Exotics and Accidentals
Exotics and Accidentals
• James Scruton
Grayson Books
West Hartford, Connecticut
Exotics and Accidentals
Copyright Š 2009 by James Scruton Printed in the USA Book Design by Virginia Anstett
Grayson Books PO Box 270549 West Hartford, CT 06127 www.graysonbooks.com
ISBN: 978-0-9785382-5-5
Acknowledgements
Poems in this collection first appeared in the following publications: Amoskeag: “Dogs and Horses” Buckle: “My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500 Kinds of Apples Grow in North America” Connecticut River Review: “Bird Stories” Cumberland Poetry Review: “Pockets” Louisville Review: “Heron’s Flight” Mid-America Poetry Review: “Exotics and Accidentals,” “Nest” New Delta Review: “Elegy for Viola Mae” New Madrid: “Scarecrows,” “Grace” Poem: “Onion Grass” Poetry: “Ordinary Plenty” Poetry East: “A Sunshower in the Middle Innings,” “Honeysuckle,” “The Accidental Garden” Southern Poetry Review: “The Names of Birds,” “First Wasp” Spire: “Ladybugs” Steam Ticket: “Good Clean Dirt” Two Review: “Buckeye”
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Contents
I
Buckeye • 1 Good Clean Dirt • 2 Nest • 3 The Names of Birds • 4 Heron’s Flight • 5 Scarecrows • 6 Elegy for Viola Mae • 7 A Sunshower in the Middle Innings • 9 Bird Stories • 10 Exotics and Accidentals • 11
II
The Accidental Garden • 15 My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500 Kinds of Apples Grow in North America • 16 First Wasp • 17 Ladybugs • 18 Onion Grass • 19 Honeysuckle • 20 Ordinary Plenty • 21 Pockets • 22 Dogs and Horses • 24 Grace • 25
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I
Buckeye
Tell me again the legend of the buckeye, of luck found at the heart of ordinary things, the bur and thistle of the everyday.
Let me hear once more the story of this dark brown charm, the one I squeeze for words as if for diamonds from a piece of coal, blood from a stone. Give me the truth in a nutshell.
1
Good Clean Dirt
An ad for Good Clean Dirt runs weekly in the classifieds, a few words at the standard rate
among the usual auctions, hay for sale, tools to buy or trade. I’ve wondered who would pay
for dirt, if there were grades not quite so good, so clean as others, and what those ads
would say. I’ve imagined people bidding for the best of it: gardeners, and some young couple
with a new house on a grassless corner lot, and maybe me there too, since I’ve thought more than once
of what it might be like to have that kind of dirt to dig in at the day’s end, to leave
something good and dark beneath my fingernails, feeling the cleaner for it, the salt of the earth.
2
Nest
The kids brought it in, all twigs and twisted lengths of grass, a threading fine as a bird’s flight. It could have been a basket, a tiny summer hat.
Not knowing a crow’s nest from a robin’s, I couldn’t say what wings had cradled there, how far that soft bowl might have fallen to take its place
among their other treasures: the long, sloughed snakeskin and the fossilized leaf, the arrowhead sharp and delicate as a bird’s beak.
3
The Names of Birds
Flicker. Grackle. Coot. Ruby-throated this, red-headed that, downy or belted or crested. They swirl, excited syllables,
feathering our speech like oaths out of Shakespeare: thou nuthatch, bufflehead, worm-eating warbler. Thou pied-billed grebe.
Skylark and nightingale flown, give me something local and down to earth, flycatcher or thrasher, a working-man’s bird,
and, for the two of us, names as light on the tongue as on the wing, names to make a love-nest of my little widgeon, my chickadee.
4
Heron’s Flight
So used to quickness, to bright flashes at the feeder, swoops and dives beyond the picture window’s glass, the eye objects now to the slow heave of those wings, the unlikely angle of the heron’s flight, steering like a drowsy pterodactyl from marsh to pond, barely clearing fences and the tall grass of the fields between, as if just roused from an age of standing silent in the reeds, that stillness at the water’s edge it emulates even in flight, so languidly aloft it might at any moment falter, break itself against the ground, and wake.
5
Scarecrows
You never see them anymore in fields; they’ve shambled off the farms, retired now to front-porch fall tableaux or shadows of their former selves in backyard gardens, pie pans and pinwheels flashing in the sunshine around them like fast, newfangled traffic.
