Monday, November 21, 2011
Turkeys
One November
a week before Thanksgiving
the Ohio river froze
and my great uncles
put on their coats
and drove the turkeys
across the ice
to Rosiclare
where they sold them
for enough to buy
my grandmother
a Christmas doll
with blue china eyes
I like to think
of the sound of
two hundred turkey feet
running across to Illinois
on their way
to the platter
the scrape of their nails
and my great uncles
in their homespun leggings
calling out gee and haw and git
to them as if they
were mules
I like to think of the Ohio
at that moment
the clear cold sky
the green river sleeping
under the ice
before the land got stripped
and the farm got sold
and the water turned the color
of whiskey
and all the uncles
lay down
and never got up again
I like to think of the world
before some genius invented
turkeys with pop-up plastic
thermometers
in their breasts
idiot birds
with no wildness left in them
turkeys that couldn't run the river
to save their souls
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Hands of a magical Grandma
SALLY MARTIN v. BRIESEN
with whom we met last Wednesday at the Steaming Cup
- meeting ground for area notables and not so notables -
unintentionally drew attention to her grandchildren's
favorite instruments,
HER HANDS.
Though until Wednesday
we have not seen her since 1954
when we graduated together from
Waukesha High School
we have read of the many amusements
those hands have arranged for all those
wee ones. Some not so wee anymore.
Sally has kept in touch for the past
few years via Email
which is the SRN's favorite instrument.
Sally and Dee hit it off instantly.
We would not have thought differently.
Once again, the raccoon editor
proved his singular value
- a go-between conduit.
Our children
and two before them
were born because of that.
And,
I'M happy.
Now it is soon time for Sally and us
to visit the 3 Bros. Serbian Restaurant
together.
And make sure Branco is still OK.
June Beisch; Hla's cactus
Holy Ghost
The congregation sang off key.
The priest was rambling.
The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.
A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church,
flew wildly around for a while and then
flew toward a stained glass window,
but it didn't look like reality.
The ushers yawned, the dollar bills
drifted lazily out of the collection baskets
and a child in the front row began to cry.
Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low,
swooping over the heads of the faithful
like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost
Everyone took it to be a sign,
Everyone wants so badly to believe.
You can survive anything if you know
that someone is looking out for you,
but the sky outside the stained glass window,
doesn't it look like home?
……………………………..
Girl Scout Picnic, 1954
The parade began and the Bryant Jr. High School band
marched through the streets of Minneapolis
wearing white shirts, blue trousers, playing John Philip Sousa
Lance, Jack, Sharon and myself on drums,
strapped to our knees so we could play,
arms akimbo, drumsticks held high,
drum rolls, paradiddles, rim shots, flams
while the trumpets groaned and the bystanders
cheered us on in the rain-drenched streets.
The Girl Scouts strutted ahead of us wearing
their green uniforms, berets and badges
waving the Girl Scout flag, and smiling,
We could do anything after this, we felt,
twirling our drumsticks between our fingers
Such joy seems unimaginable until I conjure it
Not even Wordsworth's memory of
a field of daffodils comes close to it
The picnic later at the Minnehaha Falls Park,
then walking home much later in the dark
still filled with the sounds of it.
To march at thirteen through the streets of
is to ride in triumph through
…………………………..
Lobster
On first seeing it, I was repelled
by the idea of eating something so
exotic looking and sinister,
having read Jean Paul Sartre's line
about crustaceans having a dubious
consciousness. But I was in
the young man I had met there tucked
my napkin under my chin and
handed me a nutcracker for the shell.
I was from
lakes and brook trout. I, too, was
uncooked and formless, like the creatures
who take on the shape of their environment
My first taste was delicious, but the
third was even better and by
that time I was a real New York girl
who wore skinny black dresses and false eyelashes,
able to handle myself with any
crustacean, dubious consciousness or not.
…………………………….
To a Young Son
Today I passed your room
and you were slowly quietly
combing your hair.
It was a pleasant, calm moment.
I felt the silence of the room
and could almost hear you growing.
You combed without a mirror,
your eyes distant and pale,
your head slowly nodding
like the head of a stroked animal.
Xerxes the King sent out a spy
who returned to camp, astonished to say
that the Spartans were all stripped to the waist
their bodies gleaming in the Aegean sun
and they were all carefully combing their hair.
The king was afraid then.
The Spartans were preparing to die.
I turn slowly from your doorway
and return to the linen closet where I
will fold this memory in my heart
among everything that is clean and fresh and white.
June Beisch, a
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“Skunks’’
This morning, I stepped out
onto the deck
and into the cold, sharp
morning air
and the cold sharp scent
of a skunk
lurking nearby, close
enough to remind me
that some are up early
sorting through life’s detritus,
hoping to uncover
its purpose or meaning,
some are reconnoitering,
hoping to discover
just who is the enemy, who the friend.
Last night, I sat reading poems
from a new anthology
and after a while, I put the book down,
lowered my head, my heart
aching. I was filled
with the most delicious
sadness. I was no longer in the
everyday, ordinary world but
was transported to the one of
beauty and of sorrow
and I saw then
how much we need sadness
and how sometimes, reading poetry,
you come upon a sudden
sharp whiff of truth and it
enters your life, it hurts you,
and it can even
set you free
“Aunt Bobby’’
My favorite aunt was unmarried, half deaf
and lived alone in a smoke-filled room
at the
Once beautiful, she still had her vanity.
Her hip, mangled in surgery,
gave her a spasmodic gait, she flapped
down
like a tall crane who’d had a few.
I loved the sight of her, ran to
the frazzled, overpermed head, the
too-bright ruby lips, the strong perfume.
For all the appearances of inutile femininity,
she was to me, a half divinity.
The auntness of aunts, their
bemused, hat-askance objectivity.
They belong to no one and to everyone
and can offer a child another reality.
How many times she took me home
to her apartment hoping to give
my busy mother a small reprieve
handed me a pencil and drawing pad
then made me feel like Michaelangelo.
Now thinking back, I wish I had
given back just half of what she gave to me.
......................
The Christmas cactus of Hla Aung
Burmese refugee of some years back
blooms this year
at the Odd Fellows
just in time for Thanksgiving
Hla kept that plant alive
though times
were tough
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Frau Otis bedauertes.....
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
She is sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down in Lover's Lane she strayed, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
When she woke up and found that her dream of love was gone, madam,
She ran to the man who had led her so far astray,
And from under her velvet gown,
She drew a gun and shot her love down, madam,
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
When the mob came and got her and dragged her from the jail, madam,
They strung her upon the old willow across the way,
And the moment before she died,
She lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam......
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today.
Miss Otis regrets, she's unable to lunch today
East side, west side, all around the town.....
THIS WHAT REVOLUTION LOOKS LIKE
Posted on Nov 15, 2011
By Chris Hedges
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.
The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.
(Page 2)
I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.
Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.
The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.
There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backward from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.
SEE: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_is_what_revolution_looks_like_20111115/
Philadelphia retired police officer
suits up
joins the 99%
and gets arrested, cuffed and hauled away,
as other police officers avert gazes,
look on with unknown thoughts.
For the cop's words, see this link:
Friday, November 18, 2011
Fading shirts and railroads
RUTH’S DOG
Like a piece of laundry
Washed too often
Old Duffy, mom’s dog,
Was taken into our care
After mom was phasing out
Of her life.
Mom missed Duffy
More significantly than
Anything else.
He was blind and incontinent
Requiring attitude adjustments
For our household.
He held his P for as long
As he could which wasn’t long
Duffy bumped into walls
And furniture
Unerringly
But like a mechanical toy
With built-in change of course,
He cheerfully operated
Duffy had to go out often
And he would seemingly pretend
To be seeing where he was
Going
He would look right at you
With the same earnest gaze
He had as a pup
As if to say I’m all right
I’m a-l-l right.....
After Mom passed
Duffy didn’t get any better
And feeling our duty performed
I took him out
And had him gently put down
But it was a hard thing
Nonetheless
We still have his emerald green
Coat around here somewhere.
I took my pc printer and
Made a T Shirt iron-on appliqué
Me carrying Duffy in
After one of his outside
Relievements
The T shirt has been washed
So often the appliqué has
About worn off
The red shirt is like
Duffy was at the end:
Faded, hard to see
Going,
Going,
Gone
v.Z.
Bob Heeschen
re-acquainted us with The Rock Island Line
He brought us a map of the Line
showing the routes in red.
Bob works as a guide at a RR museum
in his home town, St. Paul MN.
Formerly and for many years
Bob lived in Davenport IA.
The Rock Island served Iowa
very well, in addition to having
routes to Denver and Chicago.
A photo of folksinger Huddy Ledbetter
is above, along with the following clip
of him singing The Rock Island Line:
In the 1940s
at Hadfield Elementary school
here in Waukesha
we kids would sing along with a
Professor Gordon on a radio hook-up
into our classroom via early public radio.
Rock Island Line was one of the songs
Prof. Gordon taught us......
Bob visits a couple years ago.
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