 Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016) has many poems inspired by life in the family. “Pregnant 1951” imagines August of that year when my parents had been married seven months and I was two months away from being born. The poem is based partly on stories I’ve heard (the fainting in the street, the silk blouse), partly on my own observation (Daddy’s scars and his habit of sleeping with one arm held straight up), partly on imagination. Towards the end of the poem, fiction takes over. Pregnant
1951 Elopes. Pregnant the first week. Turns eighteen. Glows. At commencement, her mama’s face burns, but she is proud to show the bulge beneath her skirt-- her life-till-now’s work. The world is her bouquet-- dogwood with ten-penny wounds, lacy fringe tree, meadowsweet, morning glory in the hay. In idle August, she hauls her belly to the store for a Co-Cola. The streets under her soles are soft and hot as pudding. The heat puddling the blacktop looks so wet she could mop it up and wring it into a cup, but she sees it rise and shimmy like her one silk blouse on the line. She faints on Goolsby Street. Night. He sleeps. Aroused by heat and thunder, she fingers the gouge in his cheek from a knife fight over dice. She runs her hand over his thighs, caressing the old wound puckered by a nail in a loose board. To him, she’s already Mama. He’s Daddy to her. She sighs, My man, all mine. He turns on his side. His arm rises like a flag. The hand above her hovers for hours as he sleeps. The first weeks she hardly slept, afraid it might collapse. Always done it, he swears. But now, she fears no blow or punch from his hand that’s clenched as if it holds dice and cocked as if about to throw craps. Posted 3 August 2024. Send comments to [email protected].
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 Picture: Beatrix Potter, “Tailor of Gloucester” In this day of increasingly bitter human polemic, here is an occasion to relax while considering the examination required to become an honorary murid and enter a nest of mice. The questions were compiled by the teams of mice assigned to eat books. They read as they eat and send passages of interest to mice back to HQ for collation and study.  Q: “Her feet beneath her Petticoat, Like little mice stole in and out….”-- as if they were afraid of what? A: The light. Sudden light at night gives mice a fright. [Sir John Suckling, “The Bride” Picture: Artist: Cole, Herbert; Book Title: The rime of the ancient mariner.oldbookillustrations.com] **********  Q: For which peril to body or soul did Dioscorides prescribe swallowing a mouse whole? A: The eating of aconite also called wolfsbane, monkshood, blue rocket, and leopard’s bane. Do not eat it by day. Do not eat it at night. Do not keep it in your pocket. [Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names Picture: "Monkshood in Bloom" by Alida Withoos (1661–1730). www.oldbookillustrations.com] **********  Q: Can you imagine musical tones called lark, canary, or grouse, cockatoo or crow, cat, dog, or mouse, because they vaguely resemble the cries of those animals? A: I can imagine a lot of things, especially better questioning. [A. H. Munsell, A COLOR NOTATION, 1st ed 1905; 2nd, 1907. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26054/26054-h/26054-h.htm. Picture: PublicDomainPictures.Net] **********  Q: In which contexts are a mouse, a smooch, and a dish synonymous? A: (1) This examination, and (2) the screenplay of “Ball of Fire,” by Billy Wilder and Charles Bracket (1941): “We'll be stepping. Me and this smooch...I mean, the dish, I mean, the mouse. You know, hit the jiggles for a little rum boogie.” Providing either answer earns full credit. Providing both earns no credit. We don’t like showoffs. [Picture: Pair of mice on dish, Bing & grondahl no. 1562 **********  Q: What is the mouse king’s own palindrome? A clue for you: he whispers it while sitting high on his throne. A: Sum summus mus: I am the mightiest mouse. [Barry J. Blake, Secret Language, Oxford, 2010, 15 Picture: artstation.com] **********  Q: Identify the Russian who court-marshalled and hanged without legal discussion a mouse for climbing bang over his cardboard fortress. A: Tsar Peter III, but the name of any current or past leader will earn half credit. [Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, Penguin Books,276 Picture: “Coronation portrait of Peter III of Russia; Public domain] **********  Q: Which French dictator spoke with an accent and broke most of Europe before himself was broken? Who plunged like a hawk out of the sky to pierce a mouse and kill without squeak or squawk? A: “Like a true vulture, Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid the grass.”—Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [Picture: “Noiseless Wings Behind Him,” by Charles L. Bull. Book Title: The haunters of the silences. From www.oldbookillustrations.com] **********  Q: When a scrap of paper blows into court, what does it take to drag it out? A: A yoke of oxen, so say the Chinese. But a mischief of mice can gnaw it to pieces. [F.L. Lucas, Style Picture: Artist unknown, “Eurasian Harvest Mice - View of harvest mice and their nest among grasses and branches.” Book Title: Brehms Tierleben, vol. 2. From oldbookillustrations.com]  Q: When the Sultan sends a ship
to the granaries of Egypt does he worry whether mice in the hold are comfortable, well fed and free of lice? A: No, if we can believe the answer the famous dervish gave to Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. [Picture: "Göke" (1495) was the flagship of Kemal Reis. Contemporary miniature from the Ottoman period, Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul]  My memoir of my father is also in part a memoir of me as a young man. This excerpt is from the current draft.
