April 2023 – Ken Craft

Darkness Sticks to Everything: Tom Hennen in Particular

As a Midwestern poet, Tom Hennen is often paired in people’s minds with Ted Kooser. That is, if Hennen is in your mind in the first place. For me, he wasn’t because I’d never heard of him, and while his poetry is, like Kooser’s, plain-spoken, it is also so nature-centric that I cannot in good faith consider these two that similar. Related by geography and style at times, but different, too.

First and foremost, if you crave rapidly-disappearing nature as a topic in your poetry, Hennen is your man. By modern standards where identity serves as the new Garden of Poetic Eden, he is quaint with his love of the four seasons (especially autumn), trees (especially pines), earth (especially its sky) and so much more. This collection, encompassing some of his best work along with some new poesies, includes the early image poems, focused with great specificity on the landscape, as well as his wonderful collection of prose poems covering the same matter, called “Crawling Out the Window.”

If you are looking for comparisons, Hennen’s quiet army of fans are more than willing to provide them. The Ancient Chinese poets. Robert Bly. James Wright. Francis Ponge. The Scandinavian poets Olav H. Hauge, Harry Martinson, and Rolf Jacobsen. Imagery, personification, and folksiness work together to bring big surprises in small packages. As you read Hennen, his poems grow on you like moss on a tree. Slowly.

So let’s look and see, shall we?

Spring Follows Winter Once More

Lying here in the tall grass
Where it’s so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.

Finding Horse Skulls on a Day That Smelled of Flowers

At the place where I found the two white skulls
Sunlight came through the aspen branches.
Under one skull were
Large beetles with hard bodies.
The other one
I didn’t move.
Around them new grass grew
Making the scent of the earth visible.
Where the sun touched shining bone
It was warm
As though the horses were dreaming
In the spring afternoon
With night
Still miles away.

Things Are Light and Transparent

During the fall, objects come apart when you look at them.
Farm buildings are mistaken for smoke among the trees.
Stones and grass lift just enough off the ground so that you can
see daylight under them. People you know become transparent
and can no longer hide anything from you. The pond the
color of the rainy sky comes up to both sides of the gravel road
looking shiny as airplane wings. From it comes the surprised
cry the heron makes each time it finds itself floating upward
into a heaven of air, pulled by the attraction of an undiscovered
planet.

The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality
quirks, which can easily be seen if you look closely.
But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention
dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred
times more interesting than most people. Usually they
just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, such
as autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or
if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the
lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we want
to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t care to
reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before
us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking
for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we
are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day
is going by perfectly well adjusted, as some days are, with the
right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze perfumed
from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak
leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

Like I said, nothing fancy here. Country wisdom by a man who can name things and who sees movement and life in ways that we don’t and in things that we don’t. Like a warm breeze in early spring, it is. If you’re a certain kind of “old soul” reader, that is.

Mining the Synergy of Opposites

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry The Indifferent World

headlight

Contrast. Nothing tells a story quite like it. Consider the juxtaposition of junk car parked next to new Porsche, of grandmother in her wheelchair posing with her 5-year-old granddaughter for pictures, of homeless man sleeping under cardboard against the smooth base of a financial-district skyscraper.

In poetry, contrast can work its magic, too. Past and future. Dream and reality. Invincibility and mortality.

The last works particularly well when examining the one childish outlook we’re least willing to give up—the notion that good times go on forever, that hope is an unsinkable ocean liner, that death comes calling for others with regularity but doesn’t even have us on its to-do list.

Let’s see it at work in three poems:

“Driving into Our New Lives”
Maria Mazziotti Gillan,

Years ago, driving across the mountains
in West Virginia, both of us are so young
we don’t know anything. We are twenty-eight
years old, our children sleeping in the back seat.
With your fresh Ph.D. in your suitcase, we head out
toward Kansas City. We’ve never been anywhere.
We decide to go the long way around
instead of driving due west.

Years ago, driving across mountains; your
hand resting on my knee, the radio playing the folk
music we love, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or you
singing songs to keep the children entertained.
How could we know what is to come?

We are young. We think we’ll be healthy
and strong forever. We are certain we are invincible
because we love each other, because our children
are smart and beautiful, because we are heading

to a new place, because the stars
in the coal-black West Virginia sky are so thick,
they could be chunks of ice.
How could we know what is to come?

To steal a phrase from George Orwell, it has a “Such, Such Were the Days” feeling to it. Reading it, one senses how the speaker’s perspective has brought wisdom and sadness in equal measure: “How could we know what is to come? / We are young. We think we’ll be healthy / and strong forever.”

And all based on logical (to capital-R Romantic humans) reasons: love, smart and beautiful children, West Virginia stars, and a new home somewhere beyond the headlights.

I’ve used the contrast between happiness / security and some unknown reckoning myself. The alchemy works if you jigger it just right. First, from Lost Sherpa of Happiness, the perspective of innocence in the animal world:

“Sharp-Shinned Hawk & the Song Sparrow”
by Ken Craft

All spring, the punctured sky collapses blue
beneath the shrill knives of their call.
All day, shriek and talon, eye and hunger
from the heat of a red-black gullet.

They circle overhead, dive under liquid
evergreen, glide through currents of hardwood,
trunk and limb. Nestling, fledgling,
songbird—on ground or mid-flight—
leaving only an orphan feather for changeling.

