Remembrance Day, November 11
Earthgall
—in memory of Uncle Tommy and his son, my cousin Tommy Jr.
Two Thomases, a father and his son,
lie in a cemetery on a hill
that overlooks the Susquehanna. One,
a gunner with a young man’s iron will
to live, bailed from his doomed B-24,
endured Camp Shumen’s beatings, moldy bread,
survivor guilt, the aftershocks of war,
a rough divorce; yet worse times lay ahead.
The Army CNO. The folded flag.
The Valium.The oceans of Jim Beam.
The names imprinted on a metal tag.
The little boy in the recurrent dream.
I used to fear him. Now I realize
the sense behind his reek and glassy eyes.
 | |
| Thomas F. Smith, Jr. | 1945-1968 |
[Published in my Richard Wilbur Award-winning collection The Frangible Hour - University of Evansville Press, 2016. "Earthgall" is the fourth poem in the series "Days of Grass".]
 |
| Purple finch |
November
November is a season all its own —
a month of saints and souls and soldiers. Snow
will soon whiteout a fallacy of brown.
It is a month of waiting, lying low.
November is a season all its own —
a time for turning back the clock as though
it’s useless to pretend. A dressing-down.
Thin ice entices me to touch and go.
November, remnant of the year, is here
with dazzling dawns that dissipate to grey;
here in the tilting asymmetric branch
and sharp note of a towering white pine where
the pik and churlee of a purple finch
can either break a heart or make a day.
[first published in Measure, Vol VIII, Issue 1, 2013, and in my book Glad and Sorry Seasons, Biblioasis Press, Canada 2014]
Notes: Multiverse. George F. R. Ellis, philosopher and cosmologist, remains skeptical of the existence of the multiverse. Nevertheless, he writes: Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty.— from “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?”, Scientific American (August 2011).
Beth Davidson was a childhood friend of John Lennon and the inspiration for the line about the pretty nurse in the song Penny Lane. Beth Davidson went on to marry John’s best friend, Pete Shotton, and she remained a member of the Beatles’ close circle of friends until her death from cancer at the age of thirty-five.
"Multiverse", a villanelle, was first published in Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, Spring 2017, Volume 7.2 and in my collection Pointing Home (Kelsay Books 2019).
Multiverse
i.m. Beth Davidson Shotton
And though she feels as if she’s in a play,
she is anyway.―John Lennon, Penny Lane
The pretty nurse in Penny Lane is dead.
She played her part until the curtain fell.
Or is her troupe booked somewhere else instead?
Although those notes are earworms in my head—
the trumpet solo and the engine bell—
the pretty nurse in Penny Lane is dead.
The barber and the banker long since fled
the roundabout. The fireman as well.
Can they be working somewhere else instead?
The neighborhood’s a tourist trap, it’s said;
no poppies like the ones she used to sell.
The pretty nurse in Penny Lane is dead.
Or is she? Maybe we have been misled,
and other Penny Lanes spin, parallel,
in quantum time, to other tunes instead.
I’m clinging to one final, chronon shred
of hope. As far as anyone can tell,
the pretty nurse in Penny Lane is dead,
and may be living somewhere else instead.
Note: Ti Kuan Yin, Guanyin, or Iron Goddess of Mercy, is one of the most prized oolong teas. This poem is a Fibonacci sonnet with ostensible mathematical references to the Argand Diagram and Huygens's Principle of Diffraction.
"To the Iron Goddess of Mercy" was first published in Frostwriting, Issue 12, 2014 and in my award-winning book The Frangible Hour (University of Evansville Press, 2016).
Click HERE for info on the Fibonacci Sonnet.
To the Iron Goddess of Mercy
light
ze-
roes on
the table
its wavelets bending
falling crest over trough into
the imaginary axis of reality
as I take my Krazy-Glued teacup out of hiding
may the kettle whistle softly
may the day stay calm
may comets
swirl in
the
leaves
"Bequeathal" was first published in The Raintown Review, Volume 7, Issue 2, December 2008, and subsequently in my Canadian collection, Glad and Sorry Seasons (Biblioasis, 2014).
