South by North , Poems by Philip Carter
, South by North Poems by Philip
Carter
Philip Carter’s South by North is an autobiographical odyssey, a book-length narrative executed via a series of exquisitely wrought lyrics. Many of these lyrics could literally be set to music.
Carter adopts the persona of a Southern, folksy troubadour. Despite the humor, the self-deprecation, the irony of this persona, the poems of South by North are serious forays into nostalgia, self-examination, the nature of love, assessment of a life well-lived and inklings of mortality.
I rarely describe a poet’s work as “beautiful,” unless it applies, yet quite a few poems in this volume deserve that appellation—“Schenectady” and “Mother; Love” for instance. I might also add “Midnight Near Monkey Hill,” which evokes Housman or Yeats yearning for youth and the usual, innocent ardor it ensures.
Dr. Louis Gallo
Dr. Louis Gallo is Professor of English at Radford University & author of poetry volumes “Archaeology”, “Scherzo Furiant”, “Clearing the Attic”, “Crash” and the forthcoming volumes “Leeway & Advent” and “Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? “
Bare Bones Bio Student, student etcetera, printer’s devil, salesman, deckhand, dishwasher, copy boy, reporter, bureau chief, freelancer, editor, publisher,
investor, developer, actor, producer, poet during, poet thereafter.
Copyright 2022 Philip Dutart Carter
PHILIP DUTART CARTER
, South by North Poems
by Philip Carter
1. South
The Grackle | 1 Shylock | 3 Evening, City Park | 4 Peckerwood Palace | 5 Coon-On-A-Log | 7 Delta Days | 8 Magdalena | 9 The Biggest Liar On Bayou St. John | 11 Little Red | 12 Mississippi History | 13 La Tite Maison | 15 Little Woods | 17 Little Sister | 18 Goodbye New Orleans | 19 How To Sex Your Snapping Turtles | 21 Agriculture 101 | 23 The Kitchen Girl | 24 Midnight Near Monkey Hill | 25
2. South By North Schenectady | 27 Mother; Love | 28 Grande Dame | 29 Dynamite | 30 The Patio | 31 All Fall Down | 32 Bigfoot Waltz | 33 The Passerby | 35 Rain, Rain | 37 Ring Of Fire | 38 One Step At A Time | 39 The Last Cowboy | 41
[ Long Haul Blues | 60 ]
3. North Farewell, South | 43 Father Figure | 44 Scooter Plummen 1945-1964 | 45 Night Of The Fox | 47 Camden Bog | 48 Naked in Walmart | 49 Gethsemane | 49 Long Division | 50 Back to The Land | 50 Catamaran | 51 A Simple Farewell | 52 To Whom It May Concern | 53 End Times | 54
1 , South
, South by North Poems by Philip Carter
The Grackle
Believe me, son, life is not a bowl of metaphors. Death neither. Life is what it is and death is death,
just like the weather is the weather and not some cosmic signifier of something else altogether.
Also, pretty verses are just that. Your poem about Easter in Paris? That ain’t your momma’s Easter hat. So look right now at that feather fluttering to the floor. All that means is once again you just barged right in and didn’t close the kitchen door, and now we’ve got what looks
like a grackle flapping around in your great-granddaddy’s dusty damn hunting camp rafters.
All of which somehow brings to mind those scant few lines from the blessed ole Venerable Bede
about a sparrow, I believe, that got blown into the warm, bright mead hall, then back
into that hellacious winter night. Don’t know where she came from or where she flew, just out of the dark and cold, back into the dark and cold: that’s about how that one goes.
Well, two things I know for sure: that ain’t some metaphoric mumbo-jumbo that just dropped a crap in your daddy’s oyster gumbo, and it’s time for my nap. Son, where’s that old B-B gun?
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, South by North Poems by Philip Carter
Shylock
Don’t much care to reminisce. Very little now about back then I really miss, most of all the men.
