| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters The Buried Houses Revisited: Two Poems of David Mason By David Mason Feb 7, 2003 It's been more than a decade since "The Buried Houses," a collection of poems by David Mason debuted, co-winning the 1991 Nichols Roerich Prize. A lyric and narative poet David Mason's work is extraordinary in the range of characters and place. In an age when poetry tends to be auto-biographical he sailed a different current. Some of his work is reflective of his daily life, and some is sheer use of his imaginative spirit. He is also one of the most readable contemporary poets; maybe it's the narative voice or maybe it's the way he finds the poetry of the venacular voice. Like another poet and story teller, Ursula K. LeGuin, he gives us back the magic of simple words. -Editor
Versions of Ecotopia God help the land that is unlucky enough to be popular, where everyone wants the view of islands like loaves and fishes in the west, the seiner placed just right in the composition, and rain is gentle as a Japanese scroll. Perhaps you've been there, remember salmon smoked on alder coals, or have seen the northern lights like a drunken cloud off a gillnetter's deck, and said, "I want to own these stars and davits, lower my skiff each night in the same dark sound!" Or was it you who stood inside the dike and watched the valley heated to as griddle, the playing field of gulls and combines, cooked in the flying chaff? You waved your arms, shouting, "Milkpails, silos, trucks, pallets, fog--all mine!" Goggled, slogging with ice axe to the glacier, you watched the comb of Heaven touch the clouds and make them cry, the blue diadem of ice reach forever in heart-stopping air, until you prayed your bones would vanish in this grave. Mountain, sound or valley clung to you like sweat in suburbs where you worked and thought. But others like you dreamed of the Promised Land and schemed to have Ecotopia, whispering, "There's more than one way to skin a madrona tree!" For those who always lived there it was dull as drive-in movies and hot cars, until the heroes of development had built a bit of Phoenix by the oyster beds, a Trumpish tower downtown, L.A. at the fringe. As murdered buffalo disturb out dreaming plains, a rainy fish smell lingers in Ecotopia. At night the plaid giant rattles his axe and growls in Swedish, up to his neck in muck where the tall, unbarbered forest used to be. You find yourself in unexpected traffic, pressed in a narrow shoal of weeping lights, looking through the rain for an exit sign, and thinking of an old scroll you once saw rubbed to nothing by a billion loving hands. Blackened Peaches I. One fall it was Jim and me living out to the county. We were farmers then. A cold northeasterly blew down like a sheet of ice, nipped the peach trees so the leaves turned black. All winter long the leaves was black as could be. They never dropped, not even when it snowed, and it scared me some to walk under the boughs, the way they rattled so unnaturally. We were married years when that happened. I first come out here from Wisconsin on the train - 1902, when I was a little red-head. I remember the train stopped in the Cascades and I saw all the mountain sheep in the world was crossing the tracks. You wouldn't see that now. A man named Slaughter met the train, shouting, "This way to the Slaughter-house!" My father said he meant a hotel, but I was never sure. People have been dying on me ever since. Soon after we moved up here to Nooksack Father passed on. I went down with a fever and that was when Doctor Hale first come to me. He was a tall man, not a scary one,a and you could tell he was refined. He combed his hair back neat, wore wire glasses that looked tiny on a man so big, always wore a suit and carried his black leather case. His wife I believe died five years before, but you saw no sign of sadness in him. Once he asked me what was my favorite fruit and I said, "Peaches," and the next visit, why, there was a good ripe peach waiting for me. He called me Sally Peaches with a laugh. On my sixteenth birthday Doctor Hale come by in his buggy with a bucket to make ice cream. Halfway through our part Mama left the room. Doctor Hale and I sat in the kitchen, him with his hands on his knees, looking shy. After a while he took his glasses off, rubbed them with his handkerchief. His eyes was tired. "Sally Peaches," he said. "You're too big for that. I promise I won't baby you again." He brought a box in from his buggy for me: "I think, Sally, you're old enough for this." The most beautiful party dress I ever saw lay inside with its lace sleeves open to me. Doctor Hale said he'd been saving it for years. "I can tell it's going to fit you perfectly." The next time I was over to town I walked right by his office. I heard an axe's sound from his yard, tip-toed up to have a look. There was Doctor Hale stripped to the waist except for his specs and braces, swinging that axe as if he were a younger man. When he paused to wipe his brow I could see he looked angry, tired, or not right with himself; he seemed to want to tear those logs apart with bare hands. I left before he saw me, but that night I kept seeing him, the way all gentleness went out of him when he swung. One day, though nobody was sick, he come again to our house. Mother left us alone and Doctor Hale stood awkwardly and looked down at me through his lenses. We were quiet so you hear the rain clap on the roof. I give him a flower from the kitchen vase; he fingered it like something that was ill. "Sally," he said, "tell me what I look