BOB ARNOLD'S ~ WHILE ALIVE ~

Secret Love

Tucked inside the large

wheel well of the old fire

truck is the robin's nest

Painting

She is walking

in a soft blue dress

through splashed summer

grass and I can watch

her from faraway come closer

a bell-shaped bag with our breakfast

swings lightly in her hand and

I still can't believe that I

have known her forever

and may meet her again

_____________________________________________

New, perfect bound, 115 pages of poems

with an introduction by Margaret Randall

Limited:

$20

plus $5 shipping

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_______________________________

LONGHOUSE

P.O. Box 2454

West Brattleboro

Vermont

05303

WOODCUTTER ~

NIGHT TABLE



Here is part of you

While you sleep —




The small shine

Of silver earrings







DOGS IN SNOW



I bring them out water

They drink around the ice

Chains rap on the bucket




Shivering I wait

Looking up into the stars

What I see in their eyes




Plowing back to the house

After shaking their coats goodnight

Strength in my hands







THE PLEASURES OF LOVE



The last of my noon hour

Black tin lunch pail

Sitting on a sap soaked maple stump

Woodchips nettled on my woolen socks

Finding the fruit cup she made for me

Clear cold glass in my oiled hand

Neat slices of strawberry and pear

DECEMBER



She’s supposed to be land clearing

Heaping brush to burn in first snow

But the pale yellow ghost of tall

Summer grasses she sweeps down

Is instead caught in her hand

And placed that way in a kitchen vase

Showing a warmth to last us through winter







WORK GLOVES



On the garden gate

Left here with me —

Shape of her hands

I HAVE BEEN TOLD



Down on the river

There is a small place

Where there is no sound

Nothing, and I know it well

And I have been told

And since found

That when climbing back

Loaded with water

At the top of the rise

If you half turn your head

The river will tilt into your ear

HORSE & FARMHAND



Here is the slowness

Of afternoon and sun

A farmhand bending to lift

A sleeve of ice

From a trough

In the pasture

The horse that stands still

The snow we’ve been waiting for








WINTER DAY



I swore if you laid

Your cheek, wind

Blown red as any

Soft maple leaf

Onto the pond,

And looked down through

The half-foot of

Ice, the rest was

Water flowing clear

Way back up to you —

The scales of depth

Catching your breath

MANY TIMES



There is the absolute way

Of doing it, and we have done it

Many times and again —

How I will come to you

How you will meet me

The early morning sun

Perfect on the bed, and

Stripes in the Mexican blanket

Like blood, the sea, yellow iris petals —

And it is a silly lovers ritual of ours,

I hug you and you hug me and step onto

My boots, and I walk you and me around the

Sunlit room, the sway of patchouli in your hair,

And your face smooth against my lips

Like the inside of your hands

THE SKIN OF HER NECK



Tonight, because her hand is in pain, the small finger

Swollen, yes, I’ll stir the

Batter, although she is better

And first taught me how

Something is done right.

And I came from behind

And smelled the skin of

Her neck, the long blonde

Hairs alive and the blouse

White and rough, tucked into

A thin summer skirt.

Winter, near Christmas,

3 feet of snow and her

Body moves across the

Cabin room with summer,

A clay bowl with

Colored stripes in her

Arms, the fresh heat

Of the flat iron stove.







REDTAIL



By the river I found her —

Long and short feathers matted by weeks of rain,

A soft spotted down on her chest,

The whole body twisted in the crotch of an ironwood

This hawk hung and not a right way to die.

Nudged out with my axe handle it fell with no life,

Eyes gone and the rotting smell of blood and grease.

I cut the claws for the first time, others I’ve left —

One talon broken off and the muscular flex of skin

No different than a man’s, except for the ruggedness,

The pale yellow of it, but a companion to my own.

And the tail feathers — still a beautiful tan — pinned

Open for flight on rough pine boards inside our cabin,

I only buried some of her.

