The 50s

A decade
Lauded by many
Held up as example – a template to return to
With a simple president
Who didn’t take politics as seriously as his golf game
And smiled through it all

There was evil then
McCarthy let us know - not just over there
But poisoning the midst of us
Especially among those artsy eggheads
Stirring their own filth with modernism
And African rhythms

But at our house
We held Harry and Adlai
Almost up with Paul and Silas
With Roy Rogers religion
Spewed from our mouths
And Aunt Alta played Marion Anderson

The main stream
Was not where we floated
Daddy working three or four jobs at a time
But we did have the motorboat
Idyllic nights on the river
And days on the bay fishing

The farm fell
To futility under the furious inferno
In between flourishes of crops
With enough to get the financial motors running again
Along with the garden’s bounty
And the gas wells

Five to fifteen – a span of wonder
What a time to see pass by with
H-bombs and Sputnik and right-wing cousins with fallout shelters
But a decade of other cousins watching the stars
Listening to the coyotes along with the oil patch motors
And finding out a little about girls

Some glory - good grades
Some shame with the government drought relief
Then pulling out of it
Getting back to farm work and making muscles
The girls and the coaches liked
And trips out west

Relative affluence rose
Around us, with a hole in the middle
Was rain a right?
Should our share be slated?
No wonder so many farmers fueled the cities
And drove Detroit

Jesus showed Himself to me
Not the Jesus who would
Fight wars and make you rich if you did what the preacher said
But the Jesus who would love me like I was
Giving grace where fear and dread might be
And offering hope

She Sang

I will sing - She sang,
Of stories wondrous and dwelling in Beaulah
Old, old stories, told to the nations;
Wonderful words of love, of whispering hope
“Sing them over again,”
She sang.

Standing - She sang,
Eyes closed, open, at peace,
Seeing glory, feeling glory, singing glory.
Leading, leaning, learning, leaving no praise unsung,
She sang

We heard - Her singing,
Commanded, following, joining voices, adding praise,
Tunes drawn up from the dry wells of our minds,
Awed, inspired by the power in the blood,
And her power as
She sang.

The place - She sang,
Quiet most days, rang out with out-of-tune-piano,
Overcoming outside sounds of galvanized spinning steel,
Singing its wind-song.
Out-singing even mocking birds,
She sang.

Sundays, - She sang,
Over South Texas Summer squalls and
Sighing spring-greened Mesquite.
Over howling winter northers and
Fall’s sweaty southeast sea bluster,
She sang.

Still. - She sings.
And will always, for what she sang about
Saves that sound as it saved the sight of dim eyes, and
Saved those who heard and joined that chorus, for
In my knowing still remains that which
She sang.

(for Mama)


I Saw Him Going

I saw him going,
But, his going was not for my seeing then or now;
In those days, making a living was what he went for
And his living was my living in those days.

He went to build
The new house for us seven, but then there were nine:
Mamma had twins;
Philip, go get the cows, he said,
When he came home from the hospital in the Ford.

He got up early
To go on arsenic spewing tractor, demanded by dew laden cotton fields
To destroy pink boll worms, but it turned cancer on him,
So he went to his hospitals of springtime.

He dressed to go
In suit and tie to teach about Jesus and Paul and he went
To support Adlai and direct the workings of the COOP
And "Daddy, can we go?" and sometimes we could.

He climbed to the top
Of dizzying oil derricks with whirring, finger snatching steel,
Of roofs to patch hail damage, of windmills to fix the drive,
Always ready to reach down for an up-stretched hand.

Mamma saw him go,
Out into the Gulfstream, as she stood on the hot beach sand;
There he was, sun-reflecting head, floating high, way out;
She smiled; for his was her life, then as now.

Some summers he went
Out West, back East, up North, never South, in Chevy or Pontiac;
Pacific, Atlantic, Colombia, Mississippi, Potomac, Appalachians, Rockies,
Redwoods, sweetgums, granite spires, limestone cliffs, passed in a blur.

Where he couldn't go
He read of, drinking in words of places like tall glasses of iced tea
Telling of strange named countries that weren't before and aren't anymore,
Walking, in his mind, among Hottentots and Lapplanders.

Another spring he lay,
Going no place, in white sheets, with tubes, beeps and blinking lights;
Brown, plump, strong, clean fingernailed hands lying useless,
But ready next spring to go grub mesquites from the field.

I saw him going
Another last Spring, maps and charts of his mind more chicken scratches
Than routes and directions, paths dim, not seen clearly, but finally,
Directed toward the Father's own way home.

