"Like many creative writers, [Bruce] Springsteen creates a time and place that people can relate to but that may not necessarily exist:

* The story of 'Highway Patrolman' is set in an area where one can drive into Canada; however, 

* The lyrics say Joe is 'a sergeant out of Perrineville.' The only American city with that name is in New Jersey. . . . 

* While the lyrics state, 'I musta done a hundred and ten through Michigan county that night,' in actuality there is no Michigan County anywhere in the United States. 

* The chorus refers to 'dancin' with Maria as the band played '"Night of the Johnstown Flood."' There was no song with such a title when the song was released."

[from the Wikipedia page for "Highway Patrolman"]

The Husbands (2004)

Dawn Potter

Their work boots were filmed with grease,

and their faces were weary.

They never showed up till the fourth inning.

Knees spread, they let themselves rest

on chairs beside the gravel-pocked ball field;

and when the women hollered, “Good eye, honey!”

at a tearful, trembling batter,

the men smiled like gentle but distracted strangers.

In their houses, a drawer slammed,

a kettle boiled, a hound twitched on the mat.

Televisions gabbled,

and the husbands pined for a secret world.

One drove six hours in dense fog

to a motel in Mississauga

instead of sitting down to supper.

Another stayed up till dawn

picking out “Night of the Johnstown Flood”

on his mother-in-law’s old guitar.

They fumbled with their sadness,

but nothing changed.

Women still clustered along the ball field

sharing packs of licorice, cat-calling the ump,

cheering at bloop singles and horrible throws to first.

The women behaved as if they had front-row tickets

to something magnificent and vital,

but the husbands couldn’t see, couldn’t quite see.

They raised their eyes toward the blackening sky

where swallows wheeled among the mosquitoes.

A child hacked at a pitch,

and the men’s thoughts clung to emptiness.

No one cried, “Cross out this life

that batters you down, and down, and down!”

Like chairs left in the rain for twenty years,

they sat.

Then one day their knees snapped

and they toppled into the flood.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse history (in progress) of southwestern Pennsylvania]

I'm still struggling with the Johnstown Flood poem, but suddenly I've also found myself juggling a companion piece: a poem about the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, which managed the dam that collapsed and destroyed Johnstown. The list of club members is a Gilded Age who's who: manufacturers of mine explosives, members of Congress, art patrons, an attorney general, window-glass millionaires, railroad executives, and so on and so on. And as I pondered this list, I suddenly thought of card tables and old guys in tuxedos drinking brandy, and surreptitious belching. So poem number 2 is slowly taking the form of a whist party: that is, I'm breaking the poem into card-party groups of four names, and interspersing them with commentary that riffs on the Hoyle instructions for whist.

What excites me about this verse project, as much as anything, is the way in which each subject seems to discover its own poetic structure. This is a whole new world for me, one that requires me to slough off many of my preconceptions about form and line and sound. To be honest, I'm kind of scared.

"Make sure of winning at the earliest opportunity, but take any risk if that is the only way of saving the game."

I spent much of yesterday working on a poem about the 1889 Johnstown Flood; and though I came into this project hoping that I could incorporate the "young Chaucerian professor" voice that we were talking about a few days ago, I ended up being unable to find my way into a poem through that angle. Instead, my opening was a contemporaneous recollection that appears on NOAA's Historical Weather Service site. The site quotes only bits and pieces; and I have no idea whether this writer, Willis Fletcher Johnson, was a survivor or a reporter or an outsider involved in the rescue effort or none of the above. But he published his account during the year of the flood, and his word choice and syntax caught my ear.

The poem, of course, follows its own course. Not much of the real Willis Fletcher Johnson remains, though his biblical cadence and imagery became increasingly important as I reworked the drafts. And that process was tiring. The Johnstown Flood is not a cozy subject to revive, relive, or rewrite.

A dark day, and a day of storm,
and amidst the darkness
the angel of death spreads his wings over the valley.

I don't often feel comfortable using a phrase such as "the angel of death"; but that was the image that Willis Fletcher Johnson chose to evoke, and I think it was the right one. It's a prim, ministerial sort of cliche; it's a terrifying metaphor for earthly chaos and human helplessness. So the angel of death spread his wings and flew into my poem, and he was difficult and demanding company.

You may not be surprised to hear that I also found myself required to reread Milton's evocation of the battle between Satan's fallen angels and God's faithful angels.

It was a hard day.

I haven't updated the Milly Jourdain Archive since last summer, and today is the day to remedy that lack. As luck would have it, I've reached what I think is the most beautiful poem in her collection. I like this first poem so much that I'll be including it The Conversation, although the one that follows is also lovely. Both are Jourdain at her best: focused, precise, patient, lyrical.