Not but one who walked in now I’d choose to kiss-- that big, good-looking Jew I knew who played guitar and drank. His daddy owned a bank, he owned the whole dang block, and the name of Izzy’s band was Shylock. That boy could sing, that boy could dance, and what I miss is Izzy could really kiss. But as you may recall, Elvis was the one they signed at Sun. Then Izzy had that wreck and died And I may be the only gal alive
In Golden Manor, Little Rock who still remembers Isidore Meyer Rosenberg and Shylock. So mister TV man, before I cry, just turn that camera off and say goodbye.
Evening, City Park
The black swan is a serpent’s shadow hissing at Celia’s white bread crust. “Eat, eat,” the child commands. “You must.”
It will not eat. She flings her bread into the pond. The shadow flows beneath the bridge the child must cross.
Celia mourns what she has lost. “Yesterday he took my bread and did not hiss,” she sobs. Her clean tears flow.
We cross the bridge. The shadow swirls below.
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Peckerwood Palace
I put her on the Greyhound bound from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg. Just going home, she said, to see her ma, and teach a brand-new hairdo to her special baby sister and take a pint of whiskey to her pa. Son of a gun, don’t they have fun in Vicksburg, Mississippi! She sat and sipped Old Granddad with her pa and made 13-year old Lurleen look just like Dolly Parton and watched The Young and The Restless with her ma.
Then tell me if you can how come her new red velvet cocktail gown was stained with cream de mint from D to D, And in the bottom of her purse was something else a damn sight worse— a love note from some guy name Bubba Lee.
Bubba Lee, Bubba Lee what you gone and done to me?
Bubba Lee, Bubba Lee, you call that poetry?
‘Cause I’ll be a Cajun sonuvagun, looks like y’all had yourselves some fun, at the Peckerwood Palace in Memphis, Tennessee.
And I know the bus from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg, Mississippi don’t stop nowhere near the state of Tennessee.
So if you ever see that lowdown, lying two-faced redneck woman, tell her I hitched a ride back home to Point Coupee.
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Coon-On-A-Log
Tush hog in the thicket, hear that wild boar grunt. Whoo-wee Tyrone, sic him! Hunt him, Tyrone, hunt!
Hounds that brave used to be raised to chase after runaway blacks, tracking them down through the brambles and onto their backs.
Today the way you train a dog is catch yourself a coon and shackle that beast to a log in the creek under a Delta moon.
Whoo-wee Tyrone, sic him! Hunt him, Tyrone, hunt! (You’d be amazed what folks will pay for a black and tan with heart.)
Delta Days
Ours was a patriotic stable. My Tennessee Walking Horse mare named Stars and Stripes had a colt named Captain Flag.
And there was Hod’s big rough gelding, Buck Private — more horse than even he could handle—plus Tommy’s ancient burro, Uncle Sam. My friend Dan and I would gallop our chargers to the rescue of yon damsel in distress.
But the “damsel” was a furious Tommy kicking at Uncle Sam’s tired old withers while Dan and I swooped down from either side and jerked him out of his brave little cowboy saddle and dumped him in the stubbly pasture grass.
At ten, Dan Morris and I called ourselves Knights of Yore. At five, Thomas Hennen Carter just cried, furiously cried.
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Magdalena
There’s a man at the gate says he’s looking for you. He claims that he knows you and you know him, too. He’s wearing them faggoty sandals.
This house ain’t got room for no peckerwood scandals, so act like a lady, or walk out a whore— unless I just throw your butt out the back door,
‘cause Nashville ain’t buying that fake hippy act,
been there but nobody wants to go back and you know he ain’t got what you cost--
twelve hundred dollars, not counting the food! Easter is here or I’d kick your ass good. Supposed to be 20, you look 32
and I bet you turn 40 before summer’s end. What a disaster you been, Magdalena! They said you was Latin or Lafayette French, Mississippi’s more like it, a pluperfect bitch and I won’t even mention the booze.
Like I’ve always said, it ain’t how you’re bred, it’s more in the life style you choose when you got yourself something to lose, and me, I ain’t gonna choose you. So you and that raghead get on down the street, you and that wandering Jew, Magdalena. Nashville ain’t ready for you, Magdalena.
Country ain’t ready for you.
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Little Red
Watching a movie in a window on my little IPad screen, and thinking about the prettiest girl I guess I’ve ever seen.
