Goodbye Jersey Mud (2019)

Preface from Goodbye Jersey Mud

—- Jersey Mud

‘Here’s to spit and a bit of mud in your eye.”

-- Variation on John 9:15 and a drinking toast

Windshield fluids frozen

on cars & rigs alike,

driving into the winter sun

on the Jersey pike.

Another rig blows by;

its long-haul headlong rush.

Another eye-pour

of freeway slush.

For sight lines a grimace,

a swerve, two more --

passing wrecks, smokestacks,

white fields a far shore.

& the nerves singing that song again,

the old funk rhyme:

right place, wrong time

(Dr. John on oblivion).

Now windowless, wingless,

blinkered, clipped,

we are a mud-caked, bad idea

on a south-bound trip.

After Joyce Kilmer

we wiped off at Fenimore Cooper,

Walt Whitman & every stop

& turnout to Baltimore,

where bug-eyed and blear,

hemmed & harried past our turn

by night riders, juggernauts, 18-wheelers,

we sailed into the harbor tunnel

echoing arias of fear and Gilda,

vibratos trilling in every nerve,

constricting the last notes, a breath-

stopping conviction:

We’re gonna die! Here!

— Goodbye Jersey Mud

Goodbye Jersey mud,

still caked on hood and fenders,

as we ride daybreak into Northern Virginia

by Leesburg, Manassas, Culpeper

over country battle roads

and their own tableaux of winter:

Leaves, sheaves, stubble, stone,

frozen streams and bridges,

hedgerows, woodlands, pasturelands

engraved by the chaff of wheat;

counter-etchings on a lithograph,

as we pass barns, schools, estates,

sight lines to distant ridges.

Here signage at a bend:

harmonic site of worship

and vintage war antiques;

on to breweries, distilleries

and wineries boutique;

hops and grapes of wrath bucolic

for the touring alcoholic --

Drop by, taste and drink.

Then at a turn or rise to spy,

guarding a pasture or estate,

the solitary llama, celebrity creature,

a coat bred fashionably alpaca,

gazing into distances,

its toes in snow by a fence.

— What We May Conjure

And what we may conjure

from our histories popular

and Currier and Ives

of the generals, the generals

casting the die,

marching it up and down

over this same ground,

and the cavalry riding

into the teeth of it, the fusillades,

sky splitters, all sides,

opening to us the pitiless

colors and sounds of glory;

men cast blue and gray,

led from behind, massed and driven,

again and again to embrace the fire,

to assume others’ positions,

suddenly vacant or dire,

and for the willing in place

of the fallen, a reprieve or spell,

mercifully brief and forgotten,

of the most intimate smells,

as they lay there prone,

firing over their own.

— Climate Change

But a small climate change,

a matter of degree

in the former upper Confederacy,

has taken us from zero to freezing

under this bright sky, where I

keep thinking, not so brightly,

of the blight of these inversions;

how else to say? Deep sky

on a silent countryside;

its temperature set in arctic air,

while inside the beltway Misrule’s

winter carnival on parade

amid the strut and fruit and tinsel;

its trumpery taking us to school,

seeding the airwaves with enmities

to climate, comity, common sense;

all that matters to good governance.

— Ugly Math in Rhyme

“Listen to you!” says she, “talking to yourself

there behind that wheel. You sound

a pound pontifical and half-stone dense!

Is there no clearer path, no nimbler sense

through this haphazard post-election circumstance

and some very ugly math?”

“Is that a No or Yes?

One makes two of us. You ask

what could be worse than this?

To answer that, we’d have to use

a slide rule and some calculus

and remember when in school as kids

we stood each day to pledge

“One nation indivisible,”

and the allegiance felt built in,

welcome and invincible?”

“Now these empty fields and deep bone chill,

misrule in the capitol and kids in school on edge;

our venomous divisions,

deadly small-time insurrections,

lives lost in neighborhoods,

shooting deaths of children,

all cast against a fading memory of

the war for Lincoln’s bloody Union.”

“I may speak in riddles,

but the point is fundamental:

all those arms in private hands,

all this bleeding from our arsenals!

Understood? Laugh if you will,

but what’s in play today is lethal

and as evidence immiscible!” She grins,

this lawyer, punster, war historian,

as she explains:

“Count ten for every nine of us,

ten for nine – of guns that is –

and run those numbers!

plus ghost guns flying off the 3D presses!

