Unplowed Fields

Unplowed Field
--dedicated to the recipients of government-controlled health care.

See the bridge of pink clouds
And the sun pouring its last drops of day under it.
See how the grass in spring glows a gullible glow,
Like youthful love thinking all kisses are sweet breath,

That nothing could topple the head-tilt of flat-chested girls
Who linger stares at photographs of adolescent lovers.
It’s green, greener than green in evening light—
The grass, that is.

Beside the meadow with honeysuckle air
Along a fence row, half hidden by sugar maple limbs
Drooping like excused guilt,

There is a field the plow has passed,
Filled with hollow stalks that stiffly stare
At a sun they cannot use.

They clutter the days
Beyond those worth remembering,
Are rigid as old men held down
In nursing home beds.

Stems of reason are broken;
Baggy-breasted daughters sigh
At dutiful burdens,
Who poke scheduled spoons of Jello
Into mouths forgetting to close.

Amber stems are changed to gray.
Brittle and stiff; they are litter,
A burden to fields
When the plow has passed them by;
There glows among their empty stems
The showy primrose of spring.



--first appeared in Sands, 1985

Here is a poem salvaged from Descant, a literary journal at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas. Grateful appreciation is extended to Mr. Dave Kuhne, Editor, who searched the archives at the library and sent me a copy of the poem


Driving through a Street Deluge

You truck through a street
watered down by the rain last night,

gently wake the slow virgin-flow,
steer between half a hydrant

and a row of cars submerged
to the top of their tires.

The center stripes melted in the night,
spread across the sidewalks and lawns,

leveled low-down depths,
took on the behavior of a rear-view mirror.

Through a forgotten, subtle dip
where trucks refuse to float,

the fan blade screws up the water
into the distributor’s fire.

Your feet feel the floorboard change
into a liquid windshield and steering wheel.






Descant
XXIX, Number 1
Fall-Winter 1984-1985

Stretch Howe and the Wig

[The following is a letter to Liz in 1998. Names have been changed to protect the guilty]

Earlier this week I was really getting into some hot teaching. It is evolution time, so I figured I'd get this mess out of the way in a couple of weeks. While all this profound explaining was going on, Molly MacMaeur, a student who is living her life again because she bombed my class last year, walked up to me and put a wig on my head. Well, that broke up the seriousness of the uniformitarianism concept I was trying to get across to the class. I guess I really looked funny, so I thought, what the heck, I'll play along with it. I didn't skip a beat. It was what you could say an example of being naturally selected to survive in the face of a catastrophe. I kept right on evolving. But, unbeknownst to us in the class, a real-life catastrophe was storming the halls of this great institution. All of this laid-backness was about to radically change without warning.

The wig worked well when a student who had asked to go potty (his exact words) came back to class. He opened the door and doubled over with laughter. Naturally, the other 38 students joined in. Sounded like a big colony of penguins (Have you ever heard a big colony of penguins? When you get home I'll show you a video about penguins). A girl who was tardy strolled in and added her snickers to the merriment. She tried with all her might to make it to her seat with a smile, but she broke up midway down the rows of tables, staggering from hilarity.

The mood changed when this great big guy, Stretch Howe--a football person (he even has a football name, doesn't he?)--who, heretofore, had successfully conned me into buying two dead-chicken dinners, a couple of barbecue orders for the Spirit Club, and who has been energetically working on my soft side with these mugs he's selling for some reason--comes foaming into the room, slamming the door, doing his lineman thing, charging by me with the most horrendous expression of defeat on his face. Right on the edge of tears he spikes his books on the lab table, plops himself on the little stool while gyrating his upset body, causing the whole room to tremble. Pouring his face into his cupped hands he proceeds to sound like he's speaking in tongues. I did catch "dirty" and "no good" from his grief spillage, and I'm sure I ignored some other words which are unacceptable to utter in the midst of tender ears. He looked like he needed some slack cut. It was obvious to me that he had experienced a most unfortunate turn of events in his life. Clearly, the mood was not appropriate for me to approach him with that wig on. First, the young man is very big, so big that I tremble at the thought of the things I've gotten away with, like the soft-spoken reprimand, "Stretch! Sit down!" You know you just don't go around talking to a big person like you could clean his plow. When you are looking toward the sky as you chew out someone, it is a bit contradictory, humorous, even dangerous. So, here is Stretch periodically spitting out hateful utterances and flinging his arms. I believe he would have drowned himself in the aquarium if he could have fit inside. He was that far gone. To add to the humorous tragedy of the moment, I noticed these two big Oscar fish in the corner of the tank next to Stretch staring at him. It was as if they were full of sympathy and understanding. They sure seemed compassionate. I wonder if they possess a listening-ear kind of thing. But, come to think of it, they always watch Stretch, after all, Stretch is their friend. More than once I've caught him giving them goldfish he'd scooped from the nearby aquarium. So they had come to really appreciate Stretch. With all this in mind, but the realization of me wearing this silly wig not in my mind, I went to his side to be a comfort. "Is there anything I can do, Stretch?" I asked in a pastoral tone with folded hands. Sincere. A soul full of compassion.

Momentarily Stretch glanced up, withdrew his gaze, then redirected his glance that had turned to a scrunched-up face with beady eyes firing through all those hateful wrinkles. "G#%(!@ sputter, blah, blah," Stretch replied unintelligently, having the good sense not to be totally rude, crude, and abusive to me.

I was first taken aback at his response. I thought he would have appreciated a terrestrial listening ear more than those fish. Surely a human touch was warmer than a fish stare he was receiving from the Oscars. I was perplexed. Why I was suddenly receiving his emotional refuse?
A weak voice in the back broke through Stretch's wailing, "The wig, Mr. Smith, the wig."

"Oh Rats!" I thought, ashamedly. Immediately I ripped off the wig and held it behind my back. I spoke again. Stretch looked up again and slammed his fist on the table and buried his head in his arms. He was humiliated and bruised and from his point of view I was belittling his plight.

Daughter, you know my heart. I would not intentionally torment a grieving soul. Yet, that was exactly what I had done. You don't wear a wig when you're trying to console a grieving man. For a happy man, it's okay. I could have said, "I was just kidding," pretending I knew it was on my head all the time that aggravated him, but Stretch was in no mood to be kidded. I could have told him the truth, "I forgot I had the wig on." However, sometimes the twist of events entangles truth to appear absurd. Knowing Stretch would not have believed the latter, I quietly walked away and returned the wig to the young lady who had brought it to class. To Stretch I was trying to be funny, and I believe it would have been a waste of time trying to tell him otherwise.

Intentional humor can have its rewards, among which is control. One is exhilarated by the power he has over another, not from the grip of screams of terror, but by the shackles of chuckles. I once had a job being a comedian. That's right. When I was in high school this farm person thought I was so funny that he offered me a job to make him laugh. He said, "Smith, why don't go with me tomorrow (Saturday) while I disc. I'll pay you."

"How much?" I asked. He laughed. Let's be frank here, the guy was easily entertained.

"Two-ho-ho dollars." His exact words.

"How much is two-ho-ho?" I asked. He doubled over. his face turned red. Stopped breathing. No sound. Finally, after a long inhalation he bellowed out the rest of his laughter. "Oh, you mean two dollars, don't you." I continued. He shook his head, while being driven further into hilarity, unable to speak, bending down close to passing out.

Back yonder two dollars a day was a good going rate for riding on a tractor just to make a person laugh. So I packed a sack lunch, got up at 5 A.M. He came by and picked me up at six. I hadn't taken into consideration the length of time I was going to sit on that tractor, not on a cushioned seat with springs but on a fender that has no flat surface. And I was very bony back then, too. All day long I bounced on that fender. Even my cries of agony was funny to the guy each time he drove out of the furrow because he was laughing at something I had said. More than once I had to steer the tractor back into the plowed furrow for him while he got over one of his laughing fits. The condition of that field, as I viewed it at the end of the day, looked like the work of a drunk. A pathetic job it was. In fact, he told me later that his dad made him disc that field over because of anonymous calls from fellow farmers teasing his dad about the condition of the field.

As a teacher you are not paid to be funny, whether the humor is intentional or not. You are to be professional. Occasions arise when students need your wisdom and maturity, your concern, your compassion; they don't need you to ride along on the finder of their tractor and make them laugh.

