The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: J.T. Ledbetter
My poetry is often a report of a vanishing world that was always
achingly inarticulate and therefore of violent heart, and overall there
is that strange farm silence that covers the land and the people of the
prairies—places I both feared and loved.
—J.T. Ledbetter Ledbetter immerses us in a rural world all too unfamiliar to all too many of us who know only the urban environment and the sprawl of the suburban. The latter entails a daily battle to keep nature at bay, while the former provides for an organic cooperation between the land and its human residents. He is from that American prairie where the land is worked with animals and machines, where barns and coops and ponds are sited near the farmhouse, where the human drama—work, love, family relationships—is enacted on often very different terms. In his poems we breathe the hay and manure. We hear the silences. You can hear them in selected published and new poems below.
Professor Emeritus at California Lutheran University, J.T. Ledbetter is the author of four books of poetry: Plum Creek Odyssey (Valparaiso University Press, 1975), Blue Galaxy Iris (Vanguard Press, 2007), Underlying Premises (Lewis Clark Press, 2010), and most recently, Old and Lost Rivers (Lost Horse Press, 2012), winner of the Idaho Prize for poetry. He’s also published six chapbooks of poems, a volume of literary criticism and essays, as well as two plays. His poems appear in many journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and The Sewanee Review. His creative output extends to a musical stage play, several choral anthems, as well as published collage work.
Selected Poems after oats they lie down
when last light falls out of the sycamores into the horse tank work horses plunge their soft noses into the cold water their backs steaming in the snow after oats they lie down in straw kicking their legs in their dreams their eyes white at shadows running beside them the man waits for the tea kettle pluming on the stove upstairs his wife combs out her long grey hair and lies down he cups the hot tea inside his coat and goes to the barn to help the mother birth the colt then lies down in the bloody stall watching her nibble at the sack her lips pulled away from her teeth later he sits in the kitchen with some cold meat and dips a piece of bread in his tea
he sits very still because the blood on his clothes is hard he does not know his wife has died nor will he know what to do he will sit beside her until morning then call a neighbor and wonder if he should turn off something he will go to the barn to throw down some hay and listen to the pigeons thrumming against the tin roof and when shadows move from Turley’s Woods toward the farm he knows they wait to press their farm bodies against him wanting to hear how it is with him now he thinks he could go in if he walks through the wild plum orchard if he crosses the old bridge into the high corn first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal Crossing Shoal Creek The letter said you died on your tractor crossing Shoal Creek. There were no pictures to help the memories fading like mists off the bottoms that last day on the farm when I watched you milk the cows, their sweet breath filling the dark barn as the rain that wasn’t expected sluiced through the rain gutters. I waited for you to speak the loud familiar words about the weather, the failed crops— I would have talked then, too loud, stroking the Holstein moving against her stanchion— but there was only the rain on the tin roof, and the steady swish-swish of milk into the bright bucket as I walked past you, so close we could have touched. from Underlyling Premises I Would Tell You Now
The yellow hat you wore is still on the peg in the summer house I built for your potting. The blue bowl you left in the upper garden belongs to the cat now. Next spring I’ll plant whatever you have jotted down on the post, and I’ll make sure the cat is in at night before the foxes come from their fern-dark holes in Turley’s Woods. Your cousin Rose from Cincinnati
