Dad's First Car

Somewhere in the ‘20s that would have been,

when a man learned about magnetos and mudholes,

when he took care not to break an elbow or thumb

when twirling a crank, carried a cake of soap

for a squeaky fan belt and a pinch of oatmeal

to seal a radiator leak, knew that somewhere

on a back road he’d borrow a fence rail for a jack,

have to back up the steepest hills

when the engine was starved for gas—

small bits of lore from a time long gone,

as he is, but strong in his memory

as he is in mine, lips still moving in some silent language,

still telling me stories I really want to hear.

              © David Black, 2018

Woman hand cranking the car to start it on a rainy day, August 1926
Photo by Infrogmation of New Orleans
from Wikimedia Commons

Understanding Fiction

A two-year-old calls out “Ring, Ring!” and hands us

a play phone, and we take it and say “Hello.”

We carry on a full conversation

if need be, and chances are we need to,

smiles and all. 

                         Does it matter if the child

doesn’t follow all that we say? We could

speak of Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck

or pray for our long-dead Uncle Hutchins,

so long as the illusion is strong.

Chances are the child plays another game

while you talk, stacking bright rings on a peg,

perhaps, or painting her nails with a toothbrush

and the dog’s water bowl.  

                                            When she grows up,

she’ll not remember much more than the phone.

Uncle Hutchins remains just a name

on a list in the family Bible,

and the giants of jazz are just as dead

as he to this child who recalls nothing

but the faded pink phone we held, our voice,

our presence. 

           It’s a time of worthy deceit,

don’t you think? And this poem a parable

that says fiction can carry a good truth,

and  that we who write know the lessons

of irony better than most; we can conjoin

the two ends of this lie about a phone

into something strong enough to outlast

this moment and carry her on somewhere

we don’t now know, but which, if we are lucky,

we’ll live to write about some day.

            © David Black, 2017

Corbin Fleming, brother of 2011 March of Dimes National Ambassador
Lauren Fleming, plays with United States President Barack Obama's telephone
during his family's visit to the Oval Office on 7 February 2012.
Photo by Pete Souza, posted to White House Flickr Account.
From Wikimedia Commons 

Language

This land grows language like another crop:

metaphors shining like daylilies against dark pines:

a man with a whiskey still is midnight farming

a Carolina credit card siphons gas

from someone’s tank into yours

river bottoms lush with similes:

I’ll get on you like stink on a skunk

useless as tits on a bull

compliments bloom delicate as honeysuckle:

smooth as a baby’s bottom

pretty as a speckled pup

alliteration twines round your tongue like morning glories:

tight as a tick

hotter’n the hinges of hell

He don’t know shit from Shinola

sharp nettles of judgment holding on among rocks:

crooked as a dog’s hind leg

not worth the salt to make his bread

thinks he’s too good for the buzzards

tall forests of hyperbole:

so drunk he couldn’t hit the floor with his hat

too dumb to pour piss out of a boot

if the directions was on the heel

He’d screw a snake if you’d hold it still

Like heirloom seed collected and saved,

the old varieties to be savored;

And crossbreeds, mutations, pure inventions:

come a good rain, new varieties would spring up

in unexpected places.

The old man smiled and kept busy

during the long quiet hours

when there was no one to talk to,

cultivating the dusty paths of speech.

             © David Black, 2017

Speckled Bluetick Coonhound puppy
Photo from River Styx Scent Hounds

Winter Morning, -13°

Waking up in longjohns and socks

under so many quilts your body hurts,

windows rattling in the winds

and puffs of snow sprinkling

the sill and the floor beneath—

you fire up the stove with dry cobs and oak,

lean into it and rub your hands,

your mind unsettled by the linoleum rug

which won’t lie still. When a squall hits broadside,

the rug rises, billows. You press a foot and pump it slowly,

feel it push back against your toes

too soft for something that cold,

spongy as moss beside a spring.

Pants and shirt now, then ham and red-eye gravy,

eggs, yesterday’s biscuits, 

coffee as hot as you can take it

while three feet away snow won’t melt.

