Robyn Ryle's Blog, page 5

National Poetry Month: Day 12

Regarding Chainsaws

Hayden Carruth

The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,

an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn’t start.

Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,

though I’ve had enemies couldn’t of done

no worse. I took it to Ward’s over to Morrisville,

and no doubt they tinkered it as best they could,

but it still wouldn’t start. One time later

I took it down to the last bolt and gasket

and put it together again, hoping somehow

I’d do something accidental-like that would

make it go, and then I yanked on it

450 times, as I figured afterwards,

and give myself a bursitis in the elbow

that went five years even after

Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone

and near killed me when he hit a nerve

dead on. Old Stan wanted that saw, wanted it bad.

Figured I was a greenhorn that didn’t know

nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was,

you could say, being only forty at the time,

but a fair hand at tinkering. “Stan,” I said,

“you’re a neighbor. I like you. I wouldn’t

sell that thing to nobody, except maybe

Vice-President Nixon.” But Stan persisted.

He always did. One time we was loafing and

gabbing in his front dooryard, and he spied

that saw in the back of my pickup. He run

quick inside, then come out and stuck a double

sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed

that saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I

drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight

with a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge

Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it

with both hands. Two or three days after,

I asked him, “How you getting along with that

McCulloch, Stan?” “Well,” he says, “I tooken

it down to scrap, and I buried it in three

separate places yonder on the upper side

of the potato piece. You can’t be too careful,”

he says, “when you’re disposing of a hex.”

The next saw I had was a godawful ancient

Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for,

temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.

It used to remind me of Dry and how he’d

clap that saw a couple times with the flat

of his double-blade axe to make it go

and how he honed the chain with a worn-down

file stuck in an old baseball. I worked

that saw for years. I put up forty-five

run them days each summer and fall to keep

my stoves het through the winter. I couldn’t now.

It’d kill me. Of course they got these here

modern Swedish saws now that can take

all the worry out of it. What’s the good

of that? Takes all the fun out too, don’t it?

Why, I reckon. I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged

an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple

and it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn’t play

“Tea for Two” on his cornet in the town band

no more, and then when Toby Fox was holding

a beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up

and the saw skidded crossways and nipped off

one of Toby’s fingers. Ain’t that more like it?

Makes you know you’re living. But mostly they wan’t

dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your

back. Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer

in his time, no two ways about that, but he

never sawed himself. Stan had the sugar

all his life, and he wan’t always too careful

about his diet and the injections. He lost

all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.

One time he started up his Powerwagon

out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch,

and she jumped forwards right through the wall

and into the manure pit. He just set there,

swearing like you could of heard it in St.

Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said,

“Stan, what’s got into you?” “Missus,” he says

“ain’t nothing got into me. Can’t you see?

It’s me that’s got into this here pile of shit.”

Not much later they took away one of his

legs, and six months after that they took

the other and left him setting in his old chair

with a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever

he felt himself sinking. I remember that chair.

Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin

that must of come down from his great-great-

grandfather and had grit in it left over

from the Civil War and a bullet-hole as big

as a yawning cat. Stan latched the pieces together

with rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was

always breaking and coming undone. About then

I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I

don’t feel so good about that neither. But my mother

was having her strokes then. I figured

one person coming apart was as much

as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away

to the nursing home, and then he died. I always

remember how he planted them pieces of spooked

McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time

I went up and dug, and I took the old

sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it

on the windowsill right there next to the

butter mold. But I’m damned if I know why.

National Poetry Month: Day 11

These are found poems from the back of baseball cards. Specifically, those from the 1966 season and picked at random. Well, okay, not completely at random. My team (Reds), my partner’s team (Braves), the team I like the least (Cubs–yeah, suck it, I don’t care) and the team whose park we visited last summer (Cardinals).

1966

Lou Brock

The Rocket came to

The Redbirds the fastest man

On the Cardinal squad

Ron Santo

Shattered records

30 homers. 114 RBIs.

All-time Cub

Game’s great ones.