THE WOODCUTTER TALKS



I’ve got to go pretty soon

So I’ll take my boots off

And shake out the snow,

Sit close to the fire you

Have built, then left for me.

I’m in no hurry until the sun comes up.

My snowshoes need new leather straps

But for now they’ll have to do,

Carry me to the woods where I work

Thinning out the half bowl of a hillside —

That’s what it looks like — and sometimes

I rest and watch it for what it is, with my

Wet gloves off, the clearness above me.



© Bob Arnold
from Where Rivers Meet
(Mad River Press)






photos © bob arnold

STONE HUT (11) ~

"Villa of Souls" built by Bob in our woodlot

39

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, as far as one’s power reaches.          Robinson Jeffers

The town of Carmel, California can be easily bypassed, but the coastline can’t. If you do, you will miss what surf and stone is all about. There was a stonemason who once lived in Carmel, who worked around that surf and stone, who gathered the granite from the coastline to build his home. House, garden walls, and even a tower he shaped with his hands. All of it looked back at the Pacific where it came from. Robinson Jeffers looked like he came from the Pacific, just like his stone. His wife Una’s favorite poet was Yeats and when standing on the shore staring up on the bluff where the stone property is encircled by cypress and eucalyptus trees you can hear and feel Yeats’ lines “hammer your thoughts into unity” all over the stonework. When Susan and I were searching for the house, we knew this place was it by its location with the sea, the wind, the long grass blowing from the coast road up into the yard. We stayed away. Walked the road around it, connecting with a street bunched with wealthy houses which made the Jeffers home appear more of a survivor. Everything in its landscape was interesting: being a forester Jeffers had planted trees all over his land only to have them chopped apart as progress advanced. But some have withstood, enough to give the land ocean breeze movement. The house and tower are rock, not pretty, but they have the lasting appearance of being from the land. There is another stone house nearby which I didn’t give a second glance to — it was built I’m sure by a crew of masons, and while it is massive and correct, it is devoid of feeling. It’s too correct. The Jeffers house is squat, like an animal on its haunches, many small windows give it eyes that look to the Pacific. The tower, better known as Hawk Tower, is a signature to anyone who must see it for the first time that some different kind of people must be living here. “Here” was known as Tor House, and different Jeffers was. Called eccentric, loner, hermit, antihuman — people read his poetry too much and don’t visit his landscape where he carved out the life poem. The poems really live on the land he loved with his wife and twin sons. You can see a lot of humanity on that land, and where the eyes look up and down the coast that’s where the long poems came from — the legends, the stone, the combined rhythms of surf and stone. There is a tour during the week into the Jeffers house but we were there on the wrong day. Besides, the house is enough to watch from the outside, and if Jeffers were still alive that’s where most of us would have to stand to see it. You need to have the ocean in your ears. I had been reading his work for years before we arrived there. I studied the photographs of the house, read his letters, but nothing prepared me for the real thing. It is a quiet location, almost unnoticed, having lost its face long ago to nature. We were up at Fort Ross a day before looking at historical redwood log work. At Tor House it took only a minute — a long swallowed look — to know the work, the poems, the life were true.

