CLAYTON & FARLOW ~

Clayton

Clayton always had a pricky word

To say about the hippies.

They lived in a commune

Over the hill from his farm.

He ran into them at three places

At any one time during the year —

Either when he was hunting the hill

As he did every year for 40 years,

Or when he was running his snow-machine

On the back roads.

Finally he would see them in town

Every other Friday, when he was

Cashing his check from the state park.

And they was always cashing

Some other kind of check,

Smiling at him.

Of course I was a hippie to Clayton too

Because I had the long beard,

But we worked together when he came home

To his farm on the river.

Helped him screed the foundation floor

Under his house and lay down the roof, too —

Fix fence, cut the firewood and solder sap pails.

But one day I’ll never forget

Was when we were haying the lower mowing in August —

His wife had moved out long ago

And he was living with his son

And the big TV antenna.

But these summer days were spent

A long time haying,

Waiting on the weather

And broken down farm machines.

We had just finished up work,

Had the trailer swayed down loaded

With 200 bales and were coming around

The bend near the second swimming hole

When Clayton caught sight of something

Standing fresh out open

In the shallow part of the river —

A young woman soaping herself

And blonde naked as pine lumber,

Sunlight enshrined in the water

Around her knees.

We both stared like idiots

Until we got broadside with her,

Then we looked straight ahead

Business as usual

But I know she didn’t move.

Further up the road

Clayton twisted his sunburned neck

And skinny white t-shirt

Around in the tractor seat,

Looked back where I was

Holding onto the trailer stakes

And hollered, “I never did mind the hippie women!”

Farlow

Just imagine Farlow

On Washington’s Birthday

When he came out the back door

Into his woodshed and caught

Clayton’s small hunting-pup

Digging through his trash.

According to the story

He told the game warden

Was that the pup attacked him,

So he had to shoot it.

Clayton never bought that story.

He knew from past experience

Of his own that Farlow’s wife

Had left him six months

After they moved here from Connecticut.

He was spending weekend nights

And now weekdays

In bars in town after work,

Might have even brought home a lady,

But most probably not.

Clayton could read Farlow’s house lights

A quarter-mile away from where

He sat nights in his kitchen —

No houses in-between.

If he used the scope of his rifle

He could even see more.

As winter sunk in

Farlow was keeping odd-hours —

Arriving home late,

Wandering around the house weekends,

And shooting his rifle off for hours

In his field on Sunday afternoons.

The house was said to have an arsenal —

Maybe 30 rifles and pistols for one man —

And it only took one to shoot the dog.

After that, Clayton didn’t deal with him,

Didn’t pay attention to his house lights,

And in turn Farlow leased out his hayfield

To someone else, instead of Clayton —

First time in years.

Since then both men have remarried,

Moved away, and the house of Farlow’s

Was bought by a millionaire gentleman farmer.

I still hear Farlow target practicing

In his field on a Sunday afternoon,

Even though he is long gone.

Clayton’s son says they have so many puppies

Around at his father’s old place

That they’ll probably have to drown a few of them

In the river this spring.

____________________

Bob Arnold

Where Rivers Meet

CHURCH ~

ALL POETS ~

MUHAMMAD  ALI  & THE  BEATLES

ISHMAEL REED ON MUHAMMAD ALI


JOYCE CAROL OATES ON MUHAMMAD ALI

IF DOGS RUN FREE ~

TWO HOURS WITH NINA SIMONE ~

ROUNDUP ~

and here's another version, and my favorite, of Susan's favorite

and soon your favorite. . .

MORE ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK ~

A L E J A N D R A     P I Z A R N I K

THE SILENT SKY-BLUE WOMAM
AT THE EDGE OF THE SWAMP
For Enrique Pichon Riviere


    They closed the face that was identical to the highest dream of an
imperial childhood, and spooked birds in a frantic rush of black feathers made a perfect terror of the landscape. I am your silence, your tragedy, your watcher. Though I'm only night, though every night of my life is yours.




UNFINISHED WRECKAGE


    This untimely tempest, these rails on the girls of my eyes, this little
love story closing like a fan that would open to reveal a hallucinated
beauty, the most naked woman of the forest in the musical silence of
an embrace.




DENSITY


    I was the source of discord, the owner of dissonance, the girl of the harsh counterpoint. I would open and close with such pure animal
rhythm.




IN THE OPEN DARKNESS


    If the smallest death demands a song, then I should sing to those
who used to be lilacs, who, for the sake of accompanying me in my
black light, silenced their fires when a shadow shaped by my cries
took refuge among their shadows.




THE DARK ONE


    And why did she speak as if silence were a great wall and words
were the colors destined to cover it? And who was it who claimed to
feed on music and wasn't able to cry?




GHOSTLY MEMORIAL


    Night blindly mine. I dream of a body as transparent as a tree made of glass.

    Horror of searching for your eyes in the space that is full of the
screams of this poem.




SCENE


    Noise of someone going up the stairs. The woman of torments, the one who returns from nature, goes up the stairs, from which a trail of blood is flowing. The flower of distance is burning black birds in the hair of the solitary woman. We have to rescue not the flower, but the words.




