Letter To . . .

--December 2014

Dear Friend,

   They are playing our song, again:

Winter is icummen in,

Lhude sing Goddamm,

             Raineth drop and staineth slop,

           And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing Goddamm.

--Ezra Pound, from Ancient Music

   There was a light snow over much of southern Kansas yesterday and last night. One half inch where I am. Powder dry. It is the wind and the cold that kill. I know that it is worse where you are.

   Such weather takes me to Tate's 'Coming Down Cleveland Avenue', the first poem of The Lost Pilot and the one, at least for me, that set the tone for much that would come from him thereafter. And that is in part because I believe I witnessed that event on one cold snowy evening as I crossed a quiet Cleveland Avenue. You remember . . . that two block long bit of asphalt that hugged the north side of campus. Were you with me that evening? Ah, pity. From a distance I could see a couple nearing the end of the block, talking softly, the male voice sounding much like Jim's, laughing quietly, but by the time I reached the end of the street they were gone. A light breeze and the dry snow allowed no sign of human passage there.

   That was like Jim, a child of multiple worlds. Now you see him, now you don't. John Ashbery says "Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere." He got it right, I think, as far as he goes with it. Years ago Tate said he was wanting to capture moments of truth with his poetry. We both know that he knew how difficult a task he had set for himself; that you can not step into the same stream twice; that you can not even step into it once, for it is constantly changing. But in Memoir Of The Hawk he comes as close as possible while obliging us with a hawk's-eye view of the proceedings where, in the search for himself, for instance, he concludes "there was no me, / just flutterings, shudderings, and shadows."

   But I ramble. The last I remember of the three of us together was, I think, at a little bar in Chicapee, Kansas. It was summer, 1963. I was on my way to a newspaper back East. You were going to do graduate work and Jim had another year of undergraduate studies before heading off to Iowa. We toasted to the success of at least one of us becoming the writer we thought we could be. And while we knew that Jim was probably "the one most likely", we did not exclude ourselves from the possibility. It was the best of times.

   It is over 50 years later and I am wanting to finish this before the year is out, in keeping with our usual year-end greetings. I hope all is as well with you as it can be. I have much more I could/should say but will save it for later. Have a good new year, friend. Yours,


Gerald   

   

   

    

   

             

   

   

   

American Pastime

   The batter took a hard swing at a high fast ball, fouling it straight back. Then he stepped aside and looked at the bat for a long time. He brought it up to his nose and sniffed it all around. He looked and sniffed again. Pretty soon the catcher came out and looked at it too. The pitcher came off the mound and was heading toward home plate when the umpire motioned for them to get back to the game.

   What were they doing? the woman asked her companion.

   They were looking for burnt wood, he said. Some say that the seams of the ball will burn the wood if the speed of ball and bat are just right. If the wind is blowing out you can smell it as far away as the pitcher's mound. But it also takes a powerful, controlled stroke parallel to the plain of the seam with just the right amount of friction. Not too little, not too much.

   Is that true?  she asked.

   I don't know, he said. But Ted Williams said it was and I'd say he should know.

   They were in Kansas City for the weekend. It was a good game and the best afternoon he'd had in a long time and he was happy that she seemed interested in understanding baseball. Afterward, they went to the Plaza, got something to eat, and went back to the hotel where they went to bed, made love, and drifted slowly to dreaming about their day:

   Jack?  

   Hmm?

   Can you smell the burn?

   I love baseball, he said sleepily.

--glwarren, 2014

Haircut

You are where?  London?

Yes.
The last time I called it was Buenos Aires.

I know.

And the time before that, Majorca and Marseille.

I get around, don't I?

Well, wherever, I thought you might like to know that Jack has died.

. . . . Yes . . . . Thanks.

It has been some time ago and I meant to tell you sooner, but it has just kept slipping my mind.

   My hair tumbles down the barber's gray-striped cape. It has been six months since I was here last. And six months before that. And the old barber reminds me . . . again . . . that he used to cut my father's hair a long, long time ago. And . . . again . . . "Have you never met him?" And I will remind him, again, that Jack has been gone for some time now. He looks at me as if not understanding and then, "Oh, yes, I remember. You look so much like him," he says, and excuses himself a moment to take money from a customer.

   The hair on the cape appears coarse and colorless, like hair from an old dog dying. I have sometimes joked about it with the barber. What! This hair is not mine, I protest. But today, when I roll it between my fingers, it feels soft . . . soft and fine as baby's hair . . .  and strands of it float effortlessly across the room through shafts of morning light.

   Was this your hair, Father . . . ??

Before I was born?

Before Mother barred the door forever to your drunken forays?

Before voices told you, wrongly, that you could fly?

