Phantom Hill Diary

Smoke Signals

*** another work picked up after more than 15 years...VERY ROUGH work in progress **** 

Cigarette butts and their crumpled packs betray stories of abandonment
***a word for guilt/conviction**** by faded signs, doorless buildings
chimneys without rooms.

Anybody pulling off FM600 with the patience to walk the place
is told brackish water made them leave.
they search for evidence, a bridle bit, a piece of leather, a twinkle in the dry dirt.

Why the hell would even the homeless curl up here, 14 miles outside of Abilene?
Their evidence left for another generation
to contemplate habitation on this hill, inside this stone. 

Ford

Mortal sculpts yellow granite into chimneys
cooks used to bake bread, dig flies from dough.
Bad water not yet enough to give up quarter.

Mother searches tenth grade photos
still hope of being a doctor.
Three years of thirst
from the clear fork of the brazos swings doors open
cocked hammer of a .38 points to abandoned temples and unstoaked hearths. 

Affirmation, by Donald Hall

Just realized I'd created a link from my journal to here, without having the poem in place!

 

AFFIRMATION

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

My Papa's Waltz - T. Roethke

I put this poem in because of a conversation with my wife who teaches theatre arts to junior high students (a saint for doing so, is she not?). anyhow, one of the students had selected this poem under the guise of it being a lament on alcoholism.

 

i have to disagree. this is a recount, from a point of view of affection, of a son toward his father. the sentiment expressed by the narrator is not regret, or condemnation toward the father. it is one thing and one thing only:

Love. 

 

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

August in the Big Country, Rick Schochler

August in the Big Country

There is no one to blame,
but the only lakes left are shallow,
blistered around edges.
Narrow ditches hold nothing but cans and broken bottles.
Pumps churn far into the earth's belly,
seeking absolution for trying to grow staples
as fragile as wheat, cotton.

In town, we joke about donning head-dress,
offering dance to save our lawns browned under a close sun.
Instead, we draw curtains, turn the AC down a notch.
On K-TAB, Dale shrugs, points to clouds swirling
over Houston.

Narrow Light of Promise, 1935

this one's a work in progress, you can watch it change...

Narrow Light of Promise, 1935

On the long drive back from Tyler
we crave moonlight for headlamps
burned out years ago.

Nervous on the flatbed, three young goats shift legs
struggling to keep balance as we plod down rutty roads
careful of washouts and rocks.

Still thirty miles from Palestine,
in the near distance dirty canvas illuminates
with homemade torches that lead us to pause
and wait for moonlight.

We park in the cracked ditch,
the air tinned with sounds of banjos and guitars.
Sliding between canvas flaps,
we take in rows of men, their women
swaying in the hard rhythm of the gospel
hemmed skirts moving across slips
as dustcloths on oak.

Choosing the only unfolded seats left, we sit in back.
The low hum of earth moving through the night,
the crickets, the breeze - penetrates
when the preacher lifts pink palms to the crowd.

He calls for confession and testimony,
impatient for desperation of liquor, the embarassment of adultery
he promises doom for the unrepentant:
Perhaps demons will swarm our earth in the summer
as boweavils devouring our cotton.

Outside a shrill cry rises from the night,
all stop and turn as elders lift the flaps to see
one of the billys, rope turned to noose
bleating, fighting the grassrope
taught around his neck.

We run from the tent, help him to surefooting,
drive out into the night -- cool, vacant, and still       
dark.