EARTH ~

THE SPRING OR AUTUMN LIGHT HASN'T CHANGED FOR FORTY YEARS

& OUR WANTING TO

RUSH OUT INTO IT AT DAWN, JUST THE SAME








The beautiful light. Before or after the leaves. In the background of this photograph is our old cabin, built by me and rebuilt many times, often each spring. Along the river. After a long winter, and the season was colder back then, and after we had lived in two rooms with books and stovewood and kerosene lamps, I would often knock out one side wall of the cabin and fit in larger windows, all used barn sashes, and it would be primarily to celebrate the return of this glorious light. I noticed the other day the spring light falls onto Sweetheart's hair all the same way.

SAVE YOURSELF





MY MORNING



&


you




in


it








LOOK



It is best to look now

At apple blossoms and

Look all you want



Though when they go



You will feel

You didn’t look

Long enough











LITTLE SECRET



We built the house

We own the house

It is our house



But the mouse

Gnawing inside the wall

Owns us right now








WORK DAY



I like

her

sweater



it used

to be

mine








WITHOUT A MAP



We aren’t fooling anyone —

Particularly ourselves



All the way up the mountain

We cleared the trail



All the way back down

We chattered like birds









ONLY A CHILD



Cookstove choco-

late chip cookies

warm the counter

guarded by

toy-soldiers






SUDDENLY THIS



How beautiful is this spring day?

Working low to the ground

In dusky woodshed

See where a stone slips

Out of the foundation

And beauty streams in on

A pinpoint of sunshine

IN THE GARDEN



for a moment —

my steps

with a toad








ETIQUETTE



no one else does —



so the dog rises

as one enters









THAW



We went out together

To the river as it floods

And the misting and mud

With lantern light you

Held we listened and

Watched at all that

Winter going away









BREEZE



who’s that waving

to me when coming

out the door —



ferns









BACKYARD



I knew I wasn’t alone —

This all day presence of raindrops

On the flat stone step









MIDNIGHT AGAIN



The great kidder —

Moonlight spread over the ground

Having me look twice for snow

WISDOM



Three very large crows swept

Over the trees that day

From beyond the river

And the deeper woods

Where no one lived

And laughed at us —



So we laughed back










WHERE TO FIND ME



That place —

Where the

Sidewalk ends

from Save Yourself, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010
for more see here.

photos © bob arnold

EARTH ~

DION


Dion (Di Mucci) honed his skills on street corners, one of the best
A major influence to Lou Reed, Springsteen, and even Dylan has tipped his cap
Here Dion remakes a Dylan tune all his own

photo: http://polizeros.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/diondimucci.jpg

THINK BACK, PILGRIM V

Film Clips You May Watch ~ just click a title!

ALPHAVILLE

FAR SIDE OF THE MOON

EARTH ~













I was reading the other day some fine writing by a friend who mentioned how he hesitated about posting a song
better known by the bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, feeling it might be "embarrassing" showing any version other than the Reverend's original.

I wondered if he might have been speaking to me...since I posted on the Birdhouse, for Earth Day in fact, a joyous rendition of the Reverend's "Twelve Gates to the City". I went out of my way to post this version by the Sacred Shakers simply for its joy. Joy is very good and important when you can have it. Do embrace it, share it, give it. There's a flipside to everything.

I own so many different copies of the Reverend Gary Davis on old LP and CDs you would think I might be a relative.




I didn't want to have the familiar and seminal song by the Reverend on that day. The Reverend Gary Davis was a street preacher and street singer, a vintage blues performer. Some were lucky to see and hear him when he was alive. Others passed him by in Harlem and elsewhere on the sidewalk singing and shouting and had no idea who he was. He was blind and he was fabulous. He also sang the blues from the deepest roots of gospel, and everyone knows the charity of gospel is to take it further. That means in any rendition of the song you wish: from Minnie Mouse singing it, to Son House. Sing and work with it in fields, on the streets, in your kitchens, from rooftops. May it reign. So I say, show forth any style and song and pleasure you wish when singing the Reverend Gary Davis. He can handle it.


