Jay Wrote

  Clouds Followed His Every Move       All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.     Nabokov, Symbols and Signs In 1980 my brother moved from Vermont to live with us in St. Paul after a falling out with co-workers. David believed they were drug dealers and plotting to harm him. Six weeks later he was on the street under hot summer skies. I put him there. He was twenty four years old. He could have become one of the lost chronic homeless, like Sam, my friend's brother, who sank into the muck of life on the street and disappeared.  David’s childhood was hard. He was born with developmental troubles. He may have been hit by a flu virus during gestation. No...

A Rumor That in Danville Dowsers Drown Skeptics   May be a lost Kinsey title Slipped from his hunting coat pocket The kind of whiskey breath intelligence Shared when striking tents At the Tunbridge World’s Fair. ( Leland Kinsey: Vermont’s late poet, farmer, carpenter, logger, sugarmaker, Morgan horse trainer, printer, and teacher of birding, canoeing and astronomy. His "The Immigrant’s Contract" imagines the truth of a fateful flood that brings deep violence to the penstock, smugglers struggling over the Notch and sailing to Cuba, the burning of mummies to power pulp mills and old temptations in Tunbridge. His family farmed for 200+ years in NE Vt near where my mom grew up. )

  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.