Four Wonderful Poems by Shelby Stephenson

 

BANJO-HEAD

 

As noble one asks,

“Could he be a crook?”

Ten thousand martyrs

Consume an undying con.

 

Does not kindness separate

Gullibility from the living picture?

Banjo-Head wreaks

Ever to suffer any lecture.

 

To intimidate his brothers and sisters

He draws in an open breath

And lines up another way to bluster

Liberty while Virtue sulks.

 

In his eyes Nature stretches

Out her arms to embrace him.

He lets her thoughts topple reaches

For big bucks adorning a whim.

 

In unison with his schemes

He gets the pastures and roadsides

To grow up in weeds.

The presence of a higher thing he derides.

 

Beyond the human, yet so,

He loves to taste fame,

Epitome of the throw

Of his own voice; his ear, the same

 

When he was little

And hid five dollars in the chimney

Outside where he could settle

For a ball-glove with the money.

 

Where it came from, I can’t say,

Appropriated for lives

As words work and fare

To predict his future acts.

 

 

HISTORY

 

Long lane’s gravel from the mailbox to house.

The box used to be on top of the hill.

Walking’s risky now, even for a mouse

 

stirring in the pines while mockingbird spills

a four-part song, nostalgia’s sorrow,

lament, mighty, strong, and effectual.

 

I am tired admitting that I borrow

for my show a mind’s unattainable

story; yet I see clearly the yarrow

 

my mother set out in the hedge wobbling

boundaries of Calvin’s and Irving’s line.

I get worn out saying mother Maytle

 

walked across the old dirt road to garden

a spot large as John Deere’s biggest  tractor.

 

 

ONE MORE ONCE FOR THE MUSIC

 

I’ll save up some moola and work this farm

                grow sweet potatoes as long as your neck.

I’ll use leaves from Wendell Berry to charm

the beetles turning sod, and, what the heck,

 strow photos of Faulkner, Proust, and Maugham.

James Dickey’s Self-Interviews I’ll hire techs

to press a knob for, “I’ll pick some for you.”

Then he’ll sing “Cumberland Gap” and yodel.

 

Paul’s Hill, Paul’s Hill, all going up Paul’s Hill.

                O I wonder where you are today, Paul,

my brother, and you, Paul S R, my will

to wonder if you in your graves so cold

and lonesome, sad, for your favorite dale.

I hear you, dark-complected dad, “It’s all

in the pitch, Son, hold your pitch and keep time.

Don’t stop working the past in words and rhyme.”

 

My mother, Maytle, lifts an old church glass

                 and leans from her sink to sing “Amazing Grace.”

She tells me not to let nostalgia dish

up much promotion for Pap George’s race

to keep his plantation going with his

                seventeen slaves; she says enjoy the pace

July, the Slave Girl, set for thirty-three years,

when she died here on Paul’s Hill; shed some tears.

 

We need to cry for sake of history.

I listen for Mama right now to say,

when members of the Klan come to visit,

“Okay, you boys take them sheets off your face,

and come on in:  relax, drink this whiskey,

your hatred’s knee-deep on top of this clay.”

I picture all this with swerve and wonder,

how we got here; we are far from better.

 

While forgetting that a demijohn’s not

                an outdoor toilet or bully’s picnic,

I do recall when the power went off

                and I took my old trusty well bucket,

 zip-a-dee-doo-dashed to Beaver Dam Branch,

singing all the way, “Wash my face, lucky

I’ll be, able to wash my dirty face,

Get me running water to wash my face.”

 

My story’s the rivers of Caroline

                and all the states across America.

They roll into long beds filled with refined

                run-offs of branch-water, lyrically,

to every sea of unforgotten tunes.

                Flow on, the two big books, with clarity,

The Family Bible’s on the table.

The Sears-Roebuck book belongs to Maytle.

 

You will not hear this news from the wide seas:

                the authors and books I read after law

outwitted me in 1963.