When I think of songs that struck me blind when I first heard them, and the best for me was always walking into a record store (when we had plenty) and a song was on. Off the top of my head the first time I heard the Stones "The Last Time", or Rev. Gary Davis album "Harlem Street Singer" shook me alive. The lovely crazies running that store played the whole album, not just one stinky little song, and I stayed still and listened to it all, then bought the record! I did as I was told. The Karen Dalton moment ("what and who is this?"), Hendrix "Hey Joe", Townes "Poncho and Lefty". I could go on all day.



Once upon a time in Harvard Square on a spring afternoon I heard four or five street musicians, spread far apart, maybe unaware of one another, singing the same Bob Dylan song ("Masters of War"). All their own way. I'm still amazed.

















Rev.Davis:oscargamble.blogspot.com/2009/09/reverend-gar...
Karen Dalton: indiancountrynews.info/fullstory.cfm-ID=556.htm
Stones: concerts.stubhub.com/artist-discographies/?ar...
Hendrix: people.zeelandnet.nl/mkrecords/singles.htm
Townes Van Zandt: www.2blowhards.com/archives/002530.html
Dylan: beatpatrol.wordpress.com/.../music/bob-dylan/

THINK BACK, PILGRIM V

RAY JOHNSON

EARTH ~

Time for the cat to cry

LINK WRAY

photo: http://www.davidwarnerellis.co.uk/images/large_images/LinkWray_12_A.jpg

EARTH ~

Gerald & Loretta Hausman

TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND STORYTELLER GERALD HAUSMAN WHO WAS TOLD BY SOMEONE AT THE MIAMI PUBLIC LIBRARY'S "THE ART OF STORYTELLING" ANNUAL FESTIVAL THAT HE TOLD A "TALL-TALE"

Good morning sunshine coming down on the living room floor, while the upstairs floor above my head, in our bedroom, where Sweetheart is moving around, is squeaking and crying out loud. I remember the young fellow carpenter me who put that floor down one-two-three. I bet I could have found out how maybe to keep the squeaking out. But where would be the fun?

Kokomo (Cutie~Pie) is beside me, licking and cleaning. Another sort of gentle squeaking.

Yesterday I rebuilt and made twice as wide a stone stairway up onto one side of the living room porch. Last spring I built steps three times longer on the other side of the porch. I was wondering where stone could be found for this new expanded stone stairway...and lo and behold, the stone was all there (hidden). I dug out under the original stairway and found a perfectly fine flat riding rock that could be used as one of the steps...then another was hidden as filler (a waste to me now looking at it — who knows what I was thinking at age 30 when building?), and finally a lovely and mossy stone was cobbed off one of the stone walls in the yard and brought over for the top-step on the new stairway. There are plenty of other stones to replace that one. I'm stealing from my own work, which goes to show, it's never done. And in the wheelbarrow there is a full build of stones I'll stack into a cairn atop one of the stone walls as a little totem for the front of the yard. A place for the eagle (or chickadee or phoebe) to land. Right now the oriole sings. It's early in the season with the earlier than usual apple blossoms.

With stone work you want it to look like it was built yesterday. Today is wood. Stone is yesterday.

All to say I am telling no tall tales here. But then I never think of tales as anything but tales, whether tall or short. Fibs or exaggerations. Lies and wing-dingers. Whoppers. It takes away from the event of telling. To say you have just heard a "tall tale", I think, exaggerates the size of the telling. It's all a telling. It may be best to live within the event happening and not pass judgment short of enjoying. We all want to be bigger than life.

Okay, today I will go back and continue building this great wall to China.

We see from Gerry's blog he is back home on the island after the big city.

But what about that oil island the size of Delaware west of his Florida shores? Will it grow to the size of Texas? It's out of the earth and into spreading waters.

photo: www.balkinbuddies.com/hausman/index.html
oil image: www.vizworld.com/.../

EARTH ~

construct & photo 4 may 10, © bob arnold

EARTH ~







GENNADY AYGI





A SELECTION FROM FOLK-SONGS OF THE VOLGA REGION



Once I had a horse —

you could stretch out on him and sleep!

Water could lie on his back

and not a drop spill.








There's no way to still my pain,

half my soul remains in that field!

I say nothing, but beyond the hill like a child

a marten weeps out loud.








My voice is soft as the cuckoo's,

it will be carried off by the wind

and echo long

by the abandoned house.








