EARTH ~

Leslie Marmon Silko



Leslie Marmon Silko is a native New Mexican (Albuquerque birth, 5 March 1948) but has lived a good deal of her adult life in an around the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona.

The majority of her stunning and still-life memoir The Turquoise Ledge centers around her daily walks and hikes on the arroyo, keeping her eyes out for turquoise and sharing with her readers an open commentary on desert life love — whether sheltering turquoise or myriad pages simply on the description and relationship the author has with rattlesnakes about her premises or inside her house. There are companion parrots, a pet mouse, and desert rats, too.

1/4 Laguna Pueblo and otherwise Anglo-American and Mexican-American heritage, Silko, like any natural storyteller (and she is genuine) draws most of her heart and instinct from the years as a youngster when she was educated by her grandmother and aunts in traditional stories and the old ways. There is nothing like the storyteller who draws from the well of childhood.

This influence soaks through every page of this personal memoir, so one becomes accustomed to what I call an Indian drag...the methodical and no-big-deal celebration as a living witness. Less on human life and more on what is living about and with us, shaken right down to reptile life, insects, slant of sunlight, dusty emptiness. Pages and pages and pages. The walkabout of the day. Precious few non-Indian writers can do this sort of magic quite as well; maybe Jaime de Angulo comes best to mind.

The majesty of the Silko patience and wisdom is that without describing much of herself — each day as one reads from this new book — one looks forward to spending more time with the author, who does give of herself through her surroundings.

from Chapter 35

On my walk this early October morning, two horsemen startled me. I didn't realize I walked in such a deep meditative state as I was down the trail to the big arroyo. I really had trouble coming back down to Earth. "Oh, you startled me!" I said. Horses are so large I should have heard them or seen them sooner than I did. The riders seemed a little intoxicated by the power the horses gave them. I was reminded of a phrase in my new novella: the Spaniards in the New World had "the advantages of gunpowder, horses and dogs." I was glad I carried my ultralight five shot .38 revolver that day.

Encounters with wild beings aren't as jarring probably because I am watching for the wild creatures but not expecting humans, like the two horsemen.

Later I met with them in the hikers' parking lot; I'd managed to walk the same distance in the same amount of time as the horses.

I often think of Geronimo and his ragged band of women and children in their final years of resisting the U.S. troops. Five thousand of them had pursued forty or fifty Apaches, mostly women and children. The troops rode horses, while the Apaches traveled on foot. In the steep rocky terrain the horses were ineffective; they went lame and slowed the troops; if the Apaches got a horse they promptly butchered it and dried the meat. Travel on foot was the fastest way over the steep rocky trails of Sonora and Chihuahua.

Another turquoise rock washed out of the dirt in the back yard. The off-white limestone is about two inches by one half inch with odd deposits of turquoise in the moon-shaped indentations. "The end is broken off creating" —my notes are incomplete; I wonder if I can find this rock and complete the sentence. I turn to my collection of turquoise rocks. No labels, no containers. Just handfuls of turquoise pebbles and rock fragments mixed with dust and paper clips on my desktop. Nothing.

Then to the other tables that I've covered with turquoise rocks; and from the description I wrote, I only had to pick up one other piece of rock before I spied the correct one. It is almost arrowhead-shaped with the point broken off. The off-white limestone appears pockmarked and in the tear-drop indentations in the limestone small spots of turquoise in calcite and metal salts are attached.

So I would end the unfinished sentence like this: "a resemblance to a broken arrow tip." The white limestone also has turquoise on the other side in a sort of cheesy-crust texture but with no eye-catchers like the pockmarks or moon craters with turquoise spots.

The turquoise is quite hard to scratch with a fingernail and is not chalky. My note continues: "The limestone is some of the whitest I've found to contain turquoise." Again comes the question—did it occur in the layers of whitish caliche on this hilltop or was it found elsewhere and brought up here by humans? Like the old trade beads I used to find in the back yard, like the other pieces of turquoise I had found in planters and clay pots and around the house while my broken foot healed.

FASTEN YR SEAT BELT ~

director: chuck workman

EARTH ~

George Dennison


George Dennison was a handsome man. It's curious how few photographs there are of this fine author and activist on the Internet. The new home of our faces.

