The ghost looked wanting to speak. And might have if not for the bubble-headed one’s brash inquiry. The ghost of Wallace gave it a go against the east wall of the church and bounced a goodly distance from whence he came. The ghost looked wanting to swear. And might have had not the bubble-headed one suggested a try at the window. The ghost gave that a go and as sure as a moment before he was on the outside looking wanting to swear he was now on the inside feeling wanting to applaud himself for such a neat trick. (Seems windows and not walls are the ticket for ghost transference. Might make a mental note, those of you who take cigarette smoking lightly.)

The spirit’s spirits now jollified, he rejoined the two boys in the graveyard. He handed the not-so-special flower to the young one and told him to go fetch the special one and give it back to him—the fair and rightful owner. The young one made the re-switch as he was bade but the original deed could not be undone. Wallace Persons was awake and raging. Well, not so much raging as a bit miffed but awake—he was awake. Wallace Person’s ghost said, “You two run off to bed and sleep as well as you can. Sorry about that curse but I think it’s gonna stick whether I repent it or not. If I figure something out I’ll come back and reverse the curse. Ta-ta.” And he walked away scratching his head but before he got too far he turned and added, “For starters, quit being so naughty, though.”

The gale lessened to a stiff wind. The pounding rain softened to a reasonable shower. Once again it was simply a dark and stormy night.

this is not the poem's title, the title is below

Blood

First to grandmother’s, whose grief is refined,

Weathered, that is to say, on the other side of the family,

To eat late and hear the story of our lives—and how she “just laughed

And laughed and laughed” when so and so

Did such and such,

To occupy her room occupied by a ghost

Charmed within picture frames—silver, dusty.

To Bristol. Bristol to Roanoke.

A forgotten beauty, that is to say, lost in the mines

Of unrefined remembrances,

The quilt of late October laid

To warm the foothills. A drive worth the drive.

Hours, if given back, which would be re-spent identically.

A fast-food meeting with grandfather, whose grief

Is engrained—ravined and veined—in the skin,

Laden in eyelids. Arby’s. Freezing.

Could they turn down the air? Sorry but no.

Life’s refrain is restraint, apology, coda. With feeling.

Our little caravan stops at a church. Out we pile and stretch and moan.

If they got ‘em, uncles and step-aunts are smoking.

Children of cousins duck behind cars. Bashful—a word,

Come to think of it, only uttered on occasions

Like this. Like this:

So many hugs, I lose count. Fewer tears but still many.

Mostly smiles, faint recognitions, empathetic nods.

Songs—favorites of the pain-free man in ashes,

Traces of morphine, maybe, but certainly no trace of need—picked

And strummed as he would have done,

As he once showed me how.

A dinner of sandwiches after.

Hugs of departure. Lumped throats. The usual,

That is to say, the common way for strange

Days like this.

Turning for home, the Peaks of Otter,

Scapulas of blue earth in early evening,

Heave into the sky where the Hunter’s Moon

Exsanguinates all else.

going home

I was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. Small town then. Smallish now. Besides being my birthplace and its atrocious name, it is probably best known for its intrepid cleric--one Jerry Falwell and his more reasonable extension, Liberty University.

The year was 1975. The month was December. The day was the fourteenth of thirty-one--not quite middling.

Within a couple of years, I left Lynchburg behind for the larger town of Richmond where I spent ten years bicycling, shoplifting, collecting baseball cards, playing a variety of tags, whining, and being average at sports, above average at school, and below average at having friends--which was fine because I had a big brother and, before long, three little ones. Life, on average, was good. And, as it turns out (having witnessed and heard-tell of other lives) far, far too good for complaints.

Today, I am leaving for Lynchburg. My birthplace. For a funeral. Too easily ironic to elaborate the irony. In fact, I am troubled to find that my feelings about the trip are ones of alternating hesitation and resignation.

But why? Well . . . I suppose there's my natural aversion to dolor and its wont of sucking one into its melancholic juices, there to marinate until dour, until sour with thoughts of one's own mortality. Thoughts I've overthought already. Already having brushes near enough to taste. (In my experience, that particular taste is sweet, the moment calm, the resignation so pure as to obviate all hesitation. But this irony too is almost too blah to mention.)

