A Green Mountain Idyll - Poems for Hayden Carruth










There is a deep beauty in things as they are —— Walker Evans A GREEN MOUNTAIN IDYLL —— POEMS FOR HAYDEN CARRUTH Hayden Carruth . Lorine Niedecker . Cid Corman . Theodore Enslin . Mary Oliver . Barbara Moraff . Bob Arnold . David Budbill . Paul Metcalf . Joel Oppenheimer . Rene Char . Sengai . Saigyo . Ryokan . Basho . Evan Strusinski . Issa . David Ray . Geof Hewitt . William Matthews . David Huddle . Millen Brand . Alain Bosquet . Janine Pommy Vega . Lyle Glazier . M. J. Bender . Peter Gurnis . David Giannini . Barbara Howes . Samuel Green . Greg Joly . Michael Hettich . Ozaki Hosai . Rocco Scotellaro . Peter Money . Terry Hauptman . Robert Nichols
From the Longhouse archive we have selected poets & poems reflecting a Vermont residence, now or once upon a time, or a friendship with Hayden Carruth, to align with and boost a celebration of events and readings in November around the state for Hayden. I’ve edited this modest garland — and it is our first roll at this sort of thing on-line. Its clear purpose is to share poems by Hayden from our pages along with many poets from the state as if a visit at the town grange. Dip into it whenever you wish. A few weeks ago I had mistakenly announced this November event as a poet laureate position for Hayden. Kindly laugh this off as wishful thinking on my part.

—— o ——

Once upon a time Hayden would come to visit us in our cabin by the river far down a back road, no literary strings at all, a couple waiting by the dim light of a woodfire. I recall one visit he made when he read aloud his entire long poem sequence The Sleeping Beauty that was yet to be published from Harper & Row. And then he made sure we got the only credit for a magazine that published one poem from the sequence and that was the poem he left with me the next morning after a blueberry breakfast with all the fixings. He inscribed in one of his books for us just that flavor of Susan's home cooking. Soon after, he was gone from Vermont to Syracuse, NY; finally a steady paying job, teaching at the university and a whole new poem came flooding forth.

Ten years later we read together at The Clark Art Museum. Hayden started off with a poem we first published in Longhouse, "Regarding Chainsaws". We include it here. A dandy of a poem. I was always partial to the early lean years work — where the treasure-chest anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us was edited from his tiny cowshed writing hut, over-stuffed with books, box woodstove and postcard photo of Ezra Pound on the wall. Those elusive New Directions books of poems that came with a certain haunting quality from a certain haunting existence forever making ends meet; every single poem a gem in From Snow and Rock, From Chaos. Only Hayden could describe for us just where he'd been, settling in Vermont after illness, some mainstream publishing and as the editor of Poetry; now in a tiny house bought for peanuts, but still tough when you are only making peanuts, and raising a young family in Johnson, Vt. Back then in the early 60s — before the influx of communes and the long hair tribe of poets — one had to feel cut off from the literary world chopping out as a full-time resident copy editing, review writing, any nickel and dime chore and counting as your best friend a neighbor farmer called Marshall.

You bet it sounded that romantic to me as a young poet born in these hills and coming to live deeper in. I know it did with some other poets who came here about the same time rousing closing 60s and early 70s. It shows forth in all our poems. What was once romantic — and the struggle is to hold onto that love — was quickly burned off into a hardcore sense of literary maintenance and making a daily living right where you stood. A million miles from anywhere — lodged with local farmers, mechanics, loggers, dimwits, uncanny geniuses. If you listen just right today you may just find a peep-hole left of that time. But back in that day, it was the work of Hayden Carruth and Ted Enslin in Maine who were the man.

No small wonder that when Susan and I were married, like knuckleheads, we went to look for Hayden on our honeymoon up in Johnson, and inviting us in for supper and the night he and Rose Marie put us up on their screen porch, by the brook. Like some ancient tale, we went to find that house and brook almost thirty years later with no luck. As Hayden will grimly remind us in his autobiography Reluctantly, scraping together a living out in the country, one was lucky to have the time to lift one's head to see the foliage, never mind the pretty countryside. Irony has always made the finest country poem.
—— o ——
The following poems have been culled from issues of Longhouse spanning from 1971 and still thriving. Needless to say Hayden Carruth was an early supporter and contributor to our pages, often tipping off poets to send us work, stamps and any means of subsistence since we published forever without grants or funding of any kind. His kindness to struggling poets is of legend rather than any myth. And through the kindness of strangers we continue on and share these many voices forever within us.
—— Bob Arnold
Hayden Carruth
SILENCES North people known for silence. Long dark of winter. Norrland families go months without talking, Eskimos also, except bursts of sporadic errie song. South people different. Right and wrong all crystal there and they squabble, no fears, though they praise north silence. “Ho,” philosophical types, men of peace.” But take notice please of what happens. Winter on the brain. You’re literate, so words are what you feel. Then you’re struck dumb. To which love will you speak the words that mean dying and going insane and the absolute futility of the real?


