November's Garden: Quick Peeks at a Fading Grandeur

Sunset comes so early it's gone before I remember to look at it.

On the way to the golf course there's a tiny pond just big enough for a quartet of ducks to spin around one another in circles. Go a couple hundred feet farther and the city skyline rises up above the November treeline.

Back home, the Japanese 'red' maple delivers on its promise.

The sun slips away again, its patented standard time disappearing act, not bothering to tint a cloudless sky.

The Spartina grass in the salt marsh across the road from the harbor gilds in the light of a low-angled sun.

The leaves on the weeping cherry tree do their disappearing act, by stages. Some pale yellow, some bronze. Nabokov said there are a hundred shades of yellow. He must have been thinking of autumn.

The last of the perennials, the spotted toad lilies, maked a belated appearance. Autumn, we hardly knew ye.

The Garden of Voices: Poems About Veterans

Tomorrow, Veterans Day, is a holiday that began as a memorial to the millions who fought and sacrificed in World War I, called The Great War in its day, and then "The War to End All Wars," though of course it did not. The chosen date was Armistice Day, Nov. 11, because that was the date in 1918 when the armistice ending World War I was signed by the warring countries. 
          Since then we've had many more military veterans to recognize, and many more sacrifices, to acknowledge in the century that has followed that first Armistice Day. 
            We continue to recognize and honor veterans, as we should, even as we hope for no more wars. That's the note sounded by Firestone Feingold, the editor of the online literary journal Verse-Virtual, in his comment sent to the journal's contributors today: 


           "Well tomorrow is Veterans Day. Thank you to all who made it especially meaningful to me by contributing such dynamic and powerful poetry to this month's issue of Verse-Virtual. I wish everyone a good Veterans Day full of thanks to and remembrance of those who gave and yet give themselves to fight for us. May their kind of service no longer be needed by the peoples of the world — soon and forever." 

            Poems related to veterans is the optional theme for the journal's November issue (http://www.verse-virtual.com/). I picked out a few poems to mention here that I found especially effective. 

             Joseph Mills' poem "At the Veterans Hospital" blew me away. Responding to the idea that the world itself is only "virtual," a patient starts to cry. "...and when he places a hand on her new leg, she pushes it off, saying, This is not real. Her tone is hard to read, and he doesn’t know if she means the limb, the crying, the empathy, the room, the world."
             This veteran's ambiguity, and one we have probably all felt, is beautifully expressed. The issue raised is beyond words, but this poem gives us some words to put the question. And I'm not sure what the answer is.

            Mills's other poem "Service" is a slice of life report on a night "at the Legion." The poem concludes with an unassailable truth, both moving and blunt: 

"We sit, surrounded by hungry veterans who served in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf. This is their reward for living when they did, going where they were told, and still being around. Cheap beer, piles of legs and breasts and wings, and family sitting across a table as wide as a battlefield."

            Diana Rosen's poem "Father in his Swim Ensemble, Even Though He Doesn’t Swim" is full of rich detail, ironic as life. The poem tells us that the WWII veteran's gift for languages,

"(Yiddish segued to German) and a high school typing class kept him off the battlefield and inside the Captain’s office typing, filing, swallowing the bile that arose listening to 'those Jews, those Commies,' careless remarks made by the officer, oblivious to why they were both in the U.S. Army in Germany in 1943."

             Rosen's poem "Old Age" offers a concretely observed, sympathetic but unsentimental recounting of the last routines of life for a man of "the man of a thousand Oys."
              He falls asleep on a couch, wakes, nods off again, and the poem concludes with this metaphysical zinger: 

"Slowly, he lifts his head awake, whispers, You think it’s easy to dream?"

             Martin Willet's poem "How I Got To Vietnam" reports his experience as a medic in that tragic conflict, the simplicity and directness of the language lending weight to its powerful conclusion -- Should you read it here? (I don't know: is this a spoiler?):
 
 After years of butchering on a farm,
seeing men lose hands to combines,
finding a deer shot
and dragging towards death,
it was not the blood or guts
or carrying trays with amputated arms or legs —
it was the cries for mommy

            In her poem "Gulf War," Joyce Brown offers a succinct comment on the juxtaposition of news reporting and commerce that, for many of us, spoke to the heart the Gulf War. Here's an excerpt:

 
"We'll be back with more right after this:"

Chevrolet Caprice, Dodge Dynasty,
Dentu-foam and Chloraseptic Spray.