Bequeathal
For my children
"Delineations" was first published in Able Muse, Volume 10, Winter 2010, and subsequently in my first collection Lines of Flight.
Delineations
Wild geese flee the coming cold and ice,
sketching the sky with epic Vs;
no roundabout for these –
their route precise.
Starlings in formation never jostle –
aggregates of living art,
together yet apart
in graceful rustle.
Patterns of exuberant design,
cadenza, cadence, wavelength, arrow,
slant or straight and narrow –
theirs, mine.
First published in Frostwriting, Issue 12, 2014.
On
Vortex Street
the overhead wires sing and hum
plucked like strings
in tones composed by the vector sum
of the wind’s velocities
but in those resonant meanderings
harmony arpeggios
and all the world’s atrocities
and all the world’s worst-case scenarios
wail in the squalls
To hear Dylan Thomas reciting his poem "Fern Hill"
click HERE.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
 |
| Majestic oak tree at autumn sunset |
To hear Robert Frost reciting Reluctance, click HERE.
Reluctance
 |
| I bought a copy of this book in 1967. I still have it. |
Sonnet Love
I love the way its rhythm and its rhymes
provide us with a promise, a belief
familiar voices at specific times
may modulate unmanageable grief.
I love the way we’re called to referee
the mind-heart match-up in its scanty ring;
how through it all our only guarantee
is that for fourteen rounds the ropes will sing.
I love the way it makes us feel at home,
the way it welcomes fugitives and fools
who have forgotten all roads lead to Rome
from shared beginnings in the tidal pools.
Life’s unpredictability defies
clean dénouement. I love the way it tries.
P.S. My favorite sonnet by Millay begins: "Time does not bring relief; you all have lied"
A segue from my poem "Elderberry Tale", this is one of my Petrarchan sonnets, written in slant rhyme.
It was first published in The Lyric (Volume 97, Number 4, Fall 2017) and is the title poem and final poem of my book, Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019).
 |
| A typical Pennsylvania landscape in autumn. |
Pointing Home
All things on earth point home in old October:
sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences,
hunters to field and hollow and the long voice
of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
—Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
In expectation of approaching winter,
a woodchuck slips into his grass-lined burrow;
the fall migration of the vesper sparrow
begins, as afternoons grow shorter, fainter.
The blood moon of the Abenaki hunter
wanes, as mercury glissades toward zero:
apprentice to the North, I’ll need to borrow
the mettle of a born and bred Vermonter.
And so, when mountain winds conspire to wither
asters, mums and marigolds; as mice
prepare their cellar nests; before snow flurries
sweep against the windowpanes, I gather
pitch-pine kindling for the fireplace,
and from the riverbank, late elderberries.
In loving memory of my maternal Granny.
Elderberry Tale
Once upon a time at summer’s end,
without specific plans to fill my day,
I sauntered to her house. I would pretend
I’d never heard the stories of the way
the week divided into different chores.
Her gravel voice and knotted hands explained
the wringing of the wash, the hard-scrubbed floors,
the kneading and the knitting. As she strained
the mash of berries, crimson droplets bled
in trickles to a saucepan on the stove.
The secret’s in the knowing how, she said,
to measure sugar, cinnamon and clove.
For happily-ever-afters, her advice
has come in handy. As I stir my brew –
the cauldron simmering with sweet and spice –
I add a pinch of snail, a frog or two.
 |
| White Night, by Edvard Munch, 1901 |
Minutes. Hours. Darkness pressing
through the window. Not a breeze.
Freight trains at the level crossing
wail and goad my turning, tossing.
Lurid ciphers lengthen, glossing
over time’s hypotheses.
Night attends my second-guessing
days we were not meant to seize.