George was gone to lung cancer at age 62 in 1987, which was just about the time I met him. He had come down from Maine to attend a birthday party at our place in Vermont for Hayden Carruth. Many came, it was a wonderful party that spread out from a large lawn tent. That August night, when only the hardcore were left and staying over, George rolled out a sleeping bag and slept out on our lawn. Stars in his eyes. The only one who even gave it a thought to do such a thing.

Born in Pittsburgh and raised in a lifetime freedom-fighting, George was the author of a novel, short stories, plays, children stories and in his work as a teacher and therapist the author of the classic The Lives of Children, one of the bibles out of the sixties free school movement. As he set it in stone: relationships, not instruction, promoted real learning.

He wrote well of his friends — Paul Goodman, Hayden Carruth, The Bread & Puppet Theater — as well as neighbors and workers and jack-of-all-traders from his part of Maine.

I'm more than happy to showcase a few pages from Temple, from a Writer's Notebook (Steerforth Press), which maybe shares best of all George Dennison's place on earth.


~

DICK BLODGETT


I went over to Dick's place to talk about some bookcases. Beautiful views on three sides, autumn hills and fields. In the shed/garage (attached) two large bird wings. "Oh, that's a goose, a Canadian goose. George shot it. Yes, as we lost it. Isn't that awful! It went bad. I had it soaking in baking soda, and I put ice cubes in, but it just wasn't cold enough down cellar...."

Dick had a cold. "I shouldn't have gone out yesterday, but I've been trying to get some of the snowmobilers to swamp out some trails with me, and yesterday was when they could do it, so I thought I better show up."

He was drawing diagrams: packing crates for a complicated display booth he has built for a local businessman. Got out some vodka. Supper on stove. House terribly overheated, but everybody here is used to that. As always, talk of sports.

"Where've you been? Haven't seen you for a while. We called you a couple of times for poker. Did you get to the see the fight (Ali-Spinks)? I was disappointed. He's about used up, I think. But the pre-lims were good, weren't they? Yes, I thought they were real good."

And soon: "The best ball game I ever saw in my life was the Braves and the Dodgers down in Boston. Warren Spahn was pitching. Oh, he was something else. And that great big colored man, what was his name, well darn it I almost had it! Catcher — right! Campanella, Roy Campanella. But I don't know, I think the players today are faster at everything, and they get paid so much. Oh, I think they are. Look at track. Don't you remember how long it took them to break the four minute mile. Glen Cunningham — he was the big runner when I was in school. I got my growth later. But I was a good runner. I ran everything from the hundred to cross-country. Yeh. One of our local boys here, from Phillips, was the national champion in cross-country. Marty Toothaker. Yeah. I figured I was doing good if I could see him finish. When you see him today you'd never guess he was a runner. He can hardly get out of his own way (laughing) . . . a great big belly on him . . . But hockey was my game. I was a good skater and fast on the ice. I used to skate with the high school team when I was a freshman. I wasn't on the team. I just worked out with them . . . and then the next year they took hockey out completely, said it was too dangerous, or something. Oh, wasn't I disappointed!"

(I've heard about the local skating: because they used to cut ice from the ponds and the new ice was good for skating until the next snow. Now the snow piles up and no one skates.)

He let me have the bill for the last job. He'd held it for six months — a peculiarity of his.


EDDIE

I took him the three dollars for gluing and sanding the little stool. Gave him a five. We were standing just inside the door of his little shop. (Every time Eddie glues a chair the legs are uneven — it's because the floor of his workshop is uneven). He had already said, "Nice day, isn't it?" — sunny and brisk after three days of bitter cold and hard wind. (These are not banal remarks, but little prayers and attestations of an underlying joy.) The wide door to the little shed/shop was open, plenty of light. He was peering into his wallet. I could see that there were two ones there, together with a couple of fives and a twenty. Suddenly an outburst, angry, out of patience — "I can't see a goddamn thing!" He game me the singles. I questioned him, since I knew it would have to be serious, even extremely serious, before Eddie would mention it. "Do you need new glasses?"

"They can't fit me for glasses anymore. They can't give me a tamn t'ing. I've got cataracts."

"Can't they take them off?"

"They're not ripe yet. It may take six months, it may take a year."

It was clear that the sudden dependency and inability to work was frightening, painful, and humiliating, since he's fiercely independent. "I've been putting the drops right to 'em. Damn them!"

"Can you drive all right? Do you feel safe driving?"

