Nobody

Adaptation of a Poem by Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish — you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one’s name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson

Adaptation and Tune: Jim Culleny
Vocal and rhythm guitar: Jim Culleny
Lead Guitar: Joe Podlesny
Bass: Joe Podlesny
Engineering and drum track: Joe Podlesny
Production: Joe Podlesny and Jim Culleny

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Two Moon Poems

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MOON POEM
—for Linda

How did I lose track of the moon?
Living as I do in a place with no streetlights,
a place dark as the inside of my eyelids,
black as the bottom of a burnt pot.

You used to call me, and I’d run out to see the full moon,
a silver hubcap wobbling at the top of the hill, or waning,
a slice of melon ripe as any in the field.

Some nights I’d wake on my own,
my bed lit white and wonder
what my Swedish ancestors feared
when they said, “Don’t let the moon
shine on you when you’re sleeping.”

If I rise then, go into the kitchen for a glass of water,
the moon follows and I realize the danger—
I might wander off looking for something I lost,
something I loved, something that won’t
come around again.

Call me melancholy,
I’ve been called worse.
The moon knows life leans
and fattens, one part joy,
two parts loss, and our job
is to make it come out even.

Maybe it was just a long month of cloud cover.
Maybe it was because your house burned down
and you moved. Or maybe I just forgot
how much I needed to see it—
pizza pan, squashed balloon,
thin edge of a dime
spinning.

Trish Crapo

ONCE UPON A SPACETIME
—to Pat

a couple of hours before twilight 
a gibbous moon rose in the east
over the serpentine spine of the mountain,
a bright hole in a bluegrey scrim
just there without reason,
as uncomplicated and expected
as a shard of granite on the slope of a talus,
as common as the little moons that rise
above the cuticles of each finger
of your familiar hands, as singular,
as sure as the hidden sun it mirrors
and I wondered at what the ancients thought
as it appeared and disappeared
regular as breath, opulent as a third eye,
as crisp as the feel of a January breeze
slapping my cheek as I cross the bridge
from here to there. I’m as stupefied
as they must have been, 
even though I’ve been told this bright hole
is no more than dust and rock
tethered by a wrinkle in space
which holds it in a groove of time
like a stylus spiraling in black vinyl
sending mute tunes, 
hushed as the sure breath
that billowed from our mouths
as we threw row cover
over the kale

Jim Culleny

Remembering my father —Four poems

James Thomas Culleny 1918-1980

1. The Tongues of His Black Boots Say

as my father sleeps the world goes on
his work boots are by the door
he left them there unlaced
the right run down at the heel
the left’s toe scuffed
his blue shirt hangs on a hook
wrinkled below the belt line
where every morning
its tails were tucked

there’s no forgiveness in pasts
just now and here, defeat
is the hardest epiphany
the tongues of his
black boots say

2. Again

My father at the kitchen table
in a rare expression of mystery
said, I think life is a cycle
but he was not a mystical man to me,
nose to the grindstone he ground
day after day, pressed
by incessant work, bound
to contingencies
like Sisyphus to his stone
linearly, but uphill
in his black boots and socks
his blue shirt and pants
cinched with a black belt,
sometimes a fedora,
often a smile through
cigarette-clinched lips,
he trucked on (unbeknownst to me,
and despite his flat trajectory)
mulling over vicissitudes,
contemplating repetitions,
weighing the properties of circles,
as does any common philosopher
hoping to unravel the hiddeness
under blood and bone,
coming to the conclusion
that to begin again
was the only thing that made sense
to him

3. Now I Know What He Meant

—I’ll have that done in no time, my father would say
…………………
I’m in the midst of a moon
(as the Lenape called  them)
dead center. It’s Thursday
dead center, too, of the week
I’m at the pinpoint of noon poised
precisely at the day’s fulcrum
just thirty seconds into the minute
at point five Oh! of that second
and a breeze blows
across my cheek
which the sun warms
in no time

4. Hummingbird Acetylene

The  turquoise flame of a hummingbird’s head
is a blazing torch of acetylene

burning, as when my father put a welding tip to steel
joining parts of his world with the bluegreen flame
he held between

This hummingbird burns in afternoon light
at the mouth of a flower in god’s machine
jabbing her tip at a perfect hour
joining his flame to mine
in a darting iridescent gleam

Thoughts of my mother, Mary, from several of my poems—

.

