START WITH THE TREE III ~

Getting scaffolding built for the second floor and rafter raising. The scaffold is the one-man carpenter's dream (a helping hand)

Research

Spread out on the second floor. Brace your rafters for now.

Rafter detail on newly saw-milled spruce lumber.
"T" is top.

All my best carpentry and poetry teachers taught me to sweep up. Sweep up, be ready for the next day which will be ready for you. And 'poetry teachers' span from redtail hawk and worker ant to the ever literary and nonliterary.

 Early August and most of the lumber has been used up from the sawmill. The spruce rafters are all on, strapping nailed down tight a bit less than two-foot on center; we're waiting for the steel roof order which takes a week. While we wait we paint the steel siding and start gathering for the first layer of stone work, which will be all the front gable end.

The back window bought for $2 at a village rummage sale in July. It came with insulated glass to top it off. It's hinged for extra power — to open for a cross breeze on the hottest days. The upstairs loft may one day harbor books or sleeping quarters, or both.

 The 25 year old Toyota now off-road, my moving work wagon and toolbox, tailgate for sawing, back bed to catch all the butt ends of lumber. Only two tires slowly go down with air because the rims are that old.

My co-workers "truck." She wanted me to tell you this.

The finished off and painted east side windows. The top decoration I pulled off an old friend's mighty chest of drawers we hauled over one Christmas eve night from New York State. The chest was too old but the drawers I kept and all the decorations were carefully removed. It'll all be used somewhere.

Three essential

tools on

the job.

Interior of chapel — loft floor joists, with rafter butt ends of the lean-to
spiked into place. By mid-August I'll have a storage region built-in under the floor joists to keep loose lumber off the ground.

The steel walls have now been double-coat painted, the building is waiting for its roofing.

 The lean-to

From the front gate built decades ago by Bob; stonewall, too.

One hundred miles away, find this spot, out of the blue, walking around in some town neighborhood. Another person has taken the time to allow strangers to partake, and raked.

Take a breather, look out at some place different.

The stump of an oak tree I cut down. We carry the stump around as a seat. 

Daddy Longlegs is coming along.

Boxing in the gable end, soon ready for two windows

and stone. The bottom course of slate has been started.

The slate is only visually structural, but visual in architecture is often as strong as structural.

Old steel roofing, now siding, and all newly painted.

Cut out of the steel two more rough openings for windows, now to locate those windows.

They'll show up.

One of these two of a twin sugar maple will have to be removed in the Fall. Less danger from falling tree limbs onto the steel roof; more light, sunshine. I should have dropped one of the two trees before the construction began. It is not easy to want to drop a healthy sugar maple tree. Vermont's masthead.

Take part of the afternoon off from the job and go visit an old friend two miles up river in the village.

The covered bridge is out for awhile. . .okay.

But this oldest bridge in the world is in service.

 

photos 2014  © bob & susan arnold

RURAL LIFE AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD ( MEET AT THE RIVER ) ~

25th AUGUST 2014, 6 PM Green River Dam





August 25, 2014, it was a lovely late afternoon when we bicycled up to the covered bridge to have a look around, plus we wanted to cross the river to visit with an old friend in the village. We have a map to bring to her that shows how the town of Guilford has one proposal to drive a new roadway, called "alternative route," smack dab through her property. Well, no, she doesn't own the property any longer, a trustee does, but at one time, and I've written about this friend before, circa 1940, when she moved here as a youngster with her family, they owned all the village.


Our friend isn't at all happy about this proposed road route on the map.

 
Today our friend is under the weather. She answers the door by visiting with us from her second floor screened bedroom window, something we've done many times over many years if she isn't feeling herself, adding, "I don't want you two to catch what I have."


 We leave at her door certain paperwork for her to preview, mostso this map, with its alternative route barreling through her woodland, wetlands, old spring brook, expansive yard (I used to mow), and knocking apart the best plum tree in all of Green River, and oh my what plum jelly was made from the plums of that tree. You could buy this jelly in its gilt jar, from the Brattleboro Food Co-op for $9.  Once upon a time.