Pentagon officials praise
the "surgical strike...

But all that selling, and all that Pentagon PR, is not the whole story. The poem puts the event in focus with this last-line summation of the day's cost:

“and two pilots two pilots two pilots”

Poet Dick Allen's sums up the contradictions of the Vietnam Era in his poem "Veterans Day,"opening with the frank acknowledgment:

Once I hated you, your uniform, your name,
The way you hunched with buddies in an open truck.
You were the soldier shouting at the rain.

 
...and concluding with the enduring wider perspective that applies to so many of us: 

Who can stop the rain?
We were young men in the days of Vietnam.


(Read the whole poems and many others on http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html)

That's Me All Over: An Interview Online

The literary journal 3288 Review published an interview with me online today.
            The journal's editor, John Winkelman  was generous with space and gave me a lot of scope to talk about "Suosso's Lane," my recently published "history/mystery" novel on the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
           Here's an excerpt:           
           QUESTION: Can you give us some background on your novel? How and when did you decide to write a story based on Sacco and Vanzetti? Did it grow out of a general interest in that era, or did it grow from interest in the event itself?
          ME: Timely question. Suosso’s Lane (https://www.web-e-books.com/index.php#load?type=book&product=suosso), my story on the Plymouth, MA origins of the Sacco and Vanzetti case was, published recently as an ebook, with plans to eventually have it published in print.
          The idea to write a story about the case developed from moving to Plymouth and then going to work or the community newspaper group that covered Plymouth and neighboring towns. I had learned about the case long ago, and continue to be mildly shocked that like other labor-oriented and progressive causes it has disappeared from common knowledge, had long lived in Massachusetts, but only after living in Plymouth for a few years did I learn that Bartolomeo Vanzetti was living in the town at the time of his arrest. Plymouth’s self-image is all about the 1620 Pilgrims, but the town, like much of the Northeast, became an industrial center after the Civil War, its factories luring immigrants from Europe. Vanzetti found his way to Plymouth in the early years of the 20th century and lived with an Italian family from his own region (the Piemonte) near a big factory in North Plymouth. The town takes no public notice of his existence or of the world-famous Sacco-Vanzetti affair. Because he was found guilty and executed? Because his anarchist views were wildly unpopular with Yankee Plymouth? In fact, the Massachusetts establishment hated everything about Sacco and Vanzetti – including their immigrant status – and aside from a flurry of interest during the Dukakis administration, no one has ever wanted to re-visit that century old judgment. And misjudgment.
An anniversary issue of the community paper I worked gave me the opportunity to research the local angle on Vanzetti’s story. A few years later a nonfiction anthology on 20th century Plymouth history enabled me to stretch that work into a magazine-length piece (“Trial of the Century: Local Amnesia”).
         From conversations with my wife, Anne, I developed the idea of a ‘history mystery’ story centered on the efforts of a current day history teacher to dig up some lost piece of evidence that would establish Vanzetti’s innocence of the crime (a payroll robbery-murder) he was convicted of. But as I worked on the book, it became clear to me that I had to inhabit the person of Vanzetti and his circumstances more fully. There are scores of books about the case, examining the trial, the evidence, the legalities, but remarkably little on the record about Vanzetti the man, aside from the letters he wrote from prison. I do think that the issues of his time, a hundred years ago, have become our issues again. The exploitation of workers by a super-rich class – the robber barons of Gilded Age compared to today’s “One Percent”. The fear-borne prejudice against immigrants, or “others” – Southern and Eastern Europeans (Italians, Poles, Jews, etc.) were regarded as an inferior race. The use of the police, and secret police (“intelligence”), to protect the status quo. The FBI was invented to deal with Italian anarchists like Vanzetti and his “comrades.” Today the current head of the FBI tells us that criticism of the unjustified police killing of black men keeps police from doing their job.
              So as I worked on Suosso’s Lane, the book came to feel increasingly relevant. One of its current-day characters is an African immigrant trying to keep from running afoul of the law. My Plymouth history teacher finds that one of his American Indian students is homeless, because of quarrels over a piece of property his family still owned. The real estate bubble of the early 21st century leads another of my contemporary characters to commit murder to protect a deal that will make him rich. (He’s unmasked by my nosy local reporter.) Do Americans care about anything today but money? The history teacher comes to feel that the demonization of the voices on the left – anarchists, socialists, populists – is one of the reasons that contemporary American society has lost its balance.


