BARON ( László Krasznahorkai ) ~

R E A D     M E

J.D. WHITNEY OKLAHOMA POSTCARD ~

INDIAN TRICK ~

________________________INDIAN TRICK

Interesting tree work yesterday — a fully grown and powerful maple tree up in our woodlot cracked over seven feet up on the stump some years ago, lodged itself into another maple tree as if the other tree caught it in its arms. I tried, and it was very dangerous, but there was no way to free the tree at the base since the break was seven feet high. I used my chain saw over my head which is no recommendation and loosened quite a bit but this tree wasn’t budging. I hiked back home tools and all. Five years ago. For five years I have been watching the tree, watching the wind catch it and sway it and nothing doing, it wasn’t coming down. Watched the snow fall onto it and burden it. So what. Year after year. I’ve been working regularly now for months at all sorts of carpentry and stone work jobs, landscape and promised myself before July 4th I’d tackle this tree one more time. It needs to come down for firewood before it rots whole and in place, 75-100 feet tall. Yesterday I went up with my tree rope to see if I could bring it down with my Ranger. Not a chance. I worked around the tree with crowbar and sledgehammer whacking. Keep trying. Plus I was working right under the tree and if it decided to let go, I’d be crushed like a bug. I stood awhile and studied the tree, went over all my options of getting it down, none working, but I felt there was something I was missing. Then I thought of the old Indian trick of burning a tree. The Indian, much like me, works with very little equipment and likes it that way. Good with the tools he has. So I went back to the house where I keep a fresh jug of kerosene, took matches from the kitchen and some kindling and hiked to the tree and doused the stump with a quart of kerosene with kindling laid into the wedge where the full tree was punched down into the stump and waited to see if burning the base of the tree on the stump might work. Hopefully the bark wouldn’t catch and I’d watch flames skedaddle right up the tree into the crown and light up the whole woodlot. It had been raining and more rain was coming so I wasn’t too worried. The kerosene lit up like a house on fire where I wanted it. Now to keep the fire going. The next three hours, with Sweetheart’s help (she came for a look, when I get too quiet she wonders or worries), we kept the little stump fire going (above our heads!) by burning a huge brush pile of hemlock from trees I had cut a few years ago for timber posts. Believe it or not we broke up that whole brush pile by hand keeping this little fire going like the little engine that could. Storm clouds threatening and the two of us hoping the next big cloud burst would hang away in time for the fire to do its business. We kept feeding the fire and occasionally flinging on more kerosene. Kerosene has a pleasant greasy smooth feeling between the fingers, with a more mysterious aroma than gasoline and of course it doesn’t burst into flames as gasoline does. Kerosene thinks for a second and then gushes up flames. By then I’m wearing welding gloves from home where we wear them around all the woodstoves so I can feel this campfire I have going into place and keep it into place and yet here comes the rain, with thunder and lightning and the whole shebang. We run for the Ranger under a big pine and huddle close to one another since there are no doors on the wood’s buggy and the rain is blowing wildly. I can see our little campfire sputtering but maintaining its worth until the rain gets the better of everything and slowly but surely puts our campfire out. I guess it’s going to take another day. I can’t see under the tree base and wedged into the stump but our little campfire had worked its way under and into that seasoned wood and after we left for home to dry off and get out of all the rain drenched clothes, and maybe there was a good size sailing wind that passed through as the rain kept coming hours afterwards but by the time we headed back up into the woods that evening to see how the tree was doing, check on the fire and any leftover sparks, a jug of water in our hands to put out any wayward flame, by golly look! We did. The tree was down. It fell better than if I picked the tree up and put it where I wanted it. I expected the tree to come off the stump, plunge into the ground seven feet off the stump and then I’d have to work the tree from the bottom at removing six foot logs at a time until I got the tree to capsize over and onto the ground. No need. Our Indian trick worked. The tree wedge was burned off the stump and once free it fell like a long held free body and probably came crashing down through and past many smaller trees. I see a few trees scraped up pretty bad in the bargain. The big tree was down prone and available and waiting for me. The next day I was there with my chain saw, Stihl, and it holds a deep gas tank. I bucked up all the tree in one full gas tank cutting spree without let up, but leave it to the tree, the-five-year-hang-up-tree, the-I’m-never-coming-down-tree, to have the last word. Just as I was working up the last base logs, two feet through, seconds from finishing up all the tree in one fell-swoop of bucking, the very last log to cut through and finish, the very last piece, the Stihl ran out of gas. One second from done. I could hear the tree laughing.

[ BA ]

June 30, 2020

CHUCK MILLER ~

"when you live in your car"






when you live in your car

rather than a room

you get up more slowly in the morning

waiting and watching for the warm light to strike

roll out of the slightly cramped position,

and the morning blossoms

a waste field full of dandelions;

the bushes along a tiny creek will do for trees

having branches and leaves

and even the blank wall of the closed-down factory

we furtively parked behind

has its Zen-like associations

a flood of memories

something you were then

which now you can smile at, accept. . .



not having a roof, a ceiling for thoughts

and getting things going while she sleeps

you sit on the hood of the car

and your mind slowly opens to the extent of the sky

its striations, great masses of low clouds. . .

sounds and shapes seem more distinct

the singing of the highway in the distance

someone drops a tool, it clangs on the concrete

a delicate hammering with its high-pitched-chinking

a crow comes over the roof

with a disconsolate cry      piercing and full of curses

you scare each other when he first sees you

and flies limping off with a few choice words

you remember an evening in northern Ontario

after the long empty stretches had passed

with nothing but thick taiga on both sides

a moose that paused at the edge of the woods

then disappeared



Arctic watershed beginning just to the north

then a few fields again, farms

through French-speaking towns

where the French and Indians coexist

sometimes looking both so bleak and distraught

there was a strange monument along the road further on

you pulled off to see. . .

