book iii - the partridge run pieces (to scribd 07-01-09)

8/14/2019 Book III - The Partridge Run Pieces (to Scribd 07-01-09)

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(BOOK IIIFROM WLM : DISJECTI MEMBRA POETAE)

WLM: THE PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES

by

Warren L. McClure

(Last Reviewed 07-01-09)


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02

WLM : PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES AUTUMN 1980

PREFACE TO AUTUMN

Spaced out on my kitchen tablethe piddling tasks

of the past season

lay ready for the knife

Like unripe apples blown to the ground

I have collected them

and laid them out

for cutting away of rot

and the scars where birds have peckedI thought perhaps

I'd string them on a stringlet them dry

the Winter but

under the steel

of being rethought

of being laid out

on the kitchen table

nothing I've doneseems to hang

together

Now all I have left

to show

for the whole Season

is this piece

of string

full of untidy

knots

wlm

12-17-05


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03

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR WLM : THE PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES

(WLM : DISJECTI MEMBRA POETAE BOOK III)

01. Title Page02. Preface Poem (Spaced out on my kitchen table)

03. Table of Contents

04. Alone with my fire in the depth of the Woods

05. Here on this wet morning

06. Daybreak / My inward eye awakes

07. I am kin to Thunder

08. The Past irrevocably obsolete / the Future couchant indeterminate

09. Ensconced beside the Big Two-Hearted River today10. Out back of my barn / limbs blown down by the wind last night await

11. Autumn blusters about like an old pat-hen gathering her chicks12. Sitting here fingering my futility

13. How pleasantly a small change to a hut in the wild can dissemble and disturb

14. A grand old white oak in a wide meadow

15. Emboldened by the weather old vines once more put forth tendrils

16. Last week I moved the woodpile out back

17. In a world apart / surrounded by interdictions of my own devising

18. North of here some days ago deep in the Woods19. Today out gathering wood for the night20. My mind's a wooded country lane

21. In the ravaged woods past Paradise Point

22. Two Sins

23. So (and two Haiku)

24. Outside today I heard little slithering sounds under last Fall's leaves

25. The broad-leafed trees / that were so full of color / two weeks ago

26. Dragged from sleep in the middle of the night

27. Impelled by its own weird logic28. Surrounded by comely woods I build my fire

29. Down a footpath over which brown-leafed trees meet

30. Night-watching the North's still cold woods this mid-November's eve

31. It's lamp-lighting time at my place up North32. End Page


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04

WLM : PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES SUMMER 1981

Alone with my fire in the depth of the Woods

compiling a dictionary for these bleak hours

shunting aside for the momentmy life-long project

abandoning my half-dug grave

for I have become motivated by an inward rectitude

and the need to set my thoughts aright

to fetch sacred sounds out of History

that Dark Night of all our Dreams

that Land of the Dead

Weird and wonderful noises

well up to fill my throattremble on my tongue-tip

Paralyzed by their significance

by the very nature of their irrefragable need to be said

my mind wavers on the verge of coming apart

in some new and original cathexis

Like smoke from a fire where there is no flamewords hover over the wood

waiting for some simple trick of phrase-mongering

some lingual legerdemain

to resolve them

in a burst of glory

into some fundamental truth

without residue

But the Grand Alliance doesn't come

and I lay myself down and the fire dies

How I envy those droll geniuseswho take to their beds with their intellectual woes

and awake with their heads aglow

with brilliant solutions

Chances are tomorrow morn

from all this fire and woodI'll not salvage even a spark

turn up a coal

Chances are by tomorrow morn

the Wind will have blown awry

and I'll awake

with an ear full of ashand my mind still full

of smoke

wlm

12-17-05


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05


Here on this wet morning

with the dew hanging high in the trees

stretched out like a river led astray by structuremy mind glistens like a wet rock

while an itching inside my skull crowds a footnote off a page

in my pocket-sized anthology

of all the best songs

down to and including the year

1868

Before this prowess of poetic imaginationthat threatens to curl forward around my wits

