Memories from a Town Time Left Behind

Urban Abadonment - Detroit

The house situation

referred to in the poem

is actually in far worse

condition than this house

from Detroit's urban blight.

Premonitions of

Sunlight and Sorrow

James Hart

A brooding mood, I stop for a moment to stare

at my ancient neighbor’s abandoned house,

the one beyond it vacant as well but less neglected.

For a moment I’m struck by premonitions of emptiness,

shiver and shadow palpable in the autumn shade.

To awaken some year far away from now

and know I’m the final resident in my block,

the whole town vacated by an overnight mystery,

I’d ask myself how such dread losses occurred:

Alien encounters? Angels of doom? Elder gods

personified, threading vanishing skeins of fate?

Like children of time playing aimless games of tag,

clouds skip fragmented shadows over dimming sky,

sunlight and sorrow paint transparent weathers

across clapboard walls.  In the cool evening air

smells of damp and decay pervade the breeze.

Another statistic for Alzheimer’s malign triumph

over memory, laughter, the old man left this house,

powerless: first to go to his daughter, then into fog

where such men pass their days in deathless paradox.

Not even raccoons in the attic made him hire repairs;

he shared his last days here with rain, rot, ruin,

oblivious to his daughter’s or neighbors’ concerns.

I can tell you how I abhor this residential mess, fears

of fire and thieves increasing with the scattered leaves

across the lawn. And yet I wonder who would care

if we all were raptured into empty air, leaving behind

houses occupied by rank abandonment, vacant memory

shackled to his ghostly brothers, sleep and death,

fallen timbers exposed to glaring eye of sun and sky.

September 23, 2011

Room Suitable for a Tattered Ghost Revisited

Abandoned Living Room

My Mother Read Me

Sleeping Beauty

James Hart 

A poem for my mother,

Alene Wagaman Hart (1918-1990)

If I stir December’s ember fire,
I remember places where beauty lies,
my mother reading sleeping beauty
in darker language of her loving eyes:
she read I love you’s simple wisdom
to open sky and field, stone, tree, and me;
she praised rainbow’s frail iridescence,
and daily prayed for sunset’s divinity.

Recalling this sleeping beauty lost a prince,
her eyes’ wordless loss, her longing heard
among voices calling from empty rooms,
she labored to say her sorrow’s words
at the threshold where the waking day
burned lovely night’s ardent kiss away.

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

Note: My mother died on December 2, 1990.

Photo: www.flickriver.com

An Elizabethan Linen Merchant's Sign

Display in Linen Shop

At the Sign of the Piece of Linen

James Hart 

You will find fine goods,
whole bolts of pristine cloth
the pale shopkeeper will unwind
for only your appraising eyes.

He will let your fingers
feel the linen’s infinite weave,
test its strength and suppleness
to choose an immaculate length.

He will dress your somber rituals:
tablecloths for laying feasts upon,
napkins nesting communion bread,
white sheets for a virgin’s bed.

You will find fine remnants
suitable for new pillow shams,
babies’ gowns—undeniably durable
for your eternal undergarments.

At the sign of the piece of linen
you will find fine goods,
clean as the unspotted snow
that shrouds your long way home.

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


Note on Title: I remember reading something years ago that mentioned a linen merchant in Elizabethan London who could be found "at the sign of the piece of linen." The words were "found poetry" for me, and I soon wrote this poem to take advantage of the phrase. Linen has been used for burial shrouds throughout history--most famously the Shroud of Turin.

Photo: Stacks of White Linen.

http://french-grey.com/

Linen Merchants:
A Sign from Another Time

Jewish Linen Merchant - Glasgow, Scotland

Two women outside Abraham Links' drapery shop in Main Street in the Gorbals, 1907. The top left hand window has lettering in Yiddish while the bottom right window has a similar message in English. Abraham Links (1886-1953) was a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Glasgow.

http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSE00745

Some Wreckage from the Whaling Age

Vintage Poster for the White Star Line

Leviathans Dreaming

James Hart

Titanic, Lusitania, Bismarck,
the whales of empire
sleep the dreaming deep
where currents sweep so slow
nothing seems to move inside
time’s corrosive crusted skin.

What hulks of history we hold
our sleeping wreckage in,
Hindenburgs consumed to flashing ash,
periscope earth barely submerged among
the White Star Line’s vanishing shipwrecks,
flotsam drifting abandoned names.

Washing up on forgotten shores
of the universe, ghostly ribs and vertebrae
dream the shapes of whales, white pyres
of memories burning familiar as zeppelins
aglare in the flares of sand
where time spouts out its empty sea.

December 13, 2001

(Poem from a sequence entitled

Wreckage from the Whaling Age)

Arise, These Stones Sleeping in a Field

Stones Sleeping in a Field

The Sleepers

James Hart 

We found our valleys
full of love’s voluptuous languor,
sunlight folded among the hills,
corpulent mist drowsing in the dusk,
and left the sleepers to their sleep.

We found our bones
full of moonlight’s airy marrow,
starlight folded among the hills,
somnolent mist dreaming in the dark,
and left the sleepers to their sleep.

We felt old infinities fall
under night’s supernal pall;
we rose before the nimble dawn
and found the sleepers gone.

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

Winter Night in Rose Hill Cemetery

Barred Owl in Snow

Rubric for December

James Hart 

Here’s a nearby voice
among the prowling owls,
feathers of a noise.

Here lie moon bones
over glacial face of earth,
limbs in shadow tones.

Here is all you see,
stark measure of your life,
light beyond a tree.

Here stones know
weights of missing names,
cups holding snow.

Here red vestige blurs
black syllabic rabbit tracks,
a word of shredded fur.

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

Great Gray Owl in Snow

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