In Writing: Dale Hobson

This is a second stab at this scenario: me, insomniac at a window imagining my fellow insomniacs awake with me, near me on a moonlit night. Only a few lines remain of the first take: Light in Other Windows. I’m not quite where I want to be with it be even yet.

Night Owls

A hazy half-moon hangs upon the wee hours,
a lone lamp beckoning at the edge of the village.
Everyone’s asleep but the sleepless, who gaze 
out from dark rooms as late freights rumble by.

As for me, past my three-score-and-ten, I sleep
little and lightly, as if saving up for eternal rest.
But each inhabits a different village from each
as long as the rest of the village lies asleep.

One is wondering why the dead keep calling him,
why even in dreams he can’t be done with them.
Another wonders where she lost her way, if 
the way things are is the way they will always be.

One studies his reflection in the window, as if he 
were twins, one in darkness and one in the light.
In another a naked man smokes until a sleepy
murmur sounds and moon-pale flesh reaches out.

A calico cat blankets a windowsill, still but for her
blinking eyes which track mice in the moonlight.
A vet startled out of nightmare keeps moonlit watch,
cleans his sidearm, reassembles it by touch alone.

A pregnant woman moons out her kitchen window,
rubs her sore back, spoons ice cream from the carton.
And a bookish man stays up staring at a blank page,
clutching a fruitless pen beneath a stingy moon.

All these in just one square mile of night. Watching
over them, I feel I must leave some benediction:
“May the night train carry you to dreamless sleep;
may daybreak burn off what lurks in the deep.”

This feels like the first real North Country winter we’ve had in years. Five or six falls of powder without a thaw. Temperatures below zero at night. Not just coat weather, but scarf and mittens and boots. I prefer to observe it out the upstairs window, from behind my desk, wearing a cardigan and drinking coffee. It’s a good perch from which to consider the outlines of my next book.

The Open Field

All the work of last summer is purified now, deep in snow.
Game trails pierce the once claustrophobic honeysuckle.
Fox and rabbit make dens in stacks of brush and deadfall.

The back yard opens out towards the river, back to trees
whose growth has tumbled the stones of the old pasture wall. 
Morning sun floods between their limbs into my back room.

At least one more season of clearing work remains, or three–
who can say–but it is good work, the results plain to see.
In a world full of pointless and invisible toil, this is not nothing.

The open field is only a beginning, the way a blank page
is necessary to beginning a new book. Fresh, unstained,
it is fit to hold anything imaginable, anything at all.

Some of this comes from an older poem that sort of petered out unsatisfactorily. I decided it needed a second person and a touch of mortality.

Cold Snap

All night as we lay sleeping snow came down,
the way time accumulates invisibly until 
one morning these are the faces in our mirror.

What plans we might have had for the day – 
poof. Nothing is moving from here to town, 
nothing moving among white-freighted trees.

Only snow is moving, snow steadily falling,
flowing into drifts like waves breaking on
the white beach of a slow-motion ocean.

The cedars harbor black-capped chickadees
fluffed up twice their size against the cold, 
beaks tucked under wings white with snow.

The old farmhouse creaks in the draft. I feel
it in my bones, despite a well-worn cardigan.
I feel it in my heart, despite your presence.

But it is just the inner echo of the weather,
a cold snap of the mind, the brevity of the day
laid alongside the bitter length of night.

Cold and dark get no easier to bear with age, 
reminiscent as they are of that dreaded end
when winters come and winters go without us.

My resolution for the NewYear is to get together with other poets and artists more. I’ve been having a dry spell since I finished my manuscript “The Other Village.” Before I retired, I had a weekly writing assignment to keep me engaged with writing. Then through COVIID and beyond, the new book manuscript went through its several versions. The last time I dried up happened after finishing my first book, “A Drop of Ink,” and casting it adrift among the small publishers who obstruct the sea lanes of contemporary literature.

At that time, 2010 and 2011, I joined up with SLAP ( St. Lawrence Area Poets) and that helped get my juices going again, or at least accompanied me through my rejection slips. Well, SLAP is still around, which proves that the world keeps turning regardless of whether I am working the crank or not. So I’m going back to their monthly gatherings at the SLC Arts Council. I looked back through some of the poetry I wrote to fulfill SLAP assignments and found the following from 2011, which holds up pretty well, I think.

Clouds

First, the ancestor cloud, stratus,
the lattice of DNA, recording each
previous incarnation back to the amoeba.
Here remain mother and father,
instructing the body to grow. Here
is Aunt Anne’s eye and Grandpa’s jaw.

Second, cumulonimbus, the thunderhead
of memory, each impulse, each sensation
of the body, every turn of thought
a mote of condensation, a nexus of charge
that accumulates tension, building up
to lightning that twitches out in action.

Third, the cirrus cloud of culture,
wispy memes of attitude and style,
the ghost of every book ever read,
the music and images, flat phantasms,
instructional manuals, interviews with
the dead, this collective upload to eternity.

This is the way the water circulates,
rising and falling, and rising again.
This is how we distinguish ourselves,
becoming one thing and not another,
a discrete chunk awash in anonymous stew.
Any shape can arise when watching clouds.

There’s something about trillium. They are a near obsession with me and I return to them over and over in my writing. It may just be the physical and emotional constraints of winter being lifted from the shoulders. But I think it might be something more, too. Just what that might be may take a few more poems to flesh out.

Early in May

First warm, sunny day of May, a bumblebee hovers over
blooming rhododendron. Bluets and clover dot the yard,
and dogwood flowers shine white against the pine trees.

I search the riverbanks for trillium, as I’ve done each year
since I was a teenager and came to discover them here
while playing hooky from school with my first girlfriend.