AT NIGHT


    Night falls, and the dolls project marvelous images in color. Each
image is linked to another by a small cord. I listen, one by one, and
very distinctly, to noises and sounds.

translated by Yvette Siegert

Extracting the Stone of Madness

poems 1962-1972

New Directions, 2016


ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK (1936-1972) was born in Argentina to Russian Jewish immigrants and was educated in both Spanish and Yiddish. She published her first three books of poetry while studying at the University of Bueno Aires and then spent several years in Paris as a writer, critic, and translator. In addition to poetry, Pizarnik also wrote experimental works of theater and prose. She died of a deliberate drug overdose at the age of thirty-six.

VICTOR VICTORY ! ~

V I C T O R     J A R A

Chilean ex-lieutenant faces US trial in murder of singer and activist Víctor Jara

PIONEER ~

N A N E T T E     R A I N O N E

P I O N E E R

DOWNTOWN BLUES ~

MALCOLM LOWRY ~

M A L C O L M     L O W R Y

Nocturne

This evening Venus sings alone

And homeward feathers stir like silk

Like the dress of a multitudinous ghost

The pinons tear through a sky like milk.

Seagulls all soon to be turned to stone

That seeking I lose beyond the trail

In the woods that I and my ignorance own

Where together we walk on our hands and knees

Together go walking beneath the pale

Of a beautiful evening loved the most

And yet this evening is my jail

And policemen glisten in the trees.

Happiness

Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,

A wild sky full of stars at rising

And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,

Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,

Trees with branches rooted in air —

Sitting in the sun at noon with furiously

Smoking shadow of the shack chimney —

Eagles drive downward in one,

Terns blow backward,

A new kind of tobacco at eleven,

And my love returning on the four o'clock bus

— My God, why have you given this to us?

No Company But Fear

How did all this begin and why am I here

at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint,

papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza,

two slimed spittons, no company but fear:

fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint

of birds and buses flying to far places,

of girls skipping with the wind in their faces,

but no company, no company but fear,

fear of the blowing fountain: and all flowers

that know the sun are my enemies,

these, dead, hours?

____________________________


MALCOLM LOWRY
The Voyage That Never Ends
fictions  poems  fragments  letters
New York Review of Books, 2007 

 



 Malcolm Lowry's mysterious demise

THE CRYBABY ~

FARMER'S WIFE ~

Farmer's Wife

Four dozen eggs under her arm,

That’s how she greeted us.

We weren’t coming for eggs

But for a currant bush

Waiting in the dooryard

Wrapped tight in burlap.

I lifted it into the back

Of the truck since that’s

What I was hired to do,

Waited in the early sun

Leaning against the tailgate

While the two old ladies talked.

And with the eggs still under

Her arm she also turned to speak

With me, eyes dazzled like light

In water, checkered blue flannel

Shirt, out-worn by all of her

Sons and now on her back; torn

At the elbows, but warm.

Everything is just right

On this hill farm and I’ve only

Been here 5 minutes. Crows flap

West to east from the wood’s edge

Long over the flat face of pasture.

A manure spreader is backed up

To the kitchen door stacked neat

With stovewood, the lawn is mowed,

And we’ve caught this farmer’s wife

In between the chicken coop and

The house; white hair combed back

With ruddy hands that pick eggs

Each morning, and when she talks

She mentions all of her family.



__________________

Bob Arnold
Where Rivers Meet
Mad River Press

KABIR ~

god my darling
do me a favor and kill my mother-in-law
Janabai (13th century).
trans. Arun Kolatkar



Chewing slowly,

Only after I'd eaten

My grandmother,

Mother,

Son-in-law,

Two brothers-in-law,

And father-in-law

(His big family included)

In that order,

And had for desert

The town's inhabitants,



Did I find, says Kabir,

The beloved that I've become

One with.




____________________________________
K A B I R
Songs of Kabir
translated Arvind Krishna Mehrotra 
New York Review of Books

TOM PACHECO AT THE COLONY, WOODSTOCK, NY ~

RALPH J. GLEASON ~

R A L P H    J.    G L E A S O N

Music in the air

The selected writings of Ralph J. Gleason

edited by Toby Gleason

Yale University Press 2016

Ralph Gleason was more than likely the first music critic I ever read back 50 years ago 

and his selected writings hold true to this day — from Jazz to Rock with much less

the authority on display of many current music critics and more an ease

and conversation and friendship with the music and musicians.

Few can take you by the hand from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong

to Bebop and John Coltrane as Gleason will, or right into

the home of the Jefferson Airplane and the California

music scene of the 1960s. He was instrumental at organizing

 one of Bob Dylan's finest press conferences as well

at being one of the founders of the Monterey Pop Festival

and the starting pistol to the original Rolling Stone magazine.
Plus he wrote about the souls of Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae
with more soul than anyone.
Icing on the cake — he quoted in 1966 the hip poet Philip Whalen —
everything was usable to Gleason if it had the wonder.

All the while well past the age of 30 back then and younger than yesterday.

He was gone, already, by 1975.

No one like him before or since.

This collection gathered up by his son Toby

will show you why.

RARE RECORDING ~

EDGE OF IRONY ~

Marjorie Perloff ~ Edge of Irony

Think Kafka, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth et al