BY JAN HAAG
A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
HOMMAGE À PROUST
The first poem is a madeleine of remembrance, the poems that follow, a
cup of tea into which the madeleine is dipped again and again and again
and again, right down to the crumbs. JH, October 15, 2004
THIS IS WHAT HAS HAPPENED
#91
09-30-04
This is what has happened since I arrived, became aware
of the world:
I remember scruff
all around, vast
scruffy fields of golden
straw and platinum
weeds, empty lots and unkept
(unkempt -- I
always wondered: Why
the "m"?) gardens, piles of fallen
leaves. My first
memories: spaces, the sky, the mountain view
of the forest, the timberline* (I could never see that
line**, nor the
beasts
in the
constellations). But there
was air and sunlight, moss
and rain,
thunderstorms with lightening flashes lighting up the
house and barn
(where the car was kept), dripping
trees with
puddles
of fire and a
hedge***
far higher
*timberline -- "line marking the upper limit of tree growth in mountains
or northern latitudes" -- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Timberline
** line -- "a spatial location defined by a real or imaginary
unidimensional extent" -- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Timberline
***hedge = "'Dutch (haag) to signify 'enclosure,'"
4 stanzas -- 10, 6, 3, 7
SINCE I ARRIVED,
#92
09-30-04
than the highest human, dense, impenetrable, fencing off our world
from others and the little-used highway;
my perfect sister
dominating; our tummies tight with green plums;
our white-booted cat
leading us to Moss Hill's candlewick softness;
the loss of
Tinkerbell, my grey-tiger-striped
stuffed kitten, into
the creek that
flowed to the sea;
Bootsie biting through my ankle when
Con, my brother, accidently
slammed the car door on her
tail in the
barn in the rain waiting to go
buy new shoes; the twisted
foot, the cast, the crutches,
the fearful clatter they created
falling
down stairs towing
me withering, writhing with embarrassment!!! no time
BECAME AWARE OF THE WORLD:
#93
09-30-04
to feel the pain, only the conscious, blushing relief that,
after school, though
it made the echo
worse, no one
came running except my
teacher, scolding! down
the hollow, hallowing stairwell. End of
memory. We moved from
Bellingham to Tacoma, leaving behind the
Canadian border, the
Peace Arch, the Easter Sunrise Services on
Seaholm Hill, the "nameless" lad I walked across the room
to
kiss in first grade just
as we had
left marshy, scruffy, untilled
fields in Marysville
while I was not old enough to remember, but
which saturated
my blood as summers of daffodils,
winters of
chrysanthemums.
Later, our garage-house became a taxidermist's farm
I REMEMBER SCRUFF
#94
09-30/10-1-04
convincing infant, soul-hidden me, 'til I was forty-five and began
to think, that I was really
a stuffed animal,
browsing on the
chaff of the land
ignorant of a rich, smelly, manure-ing soil
beneath the platinum
and the gold. But childhood was
a
delight, apple
cider presses, here, there, and, in Roseburg,
my Granddaddy's peach farm where no peach was picked until
it
was
plump and juicy ripe,
hand-wrapped in tissue
in a
peach-smelling shed of silvered wood.
Rumble-seat riding in the
Nash, swimming in the Umpqua, dancing
naked-brown at five on rocks
beneath
the covered bridge,
breathing the parched peach fields' floating dust,
ALL AROUND, VAST SCRUFFY FIELDS
#95
10-01-04
thin, brittle weeds here and there, their heads as bent
as weathered
ribbons in the cemetery...
Ghostly Granddaddy digging
the graves deep
in the rain with
his whole and his two-fingered hand -- two
fingers lost to
the railroad when younger. He had
dug a well,
lined it with stone, kept home-made root-beer,
icy and a
little icky, to my already commercialized, opinionated,
seven-year-old
taste. They were huge stones.
I used to
lie, peering over the
edge, wondering how
he did it. We helped pick peaches, but we
didn't
help with the stones. We stole
the ribbons, but
we didn't go to the windswept funerals.
OF GOLDEN STRAW AND PLATINUM WEEDS,
#96
10-01/02-04
My hair was honey blond, thick, like twists of hemp
and soft as down
-- it was
my first love.
