by James Still
For hunger drives no wild man home.
Dark bays no hasting to a will like his.
He may dine on berries, abide where he is.
He is somewhere around. Go and look.
Day of Flowers
There is a great moving about on this particular Sunday.
Tires flog the road, walkers ride shank’s mare
At this time of remembrance.
The graveyards swarm with folk
Pondering finality, forgiving the perished
For the unseemly act of dying.
The graves bristle with metal daisies, cloth roses—
Blooms bred in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan—
Waxed and plastic and lifeless as doorknobs.
Women hug wreaths to breasts, men hold garlands at arm’s length
As though they had a dead cat by the tail.
But ho! What have we here? By the gods!
Upon the mound of George Washington Pridemore
Freshly plucked trillium strewn gravehead to footstone!
Who recollects when “Old Wash” grumbled
On spying a yard matted with blossoms,
“What’s Creation coming to, frittering the time,
Squandering the earth to grow a patch of foolishness?
If that mess of weeds was something fit to eat
I’d be the first to jump astraddle of it.”
Hunter
He killed one hundred and thirty-one squirrels
In a single season (a man of honor who wouldn’t lie,
Where one squirrel digit too many be false);
Shot one hundred and thirty-one squirrels
To see them plummet to a mounting tally;
One hundred and thirty-one flying tails,
Livers, lungs, spines, hearts penciled to a count,
Two hundred and sixty-two eyes fixed in numbered glaze;
And I said, “Pick your ears, listen! hark to me!
Should a single squirrel remain, the final one
In the forests of the world, would you gun for it,
Go for it plumb, scour universe if you could?”
And he said (spoke in honest frankness),
“I sure would.”
Are You Up There, Bad Jack?
Are you up There, Bad Jack?
Did He take you, Bad Jack Means,
Baptized though you were
In your sinking days, aged eighty,
Your path greased to heaven?
They say your sins
Killed every fish in the river—
Every sunfish, croppie and stone-toter
Between McRoberts and Hazard.
In your time, Bad Jack,
You rammacked, you cut, you shot;
When you stirred, life was barely tolerable;
You slew six, you slew hope,
You slew scores of tomorrows.
Are you up There, Bad Jack?
If you are, if He took you in,
I think I’ll choose the Other Place.
Visitor
There was a poem here yesterday,
But not now.
It sat for many an hour
Unwelcomed, unnoticed.
It went away for lack
Of ears to hear,
Eyes to see,
Hearts to open.
The poem went away
And did not look back.
The Common Crow
I know where a crow’s nest is hidden.
Six naked fledglings huddle in a clever place,
But the crow-hen doesn’t know I know;
I pass with downcast eye and empty face,
Walk as if only walking, intent on ground,
Wary with the knowledge of what I’ve found.
But I can stand it no longer:
I must climb the yellow poplar and stare,
Though I know what’s up, what without looking.
A crow’s nest is not a thing accounted rare,
And nothing is so common as the common crow;
I don’t know why I can’t help looking.
After Some Twenty Years
Attempting to Describe
a Flowering Branch of Redbud
How say
the blooming redbud
other
than
the bees of April
swarmed here today?
On the Passing of My Brother Alfred
After this death it will
be easier
To pass beyond, to go
where he went,
Out of this light into
a greater light.
What Have You Heard Lately?
What have you heard lately from Sulphur Trestle?
Nothing, huh? Nothing worth telling?
No news is bad news.
Nobody got killed? A tree never fell on nobody?
Not a soul smashed to jelly in a side-swiped flivver,
Or blowed up at a sawmill?
Dag-gone!
Hey! You say Buck Sampson got six months
For taming his high-stepping floozy,
Though she deserved every lick he hit her?
Now you’re talking!
So Lily Jenkins went crazy and stripped in the courthouse square?
And you and your ex-wife are still going round and round?
And Gone with the Wind is back at the Bijou?
And that old doll who broke us both in
Is still switching her tail about town?
And how are you?
Doing no good?
Me either.