Based on a true story. Annals of the Dear Unknown is available from Kelsay Books, or from the author (me!).
I loved researching and writing this book. At some point in the future I will be posting each of the 28 chapters.
Taking Stock
By the middle of the twentieth century,
“King Coal” had been dethroned by natural gas
and oil. In a place tagged Diamond City,
daily life had lost much of its luster.
But to the sad eyes of a little girl,
taking in the glitz of movie house
marquees mirrored in the rain-slicked street
of Public Square that blustery April night,
her Trailways slowly rolling toward the station,
Wilkes-Barre spangled, scintillated, shone.
No one had told the little girl, back then,
that Yankee blood was coursing through her veins,
nor that the subject of the “Doodle” ditty
had anything at all to do with Rose,
the woman sitting stern and ramrod straight
in that old gilt-framed sepia photograph
hanging on an uncle’s parlor wall.
It was the present moment, nothing more―
a father far away with polio.
A North-End double-block A soothing thumb.
That night, the little girl slept unaware
that over nine-score years had come and gone
since Rachel Tyler Munson was interred,
unmarked, along the Susquehanna’s banks,
her children fleeing for their lives; a time
when Eton Jones would chip the glistening rock
from local outcrops for his blacksmith forge,
long before the Knox Mine tragedy.
A time when rival passions for the land
burned like the hot blue flame of anthracite.
Ostensibly about the "hornero" (as the ovenbird is called in Uruguay), the last two lines of this intricate Spenserian sonnet give a clue to my thoughts on free verse.
The Ovenbird
In Uruguay, in spring, I’ve often heard
lighthearted trills along a dusty road:
the lively, undiminished ovenbird
sings as she builds her intricate abode.
The wily swallow, with no stringent code
of constancy, surveys the chambered nest;
and knows that, following this episode
of eggs with which the other bird is blessed,
he’ll snatch the abdicated space. Hard-pressed
though he may be for time, for love, for will,
too wise to prove an uninvited guest,
he waits it out upon a windowsill.
The ovenbird, deemed artless by the swallow,
to practiced eyes is one tough act to follow.
My father was a math and science teacher. That meant five clean, ironed, and starched shirts per week, plus one for Sunday. Some of my sisters and I took turns with the dusting and the dish-washing. But ironing my father's shirts fell to me. No steam irons either, in those days. When the no-iron shirt material came out, it was a godsend!
My Father’s Shirts
I’ve dusted, vacuumed, mopped the kitchen floor,
hung out the wash, swatted every fly—
it’s Saturday, and yet there’s one more chore.
The eldest child of seven, it is I
who’s been entrusted with his shirts. Last night
I sprinkle-dampened them, then rolled them tight.
Today, from collar, yoke, and cuffs, to sleeves,
to pocket, placket, front and back, the dry,
hot iron makes the cotton steam. Nearby,
my mother checks for creases. As she leaves,
a side-glance at the gussets and the pleat.
I bristle, being too young to know that she
just hopes and prays I’ll learn to take the heat.
And maybe live a good life, wrinkle-free.
 | |||
"The Loiterers" is a poem written in terza rima, the story being told from the point of view of one of the"grizzle-headed men".
PAS DE FLÂNAGE is French for "NO LOITERING".
The photo is from an article by Michael Hatfield, McDonald's Coffee and God's Grace.
The Loiterers
Each morning at exactly nine o’clock,
our fellowship of grizzle-headed men
meets at McDonald’s, métro Frontenac.
We take our customary seats, and then,
despite the posted warning, PAS DE FLÂNAGE,
drink discount coffee for an hour or two.
Surrounded by a motley entourage
of East-End Montrealers, we outdo
each other with our lively poppycock.
Long since returned from distant Neverlands,
we turn a deaf ear to the ticking clock.
The manager is kind. He understands
our joie de vivre, our order of the day;
refills our cups, and grants that it’s no crime
to hold our own, and though we overstay,
to squander what we’ve left of change and time.
