Interoffice Memorandum to James Seay
(In memory of Lee Anderson Pickerel, 1881 1976)
Great age came down on Lee
Like a gradual fall of small flakes, cancellations
That chipped his speech, depressed
His head, erased much of his memory.
I happened to be setting out, when he reached eighty,
For a three-year tour of Navy duty
In the Pacific. Although a native Virginian,
He was never to set eyes on even the Atlantic.
He held his deciduous hand up and out to me
And said I probably wouldn't be seeing him again.
Three years later I passed through Virginia
En route from one snakeless island to another,
Pearl Harbor to Londonderry,
And held the same changing hand. Two years after that,
Passing from Europe through America to Asia, to Vietnam,
I stopped by his house again. Having seen
Two sons off to war a generation earlier,
He now held out his hand to a grandson bound somehow
For the same mysterious oriental distances, dim.
A westward journey takes us to “the East,”
Where English breaks into flakes and burlesques.
Back home again after a solid year of not getting killed,
I called on him. Hands . . . you know the rest.
One time I asked him if tobacco farming paid well.
“Hush,” he said; “one year I made seven hundred dollars .”
The family gathered for his ninetieth.
He held up his hand—nails clipped, a dignified irregular range
Of large rough knuckles—but I kissed the cheek instead
And told him he would bury me. His wife had died
The year before, and he would say,
“I never did treat Sal right.”
I said that he had been married to her for sixty-eight years
And if that wasn't enough chance to treat her right
There sure wasn't much damned use worrying about it now.
I changed the subject to our shared “male pattern baldness,”
Which, sex-linked, was coming to me through my mother's family
And had come to him through his mother's family. Pretty soon
We would be able to comb our heavy eyebrows up and back
And cover up our matrilinear pates. I was getting earbrows, too,
Like his. “You've got more hair in your right ear,” I told him,
“Than I've got on my whole head, you rascal.”
I was there (Motley community, near Hurt,
Pittsylvania County) for his ninety-fifth.
He exhaled eleven or twelve treasured breaths
Through his trembling harmonica, surprisingly presto .
One of my aunts said, “Dad, play ‘Home Sweet Home.’ ”
He said, “I just did.”
To buy useful presents for him had become impossible.
And he loved presents, even the odd dollar
Folded inside a meretricious greeting card—
One of those lurid paradigms of retail insincerity
With the cretinous versicles so profoundly offensive
To genuinely authentic poets, like you and me.
He needed nothing any of us could come up with.
Then, for some reason, by a tacit or explicit conspiracy
That embraced even the great- great -grandchildren,
We settled on two recurrent sorts of gift:
Cardigan sweaters of every style and color
To keep the cold away (and he always felt cold)
And the gaudiest toiletries: pre-shave,
After-shave, cologne, some
With sadistically distinguished names
Like English Leather , some others
Fantastically exotic for Motley, near Hurt, Virginia:
Jade East, Hai Karate. . . .
I don't suppose he had the dimmest idea
What karate means. (I don't suppose I do, either.)
My mother and I were of the cardigan party.
Well, Jim—to make a long story short—he died,
And in the hundred dosidos and shuffles over “property”
(Nothing more than a four-room frame house
And a rock-laced acre of land) I wound up
With eight or ten cardigans
And about a dozen bottles of masculine cosmetics—
Decanters speaking of nautical smartness, brisk and bracing,
Bottles shaped like antique cars or light bulbs,
God knows what all, mad capricious surreal things, outlandish.
Luckily, when I got home I accidently dropped one whole paper sack
And got rid of half of the tacky things in one stroke
Right in my own concrete driveway, which smelled of Midnight in Manila
For a whole week. The very air—a tour de Brut force —shimmied.
I don't use such stuff, myself,
Except to sniff at now and then
When reorganizing the contents of the medicine cabinet.
But all of this does do one thing, my friend. It makes me think
That you and I had better think twice
Before we get too glib in telling those dreadful desperate students
Of ours in Creative Writing (P) (for Poetry)
How high and mighty sick and tired We are of falling leaves
And fractured hearts and how We—such big Wesleyan et cetera deals—
Do not want to see
Any more corny free-verse meditations on somebody's
Rustic grandfather's hands.
Yours in Mississippi gave you a pocket knife
And then became forgetful and pestered you about it.
Mine left me a drawer full of sweaters with pockets
And a shelf of fluid rubbish, largely green.
