Prayer to the God of Landlords

Bless his half-empty head,
his hand that held
the Phillips screwdriver
he lost in my yard
behind the hedge.

Bless the way he topped the trees,
the way he wanted them to be
perfect Grant Wood blow-pops.
Each day they show him sorrow:
peeling, sawed-off trunks,
severed necks above.

And bless the sound of his footsteps
on the ceiling at three a.m.,
the distant hiss of water, sounds
of him home from a trip
I’m sure went badly—traffic
and insolent weather,
forgotten skis and a flat
on Donner Pass—
but bless him anyway, home,
his gentle thumps of night,
the trail of creaks
leading off to his safe,
unmade bed.

Where Have All the Green Beans Gone?

I have stumbled onto a mystery. It’s been building and building for years, until now I just feel that something’s afoot, something’s wrong in the world.

The problem is that for the past several years, green beans haven’t tasted good.

This is no small matter—green beans are, hands down, my favorite food. I crave and adore them like some people hanker after ice cream or chocolate. To me, there is nothing more heavenly than a pile of freshly picked, well-cooked, butter-sweet green beans.

For years, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about green beans—I grew up on those leathery, frozen cigarette butts that food companies passed off as green beans in the 1960s. My conversion didn’t come until my 20s, when I rented a one-room cottage on an old estate in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. On the grounds were various long-neglected gardens—a horseshoe-shaped rose garden, unruly rows of iris and chrysanthemums, thickets of blackberries, and a vegetable garden, all tended by an elderly groundskeeper who came twice a week to prune, hoe, and fall asleep in the rocking chair in the woodshed.

The gardener eventually retired—he’d worked on that estate for more than 50 years. And with my landlords busy with their own lives, I was left to tend the grounds as best I could. That first spring, to my surprise, a muscular seedling poked its way out of the ground in the vegetable garden. I bought a gardening book for a buck at a thrift store, and once the seedling leafed out, I identified it as a green bean—and, with the help of a discarded seed packet in the shed, pegged it as a Kentucky Wonder pole bean. So I drove in a three-foot stake next to it and kept an eye on it. It grew wondrously fast, not unlike that fairy-tale beanstalk, and after a few days it already needed a much taller stake. I drove in a six-footer next to the first stake, and the bean soon bounded up past both of them and was waving around for something bigger to climb. I drove in another six-foot stake next to the others and watched the tendril grow up and down and up them, making a complicated ladder of green.

Eventually it flowered, and soon I had six or eight actual green beans. I carefully picked my tiny harvest and put them in the steamer one evening. They made a meager-looking side dish, a sad pile of twigs at the edge of the plate. Then I took a bite—and all I can say is that it was a religious experience. I’d never tasted anything like them—buttery, sweet, warm, and sustaining. I swooned. I made ecstatic noises. The only thing wrong was that there weren’t more of them—lots more.

Over the next few years, I expanded the estate’s vegetable garden and became proficient at workaday crops like squash and tomatoes, and even wheat and amaranth. But my real forte was green beans. My favorite type were Blue Lakes—even more delicious than Kentucky Wonders and, at the time (the mid ’80s), somewhat rare. I perfected the bamboo bean teepee and recorded planting dates, frosts, deer raids, and cutworm attacks. And after I moved away from that estate, I had a garden wherever I lived—specifically to grow green beans. One year I grew so many of them—purple-podded and yellow wax and Blue Lakes and something speckled that I can’t remember—that my boyfriend and I had to sit down two or three times a week and work our way through dinner plates piled high with them. That probably put him off beans permanently, but I was in heaven.

Then I stopped gardening for a while—I’d moved to a rental where there was no room for vegetables, and for seven years I didn’t put a trowel in the ground. Then I moved to Oregon and picked out a house especially for its big back yard. I was back in the bean business. But that first year, something didn’t seem right—the Blue Lakes came up and climbed the teepees and looked beautiful, but when I harvested and steamed them, they were…well, they sort of weren’t there. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly good. It was weird—in all those years of gardening, I had never tasted a bean that I didn’t love. But these tasted like those chewy frozen beans of my childhood. I figured I’d gotten a bad packet of seeds.

The next year, I got Blue Lake seeds from a different company and tried again. Same thing—not much flavor. Okay, I thought, maybe the soil is off. I tried different varieties—Kentucky Wonders and Domatsus and Romanos. The Domatsus were okay, but they were still a far cry from the epiphany I was after. All the others—blah.

Then I started to notice the same problem with fresh beans from the grocery store. And then with the ones from the farmer’s market. They just weren’t beany. Now it’s been years since I’ve tasted a really good green bean. And it’s nagging at me. I feel like a character in a disaster movie, the one who spots the new speck in the sky but doesn’t mention it to anyone because she doesn’t think it’s a big deal until boom!—it hits the Earth.

