"An Empty Boat . . ."

An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser,
from their collection Braided Creek.

Of course, one can appreciate the literal quality, the image of an actual boat just waiting, that call to adventure, or one can move metaphorically, the sense of the self as an empty vessel just available, that potential call to misadventure.  Or both.

(I love that small book: Braided Creek.)

"When A Hammer Sings . . .

Its head is loose."

You know, that ringing piiiinnnnnggggg when the hammerhead hits metal or concrete or even very hard wood, that noise that tells you to seat and secure the head before it flies off and hurts something or someone. (What's that saying about anger and breaking things? Don't fly off at the handle.) That pinging is singing.

Harrison and Kooser, from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Verse or something like that. I love that slim volume, but the subtitle isn't quite coming to mind.

I had a student once whose father, a carpenter, wrote poetry, published poetry. I always wondered if she let herself--for that's how it felt, that she wasn't letting herself--what poetry she could write. As a bystander, I knew she had something to share, observations to deliver. And I'm sure she's gone on to do that, whether or not she's producing poetry specifically.

Carpentry is another form of poetry, after all, and so's every other craft.

I considered getting hammered tonight, so I could sing, but I'm diving or kayaking or something tomorrow. I'll settle for my basic articulate (or semi-articulate) self and save singing for my birthday, the anniversary of Lord Byron's death (just missed his birthday), or something. Hangovers hammer back, after all.

Still, if you need to get hammered, Flor de Cana is not a bad way to go.

Mostly, I like how Harrison & Kooser's original verse gets me thinking--and smiling--every time: "When a hammer sings, its head is loose."

For some reason, rereading Elmore Leonard's Unknown Man #89 makes a lot of sense to me right now.

My Mother Taught Me To Hunt

She did, indeed. "What did you learn in school today, Matthew?" she started asking when I was five. She made me feel I should learn things, so I pursued learning, sometimes relentlessly. Learning something (or, better, multiple "things" ) to bring home and share became proof of my prowess: a string of trout for the pan after a day of fishing for knowledge. And, she listened to my answers for so many years that I think about reporting what I've "caught" at the end of each day, still, even now.

(We didn't get along all the time, but those were absolute gifts.)

When I think of her, I now often think of the ending to Ted Kooser's poem "Mother":

But the iris I moved from your house

now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots

green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,

as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything,

I would have to be lonely forever.

The poem's ending catches my sense of debt, of appreciation, and while I don't think I ever feared the spectre of loneliness the way the poem's speaker seems to have done, perhaps the gifts of seeking knowledge, of seeking life, and of reporting it, of sharing it, have protected me in their own way.

My mother died on a Friday, December 5th, back in 1997.

You should have quit smoking the day I turned eleven, Mom, the way you promised you would; I quit sneaking sips of beer that day, just as I said I would, and I didn't start again until years later when it became quite clear you weren't going to keep your part of our bargain. I know you had your reasons, but I'm still angry about that. Can you blame me?

Rest in peace, Mom. You need it, and you deserve it.

Your son,

Matthew David

Literature Club: Poems as Prompts

Carl Rakosi’s “The Experiment with a Rat”:

The Experiment with a Rat

Every time I nudge that spring

a bell rings

and a man walks out of a cage

assiduous and sharp like one of us

and brings me cheese.

How did he fall

Into my power?

Selections from Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser’s “Braided Creek.” This volume of poetry began as pieces included with letters or simply mailed to each other and subsequently gathered together without noting who wrote which.

On every topographic map

the fingerprints of God.

As a boy, when desperate I’d pray with bare knees

on the cold floor. I still do,

but from the window I look like an old man.

Mouse nest in the toe of my boot,

have I been gone that long?

The pigeon

has swallowed a fountain!

Listen!

With her brush, the artist

touches one part of her life

with another.

When a hammer sings

its head is loose.

Mirrors have always given the wrong

impression of me. So do other people.

So do I. Let’s stop this right now.

The face you look out of

is never the face

your lover looks into.

“What I would do for wisdom,”

I cried out as a young man.

Evidently not much. Or so it seems.

Even on walks I follow the dog.

What if everyone you’ve loved

were still alive? That’s the province

of the young, who don’t know it.

It’s nice to think that when

we’re fossils we’ll all be in the same

thin layer of rock.

I hope there’s time

for this and that,

and not just this.

I prefer the skyline

of a shelf of books.

Today a pink rose in a vase

on the table.

Tomorrow, petals.

The pastures grow up

With red cedars

Once the horses are gone.

[This slim volume finishes with the last two pieces.]

From Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendos,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

(Thanks, Jerome McGann for bringing this quotation to my attention.)