Madly to Learn
Madly to learn,
To fathom, to discern,
To master the Gobi, the ruins at Petri,
Climb K-2 and Nanga Parbat,
Swim the Straight of Malacca,
Be Ahab aboard the Peaquod,
Milton in his agony,
Shakespeare treading the boards;
To unravel, to grasp, to speak
Freud’s Theory of Seduction,
The mathematical beauty of irregular surfaces,
The Quantum theory, the leap genes,
The invisible morphognetic fields
Transmitted across space and time—
Bridges to infinity—
And why Tennyson’s “Flower in a Crannied Wall”
May not tell us all and all and all.
Madly to Learn.
High Field
“You would remember, I believe,
When I rented newground
Up on Dead Mare Branch
And raised a master crop of corn,
And I’d take my three sons with me—
Tadwhackers they were then,
Too young to work, too old to shirk—
And we’d grub and sow and till;
And one morning here you came
Climbing up to my high field
And stood squarely among us
And told us your name
But not why you were there,
And you grabbed up a hoe
And matched us row by row
As if I needed a hand, and I did,
And you not accepting pay
Well, I never understood that,
Not to this day.”
Unemployed Coal Miner
What
else
to
do
with
hands
except
to
put
them
into
pockets
where
nothing
is?
Apples in the Well
When a tree shed apples in my well
You were hired to clean it out—
You with shoulders small enough
To reach a sunken pail, scoop crayfish mud,
Clear claws of a mole and a length of chain
From my drinking water.
You who were hired to clean my well
<
br /> Drowned at last in other depths,
In another year, at a later season,
Where convexity of figure did not count.
You bobbed like an apple in familiarity,
In an element you shared somewhat already.
Death of a Fox
Last night I ran a fox over.
A sudden brilliant flash of gold,
A setting sun of gilded fur
Appeared in my car’s beam,
And then the fatal thump.
I asked the fox to forgive me.
He spat as he died.
I asked God to forgive me.
I don’t believe He will.
Is there no pardon anywhere?
In My Dreaming
Last night the telephone rang in my head, in my sleep,
in my dreaming.
You had passed from all reckoning of our days without
number,
From our knowledge and practice of love,
From terrestrial sleep to infinite slumber;
The coils which bound us snapped in two,
The bowl was broken at the well,
Our sky of crystal cracked and fell,
The seeds of surfeit sprouted and grew,
In my head, in my sleep, in my dreaming.
And it was true.
And it was true.
Here in My Bed
Here in my bed,
not alone:
the touch of a woman’s toe
is as
a note in music.
Yesterday in Belize
Yesterday in Belize
A dog barked, a rooster crowed,
Laughter rocked across the tidal river,
And the sun rang its chimes
Through clarion air.
Yesterday at Altun Ha
The chachalaca hooted from a palm,
A coach-whip wove its eight-foot length
Amid the custard trees,
A tinamou whistled the half-hour.
Yesterday at Xunatunich
My severed heart was offered to Chac,
And the rains came,
And the Mayan gods smiled
And poked out their tongues.
Artist
He dabbed a blob of paint
on canvas
And called it “MAN.”
He etched a field of thorns
And called it “LIFE.”
He dug a hole in earth
And dubbed it “FATE.”
He nailed two sticks together
And titled it “RESURRECTION.”
Of the Faithful
Staunch Republican was she,
Wholly, absolutely,
Till hell freezes over;
Solid as a diamond
Plumb back to Abraham Lincoln.
(Don’t call him “Abe”;
I hear he didn’t like it.)
She endured the bad years—
The terms of the opposition:
The New Deal, the New Frontier,
The New Society—
But with scorn, anguish, horror.
“The Democrats,” she scoffed,
“Don’t even know what makes a
pig’s tail curl.”
When it happened—after Roosevelt’s
fourth election—
That her calf caught a leg in a fence
And crippled it wholly, absolutely,
She cried, “It’s that man
in the White House!”
Knife Trader
“You call that thing a knife? A pocketknife?
Sort of does look like one.
Open her up, let’s see what she claims for blades.
Call them blades? Son-of-a-beagle!
They wouldn’t cut hot butter on a summer’s day.
A granddaddy Boker, huh? Who told you that?
Handed down in the family, aye?
Genuine article? Asking a hundred dollars?
Uh-uh. Don’t try pulling that hockey on me.
I’ve been swapping knives sixty-five years.
I know knives like you know your wife,
And I’ve heard more lies than I’ve heard facts,
But I’ll tell you what:
You look like a fellow who could use two bucks,
And that’s all I’ll shell out for it.