 

 

Mel Queen

The young blessed

Strongest arms

Came up an outfielder

Future on the mound

Short relief stints

Felipe Alou

One of 3 Alous

Felipe champion 1956

 

National Poetry Month: Day 10

A good and simple Monday morning poem from Thich Nhat Hanh.

 

 

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment

and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

National Poetry Month: Day 9

I always carry a little notebook of some sort with me. Sometimes they’re fancy. The one I have now is a Slytherin notebook a friend brought back from London. I write all kinds of things in them. Lists and phone numbers and random ideas. They make a very strange sort of diary when you go back to look at them later.

 

Notes Circa 2010

The library

Has a magazine called

Women and Guns

Whiskey River

Airbourne Farms

Snakes don’t die until sundown

Baptista Australis

Blue Indigo

Morning light on

Madison’s Main Street

Trees and shade

Detached deer antler

In the middle of the road

Old folks at the skate rink

Yarn needs

Bulky (for felted bowls)

Laceweight (superfine)

Lama’s Lace

Helen’s Lace (silk and wool)

Cotton/wool blend

The new mulch product

Look for book about barns

Pretty Sarah

Drive to North Vernon

Contact Neavill’s Grove

Contact Village Lights

Write letter to Aastik’s parents

Equal vinegar, sugar, water

Clove

Recycled bridge parts

Sculptures at the end of river streets

A story about a fiddle

With magic powers

National Poetry Month: Day 8

There’s a thin line between flash fiction and poetry. This is a piece I wrote in one of Kathy Fish’s amazing Fast Flash workshops. If you ever have the opportunity to take one of her classes, do it. I firmly believe her workshop could pull amazing writing out of a rock, she is that good.

We’ll All Be Together Again

Our old dog, Fluffy, is in the driveway, though he’s been dead for years. He would sit at the top of the sloping road, waiting, Mom told us, for Brownie, who disappeared the year the white van cruised the neighborhood. “It was on the news,” Mom told us. “They picked up dogs for medical experiments.” She knows that’s what happened.

Fluffy is all white, but as he sits in the driveway, his eyes glow red.

#

We order side salads and toasted ravioli. My daughter can’t get the words out fast enough. She tells me about the episode that broke her heart. “The demon ripped her here,” she says. She draws a line from her flat stomach to the place where her breasts will someday be. “She was dying and they kissed,” she said. “I waited so long.”

#

My teeth crumble in my mouth to dust.

#

After the skin’s peeled off, the butternut squash looks like cheese, orange and square. I am quiet with the knife.

#

Every new apartment is better. A window seat. Ceilings that reach the sky. We are always searching for the next best place.

#

Late afternoon, I glance up from the couch at the churchyard next door. A possum waddles in front of the steps and disappears into the overgrown weeds in our yard. The cat jumps from one window to the next, watching.

#

It’s usually my mother I’m angry at, though sometimes it’s my husband instead. What is always the same is that I have never been so filled with rage. I wake up trembling. It is as if Pandora’s box has been opened in the night and it will never be shut again.

#

We narrate our lives to each other in staccato bursts. “Meeting in Texas cancelled.” “Sam’s home sick from school.” “The deer ate all the tomatoes.” “I hate this part of my job.” “Someday we’ll all be together again.”

#

I am single again. Dating. It goes well or it doesn’t. That’s not what matters. I am back to the place where I will always be alone. It aches warm beneath my skin, just above my heart. The sadness rains down from the ceiling. But in the midst of it all, some part of me knows I’ll wake up with a warm body beside me. I know deep down that the worst is over.

#

The same day as the possum, I go out to water the garden. I find a turning tomato, sitting in the grass. The scene of the crime. Nibbled until it is almost unrecognizable. I leave it there and listen to the hiss of water from the hose. Later that night, it rains.

National Poetry Month: Day 7

I’m kind of getting into this whole found poem thing. What if poetry is everywhere and we just haven’t been paying enough attention to hear it? This poem is taken from conversations at a senior art thesis defense, where students talk about and through their work with art professors, and sometimes lucky outsiders like me. So this is art made of conversations about art. Very meta.

