Issue 11
Summer 2002
Jay Frankston
ABOUT POETRY
It all started after I had attended a number of poetry readings. I write but I seldom write poetry. At the readings, which were more or less well attended, the reader emoted his poems to the audience and each poem was followed by a collective sigh. I even found myself being part of that collective sigh. But, although I enjoyed the listening, deep down inside I had to admit that I didn’t know what the poem was about. I refused to acknowledge my ignorance and, like all the others, said something like “Wasn’t that wonderful”. But I was hungry for meaning.Then one day, at a reading at the Kelly House in Mendocino, I felt daring. I turned to my neighbor, someone I had known for a long time, and asked her if she understood the poem. To my surprise she said she didn’t. Upon asking others I found that most of them didn’t understand either, though they liked it. I was annoyed, upset, almost angry.
I remembered when, in New York City quite a number of years ago, I had been into oil painting. I wasn’t a good painter, just a rank amateur. But I was into meaningful” art and spent as much as six months on a painting that I called “The Orphans”, or “The Eternal Swing”, or “The Children of God”. And I went to the Whitney Museum one day and looked at something entitled “White on White” or some such thing, and other canvases covered with random blotches of paint. I was annoyed, upset, almost angry then.
Coming home from this exhibit I stormed into my studio, took out a large canvas and set it on the easel. I took a 6 foot-long rag, dippedit in oil and some odd colors and, standing several feet away, I whipped the canvas with color for 15 minutes. Then I took a long stick, tied a brush at the end, and drew several lines on the canvas from afar. The whole thing took less than half an hour. A few days later, when the canvas was dry, I framed it and hung it up on my living room wall, right
alongside “The Apple Pickers” and “The Children of God”. I called this one “The Joke” because, to me, that’s what it was.When people came to visit they looked at the paintings on my wall and nodded. But when they came to that one, they oohed and aahed, telling me that they saw storms, and ocean waves, and mysterious mountains and what not. When I told them that it was a joke, that I painted it in jest and anger, they nodded. “That’s it” they insisted “Your anger shows on the canvas and makes it come alive. It doesn’t matter what your intention was. It’s a good painting because of it, not in spite of it.” I never forgot that. Still I recognized that I had no real conception of color or perspective, and I gave up painting.
So here I was many years later, coming away from a poetry reading, feeling the same kind of annoyance, anger, and rebelliousness.
When I got home, I sat in an armchair with a pad and pencil and, in less than half an hour, I wrote 3 poems, in jest, or so I thought. I then read them to my wife. When I was finished, I heard a small sigh coming from her, a sigh not unlike the ones I had heard at the readings. I think I even heard it from me.
When I re-read these three poems a few days later I found myself thinking that this one was better than that one, and that one was not as good as the other. Wow! A value judgment. That implies value, merit. I astounded myself.
In the next few days I wrote some 18 poems, all of them at night, all of them in spurts over brief periods of time, and all of them without intention or conscious thought. I don’t know why, but I liked them. Still it bothered me that I had put so little time and effort in them, and without it I thought they had little merit.
Then I remembered having gone to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam some years ago. As I looked at the paintings I noticed the year in which they were painted. It astounded me to see the huge number that were painted in the same year. There must have been over 250 of them. Then there were sketches and what not. And I knew there were works of Van Gogh in other museums around the world. He must have completed a painting in a few hours, I thought to myself in awe.
One day I spoke of this to a friend and he said something that I recall now. He said “No! Of course not! It didn’t take Van Gogh a few hours to paint a canvas. It took him thirty some-odd years to get to the point where he could paint a canvas in a few hours.” The meaning of what he said is now clear to me.
I guess it took me over sixty years to get to where I could spontaneously come out with a poem in a relatively brief period of time. I look at these poems and recognize events in my past woven in and out of them, subconscious thoughts and emotions which pierced through when I allowed the words to flow without filtering them. So now I write poetry without criticism or apology.
The Mother
She takes the seeds from her womb,
scatters them to the wind
and sings to them, the Mother.
And the wind lifts them high
above fields, above fears,
takes them round and round
then lets them fall.
And flowers and trees
and children grow from the earth.
And the sun shines upon them
and makes them blossom.
And time watches,
counts, and waits for them
Around the corner
the panhandler stands
with his hand stretched out:
“Spare any change, Mister?”
There’s Vietnam in his head,
and the blades of the helicopter
keep roaring in his ears.
And the children duck
at unexpected times
as if they could hear them too.
But it’s another war they hear,
the one that follows
the one that’s ahead.
And they know, the children,
they know
that it will take them
and bleed them
and drop them from the sky.
And the Mother will scoop them up
and return them to her womb
and refuse to give birth again.
Yesterday’s hero
I was 12 years old when I got my first ax.
Fifteen when I got my first chain saw.
I was young, and strong, and proud.
My father took me into the woods with him
and showed me how we could tumble those giant trees,
lash them to ropes and load them into trucks
driven by men who, like us, were pioneers
in the remaining wilderness of the pacific northwest.
Axes would swing and chips would fly
and chain saws would buzz loud and long
under the tall canopy of leaves
a hundred and fifty feet overhead.
The noise was interrupted now and then
by the shout of “TIMBER”,
the cracking of the trunk at the base of the giant,
the whistling of the fall,
and the massive thump as it hit the ground,
the reward of long hours of hard work.
This was followed by a hollow silence
throughout the forest
before the resumption of intense activity.
We were men then. Real men!
I was strong as an ox.
My skin was tight and red as all outdoors
and no one asked me my age
when I ordered a beer.
I was part of the crew, a woodsman,
a lumberjack right out of the movies of the 50s
respected, admired, a hero of sorts.
Then someone went into the forest
and counted the remaining trees
and everything changed.
What was good became bad.
The hero became a villain
and everything turned upside down.
I never grew to understand it, and if I did,
I couldn’t deal with it.
My life had leaned too far in one direction
to be felled in another.
I am much older now and I drive a logging truck.
I no longer stick my head out of the cab
and smile proudly at my cargo.
I try to protect myself behind rolled up windows
from the curses of people
who curse under their breath
as they see me drive by with, they say,
a litter of dead trees on the back.
What I was made to be proud of
I am now made to be ashamed of.
And the medal I won
for bravery in action during the war
remains in its box at the bottom of the drawer.
It is no longer the measure of my worth as a man
and I feel as though my life is for naught.
I have been used.
And now, toward the end of it,
no one is there to acknowledge
the houses that have been built
with the lumber from those trees I felled
when I was young, strong, and a hero.