(for Daddy)

Broomcorn

The old man spreads the cold congealed meat gravy onto a slice of bread
And slakes his grease hunger as he slides again to times of his youth.
He removes his tee shirt and turns the AC colder, swabbing the stinging sweat
From the creases of his loose skinned neck, feeling an itch he’d thought long scratched.
Broomcorn itch - though so slight he barely recognized it.
Like corn but for the evil of itch and schoolboy-hand-ripping by green saws -
This the remembrance that brings on a shudder and tight-closed eyes
As he envisions grabbing the serrated flag and the handful of green tubes
That constitutes the ripened inflorescence that constructs the straws
That stiffen in the blazing sun to get swept up to be threshed into sweepers.
The boys strip them down, gather and interpolate to inner furrows laid out tanning
For a second sweep with lanyard looped for sheaving up ideal-waisted
Hour-glass straw women stacked on the octaves to await later pickup
From the boys they met the last swath swept to ride the bumping flatbed to
The threshing stack as owners dread mildew-making midsummer showers.
And on some days, the heat and humidity and the chemistry of the seeds
Seem to seek the seams of the boys’ super-heated margins and
Attack overburdened immune systems with proteins bred in African wilds
Why? Sorghum chemistry’s purpose to perpetuate misery of the already overtrodden
Who then were thankful for the sixty-five cent/hour wage that would buy a burger?
Swollen eye slits and scabs from night-time clawing is a sorrow but there are more tragic,
Like the propensity of the thresher to chop hands off nice young boys
Who lose the advantage of strength and tenacity to make a way in the world,
Leaving them to embrace the dull alternative of academia and deanships
To the proud profession of pouring paltry earnings down the hole of farming.
So the city dwelling oldster strolls to the store and spurns the plastic bristled brooms
And wonders about the tincture of green still on the straws and the ragged terminus
Of the preferred natural straws and wonders what a half century of
Mechanization might have dealt to the process he knew better than he wanted to.
At home he sweeps the street dirt out, wondering if boys still suffered so.


Truck

Lairpin’ truck, Sal,
A praise for the garden crops,
Not the beaten up pickup.
Greens and roots and reds and yellows
Flashing early summer’s bounty.
Who’d thought – "let’s feed ourselves -
Grow our own?"
Maybe Cain, but many didn’t, couldn’t, didn’t think to -
Not even a tomato.
The bounty eaten from summer’s field and stashed for winter -
Snap beans and fresh pinto beans and dried pintos -
The same for black eyes and crowder and purple hulls and cream
And corn on and off cob – elotes and creamed in great pans
Fixing a taste never even hinted at in cans or from sweet corn –
Field corn transformed to food for folks making their own -
Not to be had by outsiders who don’t feed themselves.
Only two kinds of people in the world not eating okra-
Them that’s stupid and Yankees – oops - one
Africans do and Indians – served at the grand hotels of New York.
One man’s slime another’s texture.
Melons busting, dislodging heart, being ripped open and gutted
For a sugary wet burst
And mush, musk melons golden and sweet like rich ice cream
Greens and summer crossing each other out,
Finishing spring and waiting for fall
Lettuces and cabbages waiting for November’s cool
Cucumbers and eggplants almost making it through summer,
But the red jewel, juicy and meaty drips all the way
And nothing is better than homegrown tomatoes
Then the calabashes – summers and winters
Kershaws and pumpkins, crook necks and disks
Back to spring for tubers – done by May
With the golden roots and purple
And sweet potato jumping to fall
Dug with the peanuts
But the main thing – grown by us – our own food.

Tank

Government money - sometime after the war.
Some senator set it up
So ranchers and farmers
Could trap a little water by throwing up dirt,
Stopping it in some dry gullies.
And when the mud settled
The water was good for cows and such
And fish, even, if it rained again.

Some places they called these places ponds.
But our places were tanks.
I think the little tank in front of Granny's
Was dug by mule by Daddy and Dad
Before the government money.
I hear Dad was baptized there by Daddy,
Among the little black waterbugs.

First tank, second and third tank
Measured the thirsty distance from home when we roamed the brush,
Never considering the buggy cow slime soup drinkable.
How did water snakes, turtles and leopard frogs find
These far flung ranchland oases, often ignored and leaky?
One small, smiling man with leathery face and gnarled hands,
Roy, took tanks to heart.

What tanks could be he made them be.
A husbandman to the government's money,
What he made was for us too.
Distant relatives and pretty little town girls enjoyed his tanks.
There were fish in more than one of Roy's tanks,
But there was, really, only one Roy's Tank.

Size, beauty, clarity, durability -
All roadgraded into this grand little reservoir,
Catching the flow from a great sloping glade before it sluiced
Into White Creek when the big rains came.

