"people have been trying to understand dogs ever since the beginning of time. One never knows what they'll do. You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning child, or lay down his life for his master. Some people call this loyalty. I don't. I may be wrong, but I call it love--the deepest kind of love."

Theodore Roethke

The descent into the organic life of things themselves dramatized the theme of regression that is explored in psychoanalytic terms in the book's title piece. "Sometimes, of course, there is regression," Roethke said in "An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems." "I believe that the spiritual man must go back in order to go forward." "The Lost Son" presented this regressive aesthetic in terms of both a descent into the subhuman life of nature and a return to repressed, childhood scenes. Karl Malkoff was one of the first critics to interpret these so-called "developmental poems" in terms of Roethke's divided attitude toward his father Otto, depicted, for example, in his widely anthologized work "My Papa's Waltz." Apparently, Roethke's filial anxieties stemmed from the trauma of Otto's death, which interrupted the adolescent's successful passage through oedipal rivalry. The five sections of "The Lost Son" work through the poet's conflicted attitude toward the dead patriarch and, by extension, what Roethke described as his "spiritual ancestors" of the literary tradition. Indeed, in a telling Yale Review essay, "How to Write Like Somebody Else" (1959), Roethke described his relation to W B. Yeats in terms of "daring to compete with papa." Roethke's drive to master his precursors, however, led him to forge significant literary innovations.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

~Theodore Roethke

For Roethke, boundaries between outer and inner dissolve; the natural world seems a vast landscape of the psyche, just as the voyage inward leads to natural things—roots, leaves, and flowers—as emblems of the recesses of the self. To travel either outward or inward is to encounter the self, and the voyage in either direction is fraught with the possibilities of transcendence, dissolution, or both:

In a dark wood I saw—
I saw my several selves
Come running from the leaves,
Lewd, tiny careless lives
That scuttled under stones,
Or broke, but would not go.

Dorothy Day - founder of the Catholic Worker movement - Upton Sinclair, Author of 'Jungle'

"Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate." ~ Dorothy Day

Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods in Chicago's South Side. It was the start of a life-long attraction to areas many people avoid.

Day had a gift for finding beauty in the midst of urban desolation. Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens. "Here," she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."
"Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them."

A quote from 'The Jungle' By Upton Sinclair ~"They are trying to save their souls-and who but a fool could fail to see that all that is the matter with their souls is that they has not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?" Chapter 23, pg. 273

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the actual world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

Poem By Donald Justice

Pounding The Pavement - by cynthia m. geer

The rain came in a rapid collective. Large, gusty drops pelted against his window. He reached over to his lamp next to his bed. He fumbled with the chain. Finally his fingers grasped it and he pulled it on, then off, then on again. The electricity had been shut off. He had no hot water for a shower so he splashed his face with cold water from the kitchen sink. He put on his wrinkled shirt from yesterday and his stiff wrangler jeans. He combed his hair back and stepped into his cowboy boots. By the time he had arrived to the hotel he was soaked to the bone. He stood at the front desk for a few minutes when a young man in a navy blue blazer asked him if he needed anything. John explained that he needed a job. The young desk clerk told him that they were not hiring. John explained that he had seen an ad in the paper for a maintenance person. John told him that he would take any position that they had. The front desk clerk told him to wait and he would check to see if the positions had been filled. While John stood there waiting he looked at his large calloused hands. His nails had dirt under them. He held his hand out and his hand was trembling. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a solid meal. The desk clerk returned and repeated that they were not hiring. John started to feel impatient. John asked the desk clerk if he could speak to the manager. The desk clerk muttered something under his breath and snappishly turned and walked into the back office and shut the door. Within a few minutes the desk clerk returned and told John that the manger was busy and to check back in a few months. John spoke with a break in his words. He was half Blackfeet Indian. He spent most of his life on the reservation in Cutbank, Montana. He never had a difficult time finding work on the reservation. He could always find work herding cattle, cleaning stalls, bailing hay. The previous morning John had read in The Daily Interlake that eighty five hundred people were unemployed in the valley and one hundred twenty five jobs available. The probability of finding a job was slim to none.
John told the front desk clerk that he could not wait three months for a job. He explained that he needed a job right now. The clerk told John that he could not help him out. John started to walk away when something hit him. It was impatience. He turned around and approached the desk clerk again. He asked the desk clerk his name. The desk clerk gave John his name. It was Daniel. Daniel didn’t look old enough to drink legally. He had the complexion of a halibut. Pale with a tinge of blue in the creases. His face was full, round and clean. Every movement Daniel made was with irritation and utter exhaustion. John looked at Daniel with a cold stare. This stare that John smacked Daniel with was not without fire. Daniel became increasingly uncomfortable. Daniel refused to get locked into John’s stare. He avoided his stare by staring at the palm of his hand picking at a piece of dead skin. John explained to him that he was not going to leave until he was given a job. John’s hands were clenched. His forehead had beads of perspiration dotting the creases. Daniel was obviously nervous. He picked up the phone and called the manager. He explained to the manger that there was a gentleman at the front desk interested in the maintenance position that was available. John unclenched his hands and straightened out his collar. Daniel asked John to have a seat and the manger will be out to see him.