In the mirror above the mahogany
piano's
gleam, home alone, I'd let the sun shine through,
releasing,
strand by strand, the honey-bee
glints, to dance
across my face, enchanted by my beauty.
My second love was
Max, the pillow -- made of goose-down
by my gutsy, Goose-girl
Grandmother -- left,
years later, on
the Chicago train en
route to England.
I cried, called, sent letters, never
recovered it. Tinkerbell, dignity,
Max-the-pillow, trust: defining
losses of childhood,
youth, married life.
Gone. There would be other losses. Spaces
EMPTY LOTS AND UNKEPT
#97
10-02-04
opening in my psyche found odd flotsam lodged deep in
the cracks of
my broken heart.
Never finished with
childhood: even sitting
with Shiva-purna at seventy,
tears start for that Roeder-school-child, that
little-finger-smashed-in-the-car-door girl visiting the
collasped/yet-to-be-rebuilt
Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Does
this memory
survive
because of the snapshot of that sorrow?
Does pain cling
because of the carelessness of my father?
My childhood was a happy
one:
Bootsie chasing dogs
from the schoolyard; little blue
capes against
the snows of winter; four uncles in khaki -- we
tried
to braid their crew-cuts while they
slept. My dearest
love among them came home crazy -- interred
(UNKEMPT -- I ALWAYS WONDERED:
#98
10-02-04
awhile at American Lake, never quite recovered -- achieved a later
sainthood as toothless-teacher-of-art to immigrant children,
no longer possessed
by the matinee-idol-handsomeness that caused my
youthful
crush...one moment's nonplussed horror when he kissed me as
a
lover.
I was never educated.
Oh, I went
to school, but it's taken 'til
yesterday
to even touch upon an understanding of the world's
human
inhabitants. Cat's are easier. Hence my
early love of
Bootsie, Alexandra, Ganymede, Quixote, Yossarian, Thais, Futhorc --
and my painful shyness, painful to them and me. Who
wants to hang with a mute?
The pain of
parting with Mithradates due to tom-cat rivalry...
WHY THE "M"?)
#99
10-02/04-04
Unkempt, from the Flemish, means "uncombed" according to the OED,
hence an
"m" here, no doubt,
for the same
reason as in "comb," which,
though unexplained,
goes all the way back to Sanskrit
gambha,
"tooth." Do
I dare look up the Sanskrit?
But that is
much later in life and, half a
lifetime back, another uncle,
shockingly, bussed me once as well.
Apparently, by then I was pretty
and a little
less knowledgeable about life than a
kitten.
Oh horrors! All my uncles are dead now. Fashion,
today,
is horror of incest. Actually in
thought, I thought
I'd missed some fun. Speaking of sexuality
GARDENS,
#100
10-04-04
my sole woman to woman encounter was a source of
remorse -- I
treated her badly after
our lovely mutuality.
Between this poem
and the last, I
spent the better part of a restless morning,
one a.m.
on, with a poem demanding birth:
The Arms Race.
But I have postponed it. I must get
back to my childhood.
I've skipped across the waxing moon.
I was at Moss Hill with
Bootsie.
My father had
not yet ripped me from the fence
which gashed my leg deep with gushing blood. I carried
the scar
for
years, I don't
feel it now.
I look. Hardly able to tell it
PILES OF FALLEN LEAVES.
#101
10-04-04
from a white-spot, there it is! smaller than it was
on my small
haunch amid less-wrinkled --
than if I
were thin -- skin.
Concentrate! I command my
old gray cells, on grade school, the
move to Tacoma,
to Seattle, more grade school, junior
high,
socializing problems,
lunching in the toilet, crying all night;
the old haunted house in the swamp we never looked
into,
abandoned Craigdarroch in Victoria which
we did haunt,
wandered in -- now landmarked, as historically
significant;
my nervous father, about to speak at the Empress,
my shock at his trembling hand;
cream from room-service
trolleys, for our secreted three way snacks,
MY FIRST MEMORIES:
#102
10-05-04
vast halls, jellied tomato consommé on ice in silver tureens,
my sister's mouth open in wonder,
unable to eat.
I fed her.
Butchart Gardens. On another
trip my
father found a trifle for me by asking
drivers in the
ferry-line cars -- but
way later in
life. Now it's all
chock-a-block, jumbled together.