Susan with her first grandchild, Layla

40

When I build, I have someone in mind. I lived for two years in the woods before meeting Susan. Before we met I built for myself, or for the job, if I was working for someone. In the cabin I built what was needed — the essentials — woodshed, privy, bookcases, front step stoop; a place to sit in the sun while sharpening a bowsaw. There was nothing else needed. The cabin I built was enough for me, the roof didn’t leak, water was drawn from the river. But after I met Susan it seemed everything built into the cabin had just begun. The privy got a window. The ladder to the upstairs became stairs. Kitchen shelves were added. The old fallen stone walls on the property I discovered behind years of brush, and they were repaired. The work we did in the cabin was for ourselves. The work outside, in the garden, on the stone walls, was for the land which returned its gifts to us. But without Susan, I might not have seen those stone walls for awhile. She never pointed them out, but she inspired. A worker has to follow those inspirations, there aren’t always that many. Those five years in the cabin were a coordination between the pleasures of love and the work to be done. Firewood was cut with a bowsaw and all three bowsaws were kept sharp, clean, hung on a nail out of the weather. We hauled all of the trees out of the woods by hand, either on our backs or with a sled. The river was watched a day ahead of time: rain would wash up mud, so we drew extra water and stored it in a twenty gallon pail in the kitchen. Snow was shoveled immediately. Susan taught herself gardening and weaving. I taught myself treework and stonework. Working alone it takes twice as long to learn, but what is achieved is never forgotten because it has become one with your life. You’re here to stay. I cut trees for five years with a bowsaw because I knew nothing about chain saws until a friend visited and showed me. Now part of my living is made with a pair of chain saws, but the bowsaw is still used. That was the first woods rhythm of my work, it won’t leave. Firewood is split with the woman you love in mind. If she cooks with a cookstove the wood has to be right, and Susan learned her trees by watching what wood cooked best. I have never worked alongside a better worker than Susan, she has few complaints — blonde Californian with good teeth and here she is living in the woods, drawing water, cutting her firewood to cook, sitting in the privy, driving crummy cars, and sometimes helping me lift a stone that weighs more than both of us. Others have done it, I’m simply sharing our story. What is important to me is that we have done it together. A week after the stone hut was finished, in early November, I started on a low garden wall that Susan was thinking about, and I liked the idea too. Together we gathered the stone, and I laid it, and we dug out flower beds in front of the wall and planted over 100 bulbs for next spring — just beat the frost. We give each other things, gifts, and expect nothing in return but the nature of the giving allows a sensation to return. I built things for Susan and she gave me everything. I built this hut for the birth of Carson.

Bob with Carson on the way to the stone hut

41

Almost thirty years ago I began building the stone hut for the birth of Carson, and now on this day July 9, 2013, his first child is born, a daughter, Layla Rosemary Arnold, with his partner Jocelyn, and I begin to etch in a few further chapters to expand the first edition of the book to showcase just what sort of life and stone work happened after the book was published and Carson grew up from being a very young boy — where we left him in chapter 40 — to now a full grown man, husband, lover, father, and provider. All through his childhood and long string of teenage years he worked with me on stone and wood building jobs. Heavy stuff, too, like building a few small houses. I’ve covered many of those years in another book titled Sunswumthru A Building. It takes the reader through the channels, love, and nitty-gritty of working with a young son who is not exactly gung-ho about doing this sort of work, but he’s doing it, trying his best. Learning about tools, purpose, safety, craft, balance, partnership, care, uses and abuses, and many other facets of what comes to the mind and hand just carrying a tool from one location to another. Handsaws always act like handsaws, nothing else.

But to a musician, which Carson is, a handsaw even while we were working could have been a musical instrument, a sound as tone, a different rhythm from the worker’s, yet another worker’s, a musician’s. Better yet, a drummer’s. Each hammer blow, each sledgehammer crack, all stomps of feet and pounding of lumber and drop of stone and thud of earth went into this young drummer. Whatever he would make of it was all up to him. Of course he wasn’t even aware of any of this as a youngster, he was simply enduring and making it through. But the body was listening, always listening.

So when we came to see Layla Rosemary, eleven hours after she was born, snug in bed, cradled at her mother’s heart, we grabbed some things at home that caught our eyes that we thought might work perfectly for a newborn’s heart. An old stuffed giraffe which was Carson’s and one of his favorites. A thin, beaded bracelet that Jocelyn clasped without a moment’s hesitation around her baby’s ankle. And then a painted egg — turquoise and other festive flecks of color — and smoothly oval-shaped like the prettiest of stones. I placed that at Layla’s hand.

Carson when home schooled
building a house with Bob

42

The stonemason might keep in mind, that unless he or she can lay up stone as handsome and postured and deftly set as the Incas, it is best to be keenly aware of the surroundings where one works the stone. You want the stone to fit in, to make sense, to be likewise spectacular and practical at once.