like." He smiled strangely and I suppose I blushed and couldn't raise my eyes to look at him. "No," he said. "I know how I like. I look old, old enough to have been tired out working when your father was sick. I never told you that because I held some rather strange ideas. You know, of course, I'm very fond of you." He coughed at the flower in his spotted hands. "But I developed these peculiar ideas. What I mean is that now you're growing up. You're had a lonely childhood in some ways, but you're a woman and you'll marry soon and then with luck you'll never be alone. I'm wishing you good luck, good health ... all good." Each word he spoke then seemed to weaken him, and when he drove away I sat the crying though I couldn't tell my mother what it meant. II. I was only seventeen when I met Jim. He lumberjacked in the camp out to the lake. I always liked the woods, so green and nice, the ferns in bunches, trees covered with moss. When I was little I was scared to walk alone for fear the Indians would get me, but Jim made the woods seem lighter than before. His family was Welsh. They all was singers. Next to Doctor Hale you'd think he was small, more my size, but he was a strong camp boss. Men always said he was good to work for. Once he let his whiskers grow like the men and I thought they was awful-looking things "What's the matter, Sally?" says he. "Seen a ghost?" "Jim," I says, "you've ruined your face." "Ruined?" I told him I wouldn't stand for any man who looked like a porcupine. That day he shaved. He had wavy black hair and shiny eyes, could eat like a mule and still dance all night. He used to say there was music in the Welsh and fight in the Norse - that's the stock I come from. Jim was always a truthful husband, and I told him only the one white lie. I said my father used to call me Sally Peaches. I suppose I wanted Jim to call me that, but it never felt right when he said the name. Then one year that northeasterly come down. We'd been on the farm a while; Jim bought the place so I wouldn't have to cook in a camp. There was peach trees on it just for me, he said. The cold he caught in that storm turned bad, sank down in his lungs and worded there rasping him with pain. I sent a neighbor for Doctor Hale and all day sat with a fear he wouldn't come. Finally I heard his buggy -- he never in his life would drive a car -- stop outside, and saw him stoop to come in at the door. He went to work while I stayed in the kitchen brewing tea. Outside the leaves was blackened, rattling in the wind like sick men breathing. Make me dizzy just to think of it. When Doctor Hale come out he was pasty and old. He took his glasses off, rubbed a sore spot on the bridge of his nose, give me a flat look. He said, "Jim's been asking for Sally Peaches." There we were in the kitchen, six feet apart and silent as frost on the windowpanes. The black leaves was death, though. I knew for sure they would take someone. That year Mama died. That year, while the trees was still all blighted, Doctor Hale was killed. His horse took a fright out on Mountainview Road, pulled his buggy of a bridge, and threw him into the river. There's foxes on the road; people suppose it was the foxes five that horse such a scare. You never saw so big a funeral as his. The church spilled people into the street. The paper said a whole era was gone; he was the last of the gentleman doctors. III. You won't believe me, but I saw him again. I promise I saw him here in this room twenty-two years ago, the year Jim died. It wasn't too long after Kennedy that Jim took sick again and I could see the blood draining out of his face, his lips as pale purple, skin damp and hands ice-cold. I did the only thing I knew to do and prayed to God not to take him away. It was dark. The house rattled in a wind. I sat there in the kitchen by the stove muttering this prayer, and the room change. I knew I wasn't alone any more. I turned and saw a man beside the door, knew him by the wire rims of his glasses, his smile peaceful though he was covered with rain. I heard his voice with so much gentleness: "Sally, all of our illnesses will end." When he said my name it was like the sound grew inside me till the tears had to fall. I could almost feel his hand on my hair. By the time I dried my eyes he was gone. For eight long months Jim wasted away. I remember cursing God for what he did and I know in his heart how Jim cursed God. Sometimes I wanted Doctor Hale to come, but the dead can't be faithful any more. I got up in the middle of the night to give Jim his pills. Already it was like I lived alone in a house with voices. One of those nights I saw he'd gone at last. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know why I thought there was one more thing to do, a last thing, because Jim was Welsh and I knew there was something you had to do for the Welsh. I thought about how fine he used to look. How his eyes was bright. How he sang at camp. I looked out the window and could feel him lying there in the cold bed at my back. I knew what he was telling me, and left the window open for his soul to go. David Masons poems appear regularly in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review ,The Georgia Review, Verse and many other magazines and journals. "Two Poems of David Mason" posted at West By Northwest.org from The Buried Houses © 1991 by David Mason published by Story Line Press of Ashland, Oregon, posted by permission of Story Line Press. Visit a preview of Mr. Mason's new collection, "Three Poems of David Mason." © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