It is uncertain why Stretch was on the edge of self-destruction. I didn't ask him later, neither do I plan to bring the subject up in the future. I heard rumors that his girlfriend had terminated their amorous arrangement, but intensive research is needed for a definitive conclusion. I've heard of kids going berserk, killing teachers for less than what I had unintentionally done to poor Stretch. It is clear that Stretch's last expression of disgruntlement with me was not perpetrated by the wig. I wondered why members of the class were giving me strange glances. Many would look at me and then drop their eyes toward their desks, smiling. One or two went through the motion of wiping their faces--the weak ones who couldn't keep a straight face. I later discovered the cause. In the back storage room, where a mirror hangs, I beheld the reason for Stretch's outrage. He thought I was still trying to be funny. My taking off the wig left my hair in disarray. I had the appearance of having been zapped by static electricity, hair clinging together in the center of my head like a church steeple.

Ambrosia trifida

Back in Missouri
Some folks named them Horse Weeds,
Horsus weedus.
Most called them Ragweeds—
With a nasty tone;
Only the elite knew they were
Food for the gods.

Tall and thin
With big green hands,
Rough from too much sun,
They’d listen for hours
At complaints about the high price
Of bubblegum.
With voices like cicadas
And clicking grasshoppers,
They didn't say much.
And if the wind was just right,
You could catch a whiff of plant beer
On their breath.

Where Do Poems Go When They Die?

Everywhere I look they’re gone.
Pages and pages of poems, lost forever;
Only ghostly forms drift in my mind
Like smoke rising above blackened trees--
Their music with limbs and leaves
Of shrouded oaks burned into empty computer shells
And stubby stumps, scorched,
Distorted, all dead.
One has to smile at occasional visions of nonsense.
I know where they are:
In a folder in the office,
In a notebook in the bookcase,
In complementary copies of folded journals.
Or maybe in the computer’s hard drive
Backing up everything that forms
The flesh and bone of a man’s soul.
Ah! But everything is gone.
Where do the words of poems go
When the wind lifts them from the white pages
Whose edges are smeared with ash?

Padre Island National Seashore

The wind can’t lift
Above a nodding fold
A flag for the world
To see who owns
Beached jellyfish and dunes.

They come by night,
Like locusts, Mexican dreamers
Who crossed the Rio Grande
Into the Promise Land:
Women give birth to Americanos;
Men risk their lives

For milk and honey they can earn
By the same peon sweat they shed
On their homesand.
Padre Island without a moon,
With its black flag and ocean waves
Speaking Spanish all night long.

When Red Flags Fail

I have done intensive research on humanity thoughout my life, and I've discovered that for some folks red flags mean nothing when one's sensory input is supersaturated. For many of the weaker gender (weaker in the common‑sense arena), it takes more than flags to get their attention—nothing short of a baseball bat. And yet, it is uncertain whether that does anything besides getting the bat bloody. This can apply to either gender, depending on the circumstances. In this case we’ll pretend the idiot is male.

"I gotta tell ya," one man says to another. “That woman will bring you nothing but sorry times. Count the times she's left other men on the heap of agony and despair." The one giving counsel is not feeling the hormonal rush his friend is experiencing at the time, hormones that cloak the fact that the woman in mind has gone through five husbands. This brand of love and attachments to messianic leaders have an affinity here.

"With me, it'll be different," the listener responds, assuming he's got a handle on the workings of the atom. Such arrogance!

"Remember Bubba? She took him down the road of destruction."
"Yeah, but I ain't Bubba," Grasshopper replies.

"You know how together Bubba was before she came along," the speaker of wisdom says. The only reason that this person is so wise is because he’s not being trifled with. The degree of one’s irrationality is proportional to the flirtation input directed at the recipient, such as the promise of eternal amorous bliss or the acquisition of spread-around wealth--whatever it is that the manipulated is being allured by.

"But I KNOW it's real this time." One finally reaches the bottom of the lust‑encrusted vessel of stupidity when he's babbling like that. "She has proved to me a billion times over (yeah, and I cry buckets of tears) that she LOVES me alone, and I, I, I LOVE her. Our love will last till the mountains become prairies, till I drink the oceans dry, till . . . When the sun stops shining, when crickets stop cricking, when forever becomes never (Give me a break!), then is when, (sigh) our love will start to wane. Yes, we can," says our duped dope.

Today is Ignoration Day, one filled with festivity and glee, a time of jubilation because finally Lincoln is apparently resurrected . . . or is it JFK?

