Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Mentone Cemetery; Mentone, Indiana

A perfectly blue sky. Fluffy puffy cloud. Rich black soil. Good deep greens in the trees. The grass looking like it could use some rain. And the most dramatic tombstone in my hometown's cemetery, memorializing a Wanda Summerland, who was just fourteen or so when she died some hundred and twelve years ago.


Sunday, February 22, 2009

Bernard Malamud - Mt. Auburn Cemetery - Cambridge

Sometimes you read an author or a biography of an author and you think it'd be really nice to have him/her as a friend.  That's how I feel about Bernard Malamud.  And I'm rarely moved by art but I just love this portrait of him done by his friend Rosemarie Beck; I'd like to have it on my wall so I could look at it to my heart's content.  Well, jeez, it'd be nice just to know where it is so I could maybe go see it.

There was lots of snow still on the ground at Mt. Auburn Cemetery last weekend and we were lucky that this flat stone (or lozenge as it's called in the biography) was on a slope whose slant soaked up the sun well.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Sylvia Plath - Part II

When Sylvia Plath's mother, Aurelia, published the letters the poet had written from England to those at home, I wrote Mrs. Plath a commisserating letter; she responded with a postcard.  She must have known I needed another keepsake for my keepsake box.  (Reminder: You can click on picture and make it larger.)

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

At Mt. Auburn Cemetery ...

... nice words to describe how you love your lover:

Monday, February 16, 2009

Tombstone Oddities; Mt. Auburn Cemetery; Cambridge, Mass.

Never cared for Coca-Cola myself; never cared much for any soda.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Birthday to My Sister Joan

You're lucky if there have been people in your life since you were old enough to remember, people that you've ceaselessly been able to look up to and admire.  I've been lucky.  There they are ...  my sister Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) and her husband John on their wedding day, August 3, 1946.  Sorry for the blurry image; I photographed a photograph through glass and couldn't get it to come out sharp.  And here's a poem I wrote for Joan a few years back:

Joan Back Home

From the time that I was just a kid,
right through all these years
that I've been a man full-grown,
I've known that no matter what I did
or where I might roam
I was always being loved
by my sister: Joan back home.

Nothing that I've touched
Nor anything I've seen
Nor any knowledge that I've gained
Nor any King or Queen who reigned
Has meant as much to me
as the love I've felt
from my sister: Joan back home.

Some things do not last --
feelings change, and then change some more.
Good fortune and bad fortune come and go,
and lovers, too.
But some things last,
and last, and last, and last --
such as the love of my sister: Joan back home.

I know that all our lives will end --
hers, mine, that of every woman, every man;
but I don't believe that love like Joan's will ever die --
listen for it in the wind,
watch the clouds spell it against a blue sky,
gaze at a river carrying it along,
see it reflected in a grandchild's eye,
or read it in a poem, or hear it in a song.
It's in all those places;
I swear that I've found it everywhere,
this gift of love
from my sister: Joan back home.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Grandpa Luckenbill

My maternal grandfather, Albert Aldorado Luckenbill,
a sweet, gentle man, died on this date in 1968, aged 93.
He'd not been sick a day in his life until he went into the
hospital with pneumonia a few days before his death.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald - St. Mary's Cemetery; Rockville, MD

The food Judy & Bobby Brock cooked this past weekend at their home outside DC was excellent as always, the bed they let me use was comfortable as always, their company was great as always, and on top of all that Judy drove me to Rockville, Maryland, so I could photograph the above.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said of Rockville, where his grandparents lived, "I belong here, where everything is civilized ... and polite. And I wouldn't mind if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought and not melancholy at all."

Some important person representing the Catholic church deemed Fitzgerald to be unworthy of consecrated ground; consequently he was buried in the secular Rockville Union Cemetery. In 1948 his widow died in a fire that destroyed the asylum she was in; she was buried with her husband.

In 1975, after a successful petition by their daughter Scottie, they were disinterred and, with their tombstone, moved to sacred ground at St. Mary's Cemetery, pictured below.

Zelda Sayre, a southern belle, came from a prominent Montgomery, Alabama, family. A cenotaph in the Sayre family plot in Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery memorializes Scott and Zelda as well as their daughter. (I brought image below up on Internet, then photographed it.)

Trivia #1: Nathaniel West, author of The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, and his wife Eileen, were killed in a car crash while driving to Fitzgerald's funeral.

Trivia #2: Hank Williams, killed apparently by a heart attack at 29, is also buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. It's amazing that at that age he'd already written so many great songs.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Iris Luckenbill Fitzgerald - 02/08/07 - 01/21/89


Iris Luckenbill, 2nd from right, front row.