Mary Mraz Culleny

~~~

the tsunami smell of yeast inundated our house
the mornings our mother baked bread
up through floorboards it came up the stairwell
it spread stirring our dreamselves alive
fresh loaves, bells for the nose
their toll sent sleep from somnolent heads

~~~

She had a whisper in her soul
louder than the wails the planet utters

She did the unselfconscious things
that were miracles only made by mothers

~~~

–on my mother’s birthday

Under cover of light the moon disappears
just like that, following my mother
travelling not by casket but 
instead by memory and dream
(alike as death and birth), so alike
there’s just this mirror between them

~~~~

Today we celebrate that which you excelled at, mom:
being a deeply loving, generous mother to each one of us

You are always missed.

Odder Still

On sale at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Amherst Books and
Boswell Books in Shelburne Falls, MA

Tomorrow is a Long Time

Song: Bob Dylan
Lead Vocal: Jim Culleny
Harmony Vocal: Mary Pratt
Guitar; Kevin Jones
Harmonica: Mary Pratt
Recorded 1977-78

Meager Attempt at Uplift and What’s Fundamental

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Apocalypto for a Small Planet

1

& the radio reports how in 2050
farming Massachusetts will be like farming Georgia—
all’s flux, no one can say what will grow in Georgia,

where maples will grow then or whose fine taps
will sap sugar from the cold in spring. Will we get syrup
from the boreal forest, peaches from Massachusetts?

2

Drone strikes & opium poppies.
Oil spills & poisoned wells.
Drought zone. Famine. War zone.

3

Artisanal, this
intervention:

what gift
this day.

4

My inner cynic says
don’t bother this is navel gazing

& my friend at Yale says my hunger
to be near zucchinis

will not save the planet from real hunger
except I remember in the film on gleaning

when the priest in his compassion says:
those who glean now out of spiritual hunger

also should be fed.

5

Ecosystem of yard or field or mind:

these cucumbers are more art than science,
more daydream

than global action (if we separate the two).
But digging now I feel an otherness—

life, a great inhuman freedom—
here I work a plot that also grounds—

by Tess Taylor
from Work and Days
Red Hen Press, 2016

ODDER STILL

 

On sale at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Amherst Books and
Boswell Books in Shelburne Falls, MA

The Workforce

.
Do you have adequate oxen for the job?
No, my oxen are inadequate.
Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job?
I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately.
I’ll see if I can get them for you.
I’d be obliged if you could do that for me.
Certainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men?
We have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient.
I’ll have them delivered on the morrow.
Do you need maps of the mountains and the underworld?
We have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld.
Of course you lack maps of the underworld,
there are no maps of the underworld
And, besides, you don’t want to go there, it’s stuffy.
I had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter.
It’s just that you asked me if I needed maps. . . .
Yes, yes, it’s my fault, I got carried away.
What do you need, then, you tell me?
We need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens
pigs, cows, buckets and women.
Women?
We have no women.
You’ve a sorry lot, then.
We are a sorry lot, sir.
Well, I can’t get you women.
I assumed as much, sir.
What are you going to do without women, then?
We will suffer, sir. And then we will die out one by one.
Can any of you sing?
Yes, sir, we have many fine singers among us.
Order them to begin singing immediately.
Either women will find you this way or you will die
comforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves
with the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves.
Sir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.

by James Tate
from Memoir of the Hawk
Harper Collins, 2001

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