Before that fatal flight, eyes wild open, from the fourth floor of the Evergreen    Hotel?

Before I knew that I would never know you?

--glwarren, 2014

Anna's Hummingbird

   Lucy Willow was the first to see her, that emerald flit of a thing, the Anna's Hummingbird. From her place by the window she let out such a yowl that Emma Munson dropped a pan of fresh bread dough to go see what the matter was with her "dear, dear Lucy 'Pussy' Willow." Emma then phoned Ira Horn, erstwhile mayor and ornithologist, or vice versa, and he in turn forwarded the news to Audubon in the City. Audubon explained that the poor lost soul, through some dysfunction of migratory memory, had wandered far from her California home, but given enough time would right herself and make her way back. But here she was for now, the object of boundless admiration and relentless observation. Folks from as far as Chicago and New Orleans came to see the Anna's Hummingbird, and convoys of motorists from nearby cities daily poured onto the streets of the village and spilled back into the countryside . . . until one morning the village woke to find her gone.

   Anna, my Anna, took it as a sign. She had wandered from the prairies of western Minnesota to our town one late October. There was already snow in Minnesota, while here the fields were greening with winter wheat. With some encouragement, she stayed. She believed that some part of the primitive brain that lay dormant in us all would now and then stir an individual to behavior of a migratory nature that was impossible to resist. No one knew where it would lead them. She never got quite settled here, however, and became increasingly melancholic over time. After nearly three years she decided Kansas did not suit her personality. How had she described it? Ah, yes, "humdrum". She had grown tired of the humdrum of it all.  Making humdrum love in a humdrum town to the humdrum call of summer frogs up and down the river . . . It was not her idea of happiness. We stayed up late that night. Drank wine. Cried a little. Made love and then made love again. When I woke later that morning she was gone.

--glwarren, 2014

But then someday when your poor heart

Is on the mend

I might just pass this way again

--Gordon Lightfoot, For Lovin' Me

      

The French Connection?

   There is an opportunity presented us/we bloggers for observing the traffic drawn to our sites. It is stats for the number and origin of views per day, week, month, etc. I don't profess to understand how it works. I only see the numbers. And this day the stats show that visits from France greatly outnumber those from the United States. I'm hoping I am not or have not been misleading anyone. I am thinking the webcrawlers in use have been keying on some post(s) of mine, e.g. Slacker, and drawing the browser here. But it might be a little like having your metal detector set for precious metals and coming up with nickel and copper. If so, I apologize for what is probably a wasted visit. But maybe not.

  I'm certainly happy to have the French visit. And, after all, I have bandied Rimbaud's name about.  And to his I might add that of Camus . . . oh, oh! Ah well, both have had a great influence on me. 

  In 1962 or '63 I wrote a note to a young lady and stuck it inside a volume of Camus' notebooks (English version).  "Read this man," it began. "In him you will find me. In him I found myself." Yet I had to give up reading him. I was trying to find my own way at the time and the kindred voice of his work made my efforts appear imitative and redundant. As, of course, they were.

  Come one, come all.   

Who I Am

   An old man sat crying by the side of the road. He had been making his way to Amarillo when several young men in an automobile stopped and offered him a ride. Since it was a long distance he had yet to travel, he accepted, but as he was about to climb into the auto one of the young men grabbed his straw hat and sailed it high into the air where the wind caught it and carried it far into the adjacent meadow. Upon retrieving his hat he discovered that the young men, now gone, had taken the contents of his knapsack, including an old tin of papers and photographs and scattered them throughout the roadside grass. As I helped him gather those he said to me, "I am in here," and indicated the handful of papers he was inspecting before returning them to the tin. "This is who I am," he added, nodding.

   "Have  you no family?" I asked, being concerned that he was on the road alone.

   "None."

   "Wife and children?"  "No and no. Never wanted any."

   "Father?"  "A hopeless drunk."

   "Mother?"  "Died of bitterness."

   Then he realized that missing among his papers was a letter he valued above all other things, including his straw hat, and he began crying again. After several minutes of searching, we found it farther down the road, undamaged. The old man grinned and thanked me and wiped the remaining tears from his face with his sleeve.  "This is a letter from Auntie Gallagher," he explained as he added it to the tin. He would not accept a ride to Amarillo from me, being "once bitten" I suppose, but as we parted he shouted back:

   "She was the last living person to have known me when I was a child!"

-glwarren, 2014

Have and Have-not

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away

All this fussing and fighting,

Man, you know I sure can't stay.