I turn down low the radio of my will

The Now-and-Then shakes off its valley fog

while I try to repair myself within

I hanker after well-springs roots

some pause in Actuality

some note to pen in my song-book's margins

for PosterityBut in this clammy Here-and-Now

where signs and proofs converge

couching otherwise inconceivable arguments in

its crooks and eddies

sense data leap astride their categories

but the names of things slip their mnesic traces

and flip about like water nits

tossed by froth

In purely extraneous passages thru my mind's grey folds

inspissated as ever in their own homemade brand of folly

theories usurp the functions of Creation

while the dismal trinity of Aspiration Fear and Deathtumbles about the vast abyss of Space-Time within

the only real dimensions ever

what you are and what you were

the significance of ever becoming moreor less

dissipates awaylike the passing of the mist

Perhaps it's for the better

Perhaps it's not

Whatever

one can only linger briefly here

in the Momentouscompulsively washing his wits in the River of Languageor going thru the motions of some other well worn-out rite

some alibi for Art

like brushing your teeth

wlm

12-17-05


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06


Daybreak

My inward eye awakes

a network of light shines thru the spider-web of its one-roomed window

Overnight as it were thought has crystallized

like the sap on the sugar tree

Words I wanted for have stacked themselves in categories

like cords of wood

in a dense forest round

that has been run thru with a chain-saw of superlatives

Looking up at the Sun and marveling naturally

free-spirited unconventional

I've solved the problem of Society momentarily by getting beyond its reach

away from its social engineers with their ingenuous composts of decadent civility

who speak to each other in dogmatic quips that require no answers

who buy their wits out of shiny new government manuals

instead of Life's old dog-eared wonder-books

They think they think

I rather wonder

I'd rather wonder

Civilization

When I think of having to go back there

in a couple of weeksmy heart aches

wlm

12-17-05


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07


NIGHT AND FOG

I am kin to Thunderbrother to the Storm

I am father to the Sun

wayward neighbor to the Wind

I am Night without a Moon

I am Night without a Star

Those who wonder who I am

know not why they are

I am Fog no eye can pierceI am Fog the bone can feel

Those that know me know me not

Those that don't I fill with fear

Chaos is my middle name

I chose it for its sound

For I am never differentnor ever twice the same

I am Nothing so is Will

ever roving ever still

I am Master of the Morning

Dawn's my daughter Eve's my sister

Tho I'm Darkness Deep

Deep Deep Darknesswere it not for me

Light would never be

I am not the Ripple on the Rivernor am I the Salt within the Sea

had I not been so clever

I'd not be this Mystery

Tho I'm not the River's Ripple

nor the Salt that's in the SeaI am Night without a Star

I am Fog no eye can pierce

Always lurking always fierce

Come you near Come you far

you'll not know me

till you've joined me

I am Night I am Fog

I am That That no one knows

Close your eyes as if to dream Now if I have you not

open-eyed fall into my folds I shall have you when

Come this moment now

or have no more to do with me

till then

wlm / 12-17-05


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08


The Past irrevocably obsolete

the Future couchant indeterminate

I try to enjoy calmly what is availabledodging analgesic rebirth fantasies

without stepping on cracks

Still this morning

after a bout with apotheosis

I walked thru a wet cobweb

My mind being what it is

I made an objective correlative of it

I supposed such-likean abstract princeps

once leapt from the forehead of ZeusSo Athena was begat

much like this

from the restructuring

of a deconstructed cobweb

ripped apart by some mad god

rampaging thru the Primal Woods

on a still wet morningindubitably glorified a prioriinstantly ready for attack

roundly defensible

Thus

fatuous meanings of the non-existent

ex hypostrophe ex hyperbole

gerunds plied on as real anyway

ex necessitate divinae naturaesans Grund Gehalt Gestalt Gemtlichkeit

thru philosophical frigging

transfer to concepts that which applies de re

and since hypotheses remain valid whateverare capable of prodigious extension

Therefore

the unprincipled secret springsof the haptic mind

subsume succinct sanctificationscommingle the casual with the causal

cause rollicking boom-booms in the hollow skulls

of innumerable Yoricks

resounding and resounding

rippling mellifluously over the marrowless bones

of the dead immemorial

while ideas once pregnant among the quickpropagate like flies among the staid

with contemplation like mystification

resulting in still-births

of the Ineffable

If you don't believe me

walk thru a cobweb

some wet morning

you'll see

wlm /12-17-05


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09


Ensconced beside the Big Two-Hearted River today after a summer rain

my wits trying to unite themselves in some immemorial commerce with the murmuring pines

