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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Three Kentucky Poets RICHARD TAYLOR ________________________ Cattle Song Nathan Banks, a 22 year old student at PurchaseOutside my window I see lettered angus on the hillside composing pastorals, cantos to clover, a haiku whose theme this July morning is sweet surrender to the dark cove of an encompassing oak, a deep draught of rainwater in a silver tank. From my own skirmishes with words, I know, odds are, most tries will fail. The calf will stand on wobbly legs. The field of sweet grass stiffens into frost. One moo will echo every other moo. Still, watching, I imagine a taut-uddered genius, a Holstein Homer maybe, a moony Sappho whose words take on life down some trackless cowpath the reader never dares to wander. Now, as the grazers bunch, break off, and roam, I try to sequence them into sense, to herd them whole like some dismantled sonnet, fragmented script of some language lost that they, that we, will never understand. [341]
One Fine Day at September's End The neighbor I greet at Kroger's with what a beautiful day it is says, "Yeah, good for fishing," angling his ladened cart toward checkout. Though I don't fish, I feel the lure that pulls him, imagining the sun that splays across the pool in Elkhorn Creek, ample, umber, in perfect balance with the ragged hem of blue shadow along its banks. Then I remember the email I must wade through at the office: the group excuse for student athletes, a cheery reminder that the handbook committee will meet at eleven, a frittata of flavorless memos that will not unscramble into sense, their vagueness abundantly vaguer than the terrace of riffles downstream scored with silver furrows. At the meeting, sinking in my seat, I can almost sense sunlight on my cheek. As the agenda hovers, I ponder the endless variations in constancy by which water weaves and unweaves itself, O sweet Penelope!, The flow of current over stones, the algae hugging those stones- opening, reading that mail. [342]
Intuition As my eyes thread the beads of type across the page, something wallops the morning, claps the stillness with a salvo. Even while weighing likely causes- gunshot, lightning, backfire, wind, a road crew blasting rock-I know not only that a tree has fallen but which tree: the silver maple in the shadow of the smokehouse, sparsely leafed, arthritic, its stiff ribs crumpled into punk. As I step out on the porch, I confirm what the inner eye already sees: the splayed trunk, a blitz of disarticulated limbs, an unprecedented brightness in place of substance, form- its familiar splint of upthrust bark, some mists of radiating green. All day I puzzle over this tendril of mind that twines itself to this moment's stem as some unaccountable knowing like the sensors of Canadian geese from National Geographic that wing up from the river slough before disaster, seconds before the surface furrows. The mudflats quake with explosions that detonate that other nether world and telegraph the message home, this maple splintered on the lawn. [343]
Water Hauling on Sunday Morning Pulling onto Coffeetree Drive near the pumping station to draw my weekly load, I scan for residential deer, spotting three in scruffy woods a stone's throw off the hardtop. Tame, safe on posted ground, two do not bother to lift their stretched necks. Only one, an edgy doe, swivels her tapered head and stares, eyeing my credentials. Calmed, she turns back toward the browsers on legs as tense, as frail, as wickets. I speak no language to tell her open season starts Saturday, no code to tap out muffled thunder that will thrum the hills. Instead, as the craned pipe spews white pillars downward in the tank, I watch the water rise and hear myself intone above the shushing swirl inside the void, "Lie low next week, stay close." This Sunday ritual is my church, these deer my stony habitat of hope. [344]
Impedagogy Experts tell us that only thirty percent of any class at any time is actually listening. During an exposition of Nietzsche's slave morality or the intricacies of the comma splice, students fantasize about pepperoni and extra mozzarella, someone's cleavage two desks down, the next episode of The Young and the Restless. Towards fall and spring breaks, reception flags, like the ailing radio in my son's geriatric Honda, always on but only sometimes receiving. cutting off or on each time we hit a bump. Opening and slamming the driver's door, I can revive the stray signals, the fragile contact, as sound waves bustle in the corridors of air. Restoring reception in class is not so certain as I jar the dozers with direct address, transmit thunder by means of the augering eye. Compared, the cardoor by far is more reliable. [345]
In Defense of Letters - for Gray Zeitz From his farm near Braintree, John Adams wrote that unless he kept a journal the events of his life passed like flights of birds across his vision, leaving no trace. Filling my water tank at the pump station this cold November morning, I scan the bluffs of the Kentucky, trees along the steep slopes reduced to featherless quills, to walls of anonymous mulch the color of dried tobacco. Thirty-four pigeons I count huddled along the twin power lines that droop and join at the river's edge. They remind me of fonts of type lifted from the printer's tray, their inked spines pressed into the chaste snow of the page, John Adams' migrant and elusive birds nestling on the wires. [346]
Imagining My Own Death I can envision many deaths- stumbling into the cistern on a July evening after too much chilled Zinfandel, crickets clicking their symphonies in the grass. This is only one of them. Or, instead of Pliny the Elder sniffing a fatal whiff of smoking casserole under Vesuvius, standing in my own backyard under the white throat of a colossal sycamore that snaps while I ponder the genealogy of snow or a word to describe the sounds of falling water. But the worst is sitting in a meeting of the sub committee for administrative review convened to measure the efficiency of systems and processes, the sands of the hourglass sifting into a Mojave of lost time, irrecoverable moments, the turning of thousands of tiny wheels that produce motion but no movement. [347]
Vigilante At the stoplight a Ford van idles next to me, the customized letters "Bob's Upholstery" stenciled in yellow across its side panel. Running down his list of services, I fight an urge to boost the shaky reign of proper usage, wet my finger, and hop out to add an "e" to "couchs." Even in borrowed books I feel compelled to circle misspelled words, suture misprints, to etch my scarlet letters onto some zonked-out student's tabula rasa. Each scrawl of my touchy ballpoint honors the memory of fallen legions of high school English teachers, crusaders who tangled with the dangling participle and migratory commas, stood tall against the lusty empire of slang. No matter how I try to set aright my own imperfect texts, errors crop up like new stones in ploughed fields, unearthed each time the cultivator passes. Though the lords of misrule trash each meadow of promising prose, I edit on, imagining the heaven of grammarians as a Victory Garden without weeds, hell as verbal blight, a spreading rash of anything goes. [348]
Orthography In the snowy by ways of my gradebook I collect notations misspellings, kinky syntax, verbal screw ups that send an unintended message. In this shadowland of gist and meaning, this republic of free expression, George Washington Carver becomes the founder of peanut butter, Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights" reviles the desire for another person. Picasso becomes Pacisso, and Aristotle tells us not to do anything to access. Commenting on the clasp of the Twin Towers, someone philosophizes that some folks bring others down just to bigger themselves. We lack a code of ethnics. One student writes of falling into a comma. To my office door another attaches a post it, hoping his absence didn't cause any incontinence. If balance turns on whether the world inside our heads matches the one outside it, if all my students are living their lives to the fullest intent and holding tenants and writing about a grandfather lying in a dead bed dying of gang green, and no one willingly takes a vowel of silence, I wonder about the fate of grammar, of nations- just who the next president will be. [349]
Richard Taylor is Professor of English at Kentucky State University. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Kentucky, his M.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Louisville, and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Taylor practiced law for a short period and then became an English professor. He was Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky from 1999 2001. Taylor lives near Frankfort, where he owns and operates Poor Richard's Books. "Intuition" and "Impedagogy" were first published in Open Twenty Four Hours. Both poems, along with the others here, were published in Taylor's chapbook, Braintree: Fifteen Poems (Scienter Press, 2004). |
