i have heard of men

i have heard of men

who died in poverty

and were found to have possessed

great wealth hidden in tin cans

beneath the floor boards of their shacks

i will die

and beneath the marble floors

of my palatial home

they will discover

tin cans

rusting and empty

the tentacles of love

his face was flushed as heavy drinker’s sometimes are

his body befouled by the reek of booze oozing from his pores

drunk or sober, he smelled like a bathroom in a bar

the aftershave he overused only adding the odor of a urinal cake

her face was painted garishly like the aging whore she was 

until no one would pay her anymore

the implants she’d had years ago when she was firm and toned

now made her breasts twin cantaloupes rotting over stones

each settled for the other because there wasn’t another

who’d touch them no matter how long was the pole

he was father to a daughter long forgetten; she a mother

to a half a dozen bastards better off being orphans

they’d fallen for each other like they were falling in the same hole

they were deeply serious, completely mysterious, demons sharing the same soul

at night when they sweetly, sweatily screwed they proved

there is nothing blinder than endorphins

she died first, the victim of a wasting social disease

with her last foul breath she whispered to him i love you

he nodded in his taciturn way, not trusting words to his unease

then left the corridors of the hospital into a summer day that mocked his grief

with nothing left to want, and nothing left to do

he lumbered on doing the things alone he once did when they were two

often he rode the bus to the pauper’s grave where she had found relief

with sunrise the caretaker gave him a nip from his flask then told him to leave

he didn’t die, at least, he hasn’t yet

he goes on a wretched warrior no one told about the truce

he’ll never die nor will he soon forget

the tentacles of love will never let him loose

the toys you never won

            there was chesapeake and i learned to spell the name on the yellow paper and i put my name and chesapeake and west virginia and i wrote them down and that was the name and i was there and living in it and being in it before i knew what it was called by people who were not in it and the noise and i lived above levin’s discount in three rooms with my brother and my mother and my father and he was the one and there was yelling all the time and the yelling seemed as natural as the curfew siren at ten o’clock each night from the fire department out back where i was once a junior patrolman and i heard of kids getting to go down to charleston to see the jail but i never went because i quit and the noise and the river the kanawha and the long coal barges with the big stern wheel and the low moaning they called each other with and i heard and there were dead fish in the river and i saw them dead and i covered a live one with lighter fluid and burned him in the mud puddle and there was the basketball court of the grade school i attended and hot summer nights and lights and people playing horse or dancing and i couldn’t sleep and lay in the hot dark between the sheets and heard the coal trucks on the road going from the mines to the plants or to the barges on the river and i knew the whitelight flashes even then like the cold glow of a streetlight and my body turning white and i was scared and not sure what i was scared of and i heard the trains on the track beyond the white firehouse and the repair shop for the low mining cars that go into the ground with men and bring back black coal and men with black buried deep in their skins and fingernails that were never clean and white like mine when i was still wrinkled from the tub but were black like the coal in the trains and above them the turnpike with the long cars going by and making sounds i could not hear over the rumbling of the coal that was around me and on all sides and moving and shifting and killing and the people in the cars going through and high above me and not in it like i was and calling it names that they had made up and that weren’t my names that weren’t chesapeake or west virginia or philip or anything and i did not know if i could see it because it was too close and you had to be up high and blurring by on a turnpike to see it and i was down low so i played in it and thought the mining cars with low v shaped bottoms were toys and i played on them and i played and pretended they were cars and long and blurred with speed and free and not flat and low and ugly and broken and not toys at all and i played beneath the steps that led up to where i lived and where my parents yelled and i could hear them and know that she cried and he was not a man and yet i didn’t know and yet it was something i would learn and at night i was afraid and didn’t know why and i lay and waited and listened to the coal moving in the earth and in the air and in the water and in my eyes and i played hard during the day with the sun hot and played hard beneath the rotting wooden stairs and played hard with the kid from the house behind the store and the white house and the girl who tried to kiss me and i put my broken arm in front of my face and ran and the door that led into the black dark room at the back of the store and you looked into the room and through the dirty glass and saw old bicycle pumps and boxes and darkness and i played with ginger who was young and chained beneath the rotting stairs and would tangle her chain around my legs and drag me down and lick my face and breathe hot heavy dog breath into my face and it was wet and warm and ugly like the girl from back doors who used to try and kiss me and i played and one day found it lying there or he brought it with him and i don’t remember who he was only that he was a kid and i was a kid and that made it all right but i do remember it and i always remember it and it was a steel metal tape measure that spun out stiff and shiny and had inches and feet and i played with it and i played and it was late and evening and getting dark and they called and i didn’t want to come so i played and he came and was fat and laughing and being a daddy and picking me up and throwing me over his shoulder and i didn’t want to go and the other kid was staying and why couldn’t i and he was carrying me and i had the tape and the other kid had the box end of the tape and i grabbed and fought him for it and he was laughing and he was laughing too and carrying me back to their endless yelling and i didn’t want to go and the other kid was staying and pulling me back with the shiny metal tape and i grabbed the tape and he pulled and daddy pulled and it hurt and the tape cut and jerked and the tape sliced through the palm of my hands and it hurt and i dropped the tape and it still hurt and it wouldn’t stop and he was laughing and i was ashamed because it hurt and didn’t bleed but it hurt and it hurt and i was ashamed because it hurt and didn’t bleed but it hurt laughing and i was ashamed of myself like when i wet my pants that time in the grocery store and ran back and hid them under the bed and i would have made it but i was at the grocery store and filling out a coupon for a basket of food to be given away and i needed to go but i had to fill the coupon out then it happened and i ran and ran and ran and i won the food later on but there wasn’t the toys i wanted and they had them up on the shelf you couldn’t reach and i thought i could take them if i won but you only got the food and i ran and ran and ran and i was scared at night and didn’t know why and i was ashamed of my cut hands and i was ashamed because i wanted toys when we needed food and i was ashamed and all the while the coal moved around the back and front and both sides in the barges on the river and the trucks on the road and the trains on the tracks and in the low cars in the mining repair shop that became the toys you never won