This is probably more than enough. But if anyone wants to hear more about me, the full interview is at http://www.3288review.com/2015/11/09/interview-with-robert-knox/

Into the Deep: Autumn's Garden in a Colorful Last Phase

            It's November and the sun is going down. Not just setting earlier, but hanging lower in the sky all day, even at its noontime height. The decline of the sun in its apparent southward progression has come close to the halfway mark between the equipoise of the Sept. 22, the beginning of autumn, to its low point, the winter solstice on Dec. 22. So even on the mild, gloriously sunny fall days we're enjoying this week, the rays of the sun reach us as a much deeper (or more acute) angle than they do in summer.

            The interesting thing to me -- and while it seems a charmingly aesthetic coincidence to me there is probably some deep geophysical reason for it -- is that these deeply slanted rays from the southward-descending sun serve to accentuate the colors of autumn.

            It's as if there's more red and gold -- a deeper color -- in the sun's light this time of year.

            Clearly we see more gold, and yellow, and orange and red in the earth's biological surface -- in our climate, the northern temperate zone -- in autumn than at any other time of year.

            The dark full, mature, dark (maybe even a little oppressively) greens of late summer -- the quiet August greenwood, the September lawns that greet returning students on the first days of school -- have an air of calm, but slightly weary satisfaction. They have fought their battles, won their ground. There's nothing left to green up. Those late summer woodlands are low on bright colors, and almost slumberous in mood. Birds and other animals are feeding up for seasonal transformation to come, the stresses of migrations, or the deep retreats of winter, but they're eating quietly now.

            There's still plenty of green landscape on earth's surface even now, in the first footholds of November. Lawns are green, in some cases greener than have been for months because mid and late summer often stress grass, and in some cases they're spotted with the fallen leaves that, to my eye, give them more interest. The evergreens are ever as they were, though some are showing brown spots from the now-annual summer dry period (not technically a drought, but effectively one).

            But the deciduous tree have mostly turned. The perennials in our flower gardens have colored up, though their blossoms in almost all cases are long past. The primrose, a low scrubby, prolific plant that blooms yellow in June, turn their leaves crimson in October.

            The leaves of a knee-high flowering perennial called "balloon flowers" turn yellow as cheese.

            It's the early bloomers, first half the season, that seem to provide the most of this low fall foliage. Some of our late bloomers are still trying to bloom: a white-flowering anemone; some annuals; some mums.

            The Montauk daisy is interestingly caught in the middle. It's white, October-blooming flowers still hang on the stem, though they're drying and brown-spotting their petals. But the leaves, particularly on the low stems, are already turning yellow.

            And the beautiful, rusty, bronze and copper tones of weeping cherry tree hover over the back garden's center, like a temple to the color palette of autumn (second photo down).

            The lace-cap hydrangea in the front garden does something similar, offering a whole little forest's worth of variety in a shrub-sized canopy (last photo).

            And, this week, the crown prince of autumn's color-creation, at least for intensity, is the Japanese maple, still a shrub, limited in size (having adjusted to itself to the amount of sun and water it gets from us, no longer pining for more), but not in the expression of its deep, dark, reddening heart (seen in both the top and third photo down).

            It's the declining sun that singes the foliage of these plants, firing them into autumn colors, as every day takes further into the deep.

Veterans-related Poems in November Verse-Virtual: The Garden of Remembrance

With Veterans Day on the horizon, Verse-Virtual editor Firestone Feingold gave poets the option of contributing poems pertaining to the veteran experience in the November issue of Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal. 
         Feingold's introductory notes highlight a poem contributed by Bill Glose,  a veteran of the Iraq War.  The poem, entitled "Soldiering On," deals with the epic challenge in 21st century combat experience (and maybe always) of what to do with that experience once you come back home. Glose's poem, written in sonnet form -- 14 lines, fixed meter and rhyme scheme -- doesn't slight the scope of the challenge, epitomized by a strong image when the poet wonders whether he can ever expect "the ice within my bones to melt anew."
        But the poem comes to a hopeful conclusion in its final three lines:

Disarmed, I gulped blue air and felt alive.
Headlong at life I charged and wasn’t scared
to drop my shield and let my heart be bared.