I’ve seen a crew of stone workers go at it all day and cover lots of ground and leave at the end of the day with a holy mess of squared and dressed stone that doesn’t look at all right in its rural habitat. The rural is mined by hidden streams, deep springs, centuries old woodlands and a darkness that has only seen natural light. Think about that a moment — no other light in this darkness but daylight and moonlight. It makes for amazing moss, lichen, stone coloring, and solitude. It wants stone looking and feeling the landscape this way, too. It’s up to the stonemason to adjust, to know where one is.

Some of the best stonework in New England I’ve ever seen has been off the beaten path in New Hampshire — some eight-foot wide walls that one could drive a tractor on top of if one could get up there. I’m not sure if these walls were on a ride wayward to Nelson, or around outer Monadnock, or further north into the White Mountains, and in a way I just don’t want to remember where. I want to remember what I saw. Put my hand to. It’s like the two young workers I came across on my bicycle one day in the Berkshire hills building a new wall for a mansion and estate out in the hills. The stone weaving in and out of the massive maple trees and these guys were young but they already had the knack of how to make that world their majestic. I stopped and visited with them and felt the majestic.

Where we were married in the small, white church by a waterfall in Vermont there are stone sills and outer steps to this church wide enough so I can lay down my six feet across it. The stone tablets were pulled there onto the knoll by oxen; no doubt the same team that would have yarded all the squared stone in what makes the buttress under the covered bridge that takes you across and down to our house…stone walls hidden and shown all the way down the almost two miles of dirt road, and I’ve built some of these stone walls you’ll see coming here. It’s what a stone builder does. Works where he lives.

All our married life we built what had to be done. No one had been married in that chapel in the village for years, and the height of the grass showed that. We went up a few days before the wedding and scythed down the four-foot height of grass, then mowed it closer to a somewhat lawn, and got ourselves a good dose of poison ivy while we were at it. Then we opened the doors to the church and tall windows and aired the place out, swept the joint, put flowers in the windows along the pews. People came. The night before the wedding my bride-to-be and I cooked a meal for everyone visiting, and the night of the wedding we did the same. Quite a honeymoon! We bathed in the river before the wedding ceremony and asked everyone to be there at 7 a.m. They were, blinking their eyes awake.

And it’s been all the same ever since. If we want something, we build it. Whether transplanting by hand over many years thousands of daylilies, or building the stone walls, gates between stone walls, stone stairs, stone floor, skirting stone foundation for a house, stone seats four feet wide, stone bulkhead, stone well house, circular stone beds for flowers and bee balm. Build it all, and make it fit the eye, the landscape, the overall. 

Bob atop a backwoods New Hampshire stonewall;
back home laying up a new wall; the top side of that
New Hampshire stone wall — wide enough to
drive a tractor over the top.

