POETRY MONTH DAY # 3: DAVID HUDDLE

I've been a David Huddle admirer for years now, and no, that's not David in the photo above.  It's one he emailed me, in honor of the bird that has figured prominently in the  poems below.   I'm partial to his poetry, but he's also a highly regarded fiction writer, essayist,  and, I'd wager, a memorable teacher.  I was able to meet him five years ago at the anniversary Celebration of the Emory & Henry Appalachian Writers festival, at which time he was teaching in Vermont.  He's a mountain man, though, a Virginia mountain man, and for the past couple of years he's been teaching at Hollins College, his title being Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.   

He has published seventeen books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His novel The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was named a Distinguished Book of the Year by Esquire and a best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In 2012, LSU Press will publish his seventh poetry collection, Black Snake at the Family Reunion, from which the following poems are lifted.  ( I'm justifiably proud that the two of us will have our  books coming out at the same time-early fall-- from the same publisher! )

Weather Report

 

The vultures of this landscape came to call 

this morning--found a bare-limbed tree outside

my kitchen window, settled in & held

my gaze, big tar blobs against a milky sky:

We understand you, their presence informed me,

And I you, I told them in silence.

      
                                            Right now 

this day can’t make up its mind--sun’s half out

but rain’s in those clouds.  If it’s that cold wind-

driven stuff that swats your eyes like a drink 

full of crushed ice thrown in your face, I’ll stay

indoors, count my failures & petty crimes,

loathe my life, and completely understand 

why friends and loved ones keep their distance.

The barometer yo-yos my mental state--

one day I’m a happy old dude, kitchen 

dancer, car-driving harmonizer, hilltop 

walker delighted by the world.

      
                                              Next day 

it’s the big not, the mega-never.  And where

are you breeze-blown death birds now that I need you?

This mean rain’s rotting the starch right out of me.

Come down from your perch, my beauties, I’m 

opening doors and windows, I’m looking for snacks

in the back of the fridge.  Here--try roosting 

on this chair back.  Please just sit with me 

around my table.  I’ll hold up both ends 

of our conversation.  It’s like forever

I’ve wanted to talk to you.  Here--let me 

turn off these lights--I know you like the dark.  

(first published in The New Yorker)

Hilltop Sonnet

Who visits this high meadow, lawn of the dead,

 to see blue and bluer mountains that rise

  out of the west; to converse with the crows,

   great-winged turkey buzzards, black kites riding

    thermals in seamless silence; to greet deer

     here at twilight grazing near the wood’s edge;

      to scare the huge groundhog that lives inside

       the brick-walled graveyard: Who moves through this     space?

       A yellow dog leading a deaf old man 

      who likes to talk, a girl and her boyfriend

     who sit atop her car’s roof murmuring

    quietly, two off-leash labs ignoring

   their shouting owner, a policeman who 

  parks up here to feel lonely, guarding the wind.

Roanoke Pastorale

Cardinal, goldfinch, titmouse, turkey buzzard--

dear companions of my afternoons--

above this field, high clouds dream of blizzards

to snow me in till spring ends my solitude.

Sober’s my binge now, nature my saloon. 

Wren, mourning dove, house finch, turkey buzzard--

for your entertainment, I sing the words

of old fifties songs, use baby talk, croon

as I walk the field beneath great blizzard-

dreaming clouds.  You gaudy pretties, sweet birds

of my senior years--my later’s my soon.

Catbirds flit through cedars in the graveyard, 

turkey buzzards swirl their patterns overhead,

across the mountainside sunlight bows a tune 

rising to blue eternity but heard

by the heron fishing the creek, wizard

of stillness, creature designed by the moon.

Bluebird, jay, chipping sparrow, turkey buzzard,

clouds, and field--I dream this life, walk this world.


(first published in The New Yorker)

Photo by Anne Noble

ALL HALLOWS

These powerful days around the Celtic New Year have always pulled at my soul.  Today is All Saints Day or All Hallows.  I remember a poem of Louise Gluck's that I loved many years ago.  I'd say it's haunted me ever since I first read it and remains a favorite, although I've found her later work less compelling.  My sequence HALLOWS follows Gluck's poem.  This was written for my grandmother, who is the "saint" in the second section;  the third honors All Souls Day, also known as El Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico and Central America.  For All Souls Day (tomorrow), I will share a poem by my friend Glenda Beall, who lives in Hayesville, North Carolina


ALL HALLOWS

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen Sleep in their blue yoke, The fields having been Picked clean, the sheaves Bound evenly and piled at the roadside Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness Of harvest or pestilence And the wife leaning out the window With her hand extended, as in payment, And the seeds Distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one And the soul creeps out of the tree. Louise Gluck    Hallows 1.              These leaves at my window, death-speckled black oak and blood-maple, fall to the earth into which she was sealed, leaving me to imagine I see through the hollows  of what were her eyes how another day  breaks on the backs of the scrub pines that stand up to welcome it. 2.         She was no saint. She never fasted, and if she prayed,  I never heard her aside from the Lawsy she uttered as down she sank onto the dark of the chamber pot  while I tried to be sleeping. She stirred up the fire to a roar every morning and beat the dough smooth, shoved it into the oven to bake and be eaten. When I hear Pavarotti  sing Panis Angelicus,  I see her hands deep in the dough bowl, and I hear the fire in the stove rumble, I hear her clucking and sighing, she who could never on this earth deliver unto any table a dry piece of cornbread, whose old-fashioned cakes that lay solid as flesh on the  plates put to shame every paper-thin slice of the town-ladies’ angelfood cakes. Any honest- to-god  angel  would have preferred them, a dollop of whipped cream atop every thick slice and after that, oh,  just a touch of  her Christmas divinity. 3.            Los Muertos.  The dead. They are out there this morning,  in the woods with the busy  squirrels  laying up treasures on earth,  this  heaven of acorns and walnuts. This granary. These last dawns before the leaves go, I wake early to watch from the window my  dead ones out there in the woods leaf by  leaf come to rest on the ground  where at last they have nothing  to say beyond what’s meant  to lie on the earth and be claimed by it. from Coming To Rest, LSU Press