Last fall’s venison in the freezer is warmer than this,

but you’re not that dead, not yet. There are chores out there,

and at the mill logs whose frozen hearts

will make a four-foot blade cut a crooked track.

Into as many layers as will fit.

Wrap a towel around your head,

another around your neck,

walk to the door. Beneath your feet

you feel the rug rippling

and you think of summer

and a field of clover

rising and falling, rising and falling,

and how every green and growing thing will die.

              © David Black, 2017

White clover in the meadow
Photo by Steve Daniels, UK
from Wikimedia Commons

Absently-mindedly Mowing My Lawn

A minor puzzle: that childhood riddle

about the brown cow who eats green grass

and gives white milk, but any farm boy knows

there’s a greater: how, in early spring, 

wild onions begin to flavor

that milk as no grass ever can.

Milk smelled only like itself

until the cows found wild onions,

and then the odor emerged from the teat,

hung heavy over the pail,

the taste sometimes so tainted 

that we fed it to the pigs.

No longer on a farm,

I buy mine from the store

and seldom think about the dairy’s pasture land.

Only rarely—like today, 

riding my mower over four acres

of spring grass with tufts of onions here and yon—

do I wonder where they grow, and why—

how it is that seasons, 

adorned with colors and sounds, 

are likewise rich in tastes and smells,

and think how this clean plastic jug 

I bring home from the store

bears nothing but milk, for which, 

coming from some distant place

and tamed though it is,

thanks must, nevertheless, be said.

            © David Black, 2016

Jersey cow in field
Photo by Jamain from Wikimedia Commons

Afton Mountain Piper

A warm summer day and the downhill run 

from Staunton home, and there he stood

in Highland array at the overlook, 

bag full and chanter to his lips.

A private moment, it seemed,

else we would have stopped

to listen, perhaps to chat

if he had a mind to.

But he was intent on his piping, 

facing east across the valley—

piping, one might think,

to immigrant family

who settled these hills,

tracing in his mind an unseen path

from a lowland port westward

among the glens and across these icy streams.

A mountain people before they came,

born in rocky crags stretching beneath the sea

to these selfsame Appalachian hills—

now home in ways they knew and didn’t know.

And what of this does the piper ken?

Does he pipe back two hundred years

to an ancestor Barclay or Black,

McLean or McIntosh, who built here and farmed

the land below?

Or does something stir deeper in his blood

tying him to another place and time,

and so he stands today on a new Afton

far, far this side of home, 

oblivious to the interstate

and growl of traffic and curious stares,

as alone as a man can be heart-deep among his kin,

piping to a distant land?

              © David Black, 2015

Bagpiper at Loch Garry
Photo by Bleiglass
from Wikimedia Commons

Standing Proud

There are times when you drive 

a square peg into a round hole,

as a trunnel fastens

post to beam, but today it’s round into round,

and when I’m done, the pine panel

will hold fast to the frame

for a lifetime or more.

I touch the protruding head 

with a calloused thumb,

finding it stands just a little proud.

With a scrap of sandpaper

I smooth it and touch again,

all the time thinking of Dad’s words

as we sawed and hammered 

at something long-forgotten:

“It’s the proud nail that gets driven down.”

Another lesson from that country poet

that even now shapes what goes upon this page:

words that as I trim and sand these lines

remind me that brilliant phrases are given us, 

that what I leave behind is more debt than gift.

© David Black, 2014

Mid-19th C. post & beam barn with pegged joints
Whidbey Island, Washington
Photo by Anne E. Kidd for the National Park Servise

Stone Circle in Bute Park

On past Stonehenge, the tracks not going that way,

through Plymouth and into Wales—no plan or map 

toward what one day could hold:

Cardiff Castle and the River Taff,

a pub, a pint, and shepherd’s pie, 

and then to find the ring of druid stones.

Dating from recent years, I had learned—

but enough to stop me that afternoon

for a good half hour,

and good it was to stand there,

to take some slides, then pack the Canon

back into its bag and stare with believing eye

till I was moved to walk sunwise

three times round the power,

to tiptoe toward the Logan Stone—

stand there centered amid the twelve

and raise my arms like a gnomon

shining in the sun, to look right

toward the portal stone and wish

I had been here for Midsummer Sunrise

or maybe at midnight drawing down the moon.