all photographs by Susan Arnold

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013

STONE HUT ( 10 ) ~

One of the cairns Bob built in the garden

36

The small jobs on the hut were the last things to do. It was October, windy colored leaves were falling, some stuck wet by rain on the hut roof. I loaded the Ashley woodstove into the Willys and drove it to the hut. It was light. I could load it on and off the Willys alone. I carried it into the hut and placed it in the rear left corner, and eyed up through the box cut out in the loft where a stovepipe would pass into the metal chimney installed when I was nailing on the shingles. Stove in. The stovepipe — all used pipe, but sound — had been fastened together with screws the night before at the house. Over eight feet tall, it was now in place. Ready for a fire. The damper twisted away from rust with a pinch of oil. When we use the stove, firewood will be wheelbarrowed from the house woodshed; bring it as we need it. Burn poplar since the space to heat is small. Save the hardwood for the house. One other job was to flash the rear corners of the roof where it met ledge. In fact one rafter in the rear of the hut was built on ledge — I slipped a slate shingle under to keep it off the dirt. Since the hut was built into ledge I had to work lumber to stone and the last touches of flashing with the ledge. Otherwise rain and snow would shed the roof, splash on the ledge and leak into the hut. I flashed heavily but tried to hold the flashing to a subtle art — it has to be used but shouldn’t be seen — so with bending tricks and a dap of mortar it attached to ledge. Now with most of the hut built there was time to visit it — test the door, wash the windows, climb to the loft, climb down, sweep the floor. Sweeping the stone floor was my gift to the hut at each visit. It was an exercise between us. I liked sitting up there, but sitting on the doorway stone step was too low. The only furniture I gave the hut was a stone seat built outdoors into the bank on the right corner — it was eighteen inches off the ground made of one thick flat stone. One could sit on it and lean against the hut corner and the sun was there most of the day. One more stone was left over from the time the stone culvert was dug up out on the road, it was used here. And when my final job was to trim the butt ends of the beams that ran long over the side of the hut, I stood on the stone seat for half of the job — leaned a step ladder on the other side. Used a hatchet, handsaw, and plane to shape the beams an arrow design. Stained the fresh open wood the same smoke color. I returned to the stone seat until snow fell. After a few snowstorms and winter had settled in and a 40° day in the sun felt warm again, I would visit; sweep off the door step, sweep the inside, then walk out and sweep off the stone seat, and sit awhile.

A section of "Villa of Souls" a long stonewall with cairns atop
far up the mountain road of our woodlot

37

I always called both sets of grandparents “nana and papa.” My sister Sherry remembers when I was still too young to talk right I would mouth out a “banana” for “nana.” We had a wealthy grandfather who owned a lumber business and a grandfather who owned nothing but his house and his large family of daughters and sons who all had families that would come to visit. The grandfather with the large family was my mother’s father and his name is David Scott, Sr. His oldest son would also be named David, my uncle, and he was the first carpenter I ever met. He taught me things. But my Papa Scott was the first workingman I ever knew. The toil of manual labor showed on his hands, in his face, the strength of his body. I would visit Nana and Papa Scott with my mother when I was a child. We would arrive in time to sit with my grandfather at the kitchen table while he ate his supper, and I didn’t know if he was coming or going from his job at the paper plant. My grandmother would be on her feet at the stove baking soda bread, and my grandfather would eat large servings of food and very slow and he would talk to me in his thick Irish voice which I loved. We all sat at the table. My grandmother served tea wiping her hands on an apron skirt and a pot of tea was left on the table. One of my mother’s sisters was usually visiting at the same time and the tiny apartment became crowded with people. Plastic over the furniture, plastic runners on the carpet. It was a cellar apartment under my uncle David’s house. The only window in the kitchen was a narrow casement high on the back wall level with my uncle’s driveway. When people walked by you saw their feet. I would sit at the table with everyone listening to my grandfather talk, watched how he held his fork when he ate. I wanted to hold my fork that way but my father wouldn’t let me. The soda bread mixed with egg yolk on the plate. Soda bread that came like all of the family from Belfast, Ireland. It might be a reason for my stonework and back then I was picking up the rhythms. Papa Scott was the only man in my young life to show me the love for the woods, nature, the signs to be found there. We would hike into the woods owned by my other grandfather at every visit — jump the streams, climb the old apple trees, feel our legs go places. He showed me how to bend down and drink from that stream with my cupped hands. I still do it. Think of him. Later my grandmother died too sudden for all of us, and it left my grandfather half alive, but he refused to show it. But we all knew. He moved out of the cellar apartment into a trailer and worked as a house painter and janitor in a bank. People always liked him. He bought a bicycle and like his Belfast days would ride sometimes fifty miles in a day, all through the Berkshire Hills. That sparkle in the stream water I cupped in my hands I always saw in his eyes. When I was building the stone hut he visited with my mother and held Carson and rode in the Willys with me into the woods for stone. He’s eighty years old. Body hurt from years of working and doing things for others. He watches me load stone, knowing exactly how it feels.

My Grandfather Scott at work as a baker in Belfast Ireland with his horse and cart.
He had also been a policeman on a bicycle.