The Biggest Liar On Bayou St. John
He said a big black moccasin thick as a fence post bit him right in the nuts but he always carried his great-granddaddy’s World War One gutsucker knife with the helmet buster and the steel knucks and he made the quick criss-cross cuts that saved his life but his stuff swole up bigger than alligator pears and day after day his junk just ached with pus until they hauled him over to that hoo-doo on Dumaine Street in Treme‘ who yanked it this-away and that-away until the last drop of poison was all squeezed out and his balls deflated and his thang got good and stiff but it still smelled weird and if you don’t believe me here, just take a whiff.
It was back in the summer of ‘56 at an Old-Time Gospel Show in Sheffield, Alabama— a time and a place in my fading days I’d dearly love to go. I was young but she was younger and there wasn’t any wonder that we fell in love and strayed where true love led.
Yes, I hugged her and I kissed her and ever since I’ve missed her and I never will forget my Little Red. Sheffield, Alabama—I’ll go back before I’m dead, and ask the great grand-mommas, “Are you known as Little Red?”
Little Red, Little Red, I’m lying on my bed and writing a song just a minute long with the movie on and all night long I’ll dream of Little Red.
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Mississippi History
What a great country we were then, even those times when we weren’t quite perfect, just a pack of white kids waving little rebel flags and whooping across the old killing fields of Vicksburg. But when we rode home to Greenville in the deep Delta night —eighth graders, right?— no girls got sneakily tweaked. We just sang that rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, a hell of an engineer song and the girls cheered all the old school cheers. I reckon the colored kids had their very own hoopla, too, but no black statues adorned those fields. I know many died in Vietnam
and so did my friend Travis, whose family planted cotton and voted Democrat way, way back to early Mississippi, those long generations of eager volunteers in Mexico and Virginia, Cuba and Korea, two world wars. Back then we memorized the names of dead and dying Indian tribes, like the Natchez, the Chickasaws, we’d even heard of free-born Hiram Revels, the first colored U.S. Senator, whose name earned him an asterisk, and, let’s see, Senator Leroy Percy who once upon a time broke the spine of the Ku Klux Klan. So tell me your version of Mississippi, young lady, your story of America in our time, and by God I will tell you mine, if you will just wait while I try to retrieve a couple of perfect rhymes.
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La Tite Maison
I got a gal named Amandine, a boy named Merliton, and a shotgun shack by the Press Street track we call La Tite Maison
Chicory coffee every morning. gumbo by the gallon gimme some of that étouffée
I’ll let you taste my scallion.
Perique tobacco by the fence a forty-four that shoots and I pass my days in a reefer haze Cause I got Ninth Ward roots.
Chicory coffee every morning gumbo by the gallon gimme some of that étouffée I’ll let you taste my scallion.
There’s an uptown, there’s a down and there’s an Esplanade But my little shack by the Press Street track is the best damn place God made.
Chicory coffee every morning gumbo by the gallon gimme some of that étouffée I’ll let you taste my scallion.
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Little Woods
I remember now: we kissed beside the racetrack, on a springtimein-New Orleans afternoon. As I remember also we were single and it sure felt good. Then, you moved there by the bayou, near the south shore of the Lake, and then way out to Little Woods and then it was too late.
Little Sister
I love the little sister of the girl next door, the one who said goodbye, you all, and moved to Baltimore and went to beauty college and learned to read palms and predicted what the President will say before too long. I’ll be watching, and right or wrong, I’ll sing my little sister of the girl next door down home Mississippi country music song.
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Goodbye, New Orleans
I know I been a sinner and I’m dying to confess.
I’ve got the Holy Spirit but I ain’t got time to dress.
I’m running for the levee, lordy, one foot in my jeans, and it’s hello, Mississippi River, goodbye, New Orleans.
She was peeping in the window, we was loving on the bed. A magnum makes a hellish noise and throws satanic lead. One foot out the bedroom door and one foot in my jeans, and it’s hello, Mississippi River. goodbye, New Orleans.