Lorine Niedecker
Something in the water like a flower will devour water flower



Cid Corman
from IN THE LONG RUN Drink up - friend - while you can. Today is. What glory is glories in this is. Rock holds dust - hope a cup. Drink to this.



Theodore Enslin
A CONSTANCY Love in old age is a fire of coals burns in to the core and becomes smaller only to see it smaller it rises in any sudden gust becomes larger as the youth who kindled it when he did not know the tending needed now that he does one more stoking it bursts in new flower the jewels of fire any place any time


Mary Oliver
RACCOON Roadkilled. Huddled at the side of the road. You take him up in your arms and walk into the shade of the deeper trees, beyond the blast of the summer sun, and curious dogs. You hope it was quick. You hope it didn’t hurt too much. You know he is your brother, you know how many roads flow through the world, how many bodies crawl toward the dark, how many days are marred by the bloody flick of grief, how many questions will never be answered. You put him down, you cover him over with thorns and leaves and walk away thinking, as you must, joy to the leaves, joy to the light, joy to the cycles past pain. c Mary Oliver


Barbara Moraff
WHAT DO YOU MEAN HOW DO YOU GET TO VERMONT? no one to dance with dance with falling leaves shadows at woods edge hallucinate water wind into laughing deer step lightly fade into foliage deciduous mist exposing nothing not there


Bob Arnold
THE REASON I LOVE TO BUILD STONE WALLS and have for so long is that I need few tools to do the job I could walk to work free at hand nearly whistling until I arrive ( not wanting to look too happy ) and the stones are there lopsided appearing miserably out of place to someone else as I kneel maybe with a 3 lb. hammer I’ve brought along for company



Hayden Carruth
NEAR ROCHE-COLOMBE The springtime so impetuous. Already pink blossoms Are drifting down, a flurry in the peach grove At the high end of the vallon. Sometimes They become less pink than mauve, Less mauve than deep rose, when clouds hide the sunshine And the mountains darken. Then again they are gossamer Weaving in brightness, falling, billowing, Wavering. The old brown woman below At her goat-tending looks up to see them and to see The mysterious wind spun From mountain stone that takes them, whirls them free And up, up, in a vortex. With them Her eyes too move upward. For always there is a falling And a rising within, this beautiful helical rhythm, And always, it seems, a vision calling and calling.


David Budbill
AFTER READING MENG CHAIO’S “SEEING OFF MASTER TAN” There’s never any money! All my wife and I do is worry and fight. I suffer to make these poems! I wish I could be like Master Tan and go from place to place begging for someone to pay my health insurance premiums, car repair bills and property taxes. But I can’t. I have to suffer in silence and alone, pretending there is nothing wrong. I know that since ancient times real poets have never gotten fat. What I can’t comprehend is how Master Tan could grow old, hungry and neglected because of poetry, yet never dry up, never became ironic, nasty, sarcastic or bitter. How did he keep his innocence? How could his sweet and grieving tears, even when he was an old man, still fall like rain?


Paul Metcalf
DEATH OF DOSTOYEVSKY the depression of a deep russian: deep rest

Joel Oppenheimer
HYACINTHS an april fool hi, a shy cunt, hunt shy i, a.c. ah, tushy, inc. such tiny ah. uh, i shy, can’t.




Rene Char
L’AMANTE / THE LOVER for M.C.C. So much had passion seized me for this delectable lover, I not exempt from effusion and vibrant lubricity, I was, was not to have died quietly or toned down, acknowledged merely by my lover’s eyelids. Nights of a wild novelty had rediscovered the ardent communicating saliva, and perfumed her feverish belonging. Thousands of adulterated precautions invited me to the most voluptuous flesh ever. In our hands a desire from beyond destiny, what fear at our lips tomorrow?
-translated by Cid Corman




Sengai
Just resting — letting the breezes make a thing of a body — -translated by Cid Corman



Saigyo
You are so nicely into the weave you wear and beyond undoing — ah to be woven with you — to have become that close. -translated by Cid Corman


Ryokan
Lost in a dreamworld and once again the dream ends grass for a pillow awakening all alone having to think of it too. -translated by Cid Corman


Sengai
Forget alone and forget you have forgotten — have it both your ways. -translated by Cid Corman


Saigyo
With snow fallen on field paths and mountain paths too covering them up who knows where anything is — all goings up in the air -translated by Cid Corman


Basho
Nothing lasts forever That’s the trouble with it. -translated by Cid Corman





Hayden Carruth
THE MINUTE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BIRDS AND LEAVES She lay unmoving a moment longer, silver thighs Still splayed, breasts tilted apart so that the bones Of her chest showed like interlocked fingers while she looked outward To moonlight and gleaming, billowing trees, And then she turned on her side and said — But he did not hear The words flutter down on him, touching, tickling With little brittle feet, pecking the meal Of his arms and belly, the golden grain; he heard rather The unspoken that is always eloquent, her few pleas, Echoes very distant behind the lanterns of his eyes. He rose then, scattering words, and went to the window shivering. Cold boards fed the hunger in his feet. He looked at the trees In silver frost, leaves falling, severing themselves and falling, Their silence falling in moonlight, falling all night without wind, Mouths falling, searching the whole body of earth with their kisses.