My grandfather's daughter "Penny", my mother, back visiting Belfast
and one of its many stone walls.

38

My father liquidated his lumber business in 1985. Given another three years and it would have been 200 years old. Known as the oldest family lumber business in America, at its height it was five lumberyards strong, all in the western hills of Massachusetts and Vermont, and over 400 houses were built in those hills alone. I was brought up in that lumberyard, as were my older sister and younger brothers, and Sherry has a lumberyard with her husband Ron in Great Barrington — tradition is tough to kill. I learned how to work in the backyards of the lumber business. From the age of nine I was stocking the paint room, sweeping the railroad tracks, brooming between the plywood racks. I didn’t love the work, but it was a weekly allowance, and I imagine a way for my father to teach his middle-class kids how to work. The dullest job was resorting the hundreds of spilled nails around the open nail bins. On my hands and knees distinguishing a 10-common nail from a 12-common. I swore at the job but when I look back at it now I see the pick and choose of stonework taking place; the eye to hand ability, the solitary corner of the job. I watched carpenters walk into the nail room and leave the floor a mess — their carpentry work usually matched it. Same with the ones who walked in, knew what they wanted, loaded the scale, and if a nail dropped they went after it. I enjoyed being around those builders and later I would build with them. As a teenager I started to load the lumber trucks for house deliveries and rode with the drivers to unload the same load, sometimes we’d be gone all day. Into southern Vermont, the Catskills of New York…seeing houses go up, crews of carpenters moving, sounds among men. I unloaded boxcars packed with western spruce, hot as an oven in there, me and another kid — all day, all week, all summer. You begin to learn the smell of the western lumber and its grade, superior to the eastern pine we handled. One day I brought home a small bag of pine knots — knocked out of the lumber we unloaded — as a gift for my sister. The lumber was ruined after that, but what did I know! The knots were beautiful. At age fourteen I began to work with carpenters on house jobs but didn’t touch a hammer for two summers. I spread stone for leach fields one summer, carried lumber to the carpenter with the hammer the next summer. By the third summer I was framing, using a shovel, jackhammer, tarring the foundations. I tucked a book in my lunchpail and when others broke for lunch I would listen to the chatter, eat, and read. Earned the nickname “preacher,” never mind being the boss’ son. No harm. Most of those guys showed me how to work…Freddie Zarek, Jim Duffy, Big John were their names…I always enjoyed being in their company. My father had his eye on his oldest son picking up the business end of the lumberyard, but I had no interest. It wasn’t easy for either of us. Generally I’ve never had much respect for businessmen — their attitude is power, intimidation, and of course money. My father was a good businessman, I looked up to him, even though we fought. His lumber knowledge was learned the hard way — under his own father — and he put me in with the workers to learn. And when it was time to let me go, he let go.

Three generations Bob, Carson and my father, also "Bob"
standing at the tail end of his lumber business,
whittled down from a once sawmill and five lumberyards

