Filed Under: Poetry
August 20, 2009
The million-folded tyrannies
Of forever damaged families–
Youth soiled and casually twisted
In the flicker of this mordial dark,
Drinking tear fed memories
Of stolen dreams and borrowed themes,
Quick cut from a television life–
A punch line, no joke, a lie, a kiss,
Lost trust, now murder, and revenge—again.
All re-torn fabric that will not be re-sewn,
Nor helped by the documented kindness
Of our paper-built bureaucracies.
They mean well, we all do, want the best
We can, and spend as little as we might
To get by, to get–what is it we want again?
While generous with our time and money—
Just not now, later. I’ll call. Why me?
We buy heaven on a stick and lick,
Voting for promises and believing lies—
Not what you said it was I…
Like a paving stone on a walk at night–no, more like a book left down on the floor where you were reading it while trying to stretch the pain from your back so you could sleep–I stumbled upon a book shop in Derbyshire the other day. I have never much been to Derbyshire, having missed those roads as I drove through England back in 1978. This particular bookshop was there at that time but in no better shape than my own little effort in Boston, right down to trying to survive by selling textbooks on the side. No, I stumbled upon Scarthin books in Cromford because I spend too much time on the internet these days. I was researching what others considered to be the best bookshops.
It’s all very disappointing to a glass-half-empty sort like myself. So many people who love books and want to work for themselves try…
When Andrew Wyeth died I found myself reviewing many past thoughts and realizing a few new ones. He was by far the preeminent painter of my time, one of the first living painters I became aware of as a youth. I cannot remember the exact text, but his work was the cause of the first argument I ever had about art, and subsequently many others. His father, the fabulous N.C. Wyeth, had filled the dreams of my childhood with colors that challenged the nature of the ordinary. And that path lead back and beyond to the great Howard Pyle. Andrew Wyeth’s personal life made the national and world news. Books of his work were bestsellers and helped pay my rent during the 1970’s as I started life as a professional bookseller. But his greater importance to me was, from the first, that he made me think.
I should note…
In his curiously bloodless memoir Books, Larry McMurtry says, “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely the information in them.” This explains as much as the author wanted if taken alone, but seen in the context of a life, it reveals a great deal more.
I say curiously bloodless because I have no doubt of McMurtry’s love, nor his ability to explain it. He is both an accomplished author and a successful bookman. His experience at those vocations is prodigious. Yet, he seems reluctant to bare his soul now in either calling. As if he is speaking to an unfriendly audience.
A few years ago I read McMurtry’s quest, Roads, with even less satisfaction. I love to drive. I was blessed with children who enjoy the journey, and my youthful joy at being on the road to somewhere was carried on through…
Two of the greatest American authors among us today are Tom Wolfe and John McPhee, both of whom are often pigeonholed as part of the New Journalism school that arose in the 1960’s, but are in fact just plain good writers alive by chance at the same time, and both, by the nature of the academic mind, in need of tags so that their work can be more readily handled or dismissed. I am in awe of both men, and have re-read portions of their work to see if an examination of the bones might reveal the source of their magic–on a par with dissecting the golden goose.
My younger brother re-introduced me to McPhee in the early 1990’s. My brother is a geologist and was taken with several of those works which border on that territory, as well as the one on Alaska if I remember correctly.…
I do not remember who taught me the word, ‘fungible.’ I am as sure that I did not discover it in a book as I am of any memory, but I cannot recall the person who opened that window in my mind. I have a vague recollection of repeating the word aloud and being told its meaning. I believe the discovery must have been in high school because it appears in a manuscript of the time.
The importance of the word to me lay in the sudden self-awareness that others had wrestled with the amoebic edges of memory and found a word for a phenomenon I was already encountering. We often exchange actual and original purpose or intent with a better cause when we recall our actions. Price may have been the determining factor and money the motive for accepting the price, but it was, after all, the…
My first awareness of what music was, was a cousin sitting on the front porch of my grandparents house in Spartanburg, South Carolina, playing away on an enormous guitar and singing in a voice which was not pretty, but made you listen.
