Kumin - Still to mow: poems

Still to Mow POEMS MAXINE KUMIN To Debbie When you look back theres lots of bales in the field,
but ahead its all still to mow. J OHN G ARDNER Contents On Reading The Age of Innocence
in a Troubled Time Revisionist History: The British Uganda
Program of 1903 Me in my bugproof netted headpiece kneeling to spread sodden newspapers between broccolis, corn sprouts, cabbages and four kinds of beans, prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation, AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami, front-page photographs of lines of people with everything they own heaped on their heads, the rich assortment of birds trilling on all sides of my forest garden, the exhortations of commencement speakers at local colleges, the first torture revelations under my palms and I a helpess citizen of a country I used to love, who as a child wept when the brisk police band bugled Hats off! The flag is passing by, now that every wanton deed in this stack of newsprint is heartbreak, my blackened fingers can only root in dirt, turning up industrious earthworms, bits of unreclaimed eggshell, wanting to ask the earth to take my unquiet spirit, bury it deep, make compost of it. from Dorothy Wordsworths Journals Wm went into the wood to alter his poems writes Dorothy . I shelled peas, gathered beans, and worked in the garden . This is Grasmere where she picked and boiled gooseberries, two lbs. of sugar in the first panfull while Wm went into the wood to alter his poems a trip he makes almost daily, composing the lines she will later copy.

Mornings she works in the garden at Grasmere which looked so beautiful my heart almost melted away, she confides while Wms in the wood altering his poems. On one of their daily walks she observes helpful details of Wms famed daffodils. Then its back to the garden at Grasmere where she ties up her scarlet runner beans and pulls a bag of peas for Miss Simpson. Leave Wm in the wood to alter his poems; praise Dorothy in the garden at Grasmere. Apples are dropping all over Joppa a windfall, a bagful for horses and cattle. Geese overhead are baying like beagles.

The pears in the uphill pasture lie yellow a litter gone fallow for stick pins of ground wasps. The deer are in rut. They race through the swales and here on the marshy spillway, a yearling caught drinking, spies slantwise two humansus, frozen unbreathing, the same pair who tracked him slobbering apples today in our Joppa back pasture. Bread Loaf, late August, the chemistry of a New England fall already inviting the swamp maples to flare. Magisterial in the white wicker rocker Robert Frost at rest after giving a savage reading holding nothing back, his rage at dying, not yet, as he barged his chair forth, then back, dont sit there mumbling in the shadows, call yourselves poets? All but a handful scattered. Fate rearranged us happy few at his feet.

He rocked us until midnight. I took away these close-lipped dicta. Look up from the page. Pause between poems. Say something about the next one. Otherwise the audience will coast, they cant take in half of what youre giving them.

Reaching for the knob of his cane he rose, and flung this exit line: Make every poem your final poem. Target practice in the gravel pit escalates once the date is set to orange vests and whiffs of deer immoderately helped by beer. Yarded by stream, snagged in brush Coors and Miller, bronzed and crushed glint through fallen leaves and snow to say no matter where we go on trails that plunge vertiginous their litter has preceded us. Blue jays back out of the forest reduced to December beggary hammering sunflower seeds under the gash of tin roof, frost staining the windowpanes sour rime coating the pastures unpardonable to pass out and wake with Winter, this stranger in this cold home in this cold bed. Is it my fault Im part rat terrier, part the kind of dog who lives in a ladys lap? I didnt ask to be bottom mutt in the pack that runs untamed through the twisted trash-strewn streets in Xochiapulcho, I didnt ask to be plucked up by a pair of gringos. First, they took away my manhood.

No more sweet reek of bitches, no hot pursuits, no garbage rot. When they packed up to go back to the USA I thought theyd cry, then dump me out, but no. Macho mestizo , my entry papers say. Who dines in style and sleeps the sleep of kings ought dream no more of his rowdy half-starved days.... I dwell in heaven but without the wings. He came, a dog auspiciously named Virgil, homeless, of unknown breed but clearly hound barking at scents, aroused by hot ones to bugle.

His first week here he brought three squirrels to ground and lined their mangled corpses up on the grass to bewhy not?admired before burial. He gobbled the snottiest tissues from the trash. Also, he swiped our lunches off the table. He knew not sit or stay , has still to take in that chasing sheep and horses is forbidden. When reprimanded, he grovels, penitent. He longs for love with all his poets soul.

His eyebrows make him look intelligent. We save our choicest food scraps for his bowl. On April 4, moving the pea fence to another row, we unearth forty perfect parsnips that have spent the coldest winter since the seventies condemned like leeches, Aristotle says, to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them wherever they are stuck. Overlooked. Our good luck. Aromatic poppets, pried from the black gold of old soil, dingier than cauliflower or pearls, we eat them braised with a little brown sugar.

Pure, Aristotle. Come, philosopher. Come to the table. Sit by my side. two roistering dogs splayed me flat on frozen turf shattering six ribs consigning me to gray walls, bleak thoughts Im up and about, hitching from place to place and I see the common coarse-grained stones have not given up their good seats in the wall though the deckle-edged daffodils came and went while I motored my rented bed up and down and I see the greening margin along the road is shaggy and unshorn and the goldfinches have exchanged their winter costumes for strobic lozenges of yellow that brighten the window feeder and an indigo bunting has brought his electric blue to my sphere so that each time the rose breasted grosbeak alights for a sunflower chip I am stunned into wholeness, healed by a wheel of primary colors. A student of mine turned in a composition about shooting pigeons in his uncles barn.

He peppered them with beebees. They just sat there in the rafters spots of red appearing on their breasts. Eventually they toppled. The ones that were still flapping he stomped on. He says that he was eight or nine, he claims that kids that age dont know what death is. Hes since become a vegetarian, a lifetime of expiation ahead of him in southern Ohio wheres its raining on newly thawed fields and theres a nitrate alert from all the fertilizer washing down into the ground water, contaminating local wells.

They say drinking it is still okay for grownups though not for kids too young to know what death is. C.K. 19291999 2 parts sugar, 1 part vinegar my mantra while I shred, then chop a head of purple cabbage hued so deep it stains my fingers and the countertop magenta-blue. Every September each in our own kitchen we performed this deconstruction of a perfect globe lopped from the well-worked earth, then rubbed clean enough to bring indoors. We stripped its outer layers to the shiny sphere, chopped, salted, set aside, readied for 2 parts sugar, 1 part vinegar.... More than fifty years ago you unearthed this innovative scrip for freezer cole slaw from the Womens Page, in your home town, Dayton, Ohio.

It ages well, or rather does not age 2 parts sugar, 1 part vinegar old friend from Vietnam sit-in days, the rain-soaked marches to stamp out Jim Crow, you endured a cough that ran all summer. That final meal, our mingled corn, slim ears.... How could we cut you loose so suddenly? So much unharvested, so much we did not say. Enter November, wearing his helmet. He watches me put the potato bed to sleep under a blanket of rotted manure. When March, all braggadocio and sleet, bursts in, I will fork the faded horse apples into the icy turf.