The other night I was talking about the green bean problem with a friend who worked summers picking beans when he was growing up. He said that now, in the age of mechanized farming, the seed companies have narrowed our choices down to just a few varieties that are bred to withstand rough handling without bruising. In short, he said, like so many other crops, beans are now being bred for ease of shipping rather than for taste.

So now, the thorniest of questions comes to mind—have they actually bred the flavor out of green beans? Is it gone forever? Am I doomed to wander the Earth, tasting this bean and that, shaking my head and grumbling, “It’s just not the same”? I swear I am not being nostalgic. I was there—I ate those beans. They danced in the mouth. They were like eating the whole sweet Earth in one bite. They were like the call of the dodo and the wingprint of the passenger pigeon—they lived once, perfect and fleeting. What has happened here? Did we literally breed them to death?

Flood: 3 Missing

The birds have all traded places.
The seagulls, bent kites
veering toward the hills,
are strangers. The sea is closer.
Robins sway wet
in mockingbird trees.
No one touches ground,
no one in the barefoot garden,
the riddled mirror dreaming
a forest of sunflowers.
In the dawn,
I hear the creek
boiling brown water.




Posted for Dverse Poets
Open Link Night #34

Sunnyvale

He came home to two martinis
and Art Buchwald out loud
in his black bucket chair,
steam creeping out the kitchen door.
By dinner he’d rolled his sleeves,
Indian-brown arms
like snakes under skin,
and we knew to pass the plates
without a sound.
If he was happy, he’d tell us
about the railroad—
emptied the toilets
right onto the tracks—
or the slaughterhouse
or the aircraft carrier nose-up
and falling fast.
Fish sticks hung in mid-air
and crashed the conning towers
of our tater tots. Milk bled out
the mouths of glasses.
Later, he’d change
and walk to the garage,
wrestle metal for hours
and shoot the bright rivets
through round, clean holes.



Posted for DVerse Poets
OpenLinkNight, Week 33


(Originally appeared in Alehouse)

The Incredible Growing Poem: Tim Green on the Rattle Poetry Prize

Earlier this month, just after I’d chided the editors of Rattle a bit for choosing so many long, narrative poems as finalists for their $5,000 Poetry Prize, I got an e-mail from Rattle’s editor, Tim Green. Tim had read my blog (reminder to bloggers out there—people do read these things), and he wanted to set the record straight.

My complaint had been that, while most of the 15 finalists were good poems, they seemed to show a Rattle bias toward long, stream-of-consciousness poems with complete sentences and proselike structure. Where, I asked, were the tight little sonnets, the scattershot experimental works, and the short, pared-down poems?

Tim, gracious as always, told me exactly where those short poems and concise sonnets were: They were somewhere out there in the world, but not in Rattle’s mailbox. A strange phenomenon’s been happening, he said, ever since Rattle made their prize a hefty $5,000: Fewer and fewer poets have been sending him short poems, even though he’s a big fan of brevity. He also likes unobtrusive formal verse and rhyme—and he hardly ever gets poems like that, either. There’s a misconception out there, he said, that only a long poem has a chance at winning that $5,000 prize. And then the phenomenon feeds on itself: Because Rattle receives so many long, narrative poems these days, the editors tend to pick long ones as finalists for the prize—because that’s what they’ve got to pick from. And then readers see the finalists, notice that they’re long and narrative, and then those readers send their long, narrative poems. The result, Tim said, has been a gigantic snowball effect: “I can probably count on my fingers and toes the number of poems—out of 6,000—that featured regular meter and rhyme. Short lyrics were the same.… People assume that I don’t like anything that isn’t narrative free verse. Not true at all!” Next year, he said, he’d like to see more variety in the competition, and he wants to get the word out. So, dear poets, there’s your cue: If you like to play the prize ponies, send him your best—and don’t worry if your poems don’t look like the winners of the past.

This exchange reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago with the editor of another journal that sponsored a poetry prize. One year, this editor told me, it came down to two poems: one long-ish elegy and a short, cynical little poem. He was pulling for the short poem, but the rest of the editorial board voted him down and went with the longer one, deeming it—and I quote him here—“more contestlike.” That phrase has stuck in my head ever since, and for years I thought of it every time I entered a contest. But honestly, sending long poems to constests was no better a system than betting on football teams based on the color of their uniforms; it worked once in a while, but most of the time, not so much.

Still, it’s not unusual to see a long poem win a prize—as far as I can see, it happens a lot. And if you can work in death, childrearing and/or Alzheimer’s, your chances are even better. I’m being a little facetious, but sometimes it just feels that way. Still, Tim’s e-mail reminded me of something I often lose track of in this dog-eat-poem world: We poets should ignore the trends and stick to writing what we think is good, and we should send out what we think is best. Trying to match the perceived trends of the day is usually a losing proposition, and our poetry suffers for it. Your work is your own hothouse flower, growing exotic and unique in your own particular corner of the world. Nobody can write what you write, and that uniqueness is what makes it yours, what makes it valuable. That’s what the world needs, not just another echo of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Matthew Dickman, much as we love them and are influenced by them. Here’s to breaking the mold, again and again.