Evan Strusinski
I say your name and suddenly it’s as if you were here. But you’re not. I say your name again.

Cid Corman
No one star in heaven too many no matter how many come or go.


Issa
Morning glories enough thatching for this hut. --translated by Cid Corman


David Ray
VISIT TO HELL Smoky Civil War woods, teardrops of Issa all along the rail, a bit of mist, fog of my own. I could date it.

Geof Hewitt
UNTITLED These electrical storms razz me coming on at last after so much holding off: high humidity, THI, & sweat seeps in through bones Zip crash lightning won’t hit me let the wet pellets rejoice as I dance in the mud, naked & pink like the pigs & later, after dark, the storm provides our clearest light
William Matthews
SOMETHING STRANGE IN DAVE JEFFERIES APARTMENT Well, the phone lists like an old boxer’s nose. Ring, ring. It’s Sugar Ray on the nose. Jake, he says, you cheap punk, your cornflower blue trunks don’t impress me, you wouldn’t last three rounds with Bucky Fuller. Dave gasps, this phone call is for Jake LaMotta, not me. The rest of us are sad. The nose is counting to ten and sounds authentic; we hang up just in time. Oh Lord how long this gonna go on elsewhere, always elsewhere.


David Huddle
SUNDAY DINNER If the whole length of the white tableclothed table my grandparents called each other Old Devil, Battle Ax, Bastard, and Bitch, if having stopped smoking for Lent, Mother was in a pout, if New Deal politics had my father telling us how much he loathed Roosevelt, if Grandma Lawson’s notion that we boys needed a dose of worm potion had Charles crying hard not to look amused and Bill whining for dessert even though he hadn’t finished his beets, if all this and Uncle Lawrence’s thick White Owl smoke, Aunt Elrica’s hoots, and Inez’s craziness weren’t my one truth, I’d ask to be excused.


Joel Oppenheimer
23 MARCH art, zat strain means a daft i do in which tzara married irrevocably us and his dada manifesto.




David Ray
ACADEMIC Fierce hand to hand fighting all around as I go writing my poems --

THOUGHTS ON THE WHITE HOUSE So this is where they decide to kill all the pretty people, where the disconnections get said in the head, where the wrong dreams get dreamt, where Arlington is driven out to with caisson or hired limousine. It is a thought that makes the hipflask shake in the hand, that makes the bus lights massacre innocent creatures in the dark



Millen Brand
THE PAPER CRANES I notice a paper crane. I ask about it. I’m told this story: Some ten years after the A-bombs a twelve-year-old girl in Hiroshima, Sadako Sasaki, who had been exposed to the bomb, contracted leukemia. A friend sent her a letter in the hospital, enclosing--for health--a paper crane, small, an inch and a half long with a tapering neck and folded-over sharp beak. The crane in Japanese legend lives a thousand years, so a paper crane is a symbol of health, and there is a belief that if you fold a thousand cranes you will get well. Sadako decided to fold a thousand cranes. She folded nine hundred and sixty-four and died. After she died, her classmates at Nobori-cho Elementary School in grief and love wanted a statue for her and for all the children who died. Funds were raised nationally, and in Hiroshima’s Heiwa Koen --Peace Park-- a statue was put up: high on a three-pronged pedestal, a young girl who in her raised arms holds the thin outline of a paper crane. At the statue’s base in a rainbow torrent of color are thousands of actual paper cranes and the words, “This is our cry, this is our prayer-- to establish peace in the world.”


Bob Arnold
THE FACE OF A DICTATOR ( take your pick ) All that has made you Sick in the past Is present


Alain Bosquet (Edouard Roditi)
from SEVEN POEMS FROM: An Atheist’s Creed Tell me why I live. Tell me why I think. Tell me why I die. If you can tell me, then you’re my god, it’s because you believe in me for I grant you so many powers. Tell me why I walk. Tell me why I dream. Tell me why I am. But if you keep silent, I’m your god.


David Budbill
WHAT I HEARD AT THE DISCOUNT DEPARTMENT STORE Don’t touch that. And stop your whining too. Stop it. I mean it. You know I do. If you don’t stop, I’ll give you fucking something to cry about right here and don’t you think I won’t either. So she did. She slapped him across the face. And you could hear the snap of flesh against flesh half-way across the store. Then he wasn’t whining anymore. Instead, he wept. His little body heaved and shivered and wept. He was seven or eight. She was maybe thirty. Above her left breast, the pin said: Nurse’s Aide. Now they walk hand in hand down the aisle between the tables piled with tennis shoes and underpants and plastic bags of socks. I told you I would. You knew I would. You can’t get away with shit like that with me, You know you can’t. You’re not in school anymore. You’re with your mother now. You can get away with fucking murder here, but you can’t get away with shit like that with me. Stop that crying now I say or I’ll give you another little something like I did before. That’s better. That’s a whole lot better. You know you can’t do that with me. You’re with your mother now.


