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Squirrels

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

Even when sitting on the lawn,
squirrels seem perched:
clinging as they do to ground
as if it might sway
in the next wind.
Never are they less than
tense, sinuously sleek.
Always poised for the quick
dart, the lunge, or
skittering flight to safety.

Never a wasted motion: witness
especially the flickering twitch
in a false direction before the
true thrust; such feints
are of most value.

They make fools of cats,
who, to salvage something,
break off the chase, subside,
and look regal and uncaring.

30 September

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

On the last day of the month, October
came in six hours early,
bringing a sweet wind out of the north
running before rain.
Spreading out over the plains was a
blue-gray sea for sky,
with surprising white flecks of foam
before it.
Smoke-puff clouds scraped their bellies
on the hills to the west,
which, a child out of the mountains, I once
scorned as lying too low,
now my own and loved.

Unleashed winds blew eagerly about
our valley
with the wayward motion that was to
be the carrier of leaves.

Autumn spirits announced the end of
sultriness
with a delight akin to that of the
rebirth in Spring;
soon afterward, trees and people began
clothing themselves in red and brown.

Idyl in a Willys-Knight

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , 3 Comments

by Joseph Baldwin

Other roads followed the level ground,
but this one turned a corner to the right
around a farmstead and its dark red buildings,
and the car strained over to the left, then centered
on the road
to follow up the gentle slope of a small hill,
then dropped down on the other side into a quiet
valley
where good people were sitting down to supper
after prayers.
Idly-pecking hens stepped about near the old
staunchly-built barn,
and a collie came sniffing eagerly to the gate,
his brown eyes welcoming. One tanned youth
came striding in late from the field and sprang
up the back steps
and buried his face in water his hands scooped
up from the basin.

One more long look. Then the Willys, at the
pressure of my foot,
lifted its nose and pointed away toward mountains
that lay like a purple cloud bank on the horizon.

One of the tiny lights set in that loftiness
marked where we should find shelter for the night;
which one, we’d discover in good time: the steady
climbing toward that promise was now, for the long
while,
peace enough and fulfillment, in itself.

December

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

A raw wind bent trees, blew through people and houses,
making them skeletons-of-the-moment; flesh reviving
after an interval,
but flesh discouraged, unsure of itself;
siding, stones, bricks intact, opaque once more, but
now open to question.
That wind, while it endured, was like a stark insight,
exposing — not to the eye but to intuition,
second-sight –
the structure of things, their intricate interlacings
of girders, timbers, and bones,
beautiful in design, beautiful even in accidental
or whimsical patterns of jointure and bracing;
but, alas, revealing which supports and linkages
were doubtful, which joints arthritic.

Subsidence, crumbling, and decay: their coming,
always expected in due course,
was indicated, in certain areas, as imminent.

Wind, itself transitory by nature, makes sojourners
of us, as well;
but also brings, mingled with that chill of dread,
a slender thought of soaring, an almost-hope
of ranging free of attachment, cured of the
temerity of substance,
sobriety of weight.

Private Soldier

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

I am one among the platoon they sent
to seize that itinerant preacher, rabbi, magician,
or whatever he was. And, being pushed forward, first
to lay hand on him. (Not the sort of thing
I’d do on my own, but you know how it is with a squad,
fellows pressing all about you.) Well,
before I knew what was happening, some wild peasant
among them had whipped out his sword, and there in the dust
was my ear! — before anything started to hurt.
I mean, blood from it was spreading and making dark mud,
and the side of my head felt cool, as if a breeze
had touched that side and not the other.
Up this leader of theirs stood, he the cleanest-looking of them,
and lifted his hand toward me, and may have mumbled something…
I don’t know. I was “just coming around,” as you might say,
and raised my hand and felt my ear in place where it ought to be.
Meanwhile, this leader of theirs was giving the swordsman
a proper talking-to. And after that,
he put himself into our hands, and went along
with us to the chief priest.
The thing is — the amazing thing, you see — is,
none of my mates ever knew my ear was off,
and made no mention of it. I suppose
they thought the wild one had made a pass at me and missed;
and I didn’t want to say anything to them then,
not just then, till I had a chance to think it over.

Maybe it didn’t happen, after all? I’ll never know.
But — my hearing’s been different, ever since,
in ways I can’t just put my finger on.

If he was a magician, he was an odd one, don’t you know?
He let them nail him to a cross, and there he hung –
so they tell me. I was on a pass to my home village, by then.
Who’d waste leave-time in Jerusalem, with all those mobs,
and Roman soldiers making a mock of us, and getting all the girls?

Fontaine Fox

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

He drew cartoons that strangely moved me; the jests
were in the foreground; the landscapes they were set in
stretched on beyond them, wan and deftly true:
the awful ordinary. Streets were shown
that had pushed too far from town, curbing set in,
lamps on poles, with nothing to shine upon
but expanse of ground, a single fire hydrant poking
its dome above a cluster of weeds, the corner
store built and then abandoned in this
waste, the “end of track,” where motorman
go out and switched the trolley pole around,
then ate his lunch. These scenes I knew, as a child.
America, in many places, was then
a land of vacant lots. I saw them from
train windows, and from the trolley car, and brooded
over them, not having then formed any
opinion, only bemused by a world unfinished.

