TIGERS

Ow. In fact ouch.
John Ashbery

I'm inside now after a day of shoveling heavy snow
work clothes hung up by the wood stove
ice clothes melting
which attracts the kitten
the water drops. . .
each one, one after another
and the kitten is on them
never seen these before!
pattering on the small rug
then on his head
it's all fascinating


that's a kitten —
one with the wild
everybody in the world, except for millions now,
once understood how we made our living was
with nature
not against it, with
water drops also onto our heads


we can't feed every hungry person for some reason
we can't jail the corporate criminals for some reason
just the one that feverishly stole from the rich for his own reason


we can't seem to understand why we are fascinated by the sex escapades
of Tiger Woods, the first truly black athlete accepted by white people
thought of not as black by black people


in the wild many before had their own sex stories
though none were the pet of whites, on the white golf links,
not until Tiger


who is hardly a cat —
a cat is all day fascinated by just simple water drops
the freest animal in all the world



Bob Arnold says learn to meow, purr and scratch

iron sculpture by Scott Tindall & photo © bob arnold

TWO OF THE FEW



Last night I painted the third coat of

Periwinkle twilight on the bathroom floor

A new floor I just built

Sweetheart stood in the doorway in a

Pretty blue dress and talked to me



A date



Before that we had enjoyed red raspberry

Ice-cream cones with chocolate drops —

What a scrumptious world it has become!

We believe both paint and ice-cream are two of

The best things that have improved over the years

Bob Arnold wasn’t going to share this itty-bitty poem, but Sweetheart said she liked the colors


morning glory photo © susan arnold

LICHEN

48 IN THE SHADE



The other day in the local post office (closest to us is 10 miles away) while Sweetheart sifted down book packages for customers, I met up with an old builder friend I haven't talked to in almost 25 years


We built a hefty footbridge together back in those years


He wanted to know how that bridge was faring since it is a mile up river from our place


I told Pete I had to replace the stringers he cut with me from ironwood trees because the contractor we worked for refused to believe, like we both knew, that the bark should be peeled from the logs before setting them in as supports


So the good wood rotted


I told him I had to work right in the river with my aluminum ladder...12 feet deep and the top of the ladder tied to the bridge, steady as you go


I took each old stringer out and put new 4 x 4 pressure treated braces in


Holding up that small part of the bridge momentarily with my shoulder


Today I'd make sure to charge accordingly; back then I bet I thought I was rich with a few hundred dollars in my pocket


Pete liked the story


Later in the day, I got everything done up at a carpentry job across town in the woods, and Sweetheart napped on the lawn in the warm sun


Faraway from anywhere


48 in the shade

Pete also told Bob Arnold he read one of his books and recognized everybody in the book, but one

star-roof & photo © bob arnold

BUILDERS

BOOKSHELVES OF THE FUTURE

sculpture & photo © bob arnold

MOTHERS

BOB ARNOLD





LUCKY



She is right, this woman

I love, it has been a windy

Fall. And her blonde hair slips

Apart in long strands and with

One hand she combs it away from

Her face and she is smiling. For

Lunch she eats an apple and suns

Her legs, a summer skirt raised.

She is mother. A small boy is

Napping upstairs in the house.

When awake he will chase

Leaves that fall down from the

Sky, that’s how he sees it.

He calls me daddy because I am.



When I was off at work this

Morning up river laying stone

Along the road in the village

A blonde woman and her young son

Visited me. Hands cold gripping

Wet stone, boots chalked. This

Woman carried her little boy

In her arms, his green sweater

Was like the one my son wears

His mother knitted, ah the love

of mothers! and I gathered stone

By hand and thought of blue sky

Above, day clear as the river,

And why you must love what you do.








FATHERS

WELD



Oh yes, I've known welders
They're all by themselves


Their work smell is a strict greeting
From the Industrial Revolution


Years ago I knew a welder who worked
In town out of his one red garage


Doors always open wide, even in the rain
A fire of some kind burning


Victor in his helmet and torch in hand
Boots splattered, old pants------- cement floor


I've arrived to have one more truck bumper torn off
From the mud rides out of this valley brazened back on


He'll do what he can------- backside of town
Near the river------- some tall maple trees


Beautiful old homes going the way of no money any more
Look at all those slate roofs!


