WITH ME ~

The heart & soul sound of Chicago blues, Little Walter played with Muddy Waters live and on recordings long after he had officially left the group. Born in Louisiana in 1930 and dead at age 37 in 1968 due to a blood clot to the heart — although this came about right after one more fight during a break at a nightclub on the Southside of Chicago. The feisty one. His sonic and gristle harp playing and voice had an aura that transfixed lesser blues and rock acts for decades. Little Walter was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. About time.

photo: fotolog.com

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With a painting by Steven LaRose.


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glow of doorbells

down Keean Street

lighting a path to home

SNOW ~ GETTIN' BY

1972 the deadliest blizzard recorded struck Iran, dumping upwards of 26 feet of snow. Approximately 4,000 people died, and some of the outlying villages had no survivors.







Could be worse!

North Dakota blizzard
March 9, 1966






mighty shoveler : weblogs.wgntv.com
chicago loop: getty
skiers : usnavyjeep.blogspot.com
d.c. : blog.usa.gov
railroad : www.netnebraska.org
walker : wischlist.com
plow : weather.thefuntimesguide.com
iran: emily younker
car : wbuf.noaa.gov car
dakota: wikimedia commons

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THE BARD OWL ~

Lift up your eyes
the dream is what you
see with your eyes open

And this is what happened this afternoon: I was taking the long, aluminum roof rake built to twenty feet up on the snowshoe path to clear off the faraway cottage roof when I stopped a moment to clean off the deep outhouse roof. The snow wasn't budging off there either.

Done with that I strung the rake pole back onto my shoulder and started up the trail again...when something big flew across my path. I'd been there before. I knew what it was before saying the word in my head. I knew the shadow on the snow, knew the body of flight, more like an intelligence flying, not all predator like hawk.

Here was the barred owl.

I lifted my eyes and it landed twenty feet from me on the lowest branch of a fine sugar maple tree. Turned his head and held a steady gaze onto me. I returned the favor. We stood that way for five minutes, which is a long time. Long pole on my shoulder lightly swaying up and down with its loopy weight. Not bothering anybody. Not bothering barred owl. He's fascinated with me, I'm fascinated with him.

We haven't seen one another this close for over twenty-five years. Why are we this close? Then it dawns on me. It's Janine.

Her first big book of poems was titled The Bard Owl. The last time I saw barred owl I wrote a poem to her and it's in my book of poems Where Rivers Meet. It flew right in front of me before like it just did today. Same meeting. Yes, the same bird of birds. Her.

She's been gone from us for six weeks.

It's Sunday, 1:30 in the afternoon. Janine almost always called us on a Sunday at this hour, or very late at night (another owl hour).

But what really made me know it was her was how she stayed put and waited for Sweetheart to come out of the house, latch to her snowshoes, drudge the trail to come be with me. Janine knew she might. She did. Owl waited, steadily, no hint of flight at all.

Until Sweetheart came from behind me and asked, "What is it?" I said, "Look at the maple." Whisper: "Yes?" "The lowest branch." Whisper: "What?" "See the owl?" Hesitation..."Oh, yes..!" She was blending in perfectly with the maple bark, just as she knew she did. Janine came for her visit. I inched closer on snowshoes and she didn't move, watched, waited. I inched more, making the slightest cluck sounds with my mouth that cats also like. But it got to be she saw us and we saw her and it was time to pass on. Pass she did. The bard owl.

book cover oil painting by Martin Carey
"The Barred Owl", 1976


enamel owl earring box sent from J to S

The Bard Owl
Janine Pommy Vega
Kulchur Foundation
1980

for Janine's birthday 5 February 1942

EARTH ~

S=E=A=S=O=N=S
B-O-B----A-R-N-O-L-D



DRUM


Early morning climb to the roof
Cold dew on pebbled tar, taste of
Galvanized nails in your mouth
Work — nail shingle to shingle tight —
Each hammer pound echoes another
Pound in the hills, enough to wonder
Where it ends and who hears it then



CHARLOTTE


Scrag is what they call her
A woman who has been on the river
Longer than anyone of us —
Long white hair braided and pinned up,
Yellow slicker, old pants and a squint.
Once a week she rides down the road
Real slow to the Massachusetts border,
Looks in on everyone’s place,
Then turns around and coming back
Does the same.
Her son doesn’t live out here anymore —
When Clayton did, he lost his wife for it.
Lived with his son and the small farm
For as many years as it takes to get
Sick of it, then moved closer to town
And worked for the state park.
Now his own son is doing the same —
With a wife and a baby and the job
In a wood factory, near Vernon,
Where the power plant burns into the sky.