Like Daddy, I had my own modest experience of collecting and repossessing cars. In the 70’s, when I was working part-time in the installment loan department of the bank where my father was a vice president, I went out with the collector, twice I think but maybe more. Al was a former Marine and Viet Nam vet. He had an intimidating countenance—acne scarred, grim or sardonic when he chose. He carried his service revolver under the passenger seat of the company Plymouth, though he never needed it when I traveled with him. When collecting a debt or repoing a car, he could seamlessly turn from lowkey persuasion to intimidation and back. I was quiet, bookish, and obviously naïve, and he gained some pleasure from shocking me with coarse language and stories. But I liked him and liked to help him on the occasional out-of-town trips to repo cars. He did all the work; all I had to do was to drive his company car back to the bank while he took the keys from the defaulter and drove the repoed car. One of these trips must have taken place in the summer of 1974. I went on at least one trip with Al then, because on the radio was a song that was ubiquitous that summer, Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston”; it hit the fourth spot on Billboard in August and finished the year at number 65. The man in the song pleads for a woman to join him in Boston, then Denver, then California: “Come to L.A. to live forever.” She refuses: “She just said, ‘No, / Boy, won't you come home to me?’” Al passionately hated this song, and each time it came on the radio he grumbled derisively and turned it off. I don’t believe he ever explained his reason. At the time, gossiping coworkers thought he was seeing someone in Gastonia and financing his courtship on credit card cash advances; I received the impression, possibly quite erroneous, that the relationship involved a deep need not matched by affection. I was engaged to be married and was predisposed to like the song, though I remember it only because of Al’s dislike. That summer, the Watergate scandal filled the newspapers and preoccupied television. Minnie, a delightful cook and hostess at the bank’s cafeteria, came in for a good deal of ribbing for her continued support of President Nixon. In a quirk of timing, Nixon resigned on August 8 and left the White House on August 9, the day I was married. One day, for a long-forgotten reason, I visited Al at his home and found him in the yard fitting the mechanism of a cuckoo clock into its housing of dark stained wood that he had made. Relaxed and absorbed in his hobby, he was a different man, like Dickens’ Mr. Wemmick at home with the Aged Parent. His father was a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher that I never met but once I came across him preaching on the radio. My hearing was good then, but I couldn’t understand much of what he said; his speech was fast and strongly cadenced, the chant of an angry warrior attacking sin. It was probably then that I met Al’s sister, a student at Bob Jones University. She was concerned about Al’s lifestyle and his soul but clearly loved him deeply. One of our friends and coworkers, a young teller at the bank, hinted that Al’s war had been a bad one. A few years later he died young from complications of a head wound he received in the war. He had never talked about the war with me, and I didn’t ask. Posted 20 July 2024. Questions or comments? Email me at [email protected]  The Boxcar Children was first published a century ago, in 1924, two years before the birth of my father. I was at a nearby Barnes & Noble looking at children’s picture books and came across a book I loved as a child and read many times but, oddly enough, remembered nothing about that is not revealed in the title, The Boxcar Children. I bought it and reread it. I’m not surprised I liked the depiction of the children fending for themselves like Robinson Crusoe. One of the features of the landscape that helps them is the unofficial dump, where they find plates, flat ware, cups, and wheels for a cart. The book is moralistic in a way--though I like how it fosters family solidarity and encourages initiative--but it’s amusing to consider the excesses of moral zeal a modern writer would bring to the dump.