So many years later, Victor all gone, red garage is still there
And I'm visiting all over again the same location because


Our son has just moved into a rental in
The old house where maybe Victor lived


To my mind Victor just lived in the garage------- What's a house?
I mention how I've been here before to our son who has no


Idea really what I'm talking about except it's on
The way to just one more of his father's stories. . .

for Gerry Loose

photos © bob arnold

"Lucky" from Once In Vermont (Gnomon, 1999)

CLARICE LISPECTOR
( 1920 -1977 )

STONE

Villa of Souls

Here's where you might rest from your climb







heavy and light of leaf









balanced just-so









follow along touching with your fingertips









into the sunshine









just at your height









listeners. . .









rolling over hill & dale










stand there, year by year, rain, wind, snow









stack up, make yourself








and lean into the work

— Bob Arnold

stonemason & photographer


~


remembering
Charis Wilson

THANKS--- GIVING

ILLINOIS

CARL SANDBURG

How the Three Wild Babylonian Baboons Went Away in the Rain Eating Bread and Butter

One morning when Hatrack the Horse went away from his shanty, he put three umbrellas in the corner next to the front door.

His pointing finger pointed at the three umbrellas as he said, "If the three wild Babylonian Baboons come sneaking up to this Shanty and sneaking through the door and sneaking through the house, then all you three umbrellas open up like it was raining, jump straight at the baboons and fasten your handles in their hands. Then, all three of you stay open as if it was raining—and hold those handles in the hands of the baboons and never let go till I come."

Hatrack the Horse went away. The three umbrellas stood in the corner next to the front door. And when the umbrellas listened they could hear the three wild Babylonian Baboons sneaking up to the shanty. Soon the baboons, all hairy all over, bangs down their foreheads, came sneaking through the door. Just as they were sneaking through the door they took off their hats to show they were getting ready to sneak through the house.

Then the three umbrellas in the corner opened up as if it was raining; they jumped straight at the three wild Babylonian Baboons; and they fastened their handles tight in the hands of the baboons and wouldn't let go.

So there were the three wild Babylonian Baboons, each with a hat in his left hand, and an open umbrella in his right hand.

When Hatrack the Horse came home he came, quiet. He opened the front door, quiet. Then he looked around inside the house, quiet.

In the corner where he had stood the three umbrellas, he saw the three wild Babylonian Baboons on the floor, sleeping, with umbrellas over their faces.

"The umbrellas were so big they couldn't get through the door," sat Hatrack the Horse. For a long time he stood looking at the bangs hanging down the foreheads of the baboons while they were sleeping. He took a comb and combed the bangs down the foreheads of the baboons. He went to the cupboard and spread bread and butter. He took the hats out of the left hands of the baboons and put the hats on their heads. He put a piece of bread and butter in the hand of each baboon.

After that he snipped each one across the nose with his finger (snippety-snip! just like that). They opened their eyes and stood up. Then he loosened the umbrella handles from their right hands and led them to the door.

They all looked out. It was raining. "Now you can go," he told the baboons. And they all walked out of the front door, and they seemed to be snickering and hiding the snickers.

The last he saw of them they were walking away in the rain eating bread and butter. And they took off their hats so the rain ran down and slid off on the bangs of their foreheads.

Hatrack the Horse turned to the umbrellas and said, "We know how to make a surprise party when we get a visit from the Babylonian Baboons with their bangs falling down their foreheads—don't we?"

That is what happened, as Hatrack the Horse told it to the night policeman in the Village of Cream Puffs.



from Rootabaga Stories, illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham

When not writing his biography of Lincoln, or his poems to the People, to Chicago, to the workers and the ways of the Great Plains, or playing his guitar, or welcoming the likes of a pilgrimage by Bob Dylan, Carl Sandburg wrote terrific lively fully all-sense/nonsense stories for children and the young at heart. He's little read these days compared to his grand years, and is often even ridiculed and laughed at. Imagine that.

