A Man's Life Is the Product of His Good Work

Prairie Barbed Wire Fence

Easter

Sunday

2013

Metaphor

A prose poem for my father James M. Hart

James Hart 

If I hear someone say "he was always there for me," I think the speaker sees Christ on His splintered cross, a man suspended, inanimate, a helpless paradox, patience personified, a fence post for the mind. I remember my father, see him cutting hedgerows down to human size, shaping fence posts, setting them into earth like the butts of crosses, so much weight to bear, sighting their clean straight lines. The fences he built over forty years ago have never sagged or slumped like aging men, posts straight as crosses bearing barbed wire, some crowned in thorns, wild rose and creeping briar, thrushes’ nests, twisted brambles cupping speckled eggs, living blood beating inside such fragile shells. And if I think of words as wire and work to fence the stretching years, I see my father hard as hedge, a corner post always there for me, a wiry nest of silver hair cupping his spotted skull like a wondrous egg waiting to fledge a soul.


(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)  

A Poem for My Father

Wheat Ripe for Harvest

For my father

James M. Hart 

March 30, 1910

October 7,  1979

Harvesting Darkness

James Hart 

Around our supper table tonight
we’ll explain away your empty chair
by telling children the old man’s late,
out in the fields harvesting darkness.

We’ll tell them how you only sowed
impeccably harrowed soil with cares,
wrapped your pains out in the fields
in bales of clover, timothy, and brome.

They’ll need to know you measured
your work in pecks, bushels, and tares,
counting your worth in the barn’s dark
bins brimming barley, wheat, and corn.

Any moment we expect your return
powdered in moonlight’s dusty grain,
weighing harvest in smiling words,
praising hay bound under the stars.


(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

A Room Suitable for a Tattered Ghost

Abandoned Living Room - House Location Unknown

From Too Much Dwelling

on What Has Been

James Hart

On a line by Robert Frost

From too much dwelling on what has been,

we may rebuild a house from a single stone,

or recall its mistress long after she’s gone,

how she worked keeping the windows clean,

and by dwelling within forgotten rooms,

we may hear dead mice tunneling walls,

or smelling the wallpaper’s dolor, see a pall

arise where she sweeps her molting broom.

Either industry rewards our simple cares:

recalling a life that passed within a home,

or remember her love for sweeping floors

works as well as memory cleansing time,

and becomes our going out and coming in

by building a dwelling on what has been.

(From an unpublished manuscript entitled

In the Countryside of the Dead)

Robert Frost:
"Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been."

"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"

by Robert Frost, from The Collected Poems.

1906 House - Location Unknown

Two Poems from a Time Far Away

Old Cemetery - Location Unknown

In the Landscape

of Your Loneliness

James Hart

In the landscape of your loneliness
the wind breaks broken songs on stones,
sings them through the shadows’ palisade
enclosing the day’s last trembling light.

Your ears catch a lost man’s troubled story
of a golden grail, a paradise of open doors,
a ring of inviting fire just out of reach
beyond the gilded clouds’ shuttered house.

A ghost’s marble veins under granite skin,
you drink the earth’s impassive weathers,
a sleeping rain, thunder shuddering blood,
sparks that jar your dream’s dark amphora.

You marvel hard paradox bound in words:
star and stone, soul and soil, seed or dead,
as you till an Eden inside rings of stone,
sow a body’s seed, grow a soul, harvest stars.

Abandoned Farmhouse - Location Unknown

In the Countryside

of the Dead

James Hart
 
Sometimes the dead
speak with the voices of stones
dropping in water like the flat
pebbles my mother taught me
to whisper gracefully across a shoal.

Somewhere the dead
live invisibly like ghost foliage
no longer gracing skeletal trees,
their small limbs, broken twigs,
rotting fingers of time shaping soil.

Somehow the dead
fleetingly outwit my eyes
and ears cocked for their hushed
movements in the roadside brush
where foxes nose frosted trails of quail.

Someday the dead
will weight my shoulders
with a woolen drift of surprise,
a clutch of pleasure, as I pull
my coat tighter against a familiar chill.


