in parentheses

Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He lives in West Virginia, where he raises cattle. He is an imagist poet, expressing experiences and moods in concrete descriptions. He occasionally uses the pseudonym, Turin Shroudedindoubt, for artistic work. X @Turin54024117

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Lessons

My Uncle plays the piano in solitude
I sit silently behind him
 – surely he knows –
he performs my first piano recital
show tunes and hymns
and sings
the upright faces the north wall of the empty dining room
of the little inn where I live the last year of World War II
and following year before my father is discharged from the Army
the mystery of music, tone, and rhythm
born amid dissonant clatter of the telegraph in the lobby baggage room

They sit on the couch
their presence is large as mountains
in the living room of our new ranch style home
she is old, fat, and stinks and her old dog stinks too
aroma of rot rises a mist off her dark clothes
unwashed
drape her
wet fallen autumn leaves
color washed out slopped on rocks
the frightened mutt clings to her
fur matted into hanging clogs
presses itself against her legs
her torn old lady’s black stockings
their lives abandoned
her shack on River Road
destroyed in backwash flood of the Pemigewasset
in the Intervale between Plymouth and Ashland
familiar to me
I deliver newspapers to houses there for 3 years
and in high school work at a hardware and lumber store
on its south end
I never met her or knew of her
New Hampshire National Guard rescues them
mother takes them in
my sister and I protest their intrusion
her unapologetic charity
helping others
she repeats
helping others
should not depend on our convenience

It is the last year of our family’s good fortune
we’re a soap opera, mother says, years later
an illness makes my mother blind          her retinas burst
our house burns down          father loses his job          can’t find another
takes my paper route savings          pays the mortgage
it is not enough           the town sells the house for taxes
we are homeless

Putting myself through college
I spend the last of my summer earnings
not on a meal plan
but on tickets for the university’s concert season
not a wise decision
for months I eat a single daily meal
a slice of bread from a loaf I keep on my dorm room windowsill
and a cup of milk in a conical paper container
a dime each from a coin operated refrigerated dispenser
I nearly starve
in a month I hallucinate
I do not tell anyone
I don’t think they would care
I get by
my sister occasionally sends me packages of unsold baked goods
from the bakery where she works
at Thanksgiving and Christmas I stuff myself and my pockets
at family dinners at the inn
and after dishes done
listen to my uncle play the piano

In the mid-1980s in California
I listen to EMC records of Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert
he improvises through a haze of exhaustion
over and over and
Edgard Varèse’s New York orchestrated noise
electronic sounds
open music
they re’fuse to recognize classical boundaries

Perhaps because I am musically illiterate
my battered brain from a childhood assault not fully rebuilt
as a child unable to find rhythm and beat
their creative philosophy en’trances me

Open doors. Open windows. Open fields. Open roads.
Break door jambs. Break window frames. Tear down fences. Ignore maps.
Let surprise and strange in.
Find yourself at no destination and be somewhere at last.

All Our Kin

For forty years
our lives riff on improvisation
not logical I know
My wife says most of the music I love
is built on B minor chords
move me by their dark emotional passageways
our own melody emerges
we open ourselves and our home to those in distress
my wife’s parents          we bring to California from London
arrange purchase of a house for them
my alcoholic father          my sister and I fly from Boston
to an assisted living facility near us
my sister          local police warn          her son an alcoholic
will soon be in juvey lockup          “get him out of Oklahoma”
we meet him at Ontario Airport
our neighbor across the street          asks could we take in her younger son
she is occupied with his older brother          critically ill
our high school teen son requests          we offer refuge to his friend
a girl whose family is falling apart          is becoming addicted
Robitussin and Coca Cola
we hire a music teacher to give her vocal lessons
her beautiful voice in our living room
we listen out of sight          sitting on stairs to the second floor
we take in my wife’s nephew          ill and floundering after college
he stays three years
we give a recovering alcoholic and drug addict
poor          on her own
a rent-free basement apartment
a young woman          bodybuilder
lives with us for ten years

At midnight I sit by the fire in our Buck Wood Stove
after the day’s first hard frost
October in the Appalachians
grass and tree limbs hold only tattered leaves
shrubbery is curled and brown
our hillside farm its barn and sheds and fields
all silvered with frozen dew
Saanen goats, Morgan and Thoroughbred horses,
and Hereford steers breathe plumes of condensation
our stove’s heat revives memories
lost dreams
they bob tarnished by disappointment
when a young man
I respond to the allure of city crowds and colored lights
of writing poetry late at night
walking in dawn’s daze across Copley Square
aromas          freshly baked pastries          brewed espresso in cafés
the smells          inks and paper      blank notebooks and journals
and shiny lacquered pens in the stationary shop
on Commonwealth Avenue

but sulfurous air of social conflict and riot
people float          unattached          off pavements
blown about by bilious winds
old folk evicted          exorbitant rents
punitive city taxes
poor jammed into subsidized housing projects
apartments          stacked one on top of another
spreading          block by block          pox by pox
tents of hopelessness lining prideful boulevards
dead or alive         it doesn’t matter
the lust of rule destroys benevolence
closes and locks the doors to liberation
cities become crematoria
what could we do
but return to the virtue of country
the land

Notes

Coleridge, The Frost at Midnight

Lust of rule, Augustine, City of God, bk, I.

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