William Carlos Williams -

Robert Frost, of course, rivals Williams in his use of the native idiom--his poems are true to the speech and the trapped psyches of the New England country-people he knew; the dark elegiac and tragic strains running through so much of what he wrote carry it far beyond mere pastoral charm. Williams, however, expresses the whole nation's character, and especially its urban volatility: its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behaviour, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history.........

... a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society. Williams saw this fragmentation as a pressure for 'divorce' (i.e., inability to connect or communicate), not only between the sexes but among the people at large.

....At the same time, his poems project a sensuous and associative immediacy of extraordinary vivacity. Their aura of spontaneous improvisation has misled many younger poets into overlooking his artistry. ('Rigor of beauty is the quest,' he wrote at the start of the 'Preface' to Paterson.) Perhaps it was his apparently relaxed colloquialism--often coupled, however, with startling shifts of focus and with eloquent passages of beautifully controlled rhythm and phrasing--that delayed recognition of his achievement even in the United States.

Williams' Life and Career
By M. L. Rosenthal


The Desolate Field

Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and --
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . . ?
-- and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.
By William Carlos Williams


Arrival

And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom--
feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles.
The tawdry veined body emerges
twisted upon itself
like a winter wind . . . !
By William Carlos Williams

HeliumShort stories: Outcasts

Raymond Carver

"I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact - so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration - that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!) (from foreword in Where I'm Calling From, 1998)


"I feel depressed. But I won't go into it with her. I've already told her too much.
She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.
Waiting for what? I'd like to know.
It is August.
My life is going to change - I feel it."
(from 'Fat' in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976)
Much of what Carver wrote about was based on his own experiences in the Pacific Northwest. "... everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical," he has said. Carver depicted the quiet desperation of the white- and blue-collar workers, salesmen, waitresses, and their sense of betrayal and unableness to express themselves. Things are frequently left unspoken and conflicts unresolved, and the meaning of the story is only revealed through implications.

Carver's poetry was written in the vernacular lyric-narrative mode of William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski. Although Carver began as a poet, he once confessed that he is not a "born" poet, and when he had to make a choice, he came down on the side of fiction. However, in 1984 Carver returned to Pacific Northwest and published two collections of poetry, WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER (1985) and ULTRAMARINE (1986). He shared the 1985 Levinson Prize for these books.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
(from 'Last Fragment')

Visiting - by cynthia m. geer

The day was gray with low lying clouds that sat above the tips of the tall cedars lining the curvy country road. Patches of fog hovered the fields in the low lying areas. The drizzle was constant as the wiper blades parted the rain in sheathes. The thermos filled with strong, hot coffee sat in the passenger seat.
He came around an unexpected sharp corner, the back of the truck fish tailed, and the spare tire, in the back of his 71 F 100, slid to the other side, slamming against the bed of the truck. He came to a stop, and rested his head against the steering wheel. The radio quietly buzzing an old song. He turned the radio and the wipers off. Sitting in silence he imagined what it was going to be like when he met face to face with his brother. If his brothers answer was going to be the one he had hoped for, or the one that he was praying he would not hear from his lips.
He reached over to his thermos, and unscrewed the red cup and poured the coffee. He resumed driving. There was the sign to the correctional facility. The sign read 5 miles. He was rehearsing what he was going to say when his brother was brought into the visiting room. His brother always looked better when he was serving time. Healthier. His brother would even talk about the conversions he would have and that they would result with him on his knees, in front of his bunk every night, praying to God. Every time he was released the white light would burn out, and he would be back on the street and in the bars within minutes.
He pulled in to the parking lot. He threw the residual of his coffee onto the pavement. As he shut the door to his truck he paused and gazed around. The curled barbed wire fence, the tall erect guards look out. The clean iron bars on the windows. He felt stillness. A quiet.

