Recalling Days of Abandonment

The Abandoned Bedroom

That Day Unlike Others

James Hart

All day that day I paced the floor;

I wandered my dark corridors of air.

On my feet all day, I bore a burden,

a totem without hands to hold the sun.

I stared at chairs and fingered books,

and read the straight-backed oak

as if slats were our broken daily words,

fragments you said to me I never heard.

By end of day I knew the story’s end,

time’s black chapters of the mind.

At last I sat on the far side of our bed,

adrift on the side where you once rested,

and remembered words I forgot to say,

love, among others, I’d not said that day.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

This Heft in the Maker's Hand

Neolithic Hand Axe (5.2ins/ 13.3cm)

A very attractive Neolithic hand tool, exhibiting beautiful array of colours from the chalcedony stone, with darker mauve and green mottling and some indistinct veining to upper portion. Excellent flake workmanship, a robust, heavy duty sized Hand Axe tool, dating around 12,000- 6,500 years ago approximately.

Source: thefossilstore.com

The Stone

of Ten Thousand Years

James Hart

First, the maker loved the stone’s grave heft in his hand, black like clay infused with a volcano’s fiery throes.  He would give the stone mind and direction, flaking away chips until a beautiful tool emerged with cutting edges and rounded like a tongue.  Already the telltale taste of blood lingered in the stone’s single red blemish, and the maker dreamed of nameless beasts, their skins flayed away with ease, the meat he’d feed his people when they were safe in caves.  Odd, now, to dream his art shaping stone, how three simple dimples near the edge look like fingerprints pressed by the maker’s grip, yet to test them so today shows they fit the fingers, but no imagined skill in using the stone to slice a hide.  Some marks, after all, must be the nature of the stone, yet looking at it closer, how easy to see the minute scorings that ripple across it like time’s incised grain.  Perhaps a sandstone in one hand used to smooth the final shape, soapstone or shale to polish its dull luster until ten thousand years of use gave it a patina no man can plan.  Imagine how it passed from hand to hand, hunter to hunter, sire to son to son until even the passing of it was done.  How each descendant weighed the stone’s dense mass in his palm, or suspending it from his shoulder in a leather pouch, felt the stone’s supple nibble rubbing against his ribcage on his long treks across valleys, steppes, and mountains under moon scraped night.  Right now, I wonder if a poet soul ever walked among them, one man aware of the twin kingdoms he traveled between, or how the honed stone lifted the empire of death when he resurrected the quarry’s skin, the weathered pouch became the empire of time he carried at his side, the tracked path the tongue he walked upon to feed the hunger that lingered in his gut.

November 25, 2001; March 3, 2002; February 17, 2013

The stone of my poem is about the same size as the

example pictured, but it is totally different in color and in

workmanship. My mother, Alene Wagaman Hart, found it

in the bluff area south of Oak Hill Cemetery, Carrollton,

Missouri, when she was a teenager in the 1930's.

Shades of Paradise: Romantic Film Noir

John Martin (1789-1854) - The Plains of Heaven
1851 - Oil on canvas - Tate Gallery, London
Source: Wikimedia Commons - Google Art Project

Arriving in Paradise Valley

After The Plains of Heaven, John Martin, Oil on canvas, ca. 1851

James Hart

Painting The Plains of Heaven, John Martin

imagined a purely Romantic setting, a feathery wave

of girls adorned in gowns of gossamer and gauze

drifting up God’s flower crowned slopes,

ghostly maidens adrift in radiant nature.

Stretching beyond them as far as his perspective

allows, a valley’s sapphire lake filled by falling heavenly

river, a distant mountain held in diaphanous clouds’

embrace.  Such settings suit his antique mind

once honed on biblical visions.  Martin claimed his

revelation beheld a new heaven and a new earth,

evidence the aim of art should immortalize

nature’s impossible immensities, capture one man’s

reverent heaven.  For my own thoughts today,

I’d just as soon see a fictional scene by Edward Hopper,

a touch of American realism in shades of film noir.

Supplicants and petitioners, all arrive by train

at the edge of heaven.  A brooding gray mansion

waits beyond ominous gates to receive them.  The dead

step down from luxurious Pullman Palace cars,

amble toward the station suffused in sunset red.