I suppose the current equivalent would be the dumpster. I’ve known three people who used dumpsters to support themselves. One, the grad school father of small children, foraged the dumpster behind a grocery store in Durham NC for fruits and vegetables. Another, an older widow, found most of her clothes in the dumpsters around Chapel Hill. The third, a scrapper and hoarder, found all kinds of treasures in Raleigh dumpsters—some he sold, and some he kept, so that his large storage unit was always crammed full. At times, he’d have 7 or 8 upright vacuum cleaners and 5 or 6 microwaves, dozens of remotes. Why don’t you scrap them, I’d ask, and he’d respond, Some of them work. In my childhood, dumps were common on roadsides, the favorite haunt of old bedsprings, rusting stoves, and bald tires. Probably every farm had one. I found them unpleasant yet fascinating. Lots of families had burn barrels for anything flammable. I tended ours a few times; mostly I remember the unpleasant smell of the burning garbage. When the barrel was emptied, at the bottom was a mélange of half-burnt items to add to our dump. Once I poked through the dump—I liked to think of it as a midden, since it had been there a long time before we moved in. Cans that had been burned and left in the weather to rust had somehow resolved into leafy, brittle clumps, as if brown oak leaves had turned to metal while resting in the earth. This post was inspired by today's post in Poems Ancient and Modern, a substack I highly recommend. Posted 11 July 2024.  Bernard Picart, "The Moon and Endymion," 1731. In the public domain, free for noncommercial use. The shame of Endymion is the theme of epigram 58 of Book VI of the Greek Anthology. The poem is attributed to Isidorus Scholasticus of Bolbytine. According to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (from the Digital Collections for the University of Michigan Library), Isidorus was “of the town of Bolbotine, in the Delta of Egypt” and was “the author of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology.”
I find it both mystical and amusing to accidentally choose, as an item of interest, a short poem by an otherwise unknown author. It’s as if, a thousand years from now, someone will come across a pedestrian four-line poem of mine in a tattered anthology and translate it into Martian (or whatever is being spoken). The original is a four-line dedicatory epigram; like nearly all classical Greek and Latin poetry, it does not rhyme. In W.R. Paton’s Loeb edition, it is Englished as follows: “Thy friend Endymion, O Moon, dedicates to thee, ashamed, his bed that survives in vain and its futile cover; for grey hair reigns over his whole head and no trace of his former beauty is left.” My rhyming version: O moon, your friend Endymion gives you his useless bed. He is ashamed of the gray that covers his head, his beauty in ruin. Posted 9 July 2024. Please send comments to [email protected].  Helenium is a wildflower native to North America, called sneezeweed (according to Wikipedia) because the dried leaves were used to make snuff. Like all the plants mentioned here, this is its second year in my garden. To the right you can see the edge of a lamb's ear. It is a native of the Middle East. Rabbits don't like it and it likes dry weather. Mine were given to me last summer by a couple who dug up all their flowers and put down gravel.  Another helenium, the orange variety. I watered the helenium every other day during the recent dry spell. They are not drought tolerant, but they seemed to demand less frequent watering than some of my other plants.  Tickseed coreopsis--another native perennial--is considered easy to grow, but mine has struggled, mostly because the rabbits like to snack on it. I've begun to sprinkle, on it and around it, sour-smelling, nontoxic granules. I finally have blooms!  The bumblebees have fallen in love with the joe-pye weed. crow watching the rain with dry eyes ***** More and Still More I’m on my knees digging holes for new plants. The morning provides company: the trowel unearths worms from once poor soil; a millipede waddles off, black trimmed in yellow signaling danger in its dragon world: I’m beautiful—don’t eat. Two yellow jackets shadow me unaggressively, though they, too, are marked beautiful and risky in yellow and black. They’re mesmerized perhaps into a trance of live-and- let-live by hands that dig and plant. I keep them under my eye. The blooms of the mint are buzzing with bees. As I rise to stretch my back and wipe the sweat from my eyes, the sun clears the treetops. The garden gleams. The bees’ wings glitter among silvery leaves that soothe the pain of a sting. Published by Third Wednesday, Nov. 2022  William Blake, "Jacob's Ladder" I began "Why Don't We Do Right?" sometime in 2022, for by the end of the year I thought it good enough to consider submitting for publication. It reached its present form in the summer of 2023, but I have continued to make small changes since then. It is not, as some readers may conclude, a response to the events of October 7 of last year.