39

The town of Carmel, California can be easily bypassed, but the coastline can’t. If you do, you will miss what surf and stone is all about. There was a stonemason who once lived in Carmel, who worked around that surf and stone, who gathered the granite from the coastline to build his home. House, garden walls, and even a tower he shaped with his hands. All of it looked back at the Pacific where it came from. Robinson Jeffers looked like he came from the Pacific, just like his stone. His wife Una’s favorite poet was Yeats and when standing on the shore staring up on the bluff where the stone property is encircled by cypress and eucalyptus trees you can hear and feel Yeats’ lines “hammer your thoughts into unity” all over the stonework. When Susan and I were searching for the house, we knew this place was it by its location with the sea, the wind, the long grass blowing from the coast road up into the yard. We stayed away. Walked the road around it, connecting with a street bunched with wealthy houses which made the Jeffers home appear more of a survivor. Everything in its landscape was interesting: being a forester Jeffers had planted trees all over his land only to have them chopped apart as progress advanced. But some have withstood, enough to give the land ocean breeze movement. The house and tower are rock, not pretty, but they have the lasting appearance of being from the land. There is another stone house nearby which I didn’t give a second glance to — it was built I’m sure by a crew of masons, and while it is massive and correct, it is devoid of feeling. It’s too correct. The Jeffers house is squat, like an animal on its haunches, many small windows give it eyes that look to the Pacific. The tower, better known as Hawk Tower, is a signature to anyone who must see it for the first time that some different kind of people must be living here. “Here” was known as Tor House, and different Jeffers was. Called eccentric, loner, hermit, antihuman — people read his poetry too much and don’t visit his landscape where he carved out the life poem. The poems really live on the land he loved with his wife and twin sons. You can see a lot of humanity on that land, and where the eyes look up and down the coast that’s where the long poems came from — the legends, the stone, the combined rhythms of surf and stone. There is a tour during the week into the Jeffers house but we were there on the wrong day. Besides, the house is enough to watch from the outside, and if Jeffers were still alive that’s where most of us would have to stand to see it. You need to have the ocean in your ears. I had been reading his work for years before we arrived there. I studied the photographs of the house, read his letters, but nothing prepared me for the real thing. It is a quiet location, almost unnoticed, having lost its face long ago to nature. We were up at Fort Ross a day before looking at historical redwood log work. At Tor House it took only a minute — a long swallowed look — to know the work, the poems, the life were true.

Detail of a stonewall Bob built on the way to Brattleboro

all photographs by Susan Arnold

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013

ANTHOLOGY 1 ~

 A N T H O L O G Y  1 ___________________________________

ALFRED STARR HAMILTON

town

Give us time

Give us crickets

Give us a clock

could you build this wonderful town house in the grass

and put a cricket in it by this evening?

PHILIP DOW

For a Happy Girl

She is like a cricket:

singing all night

With her legs.

WILLIAM WITHERUP

On the Death of Theodore Roethke

The papers say he died in a swimming pool,

but that's not the way that poets go.

A poet's exit is terrible: as his hour

approached the wind began to blow,

rattling the windows of his study.

Below the lake shuddered; fish grew still.

Above the light soured like spoiling grapefruit.

He listened and heard the awful rupture

of petals and stems and a chorus of worms

singing in the compost. He laid down his pen

and went out, feeling the weight of his flesh,

sensing his time of singing was done,

he who had turned the world into honey.

And he moved through his garden like a heavy bee,

his dark suit gathering a bloody pollen.

FRANK SAMPERI

settling

of the nature

of falling

riding a train

looking at homes

desiring a home

transfixed

seeing flow

in the light

on the floor

CID CORMAN

TU FU is long dead.

Leaves have fallen —

leaves will fall.

Every

thing in his words

on a far lookout.

MIKE O'CONNOR

Bamboo Grove

I sit alone

in the bamboo dark,

strumming zither

and chanting.

In deep woods,

with no one aware,

the bright moon

comes to me shining.

RON PADGETT

December

I will sleep

in my little cup

ARAM SAROYAN

       ' 

aren't

J.D. WHITNEY

Cousin Woodpecker:

How do you keep

that 

        bright red

hat on

while you work?

Cousin Wind:

Where

             do you

sleep?

Cousin Beaver:

Ah!

        The

sound of

one 

        hand

clapping.

AMIL QUAYLE

save the ranch

john wayne saved the ranch

killed three white men

fucked the banker's daughter

drove the steers north

killed four indians

paid the mortgage

married the schoolteacher

drove the steers south

built the railroad

killed five chinamen

saved the widow's ranch

fathered six sons

ran for county commissioner

killed seven democrats

drove the steers west

saved l'amour's ranch

killed eight sunsets

bought texas national

drove the steers east

saved bob hope's ranch

killed nine black men

invested in toilet seats

killed two millions japs

died from a cancer-gun

killed ten angels

drove the steers up

found god in a sheepcamp

DARLENE EDDY

Fallen Timber

A passing winter, fallen timber.

