Martian Desert Afternoon: (Dust Devils Three Miles High)

By Dayton Lummis

MARTIAN DESERT AFTERNOON is an impressionistic collection of "poetic statements" about America, places and people, in the last half of the Twentieth Centuryobservations, impressions, descriptions. All of which contain perceptive insight on what is sometimes referred to as Many a Vanished Sight" There are moments when the perceptions seem almost at the point of madness, but generally the work is a sort of wandering psychedelic journey across America. And, at times, "into America"

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450242943

Dayton Lummis

Dayton Lummis is now of that advanced age where there is a confusing amount to look back on, and a frightening current scenario to confront and evaluate. His education and experience (Yale University and various Museum directorships), plus informal degrees from “The University of North Beach” and “The Cripple Creek School of Hard Knocks,” have enabled him to navigate through “The Sea of Sorrow and Regret.” He lives in a casita in Santa Fe, NM, with his pet armadillo “Crusty.”

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Contents

Introduction

PROLOGUE

A Sampling…

PART I

Beginnings and Roots

PART II

The Open Spaces

PART III

Images of the Golden State

PART IV

My Last Poem

PART V

Commentaries

PART VI

The End

Introduction

This book is a collection of what might be loosely called poetry, but more accurately should be designated as poetic statements—a simple and direct manner to express feeling, ideas and observations about people, places and events. They have been assembled from material dating from the 1960s in San Francisco up to 1990 in Santa Monica, California. This material was in a collection of spiral notebooks that had been languishing unexamined, until recently, on the shelves of a closet in my Santa Fe casita which I call The Armory—for reasons best not discussed here!

I started writing poetry my senior year in college—1959. We used to go down to New York and hang around Greenwich Village, where the Beat poets were holding forth in jazz clubs and coffee houses. It was a seductive atmosphere—all those existential young women in black! The lives of poets seemed exotic if non-remunerative. I remember that a Greenwich Village poet named Hugh Romney came to New Haven and read some incomprehensible material. He was accompanied by several attractive young women, and wore a sport coat and tie! He would later gain fame in the Beat and Hippie worlds as Wavy Gravy—without the jacket and tie, of course.

We knew little then of the scene out in San Francisco. News did not much trickle back to the East Coast. I had been to San Francisco twice on short visits, and while I perceived the Bay Area as a super cool place to live, I was not familiar with the San Francisco/Berkeley Beat poetry scene. Until, of course, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was published. Then, all roads seemed to lead to San Francisco—where the columnist Herb Caen was said to have coined the term Beatnik—though Kerouac had much earlier used the term beat as a sort of reference to beatific.

I did not write anything at all in the Army, which seized my attentions after graduation from college. The military atmosphere was not conducive to literary creativity. When I moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1961 I was caught up in the creative atmosphere of North Beach, Berkeley and San Francisco State College (as it was then known). I wrote quite a bit of poetry, occasionally read some in coffee houses, and even had a slim volume of poems, called Closets Of Mercy, published by an East Bay press, (one book still available, I think, on Amazon.)

In Cripple Creek, Colorado, the creative muse again languished during the ten years I was there. I wrote occasional poems here and there, but the productivity was not high nor the quality very good. Lack of proper inspiration, I would have to say. Back in the Golden State, at Santa Rosa, where I was first Director of the Sonoma County Museum, I began to write poems nightly, and much of that is in my volume of Western poetry called High Lonesome, which was published in the 1990s by California Classics, a small press in Los Angeles known for publishing unknown or little known authors. I wrote poems in the solitude of the East Mojave Desert at the Rocking L Ranch, and in my father’s former studio apartment in Santa Monica up until 1990. Then I stopped writing poetry and turned full time to prose. For that, reference again Amazon under Books—Dayton Lummis.

My last poem, written in 2004, is really a sort of epitaph for Michael Vann Moore, my compadre from Victor, Colorado, on page 186 of this volume.

The so-called poems in this collection are not uniformly good, though there are some superior ones here and there. Many, I think, derive their significance and satisfaction from being social/psychological commentary on certain locales or situations—i.e. those of Cripple Creek, Colorado, the East Mojave Desert, or elsewhere throughout the Big Open, as much of the West is called.

I have arranged the pieces in certain sections, appropriate to time and geography. There is, running through them, a theme, or themes. Rather than identifying those here or analyzing them, I leave it to the reader’s intuition or perception to pick them out and perhaps give significance to them—if possible. Readers may even spot things that the author is not himself aware of. That happens…

At the end of the book I have placed several commentaries from early 2010, just to sort of keep my spoon in, and to bring readers of previous books of commentaries up to date. It is said, Never look back—something may be catching up on you. Well, it is not a matter of may—something is definitely back there and gaining on you. It is Old Father Time, or as Andrew Marvel put it, Time’s winged chariot, drawing near… Oh, Yes!

PROLOGUE

A Sampling…

*

 MARTIAN DESERT AFTERNOON

(Dust Devils Three Miles High…)

Hot winds blew all day from the south

Out of the searing whiteness of the playa

You remember the thin obsidian shadows

Creeping across the desiccated land

How the creosote bushes and greasewood

Bent in the constant hot dry wind

How I walked in a vast circle in the heat

From the small hill where we camped

How at dusk the wind died and we had

A hundred mile expanse of mountains

And sky all to ourselves

Coyotes barking and yipping

Back in the darkening foothills

An immense dark stillness

Settled over and around us

The mysterious greenish streak

Of a meteor crossing the sky

Crickets began to chirp as we

Sat quietly absorbing the desert

At dawn the next day there

Were strange dark clouds

And more wind a sense of

Danger thinking of the quick

Violent storms of desert country

Suddenly appearing out of nowhere

Strange country

Was your comment

And I knew that

It frightened you

*

 THREE DEAD MEN RIDING NORTH

I see

Them gaunt and lonely

Against a dull sky

And hear

The rattling hoofbeats

On timber bridges

As they

Cross swift, dark rivers

On their journey North.

