Remains from the Ruins of Time

"Haunted Windows." Auditorium: Old BHS,  Brookfield, Missouri.

Photo: jmh.

Postcard from Ruins, Brookfield

James Hart

Dear friend, today the snow capping the ruined school

I see from my kitchen window evokes gothic melancholy.

I wish it were cracked, crenellated ruins, or a wall from

Caspar David Friedrich’s fabled abbey looming among

wintry skeletons of ghostly trees.  Some romance or masked

madness goes a long way to pass a day away.  The empty

window in the upper wall encloses one black, glassless void

capturing shadows by day and night.  Instead of the mad

monk rambling in cloisters of ruined time, one daft teacher

parades words across a black slate board.  His chalky

finger points to invisible children remembered long ago,

before they fled his grim grammar parsing plastered shards.

 January 21, 2013

"Speak what you think today in hard words"

Church at Rensselaer, Missouri

Photo: Kent Durk.
Used by permission. 

Kent Durk's website is www.360icon.com

Postcard from a Country Church: 1910

James Hart

“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak

what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict

every thing you said today.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Having listened to Jesus’ words describing salvation through communion

of bread and blood, “Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard

this, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can hear it?’” John 6:60, KJV

Hard words fell here from Sunday sermons a century ago.

Men harvested fortitude from Bibles in glove-soft covers,

women harbored the words of God they heard like hail

hammered on tin rooftops, trouble for sheltered souls.

The bell’s early anthems called them to the door: darker

dirges sent them with coffin’s exodus to the muddied yard.

The bearers gripped the handles hard when they heard

winter’s wind bring down judgment from words of rain,

widows’ tears embraced their emptiness. Infant death held

the weight of the world’s hard burdens laid down deep

beneath tablets of protective stone. A few fathers led their

defiled daughters up the aisle, white dresses hiding hard

truths of sullied brides, weddings shadowed by awkward

smiles on baptismal days. Yes, they bore their days’ granite

truths scripted in hardened words; they praised their God

and trusted how salvation’s savor raised their eyes skyward.

February 17, 2013

Indebted to Shakespeare - Sonnet 73

Harthouse on Main - Brookfield

"At Maples on Main"

has never been published.

At Maples on Main

James Hart

“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

-from Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

When I consider my current email moniker, harthouse “at”

my present provider, the harthouse part I’ll always maintain

as easy extension of myself. But lately I’m debating naming

my house “Maples on Main,” recalling my grandfather’s home

on South Virginia in Carrollton was called “The Maples”

until the Great Depression booted them from its door,

that exit spreading melancholy over my mother’s life to me.

These maples I planted here decades ago have outgrown

my house’s height, touch the stars when I look up and sigh.

They shelter me from summer’s heat and piercing sunlight

and winter’s sorrows of the sky.  I can put them to my own

reclusive uses now: imaging limbs as antlers thrashing

in time’s tormented storm, or seeing the season’s leaves form

airy aviaries for wrens, robins, and jays—nature’s cathedral

for my choir of insect buzz and birdsong news.  Shakespeare

calls these boughs “bare ruined choirs” when a man looks

into the autumn of his bones: sunset, twilight, night, the ashes

we spread on God’s heavenly bed.  I have learned to lose William’s

dimmer view of “Death’s second self” and view blackest night

as my own second home, much like Whitman’s patient spider

launching filaments of loneliness to lodge against the universe

and take hold somewhere like a rope anchoring destiny

to a pledge:  I no longer see myself as unaccountable,

I’m no longer twinned to echoes of familiar hollowness.

I too can walk out like Orion striding blind beyond the western

ledge, the eternal huntsman clothed in his own shrouded skin,

his constellation forming the hourglass of a winter passage,

his tread steady as a man determined to bridge unbroken voids.

This is how our going out should be: into the armature of night,

into the silence of the stars, whether going to take the anxious

dog for his walk, collect the paper from the remnants of the rain,

or speak to shadows of a love you thought you lost one fabled day.

February 3, 2013

Recalling a Song, Far Away, Long Ago

Bare Trees in Winter

"What the Bare Trees Tell Us"

has never been published.

Photo Source:

http://secondbadvent.wordpress.com

What the Bare Trees Tell Us

James Hart

“I was alone in the cold of a winter’s day . . . .”

from “Bare Trees” – Fleetwood Mac

Looking at the bare trees

this morning while I’m driving

through town on my way home from errands,

coffee aroma filling the car,

I’m almost certain

I hear echoes of familiar music, a song

from yesterdays returning whole. Atmosphere

writes its foggy lyrics

over windshield and windows,

wipers erase dim cat tracks ghosted over

glass from a stray seeking shelter

in our garage last night.

Memory of a simplicity

regained often moves us toward moments

of flow and counter flow, like a vision

where waves across water seem

to lap backward in the wind’s

thrust, yet move on. You recall the deep sky

mirrors only summer blues, clouds gallop

in the pastures of the wind,

a passing neighbor’s car horn

neighs his welcome with his wave out

the window. Caught up in glimmers

remembered, you know the farm

is gone, the fallen house

fed a fire, the barn brought down by angry

wind, all the neighbors you knew in summer’s youth

retreated to embracing sod, yet

the wind’s gray lady babbles on

how winter’s day changes everything,

a chant from misty reaches of her noble soul:

“beautiful, beautiful, love, love, our own.” 

