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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810150799 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/24/1998 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 69 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
what nature
poemsBy STEVE FAY
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Steve FayAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0810150786
Chapter One
Girl with Catfish She is waiting below the barn, calling from the pig-tracked margin of the spring pond, and also in faded snapshots curled where cellophane tape has given way from the barber shop wall, and here as well in this week's Cuba Journal, her prize beside her in front of the newly painted shed door; the fish's head as wide as her face, its body longer than her arm, she smiles that no one helped her pull it in. And though it doesn't say, we know she must have impaled her own night crawler, tightening her lips intently, or because it says Spoon River, she may have hogged it, wading among rocks below Bernadotte Dam, plunging her fist into algal clefts until she was up to her elbow in barbeled flesh, risking Jonah's fate, yet landing her whale without being spat out. How the shadow of her jaw reminds of young Eve plaiting verdant blades of savanna, daydreaming herself queen of the vast tribe called Wanderer. And here she waits behind the barn, below the creek bluff, manure-rich clay drying on her Levis, her catfish gaping, surprised by sun and the locust-dry air. Landscape after John White's Indians Fishing, c. 1585There were never such fishers in Galilee, blessed without nets, raking the hammerheads into their boator waiting for the bonita to fly to meet their spears. They are untroubled by desire to pile up riches wrote the Englishman while his painter-friend, mixing too much red for the cooking fire laid mid-cannow, confounded all perspective with one terrestrial cardinal flower rising from that Virginia riverbed -that green mud on which the viewer, extending lines, must stand thinking shores of history, but slowly, slowly drowning. Science
Science is the tables of the powers of ten; not really. It is the arithmetic in the water budget sometimes. Really, you are out on the prairie, following the dog's nose, crisscrossing through the tall grass. If you are lucky, you flush the cock pheasant, and like a firecracker you go to heaven. In Germany, Einstein couldn't get off a clear shot. Someone took this photo of him opening the door to his house, muddy, his feet soaked, a few beggar-ticks clinging to his sleeve. From a Handbook to Nature We think the halls of our arteries are dark: we forget the fire that burns at the tip of each capillary. It is the white juice of the blood burning there. That part is really plant. It is the reason a man, on the coldest day of his life, wants to lie down and sleep with weeds under the snow, expressing nothing. The Serpent's Complaint
the chief sound of life is a hiss -Melville at Galapagos Imagine your Eden pierced by babble, Eve's rowdy kids stealing the iguana's eggs. Who wouldn't invent the Talking God to quell such sacrilege? Anything to get them off your island. It had been quiet once, you mused-the slow pulse of surf, gray manna of lichen growing on rocks of the caldera. What happened to the neighborhood? Still, the surf provides ... all you had to say was that the red coconut was forbidden and the bipeds-always suckers for a shell game- got drunk on milk, slew a child, and fled like thieves on flimsy rafts. How could you have known they'd beget bikers wearing chains to haul your slow cousins off for soup tureens- sporting their claws on cheap plated buckles? But it was when the syllables of their canons more raucous than gulls violated the bed of the very sea, you were finally convinced the Silent God was dead. Ictalurus
When they built the Burlington Bridge, years ago, they caught one on a crane hook that was so big everybody thought it was a sunk log. Weighed two full tons. They had to cut the cable because it wasn't any use trying to get the hook back. They were going to cut it for steaks at the sawmill, but it was too tough for dog food. Some big-timer bought it all up and ground fertilizer out of the meat, carved walking sticks and gun stocks from the ribs, and sold the skull to a museum in New York City. I heard once that there's a fancy house in Springfield with a big window cut from that same old cat's blue tailfin, but I don't expect that's true. Chemistry of the Prairie State
Ask for a bowl of chili and a toasted cheese sandwich in any bus station in Illinois and it will taste the same; some things are constants. Others are elements. Twelve years ago at a building site in Peoria, two boulders were unearthed; when split open, one contained a lost shipment of yellow and green Dekalb Corn seed caps, the other an antler plow and petrified corn. Often discoveries like this are hushed up by experienced contractors who know that much hidden under dark loam is better left buried; once near Decatur, a vein of Sauk knives and fertility dances was accidentally uncovered by a farmer, resulting in thirty-two hasty marriages and one death. What is generally forgotten, however, is the power of water to dissolve everything living underground. Analysis of half-mile-deep wells in Monmouth, and the Bell-Smith Springs, reveals traces of kinnikinnick and fox paw, German muscles and sow's blood, Vachel Lindsay's tears to God. Near Kellerville, especially, families attribute miracles of healing and long life to a daily consumption of these waters. Always by the well, a tin cup on a hook of wire, twisted around the hands of the grandfather. The President Fishes from His Speedboat
(1991) And because it would not be fitting for him to weep openly for hostage or Kurd, he takes himself away from shore to bathe cut herring in the Atlantic of his heart. There, off Maine, none but the sworn agents of his secret service shall glimpse the foundering of our ship of state, and, soon, they turn away esteeming the sacrifice -to be presidential. Though the great heart trembles, he touches the throttles for our sakes should skiffs with cameras near: penants snap to, the president doffs his cap and smiles. Lo, along riverbanks of cities and towns, far inland, men and women perish in the great boat's wake.
