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Poetry chapbook by James Scruton. Published by Grayson Books.
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Exotics and Accidentals
Exotics and Accidentals
•
James Scruton
Grayson Books
West Hartford, Connecticut
Exotics and Accidentals
Copyright © 2009 by James Scruton
Printed in the USA
Book Design by Virginia Anstett
Grayson Books
PO Box 270549
West Hartford, CT 06127
www.graysonbooks.com
ISBN: 978-0-9785382-5-5
Acknowledgements
Poems in this collection first appeared in the following
publications:
Amoskeag: “Dogs and Horses”
Buckle: “My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500 Kinds of
Apples Grow in North America”
Connecticut River Review: “Bird Stories”
Cumberland Poetry Review: “Pockets”
Louisville Review: “Heron’s Flight”
Mid-America Poetry Review: “Exotics and Accidentals,”
“Nest”
New Delta Review: “Elegy for Viola Mae”
New Madrid: “Scarecrows,” “Grace”
Poem: “Onion Grass”
Poetry: “Ordinary Plenty”
Poetry East: “A Sunshower in the Middle Innings,” “Honey-
suckle,” “The Accidental Garden”
Southern Poetry Review: “The Names of Birds,” “First
Wasp”
Spire: “Ladybugs”
Steam Ticket: “Good Clean Dirt”
Two Review: “Buckeye”
v
vii
Contents
I
Buckeye • 1
Good Clean Dirt • 2
Nest • 3
The Names of Birds • 4
Heron’s Flight • 5
Scarecrows • 6
Elegy for Viola Mae • 7
A Sunshower in the Middle Innings • 9
Bird Stories • 10
Exotics and Accidentals • 11
II
The Accidental Garden • 15
My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500 Kinds of Apples
Grow in North America • 16
First Wasp • 17
Ladybugs • 18
Onion Grass • 19
Honeysuckle • 20
Ordinary Plenty • 21
Pockets • 22
Dogs and Horses • 24
Grace • 25
I
Buckeye
Tell me again the legend
of the buckeye, of luck
found at the heart
of ordinary things, the bur
and thistle of the everyday.
Let me hear once more the story
of this dark brown charm,
the one I squeeze for words
as if for diamonds
from a piece of coal,
blood from a stone.
Give me the truth in a nutshell.
1
Good Clean Dirt
An ad for Good Clean Dirt
runs weekly in the classifieds,
a few words at the standard rate
among the usual auctions, hay
for sale, tools to buy or trade.
I’ve wondered who would pay
for dirt, if there were grades
not quite so good, so clean
as others, and what those ads
would say. I’ve imagined people
bidding for the best of it:
gardeners, and some young couple
with a new house on a grassless
corner lot, and maybe me there too,
since I’ve thought more than once
of what it might be like to have
that kind of dirt to dig in
at the day’s end, to leave
something good and dark beneath
my fingernails, feeling the cleaner
for it, the salt of the earth.
2
Nest
The kids brought it in,
all twigs and twisted lengths
of grass, a threading fine
as a bird’s flight.
It could have been a basket,
a tiny summer hat.
Not knowing a crow’s nest
from a robin’s, I couldn’t say
what wings had cradled there,
how far that soft bowl
might have fallen
to take its place
among their other treasures:
the long, sloughed snakeskin
and the fossilized leaf,
the arrowhead sharp
and delicate
as a bird’s beak.
3
The Names of Birds
Flicker. Grackle. Coot.
Ruby-throated this, red-headed that,
downy or belted or crested.
They swirl, excited syllables,
feathering our speech like oaths
out of Shakespeare: thou nuthatch,
bufflehead, worm-eating warbler.
Thou pied-billed grebe.
Skylark and nightingale flown,
give me something local
and down to earth, flycatcher
or thrasher, a working-man’s bird,
and, for the two of us, names
as light on the tongue as on the wing,
names to make a love-nest of
my little widgeon, my chickadee.
4
Heron’s Flight
So used to quickness, to bright flashes
at the feeder, swoops and dives
beyond the picture window’s glass,
the eye objects now to the slow heave
of those wings, the unlikely angle
of the heron’s flight, steering
like a drowsy pterodactyl
from marsh to pond, barely clearing
fences and the tall grass of the fields
between, as if just roused from an age
of standing silent in the reeds,
that stillness at the water’s edge
it emulates even in flight,
so languidly aloft it might
at any moment falter, break
itself against the ground, and wake.