Boys, it’s plastic firearms again,

full circle to when you were kids!

Say, can’t you see the nation bristling,

its extremes dug in for spring?

“Another spring internecine,” you say?

Did you just chime that grace note in

to echo what you’ve heard me sing?”

— Cold Harbor

At the crossroads at Cold Harbor

we take a breather by a field,

stamp off the chill, inhale,

imagine waves of men,

enfilades of fire on them,

then leave frosty semaphores

at nothing in particular.

“Seven,” I say, back in the car,

“seven” to underscore

the minutes they took out there,

June 3rd, 1864,

to cut down 7000 more.

“Perfect multiples,” she says.

“I know they didn’t stop.

Even if you exaggerate the time,

the massacres went on and on.

Can it matter on a scale like that?

and what of that endures today?

and I don’t mean the particulate.”

“One final horror that remains

is never knowing why

the wounded and the slain,

who lay out there as one,

lay for days between those lines.”

Her breath catches on another thought;

in her mind she tries to capture it:

All lie forever, do they not,

in the widening shadows where they fell?

For what’s out there is with us still

in the terrible harm men do to men when armed.

And within that darkening penumbra lies

other lessons, other lives,

in classrooms, hallways, streets and homes

for the witnesses we’ve become

to our shot up children and the suicides.

Cold HarborWitness

“The Weather Was Intensely Hot”

A Mississippian, who had recently survived the fighting at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle wrote “all around lay the shallow graves of those who had fallen in the former Battle of Cold Harbor…at night these old graves would shine with a phosphorescent light most spooky and weird, while on the surface of the ground, above the ghastly glimmering dead, lay thousands of dead that could not be buried…at night we buried our dead who had fallen in the trenches, as did the Yanks, but neither side could get at those who fell between the lines. We became indifferent to the noise and bloodshed and privation of the horrible scenes, but we could not be indifferent to the stench arising from the unburied dead”.

John Gibbon, commanding a division in Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps remembered “the weather was intensely hot…the fine sandy soil turned to dust…. our killed and wounded lay out in the space between the lines, those of the latter who could not crawl suffering intensely. Every effort was made during the night to get to them the water and to bring them in, but these efforts resulted in the enemy opening fire.”

‘The cries of the wounded were not just heard by a Confederate private or a Yankee division commander. Winfield Scott Hancock also heard the cries and appealed to his friend George Meade as to whether something could be done to assist the wounded. Meade referred the matter to Grant who penned a note to Robert E. Lee:

“It is reported to me that there are wounded men, probably of both armies, now lying exposed and suffering between the lines occupied by the armies…I would propose…when no battle is raging, either party be authorized to send to any point…unarmed men bearing litters to pick up their dead and wounded”.

The chess game being played between Grant and Lee on the battlefield over the last month now moved to their dispatches. Lee responded by suggesting that the Federals send out a flag of truce, as required by military protocol. As governed by the rules and articles of war, such a gesture would be an admission of defeat on the part of Grant. This was something that Grant was unwilling to do outright. He had pushed Lee back from the Rapidan to the threshold of Richmond at the cost of thousands of men killed and wounded and he was not about to concede a loss to his opponent.

Grant may have also considered the ripple effect of sending out a flag of truce. Later that year, residents of the Northern States would be going to the polls to elect the next President. A defeat in one of the major theaters of war could potentially have catastrophic results for Abraham Lincoln who was running on a platform of seeing the conflict through to the end.

Instead, Grant proposed a “suspension of hostilities” to which Lee agreed. On June 7, Union stretcher bearers made their way out from the lines. Gibbon would lament “it was not until four days afterwards…that we were enabled…to collect our wounded and bury the dead. The latter had by that time become a mass of corruption very offensive to everybody, friends and enemies, in the vicinity. I saw one poor fellow brought on a litter into our lines with a broken thigh. He had subsisted on three days on the spears of grass which he could reach with his hand from the point where he lay and smiled cheerfully when I spoke to him at the thought that, at last, he was where he could get food, drink and attendance.”

Article by Daniel Davis in “The Emerging Civil War.” (2014)

— A Warming Trend

“After Cold Harbor who the hell

needs more hell frozen over?”

