Issue 4:1 I Poetry I George Scarbrough
Ten Poems from Five Books by
George Scarbrough*
Experience
There in the sway-backed
bull-barn I came face
To face with death and did
not seem to care:
Caught in the desperate
closeness of that place,
I smiled at death and never
turned a hair.
Leaning against the logs I
waited, eyeing
The big black bull, watching him paw the soft,
Dark stable earth, seeing my
pitchfork lying
Just out of reach above me
in the loft.
Slowly, he turned from me
and sidled out,
His nostrils loud with
steaming, angry breath:
I pushed the door to slowly,
in a stout
Voice told myself, “I’m not
afraid of death!”
But when I’d climbed the
ladder and come down
Outside again, I knelt and
kissed the ground.
Spring
Kenneth fell out of the
wagon that day.
We were coming home up the
red clay road between
The house and barn, and
would not shut our mouths,
Be quiet enough to see
hypnotic green
Swirl blood-red with his cry. We sons came home.
That was the fact. One night away in spring
Had made the place a high
ridge of new joy.
His empty chair had
toppled. Sons can sing
Out of their tiredness when
the younger cries
Like a
wind that suffers from the breath to blow.
The wheel had found him:
there was not much to do
But lie in the ditch. Sons and brothers are so.
Spring was a green game
until then, a rare race.
We sons encountered April
once in black.
We have not felt the same
since, naming the leaves
The name
of the boy with the wheel-mark on his back.
From The Course Is Upward - E. P. Dutton, New York, 1951
Death Is a Creek, Backward
Flowing
(For my Father, W. O. Scarbrough, who died May 10, 1950)
Running Back along his tributaries to his source,
Feeling
among his ferns and grasses, where the blue
Flag
sings to his willow in the headlands, the course
Is
upward here, he comes once more to view
The
dripping springs that fed his downward fall
Into
the lower hills, onto the joyous plain
Where
in his summers lay a golden pall
Hiding
the broken path, from roar to hush again
Concealed.
Stalemated, staggered, now he comes,
Out
of his arms the waves retreating; nearer birth,
The
full, fine flowing of him stilly hums;
Left
of his presence, only his lines on earth.
Make
no mistake about it, in his climb
Passed
upon pastures was a change of time.
Essay
on Time
Long after the swimmer dropped
Under the water and the storm stopped
Around the white eye of his invisible heel,
There was still the slow motion of a wheel
In the lake’s cup answering the cliff’s well;
Or so it was made to appear. Then, the swimmer, tall
In his sudden exit to his knees,
Was an ivory bough across the blacker trees;
And his right hand, empty, opened wide, sought peace
Still in the transfixed attitude of release,
Remembering still the added weight it bore:
Then he became a body on the shore.
And what he saw in the green, covert depth
Was not made clear; and the surface slept
Like glass again, while the leaf ascended
Upward to light. His quest
ended
To tell time by a leaf dragged down,
The swimmer waited, naked on the ground,
For naked time to come out and reveal
Its debt to speed and his omnipotent heel.
From Summer So-Called –
E.P. Dutton, New York 1956
Letter from East Tennessee to
America
Turned hither from your ogre house, America,
To us who wear the cold cap of the American sky
And whose minds are cool and not, like yours,
Fermentative and fashionable, come the new ghosts
Of petulant fire, rare earth, and heavy water,
The predicated issue of your dream
Fashioned of strange arithmetics and opulent
death
Into new gibberers at our high windows:
We cannot deal with them in usual ways
And ask them to our fireside. They are there,
As they are everywhere in this bright land,
Where colored slopes are skating in the air
Like angled acres of a broken thunder,
Possessing chairs and muttering in
corners
On lovers’ seats no longer sweet to lovers;
But we did not invite them: they usurped a place
Between us and the old untransient ghosts
Who were not here themselves until we died,
In part, and gave them room for being.
