What! Two In a Week? And From Last Night?

I seldom offer poems spontaneously, more often working on a revision of something written two years before. So why not be different now and then? Vicki hasn't been sleeping well recently and we often find ourselves up in what most consider the middle of the night This is an impression from last night, with only typographic changes. (Well. almost only!)

  Idea of February

Viewed from the sofa at four-thirty AM

on this mid-winter day the picture window

is as blank and black as the turned-off TV.

The outside world has gone away, what once

was a frozen pond, a ridge-top deckled

ragged with trees, just isn't there. Nothing is

except a few lights which may be the suns

of some other worlds. But every time I raise

my cup to take a sip the lamp beside us,

the cup itself, the window pane, conspire

and send me a message, just a flash that could

be from "out there", hopelessly sent

from some other beings desperate to know

if they are alone. I suppose I should be suddenly

encouraged, but knowing the inflexibility 

of time and the speed of light, they'll never know

so what does it matter how many other worlds

there may be?  We still feel alone here on this

old settee. We doze for a while and when we wake

the sky is suffused with a pre-dawn cream

which the ice on the pond glows in echo. Only

the ridge line still holds night''s black Those lights

which might have been stars resolve to street lights

dimmed by the trees. A fingernail paring

of the dying moon, hanging over where we know

the water tower will be, seems neighborly. 

We doze and we wait for the promised sun.

Birthday Month

     My granddaughter recently asked, "Why do you think there are so many presidents born in February?" Ignoring for the moment that I too was born in this month (and just survived to be 86). As a biologist the answer came easily: "BECAUSE ABOUT NINE MONTHS AGO IT WAS SPRING."

Born just between Lincoln and Valentine, my mother said I just escaped an even odder name then Robert Maurice (pronounced Morris) Chute (pronounced as chew, not shoe).

Being personal, here is a personal poem. (And, S.P., I will try to post more frequently.)



Remembering What You Don't

How much do you remember
     of that year
when you were little more than four
     and how much
is what you've been told by
     someone older?
There's no call to feel guilty even
     if it was
that year, that summer, your last
     grandparent died.
If you'd been older I'm sure
     you'd remember
not only her death but her — her
     existence.
My brother Phil did but
     he was ten
and I'd always been six years
     behind him.
Was she sick, couldn't hold me,
     as grandmother's do?
In memory, which can't
     be true,
why do I feel her
     cold disapproval,
her arms stiff, her bosom
     starchy?
Had I told myself this or
     had someone older?

Forgotten Again!

Yes, once more I totally forgot about this blog. No need to treat you to a list of the distractions nor do I have a convincing explanation of my lack of concern. So here is a poem that recently appeared in ECHOS, that elegant journal from "the county". It purports to portray an aspect of my personal history. As most such ventures much of it is fictional. I have ice fished. Once with Uncle George. Once with my son David (now in California) but the details: what George said to me, men pounding their knees, my seeing them now, floated in with the wind to enhance my memories.


Past Is Present

I tell my son about ice fishing as
my uncle told me before the days
of the power augur, snowmobiles,
thermal boots, insulated underwear.
Telling him, as Uncle George told me,
to always tie a cord to your chisel
or lose it in the mud twenty feet below.
You let your bait kiss the bottom, then
raise it a true king's yard — that's
the distance from your nose to
finger tip, arm stretched wide. If your feet
get cold, George said, raise you knee,
pound it with your fist: one — two — three,
then do the other one. I tell my son
but he's in California, a continent away,
and I'm standing on the ice watching
strangers, for I don't fish anymore.
Far down the pond I imagine I see
a man, leg raised, pounding his knee.

PEARL HARBOR

Yes, I remember. Charley Merserve and I had come to his house for a weekend off from Fryeburg Academy. Here is a poem published years ago in Galley Sail Review — with a few current changes.

Jackson, New Hampshire: Sun., Dec. 7, 1941

Visiting at Charley's house (hymns from

the radio on the nightstand between

twin beds) as we discussed the diminished

possibility of still being give breakfast

when down the air waves, but not from

Marathon, the runner came and in that

white-painted, sun-drenched room above

a yard brilliant with the fresh snow 

we'd taken a weekend from school

to explore we both were suddenly 

Athenian (or was it Spartans) and

quicker than thought, as our fathers

had taught us, we said we'd come.

We didn't wait for Pheidippides, the

runner to come, to tell us we'd won.

********

And here, after 70 years, we wait again

for the runner's spirit to appear and

tell us, if we've not won, we're done.

MEMORY

What We Hear

As he reads I want to know more  

about him so I imagine a home,

a history, while waiting for the final

words of a long poem that reminds me

of long ago Christmas oranges

in the toe of a stocking. He reaches in,

into the past without looking.

It's as if it were my own story

and he may not recognize himself.

That's my mother bathing me 

as I stand in the wash tub in front of 

the green enamel, chrome trimmed stove. 

I grimace, then giggle, as rinse water 

pours over my head, down  my body. 

She brushes wet hair from my face.

The Homestead

At the auction we withheld a dusty 

framed photograph of The Homestead as it was 

in nineteen thirty. In the picture's lower 

foreground flakes of foam float on waves of grass,

blurry images of Queen Anne's Lace in bloom.

The buildings, burned, in eighteen sixty and

rebuilt, had been repaired, expanded, revised, 

modernized. Dormer windows budded from roofs.

Ell and shed became dining room and kitchen.

In the barn the hayloft became a dance hall.

The picture was taken from this un-mown meadow where, 

age four, I would have played and where, ten years

after the auction, I kneel, age sixty-three, to

photograph where The Homestead had been. Queen Anne's

Lace flowers lie like giant snowflakes in the grass.

DELAYED THANKSGIVING

Plus ça change

Those savages may not

have a written language

but they'll understand,

Miles standish said, as

he mounted Wituwamat's

hear on a pike by the gate.

Terror unto others,

Governor Bradford wrote.

We'd call it making a statement, 

diplomacy by drones.

I had intended to post this with new verse news but Jim remembered, and I didn't, that he had used a slightly different version five years ago. So much for memorable poems.

VETERANS DAY 11/11/2011

Veteran's Day

In the outskirts of small cities and towns

in the boot-leather tough American heart-land

from Iowa to Idaho where the suburbs quickly

fade into prairie, barrens or bad-lands you

may see our national bird, the bald eagle, perched

on the rim of rusty dumpsters in the hunt

for commercial carrion. They show the same

"make-do, can-do" spirit that made America

a great nation, showing the same adaptability

and persistence of pioneer spirit as our

homeless veterans bivouacked under bridge

abutments and vacant lots across the country.

[POSTED TODAY ON NEWVERSENEWS]