I’m dodging up the levee like I’m old Havana bound and Castro got a rocket and he’s trying to shoot me down. And I’m rolling down the levee. lordy, one foot in my jeans and it’s hello, Mississippi River, goodbye, New Orleans. Now I’m falling in the water, Jesus, can’t you hear me pray. Been saved by blood and water on a day just like today. You know I love you, Jesus, let the devil take the jeans, and it’s hello, Mississippi River, goodbye, New Orleans. I can swim to Bay St. Louis. I can swim to Ocean Springs, to Point Clear, Alabama-it’s like floating in a dream. I’m sanctified, I’m purified, I feel like age sixteen. I’m gonna live forever-but not in New Orleans.
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How To Sex Your Snapping Turtles
The males have longer tails. I can’t quite remember the rest and all it entails, but I have a hunch that the female alligator snapping turtle will crunch your thumb off for lunch and even sever your
nose if you try to kiss her toes, answering not to any other laws than the dictates of her own primordial female alligator snapping turtle jaws.
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Agriculture 101
Imagine a field of winter wheat sloping down to the Homochitto.
There’s a D7 Caterpillar tractor over there in the western woods,
killing trees for more damn wheat. The only excuse is even farmers some day get the right to eat and bankers have to be paid.
Look close, that big Cat’s chewing up snakes. Serpents got no place in this good ole boy’s dominion. And look out, baby cypresses,
Wade at the bank says push ‘em all up, and I still owe him drinks.
Next year soybeans, corn the next. Times like these ain’t over just yet.
The Kitchen Girl
No sooner did I shoo the cat than cook let all the pigeons out and how they flapped and wheeled about was quite enough to make one shout in wild appreciation unsuited though it was to my low station.
What I done saw me dismissed but cook said there was naught amiss and hugged me to her breast. Of all the servants I did favor cook the best in all of that sad nation, but sick old master was a white abomination.
The cat’s a six-toe calico. She walks with me where’er I go and wears no bell. Old master long since cussed his way to hell.
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Midnight Near Monkey Hill
A lion coughed. We lay on the grass and kissed behind Audubon Zoo. She lied and swore she was 18.
I said I was 18, too.
A tow boat up the River blew two times for Carrollton Bend.
I knew the sound. I’d just caught a ride to town on the old Betty Lynn.
Oh, to be seventeen again, Working my way through the South, Bedding down in the dews and damps with the fibs tumbling out of my mouth.
South by North
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Schenectady
I don’t look up words anymore. This one. Synecdoche, something like that. I guess you know what it means.
But I do like the feel of a big new book on my thighs, drifting me off to sleep, two blue and white gingham napkins for antimacassars under my rough, raw elbows. Geriatric psoriasis, I suppose, taking my morning doze in the wingback
chair we bought at auction somewhere. Schenectady. Somewhere around there. Dear, if you’d been here for breakfast
I would have brought you strawberries in a little white bowl, plus maybe two strips of that dietetic bacon on pumpernickel
toast, you all propped up on your side of the bed with a half cup of coffee, skim milk, no sugar, working crosswords.
Mother; Love
The way my mother parsed the higher message, all was love, even those poems that made them smile while we struggled to recite: the boy on the burning deck, my country’s flag, a little shadow in and out with me. Our summer stage was the ping-pong table in the Boat Barn, Rockport, Maine, quite a long way from New Orleans, Sophie Newcomb College
and the French poetry she knew through the Belle Epoque-- lisping, versifying gossips, villainous old rakes and the occasional boozer and bruiser in couplets and codpiece, deeply
thrilling, and she 19. None of those poets, she had us believe, would have, could have, answered the calling of letters without this unbrookable urge to proclaim the imperative: Love. Everything turns on love, and that’s a direct quotation, mother on love. And pray to God I never actually said, yes mother yes, and the kissing proximity of fame, the sweet
hot urge to tup, then back to the campaign plane, just before takeoff. No, that is not what I said, or she would have stretched out her hand (leading still with the wrist, the wrist, my still unmodern mother) and pretended to slap, to spank; the little plosions, the oxygen tube at her nose. “No, it is love, Philip. Love.”
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Grande Dame
Do you imagine we require that all the working class perspire so rising middlers may climb higher?