(Poems from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead.
All poems from this manuscript date
from the years 1995 to 2000.)

Memories from Undiscovered Country

Missouri Barn

Marion’s Barn

James Hart 

To him it was work’s wooden chapel
for harvest hours, harmonies of hay,
a rustic nave of shadowed spaces
supported by poles and able beams
the size of trees, native walnut logs
shaped by ancestors’ blistered hands
wielding sharpened axes, adze marks
showing the care they gave to square
their work in a day’s book of hours.
His pride was self-evident in their
hand-hewn finesse, pegs’ perfections
whittled round and fully filling holes,
the straight battens making the walls
airtight as a tomb, too tight almost
for crews of boys stacking hay high
under the roof’s embracing wings,
floor solid as earth suspended in air.
It is the peace of dust and darkness
I remember there, my sweat mixing
a communion of skin and clover pollen,
a darkness on my face and aching arms
undiminished in the darkness of the loft,
air alive with heaven’s heat, exhaling hay,
clover and brome rising in towered squares,
loose masonry of twine and shrouded grass,
blisters on my hands as sore as any of those
who shaped their days’ sacred space to hold
the harvest of time’s able hands and took
their eternal rest in white clover’s shroud
beside the church they raised for God.

(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Photo Source:

http://ralphsbike.blogspot.com/2011/05/riding-400k-through-night.html

News from Undiscovered Country

Dilapidated Barn in a Field of Lilies

The Undiscovered Country

James Hart 

I drive past empty barns, listing
soliloquies along the dusty roadside,
and listen to wind whispering past
the car’s open window. I hear dim
voices once lost and found, like me,
looking for the undiscovered bourn,
the green countryside of my youth,
naming aloud the latest travelers
who have left and never returned.
They, like me, if they pass this way,
find a few barns and frameless time
overstuffed with another emptiness,
the spiders’ harvest hung among
the roofless rafters, insects bound
like filmy stars inside wilted webs.
I remember when our barn stood,
dark spaces under a leaking roof,
weathered wooden shingles letting
in sunlit threads, light like splintered
stars random as a universe overhead,
songs of wasps daubing muddy tombs,
dust rising from hay on hazy wings
undisturbed by wind’s whisperings
or cows’ shufflings in gloom below.
Whether we harvest hay or words,
time, like space, remains the same,
and changes, and the wind needs
no special destination to be a wind.
Barn or bourn, empty town or hamlet
hidden by a shady curve, we will find
our way by signs, by stones, by stars,
by sunlight setting tiny fires to hay.
We hear the harmony of our years
in the rasp of wasp, the breeze of bees,
the wind’s soliloquies in the trees,
the sighs of travelers praising shade.


(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Source of title:
"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will . . . ."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III

Photo from The Ozark Homestead.

http://theozarkhomestead.wordpress.com/

In This House Does My Spirit Dwell

Plantation Ghost House

A Ghost at Home

James Hart 

I have read my memory’s dark book
until the sentences contain a road
leading always to a singular oak
in the yard where a white house stood.

I remember the house under the moon
and the tree writing shadows on its side,
indelible language that was only mine,
phrases poised in a dreamless mood.

Such nights speak without flesh or bone,
syllables of silence like endless rhyme
fashioning one poem’s singular line
recalling my soul in a familiar home.

Now I remember how I learned to live
and found my way to things undone—
by trailing shadows and learning to love
one whispered word and its silent twin.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Photo Source: http://dogwoodsandcrawdads.tumblr.com/

Doomed Ruins Under a Brooding Sky

Back of Old BHS (1928-1989) - Auditorium Wing

Photo by

Kent Durk

Testament

James Hart

Abandoned High School Building, Brookfield, Missouri

BHS Front Door, BHS-Landscapes by Kent Durk*

Inside these walls, read the testament

of wind and water, remember thunder sounding

down the stairs after years of rain soaked nights,

youthful ghosts evacuating past at school day’s end.

History’s script in glass and plaster litters floors,

paint like sensitive skin peels from metal surfaces,

privacy panels in the abandoned restrooms

attest to rust and randomness of what falls,

what retains its place.  Here, the lords of darkness

and the armored gods of chaos rule the nights,

the daylong sun penetrates windows, mullions

pass empty shadows over warped, buckled boards.

