To John Haines on His 88th Birthday

Photo by Dan O'Neill

Today would have been John Haines' (1924-2011) 88th birthday.  John, who passed away in Alaska in March 2011, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a naval officer. As a boy, Haines attended school here in Washington, D.C., while his father was stationed at the Washington Navy Yard.

After serving on a navy destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II, Haines studied at American University and the National Art School, both in Washington, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 1947, Haines left Washington and eventually homesteaded acreage along the Richardson Highway approximately 68 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.  It was here that he spent much of the next four decades running his trap lines and living off the land while trying to realize his artistic talents.  It was here that he moved from the visual to the literary arts, and his experiences in the Alaskan wilderness were the inspiration for his early poetry collections - Winter News (1966) and The Stone Harp (1971), the essay collection Living Off the Country (1981), and the memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989).

Haines came back to Washington in 1991-92 as Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at the George Washington University, and visited Washington frequently during the last two decades of his life. He also taught at several other colleges and universities; his last academic appointment was as an instructor in the Honors Program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

His later books included New Poems 1980-88 (1990), The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993), Where the Twilight Never Ends (1994), Fables and Distances (1996), A Guide to the Four-Chambered Heart (1997), For the Century’s End: Poems 1990-1999 (2001), and Descent (2010).

Haines was honored for his writing, receiving the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Western States Book Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress, and the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, among others. He was also named a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1997.

I met John as a Jenny McKean Moore fellow at George Washington University in 1991 and we remained good friends during the final two decades of his life.  He was a guest in my home during his visits to Washington, and I look back with particular fondness on the days he and I spent together in Big  Sky, Montana in the autumn of 2004 following the release of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines which I edited and which was published by CavanKerry Press.

So Happy Birthday, John!  I miss you.

My thanks to my good friend Miles David Moore, who also studied with John at George Washington University, for his contributions to this posting.  He and I will be presenting another tribute to John at the Cafe Muse, in Friendship Heights, Maryland, on the evening of December 3, 2012.

On Pemaquid Neck

ON PEMAQUID NECK


Life bubbles up and dies down like the foam
on this unbound, endless motion.
        “About the Sea”
        Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963)





The incoming tide cuddles the strong shoulders
of this rocky shoreline, reaching all the way
to the junipers, their branches tattering the fog’s
morning margins as swirling waters eddy then surge
over the striated rocks gradually emerging from sea
foam borders to deposit its mysterious detritus
the distant news of last night’s passing storm.
           
The salt pond’s calm pools obscure secret chambers
where colorful creatures, chitinous crustaceans
find safe haven from the gulls and cormorant
perched on nearby barnacle-crusted boulders.

I am reminded of Hikmet standing alone at a shore
bordered by dark and shadowy balsam and pine forests
quietly mourning the sadness of an empty auger shell
breathing in the iodine fragrance of a southern sea.

Later the tide turns and ebbs beyond the rocky ledge.

Café Slavonija

CAFÉ SLAVONIJA

War is happening not only at the front, but everywhere and to all of us.

Slavenka Drakulić

A glass of Graševina on the table before me,

an unfolding drama observed from a safe distance;

watching,I think of my family far away and safe.

What do I tell them about what I have seen and heard,

when war and genocide rage so close? I breathe

hard and heavy unable to craft words from what I know.

                                     *

 All morning they range through the Konstablerwache market

having fled Slavonia to this cheerless canton of Frankfurt,

far from Croatia where no one could or would protect them.

They beg for money, food, a new or a dog-ended cigarette.

Pomozite mi molim vas, pomoc', pomoc' mene ugoditi!

They come every week and every week they are shunned

by those who choose not to see them. No one wants to see them.

The market-goers, like the world, remain silent with blinders on,

unwilling to see what is happening to these sad and pitiful people

in their villages, in the beech forests where pits await them.

Not a stone upon a stone wall remains of what was once theirs.

Refugees from a country of the forgotten, they live to suffer,

a consequence of ignorance, a contraction of the human condition.

                                   *

One does not want to know what a sledgehammer can do to a skull,

what a crowbar can do to a jawbone, to hands and feet, to testicles;

how a well-applied knife can remove an ear still hearing the screams

of others in a former library room, books now gone from where once

they came to learns their history and their folklore now being erased

as each one of them disappears into long trenches whitened with lime,

as if late autumn snow had fallen only to quickly mask these crimes,

white like the ribbons the Croats are forced to wear so the Beli Orlovi,

the Serb White Eagle militiamen, will know whom they should kill.

Are there grounds to justify this wanton inhumanity? Revenge perhaps

for the camps at Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, old Ustaša iniquities?

                                   *

Fat white geese huddle in yards of bombed houses as refugees pass,

walking north to escape the atrocities, first to Vukovar then Osikjek;

by train to Zagreb, to the teeming stations in Vienna and Budapest.

Their bodies are no longer their own as they flee their homeland,

their bodies have been claimed by war. Citizens of no county - refugees.

They once believed the death of a body was the worst that could happen.

Their muscles tighten, the pulsing of blood reminding them they still live.

Perhaps they are the unlucky ones for escaping the pits. They do not know

that worse is the separation of self from the body, extinction before death.

                                   *

A young Croat woman, teeth yellow and cracked like autumn corn

harvested in fields along the Sava River, watches him slowly ramble

through the Konstablerwache, tugging at his jacket, a persistent pleading –

Sve kovanice? Cigarete, molimo Vas gospodine? Bitte, Zigaretten? 

He tries to ignore her, his gaze seized by her own that narrows 

with sudden recognition. Četnički! Da, ja vas znam . . . jebeni četnici!

She knows him, she remembers him from that morning in her village,

when the Chetniks came after the shelling had ended. She remembers

his cold crowbar and his knife, their work on her husband and son.

She points her finger at his dark murderous eyes. Vi prljava ubojica! 

He turns from her, swiftly retreats into a crowd, her eyes follow him

closely until he disappears, her finger pointing to where he stood.

Ubojica . . . Ubojica! 

                                   *

Here, at a table in the Café Slavonija, an empty glass of Graševina,

I watch the drama unfold from a safe distance.

Blood pulsing through my temples reminds me I am still alive.

I have no true understanding of mutilation and death,

the horrific pain induced by sledgehammers, crowbars and knives,

the secrets of the beech trees, the silence of the limed pits.

I am unable to craft words from what I have come to know.

Ashbery

ASHBERY

For DC

bacon bending
apocalyptic slant
to ante meridian
sizzle
signaling sad
aftermath
to a quiet perusal
ecclesiastic menu
suggesting
delayed death
benchmarks
in helix of grease
we die different deaths
after dissimilar lives.