We have believed, America, a man’s ghosts
By right spring from his own stocks
And were not gathered from a foreign mind
More than a spider’s frail hypothesis of home
Might by a moving van be re-erected.
We have believed, America, a man’s mind
Was pasturage enough for his ghosts
And not negotiable to the extent
His whitest thought could leap beyond that barrier:
To have consoled ourselves with otherwise
Had been as feasible as with currycomb
To take a milkweed splendor from the mane of wind!
But then we found that there was no fence there,
Only a line the heart drew when the wind
Sang in the green withes we could not name
The beautiful tress of, or when the light heart hung
The windows like new pictures on the walls
Of the old house against the green hill, the water, and the tree.
We crossed a boundary line more ways than one
With our lost ghosts, for with us ghosts are love,
And dead loves reckon with us in the night.
And we remember now, America, this love:
A mountain girl tall as a stalk of green
Queen-of-the-meadow lilting in the wind,
Tossing a blithe head to the busyness of the meadow,
A purple mint scenting the night with love.
She came, America, her narrow feet like ivory
Gleaming in the shadow, stepping as soft
As ivory wrapped in velvet. She our commonwealth
Let from the green security to the green gloom!
In the midnight we remember, and we are afraid,
For like a jealous woman she has gone,
Over the ridge, perhaps, out of the world.
Yet she returns, for ghosts are made retrievable
By love, to labor us with signs and growing
symbols:
A dream of pale hands towering like flame
Above green valleys in the open sky,
Flashing by shoulders of the mountain, dark
From foot to peak when we dream-journey there;
But lightened, first, by some pale ivory gleam,
By some faint gold is laid upon the first-bone-colored glow
Rising and spreading to a bannered spire
Of thin hands fluting on the misty arms,
Beckoning like breath’s elusion on the edge of the cold.
We dream, America, and the night is young.
There are no Don Quixotes in our hills
To ride the giants of progress down. Each man his squire
Turns from the silly sight of cap and bells
And holds remembering and muddles on.
Pity us now the mangled mess of our manners.
We asked for education and we got clichés
Already mixed beyond all hope of redemption;
Now we believe a God held in the hand
Worth more than two invisible in the bush;
Which is only one of our more formal confusions.
We took of late a notice of our deepness,
Seeing the blue holes of earth suddenly down
About our shoulders as trees increase by surprise
Over the naked ridge, rising one morning to
A contrariety of leaves over the edge of the world.
Heaven was then no longer a circle proudly put
At the end of a long telescope of earth:
It was flung around at every vantage, left
By error a scattered aim. No longer do we go
To paradise up through a well of hills
Holding at the other end a handful of stars;
No longer is God the moon in blue well-water
Returning echoes of our longing;
Our heads have entered out into the infinity
Commensurate with our impossibilities, America,
And God has gone with horizons, widening
Like water-rings into a belting remoteness.
We have been whipped before our stern fathers,
But this transcends the punishment. Pity us now
Our whole bewilderment, if you will, our honeycomb
Bearing the new-faced bees. Like some
Enchanted dream of hell, we stand
Above our valleys, each in his very own,
Stuck from the heart down in the old ways.
Pity us now the mangled mess of our manners.
March 16th:
Failure of the Dramatic Principle
Caesar has been dead for twenty-four hours,
And March is the month still, and Rome,
Quiet with Greek catharsis, is the city.
There is even a smell of spring under the towers,
And women have cleaned the house and gone home.
But for all this purgative, I pity
Brutus behind his door whence fell
The issue into the public pit,
For Brutus is not feeling well:
He has that on his mind Aristotelian theory
Does not account for: his eyes, bleary
With lack of sleep and lit
With pale carnelian miseries, lack luster
Of tears; he buttons up his duster
And sits down to another plate of leeks,
Beginning to comprehend that Greek
Psychology went only as far as the Greeks.