Think you not? Then stand by me, look down and tell me you can’t see what’s creeping up my valley:
Everywhere below, les faux chateaux! One wouldn’t mind just one or two. Like that one there. I think that’s you.
And is your little castle pleasant? Your Mexican is good with flowers? Your sweaty peasant by the hour?
Then send him to me at The Hall. We’ll plant a screen of something tall. I’m sure my looming in your view simply will not do.
Dynamite
This is the start of an erotic poem that I don’t know where the hell it’s going, triumph or cataclysm, or maybe some word I can’t spell,
rounding off a season in Maine learning to write almost anything that a writing coach might proclaim is the kind of song I can learn to sing
while auditioning my own voice jumping up and down on the page of a questionnaire about choice between freedom and flabby age, a poem rounded off by dynamite or a sweet, small titty, pert and tight.
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The Patio
She reads a novel.
He writes a poem. The boy in the pool splashes the dog.
At twilight the mosquitoes always bite the poet first.The artist suffers here among the people.
All Fall Down
Built me sound enough for way back then, but time’s a humbling crumbler. Where those Boston masons went is what I wonder. Ain’t too proud to try to patch myself, but can’t find my own mortar recipe on any shelf. Perhaps some gent of Rosicrucian bent could go enquire about the mystery of that Authorship or better yet just send for honest wood. Maine pine is always good. But can’t let mortar matters
slip for fear I’ll tumble unannounced on someone’s mortal head. Some might say it ain’t my fault. Instead, I say you’re either faulty or you’re dead.
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bigfoot waltz
I’m out on the prowl after dark in the heart of the county. Better call out the hounds, track me down, turn me in for the bounty.
A varmint so mean, that I ain’t fit to clean, nail my hide to the honky-tonk wall. I look like a man but don’t act like a human at all.
I’m Bigfoot. I’m Bigfoot.
But you found me alone in the dark in the heart of the county, you called off the hounds, cut me loose, didn’t claim the damn bounty.
Out in the dark in a cold parking lot, I was stumbling around all alone, no light in the window but praying for somebody home.
I’m Bigfoot. I’m Bigfoot.
And you taught me the big-footed waltz, taught me the big-footed waltz. Who would have thought you could fill a man’s heart so full of loving it glows in the dark, dancing the big-footed waltz.
Now the cat’s at the window the dog’s by the door, come here by the fire and let’s dance some more. Just think what a life that old hound dog has seen— the hills and the hollows,
the meadows between— and I’ve got a big woman who still loves to dance with her big-footed husband whenever we can dancing the big-footed dancing the big-footed waltz.
I’m Bigfoot. I’m Bigfoot
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The Passerby
I feel like a passerby in someone else’s dream, the forgotten notes of some love song
I never learned to sing There may be another highway I wanted to ascend but this is the country byway where (for now) my journey ends.
The Woman in the Race
There is a clear lake, a clean river, a path so straight and true that when you take the first three steps there is no turning back to Brooklyn.
The political part is this: I am the one who sucks all lips and licks all tender yearnings. I am the friendly ticket-taker who lets you ride for free.
So, yes, green kayak snugly perched on Subaru, yes, blue yurt beside the sacred wetland, ripe with frogs: I believe in no preservative but love.
Another Lie Tell yourself another lie, one last time and say goodbye. Now hypnotize Yourself into submission. What you call the big surprise Is just a bag of cordial lies, latest in a sweet hometown tradition.
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Rain, Rain
The little stream that flows to the bog is just like a pup with a wiggy-wag tail
Who joyously pees on the living room rug for sixteen, seventeen, eighteen days.
Somebody give that pup some training. Somebody say it will soon stop raining
Somebody say the flow will halt and I will go down to the cellar and mop, and rub that puppy’s nose in his piss and come to bed and give you a kiss.
Ring Of Fire
So a deacon and a rabbi danced into a bar belting out the chorus of “Ring of Fire” and a short, fat imam drinking in a booth jumped up and shouted,
“Mama, that’s the Living Truth! Don’t have to fly to Mecca, don’t have to go to Rome. Jerusalem or Little Rock or home, sweet home! We’ll boogie by the jukebox, and get a little higher and harmonize the lyrics of ‘Ring of Fire’.”
