HELLO STRANGER ~

Hello Stranger 

His name was Carl and before he was

Even through the woodshed door coming

Into the kitchen he said, “Now what did

You do?” We’ve never met but I squint a

Moment closer to make sure we never have.

Carl is an electrician, I’m a carpenter,

This morning I drew a fast chopping

Blade halfway through a live-wire while

Cutting out a hatch door into the ceiling.

At first spark I stopped the sawzall. Now Carl

Is way up in the hatch fixing wire I never

Want anything to do with. It’s late in the

Day, he’s sweaty, punchy, clumsy for an

Electric man but it doesn’t bother me

Because I like him. Did immediately.

Something about the cheap post earring

In the right ear. Something about the

Beer gut, the headband, the nonstop ramble.

Turns out he lives eight miles from where

I was born; it’s been 25 years since I’ve

Met anyone who knows Mauserts swimminghole 

And a place called Clarksburg. “Shit, yes”

Is how Carl talks, beefy enthusiasm, as

He chips the porcelain pull switch sloppy

As ever and says he won’t charge me. As if

His life has any clue about paperwork.

Let’s get honest. Carl has turned 40. He

Is to be married at the end of the week

To his third wife who has two kids while

Carl has two of his own. They met at a

Country store. He bought beer and she was

The cashier. He returned every day after

Work until he gained up the nerve to ask

Her on a date. Like I said, I fell for

The guy too when he came in today walking

And talking through the woodshed door.

Neighbor

They said it was a heart

Attack but it weren’t no

Heart attack even though

We all seen the Rescue van

Out here and we hardly ever

Do and they pulled all three

Of his sons out of school and

Rushed them and the wife from

The Ames job real fast to the

Hospital in case it was the real

Thing but it was due to plowing

Just too much snow plowing and

Rotten weather and late nights

Riding these backwoods roads

That finally got to him just

Shy of 40 and putting on some

Extra weight and sudden like

His whole body seized up and

It must of given him a real

Scare because for a few years

Now he had turned into a regular

Son of a bitch, surly and pinched

And all cockeyed behind a beard

But since the scare and the doctor

Said take-it-easy it has been

Like when I first met him as

A boy now leaving his monster

Truck at home and walking the

Road along the river with his

Dog that he takes plowing with

Him and he waves and smiles and

The dog looks happier too

Specifics

There was one stone

I set into the hut

That my neighbor Everett

Belden, a farmer, always

Remarked on liking specifically

When word of stone walls

Or such came up, “Now

There’s that white rock

You did that I like,” he’d

Always say and I can’t

Remember if I placed it

In special or it just

Came up in the pile that

Way, but now Everett is long

Gone and the hut is 10 years

Built and so is the boy who

I made it for and whenever

The story comes up he learns

A little more about Everett,

Things gone by and the love
For something done right

_________________

Bob Arnold

Once In Vermont

Gnomon

THE FATE OF RURAL HELL ~

S E A G U L L      B O O K S

2016

STARS (for Susan) ~

SHIRLEY JACKSON ~

Shirley Jackson’s house, the Greek Revival on Prospect Street in North Bennington

photo:  Kathye Fetsko Petrie

RUTH FRANKLIN ~ SHIRLEY JACKSON

DYNAMITE ~

B O B      D Y L A N      I N T E R V I E W

UNCLE GHOST ~

Right out of the blue Ronald Baatz every now and then sends to me his latest collection of poems.

Right out of the blue I usually sit right down with the collection and read the poems. Every last drop.

RB and I have never met. I know where he lives. I haven't been to Troy New York in thirty years.

I read his poems and almost never have a pencil free at hand so I stop and go get a pencil, then I

begin to read again. As I read I check a poem here and there and some I also don't check I also like.

I'm sharing the ones I recently checked. I think I'll write to RB and ask if we might take the 
checked-poems and make a foldout booklet to share.
Yes, this is what we've done.
The above image is the booklet of Ronald's poems —
but what the hey — we'll share it all with you here.

