Wild Moon Symphony Preview       Kyoti       Back Issues        Comments

Jimmy Warner's Wild Moon Transit

Jan  2000

On this, the first day of the last year of the millennium,
I wish to celebrate the passing century with glimpses of my family.

Christmas Comet

UNTIL IT THUNDERS

GETTING WELL BEFORE MARRIAGE

A toddler takes his first walk in sawgrass
risking burrs, thorns or a horned beetle
and the rasping edges of a dark green grass,
salt to the heart of its stubborn stance.

This visitor after fifty years enjoys
the little hard luck dance and purses lips
around new breath and old native talk.
When the child returns with a cherry red bump

I tell him what my granddad always said,
"It'll get well before you get married."

Granddad warned that compulsion is a teacher.
After asking why you'd do a thing like that,
he'd never accept a plea of ignorance
unless you leveled with him and said,

"I just HAD to."

"Well," he'd say, "that explains it then."

Boys HAVE TO do things before marriage;
have to kill small things, poke sticks in holes,
attach stuff to long strings and whirl them
til they hit something or themselves.

I have a small scar on my arm
made by glass on a string,
Granddad's words still hover there
every time I happen to notice it.

Boys HAVE TO break glass
even if they're trying not to;
that's what it's for.
They have to roll up as well as down hills,
aggravate bees, smush ants, scatter termites,
keep wounded birds, befriend dogs, any dog,
frighten cats, pester old ladies, steal plums,
ride bikes through flower beds, turn on a hose,
eat poisonous berries or feed them to the cat,
bury a brand new toy, dig up dead pets
just to see what they look like a month later,
invent new pesticides and rocket fuels,
cook things that weren't meant to eat,
burn things that are labeled fireproof,
find new uses for candle wax,
melt plastic figures into twisted horrors
and blow them up with fireworks,
make noises like heroes, cherish violence,
play with dead entrails,
terrify girls with insects, worms or animal parts,
stage funerals for rats, executions for toads,
rave over a smelly, dead fish,
scoop up beached nettles with sticks
and sling them,
climb trees out onto rotten limbs,
snap branches into each other's face,
throw rocks, especially into bodies of water,
slip on banks, fall into creeks,
spit gum where one is bound to step in it,
arrange other accidents
and nasty things to be stepped in,
booby trap staircases,
pull pranks under a bathroom window,
surprise a girl in her bath,
harass her through a transom,
perpetuate epic hoaxes,
and boast of huge creatures lurking
only THEY have seen.

A boy must come in with burrs in his hair,
ripped jeans covered with dirt and grass stains,
carrying the rarest collection
ever contained in a cigar box, things indescribable
and beyond all recognition,

whereupon I drop him in his tracks
like a jack-lighted deer
and scream at him for something he just HAD to do.

"Kid... go to your room."

I don't try to prevent him with more do's and dont's
than he can ever remember.
After all, he's just trying to
get well before marriage;

it doesn't really matter how.
Disallowed,
he could do far worse later on.

 

THE LONG SEASON IN MAY

She might still be waiting for it to end, lying beside my Granddaddy
out there dead in Crater Road Cemetery,
their combined headstone divided into his and hers,
where for the first time in forty years, they sleep together.

My maternal Grandmother, Marie Gertrude

was the first ecologist in my life
who knew the local history of the Delta,
where pine cottage memory stretched out half a mile or more
to the once pristine beaches and forgotten sandbars.

She hoped to blame their disappearance on global phenomena,
not sure if the perpetrator would be Man or God.

Each May we'd all pack belongings into Granddad's
cherry-kept, portholed Buick
and travel down narrow, country roads to the cottage
where deep green with whitecaps
the bay greeted us through a slice of pine.

Opening the car-door flooded the senses
with salt savory and sweetgrass
that made the long trip seem worthwhile.
.
Into the musty, cool dark of knotty-pine cottage,
the wonderful air followed as each window flew unstuck
and French doors unstopped, let in the view.

At some point my Grandmother would begin
the gradual lament of her years, demonstrating
that any kind of neglect thereabouts was due to the same
natural subtlety of age that all things undergo.

Out onto the screened porch came the creaky, old, canvas chairs,
and there she'd sit for awhile making new epitaphs
that no-one ever questioned or asked her what she meant
when she rattled off a statement like,

"We survived The Great Depression by eating endsmeat
and backbone pie."

Somewhere behind the scenes was a butcher who loved her,
saving up those red columns of pork spine to give her each day.

The weather always turned dismally gray
against the copper-green, rooster vane atop the pump house
as one northeaster followed another during May's dreary progression
announced by Grandmother's heralding cry,

"This is the long season in May."

Back beneath deep recesses of kith and ken,
were collective concerns about a summer that never came,
of a crack of Crackatoa, long before she was born.

She tried and retried her God of Mercy
whose sky of ashes blanked the sun
when the late snow fell in June of 1809.