Bandit

   We are driving through the park, Elphina and I, when we happen upon several young girls dancing with hoops to an arabesque. "Oh, I absolutely love rhythmic gymnastics!" Elphina effuses, and begs to stop a while. From a bench nearby we watch as the girls leap effortlessly through the cool morning mist, hands over hearts, hoops held guardedly forward, like Neruda's girls, "dreaming of bandits." 

   Thief that I am, aroused, I cross my legs to hide the fact, but Elphina has noticed and is on me in a second. "You bastard!" she whispers violently into my good ear. "You should be ashamed!" she reprimands. Pulling me from the bench by my collar, she leads the way to the car. "Son-of-a-bitch!" she curses ahead of me. "You have stolen my day!"

   "Ah, I love rhythmic gymnastics," I mutter to myself. "Absolutely," I say.

glwarren, 2014

   

Miscellany III


   Today I am 73. Somewhere amongst the detritus of a waning literary life there is a note that reads "Today I am 29."  Forty-four years and not much to show for it. The fault, if there be any, is not in my stars.

~~~~~~~~~~

   My mother always called me on my birthday. After singing the birthday song she would often remind me that she used to sing Melancholy Baby to me because "you were such a sad child!" 

   "Do you want me to sing it for you now?" 

   "No, Mother."  

   "Oh, come on!"  

   I would give in, of course, and she would sing the chorus. She had a nice, mellow, somewhat husky alto voice.  

   "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?"  

   "No. Thank you. Good night, Mother."

   "Good night, Jerry."

glwarren, 2014

Jack Joins The Circus

Just slip out the back, Jack

And get yourself free.

--Paul Simon, Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

   "Sop your beans with bread, Jack!" his papa told him. "Sop 'em up! The preacher's comin' and mama needs the table to pray on. And wash your face and comb your hair when you're done. No, no, I can't be here. There's chickens to put up for the night and wings to clip for some who try to fly the coop."

   So Jack slipped out the back and caught up with us in the field behind the house as we were making our way toward the encamped Ringling Bros. Circus. That night, after the show, we double dared him to proposition The Amazing Chameleon Woman! We hid in the tall grass near her tent. At the canvas flap that was her door, Jack called softly, "Hello? Miss . . . uh . . . Chameleon? he stammered. She soon appeared, a varicolored latex skin-of-a-sort peeled loose from one shoulder. Holding a lantern before her, she maneuvered to get a good look outside the tent, her big eyes popping to see who stood there in the dark.

   "What do you want?" she snapped.

   "I'm here . . . for . . . the night," he stammered again.

   "What? You must be dreaming, sonny!" she hissed. And then, to the surprise of us all, grabbed his arm and pulled his skinny little ass inside. We waited . . . and slept. The next we knew it was dawn and the tent was down and folded and about to be taken away. The entire circus was being readied to move to the next town. There was no sign of Jack. Weary from waiting, we went home without him.

   Jack's mama was understandably upset when he did not come home. We had nothing to offer about his disappearance other than after we split up we did not see him again that night. His papa suggested he might have run off with the circus and we let it go at that. A few days later, Murphy told me that Jack had it planned from the beginning.

  "Had what planned?"

  "Getting out of Kansas! You know! He's been talking about it from the get-go! I mean, since we were kids. In fact, he dared me to go see that woman himself and I double dared him right back! He knew I would, that sneaky little sonofabitch."

   "Why wouldn't he just join and be done with it?"

   "Who knows? Maybe they had something going."

   Some say they saw Jack with the circus in the next town. A few swear they ran into him later that year on the east coast near Ringling's winter quarters. We never saw him in Kansas again . . . except . . . maybe . . . years later . . . at the funerals of some old friends.

glwarren,2014

Miscellany II



   The coastal shanty town woman whose home was made of old shipping crates with some colorful cardboard pieces placed decoratively on the outside walls. A tropical storm had gone wide of the coast overnight and then back out to sea, sparing the town. "We were worried that we might lose everything," she said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

   And that would leave nothing. And at first I think that nothing is not relative. If you have nothing, you have nothing. That's it. But it occurs to me that it becomes relative when we consider that the resources available to each to recoup his/her losses will vary greatly. The woman, for instance, will have no insurance; will have no backup on the "cloud" for her digitized family photos that she also does not have; will most likely have no neighbors able to help "rebuild"; will have no online charitable site collecting funds for her. Yet the shanty town woman, because she has lived with nothing or next to nothing all her life, will be best able to cope of all who find themselves faced with nothing. "I've got plenty of nothing, and nothing's plenty for me," Porgy sings. And those who have "plenty of plenty" put a lock on their door.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