"No, I don't feel safe — I can't see that well any more! Especially on days like this. All that light from the snow. On a cloudy day I can see a little. It's all blurred. It's getting hard to see in here." (Hard to make the axe handles and the fiddles he's been making.)

"Nellie doesn't drive, does she?"

"No, she don't."

I asked what he'd do about shopping. "Well, there are people who say they'll take us in whenever we need it — but I hate that, it's god damn monotonous. Nellie has to go to the hospital maybe three times a month — she's got the sugar diabetes. I have to go twice a month."

I said we'd help. The idea of shopping like this disturbed him terribly, the idea of being dependent and beholden.

"We usually keep a good stock on hand . . . except there are things we need now and then. Damn Nellie always buys the smallest amount she can of anything, and she won't get more till she uses that last drop of it, then all of a sudden she has to have it. That's bullshit. If I buy a large amount I catch hell. . ."

Bitter mouth, bitter eyes, silence. One can see how important good sense has become to him — it carried his competence and independence through several heart attacks. He needs it to cope with illness, age, poverty, and now this hastening blindness — and it's being defeated by the silliness, giddiness, irresponsibility, lack of foresight of this fat little woman-child, who is spirited and seems to have a loving disposition, though perhaps not for him.

"All you're payin' for is the gottam jar . . . and with the cost o' gas. . ." (When he speaks excitedly, his French-Canadian accent is stronger.)

I remember: Nellie's father, mean, killed himself, never had a friend, couldn't even stand himself.

A crisis is beginning now in Eddie's life.

EARTH ~

This morning, while rebuilding a fire in the woodstove, Sweetheart asked one of those questions which turned out to be made of many layers, or staircases, or free-falling...

"Do you remember that song that went "In the year..and there'd be some date?"

Nothing was yet ringing a bell on that question with the rising cold of the floor boards starting to run up my legs. At knee level.

Then I sort of did. It was 1969. That great pivotal year. I don't think I ever bought the single but when the song came on the radio, I turned it up, and if I didn't, someone else did. And maybe we wanted to hear it again so we could get all the dates straight and what was happening when what was happening when.

It wasn't "Light My Fire" which consumed us years earlier. It was a decade ending tribute to maybe a haunting forthcoming, which if you actually listen now to the lyrics, them boys Rick Evans and Denny Zager were quite ahead of their time. Space rockers. I think we should take off that sandwich board put onto these two and made to wear as the 'one-hit wonders' (though true) and 'one of the worst rock 'n' roll songs of all time' (you decide). Rick Evans claims he wrote the song in a half-hour in 1964. It would take a record label in Odessa Texas (Truth) to first press and release the song in 1968, then it was picked up quickly by RCA which shot it up to #1 on the pop charts for a few weeks in 1969.

Many covers have been made since: REM, Ian Brown, Fields of the Nephilim, and if you have an industrial moment try on Laibach and their method.

The song appeared (July 1969) one month before Woodstock and Charles Manson, and all within the same year as the first manned moon landing.

Locally, Sweetheart brought it up — perhaps not quite out of the blue — eight hours after I posted a Birdhouse for Nebraskan poet William Kloefkorn. Zager & Evans hail from Lincoln Nebraska.

EARTH ~

I haven't seen Kloefkorn's name batted about for ages.
William Kloefkorn.

Ever since poetry went — well, somewhere else — what's someone going to do with a poet off the Plains? Who knows farm ways and farm stories and who knew farmers, even if he was a splendid teacher most of his life, teaching thousands of children so many things about delight. A farmer with words, planting, seedling, trusting is Kloefkorn all the way.

His books from the 70s, 80s out of many small press midwest publishers were one of a kind. Grainy and pithy and loaded with earthen lust.

Ted Genoways is another name that pulls me closer to the shelf where this book cries out. He has selected and drawn a personal introduction for a barn wide bright collection of poems. I don't think I've been quite as excited for the real deal rubic since I found Millen Brand's Local Lives long ago, yet another book sunk into the morass, or Genoways' own beautifully realized The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernandez. TG sure knows how to pick them.

In 1978 William Kloefkorn won first place at the Nebraska Hog-Calling Championship. I guess this is one of the poet's proudest achievements. I wish I had been there.

I'm going to be blunt. If you haven't read William Kloefkorn, you haven't read.