We approached the tank baitless most times,
Maybe carrying an axe to split a new-felled mesquite,
Hacking the iron wood with hopes of splintering out
The prized flesh-colored wood sawyer - long horned beetle's spawn.
Congenital Jungian knowledge promised
The biggest bass or catfish would take this squirming daemon.
Tiny frogs at the verge, easily slapped by willow sticks,
Or grubs under dead trees and grasshoppers in the weeds
All seemed willing enough to act the part, when stunned and stuck.
Spin cast rigs and yellow, black-specked shyster lures
Graduated us from bait hunter-gatherers to anglers.

More than a few fish fries were supplied by Roy’s tank
But there were lots that got away and, others that didn’t, became legend
Like the five-pounder caught in the back under the dorsal.
In the big drought the deep holes, muddied from cows,
Held on when the other tanks shriveled and cracked.
Then came the rains again and Roy restocked
Without ever getting gratitude from the beneficiaries
Who loved what he gave.

Finally, I offer the thanks deserved.


Granny’s Porch

That space of gray-painted one-by-six shiplap boards
Provided a covered entry
And room for two of those old circle-backed iron chairs
The southern porch made famous.

Granny and we sat there, facing the shaded east
To catch the southeastern sea breeze
That came every day when the sun had heated the land up enough
To suck it in from the slightly cooler Gulf.

We grandkids - cousins - might crowd eight or ten at a time,
Yelling and laughing -
Jumping over the periwinkle or petunia bed to the yard
That Granny’d kept alive through the droughts from the dregs in the old cistern.

But the real worth of the porch was the view of the old mesquite
And the hollow back of the wood stove lid
She filled with clear water for jewel-feathered
Neighbors who fluttered down to take a pure, clean drink.

Granny tolerated the kid’s traps
That caught vermillion and indigo
With white wings and top knots four at a time
But she somehow saw they all got to fly away, minutes from the capture.

So we all knew the Birds of Texas
As did Granny,
Reciting names like Passerina and Geococcyx
For painted buntings and road runners

It’s years since anybody put water out
Like Granny did;
Those last few mesquites were chained down too,
When the hunters went crazier and bought the whole countryside.

River

I drank from it.
Daddy threw me in and
I swam so next time he wouldn’t have to.

In late spring flow we seined with a tow sack
And river shrimp and red horses wiggled with the shiners and toppers.
We dug mussels – the conchos the Cuahuiltecans lived on,
Their stink left them uneaten but for the nocturnal coons.

Channel cats, blues, appaloosa, some perch and gaspergou,
Then high class entries – crappie, whites and largemouths.
The monster gars ruled them all with their long, sharp teeth.
Gators left their tracks and tail drags in the flood mud as if to tell:
“There’s somebody here a sight bigger than you.”

Our river, the last river, the last dependable water for a hundred miles
Cooled us, flowing through our “marginal steppe”
To a city who would do better with desalination.
We swam, rise or trickle – even the drought let us run and splash most years.

The river was not a girl place by the time I arrived.
The pool in ’62 meant female swimmers could keep their heads up.
Where had they learned to swim without our river?

Noon’s suspended cotton picking brought a horde of teen testosterone
To jump from chalk bluffs and wear out a labor force
That dragged itself back to the fields in the zenith of heat.

The river’s “owners’” pride grew.
First the locks, then the signs.
No more my daddy knew your daddy.
Not any my mama rode her horse into the river right there back in ’22.

What’s a blocked resource?
No more dank mud smell or tiny frog midday complaint,
Cicada riots and tail splashes are silenced.
It may as well dry up.

Yet once or three times
I drank from it.

Keehiho

Named, called, recalled, renamed
Nomer, misnomer – San, Sin, Cajo, Caja, mountain, hill, mesa
Boxes, saints, with, without, holy coffins, bones, treasure chests -marked by a highest hill
Viewed from Granny’s mesquite, Korchinski’s hill, Tilden road, Mountain View,
Rising above planar plains, shimmering in August simmer,
It beckons me like nothing else, ever.

This singular rise enters my sleeping dreams like no other place.
I go alone – it is my place; companions are peripheral.
I gain its summit and gaze to the far lands, to Mexico perhaps, overlooking a wasteland
That’s a Narnia space that promises me a longed-for homeland
I cannot perceive nor conceive of upon waking.