Chapter Two
The Milkweed Parables We bear the seeds of our return forever, the flowers of our leaving, fruit of flight ... -Muriel Rukeyser I. The Keeper1
The girl saw something like it in the eyes of the men as they discussed how best to stack straw or butcher hogs. Silently stirring the lard kettle with the heavy paddle, she would watch them argue about seasoning the sausage, then later, alone in the woods, try to wrinkle her nose like Augie Ochslein as if to interrupt her uncle, Nein-Kein garlic! Oskar, du weisst-no garlic in mine. The others would laugh at him, but Mr. Ochslein clearly took pride in being the most persnickety neighbor. Turning over leaves to find the new ginger shoots, she knew no adult would have appreciated such a finickiness in her, unless it was applied to swishing the bluebottles away from the cooling mincemeat pies. So her vision grew in her eyes and her fingertips, and was called out at evening when the crows gathered along the opposite bluff of the creek. And she said to no one but herself, Tomorrow the hickory buds will open their small hands and call down rain. 2
A demon of willfulness had once almost come to life before her in the coal-oil flicker of the parlor, as her uncle read in the almanac the story of a young girl struck down and disgraced by adventure. And so she had willingly memorized the verses from the German Bible, and stayed away for a month from the catfish hole in the creek and fenceposts and other places where it would have been easy for the Devil to reach up from Hell and grab her. But even then, she knew that she was drawn to another side, though she did not know what was there. Even her breathing became less girl-like at age twelve, with her turning to walk up the small twisting draws from McGee Creek, watching the growth of the gooseberry leaves, the sprouting acorns where a tree had fallen, arriving home from school so late they assumed she had visited Elsbeth. And so she said she did and made up a story of what the old midwife had asked, something about her boy, Oskar, that made her uncle shift, then smile and forget about more scolding. She only visited Elsbeth that next week to try to get her to talk about the same things she herself had told, so that the old woman might later remember and reply about such a visit from the girl once that spring. She had never gone into the house of a woman who lived alone before, a house with no man and a messy table, and everywhere small piles of leaves and bark and paper. As she followed hunched Elsbeth into the kitchen, she bumped her head on a low-hanging shock of herbs, and white-plumed seeds fell from narrow pods catching like snowflakes in her auburn hair. Elsbeth laughed and told her about curing Uncle Oskar of pleurisy with the root of that same plant, as they drank sassafras tea and the girl only played at removing the seeds from her hair, admiring the way they glistened there with Elsbeth's small looking glass. 3
Thus one called may find a mentor. But there was only that one summer, after she had turned twelve, when she lived with and worked for Elsbeth, as they both told her mother and uncle, Elsbeth paying for the girl's housekeeping with paper bundles of cures and a mixture for brewing tonic for Oskar's mare. It meant something coming in and nothing more going out to the school next fall, except for Cousin Gus, Oskar's boy; it meant a hardworking, more marriageable daughter for her mother. But for herself, it meant finding Elsbeth's light in her own hands, feeling the difference between poison and cure, as if in the dark, for it was surely darkness that hid this light from others. It meant knowing, as surely as knowing straw, or butchering, or burning brick or charcoal, and it meant laughing out loud sitting at the dirty table with Elsbeth or calling in the crows together from the shade of the hickory grove. When Elsbeth caught the palsy in October's early freeze and could not tell her what herbs to brew, she tried to find them on her own, but Elsbeth was taken in a wagon to town and died. She never knew if she could have saved her. No one held her responsible, but they interrogated her, asking why she wanted to keep living in Elsbeth's cluttered house, and for that matter, how had she spent her housekeeper's time if the old woman's place was such a sty. In less than a month, as Uncle Oskar returned to supper sweaty and nervous, her mother muttered, Fertig-Ganz fertig-Ende, and a fragrant smoke twisted above the hickories as Elsbeth's herb stores burned. The girl took up reading Psalms aloud each Sunday night and the questions stopped. But when Gus choked on a fish bone, the week before Christmas, and she made him swallow bread, as anyone but a child knew to do, Uncle Oskar blurted that God be praised that she had stayed with Elsbeth, but then he glanced to heaven and down again as if embarrassed and quickly went to see about the calf. Surely, the calf's small nose knew more about the light in yarrow and in chicory and in maple twigs than her uncle, she thought, but he believed his darkness was the light. 4