What else? Well . . . there's the fact that the uncle for whom the bell tolled is the one I've interacted with the least over the years. (35 since 1975 [he calculated unnecessarily]). So there's a sense that among the nearer family members I will feel somehow unworthy of bereavement. That somehow, when I go to hug a cousin or an aunt, there will be a coolness in my touch that bespeaks my absence from their lives. On one hand, this is a bogus thought. An imaginary exclusion. But on the other hand, I believe there is something to it. Not a bad thing and certainly not a good thing but just a thing. A thing that makes you feel that way without offering excuse or implicating its agency. Just an icky, unavoidable thing.

Anything more? Not much. I'm not a fan of the shrinkray of adulthood. The redoubtable influence of time over matter. The squish of youth beneath the heels of experience. The verdant football yard now barely a swatch of brown grass.

Oh, and I hate, with a capital HATE, car trips. Anything over thirty minutes really sticks in my craw--which is saying a lot because otherwise I have no craw to speak of for all that I know. Craws are like the appendices that way. Unnoticeable until molested. In that case, craws are also like one's feeling upon going home. Not just for a funeral but for an encounter with the living. The rest of us. The flesh-wrapped skeletons, still warm from birth.

of numbers and names

So now it's getting a little ridiculous. Beans and Pickles continue to grow leaving Scooter ever diminishing in comparison. And it's not cool that I am thinking of my cacti in terms of exponents and algebra. Let the growth of Scooter be x and the growth of Beans/ Pickles be x squared and the increments of development be equal to the time elapsed between blog updates on the growth of my cacti. Or something. I'm not a mathematician. Which, Ether, is why I'm here and not elsewhere. Well, that and jocose crows. Side note: I actually scored higher on my GREs in math than I did in language. Perhaps why so many English programs turned me down. Well, that and the B- undergrad GPA. Well, those and the weakness of my writing samples. Anyway. Yeah. And speaking of weak writing samples . . . BEHOLD THIS POST. Johnny's my name, Lackluster's my pain. [See track 28 on my little ditty widget below to the right for this realization in slapdash song.]

Oh yes, let me introduce you to my hyacinth--the purple butterflies seeming to flit about the top of the frames. What's that you ask? What's her name?
First of all, it's not a she it's an it. Secondly, therefore, she doesn't have a name. It doesn't, I mean. Why on earth would I name a plant? Next thing you know I'll have it talking, telling us of the vicissitudes of purplishness, the vagaries of rain and wind.

It will say . . . fine she will say . . . fine Calliope will say, "Johnny, lacklusterest of poets, ramshacklest of bloggers, listen as I whisper soft against the vines, gingerly through the cactus quills. There is a story in the veins of my leaves. A story of love purblind and purpose lost. And the cost of pennies flicked in wells for wishes ill-conceived."

But that would just be silly.

Silly and AWESOME.

momentous

Here is a sonnet to commemorate the rescue of the Chilean miners that began last night. It is not necessarily finished. It is directly from a two hour wrestling match with my brain. So why post it now? At first, the answer was clear. I won't. No sense in it. Because not only is the poem possibly incomplete, neither is the rescue effort complete. As of this instant, only sixteen of the miners are above ground. Then I got to thinking about it. I was impressed by a sense of nowness. Something to do with immediacy and the life of a poem. If I am the least bit effective as a poet, I should be able to capture a moment in such a way as to sustain its urgency, in a self-perpetuating sense (a sort of Romantic sense). Such a poem survives the present. Mounts time and rides it into everlasting. Something like that. Something far too laden with metaphysical propositions beyond the scope or intent of this preface.

I don't presume to be achieving anything particularly momentous here. I simply became intrigued by the concept of embedding this object, my small poem, into this time-stamped medium, as an exercise in interaction--that is, an attempt to utilize simultaneity as a means to fully engage the art with its inspiration. Like the quick consumption of hot-out-of-the-oven-bread born of an out-of-the-blue craving. Or something like that. Something to do with immediacy and the life of a poem.

Fenix 2

Descent begins. Slow troll of cable, taut

Along the pulley. The indelible

Unspooling spectacle, invincible

Time counterwise on whitewash spokes and caught

Off guard. Now darkness. Stone against machine.