February 10, 2013

For a Moment You Imagine . . .

Antique Glass Paperweight

"The Angel in the Paperweight"

has never been published.

Dates of composition

and revision:

March 18, 2006

September 20, 2006

March 10, 2007

February 2, 2013

The Angel in the Paperweight

James Hart

For a moment you imagine

looking in to see a pair of wings,

a pale angel face above them,

some fault you see in flaring light,

fractures in the glass.

There is no angel.

Like a child, you wish you held

a snow globe instead of this solid crystal

weight, frozen spiral swirls.

Your hand quakes it awake,

tilts the mind’s tiny white church inside.  Shiny

pearl flakes jump and tumble, trapped

in watery sky, their silver blizzard

twinkling in the half light of reason.

What was that stifled whisper you heard

just now?  A memory of your mother

comes to mind:  You’re the child Narcissus

peering into her blue pools.

Her eyebrows rise in surprise, brown wings

arching over visions into distant worlds.

Those two bands of bristling hair

become the bridge to all you’ve lost somewhere

so far off you can’t remember, a rush

of angel air crossing time’s glass abyss.

Old Time Prone and Dozing

Osiris - God of the Dead

"The Night Old Cyrus Stone Died"

has never been published.

Dates of composition

and revision:

May 10, 2002

October 6, 2004

February 19, 2011

August 10, 2011

The Night Old Cyrus Stone Died

James Hart

The night old Cyrus Stone died,

we neighbors like to tell ourselves,

we heard the rattle of leash and link,

claws scrabbling across the gravel road

followed by baying that mourned back

from beyond the hills’ black shapes,

distance rimmed by the gods, old time prone

and dozing under the blanketed sky.

It must have been him, we still say,

who held each velvet muzzle long enough

to slip the collars free from his prized dogs, Blueticks

called Newt, Jeb, and Matt, and lop-eared Nub,

so they too could lope the unchained night

and chase darkness, the dim scents of destiny.

We were sure it was him we heard

whistling them home by trembling wind,

the call of hunter to his hounds:

a quick piercing jolt, the bladed split

of breath through hooked finger and thumb

slicing air shrill as a crow’s frightened cry.

How long gone, but we hear him still

somewhere between hell and heaven’s gate,

or we tell ourselves we hear his hounds

hungering for what is beyond the sleeping hills

whenever night wind bays above the river bluffs,

or sudden stillness wakes us from fitful dreams

as if we too hasten through a sanguine dawn,

hearts hammering from the long run home.

Sighting Ghosts of Spanish Galleons

Oak Alley Plantation - Vacherie, Louisiana

"Remembering Cafe du Monde"

was first published in

The Chariton Review

at Truman State University

in the Spring 2002 issue.

Remembering Café du Monde,

New Orleans: Early Morning, 

Independence Day, 1994

James Hart

for Nathaniel

Words your mother said the other day,

about knowing the last time was the last

so we might remember it, made me recall

the morning you and I awakened early

and left the others sleeping as we ambled

through the Quarter, foreigners at home

here on Independence Day, our port of call

the alley streets sweating mist, dawn rain

just past, the sun stretching past our backs

to light the Mississippi’s massive commerce

moving slow leviathans toward the Gulf.

I didn’t give much thought then, I’m sure,

to how a river divides a father and a son

as it widens and runs to opposing flows.

To show you how the world expands us,

I said I’d take you to the Café du Monde

and let you order beignets and cafe au lait,

grown-up food finer than juice and toast.

I know you didn’t blink an eye at your first

hot sip, while I quickly watered down mine

with ice and praised the heavenly pastries,

and you reached for more, sprinkling sugar

from your lips onto your sleeve like a child’s

floating, sprightly talk, a vessel on the move.

I don’t remember what casual words we said,

plans perhaps for our trip up the River Road

to hunt old houses or boats afloat on dreams,

maybe promising you’d see Oak Alley’s past

channel sunlight’s timeless shadows under

a tunnel of ancient trees, ghosts of Spanish

galleons waving mossy sails in the river air,

or how your brother feared every black face

he saw whispered voodoo as he turned away.

So was that the last time I was the captain

of your world as we stood on the river walk

watching tankers bound for Cairo, imagining

Algiers just across the river lay half a world

away from us in tropic climates of the mind?

And now, like Magellan, you circumnavigate

a globe of silence, a resolutely mute hostility

that swells its sails before your father’s wind,

and just as I vanished from my father’s eyes,

I too could tell you there’s no new otherland

here for you to name, wilderness claimed ages

ago when a boy in feathers sought the sun,

and I too found my father in time’s Acheron

embracing darkness where you will follow

when the river running so wide between us

circles back through space on comets’ tails,

falls in rocket glares on these amber islands.