I wear the sweaters now and then
Even though they scarcely fit my figure or the fashion.
At present I have no plans to use the scents,
But I am going to hang on to them anyway,
At least for a while.
I suppose my maternal grandfather—Mr. Lee Anderson Pickerel—
Until the day he died
Regarded the wristwatch, the belt, the cigarette,
And the low-cut shoe (or “slipper”)
As sure signs of fecklessness and city ways.
He might have thrown away the toiletries, too—
They say he had no use for flowers in any form—
If he could have found a courteous way to do so.
Still, Jim, for the sake of our self-respect
And the sacred honor of our atavistic art, let's continue
To act as vigilant watchdogs flanking the doors
Of the temple of poetry
Lest some profanely sentimental immature undergraduate
Tries to slip by our fangs and F's
And sneak in with some cheap shot
(All lower-case egomania and misspelled platitudes)
About the spots and palsies afflicting the poor old hands
Of his or her God-damned grand-dad
Growing old and dying in the God-damned sticks
Some forsaken place in our South—one of those shrimp villages
Ulcering up the coast or picturesque settings
In the hills or mountains
Among the innumerable God-damned falling leaves
of
autumn,
Autumn.
(In memory of Lee Anderson Pickerel, 1881 1976)
Great age came down on Lee
Like a gradual fall of small flakes, cancellations
That chipped his speech, depressed
His head, erased much of his memory.
I happened to be setting out, when he reached eighty,
For a three-year tour of Navy duty
In the Pacific. Although a native Virginian,
He was never to set eyes on even the Atlantic.
He held his deciduous hand up and out to me
And said I probably wouldn't be seeing him again.
Three years later I passed through Virginia
En route from one snakeless island to another,
Pearl Harbor to Londonderry,
And held the same changing hand. Two years after that,
Passing from Europe through America to Asia, to Vietnam,
I stopped by his house again. Having seen
Two sons off to war a generation earlier,
He now held out his hand to a grandson bound somehow
For the same mysterious oriental distances, dim.
A westward journey takes us to “the East,”
Where English breaks into flakes and burlesques.
Back home again after a solid year of not getting killed,
I called on him. Hands . . . you know the rest.
One time I asked him if tobacco farming paid well.
“Hush,” he said; “one year I made seven hundred dollars .”
The family gathered for his ninetieth.
He held up his hand—nails clipped, a dignified irregular range
Of large rough knuckles—but I kissed the cheek instead
And told him he would bury me. His wife had died
The year before, and he would say,
“I never did treat Sal right.”
I said that he had been married to her for sixty-eight years
And if that wasn't enough chance to treat her right
There sure wasn't much damned use worrying about it now.
I changed the subject to our shared “male pattern baldness,”
Which, sex-linked, was coming to me through my mother's family
And had come to him through his mother's family. Pretty soon
We would be able to comb our heavy eyebrows up and back
And cover up our matrilinear pates. I was getting earbrows, too,
Like his. “You've got more hair in your right ear,” I told him,
“Than I've got on my whole head, you rascal.”
I was there (Motley community, near Hurt,
Pittsylvania County) for his ninety-fifth.
He exhaled eleven or twelve treasured breaths
Through his trembling harmonica, surprisingly presto .
One of my aunts said, “Dad, play ‘Home Sweet Home.’ ”
He said, “I just did.”
To buy useful presents for him had become impossible.
And he loved presents, even the odd dollar
Folded inside a meretricious greeting card—
One of those lurid paradigms of retail insincerity
With the cretinous versicles so profoundly offensive
To genuinely authentic poets, like you and me.
He needed nothing any of us could come up with.
Then, for some reason, by a tacit or explicit conspiracy
That embraced even the great- great -grandchildren,
We settled on two recurrent sorts of gift:
Cardigan sweaters of every style and color
To keep the cold away (and he always felt cold)
And the gaudiest toiletries: pre-shave,
After-shave, cologne, some
With sadistically distinguished names
Like English Leather , some others
Fantastically exotic for Motley, near Hurt, Virginia:
Jade East, Hai Karate. . . .
I don't suppose he had the dimmest idea
What karate means. (I don't suppose I do, either.)
My mother and I were of the cardigan party.
Well, Jim—to make a long story short—he died,
And in the hundred dosidos and shuffles over “property”
(Nothing more than a four-room frame house
And a rock-laced acre of land) I wound up
With eight or ten cardigans
And about a dozen bottles of masculine cosmetics—
Decanters speaking of nautical smartness, brisk and bracing,
Bottles shaped like antique cars or light bulbs,
God knows what all, mad capricious surreal things, outlandish.