 
While we toured on the bikes we shot more photographs of the covered bridge work site, as well as the footbridge being erected by some of the neighbors in the neighborhood a quarter mile south of the covered bridge.


We got ourselves across the river not using the ford this time, nor disobeying the footbridge signs of "Keep Out" since it's still under construction, and we didn't get our feet wet neither.

 
You figure out how we got across.
 
 
[ BA ]

The Start of a footbridge a quarter mile south of the closed covered bridge

Planking for the footbridge

River ledge and support

Entrance to the footbridge from River Road, west side of the river

Abutment to the covered bridge exposed for renovation

Cribbing under the abutment

The progression of the stone wing wall

Getting under into the abutment

Back fill of the wing wall

 

photos 2014  © bob & susan arnold

PSYCHEDELIC NORWAY ~

Psychedelic Norway

John Colburn

Coffee House Press

first impression

we throw a party and the police come

they have black shoes and accessorize well

like hipsters

we immediately throw another party

the police come back

they are enchanted with our music

it calls to them

their fists love our doors

I have been in this kind of relationship before

the police leave

they drive through the night to end another party

we must think of them in the morning

how an officer sits at the edge of a mattress

afraid of a new day

fumbling with the silk edge of a blanket for comfort

the police want us to think of others

and to stop having this good time

but everything that happens is just something

we made up a moment ago

and when the police tell us not to be so happy

we ask them where they got their shoes

it is unspeakably early in our lives

we want to come to our own parties

as other people — then we'd show us how to live

we want to come to our party as the police

we want to be others

it is wrong but we still want to

some people keep a record of their most loved moments

on scraps of paper in a coffee can

we want to be something we just made up

when the song ends

we want the next song to make us happy

the police drive through the night on pursuit tires

we know where they get their shoes

we show them how to live

fumbling with the silk edge of a blanket for comfort

writing their names on scraps of paper

to put in a coffee can

we want them to come back

_________

ode to mescaline

Cold flower walks back and forth in the shy body.

Cactus petal swims in the hungry body.

Green vapor sings in the fever body.

The stomach goes away down a hard road.

Here comes a fireworks body.

Father flies through clouds.

Mother rises through earth.

I admire each leaf.

The sky pleases the day.

We'll give our hair back to earth.

Even the armpit, even the ditch has a pleasing fashion.

What if I were a mango?

Smell how the grass loves us.

Feel the tongue of the cloud.

A listener praises the sound of fire.

See our shadows have dignity.

Our headaches have their own lives, like moons.

I sit aside a day for clouds, a night for clouds.

It grows green light inside me.

There is nothing to resist.

Sometimes I am nothing.

The tongue of the cloud cleans each word.

The sweet offering of the voice makes a way.

Any name is good enough.

Let's hear the sound of walking.

Walking is part of the song.

A cactus god dreams everything.

I heard about your other god.

I heard it walking.

____________

obedience

It is better to sleep upstairs

in the world of dreams.

Almost shining in the sky.

My parents have never told me

one dream they've had.

When daylight moves in, a settlement,

the dream travels by dog.

It is a dog in the shape of a dog.

In a dream my parents finally tell me

one dream they've had.

Then I sit up in bed and dream I

sit up in bed

telling my wife about a dream I had

with a dog in it.

My father yells up the stairs

I had a dream, I had a dream.

Then I look out the window

and see a space on the sidewalk

where a dog just was.

The dog that sleeps when I am awake

and wakes up running when I fall asleep.

Later, in the shower,

I put my mouth to the nozzle

and I am a dog.

What if my parents

have never had one dream!

I sit up in bed

almost shining in the sky

and tell my wife about a dream.

The downstairs in the shower

I am a dog, distracting myself

from the other thing I am becoming.

My dreamless father shouts up the stairs.

He can't walk anymore,

he is in my dream.

He will have to travel by dog.