I saw a fat carp trying to swim upstream against the swollen current

Old wordsmith that I am

I knew that before exercising my pen on such an observation as this

some trepidation might well be called for

But ever since becoming privy to allusions that even the most judicious might not perceive

I have often found myself in the awkward position

tho no different from that of other dishonest craftsmen beyond the pale of the Writers' Guild

of being caught between applying the whip of the imaginationto images that won't pull their own weight

and flowing with those that simply flow whether they have anything to show or notto where I no longer find joy in the search for the mot juste

but in the killing of the beast

the butchering

the feast

Yet surely there is some way of rationally reconciling this sort of thing

For contrary to the old Latin proscriptionfor writers of my ilk

catena esse tacendorum

it's not a thing to remain silent about

For once the pattern appears the Devil takes hold

and even the poet with both feet in his mouth

may find he has the labels in his coat of red and green

turned upside down

and that motley coat itself

turned inside out

So a final word of warning Children

to those of you who would poets be

may not be out of place

Yet here such simple sounding things get doubly confounded

and the dog really starts to bark

as if all the possibilities of putting words togetherhad all been used up

as tho all the ink in the very last pen on Earthhad suddenly inextricably run out

So here I am tonight Children

in my cabin deep in the Woods distraught

hunkered down over my collapsible desk

and a blank pad of paper

my windows barred my doors lockedno match to light a candle

trying to fry a carp

wlm

12-17-05


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10

WLM : PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES WINTER 1992-93

Out back of my barn

limbs blown down by the wind last night await

I've ground the axe and set the teeth of the sawNature began her annual Winter's rampage last night

The precociousness that was in her step last Spring

before which my vocabulary collapsed in utter amazement

that hop-skip-and-jump that became a bit more sinister as Summer wore on

then this whimsical Dance of the Leaves that's just ended

that one knew not whether to take

with awe or amusement

has turned downright rapacious as time rushes onand has left my Autumn inscape like the space

out back of my barnstrewn with fragments of the Macabre

Yet the reasons tho devious are obvious

to all of us who seek to know by Poetry's Light

to any of us who have even a smidgen of defiant integrity left in our Psyches

for we know that certain things about Certainty are thus made opaque

things that one could never be quite sure of one's Self without

things that should hardly be necessary for me to point out to youmy Perspicacious Observers

things that provide beyond simple awareness

answers to Uncertainty's niggling questions

and novel tho inclusive sorts of insights into Nature's conundrums

that titillate the mind yet tell us nothing we don't already know

yet that are capable of feeling the wordsman's axe

and the bite of his saw

wlm12-17-05


11/32

11


Autumn blusters about like an old pat-hen gathering her chicks

trying to envelop all under her nut-brown wing

Chances are some rain will fallcompensation for the day's shortcomings

Along the rocky rill to West Wind Gate

inventions that shaped the Modern World lie strewn

the printing press the phonograph the guillotine the comic strip

inventions that once brought peals of laughter

from the reprehensible bowels of the irrepressible Gods

of Science and Technologywhile Poetry was trying to preserve her purity

by offering upa mind-boggling array

of new words symbols and philosophical misconceptions

masterpieces of downright bamboozling

and obtuse obfuscation

Yet chances are some rain will fall

compensation for the day's misgivingsbefore Autumn envelops all

under her nut-brown wing

wlm

12-17-05


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12


Sitting here fingering my futility while taking a coffee-break

from the knapsack of the Phenomenal

on a field-trip north into the womb of Naturemy Inner Ear peeled back like a radio receiver tuned in to the Ethereal