EDWARD DORN

The Rick of Green Wood


In the woodyard were green and dry
woods fanning out, behind
----------------------------------------a valley below
a pleasure for the eye to go.

Woodpile by the buzzsaw. I heard
the woodsman down in the thicket. I don't
want a rick of green wood, I told him
I want cherry or alder or something strong
and thin, or thick if dry, but I don't
want the green wood, my wife could die

Her back is slender
and the wood I get must not
bend her too much through the day.

Aye, the wood is some green
and some dry, the cherry thin of bark
cut in July.

My name is Burlingame
said the woodcutter.
My name is Dorn, I said.
I buzz on Friday if the weather cools
said Burlingame, enough of names.

-------Out of the thicket my daughter was walking
singing—

------------backtracking the horse hoof
-------gone in earlier this morning, the woodcutter's horse
-------pulling the alder, the fir, the hemlock
-------above the valley
---------------------------------in the november

air, in the world, that was getting colder
as we stood there in the woodyard talking
pleasantly, of the green wood and the dry.

If there's one poem allowed to remember Ed Dorn by, this is my choice. And this one was recently sent to me by one of his closest friends. It was no coincidence we were both thinking of the same poem in November.

JAMES KOLLER






~


A river I couldn’t find
flows through my head.

You are standing
below the cottonwood tree
on the river’s bank.

I listen to the wind
move the tree’s leaves.

Your long dark hair
wraps around you.

I can’t see your face.

All Illinois boys have a steady eye and it often ripraps through their poems. James Koller and Coyote's Journal has long been associated with Longhouse. We're always happy to share Jim's work.

TOM CLARK







What Is That Bright Star Next to the Moon Tonight?


Out late and looking again to the hazed red urban evening sky for a sign
What is that bright star next to the moon tonight?
Asking myself this among other questions of fleeting consequence
I watched Jupiter the great fluid king of the night
With his rude belching gases and submissive fluctuating moons

His swashbuckling bright streaks flaunted like sans culottes
Boiling firestorm spots and magnetic auroras
Cozying up, it seemed, to the chaste and shying
Waxing gibbous Lady Luna — seeming so close,
Though in reality far more distant and intense,

With nothing of her ethereal luminous
Silent running beauty, her unearthly milky violet glow —
Challenging her brightness perhaps
Though hardly her pulchritude —
Until my view grew occluded under the constellated neons

Of the Pyramid Ale House



Long known to California, Tom Clark was referred to Charles Olson by Ed Dorn as a "Chicago buster." Tom says that was a downstate sodbuster's way of referring to a Chicago boy. Longhouse recently published Tom Clark's Single and here is a piece from that. Much more of Tom's world may be found from his blog: Tom Clark: Beyond the Pale

It won't waste your time.

AUSTIN SMITH





Instructions For How To Put an Old Horse Down


This is what you need to do:
wait for one of those mornings
that seems as if it will never come,
and when it comes, wait for evening.

While waiting for evening,
do as little as possible,
and don’t visit the horse:
you’ll only lose heart.
Remind yourself that she
is suffering and that
her time has come.

One thing you can do
is find a length of rope
hanging in the shape
of a racetrack in the barn:
you won’t need it
but it’s a good thing to find.

If you have kids, tell them
what’s going to happen
sometime in the afternoon.
They’ll understand.
If you wait and tell them
afterwards what you’ve done,
they’ll never forgive you.

Finally, in that hour when
you usually visit her,
walk into the field with oats
in your pockets.

Let her eat them
out of your hand
until they’re gone,
then lead her in.

Then lead her in.

