Third Movement
* * *
There and Here
The abundance there is longed for, in contrast to the emptiness here; yet participation without loss of being is felt to be impossible, and also is not enough, and so the individual must cling to his isolation—his separateness without spontaneous, direct relatedness—because in doing so he is clinging to his identity. His longing is for complete union. But of this very longing he is terrified, because it will be the end of his self.
—R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
Montross: Selected Poems
Daniel Lyam Montross
Copyright by Diana Ruth Stoving as Administrix of the Estate of Daniel Lyam Montross
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
Contents
One
Whooptedoo
Driving South in December
Why Did I Go There?
Entity
No Road
Getting There
On First Viewing the Place
Now That We Are Here, Where Are We?
Founding
Housewarming
Post Coitum Triste
Two
First Sight
On Being a Furriner
Identity
Communication
The Curing
1. “I ‘took down sick’”
2. “Their ministrations failed”
3. “How right she was!”
The Outcast
Befriending. Brief Ending.
Three
Relative
Getting a Good Fire Going
Additional Gratuitous Advice from Mrs. Flossie Fay Salter on Their Use of Her Hearth
Cutting Her Water Off
The Ghost’s Outrage
Two Reasons
Strategy
The Exorcism
Christmas Coming
Mistletoe
Four
Hospitiful
Presents. Presence.
Virtue
Enters
You Can’t See Me, but I’m on My Knees
Unverminous
Synopsis so Far
Five
A Ballit of Amenities
Problem
Elements
The Mistletoe Revisited Yet Again
Turning It Around
The Wind, the Wind
What Do You Give a Ghost for Christmas?
Calendar: January
Idyll
Warming Up
The Ghost’s Song and Other Poems
One
Contents
Contents (cont.)
Still-Hunt
Still-Fire
Still-Life with Stallion
Strains in the Stillness
Stills in the Stereoscope
Distilling the Sticky Installment
Epistle to the Pestle
Still More
Girl, Still, on a Pedestal
Forestalling
Still in the Sticks
Two
Their Dance
Fade-Out
Bale and Woe
Double Take
The Return
Words
Venue (Vulgar)
Three
Audience
Negative
Thought versus Sense
Emulation
The Summons
Four
The Ghost’s Song
1. The Opening
2. There and Here
3. The Arrangement
4. The Birthing
5. The Duel
Old Woman’s Last Words
The Dreaming
MONTROSS:
Selected Poems
* * *
I
* * *
Whooptedoo
I hold my It’s debut.
A party’s being thrown.
A livelong whooptedoo,
With favors for your own.
Refreshments frequently.
Get drunk on these with me.
It’s not all fun and games.
Some speeches should be made,
Some highfalutin claims,
A screed, harangue, tirade.
You’ll keep from being bored
By all the drink you’ve stored.
Why must a drinking bout
Accompany a fête
Such as my coming-out?
Because it may off set
The horrors of the sight
Of quenchless appetite.
Driving South in December
The migratory birds have gone
Ahead of them. They follow fast
On numbered highways close upon
Unperceived airways of the last.
The cold pursues them but the snow
Abandons them in Delaware
Thereafter all the way they go
The sky is clear and weather’s fair.
The rising sun from off the sea
Shines on their left. Their lefts are gold.
This is the farthest south that he
Has wandered since my time of old.
Occasionally they traverse
Some trail or road I took before.
But seldom do they ask my course.
Such slights as this I can’t ignore.
How can one’s destination reach
Without advice? They seem to feel
Those migratory birds have each
Their own peculiar steering wheel.
Why Did I Go There?
Of all the places I have been,
It had enough to please:
The highest mountains I had seen,
The toweringest trees.
Was that enough to make me stop?
There’s more some other place.
Yet there I had a surplus crop
Of extra breathing space.
Entity
Extreme, how often he thinks her but his fancy’s figment
And grieves because he’ll never know for sure.
O how terrible to feel she’s only a segment
Of himself, who is so deeply insecure.
Little does he know she’s just as daft as he is,
And catches herself disbelieving in him.
She thinks he’s what a girl as silly as she is
Would fantasize, sweetly, on hysteric whim.