But I miss those bucketheads and strawmen at attention in overalls and tattered flannel, broomhandle arms fixed always in that same cockeyed salute.
And I wish some spring they’d make a comeback, somehow pull themselves together and take their beanpole places after all the planting’s done, a countryside of humble sentinels again, a host of patchwork knights to tilt at the inscrutable, circling crows.
6
Elegy for Viola Mae
You half-haunt us, now that half of your ashes have been spread across our pasture, your son wholly faithful to your wishes.
We thought he had stopped to ask directions, lost in a rented car among these hills and hayfields; instead he showed us photographs of a horse-plow, barn, and clapboard house in greying black and white, some trees that might have been our tallest oaks when young.
And then his odd request, that small urn he had brought, no word about where else he would be leaving you‌
How could we tell him he had come so far to get it wrong, no house or barn here before our own? How could we say some part of you did not belong, laid to rest
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in his mind, finally, as he drove away, half-empty urn beside him, an old road’s dust rising in the rear-view mirror?
8
A Sunshower in the Middle Innings
A single cloud passed like a mood and we were doused with prismed light, the air like strings of colored beads around the bases, at mound and plate.
We fielded grounders wet grass sped and felt the slicked force in our throws. Each fly ball became a rainbow, a glove's webbed pocket a pot of gold.
And in just minutes it was gone, having scattered across our play like handfuls of enchanted seeds a rain that fell diamond-bright in sun, the day
from then on merely clear again.
9
Bird Stories
—for Cindy
Like those fishy tales about the ones that got away, like second-hand accounts of apparitions or strange lights in the sky, we trade flights of fancy, avian folklore, shaggy bird stories: that owl in a house I rented once, a blue jay’s diving at our cat for hours, the robin’s nest in your flowerpot.
Now this: some feathered shadow whose beak keeps chipping at your window, the marks there sparkling when the sun hits, like scratches from a youthful lover’s pebbles dashed against the glass. Maybe, I said, it’s a jilted one, a would-be lovebird from your past, or a spirit hatched from one of the myths you like to teach, Philomena or some bird undone by Orpheus as he strummed his last lament.
Somehow you know you won’t look back on this and laugh, whatever happens next, whatever story this will become of omen, ghost, or curse, of just the ordinary trying to break through.
10
Exotics and Accidentals
These are your favorites, the ones here on the off-chance, each a bird of a different feather.
Even nested they never quite belong, some note they can’t pick up in local songs, their habitat re-mapped
beneath them. What strange migration brings them here, what turn of wing or weather?
Vagrants, stragglers, escaped or astray, their names go on your list as if the one place left to land.
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II
The Accidental Garden
Late April turning cold, we saw blankets over flower beds, front-yard shrubs and bushes shrouded
like furniture in unused rooms, like church statues during Holy Week— a solicitude for leaf and stem
that always takes us by surprise, since anything that grows for us is wild or thrives by luck, our prized
but accidental garden full of unruly roses, unlooked-for lilies. Our blow-ins have become perennials
re-christened every spring: Windbloom, Randomflower, Golden Come-What-May, Weather’s Will, Common Chance-Blossom.
15
My Daughter Reads Aloud That 2500 Kinds of Apples Grow in North America
A fact that ought to fill me once again with wonder at the plenitude of this world, it makes me think instead of two old trees we had to bring down earlier this year, of their sour green windfalls I was always raking up along the fence.
I tell myself no one will miss them from the 2500 I’ve just heard about— a nice round number, after all, those last two digits themselves like little apples— 2500 ways to shine in someone’s eye, to ward off doctors or please a teacher.
I ask myself how many kinds must grow the world over; if anyone has counted; the bad one it would take to spoil them all.
And I wonder about the very first, the one that started everything, or whether there were just as many kinds of apples then as now, an Eden full of branches grown so heavy something had to fall,
or maybe, as the story says, just two trees in the beginning, no fruit to pick or gather yet from either life or knowledge, nothing for a while beneath those perfect boughs but shade.
16
First Wasp
Just before the weather changes it appears, hobbling along a windowsill or across the glass,
bent as a beggar in some nineteenth-century novel, one of those small passing figures
at the periphery of a sprawling plot, almost unnoticeable against the view beyond.