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One Step At A Time
boy
I got what you want You can pay me for it or just try to take it but I don’t lend and I don’t give so don’t ask if you don’t want me to hand you a slap. Do you hear me? And don’t think you can set there all day with a grin on your face and squat on that stair and sniff the spring air. You ain’t my kind of boy toy that’s for damn sure, and if you was you’d
be the last to know it and I’d be the last to show it I ain’t got time, and you too slow, so get on home to your folks and them and come back when you’re more like twelve and less like ten just watch that last step on your way down the stair then we’ll see what you get when you fix it, hear?
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The Last Cowboy
With one broken gallus but ready to ride, stripped to his chaps and with nothing to hide, all he had left was his old cowboy pride and the hat that he swiped down in Dallas.
Lips to the chalice and spurring astride. too late for his nap but on top of his pride, last that I saw him they’d slammed him inside and you’d think it was Buckaroo Palace.
, North
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Farewell, South
Oh, God, I wrote this poem last week and now it’s putting even me to sleep, which makes me wince: Down with this audience of one, bury the evidence--
the water hyacinth in granny’s pond, the moonlight filtered through the cypress slough, the melon patch, sweet juleps on the porch. I do now believe in shotgun zen, small Yankee moments, richly contemplated gin, the bold loquacity of canvasbacks.
I believe in Maine.
Father Figure
He liked to look at landscapes and meditate on the meaning of landscapes. Stuff like that.
He said he would leave me baskets of peonies hanging from rafters where folk singers sing
at happy hour, pale orphans of a minor sunset. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
The singers or the frigging flowers? He wrote a new town motto for Rockport
no one asked for: “Sail into Rockport, wing on wing.” When that failed, he urged everyone to sing “God Bless America” at the children’s birthday parties. Next he jogged to Portland for peace, and then he changed his Rockport slogan to this: “The lay of the land, the call of the sea, the craft of hand, the heart of Maine.” He actually came from Georgia and said he remembered when real estate was cheap and women were hard to get.
Also he invented Sardines for Breakfast: Heart-Healthy Living Straight Out of the Can. And told that young Baptist preacher that finding Jesus late in life was like spending an hour with the answer sheet before taking the final exam.
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Scooter Plummen
1945-1964
Scooter Plummen was the nickname my father bestowed on his youngest son, the blonde little three-year-old plum thief, who scooted his two-wheel scooter across the dew-laden morning grass and plucked unripe plums from the only plum tree on our street in Rockport, Maine and left behind him the fading but traceable tracks of little
tires across wet lawn just as breakfast was coming on and everybody wondered, where is Tommy?
As I discovered and immediately blabbed, he’s out on the lawn, stuffing his mouth with plums. Look— there were the tracks in the grass and there was little Tommy. He had bad bellyache and he wanted his mommy, the plum juice like green blood, all over his tee shirt.
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The Night Of The Fox
From over the top of the hill a fox and two kits came trotting down Pearl Street under the light pole. Whoa! Not many nights like this here in my quiet Camden, the old man marveled. This beats harborside fireworks, this is better than the Late Show. Fox versus chickens, kits versus Leghorn chicks in mail order chicken coops. About then, Officer Ken Jones turned left onto Pearl and the fox family scrambled into the roadside shadows, deep under the dense black canopy of trees. This is more a story than a poem, the old man mused. Then he went in to tell what he had seen.
Camden Bog
I never wished upon a bog. I never prayed to dwell with frogs and wallow in swampy ecstasy through muck up to my knees. The Bog is just what happened to me. I chanced upon it in the town where, young, we sailed the summer round and mountains meet the sea. I knew not then what lay between, but now of Camden Bog I sing, where cattails all turn green in spring and heron stalks the frog.
I never skated out on Hosmer Pond, I didn’t ski the hills beyond or hearken as the unattended beech tree fell, and now the summer boats are put away and I’ll not climb Mount Battie though I could (the moon is bright enough).