Maybe I can sharpen the scudder a whet,
And scoot a little Three-in-One along the cracks,
And put it off on some witty with no more brains
than a jaybird,
And get my money back.
Just maybe.”
Truck Driver
“My name is Mack.
It’s printed on my cap.
What did you figure:
Toro, Peterbilt, Coors?
I see ‘K.M.I.’ on yours,
And what does that mean—
‘Kentucky Mental Institute?’
By the hang of your jaw there’s no
dispute.
Damn, you’re touchy! Working up
a heat.
Hell, Old Son, I’d as soon fight
as eat.
But I need to shove on to Atlanta,
Can’t blow a minute on fists or banter;
Got to get my rig rolling, no time for foes,
And coming from Big Mack that’s no lie,
So bye-bye, Bozo—I mean K.M.I.—
Don’t go sticking no beans up your nose.”
Okra King
“. . . the divine fact of okra . . .”
—James Dickey
Who is this man, “The Okra King,”
High-blazoning his title, his royalty
On van-flank, on truck’s side for markets far,
On lug and crate and railroad car?
To this self-appointed Aga of Okra
Who would crown himself and assume reign,
Be potentate, seize omnipotence over
The lowly pod of the cotton cousin in sale,
Sovereign of gumbo, of vegetable caviar,
I bend the knee. All hail!
Could It Be
when
a
baby
smiles
in
its
sleep
an
angel
is
tickling
its
toes?
Of Concern
Has any thought been given to the malevolence of
inanimate objects,
Taking the long view in the human continuum,
Scientific study under controlled conditions, of,
for instance,
The hoe handle that crowned Robert Frost,
The toothpick piercing the throat of Sherwood Anderson,
The thorn that pricked the eye of Dylan Thomas,
The bottle top Tennessee Williams swallowed,
And such as the andiron which broke my toe when I
kicked the cat?
I suppose not, science being such a random profession,
But intent is there,
No doubt about it.
Dove
When a wild bird, a dove, a mourning dove
Flew from a tree and plucked a seed from my fingers,
I knew at last I had achieved something long sought:
A oneness with earth, plant, animal, cloud, water,
Fowls of the air, denizens of the deep,
The mist at morning, the sun at setting,
Wind song, hail pelt, thunder clap—
An invitation to the eternal,
The great meadow of the hereafter.
Peace.
Forever.
Here and Now
It has been said in poem, essay, play,
In every medium, style, and way:
Today is only bearable today;
Our endurable limits lie
The life-span of a butterfly,
And to know tomorrow
Is to borrow sorro
w.
Be this true or nay
Hurrah for today!
Mine Is a Wide Estate
I am wealthy with earth and sky,
Heir to far boundaries of field and stream,
And scarce can keep track of so much property:
Cloud-herd, dew-diamond, midge, and bee,
Wasp-way, wind’s wisdom, and the foxfire’s gleam—
I am rich despite a seeming poverty.
Mine is a wide estate. It is a legal jest.
These are a neighbor’s hills, those a stranger’s.
Who owns the water’s speech, the hornet’s nest,
The catbird’s mew, the grassy breath in mangers,
And who in cricket song and mayfly nymphs invest?
I am possessor and possessed.
My Aunt Carrie
My Aunt Carrie, she tore into the house,
And cried, “Lonie!”—that’s Mama—;
Cried, “Lonie, we’ve got to do something with Pa,
Pa’s gone crazy”—that’s Grandpa—
“Pa’s gone crazy and paid three thousand dollars
For the abandoned Roanoke railroad station.
He’s lost his mind, squandering our inheritance,
Throwing away everything coming to us.
We’ve got to have him declared senile,
With a court-appointed guardian.”
When Grandpa sold the old station
Three weeks later for nine thousand,
Tripling his money,
That was the last word we heard
Of Grandpa going crazy and needing a guardian
And throwing away the money coming to us
The day he dies.
Not a word.
Mrs. Lloyd, Her Rag Sale
“Along about the time willow leaves were the size
of mouse’s ears,
Mrs. Lloyd had her rag sale over on Caney Creek:
Plumb barrels of garments, used and new and in
between,
And the hats!—womenfolks wore hats in them days—