______________________

from Uncle Ghost

Morning -

I shake

a little birth

a little death

on my eggs

I row

an unwanted dog to

the other side of the lake

along with a box

of powdered milk

It's true -

I always save

some piss for the shower

always forget to rinse

some soap from the beard

Old woman sitting

on the same bench

tells me that if she has

two hairs left under her arms

it's a lot

In my younger days

an old person's eyes seemed

to be the eyes of a donkey

now such eyes are the eyes

of a saint with bent legs

Scattering

my first wife's ashes

in a high and windy place -

so high and so windy

my hat's blown off

Relax -

no harm will come

to the merriment of the berry

spinning in its

own decay

Alone

I take the night

and slowly soften it on my tongue

so it's easy

to swallow

Like the perfect cricket

I continue singing my lazy song

knowing I've already

practically killed

a lifetime

Until they bathe

in the soft dirt at the

edge of the garden

sparrows avoid

being seen

Painstakingly

I lick every seed

I throw to the birds -

so at least some part of me

will fly away

While cutting away

the rotten parts of a pear

I wonder how many gods

can fit on the head

of a fruit fly

I was just a small kid

when I learned how to use a swing

but I was able to swing high enough

to see beyond the hedges

to the cemetery

Insomnia -

doubtless it will be

with me until the end

I'll probably die one night

while trying to fall asleep

I want to come back as a crow

and keep coming back as a crow

until the sun turns into a raisin

in a dark box

of other raisins

All night long

the mockingbird reminds me

that one must also rely

on the songs

of others

for Samuel Charters

_______________

R O N A L D      B A A T Z

Uncle Ghost

Wolfscat Press
baatzu555@gmail.com

LA FRONTERA ~

UTOPIA ~

U T O P I A     D R I V E

E R I K     R E E C E

once again — a moment to grumble on book design

this one is quite unique for subject and we are

moving along on the highway, two-lane, lots of bends, hill country

searching for the lost utopia
in a one guy and his pickup truck

and we haven't seen a book quite like this one in adventurous spirit

since Blue Highways

but like I say, we are digging into the worm of the apple here —

utopian communities that at one time were speaking to this same

violent america as a possibility of

peace on earth —

indeed, bury it swiftly!

so the book is moving

allow it more space, wider margins,

a more relaxed and less jammed typography —

is the book world really going out as cheapskates?

If there is anyone in the younger generation
learned from the likes of Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Wes Jackson
I believe Eric Reece may be the one.

__________________________

[Yet] "the Shakers lasted one hundred years at Pleasant Hill; the perfectionists turned a completely successful experiment in socialism into a wildly successful joint-stock company; Modern Times gave up equitable commerce only after proving that it worked. To say that these communities no longer exist — and as Twin Oaks proves, many of them still do exist — is not the same things as saying that they failed. The angel of history may yet salvage their blueprints from the detritus of the past. Because, after all, we still need these ideas so badly. In fact, we need them now more than ever before. During my utopian summer, the western ice sheet of Antarctica began breaking off into the ocean, which will cause sea levels to rise far more than scientists had predicted. Back in my hemisphere, the American Congress passed fifteen bills into law — total. Five percent of Americans continue to control 85 percent of this country's wealth, and since 1980, the wealthiest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple, while those of the poor and middle class have flatlined. The more this inequality grows, the sicker and more punitive our country becomes. The epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have recently shown that every single societal problem, with no exception, can be tied directly to income inequality. As a result, the United States has higher levels of mental illness, infant immortality, divorce, obesity, violence, incarceration, and substance abuse than all the other countries north of the equator. "In more unequal societies," they wrote, "people are five times as likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be clinically obese, and murder rates may be many times higher." Consider these two statistics: the United States makes up5 percent of the world's population, but we consume 25 percent of its resources and we incarcerate 25 percent of its population. I don't believe those numbers are a coincidence Almost all the wealth from extracting those resources, those fossil fuels, goes to the very richest, and the very poorest end up in jail because either they can't get by or they find illicit ways to get by or simply cope. Money that might go into education or even food stamps goes instead into the penal system. Money that might fund badly needed American infrastructure instead funds 761 military bases all over the world. Money that might be loaned by a community bank is paced as a Wall Street bet that a bond will default. Money that might reward real work circulates instead inside the same echo chamber of less and less tangible securities. Wealth becomes less accessible to most Americans, while the wealthy themselves use their power to ensure that politicians do their bidding, mostly in the form of lowering their tax rates and deregulating the industries they control. Large corporations shell out $6 billion annually to employ thirty-five thousand D.C. lobbyists to protect their wealth. Such game rigging has bred cynicism and pessimism among the body politic, and as a result, we have the lowest voter turnout on the world's forty industrial democracies. The more we retreat from, or are pushed from, the public sphere of influence, the more we lose trust in our public institutions and in one another According to the National Opinion Research Center, levels of trust in the United States have fallen from 60 percent in 1960 less than 40 percent in 2004. Into that vacuum, the imperious One Percent pours more money and accrues more power. That decline in trust has paralleled a widening income gap in the United States — currently the largest of any country in the Northern Hemisphere and the largest in this country's history, according to the 2009 census. When trust weakens and economic inequality widens, an epidemic of social maladies follows What it all adds up to, said the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, is this: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both."

