Jay Wrote

 Topping Off 2020  So this has been a year. I’ve spent some time writing, including daily responses to the headlines of violence here in Minnesota back in June. And on other current and predictable topics. But later, drawing on my small-town boyhood, I tried to write something hopeful, something poetic, something with the glories and sunshine of youth and the Beatles. What came out was a piece called Blood Poisoning and then I dug up my older hometown piece, Three Cold Holsteins . Both gruesome. Wonder why it went that way, this year?  And so then to try to reverse that stream, I wrote Sutherland Falls Survey , a nostalgic narrative of growing up in Proctor, Vt. The Proctor facebook group really liked this incomplete paean to a privileged childhood. (The poems I have not shared with them.) I post Survey, those poems and more writing here on my blog: https://jaywwrote.blogspot.com.  I listened again to a favorite new rock song today and decided that the lyrics line u...

  Blood Poisoning JFK and Jackie are in the news, game show hosts and soaps,  but without the Maytags and Mercuries, their profiles of luck, success and beauty  beyond what boys could achieve or girls imagine. We catch a scent of distant threat and hunker under desks  and hear about oriental dominoes  and missiles south of Miami.   Every May a repurposed army truck rumbles down South Street  with a monster fan mounted on its cab waving back and forth,  blowing storms of DDT into elm trees in a failing war against the gypsy moth.  We run alongside and it was an early Fourth of July,  especially when we heard the sonic booms  of F4 Phantom jets streaking toward a MIG-free coast.   I still see planes crashing in my dreams. The dads, the uncles, the village cop, the Boy Scouts’ Sergeant Major,   the Peyton Place- exile guidance counselor  the pastor and the priest all have much to say.     We...

  Three Cold Holsteins Three down Holsteins  before the first dark milking of March the oil tank echoed empty overdue assessment tacked on the milk house door frayed hemp rope reached from the shadows hung over the rafter stronger than spring eight inches short of sunrise .       Note:  from dark episodes in a largely idyllic childhood, recollected in my Sutherland Falls Survey reminiscence.

  A “Sutherland Falls” Survey A child’s decade (1958-68) in Proctor (aka Sutherland Falls) was a protected experience, idyllic even at times.   So why is my first Proctor poem such a dark thing?   Blood Poisoning.   I started one that had us on the Phantom’s school bus, during the state soccer championship season of 1967, singing Beatles songs, but it never breathed.   Maybe later.   But for now, before I publish Poisoning , recollection is a positive endeavor.   I had the run of a neighborhood that included woods running up behind the high school,   past the playing fields and hill side that served as bleachers for baseball games.   The woods passed the skating rink, log cabin warming house, rope tow and a road closed off in winter for a quarter mile of sledding.   A stream suited to children’s hydraulic experiments came down the same slope.   Southward the woods ran up towards the swimming pool, a tree-ringed, engineered pool with...

She moved through life using her humanity in the way that a great poet wields words. With imagination, challenge, welcome, adventure, modesty, history, determination, fun, optimism, curiosity, kindness, guts….    At home on the Anishinabe nation at Onigum, welcomed in Geneva’s United Nations precincts.   Parching lesson. Hand-harvested manoomin (wild rice) tossed on a giant steel pan over a wood fire, hooked to a shaking gizmo powered by a long belt running off the rear wheel of a jacked-up pickup.   An announcement with excitement in her eyes and voice. “We’re going to get the Nobel Prize for Rigoberta Menchu!” Two years later - it was true.   Family tree trading. We each trace our families back to the St. Lawrence River - four hundred years.   Seer. The day Mount St. Helens exploded followed her dreaming with all the Seven Sisters.   Soldier. At Wounded Knee, back-packed medical supplies past U.S. Army lines for the traditionals, for...

Flashing Negatives  Mississippi, south-bound at summer solstice  endorphins wheeling  eyes down  sensing  without seeing:        a loss in the leaves        a disappearance  and again        a break in the phone line        an absence  and again        a topped-off light pole        a vanishing  and again  and again       and now,        a flashing eclipse in a bough.  The gorge’s green palisade drops  and I am jarred because  a high-looping stone’s throw  west of my shoulder,  wings are beating my cadence and keeping pace.  That fierce-eyed, lovely, troublesome symbol spirit  casting performance art in raptor shadows.  Dr. Kramer (Captain of the Carl Jung) called:       “I’ve got those m...

 I am in trouble and you can help. On Tuesday I had a great day helping democracy function by working  as an election judge over at Mt. Zion.  Sara, my daughter on the coast,  however is very, very unhappy with me because this increased my chances  of COVID exposure.  Now, I don't feel old or vulnerable but I am a  caretaker and if I get sick the consequences spiral.... So,  I would like someone to step up and take over my role as Election Judge  so I can stay home and stay safe(r.).  More info here: https://www.ramseycounty.us/residents/elections-voting/election-judges. Everyone was masked when they came in to vote and we had lots of masks if  someone had forgotten theirs.  Surfaces were cleaned frequently.   Plexiglass shields were all about.  Distancing was observed. I  have done this three times now and I can tell you that it is really a  wonderfully positive experience.  Over the course of the...

The Humorist Revealed; Betty Walker Wilkinson Don't it always seem to go?  Don't know what you got till it's gone...  Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell   When you are growing up, likely nothing your mom or dad said or did was funny. Unintentionally ridiculous perhaps. But the muscles that roll your eyeballs were hur by those attempts at humor - especially in the awful context of your mom as a substitute teacher. And those family stories - weird, yes. Funny, no. Ah, the deafness of youth! I didn’t recognize and appreciate my mom’s humor until far too late. When she died, I found letters she wrote to us in the 70s, sometimes faint 3rd level carbon copies, missives sent to us young men and one young woman eventually, mostly off on their own, scattered across the country. Did she talk like this to us before I headed off to college? Probably, but did I hear it? Nope. And hmmm, I got very different inheritances from my mother and my father. I now re...