foothills of the past

Shortly after the time Marconi began his famous radio transmissions, my grandmother as a young girl was still on horseback for supplies at the small general store. Situated at the crossroads of a Swedish settlement in Iowa, it was near the church my great great great grandfather built and ministered.

As I grew up, my grandmother recounted these tales of my family as they were passed down to her but the basis of her own existence as a little girl was modern: riding a horse into town for supplies was better than walking. And she knew stories of hardship. Even before the homes were staked, the first winter was severe and early, forcing her ancestors to dig caves  into the hillsides for shelter.

She lived in between two centuries, to the age of 103 and was lucky enough to see the memorial of the immigrants’ community in its ghost-town form of Calliope Village, put onto a plot of land near her town's present day railroad.

--- 

at the end of her burial day as

the wind cut through the switchgrass,

a soot-black suit carried forward

the muted explorations of a cobweb-rattled

stable from one hundred years ago.

steeped in molasses-soaked barley, the sweat

of a horse under cracked leather tack

drifts through the homesteader’s air on a calliope song

long gone across the tracks to the empty side of town.

clouds of dust ripple out like marconi’s waves on the

gravel road as she meditates in the saddle to the clopping

hooves of her four-legged ride.

a stone-ground loaf of bread waits on the sill,

baked for her by the shopkeep’s boy at the grey clapboard

store facing north near the church and cemetery where

her great grandfather Ring lowered the

dead and softly sang their praise:

swedish hymns to the tenders of the prairie

and the harmonies they knew in the dust, rough-milled grain

and the holes dug into the winter ground.

I learned these ballads at her side in this four-cornered

churchyard where the sandstones lean distilled through

time and I quietly now sing out my goodbyes

to the girl with her warm bread and

long-stride friend as they fade down the road

to their far place in the foothills of the past.

See also: 

Lost at Sea - Part One

Lost at Sea - Part Two

 

Lost at Sea - Part Two

A Search for Meaning

  

Mark and the Healey, Fall 1966

When a friend’s car in storage finally had to move, Mark brought it home and managed his teen-survival by escaping to our garage where he and his high-school buddies would spend their time for the next couple of years restoring a very ugly, very non-running Austin Healey 3000 MK-I that would “soon be cherry, really!” Pistons, connecting rods, and camshafts would land in one of four spider-filled corners as each new portion of the engine block was split open like a carp on the riverbank. Sections were gutted and placed to rest in the right sequence - or not - and they prayed for their salvation with the hope to finding their way back to the convertible’s beginning; the mechanical mecca of their 2.9 liter car, to purr again like it did at LeMans in 1959.

This was how the dream spunout in their heads while eating Scrumptuous cheeseburgers and hanging at the drive-in theatre watching “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” They played like teenagers late at night and away from home, and the car was still a dream remembered every morning, but that wasn’t the moving force for them. It was the refuge of the garage and its social event playing weekly that was their raison d’etre. It was better than a Wednesday night cardgame though you might have easily seen their caricatures off the sideroad parking lot as dogs around a table painted on black velvet; green plastic visors on their foreheads and wrenchs in their hands; doobies in the ashtrays. Their time as friends working on the car together was a process that would help them all slowly pull that family crap of their households out of them like a swallowed fishhook; away from the environment most damaging, away from the emotional chaos and dysfunctional alignment to their parents.

Their idea worked for awhile but the closer they got to putting pistons and cylinders back into harmonic balance, the farther away from reality a maiden-voyage fill-up at the Sinclair pump would ever become. They had the dream, but lack of cash dashed their hopes as gran prix mechanics, and their time in the garage became less time spent on the car and more on their bravado.

Gran Prix Mechanics, Fall 1966

After the second year with Mark and his friends holed up in their ashram, it was apparent to my dad that the Austin Healey wasn’t going to roll down the driveway on its own ignition and he had the heap towed and scrapped and regretfully gave Mark the fractional money returned from the sale for his college funds as a payoff. He had better things planned for the garage, like lawnmowers and rakes, and wanted the oil stains over and done with. At this point, quite the drinker in his own right, my dad hadn’t gone so far yet to check himself in to the 12-Step Program but the Healey stood as an incentive moment from a latenight confrontation illuminated under the swinging glare of a naked bulb dangling high from a single wire, each arc shifting the light and stretching the shadows of an ugly moment of ultimatums; friends scattering into the dark; fouled spark plugs kicked on the floor, and the garage door closing on the dream of a cherry car with a high-performance history for the last time.

You should know that my dad had grown up in the Great Depression where northwestern Iowa bordered South Dakota, in the midst of thousands of other Scandinavians who had staked their claims and  transplanted their farming knowledge in the 1860s onto the restless fields of 4-foot tall grasses, blackened sod, and tight little Seventh Day Adventist communities. His ancestors had founded a township in South Dakota near Big Springs and his great-grandfather, as carpenter and pastor, built the church and its graveyard on the knoll beside that still quietly covers those first settlers of that small corner of the American landscape.

My dad was without brothers or sisters and his childhood was all about work. His grandfather was a banker who had lost everything in the 1920s and went back to the dirt and muck to survive. My dad’s mother was also an only child and sang from a strict and a severe prairie hymnal, and he was bequethed the same at age four when his father died. His mother quickly remarried for survival, to a smalltown entrepreneur in Hawarden who owned a dry-cleaning business and the three worked together in the steam-filled rooms mixed with solvent to make ends meet.

