Peterson David - Earth apples: Edward Abbey--collected poems = Pommes de terre

Earth Apples
Copyright 1994 by Clarke C. Abbey
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795317545

Edward Paul Abbey was born on January 29, 1927, on a hillside farm in rural Pennsylvania. He died on March 14, 1989, at his Tucson home. In his sixty-two years, Abbey published eight novelsincluding the comedic-eco-anarchistic Monkey Wrench Gangand fourteen volumes of nonfiction, among them the American classic Desert Solitaire. Two of Abbeys novels have found their way to film, and a third is in the works. No other contemporary American literary and cultural figure is so widely loved, and hated, as Edward Abbey. I write, he liked to say, to entertain my friends and infuriate our enemies. He did both.

David Petersen knew Edward Abbey as a friend, a mentor, and a colleague in letters. In addition to this volume, Petersen also edited and introduced Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey. Petersen was born in 1946 and lives today with his wife Caroline in a self-built cabin in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. He is the author of three books of natural history, and has edited and introduced Big Sky, Fair Land, essays by Pulitzer-winning novelist A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Petersens own essays have been included in several anthologies. He is currently writing a book about grizzly bears in Colorado.

Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for youbeyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

So long.

Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

in a letter from Mrs. Melville to her mother, 1859,
as quoted in Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections
from the Journals of Edward Abbey

(July 26, 1972Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona)

There was so much I wanted to say
and did not say.

There was so much I wanted to do
and did not do.

There was so much I wanted to be
and never was.

(August, 1977Aztec Peak Lookout, Arizona)

#1

A modest young fellow named Morgan
Had a hideous sexual organ;
It resembled a log
Dredged up from a bog,
With a head on it just like a Gorgon.

#2

An old aging rou known as Drew
Looks back on his youth in sweet rue;
In the years of his might
He could do through the night
What it now takes him all night to do.

#3

An LDS bishop named Bundy
Used to wed a new wife every Sunday.
But his multiple matehood
Was ended by statehood:
Sic transit gloria mundi!

(October, 1978Aztec Peak Lookout, Arizona)

They praise the firm restraint with which you write;
Im with them there, of course.
You use the bridle and the bit all right
But wheres the fucking horse?

(October; 1982Tucson)

High in the redrock canyon land
We come for our honeymoon;
Married in bliss near the end of May
Would it last till the end of June?
Youre selfish, she says, and mean and crass,
And dirty and ugly and old.
Quite true, I admit, but you have a sweet!
If I may be so bold.
So we love one day and we battle the next,
And the music goes round and round;
Were on top of the mountain on Thursday eve
And by Friday were underground.
Rising on wings of delight to fly
Just as high as lovebirds can sail;
Then sinking, barge-like, to the floor of the sea,
Low down as the shit of a whale.
But well struggle on through and outlive our tears,
Whether marriage be joy or a joke;
I dont give a damn if it takes forty years,
Im cleaving to Clarke till I croak.

(March, 1989Tucson)

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a bawling beef herd
And the flies are not swarming all day.

Yes, give me a home where the grizzer bears roam
Where the bighorn and wapiti play,
Where never is seen a hamburger machine
And the cowshits not stinking all day.

(I should recite this at the annual Cowboy Poets
Roundup.)

[Editors Note: This poem is the last entry that appeared in Abbeys journals before his death on March 14, 1989.]

I dont see how poetry can ever be easy. Real poetry, the thick dense intense complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood and sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Edward Abbey

My late friend Edward Abbey preferred to think of himself as a novelist, and in fact published eight fictional works, including the immortal The Brave Cowboy, the anarchic The Monkey Wrench Gang, and his semiautobiographical fat masterpiece, The Fools Progress. Of the eight, seven remain in print (all but his first, Jonathan Troy, written when he was but twenty-five) and continue to sell like proverbial hotcakes. Two of Abbeys novels, The Brave Cowboy and Fire on the Mountain, have been filmed and a third, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is presently under option to Hollywood.

Not bad for a spud-digging farm boy out of rural Pennsylvania.

But, to paraphrase Eds good friend Doug Hayduke Peacock, Abbeys opinion of his own work is only one among many, and Ed will likely be remembered as much for his fourteen volumes of literary nonfiction as for his novels. And few, except perhaps the author himself, would dispute the proposal that the high point in Abbeys literary career was his prose masterpiece, Desert Solitaire.

But Cactus Ed as poet? Where does poetry fit in the big picture of Abbeys literary accomplishments?

Well, it doesnt, really. This collection, in fact, is something of an anomaly, not proffered as great poetry, but rather, offered as a revealing and entertaining insight into the mind and emotions of a great contemporary novelist and essayist, a great man. For Ed, writing poetry was alternately cathartic and playful, but never, it seems, intended to be the thick dense intense complicated stuff [requiring] blood and sweat on the poets part. Yet, because the seventy-one works contained in these pages are absolutely and irrefutably