Aristotle, Homer, Faulkner, Roethke;

in translation, miraculous Rilke;

North Carolina writers:  Wolfe, Walser,

Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, Betty Adcock,

Hilda Downer, Jaki Green, Gib Ruark,

 

Grace Ocasio, L. Moore, C. Peters,

James Applewhite, Michael McFee, Ehle,

and more, on and on, places where leaders

in politics break for good luck to see

what’s happening out among mosquitoes

that bite their slender ankles for better

days through better ways, the Future Farmers

of America’s creed says for achieving

 

out of the past what we use for present

and the sweet doldrums of the past’s sameness

always different as you talk knowledge

and think of every little one, children

who are born to hoe their rows, feel lessons

on axe-helves to muddle the mostly tan

camels breaking out of hand in openness

I cannot speak with recall to save me.

 

And our stories so real I cannot help

                but leave many ones, their names out, poets,

writers, our high school janitor, the welts

                from paddles on hooks Miss Lowden Lovet

used when paddling hands was not rare in depth

                or width of the coat-hanger flirters loved

at the back of every room in my school,

Cleveland High, where I fell asleep and drooled. 

 

 

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING WHEN I SEE IT COMING

 

Gadzooks, Walter Jackson Bate loved the heart’s treachery, for deep in the writings of Dr. Johnson, vanity washes deep and wide my schooling after I left the telephone company, mid-60’s, to study lit at Pitt.  Eighteenth-century English writings discovered me, thanks to Sir James Sutherland who walked over to a painting on the wall and straightened it.  “That’s what satire does,” he said.  I was more interested in dazzling patrons at Frankie Gustine’s Bar with talk about Ralph Kiner, my man to break the

 

Babe’s homerun record.  Lines from Boswell’s Life of Johnson stay in memory since undergraduate school at UNC.  Richmond P. Bond made me feel school should not be secondary in my life, as I was working in radio and television, hoping to star.  Mr. Bond taught Boswell’s Life.  I loved it, marked some quotes.  “He had no settled plan of life, nor looked forward at all, but merely lived from day to day.”  Mr. Bond and I somehow hit it off, as they say.  He asked me once to try to write a poem about Robert Browning’s

 

“Fra Lippo Lippi.”  “Zooks, what’s to blame?  You think you see a monk!”  That’s Browning.  I cannot remember a word of what I wrote.  I know it was doggerel, for I could hear my father’s dogs sounding in my head, all thirty-five, especially Slobber Mouth.  Of course I never took a writing course at universities I worked my way through:  Chapel Hill, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin-Madison.  I never thought I could write about my father’s hunting, or my mother’s garden, still my favorite botanicals of all times. 

 

Write about tobacco?  You kidding?  The law and I had to fail each other first to make me see the truth I could not write, though I could not forget.  I wanted, as Conrad said, to seek some truth I failed to ask for.  When I was lost at Chapel Hill, I needed Jessie Rehder, Phillips Russell, Daphne Athas, Doris Betts, Max Steele.  I needed the writers galore at Pitt.  And Wisconsin:  George Barker.  Still I doodled in a diary, trying to imitate Blake or Stevens.  I stayed out of sight, sitting in backs of rooms at readings.

 

I realized along the way that I could not be born in a museum.  My diary turned into songs into poems into stories into poems, for every time I would start a story, words would get in the way.  Samuel Johnson:  “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”  And consider Jane Austen, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Amy Clampitt.  And Robert Frost:  who would write him off in any blue book?  What, therefore, sustained my life?  Childhood and Frost.  He came to Memorial Hall. 

 

That was 1957.  I was a sophomore.  I see him now at the podium, “saying” his conversational iambs:  “When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees . . .” – roll up six years to ’63.  I was working in the Right-of-Way Department, American Telephone & Telegraph Company, out of White Plains, New York, buying easements for underground cables and land for microwave towers.  Up the Hudson Valley on through New Hampshire, I saw those birches hanging into roads.

 

Some boys, there, swing in boughs, at least, in my mind.  I said there it is:  the poet did not make it all up; yet he did.  Soon I took leave of A. T. & T.  What did I know.  I thought teaching was for girls and sissies when I was growing up on the small farm on Paul’s Hill.  Named for Shelby Jean Davis, known as the Little Mountain Sweetheart from Mount Vernon, Kentucky, I hear my mother say again, “I wanted a girl.”  Here I am, Shelby Dean, after teaching school for thirty-six years.

Shelby Stephenson was poet laureate of North Carolina (USA) from 2015-18.  He was editor of the international literary journal Pembroke Magazine for 32 years.  His recent book is Shelby's Lady:  The Hog Poems.