That leaves Scrag.
I heard that name first from a young hunter
Who would never hunt, half what she has,
And he knows it.
She’s tiny, body gripped like a hickory,
She’ll tend the farm all the men have left —
Mend fence and draw water and shovel shit,
Make sure the pigs don’t get loose.
When Clayton comes to sugar at mud-time
She hangs the buckets with him,
Pulls a tractor along the side of the road.
Her hair’s long and white and probably beautiful.
In this raw wind it blows apart like late summer
Milkweed.




TREEING THE RACCOON


I’m running and dodging mud holes
And ice, a human wind slamming out of
The woodshed and into the moonlight,
Where we have lain and waited the
Return of the raccoon. I was thinking
Of grabbing a coal shovel, the axe,
Even a stick on my way out the door,
But my voice seemed to do the trick —
Frightening him off tin sheets of
The duck pen and into the darkness of
His mask. I’m crushing through soft snow
And somewhere ahead he’s scurrying it
Seems in a half-circle, until my war cry
Has gripped him claws and bark up a
Tall ash tree between the house and pond —
Maybe 20 feet — until he has regained
Himself in the crotch; where under the
Wizard cap of stars I poke a flashlight
Into the first night of spring, and with
A disgusted look in the eye, he turns his
Ears back and waits a bullet I can’t hear.




BEEN GONNA


To Everett everything
He had meant to do was
Termed “been gonna” —
So when you view his
Unfinished farm built on top
Of old farms of the
Past, including the burned
Down house his was above,
And the barn once torched,
Never mind the wrecked cars
Over the river bank and
Sculptures of rusted farm
Machinery pulled into one
Corner of the pasture, and
The sugarhouse built on a
Slipping log sill, and the
Barbed wire fence line
Fallen in the brook, you’re
Looking at a lot of been gonna.




PURPLE JAPANESE IRIS


Where you stand

They just about

Touch your lips




DOE


Standing midriver
Sunlight already
In the waves, long
Before any sound or
Movement beyond her
Own or my own —
Out of my clothes into
The water, looking up
I see her then, eyes
Meeting in the current
No sound I say, even as
She lifts her muzzle and
Rears her spotted hide
The stare lasts for years

SAND DOLLAR


We’ve waited all year
And traveled all morning
Just to arrive like this —
In the very same place
We were a year ago today.
And you are just as beautiful,
Your long skirt blowing in sand,
And we walk for miles along
The edge of the leaving tide
Picking up seashells and stone
That we’ll select more carefully
The longer we are here —
Which is no place with a name,
Except someplace in our heart.
Where on that day, unlike any other,
You found excitedly a sand dollar
Washed in during the night,
Left in a tidal pool, and
Kneeling while taking it up,
Placed it home in my hand.




BARRED OWL

===========for Janine Pommy Vega


Without a sound
I made myself walk
A day in the sun
The thin pale grass breeze
An axe along to trim dead limbs

Moving beneath pines
I stopped when I saw its wings
Spread straight for me and
Grips itself 10 yards away
With no idea we were face to face

Black water of the eyes opening and seeing
Spotting easily what wasn’t right

In a skiff of wind
She dropped and floated
Low to the ground
Lost my eye in blending flight
With feathers like the woodland

SEASONS


All my life
Lived under the stars,
Walked with them night after
Night, and I’m still
Learning how they move
Through the seasons.
And you help — point your
Gloved hand this winter
Evening almost over our heads
To Cassiopeia and then arc
To the North Star in the
Little of the dippers. It’s
Easy once you know, once you
Are shown, once you have
Someone to see with.







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


photos © bob arnold

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HOME


Look at the cat

Look at the lantern

Listen to the rain —

None can tell me

What day it is

SNOWEARTH ~

Snowing ~ to beat the band, like they used to like to say.

A back-to-back snowfall, maybe even a third coming on the back of the second, if the weather map proves right. From Texas to Maine. Nothing like something uniting a nation.