made a list of things to keep me busy before she went back to Tennessee. I don’t know how that works either, calling her Rose from Cincinnati. The man with her calls himself the Rev. Fimbarrus Nobs. I’ll just leave it at that. Too many facts get in my way at night when I’m trying to see your face through the bougainvillea brushing against our window. I won’t stop trying, and it won’t stop brushing. It’s just the kind of thing that would make you lift your head up from digging to explain once again how the world works. It has been a long time since I left you sitting in the pool of your shadow, your dress spread to catch the falling leaves, immortal in their mortal splendor, and I remember asking if heaven was already spreading to catch us in the moment of our flaming out and our blossoming, or if it was only our voice in the silence, frightened, expecting nothing— and how you raised your head and looked at me. I could not tell you that it was just the lifting of your head under that damned yellow hat I waited for, the rose smoke of autumn in your eyes. I should have told you then. I would tell you now. first appeared in American Literary Review Girls in Their Summer Dresses Girls in their summer dresses, like drowsy swans upon a pond turning their heads as we walk by, unfold their legs and together sigh at tiny men in each round eye. Their dresses billow up and out like feathers on a sudden breeze, showing legs and lovely knees, and every passing man undresses all the girls in summer dresses turning their heads as we pass by, little men in each bright eye. When it’s dark, or nearly so, and summer girls rise to go, we circle faster round and round following their shadows across the ground and over the hill and out of sight into memory-enhancing night, happy to be passing by, tiny men in each round eye, and mindful of what each dress caresses, not a man but secretly blesses summer girls in their summer dresses. from Underlyling Premises to the person considering reading Proust
—for Melyou don’t have to take the book into the closet like the little plastic cross you received for 13 weeks of perfect Sunday School attendance Proust will not glow in the dark when you open the book take care the pages do not tear—do not hope the pages tear either— there are other books on your shelf which do not require holy orders you may read the book with a kind of smirk if you have to do something besides just opening the damned thing if your friends ask you why you would spend some of your limited hours on earth reading about a man who cannot get out of bed you must affect a certain je ne sais pas raise of the eyebrows or purse your lips as if on the verge of delivering a mild philippic a casual shrug says worlds take the book for a walk or place it beneath your pillow and see if any action is forthcoming don’t bring it up at a dinner where people talk about buying on spec or which island they found/one unknown to the rest/ if someone asks where you summered or wintered say Proust you know enough French to order green beans so what’s the big deal? if the book is older than you are it deserves to be read so settle in with a kind attitude and lose yourself in the rooms and minds of people hitherto strangers— you may find you like being where Proust is it may even look a little (go ahead say un peu) like where you are or wish you had been “if you wonder if it’s true but keep reading to find out you have your answer . . . .” first appeared in The French Review of Literature Under the Chinaberry Tree He washed his hair after working in the silos all day then drove his pickup into town where he waited in the shadows for lights to come on before taking off his clothes under the chinaberry tree near the window where the woman undressed. Sometimes wind stirred a branch against the house and he froze in fear when she went to the window, seeing only her reflection in the darkness, and he held his breath as she stepped out of her dress and reached her hand to unsnap her bra, folding her arms before her. When he could not come to town he imagined her looking through the window at him, and when they laughed at his silences he worked alone at the edge of the upper garden and at night threw hay down to the cows who filled the dark barn with their sweet breath. He watched and waited, crouching naked under the chinaberry tree until he heard her come in, parting the leaves to watch her put necklace and earrings into the white porcelain box on her dresser, and once he lay for hours in the notch of the tree as she sat at her desk, her back moving gently as she wrote. When spring came he felt the velvet blossoms touch his belly and he curled his toes into the soft wet earth as she slept, the bedroom bathed in the moonlight that froze the trees to the window. When the early snow came he lifted himself on his toes and watched her peel her stockings off her legs, slowly, as if she dreamed, and when she stood naked before the window he tightened his hands on the windowsill and felt the wood slice under his fingernails. When she leaned her body against the cold glass, her eyes closed, he moved from the shadows and pressed himself against her, tracing her arms and legs against the glass, the chinaberry leaves framing his face as snow swept through the trees and stung his bare back and convulsing buttocks, the white flower unfolding inside him, as she disappeared inside the circle her warm breath formed on the glass, her lips parted, her eyes wide in wonder.