5
Scarecrows
You never see them anymore
in fields; they’ve shambled off
the farms, retired now
to front-porch fall tableaux
or shadows of their former selves
in backyard gardens,
pie pans and pinwheels flashing
in the sunshine around them
like fast, newfangled traffic.
But I miss those bucketheads
and strawmen at attention
in overalls and tattered flannel,
broomhandle arms fixed always
in that same cockeyed salute.
And I wish some spring they’d make
a comeback, somehow pull
themselves together and take
their beanpole places after all
the planting’s done, a countryside
of humble sentinels again,
a host of patchwork knights to tilt
at the inscrutable, circling crows.
6
Elegy for Viola Mae
You half-haunt us, now
that half of your ashes
have been spread across
our pasture, your son
wholly faithful to your wishes.
We thought he had stopped
to ask directions, lost
in a rented car among
these hills and hayfields;
instead he showed us photographs
of a horse-plow, barn,
and clapboard house
in greying black and white,
some trees that might have been
our tallest oaks when young.
And then his odd request,
that small urn he had brought,
no word about where else
he would be leaving you…
How could we tell him
he had come so far
to get it wrong, no house
or barn here before our own?
How could we say some part of you
did not belong, laid to rest
7
in his mind, finally,
as he drove away,
half-empty urn beside him,
an old road’s dust rising
in the rear-view mirror?
8
A Sunshower in the Middle Innings
A single cloud passed like a mood
and we were doused with prismed light,
the air like strings of colored beads
around the bases, at mound and plate.
We fielded grounders wet grass sped
and felt the slicked force in our throws.
Each fly ball became a rainbow,
a glove's webbed pocket a pot of gold.
And in just minutes it was gone,
having scattered across our play
like handfuls of enchanted seeds a rain
that fell diamond-bright in sun, the day
from then on merely clear again.
9
10
Bird Stories
—for Cindy
Like those fishy tales about the ones
that got away, like second-hand accounts
of apparitions or strange lights
in the sky, we trade flights of fancy,
avian folklore, shaggy bird stories:
that owl in a house I rented once,
a blue jay’s diving at our cat for hours,
the robin’s nest in your flowerpot.
Now this: some feathered shadow whose beak
keeps chipping at your window, the marks there
sparkling when the sun hits, like scratches
from a youthful lover’s pebbles
dashed against the glass. Maybe, I said,
it’s a jilted one, a would-be lovebird
from your past, or a spirit hatched
from one of the myths you like to teach,
Philomena or some bird undone
by Orpheus as he strummed his last lament.
Somehow you know you won’t look back
on this and laugh, whatever happens next,
whatever story this will become
of omen, ghost, or curse,
of just the ordinary trying to break through.
11
Exotics and Accidentals
These are your favorites,
the ones here on the off-chance,
each a bird of a different feather.
Even nested they never quite belong,
some note they can’t pick up
in local songs, their habitat re-mapped
beneath them. What strange migration
brings them here, what turn
of wing or weather?
Vagrants, stragglers, escaped
or astray, their names go on your list
as if the one place left to land.
II
The Accidental Garden
Late April turning cold,
we saw blankets over flower beds,
front-yard shrubs and bushes shrouded
like furniture in unused rooms,
like church statues during Holy Week—
a solicitude for leaf and stem
that always takes us by surprise,
since anything that grows for us
is wild or thrives by luck, our prized
but accidental garden full
of unruly roses, unlooked-for lilies.
Our blow-ins have become perennials
re-christened every spring: Windbloom,
Randomflower, Golden Come-What-May,
Weather’s Will, Common Chance-Blossom.
15
My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500
Kinds of Apples Grow in North America
A fact that ought to fill me once again
with wonder at the plenitude of this world,
it makes me think instead of two old trees
we had to bring down earlier this year,
of their sour green windfalls
I was always raking up along the fence.
I tell myself no one will miss them
from the 2500 I’ve just heard about—
a nice round number, after all, those last
two digits themselves like little apples—
2500 ways to shine in someone’s eye,
to ward off doctors or please a teacher.
I ask myself how many kinds must grow
the world over; if anyone has counted;
the bad one it would take to spoil them all.
And I wonder about the very first,
the one that started everything, or whether
there were just as many kinds of apples
then as now, an Eden full of branches
grown so heavy something had to fall,
or maybe, as the story says, just two trees
in the beginning, no fruit to pick
or gather yet from either life
or knowledge, nothing for a while
beneath those perfect boughs but shade.
16
First Wasp
Just before the weather changes
it appears, hobbling along a windowsill
or across the glass,
bent as a beggar
in some nineteenth-century novel,
one of those small passing figures
at the periphery of a sprawling plot,
almost unnoticeable
against the view beyond.