the inside of my head suddenly squeals

like a mandrake whose root-legs have just been pulled out from the underside

of the Umvelt of Disbelief

as if I had suddenly taken a leap two steps backwards

into that mid-Pleistocene tar-pit of the Mind

that protoplasmic slime of the Will

where Mankind first became inextricably mired in the Idealthat quagmire of guilt complexes and false modalities

that has been building since the Dawn of Time

Thus bogged down in the naturally unheroic

the iron jaws of Nature clacking at my mental heels

lacking the strength of character to bear up under human pettinesses

a wayward nodule in the nerve-net of Space and Duration

I have taken my pen-knife to a shaman's tree and cut close to the pith

of this long day of unbelievingin the hope once again of conjuring up

the Divine

Perhaps some old sprite of wood and field will slip by these slits in his prison

trip thru some long forgotten song and dance while I watch

murmur a few mind-boggling words while I listen

that I may lay on you and posterity

some esoteric bit of wondermentsome discontinuous concept which might have otherwise haply passed by unsung

But just as suddenly as before when my thoughts took flight

my Weltansicht within fills upwith the strident dentals of cicadas scraping the teeth of their wings

while round about me a thunderstorm of mushroom caps

pushes up thru the earth and leaves

My contemplation is completely shattered

So you will have to wait a while my friends

to intertwine the tendrils of your minds with mine

in that far-fetched field of asphodel and myrrh

the Ideal

till the Realquiets down

wlm

12

17

05


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13

WLM : PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES SPRING 1981

How pleasantly a small change to a hut in the wild can dissemble and disturb

a weekend escape from the familiar tri-level Western burrow

to which our Science and Technology have brought usto where foundations are crumbling and the crickets are coming in

thru every crevice

and the mice thru the walls

the crickets singing the same old song about the same old thing

the mice scurrying after it

The Essential never changes

But we cannot comprehend iteven tho poets fashion metaphors for it and priests idols

and our philosopher-scientists postulates of its nature

because of our insatiable bent to clothe the Ineffable

the bias between Space and Time

with signs and symbols

And so the Gate to the Real Tomorrow is never where we placed it yesterdaytho every day we keep bumping into its postsPerhaps it would have been better for most of us to have denied

and never to have questioned the Ineffable

to have struggled more vehemently against those belief systems

where all that is real are the names of things

and to have remained in the Dark in near silence

in that animal existence

where life is a process and its language verbs

mere squeaks and chirps

wlm11-18-07


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14


OCTOBER MORNING

A grand old white oak in a wide meadowhas more starlings on its limbs than leaves

Beyond

a dense dark deep mist creeps

thru still woods

a mist that seems no longer to have

the strength to rise

above the trees

The great red Sunimaged in my rear view mirror

has chased it there

away from early Autumn's still green fields

where

Canada geese land

to feed on grass nubbins

far from ponds

wlm

11-27-06


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16


Last week I moved the woodpile outback

from one side of the fence to the other

as much as to create a change of scenery thereas for the air to dry out the wood

Unfortunately this disturbed a spider

of a kind that does not take to change kindly

Now this day or so a week later

like an animal with a sore that won't heal

I lay with my rump exposed to the Sun

hoping its rays will draw out the fever

so that my wound will scab overand my flesh shall be made whole again

nor shall I lose a limb

In my brain too there is a spider

I have to watch out for every day

full of venom quietly waiting its moment

My mind is its prey

wlm12-17-05


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17


In a world apart

surrounded by interdictions of my own devising

my hearth full of smoldering ashesthe elements of Despair and Self-Surrender locked outside

in the cold night air

here in my cabinet in the Wilderness

where I can be myself again

repair the holes in my sleeves

holes worn there by the care for and submission to

the whims of Others

Perhaps I'll throw another log on the fireand flay a scapegoat

then later while stirring the embersI'll dine on hubris

spiced with wild herbs

wlm

12-17-05


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18


North of here some days ago deep in the woods

I watched the legions of this year's starlings come in at dusk

land on neurotic boughs that swayed in the windEvery limb in the forest seemed to have its quota of birds