   Does nothing matter to me? Yes, it does. Nothing pleases me. I will collect nothing. There will be bottles with nothing in them, postcards with nothing written on them, heirloom photographs with nothing to identify their subjects. My friends will continue to give me nothing. And while nothing comes easily to me, it is not for nothing that I continue. I will stop for nothing and in nothing flat. Though nothing is wrong, nothing is right, so nothing will be good enough for me. In the end it will be all for nothing, for there is nothing like it. So thanks, thanks for nothing.

glwarren, 2014

   

     

Some Say . . . Ice

   His grandmother had told him the story of Icarus, so he became a child of the night sky. He liked to lay on the grass of the yard and imagine traveling to the farthest star. Not this one, nor the next, but the one after the one after that and so on. Try as he might, however, he never got much past the next one before his eyes clouded over and his effort became lost in the cold darkness above him.

   One night, resolving to get farther, he found himself seeing beyond everything he had seen before. Although his mind was spinning crazily and his eyes were turning around in his head, he pushed on until he found himself looking back at the known universe while he sped across what learned men refer to as the "event horizon" beyond which, those same learned men say, there is nothing and no return.

   When his grandmother, still in her apron, dish towel and plate in hand, came out to call him to bed, all that remained was a frosty deposit forming an outline where he had lain. There was a drafty chill throughout the yard. "Land sakes!" she exclaimed, shivering, "What is that boy up to now?"

glwarren, 2014 

   

  

Alone At Last

   Enola has skin like fine old leather, smooth, but brittle and worn scarily thin. I am careful when I touch her not to tear or bruise. Her breasts are like the flaps of pockets; her lips hard, thin lines that I am afraid may slit my own papery flesh if too passionately applied. We have met like this before, the first time being when Caroline died. We came together quite accidentally and in a conjugal way after the funeral and then agreed to do the same after the funeral of every friend until they were all gone. We reasoned that it would help to ease our sorrow.

   But wait, I ask, what will become of the other when, finally, as is certain to happen, one of us passes? Enola laughs uncontrollably, her side cramping, her ribs colliding and then, laughing still, cradles my face with her long sinewy fingers. "Don't be such a ninny, Jack!" she scolds, moving closer, her nose nearly touching mine. "Haven't we each had more than enough practice at going it alone?"

glwarren, 2014 

Poor Folk

   Ira Sams was born with nearly useless legs on which he got about with the help of crutches fashioned from branches of a bodark tree. The knobby limbs were wrapped at the bottom with pieces of tire inner tube so they would not poke holes in the linoleum floor. "Poor folk have poor ways," he was fond of saying in a faux apologetic manner. When he became sick with diabetes they had to remove one of his legs just above the knee. As if that were not enough misfortune for one man, in the same week that they had to remove his other leg his wife Margaret died from the epizeutic, leaving Ira to fend for himself. With the small amount of insurance from her death, Ira had the doctors make him two legs of plastic that were disproportionately lengthened, at his request, to make him nearly a foot taller! He seemed not to care that his torso appeared grotesquely stunted. "I have been a cripple all my life," he said. "Now I am a big man."

   With the remainder of Margaret's money he bought fancy suits and shoes to "keep up appearances," and wenched and boozed and gambled the rest away. While the money lasted, few objected that he was often offensively smug about his changed lot in life. When he marched about town on those long stiff legs of his, half a head taller than most, the children would look up and shout in mock terror "Look alive! Here comes Ira Sams!" to which he always responded with a big smile and a sweeping wave of his felt fedora hat. He was a "big man" for almost a year when, nearly penniless, he died from a blood clot on the brain. The cemetery association donated the plot next to Margaret's. The townspeople threw together a coffin of scrap plyboard barely four feet long and buried him with his plastic legs laid neatly by his side. Today there is a brief, complimentary, graveside service:

   "Poor folk have poor ways," saith the preacher. . . . "Amen." 

glwarren, 2014     

Zhivagoland

Winter is icummen in,

Lhude sing goddamm.

                                                                                   --Ezra Pound, from Ancient Music                                                                            

   A raw north wind rages about the plain. This old house, windows painted shut last summer, chinks sealed with can tin, old bed covers laid against the threshold and across the door, is no match for it. It is too cold to write, but it would be a good day to drive somewhere and let the sun warm the soul through the windshield. And if he were on the way to somewhere, I would visit friend Ray. But he has gone to North Dakota, land of sun dogs and Sacagawea, where winters hang on for millennia I am told, and where today, I am certain, it is too cold to write.

  Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, doctor, in the dead of a Russian winter, by the light and warmth of a single candle, wrote love poems to Lara. Yet we wonder whether under our present circumstances we will ever write again. Let's not kid ourselves. We are no Doctors Zhivago. We are old men and over time the intense cold of this land has taken its toll on our words, frozen them rock solid in our brains, and no amount of alcohol or a good woman's loving can thaw them into usefulness again. We know. We have tried. We have no answer for it . . . only a few old Mandan prayers that will never be of use to us.

-glwarren, 2014

Notes

   Yes, I know, Pasternak and Pound make strange bedfellows. But the epigraph has a history in that even on the so-called southern plains the winter can be brutal. And when we were university students we dreaded its coming so much that at the first sign we began chanting that old Pound verse as if doing so might ward off the worst of it. We were the thinnest of boys with thinner coats and spent a lot of time drinking hot coffee with lots of creamer in the mothering warmth of the student union. Runny noses, watery eyes. Still . . . I believe the beginnings of some of our best literary efforts came from those winters. But that was a long, long time ago.    

Mother Passes

   Maybelle and Elberta, "My little peaches," our father used to call them, were already there. Sister Rosetta took my hand as I entered the room. "We are glad you are here," she said softly. I was "late as usual" by my sisters' accounting, having been notified several hours earlier that Mother hadn't long to live. "It is hopeless," complained Elberta. "Not a peep out of her since I arrived," she sniffled. Maybelle, meanwhile, kept shifting from one foot to the other as if her hemorrhoids were bothering her terribly. "I drove for hours for this?" she whined and shifted again. "I have told her she can let go," said Elberta with perfect aplomb. Then, suddenly and quite dramatically, as was her nature, Mother expired with a great whoosh of breath that Elberta would later characterize as having the odor of bad wine. To the great dismay of my sisters, Mother's head dropped to the side and her left eye, having failed to close, was staring directly at me. The girls became agitated and kept looking back and forth from me to the eye as if I were somehow to blame. "Well, say something! Do something!" demanded Elberta. I could not. I was transfixed by the stare. Sister Rosetta arrived to swiftly, gently, close the offending orb.

   "That was always her good eye," I felt obliged to say.

glwarren, 2014  

Slacker

   It is a warm evening in Paris. I have returned from a walk along the river to find that the police have invaded my loft in the rue de Seine in Saint Germain des pres where I have struggled all summer to complete a collection of stories and prose poems. They have been here before. They say they are looking for a missing poet.

   "What? Stop!!" I cry out as they begin methodically disassembling my room again. "Do you not remember me from before?" "Ah yes," replies one officer, "Le paresseaux," which roughly translated means "ne'er-do-well" or "slacker." Most of my stuff ends up in a pile on the floor, again, including a postcard from Mother that has a field of Kansas sunflowers on the front and a note on the back inquiring about my welfare. The officer looks at it a moment then shakes his head and tosses it back onto the pile. This time, using the latest digital portable scanning equipment, they claim to have located said poet deep within my viscera. It is now a matter of debate what is to be done. One fellow recommends a cesarean in order that the found poet may be saved whole. Another suggests an enema. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I awaken before any action can be taken. Disturbed by this recurring dream and in need of collecting my thoughts, I abandon pen and paper for a quiet evening's walk along the Ninnescah, its cool, clear waters barely flowing, its sands still showing my footprints from the days before.

glwarren, 2014  

Notes

  Years ago my friend Ray Wheeler told me to get out of Paris. "You have no business being there," he said in so many words. He was/is right, of course. But such travels were/are now my only venue for "leaving Kansas."  I am too old for long walks anywhere. Dreaming helps. Sorry, old friend, that I have had to go against your good advice. Don't give up on me yet. 

Gerald    

   

Miscellany I

Little Red Horse

   Blackbull rode into town on the mustang Shinka Jootsi Kawa, or "Little Red Horse." They had come from the cool forests and springs of the Missouri woodlands, westward to Kansas and the Arkansas River but would be well south of that stream by the time they reached the Rockies where they would meet up with the San Juan River on the other side and continue their journey across the rib-jarring, hoof-cracking fields of the Colorado Plateau. Their journey, as described in the tales of the Osage elder, Traveling Rain, and as first undertaken by the Osage one thousand years ago and repeated every seven generations thence, was to "The Doorstep of God." Their arrival in our little prairie town was with much fanfare and featured in all the news where it was reported that this was a journey that Blackbull had been wanting to make since he was a boy.

   No one knows what Little Red Horse wanted.

