The Folk -- Southeastern Kentucky

And the outsider wonders what kind of life is their mademove figures --
                              the women scuttle with arms folded just over the waist,
the men loll, standing up straight; they do not spit while the politician
                                                              pounds the Bible
but resume chewing when he comes off the namdstand, his business suit among
                                                                       their overalls.
Their kids are brash in strange places
the poorest beg for pennies and make sure they get to movies
and don't learn to want what they can't have.
Some women never write to "the fathers of their children"
and some don't lose their teeth
and some get the color of an old tree, looking old enough so they will
                                                                                                   never age.
They've got personal names and mouthings of names of places that make
                                 surveyed maps crawl with gossip and sniggered laughter
Craws Nest, Aykay, Foot Scratch, Stinking Creek, Hogg and Pigg and Bacons,
                                                                                                   Boone Run
have even the leveled places in a road or valley named for a pioneer or an
                                                                            inconsequent murder
that they talk quietly, not to an outsider.

On Seeing a Manuscript of Ezra Pound

Long-stemmed letters
rank swiftly, stand fast to hold Sibylline command
of today's post, as if they had been run here
too quick for any digust or non-hearing to tear up
the poet's orders.
The air is finger-cold
through a house's ill-contrived windows, makes the hand move more frantic
over lines, in which I may warp my own characters;
sun's not hot nor gas lit high enough to uncramp a pen's grasp
working to write enough.
American poor man
today can't break the ice that's thin and hard enough
on a small town's ill-drainings; can stand by lean trunks and branches
snow-marked, not by ruined walls or gutted houses
to make gossip
not yet considered songs; an eccentric phrase
hangs in conversation; song was last night
fixed in a hymn-tune or on bland television.
Moved, in real air, we go in to read.

Three Letters

                                                                                                                1     to an old man
In the churning of three days' sickness
saffron bills
of that pretended rich disorder gout, getting cured,
I gouged from this palette
the trace of your emotional hues, greensickness:
idealism to keep the old awake, and waste their faces,
seems wore in the body than my howling ache,
inability to keep myself private; you go out
with those faint lines at the ends of your lips,
your eyes are smoke, not burning now,
you go all weekly, without my cane.
There's something in the guts, too, that makes you cry: let's take a solid
                                                                                    medicine together.

                                                                                                           2.       to a contemporary

I could never live with anyone in 1933 or 1943 -- the oddity of an illusion
                                                                          appearing every decade
and of not wanting what I sense most vividly: yellow gloves, a blue over -
                                                                          cost; chance comradeships --
prefer knowing what ignorant defenses these were for being young,
glamor for poverty and pretense, for dislike of men and self.
Recognizing strength: fear against apathy:
as lying in a ditch, the explosions bracketed
and the third did not come, leaving my full moment outside nothingness;
as seeing that girl no charm unto herself
but wearing some kind of headband, fitting to an old coquette.
Knowledge gives the old pleasures, has surpassed them:
can you top the story of any year I name?

                                                                                                       3             to a boy

Indignity
it's a part of youth; you know how free will changes things
the morning you were prepared for another test -- everybody got a good grade,
and the check didn't come to pay your schoolbills, while you responded
                                                                           hopefully to the weather.
Sure, you've seen my anger out of quarrels
even older adults forced upon me; and the vulgar concerns of families
and our pretensions to art,
maybe our preferences.
We're more than the birds that pick for grain, seeing their colors;
we stay long awake on quiet nights; and we sing in ruins;
or forget the last minutes of those we have loved.  What you shall lose,
let it be largely unhappy.

And, and . . .