Mother, you will start sweeping the room,

and remembering me, perhaps,

you will stop short

by the door and burst out crying.








The dancing begins,

and you must light such candles

that all — my girl's — beauty

shall be illuminated.








And at last I fell to my knees

in the middle of the field,

not because I was tired,

but because my soul was burning,







Have other hands touched her? I touch her lightly;

she writhes like a snake (they have touched her),

or she twitters like a swallow

(they haven't).





translated from the Russian by Peter France









Look around and you will find the beautiful books of poetry and dreams by the late Gennady Aygi. New Directions has done us well with GA, as have Zephyr and a few other small press publishers.

Gennady Aygi was born in 1934 in Shaymurzino, a Chuvash village. Chuvash natives are descended from the Huns of Attila. Maybe two million inhabitants have settled near Kazan along the Volga, with even more settlements across river and people with similar looks but different languages and all of this within the Russian Federation. Even with different languages and different religions: the Tatars with Islam/the Chuvash holding to Christianity, intermarriages with the people thrived and amongst this shared peasant culture songs and poems arose. No demarcation.

Gennady Aygi was there to hear these songs and know them, later to collect them. I show a small selection above. He drank all of this, along with Russian Symbolism, the ramparts of Futurism and the modern era, steeped with ancient customs, rural hollow and souls, producing a bristling new poetry for himself.

image: lib.blcu.edu.cn/qkbdzdd/025.htm

EARTH ~



seat







construct & photo © bob arnold

PASSING

-----------------------------

Watching the winter in the blood really getting out of the way ~ yesterday we left at 4 AM for another town (one where I once traveled at the same hour to be in a small college radio station to speak to the BBC who were calling to ask me to say a few words about Cid Corman's passing...) and by the time we arrived a little after 5, it was still 25 degrees. Nothing like a town waking up. Any town really. Or city. I can remember Las Vegas at dawn. The streets the night before a human whoring and splash of whirling lights. At 5 AM it's a desert town. No makeup. The faucet dripping from the night before, a whiskey bottle spinning on the sidewalk, the bum who looks up from his lotus position from the cement, and the lighting of that desert, spreading like a butter throughout all the toilet rinsing city. Santa Fe even finer. In this small town it's the birds awakening, owning all day at that hour.

Everyone was once a lover, even the worst. I read every morning in the local paper obituaries of people I've never known (but we have) and within those capsules are teaming life wanting still to be known as lived and shared. The woman of 50 years, knocked dead by a heart attack, never married, lived with or closeby to her parents is a world of hurt and longing, and yet finding all sorts of smaller passions for herself. I wish I had known this before she was gone. She might lift her eyes and clearly hear a friend read my poem "Passing" during his own public reading. The kindness of sharing that poem by this friend. At that moment it is his poem, then anyone's poem.

I've always read another poet in my readings. On the street readings I read easily 50% from others.

-ONE MUST BE AN INVENTOR TO READ WELL ~ EMERSON

I spoke to someone yesterday in chilly awakening town who had just attended a forum regarding 40 years ago when the Bank of America was lit up in outer Santa Barbara. Sweetheart, who has a quiet knack of being in the right places at the right time, was up in a tree during the unfolding event of some figures in nondescript clothing just showing up and suddenly inflammatory was everywhere, the bank was torched. It was going to burn. The intentions were direct. This storyteller had been there, like Sweetheart, as a student at the university...but in those great days the university had been stormed and shutdown by the students, there was business to tend to, a war to end (imagine the youthful power), a bank burned to the ground. As we drove into sleepy New England town there was a bank on the corner, never there when I was a kid. Pillars. I looked up to the sign the Bank of America. Yes, indeed, ugly enough to burn to the ground. Where is the local banker? To this day they never found who burned the California bank. A job well done.

It's a good day whenever poetry can be heard. We work in inches. Sometimes fire. It is occasionally rash and destructive, but so is burning whole villages live, whole cultures, destroying one person, all neighborhoods, town after town with no forgiveness. I've built many buildings. I never like seeing anything destroyed. No one to be hurt. And then again there is the human wave, or building, of sentiment and cause wishing to rise and care for the brutality wasted onto others.