Old and Lost Rivers Old and Lost Rivers flow quietly over older rocks and tangled roots, past empty houses leaning against each other where an old man standing where the two rivers come together watches a barrel and a Methodist Hymn Book swimming for their lives down to the Houston Marshes to the sea . . . he remembers the people along the rivers who prayed at night beneath a harvest moon for peace and money or love— or just to be left alone to die where they were, and a woman walking by the river just at dusk who stopped to wave, her shadow on the water already moving . . . he dreams of her now, watching the water spinning around a tree in the middle of the stream, a sprout someone threw there, thinking it dead—or maybe a bird dropped seeds there, flying, that the river swallowed, forcing them down into the mud that sent spindly black branches up to breathe . . . where is the woman now, he wonders, but the rivers flow and do not answer him or back up to say:
night comes quickly, covering the marshes where fish hover
in the waving grasses, their mouths against the current flowing to the gulf where phosphorescent waves break and withdraw whispering of life along the rivers where a man dreamed long of a woman, tall and thin, with long arms, waving . . . from Old and Lost Rivers girl on plum creek 13 and afraid of dark things moving in the water shadows hiding in other shadows a lone goose floating in the horse tank the moon in her window and doors opening downstairs if she takes off her clothes and lies naked on the hot sheets she thinks nothing will find her but something riffles the curtains making the moon shimmer away she feels her body to know if she has been found but the house is asleep her door is locked when it touches her feet she spreads her arms and legs to welcome it she is not afraid of the cool delicate night when the cooling breezes slide off her body the curtains fall without a sound and she sleeps first appeared in a 48th Street Press broadside Kentucky spring possum hangs on a barb-wire fence hissing at the rusty barbs dug deep in his belly goose him with a stick up off the points and he drops like a pile of old clothes face full of teeth and hate chuffing and snarling dribbing remains of dead bird stringing out his innards like pearls on the wet green grass first appeared in Asheville Poetry Review pond by the edge of a lovely green pond a frog muses on life happy in the sun beating on his pebbly back his eyes are closed his ugly mouth works and rows with the last of a dragonfly waving its wings like a hanky while just below the surface of the stagnant green water a green snake slithers silent and deadly behind the frog drunk to the shadow curling around him turning him upside down sliding him backwards into the water his lunch dribbing onto the grassy green water where three tiny bubbles break on the surface of the pond already calming already shimmering in the late afternoon heat glistening and lovely on wide-bladed leaves and delicate ferns bending over the dark sun-swallowing water from Underlyling Premises Snow on the Palouse
I didn’t like the cold, my mother said, closing the album. All those people huddled together in the Palouse . . . exactly what is that anyway? My parents drove through Spokane when I was six, then turned south and got lost in it. I peed in it after my mother said, “Leslie, let the girl out of the car!” Getting home to southern California was supposed to be heaven, my mother said, but she kept looking at the photos of those rolling hills covered with snow. There are no people in the pictures, just snow. You can’t hear the wolves either. She asks me if I remember eating in The Harvest Moon Café where men in cowboy hats cursed the Government and some of the Republicans and all of the Democrats. I didn’t because I was looking at the moose head with a newspaper stuck in its mouth, wondering if it was happier that way. Mother says she wants to go back there someday. My father says people in hell want ice-water. I say nothing. But if they really cared, I would tell them I got out of the car that snowy night and peed a series of yellow rings in the snow. That’s something! But they won’t ask and I won’t tell. I’m saving it. I still don’t know what the Palouse is, but I won’t forget it accepted my offering there in the dark of those rolling hills, in the quiet of the secret-covering snow. from Old and Lost Rivers Daughter of the Palouse They call it The Palouse, those sun-burnt hillsA young girl undresses, a star in her window. her cotton nightgown over her body, she wishes her bones might be found by a young explorer who will say she was young and lovely, and often lonely— admitting he does not know how he knows. And when she cannot stand the night silences, she comes down from her bed in the loft, passing like a shadow the sleeping sheep, and climb the hill to stand naked under stars turning over ancient hills, listening to the long grasses hissing her name, until the earth hears and remembers. from Old and Lost Rivers Child of the Palouse She doesn’t know she is different. Voices on the playground say