Already yesterday we spent all day in hand shoveling bouts. I read one new Merrill Gilfillan book of poems in between drying off by the woodstove and heading out for a second and third swipe at all the snow. All the long drive, all the pathways connecting doorways. Then the roofs. The big apron back roof will have to wait until later in the week, when all is calmed down. It will calm down, I believe.

Wednesday morning dawns with another half-foot, and mounting. This is starting to look more & more like the snowfalls of the 60s &70s. We were always shoveling then. With daytime temperatures barely above 9 degrees, like yesterday. In the 60s I was a boy in a school in New Hampshire watching the barrel-sized janitors shoveling pathways all day, tunnels! for the students to get to & fro. After classes I went and helped these guys, raw New Hampshire conservatives. If they saw you pitch in they didn't care what you looked like or thought like (high antiwar time). When I took the American flag down one morning from the flagpole in protest at the school against the war and ran up a white flag of truce, the rawboned janitor pal chuckled and looked the other way since he had just put the US flag up. For all I knew he had once fought for that flag. I was too. We had worked together and talked together so he waited until he was told what to do by the school.

Don't forget how beautiful it all looks. If you're in the trees it does. Whistle while you work, in other words. Bitching and fussing is so much of nothing.

By last night, still drying off after darkness shoveling, I started into a second Merrill Gilfillan book. His eyes to warblers. Merrill doesn't just write with his eyes and mind matched ~ there comes his body, fingertips. Many many of his poems are fingertip delicate and strong. You can't but feel the shoulders shifting in his clothing as you move through and with his lines of thought. He likes to get out there into the geography. Plans trips, packs simple gear, goes, but takes us with him. That's very good reading, poetry & prose.

I part the curtains, look out, there's Sweetheart's red jacket working a shovel under the large twin oaks. Oaks catching snow like sombreros.

Sweetheart works a snow-boat like I work a stone-boat. This snow-boat is a plastic sled that has pulled our groceries in over deep snow. Now Sweetheart is loading up the snow in her boat to get it out of here, across the road, over the river bank.

A. stops to talk with his big plow on the road crew schedule. He says there's no place to put the snow. Tell me about it! In a few days, when all is calm, the town will bring down the grader and make some room. After I get all the roofs clear with the roof rake, I'll rake down the tops of the snow banks here so we have room for more shoveling.

After twenty years being a cheapskate I bought a new pair of winter boots. Of course I won't wear them until next winter. Sweetheart rolls her eyes and says she would have worn them home if the boots were hers. We tried to find a pair for her. All sold out. We were even in town the day this store had all boots 20% off and I didn't even think to buy anything so expensive and new. I'm wearing boots from LL Beans fifteen years old, same liners too if you can believe that. Double socks. Repair glue all over the old boots. I buy mine to last as long as a hammer. On the day of the sale I picked up new liners because they normally cost $35 and here they were in a big package for 99 cents. Yes, I even did a double take. The young clerk upstairs manning the cash register thought we must be real grifters when he did a double-then-triple-take on the price. I loved the expression on his face. After looking at the 99 cent price twice, he then troubled himself to look us over. Priceless. I smiled and told him that he should get himself downstairs and buy a pair for himself. I also shared how if the liners didn't fit my winter boots I'd wear them as perfect warm boots for indoors. He wasn't listening much, he was still trying to unpuzzle this deal of the day in the big busy store.

Then he chuckled to himself and said to us, "And with the 20% sale you're getting them for 77 cents!" Like that was too much to believe. Now he was in the world with us of the incredulous. It was a together in a life raft moment.

Two days later we happened to be back in the store and it was then Dummy woke up to buy new boots. Now $10 off. I'm trying to get across how difficult it is to spend money you don't have. It's epidemic now all through this country. We're being taken to the cleaners by the powers-that-be.

Egypt erupts, meaning the people, take note.

America used to take to the streets in droves ~ the workers, the feminists, civil rights, antiwar the most exhilarating. That has been quieted down in Twitter Nation. The powers that-be-have made expensive toys to pay&play with, then they creamed us.