The poem treats three situations—a writer in occupied France who, despite the pangs of conscience, writes antisemitic works to give him the freedom to pursue his sexual adventures; the celebrated French composer, Olivier Messiaen, who during Occupation took over a prestigious post in the Conservatoire de Paris after a Jew was ousted; and Billy Wilder, the Austrian born screen writer who fled Austria to escape the Nazis: he represents all those who fled, hid, or suffered to save their souls in the Nazi era. As the speaker—a high school teacher—tells his students, our choices in the end may not be much better. We must step into the fire laid for us. The poem is in the form of the teacher’s lecture at the end of the school year in May 1968. In my youth, world and American history classes rarely got beyond World War 2. When I graduated in 1970, only twenty-five years had passed since the end of the war, many veterans were alive and occupied prominent public and corporate positions, and the war loomed large in popular consciousness. The teacher, Mr. Jones, is rather more interested in the juxtapositions and dark meanings of history than in communicating with his students. There was a lot to ponder at the time. May 1968 was the month of the uprising in France; a delayed effect was the resignation of De Gaulle the following year. It was also the month that peace talks began between North Vietnam and the US. Neither of those events are reflected in the poems, but these are: it was just five years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, and the month before Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in LA (here, I give the teacher a bit of prophetic power). A key term in the poem is the slang word mahaha. It could mean “nonsense” (a meaning noted in the 30’s; a variation was mahoula) or “silly talk,” a meaning from 1947. Currently it means a laugh by someone planning evil deeds, like bwahaha in cartoons. I hope the poem reflects all three meanings. Why Don’t We Do Right? American History Class, May 1968 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?—Jeremiah 8:9 1941!—a hole in history—a year in which all the visible gods had abandoned us, in which god was really dead or gone back into his non-revealedness.--Emanuel Levinas Today, class, the Second World War continues with us at peace: Whirlaway wins the Preakness; the Giants start wearing plastic batting helmets. The Einsatzgruppen are cleaning and loading weapons. The self-selected wise define the world, from Abram to Zapruder, but a gunsel grumbles, “Your mixed-up talk is giving me a headache; it’s mahaha.” He settles the argument by shooting up the globe to make it move. His slugs shatter Memphis and LA. Where’s Jeremiah when you need him? [A hand shoots up.] Your mixed-up talk is giving us a headache! What does mahaha mean? Let’s see how it’s used. [Another hand.] Teach, we’re so confused. This isn’t in the book. Congratulations! You’re getting the point. Like love and chickenpox, history comes at us hard, off-script, and when it’s done the world’s been rearranged. So what was and was not mahaha in that year, some say of grace, 41? At four of a summer morning, the joyful noising of the birds, the mockingbird’s improvisations are not mahaha; they are antonyms of nonsense, the reaching for light and grace in jubilating song: now you know what isn’t it. Mr. Jones, will this be on the test? But class, this is mahaha: in October, a French raciste de plume visits Munich on Goebbels’ invitation. Walking the streets, he sees a mustached man in black serge and a little hat. He looks like a sacristan, but on his chest an emblem has been stitched, two and a half inches wide, a yellow star. The writer follows the little man down the street, but only a little way, till he comes to himself: I’m not the same as that little man! Oh, he looks vulnerable and anxious, but he carries the diseases of Moscow and Wall Street. Our clever writer buys in to antisemitic mahaha, scribbles Le Péril Juif to purchase the freedom to write unmolested his sexual adventures with a Nazi poet, a Wehrmacht Sonderführer. Class, we are like him. Like which one, Teach? Pop quiz: Which one are we—victim, victimizer, collaborator? Explain in complete sentences. The writer’s full of himself, and self is mahaha. He should have gone the way of dispossession, become the great soul paraded in his journal: o his frisson of pity for the little man facing extermination: how exquisitely it sharpens cruelty! It makes one feel clean and jubilant. It certifies the superiority of the Übermensch. [Most of the children doze off, a few cry.] Why are we studying this beast? To help us cage or kill our own mahaha beasts. Here’s an instructive case: a composer in Stalag VIII recalls the angry Panzers rolling across his France. He will become famous, but in his myth certain inaccuracies will arise, for his is not “a concentration camp,” the instruments that play his great Quatuor are not “decrepit,” his work of composing and performing is assisted by his German imprisoners. Released, he will become professor of harmony, a post from which a Jew has been ousted. And if he does not know this? In evil times, to prosper is to be complicit. To serve truth and save their souls, some choose to suffer, flee, or hide, like Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Voegelin: heroes, whatever their flaws. Dear class, your choices may not be much better. Mr. Jones, will we be tested on this? Consider Billy Wilder, the writer who fled Austria for Paris, then the US. In the week of Pearl Harbor, his Ball of Fire lit up screens smoking with the Arizona. The actors in his comedy—Homolka and Sakall, who escaped the Nazis, Kinskey who fled the Reds and the Whites—remind us of the divinely light-footed worlds we lost where ballerinas giggled up and down iron staircases, whirling round and round Jacob’s ladder wearing tights and smelling of rice powder on nude shoulders. As Spade says to Wonderly, it’s not always easy to know what to do—not easy to improvise righteous song while history’s demons chase the angels weeping down the iron staircase. Not easy in our republic of lies to do justly, walk unself- deceived, speak uprightly. Teach, we’re lost and sad and don’t know why. I thought we won the war. So let’s watch Ball of Fire and laugh: “The mouse is the dish. We’ll be stepping, me and this smooch. I mean, the dish, I mean, the mouse.” Let’s leap into the fire laid for us and make a joyful noise unto the Lord. NOTES: The poem relies heavily on Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s slang-filled screenplay for Ball of Fire and on François Dufay, Le voyage d’automne. Other sources include Kansas Joe McCoy (title); the screenplay for Casablanca by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch; the notes of Olivier Messiaen for his Quatuor pour la fin du temps: John Huston’s screenplay for The Maltese Falcon; Psalm 100.