Any passerby looking in might remember English

teachers parsing Shakespeare into memory’s particles,

assessing Emily’s certain slant of light and how

on winters’ afternoons the shadows do hold

their breath in hallways where nothing living happens.

Here is a declaration of dependence on heat and frost

to repeat their upheavals endlessly in the name of change:

shift, drop, clatter, collapse the only necessary vocabulary

studied here.  Minuscule from time’s ancient pages,

mold and mildew ink the handwriting on these walls,

silence deafening in its loneliness the only language

we know for what happens here, the life of dying.

August 29, 2010

*The original picture by Kent Durk for which

I wrote this poem is no longer available.  However,

any of Kent Durk's photos seen in the slide show

at the link below provide a brilliant testament

to my poem's images of doom.

http://www.360icon.com/Fotografs/brookfield.html

Stone Panel over Front Door
Old BHS - Photo by jmh

Where the Dead Relive Opening Nights

Balcony in Ruins - Old BHS - Brookfield

Photo Courtesy

Sara C. Mosley,

Brookfield, Missouri

Theater for the Dead 

James Hart

Abandoned High School Building, Brookfield, Missouri

Auditorium, BHS-Landscapes by Kent Durk

After the couples promenade the desolate halls,

generations blended without order or meaning,

all the flappers and the flamers parade beside

the bobby-soxers clinging to boys in letter jackets

heavy with medals pinned to their Brookfield B’s,

the stoners and loners, the losers desperate for dates,

all of us peering and nodding in nameless recognition

before last call for seats spared time’s chaos and decay.

Each night the alumni of loneliness assemble here

to relive the plots of forgotten plays scattered among

un-numbered opening nights.  We wait for the curtain

that fell in shreds to shroud a ghostly world below us

to whisper open in our memories, the clatter and rattle

of ropes and pulleys in the track reminiscent of bones

or dice. Life played out games we can’t recall a score.

Stage lights gone out long ago, a thousand sets arrayed

in time’s exposures, we peer into layers of liquid light,

moon and star shimmer come down through empty

windows glimmering with dust and desolation,

the crush of glass a script of syllables on the floor,

to see the players we remember among ourselves.

We listen for our silent soliloquies about space

and solitude, recalling only the purr of galaxies,

novas that brought us here a million dawns ago.

August 29, 2010; February 2, 2013

Any of Kent Durk's photos of the auditorium

would illustrate this poem. Open the following link,

and slides numbered 26-32 feature the auditorium.

Slide No. 30 is the best setting for the poem.

http://www.360icon.com/Fotografs/brookfield.html

Only Time Inhabits These Brooding Ruins

Old BHS - (1928-1989)

Photo by 

Kent Durk

Love for Tormented Juliets

James Hart

Abandoned High School Building, Brookfield, Missouri

Front Stairway Reflection, BHS-Landscapes by Kent Durk

Here is where I imagine all the countless couples,

the hapless high school Romeos and their jilted Juliets,

played out their little dramas of defiance and desire.

From the third floor balcony, looking down,

how many girls must have fantasized dropping

like broken dolls onto the mid-flight landing below,

a perfect stage for rendezvous, glass trophy case

panels on both sides of space superimposing

multiple reflections of lovers’ whispered tête-à-têtes.

Ghosts passing in the parade between classes see out

the big front windows framing the tower of Capulet

Castle, a banker’s brick mansion across the street,

all of it layered in glass reflection like a map to Mantua,

trophy urns worthy of containing the past in its ashes,

athletic statuettes providing stand-ins for Friar Laurence

and his urgent warning:  wisely and slow; they stumble

that  run fast.  Here is where all the tormented Juliets

passed along their love notes full of passion and poison,

pink threats and promises written in fractious solitude

stolen from the study hall teacher’s hawk-like glare.

