Windmill Against a Winter Sky

Windmill and Winter Sky

On Stopping by My Home Place

After a Childhood Friend’s Funeral

James Hart

This is January-land where brown grass stems

spin their pathetic pun—What’s done is dun—

and the wind bewilders surface water, a million

lapping lips slipping toward a shore away from

me.  I listen for the play of children, three girls

and two boys parading trikes and a Red Flyer

in that lane over there forty years ago.  I hear

implacable years instead, as firm as the curl

of shoreline that harbors everything forgotten

here just below the water’s gray hypnotic drift.

That neighbor’s distant windmill whirling swift

in its blur should be the youngest of us then

pedaling his tricycle furiously in a gravel sky,

that scrim of cloud his cloud of dust that never

really flew from his whirling wheels no matter

how much the image suits my mood or memory.

Nor should I be standing here today, except

to pause and remember us then—five children

playing daily in the quarter-mile road that ran

along our farm’s western edge—for a windswept

moment I’d rid myself of funeral gloom I wear.

The wind is attended by soft undercurrent songs

below surface air, long resonant rememberings

rising from earth, harping at barbs of sagging wire,

and the wood of a crippled gate I lean against

tremors with swiftness from the south.  I’d chide

the neighbor’s cows if I could, for silence abides

with them as if they browse in dun fields fenced

by disappearances.  Here nothing remains I recall,

both houses gone, soundingboards of emptiness

thrumming where wind rubs them raw and lawless,

and only ghost children sleep at ease in their walls.

January 27, 2002

Testaments of Abandonment

Redefining Richard Cory's Legacy

"Richard Cory"

The Eakins portrait is an appropriate

image for poet E. A. Robinson's tragic figure 

in his poem "Richard Cory." 

The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, 1900
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Oil on canvas; 82 x 42 in. (208.3 x 106.7 cm)
John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1917 (17.172)

Whenever I Read
Richard Cory 

James Hart 

Whenever I read Richard Cory,
I see my grandfather stroll down town
long years before I knew his story,
and all eyes envied his haughty frown.

Dressed head to heel in dapper grays,
he tipped his hat like a lord for ladies
and made good day a grand regal phrase
that fluttered pulses to shy rhapsodies.

“Beau Brummel of Carrollton, 1910”
he dared inscribe on a sly self-portrait
where he casts his gaze beyond his ken
like a landless squire who beggars fate.

So it comes as no grim surprise to me
that he fired only words in his head,
and daily deadened his sad gravity
in shots of whiskey downed like lead.

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

Louis N. Kenton (1865–1947) was Eakins's brother-in-law, having married

Elizabeth Macdowell (1858–1953), sister of Eakins's wife Susan, in 1889. 

Elizabeth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia,

exhibited professionally, and traveled widely. Her marriage to Kenton was stormy

and apparently brief, and very little is known of it, or of Kenton. The title associated

with this portrait, "The Thinker," was at one time based upon an inscription on

the reverse that apparently was placed there by Susan Eakins. Beginning in 1900,

the portrait was widely exhibited and much admired. An oil study for the portrait

is in the Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.

Nomenclature: The Art of Naming

Paperweight With Watchful Eye - French Text Page

Emersonian Einstein

James Hart 

I find in some words and nature,
relativities of our nomenclature:
Is what I see a cloud, or butterfly
shadow passing over edge of sky,
soul’s transcendental adventure,
or blink in time’s universal eye?

(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Classic Eye of Horus Hieroglyph

Eye of Horus by Monika Pederson

To Journey Somewhere West of Never

Flatirons, near Boulder, Colorado

Epiphany on the Road
to Boulder

James Hart 

In the beginning was the stone and the word,
and the word was water spoken by the wind,
and there was music only stones have heard,
thrust up by time so they would understand.