scuplted man, woman, and child

holding hands atop a stone pedestal



"In the early morning of Aug 4, 1963

not far from here 3 members of the Lumber and Sawmill Workers    Union

were killed as well as 7 other wounded

in order to saveguard the rights

of organized labor everywhere."

we stood struck —

the prairie wind fingered our hair

the silence breathed very slowly

—then not at all



"This is to the memory of Jodeph Fortier

born 1928, Irenee Fortier

born 1938"

and one more

brother and sister? husband and wife?

or from the same clan

and one whose name you forgot

were they mostly French caught in some ethnic pverty

or had they, crossing lines, joined with some others —

immigrants perhaps, to struggle fraternally. . .

but the inscription in English? for us maybe

as though to say, we'll tell you in the way you'll best understand



you imagine sighting down the rifles of the Mounties

or the company men — the instant after they fired

into the crowd of unnamed strikers

as though from there,

seeing the cruelty of it straight on — the crimson splotches

the bloody tableau as though fixed in time

and then like a film that starts up again the cries

the fearful moaning, the agony of the bodies strewn out



the 10 p.m. sun cast its bright luminous Arctic glow

the black flies bit us on the neck and back of the head

they swarmed over the dogs

we walked back through the little woods

and looked at the abandoned shacks

hardly anything left —

put in a liter of oil and started off



the mornings come slowly

and more simply     if you're lucky

and other times estranged, claustrophobic, and lost

your friend still asleep in the back

you see over the fields to the lake

the mist rising slowly

something straightens in you and reaches out

does justice begin then in fragmentary glimpses

of things barely imagined?

but will-o-wisp you wonder — and it's gone






__________________________

CHUCK MILLER
NORTHERN FIELDS
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
1994

JOSE LEZAMA LIMA ~

R E A D      M E

One more of the remarkable beauties 

issued from this press

 ready to pack into

your pocket

Green Integer Books

2019

WITHOUT CEREMONY ~

Without Ceremony



It was your way, my dear,

To vanish without a word

When callers, friends, or kin

Had left, and I hastened in

To rejoin you, as I inferred.



And when you'd a mind to career

Off anywhere — say to town —

You were all on a sudden gone

Before I had thought thereon,

Or noticed your trunks were down.



So, now that you disappear

For ever in that swift style,

Your meaning seems to me

Just as it used to be:

'Good-bye is not worth while!'





___________________

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)





Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma

POETS WHO SLEEP (The Book) ~ #5

all drawings
copyright 2020
Bob Arnold

CID CORMAN and MIKE DOYLE 1967-1970 ~

R E A D      M E

Happy Birthday, tomorrow, Cid!

LATE SONG ~

Late Song




Long evening at the end of spring

with soft rain falling and flowing

from the caves into the broken

stone basin outside the window

a blackbird warning of nightfall

coming and I hear again

announcing that it will happen

darkness and the day will be gone

as I heard it all years ago

knowing no more that I know now

but once more I sit and listen

in the same still room to the rain

at the end of spring and again

hear the blackbird in the evening




_________________

W. S. Merwin
The Pupil
Knopf
2001

TOM SEXTON ~

At Fort Egbert

    Eagle, Alaska




In a field where weary soldiers once stood

breathing cold river mist at reveille,

I watched a woman and child filling

a large pail with strawberries as small

as the tip of the child's little finger.

She said they were brought to Eagle

over coastal mountains from Valdez

by a cavalry officer's young wife

who wrapped them in wet straw and burlap

when her steamer saild for Seattle.

She had found them deep in the woods

in ruts once cut by wagon wheels.

This story was told her by a woman

whose grandfather was stationed here.

The evening air was cooling as she spoke

with an accent slightly soft and Southern.

I knew the strawberries were wild.

A few were growing in my garden,

and I had seen them near the cemetery, as well.

Still I listened without saying a word.

Her story would comfort them when December's

gruel of thin light shivered in her daughter's spoon.





____________________
Tom Sexton
World Brimming Over
Brooding Heron Press
2003

JOEL FELIX ~

On Pharmakos Farm

                                     for Tom

Join my song

flossing loopholes

'neath this spiny tree

for time has difficulty

rolling uphill  —

nothing consecutive

on this cloud-initiated mountain:

cluster and

clearing

blue flashes

on the backs of birds

the sound of cinnamon

all you get

till you're picked

on pharmakos farm

no cooling herb

from bloodless flowers

at the bottom of summer's

paper hearts

________________

Joel Felix

Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die

Verge Books

2013

FRANKLIN BRAINARD ~

Song For A Widow's Marriage




Husband, I come to you, no girl,

but a woman earthed from North Dakota.

I have known the farm,

have milked cows,

have forked manure

into the spreader,

have smelt the deep ammonia

of horse urine.

I have borne the womb burden;

I have borne and bear

the woes of children,

woes that hang as unaccountable

as moon dogs or a dry dipper.

I come to you no girl

but I come rich

with peasant blood

and warm as sun-dug potatoes.

You shall have me warm beside you

when winter turns over the roof's edge;

you shall have me

like something held for winter

coming live with flavor

from the double-doored root cellar;

and, when I take the pies

from the oven

and when I take the bread

that yeasted all the kitchen

in the afternoon,

come, kiss my neck

and walk with me

through the late garden.




_____________________
Franklin Brainard
Raingatherer
Minnesota's Writer's Publishing House
1973

DAVID TOOP ~

Goldsmiths

U.K.

2019

POETS WHO SLEEP (The Book) ~ #4