He believed in a strong work ethic and freely assigned our chores but I also think he wanted us to understand that we could survive the inevitable drudgery of work and still live a fulfilling life. As the eldest male, Mark felt inequitably burdened by this dogma and with resentment held it over my head as ‘older brother ammo’ for years. After the garage repair shop was closed, my dad decorated it with his favorite lawn implements but NO power mowers until it was deemed that I was old enough to carry on the torch of turf trimming. Into our adulthood, Mark would continue to torment me with the guilt that ‘I got off light with the power-mower’, that his indentured summers were defined by Greek mythology; to forever push a rock up the hill of our 2-acre lawn by the helical blades of a push-mower and the heroic determination of his own adolescent muscle.

All behind him now. Finger Lakes, Summer 1968

First the oil paints, canvas and lessons, then the sportscar to the metalcrusher, and now, my fault, the power mower that might have given the meaning of love to his life. He could only stand by helplessly as my father bestowed upon me (obviously his favorite son) the luxury of a new and  powerful LawnBoy with razor-sharp blades and limegreen paint. Mark stood planted in one spot for the next half hour, glaring and seething as I pushed it effortlessly, trickling a gratuitous bead of sweat down my unworthy, undeserving brow over the buff green. I felt him looking on as the mower hummed smoothly over the yard like a hovercraft, row after row – then sensing his resignation – I glanced up to see his retreat into the house, back to the quiet of his black lair under the basement stairs and the comfort that was there for him.

Next … Closing in on the Gulfstream

Previous ... Part One - Casting Off

kid gloves

in a certain way, our hands and the expressions we create with them limit or extend our connections to the world. i think our link to the animal world is very different than what binds our souls into Humanity and it is the search for these distinctions, to step outside of ourselves, that determines the success of our brief time on this planet.

there is an aquarium in my house

with fish who never wave when

I hover above the water, waiting to drop food flakes.

humble and unaware, they have

no right or left, can’t hold a bat,

and would strike out on the third pitch

despite their lower jaws, forever in a bulldog’s snarl at home plate.

without thumbs or aspirations,

they can’t hitchhike, they’ll never pass the butter,

and will forget your birthday.

my hands, tools, are for this poem; ordering

pizza; shoveling my driveway.

these covered, calloused palms; missing humanity,

afraid to wave to that guy walking the dogs in our neighborhood,

who,

reaching out for love,

sees only the kid gloves hiding the tendrils of my soul.

another manifestation

my dreams are often vivid and bizarre representations of travel, vehicles and transportation, houses and buildings, with animals and sometimes spirits that have just whisked around the corner out of sight. this poem, like others, is written after dreams i've had that move between the semblance of stability, and the marginal haze of sleepwalking. 

 

startled awake

deep in the night,

sliding downward to the end

of a fresh-mopped floor, you peer,

head sideways to the gape of an elevator shaft,

opened, like a guillotine.

you don’t remember falling

asleep but land your dreaming thirst

outside to the fountain in the park because the water

is cold,

even though it tastes like wet dog,

and the air that you expel

from your lungs coats your mouth like

the stale closet air beneath your back staircase.

you might wake up,

with a limp in your walk

from a clump you stepped in near the fountain, packed into

the grooves of your boot and no time to scrape …

here’s the bus! with a picture on the side with happy people

and text that says “we love the bus!”

you step up to the changebox,

the bus driver’s hat says

kerouac and you say hello.

he’s driving to denver, yammering into the mirror

to some gonzo donned with sunglasses and a

blue feather boa draped over his violin case,

discussing universal health care

because it’s in the papers.

they’re barely dressed with their opinions, going west,

smoking cigars like castro twins.

you take your seat.

gonzo man takes a drag

on his havana and punctuates

with a truman capote flick

of his finger, “something smells …”

a guy with a dog reading

steinbeck juts forward

like a ventriloquist’s dummy

with a wooden jaw to say, “why yes, it does, doesn’t it?

"what a beautiful day.”

it’s a day where things come alive, even if

in the wrong way, even if  in a dream where

a cigar is more than a cigar

and where the love for a bus with

a cadre of dead fools is

just another manifestation of the perfect day ahead.

almost the same

my wife sells shoes at an upscale department store in west des moines, while i work in the offices of a bank. the way we deal with people at our jobs is so very different but we always come together again at the end of the day, and i try to imagine parallels that will provide continuity in our lives. at my job we used to have a contractor who would bring in donuts every friday (to keep his employment!) and this poem is about my reflections around this. 'Donald Pliner' is a high-end brand of shoe.

I thought of you, while
leaning back in my chair
at work eating one of
those donuts that someone
brings in every friday. I knew
you’d never be so lucky;
on break with powdered sugar
on your shirt. instead, you’ll stand
all day for impatient customers,
measuring feet
with that odd, flat, boat-like ruler
that always gave away my toe, raised
skyward like a flag
on the bowsprit of my foot.
while I smell fresh cake donuts,
you smell musty feet and the crumbs
they carry in their shoes
from suburb breakfasts of english muffins and
cornflakes. I can’t protect you
from these things or the report cards from
the kids, tv, or even the drunk tomorrow night
whose wheels will jump the curb and
plow into the person strutting
with the pair of donald pliners you sold today.
I can’t protect you from this,
but I can love you,
and hope that I’ll see you again, unscathed,
maybe almost the same as before.