In the back pond,
while I am burning leaves
and winter-downed limbs,
two Red-wing Blackbirds
chatter “chuck” in the reeds.
I tried to join their conversation
and they went silent–
two black-eyed parts,
invisible in the wider sytax.
In the next door front yard,
the neighbor’s daughter
is standing in early sun with her new beau.
They also chatter.
Their eyes shine for each other.
I did not try to join their conversation,
although I know the language.
I always forget the vines behind the shed.
Every year they get pruned a day or two later.
Their beds are cleared last.
They are planted too near each other
so they get pruned mercilessly close.
This year I had to dig last year’s bird’s nest
out of the sheltering crotch of three canes.
Then cut the canes away.
Last year’s vigilance against the birds
showed a breach on the southern border.
This arbor could be more beautiful.
Today it is only less ugly–
less neglected.
Some days that’s the best I can do.
Memory slips,
neglect rises,
diminished man survives.
There’s your headline.
I must apologize to the vines this year.
I was much too late in the pruning.
Instead of my cuts coming in the middle of winter,
when cold and ice have anesthetized
their limbs on cordons of frozen steel,
I was in my own darkness,
wrapped in a blanket that hindered action.
I merely bore out the short gray days and
stared impotently into the black nights.
Winter shook me like a dog shakes a snake in summer.
Instead, I come to them in a time
more comfortable for me–
A warming day,
knowing
that the necessary cuts come in Spring–
that living sap will leak
because of my tardiness,
that I risk the health,
of buds,
of growth,
of flowers,
of fruit,
the wine.
I am sorry.
I will do better now.
Our chemistry is better applied this Spring.
I vow to better protect against living rabbits and deer,
against a thousand kinds of scuttling bugs,
against the single minded mania of birds
and greedy ground squirrels.
The end-of-the-season Autumn battle
will be fierce.
I cannot be certain of next November
or her cruelest shorter sister February,
But I can offer the summer, still with hope.
Before knowing
There is not knowing.
We bumble along
In our ignorance
Like a bee bypassing a flower
And we care not–
Because we know not.
Then suddenly we know.
Ignorance is torn,
Like a worn garment
discarded.
We bumble on
With the new known.
But for some few of us,
There is the new not known.
That which was known
Is known no more.
We no longer know the flower.
The scent is foreign.
Genus and Species slide back
Into unknowing.
This nectar is not known,
And then nectar is not known.
I have been a fan of James Lee Burke’s for several years. Shout out to Scott Woods for turning me on to him.
I am unashamed to say that I believe Burke to be among the best, if not THE best novelist in America today. I think I can make that point by comparing a short passage of his 1989 Novel, To the Bright and Shining Sun, to a renowned short passage from the 1939 novel by another great American novelist, John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. It is commonly accepted that this is the book that won him the attention that culminated in the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, both books focus on the lives of the working poor. In Steinbeck’s case, dirt farmers from the Oklahoma dustbowl. The real-life humans who lived that chapter of American history must have felt that God Himself hated them and the banks existed to prove it. At the end of that novel there is nothing left in the world but the literal “milk of human kindness.”
Winfield said, “Ma!” and the rain roaring on the roof drowned his voice. “Ma!”
“What is it? What you want?”
“Look! In the corner.”
Ma looked. There were two figures in the gloom; a man who lay on his back, and a boy sitting beside him, his eyes wide, staring at the newcomers. As she looked, the boy got slowly up to his feet and came toward her. His voice croaked. “You own this here?”
“No,” Ma said. “Jus’ come in outa the wet. We got a sick girl. You got a dry blanket we could use an’ get her wet clothes off?”
The boy went back to the corner and brought a dirty comfort and held it out to Ma.
“Thank ya,” she said. “What’s the matter’th that fella?”
The boy spoke in a croaking monotone. “Fust he was sick—but now he’s starvin’.”
“What?”
“Starvin’. Got sick in the cotton. He ain’t et for six days.”
Ma walked to the corner and looked down at the man. He was about fifty, his whiskery face gaunt, and his open eyes were vague and staring. The boy stood beside her. “Your pa?” Ma asked.
“Yeah! Says he wasn’ hungry, or he jus’ et. Give me the food. Now he’s too weak. Can’t hardly move.”
The pounding of the rain decreased to a soothing swish on the roof. The gaunt man moved his lips. Ma knelt beside him and put her ear close. His lips moved again.