Luckily, when I got home I accidently dropped one whole paper sack
And got rid of half of the tacky things in one stroke
Right in my own concrete driveway, which smelled of Midnight in Manila
For a whole week. The very air—a tour de Brut force —shimmied.
I don't use such stuff, myself,
Except to sniff at now and then
When reorganizing the contents of the medicine cabinet.
But all of this does do one thing, my friend. It makes me think
That you and I had better think twice
Before we get too glib in telling those dreadful desperate students
Of ours in Creative Writing (P) (for Poetry)
How high and mighty sick and tired We are of falling leaves
And fractured hearts and how We—such big Wesleyan et cetera deals—
Do not want to see
Any more corny free-verse meditations on somebody's
Rustic grandfather's hands.
Yours in Mississippi gave you a pocket knife
And then became forgetful and pestered you about it.
Mine left me a drawer full of sweaters with pockets
And a shelf of fluid rubbish, largely green.
I wear the sweaters now and then
Even though they scarcely fit my figure or the fashion.
At present I have no plans to use the scents,
But I am going to hang on to them anyway,
At least for a while.
I suppose my maternal grandfather—Mr. Lee Anderson Pickerel—
Until the day he died
Regarded the wristwatch, the belt, the cigarette,
And the low-cut shoe (or “slipper”)
As sure signs of fecklessness and city ways.
He might have thrown away the toiletries, too—
They say he had no use for flowers in any form—
If he could have found a courteous way to do so.
Still, Jim, for the sake of our self-respect
And the sacred honor of our atavistic art, let's continue
To act as vigilant watchdogs flanking the doors
Of the temple of poetry
Lest some profanely sentimental immature undergraduate
Tries to slip by our fangs and F's
And sneak in with some cheap shot
(All lower-case egomania and misspelled platitudes)
About the spots and palsies afflicting the poor old hands
Of his or her God-damned grand-dad
Growing old and dying in the God-damned sticks
Some forsaken place in our South—one of those shrimp villages
Ulcering up the coast or picturesque settings
In the hills or mountains
Among the innumerable God-damned falling leaves
of
autumn,
Autumn.
Great age came down on Lee
Like a gradual fall of small flakes, cancellations
That chipped his speech, depressed
His head, erased much of his memory.
I happened to be setting out, when he reached eighty,
For a three-year tour of Navy duty
In the Pacific. Although a native Virginian,
He was never to set eyes on even the Atlantic.
He held his deciduous hand up and out to me
And said I probably wouldn't be seeing him again.
Three years later I passed through Virginia
En route from one snakeless island to another,
Pearl Harbor to Londonderry,
And held the same changing hand. Two years after that,
Passing from Europe through America to Asia, to Vietnam,
I stopped by his house again. Having seen
Two sons off to war a generation earlier,
He now held out his hand to a grandson bound somehow
For the same mysterious oriental distances, dim.
A westward journey takes us to “the East,”
Where English breaks into flakes and burlesques.
Back home again after a solid year of not getting killed,
I called on him. Hands . . . you know the rest.
One time I asked him if tobacco farming paid well.
“Hush,” he said; “one year I made seven hundred dollars .”
The family gathered for his ninetieth.
He held up his hand—nails clipped, a dignified irregular range
Of large rough knuckles—but I kissed the cheek instead
And told him he would bury me. His wife had died
The year before, and he would say,
“I never did treat Sal right.”
I said that he had been married to her for sixty-eight years
And if that wasn't enough chance to treat her right
There sure wasn't much damned use worrying about it now.
I changed the subject to our shared “male pattern baldness,”
Which, sex-linked, was coming to me through my mother's family
And had come to him through his mother's family. Pretty soon
We would be able to comb our heavy eyebrows up and back
And cover up our matrilinear pates. I was getting earbrows, too,
Like his. “You've got more hair in your right ear,” I told him,
“Than I've got on my whole head, you rascal.”
I was there (Motley community, near Hurt,
Pittsylvania County) for his ninety-fifth.
He exhaled eleven or twelve treasured breaths
Through his trembling harmonica, surprisingly presto .
One of my aunts said, “Dad, play ‘Home Sweet Home.’ ”
He said, “I just did.”
To buy useful presents for him had become impossible.