They were strangely quiet as such birds rarely are

Perhaps they were thinking of Dawn rather than Night

But who am I to decipher out ideological deviations in the brains of birds

I who am here rubbing down words with dabs of artifice

trying to spit-polish my works to a sheen no one else can paraphrase

interspersing the magic of my thoughts between Time-Spacecanalizing my curiosity into closed channels of crisp-sounding syllables

while I await the call to a more lofty perch in the Hierarchy

One of my birds moves apart on a limb

preens in the half-light

An owl swoops in

fat like the holy ones at Delosunconscious like them of its sanctity

not realizing it too will be gutted

by the insatiable Powers-That-Be

in some subsequent fell swoop of Eternity

or at the next request

for an oracle

I could scream

For like the inner eye the heart cannot be closed

But it's too late

another more Holy-Than-I has already lightened this branch of my inquiry

this limb onto which my small bird in its hubrisshould never have flown

wlm

12-17-05


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20


My mind's a wooded country lane down which ideas wind slowly at low levels of ambiguity

the trees at the edges of the woods irregularly losing their leaves as the season progresses

Here and there hollows voids open spaces creep like dry rot from the hedges

Meantime salvation from the witless battles of Systems Analysis ceases

waits for another windfall of experts to come by to blow down the rest of the old leaves

But for the moment it's good to be at peace with the Word once more

no ivory tigers no jaded what-ifs to plague one's reveries

for once without a book in my handin my pocket

not even a few pages

wlm

12-17-05


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21


In the ravaged woods past Paradise Point

you can still see the gleam from the chrome on an old wreck's bumpers

tho the rest of the vehicle has long gone to rustlittle heaps of red-black on the brown earth

among the scrub brush

where once only giant pines

had grown

wlm

12-17-05


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23


Fog following rain

obscures the door-opening dawn

to this empty day

SO

It is

impossible to make

each moment

significant

the hours passthe days

the weeksthe months

the years

and the

significant

things

one does

can be numbered on

two hands

ten fingers

AND

The leaves gather brown

before the green ink has dried

on my canvases

wlm

12-17-05


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25


AN AUTUMNAL

The broad-leafed treesthat were so full of browns

two weeks ago

are now bleak stems

and smooth grey boughs

Swift-fingered Fall

has picked them clean

not quite

For here and therea crooked leaf

defies her hand

and clings to life

upon a limb

for spite

I suppose

Or perhaps

just to keep

Old Man Winter

on his toes

wlm12-17-05


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27


Impelled by its own weird logic

the notion of ambition has once again run its course thru me

past horizons that have long ago bagged uptheir morning mists and night dews

even as this day now gathers in its dead instants to where

it will bury them forever in that garbage pit beyond the setting Sun

Yet even while this doleful process is going on

the last horizon of the day has been becoming an embryo picture stage

for tomorrow morning's inset effects and sudden disclosures

where foresight may be taken in a view asquint

Possibilities that were this day's still float aboutlike unused nemes in some Augustinian language game

High atop my mound of earth here in the North Woods

my mind early on played furtively with each new idea as it came up

over one hill and down the next

Now late with my wits on edge I ponder wistfully the sorry lot of them all

as they cower before this the last horizon of the day

The last horizon of the dayone oftentimes finds freedom here in his Art

in a delirious dream in a feverish moment of half-light

just before the Sun goes down

Unique ideas may then slip thru the carefully prepared nets of the mind

those nets prepared by others than one's Own

and like those times when the silent apostrophes at the outposts of the Sun

startle the eye into some awe-inspiring vision of it All

ingenuously compounding of imaginary birds and beastsand the shadows of the Real

something beautiful and significant

one's pen-hand may be frightened back and forth across a page

in some dim ouija-like Apprehension that was till thentoo outlandish for existing language