To whom does the sequence
matter? This morning, I can't
remember if it was my mother
or
Betty with
whom I bought, at a lawn-sale, for
a dollar,
a length of soft, gray sweat-cloth that has
served as a cuddly warm
blanket
for the past
eight years --and a blender. Doris? Betty?
SPACES, THE SKY,
#103
10-05-04
"All is one," Hindus say: It gets more difficult each
year to find
the exact separation
between thee and
me. Is that your arm?
Mine? Your
thought? Or did you borrow it from me? Or I
from you? I've never understood the
value of attribution.
It seems to me you eat and
it becomes you. Do I need to
remember this word
was once a zucchini? Who knows
where
you breathe
it in? Who cares? When you breathe
it out,
whose is it? Yours? Mine? Who keeps track?
Yet, being massively
plagiarized, I was
mightily angered. A
few poems, flattering, over a hundred -- stealing!
THE MOUNTAIN VIEW OF THE FOREST,
#104
10-05/07-04
I've lost the thread, everything tangled into a chaos. When
were
you a child and when
were you seventy?
Has today come? Or is
this tomorrow?
Who draws the line? Who drew the timber line?
Unless
you are talking of hair, just
keep silent. I
look up "keep." "No one," says OED,
"knows where it came
from." About 1,000 c.e., it came
suddenly into literary use. My
interim
soul decided long
ago that I wouldn't be a player.
Not meant to be, I've come to not wanting to
be. I freeze
when I come
near being. I'll
stifle if I don't get out, take
THE TIMBERLINE*
#105
10-07-04
a trip to Bremerton today. I hear sirens, I look
out each time with a
jet-engine
trill climbing my
nerves, knowing the city -- the
only city
in my purview* -- will be roiling smoke, drifts of
paper,
dust. I can see Rainier from
here, but not
St.
Helens. She's boiling, quaking. Who can
blame her? I boil too.
Not from fear, but from
invasion of my brain by Bush's
Brain,
the Goebbels
of our day, the sickness of our
age,
black
IS white. Don't doubt it. Freedom IS bombs
forever and, floating
from the sky,
your child's limbs
exploded against the sun, your house's mortar
*"2. the range of vision, insight, or understanding." p.582, Random House
Webster's Dictionary, Third Edition
(I COULD NEVER SEE THAT LINE**,
#106
10-07-04
powdered, trickling from the wind to veil your heart's blood
smeared
by Americans on your earth.
This is my
story! Not yours. But
the molecules cycle,
twist into unseparateable patterns of
redemption: save one, save 'em
all or, vice versa, they all
disappear. My cat's
long teeth, like saber-toothed tiger teeth,
clamp
sharply across his gums, poke into his fur, his paws
are softer than fleece. My bright
blood flows from
scarcely
feel-able flicks of his scimitar claws.
Childhood, where are
you now? In the mud and muck
of daffodil fields? Not even a
fleck upon earth.
Marysville -- where they want to build a
#107
10-07/08-04
NASCAR
Track. Nothing of me seems to fit into the
universe of "the
way things are."
(I see we
are playing Camille this morning.)
The sun
pouring in the window, off on an unnecessary ride
across
the beautiful waters. I went to
Bremerton and came
home. I hear the word chairs on
the radio and, suddenly, I
remember the many kitchen chairs
I painted, both in the flesh
and on canvas
-- or not on
canvas, on paper. I painted
dozens of
pictures of one kitchen chair at Shelby Street,
acquired, no
doubt, from the Union Gospel Mission,
round
wooden legs
and veneer seat. I painted it again
BUT THERE WAS AIR AND SUNLIGHT,
#108
10-08-04
and again and again, in bright golds and reds and
oranges, with
blues and blacks, on
eleven by seventeen
sheets of paper,
heavy paper with some
kind of pre-computer black and white configurations on the other
side, before my decision to never
use used paper
again for
my paintings and poems. An
injunction strictly obeyed for dozens of
years,
more or less, and now set aside, liking the paper
trail the used
side leaves, like
bird tracks through
the plethora of the
10,000 things to
be recorded day after day after day. Poems
lie on
my desk and my floor, in
notebooks and libraries,
3,000 scattered across the NET, more numerous
MOSS AND RAIN,
#109
10-08-04
than the uncountable leaves of autumn which fall and fall
and fall,
one after the other
-- each year, crisp
and scattering, birds
before my shoe tips.
