When I was a boy growing up in Sopchoppy, I would go out in the Apalachicola in Grimes Bay with Mr George Strickland shown here and his son Robert, one year older than me, to check his hives for bear. I still recall that chilling feeling of coming up on torn up supers. Ole Slewfoot struck again.
Oh Kentucky, when I am lonely and the autumn breezes chill me, in your bluegrass hills I long to be, place of boyhood spills and college thrills, where ever I have roamed, from Florida's sands to West Virginia's mines, always it seems I am drawn, to the Kentucky I once called home.
Deer Boy
I see they finally got
You deer boy
Oh boy
One-hundred and twenty five
Atta boy
Like a lots
And way to go's
Later
Hung you for all
To gawk
Sorry for all this
deer boy
Granny never wanted
That deer blood
Transfusion
You were not meant
To live unhunted
You were a deer
Not dear
No longer a boy with
Spots beneath the palmetto.
With Me
John Clare Stokes
All day she told me
She could sit and
listen to the poetry
And I had just enough
audacity
to believe her
so I stacked deep
the volumes of
Clare
Yeats
Burns
Stevens
even
some of my own
and waited to read the one
that began with the line:
Maid of the wilderness,
Sweet in thy rural dress,
Fond thy rich lips I press
Under this tree.
then:
I thought of your beauty, and this arrow
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
to:
Come, let me take thee to my breast,
And pledge we ne'er shall sunder,
And i shall spurn as vilest dust
The world's wealth and grandeur!
finally:
God and all angels sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat
And crickets are loud again in the grass.
The moon burns in the mind of
lost remembrances.
And I would have read them all
Had we but the time
But came the arrow
the vile dust
the heat
and this Robert Frosty
simply melted away.
Klein Time
John Clare Stokes
Today I heard a knocking
It was at the degree
Of sixty
I knew he'd be coming
Burning day light, you see.
Upon the red Klein
Huret counter set to zero
A century I expect this time
Toward Moniac we will go.
Resting at the East Tower
Huret cyclometer at twenty five
Over the drop bars i cower
Seventy-five more I cry!
Sand and pines
Sand and pines
Will the miles ever end
Red Klein way ahead
Slow squares I spin.
Parched in a mirage
Moniac and the end
There sits ole Rog
Offering me a fig newton.
To Roger Kosch Sessler
March 22, 1932
October 22, 2011
October wind
We know the winds of March and
how the winter they part
ushering summer upon us
But the winds of October foreign
with winter soon returning.
In this world of body piercing and full frontal tattoos, I come bearing the scars of my own making, the result of pulling a coffee pot of boiling water on me, as a child of two. I did not wear my scars proudly as a child. I went to great lengths to conceal them, making great excuses for wearing a tee swimming. What angst to be chosen on the skins team. The kids in their comments were brutal. And so now that I am old, I have finally learned, no one cares for these scars but me. Today I shaved all facial hair. Not even the wife noticed. What a waste of angst all those years.
I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of the other times and places I might have lived, the other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.
~ Wendell Berry
Jordon at Big Shoals
Suwannee
Photo by John Clare Stokes
Sometime I see myself as the crazed
Gadarene
Living chained among the tombs
Striking great fear
In all who would venture near
Other times the one in his
Right mind
Sitting quietly at the Masters feet
Striking great fear
In all who would venture near.
John Clare Stokes
You get to the age
When you think
By now I should
See clearly
But the vision is
Still cloudy
Men as trees walking
Not discerning
An arm from a branch
A leg from a root
And the voice you hear
Is it of man or is it
Of fowl
I take to the limbs
Carefully
Saw in hand
I begin cutting
Not knowing from
Whence comes
The screaming.
Is it sap
Or is it blood?
Johnclarestokes
I cannot fathom how he did not make it to a century
I truly thought that lean raising in Homewood, Mississippi
Would prepare him for making it easily
He never tired when working the long
acre rows with the sharp hoe
Digging the endless stretch of posts
Hole after hole
Waiting patient for the boy so slow
And when he preached and sang
He was so much larger than his frame
Thanks to him so many to heaven came
This day the son upon sixty-nine will reflect
Cinch his old bolo and recollect
The father of a century he'll always respect.
Rev Luther Ray Stokes, would be 102 today.