Poem: Waking to Snow

It gathered in your sleep,
quietly packed your dreams
for the long glare of day.
It arrived alone,
stamping small feet on the brick stairs,
pulling down the rhododendron.

You did not need to call it
or think ahead
or clean a small room for its stay.
It will settle on the roof,
on your shoulder,
on the soft back of the doe
who will not move when you step out
onto the street’s new-made bed
as birches rake the wind
with long, patient hands.

This morning is your everywhere,
your everything at once. It took
nothing at all to get here—you
came in sleeping, remember?
Even your brightest dream
could not have seen it so new, so cold.





Posted for DVerse
Open Link Night #32
Thank you, DVerse!

RIP, Nick Barkley

I was sad to read that one of my childhood icons, Peter Breck, died earlier this week at the age of 82. He was best known as the actor who played Nick Barkley, the mercurial middle brother on The Big Valley.

I got hooked on The Big Valley when my sister Bev and I used to stay up to watch it in the late 1960s. She was seven years older than me, and up until then, we hadn’t liked each other—she was the haughty teenager who knew everything, and I was the geeky little sister who’d replaced her as the baby of the family. But, slightly bleary-eyed and watching TV after the rest of the house had gone to bed, for some reason we bonded over shows like The Big Valley and Marcus Welby, M.D. At first, we just sat in silence together. But eventually we started making fun of those shows—laughing at bad dialog and implausible plot twists*. We’ve been laughing ever since.

The Big Valley gets kind of a bad rap these days. Of course, Gunsmoke lasted longer, Maverick was cooler, and Have Gun, Will Travel had that great theme song**. But for me, The Big Valley trumped them all. This was largely due to my raging crush on Lee Majors, who managed to get through four years of playing the sullen brother, Heath, without cracking a smile more than twice. There were other things to love, too: We had Richard Long as the sensible brother, Jarrod, who always followed his moral compass while the rest of the family started bar fights, fell in love with swindlers, and generally made bad decisions. Then there was (Miss) Barbara Stanwyck as the steely matriarch, Victoria, and Linda Evans playing the slightly dim daughter, Audra***. And then of course there was Peter Breck as the brawling Nick, iconic in his neckerchief and black gloves.

For the first couple of seasons, the show placed all its bets on the hunky Majors, who seemed to have been recruited mostly for his tanned torso. Poor Peter Breck was often lost at the wayside as the impulsive, less photogenic Nick, a man who had a five o’clock shadow even at breakfast and rarely took off those gloves. (Now nearing 50, I can’t help wondering: psoriasis?) But without Nick, that show would have been a brooding mess—Jarrod and Heath would have pondered everything to death, and Audra would have been murdered by about eight different psychos. So, while Heath was out chopping wood with his shirt off, Nick was doing the dirty work—smacking the bad guys (and the occasional bystander) and shouting what needed to be said. Nick was the great air-clearer, the icebreaker, the jester who jumps in and stirs everyone up. In a way, he was the true hero of the show, the one who really ran the ranch and broke heads to get it done.

Maybe every family needs a loudmouth like Nick. Or maybe, as I discovered, sitting in the living room with my sister all those late nights, maybe it doesn’t matter who’s the shouter and who’s the thinker. What matters is that they’re family. You rode in with them, and at the end of the day—if you’re lucky—maybe they’ll be there to help you bring the cattle in.




*You just can’t bring up this sort of thing without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. People tend to fall into two camps about MST3K; I’m in the Joel Hodgson camp. I like Mike Nelson too, but Joel would never have let so many sexist jokes into the scripts.


**A couple of years ago, during a Big Valley binge, I came up with words for its theme song:
The…Big…Valley!
The…Big…Valley!
Nick and Heath…and Jarrod are boys…and Audra’s a girl…
and they all…are…still living with their mom…
Barbara Stanwyck!
Bar…bara…Stanwyck!


***I never identified with Audra; most of her subplots involved her falling for one unscrupulous man or another, and she had a weird, clingy relationship with her mother. I have this vision of her, after all these years, still unmarried and living in that big house. She still puts on a satin dress every morning, and Silas, who’s about 105 now, still offers her pots of tea and tells her when there’s somebody at the door. Her mom is long gone, shot dead one day by bounty hunters when they mistook her for a lady outlaw in her bandolero hat and peg-legged riding pants. Victoria cracked one of those guys good with a bullwhip before she went down, but there was no arguing with that clean bullet hole in the back of her black leather vest.