Old Rags and Iron: New and Selected Poems (Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry) - Softcover

McEwen, R. F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496241894 ISBN 13: 9781496241894

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Old Rags and Iron is a collection of narrative poems about the life experiences of working-class people with whom the author, R. F. McEwen, is not only acquainted but whose lives he has shared. McEwen supplemented his income as a teacher while working as a professional logger and tree trimmer, and he writes with great love and respect for blue-collar families.

Set primarily in the back-of-the-yard neighborhood of South Side Chicago, where McEwen grew up, as well as Pine Ridge, South Dakota, western Nebraska, Ireland, and elsewhere, the poems celebrate many voices and stories. Utilizing tree-trimming as a central metaphor, these poems of blank verse fictions reverberate like truth.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R. F. McEwen was born in Chicago, Illinois. Since 1962 he has been a professional logger and tree trimmer, and he has taught English in Chadron, Nebraska, since 1972. McEwen is the author of several books, most recently The Big Sandy, Bill’s Boys and Other Poems, and And There’s Been Talk . . .
 

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Old Rags and Iron

There was an apple tree in our backyard,
and I remember balancing myself
against the wind in its green top. The apples, too,
were green, and I remember picking them
for pie my mother baked. It was a good
backyard, with rhubarb smack against the fence,
and farther back a weather-ravaged shed
we never used, until my mother fixed
a hoop against its side. And there I’d stand
and shoot against the world, against all time;
for morning lingered into afternoons,
and afternoons to long, descending dusks
that never fell until I’d won my game,
or mother called. And I remember well
the junkman and his wizened horse. They came
on Wednesday morning down the alley, where
in autumn we burned leaves; where the police
took rabid dogs to make them well; and where
on winter mornings tramps might keep a fire
in a rusty garbage can. This junkman, though,
it seemed he’d lost a lion by the name
of Rags. For over and again his voice
rang down the alley like a muffled bell,
its clapper wrapped in someone’s cast-off drawers.
“Old Rags, Old Rags the Lion,” was his cry
that, when I first remember hearing it,
had me believing he had Rags in tow,
that for a nickel one might view the beast
who, though he’d fallen on hard times, had once
been king.

It was late autumn, and the air
was heavy with a mist and lingering
leaf-smoke. I’d gone outside that morning, hard
upon my mother’s discontent with milk
that turned before it wet the glass, but more
with me: I’d moved the glass before she poured.
And when I heard the call announcing Rags
I called into the megaphone I’d made
my hands, “I’ll be right there.” And off I ran
with hope the man would stop just long enough
for me to see Old Rags. Then, “Stop! Wait up!”
I cried, confounded by my father’s coat
I’d worn against the rain, which caught, along
with clutching apple roots and unretrieved,
slow-rotting fruit, beneath my feet and pitched
me flailing on the apple-rancid ground.
And from my place I watched the horse pass by
and defecate. Its nostrils blew a stream
of heavy breath that sprayed the air with clots
of phlegm and mucous-weighted blood. It wore
a funnel-shaped fedora and a shawl
of emerald. And then I saw the man
and hailed him from my stew of muddy fruit;
“I want to see Old Rags,” I cried, my voice
a small tin whistle, shrill, at which he stopped his cart.
His back was bent, and he sat huddling
beneath a Turkish rug that formed a tent
about his shoulders and his head. Drawn on,
my head just level with the wheel’s top rim,
I heard within the tent the sound of raw,
long, grating coughs and sputtering. The air
that hovered at the entrance to the tent
was mingled with a staleness of smoke.
I stood below him in the mud; my eyes
were blank, my voice, except to say, “Old Rags,”
was gone. The soft rain, too, had gone from drops
to dampened air; the mist had cleared, the smoke
dispersed. And as I stood I couldn’t help
but send my glances slantways toward the cart.
But nothing rumbled, no, and nothing roared.
“If Rags is in there now,” I thought, “he’s off
to sleep, or sick.” But when the junkman turned
toward me and coughed, “Old Rags?” not glancing down,
I answered him, “I want to see Old Rags
the Lion.” “Then all aboard,” he said, “but don’t
be long.” And then he laughed, low, short, and mean,
“He wants to see old rags!”

But only heaps
of spongy gabardine, and shredded twists
of wilted felt, and steaming woolen scraps,
and greasy denim, corduroy in lumps
confronted me. Old Rags had bolted: “Free,”
I thought, while fear rose like a secret
in my throat. And with this revelation came
the sudden snapping of the junkman’s whip,
and then his gravel-burdened voice, “Move off
from there.” The wagon lurched, and I went down
into the mud still looking for Old Rags.

It was two years, I think, before I learned
the truth about Old Rags. Until that time
I played less in the yard, and when I did
I kept a weather eye for mottled shade
and always one ear cocked against the low,
voracious rumbling I knew would sound
his contemplation of a charge. And never
on a Wednesday would I play, unless indoors.
And always on a Wednesday I would hear,
come early morning on near breakfast time
after my father’d left for work, the sound
that, long years later, I remembered when
in northern Michigan, I heard far off
from shore the sound the ore boats make so late
at night when they are wallowing through fog.
“Old Rags, Old Rags the Lion, the Lion . . .”
And I, from safe inside, would always see
that grizzled man, aslump in summer with
a rainbow umbrella rattling
above his head, in fall and winter with
the Turkish rug; and always with a fresh,
more wizened horse, less lucky than the last
that must have died. But never did I see
the lion, Rags, or hear his deep marauding voice.
I never saw him springing from the mist,
or blend his tawny shadow with the trees.

And then one Wednesday when the night before
my ma had pulverized the house with cleaning up,
and gathered half a ton of junk, she heard
along with me the voice she’d waited for.
“Ah, that’ll be the man himself,” she said,
“the rags and iron man.” And then she turned
on me. “Get outta that,” she said, for I
was crouching near the pile. “Or would you stare
and watch me hauling this and never stir?”

Well, stir I did, and stir I have. Till now
it’s been mid-past full forty years since Rags
would, on a Wednesday, stalk our neighborhood
and make of our backyard his hunting ground.
My fear abated when I learned the truth,
and yet I’ve never lost entirely
my terror when I peered above the siding
of the junkman’s weathered cart and saw
old rags heaped listlessly like fallen men
and knew the Lion I was looking for
had fled. And it’s stayed with me all this time,
another rag of truth that nothing yet
in life’s caused me to shed or made less true:
I know the junkman never found Old Rags.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1496241894
• ISBN 13: 9781496241894
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande