You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
this lapping water is a nagging unease
so far from a destination
you can address
do I walk as fast as we’re sailing?
a fathom is essentially an arm span
how far the sound carries
that lawnmower
I think we’re heading the wrong direction
with someone new at the helm
how can they see ahead
from way back there?
I’m freezing
ready on the down haul
island hopping
today’s cold
except in the galley
The Milanos were also short-term owners of our house. They sold the property in June 1978 to Dora and Merrill Lank junior. He was an Eastport native who served a stint as a city police officer and also enjoyed making wreaths. Both of them had grown up in Eastport — he in the north end and she in the south — and had children.
When the Lanks took ownership, our house had a slate roof, one with a pink scalloped pattern worked it. It was sided it what Dora has called ugly blue asphalt shingles. They divided the two big rooms upstairs into four, added the closets at the top of the stairs, and installed the casement window over the kitchen sink and the pass-through to the front parlor before moving in with her mother a few blocks away.
The house was then rented to Mel Soctomah, newly retired from the U.S. Army. He was Passamaquoddy in his late 40s and moved in with his wife, three children, and a dog. At liberty to make renovations, he installed the big wood and oil-fired cook stove that occupied the kitchen when we arrived. He recalled that the flue drew well, an important consideration in a place as windy as Eastport. They then left for a stint in Florida before returning to Eastport and neighboring Sipayik for good.
Dora and Merrill divorced, though, and complications emerged after she moved on. There was a sale from Bangor Savings Bank to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on October 8, 1982, with a supplementary entry on August 5, 1983. This was during a national recession that included a depressed real estate market and foreclosures. Somehow, Gordon Greenlaw reappears in this sale.
Sometime during this period and the one that followed, puzzling rough-sawn dark ceiling beams were erected in the two front parlors — “pseudo-rustic pop 1970’s kitsch,” in the words of one current resident, or “ye old Lion’s Den tavern,” in the mind of another. Those ceiling beams are distinctive, in that love- it-or-hate-it kind of way. For us, our reaction often depends on the day you might be asking. Looking closer, touches appeared in the kitchen, like the Montgomery Ward electric stovetop that came with the house when we bought it. Monkey Ward, for the record, went out of business in 2000 and probably had no outlet anywhere near Eastport well before that. I am wondering about some of the shelves, though, and considering them her Calla’s. Or now, maybe Mel’s. Nice work, either way. Particle board cabinets that also arrived at now scheduled for replacement, as are the triple-track storm windows.
We can still ask who added the knee walls or the cosmic crab wall painting we found under the wallpaper upstairs.
As a third book involving Jaya shaped up, I reflected on ways some people perceive things most folks don’t. The angels everywhere, as Hassidic contend, perhaps matching the dakinis of Tibetan Buddhist circles. Some of my fellow yogis saw auras around people, although I’ve seen just one, quite black, surrounding the Reverend Pat Robertson when he and his handlers walked through the newsroom for a conference with the editor-in-chief and the editorial writer.
Since moving Way Downeast, I know of the small rock people some of the Passamaquoddy observe.
You might add elves or gnomes or other creatures to the list.
The concept did give me a threat to unite the three novellas into one.
~*~
What was needed was a third novella, reflecting the place Jaya lived between Prairie Depot and the Pacific Northwest. It would have With a Passing Freight Train of 119 Cars and Twin Cabooses before it and Along With Kokopelli’s Hornpipe following. It would be like an adagio in a symphony or sonata or the middle panel in a painted triptych.
I decided to draw on a wooded alcove I loved to explore during my return to Bloomington. It was a largely unknown tract that had included a city water reservoir as well as several caves and springs that had fed two gristmills.
In the years since I moved on, the site has been cleaned up into a city park that even has a stairway down one of the steep slopes.
It had inspired a set of Leonard Springs poems you can find as a free chapbook at my Thistle Finch blog. As I revisited those pieces, I realized that the hollow’s scene and history just beyond the duplex my first wife and I rented on my return to Bloomington as a research associate would transport well to the Ozarks. Especially the part about grist mills at the foot of the sharp hillsides slopes where springs poured out from cave formations.
The story took off from there, especially when I chanced upon the woman miller. I must confess being especially fond of the result. Was this Cassia from What’s Left whispering in my ear once again?
Researching details for this story was a delight. Grist mills had run for a while in my ancestry; the Hodgson Mill in the Ozarks, for one, reflects one side of my family – they even spelled their surname for a while without the G, like mine. (They descend from one William while the other William, also a miller, was my umpteen greats-grandfather.)
Caves were another thing the Ozarks had in common with southern Indiana.
And, speaking of things some people see and hear that others don’t, we had the American Shakers whose spirit drawings and writings wandered outside of the normal artistic constraints. That gave me one more element to play with, especially when I turned to the artistic projects that Jaya had relied on to replenish her own soul in her spare time. I didn’t want her to be writing poetry, as I had, but to be creating some blend of art forms beyond that. Think of Joseph Cornell’s boxes or Emily Dickinson’s bits of paper constructions as possibilities. While I touch on Jaya’s legacy on that front toward the ending of Nearly Canaan, I felt freer to explore it here.
Just what was Jaya’s off-hours creative activity and spiritual practice leading to? Or what prompted them?
Miller at the Springs became an ideal forum for their consideration. Here it was, the final piece of writing in my range of fiction, and it was the most joyous to draft, the least ambitious in its art, and perhaps the most down-to-earth.
~*~
These three novellas presented a private Jaya much different from the one in the public eye. Titling the book the Secret Side of Jaya came naturally, along with the subtitle, Three surreal and fantastic encounters.
The book rounded out my Living Dharma series.
I was ready to kick back and relax, intending to enjoy the role of an author.
To put the jack-o’-lanterns in context, let’s take a step back.
The first is, that the Convention must have enjoyed in a very singular degree, an exemption from the pestilential influence of party animosities, the diseases most incident to deliberative bodies, and most apt to contaminate their proceedings. The second conclusion is, that all of the deputations composing the Convention, were either satisfactorily accommodated by the final act; or were induced to accede to it, by a deep conviction of sacrificing private opinions and partial interests to the public good, and by a despair of seeing this necessity diminished by delays or by new experiments.
James Madison in Federalist No. 37
Injustice of all sorts. Whiny diatribes and mud-slinging, character assassination.
TV/Rock obsession. Illiteracy. Consumerism.
Loud sound systems in cars. Drivers who think they bought the highway. Drivers who ignore changing lights.
Clutter and pollution.
Senseless regulations, corporate, not just governmental, let’s be fair.
Being put on hold while I’m present in a store.
Presumptuous artists.
The super-rich.
Country roads sometimes carry imaginative monikers.
Here are some ones that stand out in my encounters:
After reading Jewish authors complain about mistranslated passages from the Hebrew Bible, I welcome Hebrew scholar Alter’s thorough translation with an eye and ear for its innate literary qualities. A fine poet himself, Alter’s sensitive three volumes (including notes and footnotes that illuminate the working of puns and other devices) have become my go-to version in referencing passages and stories. The big and beautifully designed volumes are (1) the Five Books of Moses, (2) the Prophets, and (3) the Writings (Psalms and Proverbs, for instance).
Also of note are his The Art of Biblical Poetry and The Art of Biblical Narrative, examinations that challenge many earlier Biblical scholars’ contentions. I find both books to be excellent presentations of the craft of writing (and reading) both poetry and literary prose even apart from their Biblical subject.
Jnana's Red Barn 