But maybe that's too blunt — what I mean to say is I can't ever remember meeting anyone from the Plains I didn't like. All good eggs. And that includes up into Wisconsin where the hills start to rise. Pee Wee King was a Polish boy from Wisconsin and somehow convinced everyone he was a true Texan, leading one of the country's most popular western swing bands. On top of that he wrote "The Tennessee Waltz". Of course he played the accordion.

William Kloefkorn was born in Kansas in 1932 and is suggested by me to be a very fine Nebraska poet.

~

from Alvin Turner as Farmer


I am a dirt farmer
Who dreams of poetry.
Is that so strange? Is anything?
I have bent myself thankfully
Over the heat of cowchips.
When the lespedeza flowers
I breathe its blooms.
The calf I winch to birth
Grows legs like oaks to graze on,
And stuck hogs bleed for breakfasts.
This morning at milking
I kissed the cow's warm flank
And she kicked the milk to froth beneath my knees.
I forgave her,
Then cried with the cats.
Now the manure is in bloom,
Thistles defend the driveway,
And corncobs gird the mud beneath my boots.
Plotting harvests,
I roam my acreage like a sweet spy.



~



After a difference
We go together as
We fall apart: with words.
They are clear and clipped and
Gently strange,
And hearing them I think
Their sound is like the little noise
Of needles, knitting.



~



Perhaps one of Ecclesiastes' river
Does somehow begin at our downspouts,
And if I mended them as well as I meant to
The cistern should be bursting.
I have seen such rain, the rocks so clean.
Because I prefer not to think of mire,
Of the chores of evening,
I'll settle back
And contemplate the woman.

I see her with a dishpan
Catching rain. She wants the water
Straight down from heaven, untainted even
By my soldered tin. With it
She will wash her hair,
With it rub her clear face clearer.
She has a small nose,
Active eyes,
And a high forehead that
Under a wrap of hair shampooed
Will smell like rain.

Later I'll use a kiss. But
With words I read to touch it now:
Lightly, like the skimming of cream.
My hand to her brow,
My fingers,
Tipped in butter,
Suddenly rich and unpalsied and newly nerved.



~



look boys
i don't honestly know
whether jesus wants either of you
for a sunbeam you'll
have to check with your
mother if you must have
my opinion though
i'd guess he has
plenty already like
for instance that one
there on the knifeblade
which by midnight
just might be
sharp enough to saw
lard if you two bandits
will keep the grindstone
wet
you hear me?



~



When the sap stars downward
Farmyards sigh,
Their sound the drone of deliverance that moves
Like half-slept moments
To the first shrill hour of Spring.

It is the relief of closing in,
The disconnection
Of leaves that echoes human sighs:
The time for living,
Both say, has been survived again.



~



To say There is always the rock
Is not to forfeit the harvest.
Below, beside each hard place
Lies the land,
Though I remember how one summer,
Wanting rain,
I watched my topsoil disappear in wind.
I called Martha to the south porch,
To the screendoor,
And told her the future, and my plan.
When the end arrives, I said
(And it is just around the corner),
Only rock will remain.
So I told her I'd fight it no longer:
To the conqueror goes everything.
Walking out and into the dust then
I released my hat,
Intending myself to follow it
To the remotest end of oblivion.
But my bootstrings,
Pesky with sandburs,
Snagged the treetops,
So that when the ceiling cleared
I tumbled to rest in a plowseat,
And hitched to familiar mares.
After a recent shower then
The soil turned comic and dark.
On and within it the rock chuckled,
And no longer believing in wind
I joined their joke.
Now late into each year I work the ground,
Burying seedling and seed,
Stubble and husk and leaf.
That,
And the crushed dusty felt
Of the hat.




William Kloefkorn ~ Swallowing the Soap
New and Selected Poems
edited with an introduction by Ted Genoways
University of Nebraska Press
bisonbooks.com

BROTHERS ~

L. Vaidyanathan
(1942-2007)

A composer of scores for over 150 films


All three brothers were musically trained by their father V. Lakshminarayana.

Their Indian family was a great one, of all music lovers and players







L. Subramaniam

(1947)


A master musician as well as having a degree as a general practitioner in medicine.

"I find nothing more inspiring than the music making of my very great colleague Subramaniam. Each time I listen to him, I am carried away in wonderment.”

Yehudi Menuhin

L. Shankar / Shenkar
(1950)


L. Shankar plays the 10 string stereophonic double violin
which covers all the orchestral range
— double bass, viola, cello and violin

Between the days of a Jack London Birdhouse and another (you'll see), I came upon a cache of my world music LPs and brought them back into the fold, including L. Shankar and his older brothers.

EARTH ~

Here's a book to knock your socks off, boots and all.

Not only was wunderkind London a classic novelist and storyteller, Yukon explorer and "Buck's" owner, journalist, socialist, world traveler, sailor; he clicked into existence over 12,000 photographs, barely known until now.

I hugged this library book to my chest when I found it.

If you want to imagine what sort of imagination unfolds in the many London stories and travel yarns, watch what happens when he reaches for his camera. To be with London and his camera after the famous San Francisco earthquake 1906 is just a start. . .





Jack London's photo of San Francisco, City Hall 1906




Jack London in Korea



Jack London's bookplate



Jack London, Photographer
by
Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson, Philip Adam

(University of Georgia Press, 2010)

FILMMAKER ~

Vermont born, Robbins Barstow (1919-2010) and one of his home-made movie masterpieces

"In July 1956, the five-member Barstow family of Wethersfield, Connecticut, won a free trip to newly-opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in a nationwide contest. This 30-minute amateur documentary film tells the fabulous story of their fun-filled, dream-come-true, family travel adventure, filmed on the scene at Walt Disney's "Magic Kingdom" by Robbins Barstow.

In December 2008, Disneyland Dream was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress."


This movie is part of the collection: Home Movies

Producer: Robbins Barstow
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: home movie; Barstow Travel Adventure
Contact Information: RobbinsB@aol.com

EARTHLY ~

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

JUNE CARTER CASH

In 1961, returning to the studio after an absence of five years, June Carter Cash recorded this spooky noir gem. Saturday into early Sunday morning material.

She started singing at the age of ten in 1939 with the legendary Carter Family, which included her mother Maybelle Carter.

Versatile with guitar, banjo, harmonica and signature autoharp, June was also an actress, songwriter and dancer; others would remember a comedian. She stands out in the film The Apostle; being the second and lasting wife of Johnny Cash; and a distant cousin to President Jimmy Carter.

Virginia was her birth home.

June Carter Cash didn't last forever as her verve and spirit seemed to predict. She passed away only a few months before The Man in Black in 2003.

alanmesser.com

A GOOD DAY ~

Daw Aung San Sun Kyi

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been confined 15 of the last 21 years, was freed after seven and a half years of house arrest. Read More:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/daw_aung_san_suu_kyi/index.html?inline=nyt-per

TRAIL ~

Exactly a year ago this week we got up to a large sugar maple that had fallen during a snowstorm and I bucked and split the good wood, and together Sweetheart piled it up with me. Allowed it to season a year.

It's in a region we call "the swamp" which is really a wet spot behind Faraway Cottage. Those who have visited here know this cottage and exactly where it is. For all others, it's just a cottage I built ten years ago with my young son and behind it gets wet, sometimes very wet, and then there are dry periods where we can cross any part of it and never think much of water. It's mossy then. When we cut the tree it was half and half so we had to watch were we stepped.

A year later we are carrying the seasoned firewood home and putting it right into the woodstoves.

We used to sled firewood out of the woods with a toboggan and a malamute dog by the name of Jack. Jack was a good ol' boy. Buried now and I can show you the stone.

Sometimes we'll wheelbarrow out firewood if we can get to it. Other times we have used canvas sacks. For some reason this month we're content just using our arms and coming home with wood.

It's been unusually warm between 11AM-2PM and this has been a good time to carry wood. Lots of it. The two of us talking while we hike up and talking as we hike back. Breaking down a better trail out around the cottage and beside the small farm pond and down along the flower beds and gardens and into the woodshed.

No fuel cost. Great sunshine. The chickadees following us in and back out and back in because they know we're the very same ones who feed them.

photo © bob arnold

SQUIRRELS ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/nyregion/13trees.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

photo: Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

TINY ~

Be content and celebrate the work of tiny hands.

Bicycling home five miles from a mechanic's garage the other morning with Sweetheart — 35 degrees and a great gust to cleanse the lungs — we came upon this small alter along the side of the road, placed upon an old tree stump.

Me without my camera. Me always liking the eyes as the first camera.

We promised ourselves we would bicycle back with camera in a day or two and take a photograph. All is well.

Maybe missed by every other driver and respectfully left alone by walkers and other bicyclists that may happen by.

