Hired Hands

By John B. Lee

Shortlisted for the 1987 Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Prize

The hired hand of these poems was a stupid man. Nowadays he would be known as one of the employable retarded. Tom was lucky enough to find work and a home with the family of John B. Lee, people who understood him. And John B. Lee was lucky to have his whole life coloured by the presence of an apparently limited man who turns out to have been a poem. John B. Lee has with great tact and without a shred of patronizing found the words to make this inarticulate man live.

Hired Hands is a remarkable accomplishment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 1987
• ISBN: 9781771311984

Book preview

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lee, John B., 1951-

    Hired Hands

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-771311-98-4

I. Title.

PS8573.E348H57  1986    C811′.54    C86-094131-0

PR9199.3.L44H57  1986

Copyright © John B. Lee, 1986, 1992.

The support of the Canada Council and The Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

to Thomas Sheil Malott

*

He squares off

and heaves a bale

over his head.

His poem.

THE WELL

Tom peed the bed. For a boy of ten this was unusual. His father warned him not to pee the bed again or he would hang him upside down in the well, but Tom couldn't help it. His father hung him upside down with a rope tied around his feet. He dunked his head like a doughnut in coffee. This was the only justice Tom's father understood.

*

He remembers

what he likes —

not what happened

or is

or will be

but what he likes.

He is constantly

writing and rewriting

his life

for he remembers perfectly

what didn't happen

and why.

*

Through the corn

you see him squat to shit.

This is what poetry

ignores.

*

At the fair grounds

or in the field

there is a natural slovenliness

the world adapts to.

An abandoned cattle yard

grown up with weeds.

A corn crib broken down.

These are real.

We are incongruous.

God encourages us

to wear his dust

like plants.

Organisation is transgression.

We must be ugly to be beautiful.

*

His hair

like an ash tray was dumped on his head.

His close-set mud-brown eyes

look at you like a murky photograph

over a nose

too three-dimensional.

His thin lips

close over dentures

like melon rinds

or gums hard as rock candy.

Stretched over all of this is flesh

loose and bumpy and burlap brown

from weathering.

White chickens

beside a red wheel barrow.

This face too

is everything.

THE WELL

Tom was nine years old when he was born. Nine months, not years, I tried to tell him, but he told me again he was nine years old. He heard Blondie, the old German Shepherd, the one that got poisoned when he was a boy, he heard her come barking up the lane. She was barking because he was born.

When Tom