Introduction to When Green the Grass Did Grow Around the Fumbles of Desire

Introduction

I am a West Virginian.  My father’s people came from France by way of Scotland to the area around Pinch up the Elk River to settle on a 900 acre tract of land, less than an hours drive from where I now live, bequeathed to them by the King of England in 1625.  My mother’s father was from the Nash family with links to the Melungeon clan who claim to be descendants of the Portuguese who chose to stay behind from the original explorers of the Appalachian Mountains in the 1500s and intermarried with the Cherokee to form their own tribe.  Others emigrated from Wales during the 19^th Century influx of “Scotch/Irish” who came to work the mines.  My father’s grandfather was a minister in the Church of Christ who ran for and won a seat in the state legislature only to be cheated out of it by the mine owners who held up the election results in court until he finally served a single day and made a single speech.  


In 1928 my real grandfather changed his name, stole a car and chiseled off the serial number and fled West Virginia.  He was arrested in Roswell, New Mexico and ended up in a federal prison in Washington state.  I like to think he was heading for the Mother Ship with two whores and a trunkfull of 'shine. The only grandfather I ever knew, my grandmother’s second husband, fought with the miners at Blair Mountain and died of black lung when I was still a boy.

            My father was a minister in the Church of Christ.  He was a good and honest man, much better one on one over the inevitable chicken dinner on Sunday afternoon or at the bedside of the sick and dying than he was in the pulpit.  He preached to the churches in West Virginia that really couldn’t afford a minister.  He prided himself for not taking any money directly choosing to live on the small stipend his parishioners could afford.  He never made more than nine thousand dollars in any year of his long career  He died from injuries sustained in a car wreck while on his way to preach.

            My mother was a raven haired beauty scarred by a father who abandoned her and a truncated childhood made endurable only by a vibrant imagination and an unschooled talent for language and life. She took her training and became a Licensed Practical Nurse back in the Fifties and worked till she broke her back in a fall in the late Seventies.  She moved from a holler in Boone County to subsidized housing in Kanawha City after my father’s death where she currently resides.

            I have one brother who chose to cont-
inue the family business of preaching and now serves a church in Naples, Florida.  He’s the white sheep of the family.

            To say I’m proud of my heritage is a cliché I can’t bring myself to use.  I have no reason to be proud of what others did before me.  I hope, when or if I am remembered at all, that I will be part of a long line of ancestors they will be proud to call their own.  

            I say all this to establish my credentials as a bona fide, born and bred West Virginian.  I left for Nashville, Tennessee in 1968 and, after living in Tennessee, Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia, I returned to the hills in 1989.  Those years in the flatlands don’t negate my hillbilly status, but rather confirm it.  The best of us go away and, those of us who can’t cut it in the real world, find our way back to the only home we know. 