Of course nothing beats the natural ~ so children, animals, the day dawn. The truest purveyors of what is up. We saw all ages of kids all day running and laughing and those wide expressions and an undying fearlessness and wonder.

I once wrote a poem looking out into a field and seeing a lone figure at work. It could have been me, it could have been you. The time was Spring.



PASSING


It is Spring

Already you relax in a cotton skirt

Passing through mountains is a strong feeling

Fields plowed, new wood split, a hawk floating

Puffs of softwood in the gray hills

A river runs with snow melting

A small bridge neatly built to get by

There is pleasure in such places

An old woman and her huge straw hat

Raking the far corner of a hayfield

"Passing" from Where Rivers Meet, Bob Arnold

may day moonlight, photo © bob arnold

AIMEE MANN

With an independent streak that first showed itself when she quit the Berklee School of Music for a Punk band, and ever since wanting to keep the spirit of the music as music with each one of her seven albums in fifteen years, listen to Aimee Mann tell her stories.

photo: blogs.denverpost.com/.../2009/10/DSC_0273.JPG

MAY DAY ~

8 DAYS A WEEK, JOB SITES
celebrating the international worker and the cross purposes of winter then spring. Rejoice!




monday





tuesday





wednesday





share & talk





thursday





friday old workmate repairs





saturday






dun

all constructions & photos © bob arnold

EARTH ~

NORMAN SCHAEFER


~


LITTLE SIERRA NEVADA POEMS

WITH PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN GARNER LOOKING FROM LONE PINE TO MT. WHITNEY





If you would like to purchase the new booklet, please link here


For the complete Longhouse titles we offer, please link here

Norman's another one of those Pacific coast wild birds, west of Seattle. I edited these poems from almost 100 that were a complete joy to read and sift. It took only one night, easy stuff when poems are this good. The hard part was getting the collection down to its size, which meant leaving great poems on the floor. The poems on the floor are hardy, they all picked up and went back into the woods on strong legs. This collection of two-dozen come off the Sierra trails. Slick rock and moonlight. Welcoming anyone who wishes to come along.

Mountains are a cold and icy place

for someone seeking

fame and fortune,

yet a haven

for an empty-handed wanderer.

EARTH ~

TOM WAITS

~

Born and raised in southern California of school teachers ~ with trips to Mexico as a child that rubbed onto his eyes and ears.

We're going to let the singer rest his distinctive song and storytellin' voice and go an instrumental.

photo: pathfinderpat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/tom..

EARTH ~

MY FAMILY

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~











GRAYSON PERRY

Do you know the work of Grayson Perry?

Greek pottery meets folk art. Works in the bold coiled method, not thrown.

Came upon pottery as almost a caper. After Punk. Gave it a try. Controversial ceramic vases ensued.

He also has a female alter-ego by the name of "Claire" who shows up in the darnedest places.

Once a wild kid, of course wild because of his sensual orientations, fantasy, past family abuse and struggle... once he started dressing the part/ expressing the part, the art and lifestyle flowed. Seems unstoppable, and likewise appears most alive and most vulnerable. He dresses as "Claire" some of the time, has a wife, a family, the pottery has only increased and become more defined. He's gone through the outcast role. His commentary in a large retrospective of his work is candid and sweet stuff. He seems incapable of ever wanting to fib or play up to stature. What would be the point? His commentary (words action) goes onto a glazed pot for all the world to see.

Many flee to the land of enchantment: India, Japan. Learn lessons. Bring them home, or stay. It doesn't matter after the lesson is learned, throw it away. Throw this away.

I rather think one makes the land of enchantment from one's own outpost, dead center NYC included. An isle is there as long as you are there.

Perry is childlike, authoritative, and fearless. He will make bold comments on his pots and vases against the very museums that showcase his work. He'll ponder in public his and our mistakes. He'll make sure he is all part of the mess he is in, we are in.

I like anyone who comes to the campfire, uses the stash of dry wood, leaves behind more dry wood. Or a pot to piss in, and not to be crude — as others before me have lived and stated — the highest condition of art is artlessness.





photo: search.independent.co.uk/topic/craft-pottery
see more: lmaclean.ca/LisaMacLean/nfblog/?p=929

Saint Claire 37
2003, Earthenware
84 x 55 x 55 cm