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...