Today, early blooms pop out along the beaver slide down
to Sugar Island reservoir– tiny as a periwinkle, but white
as moonlight. The full-furled flowers are yet to come.

The sweetest beauty is in the birth of something new, 
the promise of what could be, rather than in fulfillment,
which is tempered by knowing, regret, salted with grief.

Trillium time is fleeting, a week or two and then no more,
the way a first romance fires the blood so fiercely it burns
itself to ashes before one can learn how to take good care.

But no matter, we learn better each year as spring returns  
to rekindle even so timeworn a heart as mine, making light
my steps as I clamber up the bluff again to our back door.

Macular degeneration: it’s a classic example of “Some blessings are harder to give thanks for than others.” Failing vision prompted me to retire as a web editor sooner than I might have otherwise. And my previous careers in publication design and printing would now be impractical, or actively dangerous. But I am now freed from being an obsessive workaholic and find I can bring a more reflective depth to my writing and a sharper appreciation for the people in my life and for such places and things as have come under my care.

Unsharpening

The world gains an Impressionistic swash as my vision dulls.
The doctor shows me a Mt. Fuji-shaped blip, as small as 
a pinhead, warping my central sight. Half the rods and cones
in the whole retina cram into this two-millimeter focal point.

It’s inherited from my mother’s side: macular degeneration.
I cringe to recall berating her for not seeing the small flaws in 
a print job when she came out of retirement to help in my shop.  
My vision was fine then, but not fine enough to see her struggle.

Concealing my disability is easy so far–long as I don’t drive 
at night, long as I let Siri talk me through strange streets,
so long as no one notices I do my reading in 30-point type.
How many years did my mother keep up her brave front?

My eyes join my memory now in struggling with names.
I know it’s a bird out in the yard, but can’t see what kind.
More than a few feet away, human faces are anonymous.
Just to be safe, I greet everyone I meet like an old friend.

To be certain if they are friend or stranger, I have to come 
close enough to kiss them. In a way, it is my just deserts, 
for having been so long aloof and oblivious, half-hearted.
For a progressive, incurable condition, this is not too bad.

I discover I’ve always been blind–in worse ways than this.

I’ve written about my poetry “junk drawer” before, how it is sometimes possible to weld pieces together into something good (or good enough, anyway). But no matter how often those unlikely mashups occur, the junk drawer seems to stay as full as ever.

False Starts

Yesterday, snowdrops pearled the bulb bed 
and daffodils raised up their green spears.
The maples were russet with tiny leaflets,
the lilacs freckled with yellow-green buds.

But now it’s gone back to black and white,
each bud and bloom hooded with snow, all
the limbs like chalk on a blackboard of cedar,
the grass a white map drawn in rabbit tracks.

This cruelest month, season of dashed hope,
is, ironically, Poetry Month. Think about it.
It’s as if someone could see in my desk drawer
all those promising openings now abandoned.

There is a cruel streak in American culture that recognizes the utility of keeping people insecure, that wields power by making sure that the bottom is as far down as possible, and that there is no sure way to avoid winding up there. This is one of the reasons so many are reluctant to engage with the homeless, as if misfortune were a contagious disease.

Gratitude

“Never give your money to bums and winos,” Mom
taught me, “they’ll just go spend it on another bottle.”
True enough, often enough, but then she had been
raised up in ungenerous times, the Great Depression.

“There but for the grace of God…” never occurred to me
even though, ironically, I was an alcoholic myself. But 
I was torn by my Puritan upbringing, which taught me
I should give to the “deserving,” but pass others by.

How can I tell? Which one huddled in which doorway
deserved a handout? I wondered, just as if I deserved
every middle-class advantage of American culture–and
which deserved nothing, just as if my own sins were less.

Some years ago, I visited David, living then in Manhattan.
His idea of a walk around the neighborhood was chatting
with all the homeless, most of whom he knew by name, 
and giving each, unasked, a little cash before he walked on.

I was dumfounded. This was not how the world worked.
I asked him “Why give to all? He asked me if I liked to ask
for help. “Well, no,” I replied. “Neither do they,” he said.
“I see the need; why make them ask when I know it’s hard?”

It was kind of a conversion experience. Afterward, I would
keep a little cash on my person, stopped feigning interest
in something across the street as I passed beggars by.
I made my living in public radio, paid by tin cup, mostly.

I recently learned that David had to be nudged toward
epiphany, too. His mom, refugee from pogrom, world war
and Holocaust, once rebuked him for passing a beggar by.
“What,” she said, “are you crazy?” and turned back to give.

I don’t often sweat the big picture. I’m more focused on the small and nearby. But some nights I don’t sleep well and then night thoughts connect the dots for me and I hear the voice of Afrofuturist poet and jazzman Sun Ra say it in his outside voice: “This Planet is Doomed.” All I can say is “Hope not.”

Open Winter

All night the wind worked its way,
transforming snow into snowmelt,
showing here a patch of muddy soil
and there a broken limb of pine.

The tracks that deer left in the yard
grow wide as if Sasquatch roamed
here. Ice fell from eaves, unremarked,
as icebergs calve off from Greenland.

I would say winter gives way, had it
ever really taken hold. I worry when
the weather goes strange, when the
wind chime bells all through the night.

And they say I’m right to worry, not just
for this winter in this place, but for all 
the winters in all the world. Our powers
might grow Biblical, but we are no angels.

The West and the North burn each year;
in the South what doesn’t drown flies off
on the wind. Some say pay no mind–it’s 
natural, or it’s Jesus, or just in your head.

Assholes. I feel an awful future coming,
like an asteroid that dogs Earth’s orbit. 
It’s more a matter of we know not when,
and but a slim chance that we know not if.