She learned to avert her eyes so that the others would not be troubled by what showed through, and so she grew to adulthood in two worlds, marrying Arnie Ochslein to please her mother, who was ill, and moving back home to have her child when Arnie was hospitalized with malaria in Manila, where he was soldiering. The influenza took her mother before the cancer and she passed away in spring. And when the government telegram came about Arnie, Uncle Oskar pledged they would raise her baby as Gus's little brother, while large tears streamed down both sides of his furrowed nose. Sunday afternoons that summer, when Gus had taken the wagon to his friend's and when her Uncle Oskar napped as if beneath the safe canopy of his pork-chop dinner, she would carry her baby out across the farm, through the hickories and along the creek, the small boy's hands mimicking her own as she reached to touch the leaves or as she knelt to touch the water. If she handed him a stalk of goatsbeard, he stared transfixed, and he screamed beyond all decorum with delight when she blew away the buoyant seeds. And the wordless baby, like his mother, hid all trace of these discoveries from the world of Oskar and Gus, kept it wrapped within the pod of his small secret soul. 5
That Monday in September, she hadn't known the cow had gotten down into the west ravine where the white snakeroot grows; Oskar hadn't told her. But when the new milk smelled strange, she had thought better to drink a little of it herself to test it before giving it to her child, and when it did not seem so bad, she drank a bit more. By the time Oskar ran in to say that cow had trembles, the milksickness had already begun to double her over. As she lay on the kitchen floor, she thought she saw her son growing into a boy; could that be him coming in with the doctor, she wondered. But it was Gus. The delirium's taking her ..., the doctor's words floated apart from his bobbing face in the misty kitchen, ... the coma's next ... takes a poison to fight a poison ... arsenic ... back, lad, ... enough to kill a horse.... She fought the pill, trying to push from deep within, as if she were again giving birth, but the last push seemed to heave her clear, beyond and above the house, far above poor Uncle Oskar rocking a baby in his arms and standing beside the doctor's carriage. Her hands reaching at last into the top of the hickory grove, now she could count the weight of the kernels ripening before the frost. She could hear the crows calling from the horizon, the echo of Elsbeth's laugh. Far on the other knoll, across the creek, they seemed to be covering something-baskets of new potatoes, she thought-in the kitchen of a farmhouse; a black carriage drove away, splashed through the ford, then kicked a small curl of yellow dust above the bramble patch at the turn toward town. II. The Flyer
1
In the black pool of McGee Creek, he touched his face, and it dissolved in rings of light. That game might have been at his young mother's urging, but he had long abandoned such play when already the hired blade of the dozer severed the meanders wreathing his lowland, to shunt the current down a straight trough along the eastern boundary of the farm. And after the willows had been smacked smooth, as he had heard the pioneers called it, and the old way of the creek graded level, each corner of the new field lay quietly in the sun. There was a year of gigantic corn. But that triumph seemed a cheating when the next year floods rotted the seeds, and the third autumn brought hail just before the harvest. He might not have cursed the roping clouds that day had he known of the coming decade of dust, years when the seedlings shot up as if to make a bounty, only to wither by July. At first he blamed the insidious milkweeds that also claimed his field of sun. For weeks he patrolled the furrows with his hoe, striking off their milky heads, but still they rose by the thousands above the dying corn, their seeds wrapped like snake-scales within the ovarian pods. By November, their white hair shaken dry, they rose like a mist above the bottomland with every breeze rattling the frayed corn. It seemed that the channel he had made worked too well, cutting fast and deep, drawing down the watertable as quickly as the earth along the gully fell away from the foot of his corner post. Only stapled wire held him when the war came, and he was not as sorry as some others for his calling up. 2
In every way, the training suited him. His carbine seemed much lighter than the hoe, and his field pack weighed no more from season to season. He became a navigator in the Air Corps and watched the earth fall away farther and farther beneath his straightedge and protractor, triangles gathering fields, woods, and seas. On his vellum charts, Normandy itself looked no bigger than his farm, and the shadow of the bomber stirred glimmers on the Channel effortlessly as a child's hand swishing in a bucket, or a creek.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from what nature by STEVE FAY Copyright © 1998 by Steve Fay
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.