From New and Selected Poems – Iris Press, 1977
Hermes
Deep in backcountry green
Three of us, two girls, one
Boy, came to a gray grotto
Pictured with calves’ bones
And a lime pool green as old
Silver in a glass; passed
In the wood a great horse’s
Head of white bone, arriving,
And were breathless; came
On foot, lightly treading,
As breathlessness allows,
The veil between us and him:
Enoch the Baptist, menagerie
Of wing, service of snake,
Rattler and copperhead (by mad
Cajolery stripped from fern),
With which he marked appropriate
Places in his viperish texts,
Exploding the world dry, mostly
By sins of women, and heard by us
In the summery outcountry of his
Place as fabled entries in
The common talk. Straight
to
The grotto’s mouth we came
To here from Enoch’s mouth
The record of our alienation.
Poised in the vines like floral
Hermes, one foot in the air,
We stared in the cold green
(Extracted from August and
The rough gold sun) down narrow
Rocks to where they forked in bushes
Like green growths at the crotch
Of earth, from which emerged as
From a murmurous womb the sound
Of singing, not words but sawing,
Strangled croaks of one
Whose cords have been misused,
Backed by a softer hum as of great
Bees working behind a wall,
The way a swarm is inside
The ceiling of a sleepingroom.
We joined hands then. Afternoon
Began. Then from the trees
A woman crept. Another. And
Another. Then two men came,
all
Seating themselves on the ground
Before the windy opening in
The forked ledge. Then He
came,
Out of the dark hole, mincing
Along the rocks, delicate-footed
And sure as a goat picking his way.
Behind him the murmur flourished.
But rifle sounds would not have
Moved us, for in his hands,
Dripping like jeweled guts,
Slithering like warm wet guts from
A hog’s insides, the preacher
Bore the glory of his trade,
The fame that brought us hiding
In the vines: a mountain
Rattler, wrapped about each art,
Restlessly turning, the heads
Like flying arrows curtailed
By strings. A moan went up
From off his congregation like
A cream of ecstasy cupped
From a sweet jar. How many
there
Were now we could not tell.
Faces like pale moons rose
In the alley before him as
He stepped towards us all, lifting
The snakes in blessing.
Beautiful, they sprang out tirelessly
Above us, flaunting the suave,
Unwanted muscle while we shrank
And shrank, down to our cold cords,
Until three nerves stood coldly
Interlaced. The others
leaned
Expectantly forward to hear him
Bring his text: the pity of Adam,
Who, by woman’s fault, lost Eden,
The serpent being interlocutor for
One who was the woman’s father.
He sweat the while, and from his
Forehead poured a sweat like cleansing
Water. Presently, his face
Began to glow, his eyes incurring
First a gold illumination; then
His countenance caught up in some
Interior incandescence that put
The leafy semi-light to shame,
So that his head suspended in the green
Lightly luminescent between two lifted
Ears of snakes like whorled horns or
The thick crusty tresses of some
Country god doing libations in a
Liberal place, despite his text,
Which, by this, entranced us all
But three who waited, one foot up
Like dancing, floral Hermes,
At the green periphery of his scream:
Telling us it pleasured him to think
The snake establishing Her guile
Belonged to the genus Garter. For,
Up to the Tree, he said,
Love was not known on earth,
Only seasonal communion.
“Love, friends, that myth of God,
Is Hell’s ophidian gesture.
“These creatures in my hands
Are Hell’s writing proof I have
Not put my faith in faithlessness,
Have not betrayed original trust,
And so remain whole and unharmed
Among these happy, crawling things
Whose beauty makes you sick—you
Who have been like chickens crying
From the start under your own
Hawkshadow, experiencing
“The unlearned response
At the wild curlicues of vision!”
A woman screamed and fled
The others straight to Enoch’s
Side, grasping at his arm
To drag the glory down, imploring
To kiss the narrow adequate mouth
Of the strict economy of form
He jealously guarded on high
Against her ecstasy.