17
Ladybugs
Some must be gentlemen bugs, of course,
but we call them ladies, always—
scarlet women of the insect world,
so many tiny, speckled bonnets.
But what of their invasions every spring,
the legions of little helmets
in the cupboard, on the windowsill?
What of their intrepid explorations,
one navigating the folds of my shirtsleeve,
another nudging itself like a sentence
across the page I’m reading?
Two, now three, cling to the kitchen ceiling
the way medieval ships did
to the bottom of the world,
while still another is ascending the Everest
of a lampshade, all of them bearing
a small red flag toward the edge
of everything they know.
18
Onion Grass
It’s finally spring when we smell onions,
some neighbor’s mower spreading on the air
a scent as dark and thick as those tufts
themselves, those wild salad grasses diced
across the mannered blandness of a lawn.
Some tell the fall by burning leaves,
winter by the merest whiff of snow,
summer pungent as a jungle flower.
Around here spring’s a watering of the eyes,
a seasoning so green we almost cry.
19
Honeysuckle
It seems a kind of moonshine,
sweet enough to be illegal,
whole distilleries coiled over fences
and hedgerows every summer.
And shine these blossoms do
on moonlit nights, pale flowers
soaking up the stuff
we squeeze from them a drop
at a time: nectar, juice, sap,
little bubbles of syrup, translucent beads
we can imagine strung with cornsilk
into fairy necklaces,
into pixie chains and bracelets,
strand after honeyed strand
until the summer’s end,
licking magic from our fingers.
20
Ordinary Plenty
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty…
—Patrick Kavanagh, “Advent”
What did you call it? Heather? Wheat?
Or just an ordinary field
of uncut hay the late sun hit
to fool your eye with sudden gold?
The whole day seemed to settle on
the rough pond of that ripened straw,
that sunlit lake of heavy grain.
You still can’t say quite what you saw.
Since then, how many roads have passed
through other places unremarked
as those few acres of long grass?
The dust and gravel where you parked
led into hills already lost
to that deep light, and you would turn
to more exotic plains of whin
and thistle, furze and gorse. But that last
look in your rear-view mirror filled
the car like folktale straw made gold,
like loaves and fishes giving more
and going further than they were.
21
Pockets
I empty pockets as the clothes
go in the washer, finding change
some days, some days a crumpled note
from study hall or the earring
my oldest daughter thought she’d lost.
The kids all know the rule: what gets
this far is mine. Just as they know
how I’ll give in, give back the change,
not read the notes. It’s enough to stay
this much in touch with their lives’
small particulars, particulars
in all our pockets once, saved
beyond reason. I shake from my son’s
blue jeans what I gathered years ago:
a pencil stub, spent shotgun shells
found in the woods, ruined pennies
off the tracks, a rusty bolt
that must feel heavy as a barbell
in his hand. And, most often, rocks
of all kinds, faceted like gems
22
or marble-smooth, faux arrowheads
and fossils, a load of pebbles
worthy of Demosthenes—
though it’s not eloquence but weight
he wants from such a pocketful,
some gravitas beyond his years.
I can’t begin to tell him how
or why it all adds up, or if
it will. I can’t explain, now,
that some days it takes everything
you have to keep from going,
pockets turned out, on your way.
23
24
Dogs and Horses
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us
as dogs and horses.
—Herman Melville
Perhaps they are philosophers,
quiet guides to truth
and beauty, exemplars
of the examined life.
Maybe the dog’s been thinking
all day in the sunny yard,
head raised with an insight
now and then, working at
the bone of some idea.
When horses stand and stare
for what seems hours
they could be contemplating
once again the reality
of limits, the age-old paradox
of fence and greener grass.
It might be from weariness
they turn to us at all,
fatigued by so much thought,
and from a kind of pity
for our existential sniffing
after meaning, our stoic charades,
the dog-and-pony show
we make of everything.
25
Grace
O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain…
The small rain down can rain,
and the big rain, too,
not to mention the sleet or hail
or snow, depending on the time of year,
on the unseasonable weather of the heart.
This late December afternoon
the snow is so fine coming down
I can barely see it through the window,
unconvinced until I’m outside
catching it like salt across
the dark palms of my gloves.
It’s coming down as a friend of mine says
grace does, on the just
and unjust alike, asked for or not,
believed in or doubted. And who am I
to say he’s wrong, to tell him
that faith is one more word
for need so great it must be holy,
a desire for truth or peace
or another life in which to find them—
or more often just for love,
prayer enough in any wind, any season.
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