I was in Walgreens the other night and noticed all the Obama paraphernalia for sale: plates, hats, baseball cards, and a book that pictured the "president"-to-be today with hand caressing his heart next to a shiny flag pen attached to his thousand-dollar lapel. Never before in history has a phenomenon like this occurred: An obscure, insignificant, first-term senator from one of the most corrupt states in the union--having done nothing worthy of a news report next to the obituaries but to mesmerize a nation with babblings of “yes, we can,” and a two-word summarized promise of hope and change--having been elected by the people to act as the President of the United States. Before today there have been four coins struck to commemorate this groundbreaking achievement--I guess his election. WOW! All he's done is breathe, and that has made him a hero even before Michelle has packed up her silverware. What a time in history to live. Could it be that we are actually watching the decline of the Great Experiment. God help us in our stupidity.

Oh, yes, the book about the inauguration of Obama: On the front cover he wears a smile as big as Chicago (Why the back cover has a picture of the back of his head is beyond explanation). What a change from the photo of The Man with limp shoulders looking off towards the Middle East while the rest of the big shots were clutching their hearts--at least a show of civil American protocol--during the National Anthem. The pictures tell it as it is. This country has a changeling in the White House.

I believe I’ll root out a few rocks in the back yard today and watch a few episodes of “Monk.” There’s no sense in wasting time watching the biggest joke of a ceremony in the history of man.

Feeding your grandparents' dogs--
From a letter to daughter Liz dated a few years ago

Speaking of your grandparents' dogs. I really don’t like the flea-bagged bloated packages of hyperactivity. Get this, while your grandparents are off in Los Vegas, I’m taking care of their dogs. Well, I don’t have a problem with that; I’ve done it before.

Part of the routine is to check their water level and give them a skillet full of dog food, and every two or three days drop-kick Muscle Mouth over the plum tree. That’s the only way to keep the idiot in line (I’m kidding about the drop-kicking, but I am tempted to act out my emotional disfavor with that canine). Oddly, when I take care of them, they behave very well.

Back to the point I started on. This time Grandpa wants me to feed each a half-package of hotdogs each day. Oh boy! Can you believe that? Next year it’ll probably be prime rib. Again, I don’t mind taking care of those mutts, but to feed ‘em high-classed grub is rather wasteful. Think of all the starving people who would rather eat those dogs rather than their dog food. It is a senseless waste of good meat. Have you ever seen those two go after steak and gravy? Now, I don’t mean leftover steak and gravy. I’m talking about the right-off-Granny’s-stove steak and gravy--she has to prepare meals for four, for her, Grandpa, Toby, and Chuck.

They look like slow-motion jack hammers. Maybe you haven’t seen jack hammers in action; if not, you’re not getting the full impact of this image. If the dogs could swallow whole those franks--Great Scott!--they would have.

I have eighteen packages of hotdogs to feed them, one each day. Sadly, I was unable to feed them Saturday. I just didn’t have the time or energy to slither over to your grandparents' house to feed their dog fat. Sunday afternoon I gave each of them a package of weeners to make up for the half package they were deprived on Saturday. After I had thrown the hotdogs into the grass, they looked like a cord of wood strewed on the lawn. The dogs started scarfing and snorting, sounding as if they hadn’t eaten in a week or two, even though they have a number 3 washtub full of dog food in the garage to tie them over between meals.

At first I didn’t think much about what went down. I figured they were dog enough to handle a package, after all they were able to consume a half-package in ten seconds or less. But as they were "eating," it appeared they were slowing down. I estimate it was at the tenth dog when I realized what I did wasn’t the wisest thing to do. Each dog looked at his remaining weenies; I knew they were tempted to eat them, though they didn’t have the capacity to contain them. Have you ever eaten twelve weenies at once? I know you wouldn’t try. But they, being dogs, hadn’t either, but they did. They began chewing their food. The novelty of those stinking dogs chewing their food was . . .well, revolutionary. However, it is what happened next that carries a foregone conclusion to this story. I shall quote you a passage of scripture that alludes to the situation and rings true to the nature of dog and man: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly" (Proverbs 26:11). I think you get the point.

Amadillo Kill

Some of the strands in a food web are hard to live with. The inconvenience of a species depends on its intrusive factor in our lives. For gardeners a multitude of grasshoppers is a disaster, but for the exotic diners a plague is a feast. Years ago in the city where we lived, possums were a scourge. I can’t count the number of possums I killed. In fact I ran out of room in the back yard from burying their carcasses. Instead, I’d catch them in a trap and dispatch them in the country. At least the buzzards were fed the following day.