These poems are about West Virginia.  The West Virginia I grew up in then spent years running from.  The West Virginia I returned  to when I found myself looking up over the flat roof of a Virginia shopping mall and seeing nothing but blue sky and no comforting green hills to bracket my horizon and realized what I once thought of as a prison’s walls were really the balustrade of a fortress strong and secure. 

This is my West Virginia.  These poems  talk about the streets and alleys of Charleston and the degrading poverty of Chesapeake and the tangible darkness of a Boone County night and the loneliness of those who have lifted the rock and looked under and can’t forget what they’ve seen.  When I write about the hills they don’t have “...summits bathed in glory like the Prince Emanuel’s land.”  I don’t write bits of folksy wisdom and nostalgia about growing up in the holler with a tight knit family clan filled with god-fearin’, Bible-believing gun-toting men and women who could whip up supper for a mess of kinfolk from commodity cans of beef and home grown vegetables then come out on the porch to play a tune on the dulcimer as the sun dips behind the hills and the kids catch fireflies in the twilight. 

Don’t get me wrong, I caught my share of fireflies growing up.  I’m not saying that image wasn’t partially true.  I’m just saying it never was the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I’m saying that Edenic time is as gone as going will get you gone.  All that’s left is a bunch of craft show sellers who moved here from New York in the Sixties and wannabee rednecks who take their lifestyle cues and politics from the boardrooms in the skyscrapers of Nashville.

We can’t afford to let nostalgia numb us to the needs and problems of real people struggling to overcome the inherited evils of poverty and joblessness, of alcohol and drugs, of pandemic child abuse and domestic violence and of the scathing bigotry and ignorance this pastoral image serves to mask.  We need to face our past with honesty and our present with a firm determination to end these evils in our generation and not pass them down to the next.

Philip Jarrett

Dunbar, WV
6/30/2012

and nothing right with being rich

i had a dollar in my pocket

at least, i did before i spent it

on some trinket or some locket

that now is lost and i resent it

there is nothing quite as gone

as a dollar when it’s spent

nothing leaves you as alone

wondering where the dollar went

a dollar anticipated

is a great treasure for a man

but a dollar dissipated

grates on your soul like sand

to owe a dollar to another

is a dollar spent on guilt

a twin-bladed knife between two brothers

driven into each up to the hilt

you never own a dollar

you rent potential for a while

then it’s gone where you can’t follow

like a sycophantic smile

ayn rand said the choice

is between the dollar and the gun

in the end she couldn’t rejoice

she just wasn’t that much fun

jesus had a different view

you served dollars or the gods

if i had to choose between the two

i’d say the lord gave better odds

do you think what a dollar really is?

green paper with strange signs upon it

fit to wipe your ass or blot your piss

till someone else says ‘i want it.’

what if you just gave it away

to those really in need

do you think you could thus repay

all you’d stolen in your greed?

greed, there’s a word you don’t hear often

in this land of milk and honey

from the belly to the coffin

no one condemns you if you have money

great wealth is the sign of our god’s blessing

poverty means you lack the proper attitude

just ignore poor jesus’ lesson

wrong is right and bad is good

i have lately come to know quite sure

a dollar is a dead man’s bitch

there is nothing wrong with being poor...

...and nothing right with being rich

the poor are breeding stock

the poor are breeding stock

the welfare and food stamps

the rich dole out to these sows and studs

serves as the paddock’s lock

and the lure to lead them up the ramp

so the ones with promise

            can be separated from the duds

each season they trim their herd

this one has a beauty

            worth cultivating

this one is tall and quick enough

            to play pro ball

here is a voice to make them even richer

            if they decide to let it be heard

a few with minds worth exploiting

            but these are the dangerous ones

                        so their numbers are kept small

then there are those fit to be nothing but cannon fodder

just smart enough to learn to take orders

but not so smart to question why the US borders

circle the world, an empire far, far larger

than just our fifty states

most of them are left behind

turned loose in the wild, wild streets

they live a life of horror

they cluster together in gangs

and churches to survive

their family connections would

put a holler grannie to her shame

but the cruelest cut of all’s

how they split the poor in half

the whites fearing colors,

the colors hating whites

the deliberate installation

of the very thing

they say they hate

until we, the poor of this country

the livestock rejected at the gate

the left behind

the true poor

the poverty that goes on for generations

and the only thing we have to leave our children

when it’s their turn to step up to the plate

and so we’ll stay this way

until we learn that white’s a color, too

and skin don’t make the man

admit we have a common foe

for the enemy of my enemy

is my friend