Art Defense

Many different ways

Resonate

Hope within itself

A possibility of excelling

Sigmund Freud

Cannot respect a woman who is sexual

In general

To visually communicate

Exploring conditions of dreams versus reality

What is fabrication

I want my audience to contemplate

The sense of space

This space that goes beyond the image

I made the frame myself

Unified in one frame

Exposure of raw wood

How each specifically touches on something

The snake being the serpent

In the second image

There’s a struggle here

Trying to protect something

There’s a very unnatural feeling here

I used cherries

Needles

A sharp and threatening object

What happens there

A sea of despair

The fairy tale aspect

It’s not very realistic

Progressivism

And moving forward

This dream that we want to attain

I see a continuity

Where light becomes important

You wanted them to be beautiful, right?

So they are a whisper?

More an investigation

Night and day

Hot and cold

These things are implied

Pretty windows that we’re looking through

National Poetry Month: Day Six

 

Such a beautiful sight

Green is never as green as in the strange light after an April storm and I have 2,456 steps to go so I leave the sounds of the baseball game on the TV and step out the door.

There’s a picture-perfect sunset against the stacks of the power plant at the end of 2nd St and it’s like all the images in Sunday school as a kid of God, sunlight breaking through clouds.

But then at the corner, a guy with long hair yells at me from across the street,“Where’s Telegraph Hill?” And I point toward the hill in the distance.

“No, where’s the end of Telegraph Hill?” he asks.“Where’s 3rd St.?”

“Across Main St.” And I point north and he heads toward the river which is the wrong direction and now the picture of the sunset is gone.

But then a robin lands on the sidewalk and yells at me and down at the river there’s a family, a woman in a long skirt and a girl in tight jeans and high heels with a range of boys at different heights and the woman is speaking into her cell phone in a language I don’t recognize as one of the boys points to a bucket on the river shore. “That’s someone’s bucket,” he says.

At the same spot a woman with big hair sits in her mini-van with the windows down and the radio turned up to Kenny Loggins—“Sweet love’s showin’ us a heavenly light / Never seen such a beautiful sight.”

And the petals from the cherry tree are scattered on the sidewalk and the grass is so green. Do you see? Are you looking?

And this is what life is like on a Wednesday night after a storm in a small town in Indiana.

 

National Poetry Month: Day Five

This morning, a blackout poem, which is a kind of found poem you make by blocking out various words in an existing document. This one came from an e-mail.

Response to Colleagues

Thank you

We *do* understand

Increasing

Responses

Questions

All under

Limited

Space

Sorry about

Exclusion. We did reduce

Attempts to go lower

Rejected

Plans to knock down walls or

Whatever else is needed

The simple fact is,

We do not even have enough

Which break out

And anything

That I’m not aware of

Thrives with

Our own and that we’re all in this together

National Poetry Month: Day 4

This poem dedicated to the folks at Hong Kong Kitchen, who are always there to feed us.

Chinese Restaurant

by David Shumate

After an argument, my family always dined at the Chinese

restaurant. Something about the Orient washed the bitterness

away. Like a riverbank where you rest for awhile. The owner

bowed as we entered. The face of one who had seen too much.

A revolution. The torture of loved ones. Horrors he would never

reveal. His wife ushered us to our table. Her steps smaller than

ours. The younger daughter brought us tea. The older one took

our orders in perfect English. Each year her beauty was more

delicate than before. Sometimes we were the only customers

and they smiled from afar as we ate duck and shrimp with our

chopsticks. After dinner we sat in the comfort of their silence.

My brother told a joke. My mother folded a napkin into the shape

of a bird. My sister broke open our cookies and read our fortunes

aloud. As we left, my father always shook the old man’s hand.

From The Writer’s Almanac.

National Poetry Month: Day Three

In honor of Opening Day, a baseball poem by Kate Glavin from Hobart, which publishes great baseball poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

 

Men Try to Teach You Things

you already know.

Never take the first pitch.

Never buy a glove too big.

That’s not how I learn.

We had a knothole

gang—people

who couldn’t pay

for the game

watched us play

through holes

in the fence.

You should’ve seen

them—all tiptoes

til the last

batter swung.

That’s hard work—

always reaching

up to see.

And the funny thing is

it was always them

thanking me.

from Hobart: Another Literary Journal