Johnny Morrison's Garden \ Weather Report: Straight Bay: Last Week of April

Alan:  Johnny was a gentle soul.  He welcomed us back-to-the-landers, made his near-empty store a place for the food co-op to break down bulk orders, and always had a few donuts around for any kids who stopped by.  I miss him.

Johnny Morrison’s Garden

Some folks take a long time dying

if they die at all.  Johnny’s like that:

it was a year ago – last Fourth of July –

I saw him sitting on his stoop watching the parade.

You could tell he was dying by the way he waved –

weak, kind of glum – his face fading

like July sun when the fog pours in off the sea,

the smile still there but all the sparkle gone.

Next we heard, he was over at Ocean View,

and we knew it was just a matter of time.

He’d have given up: some folks don’t transplant.

I didn’t visit – couldn’t bring myself to go –

as I watched his storefront geraniums slowly brown and droop.

I wonder, when he packed, did he leave the table

set, as usual, for himself, Mother and one guest?

“Don’t sit there,” he’d say, as you reached

for the dusty chair, “that’s Mother’s place.”

His voice apologizing, like she’d just stepped out

and would be back a little late for supper.

Then he’d start: “Mother – she’s 102 now – ,” family

always present tense, and all of them gone

years before.  Johnny’s home at last.

So just today, we were discussing Johnny Morrison’s garden.

“It’s a wet one – always was...”

“He put in a lot of sand, but I don’t know if it’s done much good...”

and I thought, Johnny hasn’t died yet in this town

and I doubt he will, until all of us have too.

It will always be Johnny Morrison’s store, and Johnny Morrison’s woods,

and as long as there are powdered sugar doughnuts

we’ll be thinking that maybe he’ll be out to see us

Sunday with a box.  Johnny’s geraniums are gone

and the store is boarded up,

but we know his garden is back there, wet and clayey as ever,

and – whatever else fails –

the Johnny Jump-ups will have come on strong.

Nancy:  Do those old migratory tides still flow in our veins?

Weather Report: Straight Bay: Last Week of April

The low moves offshore.

Hawks cast over the field and over the spruce.

Geese ribbon out in Vs.

A heron tribe gathers to fish and rest.

The heavy overcast gives way to sun.

Hawks come out of the sun;

they come out of dark shadows; they wheel

and fall; they watch.

Geese waver out to the east,

offshore, toward Musquash marsh and Shubenacadie,

toward the eelgrass beds in the bay at Willet Rocks.

Herons lift and flare with the ebb and flow of the tides,

from the upper bay to the small coves notched out of the shore,

from the bluff by the apple tree

to the saltmarsh beyond Clam Rock.

The wind swings round and comes out of the south and west.

And it plucks at me, a fixed point, a pole star, lodged,

deep-rooted, in place, enduring, not

discontented, and yet

all this motion tugs at me;

It tugs at me.

“Johnny Morrison’s Garden” and “Weather Report:  Straight Bay:  Last Week in April” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

The Tuberous Begonias \ Sweet Sovereign Root

Alan:  We tried growing begonias once or twice.  The sun burned them, the cold rotted them, and the wind blew them apart.   It’s not the Susquehanna River valley.

The Tuberous Begonias

Baffled against spring’s edge,

needy of sun, foreseeing summer

again too short, dry, cold,

you recall the old story –

driving south from Windsor

along a winding river road,

you come upon the small, tired house,

almost a shack,

completely fronted in lipstick-bright

begonias.

Begonias potted along the porch rail,

jungling from shadowy eaves;

begonias waxing from window boxes,

coffee cans, resisting with pink

hungry mouths the wall’s sad lean.

You passed there a few times,

never stopped for the old man

who sat, amid roof-sag and paint-peel,

content in his poor-will’s paradise,

as if to do this one thing perfectly

could forever uphold a house, or a world.

You have travelled so far

from that valley’s nuzzling embrace,

for fifty years wishing you had asked him

how you could do this too,

especially here

in this scrape of rock by the salt sea shore

where the saw wind shivers your fruit trees

and mice gnaw incessantly at your roots.

Nancy:  One smell, one taste... it’s early ‘30s depression Indiana.  What a powerful effect our tastes and smells have on our memories.

