SkyldTouch Poetry (9)

The old man’s gone off to the hills now

Though it’s frosted over outside

He went off real quiet now

Like the winter momma died.

He won’t be going off to pray now

Praying man don’t need a gun.

I know, lord, it’s been coming on

Since he was twenty-one.



Living in the county was mighty hard

For a haunted woman and a bastard child.

She had no love to give him

The mountains raised him wild.

A lonely woman possessed by devils

And a boy believing in the wind

Scratched a living from a hillside farm

Till the bad times settled on them.



He went down to the city

In 1929

And slaved for flatland wages

To save their place from the mines.

At 21 he came back home

To put his mother in the grave

Going up to the mountain like Moses

He grieved his mother and prayed.



He took a wife in ‘35

I was born the very next spring

We ploughed good rows

And made the crops grow

And made a lot of living.

The hills are in your veins he said

You come from mountain ground

They’ll stir the blood inside your head

Like a wind that has no sound.



Two years later in the winter time

Gabriel made a claim

And Moses went to the mountain once more

To grieve and call her name.







Now the crops we need are gone

A killing frost is to blame

And the old man’s gone to hills now

But his leaving’s not the same.

The wind howling down the mountain

Stirs the senses of my mind

The old man wants me to go now

And leave these hills behind.

The wind howling down the mountain

Tells me Gabriel made a claim

Moses took his gun to the mountain

And he won’t come back again.

The name perplexed me—cotton Easter—

For the plant did not bear red as the stain of blood,

Heralded not suffering in foliage luscious,

Hinted not at resurrection in drooping limbs.

Cotton Easter lays softly on the mind,

Peaceful and blissfully supine,

Without crosses and nails and moral shims,

That seek to align, demean and shame us,

Or drown our spirits with vengeful flood.

Eisegesis of true paradise in simple misreading: cotoneaster.

We began blank as the white-washed houses of Alentejo,

Strangers with a clean slate of heart between us,

Yet we were drawn together with colorless brushes

Dipping into experience as passion rushes

We striped our history like the basalt trim of the Azores

Then thatched our affections like the roofs of Madeira

All while drawing nearer.

We stenciled our saga with love and romance

Complex and engaged like terraces of the Algarve

Filigrees of entanglement we continued to carve

Azulejos we became, colors in dance,

Like shimmering sea waves crashing on shores

Of a rapier thin isthmus

Deeply into each other, destined to go.

On this day that speaks of the heart,

Know that I have loved you from the start.

The lilt of your voice that first call,

Resounded, I knew,

The melody of myself, the anthem of you,

Harmony of passion and gall,

Duet—felicity and fire—

Sing ardently of our romance.

Desire and happiness intimately dance,

Twain as one,

To love,

Above

All.

In a shadow, in a corner, that the world was passing by,

I found a broken angel, who knew that she could fly.

But the world is not kind to angels,

And she wept internal tears,

Because her poised, radiant wings were tattered,

And she was trapped within her fears.

From the tenderness in her eyes, I spun a silver thread,

Then I placed it in her hand and kindly said,

“It is not for me to mend you, but to stand guard instead,

While you bind your wings of passion and dream of the sky.”

With intelligent and educated skill, she stitched herself,

To hope and courage, to things that really mattered,

And she captured my heart while she fluttered.

“It’s only infatuation,” she demurely muttered,

While the fire in her eye said it might be more than we knew,

Like the writer freely bound to the beauty of his art.

In a flash of white brilliance, she left the ground and flew,

Into the tender canyons deep within my heart,

And I hoped my broken angel would be happy flying there,

Until death do us part.

In Spring the bloom is on the rose

And, admixed with colored petals and rare fragrance,

Is a delight for the senses.

In the autumn of maturity, the bloom is in the rose,

Nestled in kindness, folded in generosity.

More cherished is the autumn rose

To those whose journeying through the garden has revealed the differences.

They shook their heads that morning,

And said it was a shame,

That he was leaving Saint Joe’s,

And the family name.

Door hanging open to the cold,

They watched him turn and go;

Faces framed in the windowpane,

And footsteps in the snow.

The younger brothers would hear it,

In the Father’s simple way,

“Brother Sterling Cleon left the seminary today.”



Down from Calicoon,

With the wind rising high,

He lost himself and kissed his rosary.

Down from Yasgur’s frozen fields,

Where his nation had just died,

He looked for Mary along the highway.