It is only this year, this seventieth
year, that I
have taken to walking the autumn
leaves
bare-footed, cold,
wet with dew, across the campus green.
The leaves will decay into mulch, whether left or raked,
but a few
will leave their
skeletons, lacey and
frilled, to be picked
up, treasured, impressed
(CK -- A hr Sharon Kallis and my accu's)
for works of art, more fragile than the fall. Humankind,
more
fragile than the Christian fall
would indicate, soon
turned to mulch, mass graves now on
THUNDERSTORMS WITH LIGHTENING FLASHES
#110
10-08-04
every continent. Why can I not live a day, even
an hour, without the
thought of
death, dark or
light, humorous or horrendous
dogging my mind-prints?
Every thought that sails from the
harbors of my mind,
ends in a drowning, a crash
upon the
rocks,
a beaching along the shoals. The most
beautiful
of all sights yesterday, was the ferry coming into
harbor, engines
reversed, white water churned
up between the
bow and the dock.
You see, I
can no longer think of the past, of my childhood,
of my fame, glory and retribution
of quitting that
life, for now I have nothing, need
LIGHTING UP THE HOUSE AND BARN
#111
10-08-04
nothing, want nothing, and still I have so much more
than the people
gazing at the
sky to see
bombs coming toward their eyes and
mouths
in Afghanistan, Iraq and, this morning, bombs beside
Egyptian swimming
pools, Hiltons. Israelis dead, now to
be
laid rank
upon rank upon rank beside the Palestinian
dead with whom they have declined to talk peace. It's
just the
beginning, another beginning of
the conflagration in
the
Middle East, warns my already sinking,
drowned heart, which
will end this crucifying civilization, spreading like
a virus more
deadly than AIDS
from US to
every nation of the world, willing or
(WHERE THE CAR WAS KEPT).
#112
10-08-04
unwilling participant in the greedification of all humans. Is this
what I grew up for? Certainly, I
played my part,
but quite
twenty-two years ago, and quit
again and again each day, each
shopping day before Christmas
and after. I look out my
window
at the,
pointed out by Jim, toy, Disneyland City.
It's
hard to believe it is there, wasn't always there,
both illusions
only exceeded in their
foolishness by the
idea: it will always
be there, fired-up
by oil, sustained by the inhumane-ness
seemingly inherent in the
human psyche. We can't imagine them
as brothers and
sisters, we can't imagine that they bleed
DRIPPING TREES
#113
10-08-04
as we do, that their child, exploded into constituent parts --
arms
and legs here, head there,
small breast on
a tree's twig, two
toes in the
muddy ditch, gathering each part tenderly into the
mother's head
scarf -- hurts as much for her
as it would
for thee and me. Collateral damage. If
this is only
collateral, which is the real damage? "Collateral,"
interesting word
to be chosen by
the war-mongers, goes
back at least to 1374,
Chaucer: "Lying
aside from the main subject. line of action.
issue, purpose,
etc.* If the child's death is
collateral, what
is
the child's life? "Do not ask for
*p. 617, OED, Vol. C
WITH PUDDLES OF FIRE
#114
10-08-04
whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Your life,
your loves
scattered among the molecules,
meaningless as the
puppet who is
breaking down into his
constituent parts. Bush is wired like
a robot so he can mimic
words fed to him through a
tiny ear
piece
in the presidential debates. When this is
announced, mark my words, the defense will be: Since we
have the
technology, wouldn't anyone prefer
to be coached?
No, we would
like our president to
have his own brain, not to rent it from
a
stooge. Then there will be a
debate about the
good and bad, the two views, of
AND A HEDGE FAR HIGHER
#115
10-08-04
being coached, which the GOP will see runs right up
to election day.
Charlie W. McCarthy
with his Bergen
prevail. Holding
the knobs of the old
radio to make the sound come in clear, we
listened
to
Edgar and Charlie, never dreaming
they were prototype
for our
2004 president. This is what
has happened since I
arrived, became aware of the world.
When I was a child, the
world was different.
When I grew up change was barely
noticeable. As I have grown old, the coyote in the
chicken house
is feeding on the
chickens of life --
there's no farmer to say him nay.
Copyright © 2004 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A Remembrance Of Things Past
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