~~~~~~~~

   That was ten years ago. I somehow lost track of that story and never learned the outcome. I assume they made it. Still . . . it would be nice to have some kind of confirmation. I have googled it (using Google search engine, of course) with no luck. So if you are reading this and know anything, pass it on, either through comment or via email. 
   I need to add that "The Doorstep of God" refers to Rainbow Bridge, one of the largest natural bridges in the world, located in southern Utah. It was thought by the Osage to be the entrance to a heavenly teepee and was held sacred by various tribes in that area. (Much of what I gave you here was gleaned from an article by Rebekah West appearing in the Belle Plaine, Kansas News, Thursday, August 19, 2004.) 

~~~~~~~~

   I have recently learned that "typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, inarguably wrong." This I found while trying to 'remember' how many spaces after a colon.  The author of the above quote, Farhad Manjoo, in an article appearing in Slate online magazine, Jan 12, 2011, says it is a done deal and has been so for quite some time. The MLA Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style both "prescribe a single space after a period."  My bad. It will be hard to unlearn two spaces. The font I have been using for text, Trebuchet MS, is supposedly one optimized for use on the internet and the screen. It seems to handle the single space well. Incidentally, I checked "inarguably" and it is ok. So is "unarguably". You pays your money . . .   

  

    

  

Purging The Pocket Notebook

Some Thoughts

"So much that can neither be written nor kept inside!"

-Tomas Transtromer, Lamento

Some thoughts will hound you to the grave. 

There is no refuge from them.

In your dreams they will taunt you. 

In your lover's bed they will fondle your imagination.

Running out of places to hide, overmatched and near madness, you retreat to a drawer in the attic where a lifetime of forgotten prose resides. Resting among the pocket calculator, the pocket comb, the pocket compass, the pocket knife, is the pocket notebook you have not seen in nearly half a century. You open it carefully, lest the brittle brown pages come from together, and on the first blank page you find you write:  Some thoughts . . .

   When asked if there were any writers he turned to now and then for "nourishment," poet John Ashbery mentioned Holderlin, Celan and De Quincey, and then James Tate "who has a pizazz that always gets me started writing." (From an interview with Sarah Rothenberg.)

  Strangely enough, I've also used Tate's "pizazz" to get me going first thing in the morning. Usually it's something from Lost Pilot or Memoir of the Hawk, the latter being my favorite of all Tate's work if one excludes the selected poems volumes. Someday I will tell you why.

   Otherwise I will turn to my older notes. It has a two-fold benefit: It allows me to 'warm up' to the sound of my own voice without doing damage to the day's work; and it sometimes happens that it gives me new insight into the older piece. That would be on 'good' days. The above fragment is such an older piece. Rather than leave it in the notebook I thought to use it here as an introduction to the day's post.

   And now I am in that quandary referred to above. But nothing seems to work. Do I begin tearing out pages with the hope that something will strike a chord in me? How about this: "Thundersleet and thundersnow."  No, no. Weather related. Doesn't everyone have those?

   Or: "Windstorm overnight. The chairs are in a little gathering at the north end of the deck. We wonder if there is some kind of rebellion at hand." I remember finding that humorous. A keeper, I suppose.

   Sometimes the entries are bits of dialogue out of context, sometimes in a context that I probably fully intended to develop later:

   My father died several months ago. I have just learned it today from Mother:
   "You are where? Peru?" "Yes," I said, "Lima".
   'Well, I wanted to tell you that Jack died in August sometime," she said. I've been meaning to tell you for quite a while, but it just kept slipping my mind."

   I will do that one. It is close to me.

   From a newspaper article: "Now imagine talking holograms and avatars, working for you, listening politely as you blab on and on about some silly passion." There were times when I would have found that pleasing, but this one goes to the trash.

   "I am still plodding along with Leaving Kansas, but intend to finish before I am 70."  . . . So much for good intentions. Trash.

   The children of anonymous sperm donors. They search for their fathers. All across the country the 'fatherless' children go. . . . Keep. . . . Maybe before I am 80.

   The old farmer in overalls hanging from a barn beam. --Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End

That is how my great grandfather died. Of his ten children, the youngest, a girl, was killed in a buckboard accident. One of the twins died in a shootout with Oklahoma police. And one, the quiet one, grew murderous and was institutionalized for the rest of his life. My grandfather fled to Kansas where he married a lady, my grandmother, whose husband, a one-legged man, had "run off" with another woman. . . . A keeper, of course.

   What I have learned today (August 2007): The Palouse earthworm is a lily-scented white earthworm, now very rare, that grows to three feet in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. . . . When I was through there as a boy nearly 60 years ago, the Palouse was miles and miles of rolling, open terrain. Now it is heavily farmed and the farmers are fighting government efforts to 'protect' the earthworm.

   What becomes of the man whose whole being is focused on becoming a successful writer? "You must believe," said the fighter, "that you will prevail. If you do not believe, then you will surely be defeated. Believe and the world will be open to you."

   Champagne aspirations and a beer intellect. We have to work within our limitations. Beer intellect? Then let's forget the champagne and write about beer.  Cheers!      

glwarren, 2014

   

It's A Topsy-Turvy World