Faun and nymph sit in the wood so close together
They cannot see the forest for the trees,
Nor persons for their selves, and know not whether
Their vision is disorder or disease.
If it is true that one tree suffices to a woodland,
One person makes an entity, perhaps.
Therefore the burning question is: which one could stand
To let a vision of the other first collapse?
No Road
O my children the chagrin you felt when you got there
Or, rather, failed to get there in your car.
There never was a road for cars or anywhere
A way of ingress save for railroad car.
You had to leave the rented car there at Poplar,
And walk four miles to reach Lost Cove proper.
In Ought Six when first I found the Cove,
Leaving the Clinchfield train stalled in a grove,
The first few cars that people drove
Were on the market, but none would ever find
Access to that recess of humankind.
Getting There
Walking the trestle scared her.
High above the Toe River.
No handrail to hold to, and gaps
Between the ties. Oh! she gasped
And teetered, and he, holding, tottered.
The two swayed in the cold breeze.
Nights, blind, I used to skip along
This same trestle, and drunk to boot;
The river in its go
rge roaring
As loud as I; nearly as liquid.
Care keeps us from dying.
Haste keeps us from caring.
The trestle is waiting, and daring.
On First Viewing the Place
The oblivescence came as no surprise.
This seasoned pair had learned not to expect.
And therefore they could not believe their eyes
On finding most of Love Cove still erect.
No house still stood with all its panes intact.
But still they stood. And they must stand and stare
Enrapturedly, and marvel at this fact:
The town exists without a person there.
If one could say a “town.” It never had
A grocery store or such concessionaires
As drugstore, bar, cafe; and that is sad.
But twenty families called it theirs.
Now That We Are Here, Where Are We?
Close, Tennessee’s east border,
Less than a mile in fact,
Or maybe even shorter,
I never paced it off.
A Yancey County quarter
Once but a water trough
In primitive disorder.
Steep, mountains are its warder,
Its solemn sentry mute.
Thick forests fast emborder
All corners of this glade,
Three-hundred-acre larder
Of air and sun and shade.
These elements transport her.
Rough path’s a mean retarder,
A crooked climbing hike.
No access could be harder
To any town on earth.
And as the town’s reporter,
I say for what it’s worth:
It takes a perfect ardor.
Founding
Who cleared it? Some of it was clear
When Morgan Ailing came the year
Of eighteen forty, looking for
Some other place ulterior.
For years he’d been a mountaineer.
He knew he’d found the right place here.
But Indians had made a stop,
To fell the forest, plant a crop,
And call it home. This bothered him
Whenever he discovered grim
Reminders of their tenancy.
The land, his bride, could never be
A maiden lady any more.
Instead, she was, he thought, a whore.
And so he used her. All his sons,
Except the very youngest ones
(When twelve were born he lost his count),
Upon their father’s whore would mount
And plant their seed. She took them each.
They stripped her far as they could reach.
Today her garments give the lie,
Reclaiming her virginity.
Housewarming
Touring, but hardly knowing which to choose,
They picked a house in fair repair to use.
It was a place that recent vandals spared,
The ancient Salter house of timbers squared.
The vandals must have brought along their girls,
Their rubbers left behind in twisted curls.
The walls were crudely crayoned with remarks
“Loretta sucks,” and “Ethel’s pussy barks.”
Amused by all this evidence of sin,
Our couple warmed their house by joining in.
Post Coitum Triste
Charged hearts beat time in tune.
The quick caught breath unbends.
Light leaves the afternoon.
It cools these friends.
Such love of loving dulls,
As when a lengthy drought
Hits a small town and pulls
The people out.
The flesh dispeopled lies.
Before all else expire,
This emptied pair must rise
To light a fire.
II
* * *
First Sight
Young winter there was not as black or bleak
As in Vermont or in Connecticut.
The rhododendron, everywhere in glut
Of green, kept winter fresh week after week.
When I arrived, the first few folk I met
Were three young ladies washing clothing in
The waters of the creek. They were all wet
And cold, but customed to this discipline.
The youngest girl among this comely three,
A blue-eyed blonde, a charming specimen,
Was destined when she came of age to be
My love. I wish I’d known it even then.
