The Importance of Books in Everyday Ramblings

This is Tad’s house. He is the artist that wrote the electronic book on South Portland that I have been drawing a lot of material from on my “project”. While I was working on my poem this week I figured out (much to my delight) how to search his book for street names and addresses.

The deeper I go into the history of my neighborhood the more fired up I get. Last night at my local poetry reading much to my surprise our Poet Laureate Emeriti said hello to me and mentioned she hadn’t seen me in awhile. She is Jewish and I started asking her questions about where her family lived when they first came here. She was a bit taken aback but in a good-natured way. She really doesn’t know much about the history here at all. Ha. My goal is to change that.

There was another woman poet listening in and as I was telling them about my project the other woman said, “You sure are enthusiastic about this!” And I am.

It is such a wonderful place to put my mind.

When I walk down my block I don’t just see what is here now, I see all the layers and lives (and in my case, horses) that have gone on here before. The barn here was the last active commercial barn in Portland.

It is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. So working on the one corner that I am focusing on right this moment for the first section of the poem I am piecing together from eyewitness accounts contradictory stuff and settling in on a picture that is subject to revision as a new piece of info comes in.

My adored friend M and her husband were there last night and we were talking about how at the library poetry is shelved as Non Fiction. And how funny that is to a poet.

So all this detail that I am gathering is as accurate as I can possibly make it but the characters, in this first draft of the first piece are completely made up. This is the first section that I read last night. They seemed to like it. It certainly held their attention.

The Through Line
I

At dawn as curtains are drawn
In the children’s room I can hear
harnesses clanking as horses
are hitched to their wagons up
at the drayage stables in the next block.

I smell blood from the slaughter
shed downstairs in back as Isaac
starts his day’s preparations for the shop.
Dark men speak Yiddish in front of the Shul
as junk peddlers imagine prosperous finds

In the mud. Nothing goes to waste here.
I murmur to the baby in French so she’ll know
when she grows the sound of a life more
than a butcher’s wife, kosher or otherwise,
a life of thin hips and admiration

From some of the most gifted young painters
on the Continent. Those epic Homeric tales
of wild meaningful journeys, of intricate
detail, the white horse, the blue rose,
your mother one of the models,
a muse, yes, one of those.

It is not the smell of damp ink
or marble chips, this morning
but wood smoke, offal and the salt
we had delivered yesterday. Eloise says
there are a few new books in this week on the ships.

I’ll send the boy when we can spare him
to the lending library. I want him to learn
more than how to handle the cleavers
and knives and look for old glass
up where the shacks used to be on the other
side of the trestle over this forsaken hole
in the ground they call a gulch.

I have discovered that the slaughter shed may have actually been across the street from the deli (next to the Temple) and the deli may have been a fish store for a time.

I do know the women and girls would either take one of their own live chickens or one they purchased from the basement of a neighbor on Fridays in a burlap bag to the butcher and for 5 cents each he would bless the chicken and humanely slaughter it in the kosher fashion and they would carry it home to either be plucked by a family member or a woman down on her luck that would do it for a few pennies.

Remind me to share with you how when they moved the library all the children made a line for the block between old and new and handed each book up the line to the person next to them. Imagine the impression this made on them of the importance of books!

Last updated July 13, 2015