17
Ladybugs
Some must be gentlemen bugs, of course, but we call them ladies, always— scarlet women of the insect world, so many tiny, speckled bonnets.
But what of their invasions every spring, the legions of little helmets in the cupboard, on the windowsill? What of their intrepid explorations,
one navigating the folds of my shirtsleeve, another nudging itself like a sentence across the page I’m reading? Two, now three, cling to the kitchen ceiling
the way medieval ships did to the bottom of the world, while still another is ascending the Everest of a lampshade, all of them bearing
a small red flag toward the edge of everything they know.
18
Onion Grass
It’s finally spring when we smell onions, some neighbor’s mower spreading on the air a scent as dark and thick as those tufts themselves, those wild salad grasses diced across the mannered blandness of a lawn.
Some tell the fall by burning leaves, winter by the merest whiff of snow, summer pungent as a jungle flower. Around here spring’s a watering of the eyes, a seasoning so green we almost cry.
19
Honeysuckle
It seems a kind of moonshine, sweet enough to be illegal, whole distilleries coiled over fences and hedgerows every summer.
And shine these blossoms do on moonlit nights, pale flowers soaking up the stuff we squeeze from them a drop
at a time: nectar, juice, sap, little bubbles of syrup, translucent beads we can imagine strung with cornsilk into fairy necklaces,
into pixie chains and bracelets, strand after honeyed strand until the summer’s end, licking magic from our fingers.
20
Ordinary Plenty
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty… —Patrick Kavanagh, “Advent”
What did you call it? Heather? Wheat? Or just an ordinary field of uncut hay the late sun hit to fool your eye with sudden gold?
The whole day seemed to settle on the rough pond of that ripened straw, that sunlit lake of heavy grain. You still can’t say quite what you saw.
Since then, how many roads have passed through other places unremarked as those few acres of long grass? The dust and gravel where you parked
led into hills already lost to that deep light, and you would turn to more exotic plains of whin and thistle, furze and gorse. But that last
look in your rear-view mirror filled the car like folktale straw made gold, like loaves and fishes giving more and going further than they were.
21
Pockets
I empty pockets as the clothes go in the washer, finding change some days, some days a crumpled note from study hall or the earring my oldest daughter thought she’d lost.
The kids all know the rule: what gets this far is mine. Just as they know how I’ll give in, give back the change, not read the notes. It’s enough to stay this much in touch with their lives’
small particulars, particulars in all our pockets once, saved beyond reason. I shake from my son’s blue jeans what I gathered years ago: a pencil stub, spent shotgun shells
found in the woods, ruined pennies off the tracks, a rusty bolt that must feel heavy as a barbell in his hand. And, most often, rocks of all kinds, faceted like gems
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or marble-smooth, faux arrowheads and fossils, a load of pebbles worthy of Demosthenes— though it’s not eloquence but weight he wants from such a pocketful, some gravitas beyond his years. I can’t begin to tell him how or why it all adds up, or if it will. I can’t explain, now, that some days it takes everything
you have to keep from going, pockets turned out, on your way.
23
Dogs and Horses
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses. —Herman Melville
Perhaps they are philosophers, quiet guides to truth and beauty, exemplars of the examined life.
Maybe the dog’s been thinking all day in the sunny yard, head raised with an insight now and then, working at the bone of some idea.
When horses stand and stare for what seems hours they could be contemplating once again the reality of limits, the age-old paradox of fence and greener grass.
It might be from weariness they turn to us at all, fatigued by so much thought, and from a kind of pity for our existential sniffing after meaning, our stoic charades, the dog-and-pony show we make of everything.
24
Grace
O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow The small rain down can rain…
The small rain down can rain, and the big rain, too, not to mention the sleet or hail or snow, depending on the time of year, on the unseasonable weather of the heart.
This late December afternoon the snow is so fine coming down I can barely see it through the window, unconvinced until I’m outside catching it like salt across the dark palms of my gloves.
It’s coming down as a friend of mine says grace does, on the just and unjust alike, asked for or not, believed in or doubted. And who am I to say he’s wrong, to tell him
that faith is one more word for need so great it must be holy, a desire for truth or peace or another life in which to find them— or more often just for love, prayer enough in any wind, any season.
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