A boy thrilled with his first horse,
I climbed aboard my father hunkering in hip boots
below the graveled road berm, Cominski Crick
funneling to a rusty culvert. Hooking
an arm behind one of my knees, he lifted
with a grunt and laugh, his creel harness creaking,
splitshot clattering in our bait boxes.
I dreamed a Robin Hood-Paladin-Sinbad life
from those shoulders. His jugular pulse rumbled
into the riffle of my pulse, my thin wrists
against his Adam’s apple—a whiskered knuckle
prickly as cucumbers in our garden
where I picked nightcrawlers, wet and moonlit,
glistening between vines across the black soil.
Eye-level with an array of flies, every crayon
color fastened to the silk band
of his tattered fedora, the hat my mother vowed
a thousand times to burn, I learned to love
the sound of words in the woods—Jock Scott,
Silver Doctor, Mickey Finn, Quill Gordon, Gray
Ghost booming in his voice through the spruce.
At five, my life rhymed with first flights
bursting into birdsong. I loved
the piquant smell of fiddleheads and trilliums,
hickory and maple leaf humus, the petite
bouquets of arbutus we picked for Mom.
I loved the power of my father’s stride
thigh-deep against the surge of dark swirls.
Perched offshore on boulder—safe from wanderlust
but not from currents coiling below—
I prayed to the apostles for a ten-pounder
to test the steel of my telescopic pole,
while Dad, working the water upstream and down,
stayed always in earshot—alert and calling to me
after each beaver splash between us.
I still go home to relearn my first love for words
echoing through those woods: I caught one!
Dad! I caught one! Dad! Dad!
skipping like thin flat stones down the crick—
and him galloping through popples, splitshot ticking,
to find me leaping for a fingerling, my first
brookie twirling from a willow like a jewel.
[cont. from page 1]
Here we go—What I’VE Learned: (you’ll hear this I’ve Learned refrain 18 times, in tribute to the 18 years you’ve lived—Valedictorian and math major Matt Best will keep tally).
I’ve Learned (1) the possibilities of what you can or will do with your life are limitless/infinite. In my later teens, the two vocations Poetry and Rodeo never EVER even crossed my mind. My mother wanted me to either become a priest or a lawyer married to an Italian nurse. I wore a leather jacket with 15 zippers all half-unzipped and drove a fast motorcycle and aspired to join the Hell’s Angels. To say Mom and I were NOT on the same page is the Mother of all understatements. Because of the times, I was left with only 2 choices, Viet Nam or college. I chose the latter and, consequently, discovered poetry, which brought me to Montana to study with the great Richard Hugo in Missoula, where I crossed trails with rodeo. Ahh, the beauty of adventure/discovery/Star Trek! —going boldly where nobody from Hurley had ever gone before. Hard to believe now that, earlier in my life, everything seemed to come down to only 2 choices: Right or Wrong. Left or Right. Hell’s Angel or Catholic priest. Heaven or Hell. College or Nam….
I’ve Learned (2) how our lives are rich with teachers, beginning to end. We’re continually being taught by, and learning from, parents, family, friends, enemies, educators, animals—Nature’s People, Charlie Russell called our fellow beings—and hopefully we’re TEACHING OURSELVES some of life’s greatest lessons. Learning rhymes with Listening. To listen, to pay close attention, to be an ardent observer—to lend the keenest antennas of all five senses to the world—is akin to learning.
I recommend highly the Michael Moore documentary, Bowling For Columbine. In this film Moore interviews Marilyn Manson (I don’t know much about his music, but he doesn’t appear to me to be a country-western singer?). What would you say to the students of Columbine today? Mr. Moore asks. Without one nano-iota of hesitation, Manson replies. I wouldn’t say anything; I’d listen to what they have to say, which is what somebody should have done in the first place.
ENTRIES:
Santa Fe Lensic Theater
Close Encounters—The Interview
Commencement
Putting the Bite into Cowboy Poetry
Newsflash: 01-13-08
Newsflash: 11-28-2007
Proclamation/Preview
Newsflash: 10-04-2007
Making Wood
Postscript to Making Wood
Tom Russell/Cowboys & Indians
Western Horseman review
Tom Russell review
Ray March review
Red Shuttleworth
Happy Birthday Paul!
(News?) Flash: 4-24-2007
© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
Listening is the greater facet of communication. Hopefully, you’ve had mentors who have listened to your voice, your heart; if not, please don’t go out into the world with a git-even attitude—nobody listened to me; therefore, why should I afford others such respect. Instead, break the negative cycle. Our mission as human beings on planet Earth is to set the excellence bar higher, to leave this world a more humane place than it was when we entered it. Try hard NOT to propagate the negatives. If you feel you’ve been disrespected, counter by affording others MORE respect.
I’ve Learned (3) not all our teachers are well-educated in a formal sense. Two of my most profound mentors are my Mother and Father. I do a poem titled WORDS GROWING WILD IN THE WOODS, which pays tribute to the greatest professor of poetry a youngster could ever hope for. You see, I grew up in a bookless house. I vaguely remember a red leather-bound bible in a box high on a closet shelf, a volume titled Vein Of Iron, a history of the Pickands-Mather Iron Ore Company (likely a Christmas bonus) my Father worked for—20 years and a $34.42 monthly pension to prove it, incidentally. And then, thirdly, there was the Hurley phone book, page-after-page of musical ethnic names, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, my poetic ear fell in love with: Mario Gianunzio, Italo Bensoni, Pine Morello, Suds Morghetti, Urho Tuominen, Angelo Muffesanti, Ginty Fontecchio, Guido Ransanici, Lick DiGeorgio, Ham Cavosie, Tonina Crosina, Skip Wick, Bucky Laguna, Pupsy Savant, Eino Aho, and on and on and hilariously on! Shortly after moving to Montana in the Fall of ‘73, I met a bullrider, from Butte, Tudo Stagnoli, and I knew the instant he told me his name that I had found home away from home. But, as I started to tell you, it was my Dad, who often joked that he had gotten kicked out of second grade for not shaving, and who, in truth, went to work in the mines before graduating from high school…it was my Dad who taught me to love words spoken aloud in the north woods, as he carried me piggy-back into his secret fishing waters and addressed my curiosities about the names of plants and animals and the colorful arrays of dry flies in the band of his gray fedora. Yup, Professor of Poetry, Leonard Zarzyski. Here’s my tribute to those earliest sparkings: