1. Memento Mori

Memorial Day: I had just come in from trimming and sweeping the deck wisteria’s ambitious scouts, which will, left to their own devices, extend and explore , insinuate among the lounge chairs, twine the arms and legs to claim the faux natural materials and (beckoning toward the treeline) whisper, “Brother, come with us, come home.” My wife was in the garden performing more arduous weeding chores, but I couldn’t get out of my mind what she’d told me an hour earlier. Mary Baldwin College’s Facebook hostesses had been scolded by a follower for posting a “Happy Memorial Day” message sporting the image of a squirrel (MBC’s mascot) armed with an American flag. The mild admonition was directed at the inappropriate whimsy and that “happy,” given what we’re officially supposed to be remembering beyond race cars, water sports and grilled meat.

I was feeling immune to that criticism, as I neither celebrate nor much register that holiday. Many have given the full measure, no few of them due to foolish miscalculation and misplaced enthusiasm from our generals and princes, but at my house we don’t seize the occasion to engage in family scrum, feasts, flag-waving or pyrotechnics, and I’m likely to spend the afternoon in my office or my reading chair. Sarah and I were planning to sup on fresh bread and a long-simmered soup of beans and sausage. I was reading a couple of books I enjoyed and planning to watch part of a TV miniseries, Texas Rising, on Sam Houston as Texas savior that night, and so to bed, as the chroniclers say. Not much thought dedicated to American victories and losses beyond my pilot light of disgust at our various administrations and their foreign adventures, which, mind you, doesn’t equal my anger at the current international felons and their jackal depravity, but I feel hamstrung and impotent in those matters. In short: the usual discontent and dismay, but thirst for distraction which would encourage me to focus on some “larger picture,” or smaller ones.

When I went into my study to change shoes after my Nemo-like battle with the squid-wisteria, I stopped longer than usual in front of a smaller picture, a painting sent to me by friend Billy Dunlap and hanging on the blue wall. I’ve seen it, as they say, a thousand, and Billy knows my mind enough to have guessed I’d be fixated by it. The title scrawled in white on the verso of the black canvas is “Sgt. Williams in the Moonlight,” and it’s dated 2007, accompanied by what’s called an appropriate sentiment about our mutual something-illegible, so I suppose I’ve had it 7-8 years. Now, here it is, on our livingroom table like a body ready to be cleaned:

12” X 24” polymer paint on canvas
The image is a familiar one, the original photograph widely reprinted in the late 19th century, then in history books, as perhaps a cautionary emblem for those traveling west, or a reminder of the cost.  I have seen it on practicallyhistorical.net and grouped with images of Custer, though we have no photographs of the fatalities after that battle, so I’ll resist that interpretive path.  The cavalryman whose family came west (I’m projecting based on his name) from Wales, then further, was probably left behind by his enemies as a NO TRESPASSING sign. I’ve heard the larger field of the photograph shows a lonesome horse grazing in the background, but my artist friend has, I believe,  selected and composed (though maybe the source of that horse is one of Dunlap’s own constructions; trickster that he is), turning grim pastoral to both memento mori and an object of stern beauty.

Once Billy cast his artist’s eye beyond the Mississippi, where the bison and hawks different from Virginia and Mississippi denizens could be found, his archival instincts found this whole new trove of images, and he lit on this Sergeant Williams or was lit up by the sergeant and placed him, with or without his mount and the glowering Yahweh sky, on various panels and dedicated canvases for years (“Landscape and Variable: Indian Paint Brush” 1987; “Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America” same year; “Object Lesson Series: Willing Spirit/ Weak Flesh” 1991). Sometimes the panels or canvases have an actual arrow embedded in the images, usually not. The body – a soldier, a casualty, a guardian – of the non-com can appear in different lights and stages of decay; in one rendering his body appears to be mossed over, glowing verdigris, in others the wounds are fresher, more delineated, the ribs or facial features more prominent. The disposition and proportions of the body always approximate the “pose” in the original photograph.

At first, I couldn’t decide if he reminded me more of St. Sebastian or a misshapen porcupine. St. Porcupine? Clearly, I wanted to joke the impact into submission, to peer to the side, see the Dunlap Williams as subsidiary or peripheral. It is a disturbing image, though not really grisly, compared to, say, the grue-fetish zombie crap comics, popular TV and movies assail us with, hoping to scare-titillate us. There ought to be a word – scittilate – for that unimaginative enterprise. But Williams is ghostly in that deeply spiritual, but not religious, way which often leaves us blinking, if not transformed.

And he reminded me of the scene in Dances with Wolves when Costner/Dunbar and his muleskinner discover a Caucasian body long dwelling in the tall prairie grass, occasioning the wagonneer to quip, “Somewhere back home somebody’s wondering, ‘Why don’t he write?’” [This is approximate; I’m not ready to watch that film again to get the line exact.] While Sgt. Williams is not without identity, he’s still pretty much one of our unknown soldiers, but here he is also big A Art – emotional, highly wrought, mysterious, both sustaining and able to trigger serious hungers.

And the painting has outlasted my earlier associations and driven me deeper into meditations I never volunteered for. Billy is many things: painter with perfect visual pitch, sculptor, teacher, curator, wit, writer, raconteur, bon vivant, and so on. But at his core, he’s a trickster, and I find myself wishing I could decipher that word after “mutual” in the inscription.

Sergeant Will is moonwashed white, his flesh become bone, his face eluding recognition, but just expressive enough to occupy the threshold between mime and demon, and yet still human. He might be floating upon calm black waters, but the brushstrokes in muted colors complicating the backdrop suggest something more solid. His feet are pitiable, and you want to start covering him there and move the blanket up for privacy, yet in the whitening moonlight he has a profound dignity, the five arrows almost symbolic: one planted in the groin, a second in the belly, one in the heart, another just above the sternum, a final one in the left deltoid. They come from different angles and carry a hint of red on their fletching. The body also shows red wisps and splotches, enough blood on the right elbow to suggest blunt trauma.

Intriguing as the amateur forensics might be, the whole is so much more than . . . . Sergeant Williams is in repose. He has come face to face with death and become, for me, the face of death, even more than my maternal grandfather John P. Thaxton, whom I was always said to favor physically until I grew old and grayed old and took on my father’s features. (Temperamentally, I excite few comparisons to either man.) I remember seeing granddaddy the day he died in that back (west) room on the iron-framed feather bed I had so often slept in. Patchwork quilt of many blues, pillows thick as shoats.  I was six. He’d been suffering from lung cancer long enough to have grown even more sparse and sinewy than labor had made him.  Grizzled of cheek, chin and mien.  I’m now developing his hairline, but I never had his sinewy grit or lanky good nature. That’s wisdom, to my mind: grit and humor together, a strong dose of generosity doesn’t hurt.  Wisdom is humanitarian instincts spoken and then acted, I believe.   I’m just a poor facsimile. But I knew him as a child knows a local hero, not even aware until I was sixty that his “unexplained” disappearances and extended absences were binges the Baptist church wouldn’t much excuse in a farming carpenter. But at least they didn’t express their disapproval with archery.

I wonder if Sergeant Williams achieved wisdom? I think of the last line of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” but twisting it, with death-in-flight replacing the assailant Zeus-goose. “Did [he] put on his knowledge. . . ?” Hard to believe a soldier of the sergeant’s era didn’t tipple a bit, which is a useful clarifying lens just before it becomes an occluding one. I’m guessing he was a scout, but as soon as I begin to speculate on his identity and function, I want to know who took the original damn picture. And what was left out. The records don’t show. Old Anonymous at it again. I wonder if it was someone whose curiosity about the human condition and respect for the final stages mirrored Sally Mann’s as she photographed her dying father and the corpses at the “Body Farm” where forensic scientists use to learn how the forces of nature reclaim various examples of our flesh and bones. Maybe it was just an artless journalist, but I’m skeptical about makers of images shooting from the hip with neither design nor agenda, intent being a natural instinct for our species.

A few years ago, my wife didn’t object when I asked if I could move the sarge to our bedroom, where I could study him from my own prone position. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit to arranging my body to mimic his position. I also thought of my grandfather’s position as he prepared for death and mine when I was laid up with the poisons of chemotherapy and radiation in the same room a decade ago. “Fallen man” is my phrase for the general posture, and I have stretched out on my deck in winter to seek his outline in the stars, though that constellation eludes me so far. I have found both terror and comfort in my morbid exercises, just as I find that pair in most activities.  O felix culpa?

Neither did Sarah object when I decided to move the painting back to the wall of my study, where there’s a scarlet, trumpet-blowing angel silhouette cut from sheet metal to greet him, to “Taps” and “Reveille” him. What I’m hoping in the long run is that I’ll be able to follow this meditative path when my time to cross the river comes along: wisteria, the sergeant resting in peace, the red angel blowing maybe a kind of jazz anthem of welcome. I read this anecdote somewhere. When Allen Ginsberg was dying, he was asked how he felt, and his answer was that, where he’d expected to be terrified, he was instead exhilarated. Smell of fresh grass and a lathered horse, twang of a bowstring, moonlight on the face . . . and just hope that first arrow is well-chosen and flies true.  “All fall down.”
*
The Mighty Billy D

 

POETRY//  mysterious fall of blackbirds and the sins of the past/ Graybeal-Gowen winner “May” by Juliana Daugherty/ a relief pitcher picks up the fiddle/ meditative and spiritual poems/ Davis McCombs on the mysteries of fox passage /Wild Turkeys and Marianne Moore/ Bobby Rogers on Elvis, Hank and wondrous births / Tom Reiter, Jeff Mock, Carol Frost and more/ an interview with Tim Siebels/ Kempf on the associative mode in contemporary poetry

Resurrecting “Dirty Little Billy”

1. Spoiler Alert
2. No animals were harmed or confused in the production of this commentary.
3. Author’s cousin will be mentioned in passing.
4. Geezer Subject Matter Warning: Western Films, naked knives, Gary Busey.

Some things treasured but believed lost are still splendid when they’re found or revived. A few nights ago I stayed up late to catch Dirty Little Billy, a gritty, darkly funny western I saw and admired when it first appeared in late 1972 but which, to my disappointment, seemed to vanish from public view like a woodstove dropped into a swamp. The film’s narrative is a highly fictionalized account of Billy Bonney’s first steps from snot-nosed sullen teenager to pistolero, and the source of its fascination for me was twofold: the grimy, shadow- strangled atmosphere of the story’s Kansas railroad-stop village and Michael J. Pollard’s portrayal of William Henry McCarty as a kind of Huck on crack. This film helped shape my appetite and concept of the western, and I have often, while reading or viewing western stories, pined for it.

Most moviegoers recall Pollard from his Academy Award nominated role as C. W. Moss, gas pump monkey/wheelman/sidekick to Bonnie and Clyde in the 1967 Arthur Penn film that launched Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into the cinema wowasphere. Pollard’s puckish-punk face and dazzled eyes are enough to make him memorable at a glance, but his shearing laugh and glee over souped-up cars and gunfire cut against the grain of that cartoon grin to stamp him in the mind unforgettably as a lethal innocent.

In Dirty Little Billy, he’s at it again, going from repressed and lethargic teen to ballistic savant in just a few days, or in real time, an hour and a half. The film’s narrative is fairly simple – dragged along a muddy road to a dilapidated farm where the Irish lad’s severe step-father wants to see how quickly Billy’s palms can become huge blisters, he goes AWOL and falls in with Goldie, who — though seemingly only slightly Billy’s senior — terrorizes the town. Now called Billy, instead of Henry McCarty, Pollard joins his mentor hunkered down in Goldie’s stronghold, a ramshackle bar where Goldie’s his girl Berl (perhaps “Beryl” on a clodhopper’s tongue), at the sound of a bell, retreats to a back room where she is repeatedly deflowered for chump change. Along with a couple of unsavory senior citizens, the trio drinks endlessly and sloppily, plays cards against rubes, exudes bile and easy sentiment and engage in sex and often-clownish combat. Eventually the town decides to hire an exterminator. Mayhem follows, with Billy and Goldie escaping to the badlands, where they employ their wiles and Billy’s newfound sharpshooter talent to launch their life as nomadic rogues.

The history of Billy on screen is long and various. Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown and Audie Murphy played him as a misunderstood adolescent or simple maligned hero, Howard Hughes offers Jack Bertel in the role of a wounded and romantic but snake-minded Billy in The Outlaw, a film famous for something other than Billy’s pair of six-shooters. Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun rendered Billy (by that stage of his life Bonney, BtK) savvy, more sinned against than sinning and, well, Newman-eyed righteous avenger. There were more Billys in heaven and earth than are dreamt of . . . , and room for a whole gallery of interpretations, but perhaps the death blow to DLB, the product of Charles Moss and Stan Dragoti’s imaginations, was Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with its star-peppered cast a far cry from DLB. Singing star Kris Kristofferson is a rangy, mean, charismatic and sexy Billy in this endgame display of B’s long 21-year life, and James Coburn plays assassin/sheriff Pat Garrett, while icons like Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, Jack Elam et alia show up, Rita Coolidge plays B’s paramour “Marie” (really Paulita Maxwell) and one of his henchman, a wise cracker called “Alias,” is played by Robert Zimmerman (aka Dylan, who supplies some of the sound track – “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” for instance). Big budget, Sam Peckinpah in the director’s gurney. I remember loving it in a counter-culture way – just suppose Billy and his pards were like a counter-culture folk music posse, living large and dying hard. . . . And I feel obliged to say that Emilio Estevez’s brat pack and superficially hysterical portrayal of Billy in Young Guns never seemed more than a horse opera, with it’s suggestion that Billy outlived his supposed death to show up years later as ancient Brushy Bill and tell his story.  That frame device seemed too transparently lifted from Little Big Man that it didn’t add anything to the inquiry into the nature of Billy and the narrative of his life and “career.”

I’ve seen the Kris/Rita/Bob version four or five times, but it never eclipsed that hour and a half I spent staring at Pollard’s mobile features and hearing his elvish voice. He’s an even five and a half feet tall and comes across as a clown who’s hiding something, a benign naif about to blossom into something truly peculiar amid deep sienna scenery, twisted and cracked planks, scruffy horse-like quadrupeds.
Perhaps a healthier response to DLB would be disgust, but I can’t wash the fascination out of my distaste for the nightmare realism. It doesn’t hurt that Lee Purcell is great as Berl, Richard Evans viable as Goldie and a small cast of helpful “characters,” including Ed Lauter in a small role and an early, not quite complete, teen-mimicking version of Gary Busey, who is already almost all toothy sneer and madness. And Nick Nolte, momentarily.

Why did DLB vanish so quickly and completely? It surely has a lot to do with other westerns released about the same time. The antihero was riding high, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid brought a new glamor, even beauty, to the category. The Redford/Newman combination was immediately loveable: they were slick and sleek and pretty, mischievous, gallant, witty and naughty. Not real.

For realism, I’ll take the incompetent nightmare post-poker gunfight in a half-lit bar – shadows shoot at shadows, Colts misfire, breakage, screaming, crawling, a drunk bystander the only casualty. Or the knife fight between Berl and the other card sharper’s woman. The two combatant’s slash and jab in a fight that seems unchoreographed skirmish between two snarling doxies who have surely wielded blades before. What stuck with me about this combat was that the director found a middle path between today’s orgy of wounds and blood and the euphemisms of days gone by. The wounds are real enough, but the muted hues and blear prevent Technicolor indulgence typical of that era of Straw Dogs. I have seen fights on and off screen, and this claustrophobic one was one of the most unforgettable and terrifying ones, nothing like the haymakers of the Wayne era or the martial arts of the current scene.

Also high on the realism scale are Billy’s desperation, his yearning for identity, freedom, a voice. He’s a follower looking for something to be proud of it, and grisly as his search is, he finds a self in the end, though one with a short shelf life. All this managed with a humor of action and expression that’s like a dark Harpo thrown in the wilderness. The transitions and juxtapositions are shrewd and ruthless, reminiscent of the Ray Carver of Furious Seasons, before he was Lished into something more marketable, but that’s another story.

In the decades since I first saw the movie I’ve developed an appetite for the western which prosecutes its agenda through atmosphere, tempers its violence with humor and refuses to wallow in either abbatoir splatter or romantic conceit.  The necessities of daily survival were taxing, and the temptation to be shifty was stronger than most men and women.  I won’t say I could recommend Dirty Little Billy to everyone, but it’s an example of what we now call the “independent film” which offers an alternative fiction where the facts are few and the legends ossified.  And surely there’s room for the twisted cherub Pollard embodies in our BtK puzzle.

P.S. on the page, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is worth a look.

The one extant tintype of the notorious BtK, as it is usually seen, with the negative flipped.

I recently wrote a blog entry for Brian Brodeur’s valuable “How a Poem Happens,” (http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com) a collection of many blog posts from myriad poets—many very well known—that ask the same series of questions. My entry centered on “Barn Gothic,” published a while back here at Shenandoah. One of the questions centered on form and application:

“How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?”

This question proved difficult to answer and elicited a peculiar response. R. T. Smith suggested I expand the answer to explore the process by which this poem came to be while synthesizing the central idea in Brodeur’s blog.

As I noted in “How a Poem Happens,” I am obsessed with sonic lushness—if, for example, I go to a poet to read for pleasure, it will most likely be Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, early Heaney, etc. I love circuitous, complex applications of sound, so much so that in recent years certain sounds summon synesthetic experiences. For example, I pair certain consonantal repetitions (particularly “w” and “s” and “l” sounds) with the sight and smell of flora. I think instantly, for example, of Hopkins’s “When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush,” a line that conveniently marries my synesthesia with the actual motif. This line is delicious to me. I savor it and could say it again and again, which leads to my next idiosyncratic relationship with sound.

I am a fan of verbigeration, the nonsensical repetition of words or phrases. While I never apply this technique within my own poetry, in life I do repeat certain words—some as benign as “and”—over and over until they lose their meaning and take on a purely sonic simplicity. I liken it to staring at someone or something for so long that they take on an otherworldly radiance, simultaneously lose a certain context and yet gain another one as an object that transcends their mere tangibility.

Such practices have their drawbacks. Even in short-lined poems such as “Barn Gothic,” as I noted in “How a Poem Happens,” I’m perhaps overly conscious of imbuing each line with sonic dynamism. The result is often that my poems, relative to other the work of others now being published, appear (or sound) antiquated.

One fellow poet recently wrote to another fellow poet that I was a poet of “old traditions.” I’m not sure what this means, other than to suggest that I am conscious of form to the degree that my work sounds “old” not in its lack of originality (I hope), but in its prolixity or its ornamentation.

I find much contemporary poetry boring, and I flinch at such a general admonition—but it’s true: most of the work I encounter in journals seems like lineated prose. There’s an argument in my mind about the “truth” of poetry—what it’s meant to say, and many writers argue that poetry needs to sound like someone talking, someone relaying the message to reader in a way devoid of adornments. It’s not that I don’t believe in the validity of this style: I appreciate that it exists, but I won’t read it when I encounter it. I don’t think the purity of truth is in proportion to a transcription of actual experience, but just as likely to emerge through a purely imaginative and lyrical exploration—the latter of which opens more possibilities (in my case) for interesting—and mostly not completely purposeful—applications of sound.

For me, sound need not be limited to idiosyncratic sound relationships as in Hopkins, but can be enjoyed in a less pyrotechnic way. One reason, for example, that I love James Dickey’s early work is his reliance on the anapest, which gives his work an almost engine-like quality, a sound-fuel that creates tension, energy, builds to a revelatory climax.

Simply put: I can’t separate my life from my preoccupation with the sounds of words. I find them strange and incantatory, and I enjoy poets who seem to apply them in similar ways (the very ornamental Eric Pankey, the dynamic Betty Adcock, the hewn expansiveness of Steve Scafidi).

— William Wright