   Two young women walking on the beach came across an old man sitting on a driftwood log, whereupon they removed their bikini tops, stood on their hands in the sand, and shook their great breasts in his direction with much gusto and fanfare. "Oh, we should be ashamed!" said one afterward, giggling. "No freaking way!" said the other. "He will go home to his loneliness tonight and have wet dreams about this day. We have done the poor man a great service."

   But the old man dreamed instead of his home on the prairie and the strawberry upside-down cake his mother used to make when he was a boy. And of the visits his father and Uncle Jim and their old friend Ben Dantic had on warm summer evenings on the porch outside his bedroom window where he hung from the sill by his knees listening:

   "When I was a boy," his Uncle Jim would say, "they told us that the children were our future. Now I am an old man and they are still saying that and I wonder what ever became of us? We have been disinherited, I tell you, disinherited and forgotten!" "It's a topsy-turvy world, Jimmy," his father would say. "It's a topsy-turvy world." And then old Ben Dantic would take up his fiddle and play and sing, in an airy falsetto much too small for his great size,

I wanna hear it again,

I wanna hear it again,

    The old piano roll blues. 

glwarren, 2009, 2014 

The Journey Begins

   . . . in the rocking chair, on my grandmother's lap, turnip soup, her favorite, going 'ker-pank' inside her little belly, her sweet alto rising with:

                               In my red rocking chair
                               We will travel far
                               Over hill, over dale,
                               Where the fairies are.

   Then on to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden Of Verses where most verses are journeys of one kind or another befitting their author's lifelong propensity for travel:

                               Smooth it glides upon its travel,
                               Here a wimple, there a gleam--
                               O the clean gravel!
                               O the smooth stream!
                                           ~~~~~

                               I should like to rise and go
                               Where the golden apples grow;
                               . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                               Where the knotty crocodile
                                Lies and blinks in the Nile;
                                            ~~~~~

                               But every night I go abroad
                               Afar into the land of Nod
                                             ~~~~~

                               The coach is at the door at last;
                               The eager children, mounting fast
                               And kissing hands, in chorus sing;
                               Good-bye, Good-bye to everything!

   Good-bye, Good-bye indeed!  WWII had been over for nearly a year and I would be starting school in the fall.  We moved into a duplex nearby.  Life as I had known it with Grandmother was done . . . but the seeds of skedaddle were already sown.
                                                           

                                               

                                                       1941                                                                                              

Snowbound

   The snowy fields rise to an alabaster sky. The union is seamless, the effect blinding and disturbing. It is like the bright light of the near-death experience, but there is no one there to take us home. We are alone. No word from the county. No phone. No electricity. No way out. We fear we have been forgotten. We wait. In another room someone is playing Tchaikovsky's Winter Dreams on Grandmother's wind-up Victrola. Grandfather, who has been dozing in fits in his chair by the window, wakes.

   

   "Do you remember when Ala and I made love on that snowy mountain in Colorado?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "You've been dreaming. There is no Ala and you've never been to Colorado."

   "What? But aren't we in Colorado as we speak?" he asks.

   "No, Grandfather, we're in Kansas."

   It is snowing again. Saucer-sized portions of the sky tumble straight down, intensifying our sense of claustrophobic isolation. The snow-mantled cedars, outposts of the world as we know it, are now lost to the horizon. The barn, the silo, the broken-down windmill are easing toward us and risk being sucked into the black hole that is this old farmhouse. God help us, we say, for it appears that no one else will. It has been nine days since we last saw the sun and it is madding. Even Grandfather, mad for more winters than we care to remember, appears agitated.

   "Kansas, you say? Kansas?"

   "Yes, Grandfather."

   "Well . . . is it possible it was Dorothy that I was thinking of?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "Anything is possible. Anything . . . and sometimes nothing." But he is asleep again and not in Kansas anymore.

                                                                                             glwarren 2008, 2014  

How It Finally Ended

Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination.

                                                                                                                               --James Tate, Success Comes To Cow Creek

   "You are the greatest writer ever!"  Nadia shouted as she waved a half sheet of paper on which I had written a prose poem for her. I had slipped it beneath her door a half hour earlier with a note scrawled on the back saying I was off for a walk in the country. She was out of breath when she caught up with me and only half sober with the sun still high in the evening sky. Thinking there might be some magic for us there, we lay down in the warm grass on the bank of a stream where a now famous poet had often come to write. "I meant it," she said afterward. "The greatest! Ever!"

   