Janine Pommy Vega
HUMAN PRAYER Sing Sing entrance stands over the shoreline of the Hudson River to the left behind barbed wire topped wall is a ball field someone hits a triple as the sun goes down to the right sprawled along the river is lover’s lane, a kid peels out in a blue car, the squeal of tires and one side is inside and one side is outside the same plane passing through the same sky over both inside, walking out through stone corridors I rub a little lipstick on the wall.



Lyle Glazier
THE SHANTIES - 1 - West window looks to the river beyond houses strung on a valley road east window looks to the mountain We hear the drag of the saw a long time before we see the dustcloud A team is unloading in the bay Perry snags logs with a canthook Maurice is sawing Pop brings Mayflowers in April swamp pinks in June wild honeysuckle in July - 2 - Schoolnights early to bed from the upper bunk we boys hear voices “Keep your eye on this one, Harry, my ringer will slip between the legs of your leaner without touching a hair” - 3 - Dead level under apple boughs April to June is muddy, Mel and I carry lard pails to the spring box, the slope spongy with bluets



M.J. Bender
from VERSUS I Black Ash corn borders Northern White Flint barbwire bends around mounds of stone -- tear out the eyes of each one slain beaver mink otter fox each inclination shot flayed and off to market skin exchanged for perfect duty kersey duffel stammels shags and beys



Peter Gurnis
CANTERBURY, N.H. Shaker- chair on the peg of noon, eclipsed sisterhood, brother built wagons, good gardens in a church that lacks only roe.



David Giannini
SILENCE OF STONE
Voice of the workman sounding over his idling tractor: "What the fuck tip of rock is this?" Does he think silence waits to be taken custody? What he unearths be- comes a figure fit to feel as sculpture — fingers of neighbor kids playing on stone valleys and chipped peaks glinting and rain worn but in stance — still — of silence untaken — standing its ground — rock as rock must be: locked voice of an ancient future the ants walk


Barbara Moraff
THINGS TO DO IN VERMONT Everything that needs to be done. Oh well, till that garden in October and lay down vegetable debris which with poorman’s fertilizer (snow) will nourish the earth. Stack the firewood in non-collapsible way. Clean out the chimneys. Plant bulbs. Visit yr downcountry neighbor & milk his goat faster than he can, smile & stand back, waiting for him to say “cheese”. Getyr car an oil change, check the tires & air filters. Sing a song to yr steer before you shoot his brains out. This is all called Giving Thanks Properly. It effectively prevents: earthquake, dropsy, cabin-fever and the other winter ailments we northcountry folk are heir to. It’s also a good idea to buy or make a good wintercoat, epoxy the holes in those old mudkickers. There are other things you can do in Vermont. So goes the rumor: like observe how the clouds thin deceptively before blizzard, let go of yr natural hostility & don’t accuse anyone of running a junkyard; he’s only making his ends meet.

Hayden Carruth
UBI AMOR This too I affirm sacred, here beneath yellow birch and hophornbeam, hiddenness in our discovered glen when we see the snake gliding from the rock pool, the Bo and I — snake gliding on crystal in shaded sun, in sunsplatter, the Bo and i — we urgent and outgoing, intent now, going down away through into crystal and the snake’s perfection - our movement against leaf-shadow and the mosaic of stone — a blue world, for all the colors of autumn, even brown or the brown-gray, are purity, blue on the boy’s arm taut in extension, downward, a thought muted in his movement to shadow and stone, to object — I too joined there inseparable. He tosses back his blue-gold hair, thought again transparent in movement, his ecstasy, a being gone from itself, tough in its way, and then smiling, touching me — oh from this my own dulled edge beyond pain, m’elevasti, my Bo — this, this is the love that transmutes thought beyond selfhood, so now I say it, descending still, leaf-fall, year-fall, the irretrievable — a boy and a man, son and father in the blue world where a snake glides from the rock pool.

Bob Arnold
IS IT river flowing beneath the stars or stars flowing over the river

Barbara Howes
HUNTING-SEASON MORNING-SOUNDS Furry with sleep, he struggled Up; shoved food; took off: By 5:30, night still Drooped over my window, Then siphoning sound began: Here, a junker swerving -- Each corner its last -- Now the idling hum of taxis To La Guardia; later, A BB gun -- a kid -- shot Robert’s heifers. Six prime bucks leapt our road. Furry with sleep, he died.