Sweet Sovereign Root

My mother died in the Spring.

She died of thick blood.  That grieved me

and I thought it astonishing; I thought

of her death as caused by a successful transition

to the middle class.  I knew, without looking

behind the fruitwood veneer doors of her cupboards,

what I would not find.

No fever root, toothache root, sweet sassafras.

No sassafras.  Mama, I thought, we’ve come a long way

from our childhoods, from black salve and sang

and spikenard to an empty cupboard

and you dead of thick blood.

No spicebush, flower of melilot, rose gold sassafras

tea of Spring, to thin the blood.  Mama,

you never let me down; your paper packages

of bark followed me to college.  You had never read

Proust, you only knew that it was dangerous

not to quicken wintry blood, but when I brewed

your roots it was suddenly Spring, even there,

among the unbelievers.

No more.  The palm trees outside my mother’s room

denied the existence of Spring.  I thought, if there are ghosts

(yes – I hope there are ghosts) they will be wise women,

with aprons full of comfort, and they will take her home

to chamomile, star root, sweet sovereign sassafras.

“Sweet Sovereign Root” first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal.

Poets in Spring \ A Dance of Innocents

Alan:  I read this once at an open-mic poetry event and got a spontaneous round of applause, which I didn’t know quite what to do with, so I read some more.  I should have quit while I was ahead.

Poets in Spring

In Spring, when the metaphors run upstream to spawn,

poets camp by the waterside,

hooks sharpened, nets mended, trap weirs set

and prepare to feast.

They come leaping, sliding, singing the music of the Spheres,

their smooth muscular bodies slippery with magic,

rooted in proteinaceous delight.

And the poets move.

The poets wade.  They grab them, hook them, net them, trap them, haul them, hoist them, fling them

on the shores of the rippling roaring river

and then they feed.

And they split them, gut them, hang them, stake them, smoke them,

stack them like red resinous shingles

and then they leave the river, swaying,

obese with metaphors,

staggering under their bales of dry metaphors,

ready for the lean times when the hovels creak with the weight of the cold

and the Hunger Moon begs for a metaphor in the dark.

Every year, some survive,

find at last the bars of clean sand,

mate, sink to the bottom of the quickly running waters and die

among their eggs.

Every year, a myriad of tiny metaphors

wriggle into life, look up

at the flowing world through enormous eyes,

turn downstream,

start swimming.

Nancy:  The world is not romantic, warm and fuzzy, not the real, beautiful, complex world of our coast.

A Dance of Innocents

It is not good to be judgmental.

To hear the Spring song clearly is to hear

hunger; young must be fed,

and fed with young.  It does not do

to dwell on the ravaged nest.  The sounds of the night

are night sounds, a part of Spring.

The silences are hunger stilled.

I take note of them, and of absences –

but it is best not to brood.

In the Spring, it is enough to be grateful

for mornings, early, those minutes

drawing water at the well,

before the high rumped hares have lost their innocence.

“Poets in Spring” first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal.  “A Dance Of Innocents” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984)

The Winter Wren \ Bones Filled With Air

Alan:  I’ve been to places where these feisty little guys are everywhere, shouting and posturing from the tips of branches.  Here, we only ever seem to have one, and it stays out of sight.  It often wakes me, in April and May; after that, I hardly hear it at all.

The Winter Wren

You do not come here in Winter

but in wintry Spring, old snow

still tucked up under trees

and along the shaded edges of fields

and back roads.

In this country you are never seen;

rather, from the thicket, before dawn,

the long line of your song casts,

looping, into pooled shadows

where, hungry for anything

this silvery and bright,

cautiously

I rise.

Nancy:  Commitments.  Responsibilities.  Demands.  And out there... the wild, compelling call of my favorite bird.

Bones Filled With Air

The wind came up at night

and it blew offshore

and the small birds settled

and the Willets rose up crying;

they called me out

they pointed to another bay

they rode off on the wind, calling.

Then I looked at the walls I had built.

Paper walls.  Paper windows.  Paper between

me and the wind; every day

another layer of paper.

I opened the door and I left it ajar.

We fly toward the sun, toward stone,

toward eelgrass.  On the hill behind me,

the dogs have covered their eyes with their paws

and the door swings in the wind.

