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A Peony for Bill

Reading my friend Bill's blog again at Poet's Farm, I realize that I have been rushing to such a degree, that Memorial Day has passed me and I am approaching the last week of June. Bill's grandmother grew and sold peonies over Memorial Days past. Today, of my four, one peony on the shaded northern bush is still in bloom.

So in honor of those who are gone, but still in bloom inside of us, as Bill so beautifully said, here are some photos to witness and remember the sunlight and color, as well as a poem reminding me of the redemptive power of having my hands in the soil:

Earth

Through the curtains
I watch my mother planting
flowers; alyssum, indigo
lobelia, the bulbs
of lavender tulips, her
clipped nails christened
in earth.

My sons gallop toward her. She squeals
as they tumble together

laughing.

And Mother,
I remember you spinning
me, round and round
in your arms, me
squealing with delight,
your open smile
my only focus

in a rapidly dizzying world.

And for context sake of the earlier entry- Smart Billy's Prologue

Smart-Billy
By Jim Churchill-Dicks


PROLOGUE


Witness a man, a 19th century trapper, violently shivering in a snow cave with his dog. The dog has shared her heat with the man, has positioned herself between the man and the cave opening, protecting the man from the elements, because she is a good dog.

But now, just now she is dead, heat escaping her body.

Witness the man, buried and shivering in a snow cave up high, near Heaven’s Gate on Mt. Hood. His dead dog is his only company. Wind howls over the mountain, burning with snow in relentless curtains. For the moment, ignore the impulse to wonder why this trapper is so high upon this lifeless slope. Instead, wonder at his body, his sinewy skeleton loosely draped in blotchy pale skin.

Behold the man, the man whose shivering now stops. He strips away his beaver pelts, delirious and warm. He is chanting with graveled breaths, incomprehensible, swaying forward and back, forward and back. Behold the preconceived syllables of his language. The groaning vowels, the gravelly aspirates, the whiny whistle in each breath.

Behold the man’s pink face, freckled and burning through frizzy shocks of a chest-length, auburn beard. Behold the dried and broken blisters on his sharply cut nose, the wild green eyes, and closer, to his right eye, with broken capillaries slowly pooling with blood, just below the cornea’s surface. Behold the caked mucous at the lashes. The whitened salt-stained lower lid from dried tears—

Gaze into this eye, some reddening cloud that could swallow the moon— Look closer. Behold the muscular green filaments twitching in unison, now growing sluggish, failing, as they begin to give way to the pupil, a growing shadow swirling inward. Lean closer. Hear his whistling whisper in a final plume of breath— then stillness.

Wait. You heard something. Let your mind register it. You are correct. A final word, no, a name escaping the trapper’s rapidly cooling lips—

Billy .

Smart Billy: Chapter One Process Brainstorm

any feedback you have for me would be grand.

CHAPTER ONE Brainstorm
EAGLE CREEK OREGON, SPRING 1878:

Billy is fifteen. and here should be the Billy sentences, lots of them, of what he does, repetition of billy. Checking traplines, wondering at father’s eleven week absence, fashioning a homemade bear trap, one that will kill its quarry this time, not like last summer, losing his brother, everything falling apart after that, mother catatonic, father leaving, billy running household on own,

(secret: the father putting younger brother out of misery, covering his face, older brother walks in, to brother’s newly strong kicking. Hidden memory. Not until long after, a revelation, father leaving, not out of shame of the older, but out of shame for himself.)

Describe the carrying back of the comatose brother, of the wet powder from earlier, how the boy failed to fire at the bear, the father surviving by batting the butt of the rifle on the bear’s nose.

Billy finding this bear near punchbowl falls, by Tanner butte, indepth fashioning of this mankiller trap, not aboriginal, not a connection to the circle of life, but of revenge, of hatred for an animal, a quest for atonement.

EXPERIMENT: OPENING SCENE, BILLY TRYING TO FIT THE PIECES TOGETHER, TO NOT GIVE TOO MUCH AWAY, TO VALUE THE READER’S INTELLIGENCE, TO PIECE TOGETHER WHAT HAS HAPPENED, TO LEAVE SOME TO THE IMAGINATION, TO LEAVE SOME FOR LATER. WHAT ABOUT AN EXPERIMENT- A PROSE SESTINA, IS THERE SUCH A THING? 1 STANZA PER 2 PAGES, END LINE WORDS REPEATED OVER AND OVER IN A PARAGRAPH, 3 PARAGRAPHS PER PAGE SWITCH ORDER AS THE SESTINA SWITCHES.

END WORDS TO CONSIDER:
BILLY
BROTHER, BROTH, BROTHEL, BOTHER
GUN (POWDER?)
BEAR (GOOD, WITH HOMONYMS BEAR[A BURDEN] BARE)
FATHER, FARTHER (Water?)
MOTHER SMOTHER MOTH, OTHER
OPTIONAL, IN PLACE OF GUN: RIVER

Final stanza a realization, the father killing brother? Too soon? We’re setting up for the missionaries to find them, and take them, yes?

Just found this on the net, thought I invented something new. But googled "prose sestina" and found this little nugget:

The Prose Sestina. A narrative of seven paragraphs in which six words recur in each paragraph in the same order as dictated by the rules of a sestina: 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531, 652431. The paragraphs are of about the same length, except for the last paragraph, which is half as long as the others. (Ron McFarland)

Still, I was thinking a paragraph per word uttered several times, which would be new, would possibly be impossibly droll, or hypnotic, or shamanic, healing the boy, hurtling him toward revelation, to meaning, or at least hurtling him the hell out of his present circumstance-that may be all the exorcism anyone needs. Who knows? But Billy is in crisis, searching for answers by doing works in a routine, maybe needing to mix up the routine in different order to reassemble the puzzle, as it were. Can I do this with action and gesture and very little else, other than the form? Will the form stick out, like an ill-fitting suit, or will it suit Billy, in his tendencies, his story, what he has been mutely shouting to me for the last five years?

Jesus Billy, what are you trying to say to me? What are you needing me to help you figure out? Go home. Rest. The leaves are whispering in the trees. Go to sleep…

Would that all of my friends be recognized by such kind and generous eyes...

I am shy when it comes to praise, but I'd like to share an article that one of my Freshman wrote about me in CCHS's inaugural online journalistic enterprise called The Rimrock Echo.

http://my.highschooljournalism.org/or/prineville/cchs/article.cfm?eid=17149&aid=220673


They have also featured two of my poems.

Would that all of my friends be recognized by such kind and generous eyes.

Our Father

He extended
his routine flight and flew
above our camp, hovered there
in his rescue chopper, that rumbling chariot
as we ran to the lake shore
to greet him, waved and hollered;

an image of God and angels.

He circled behind the trees,
a thundering perimeter,
a whirring proclamation

I am that I am and you are mine!

Today he snowshoes up to a rented
hut. His wife has barred him from his house,
scattered his belongings
into locked up warehouses,
skilled at taking hostages.

Alone,
a thin candle fixed
into a cut away coffee can, he reads
about a boy, a delinquent boy, the toughest
kid on the Big J ranch,
who rode off on a wounded horse,
beaten ugly, a lazy eye, trailing ear,

he reads
about how the ranchers found him in a clearing,
face buried, sobbing into the horse’s chest
whose sad face stood with newborn watchfulness

and our father,
hunched on a rough hewn bench, far
from home, sobs into his massive, perfect hands
in the fading light,

a vision of God and angels.

A Crack of Light

I remember the salt-stained boulders, encrusted with mussel shells, which flanked the levee to my father’s Coast Guard base, reaching like a prickly arm around the Port Angeles harbor.

I remember delivering casseroles late at night in the pilot’s hangar, being driven through the gates-the guard’s salute because of our officer’s bumper decal. Delivering casseroles to my father as he pulled all-night duty flying his lumbering H-52.

I remember my father, at dawn, dragging his heavy boots across the threshold, peeling his orange flight-suit halfway down, a snake shedding his skin as he chugged milk from the up-turned jug, draining its contents in front of the open refrigerator.

I remember watching him from the crack of light in the swinging kitchen door as he told his wife about his latest search and rescue case, “I lost him,” he whispered in a milky gravel. “Twenty-foot seas, winds at 50 knots, only five feet of rotor-clearance on either side— It was the water’s temperature that killed him.”

His voice was tired, but without emotion, not like when -that same summer, in the middle of the night, when he thought I was asleep in the back seat- he sobbed behind the wheel, a forceful engine choking into gear while listening to the radio, listening to how Thurman Munson –his favorite Yankees catcher- had perished in an airplane crash.

“Augered in—” he cried. “My boy has augered in…” as I watched him through the rear view mirror, the intermittent streetlights staining his warm, wet face.

It is graduation week here at Crook County High School, but all I can think about is my father, who will make his last flight as a helicopter pilot on the 4th of June; the day of his retirement. He has been a pilot since I was a baby. Over the next couple of entries, I will post some of my archived work about my dad as a pilot.