“Go back,” he screeched, “whore of
Babylon, bitch of Belial! These
Holy precincts are not for you!
The gate is closed!”
Moaning, the woman fell
To the ground, clasping her
Arms about his knees.
The tried, black arrows went
And came about the preacher’s
Upstretched hands like springes
Set to catch a sinner in.
Stepping from her embrace as
Out of choking vines, Enoch
Began to move, delicate-footed
And sure, backward to his cave,
Waving the flamelike serpents
Above his head as we, unleashed
From spells, crashed, two-footed,
Down and leapt away, perfectly
Tutored, into the garden green.
Room With A View
I had these cecropias, see, on the window-
sill all winter, and now they were hatching,
dragging themselves out of the snipped ends
of their cocoons like damp, crushed leaves
and hanging onto the sill until they
smoothed out to beautiful, dust-
spotted flies.
I got me this idea.
My room needed a picture.
It always needed a picture.
It was that kind of room—
Bare as a sharecropper’s ass
In his nightclothes.
I went out to the cottonfield
and picked some last year’s cotton
and fluffed the seeds like mouldy rat turds
on the kitchen table and saved the fluff
and combed it with a comb.
Then I asked for a square of glass
and was told to skin out of there.
So I skinned and took the glass
from under the goddam landlord’s floor,
a whole miraculous piece of windowpane
stuck away in the gray, lifeless dirt.
“Landlords, weepers!” I carolled while
the goddam hens set up a dry yell and I
skinned out from under the goddam floor
almost between the goddam landlord’s legs,
wishing I could cut his water off good
and proper with my razor glass.
Then I didn’t stop running for a while.
Behind the toolshed, the landlord’s pale
Prick lanky as a severed vine in the shaking
Afterthought of my bloody fright,
I hawked and spat and polished the grimy pane
on my shirt-tail, being a juicy and
resourceful boy. “Better a
slimy ass
than a room without a view,” I opined,
to the goddam yammering jay who kept
announcing my whereabouts to an
interfering world.
Then I heaved myself through the shed window,
stole a stick of cedar wood from the heap
beside the planning-mill, and hammered and
nailed it true. Ah, but the
lovely,
purloined frame was neat as a fence,
the combed cotton lay drifted smooth
behind the clean glad like an empty
winter field needing a blue pine tree—
spread to the horizon in my expanding mind
like a tall deep cloud in a summer sky
awaiting the long crank flight
of some ebony bird, or the flat dried wings
of my winterset moths.
O ready for art was I!
aching to cocoon myself in some superlative,
spectacular bliss!
But the dumb cecropias would not die
comfortably in a glass fruit jar.
(A poor man has poor ways, said my
father, speaking to the end of my wants.)
And so what I ended up with was a pair
of oversized lacewings because of
the strenuous exercise of dying.
To hurry them on, I pulled off
their feathery stumps and fed
the idiot bugs to the hens.
But the hens would not cooperate.
The eggy fools warbled away.
In the dull backyard the fat,
wingless worms flapped and humped,
lively as raindrops on a hot tin roof,
until I stepped with a tearing sound
on the dancing ruins of my nonsuited enterprise,
the savor of some perfect competence
having gone elsewhere in the world.
Then I placed a fat tabby-black slug
from under the kitchen step
on the hot sand of the garden path
to see if he could oil his way out of that.
He could not. He sizzled
down to a smelly
ghost like a black tarry henturd
on the baking sand.
In the middle of the afternoon,
goddam dopey time when all skill of hope,
and all hope of skill, has gone out of the mind,
I stretched myself out on the back porch
and, fool that I am, had me this
beautiful dream.