(She now warming up the car…)

“As if we need reminding of

how a divided nation’s guns

kept repeating in defense of,

maimed and mortified in the name of,

on whatever scale of

(she waves her arms in the direction of),

for this more perfect union of

(she holds out her palms to it),

engraved forever on these fields

as on the Shield of Heracles.”

“Now, isn’t all of this tendentious!

What’s with my frosty mouth?

Are these chilblains on my lips

or are you contagious? Please,

can we be done with this?

No more ghostly battlefields

on which my thinking’s stuck.

Now I’m painfully unfreezing

and about to pee myself.

Which way out of here is south?”

With this she sweeps the air,

as if nothing left in it to pluck or stir.

I look at her and start the car.

— Keen

Today the swamp is frozen,

the fields and roads are clear;

the leaves sheaves stubble

snow and windless sight lines

lay by their winter whisperings

as we listeners pass by —-

until off road somewhere

a sound we dread to hear;

sharp it is and conjuring:

pock-a-pock-pock-pock,

and pock-a-pock, the shock

fading on the air, directionless,

no keening in its wake.

Did you hear it too?

Another car? A deer?

No, that’s the spat of rifle fire!

The question turns on us, from where?

One thought, only one,

on what capricious wind or mind:

There’s a gun out there, echoing oblivion

in a school or schoolyard!

The one we saw coming in?

“I don’t know,” she said, “but please,

Oh pretty fucking please,

get us out of here!”

— A Mexican Minute

For an instant I am riven

by the moment, a given

Are-you-shitting-me-John-Brown?

Mexican minute, pinning me

inside the aperture

of a wall-length trompe-l’oeil;

a one-way passageway

of fun-house mirrors in 3D

to a bunkered, out-of-scale,

2nd-amendment armory,

and there the blinkered caption:

“Enter, ye deceived!”

It’s that deal we’d sealed,

we acolytes of looking away

from the rising tide of weaponry,

as we watched its history unfolding,

so many lifetimes watching it unfolding

in the endless stir of news that speaks

to no one not fired upon

of the wretched thing life is

at the end of a gun,

that business end of ordnance,

in industry drive-by doublespeak

for weapon fire and misery.

What comes now to our children,

opening again to us

as someone else's rotten news,

as the stain of someone else's war,

as another seismic concussion, tha-whump,

in a world heft of them, whump, whump,

and waft of carnage without sound.

(This series continues in the book.)

—Savannah Noir

Savannah, where you're asked,

if asked at all, not where

you're from or what you do,

as up north we do or think,

but directly what you drink.

On icy River Street I present

a sour belly to the saucy

mixologist; under her head rag

a wink, "Just call me Irma,"

invoking the visitor in September

who turned River Street

into more Savannah River than street,

blew ghosts out of falling trees,

and whose proxy at this bar swears to me

nothing less than a Moscow Mule

will do; a "shoe-thumping" shot

of the house vodka with ginger beer and lime.

And only for a blink do I think

Irma might be having me on

with a cold war bit long before her time

about a shoe-thumping head of state

who knew how to play the press

and finally when to blink. But Irma,

who looks across her bar into many futures,

had something else in mind

besides my gastro-intestinal relief

or loosening these old knees

to try a Georgia two step to the street,

but instead to test each icy step

with a firm heel to gauge the slip.

The mule set down, not a wink,

she holds my eye. "Just this one.

Two or more and that river

might rise right to your stool.

So tonight, you two, watch your step."

And she was right -- about the medicinal effects

of a single mule

and the slippery steps awaiting tenderfeet

afoot on empty River Street's

unseasonable black ice,

housing the venerable cobbles

of the waterfront district,

lumpy underfoot and slickest

in the gaslight shadows,

which assured a dance of sorts

between the gaslights and upslope;

a slow-motion stomp, hesitant

with every step and shuffle

like Tim Conway's "oldest man"

played by an older couple

gripping each other, cobble by cobble,

beyond the final gaslight circle,

then up an alley passage way,

dreading the slip and stutter step,

slick shoe slide or buck n' tip

of a stumble, fall or tumble

in this Olympics-level ice routine,

unheralded in the dark.