Because if I had told her on the spot,
It would no doubt have overwhelmed her less
Than my mere coming did. I’ve n’er forgot
Her open-mouthed bedazzled bashfulness.
Instead of saying, as I did, “How are
Ya, gulls? How can I find the Ailing place?”
I should have said to her alone, “My star,
Your light has led me here; now let’s embrace.”
On Being a Furriner
A dark outlander rarely showed up there.
To be a stranger takes a certain style,
A mixture both of artlessness and guile,
Or else he’s “fotched-on,” native folk declare.
No move was made to make me feel apart
Nor welcome either. Like the weather, I
Was looked upon the way they scan the sky
To see what ill the elements would start.
They asked not what I did but what I could.
To be a stranger and a carpenter,
Gave them a choice of evils to prefer,
Unless their statements I misunderstood.
But Jotham Ailing left behind a will
Decreeing how he wished his coffin made.
If I my skimpy welcome overstayed,
They let a stranger show a useful skill.
Identity
By name and by byname the populace called
My presence among the close kin and the cohorts who keep tight breath,
As I walked through their midst in their hard blank gaze unenthralled,
Like some poor doomed convict marching to his death.
“The Yankee,” first they called me when I came,
Or “Muntruss,” they sounded the name of my clan,
Or then “MONTrust” or then “MintROST” their tongues would tease
my name.
Most just said “Him.” Scarcely anyone knew me as “Dan.”
Communication
Our difficulties sharply underline:
Their way of speech, or maybe it was mine.
I loved the lilt with which their voices sang.
Their ears were grated by my nasal twang.
My road as “rud,” my four-syllable “cow”
Would make them snort and laugh, I don’t see how.
“I wonder—” I would say in accents stiff,
Whereas those folks would sing, “I wonder me if.”
“How are you?” was just “Hwarye?” on my tongue.
“Heigh-ho! God-proud to see ya!” they all sung.
My cow had “loo’ed”; a cow of theirs now “moo’ed.”
But “Bossie” gave our tongues similitude.
The Curing
ONE
I “took down sick” the second week.
So early did I lose repute.
I lost my voice and couldn’t speak
To boast I’d not been sick before.
What agony, that I was mute
And could not rail against death’s door.
The nearest doctor miles away,
And no one cared to take me there.
If I had known that he was not
Their doctor anyhow, it may
Have eased my wretched mind a lot.
Days passed before they were aware
That I was sick. They seemed to think
Me idle. “Law,” my hostess said,
“He don’t git up to eat nor drink,
Jist lies the day long in that bed.”
“A lazybones,” her man replied,
“Molasses won’t run down his laig.”
I wonder if I would have died
Had not a neighbor lady found:
“I do believe he’s got the plague.”
TWO
Their ministrations failed to help.
I was beyond the reach of such
Poor remedies they dosed me with.
Daniel Lyam Montross
They shook their heads and spoke of “yarbs,”
Their medicine to me a myth.
“I reckon best we’d better fetch
Aunt Billie Ledyard right away.”
They had the kindness to explain
That she could “doctor” me with “yarbs.”
I was too weak to doubt them sane.
She came. Her face relieved my fears
A woman older than her years
But handsome nonetheless, and sage.
She plunged right in to treat my case.
There was no fever she could not assuage.
She said I’d live to ripe old age.
THREE
How right she was! I’ll never know
Just what my diagnosis was.
She didn’t say. Perhaps I had
Some malady indeed death-throe.
A dose of “yarbs” like magic does
The curing. Herbs she used on me
Were pennyroyal, creosote,
I think, and balm of Gilead,
And Jimson root and foxglove blue.
For days my head was kept abuzz.
My heart was kept ablaze because
She cared, and worked so hard for me,
This woman of good antidote.
All doctors should be given pause
By wondrous rural pharmacy.
The Outcast
Although Aunt Billie’s herbs were welcome there,
I learned her husband wasn’t on good terms
With any of the Lost Cove folks, who were
Displeased with what they thought his downright harms.
It seems he’d lighted up the woods to burn,
And not just once, though this was years before.
He’d only meant to clear off brush and fern
To graze his cattle on the forest floor.
The townsmen warned him twice to quit his ways.
But Carlisle Ledyard was a stubborn soul.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 62