      In an introductory note Glose says he found release from that "ice" of bottled-up emotion by writing about his experiences. He states: "The first poems and essays seared like glowing skewers, but as I poured more of my heart onto the page a strange thing happened...I felt the catharsis of release. And so I kept going until I had a drawer full of them." (For the full story see http://www.verse-virtual.com/editors-note.html)

      I'm not a veteran. My father (Alva J. Knox, 1921-2003) was and so were his three brothers, all serving during World War II, as did millions of other men and women of his generation. My connection to the veterans experience comes through him and my appreciation of the generation of Americans who struggled and sacrificed during a world war and succeeded not only in defeating the forces of hate but in making a better world both for themselves and for all of us who came after. 
      So my contribution to the veterans theme is a group of three poems, grouped under the title "Three Poems for My Father, And All The Rest." 
       Here's the first of those three poems:

A Row of Stones: Calverton National Cemetery


It looks like all the rest
slotted in this final postwar census, this straight-line campground of eternity,
a parking lot for identical souls
a computer punch card, names in the phonebook,
the roll call for hereafter,
the Levittown of the life to come

It looks, almost, like the line-up of all the local men,
stretching from here to God,  
who once were young on any given day
Dress them in Army green
and lay them down in straight lines without number 
on the battleground where future always conquers past 
in an age we thought would never end 

His gravestone looks... like all the others,
laid to rest exactingly in lines identical and perfectly straight, 
the Army way, the regimental way of passage, 
this permanent occupation of a grassy plain 'out East' on the island 
where he planted his back-home, postwar fortunate flag
never to wander, really, plowing the highways on the city commute 
never to leave the good ol' USA
and never, he said, to stand in line again
(I won't tell him if you don't)

They made it home, those who lie beneath these stones  
facing straight ahead, 
comrades to left and right, messmates, men of a generation 
who did not fall in wintry France 
nor plunge to doom from the infinite Pacific sky
but passed in cooler times, 
doing their bit for the world that came after,
the world that they made safe for us 

I number his grave goods, now the hour's long past, 
bowling league trophies, pool hall cue
German rifle (Mauser, maybe) shot from the hands 
of an enemy patrol in the Nice Triangle, 
barkeep paraphernalia, little mixer sticks, 
cut glass bowls for lemon twists 
barbeque apron, cotton hat and silly stenciled T-shirt 
"Who invited all these tacky people?"
paintbrush, hammer, handsaw,
pen and pencil, adding machine 

Space, I wonder, in the final straight-line muster 
for an old Dodge Dart, most enduring companion of the road, 
the ashtray almost always full
 http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2015-november.html

 

Autumn Looks: Fallen Leaves Make a Garden Everywhere

          One of the best moments in autumn is when a big flotilla of leaves falls from some tall, handsome, colorful trees on your block, neighborhood, or especially right in front of your house, spreading their still vibrant colors all over your pavement.

            Those leaves will dry out, and the color will fail until all the fallen leaves appear uniformly 'brown, old, dead' or any number of unattractive appellations.

            But that time is not today.

            When the leaves come down it's time to look at them. All over town they're creating compositions, textures, ephemeral works of color shape, patterns, and mixtures of all these elements on the canvas of earth's surfaces. Those surfaces in densely populated ares are generally hard, impervious. But for a week or two, they'll appeal to the senses.

            Artists try to achieve some of the same effects in museums -- ephemeral, changing, disappearing -- with light machines, timers, filters, varieties of shadow and light, and natural materials that fade over time. But nature, the tilt of the earth, the apparent revolution of the sun spinning sine curves through the years, does it every year and all the time. Autumn is one its more stunning effects.         

            The same effect, a stunning transformation of the look of surfaces, this sublime cultivation of appearances, is duplicated in the trees. And while many leaves are on the ground, still many more remain in the trees. 

            It's a good time to look at them.      
            We won't have these color transformations to drink in much longer.