As if fire fire drew
up the skin of the backs of my fist, relaxed,
in a throat-catch and a tense of hot and cold mixed,
with a colorless face shows I gape, live through drowning,
so I live for what come
hear an outside minute's release, and a past clock's tick as
                                                           my throat-catch goes.
Pound knew they weren't going to kill him in a puptent or at the
                                                           crazy house
and Win Scott, who could calm him, calmed too much and gave up
                                                           himself
and I carry the set bomb --
is heart's function to tock to an explosion?
            I'll be no staled fish on somebody's doorstep,
            was no battlefield corpse, my pants full of shit;
            and I want live horror --
            no sense in letting the world keep some awful me-smell.
Though memories still root
this sere bud and browned scarlet split blood of a contained
                                                                         moment,
dreams are in the present; wild, courageous
pretentious cries drove us to a coward's moment
of saying, "Not this," or "I know true joy
as being different" and "The blinded see dark"
and "what the dead know is what's not living."
                Down the staled or peppered throat pass Keats' light
                                                                              wine
                 rejoice; you cried because a girl sang beautifully, whom
                                                                 you could not have;
                 a day is over, a nightmare halts your falling into
                                                                        sleep.

Never on the Funicular

(alla memoria di Napoli, 1944; out Branch Avenue, Providence, 1934)

I keep an Italy
it was always raining
stones inside or corridors, stairs present a smooth and moist
footing where drunks can fly, to their bums, unwarily running
and area-ways and old courts and buildings seeming old
are grimed and wet, so that the lights of the poor look comfortable
rooms are bars but bed-covers
fringed; holy pictures garish
and women's heads covered while they show a bosom.
Back home, sunny
backyards with tables under our once-forbidden wine
was Italian knowledge, a game of "Boss," kings made by throwing fingers
and winter made bright by sticky warm anisette
against an American chill.  Of course, above Naples there was a
                                                        bush of vegetable roses
where I went by rickety, seemingly enduring streetcar
and could imagine a childhood, kicking in kne--trousers against
                                                        the seat,
but ash of Vesuvic and home-come late in nightfall
darken my summer
                                and the chill of any dead
                                so perfectly remembered, my Italy

The Decline of Catholicism

They tell me it's louder in the silence of a dumb chapel to bark your shins.
The priests do not come early enough of a morning; their orders of
                                                                   penance are rescinded.
Who tore soft bakers' bread? Will anyone pass out wine to everyone?
                                                                   Who gave communion?
Now and at the hour of our death, where is the old waxy smell
it might be in a poor neighborhood? Watch the nuns and you can see their
                                                                     knees.
Hear English, and it can be mubled more confusedly than Latin, by the
                                                                     Irish or Italian.
Recall how sex is guiltful; be aware of birth
broken virginity, blood, floodind waters, no abortion.
Scraped knees, worn and ben back are the uniform of Saturday
or weeks in the middle of Lent. Stabat Mater  sings to stations
symbolic, like the iron designs I saw in Germany
in the neighborhoods church that was comforting-clean, all too quiet.
My prayerful friends, old patterers, aged man left to his rosary
I may see you in the streets of old-fashioned neighborhoods;
Sunday papers aren't sold in such numbers outside the Masses. Bless the
                                                                       lessening collections
of folk or money. Will there be only bells, to color an evening.  What
                                                                       will we have, to remember from their
                                                                                                       sound?

To the Old Hero

He was so eager to lie on reality's ordinary board, Wallace Stevens,
                                                        even not on spikes
as I to escape a dull-it, unread, walking afternoon
Winners tell us nothing by mubles like ours on a bright morning.
Fictive sounds I make for comedy
are put against a sun, a blue air less imaginable than any browned guitar's
thump on fingers outside the heart
or nearly in the circuit of its reach.
I am not student, borrowing a better's thought
nor bold enough to steal.  Who's awakward enough to dance
appropriately at my later time? With Stevens dead, can we make up a ghost
to shine and make the noon startling
or to endure, in the framed midnight, with all our poems?

Biography of Frank E. Merchant

Dr. Merchant by Gene Robertson

Frank Merchant was born in 1910 in Providence, Rhode Island.  He attended Brown University and graduated with a BA, cum laude, in 1931.  He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and proudly wore his key most of his life.  After college he moved to New York where he worked as a free lance writer for newspapers and magazines.  He was one of the editors of "Smoke" magazine.