The mineral moisture, the tang-pricked tears.

His own hot breath—the vapor versus gears

Above, the only vital sign between

The separated lives, the low and high.

The second-hours, the minute-days—how long

Must months seem? Cannot rub the itching eye.

May never see the stars again. Or friends.

Imagine ocean shores. Listen . . . a song—

The hope of half-naked survivors ascends.

[since originally posting this, two things of note: 25 miners are presently out and I changed the "spokes" from "yellow" to "whitewash" having misremembered the color of the pulley-wheel. The frame is yellow.]

appropriateness

Here is an excerpt from The Gist of Elijah chosen for its seasonal appropriateness. (What an awful, ugly word--appropriateness--I shall never use it again, not even when it is appropriate.) Reminder: The narrator (Justin Latterly) is writing the biography of a poet--one Elijah Stenson; and here, Justin is fresh from a fight with his off-again, off-again girlfriend.

With several hours to kill before my session with Stenson, I drove to Klieger Park. The parking lot was empty except for two cars—a brown station wagon and a blue Civic like mine. I parked under a maple as far away from the other cars as the small gravel lot allowed and sat for fifteen minutes too sapped of will to budge. The speakers crackled Johnny Cash. I brooded and let the music sink me deeper like a bullet weight on a fishing line. The day was clear, sun bright in the rearview, one cloud trolling the sky through my windshield. I should get out and let the early autumn do its trick.

If I was a poet, I’d write of autumn. If I was Elijah Stenson, I’d cast my lines in the reds that begin to bruise beneath the greens of summer. In Virginia, as a child, when poetry was still possible, I cherished the distinct flavor of fall. Each breeze brought the burning of leaves or the barks of front-yard football. You stepped out the door and life welcomed you, still so young, in on the secret of its seriousness. Not much. Not enough to quell the thrill of the pirate you’ll be come Halloween or the Indian come Thanksgiving. But just a tinge of decay, a redolence of the grave. Something that, at the time, smells pumpkin-spiced and feels hackled with cold weather.

I got out of the car. The gravel crunched and gave way beneath my heavy working boots—the ones with steel toes for protection against dropped boxes or the collapse of heavy equipment. In my rush to skip Dodge, those shoes were the readiest at hand but they made for sore hiking. Nevertheless, I tromped across the lot, past the other two cars, and onto to the paved walking track. I headed for the river against the direction of the cartoon duck feet painted on the asphalt. I almost turned to go the long way—the pull of arbitrary obedience absurdly strong—but gathered courage and continued counter-clockwise, blue and yellow duck feet be damned.

The river was strong with recent rain. Fallen limbs and plastic bottles rode the rapids like a rodeo cowboy on a bronco. The water was high against the jutting banks; thick tree roots cut extra eddies into the roil. I wished for a kayak. At the mere thought, my bowels cramped and grew warm. Just shove off and dive in. Parry the rocks and fight the flumes. Then somewhere down the line, smash into the Cahaba River and go and go and go. I had never kayaked in my life. The fact didn’t even faze me. By the time I heard the dog bark, I had nearly reached the Gulf of Mexico.

having to do with the weight of words

So here is the bundle of grief. (As opposed to joy.) The Gist of Elijah--tangible, tactile. The pith and the pulp of it. Three pounds of dead tree. Three hundred and one pages of ink-stained copy-paper printed by the good folks at FedEx Kinkos for a fair market price and then shipped (via ground, so the heft of the manuscript can crawl like a tortoise--carapace heavy and plastron thick) to the sublime clime of Vermont where it will be unboxed and flipped through. Where later, the ink-stains will be Rorschach-ed and Cap'n Crunch Decoder-ringed and evaluated for relative merits against conceivably a thousand other novels.

There went my little bundle, my offsprung germ of literature, mayhaps to burrow into a judge's skull, infest and foment, bubble and deliquesce, suffuse the glials and neurons, and win a first novel contest.

Godspeed my grief. Fare thee well. May we meet again on happier, yonder shores. St. Elmo and St. Christopher guide and keep you. Bon voyage, you bulk of many hours, you girth of lost hair, you joyous, joyful, grief. Adieu.