And he loved presents, even the odd dollar
Folded inside a meretricious greeting card—
One of those lurid paradigms of retail insincerity
With the cretinous versicles so profoundly offensive
To genuinely authentic poets, like you and me.
He needed nothing any of us could come up with.
Then, for some reason, by a tacit or explicit conspiracy
That embraced even the great- great -grandchildren,
We settled on two recurrent sorts of gift:
Cardigan sweaters of every style and color
To keep the cold away (and he always felt cold)
And the gaudiest toiletries: pre-shave,
After-shave, cologne, some
With sadistically distinguished names
Like English Leather , some others
Fantastically exotic for Motley, near Hurt, Virginia:
Jade East, Hai Karate. . . .
I don't suppose he had the dimmest idea
What karate means. (I don't suppose I do, either.)
My mother and I were of the cardigan party.
Well, Jim—to make a long story short—he died,
And in the hundred dosidos and shuffles over “property”
(Nothing more than a four-room frame house
And a rock-laced acre of land) I wound up
With eight or ten cardigans
And about a dozen bottles of masculine cosmetics—
Decanters speaking of nautical smartness, brisk and bracing,
Bottles shaped like antique cars or light bulbs,
God knows what all, mad capricious surreal things, outlandish.
Luckily, when I got home I accidently dropped one whole paper sack
And got rid of half of the tacky things in one stroke
Right in my own concrete driveway, which smelled of Midnight in Manila
For a whole week. The very air—a tour de Brut force —shimmied.
I don't use such stuff, myself,
Except to sniff at now and then
When reorganizing the contents of the medicine cabinet.
But all of this does do one thing, my friend. It makes me think
That you and I had better think twice
Before we get too glib in telling those dreadful desperate students
Of ours in Creative Writing (P) (for Poetry)
How high and mighty sick and tired We are of falling leaves
And fractured hearts and how We—such big Wesleyan et cetera deals—
Do not want to see
Any more corny free-verse meditations on somebody's
Rustic grandfather's hands.
Yours in Mississippi gave you a pocket knife
And then became forgetful and pestered you about it.
Mine left me a drawer full of sweaters with pockets
And a shelf of fluid rubbish, largely green.
I wear the sweaters now and then
Even though they scarcely fit my figure or the fashion.
At present I have no plans to use the scents,
But I am going to hang on to them anyway,
At least for a while.
I suppose my maternal grandfather—Mr. Lee Anderson Pickerel—
Until the day he died
Regarded the wristwatch, the belt, the cigarette,
And the low-cut shoe (or “slipper”)
As sure signs of fecklessness and city ways.
He might have thrown away the toiletries, too—
They say he had no use for flowers in any form—
If he could have found a courteous way to do so.
Still, Jim, for the sake of our self-respect
And the sacred honor of our atavistic art, let's continue
To act as vigilant watchdogs flanking the doors
Of the temple of poetry
Lest some profanely sentimental immature undergraduate
Tries to slip by our fangs and F's
And sneak in with some cheap shot
(All lower-case egomania and misspelled platitudes)
About the spots and palsies afflicting the poor old hands
Of his or her God-damned grand-dad
Growing old and dying in the God-damned sticks
Some forsaken place in our South—one of those shrimp villages
Ulcering up the coast or picturesque settings
In the hills or mountains
Among the innumerable God-damned falling leaves
of
autumn,
Autumn.
(In memory of Lee Anderson Pickerel, 1881 1976)
Great age came down on Lee
Like a gradual fall of small flakes, cancellations
That chipped his speech, depressed
His head, erased much of his memory.
I happened to be setting out, when he reached eighty,
For a three-year tour of Navy duty
In the Pacific. Although a native Virginian,
He was never to set eyes on even the Atlantic.
He held his deciduous hand up and out to me
And said I probably wouldn't be seeing him again.
Three years later I passed through Virginia
En route from one snakeless island to another,
Pearl Harbor to Londonderry,
And held the same changing hand. Two years after that,
Passing from Europe through America to Asia, to Vietnam,
I stopped by his house again. Having seen
Two sons off to war a generation earlier,
He now held out his hand to a grandson bound somehow
For the same mysterious oriental distances, dim.
A westward journey takes us to “the East,”
Where English breaks into flakes and burlesques.
Back home again after a solid year of not getting killed,
I called on him. Hands . . . you know the rest.
One time I asked him if tobacco farming paid well.
“Hush,” he said; “one year I made seven hundred dollars .”
The family gathered for his ninetieth.