Watching the Meet

Milly Jourdain

The air is still so new and fresh and cold,
It makes a warm excitement in our hearts
To drive beside the sad and lonely fields.
And now we see a wider space of road
Where groups of horsemen moving restlessly
Are waiting for the quiet-footed hounds.
The hounds come swiftly, covering the way
Like foaming water surging round our feet.
And then with cries and sound of cracking whips
All, all are gone: the distant beat of hoofs
Like trailing smoke of dreams, comes fitfully
To tell how near they were a moment past.
But we see only winter trees again,
And turning homewards meet a drifting rain.



The End of a Hunting Day

Milly Jourdain

The dusk is creeping up the vale
While on the hill we rest,
And look across the wint'ry fields
Towards the dark'ning west.

A ringing sound comes changefully
Along the narrow way--
Some horsemen going to their homes,
After a hunting day.

They call "Good-night," and soon the dark
Has swallowed them from sight:
But still the sound lives on a while
Lingering like a light.

And now it all grows lonelier
Under the quiet sky,
Until some sparks of life shall come
And burn and then pass by.

"Sunny and cold, with a high near 10. Wind chill values as low as -17. West wind 10 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph," chirps a brisk little predictor at the National Weather Service. Sounds almost idyllic, almost as if I might be able to spend fifteen minutes outside without suffering.

I've been having so much trouble with my hands; I can't seem to keep them warm, even when I'm wearing three pairs of gloves. Ice is creeping under the front door. Yesterday I ran forty times around the circuit of my kitchen and living room and never felt like I needed to take off my sweater. Our house is small and reasonably well-insulated, and the woodstove burns and burns. But I can't stop shivering.

It would help if we could get some sunlight blazing through these south-facing windows. Maybe today really will be better than yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

I have written many letters this week. Two were long ones to old acquaintances that I haven't seen for years, so they were autobiographical in a "let me tell you what I've been doing for the past 20 years" kind of way, though I found myself scrupulously avoiding all mention of writing. Why is that, I wonder? Both of these old acquaintances knew me in high school, when all I did was read books, play the violin, and moon over boys and animals. Thirty years later, that's still all I do. I've led a very consistent life. But in my letters to these friends, I found myself focusing on my children, how Tom and I ended up in Harmony, how I'm looking for a job but am, of course, unhireable. I make myself sound like an undereducated hausfrau, and I know it's because both of these friends have relatively high-powered, well-paying, prestigious-sounding "real" careers. It's so stupid of me to act like this: the best I can say is that I'm well aware that it's stupid, but at least for this first round of reconnection, I'm not able to override it.

But I also wrote a different sort of letter. This correspondence was with another old friend, not a high school acquaintance but a woman whom I'd met when I was looking for a place to board my goat while Tom and I were living in an apartment in Providence and he was going to RISD. She was older than me, a grown-up when I was still a callow youth, but we really liked each other. I spent a lot of time on her farm, and we were both frantic consumers of books. We began sharing volumes back and forth: all of Trollope's novels, contemporary novels and histories, books and books and books. I was at an age when I read anything that anyone would hand to me, and she introduced me to many books, good and bad, that I would never have otherwise met. After I moved to Maine, she moved out west and we gradually lost touch. But recently her house burned down in a wildfire, and she lost all of her possessions, so she wrote to us, asking if Tom had negatives of any of the photos he'd taken of her Massachusetts farm. He printed a stack of new pictures for her; and then the other day I got an email from her in which she said she was re-buying all my books. It was news to me that she'd ever owned any of my books, but it turns out that she had, that she'd been reading what I was writing. You are so lucky to be living your dream, she told me, which was also news to me. Have I been living my dream? I suppose I have. Truly, I never fantasized about having a job that paid the bills. I did fantasize about books and books and books, with a little bit of music thrown in, and a great deal of romance cementing the whole. And while the entire structure of this fantasy has turned out to be more like a slapdash and unsteady Lego parking garage than a Frank Gehry museum, still, here it is, not quite toppling over.

Finally, I wrote a third sort of letter--to another poet, whom I have never met, never corresponded with before this week; about whom I have few preconceived notions . . . but our letters have been whirlwinds of "oh, my God, this is what I see, and this is what I did, and this is what the past was like, and this is how I walk down the street, and this is what the words don't say, and this is what I understand just barely how I might rethink, and. . . ." In other words, I have had an epiphanic mind-meld conversation with a complete stranger and I'm fairly sure that she feels the same way that I do, and the sensation is a 50-year-old poet version of a teen crush. Who knows if it will last? Very likely not. But golly.