Samuel Green
GRUBS Working with the bark spud peeling cedar logs for the shed I uncover white grubs, wrinkled & thick as my little finger. They have powerful jaws. Working in the dark, blind, in faith toward whatever they might become, they leave delicate etchings in the wood. I have to say that I understood them more than the squawking, squabbling chickens who crowded to peck them from my unprotected hand.



Theodore Enslin
MAPLE STUDY There is a spell cast over everything I see or touch -- not a usual magic. What adheres is my own. A simple fact of being. Things count but this is the tree and shadow I have made. You by me will have your own version of what may not be at all.

Greg Joly
LESSON Topping off the wheelbarrow, I ask jay where he wants the dirt dumped. Looking up from spade work, he eyes me, “Not dirt. Earth.”


Michael Hettich
THESE ROADS lead nowhere. We build them to get here. At night we put up our tents and lie thinking of our families, listening to bugs bounce off the canvas. We dream of our new road. A few miles behind us others follow building houses. Behind them others fill the houses with furniture, fill the cupboards with food and plates, make sure everything works. Others build stores and schools, and then, way back, the families, scared-looking, sweaty, walk, reading the number on each house. In every garage a shiny car. In every kitchen a modern stove. There are plenty of jobs building. There are plenty of toys for the children.


Mary Oliver
WAITING FOR RAIN Down by the stream that has thinned to a single stroke the bobwhite’s parched cry thickens. Some streams run deep, some run shallow. Some summers are dry. Oh, I think, standing in a dusty field, what can beauty do, or happiness, that the simple rain cannot? On one or two small berries the mockingbird keeps his fires going. But his music all day floats like smoke, remembering, extolling the elusive crystal of water, the huge down-driving resurrection. And the shimmering taste of it. c Mary Oliver


Bob Arnold
TOUGH Leaf hangs To one beat-up Sawmill log


Theodore Enslin
from HDT Why do men split wood? Round, as it comes from the tree, one stick, unsplit, will burn as long as two of the same size split -- often through knots and twisted grains, to try the patience of the axeman. The midsection burns fastest, as the moisture is forced out both ends -- so that eventually the two ends can be raked together and burned again. I cut my wood, and sort it for different size stoves -- the largest for the furnace, the next size for the library stove, smaller sticks -- the branches that many scorn and leave in the woods to rot -- for the kitchen range, and the short ends left over for the Franklin stove which heats the bedroom on cold nights. Unless a stick is too large to fit through the openings, not one of them is split. I haven’t laid hand to an axe this season. But if I tell an old-timer about this, he reaches for his wedges and splitting maul, muttering about more heat from split wood. Nearly everything, down to two inch sticks, is split, and has been for generations. At the end of the year, if we were to balance accounts, I imagine I burn a third less, and keep just as warm (unless part of the value in splitting is in warming one’s self at the chopping block) as those who burn their mountains of splinters, for no good except that their fathers and grandfathers did the same. --
3/21/87 — something after all and all in all the snow that melts almost as it falls


David Ray
FOR GALWAY, MY VERMONT LANDLORD You said to pull the burdocks, hear ‘em crack. And shoot the porcupines that eat the house-beams down. But one was quite enough, my first and last. He stared out from the woodpile’s top, dared me to go ahead and shoot. I did, and watched him in his own slow time uncurl my father’s hands.



Hayden Carruth
TO A FRIEND NEVER SEEN Words we are; you this bundle of blue aerograms, postmark Kyoto. I imagine nothing, why should I (scent of tea, flowers and fat gongs, the god smiling at your elbow) nothing, no face. Nothing; give no face, ask none. Two poets, worlds apart, words — what better? Not man but man’s being, steadiness almost flame. The postmark’s song: Kyoto meaning steadiness, faded now, dogeared but still the same, calling my steadiness. Would not do for brotherhood in the ordinary way, that sweetness of knowledge. To lack knowledge is more rare. To “know” only what is, to see, to see, between vision and memory — white panther on hemlock bough, the crouching snow, drops, a miniature, glass globe of the eye, and the brief good scream of the doe —echo, echo sweet to mortality — here, there, Clay Hill or Kyoto. No more needed. This song, this fall of the moment, being — sung only in words.



Ozaki Hosai
Without a bowl both hands receiving
-translated by Cid Corman




Cid Corman
We are offspring the earth as earth of sky and sky of emptiness --
Everything is coming to a head — meaning blossoms yet to fall.



Rocco Scotellaro
Day is done, and we too have been brought to play with the clothes and the shoes and the faces we had. The hares have gone to their burrows and the cocks crow, the face of my mother returns to the fireplace. -translated by Cid Corman




Peter Money

WHEN JOE SPENCE PUT DOWN HIS GUITAR
(after a painting by Barbara Jackson; for R.C.)

you go to this island & there’s a road
& you take it and follow to the end
& across from Mom’s there’s a little place
& you walk in & Maizie’ll feed you
fritters & fingers & in the back there’s a jukebox
& you think this’s better’n Paris-
Miami-Florence, & you don’t play
anything ‘cause there’s music all around
& it’s quiet.