It’s down through Camden Bog I slog tonight, tethered to my fate, to winter’s beak, the sting of ice on cheek— but no, my friend, my end as bogside frozen frog I do not seek. And since you ask my Christmas list, those Maine Guide boots from L.L. Bean and Gore-Tex parka would be keen, plus greening hummock of my own come spring on which to pitch my little Boy Scout tent.
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South
Naked in Walmart
I’m gonna be a poet when I get big and streak through Walmart jiggety-jig and swipe me a Little League jockey strap and stuff it with a Louisville Slugger bat.
Ooo-wee momma, look at that-bare-ass honky slick as chicken fat And where he runs is where it’s at— nude poetics in a camo cap.
Gethsemane
So this man volunteered to drive me home and yes it was a helluva summer storm but I didn’t need his fingers along for the ride, and that stubble chin and all the slobber.
The way I made him stop was purely inspired.
I said look up there on the balcony, darling, that shadow looks like Christ on the cross. That wind is the wind from Gethsemane.
Long Division
You say you’re sick and you’re going to die. What’s new about that?
You’re thin as a popsicle stick, you won’t eat my rhubarb pie, you peed on the yoga mat.
we›ve seen this coming since we were 76, this gradual numbing of yours, the final arithmetic.
Back to the Land
Don’t preach back to the land to those who are slaves to the land and way behind at the bank.
When I was more or less rich I bought a riverside farm down South and the markets moved against me like a punch in the mouth and smashed my handsome teeth.
Now when I see back-to-the-landers passing out tracts on a city sidewalk I always spit and cross the street.
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Catamaran
Some day people may remember that, towards the end, I lived with Lynn on six acres of flowers and trees in Camden, Maine, maybe 300 yards by sidewalk to the little public park at The Camden Bog, perhaps a 30 minute stroll down through the village to Bay View Street and the Public Landing, where— in a great storm blowing out of the west for 21 nights and days— a truly determined old man could steal a shipshape catamaran and sail more or less east, the way I figure, ‘til he hit the Azores.
I am that man. I am that man in the catamaran.
A Simple Farewell
This is my last poem to myself, the last this week and beyond and beyond. This is my last song, he cried to the crowd below. Way
down there you can’t possibly imagine how long, how terribly long It has been since I made simple human contact with a policeman, for example, or a factory worker without a union card, an unemployed actress or a blueberry picker from Union, Maine, her daughters in jail, her husband still in arrears. In this poem, I just want to say goodbye to Yale University and Tulane, to
a drunk old newspaper rewrite man, a defrocked priest from Modesto. Up here it’s just been me and my poems, my unaccountable little songs.
Now if you will please make a line I will kiss you one at a time. Life is not a kid’s ‘37 Studebaker coupe painted with red house paint. Life is not a farewell address from a high place.
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, South by North Poems by Philip Carter
To Whom It May Concern
Remember I loved hot sauce in my grits, cooking up that mumbo gumbo and pecking out my random little verses.
And if some day I die up here in Maine, as I expect, please scatter half my ashes all around that big white pine
along the path into our woods out back and afterwards be sure to check for ticks— don’t want my dying to make anybody sick. The rest of my remains you may divide as you see fit, but let me recommend you make short shrift of it.
End Times
So here I sit in our little Maine village while down the coast the pillage begins, consoling myself that at 83 I still have a rusty old gun or two and a lifetime supply of gin. Remember the End Times you always predicted when you got stoned? Sorry I was busy when you knocked.
Sorry I didn’t answer when you phoned.
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,About Philip Dutart Carter
In his twenties and thirties, Philip D. Carter wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek and the Washington Post, published a French Quarter weekly in New Orleans and edited his family’s Greenville, Mississippi daily for three years until its sale in 1980.
,Except for visiting his offspring and their children in Washington, D.C. and Istanbul, Turkey, Carter lives pretty much year round these days in Camden, Maine with his wife, Lynn Bowker. Otherwise, for the past 42 years his various endeavors have included a 1,050 acre riverside farm and timber tract in southwest Mississippi, island properties in coastal Maine and what eventually became the New Orleans Ritz Carlton Hotel.
