New Year’s Day: Tell Me Where All Past Years Are

My grandmother, Sallie Grubb Absher (1903 – 1983)

 
Tell Me Where All Past Years Are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, the dust of furrows.
She hummed; I translate:

When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies, 
when days oozed slow and thick
as end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?

Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
     Visions International, 2022


The Day

The little room’s only window looked out
towards the ridgetop, the Dunkard church in the curve
of the two-lane, and, just beyond, the graveyard.

The morning sun sidled in past the half-closed
slats and resolved into rays and flecks
burning in the light—dust motes, I know,

and likely knew then, too, but still entranced
I watched one morning after our breakfast.
On this day I’d have otherwise forgotten,

probably my grannies were in the kitchen--
Emma with arms stretched out to read who’d died
(she’d be in the Dunkard cemetery soon),

half-crippled Sallie stringing the green beans
(years of suffering and strokes lay just ahead)--
while I stood quietly in the little room to see

random sparks caught in the sunbeam’s glow,
worlds I could move with a single breath
of poem or prayer, but could not control.
      Skating Rough Ground, 2022

Out of Selection Come Painful Cattle

The present is a cow grazing
the meadow—a fawn-colored Jersey,
from muzzle to switch absorbed
in filling her rumen. Many cattle,
many presents, moving together
across the meadow, up
the hill into a stand of locusts.
They graze and chew, passing
the world through four stomachs
beautifully named—omasum
that some call manyplies,
abomasum, the honey-combed
reticulum, the paunch. 
The cattle leave their pasts
behind, in dark green puddles. 

Let the future come to you. 
It will swell like a freshening udder,
it will break into dark bloom
like the flower of afterbirth,
it will be rough tongues licking
breath into your lungs, throatfuls
of milk sucked greedily
from the teat, a season of frolic,
a day of weaning and bawling,
the moment when ownership
cuts into your ear, the months’ long
dark of mire and muck
when the dog-foot and clover hay
bursts with summer’s fragrance. 
It will be the cold shock
of the salt-block on your tongue,
the heat of the chemical dehorning,
the days fattening in the feedlot,
the rebirth in the chute, the ride,
the unnamed place you go to.

To lard its secret flesh
with purpose, the future will feast
on lespedeza and wind-punched
apples, on corn shocks and silage
sweet with that year’s molasses. 
Let it go slow, placing its feet only
where you have stepped, seeing
only what you have seen, trees
herded into evening shade. 
May it come up behind you
like a man with a halter
to lead you back to the barn. 
     A different, later version appeared in Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)

NOTE: The title is from Gertrude Stein, “A Box,” in Tender Buttons, 1912

 
The Presentness of the Past and Future
 “For Augustine, the past and the future are present to the reflecting mind in the present, and that mutual co-presence is exemplified in the ontological involvements of actions and their larger temporal contexts. The past and the future are ontologically present in the present, not just objects of thought for the mind. Things in the present are related to their being to the past and the future. In his way, Augustine belabored these puzzles, and those who have followed him (notably Heidegger) are indebted to the breakthrough that he opened up.... Augustine certainly sees the past no longer existent and the future not yet existent, but he also sees them as simultaneously existent and present in the present to the relating and involved soul or mind. In his language, the soul is 'distended'; he speaks of a 'distentio animi,' some of those meaning is present already in ‘intentio.’ The word intentio in Latin has meanings a lot broader than its English cognate (‘to put in tension’ is only one, and distento in some ways merely selects and emphasizes the meanings that English has lost."—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin: Narrative as a Distributed Ontology of Human Action (AuthorHouse, 2011), 117-8.
 
*****
 
“The first [the naturalistic] concept of time cuts up time into accurately limited single sections and into single facts standing in those sections, which is finally possible only by reducing time to spatial happenings. Historical time, on the other hand, means a stream in which nothing is limited and isolated, but where all things flow into each other, where past and future are put into each other, where each present time carries, in a productive manner, at once past and future, where a measuring is not possible but only caesuras, which are more or less arbitrarily put in according to connections of meaning and great changes of meaning. The chronological reduction of those proceedings to spatial solar time is only a very crude and superficial means of orientation, which has nothing to do with the inner division, with the inner slowness or rapidity.”—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin, 92-3, summarizing Ernst Troeltsch's formal logic of history in Der Historismus und seine Probleme.
 
 
Memory and History
 “[W]hat happens is inseparable from what people think happens. Inseparable; but not identical, and not enduring.... when it comes to a human event, a later realization that what happened was not what we/thought happened usually involves an increase in the quality of our knowledge, together with a decrease in the quantity in our memory.—John Lukacs, “The Presence of Historical Thinking,” in Remembered Past, 6-7.

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/433893745323772064/