Lyle Glazier
SUGARING OFF Easter vacation he tramps the Gutter Road from Gramp’s to Uncle Maurice’s where the whole family’s sugaring Lynn and Orman and Calvin trip metal caps off buckets under spiles draining the sugar bush Merle bossing the gathering tub slewing, team straining, bobsled runners grating on a ledge Perry shoves another slab in the firebox “a gallon to the barrel, boys, get a move on!” Maurice tips the dipper, testing In the kitchen Aunt Pluma boils down a batch for fancy sugar cakes: stars, hearts, scaled fish Loyce and Thelma spoon snow from a dishpan into pie plates the thick glaze pulls at the fork “a little goes a long ways”


Terry Hauptman
AT THE CEDAR LEBANON HOSPITAL At the Cedar Lebanon Hospital your mother wondered why all the mothers were weeping so ecstatically over the births of their babies She was sure she was the only mother who wanted to die At The Dry Harbor Nursing Home your mother wondered why everyone wanted to die She was sure she was the only one who wanted to live


Bob Arnold
A TREE FULL OF BIRDS for Janine Pommy Vega That’s what I heard one morning In a no-nothing town between Phoenix and Tucson, where it Appeared desolate and desperate With a mall and motel and a big Highway running through it all And even the motel desk didn’t Know the name of the route number Of the highway when I asked the Next morning with a desire to go To the mountains north — as if no One went to the mountains from here — But I did, and before I left, hours Before I asked any questions, birds By the hundreds came to the trees and Bushes of this motel square, dipping Even into the swimming pool, and whether It was sunrise that lit each bird yellow Or if in fact they were yellow and each Singing magnificently in the coolness of Daybreak when I was awakened gladly And stepped out my door and onto a long Balcony to see and hear and feel the most Beautiful day in the world begin


Barbara Moraff
DAKINISONG Only a woman can attain the annual abundance of utter satisfaction of desire. How sad to be born a male. How unfortunate to be a man who does not realize the feminine! Only a woman can unite insight compassion & skillful means, her skin blazing with cool fire. How sad to be born a male. How unfortunate to be a man attached to what’s given! Only a woman can flow w/unbiased tenderness ripe as peaches in sunlight, to all, excepting none. How sad to be born a male. How unfortunate to be a man attached to bias as survival! Only a woman appreciates body speech & mind as being the same whether in harmony or strife. How sad to be born a male. How unfortunate to be a man who does not realize his feminine nature! Only a woman can experience suffering as being bliss arising, birthwet wings of butterfly, arid dry rasp of cocoon. How sad to be born a male. How unfortunate to be a man who ignores the natural state! The truth is there is nothing special to do; nothing special to say. The key is to relax in the natural state, the mahamudra before accepting & rejecting, the mahamudra before ignorance & wisdom, the mahamudra before the fish-hook strike of concept. The key is Be grateful to everyone. This is difficult; to be sure it is harder than solving a Koan.



Bob Arnold
Everlasting Some things never change —— Under your dress Hours later Entirely feel Our river swim