"We obviously have the latter in this country, and I've come to believe that things will only get worse if we don't engage in some serious utopian thinking. Fighting for something like campaign finance reform is laudable, but that isn't what I consider utopian thinking because it is an effort to fix a plutocratic system that doesn't deserve to be salvaged. It isn't enough. Utopian thinking by contrast and by definition, works outside the system, in a bottom-up fashion, to create a new paradigm and thus create a true form of democracy that is worthy of its name. In my view, such thinking must begin by addressing this country's most intractable problems, namely, our gross disparity in wealth and a fossil fuel-based economy that is completely unsustainable in the face of climate change, resource depletion, and the degradation of our ecosystems."

(typed with book open on my knees from pages 327-329, if you, reader, are following along)

from UTOPIA DRIVE
Erik Reece
FSG, 2016

KAFKA ~

Aphorisms by Franz Kafka

Schocken 2015

Imagine to our surprise, a new book by Franz Kafka!

gone now almost 100 years

translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

and Michael Hofmann (who seems relentless

in bringing us new, fresh work, thank you)

nicely introduced by Daniel Frank as

"The Afterlife of Fragments"

T O M     H A Y D E N ( 1939-2016 )
Back in the good ol' days

“One of your prime objectives,” J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, said in one memo, “should be to neutralize him in the New Left movement.”





T O M     H A Y D E N

STARE ~

Y O U     T A L K I N'     T O     M E  ?





photo ~ susan arnold

PASSED WITHOUT WORDS~

Family Fire

Almost hunting season

Last week of October

No one was around when the new house

Somehow turned to fire and after

A year building for this farm family

Fell into ashes in a half hour.

The first person to get

There before the fire department

Spoke of gas tanks blowing off,

Windows melting flames,

A big blue spruce close by shredded brown.

  

Now down in the dungeon of the cellar

Snow shovels and pitchforks sift through

Savings of four sons, a man and woman —

Blackened chain saw bar, lost book pages,

Bills and receipts, iron coat hooks, an axe head.

No clue to the favorite family photographs

Or pet parakeet, only the twisted

Hunk of his wire cage.

I can just imagine the fright

In the bird at first sense of fire —

A quarter mile away one of our dogs

Broke the clasp to his chain

Smelling five cords of firewood

Burn all at once.

The Walker

Everyone who has been around

The last twenty years, at least,

Has a different story to

Remember about the Henry boy

Who walked the roads.

He’s dead now.

One night after not seeing him

For a few years I came across

His tiny obituary in the newspaper

And if you hadn’t known him

The notice said nothing —

Only that he lived,

Had relatives in town,

And now he was dead —

No mention that he walked

Twenty-five miles sometimes in one day.

Started off at his parents’ farm and

Followed over the hill then

Tracked down into the village,

Poked through the covered bridge,

And turned on his heel to the left

Wandering down the river road —

Where two miles later he would

Pass me digging up stone for

One of the old walls around here.

Usually he was surprised when

I said hello, squinted over at

Me and raised his whole arm

In a salute, while still marching.

No one would have kept up with

His stride, and I watched him

Until he disappeared down the

Knoll — a harmless character in

Clothing that blended with the

Trees, road gravel, spring air.

Most of the people called him

Deaf, dumb or other things.

Old timers brushed his name aside

Whenever it came up, or else

Said something about “How it

Was a shame.” And now as the

Town changes and funny looking

Houses are built and taxes go up

Each year for easier living

I know I miss the Henry boy,

Who I simply called the walker,

Because that’s what he did

Everyday. And everyone either

Ignored him, or were used to what

They thought a pitiful sight

And no doubt he did struggle,

But this road isn’t the same

Without him — it’s gotten

Respectable almost — lost sight

Of one who walked these miles

For whatever his private reasons.

Nevertheless, he always saluted

His hello, passed without words.

Tom Newall

We haven’t a clue

What he is doing —

Moving in tangle of

Thistle and goldenrod,

Grass wet to his chest,

Sun storms the barn roof —

This is Tom Newall who is

90 years old and never married,

And he might be in a habit

Of walking his fence line

Tugging off brush and tassel

  

My friend drives by this farm,

Always tells me the same

Story no matter how many times

As if he can’t remember repeating

Why he is proud about knowing

Tom Newall — who boiled 400 gallons

Of maple syrup last year,

Triple that when he was younger —

And he never did marry, but how

Is it possible no one would fetch

This man of gentle poise and nitid

Eyes I can’t forget from meeting

Him just one time

Around the house lawn trim and

Kept, chickens roost on the front

Stair stoop as if, and now

It is, perfectly normal —

There is no reason to bother

Tom Newall or any other like this

Good man — if my friend had his

Way this farmer and land and

Summit would remain as it is —
That it won’t, has us look

________________

Bob Arnold

O N C E     I N     VE R M O N T

G n o m o n