“Sure,” Ma said. “You jus’ be easy. He’ll be awright. You jus’ wait’ll I get them wet clo’es off’n my girl.”
Ma went back to the girl. “Now slip ’em off,” she said. She held the comfort up to screen her from view. And when she was naked, Ma folded the comfort about her.
The boy was at her side again explaining, “I didn’ know. He said he et, or he wasn’ hungry. Las’ night I went an’ bust a winda an’ stoled some bread. Made ‘im chew ‘er down. But he puked it all up, an’ then he was weaker. Got to have soup or milk. You folks got money to git milk?”
Ma said, “Hush. Don’ worry. We’ll figger somepin out.”
Suddenly the boy cried, “He’s dyin’, I tell you! He’s starvin’ to death, I tell you.”
“Hush,” said Ma. She looked at Pa and Uncle John standing helplessly gazing at the sick man. She looked at Rose of Sharon huddled in the comfort. Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping.
She said “Yes.”
Ma smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap.
Rose of Sharon whispered, “Will—will you all—go out?” The rain whisked lightly on the roof.
Ma leaned forward and with her palm she brushed the tousled hair back from her daughter’s forehead, and she kissed her on the forehead. Ma got up quickly. “Come on, you fellas,” she called. “You come out in the tool shed.”
Ruthie opened her mouth to speak. “Hush,” Ma said. “Hush and git.” She herded them through the door, drew the boy with her; and she closed the squeaking door.
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
Wow! What a scene and what a hopeful, sad ending to a novel that generally wasn’t all that hopeful. You remember it, right?
Fifty years later, Burke takes up a very similar subject, but instead of dirt farmers, Burke uses the geography and culture of Appalachian coal miners in the times of the union struggle and at the advent of mechanized mining. It’s amazingly the same story. There may be love between poor people, but there is damned little of it between the impoverished miners and the fat-cat owners and banks. And the results are the same. In Burke’s case, the death in this scene comes as a direct result of labor strife and violence, but it is the same phenomenon at work. Here for comparison is another old man, beaten down by an unjust system to his deathbed.
Mrs. James called the doctor, who filled a syringe to give Woodson another shot of morphine. As the doctor rubbed an alcohol-soaked pad on the skin, Woodson held up his hand weakly to push away the needle. Then the light began to grow fixed in his one uncovered eye, the muscles relaxed in his face and his breathing became more shallow and even. He rested his head back on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling a gray strand of hair stuck out from the bandage on his forehead. He felt a longing inside him for sleep and an end of the fury that had burned in him for a lifetime. A warm feeling, like a mild fever, began to glow inside his body, and a pink mist, the color of blood diluted in water, seem to circulate in the room. “You ain’t going to need it this time, Doc,” he said.
The doctor drew the blinds, and everyone left the room. The stillness made the distant drumming grow louder in Woodson’s head. The mist was so thick that he could feel it in his hand: it changed color to crimson and then to purple, and he knew that he was back in the mine shaft for the last time. He didn’t have to worry about the clot of blood in his windpipe any longer. He could breathe the cool air through the pores in his skin. The burned wounds in his scalp had healed, his mutilated hand could grasp an ax handle with the strength of a man in his twenties, and he felt his darkened eye burn through the gauze until it could see the frozen timbers hanging from the limestone in the top of the shaft. I’m going underground to stay this time, ain’t I, God, he thought. I ain’t got to fight with you or make no bargains anymore. We are a-going home.
For the first time in his life he rested quietly, without heat or anger or struggling against that fierce, unknown enemy that had always tried to strike him down. A square ripple of fire broke through the rock wall, burning a great doorway in the shaft. The flame showered out in sparks like a welder’s torch, and the room was again flooded with yellow light, but it was brighter this time. Then he felt himself being absorbed into the light and carried to its source. He seemed to rise from the floor without willing his body to move. As he went up through the earth towards the sky, he could smell the wind blowing in the white oaks and poplars, the new pine sap in freshly cut logs, and the sweat glistening on the horses. He rose faster to the surface now, closer to the light, and he saw that the sun had descended from the sky and spangled everything with a radiance that made him shield his eyes. He floated higher, feeling himself dissolve and become a part of all things, and he could see to the far reaches of the earth on both horizons. The oceans were blue and green, and the mountains rose up jagged against the sky behind them. He had never known the world was so immense. He felt the light enter his mind and consume him, and the radiance became so bright that he was conscious of nothing else.