Hayden Carruth
REGARDING CHAINSAWS The first chainsaw I owned years ago Was an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn’t start. Jas Laughlin gave it to me that was my friend. Well, I’ve had enemies that couldn’t of done No worse. I took it to Ward’s over to Morrisville, And no doubt they tinkered it as best they could, But it still wouldn’t start. One time later I took it down to the last bolt and gasket And put back together again, hoping Somehow I’d do something accidental-like That would make it go. You know the way you do. Then I yanked on it 450 times, As I figured afterwards, and give myself A bursitis in the elbow that went five years Even after Doc Barber shot it full Of cortisone and near killed me when he hit A nerve dead on. Old Phil wanted that saw. Figured I was a greenhorn that didn’t know Nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was, You could say, green as bile and twice as ugly, But a fair hand at tinkering. “Phil,” I said, “You’re a neighbor, I like you, and I wouldn’t Sell that tarnation thing to nobody, except Vice-President Nixon.” But Phil persisted. He always did. One time we was standing Gabbing in his side dooryard, and he spied That saw in the back of my pickup. He run Quick inside, then come out and stuck a double Sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed That saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I Drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight With a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it With both hands. Two or three days after, I asked him, I says, “How you doing with that McCulloch, Phil?” ‘Well,” he says, “I tooken It down to scrap, and I buried it in three Separate places yonder on the upper side Of the potato piece. You can’t be too careful,” He says, “when you’re disposing of a hex.” The next saw I had was a godawful ancient Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for, Temperamental as a ram, too, but I liked it. It used to remind me of Dry and how he’d Clap that saw a couple of times with the flat Of his double-bitted axe to make it go And how he honed the chain with a worn-down File stuck into an old baseball. I worked That saw for years. Why, I used to put up Forty-five run a year to keep my stoves Hot all winter in them days. I couldn’t Now, it’d kill me. Well, of course they got These modern Swedish saws now that can take All the worry out of it. What’s the good Of that? Takes all the fun out, too, don’t it? Why, I reckon. I mind when David Budbill snagged An old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple And it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn’t play “Green Dolphin Street” on his trumpet like Peter Candoli No more, and then when Toby Wolff was holding A beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up And the saw skidded crossways and nipped off One of Toby’s fingers. That’s more like it. Makes you know you’re living. But mostly they wan’t Dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your Back. Old Phil, he was a buller and a jammer In his time, no two ways about that, but he Never sawed himself. Phil had the sugar All his life, and he wan’t always too careful About his diet and the injections. He lost All the feeling in his legs from the knees down. One time he started up his Powerwagon Out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch, And she jumped frontwards right through the wall And into the manure pit. He just set there, Swearing like you could of heard it in St. Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said, “Phil, what’s got into you?” “Missus,” he says, “Ain’t nothing got into me. Can’t you see? It’s me that’s got into this here pile of shit.” Well, not much later they took away one of his Legs, and six months after that they took The other and left him setting in his old chair With a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever He felt himself sinking. I remember that chair. Phil reupholstered it with an old bearskin That must of come down from his great-great- Grandfather. Why, I swear it had grit in it From the Civil War and a bullet hole big As your mouth. Phil latched the pieces together With rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was Always breaking and coming undone. About then I quit stopping by to see Old Phil, and I Don’t feel good about that neither. But my mother Was having her strokes then. I figured One person coming apart was as much As a man can stand. Then Phil was put in the Nursing home, and then he died. I always Remember how he planted them pieces of spooked McCulloch up above the potatoes. Funny, Sometimes I used to think I’d go up there To see if anything sprouted. You know how A man gets took by notions once in a while. But I never did it. I reckon it’s just as well.
Robert Nichols
from The Last Farmer -a mythology- AUTHOR’S AFTERWARD This is a story about a last person. The last person does not disappear easily. He is either beaten; or he becomes absorbed in the system. In which case he is another person. He is undistinguishable from the rest of us. We no longer recognize him as a survivor. There have been pressures on the American family farm in the modern world such that the farmer either fails, he goes to the city or stays on selling off land for house lots - or he becomes successful and moves on into agribusiness either as owner or part-owner of a corporation or as the agent for someone else. But in neither case is there left the farmer as we think of him, or farming as it has been part of the American experience. The last farmer has eluded us. We find him only in myth. What we want in myth is the last farmer farming: doing the same actions, performing the same tasks as he would do on his own farm every day - and against the background of the farm’s annihilation. There is a peculiar act of will involved, an ambiguity, in the story of last things or last people: where we are insisting on a fate which has come, and which has not come. In a sense we are holding apart two moments in the time process. Suspending them, holding them one over the other, as in a superimposed photograph taken with the camera. Mythologizing is not so much an act of the imagination or heroic exaggeration (though that may be part of it: Gargantua eats fifty sheep at one sitting). But of a quite literal displacement. In which ordinary acts and traits of character - what we once considered to be beautiful or valuable, or at least useful, or at least natural - are preserved in a world in which they are no longer possible. Perhaps we should speak not of the novel, but of a particular form whose essential condition is an act of balance (like watching an acrobat on the high wire) of deliberately not resolving certain tensions, of maintaining a precarious equilibrium. In this world where neither resistance nor flight is possible and which is simply what it is, it doesn’t pay us much to focus exclusively on relations of character. But what about the others? in this story of Asa, a farmer in Western Massachusetts during certain years. In this case the three women move through the story with him, who were close to him, and stood at the edge of his world? What we would expect to find here is