The other evening near sundown, I was out back inspecting my potted plants on the stairs that go nowhere, when I heard something rustling in the leaves. I knew it wasn't my cat wandering around since he was nearby, sitting, and looking in the direction of the leaf disturbance as well. By and by I caught sight of an armadillo wandering around, digging the ground and munching on bug morsels. Anger flushed away any bowels of compassion I may have had. Usually I am not a killer of lower creatures simply because they are breathing, but this critter aggravated me. For several days armadillos had been turning over my potted plants in search of bugs. I also heard complaints from neighbor Joe down the hill that armadillos had been plowing up his lawn.

Any armadillo caught crossing Joe’s lawn is dead meat. Snakes are deader meat. One evening back in July, I heard three shotgun blasts (I was told later there were five in all.) from the direction of Joe’s house. I envisioned there were several armadillos feeding in his yard, all being bushwhacked by Joe’s Mossburg. I went down to his house to snoop things out. When I arrived Joe was trying to remove with a shovel a very long snake from one of his cedar trees he had mangled at close range with his shootin’ iron (both snake and tree). The snake was headless; a portion of its center was missing, resembling a big bite; and the coiled tail section that held the dangling carcass in the fork of a limb was attached by a thin shred of skin. When asked why he needed to shoot the snake so many times, he told me that it kept moving. I guess he wanted to get it out of its misery. Compassionate soul.

Being the impressionable person that I am, I decided to join Joe in his campaign to thin the armadillo population, at least on Hidden Bluff. In order to fully appreciate the passion the members of the NRA have to bear arms, I figured I needed to experience the thrill of the kill. I went into the house, got my .22 pistol, and returned with the view of dispatching the armadillo. I wasn’t entirely cold natured about it; there was a twinge of second thoughts about shooting him, but as with all excuses resulting from emotionally based reasoning, I pressed forward with a killer intent based on the distructo premise—the armadillo had no right destroying property. He deserves to die! I was about ten feet from the poor creature before squeezing off a shot. I expected him to writhe and kick in agony, lie gasping for air, and bleed all over my rocks. He simply perked up his head and resumed munching on another grub he had found. I knew I had hit him. I was too close to miss. However, I didn’t realize how tough an armadillo’s hide is. I also understand why God gave those creatures body armor to protect them. They seem to have the mentality of the gnat; and they look funny, too--a head fit for “The Far Side.” And their senses are severely challenged. They are so blind and deaf that if you carefully, slowly creep upon one, you can kick him across the road like a football. Wouldn’t hurt him though. He’d just get up from the bouncing roll and start digging for some more worms.

I fired again. I assume that bullet hurt him a little because this time he began moving briskly down the hill. I followed him. When he would stop to scratch at the dirt, I’d fire again. During the course of his stopping to scratch and my following and shooting him five times, I ended up in the middle of the lot south of our property, where the armadillo decided to hightail it away with vigor. I watched the little fellow scamper away, showing no evidence that the long-rifle bullets had any effect on his hide. That harmless experience cauterized my conscience. I had a challenge: Somehow I had to kill an armadillo.

A few nights later the occasion arose. Another armadillo came calling. This time it was much later and the bluff was pitch black; so with flashlight and pistol I headed through the brush toward the leaf-scratching just beyond the stairs that go nowhere with my cat following me. The flashlight caught his beady eyes glistening in the dark. I fired. Whoa ho ho ho! I must have hit this one's nerve. He began scurrying around in circles. I fired again, and again, and finally after the fourth shot, he ended up spinning his front feet with his head butted against a tree. Reminded me of one of those wind-up toys that keeps moving after it runs into a wall. At that point, I decided to use a shovel instead of shooting him again. More importantly I became concerned that my neighbors up the hill were overly disturbed. I discovered that the shovel is not the best thing to use to kill an armadillo. Bonk! It rang like a bell when I missed his head and struck his bony hide. Another interesting thing occurred. When I finally was able to hit his head, he began randomly hopping high off the ground, similar to the behavior of a decapitated chicken or a bucking bronco.

I lost count of the times I hit that armadillo, but with each thump, compassion slowly seeped back into my soul, then came sadness, and finally regret. His head looked adequately mangled for death, but he kept kicking and hopping around. I finally stopped beating up on him and went into the house, leaving him flopping in the leaves, hoping all that bouncing around was due to involuntary muscles as it was with Joe’s wiggling snake.