I don’t need to belabor the point. Burke is a fine, fine writer. Who said anything about a Nobel Prize?
Mary Oliver died today
as she so often predicted.
Eighty-three is a good age for a poet to die:
old enough to have long production,
old enough to have regarded the brackets around natural life.
She’s gone.
It is winter. Life in the Midwest is sere:
browns, grays, near whites,
frozen ridges and refrozen rime.
My natural world shows little
of birds.
Nothing
of reptiles,
of insects,
of tiny mammals.
When I die I hope it is February
in a place just as sere.
Better to fade out in a scene already faded
than to be the lone grayness
surrounded by a burst of flora and fauna,
a wasteful abundance of color
a cacophony of birdsong and pig whistles.
Transitions are easier for the living
if there isn’t too much change.
I don’t know what they are like for the dead–
probably less dramatic than we fear.
The letters we write can’t be edited down to contain an entire year.
Fonts get smaller, margins get smaller. It just doesn’t matter.
We love you.
We miss you.
We saw you and we still miss you.
We hope we hugged you last year;
If not, it is our primary goal this year.
How’s our life? Pretty great. Hope yours is too.
Steve stays retired. Hard work.
Deb stays in education. Really hard work with payoffs (just not cash).
Kids are all working.
Grandkids still convince us of the value of humanity.
Stay warm in the winter,
Cool in the summer
And chill as hell the rest of the year.
May your Christmas be perfect.
May 2019 bring moments that steal your breath.
Start out knowing you are loved.
Sometime between the fall of 1958 and the fall of 1962 I learned the lore of hard cider, at least as it applied to Marsh men going back three generations in my family.
We often drank apple cider in my family when it was in season. I don’t know if it was cheaper than milk or not. I’m pretty sure it was not cheaper than Kool-Aid but despite the tight food budget we stayed on for years, cider was still allowed on the grocery list when it was in season. I speculate that it was a rare indulgence of my father’s that the rest of us got to share in.
In the fall of 1958 our house was small. It was the first house my parents owned. It was just a couple of miles outside of town on a divided highway. Since then, the house and in fact, the whole highway are gone. I can point out the approximate location on a drive by, but I’m never exactly certain. Odd to think of having spent my formative life there and not know today exactly where it was. But I remember some things with clarity.
We rarely used the front entrance to our house. There was no walkway from the dirt and gravel drive to the front porch. Instead, everyone used the back door. The driveway turned into parking places under two spreading black walnut trees where there was a short walkway my mother installed with used red brick. That led to the back door which was on a little enclosed porch. It was very small with space enough to get out of the weather and close one door behind you before you opened the kitchen door to come inside.
The milk company still delivered milk in those days. We had an aluminum-clad box in there for the milkman’s deliveries. It was insulated to keep the milk from freezing on cold winter mornings. But for about 6 weeks in the fall, that was where Dad kept the sweet apple cider too. He rationed it out slowly. His argument was that too much apple cider would give you the runs. That was probably true, but we never got to learn that life lesson on our own. His direct regulation was why.
The thing about apple cider back then was that there were never any preservatives in it. It contained fresh apple juice and that was all. It was pretty usual for cider to begin to “turn” before Dad’s parsimonious distribution ever came close to emptying the jug. Turning involved naturally existing yeasts beginning to ferment the liquid. Most of the time, that meant a little bit of alcohol in the mix, but sometimes it would be bacteria that fed off the alcohol and generated vinegar. The point was to keep the cider long enough for it to ferment a little but not so long that the “mother of vinegar” developed in the bottom of the jug and converted the hard cider to vinegar.
Dad was the one who most liked hard cider. He told me stories how his grandfather, Gary, my great-grandfather, made applejack from the apples he grew in his own small orchard. I can’t tell you how much truth there was to the story, but the way Dad told it, there were always enough details to make it believable.
Generally, to make apple cider into applejack one added brown sugar and raisins to raise the amount of fermentable sugars in the juice and then to keep oxygen and other bacterial contaminants out of the concoction, you stretched a balloon over the neck of the jug. In the morning, Dad would let the night’s build up of CO2 out of the balloon and when he came home from work in the afternoon, he would remove the balloon, take a couple of healthy swigs from the neck of the jug, declare it “not-quite-ready” and return the balloon to the neck and set it carefully on top of the milk box. The fermentation process needed the heat from the sun coming through the little window on the south side of the entryway and the storm door on the west. This was a crudely effective way to keep a ferment alive for many days.