Austin Smith was born and raised on a family farm in Illinois. The son of the poet Daniel Smith, Austin has had two publications issued from Longhouse: Wheat & Distance and Instructions for How to Put An Old Horse Down. The family have recently moved their good work and farm chores to rural Wisconsin.

photo Ed Dorn: courtesy The Poetry Project Photo Archive
photo James Koller: courtesy NEW (Paris)
photo Tom Clark: copyright Gerard Malanga
photo Austin Smith: copyright Austin Smith

DOROTHEA TANNING

I stood before this painting today for a good 15 minutes after being stuck away in the woods all week. It's nice to visit a town. And to be allowed in free to see such a painting as Dorothea Tanning's To the Rescue. On the same floor with a Mark Rothko, a gruelling oil by Ivan Albright, and a small but enduring Rauschenberg exhibit holding up everything from the first floor. Dorothea Tanning has not had enough said about her, and she is nearly 100 years old. She has been waiting for us.


Here is another:






Like Carl Sandburg, Dorothea Tanning was born in Galesburg, Illinois.








In 1946 she became Max Ernst's fourth and last wife








Today she paints, has poems published in the New Yorker, and writes books like we may never see again

To the Rescue (1965 ), Dorothea Tanning, Hood Art Museum
Insomnies (1957), Dorothea Tanning
photo of Dorothea Tanning (1943), Robert Bruce
A Little Night Music (1946), Dorothea Tanning

WOOD

photo © susan arnold

TODAY I DROPPED SOME HIGH AND STANDING DEAD WHITE PINE TREES

Today I dropped some high and standing dead white pine trees. 75 feet tall. Sweetheart stood far away, but I wanted her to watch how beautifully they fell. So what the workmanship — it's the tree, the tree — the falling from grace. Dead and only to rot on the ground, though we will bust off the dry limbs for kindling. And if we were still tapping maple trees for making syrup, we'd grab all this deadwood for the hopper. After I dropped the trees the woods started to look cleaner and retrieve that old brown and green needle pine look of the healthier trees. Before I dropped the dead ones, Sweetheart said they reminded her of bears when she hikes through the woods and sees them. I have two more to drop but I'll save those for the next thrill day. They can kill you in a second with a widow maker or any damn thing since they're unpredictably tall and dead, so I have to be in the cutting mood. We also worked down on the river with the chain saw and wheelbarrow and scraped up a big load of dry apple wood we're burning right now. From river to woodstove. No middle man, except us, but we're part river and part wood.




THE CHERRIES



Great weather has kept me in the woods with both chain saws. A tall and gangly cherry went the other way, which was no surprise; it was nearly straight up without much of a lean. What I didn't like after I cut it loose was that it took down an equally tall cherry tree. One I would have liked to save...but inspecting the root system later, curious why it toppled, I could see it wasn't long to go. On ledge and probably a heavy wind would take it. Also 75 feet to the tippity-top. Now I have both trees lodged up, and the knocked over one is hung up in a group of trees...so the afternoon got longer. I get paid to drop trees exactly where I want them or the customer would like them, so this was something different. I didn't care where it fell. I just wanted it down safely. But not into the other tree. Mucho firewood is the result. Today I'll go back and make more cordwood lengths, stack logs and buck up the larger logs no one can handle without a tractor. It'll be fine stovewood. Too crotched-out to make any sound lumber. But this felling is just the stories other choppers have. The one that got away. The one that made sure if it was going to fall it was going to take a brother tree along with it. Sweetheart hiked out to the job after she heard all saw work was quieted down and reminded me, "You said it could fall either way." In a woodlot you want the tree down closest at hand (this one is), and you just want no one hurt. The earth is waiting for what drops, however it comes.



Bob Arnold says, know where you stand but don't ever think you know enough

photo © bob arnold

LULJETA LLESHANAKU









VERTICAL REALITIES



Waking is an obligation:
three generations open their eyes every morning
inside me.


The first is an old child — my father;
he always chooses his luck and clothes one size too small for him.


Next comes grandfather...In his day, the word "diagnosis" did not exist.
He simply died of misery six months after his wife.
No time was wasted. Above their corpses
rose a factory to make uniforms for dock workers.