Cairns of the small hands, simply awaiting.





photo © bob arnold

LA FRONTERA ~

LHASA DE SELA


We lost a lovely voice this year. Often known by one word complete "Lasha" was born in 1972 and passed away to breast cancer on New Year's Day 2010. Her home was wherever she could sing — from San Francisco where she started to sing at age 13, and later a permanent move to Montreal at age 19. Over a twelve year period she released three startling albums and toured and performed with various adventurous venues. Child of a Mexican father and Lebanese-American mother, she enriched her music with this background, often adding Klezmer, gypsy music and folk tales.

EARTH ~

Lynne Allen


Another painting that drew me from across the room, literally ignoring all else, was Lynne Allen's They Were As Numerous As Grass. They meaning buffalo.

Lynne Allen's mother and grandmother were members of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Her prints and paintings draw together often a process of photography, hand-written diaries, lithograph, silkscreen, intagilio, and woodblock.

EARTH ~

Maxfield Parrish
(1870-1966)


I was in a museum the other afternoon, a perfect spot to be during a lunch hour, not mine but the others who were in there with us, and from across the room Maxfield Parrish's Hunt's Farm
called me across. It was the lighting around the farm house.

The elms — you should see these towering yard elms in the person of this painting! — every leaf singled out, certainly elegiac, three dimensional, all part of the process of the Parrish technique using photography, tracing, painting over and then the layers of varnish or glaze. By magic and a knowing he achieved just the spatial balance.

He lived most of his life in New Hampshire, nearby in fact to JD Salinger. There's something about that region. I saw the original painting maybe a half-hour from the artist's homestead.

WALKER ~

I’ve been reading John Ledyard again, our man stopped by Catherine the Great in 1788 when he attempted to walk around the world. He did do a fair portion: touching down on America's western shores before Lewis & Clark, through some of Europe, all of Lapland. Pretty much considered an early day terrorist while in Russia (their fur trade possessiveness, Ledyard’s own aggressive interest in fur and trade).


While in Hanover, when crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire, we noticed the marvelous bridge, quite fancy, is named after Ledyard. Many of the biographies of the man are written by Dartmouth College alumni. The one who arrived in Hanover when the college was nineteen months old, its first half dozen acres roughed out and first built by a minister and his slaves, with a college charter proclaiming "education and instruction of the youth of the Indian tribes" which didn't quite succeed. Fleet-footed Ledyard lasted only one year. He had other things to do — like dropping a shoreline white pine and hollowing it out as a 50 x 3 foot dugout canoe, handwork he learned while recruiting students from the Six Nations Iroquois and paddling down the Connecticut to his family home in Connecticut. His favorite author Ovid as book companion.

Born in Groton, Connecticut in 1751 to the well-to- do, this sea captain's son and dreamer was shunned any inheritance that went to a younger brother, and for his 37 years got by on wit and wisdom and walking. Lots of walking. Some of his associates were the sailor John Paul Jones, Captain James Cook, and Thomas Jefferson, who slipped the adventurer funding and ideas, the latter the former didn't quite have the stomach for. While serving as the American ambassador in Paris, Jefferson hatched this brainstorm journey for Ledyard to explore the American continent — through overland Russia, crossing the Bering Strait and down across America to Virginia. Ledyard said he would do this on-foot. He would prowl across 2/3 of Russia before facing Catherine the Great's authority.


Aboard James Cook's final voyage, where the captain was murdered on a Hawaiian beach, Ledyard became a British marine for four years. He circled the world. Wrote of his adventures. One hundred years before Arthur Rimbaud, John Ledyard traveled into Africa as an explorer for the African Association and would die there at the same age as the poet (37); who never made it back, as was his plan. Ledyard's plan was characteristically bold: he would lead an expedition from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. Not at all well, close to Cairo, Ledyard died in 1789 overdosing on vitriolic acid and was buried in the sand dunes along the Nile. The precise location has never been found.

photo: © bob arnold
dartmouth.edu

EDEN 7 ~

POET IN RESIDENCE


Before I thought to make the little bakery booklet of poems, Sweetheart and I spoke about framing each poem, unsigned, and installing them on the bakery walls.

It would be a bold move.

In the bakery, on all the walls around the fairly large one room built like a barn, with timbered posts and beams, white walls, many splashy windows, are paintings on display by some local artists. Not always that good.