The historical story also included a part where Dad’s grandfather used to sneak my father sips of the applejack. It was a secret he and grandpa shared. Makes a lot of sense to me now, more than 50 years after he told me the story. So I don’t know if my father liked applejack or if he liked the connection to his grandfather from many years before, but there was always a jug growing a balloon in our entryway in the fall.
There were two issues here. I knew about the “purloined sips,” and I knew the recipe. I want you to know I was never caught in this first part of the surreptitious applejack production. A kid could sneak a sip or two of applejack if his timing was right. My timing was thus: Dad got up to go to work. He released the carbon dioxide from the balloon and left. I, however, did not have to go to school until a while after that. The trick was to be the first one or the last one out to the bus stop. I would come through the breezeway, remove the balloon, tip the jug up on one shoulder, take several pulls off the sweet-bitey liquid. Then replace the liquid I drank with fresh cider from the milk box and Dad was none the wiser. The balloon filled all day while Dad was at work, when he came home he took his turn and recycled.
But eventually, he would complain that the recipe didn’t seem to be working right. He made a big production about explaining how the mixture needed more brown sugar and more raisins. He recharged the jug and I watched. That was the most powerful raw hard cider ever. I wonder how many morning classes I slept through in late autumn.
Here is the way it ended. Once, late in the season, it had gotten very cold overnight. The milk and the cider in the milk box were just fine. They were insulated from the cold, but the applejack maker was sitting on top. It froze, all but a couple of big glugs of rather clear-ish liquid in the neck of the jug. What I didn’t understand back then was that certain liquids have different freezing points. What we had in the jug was about 125 ounces of frozen apple juice, raisins and brown sugar and about three ounces of pure-ish ethanol. It is called freeze distilling and it was a technique employed by ethanol lovers for generations.
But what was a young boy to do without that information? Down the hatch! Replace the balloon and go to school. No, I didn’t get sent home from school. I just cruised through. But when I came home, the apple jack generator was gone. Dad said it had produced all it was going to, that when he sampled it when he got home it had hardly any kick to it at all and that’s when he threw it out. I didn’t tell him anything, but obviously I remembered the family recipe.
When we moved into town, we no longer had an entryway nor an aluminum-clad insulated milk box. The world was getting more modern and we didn’t have a milkman at all. I don’t remember much cider in that house, sweet, hard or otherwise.
I still make cider when I can. I have a small press and three apple trees. I also have a wife who puts up with the sticky mess it always becomes. And two grandsons who have declared Pop Pop’s Cider the best in the world, “even better than the Dexter Mill,” according to Teddy.
I made hard cider a couple of years ago, but it never tastes exactly right. I probably need to add some raisins and brown sugar. And maybe I need some kids around here to help me more often. I promise if that happens I won’t let them drink homemade apple moonshine. But if you hear me complaining about the quality of my apple cider, check Teddy. Smell his breath.
Two young poems walked down an alley
arguing.
“You already agreed,” said one,
“that Love is what we seek.”
“Yes,” said the other. “But not the only thing.
You know, food, shelter, some other things too.”
The first poem dug his bare hands into empty pockets
And hunched his shoulders into stubborn wind.
A cold mist had begun to drift inside buttons.
“Which one first?”
“Why, the most important, of course!”
The second poem was smug.
“Then love,” said the first,
his attitude improving despite the elements.
“I was thinking shelter,” said the second.
Low, distant thunder rolled through them.
“Shelter it is, then, where we might find love.”
My sister reminded me that
As a nearly teen
I accumulated my toenail and fingernail
Clippings in a small blue medicine bottle.
Someday, this will be valuable,
I no doubt thought.
Genuine DNA from
Steve Daniel Marsh,
In a form readily accessible
And immeasurably identifiable
By the average fan or devote´.
Perhaps I thought this was an investment.
I could sell them later
When I was Elvis
Or Picasso
Or Hemingway.
Or I could give them to friends
And lovers as tokens–
Keepsakes of fidelity
In a world so empty and ephemeral.
What would you give for an original
Certified Elvis toenail?
I’ll bet they are worth thousands.
The market begged for expansion:
Hair, spit, later razor stubble.
A variety of solids and liquids,
Discarded clothing.
Collections work that way
For those with forethought.