Ambling Creekside

By Marty Price

This collection includes all of my early poems which I judged worth keeping, dating from when I began writing through 2000. Many of them deal with West Virginia themes and growing up in West Virginia in the latter half of the 20th century. The collection also includes a few of my short stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387869268

Book preview

Ambling Creekside

Ambling Creekside:

Older Poems and a Range of Short Fiction

By Marty Price

Copyright © 2018 by Marty Price

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2018

ISBN 978-1-387-86926-8

Windword Press

106 Dunbrook Drive

Starkville, Mississippi 39759

Dedication

To Carolyn, Rob, and Allison

Contents

Introduction

Poems: By Year, Then Title

The Celestial Interstate

Just a Day in the Garden

Midnight Rider

Ghost Reading

Do You Believe in Magick? (an Elemental Story)

The Hunt

An Evening in Port Royale

Introduction

This book includes all of the poems I wrote between late 1952 (I was born then) and about 2000 or so that I have any reason to believe should survive immediate bonfire. Some of them are, in my estimation, good. The book also contains some short stories and the like – a few old ones and some that I have written since I last gathered my stuff into a collection. It contains no recent poems. Some of my more recent poems and stories are in my two self-published collections (A Few Ragged Words and Things That Go Bump in the Mind); other poems will wait for a future project. While I would love it if someone decided my works were the stuff of genius and these little collections made me famous, I have no such expectations. They are compiled for my friends and family, who I would like to have remember me as a writer (not necessarily as a successful one).

Poems: By Year, Then Title

Last Fire

Evermore the tree shall stand

Its leaves whisper outliving man;

Evermore the wind shall blow

And man no more the breezes know;

And even then the turtle cry

And wonder why the others died;

And last or first the skyline rot,

Tumble, now remembered not;

And the stillness is held fast,

Peace, except for ghosts, at last.

1972?

(written after reading somewhere that nuclear holocaust would extinguish all life forms above the turtle; slightly revised)

First Glow of Deep Autumn

Dreaming of Winter sunshine

Golden gloss of a pleasant life

Adjusting

Building

A hear like Vermont’s quarry marble

Into something new:

The finest kiln-burnt stone,

White, purified, alive,

Tempered by flames of life,

Burnt-clean by less than hellfire.

By something purer, softer, vibrant

With light, not heat.

A Winter dreamscape

First ray of sunshine

On the final flaming red of trees,

Or orange, matching the sunlight,

A golden gloss of fearful hope.

9/22/1976

I-79

A fright-filled moment of vision attained

In a brief outward glimpse at bareness

Extending beyond a thin, green line, trees,

Exhausting the sight by lack of substance,

A desert two hundred feet wide, or less

Whose extent is somehow infinite,

A widening band, interlacing, meeting,

Leaving, finding, seeing, fleeing others,

A spectacle clouded as an extension cord

Wrapped about itself and several other

Of its kind, an insane spider’s web

For the spider who would build such a web

Must be insane, or manlike, or sick,

Lacking aesthetic sense, lacking harmony,

Mad with the power of its own creativity,

Too pleased to ask for an end, a beginning,

A godly or hellish sign of purpose,

A dream or nightmare to hold it,

To bask in the glory of its power,

As infinite sight stagnates on a horizon,

Cloverleafs into an interlaced knot,

Ripples with vanity’s curls and windings,

In vain, as hard bare rock, unseen

By the hand of the sculptor (for this,

This land, reflects a chiseled, barren art).

8/4/1976

Red Fire

Burst in flames, a Monty Python cow,

Struck by lightning, red fire.

Or just a July sunset, or perhaps a

Sunset on Krakatoa, after the blast.

A tree in early October, standing out

Among yellow ones, the green gone.

Red burning, attract a bull, colorblind,

To stride into the flames, attack the heart.

A '66 Mustang convertible

In the August sun, that kind of red,

Two women in front, cruising,

Meet a half-baked motorcyclist

Burned red in the sun, red arms,

Red face, modern Indian gypsy,

Hair burned flaxen, long-lived fire.

A heat that lasts long after sunset,

Half-way through the night, still burning

Unquenched by two gallons of beer.

Two divided by three, doesn't fit,

Works though, he thinks so. Tired

Fighting May flames in August.

June is the marriage month,

Right after papa finds out, right?

But August, bad luck, no September brides.

August heat bides its time, escapes,

Though you need someone

Cold October nights, not like summer.

Too hot in June. Don't share covers.

Go out and look. Live on the grass.

Wake up sticky with dew, crawl off nights.

Timing's wrong. Must be too easy.

Too easy to crawl off in August.

Red convertibles are black streaks at night,

At four a.m., half the country to cross.

Red fire. Goes with yellow, lightning,

Running with leaky ragtop roof.

7/27/76

Winter Nights

Silver tipped paint brushes dab from the sky,

Speckle the landscape with shining dots.

Crystalline castles rise from the mud;

A white-silver sheen coats dead grass.

Night has proven a shy painter,

One secretly investing every inch

Of barren, dead, chilled and muddy

Landscape with the beauty of the grave.

Fragile crystals, fragile in hardness,

Tiny diamonds on a field of diamond ice,

Patterns of the night, frozen.

Silver tipped brushes work only at night.

They are shy, of malicious stealth.

Their crystalline castles mock the soft mud,

Invert nature – aesthetic fabricators.

Jack Frost is laughing in the darkness,

Alive, malicious, whistling frozen death

As he paints windows with icy dead ferns.

He is death with a silvery hand.

12/19/1976

(another very early one; edited)

Meteorite

Coming down, in mid-evening,

Like a star anxious to fade

Before some night watcher can see it

(Even a dying star has some pride

And could wish privacy

From that true oldest profession ---

The dozens of star gazers

Who would pick the secrets of heaven

As some pick pockets

And offer their findings

To kings and tradesmen

For such rewards as kings and tradesmen give).

Easing from the sublime ignorance

(Well marked on the proud face

A drunk would dare not show)

To a simple contentment

(As recognized only in the well-fed cat,

Canary feathers sticking to his mouth)

And finally to a sort of bliss unknown

(For one who experienced it

Would be too ashamed to note it).

But even I, visible as a star

(A small unnoticed occupant of the Milky Way),

Have my moment of pride

And find myself at loss

For a better hiding place

Than the questionable twilight of mid-evening

For coming down.

1/24/77

Shay # ___

Feeling like a freight on a siding,

Engine pitting with rust,

Partially burned;

A self-consumed coal burning Shay

Log train.

The summer excursion runs up a hill

Or two or three

Takes a couple switchbacks

--- Uphill U-turns;

Runs back down,

Same track,

Same time,

Same year of death.

Past a town called Spruce,

Population three hundred,

All ghosts --- dead and invisible,

Washed clean as the forest after rain,

Washed clean as every building

disappeared:

Hardly a clearing left in the forest,

Overgrown.

Lost ghosts seek vainly for old homes:

The forest covers as a thick warm

Blanket of the fluffiest snow.

Down past a rusty engineless engine:

Burnt-up coal-burning Shay,

Cooled and rusting in the rain

Of a late August day,

Waiting for sunset,

Waiting for ghosts.

12/29/77

Appeared in Hill & Valley, vol. 6, no.