He also played small speaking roles in four Hollywood movies; engaged in oil and gas ventures in Texas and Louisiana; tried his luck investing in Louisiana and New York film, television and stage productions; worked on the Mississippi River out of Greenville as a teenaged towboat deckhand on the Betty Brent; and once steamed to Buenos Aires and back to New Orleans as an ordinary seaman aboard the old S.S. Del Mar.
Today he is a widely unpublished poet. ☛
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About Philip Dutart Carter
Born in New Orleans on October 20, 1939, Carter was educated through ninth grade in Greenville’s public schools.
His father, Hodding Carter, was founder and editor of the local daily newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials in 1946 and where Betty Werlein Carter, a New Orleans native, worked as publisher after her husband’s death, at 65, in 1972.
His older brother, Hodding Carter III, left his job as the newspaper’s editor in 1977 to serve in the administration of President Jimmy Carter followed by consecutive careers in television, national foundation administration and university education. Philip Carter served as editor until the paper’s sale in 1980.
A 1957 graduate of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Philip Carter was founding editor of that boarding school’s literary magazine, The Daemon, acted in school plays, played tackle and linebacker on the junior varsity football team, once came in third in the pole vault and won the poetry prize.
By way of friendly counsel, an assistant football coach and English teacher at Episcopal High suggested Carter attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina and thereby perhaps unleash his inner cornpone Dylan Thomas.
But that famously progressive institution closed its doors before he could apply. Instead, Carter duly went to Yale and was rusticated twice, in 1958 and 1961. (He did pass French.)
He also studied African colonial history at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 1959 and English, anthropology, economics and political science at Tulane, where he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and in 1964 was finally awarded a B.A. degree in English while married to his first wife, Marcia (McGhee) Carter of Washington, D.C.
Aside from his disjointed formal education, Carter worked in his teens as a printer’s apprentice and proof reader on his parents’ paper, where he also wrote occasional book reviews and feature stories. Between academic labors, his big city journalistic debut came in 1961, when he went to work in Manhattan for the Herald Tribune—first as a copy boy and then as a general assignment reporter, covering everything from Brooklyn police news to race relations in Manhattan.
His next employer was Newsweek magazine, which he joined in 1964 as a Washington correspondent under bureau chief Benjamin C. Bradlee. After a brief reportorial stint in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House and a year and a half in the Southwest as Houston bureau chief, Carter returned to Washington and shortly was working again as a national reporter for Bradlee, by now executive editor of the Post. ☛
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About Philip Dutart Carter
The Post sent him to Atlanta as Southern bureau chief in 1970. However, not long thereafter he bid that newspaper a friendly farewell, borrowed $15,000 from a hometown banker, moved to New Orleans and bought majority interest in a French Quarter tabloid weekly called the Vieux Carre’ Courier, a local leader in the cause of historic preservation and gadfly to the daily Times-Picayune (now defunct.) He was editor and publisher for three lean years before the Courier itself ran out of cash.
Other ventures included investments in Gris-Gris, a Baton Rouge weekly, and in Gambit, the New Orleans urban weekly that he served, in the 1980s, as majority stockholder and chairman. That weekly survives. He also acquired majority interest in a local historic landmark, the 13-story Maison Blanche Building, which — under new ownership — operates today as the local Ritz-Carlton.
In 2014, Carter moved full-time to Maine, where his family has had strong ties for a century of summers. Today Philip Dutart Carter resides with his wife, Lynn Bowker, in the coastal community of Camden. There his principal occupation is writing verse, including the occasional country ballad. ☛
Long Haul Blues
I’ve been driving through the night trying to remember all those songs we used to write.
I know moon rhymes with June and baby come back soon, but it’s all fading in the light.
What tears my heart is the breakup part, the damn fool things a traveling man can do, like I did to you.
I came home but you were gone, it’s dawn and here I’m writing on. these broken-hearted sunrise long haul blues.
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South by North , Poems by Philip Carter
Philip Dutart Carter 70 Pearl Street Camden, Maine 04843 philipdcarter@gmail.com
Copyright 2022 Philip Dutart Carter