And here is also where all the rampant Romeos

waited, lazily lounging against the broad window sill,

or standing with one foot resting flat against the wall

in that mistaken attitude of patience and poise,

hoping for those fleeting peeks up the girls’ skirts

on their way down the stairs, reaching for Juliet’s hand,

confusing their memories of teachers’ clairvoyant words

about daggers and darkness with their whispered kisses:

if you love me,  you’ll show me, you will, or kill  me . . . .

August 29, 2010

Open this portfolio slide show at the link below and look for the

pictures (slides 2, 3, and 5) of the big staircase landing above the

front entrance. Slide No. 5 is the "stage" setting for the poem:

http://www.360icon.com/Fotografs/brookfield.html

The Backyard Is an Alternate Universe

Goldfish and Dictionary Text

Ghost Goldfish

James Hart

for my son Ethan, when he turns 50

There’s unmarked space in our backyard where

no careless digging is allowed, where for 20 years

small forms assembled one by one:  a succession

of princely cats in shoe boxes lined with towels,

a hamster in a coffee tin, a goldfish in an olive jar.

At first I buried furtively, as if passersby

might snicker at the friction I made with spade.

In time, there were witnesses, my young sons

examining docile death in its famished fur,

touching paws or whiskers before we sealed

lids with tape and placed the boxes in their beds,

covered them with care, mud and love heavy

on our fingers. And once my youngest boy

brought home a sparrow flat from the street,

placed in what proximity of hamster, cat, or fish

I wish I remembered now, a five-year-old

dragging home a prize by bird claw, his hand

somehow a cat’s mouth in its gentle grasp.

His hair spilling cat shine in the sun, my son

asked “Daddy, can we have a funeral?”

and soon the sparrow flew with ghosts

of cats under summer air, the turf recalling

no disturbance there, so little space a sparrow

needs.  Now afraid I’ll tell his teenage friends,

he shrugs and blushes if I mention this, but I

at ten times his five believe there was mercy

in his practicing that will stead me well someday

when my soul will purr away perhaps in furless

winter, or wrapped in summer’s cotton towel,

just-bathed yet unprepared for the surprise

of visitors at the door, I drop from air like his

sparrow to roam restlessly with our spirit cats.

Isn’t that what we all desire? To know there,

somewhere under familiar lily beds, ghost

goldfish swim perfectly in gentle jars of air.

January 23, 2002; March 10, 2007

Cloud Hands Reach Out Across the Sky

Hands of God and Man - Michelangelo

The Voices of My Children

James Hart

Summer air murmurs, buzz and bird song

fill a ground of dreaming sun as I lie there

becoming bronze, hearing how my two sons

contend their ninjas’ martial merits through

long bee-drowsy afternoon.  Often they clash

their plastic sabers, alternately declaring

Raphael’s their man of stone, Leonardo’s

greater than Michelangelo, Donatello’s

never yellow-bellied.  They were too young

to know turtle heroes from urban sewers

honored namesakes from the Renaissance,

real warriors of brush and chisel as bold

as samurai in their ways.  Vaguely invisible

as I floated on time’s intangible blank canvas,

I’d dream them sculpted someday as Davids,

sight their conquests over unknown giants,

limn their futures beside serene Madonnas.

In time, they’d fill their own empty niches

projected past the privacy of my closed eyes.

And if I opened my eyes to see them, I’d

be momentarily blinded by gilt sun blaze

arcing overhead in the Sistine sky, clouds

stretching out their godly hands toward

clouds, maples brushing verdigris glaze

over two little boys marshaling ninja magic

in the shade where blue jays flashed Giotto

sheens among the leaves.  All around me

on the palette lawn spread colors’ arrays

more real than art’s best imaginary hues,

boys’ bright toys a field of primary stars,

Eden an eye-blink from its vanishing point.

Looking backward, time is metamorphosis

as I become an effigy, dull bronze over bones,

recalling their war cries like shrill blue jay

clarities, the last music from this world

I’d choose now to hear not Bach, Vivaldi,

or Pachelbel, so Baroque and contrapuntal,

but the simple voices of my children chanting

heroes’ merits under syllables of sunlight,

and no poem I could write surpasses now

the music of a child, an angel reading me

the endless story begun once upon a time . . .

 (Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)