   The Eskimo told Rasmussen that whenever they needed a new song, the words would "shoot up of themselves." Many would be the words that came over them, they said, "like the wings of birds out of darkness." Sadly, my own words, which heretofore had always come to me of their own, began to fail me. Without words, Nadia's love for me began to diminish. She said she hoped there would be some kind of recovery, but soon grew tired of waiting and eventually ran off to the west coast with a slogger of prize-winning doggerel. Finally, for lack of words I was forced to give up writing altogether. There was no recovery. And the poet doesn't come here anymore.

                                                                                                                glwarren, 2014

Promises

Mostly cloudy overnight with rain likely.

   We had heard the thunder from distant storms all night long.  Dry and tinny the sound, bang, not boom, refusing to roll.  When dawn came we could see that the storms were moving away from us. Drought-weary and longing to feel the rain in our faces, we ran to the truck, the spent grass crackling like fire beneath our feet, and raced westward.  The storms were swifter however, and had passed well beyond us by the time we arrived where they had been. The roadway was barely damp.  Dolores, my sweet, sorrowful other, cried and railed against those "liars" from the city who had promised us rain. "I'm sick and tired of it," she said. "Let's just keep on going.  Let's just keep on going and never come back."

   "Ah, Dolores, you mustn't trust too much in what men say," I said.  You know that city folk don't amount to much when it comes to calling the weather.  Listen, I promise you that it will rain again soon.  The signs are everywhere.  The rain crow calls again and again from the thicket, for instance, while the burnt-land bird flies low to the ground.  And if you'd been down to the county road around midnight, you could have heard ol' Annabeth's rooster crowing.  But even if all the signs fail and the rains don't come, don't you worry.  I know a rainmaker out of Wichita who says he can drum us up a doozy anytime.

"Promise?" she sniffled.

"Promise," I said.

"Pinkie promise?" she asked.

"Oh, absolutely!'" I said.

"Alright'" she said.  "Then let's just go on home."
                                                                                             glwarren 2009,2014

A Very Very Short Story

Leaving Kansas

                           In my room on the road to Denver, a few miles from

                        the Colorado line, the amber light on the telephone was

                        flashing. The message was not meant for me. "Listen," a 

                        distraught woman's voice began, "it's me. And I'm so sorry

                        . . . and I . . . I really need to talk to you. Please don't go 

                        to Colorado. And please call me. Please."

                            "Oh, we get that all the time," the evening clerk said as

                         he tallied the day's receipts. "The man who was in that room

                         came in late last night and left first thing this morning. There's

                         nothing to be done about it. It's out of our hands. Day and

                         night that road out there thunders with the sound of leaving.

                         Madmen and fools, all of them. Mark my words. They will all

                         be back, sooner or later, one way or another, and none of 

                         them the wiser for it. Which way you headed?" he asked without

                         looking up.  "Kansas City," I lied.

                                                                                                                                                  glwarren, 2014

     Worse were the lies we told ourselves: that in faraway places we would discover who we really were and that our Muse, free at last, would carry us to the literary glory we had always imagined. Madmen and fools, truly!                                                 

                                                                                                                          

  

What you will find here  

   . . . are notes, stories/prose poems and other things literary having to do with or being set in, for the most part, the prairie-plains. This is a work in progress. 

Prose Poem?

   One caveat. At least one. I won't debate what is or is not a prose poem. I mention it above only because I know there will be some question as to what genre or form my prose might belong. When I was a young writer they told me that no one wrote like that anymore; that my efforts were bits-and-pieces, fragments, on wasted paper. Too bad. At great sacrifice I had just bought a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations. It was 1960 and I was raring to get going with my own work.    

   If you are interested, you might take a look at Michel Delville's The American Prose Poem, 1998. It is a good source for anyone wanting to do further study. Also, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, 2009, edited by Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham. For here, for now, you pays your money and you gets your choice. 

Of Further Interest
   Author L. Ray Wheeler has recently had published a collection of short stories titled Bar Talk And Tall Tales. The stories are set in contemporary western North Dakota and will simply blow you away with their portrayal of life on the edge. For a brief, insightful review, I refer you to Jim McWilliams'  theliterarysoapbox.blogspot.com.  Or go to my profile and click on the link in Blogs That I Follow. You will find the review in December of 2013. While you are visiting Jim's site, check out some of his other posts as well. Wheeler's book may be purchased from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter MN, 56082, for $15.00. Just send them your check and tell them where you want the book mailed.
   
Finally
   Much of what I write here will be with family and friends in mind. They have always been curious as to how I spend my free time and they may comment and refer to me as 'Jerry' or sometimes just 'Jer'. But I will sign off as 'Gerald' since most who will visit this site know me by that name.

   And what I write will often be patterned after spoken language, so try not to take me to task for my fragments/incomplete sentences, strange juxtaposition of words, phrases, etc.  Enjoy, 


Gerald