In 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the 45th Infantry Division, 157th Infantry Regiment, Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon, also known as "the coffee coolers".  His nickname was "the professor" fitting since later he would obtain a Phd and become a college professor.  He was one of the four originals in his company to return from Sicily and Italy.  He fought through two beach landings and was awarded two bronz stars.

After the war he settled in Denver, Colorado where he attended the University of Denver and earned a doctorate degree.  He spent several years as the public relations director for the Colorado State Highway Department and wrote a brief history of highways in Colorado.  But teaching had always been his first calling.  He spent a brief time at Mayville Teachers College in Mayville, North Dakota.  He was recruited in 1960 by Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky to be the head of the English Department.  He taught there for sixteen years.  He was a regular speaker at for the National Council of English Teachers.  In summers he made trips to Mexico and Spain.  He spent a sabatical at the Univeristy of Heidelberg, Germany, and was the Fulbright Guest at the German-American Studies Conference at Bochum. After his retirement in 1976 he stayed in Barbourville and continued to write.

All through his life he wrote these poems.  His chief muse was his wife, Christine.  His subjects were the war, his work, and his family.  The poems are windows into his life and thinking.  At the age of 80 he died in 1991.

If I ever met a person who I considered to be genius, Frank Merchant was the guy.

Karl Merchant

To Make, To Hear

Poetry is very simple
mere experience, one-dimenstion of what's past
and proclaiming "I feel:" and maybe cute.
But put me into last night
still churning in my stomach; worries in the near subconscious
summoning clacks of watch-minutes.  I haven't finished timing
my hopes, worst my fears while I am going on
in the never-end.
                  Love's like that, both finished and restirred
bad memories with the silk touch of a strange beauty's hand
as she said, "I'm now from Baton Rouge," and I don't know how she came up,
                                                                 why she left, who she was or the
                                                                        past I was supposed to be.

Poetry is very simple when it's over;
you never know why it came up, to who you are.  It's saying
stuff unending about your worries not-quite experienced or your straining
to get through the day as in a dream
                                                         unawakened
in a present where you want nothing clear
but to enjoy the words and the sudden, unrecognized face
in the time of whoever you were.

                                                                                                                                11-30-1974
                                                                                                                                 new orleans

For a Class in Composition

Well, you teach me so much error
by irritations that scratch out too many words:
I bathe my eyes
in unbroken paragraphs, must blink
from your unnecessary punctuation
and go on, as in unwanted dreams, through verbless sentences.

You do best with disasters, seem anyhow to understand yourselves
but strain at joys
anyhow; want to retreat from them in cliches
of beautiful trees, always the friendly stranger, friendly and admirable teachers;
anyhow no conscious word to wake up more than anything.

Learn to laugh; I have wanted to live with you
even if it meant wiping your eyeglasses constantly;
doing the whole writing myself
even if it mean imagining all you should say
and what I should relive.  I have not found your hidden, ruleless fun
even at what I say.  You let yourselves be caught, you do not win:
you do not evade our game.

Listening to Silence

                                                                             Too soon in the dripping forest
                                                                              to encounter myth
                                                                              wet tennis shoes
                                                                              move to plaster human floors
                                                                              from their aimless return
Experience a ricochet this morning, from last night; tomorrow
is placid, indoors
reflecting on a television woman's freckled cleavage
and rising to disagreement, not to be sold anything from electric
                                                                              screens by errant memory
of a delight
in old experiments or new tastes
the bored day leads to
by thinking about discomfort.
I have sat around the day after Pearl Harbor, listening.  There is no
                                                                             more urgent survival today
and very little expectation of victory, in a poem: only the trouble
                                                                              that is over
and a going back, in reversed echo.  All I am, let be confined, in a
                                                                              room which enfolds me like a minute.
                                                                              Down a trail a Schwetzingen squirrel, a
                                                                                                                     peacock
                                                                              move with nerves or stateliness I think
                                                                                                                     about
                                                                               to make a simulacrum
                                                                               ##
                                                                               with their sense
                                                                               or summaries in mind, layers above a death.
The room contains time, space for the hardly-felt lives of others;
inside my drying air falls dust recalled
or words recalled, in listening to silence.