Unlike the day of the sale when the shoe department in this store was swarming; the day after was dead as doornails. Three workers on shift. Two are seasoned vets and don't want to do much. The youngest is all black curls and a smile to believe in. After I quickly burn through the two vets ~ forever disappearing on little breaks, bored out of their minds and they weren't even on duty during the frantic sale, and I have to believe the young woman was, after two hours of pestering and talking and trying three different pairs of boots on (being away from new boots for two decades takes catching up!), the young woman clerk, and I with Sweetheart, settle in for the kill on just which boot to invest in. She told us a woman came in recently and spent two hours just whittling down what hiking boot to buy. Sadly I had her beat. Four of five customers came and went with new boots while I was still mid-galaxy.

I'll spend a lifetime in my boots talking to them ~ as I do my axe, snow shovels, truck back bed, every tool, stones I lay down, even all the snow falling. Pieces of firewood, all shapes and sizes, plus remembering which trees they came from, when and where and what season cut. Lots of talk to just wood. Talk is cheap.

In Egypt they took to the streets with talk. Face to face, and Facebook. They meant it. They won.

Snow is now up past the bottom half of the downstairs windows. Keep talking.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Bark of the Dog

The Warbler Road

FLOOD EDITIONS
www.floodeditions.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE BAYS


Plow Monday: second-best beast

high in the sweetsop tree.



Sweet rocket, sweet amber,

sweet gale. Sweet sultan, sweet Wilson

of saxifrage. Sweet tangle,

sloshing in the bays.



Sweet-talkers with horns

show up in the yard.

What would you like them to play?

MERRILL GILFILLAN

drawing © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Here we see Orna & Estil C. Ball, most likely at home, enduring a flashbulb photograph. Estil Cortez Ball (1913-1978) was first recorded by John Lomax in 1937 for The Library of Congress. JL's son Alan Lomax would record Ball and others in 1941 and 1959, and this would encourage many folk and bluegrass musicians to follow suit, see John Cohen and Mike Seeger. EC Ball had a prolific songbook of hymns, country gospel, ballads, blues, instrumentals, and comic songs. His day job would find him working in a service station or driving a school bus and he grandly looked the part. With his wife Orna, Ball was the unquestionable interpreter of the white folk spiritual. He was raised and buried in Rugby, Grayson County, Virginia.

see: Blue Ridge Institute

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WITH ME ~

This brother & sister duo are a gas, and still performing to this day nearing on age 70. Rockabilly never dies.

Larry and Lorrie ("Lawrencine") Collins could often be caught on 1950s tv: either with Tex Ritter's "Ranch Party", or on "Town Hall Party", where Ricky Nelson eyed Lorrie and they became an item. Lorrie appeared as Ricky's girlfriend on his parents tv show...years and years before reality television shows, which I've never seen, and won't.

What we are listening to here is Larry as a guitar whiz at age ten or so, and Lorrie a few years older. He plays the solos, they both sing. If you told me they were Wanda Jackson's kids, I'd say, "Had to be."

It all came about when Sweetheart and I pulled out the map of California, as we often do in the dead of winter, and saw the stretch of open highway through the desert to the Sierra. We have the desire; we just need the right car.

Play the song.

EARTH ~

O beautiful hour, masterful state, garden gone wild. You turn from the house and see, rushing toward you on the garden path, the goddess of happiness.

Franz Kafka, Zurau, 1917

You want stillness?

Out in the deep snow this morning I could hear the chickadee's call from 100 feet off. Flatline zero degrees. In a tamarack, one of the few in the valley, one I planted 35 years ago. 75 feet tall. The bird's busy signal of a call.

Listen even closer and hear the river barely bubble beneath too much ice.

Our snowshoe track we use every day has its simple trail leaving the back door and winding through the woodlot, hill & dale, and while up there we pick up another log or two from the cord of rock maple & beech and under each arm bring it home. The wood cache is midway and at the highest point, so it's almost downhill when returning with the firewood.

A neighbor caught us working and nearing home with the wood and asked what we were doing. We told her, melting smiles as we all talked. A very cold day. Snow banks between us.

The plumbing hasn't worked right in the house since last summer, but between us and a plumber friend we thought we had it licked. Always find a plumber that doesn't mind cobbing together a new trick, especially for a very old house. Old houses never sleep! However, for the moment, all the cobbing ain't doing the trick. And if it's coming from the well the well is way way under snow, but not really — I keep the well head available. Still it all looks way way under snow.