And great=grandfather, if he ever existed,
I don't even know his name. Here my memory goes on hiatus
my peasant origins cut like the thick and yellow nails
of field workers.


Three shadows loom like a forest over me
telling me what to do
and what not to do.


You listened to me say "good morning"
bit it was either an elephant pounding on a piano
or the seams coming apart in my father's little jacket.


Indeed, my father, his father. and his father before that
are not trying to change anything
nor do they refuse to change anything; the soap of ephemerality
leaves them feeling fresh and clean.


They only wish to gently touch the world again
through me, the way latex gloves
lovingly touch the evidence
of a crime scene.


translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Oatipi

From the second book of poems in English by this Albanian native. To be published by New Directions in February 2010.

RAINER MARIA RILKE







POEMS FROM THE BOOK OF HOURS



Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;

slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;

and without any feet can go to you;

and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.

Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you

and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;

arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;

and if you set this brain of mine afire,

upon my blood I then will carry you.


translated by Babette Deutsch
from the original bilingual edition published by
New Directions in 1941, now with an introduction by
Ursula K. Le Guin — we haven't yet found quite the
perfect stocking-stuffer that beats this one.








PAAVO HAAVIKKO







from BIRTHPLACE


And yet, we must have a word with happiness,
Build the house to catch the sun's light,
Open our windows on the valley;
So, be seated under the tree and listen to it,
Exchange pleasantries, talk to it.


Give up all hating, see the fir growing, and the rose
How it flowers there, by the field,


Before the lake freezes over you hear the horsemen
On their way to the forest, before the mountains grow
----dark in Bohemia,
The Bohemia mountains, the Bohemian forests,
Deep down to the forests of the Balkan,
Deep down into Balkan dust
Where pine, fir and wallow rise out of the sand, a white
----bird perches
On the far side of the Danube, utters a pitiful cry.


translated from the Finnish by Anselm Hollo

I love these three poets of the heart and the home, be-it home wherever you may be at this very moment.

photograph of Luljeta Lleshanaku courtesy New Directions
photograph of Paavo Haavikko by Pekka Tynell

ENTOURAGE

Yesterday we were at a book sale in an old meeting house (center of a small town, wide doors, old creaking floors, maybe 1000 books) and brought home a few boxes of well chosen books. All at a modest cost and three hours of concentrated work — half of that time spent waiting for the event to start.


Outside it was raining, people were coming into a place lit by tall broad windows and almost every person was over 40 years of age. It was like a secret meeting place of older folk. The books like ancient texts. Everyone stationed to take the money for the books were over 70 years of age, at least. You could watch them work with poor eyesight and hearing. Adding numbers even took effort. They had had a life of raising children, growing vegetables, tending farm animals, adjusting to losses of loved ones and their own abilities. These were all people with no parents on earth any longer. Their clothes were practical and completely simple. They were supporting a cause that raised money for a library, and the library had cut back its hours over the years, because all its benefits from long ago were now gone to the greed of war capitalists and money grubbers.


The irony is that we were in a small New England town, one of the quaintest, and all the buildings in the vicinity were required to be painted almost a cleansed pure white. The very wealthy have visited this town for its splendid foliage and simple ways that can be predicted and schedules made by its enduring clock. The limousines have been seen, but nowhere in this crowd. Even the big drafty whale-like building we were in like Pinocchio was bold and white and the bright windows were the size of rowboats. I had looked the building over while I waited to get inside for the books, and it had gone a little shabby from what the original settlers would have maintained.


These are the times, tough times when you think of what has been lost. As I watched the elders come in for books, shedding rain gear and old hats, I seemed to be in a private counsel celebration with my own kind. My young son was nowhere to be seen and none of his friends or anyone his age. I've seen them buying books elsewhere, but not this morning out of the rain, a chilly early hour of the day, finding something very good to read before the fire as winter approaches, understanding loss and maybe even vitality, and that feeling of a friend.

The book sale was indoors and a smart move. The bake sale went on as planned — a half dozen hardy women, with a tableware of goodies for sale, out in the rain.