Rural Nocturne

This poem was originally published by the Maine Sunday Telegram. One of only three poems I have had published. It went through some revision from the version submitted in the Charles Street manuscript. Most notably, there was a couple of lines around Line 15 that referred to a hunting cat and rats in the hay mow. There was also some lines about swallow babies. I took them out since I felt they were trite and more importantly, it took away from the obvious punchline at the end. Oh, yeah, that's right. . . . that's why they are here. Protection? From whom or what? I cannot remember ever going into the barn and the cattle not being awake and alert; old instincts of the herd that would not go away. That was the genesis of this poem. what are they waiting for, if anything? I don't know about the 'dark wind', but I like the reinforcing power of alliteration. . . maybe more than rhyme. In the published version I changed 'cough' to 'breath' in line 10 to alliterate with betray, but 'calves' and 'cough' work just as well.

The night comes in.

The black hulks down over the barn.

From the moonless sky swallows, noiseless,

Dive to nests in the rafters.

Quiet.

And the night creeps in.

Seeps thru broken panes and

Doors banging idle in the dark wind.

The cattle in their muck-lined barn

Are anxious, huddle shoulder to shoulder

Watching the door with ink black eyes.

Behind, against the walls, cows

And calves wait unseen. A cough

Betrays their place.

Pigs rustle in their stalls in

Restless sleep and are still again.

The night air comes in, thick as

Blood on butcher's boots,

And this barn creaks,

waiting.

Setting the Stage

Summer has come to Maine. The day is warm and there is a breeze in the oaks outside my window. I am sitting in my oxblood room with a cold beer and a two inch folder of printed and handwritten pages on the desk beside me. My old friend Hal is playing "Thingamajig" from his CD, "People Wave" in the background. I am about to embark on a project that I have had for many months now; a project that was the genesis of this blog, to a certain extent. What a perfect day for it.

From the time I was about 15 years old, I wrote almost every day, certainly every week. This writing continued throughout college and into the first years of my marriage. Eventually the writing subsided to a trickle, but continues to this day, off and on. My preferred medium was the poem, as you can no doubt tell from this blog. I feel the poem is to writing what espresso is to coffee, a fast hit meant to capture the moment. I have great admiration for novelists and short story writers and would love to try my hand. Who knows? But historically, my output has been in verse. What I propose to do is share that with you.

To a certain extent, all writing is self-indulgent. And with this medium of blog self, anybody can 'publish' their thoughts. My goal is to share my writing in the hopes that it may inspire others who love language. My second goal is to preserve on the web my writing and hence my self-history. Honestly, the latter is more important to me than the former. Pretty early on, I realized that I was writing to understand myself more than to entertain or inform others. No poet ever writes for commercial reasons.

In January of 1981, I entered a poetry contest put on by Loyola College to be published in the Charles Street Press Folio Chapbook Series. I submitted 12 poems that were my best work. I paid a $1.00 reading fee. My poems were all rejected. (Later, I published one of them in the Portland Sunday Telegram when they still published poems every week.) Afterward, I wrote notes to myself outlining what I was trying to convey in the poems. This document was probably my high water mark, so it seems a good place to start. Finally, I will say that as I publish, I feel no guilt about editing as I see fit. This is not Coleridge's notebooks here, nobody is going to be scouring these post for insights into my poetic process. Seem fair?

Oh yeah, of course I had the merit badge. Life Scout.