He held up his hand—nails clipped, a dignified irregular range
Of large rough knuckles—but I kissed the cheek instead
And told him he would bury me. His wife had died
The year before, and he would say,
“I never did treat Sal right.”
I said that he had been married to her for sixty-eight years
And if that wasn't enough chance to treat her right
There sure wasn't much damned use worrying about it now.
I changed the subject to our shared “male pattern baldness,”
Which, sex-linked, was coming to me through my mother's family
And had come to him through his mother's family. Pretty soon
We would be able to comb our heavy eyebrows up and back
And cover up our matrilinear pates. I was getting earbrows, too,
Like his. “You've got more hair in your right ear,” I told him,
“Than I've got on my whole head, you rascal.”
I was there (Motley community, near Hurt,
Pittsylvania County) for his ninety-fifth.
He exhaled eleven or twelve treasured breaths
Through his trembling harmonica, surprisingly presto .
One of my aunts said, “Dad, play ‘Home Sweet Home.’ ”
He said, “I just did.”
To buy useful presents for him had become impossible.
And he loved presents, even the odd dollar
Folded inside a meretricious greeting card—
One of those lurid paradigms of retail insincerity
With the cretinous versicles so profoundly offensive
To genuinely authentic poets, like you and me.
He needed nothing any of us could come up with.
Then, for some reason, by a tacit or explicit conspiracy
That embraced even the great- great -grandchildren,
We settled on two recurrent sorts of gift:
Cardigan sweaters of every style and color
To keep the cold away (and he always felt cold)
And the gaudiest toiletries: pre-shave,
After-shave, cologne, some
With sadistically distinguished names
Like English Leather , some others
Fantastically exotic for Motley, near Hurt, Virginia:
Jade East, Hai Karate. . . .
I don't suppose he had the dimmest idea
What karate means. (I don't suppose I do, either.)
My mother and I were of the cardigan party.
Well, Jim—to make a long story short—he died,
And in the hundred dosidos and shuffles over “property”
(Nothing more than a four-room frame house
And a rock-laced acre of land) I wound up
With eight or ten cardigans
And about a dozen bottles of masculine cosmetics—
Decanters speaking of nautical smartness, brisk and bracing,
Bottles shaped like antique cars or light bulbs,
God knows what all, mad capricious surreal things, outlandish.
Luckily, when I got home I accidently dropped one whole paper sack
And got rid of half of the tacky things in one stroke
Right in my own concrete driveway, which smelled of Midnight in Manila
For a whole week. The very air—a tour de Brut force —shimmied.
I don't use such stuff, myself,
Except to sniff at now and then
When reorganizing the contents of the medicine cabinet.
But all of this does do one thing, my friend. It makes me think
That you and I had better think twice
Before we get too glib in telling those dreadful desperate students
Of ours in Creative Writing (P) (for Poetry)
How high and mighty sick and tired We are of falling leaves
And fractured hearts and how We—such big Wesleyan et cetera deals—
Do not want to see
Any more corny free-verse meditations on somebody's
Rustic grandfather's hands.
Yours in Mississippi gave you a pocket knife
And then became forgetful and pestered you about it.
Mine left me a drawer full of sweaters with pockets
And a shelf of fluid rubbish, largely green.
I wear the sweaters now and then
Even though they scarcely fit my figure or the fashion.
At present I have no plans to use the scents,
But I am going to hang on to them anyway,
At least for a while.
I suppose my maternal grandfather—Mr. Lee Anderson Pickerel—
Until the day he died
Regarded the wristwatch, the belt, the cigarette,
And the low-cut shoe (or “slipper”)
As sure signs of fecklessness and city ways.
He might have thrown away the toiletries, too—
They say he had no use for flowers in any form—
If he could have found a courteous way to do so.
Still, Jim, for the sake of our self-respect
And the sacred honor of our atavistic art, let's continue
To act as vigilant watchdogs flanking the doors
Of the temple of poetry
Lest some profanely sentimental immature undergraduate
Tries to slip by our fangs and F's
And sneak in with some cheap shot
(All lower-case egomania and misspelled platitudes)
About the spots and palsies afflicting the poor old hands
Of his or her God-damned grand-dad
Growing old and dying in the God-damned sticks
Some forsaken place in our South—one of those shrimp villages
Ulcering up the coast or picturesque settings
In the hills or mountains
Among the innumerable God-damned falling leaves
of
autumn,
Autumn.
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