Fur-Flight

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

I saw a squirrel launch himself
from a perch ten feet above where the trunk
of my elm forks to form a V,
and leap across to the other branch,
landing only a foot or so below
his departure point.
Inside such a quaint fur ball,
what suppleness, lithe grace!
How he gathered, flickered across
the space, then landed, again a ball,
and then slimmed out again
to scuttle along a limb!

Could this be only a search
for food, such a ballet?

I must believe he did it
for joy alone.

His flight, for flight it was,
was like words without music,
the words making me hear
a music of my own;
similarly, he wore, for a moment,
splendid and indescribable
wings — of my imagining.

Branch Line Local, 1923

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , 1 Comment

by Joseph Baldwin

In that part of Tennessee, the train rocked
like a vessel on a storm-tossed ocean:
outside, red clay banks rose and fell away with
sickening surprise,
green meadows humped up in great muffin-like swells
and then fell off to nothing;
the horizon was going up and down.
Trees walked along the ridges;
the child saw them as dark muttering giants
keeping a menacing pace with the tall windows,
seeming to march with the train for a while,
then only reluctantly falling behind and away.

The child — rocked, lulled — heard
the french-harp whistle up ahead
and stared at the custard-colored ceiling
from which hung clusters of tulip-star lamps
and wondered at the rich, edible color
and the sweet lights’ glowing in day-time.
Wondered long
until life paused, and he slept,
cradled in good: the train.

Awakened in Virginia by this warning:
Don’t mention the train to Grandma.
– Grandmother, bed-ridden now fifteen years,
victim of a train-wreck in Kentucky, a collision,
and of the dark business (so the story went)
of company representatives picking their way
among the wreckage, getting release forms signed
by the dazed injured people, she one of the cheated:
the family grudge told over and over, but resisted
by the child.

Too soon, too soon in life to learn
of evil lurking in beauty; not for the child
to know of the copperhead coiled beneath flowers
waiting to fang his mother’s hand reaching for eggs
in the “stolen” nest; also, he shut his ears against
his cousins’ warnings about stings waiting
among blackberry bushes. These were gashes in
a world which should be sure, and whole.

For Grandma (propped up in her bed)
he sang about Jesus
and recited his poem and was kissed; earned back
his homeward journey in the train — trusting,
surrendered to the green seat’s swaying,
hearing the voices of wheels and rail-joints
and the complaints of bonded wood and iron
working upon each other in the inmost secret
coach-parts like the creaking of oaken ships’ timbers.

The pauses in life, the on-going lulls
of journeys, not the arrivals: these
he would love, life-long. He knew this
in secret; clutched it close against reproof.

Cloud Picture

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

Images, images.
Gull wings, cutting scarlet;
sun fractured, bitten
into new shapes.

On fire, glowing fire,
are edges of things,
because of sun;
and thunder-colored undersides
sulk.

Wreckage of a storm
which harbored in itself
dissentings.

Most savage mien,
but innocent now
of any harm,
its violence changed
to rue:
the look of embers.

Geese, and the Boy

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

A sound like a bicycle horns,
coming at us at rooftop level, rapid and almost scary.
The six-year-old next door,
stomping his trampoline and soaring
again and again, cries to his brother:
“Geese! Geese! Hear?”

And again, without pause
in his jumping, himself airborne
almost as much as the birds:
“Geese! Hear?”

And I was glad I heard
both boy and geese.

He is the one who,
when three years old,
put the family’s miniature
Doberman-pinscher into
the refrigerator,
as a kind of experiment.
(The dog survived.)

And he’s the one I’ve seen
doing a sort of pantomime
on the way to school,
making only a bit more
progress forward than to
one side or other of the walk,

straying to look at things,
to handle them and test them,
to threaten them, to pose with them
– all the while voicing
a wordless music.

Him I have seen
breaking a branch off a bush
and making it his foil
for fencing with the other branches.

And once I saw him
picking up the little yellow flags
marking the path of
the buried natural gas line
and using them as darts
for tossing at tree trunks.

I shall hope to hear geese again,
and soon after, the boy
not yet immune to amazement
who, at home or edging schoolward,
dances his own movie.

Creatures Interface

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

Raccoons live in the storm sewer — this I believe
since seeing a great rat-rump near the entrance;
the whole beast almost swallowed by that concrete mouth,
suddenly a clown face flashed at me over a shoulder:
one look, then gone. Not a rat, after all!
I was reassured, for I had been all ice with the thought:
If the rats around here are this big, I’m moving!
Apprehension gone; comfort given — by a raccoon!

Life in a sewer? — or do they live in trees and only
hunt in sewers?
What is the way of raccoons, in a city,
confronting asphalt, concrete, human noise and detritus,
ears nature tuned to owls here assaulted by sirens and
horns.