From Invitation to Kim - Iris Press,
1989
Though I Do Not Believe
Though I do not believe
And a few bells tolling
In God the Father
In God the Father’s Son
Nor that Other Emissary
Spooky as milkweed down
And do not expect
To be lifted up
From the floor of being
Any further than
A mouse is
I am not afraid
I am not afraid
To be dust
Gentle and brown
Gentle and brown
At the root of things
Lilies and wheat
Lilies and wheat
Onions that grow
Into the fire
Of a man’s hot tongue
Sharply speaking
Words of the angels
Whose glittering scales
String the field
In mirrors of mica
To the rim of the river
Where the dusty earth
Was once exclaimed
From my timorous soul
I am not afraid
I am not afraid
Hear my declaration
Here by the animal run
Where the walk is exquisite
The dance is exquisite
The skip is exquisite
The leap is exquisite
Down to the water
Murmuring by
The red clay road
Rut deep in river
I am not afraid
To mix my dust
With the dust of these
With the dust of these other
Sleek lovely ones
Whose mire I cannot
Reasonably exceed
And all transfused
Into the dust
Gentle and brown
Gentle and brown
At the root of things
The glaze of lilies
The gloze of wheat
The fire of onions
Speaking sharply
The words of angels
On a man’s hot tongue
In which I do not either
Much believe
Though wings are singing
Above the river
Running crystal
Shoaling white
Increasing blue
But for which I thank Thee
For understood reasons
Thou It of Things
So variously named
So curiously called
God the Father
God the Father’s Son
God the Father’s Other
Emissary
Spooky as milkweed down
As a dandelion’s uneasy head
Exploded by pouting lips
On the mystery of wind
History
Sifted through England
On the way to Pennsylvania,
They came out of the Danelaw.
The record is set in my father’s
Proud, high prowed face.
I, English toned and tainted,
With Bucks County only a name
Like a kite at the end of a long
Thread in a cold northern sky,
Do not plan to go there.
Somewhere South through
Sweetbriar, Knox, Anderson,
Roane, to Polk, the Cherokee
Dropped in for a chat, leaving
My father such cheekbones!
They almost crowd his eyes
Shut in the old photograph (prow
Merely augmented). The Dane
shows
Still in the way his head rides
His neck like a tall ship.
Scarborough (North Sea) Scarbrough,
Scarberry is the way the name goes,
Traceable on landholds: a fortified
Place. In the Danelaw: Skarthi’s fort,
Ramparts apparent still
In the formidbable look.
The other (Celtic) essence of me
Sounds in my mother’s highland name:
McDowell: son of the dark stranger.
Sept, not clan. Perhaps
Explained by the swarthy son.
Sifted through Ireland on the way
To Cape Hatteras (fleeing rejection),
They came eventually to mountains.
On the way a red-haired Dutch
Girl dropped in for a chat,
Leaving my mother her auburn hair.
It was the color of a stormcloud
Besieged by sun. In the
photograph
It reddens like dawnlight.
Daughter of the wandering
Medical Scot, she crossed (at age 2)
The last western escarpment, dropping
By jolt wagon down to Tennessee,
Polk County, and my father,
Errant orphan she would later
Marry mostly from pity, she said.
But it was not a pitiful marriage,
Grim poverty notwithstanding.
She was the driving force.
Dying, he cried, “Some water,
Please,” adding the word “home.”
One hand under his head, with the other
She held the cup steady, returning
It full to the kitchen.
Leafing again the worn album
(Bachelor on the Sunday afternoon,
With whom avoidlessly the line stops),
Pondering the long treks they
Took to my native country,
These folks of mine,
Bringing me rich blood and certain
Not negligible gifts (acknowledged now
In far places), I am perplexed
To be the one to subvert history.
* This selection of George Scarbrough’s poetry is published with permission from his publisher Robert B. Cumming and
his Literary Executor Rebecca Mobbs. Thanks to Robert B. Cumming (Iris
Press), Mark A. Roberts (Virginia Intermont College),
and Daniel Cross Turner (Siena College) for proposing poems to be included in
this overview of Scarbrough’s work.