Pennsylvania before nightfall,

If the rides were good,

Carolina by daybreak,

And friends that understood.

A truck stop in New Jersey,

An accident on the Pike,

A little girl dead and frozen,

And the sirens in the night.

A half-a-man in Delaware,

Vietnam amputee,

Brother Sterling Cleon threw away his rosary.



Down from Calicoon,

With the wind rising high,

He lost himself—there was no rosary.

Down from Yasgur’s frozen fields,

Where his nation had just died,

He looked for Mary along the highway.



Winter passed in a southern town,

And spring was growing warm,

A caravan would be leaving for the river,

Looking for a farm.

Empty years had made the choice,

Nothing left to say—

Brother Sterling Cleon waited for that summer day.



Spirit of the river,

Come inside a troubled mind,

And lay to rest the evil that you find.

August on the river,

Together let us be,

Together let us be.



The summer sun burned the grass,

And the old men that they passed,

Working in the fields of Ohio.

A song to ease the fears,

Of all the coming years,

Anthem for a long, long way to go.



Spirit of the river,

Come inside a troubled mind,

And lay to rest the evil that you find.

August on the river,

Together let us be,

Together let us be.



August on the river,

August to be free.

There will come an hour

In an afternoon of reckoning

To shuffle down the hallway,

Turning in at the door—

The room is old and faintly terrifying:

You did not know them then.

At twenty they welcomed the sun for breakfast

And evenings sipped coffee—without fear—

As long black shadows fell across the fields,

Fell across the lawn and into the far corner

Where the beautiful baby slept.

There were flowers in the windows

And the yellow corn grew tall;

Easy minds explored the hours

Spent talking in this hall.

A woman was marked within her child

And a man with his sky-proud stalks

And time was marked within the sense

Of seasons and sunrises.

You did not know them that long December

When they rocked by the fire.

The farmer gave up his eyes to the flames

And the woman abandoned her eyes to the black woods

That held her first-born in the ground.

The world was past them then.

Come the New Year they would sift their minds

And find the ways to pass the time;

Come the spring the corn would assault the sky

And be pulled from its height by aimless hands

To be sold to the unfamiliar man in town;

Come the spring the wife would do the canning,

Thinking they must eat well the next winter.

You did not know them that long December

When they rocked by the fire.

In August the money from the yellow pride

Bought a box

And all the blood-kin came

To lay the woman in the woods

By a mound that grows grass quite well.

September was good for fishing

And the farmer passed the time

Until the air and leaves and sky

Heaved in that last great beauty of summer

And the man came in—

Came in to this quiet room

And stood in the afternoon grey.

Something old in the farmer’s blood—

A mind within a mind that could read the wind—

Shivered in this quiet room.

The world was past him then

And the sense lost in summers and graves

And the emptiness shook him like dying in a dream,

A dream that promised to be there

In shadows and sunshine

A vision on a wind

Stirring an afternoon of reckoning.

There will come an hour

In an afternoon of reckoning

And you will know the things that went before.

You will be here in the afternoon grey,

A mind within a mind that comes to read the wind.

I was newly in love,

And did not know how to tell her,

So my clumsiness made her cry.

I confessed my heart and made her see,

The depth of my emotion.

But secretly I whipped myself,

Haunted by the jagged notion,

I had caused a tender woman to weep.



Then we drank from the blue bottle,

And in a labored whisper,

With caution as a nervous throttle,

And a sorrow she could no longer keep,

She put an ingrained fear on the shelf,

Did not question why,

And simply revealed to me,

From shards she had sown,

The greatest pain she had known.

She, like me, has no recourse from above,

But on that day, she started on her way,

To recovering the spirit of her soul,

And understanding that she must self forgive.

Because in her desperate hour,

She lacked the power,

To justly judge the path to take.

For years and years, the tyranny of mistake,

In thinking she had freely selected,

An act she could not have expected,

To transcend with wisdom matured,

Had not let her love herself or admire,

The purity of fire,

That in the canyons of her being endured.

Now wine from the bottle of blue,

And the gentle urging I could do,

Have cast a clearer light,

On the torment of her plight,

And helped her to find,

The justice of mind,

To see, that in her blackest travail,

Still she did not fail,

To grace the world with love.

For the true measure of spirit,

Can only be found,

When a soul, knowledgeable and free,

Strikes a mark on the ground,

And declares immutably explicit,

On this side, unmoved, you shall find me.