The House on Antioch

On Sunday the 9th, we were driving home from a great brunch with great friends, and on Antioch Road we passed a house that we've passed hundreds of times since moving into that area back in 2002. Over the years, the house has from time to time drawn my attention for one oddity or another. Once the unknown folks who lived there put up a little house in a stretch of yard that spreads to the east of the house. It seemed to me that a woman was opening up a little shop there, a permanent yard sale, a "cent-shop" like that of Hepzibah Pyncheon in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. But that soon disappeared, shut down, I imagined, by those city or county officials who would identify it as a business and raise zoning objections or force her to pay Tennessee's excessive sales tax. Later a large rectangular portion of the same yard was stringed off and became the home of a pony or miniature horse. (Is there a difference?) He grazed the grass down and weathered the elements until one day somebody was out inside his stringed pasture petting him and the next day he was gone.

On Sunday as we approached the house, we could see a couple of cars parked along the roadside and in the yard and two cars from the Sheriff's office parked in the driveway. One officer had the trunk of his car open and was removing cases (like CSI cases, we said) and a duffle bag . We glanced at the house and saw the yellow crime scene tape wrapped around the entire front and across the entrance of a basement door that I've always thought must lead to an apartment. We turned around a couple of times but couldn't come up with an idea of what was going on—or what had gone on. It seems to me that while we were away at church and in the company of friends, somebody's life blew apart.

This morning I drove through the dark on my way to the gym and passed that house, wondering again what had happened there. On the rest of the drive I put these lines together in my head and wrote them down on a napkin when I parked in the gym lot.

The house sits in the darkness before dawn,
against a black backdrop of scattered trees,
a dim image of roof, façade and walls
held together by yellow crime scene tape.

That's all I have for now. We'll see if it goes anywhere in the future.

Okay, so I'm currently not real pleased with the apparent formatting limitations of my blogger word processor. Every time I use enter for a return, it skips a space, which makes for some airy-looking poetry (see my 1 October haiku). I don't like this, so I'm trying an experiment. I'm going to type that same haiku in Word and try two things: 1) pasting it directly from Word into the blog processor and 2) composing in Word and then using Word's blog publishing function. Let's see how it works.

Night, windy with leaves—
filled with song and beer, I drive
through the dark mountains.

 

All right. That was composed in Word and then posted to the blog via Word's blog-publishing function.

Okay, here's another thing that I'm going to try to do before attempting Word's blog-publishing function. I'm going to type directly into the "Edit Html" and see what happens.

Night, windy with leaves--
filled with song and beer, I drive
through the dark mountains.

Word Processing Frustrations

Okay, so I'm currently not real pleased with the apparent formatting limitations of my blogger word processor. Every time I use enter for a return, it skips a space, which makes for some airy-looking poetry (see my 1 October haiku). I don't like this, so I'm trying an experiment. I'm going to type that same haiku in Word and try two things: 1) pasting it directly from Word into the blog processor and 2) composing in Word and then using Word's blog publishing function. Let's see how it works.

Night, windy with leaves—
filled with song and beer, I drive
through the dark mountains.

All right. That was posted directly from text typed into Word and then pasted to the "Edit HTML" window of the blog.

October Game: Slow Start

Okay, here it is the 7th already, and I've got no game. Although I won't give up totally for this month, I'll admit that I'm likely to have poor writing percentage this season. I wonder what a November Game would look like. Then again, I might just back off to posting a bit of writing every day that I can--a poem, a brief prose poem, a shortshort fiction, etc. Maybe something like this:

The sun rises in Nashville and shines in two yellow strips on the wall of my hotel room. I imagine the hundred or thousand never-will-be stars that inhabit the sludge beneath the country music industry, imagine them as they fumble sleepily, drunkenly with keys at the doors of old houses and trailers, of cars made in the '70s, '80's, '90s. They crawl into creaky beds, into sleeping bags on couches, on floors, in back seats, pulling their dreams over their eyes as I watch these strips of sunlight brighten and slide down the wall to disappear into the floor.

October Again

Last year at this time I played the October Game. What I tried to do was write a poem every day and post it to this blog. I did okay, creating, I think, 21 out of 31. This seemed pretty good to me, but as one of my friends pointed out, it wouldn't necessarily make for a very good batting average in baseball or field goal percentage in basketball. Still, I got a publication out of it. The poem "Columbus Day," written for October 12, was recently published in a journal called The Howl.

Last night I played a gig at Iron Horse Station in Hot Springs, North Carolina. It was a noisy restaurant, and few people seemed to be listening. But I had a table of the loyal right in front of me, which helped tremendously. They're lifesavers, but little by little I'm learning just to do my thing the way I ought to do it, without worrying about who's listening. I ended up with $45 in tips, so I guess some folks appreciate it.

Anyway, this morning I woke up with this haiku taking shape in my mind. I was thinking about the windy night I drove through to get us home after last night's gig. A haiku is maybe not the best omen for success to begin the October Game, but it's what I've got.

Night, windy with leaves--

filled with song and beer, I drive

through the dark mountains.

By the way, the guy from whom I got the idea of the October Game died this year. He was an artist, and he tried to create a piece of art—a drawing or a painting, I think—for every day in the month.