I

On May 11, nineteen thirty-four,
you and Dad bought a house
in a small town in Indiana.
On the Mother's Day that followed
he planted a lilac bush. Perhaps
he said, "Happy Mother's Day!"
Then, in forty-nine, he died on you.

II

One summer's day in seventy-two --
I was thirty-two, you were sixty-five --
you asked if I'd prune the lilac.
I went out back to look.
Twelve, fourteen-feet tall.
Thick with stems.
Some around the edge drooping,
almost laying flat on the ground;
some violating the garden's space.
I went up to the hardware and bought a saw.
I came back. You squinted
into a bright afternoon; you shaded
your eyes with a salute of a hand.
I sawed away.
"This one too, don't you think?"
you'd say. I said it was up to you,
to just tell me what you wanted me to do.

III

Twenty years ago we chose a lilac dress for you.
On an amazingly warm January day
my five brothers and I bore you to your grave.
Our three sisters looked on and cried.
The priest intoned some intonations.
He sprinkled water onto the casket
with an aspergillum.
And then it was done.
I did not want to turn and go,
did not want to leave you there.
I did though,
and as I did I saw
the gravediggers across the way;
leaning against the back of a pickup truck,
waiting for the seventy of us to leave.
They had work to do;
it was just a job to them.

IV

Here's what's come to mind today:
Your pies were the world's best,
as perfect as T.S. Eliot's poems,
and no one else's crust comes close.
"Don't work the dough too much," you'd instruct.
Only you, though, seemed to know
how much is too much.
And what I wouldn't give for one of your
from-scratch chocolate cakes with that icing
that was flavored with stale coffee.
And I'd love some of your fried chicken;
I can see you prepping it,
shaking it in a brown paper bag
into which you'd put seasonings and flour.
And I think of your gardens,
your year after year after year gardens,
your straight and disciplined rows of onions,
of lettuce, of beans, of tomatoes and of corn.
And I think of your hair, always in a bun,
except when it was being washed or dried --
dried sometimes in the summer sun.

V

The house ended up in my name.
Five years ago I sold it to my brother Jim.
We made a deal: 5 lump sums, 5 annual payments.
He asked, "What day to you want them payments due?"
"Doesn't matter to me," I said to him.
"How's about we make them due on the
eighth of February ... that way I'll never forget."

VI

The lilac bush is still there.
I still have that saw, too, by the way;
it's a good one.

VII

I think this poem could use some pruning.
Some of my lines are drooping I suspect,
some are laying almost flat on the ground.
"This one, too, don't you think?"
I might say to myself.
But no. Enough's enough.
I'm closing this notebook;
I'm putting it on my notebook shelf.


My mother, drying her hair in the sun, 1972,
in front of lilac bush.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

My Used-To-Be Writing/Reading Table

The fun I was having above was comparing what was then the 3 different translations of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. On the left, resting on the typewriter, is the original C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation done in the teens and twenties. To it's right is a dictionary. To it's right, with a yellow pencil laying between the sheets, is the 1981 verison, based on Moncrieff but revised by Terence Kilmartin. The book front and center is the 1992 Modern Library edition, my favorite, translated by D.J. Enright who worked from the previous translations.

There's now a fourth translation, done by a sort of committee for Penguin Books, and it has had rave reviews but due to copyright problems Parts 5, 6, and 7, of this new translation will not be published in the United States until 2019. Ridiculous!

And now I'm flying to DC tomorrow; be back Sunday.

Maybe Monday I can fly to Canada where the complete set of the new translation is available.

Maybe not.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Anne Sexton - 11/9/28 - 10/4/74 - Forest Hills - Boston




In the late fifties Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were fellow students in a poetry class in Boston; after class, with a couple other students, they'd often go, in Anne's beat-up car, to the Ritz-Carlton bar.  Anne would park in the loading zone. One of her pals said, "You can't park here!" Anne said, "Why not? We're going to get loaded!" She sounds like fun to me and I'd like to have been there with them. Especially since they had very dry martinis. I can see the shallow conicality of the frosted glass, the elegant stem of it; the olives or the twist of lemon; I can taste a perfect perfectly dry martini.  But I hope I'd have had two at the most:

I like to have a martini,
two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under the host.
-- Dorothy Parker

Anne perhaps drank four. Already married, she had an affair with one of the young men who regularly joined them at the bar.

She wrote some great poems. Try "Ringing the Bells" ... try "Her Kind" ... or lots of others, lots of amazing stuff.

And then, some eleven years after Sylvia's London suicide, Anne drove into her suburban Boston garage, shut the garage's door and left the car's engine running. She went to where Sylvia had gone.