From stone to feet to head to fingertips, 

the god within me wakened and this poem began to shape.

Small matter, really, when the stones arrived—

they are as old as they ever were,

and of a strength to hold within their gritty hearts

all possible chants and prayers.

© David Black, 2014

Gorstedd stones, Bute Park, Cardiff
Photo by Andy Dingley
from Wikimedia Commons

Looking Skyward in the Pantheon

You never took it for granted,

the Rotunda—no matter that you passed it

daily on your way to Mincer’s Pipe Shop

or the University Diner for grilleds and ice cream—

no matter that you and the Team once

suspended a garbage can and blue flag

flaunting a giant brassiere

atop the flagpole just in front—

no matter that you and Henry Taylor

explored its innards at 2:00 A.M.

through passages long since locked— 

once standing beneath that awesome dome

you felt yourself in sacred space.

And now, walking into the Pantheon,

you feel that familiar weight, and more.

Even without a guidebook, you see

the perfect symmetry of the dome

above the cube—sense the lunar cycle

of the twenty-eight coffers

in each row—find yourself in the path

of the god’s eye centered above you,

even after eighteen centuries

still unwindowed and open to the rain.

What manner of worship or sacrifice

took place here, you do not know,

but your heart bypasses all doubts

and mysteries. A-tremble

beneath this manmade sky, you find yourself

going to your knees, no matter 

what god puts you there.

© David Black, 2014

The Rotunda at UVA
Photo posted on Flickr, modified by Ben Lunsford
Wikimedia Commons

The Old Man Wakes up Early

Coming suddenly awake before dawn,

he gets up, mouth dry as ashes.

He eases to the kitchen,

dippers water down his throat and splashes his face

before he feels the coolness blowing in.

From the porch he watches the stars–

like his mother’s colander turned upside-down–

but in his bones he feels the front stirring.

By nightfall it’ll be here

and maybe his corn will make.

Two years out of five you lose it all,

his father had said, and break even the others.

He steps off into wet grass and through trees

with antique names–Smokehouse, Albemarle Pippin,

Sops of Wine–his grandfather’s favorites:

remembering his mother’s caution

about dew sores on bare feet;

how he learned to break in new shoes

by walking in dew till they were soaked,

then drying them on his feet,

and the baseball glove he’d wet with dew

and tie up with a ball in it to shape the pocket;

a hayfield glittering in morning light–

silver beads sliding down a rusty wire.

He looks down at his skinny feet

and long, bony toes splayed on the damp earth

in the moonlight, pale as clover roots.

Slowly digs them in till they disappear.

Feels himself start to grow again.

© David Black, 2011

"Barefoot"
Photo by Lorenz Kerscher
from Wikimedia Commons

The Other Side

All week the threshing machine spat straw.

And then there it sat, a great yellow dome

begging to be climbed if you could do it.

I couldn’t.  Nobody could, not a straw pile -

a running start and a loud whoop gained you

a few feet but not the summit, ever.

It was the pigs, rubbing and burrowing

around the edges, who started the other game.

They’d thrust their shoulders against the stack,

then root and trench their way around the base.

Before long they had undercut the edge

and turned their crooked paths toward the center,

rambling pig-sized tunnels just right for a boy

on his knees, and there I was, crawling around

beneath who knows how many tons of straw

held up by pillars any runt could knock down.

Breathe deeply and ease in, grope your way along.

Follow the shoat trotting through the dark -

he grunts in fear of you, not of the path.

Hold your breath against the rot and something

that’s cramping your heart.  Let the shoulders glide

gently, so gently, along the walls.  Let it doze,

let it dream of quiet days in the sun

when a wren could light unnoticed.  Let it sleep

like a child till you reach the other side

and daylight: stained knees, manure up to your wrists,

but you’re out now, and no column fell.

And if it had, that great stack would have made no sound–

oh, a little sigh, perhaps, as it listed

a few degrees, exhaled a wisp or two,

and snuggled around me its gentle bulk.

© David Black, 2011

Haystack at Giverny, by Monet