Against all odds luck held;

no cantilevers, camel spins,

death spirals, points for style,

as we teetered higher to the base

of two flights of high stone steps

by the foundation of the Cotton Exchange,

leading steeply upward to our car, and there,

as if groping along a dungeon stair,

unsteady on the iron railing,

slipping on foundation stone,

we reached the second flight,

to see on our periphery

deep in the alley to our right

a misbegotten creature of the night

hunched against a wall and staring.

"There’s a man down there," I said.

"Who says that's a man?" said she,

as we scrambled out of there.

— Three at Tybee: An Interlude

Stand in one spot and slowly turn 360 degress.

Observe what you see and write.

—The Dixie Overland

Camera-panning the strand at Tybee

at the outermost eastern end

of long-since bypassed U.S. 80 West,

a route for years in disrepair

from this sea-end to the other,

but one I’d come to learn

stirred long ago with promise

one October week in 1926,

the time a legendary San Diego man,

Colonel Ed Fletcher, on a dare,

drove the former “Dixie Overland,”

in a stick-shift Cadillac sedan

from San Diego to Savannah

in seventy-one hours in record time,

as hundreds waved him on

over unpaved miles of gravel, dirt and clay

through desert towns and stations and beyond,

as he rode out his sunbelt vision

of the shortest, straightest U. S. highway

east and west and coast-to-coast,

and the only one accessible year round.

It was the birth of U. S. 80,

an ocean-to-ocean interstate,

and the nation’s first,

here ending at my feet

says a small stone monument.

Soon the go-west touts were out,

a-touting opportunity

and good times down the line:

“Escape the Blues!”(if you are white).

“Follow the sun!” Inopportune

for those who bought a one-way ticket out

to the “Broadway of the West and South,”

and yet what would the music be

that woke our teen-age feet

in our teen-age bobby sox and dancing shoes,

caught up our miseries and lusts

as we danced close or cut a shag

or overdid a jitterbug,

if it did not appropriate

within its blues progressions

blue notes picked and sung

by those who stayed behind

to pick along a blue highway

such as this old Dixie Overland,

plangent still from where I stand

looking west: Savannah to Montgomery,

Selma, Vicksburg, Jackson …

—Irmafish

This outermost eastern end

in a camera’s long slow pan

is a bare place of pass-through hurricanes

and the flood plain it became again

under an oceanic September moon

and a titanic storm named Irma,

where now the winter ocean, flat and brown,

slides shoreward on the tiniest ripples

barely incoming to the eye

onto the wide beach dry and waiting,

and the winter light draining,

and a night wind rising,

and the dusk dancers out to play

in sudden gusts, skittering sand devils,

funnels and whirls, tiny spin-off tornadoes

impishly moving the beach around.

And that one man

running hard on the sand

under a striated green kite, big fish eye

air-dancing in the twilight,

collapsing in a downdraft behind him.

I turn with the camera,

and there you are by the summer

pavilion, cinematically bundled

in your red parka and cap,

grinning girlishly

on a child's red swing.

And before this part gets

any more or less red wheel

barrowish,

there is lying

in the little swirls

by your swinging feet, a

large, dull-eyed, formerly red

Irma fish

too far blown up

on the sand.

—And all of this …

And all of this in the January sun,

for the dull show it was today

in its low trajectory,

as if we’d slipped into

a deeper orbit, far away,

until out of the blue that wasn’t,

as if painted by another hand,

a spectacular red fade at sundown

in shades of vermilion, oxblood, carnelian …

or if none of these exactly,

giving way to a palette deeper in

as on a smear of tincture of

decades-old mercurochrome

on open skin, exactly.

— Basilica

St Augustine

Long lapsed, one step inside,

would I kneel or make a sign?

And stepping further in, looked up

to see illumined beneath a vaulted dome

the red bunting of the canopy,

bathing apse, transept and nave

in celestial martyrdom.

And here above the altar

hung in sepulchral white

by the saints and pieties --

those marbled reliquaries

of suffering and belief --

the ubiquitous crucifixion

under a crown of thorns

in His forsaken agony,

My Old Salvation, Lo!

staring down at me:

O Lift up thine eyes and gaze upon,

who will not kneel and rise

or make the sign.

Would there not be, O Lord,

between Thy crucifix and me,

some twinge or shudder,

death throe, holy spew,

spot of blood on marble toe?

But, no, that mishugas fell out

when I lapsed long ago.

Just then I turned to see

flickering in the nave

a stand of votive candles

in the shadows, flickering on

the spit and image of a man,

my grandfather, William,

kneeling with his rosary;

impeccable “Colonel”

to his Yankee Division men,

who brought the ammunition

on time every time

to the first Americans at the trenches:

“Saviors of Paris” to the French

and to history whatever’s in a name

after a war like that:

Chemin des Dames and Toul,

Chateau-Thierry, Seicheprey, Belleau Wood,

St. Mihiel, Argonne, Verdun –

Grainy flickerings, half-caught

in newsreels of the day

of waves of men and bayonets

fixed for the Boche

and surging over the top, huzzah!

into no-man’s land, then lost

to fields of white crosses,

long-grassed-over trenches

in the mustard gas and fog

of a war to end all wars,

as for William’s men it did

and millions more.

Such flickerings in St Augustine

from altar side to nave

over a solitary gentleman

of cropped white hair and certain bearing,

and likely not from here;

well-fitted in a London suit,

the cut grandfather wore,

so it appeared to me.

And kneeling apart, as he did,

by the votive candles, as he did,

passing his rosary, as he did,

in the great silence he brought to it

before the liturgy of the day …

And glancing at him furtively

from our pew, as kids,

at what we could not know

of such mysteries, but did;

of a citizen-soldier called to lead

his lads to Armageddon,

who was by prayer and candles bid

forty years on from Over There,

bead by bead to reel them in.

And the last of that rosary

that I would remember

hung by his standing mirror

in his bedroom chambers,

where he stood to his own inspection,

the day he pitched face first into his reflection,

to lay at painful rest,

never to move his limbs again

in a room, Requiem Aeternam,

at the Chelsea Soldier’s Home

in a wreck of a building named for him.

So, goodbye my ones today:

you, pierced in stone;

you, kneeling in a pew;

all you, Over There; and you,

mon grand pere, wherever you are,

favor me, linger here

in this unsanctioned, trans-

substantiation of lingo,

this daresay of poetry,

while I step past the benetier of holy water,

still undisturbed by my finger,

and by the entrance stone’s

high water lines from Irma,

stain of her September surge,

ankle-high into the Basilica.

Note:

Requiem Aeternam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjWjnhfEto8

Lines for a Gun-Toting Friend

(A year after Parkland, February 14)

Ten to nine, ten to nine,

ten for every nine of us;

three-hundred ninety million

(guns, that is)

in owner’s hands is why

we cannot save the children.

Guns roam, you know,

out of house and home they go,

turn up in undefended places

to zero in on unsuspecting faces;

so welcome to the show, my friend,

that so entertains the children.

We’ve piped in weapon fire and misery

and recursive chants for peace.

Off stage the drums are grieving,

repeating and repeating,

as if to summon deities

beyond a rosary or prayer beads.

Stage right you’re sounding off

in defense of the true nation:

“my home,“ “my rights,” “my rounds,”

“my ammo, ammo, ammunition,”

as if to righteously appropriate

an 18th-century constitution.

You enunciate each phrase

as would Demosthenes,

stand tall before the news,

remote and gun in hand,

as I’ve seen you do, my friend,

without a plan in mind

to save the children.

But it just takes one of you,

one slithering dark mood,

a round of death in hand,

to tip the scale again,

unsave another child or two

or an entire school.

So this petition is for you,

for all of us and all of you

caught together in this thing;

so bring your guns along,

and together let us sing

our unsaved children.

I once sang them to a driving wheel

as two of us rode south,

to a mother and a wayside youth,

a soldier, barkeep and a mule

(imagine how I seemed the fool).

But it was too late a year ago

for seventeen who left for school.

That was 4,000 kids ago,

shot up at school or home

or out there on their own.

No elegiac consolations here:

for those, stare down a gun,

of that make your song.

So how can we add voice?

Shout it face to face?

Say it all repeatedly

in speech and song and poetry

to save the words from entropy,

as if it were enough?

Join voices in assembly?

or be a choir of one?

Ride the campaign whistle stop;

the shame drum up, drum up?

when drums are not enough,

when all will pass but weaponry,

which does not pass?

For here, my friends, is how

this armed Republic fares,

exalting in its right to bear

in its arms all these lives

in defense of them,

and for its industry of arms

on which their lives depend.

For it’s said their lives depend on it;

all our lives depend on it.

—<>—

(The poems continue in the book.)