In scents of carrion bloom wake-robin.

Leached oak leaves cushion lady's slipper.

Amid decaying branch, wet loam,

Marsh marigold, wax trillium.

Petaled suns, a faint profusion.

JOHN PHILLIPS

the time

                it takes

     to read

             a poem

  is it

Palimpset

All writing

is written

in a past

the future

reads backwards

to be now

Late

for Eva

Not to

interrupt

you, placing

into,

and out of,

green plastic

cups, pieces of

precious

gravel.

GERALD LOCKLIN

Faith Partially Restored

the sprightly old man from iowa

who is with the sprightly old woman

from iowa

says to the sprightly old woman

who has just taken the seat between them and me

at the bar,

"what do you do for a living?"

and she replies, "I'm a drug dealer."

he says, "you got any on you?"

and she says, "i just plumb ran out."

and even though it later turns out

that she was raised in iowa also,

and the conversation turns

to relatives that might have known each other,

I decide it's not quite time

to give up altogether on bars.

BOB ARNOLD

All

There is

nothing

greater

than a

greatness

that

comes

not at

all

 Hands

 

He was the first

One ever to show

Me anything, and

Make sense, about

A garden. When he

Called me down into

The fenced half-acre

I walked through the

Wire gate and found

Him shoulder high

In the early morning

Blossom of peas.

And snapping a pod

Open, with the same

Hands that cut timber,

Mended fence and

Milked cows — who

Came in here every

Morning before he

Went off to chores —

He put everything

Into my hands

When he said,

Now taste this.

Purple Japanese Iris

 

 

Where you stand

They just about

Touch your lips

LUCILLE CLIFTON

jasper   texas   1998

for j. byrd

i am a man's head hunched in the road.

i was chosen to speak by the members

of my body. the arm as it pulled away

pointed toward me, the hand opened once

and was gone.

why and why and why

should i call a white man brother?

who is the human in this place,

the thing that is dragged or the dragger?

what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.

if i were alive i could not bear it.

the townsfolk sing we shall overcome

while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

into the dirt that covers us all.

i am done with this dust. i am done.

ROBERT CREELEY

Here

Here is

where there

is.

RONALD BAATZ

Children running from a dragonfly

             as though its wings

               spanned two feet

Silent clock

  in the kitchen

cuckoo gone

On our drive out to the country

                      a fly

             in the back seat

KO UN

Farewell.

Fare well.

Tripitaka Koreana

Finding the way blocked by utter gibberish

I turned back

and saw

a snake.

Snakes know the ways of snakes so well.

A Shooting Star

Wow! You recognize me.

JACK KEROUAC

Early morning with the

     happy dogs —

I forgot the Path

The raindrops have plenty

     of personality

Each one

There's no Buddha

     because

There's no me

ROBERTO BOLANO

Angels

Night I've slept between faces and words,

Bodies bent by the wind,

Lines I watched spellbound

At the edge of my dreams.

Freezing European nights, my body in the ghetto

But dreaming.

ALFONSINA STORNI

"I'm Going To Sleep"

Teeth of flowers, bonnet of dew,

hands of grass, you, lovely nursemaid,

turn down the earthen sheets for me

and the quilts of weeded moss.

I'm going to sleep, my nurse, tuck me in,

put a lamp on my headboard:

a constellation, whichever you like;

both are fine; lower the light a little.

Leave me alone: you hear buds bursting open . . .

An unearthly foot rocks you from above

and a bird sketches you a few beats

so you'll forget . . . Thanks. Oh, a favor:

if he calls again on the phone

tell him not to insist, that I've gone . . .

translated by Lauren K. Watel

RAE ARMANTROUT

Clip Art

Stroking her cheek,

I'm drawing

mirror image arcs

in the baby's brain —

closed parentheses

left hanging.

Our topiary space.

Poems from various anthologies, small press journals, friends books et al., 

I have jotted down for years and kept in a notebook to share, as I do now

[ BA ]