JOHN COLBURN

THE MUSEUM OF SCANDALS ~

The Museum of Scandals

by Elea Raucheron & Diane Routex

Prestel, 2013

AUGUST DOGS SING ~

"august dogs sing"
august 2014
music compiled by bob arnold

BLACK PANTHERS 1968 ~

BLACK PANTHERS 1968

Howard L. Bingham

Ammo Books, 2009

~

essays by 

Howard L. Bingham, Tessa Hicks, Mar Hollingsworth,

 Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Bernard Kinsey, Gilbert Moore

"On the steps of the Capitol, Bobby Seale read a statement, an executive mandate: "The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general, and black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California Legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people and at the same time that the American government is waging a racist war of genocide in Vietnam." 

May 2, 1967

 

Nearly a half century later substitute "California" for Ferguson - St. Louis, MO. and

 "Vietnam" with Iraq or Afghanistan 

— we haven't learned our lesson.

http://www.blackpanther.org/

This book can still be found, very reasonably priced at $20, shrink wrapped and stunning hardback, showcasing Bingham's portrait of the Panthers in their prime.

MALCOLM COWLEY ~

Malcolm Cowley
The Long Voyage
Selected Letters 1915-1987
edited by Hans Bak
Harvard, 2013

Behind every great man there is, these days, perhaps a woman, or another man. And vice-versa. Behind every great book there has been a great editor, and Malcolm Cowley was one of the greatest in 20th century American literature. His banner list of writers include Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and John Cheever for starters. And on the Kerouac front, Cowley not only brought On the Road forth from where he worked at Viking, he went back to Kerouac after Viking initially rejected the book and impressed upon his colleagues to have another look.
 There's your editor.

AMIS TO LARKIN ~

Kingsley Amis & Philip Larkin

The Odd Couple

by Richard Bradford

The Robson Press

RURAL LIFE AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD (BERKSHIRES) ~

Summertime

Thinking over the past week, which then takes me further back, as it always does —


Robin Williams could have been capable of striving deeply into acting and the cinema world but my hunch is he couldn't control his vices, so the comedy masqueraded much of his madness. He was as mad as depressed. If you watch him in his earlier films, you see deep potential and scale. Then he got lazy with fame, fortune and needing the audience to respond to him. Thus the standup and the constant tv work on talk shows where he couldn't resist but to go into his scheme, which I loved of course, since it was channeling my own humor and madness but I'll let him do it for me. With that relief, I can stick to the real world. We use our comedians and they know it. The two rarest ones: Keaton and Chaplin made more than comedy. It was drama. I feel terrible for Williams since he had powerhouse abilities and now he's sunk by his own hand. Hunter Thompson raising a big revolver at his kitchen stool, son and family in the other room, blows his brains out. No warning. Another one who worked masterpieces, gone. In the meantime we have the likes of Kissinger and the whole Bush family moving around us doing just fine. Accepted or ignored in a benign way. We lose the Masters. It's always been this way. Thompson and Williams ended up believing, somehow, that they were shunned.


Now look at the comedians of old — George Burns, Milton Berle, Sid Cesar, Bob Hope, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Carol Burnett, many many more, all lived and some are still living, deep into old age. What did they have, despite the comedy, the tragedy, the acceptance and the shunning? They have and had a classical bent. Very different from the 60s icons and troubled souls, although Dylan may get there. They all had a poise and an elegance for style and demeanor, and an almost balance with patience and timing, and they listened as well as any wild animal since they drew their work from the public and privacy of life. They took care of business.

Susan and I have just put down one half of the chapel roof, or is it a garage or is it a small barn, that may one day also become part bookshop, or even a lending library? You dream when you build if you're really building. Build in a routine and you're sure to get a routine. Today we take a rare lunch break since the work has driven us ravenous. We'll go out and start on the other side of the roof so we can finish it all by tomorrow afternoon and then take off Sunday and travel, frolic, hike, search out the bookshops, byways, even strangers, and say "hello." We give ourselves, if we're lucky, one day off a week.

Yesterday -

Changed horses at the last minute yesterday morning - 4AM - and took the new Tacoma pickup, which I call the Bronco.  We were gone by 5 and in the Berkshires, southern level, Stockbridge town to be exact (where Alice's Restaurant was, sung by Arlo Guthrie, I ate there once upon a leafy time), where I used to see Norman Rockwell cross the quiet streets very early in the morning on my way as a teenager to work the family lumberyards with a roving manager. I was his roving sidekick. 5 lumberyards, one a day for us, quite a mutt & jeff team. Rockwell with his pipe, debonair hat, and the New York Times under his arm. That's what he was walking for. A classic gentleman. It's 7:30 and chilly when we arrive in the town.