Posted 6 July 2024  "Erato, Muse of Poetry," by Edward Poynter (1836 - 1919) I subscribe to a substack, Poems Ancient and Modern (https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/) conducted by the writers Joseph Bottum (South Dakota) and Sally Thomas (North Carolina). Five days a week, they present and briefly discuss a poem in the public domain. The hosts and commenters occasionally mention the pleasures of memorizing poetry.
A recent comment set me to thinking about the poems that I used to know by heart. Here’s the list of the poems I believe I could recite from memory at one time or another. There’s nothing surprising here, perhaps, except the first poem. I memorized it around 1977 to pass the hours while sitting with my sleeping father-in-law in his hospital room. The list, in no particular order: Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”; James Elroy Flecker, “The Old Ships”; John Donne’s holy sonnet, “At the round earth’s imagined corners” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”; Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”; W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” large sections of “The Tower” (I still know the stanza about Mrs. French and her obliging servant with the garden shears), “For Anne Gregory,” “Sailing to Byzantium”; Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”; A. E. Housman, “With rue my heart is laden”; John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; Samuel T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”; Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”, “Ulysses”; George Herbert, “Love (III)”; W. C. Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”; William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” After publishing this post, I remembered once knowing Charles Wolfe, "The Burial of Sir John Moore After Corunna," a modernized version of "Westron Wind," Sir Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee from Me," William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just to Say," Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." I knew (and know) bits and pieces of many other poems. Yesterday I made my wife giggle when out of the blue I recited, in mangled form, the first stanza of Suckling's "Song: Why so pale and wan fond lover." I probably knew more at various times. I held tightly to the poems in the unhappiest period of my life, when my first marriage failed, but as I became happier I lost my grip on them. Posted 5 July 2024 updated 20 July 2024. Please send comments to [email protected]  Illustration by Milo White (1888 - 1956), an American illustrator. In the public domain. He has made the ants plural--a collective, rather than a single individual. La Fontaine is one of my favorite French authors. I have tried at various times, unsuccessfully, to translate several of his fables. To create this version, I borrowed shamelessly from previous versions.
The Grasshopper and the Ant by Jean de la Fontaine The Grasshopper kept fiddling As summer light was dwindling. When the North Wind blew, She hadn’t a scrap to chew, Not a bite of grub, no fly To bake into a pie. So she went complaining, To the Ant, of famine, And begged a cup of grain To keep flesh on her bone Till harvest home. “When the crop comes in, I’ll pay you back,” she claimed, “On my word as animal, Interest and principal.” The Ant was not a lender—that Was her smallest fault. “So what Did you do all summer?” She asked the Grasshopper. “Night and day, for every comer I fiddled without stopping. That’s why I love grasshopping.” “You fiddled? I don’t give a fig. Now you can dance a jig.” Posted 2 July 2024. Please send comments to [email protected]  The coneflowers continue to flourish. The garden is two or three years away from filling in, and that's if I've chosen well.  The joe-pye weed is slowly forming blooms and taking on color. There isn't much noticeable change day by day.  I thought that the New England aster died last year, so its bloom caught me surprise.  The hellenium will be blooming soon. It's common name is sneezeweed. We shall see how many sneezes it triggers.
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