Clouds Don't Lie - by cynthia m. geer

I was eight years old the spring of 1968, when my neighbor disappeared for the afternoon. I was disinclined to call her my friend. She was usually a last resort to fall back on. If the neighborhood lie stagnant I would engage her to squander the time. I would entertain myself by asking her if her name was short for Marcel or Marcella. Expectedly she would respond with a partial tantrum, “no!” I would explain to her that no one has a name that isn’t short for a more protracted one. She would retort with a stomping of her foot. “That wasn’t nithe!” and accuse me of making things up just to upset her. When she would get upset she would regress to a toddler age and talk in a contrived baby voice that included an intentional lisp. Marcy’s traits exasperated me. There was something about her that invited my mischievous sense of humor to surface. The freedom of choice in a child’s mind can be dangerous especially to others.
The day I remember most vividly was a sunny day in mid July. I was lying on my front lawn focused on the white fluffy clouds gracefully changing. The deep blue backdrop pulsed the white clouds closer to me. I heard the slapping of Marcy’s patent leather shoes running on the asphalt. She stood over me blocking the view of a dissipating cloud that resembled a turtle with a rabbit’s head. She asked me what I was doing. I told her I was relaxing. She asked me if I wanted to come over to her house and play Barbie’s. I told her I had more interesting things to do. Her attire could have landed her on the Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa label. She even had braids to complete the illustration. She asked me what interesting things might I be doing. I told her that I had planned to fry ants on the cement with a magnifying glass. She asked if she could help and I responded by telling her she could by not getting in the way.
I had on my usual denims with reinforced knees and my Charles Schultz sweatshirt. It had a sketch of Snoopy and Linus sitting behind a rickety booth with a sign above their heads, “psychiatric help 5 cents.” I had no idea what the word psychiatric meant. But wearing this sweatshirt with this large word imprinted on it made me feel especially smart. The white rubber toes of my blue Ked’s sneakers were stained green from the many hours of playing outside. The sense of freedom I felt being outside was exhilarating. As I was standing up from my comfortable spot on the lawn a grey truck pulled up to the curb. It was an old truck. It had no sharp points. It rumbled loud and had a sound that sounded as if it was struggling to stay running. The driver of the truck turned off the rumbling and leaned over to the passenger side and rolled down the window. He was a fat older man. He had a look about him that was dirty. A look that conveyed a sour odor. When he finished rolling the window down he greeted us. He told Marcy how pretty she was and commented that I looked like a boy. I had a pixie haircut and I am sure that was what confused him. Marcy proceeded to skip over to his truck with no trepidation whatsoever. I raised my voice a little and told her to come on, that we needed to get our supplies together to kill the ants. She ignored me and continued towards the man in the truck. When she arrived to the truck I saw the man reach out and stroke one of her braids. He said something to her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Marcy then turned around and looked at me and hollered that she would be back soon, that she was going for a ride. The man opened the passenger door from inside and Marcy climbed up into the old truck. As they pulled away she turned to me and waved. I felt an impending danger for her. My heart pounded to where I could feel it in my ears. I ran to the garage and grabbed my bicycle. I rode as fast as I could trying to catch them. It was no use, they were too far ahead. I turned around and rode back to my house. I dismounted my bike as it was still moving and let it glide onto the lawn where it came to a resting place. I ran into the house to find my mother. I yelled for her. I found her in the laundry room folding clothes. I told her that Marcy had gotten into an old truck with a fat, stinky stranger. She looked at me with that look that says, “what in the world are you talking about?” I told her that we needed to call the police. As she snapped the towel in the air and folded it in half, she reminded me of the story of the little girl who cried wolf. The phone rang at that moment. I followed her to the kitchen. It was her friend Martha calling. I knew that this was going to be a long conversation. When the two of them talk on the phone, it is usually a long, sit down at the table and have a cup of coffee conversation. Sure enough, she stretched the phone cord across the kitchen counter and poured herself a cup of coffee. I ducked under the phone cord and ran across the street to Marcy’s house. I rang the doorbell and waited. No answer. I could hear the faint sound of the television. I opened the screen door and knocked fairly hard. Finally, through the sheer curtains I could see a figure coming. It was Marcy’s uncle who lived with them. His name was Darrell. It was difficult to put an age on him. I knew he was old enough to drink. He frequently had a can of Olympia beer in his hand. Darrell’s left arm was unfinished. It stopped half way up his forearm. There at the end were five little bumps as if fingers tried to grow but couldn’t. When he wasn’t looking I would stare deeply at the minute little bumps. They had hardly visible nails on each stub. I would often wonder if he might be one of those guys that came home from that far away place where young men crawled through the jungle on heir stomachs in clothes that matched the trees. On rainy days I would occasionally join Marcy in her garage and we would roller skate. She had the white boot roller skates with bright red pom pom’s attached to the laces. Her skates rolled over the pavement smoothly with out a sound. My skates had a key that you turned to tighten the metal clasps that fit around your shoes. My skates vibrated when they rolled making my lips tickle and my brain rattle. Darrel would sit there in his lawn chair and watch us. He had a box situated next to his chair where he had his ashtray and would place his can of beer, cigarettes and lighter. He would just sit there watching us. His cigarette smoke would curl up and out of the dried sputum cracks in the corner of his mouth. I had never seen him dressed in anything but his grey sweatpants and his black satin jacket that had a red embroidered dragon on the back. Above the dragon it read, “The year of the dragon.” He wore it unzipped with a flimsy white ribbed tank underneath. He wore tan sued slippers. They made a scuffing sound when he walked. My mother didn’t approve of me spending time over at Marcy’s house. She knew something wasn’t right. But she would never tell me what that something was.
When Darrell answered the door he asked me what I wanted. He seemed irritated. He said that Marcy wasn’t home. I told him that I already knew that. I explained that I saw her get into a stranger’s truck. Darrell squinted one side of his face and told me to go play. He started to shut the door and I asked him if Marcy’s mother was home. She said that she was at the store. He shut the door. I went back to my yard and sat on the lawn waiting for Marcy’s return. An hour must have passed and still no sign of her. My mother came out and told me to get into the car and go to town with her. As we were driving a long I kept my eyes open for the old truck. My mother reached down and turned the radio on. “Goodbye Michelle it’s hard to die” was singing on the radio. I asked my mother what the song was about.