Now the town is summer-tourist crazy, bustling, loud, way too much traffic storming through for a town its size. Susan used the bathroom she likes from the fanciful Red Lion Inn (50 years ago my father was flagged down for a speeding ticket right at this corner, four kids in the backseat) while I got the bicycles out from the back of the short pickup. They fit like sardines, but they fit. And we rode for a good hour around all the side street neighborhoods with good homes, none too fancy, and then a deeper ride through the back gardens of Austin Riggs, the expensive mental institution. James Taylor was stationed there when I was that boy passing through. The rumor at the time was his heroin addiction, who knows? When he got out he played a concert, large as jesus, up the road in Lenox and I was there for Sweet Baby James.

By 9 we were at the used book shop we love, and its owner a real tireless book lover out of Manhattan long ago, in her 70s, with a classic eye and so many books I need to be there almost all of a day. So we were. The owner says, and she has a sweet way of saying it, "I love you visiting, but you take my best books." I smile back to this Londoner (native home) and say, "Well, I can't very well take your worse books." She laughs and agrees. Susan worked finding books and I also asked her to just sit out in the sun and partake there. No complaints. I worked the premises. Good stuff. Nuts in the cheeks. Winter fuel. It will also appease us from any appetite to head back down to the Berkshires in a week to a library book sale we hardly ever miss in Lenox. This year we'll miss it, having spent our wad here, and work instead in buttoning up the chapel construction. I have stone work to get to.

So while I'm finishing up, Susan in the sun, and this place is off the beaten track 5 miles from a tar road, the outer Berkshires, I see a very old fellow and know who it is instantaneously, hobbled horribly and being helped from his silver Honda by his male companion, a good and patient man, holding the old fellow up, with his cane, soft comfortable shoes, who looks at me square in the face as I approach and I look at him squarely and say, "A lovely day." Meaning the sun. He seems to agree with a nod and goes back to figuring out how to cross the earth. And I mean he's in very very rough shape moving. Susan, sitting in the sun, was surprised the man was in such bad condition yet had the wherewithal to have immediate attention onto her when he got himself, with help, out of the car. He was going to get inside the tiny book packed building and get plunked down into a comfortable wooden chair up front near the checkout counter and his friend was going to bring him a box of old postcards and John Ashbery was going to wheeze a bit and catch his breath looking over this postcard collection. I've been reading him all my life. We're nothing alike but he's my sort of man of letters. And I felt fortunate to have been with him for a moment today.

Susan later asked before we left, "Don't you want to say something to him?" I do but I shouldn't. He's at a point in life of just getting from one place to another is a dog-team effort. Leave him be to relax.

We drove home the three hours through the old roots and tangled roads of back lots and farmlands. I love the drive back to my old home place. . .in the Berkshires, and I can see it's only a matter of time my other home place, Vermont, will also be overrun.

"summertime" photo 2014  © bob arnold

Ashbery is very frail, and also edging toward 90 years of age (b. 1927), and I mean he should have been carried from the car and into the used book hamlet (which is his familiar, well welcomed by the owner etc) but there is a admirable determination on his part to get from point A to point B with his cane. I couldn't help myself to be right there, in my own familiar (the rural setting) with a man who meant a great deal to me since the age of 15 when I was discovering his poetry, art essays, and translations goodness sakes the same time I was discovering Ted Enslin, Cid Corman, James Koller, Janine Pommy Vega, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Hayden Carruth. Here is, essentially, the genius of the NY School, Frank O'Hara, a pal, later Ted Berrigan, all the guys. The guys that helped save my young life. I'll regret I didn't say something more than "hello" which I at least did, eye to eye, because I am capable of also regretting that I bothered him if I did go ahead and make the plunge. Better to be moderate, since I'm often anything but with an endurance and at least a wish at taking on the day.

(letter to John Phillips, 16 august 2014)