Windy Day at Kabekona

Préface
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Auteur
Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Ireland. He is author of seven books of poems, Keeping the Star (New Rivers Press, 1988), Horse of Earth (Holy Cow! Press, 1994), The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), Winter Hours (Red Dragonfly Press, 2005), Waking Before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press, 2007), The Foot of the Rainbow (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010), and The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015).

Texte du rabat

Thomas R. Smith, along with Robert Bly and Louis Jenkins, has become one the masters of the Midwestern prose poem.

Échantillon de lecture
THE SOPRANO

The conductor brings up violins behind the heavy-breasted woman. Tonight she is singing Four Last Songs by Strauss. Her knees bend, she lists to one side like a boat on the Rhine.
Notes stream upward, almost inaudibly, a breeze stirring among oak leaves or the sounds river ice makes in early spring. Suddenly what was listened for so carefully is loose in air, a passion declared after years of concealment, a storm arriving on a clear day. In a valley, sunlight flees the ripened clusters of grapes. So many not tasted, paintings never seen, cities that waited for us and we did not come. . . .
The audience feels fear beneath the intoxicating melody. In the voice's distillation is a summing up, a precise accounting of its existence, a rose fully open in this room. The hearer glimpses not only the strength and subtlety of the soul, but its dark seams also, niches of character, dislocations and failings. How difficult it is to be a woman, the grief of the new life turning in her earthen body. And then how difficult it is to be human. The man is inside the woman and the woman inside the man, and they have never met.
"PRAYING MANTIS

Eye-level with the low theater of the yard, I watched the green invader with eyes luminous and gaseous as suns. It scissored above the grass's raised spears, jerky as a stop-action model, menaced with the hanging sickles of its claws, then swiveled on its turret and vanished into the high thistles. Summer would never be so long and low and broad a stage again, although I still taste the sour wonderment of that fleeting samurai presence when I descend from my adult elevation to cling to earth's breathing fur, and wish for that tiny monster's matinee return. "
WINDY DAY AT KABEKONA

Only a picture window stands between us and the full force of gusts that lift the branches of the red pine. Drafts under the cabin door roll the rug resolutely into a tube despite our attempts to spread it flat.
Foot-high waves spume across the lake; near shore the color of the long, gleaming swells softens to a milky jade, warmer looking than it is, almost southern. But the drift of this world is northerly; lawn chairs are hurled into woodpiles, propellers of outboard motors scrape against stones. The door bangs loosely in its sill. Jackpines groan as if they could snap and fall.
There is something in all this fury that makes the day oceanic: We're near at any moment being swamped, drowned, pinned by wreckage. In the cloudless sky, the sun gleefully conducts the turbulence as though it were Wagnerian opera. A gull white as our idea of angels hovers above the shore for a moment fully awake fighting the wind before being torn from its place.

JESUS AND MARY, 1978

They're the hardest-working panhandlers in Amsterdam: Jesus with his matted beard and Mary with her dirty blond hair dreadlocked by weather and neglect, Jesus so tall he seems twice Mary's height. Holding out sun-and-dirt-darkened palms, they look rubbery, like caterpillars rearing on a leaf. Refuse them and Jesus's grizzled scowl implodes, a black hole, and tears scald Mary's cheeks. He pulls her doll-like, so fast her feet can barely skim the ground, though a few dozen yards away the two instantly recover an intense composure midway between appeal and demand.
I fantasize for them a different life after hours because being Jesus and Mary looks so hard I can't imagine anyone doing it full-time. Once after midnight, beneath my friend Joop's window, a voice called from the alley. Everyone got up to look: In the moonlight, alone and as if naked because not clothed by a crowd, lanky Jesus stood with his diminutive shadow Mary. In a scene I understood had repeated often, Joop knifed from a hunk of hashish a generous brownish wedge, tossed it down to them. Fluid as a mime, Jesus caught it, and tipped an imaginary hat to his benefactor. Then with a solicitous tenderness, he took Mary's small, chapped hand and vanished with her into the fragrant May darkness.
(Joop is pronounced yope as to rhyme with hope)

THIS ABUNDANCE

Small screens diminish the world, I think, driving my 96-year-old mother past farms near her home on a morning in what has so far proven an atypically mild November. Wooded hills and swamps alternate with fields, all harvested by now. Geese forage the corn stubble, not yet convinced it's time for them to leave. Homes variously kept up or neglected say how well, or not, each farm family is doing.
We crest a gentle rise to view clipped pastures vividly green, bordered by bristling bare trees that make a kind of spiky-hairy barrier between earth and dry blue sky. Deep in the thickets is an unperturbedness, acquiescence to what comes. My mother still knows every turn of the road better than I do I depend on her not to get us lost. No one complains about the weather, but there's something unsettling about this continuing moderation.
This is the north country, not known for its moderation. But all that's immoderate here today is opinion. On Main Street barstool pundits badmouth Obama and agree that climate change is a leftist hoax.
I love these back roads through scrub woods that hold so much of the rugged, persistent wildness of the land in them. Since childhood they have occupied my imagination. What has happened to the imagination of others? The country is large and their world small, shrinking along with the screens. Many have never lived outside this abundance and simply can't imagine anything could threaten it.
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