Spring, or nearly spring. Nearly Easter. Nearly the Holy Season. Once again.
I popped into The Last Mile mainly to say hello to Deano at the bar. It was nearly 5 p.m. today. There was a scattering of people at the tables, oddly no one I knew. But Deano informed me that PipPa Goldflower was having drinks on Knox the artist’s back porch upstairs. You get there through a side door and up a stairway off the side street. Knox’s door was open and I could see through his cramped dining area — full of leaning, half-finshed canvases and other junk — that he was, in deed, out there on his back porch with Pippa. I joined them. They gave me welcoming hellos. Pippa was in a long shift, florid, almost tropical (for spring, I presume). Knox was in jeans and a black shirt open at the neck, having a kind of priestly air — the black highlighting his gray, trimmed beard. They sat in cheap folding chairs I’m sure Knox picked up at Walmart.There was one more leaning against the wall and I took it. Down below were remnants of the winter’s fierce, unending snowfalls. It had been some winter. Of course, this being New England, it isn’t necessariliy over yet. But, spring seemed to be approaching at last… the temperature, the extra daylight, a certain smell of vegitation as it emerged from the ice and snow….
Down below in the dirt lot that was parking for Knox, Deano and whoever worked at The Mile (everybody else parked on the street). Knox’s old 1994 Volvo was down there pulled up against the lone tree. That car barely hangs together to get him around. It is burgundy red. Out ahead were the trees and the rooftops of the neighborhood and Knox had always hope he could get a peek through those roofs and trees at the blue ocean at Revere Beach. He claims you can when things line up (like hes saying the trees and rooftops move aside for him???Maybe after a couple of Blushing Monks). Dean says in winter, when the trees are bare, you can see the ocean from the roof. I haven’t been up on the roof. Maybe someday. Maybe not.
“So, a little change in the weather,” said Pippa. She had turquoise beads and a pendant hanging down over her shift. Her hair is dyed a kind of maize color and was pulled back behind her ears and flowed down her back. She has a wonderful smile that illuiminates a face that has been Botoxed to a vinyl-like smoothness. I could only guess at Pippa’s age — and I won’t. She’s an attractive women, will never age.
I thought these two might make lovers someday — but, no. Just friends. Good friends. Loyal patrons of the world of The Last Mile that Knox had graced with his mural art, making the place — from time to time –attractive to, believe it or not, tourists who happen to consult a guide to local “interesting” joints.
“The snow was eye-high out there,” Knox said. And right now, the air was mild enough for us to be sitting outside without jackets. The occasional breeze reminded us that that could change as the sunlight drifted west. Perhaps that breeze came from the ocean Knox hoped to see, like Balboa when he found the Pacific. Knox would discover the Atlantic.
“The war is driving me nuts,” Pippa said. I didn’t want to bring up the war. Who can do anything about the war who hangs around The Last Mile?
“All this reminds me of favorite poems,” said Knox, shifting quickly away from war.
Of course it did — whatever “all this” was — and something was always remining Knox of poetry. He named the poems. Things by Keats, Shelley, Byron. Knox is a romantic. “The world gets renewed by art and poetry,” he said.
“So, renew us,” I said. What he proceeded to give us wasn’t one of the Romantics. Even I, the old English major, knew that. But I thought I recognized it.
In Just-spring when the world is mudlicious, the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee…
That was how the poem went, spilling out in Knox’s deep baratone. He recited the whole thing from memory. It was by e.e. cummings. I did recognize it — Strang little thing, but nice. Yes, I liked it. I know e.e. cummings. He’s fun. He’s good for spring.
“I know the others,” Pippa said. “I know what you’re going to give us. Cummings is your only modern guy. Next you’ll recite some Romantics. Impress us with your memory.”
Knox laughed.
“But let me get one in there edgewise, if I may, “Pippa said.
I knew Pippa liked Edna St. Vincent Millay. How did I know that? Well, this sort of thing — these quirky patrons of the Mile sitting around, musing –had happened one day last spring when it was still chilly out and Knox and Pippa and some guy she’d linked up with, an arty type, were sitting around a table and Knox had his Blushing Monk in front of him. (This day, up there on his porch, he and Pippa just had half-drunk cups of coffee.)
“So, what have you got for us, Pip?” I said.
Nothing is so beautiful as spring,” she said. That was the beginning of her poem. It wasn’t her lady Edna S.V.M. It was someone and something else. A strange little poem, which continued…into spring…
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
No, she hadn’t memorized that. She was reading off her iPhone. But that was quite some poem.
“Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she said.
“Ah, the old Jesuit,” I said. “Sprung rhythm,” I added, summoning a memory of English class.
“There’s more,” she said.
“Well, by all means, let’s hear it,” said. Knox.
And we did, in Pippa’s velvet voice. (I believe she been on the stage at one time.)
“What is all this juice and all this joy? ” she said, reading.
Juice. Joy. Yeah, That sounded like Hopkins. Really — evocative, the way he writes. Odd rhythms. Odd diction. (I was really channeling Literature 101 now.
Pipa went on…
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Wild, wierd stuff,” said Knox.
“Not unlike your paintings,” said Pippa.
“I liked it,” I said while Knox was still laughing. “I like Hopkins. It’s religious, of course. He was a priest, after all.”
“Religion, poetry–we’ve had it all out here,” Knox said, sipping his cooling coffee –which, I’d wager, had a drop of brandy in it. “I’d call it sufficient. Enough! Enough with words! Words, words, words….
Now,” he said, stood, plainly a little stiff from sitting, and went to the porch rail which I hoped could take his leaning weight, ” let me see if, just for once, I can see the sea out there.”He stared, in silence — as if “on a peak in Darian.” (I was channeling poetry now, too. Phrases popping into mind.
“Yes! I see it,” Knox said. He meant the ocean.
I’m sure he did. I’m sure at that point, old Knox, flush with springtime and in the presence of Pippa his warmest inspiration, his “juices and joys” flowing — I’ll bet he could see all the way to Europe.
And if we stayed out there long enough, he’d be seeing all the way to the moon, too.
Yes, there were more poems. And some repeats, the world down below us, the mudlicious, the little lame balloon man’s whistles far and wee… (Pippa said she could hear it on some street nearby) … We were with old G.M. Hopkins …In Eden garden.
I stayed with them until the early spring dusk set in.
19 Cent Notebook 