The property line melts into forest, its late winter browns
Like a beast’s pelt; oaks hunched like sleeping bear;
Beech and birch extend into ugly candid possum hair,
And elms and maples muster into a passel of woodchuck.
The air waited on first signs of spring, curling up like smoke
Through your lips – petals thin as pencils, yet capable of shape
And form; they’re forced into a smile by a late March sleep
Being much too late for April showers. The ice is glassed
Over, bonding yesterday afternoon’s puddles into a crust,
The gouged march of cattle habitual for bleak pasture;
The frozen prints are filmy, each a black and white fish-eyed fissure
That gazes up from feathery hooks to ultimate grey; outside
We’ve come to test the meadows and taste the weather, greyed
As tombs. Embraced by down and wool, we try hard to ignore
The vestiges of conversational winter, snow that quipped before
In patches defers now to gelid mud. The quiet of the fire
In the parlor stove lives on – but questions hang in the air
Beyond their usefulness – like the organic smell of summer cotton
Released as a felt presence in the room by the heat of an iron.
So thickly dressed, you could be woman or man; though your feet
Are deliberate with feminine pause, your eyes have decided to fight
The urge to ever meet on the issue but maintain the differences
Like valleys that separate the hills with everlasting distances.
With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return, bounding
The fields with pump-handled pinions rising, falling, finding
Their shadows threading like dolphins through a splintered sea.
You look up at them and their shadows across the valley.
Your smile relaxes, warms up, shares the sky and ground with no one.
Your glance takes in the entire landscape without love, but then
You allow that spring may overwhelm us at any moment; I gather
Your silhouette by heart; it is the short memory of ice. The weather
Is turning chalky blue. (The day’s vanishing point held us where we stood.)
A slight breeze stirs the sleeping forest from its impenetrable mood;
The cold air pushes our shadows together. We share the horizon
To search for where a once-familiar tree is a woodpile now forgotten.
Look what came in the mail…
Long awaited (at least by me) - Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963.
It’s been edited by the author’s daughter Katherine A. Powers, and an uncorrected proof copy was sent to me, unsolicited. They must think I’m some sort of Powers scholar – and given half a chance I would be…
Already dipped into the thing – and lots of gems in the introduction by Ms. Powers:
“Well before the publication of his first novel Morte D’Urban in 1962, my father…planed to write a novel about ‘family life,’ an intention that persisted for the rest of his life. … The man falls in love, gets married, has numerous children – but has neither money nor home. He finds no pleasant ease and little of the fellowship of like minds he associated with the literary life [he didn't have Korrektiv] he had thought was to be his own. The novel would be called Flesh, a word infused with Jansenist distaste, conveying a bleak comedy and terrible bathos of high aesthetic and spiritual aspiration in hopeless contest with human needs and material necessity.”
“The letters that make up this story begin with Him at age twenty-five and the acceptance for publication of his first short story. They then leap forward to letters from prison [where Powers, a pacifist, served time as a conscientious objector during WWII] and on through those recording high hopes, great promise, and a passionate courtship and marriage to Betty Wahl. Then comes the black comedy of children, five all told, great poverty, bad luck, and balked creativity. Central to this progression is the matter of where and how to live. Jim’s married life was dominated by the search for ‘suitable accommodations,’ for a house that would reflect and foster the high calling of the artist. In the course of their married life… the couple moved more than twenty times.”
And one more:
“In his letters to his friends…He often adopted a tone of macabre relish for the hopelessness of his situation: the absence of a house, the presence of many children and a desperate wife, the amount of time he had spent on the mechanics of life, the piddling nature of his daily doings, and his longing for and lack of camaraderie.
“‘We have her no lasting home’ was his constant refrain, drawing, with feigned smugness, on Christian teaching… In any case, the phrase always had the torque of a joke, for the Powerses were forever on the move, leaving some houses out of the urge to quit the country (whichever one it happened to be at the time [America or Ireland]), laving other houses because they were taken by eminent domain or sold out from under them. But Jim also meant the statement as a summary of his essential belief: that life on earth doesn’t make sense and that when you understood that, you understood reality. Still, for a person who held that the world is an obstacle-strewn journey toward one’s proper home (heaven), he was more than ordinarily affronted by hardship and adversity, to say nothing of mediocrity and dullness. He was no stoic, and he took it all personally.”
Then Ms. powers quotes one of her father’s 1979 letter to her, who was “then thirty-one and living, as were his other children, far away: ‘You referred to [Powers' son] Boz’s plan for me to make a lot of money so we can move back to Ireland. He may be right. I see it as idealism, but what else would work for our family? A big house not too far from Dublin, [daughter] Jane weaving and dyeing in one room, [son]Hugh philosophizing and botanizing in another, Boz and family in one wing, [daughter] Mary etching in one tower, Katherine reading in another, Mama in the garden, Daddy with The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph in his study.’
“To which scheme I say to myself now, as I did then: Oh, dear.”