A sign overhead proclaims Paradise Valley, landscape

beyond the town fulfills desert promises prophets

saw centuries ago in Moses’ own wild west show.

Right about now, someone cues a soundtrack

for this scene: a man whistles on the evening wind,

Eastwood’s eyes survey the good, the bad, and the ugly,

each of them freed from darkness the living dream.

January 23, 2012

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) - The House by the Railroad
1925 - Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
Source: WikiPaintings - Visual Art Encyclopedia

To Mark a May Snowstorm in Missouri

Nature's Cuneiform: Bird Tracks and Gravel in Snow

The last time

 it snowed in May

in northern Missouri

was in 1907.

Snow fell abundantly

on Brookfield, Missouri

on May 3, 2013.

Reading by Intaglio

James Hart

Some words are easily read

in the world’s curt cuneiform

like bird tracks in the snow,

or the faint scrawlings of a worm

showing my bones where I’ll go

as well as alphabets of lead.

Such words mean no harm,

nor do I read them so—

not even ink knows it’s dead

yet educating in the page’s glow,

nor names know upon a tablet’s bed

they teach us by a rigid Roman form.

This is language of the long ago

if we discern lessons of the dead

are as mute as Grecian marble herms

incised by time’s letters uncorrupted,

muddied scribbles of random worms

no more valedictory than tiny y’s in snow.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Bird Cuneiform: "...tiny y's in snow"

From Such Fallowness Imagination Soars

Roy C. Andrews. Classroom, ca.1911.

University of Oregon Photograph Collection

Teaching by Nature

James Hart

"it's spring and the goat-footed

baloonMan whistles far and wee" 

~ "in Just"  by e. e. cummings

We construe autumn lessons for you,

share yellow notes of leaves we carry

here from time’s college of the soul,

geese's check marks on far margins

of the sky, old familiar words we say

year in year out like whiskered frost

x-ing over text on pages in dead grass.

We chalk desire’s lush verbal phrases

across winter’s bleak squeaky board,

sometimes our participles dangle ice

in our minds, time’s vague antecedents

waiting to be clarified like sky as years

settle in powdery drifts across the floor

if your custodial ears will not hear us.

Class, I hope you’re all taking notes:

you join fragments to hapless clauses

and discern when to let your sentences

run on beyond black night’s horizons;

you learn to scan context from the stars

and know, like Cummings, when to void

punctuation’s rules, and feel green buds

sprout poetry in goats and barren souls.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Sky Writing in Long Symmetrical Lines

Geese / Standard V Flight Formation

Geese Too Many to Number

James Hart

Sometimes destiny

writes itself in long sentences across the sky,

migration’s clustered alphabets

forming

            scattered

                        words I begin

                                    to understand, yet

have no tongue

to speak the syntax of distant wings

diagraming gray clouds’ grammar,

the chill

            of late

                        winter air still

                                    a skillful murmur

I also comprehend

as, open-mouthed, I stand

looking up in muted awe

at couplets

            slipping

                        into quatrains

                                    of sky and poetry,

nature’s black diction rhyming one immutable law

scripted

            there in lines

                        of shifting

                                    symmetry.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

To Be the Light of Rubies, Sapphires

The Judgment of Paris.
Italy. Second half of the 16th century.
Cameo. Chalcedony—onyx, gold. 3.0 × 3.6 cm.
Inv. No. К 2438.
Saint-Petersburg,
The State Hermitage Muse

Sleeping Khalkedon

Dreams of Corundum

James Hart

If I were a globe of sleeping ice,

I’d choose to wear the snow,

become chalcedony under silica pose,

and by the night’s white devices

I’d don the moon’s surplice

and make my melancholy glow.

I’d linger in this crystal place

until just before the dawn

I’d be some pale deceptive stone

berthed in rose and amethyst hues,

maybe a carnelian with a purple surplus,

a moonstone face undone by ruby tones.

By such mysticism’s throes,

I’d be both alchemist and prize,

something ivory with facets for my eyes,

perhaps a mounting at the crux of cross

like an effigy of bones evolving Tudor rose,

quelling time’s economy, both igneous and ice.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Corundum / Sapphires