We stopped counting how many feet we've had from the sky.

Ten years ago we thought about a snowblower and that's as far as we got. Something about grabbing a shovel, and we own six shovels for just snow. I still own one I bought forty years ago when tools lasted forever. Now we don't even last forever.

We're shoveling a 200 foot driveway, and pathway to the back door. This doesn't count the other pathways, both porches, stairway, and all the roofs to move. One part of me says so-what, shutup, enough of this heroic stuff already, live silently as you have and stay at your work. The other part of me says ~ nah, life is good (even if it is bad), celebrate, and let the chips fall. Invite everyone in.

I'm happy to say the roof we installed last summer is a beautiful pal. Snow can't stay on it. And this is the winter snow is staying on steel roofs. When I was putting the steel roof down I noticed just how slick it was. Dangerous then, a service now.

There's plenty of firewood. Kokomo (Cutie Pie) is feeling better; if anyone is wondering why all the music on the Birdhouse I'm actually restraining myself. I could set on favorite tunes day and night. That's what you get working outdoors, building a sweat, coming back in and stripping off and drying an hour by the woodfire and listening to a song, or two. Even if nothing is playing but something is in your head. You want to share it. I add one more song. Clothes are dry, get back outdoors, it's waiting for you.

For close friends ~ Sweetheart had a dream a few nights ago that I found Janine herding cows on a fine grassy steppe high outside an Alpine village! Don't you love it. There is a long history of Sweetheart's dreams and Janine. She only told Janine.

We are making many booklets, too, like cookies. All these poets we love. Cookie-sheeted and on the kitchen counter by a warm lamp. If we love you, we print you, or we at least try to. Though if we haven't printed you it doesn't mean we don't love you.

Oh yeah, we shut the tv down in August. What we're saving (the crooks) we just paid for that steel roof.

Stay warm!

photo © bob arnold

WITH ME ~

Another rockin' classic written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, on their Spark label from 1954 and performed by a black gospel group, if you can believe that, letting down their hair for this one. Leiber & Stoller dubbed the group "The Honey Bears" for the handful of tunes they cut that day in the studio and then they were gone, I think forever. "Love Me" was another of the group's tunes recorded in that session, later picked up by Elvis as one of his early hits.

The tune below should correctly read "One Bad Stud". It's all in the wording.

leiber & stoller: laconsultadeldrrhino.blogspot.com

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FEBRUARY


Although they have been drained
of their juices
the leaves still stand up straight
in the frosty air

She runs toward the river
and finds a hole in the ice
to have a dip
while the light turns red

WITH ME ~

When you're down to one or two stock photographs of yourself kicking around, you're either Thomas Pynchon or Tommy Johnson, top of the line author and bluesmaker of underbelly America. Both authors delving into the Seven Deadly Sins. Both fresh as a daisy. Scholars and copy cats tear their hair trying to figure out how it's all done. Long before Jimi Hendrix there was Tommy Johnson on guitar, with that growl or spine tingling falsetto, somewhat captured these days by Geof Muldaur. Johnson was born in rural Mississippi and lived there all his life. Died of a heart attack in 1956 after playing a party ~ what do we expect from one who truly sold his soul to the devil? A heavy drinker, he sang of drinking methanol from Sterno in his classic song "Canned Heat Blues". The roughest of the rough: Robert Nighthawk and Howlin' Wolf learned from him, and the Los Angeles group tore their name from his song.

EARTH ~

EDGAR MILLER

Self-portrait of an artist above, Edgar Miller (1899-1993), like Ezra Pound, Idaho-born, was cut out of the American frontier.

Miller landed in Chicago at age 17 and would inch-by-inch begin to transform the architecture of certain sections of this vast and original city.

"One should learn from nature" was how this prolific and gifted craftsman went about his work with animal and plant motifs that he would turn into woodcarvings, paintings, stained glass windows, ceramic tiles, frescoes, mosaics, and illustrious household murals.

Fond of using used materials, and in fact insisting on its use — everything was spared — and spun into gold. Oak doors layered with intricate chisel chop and entwined imagery stand to this day.

At age 89 it wasn't unusual for Miller to work a 12 hour day with his hand tools for ten days straight to complete a masterpiece entry door.

One more of the hidden delights of the world, dear Edgar Miller.