The beasts and varmints define the place in my childhood
With rattlesnake’s staccato off under packrat middens and sand racer’s zipping,
Rabbits and ground squirrels scurrying, avoiding the approaching platoon
Wild hogs give scares on the way and full racked white tails burst through the brush.
The sky never lacks for buzzard, hawk or caracara.
At the cliffs, in the holes are bobcats, javelinas, fleas and bats.
On the bluffs, panthers might be waiting ‘cause we want so badly to see one.
Skunk flavors the air along with the chapollo blossoms
And a colossal comb with hordes of bees drips honey in the rocks.

The crown is thicketed with chapote, guajillo, granjeno, mesquite, palito and palo blanco
Woven with tassajillo, nopales, comida de bibora and agarita,
Opening up for manca caballo and sangre de drago.
And rocks – big rocks not seen for miles around but for the Lomas
With collared and spiny lizards and horny toads, sunning and
Shading cross country pokings of tortoises, tarantulas and giant velvet ants.
And the one, the only fern, soaking up northside drips on the lower rocks.

My lone hill figures in the history of others, I concede.
Maybe someone buried treasure on or near here.
A last Indian fight gave the locals a chance to meet death through violence,
So someone looked for the treasure, digging tunnels
And then someone’s lawyer had him fill’em in.
A place of picnics evolved to big buck hunter’s preserve
Then a place of exclusion, a resource blocked to adventure,
A place for owners to use the law to seclude and bar.
We who long just for the sight and the smell and the sounds
Own it still in our souls – we sought treasure there, but of an eternal kind.

These are writings that show my attachment to South Texas. They are also true and based on personal incidents.

EMOTIONAL NATURAL HISTORY

A Place

Attachment to place
Especially those I count mine
Keeps youth rushing back to touch this future.
Our place – south of here – south of most places
Didn’t seem that strange,
Especially not exotic, as I see it now.
I watched at ten years
When they chained down the woods
Trying to make it some prairie that never had been or could be.
Daddy cleared his fields with ax and grubbing hoe,
A careful slash and burn that matched human effort and nature’s rebound.
Most of the wonder of plants and animals around us
Didn’t belong to us
But to friendly neighbors.
That’s until Deer Money came into the equation
And proved the postulate that money trumps neighborhood -
We didn’t blame them.
Whatever the social and environmental evolution,
Then and now,
The ties and links to that place will hold me until I’m gone.
I track down every path and perimeter of that place, in my mind
And remember the times we had –
Mostly fun when you smooth back the periphery.

Caliche Cliffs

Think about where they came from
Where they went,
Where they’re going.
Has downstream always been thataway?
Where should we set the beginning of always?
Since we’re talking about caliche, we’d better remember
That limestone - made up by little squirmy things –
Was upstream from here somewhere.
So the hills and little mountains north and west
Sent some of their tops and sides down here
To wash into pools along with the sandy stuff
From some deeper source, scraped, ground, mixed
To a concrete of sorts,
Settling and sticking and building layers of graying, creamy white,
Not quite rock nor clay either - caliche.
This white earth makes good walls, if you saw it square,
Not letting it crumble, letting it set with its neighbors.
Then, too, it can be gouged and mixed with tar or what not
And made into roads.
Or, the rains can start pulling it down to the sea that laps further down now,
Taking away the ridges shoved up by some angry crustal shrug,
That snapped a caliche chalk fault line
From the piney woods to the long river that’s not where it was then.
You could call these fifty-foot-deep gullies canyons
Like the locals sometimes did – calling coyotes wolves in the same sentence;
Or you could get it right and just call it White Creek.
Of course not a real creek,
Because with that caliche and south Texas clays and such,
Springs don’t flow but when it rains for days,
And no creek keeps flowing without springs.
But to the point – the really wow caliche cliffs or bluffs
Are called Tecolote.
That’s Nahuatl for the monkey-faced owls we always watched for,
Dodging the cloacal flux as they burst from the holes
In the sheer pure white walls
That had just enough toeholds for scaling nearly to the top
To the black recesses so we could
Doodlebug around with little sticks through the vomited
Fur and bones of the tiny rodents that carpeted
The vestibules of the tecolote tunnels.
I think it’s still the way it was, this set of bifurcating trenches
Washed from the sides of worthless hills down to the dry creek and on to the river.
Generations past, its members mostly dead now,
Found it a cool , shady hiding place for romance,
But I never knew a girl from my day who would have walked through the white heat
To watch owls poop or to come home to brag about the seven-foot rattlesnake
Or the javelinas that chased us up that ravine where we found that big arrowhead.
Maybe deer hunters on the big leases get by there from time to time
To look down these curious barranquitas where no game of interest creeps.
Still, I’d like to see that crumbly old hole in the ground
From above and below while I can still walk.
Maybe some of my old brush roving buddies can get me in
And help me get back there.