Literature & Fiction Blogging

Oh boy, this getting rich quick stuff is not as easy as I thought it was going to be. Day one in my quest to reach the new FDIC limit of $250,000 in insured deposits turned out to be a complete and total bust. I spent the day dropping my tiller off to be fixed (estimated cost: $125) and then heading over to help my friend, Boots, set up his new greenhouse. The economic component of the day involved bringing some of my freshly milled wood to him for the project. But then, at the very moment I was going to ask for the $248,000 needed to get me to the limit, I offered a bartering arrangement whereby I’d simply get some of his seed garlic and maple syrup in exchange for the wood and my labor. I know, I know: That’s not what Donald Trump would do. But it was only day one, damn it.

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There’s a man on Route 25 who builds bird houses. Hundreds and hundreds of bird houses of all colors and sizes. They fill his tiny yard, stacked and restacked within feet of the 50 mph traffic that zips by. As fast as you see the houses, they disappear – a colorful blur of the wooden boxes to each motorist.

Yesterday, though, I saw the bird house maker. He was on his knees, delicately painting his newest house as I whirred by. Nothing else seemed to matter to him. Not the rain. Not the sound – or proximity — of my truck. Not the soft rain. Not the chill in the air. And certainly not the fact that he barely had a place to put his newest house.

And I thought to myself: I’d like to be a bird house maker, too.

–

I wish I had been with Hayden Carruth when I saw the bird house maker. He would have written a beautiful poem or, better yet, he would have told me in his scrambled egg and whiskey voice why the bird nest maker matters most at that very moment.

But Hayden Carruth died last week. He was 87, and, for decades lamented to anyone who would listen that he was near death. But he kept living and kept writing. And, I’m proud to say, I’ve got all his books – poems, essays and reviews.

I began perusing my Carruth collection earlier this week when I heard about his death on the radio. The first book I grabbed off the shelf was Beside the Shadblow Tree, a memoir of his friend, James Laughlin. It’s an elegant tribute, part autobiography and part biography. I flipped through it, remembering by all the underlines that I once reviewed it for a magazine. My first random stop amidst the underlines was this one:

“Is it such an anomaly that I choose not to mourn the deaths of my good friends in public?”

Carruth was writing about his decision not to attend the memorial service for Laughlin – a decision that led to great consternation amongst their mutual friends. Carruth brushed the blustering aside, concluding that Laughlin “would have understood.” Indeed.

Last week, however, it was Carruth’s turn to pass. And I’ll bet he would have been the first to opt out of the tributes that have come pouring out since the news of his death became public. No thanks, I can hear him say in his husky voice, just read the poems and carry on.

Here’s an entry to my original blog, “The Daily Curio,” that I wrote in April 2003:

Check out Hayden Carruth’s latest book of poetry, Doctor Jazz (Copper Canyon Press, 2001). The cantankerous Carruth keeps rolling along despite bouts with illness for the past couple of decades. Carruth, a former Vermont resident who now lives in upstate New York, tickles the funny bone, slaps established thinking upside the head, and ruminates beautifully on some of the curveballs life’s thrown his way. Here’s a taste of Carruth, from his series of poems under the title “Faxes to William.” This one is officially called “Three:”

The man who has a lifelong intimate relationship
with death, who thinks of death continually,
whose sexual and esthetic behavior is determined
by death, whose ordinary perceptions and routines
of work are shadowed by death, nevertheless
hides his obsession or disguises it in hundreds
of devious and nearly unconscious demeanors,
and then he wonders, he always wonders,
if everyone else is doing the same thing.

–

And here’s “Nineteen:”

William, do you know why
I like writing these faxes
to you? Because you
don’t have a fax machine.

–

And here’s a Carruth poem that I reprinted in an issue of Wild Matters when that monthly rag of agitation was still in circulation:

On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don’t remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

Face it, this sure beats the hell out of wasting more time on analyzing that poor excuse for a national discourse that took place last night. But don’t worry, I’ll get to that, too. Once I’m in the mood to place small splinters into my fingernails.

Thanks for playing, my friends. Now go do something real. You know, build a bird nest or something.