And here I hear the song sparrow sing.
Here in the narrow interstice between stealth and wait.
Her three notes. Her cheerful trill. Her hesitation
at the wood’s held breath.
Then, song again.
To sun or cloud, maybe. Wind or mate.

She sings to the stillness of quiet’s dull edge.
She sings to not knowing that every joy
in life is answered, eventually.

As with the Gillan poem, there is no need to address the future, as it is implied. The future is a hawk in waiting. An indifferent hawk, blindly following instinct’s edicts, which somehow doubles the affront.

And here, from The Indifferent World, a similar scene, only more domestic:

“Insomnia”
by Ken Craft

Three is the loneliest number on a clock
when the night can’t save you.

No doubt it is the constellated tug,
a conspiracy of stars, the silent, primal

voice that whispers the uselessness,
that grinds greater gears,

that mocks the hubris of careful plans,
set alarms. Every blanketed life around you

sleeps safe and happy and secure
like nothing can touch them, like change

has made its exception, named it you,
and passed finally over the frosted roof.

Contrast. A young family driving toward a life of endless happiness in the West Virginia night. A song sparrow singing blithely while bill and talon bide their time from a branch high above. An insomniac convinced that both change and the future make exceptions.

Readers shake their heads saying, “No, no, no,” while wishing, “Yes, yes, yes” against their better judgment.

That wish is a big part of this brief, lovely journey we call life. I’m not sure where we’d be without it.

A Travel Day in the Life

blathering comma mine random thoughts

It doesn’t take much to feel like you’re in a movie. Buying a bus ticket for an hour and a half ride from New Hampshire to Boston for a train departing in two hours and ten minutes, for instance. You considered traffic, yes, but did you consider it enough? Do you ever consider it enough?

The movie part: Running through South Station for your train (for it IS yours, in your mind – the next one, leaving in two hours, is someone else’s, dammit). Not knowing the track, just knowing it’s the Acela and not the Regional. Backpack strap digging your shoulder, luggage wheels jumping like Jiffy-Pop on every crack in the station’s bumpy-as-Boston terrain, heels kicking up like the hundred yard dasher you were decades ago.

Is there any feeling as sweet as jumping through a train door just before it closes? Just before the car takes its first lurch forward? Just before you feel the smooth and friendly slide of track somewhere beneath your shoes? It’s as if you’ve liberated a damsel in distress called Two Hours of Your Day, and she’s showering you with gratitude and you don’t want an umbrella.

Amtrak has this marvelous invention called the Quiet Car. It’s no match for humans, however. Humans are social animals. Sometimes the accent is on social, other times it is on animal, but in neither case is it a good thing for Amtrak inventions.

The first two seats in the car face each other. Why, a logical type might ask, would a Quiet Car include facing seats if designed to thwart social animals? Two not-so-gentlemen sat facing each other and talked blithely away. I figured it would last a few minutes at best, but no. These two were like ladies at the clothesline, coworkers at the water cooler, gossips bursting with goods to share and little time to share it. By God, they had staying power (“staying” defined as “Boston to New York”).

You would think that the conductor would say something. You would think that people who paid for Quiet Car seats close to them would say something. And finally, the thought occurs to you that maybe YOU should say something.

The problem, of course, is politely asking them to shush or, more discreetly, pointing at the signs hanging over the aisle that say QUIET CAR, is not without some danger. After all, we now live in the Age of Individual Rights. Motto: “Don’t tread on my individual rights, I’ll tread on your community rights.”

It’s like road rage. Express displeasure by rolling down your window or signaling with your bird finger at your own risk. In cars, the glove compartment is now known as the Second Amendment Compartment.

So it comes down to ear plugs, the last resort of that drying pool we call common courtesy and respect. Remember them?

Meantime you’re chugging along for New York City en route to our nation’s capital. And it happens to be the day that a certain former president is being indicted by a certain district attorney for certain hush money paid to a certain porn star. That’s one of dozens of charges, really. And there are other investigations going on at both federal and state levels — all leftovers from four years of “We Interrupt This Program to Bring You Projection, Gaslighting, Narcissism, and Greed” (known in Revelations as the Four Horsemen).

Are any of these passengers getting off here to exercise their first amendment protest rights (kind of like exercising your right to run for trains), you wonder? You also wonder because humans are not only social animals, they’re wondering animals. You? You chiefly wonder when it ends and truly goes away.

There’s nothing peculiar to New York today, though. No sign of pro- or con- crazies dying to exercise their First Quiet Car rights. Just the usual 20 minute layover. Change of crew. A few people running for the train with a backpack strap digging into their shoulder while wheeling luggage that bounces like a colicky baby behind them (sound effects left for you to imagine, as it’s a silent movie outside your window).

Not much left to this day, then, other than the usual taped announcement about turning off phones and not talking on phones. And oh, yes, the usual phones going off with any number of creative tones and far-from-mortified folks not only answering but talking in tones East of Hushed (the town next to Eden). This is the Age of the Cellphone, after all. The Pleistocene is no match.

All this is what you come to expect from a travel day, though. Your reward? Getting there in one piece with little delay. Not quite as sweet as jumping through a train portal before it moves on the track, but still, the announcement that Union Station is nigh, that you can gather all your belongings, that you can join the huddled masses (“Got any change?”) at a station well south of South Station and the track run that started your day.

In a courteous way, you mean. Respectful, trying-to-set-an example way. Like salmon leaping upstream, maybe.