daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
In the Event of
Officer how you know I'm dancing is the body
-cam. Look, I'm riding centuries of whips, the first half
Of the ghost, arms out the window up, the second half
Arms flat on the pavement, palms down, now the ghost is whole
My arms stretched forward, like I'm bowing, but if I
Were standing, stretched above my head. Officer how
you know I'm dead is that I seem to bow to you
________________________
Shane McCrae
The Many Hundreds of the Scent
Farrar, 2023
The Albert Camus quote was chalked at 7 PM
election night with a good pal holding
a flashlight to guide the guiding words
BACKROAD CHALKIE NOV 6 '24
Stupid America
stupid america, see that chicano
with a big knife
in his steady hand
he doesn't want to knife you
he wants to sit down on a bench
and carve christ figures
but you won't let him.
stupid america, hear that chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write
he will explode.
stupid america, remember that chicanito
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand masterpieces
hanging only from his mind.
__________________
Lalo Delgardo
"Stupid America"
from Latino Poetry
Rigoberto Gonzalez, editor
The Library of America, 2024
Simon & Schuster, 2024
Claire Anne Daly was born on Feb. 26, 1958, in Bronxville, N.Y
died at age 66 in Longmont, Colo.
Barbara Jean Spillman was born on May 12, 1927, in Detroit
gone in Oakland, CA. Oct 20, 2024
Directive
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
_____________________
Robert Frost
Steeple Bush (1947)
T H E L I B R A R Y O F A M E R I C A
Once upon a time Jay Parini and I worked together
for a few days in the academia of Middlebury Vermont ~
I have only fond memories,
he knows his Frost.
BOB ARNOLD'S
"FEW WORDS, MANY BOOKS, UNWAVERING LOVE"
Book Review: Cup, Faraway Like the Deer's Eye, and Darling Companion by Bob Arnold
by Svetlana Litvinchuk
October 4, 2024
Bob Arnold is one of those rare visionary poets whose work stands the test of time, bypassing trends to arrive at something foundational. With his impeccable vision, he makes it his mission to get us to slow down and see what matters in this brief life. Even from a moving train speeding from Chicago out west and back again, which is the setting for his collection, Darling Companion, he reminds us to take time to notice, to “find sunlight to sit in,” and to ponder things like, “Nebraska. When will they have time to chop all this corn” or the reasons why “as we cross America/ look up every main street— nobody.”
Arnold doesn’t use a lot of words yet manages to say so much. One remarkable quality of his writing is that there is almost no sense of the poet himself in his aphorism-like poems. His scenes are always grounded in a strong sense of place but his mastery is in showing while making the narrator invisible, managing to melt into the scenery with jewels like,
“in a new land
otherwise taken for granted—
the evening breeze
touching every leaf.”
This is a gift he bestows upon the reader— he offers pure glimpses and unmarred observations of landscapes and of Americana, urging us to pay attention, or in his own words, to “buy so many postcards— as if you’ll never return.” By stitching together tiny vignettes, Arnold paints a larger picture of rural life that seems to expand throughout his work. With precision and economy of words, he whittles poems down to attain the minimalist aesthetic that befits an ascetic. Take the poem, “Mountain” for instance, which with four simple words creates a story of a mountain greeting the day:
“Mount Blanca
Sunrise
Stone”
His work relies on recurring themes, and we get the sense that he writes poems the same way he builds cabins, constructing images piece by piece until they are large enough so the reader can walk around inside and look around. Much as in architecture, the materials are basic and uniform, the words are simple building blocks. But the artistry is in their configuration; the grandness is in the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.
Always present in his work is his obvious fondness for his partner, Susan, his cup of his love overflowing for her at every opportunity. In his book Cup, we get a deep yet brief and intimate glimpse of their decades-long love affair taking place in their small cabin where he chops wood, washes her hair by the fire, gazes at the way it falls in front of her face, and takes the time to admire her long cotton skirts as he melts snow into water, and we are endeared by the flour on her lips in her otherwise clean kitchen after she finishes baking and watches the river freezing, then thawing, then flooding the bridge into town. He shows us that we are ultimately defined by who we love and how we love them, by what we do and why we do it.
In Arnold’s work, Susan is not a figure left to our imaginations shrouded in mystery, as her photographs liberally grace the pages of his other books. In Far Away Like a Deer’s Eye, we get a deep look into his entire life through stories that span his childhood all the way into the present where we find him today, well into his 70’s, complete with color photos of the poet and his muse growing older together and as in love as ever. Through this glimpse of their shared lives we are warmed by the fire of the unfolding tale of the tender tale of their marriage and family.
Bob Arnold is a poet with a strong back and an open heart, but his words are not those of a romantic. He is never effusive or overly sentimental. His poems are bare as a no-frills cabin life in the woods of Vermont. Still, they are gentle, precise, and devoted, a hallmark of a carpenter who has been softened by years of reverence for the forest. His cool, even tone gives rise to a deep well of emotion as he tells us about “places[s] of many trees, grasses, and children playing and we could have broke down weeping to see the earth this way.” Over the decades, Arnold has honed the skill of helping us access a passion for the natural world and the interconnectedness of human relationships, showing us what a true humanitarian, environmentalist, and craftsman aspires to, leading us to beauty both very near and the very far with lines like,
“same stars as home
except these nearly
touch the ground”
and
“not electric lines anymore
across New Mexico plains—
strings of sunlight”
Despite his brevity, his attention to detail and simultaneous hawk’s eye for the big picture is a gift. Zooming in and out, he says much in what he leaves unsaid, painting millennia-long stories of fields with “trees far off/ never climbed by a child/ only crows.”
While each short poem has its own legs to stand on, with a singular pearl of wisdom to share, woven together into a collection the poems create an inspiring landscape. Through repetition of the images of things that surround him, like trees, snow, the wood stove, and the bowls in their kitchen, the reader can cobble together a broader panorama of the world and the few things in it that matter. Arnold makes connections in quiet, pensive, and humorous ways with observations like:
“$35 night
in Kayenta—
motel hot
water is cold
cold is scalding
drain is slow”
Wholly Zen with an untiring admiration for nature, his ability to notice and to help us see is unfaltering. His books are candid, the poems brief, yet in a series of vignettes strung together he opens our field of vision to an unfolding landscape that leads us up the mountain of the Self, placing a picture window in front of us and sitting us by the wood stove. As we gaze, he tells us stories, quietly gathers kindling, and builds a fire to keep us warm as we look out onto the world, remembering that our Earth is merely a “rock rising to light.” All that matters, his poems tell us, is to take a few deep breaths and to practice seeing the fleeting nature of life on our own, to find the beauty in it—the magic, the love.
Svetlana Litvinchuk holds a double degree in Foreign Language and Literature and International Studies from University of New Mexico. She is the author of a debut poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Sky Island Journal, Plant-Human Quarterly, ONE ART, Willows Wept, Union Spring Review, New Verse News, Merion West, Propagate: Fruits from the Garden Anyhology, Black Coffee Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter in Cape Girardeau, MO. She is passionate about nature, the Earth, and sustainable agriculture. She is a reviews editor with ONLY POEMS.