not so much relations made completely explicit, but rather a sensibility, an awareness of mysteries and possibilities, a state which is between love and bafflement. It is this place, this psychological landscape, that I have called in this story “Shattagee.” THE LAST FARMER, a mythology Chapter 38 / “It sure looks good, you’ll have to admit that”. I was calling Anna’s attention to the weathervane. The shaft gleamed boldly and the tail vanes swung from side to side in the breeze, a banner to Asa’s recklessness. Asa had lost no time after his confrontation with Bumpers in following up his contact with the Yankee Milk Producers Association. He had stopped by on the way back from Amherst. His dealings with the farmers cooperative before had been minimal. He had paid his small dues over the years and then allowed them to lapse. Now he was paid up again. But the prospects were clouded. The organization had once been strong among the New England farmers of the area. It had its own processing plant and marketing outlets, but was now largely an insurance organization. It was limited to a pickup route with a few tank trucks, and to providing farmers with a temporary sales outlet for their milk, between contracts with the commercial creameries. Having made his surprising move against Bumpers and taken out his insurance with YMPA, Asa’s mood was confident. Meanwhile, Dairymart continued its pick-ups at the farm. Under the usual circumstances there was a three-month period when the distributor was legally bound to continue his collections, after the expiration of an agreement. But Anna found to her dismay that this might not be the case with them. As it had been Asa who had terminated the contract, the three-months grace period might not apply. The pick-ups would stop at the end of the month possibly. As the Dairymart truck drove into the yard each day, pulled beside the milkhouse, and the man drew out the long salmon-colored hose to siphon off the holding tank, Flo and I would watch him with misgivings. One Saturday when she was there, Anna asked how long he would be coming. The driver shrugged. Apparently he did not know either. “Well, Asa’s happy. At the end of the month they’ll give him his last check and that’ll be the end of it with Dairymart,” Anna predicted. * Flo and I were bringing in the cows. I had just swung open the gate from the lane into the trampled barnyard. The barn door was shut and the cows milled around. Asa was inside the barn getting ready for milking, putting hay in the stalls and setting out the grain. In the yard a frisky cow, in heat, would mount another cow. Backed up in a mass, an animal would bellow, her head raised. The leaders pressed against the barn door as if they were particularly hungry and impatient for Asa to finish his chores. Finally Asa opened the door and called, “Come on ladies. Let’s go!” On August 31 the pick-ups stopped. The following day no truck from the creamery pulled into the yard under the big poplar and circled by the milkhouse with a called greeting from the driver. Anna, looking glum had said before leaving for work. “Well, I certainly don’t expect him. They’re a big outfit and they operate on schedule.” The yard seemed strangely empty. It was not the first time that milk deliveries had been interrupted at the Bigelow farm. In earlier years, after terminating with one company, Asa had signed a contract with another to continue with the milk pick-ups. There had been times when there had been some interval between. There was still some excess capacity in the thousand gallon bulk tank. That evening Asa walked back and forth preparing the stalls in the barn as usual. Joel was away. Asa working alone clamped the milking cups on the udder of each cow and the milk was carried to the tank through the vacuum line. He was in no hurry evidently. Nevertheless, when the milk truck from YMPA pulled into the yard the next day, Asa called out to the driver, “Well, I’m sure glad to see you!” He was relieved. It soon became apparent that YMPA was not be counted on. The milk was trucked to the organization headquarters in Brattleboro and then sold when a buyer could be arranged for. By law it was a maximum of five days that milk could be held in refrigerated tanks in the coop. It was not always there were buyers. The cooperative did not have its own outlets to the larger cities. With Asa’s tank, size was the limiting factor. The milk would keep for several days but the tank was not large enough to hold the volume for milk. The two men cleaned out an older discarded tank which had been used before they bought the new one, and was still good. With this arrangement they could still keep on milking, even though the YMPA truck missed a day, or sometimes two. When the tanks were near full it was an anxious time. It became the habit of the family to wait for the milk truck. Asa said: “It’s too bad we have to depend on them. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take it into Boston and just sell it!” Joel suggested that, since I worked out of Boston, maybe I should become the Bigelow agent. Anna said, “A couple of farmers in overalls selling milk on the street corners! Well, you can’t turn the clock back.” Whether the cooperative truck came or not, the cows had to be milked twice a day. In the morning before breakfast or around four in the afternoon the cows, lumbering into their stalls, were unaware of the wider complications. Their pleasure was to be grained and have their bags emptied. Anna was helping her brother one late afternoon. Asa went ahead down the line of stalls wiping the udders with a clean cloth, while Anna applied the milking machine to each animal. “Here’s one,” Anna said, “got a weak hind quarter.” She hung the vacuum cups onto the stanchion and stripped the udder by hand. That part of the udder had been torn perhaps; the other quarters were full and healthy. Anna said, “Wonder how they feel when they’re not stripped?” Both had been to auctions and seen with anger the pathetic beasts whose owners had not bothered to milk them for several days. “Painful, I guess.” “What’ll we do if he don’t come?” Asa: “We’ll just have to milk and throw it away. We can’t stop milking.” In fact there be days ahead when they would be throwing the milk away ... intervals when the collection truck had been unable to come and we had all stood in the milkroom and watched the white liquid spill onto the floor and sink into the drain. Asa had pulled the plug. I had felt then Anna’s bitterness. In the old days on the hill farms it had been the custom to “dry off” cows each winter, by regulating the breeding dates. Milking had been a summer activity. Nowadays the scheduling was constant. The cows were genetically programmed to give milk. And milk continued to flow into the holding tanks.




Hayden Carruth
SMALL PLEASURES In the way of a small song I would say how robin’s plantain grows as it were in long chryselephantine rows at the edges of weed-lots like little edges with enameled bergamots and golden black-eyed susans and other such ardent up-gazers for the Syracusans who look down to small pleasures.

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A GREEN MOUNTAIN IDYLL —— POEMS FOR HAYDEN CARRUTH