She scoured the back pages of newspapers
for hidden reports of pyrotechnic billows in God's activities abroad
and spoke sternly to those who would listen
as she accused each overcast day
of causing more, bug riddled trunks of mimosa,
and more shoals of sand to be washed away.

With words of wonder and despair, she'd say,
"Perhaps there will be another Ice Age after all, apres moi."

She paced up and down the screened in porch
pausing with binoculars, evidence in hand,
that yet another tree had fallen this year, a victim of the sea.

She waded back and forth along the waterfront
poking and prodding the shore line rocks
with her custom, sawed-off crab net,
rejoicing with every soft-shelled crab stuffed in the pockets
of a gray, stained, canvas bib,
assured that summer was safely on its way.

By June, the glib, telltale signs of nature
were just enough to ease her great anxiety,
brought on by all those occasional, rubbed-raw days
that unsettle with fog and drizzle
the sailor's nerve, the sea watching wife,
that turn the waking eye of spine chilling concern
outward and skyward

as though a pastry of gray crust overhead
might never be broken
til the end of the long season in May.

 

These next two remember my Grandmother Aleta from Ohio

OF MICE AND ROSES

Looking down the avenue at the monuments,
I can trace the love inside me back to the eighteen eighties,
to grandmothers and grandfathers
whose thoughts still race through mine.

WHAT IS IT THAT GOES DIRECTLY
FROM GRANDPARENT TO GRANDCHILD
AND SKIPS ALL OTHER GENERATIONS?

My grandmother, naked in her bath,
would swing open the door to answer that question.
Just like the bible stories she read me,
filled with naked people running around, fearing God.

"THEY WERE WICKED MEN AND WOMEN IN THOSE DAYS,"
she read.

Whenever she spoke of the wicked
I pictured my mother and father naked
and thought how stupid I was,
coerced by men in black robes to honor them.

Grandmother excelled as a gardener planting honor in my hard pan will.
Lying beside her in her huge bed wide as nightfall, she inscribed
words, numbers and pictures on my back for me to guess,
her strong, sensual message, more forceful than a trembling hand.

She talked of honor, of roses growing from the heart,
of dishonor lodging its thorn.

She showed me a dead mouse lying in a trap
and entrusted to me its burial,
but all I could do was fondle
the soft fur of the mouse over and over in my pocket
until finally with her help, resting it on a powder puff in a perfumed box,
we entombed it by a tree in a plot of urban dust.

THERE WAS WONDER AND DESTRUCTION
AS RILKE ONCE SAID, NOT DEEPLY UNDERSTOOD

though demonstrated before my unwavering eyes
by her cultivation of a rose and by my imitation of a bud.

 

THE SKELETON VISITS GRAMMA

Night reaches out of private space,
toys with her stars making up faces
promising little boys a tangible, sugary taste.

In my mask of life, unlike a Halloween mask,
running before curfew in a skeleton suit,
I had the gut-instinct to visit Gramma.

I ran sweating in rubber clothes as the afterthought arose
that Gramma might want to see my fall fashion.
Nurses and hovering friends received me nervously,
ushered me through the acrid smell of sickness
to Gramma's chamber

whereupon she sang a note of pleasure and surprise.
Unwittingly I pranced my specter of death before her dying eyes.
We were all saints in bad taste, stooping to keep her alive.

She recognized the suit, but with the mask removed she asked me
who I was.
"It's your grandson," they all chimed in.

I don't think she was aware that she had one.
"It's little Jimmy," they added.
"Oh, Jimmy, my boy," said Gramma, for now I was her son.
"We'll go to the park again soon," she said with apology
high in her voice,
"And you can spend the night when I'm feeling better.
Don't be mad at me; can you promise that?"

And I promised. And I promised.

When she died shortly before my birthday I was plenty angry
and I banged things about the house all day.
"I went to see her you know," I yelled to mom and dad,
"Why didn't you tell me she was dying?"

They gathered to stare at me, mouths hung open.
"When?" they whispered. "Halloween night," I replied.
"That's when she went into a coma," they said to each other
as though I had no medical savvy whatever.
"Hey, I watch Richard Boone, I study health in school,
I know what leukemia is, and Gramma told me about death
and its nothing to whisper about," I exclaimed in a torrent.
"I showed her my costume and she liked it and I'm glad
and she made me promise not to be mad at her, but I am.
I'm mad at everyone for lying." I shouted, heaving shoulders.

My parents were stunned, and yet, I sensed respect.

Each Halloween I celebrate victory over death.
I observed the ritual in my own spooky way,
running through moonlit streets and up to porch lights,
ringing bells, announcing trick or treat.

One old lady asked me, "Do you promise to be good?"
"No," I said, clenching fists,
"but I'm going to church tomorrow and pray for my gramma
when they read her name from the list."

copyright   Jimmy Warner 1999