“Bones Filled With Air” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999)

Gritty Wind Blues \ Man with Dog and Cone

Nancy:  "Shopping" means a 45 mile drive.  Plenty of chance to appreciate the grotty end of winter.  Written in the parking lot of the big box store, where the anonymous shopper made my day.

Gritty Wind Blues

There’s no crayon in the box for this,

nothing as dirty as old ice,

nothing as cold as the jagged bay,

nothing as tired as the matted grasses

and the ubiquitous plastic bags

impaled in the roadside branches.

We’re all ground down to a nameless shade

of worn.

So it’s not surprising that I saw the woman

with the shopping cart as defiant.

Way to go, lady, with your ribbons,

with your improbable rainbow garden

of plastic flowers.  Red, pink, orange,

purple, green, a whole fistful of colors.

Just what we needed, spunky graffiti

scrawled on the grit of the day.

Alan:  There’s nothing like a long, solo car trip with the radio off to encourage a poem.      Here’s one that came out in a rush.

Man with Dog and Cone

A large man

walking the roadside

against sparse rural traffic

leads a small, no-breed, somehow

cheerful dog while holding by its tip

an orange-and-white striped

cone, the cone in his right hand, starboard

so to speak, the dog trending slightly to port,

protected by the man’s heft and maybe the cone

and really as I now see it a step or two ahead:

some rustic Diogenes, it appears, lifting

a blind and useless lantern

while tugged by mongrel hope.

I would not mind

being thus encumbered

in equal parts by bright

enquiring foolishness and shaggy

dog-trot optimism, the more staunchly thereby

to face each on-rushing, deadly truth

or lie, particularly if the alternative meant

to set them down, one or the other

or both, and become then simply

a rather bulky person bereft

of companionship, walking the edge

to nowhere, holding out

nothing at all.

“Gritty Wind Blues” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

Tracking Fox \ Over Wind Mountain

Nancy:  Coming down the lane toward home and it was all written out.  A light snow on a solid crust.  No tracking skills required.

Tracking Fox

tangle of roses, field

hollow, deer mouse

precise, with intent,

neatly drawn, red fox

snow firm enough to hold

the calligraphy of toes, nails,

pads, the fine line of a tail

drawn across the surface

each foot so carefully placed

writing fox

across smooth white snow

fox, mouse, fox

we want our stories to end

but this one is still writing itself

down the slope

fox, fox, mouse

               fox

Alan:  Sometimes a print of an old photo in a simple frame on a white wall speaks more compellingly than what’s beyond the window.  This one has called to me more than once.

Over Wind Mountain

                On a photograph by E.A. Curtis

What lies beyond the hill —

this mountain filling the frame

(other than boat and water and sky)?

Sky luminous: sun, it seems,

held in mountain’s sleighting hand;

water hardly rippled, a shining

here, there, polished dark between;

canoe high-prowed and angled

away, inviting — paddles ready —

any breeze might lift it, set it free.

No context, code or narrative

for what is off beyond, behind us

or even to the sides,

so we who look and trace some journey here

see only shadowed height;

the boat to reach it by;

distance we can measure;

distance immeasurable beyond it:

a slowly darkening sky.

“Tracking Fox” first appeared in Friends of Acadia Journal.

March, April Coming \ Climbing March Hill #1

Nancy: Hard long winters leave the eye hungry for the first red dogwood twig or golden willow branch.  By May we go from the subtleties of Ansel Adams to the exuberance of Carnival.

March, April Coming

The winter’s been etchings, charcoal, scratchboard,

white walls, black stove,

grey wool pants,

crows, ravens,

impastos white on white,

edge, line, petroglyph, cuneiform.

It surprised my eye to tears,

yesterday, to see a hare against the grass

and you in your shirt sleeves,

that old shirt, blue.

Alan:  But before we can get there, we have to slog through what always seems like the longest month of the year.  It’s a time that’s saved by those rare calm, clear nights when the stars are at their brightest.

Climbing March Hill #1

There are times, climbing March Hill,

when Spring seems as far off as Arcturus,

and as alien, and as distant from anything sticky, or sweet,

as that place in the night

we call the Beehive.

“March, April Coming” originally appeared in Living on Salt and Stone (Stone Man Press, 1984)