Here lives rocky faith where we may find it,
in imagination rocking with the heaving land,
specters in the empty sky and the flying sight,
in the raptor dropping from the granite hand.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Magnificent Raptors: A Golden Eagle

Journeys Into the Countryside of the Dead

Abandoned Farmhouse:
The Long Waiting for Ruin and Wreckage

Memorial Days 

James Hart 

for Sharon Catlin Coleman, a prose poem

Time eats them all eventually, the houses of my memory gone year by hungry year. Most of them just slowly fold, disappearing into omnivorous earth marked by weedy drives and hollow stands of trees where a barn and asymmetrical emptiness hold the harvest of the years. Sometimes they fall to predatory storms, scavengers nosing their bony remains. A few find grace in salvage taken somewhere further down the road. Tabulating these former houses, another one down and gone, makes a mental calendar, a way of giving annual form to formlessness, as I drive out country roads to decorate my family’s dead where they lay in cemeteries bearing family or biblical names: Braden, Mt. Zion, Appleberry, and Ebenezer, my favorite name for its hard meaning: stone of help. Out of touch with generations, my fingertips trace their vanishing names eroding the older stones, victims of discerning water and digestive weather. My parents’ names more newly hewn will someday feed the cravings of a distant wind. My sons endure their strange pilgrimage across the countryside of the dead, requesting favorite family stories to help the car move more quickly along the miles as I tell myself I serve the replenished past for them. But I know it’s only my lonely hopefulness that these stones might flesh familiar bones, that houses might home us again, that time’s insatiability might turn to stone before it swallows my fading name. And so we take the fast road home under darkness sifting down from stars: my sons sensing this rhythm in their sleeping breathing, their heads resting and rocking with the car’s urgent pace, dreaming their ancestors’ feasted dreams.

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

Missouri Red Barn Ruins

Orange Notes from Green Vines

Trumpet Vines and Brick House

Trumpet Vines 

James Hart

Like their heads lolling in the wind,

I thought I’d love their clustered trumpets,

orange clumps, funnel throats,

volleys bursting from roadside vines,

their music of abandonment pushing toward

heaven’s stages on fence posts and poles

of singing wires,

tangled masses of them pulling down

vacant houses like requiems

of loss and lassitude.

And for some years I did

love them for their orange music

where some voluntarily took root and rose

through a honeysuckle shrub,

others amassing in the privet hedge

beside the drive until

the largo of their leaves and seasons

began to choke the limbs

supporting them, until even I felt trapped

in their green orchestral curtain.

Now it’s a long siege of grubbing

out, knowing hidden nodes

of roots will spring up opening notes,

and hard to know at which of human stages,

like hindsight, second thought, or memory,

how some music from a life lived

along abandoned roadsides

will overwhelm us with its thrust,

choke the throats that know its

volleys from the silent vines.

July 13, 2001

Trumpet Vines on Small Red Barn

The Past is Dyed With Indigo and Madder

Overshot Coverlet - Detail

Counting the Dust of Jacob

James Hart 

Who can count the dust of Jacob
or number the fourth part of Israel?
Numbers 23:10 (NIV)

We read the text of lost daughters
in the dim blood of unnumbered sons.
They sleep under thick grass coverlets
woven with threads of indigo and madder,
violets matted by our feet in May,
wild rose briars stitching them into time.
We dream of ancestors at their looms,
unaware we are the mordant in the dye
while little claws clutch at our shoes,
and something in our spirits implores
us to linger upon this sleeping earth
longer than it takes us to place our
tributary flowers below their names,
or note dates in paper’s embracing space,
a history beside an x or asterisk
tying forgotten bones to a single star,
raising from the dust of Jacob
our long losses under summer sky.


July 25, 2001

Overshot Coverlet - Detail

Overshot Coverlet - Detai

Note: Among the items of record in my great great great grandfather Nowel Alfred Hart's will and probate papers is an inventory listing his property, including supplies of indigo and madder, which are both used to make blue and red dyes. These colors you see regularly in antique red, white, and blue overshot coverlets. 

When Nowel Hart died in Callaway County, MO, in 1837, indigo and madder were important enough staples of frontier life to be listed as property in his probate inventory. 

For me, the syllables of the two words spoken together in this order, "indigo and madder," create a woven sound pleasing to the ear, and rich with colors of their own.