So we thought, for a day only, we would come in before the place opened, using our magic key, and take down for a very short time the paintings everyone was used to, and hang in their place these unsigned framed poems. Small poems, small frames.

The thing to keep in mind is that no one knows us in the bakery, or even the town. This is just our concocted crazy scheme. Do you realize how many great things are drummed up this way? and how many equally bad and ruinous and selfish things are made? Miserable and sweeping oil spills derive from almost the same commanding self-interest, but this would be poetry, kept small scale, and in this case kept imaginary. So let me continue with the dream. . .

The public might protest the act, but it would be a sure thing that they would approach the smaller world, on seeing the paintings and color and big world removed (all stored lovingly in the back room against one another), and come to the framed poems curious as to who had the nerve to do this.

They would stop at one and cry out loud to the others who have gone to all the other poems, “You call this a poem?!” and another would reply after peering into a frame, “I know! Who did this?” and others would only grumble as they dashed frame to frame.

The only ones who were saying nothing — in fact little smiles could be seen from the corners of their mouths as they left one poem and walked slowly to another — were the ones who recognized themselves. Yes, these were poems written about and for people who had come to the bakery for a cookie or a turnover with no idea on that same day someone was watching and remembering. These would be poems absolutely to and for the bakery and its customers. Nothing more. Oh, well, maybe to the surroundings. . .

Even the poet wasn’t quite sure if the poems were any good, but he was happy enough to see for a very short time such a ruckus.

Of course it didn’t take long for that one with Authority — and it is often an individual who doesn’t come even close to the work, never mind bothering to read it or look at it — to take over, and the frames were now being removed by a small squad of volunteers, who got the poem frames all off the walls and momentarily placed on tables.

But then people were seen still curious going to the unguarded tables and lifting a poem to read, maybe for a second or third time.

In the meantime, the Authority figure was seen standing in the middle of the bakery shouting orders to his minions, “Did you look around all the corners, one could be there!” And sure enough there was another small poem in a 5 x 7 frame just waiting. Floating in its stillness...

There were different accounts but one person swears the poems stayed up for at least one hour, and it was at that lovely hour in any bakery in any part of the world, Sunday morning, 7:45 to 8:45, as people were waking up and walking in with the slowly warming sunrise.

One child was heard to say, “I liked the poems. It was different,” then shrugging and biting into a powdered cookie.

When the artists were told what had happened to their works, they made sure they returned personally to see that their paintings were hung properly. It’s not just any old frame on a nail, you know.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EARTH ~

VASHTI BUNYAN

The proclaimed godmother of Freak Folk was London born in 1945. A pal of Donovan, she once took off for the northern reaches of Scotland to join a commune, but before that she traveled to New York City and fell under the influence of early Bob Dylan (the Freewheelin' album). The traveling time in the UK was a year and a half on the road, stretching from South London to the Hebrides, in a horse and cart. Joe Boyd produced her first album Just Another Diamond Day, recorded in three evenings at the height of the sixties with some of the finest British folk musicians. Critically received, the album was never known. Having enough of that, VB disappeared into Ireland from the music scene for the next 30 years to raise three children and tend to her animals. A beautiful Earth Mother. In 2000 her first album was rereleased, followed by a second album Lookaftering in 2005. Word has it a fourth album is slowly in the works. I drew the song "Winter Is Blue" from the collection Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind, a 2-CD compilation of singles and demos cut from 1964 to 1967. The title of the collection and first song was penned by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and recorded by VB in 1965.

EDEN 6 ~

LITTLE ONES


I went out before the rain and scythed the roadway. Only me out there, though Kokomo, our kitten, would certainly follow me anywhere. Yesterday I was scything and a neighbor was walking by, she limps and her elder dog wheezes. I can hear them coming from fifty feet off with my back turned on an old dirt road. She knows the pooch is going to die any time now, but I mentioned how she still wags her tail. What a heart an animal has. I’ve tried to learn my lessons from birds and animals and the great Mother more than other humans, but occasionally a human being becomes a spectacular moment. So as I am saying adieu to the neighbor and her dog heading up river for the mailbox, I turn and look down behind the stonewall and there’s my buddy Kokomo who has made his silent stay all the way to the road and by my boots where I stand...peering out with those glorious eyes. Beaming. It was his first look at a dog. I left myself and thought more about him. I know he is everything to me that I give to my one grown son. It can’t be helped.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold