Thanksgiving Benediction

Thanksgiving

Every year we call it down upon ourselves,
the chaos of the day before the occasion,
the morning before the meal. Outdoors,
the men cut wood, fueling appetite
in the gray air, as Nana, Arlene, Mary,
Robin--whatever women we amount to--
turn loose from their wrappers the raw,
unmade ingredients. A flour sack leaks,
potatoes wobble down counter tops
tracking dirt like kids, blue hubbard[i] erupts
into shards and sticky pulp when it's whacked
with the big knife, cranberries leap away
rather than be halved. And the bird, poor
blue thing--only we see it in its dead skin--
gives up for good the long, obscene neck, the gizzard,
the liver quivering in my hand, the heart.

So what? What of it? Besides the laughter,
I mean, or the steam that shades the windows
so that the youngest sons must come inside
to see how the smells look. Besides
the piled wood closing over the porch windows,
the pipes the men fill, the beers
they crack, waiting in front of the game.

Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters. That's what.
A whole day has passed between the first apple
cored for pie, and the last glass polished
and set down. This is a feast we know how to make,
a Day of Feast, a day of thanksgiving
for all we have and all we are and whatever
we've learned to do with it: Dear God, we thank you
for your gifts in this kitchen, the fire,
the food, the wine. That we are together here.
Bless the world that swirls outside these windows--
a room full of gifts seeming raw and disordered,
a great room in which the stoves are cold,
the food scattered, the children locked forever
outside dark windows. Dear God, grant
to the makers and keepers power to save it all.

Benediction

That’s how I think of it.  Good words, expression of gratitude, the results of good work, our ordering of the chaotic into something beneficial.  And maybe a metaphor for art, taking our incoherent experience and creating meaning.

That first line mystifies me.  They “call it down.”  While the phrase may be merely a figure of speech, there is something odd about it.  Gamey?  A call for a battle..

That first stanza, the women cooking the meal.  The abundance of raw foods.  The steamy windows.  And timing their preparation so all the dishes arrive, miraculously, at the same time.  These details give the poem authenticity that in themselves have value.  “Cataloguing” or “listing” as a technique or as a poetic genre, is one that in my estimation, seems to be a distinctly American form.   There are, of course, others, but Whitman excelled in listing occupations, forms of life, emotional states, and locales in order to express the awe he held in his vision of America.

But here, the list gives a sense of the sheer stuff and disorder that must be transformed to create a feast of thanksgiving.

The exclusivity or maybe obligation of women in the kitchen has, of course, changed, mostly in my lifetime, but as a child, especially on the Dzurick farm, Jewel rose long, long before dark.  They, the farmers, ate at noon.  Only the city people whose luxury of jobs, paid vacation days, paid sick days, and paid personal days would be so indulgent to eat Thanksgiving in late afternoon or evening.

Twenty to thirty people would dine, family and friends.  Pecan and pumpkin pies.  Jewel canned blackberry and gooseberry, and she retrieved them from the musty root cellar behind the house where they piled white potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, and onions.  So the cobblers, too, were placed on a sideboard.

It was a mess, and somehow, my grandmother kept a smile.  It appeared, in some strange way, like a performance.  And despite her efforts, she would, as if confessing to a pries, elucidate, perhaps exagerate the shortcomings of the meal.

And what does it all mean?  The narrator explains implicitly and explicitly in the prayer that closes the poem.  The act of transforming the raw materials is clearly important.  But inside, it is the fellowship, rather womanship of the act itself.  The children are out of doors. The men are cracking beers and smoking pipes. While the “world” “swirls” and this, without explanation, is the blessing.

More catalogue poems to follow by Christopher Smart and Vance Hedderal.

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[i] Blue Hubbard is a winter squash.

Deliverance

I like this poem if only because it hearkens back to my childhood.  For my first fifteen years or so, we trudged to church three days a week. 

We , my very young parents, my brother, and I, lived in a trailer on what is now the runway at St. Louis Lambert Airfield in northwest St. Louis County.  The Tip Top Trailer Court.  

Given there were no highwaysm we woke early and drove to South Side Assembly of God on the far south side of St. Louis on Grand Avenue.  There my brother an I sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children” with Sister Trendle.  She led Sunday School for kids,.  She bore a purple birthmark that covered most of her face.  No matter how sweet her voice, her purple skin gave me the creeps.  

Later, we joined the adults upstairs for the service.  It was a dank, cavernous room whose boards creaked and angled towards the pulpit.  And before, we greeted adults in ways that I don’t think children do now.  

Andy Keenan had served early in Vietnam and his pinky finger and ring finger of his right hand had been shot off.  He vigorously shook my hand as if to say, “I am here, and losing two fingers in battle is part of he plan.”  

One of the Pickeral twins was wearing a football helmet because his brother locked him in the dryer and turned it on.  Everyone wore a tie.

Sister Giacoletto, a fallen Roman Catholic and recent convert to charismatic principles, brought us a loaf of her crispy Italian bread and apple butter from her backyard tree.

These were a people who possessed deep belief.  They prayed for the sick and dying.    They wept and spoke in tongues.  And afterwards, they felt forgiven, lighter.  I’ve no certainty of what they were experiencing, but it was sincere.  Many people I know might have been frightened and imagined that witch burning would begin after services.

But for me, this was a commonplace.  

There I first flirted with eternity.  Hell? Forever.  Remembering my throbbing thumb that I burned on our stove, I imagined pain today, tonight, the next day, and for a moment, I had a grasp of forever.  

And heaven?  It didn’t seem appealing to me either.  “Streets paved with gold?”  What would I spend it on?  Heaven for me might have been a tree house (we had no tree), a banana split, or holding hands with Michelle and Renee, our heartthrobs next door.

God, while powerful, seemed to lead a dull existence.

After singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” our stomachs gnawed for food.  Dad would discretely slip us gum, Juicy Fruit if we were lucky, Dentyne if not.  The worst was Sen Sen, the bitter licorice flavor.

I prayed that this was over.  Hungry.  Restless.  Please let me walk about.

Oh, had a pigeon flown loose through the congregation to deliver me.

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?

Cutting Grass, Creating Order

I heard this poem today on Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac, and by poem’s end, I was gleeful.  Not infrequently, I read a passage from a book or a poem, and I recognize experiences I’ve had, which I was either vaguely conscious or had never fully brought into conversation with others.  So often, simple and seemingly odd pleasures are never articulated.

Cutting grass, especially as adolescent was a badge of competency and maturity.  No longer were my parents fearful of me losing a foot (although I once foolishly stuck my hand in the exhaust of our Toro and slit the ends of my fingers).  Cutting grass was effort with tangible results.  So little of our lives now result in a concrete demonstration of work.

Here is one of my own unspoken pleasures.  A few years ago, we bought a hyper energy-efficient dishwasher.  The most efficient mode is the three-hour wash.  While it appears contradictory that it would be so efficient, it sprays water slowly, and produces a steady hum, the white noise of dusk.  It signals days end.  It signals a tiny kind of order that allows me to be assured that I will wake the next day with clean dishes.

A bed which has been made is far more inviting than one with sheets balled up and littered with books and clothing.  A weeded garden.  Clothes folded and stowed among the others I do not need.

Another from childhood.  Saturdays were cleaning day in my childhood.  By days end, our refrigerator was filled with food for the following week and the smell of ammonia wafted from the kitchen’s linoleum floor.  Saturday was the first day of the week, and by those actions, we could do what we had to do.

Cutting grass, too, has its own kind of satisfaction.  There is the smell, of course.  But it is the order.  Cutting grass is like an exercise is in efficiency.  It is working out the quadratic equation and plotting a graph that, when I learned the language of mathematics, was consistent, predictable, and ultimately a form of certainty.  

The narrator of the poem alludes to the “ever-diminishing square,” which worked in most of he lawns I’ve cut.  Then there are the irregular shapes.  The five-acre triangle of my mother’s cabin.  Behind my current house, neighbors took turns cutting the flood plain and ridge that, miraculously, has not been developed given we are three miles from downtown Atlanta, its shape defined by the steep hills, the bamboo grove, and, again, the creeping kudzu.

More often than not, yards are wasted, especially those that are set so far back from the street, that to occupy them, you might be mistaken for a lonely, old grubber desperately needing conversation.  There, few children play.  The action is for the backyard: vegetable gardens, barbecues, Wiffle ball, and various forms of excess and illegality.

I no longer have grass to cut.  Oaks eighty-feet tall in my backyard, creates shad that only allows English Ivy and the pernicious Kudzu.  The front yard, most of which is shaded since we moved here in 1994, is covered in shad-loving plants enclosed in stone islands, and in between are mulched walkways.

P.S.  I received a number of responses from my last posting.  I encourage your to sing up for my blog and post your own unarticulated satisfaction.  

                             http://pencilgrub.blogspot.com/

Tamed  by George Bilgere

This summer my nephew
is old enough for his first job:
mowing the lawn.

I watch him lean his skinny chest
to the bar of the pushmower,
put his weight into it, and become,

for the first time, a beast in harness,
a laborer on the face of the earth,
somehow withering and expanding at the same time

into something worn and ancient, but still
a kid withal. And I remember
how bitterly I went into the traces,

hating that Saturday ritual
for a while, then growing inexplicably
into it, gradually mastering

the topography of the yard,
sometimes using the back and forth technique,
sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,

or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
that left, at the lawn's center, one
last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

I annihilated with a strange thrill,
then stood back to take a look--
to survey the field. To cast

a critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
at the edge of the mowed clearance.

Taking his own measure. And liking it.