Which of us, then, is the intruder?

And what did that one, for instance, think
of the sudden clown face I showed him?

Ghosts of a Summer Evening

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

He stepped out into the warm, caressing
night, and smiles, remembering music
and slim girls in bright flimsy dresses,
smiling, sweat gleaming on their foreheads.
And then came near fainting with dismay.
It was a judgment on his life,
he feared, that such a night, beloved
of his youth, should now distress him.

Warm, warm, they had been, eight hundred
miles away and fifty years
ago! And careless of all but love songs,
blooming youthful bodies, and hope.

Fans placed here and there gave breaths
of cooling; moments were enough,
then back to the giddy heat and swirl
of dance; linkings raised hopes higher.

Hopes of what? Life to be grasped.
Each other, grasped. Promises;
only implied, but promises,
for all of that; in touch, in glance.

Promises of bright futures;
financially bright, of course; but also
immediate promise given unspoken,
then taken back, as soon as given.

The embrace frankly sexual;
but, by tacit agreement, not that
at all, only social custom,
though shared sweat drenched clothes of each.

And weren’t mothers looking on,
while scantily-clothed daughters clung
to lanky swains, to see that all
was decent, stayed within control?

Years later, why dismay? Distress?
Ah, yes. The memory of shame,
at being an imposter there.
Imposter? Yes. But, in what sense?

Why, simply that all such affairs,
cotillions, balls, “formals,” where
the bright of eye and light of foot
displayed themselves (discreetly and

by custom, but nonetheless displayed
themselves as “eligible”) had ever
been a showing of wares. And also
that one knew it was understood

accepting such hospitality
and exchanging embraces in the formal
figures of the dance meant one
shared in this eligibility,

having “something to offer,” and wasn’t
poor then, nor poor in prospects. Ah, yes:
the cruelty of the social system,
offering such delights, but only

at a price! Better not
to have come at all, as if disguised
as one of them and able, like them,
to repay the piper for the tune.

Hence, the shameful distress. In spite
of knowledge that the sweating girls
of long ago in long bright dresses
were now grandmothers; that, or dead;

and that the dance, the glitter and romance,
was all a form of commerce; dismay
persisted. The shame of being poor,
of having been poor, lasts all one’s life.

Also, the shame of having been
a pretender lasts. But, O! the glowing
girls, the music, and the dance!
Enchantment, then its own excuse.

Downpour

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

Raindrops are exploding
into brief crystal crowns
on the glistering asphalt
outside my window,
thunder is laying down
a barrage, dullness and
sloth in nature are being
defeated, stale air and
old thoughts washed clean,
all life renewed.
– Even my own. I shall
stir, soon as the storm
has passed, and stride
about outside, ingesting
the new world; blithe,
remembering how prodigal was
the scattering of crowns.

Window: A Portion of the World

October 23, 1997 By in Go Inside Tags: , , Leave a comment

by Joseph Baldwin

I am saying goodbye now
to the scene outside the window:
certain trees, a familiar tilt of land.
Travelers through called it flat country,
but we who lived here knew
that it leans this way and that, by turns.
Witness: during the ice season, some intersections
needed sand, else you couldn’t get started
if the red light halted your car upgrade.

Well. It was nothing to see, our place,
even with its up and downs. Travelers
went through here on their way to the mountains,
forests, canyons, lakes, geysers; and (eventually)
the ocean. Only stopped among us for
gas and food.

People who lived here came only for the job.
The place was… nothing much. And
always open to the wind. You wouldn’t choose it.

No one would hymn this place; not
ungrudging hymn it. Instead, some
hymn their forbears for having
endured it and brought it under cultivation.

And this place I’m telling goodbye,
with nowhere else in particular to go.
Where would I go, if I’d not walked or worked there?

They tell of prison librarians, who,
having built the collection, and having
found a function, regret being paroled.

And we who worked in ampler prisons,
on tasks we hardly chose at will, but
fitted into, and had our orbits:
home-to-work, home-to-church,
home-to-the-movies, to the stadium,
to Chinese food, to… in short, to
the limits of this wider prison,
saw the travelers going through, and
saw it with their eyes, and knew it.
It was… nothing much.

But what our keepers in this prison
never figured, never counted on — if ever
they thought of us who were only functions,
people you’d never hear about, people
who could be laid off in slack seasons
and never missed — what they never counted on
was this: we could love. Love
certain familiar trees, the slant
of land, buildings kept in poor
repair but still inhabitable,
where our work-benches were and
where our tools were kept.

In the slack season, they didn’t see us
come down to the old buildings, use
the keys they didn’t take back from us,
open the doors, and sit at the work-benches,
picking up the old tools one at a time,
and looking at them as if they were strange:
feeling their heft in the hand, just in case –
what? — they might be used again?
They forgot we were human and had to love
something.

And now
even that scene is outside my window
and I’m telling it goodbye.
I didn’t choose this, either.

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