They pause on a rise,

And in the quietness

Of the empty land

Their slow breathing comes

Like wind in dry grass;

With eyes pale as ice

They gaze across trees

To the distant South.

Then, as by a call,

They turn North once more,

Grim because they must.

Through tall trees they ride

In silence, hunched from

Sudden winds coming

Cold from the black woods.

Three dead men riding North.

*

 REUBEN

I know loneliness

in the dark streets

of this strange city,

and the warm winds

from the nearby sea

bring no thoughts

of things past.

This night is alive

with strange happenings,

unfoldings and endings—

and I am vaguely aware

that they have nothing

to do with me,

they are as remote

as the doorways opening

with strange tongues

in this foreign place.

The air reeks of

something ominous;

dark fates cross

the city like shadows

and the inevitable ones

drift on appointed paths

until like doomed planets

they meet.

Under a bench

some spider lurks,

waiting to sting

to death whatever

wanders into its web.

Reuben crosses the square

and settles into a café;

call him Reuben,

he is anyone,

unaware as he sits

smoking his pipe

of the burning boxcar

and screams in the night.

The darkness is tinged

with the unhealthy

pungent odor of fear,

and the wind rises and falls

with the fetid smell of the sea;

I know, I can feel it,

something will happen.

*

 THE CHIEFTAIN

Somewhere in the lostness of a prairie

where sky falls into grass

a woman stands,

her hair blown over her face

by the ceaseless wind,

remembering

the way the man’s back looked

as his horse carried him

into the haze of distance;

he had not turned to wave,

but that was his way.

Time and space—

what have these to do

with the fact that one

never sees a person again?

The night wind blows

in through the window;

rising from a troubled dream

one falls down drunk,

fortunately on a bed of old leaves

undulating in a corner of the room.

Once it was my sister calling

from the field in back of our barn.

There was the smell of something dead

and a hot splash of tears.

I saw a flock of tiny birds

darting toward me like bullets.

Yes, yes, I know…

Dull heat bounces from the ground

into a sky scuffed with aimless clouds,

as summer pounds across the grasslands

with the rhythm of horsemen riding

fast to the brake of tangled brush

where the river flows,

brown, sluggish, and wide.

Strange things have happened,

things I only half-remember,

ghosts trampling the grass

in a mad, leaping dance.

On a bluff overlooking the river

a chieftain sits buried

upright on his horse.

Why have all these years

of history devolved to me?

*

PART I

Beginnings and Roots

*

 MAINE WOODS 1949

Pine hemlock spruce

A certain dampness

Lingering days after rain

The grinding crunch

Of canoe bows nosing

Onto pebbled lake shores

Dark silent root-stained

Cedar water pools where

No fish live only silence

Before dusk canoe drifting

Hoping to see a moose

Long-ago empty logging camps

The mystique of places that

People have been long gone from

Have left suddenly for

Reasons not entirely clear

Days of pushing onward

Streams emptying into wide lakes

Not having to share any of it

With others or burdens of cities

Occasionally climbing a

Low mountain and seeing only

More of the same trees and lakes

It seemed the whole world

There was a war on

The other side of the earth

Newspaper diagrams with

Arrows jagged perimeters

Stories of armies and

Men dying

There were women

Who cried all night

In lonely prairie towns

Girls who sat in icy stillness

And young men who

Came out of the woods

To die…

*

 WINTER SNOW

Snow falling on a gray afternoon,

Muffled silence in early darkness,

Occasional car with chains

Laboring up a nearby hill,

Trains still running,

Bringing men home early from the city

Dark, overcoated figures tramping off

In different directions from the station,

A haze of snowflakes drifting

Down around the streetlights,

A few house windows lit

Up in the soft gloom.

Along a wooded road, a path almost,

Not traveled by cars,

A young boy trudges wrapped in silence,

The snow growing deeper, reflecting

Light in the growing darkness,

A sense of retreating into an earlier time,

People on foot, tramping through woods

To the hidden places where they

Had built their houses,

A quiet and private world, lonely

On the edge of wilderness

Stretching west into

Something unknown and fearful.

Another train from the city

And the spell is broken.

A boy and his dog coming in

From the snow to warmth and dinner,

Wondering if there will

Be school tomorrow…

*

 STRAFFORD, PENNSYLVANIA—1950

The crisp sharp air of winter,

A clear stillness in the fading

Light of afternoon into evening,

The branches bare against the

Cloudless westward sky,

A thin, crunchy snow

Just covering the leaves

And a whiff of woodsmoke drifting

From a neighbor’s chimney somewhere

Among the houses scattered in

These rolling, wooded hills.

A narrow lane almost hidden

Beneath the untrodden snow,

Bending around a hill

Toward the rhododendrons curling

In the falling temperature.

Heading home from tramping round

The Pennsylvania woods and fields,

Untroubled by any thoughts

Of long years ahead

And what to do with them,

A twilight world unto itself—

The way life is. And should be.

Woodsmoke, and a moon

Rising behind the trees,

The rumble of a distant train,

A world of things in place—

Or so it seems,

Looking back across

The bridge of Time.

*

 THE LITTLE PADDOCK

Rolando settled in at the bar—

There were shouts and backslaps

From the usual Friday afternoon crowd.