she carries her lunch and has no cell phone. Her father watches her on the hill listening to the grasses, finding flowers where none grow. She reads by the fire at night while he listens for wolves. I guess I’ll check the sheep pen, he says, the heavy curtains falling at the closing of the door. At night she watches the water undulate across her face in the bowl, wondering if it’s her world the little ocean breaks against. Tomorrow she will step into snow, her face red and stinging, following her white plume of breath to where the road bends to town. Girls on the bus will giggle behind their books at her straight dress the color of wheat, and bunch together to make her sit alone in front where she watches them in the mirror over the driver. Their braided hair. Their colored dresses. Their pink mouths moving. At dusk it snows again as she moves among the sheep, holding an ear of corn. They follow her, pushing against her like the water breaking the mirror of her face, and the sun, locked in frozen puddles, rushing up beneath her feet, wanting out. Things moving. She tells her father death will be like that, going on, knowing or unknowing forever. Papa, do you love me? He puts down his paper. The question her mother asked the night she died when he could not say the word others used for God or cars, or the weather,—mouths already forming it before mind thinks or the heart feels. But he could not say this either. Anyone on the road would have seen, but not remarked on smoke trailing over the house set far back in the ravine, anymore than the silo leaning against the ruined barn once owned by a Swede who couldn’t make it here. The car is gone, its lights moving up and down the hills as it turns north to Spokane or south to the world beyond the Palouse where snow covers everything in silence, turning the hills white to the horizons. first appeared in The Comstock Review New Poems
rain down the block two girls wearing Candy Stripers uniforms carry donuts into a rest home—they worry about their hair, not liking rain except in movies where the girl is about to be ravaged by a man who drives a truck hauling veggies
out of Springfield— they watch the people eat the donuts trying to be careful about the crumbs the night nurse watches them eat and watches the crumbs spread out around them she sighs and motions for the candy strippers to leave which they do after the nurse signs a little card each carries saying they had done their duty outside a band has finished playing in the rain and is packing their instruments into expensive cases lined with plush or red or scarlet velvet they have just played some 40’s music for the people who trace the outlines of their faces on the breath they have breathed onto the cold windows
sometimes placing their face against their face in the next half hour a woman coming home in the rain will be stopped by a man in an overcoat once worn by Alan Ladd she will reach into her handbag for the small revolver and wait as he opens his coat she smiles at what he has exposed and walks around him the gun still in her purse a church has a hole in the roof people fall asleep listening to the rain washing against the saints standing in their stained-glass windows the preacher has a parrot on his shoulder that sings verses from an old Norwegian Hymnal
Lutherans follow easily/pausing at the end of each line for breath people raise rain-rinsed eyes to heaven and children stamp down the aisles in puddles
there is much joy in the rain/ the candles gutter and go out/ the preacher has flown home
chicken houseto his family who will have to tell him his dog got into the neighbor’s the Candy Stripers are reading The Sun Also Rises together— the rain on the windows is an omen they say their teacher says it’s a good book/their parents are not sure/ they have heard stories—all that drinking on a hill above town a broken flower spills a gibbous moon two boys find a horse while gigging fish in Turley’s Marsh
it was lying in lead-white quick lime head and neck were there the rest was gone sockets where eyes had been flared nostrils like it was holding its breath you can find it in the field of yellow-headed daisies my mom calls them you’ll smell ripe plums Farm Dreams He wants to tell her he dreamed she was milking the cow, and how the seasons seemed to move around her, colors and weathers swirling in the barn as she leaned her head against the cow’s warm stomach, and then she was upstairs in bed, and in his dream he touched her body beneath the cold sheets but she slept long and deep and would not wake to his hands. She watches him drink his hot tea from the saucer and wants to tell him she dreamed he plowed the garden, blindfolded, the reins tying him to the plow, and when she ran to him the horse bolted, turning the plow over and how he flailed blindly at the horse, cursing and crying, crawling in the damp furrows. At night they sit in the yellow glow of light in the kitchen where words might come, but words do not come so they pull on heavy boots, their fingers touching crossing laces, their clothes billowing out as they cross the porch to the barn, noticing the old horse leaning against the silo, the mother cat carrying her kittens into the corn crib, the lone duck in the horse tank and the moon overflowing the bird bath. They notice these things, but the farm and poor crops and bad weather have given them no words for what they mean, anymore than they have for dreams or the coming snow or the cold night that surrounds them in their bed where their sock feet touch, their breath a blue mist in the cold room. They notice such things, and mean to talk about them someday, but they wonder if they would still be able to clear the upper pasture or cap the old well in Turley’s Woods or hold the cow's head while the other pulls the dead calf out. And which words could they use after the flood carries off the new pigs and Rev. Nobs takes his life in the belfry, neighbors asking them if they knew that woman from Galena. But these questions do not last as the first snow swirls about them as they dig up rotten potatoes, and listen to the wind coming through the attic window he meant to fix, or why she cried in her apron after dropping her mother’s dish,—watching him watch her in the dark kitchen where he waits for his dinner. What words then? Or now? when you say good-by when you say good-by the eye having seen enough of the world shuts leaving the sun balanced on the horizon the familiar face turning away the hand having touched bone and nerve recoils as the needle unstitches the skin levering the splinter out and the heart no louder than the thrush hiding in the fox’s shadow stops as the candle goes out a wisp of smoke upon the water one spring day we went behind the barn where my uncle had the boar’s legs tied with bailing wire to a red bud tree and said “when I cut ’em take the nuts and toss ’em into the cabbage patch but make sure the sows are penned up or they’ll eat the baby chicks the mother had there along with the nuts” and he raised a kinky wiry tail and cut the testicles with one snap of the wire cutters and pulled on the rope and the hog squealed and tried to bite itself and the blood spurted onto my uncle who swore and kicked at the hog as it ran or jerked its way to the hog wallow where it eased itself into the muddy water blowing bubbles and rolling this way and that still squealing and my uncle grinned and looked at us and snapped his cutters shut and we ran and hid in the wild plum orchard each holding one that night the moon filled our window as we lay on top of the wet sheets afraid to move afraid to touch snow was not expected but neither was the baby or the tax man somehow all three came at once and the weather man said more coming down the block a woman pulls a kid’s wagon her life covered by a tarp taken off a dead horse she found in a pasture ground hogs root for sprigs of anything moose spraddle their legs to get at the salt-lick cars slide and crash people curse and sing carols children will wake up to snow on their window sill their parents woke earlier to finish the tree they cut down after they burned the first one for heat over the line in Idaho two men hunt along the Coeur d’Alene river their camies red with blood and whiskey dogs slide on the ice chewing on what may have been a red-tailed fox in happier times someone driving in the Palouse stops for a look at his tires they will find him next month snow falls lightly in footsteps that go from house to barn filling them like cream the man watches it come down from the barn where he milks the one cow he had from his father when he married Sue Notts after she got back from a country he cannot find on a map her medals are in her sock drawer the Monroe Street Bridge in Spokane is covered with snow cars are spinning crossways avoiding children on new sleds while a man with no sleds watches from a burning barrel his medals still in country it is night the snow is still falling becoming flowers in a milk-white vase past tense
it said rain so she left him a note to bring in the cat and to turn off the gas unless he was going to eat if so call the fire department never mind sending money I visited the bank yesterday you may be a little low now you can leave her picture in the Bible you never read I found it after burning everything but don’t try to find me and if you hear from people insisting they know us it’s probably our children the goat you wanted is in the basement don't ask me now he got there the neighbors you never liked never liked you either the goat didn’t either the rent is paid up to yesterday do you remember yesterday? look in the fridge—NO, the FRIDGE there may be fragments try to remember how it was when we were 19 then try to remember who we are now and how we got there/here if we ever meet on some corner in another town pretend you tripped otherwise we may have to respond with a smile or nod or god forbid say something— what’s the past tense of “I do”? toe dancing on Mr. Baldy my son calls rock hopping toe dancing and Mt. Baldy Mr. Baldy and fire trucks fire fuks because of a glitch in his epiglottis and the je m’em fous he said was emblematic period but on top of the mountain his eyes are eagles and his hands claws to climb the last peak over oceans of blue and salt sands toe dancing peak to dangerous peak leaving us remembering his penchant for messing with words and mountains exclaiming bits of Le Petit Prince and laughing at death and crowds below who ask if we know the guy dancing in clouds and we wince and say we do just like we said it before when first we met and kissed stretching muscles can be dangerous fishing from a pier deadly memories not founded on experience dull somewhere a manual is being written explaining why one cannot just get together with anyone anytime anywhere without consequences if they had seen the way you turned your dress flowing out around slender legs your eyes darting backward into mine your face fresh and clear and letting me know that you know I’ve looked at you before but now you are late and must let it go into the file labeled “don’t open” yesterday my goat bleated like its heart was broken I threw an old pair of shoes into his pen and he stared at them as if life depended on how he read this new sign surely your leaving was written in the stars even as we were taking our birth-breaths together and now here we are/you walking into the sunset me ironing a shirt the wrong way there is a magnetism that we rarely consider other than physically—thus divorce and sadness the mind shriveled/the heart lonely whose parents warned me/you which friends applauded/which wept where were the signs we missed when first we met and kissed? Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