The last horizon of the day

With my inward ear I follow the Sun's Dogs down the backside of the last hillas they give silent tongue to its departing rays

tracking along with them to the Phoenix's nestseeking the word-wizardry I know I will find there as Darkness approaches

where all these multiple and varied meanings of the day just passed

will be rounded off by Night into purple-toned patterns

much as the ground fog now does for the crests of the hills

and the tufts of the deciduous trees

for the Clarity of Day obscures the Unities

utterances of good sense and nobilitydo not come about in broad day-light

The Last Horizon

We too are going the way of these sorrowful processes

processes that will some day quite come to an end like this day

I write this here so no one of outraged innocence will say on that Day

that no one ever told them so

The Last HorizonHere will be found the measure of one's worth

that all on one's Own with Luck and an ironic twist of ones wits


28/32

one might have colandered out from all these sorrowful processes

some work of Art

that will last

till then

wlm12-17-05

28


Surrounded by comely woods I build my fire

to warm the stones on which I lie

pencil-sized sticks that split as you break them apartcrossed and criss-crossed in a little stack

under the force majeure of thumb-wide limbs

cracked to length by the weight of a boot

Fire Prometheus

with which to turn away the wrath of the Irrepressible

Fire Inachus

to light up those occasional moments left unfilled by Ignorancewhen a man may examine the bedrock of his mind

by the glow of his Culture

Fire Argeiato warm cold stones

A spark rises Io

vanishes across the Night in a flashinaugurates a new passage thru the Imperceptible

like a meteor

Like choruses of philosophers in borrowed skirts

the Fixed Stars hold their places

The wan-faced Moon wanders about among them

a priest sprinkling ashes

I would fly after that wayward ember Iobut my wings are asleep

from lying on

cold stones

wlm

12-17-05


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29


Down a footpath over which the branches of brown-leafed trees meet

here where a slight breeze stirs the dust from the remote past and other regions

here in Autumn's shade where one may findthe beginning point of the collapse of Nature

I wander like an untutored singer

unaccompanied by instruments

that might drown out

my raucous songs

For I will sing in an unrecognized jargon

an obscure argotin which books are no longer written

I will sing until din becomes music

organized within me in an adventurous way

beyond the familiarity of quotidian language

I will make demands on your imaginations

my Friends

And to those of you who have no sense of significancewhat does it matter

I am only a superficial disturbance

in the established Order of Things

a fool playing games

May your own words

dry up on your lips

wlm

11-27-06


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30


Night-watching the North's still cold Woods this mid-November's eve

the Bear-Stars cautiously circling the Pole as ever

the Moon full low enormouscasting shadows almost as sharp

as the Sun's

Caught between the magic of the Moonlight and the Significant

in an ipse dixit of a dipsy-doodle about the Passing and the Permanent

the Discrete and the Continuous

I can't quite abandon those dark first readings

those moments of pantheistic adorationwhen I was first made eye-witness to the far-out transactions

of these distant themes

And even now

after a candid re-examination of all the evidences of negation

I still listen to the echoes from the Stars

with an infectious gusto

and let them guide my monologues with the Sun and the Moon

For one cannot put out Darkness like a light

So rage to your heart's content You Wise

with your neat out-houses full of stacked categories

protest vociferously as long as you like

in dactyls and spondees

I'll stick to my iambic fields of asphodel and clover

giving ear to the wandering goat-cries of the Irrationalcoming out from behind that Primeval Water-Closet

untouched by Meaningfulness

where the hand-towels don't match

the wash-cloths

wlm12-17-05


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31


It's lamp-lighting time at my place up North

night's oncoming shadows quicken their pace

draw their own shades across the fringe of the skycrows wing their way to favorite limbs in the forest

the insect life of the woods quiets down to a hum

It's lamp-lighting time at my place up North

the smell of darkness swirls in the air

the wind takes a turn from warmth to worse

troubles bruited abroad in loud daylight only whisper now

words wandering aloft come down to earth

It's lamp-lighting time at my place up Northsecond-hand credos rush in with dusk for all they're worth

embroil my mind in terrific schemes to save the Universe

foist wisdom from stones turn the World on its heel

draw wind from water and water from Hell

But those dark dreams never get very far

for you see

it's lamp-lighting time at my place up Northin two swift strokes

the turn of a wick

the strike of a match

the day's-end ritual evokes its common country senseand

as the lamp lights up

the priest's ego in me

crude naive and not without charlatanrygoes up in smoke

wlm

12-17-05


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WLM : PARTRIDGE RUN PIECES

book iii - the partridge run pieces (to scribd 07-01-09)

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