Up Shit Creek. "Shit Creek;" as the locals called it, was nothing more than a tidal inlet at the mouth of the Skagit River. It was a beautiful place. Robert had his summer cabin there, up on pilings. He kept his rowboat at the Sand Spit where you could walk into the small town of LaConner. The photo shows Robert rowing out to his cabin one summer day. He spent his winters at a small cabin in Anacortes. What follows are memories of Robert and times we had together.
Memories. When poet Robert Sund died in 2001, I spent a couple of weeks sorting through his papers and books in his small cabin in Anacortes. I drank his wine. I cooked in his kitchen... And I hoped that unsung artists like Jimmy Schermerhorn could come and stay in his cabin like I did, like a writer or artist in residence. But the trustees took all his papers and books down to the university where they remain under lock and key, available only to approved researchers. That killed him. He remains embalmed in the lower basement of the library of the University of Washington in Seattle...Well, I did enjoy spending time in his cabin when his spirit was still alive and present.
When Robert died, they took him to the funeral home to be cremated. Robert did not want an open-casket wake and burial. But I didn't know that. I went over to the funeral home and they directed me to the room where Robert was resting. He was lying on a gurney all cleaned and fresh in a simple hospital gown. His hands were neatly folded and resting on his stomach, with his fingers wrapped around some Buddhist prayer beads like a rosary. His feet were bare, dangling over the edge of the gurney. I wanted to cover his bare feet with a blanket so he wouldn't catch cold, but then I realized that where Robert was going you don't need shoes and your feet never get cold. So, I stood there and just looked at him, all peaceful and serene. Then Jeff Langlow walked in. We talked quietly about Robert -- so many stories to tell. That was Robert’s wake, the one he didn't want. Later, he was cremated, and his ashes were given a proper Buddhist farewell.
November 1, 2003 at the Poet’s House. I had been maintaining Robert’s garden these past two years. The first thing to say is that a garden grows, but it can't be preserved. When I first began to work on it, I snipped a branch on the Mugu pine, and I knew right away that Robert would never have snipped that branch. He would have studied the situation for several months, and talked it over with people, and considered alternatives, and probably have made sketches, and then maybe – just maybe – he would have snipped a tiny bit of it. So, the garden is not the same and it never can be. That summer of 2003 I wanted to put new plants in the pots, but there was no one coming by to water them, so that was not possible. But that winter, I put in a few plants, a flowering kale and a chrysanthemum, which would do fine without attention. And the next summer, if we could get an Anacortes resident to be the waterer, we could plant all kinds of things. So, the garden grows, but as many people have asked me, everything in the house was just the way it was, all the books and papers and paintings and pottery, and little notes stuck here and there. All that can be preserved as it is, and the Trustees were seeing to that.
I wrote this in 2003, when dunja and I visited his garden. (She writes her name this way -- dunja)
Halloween,
Hail the Dead.
dunja and I toasted with sake,
scattering corn chips in the garden.
dunja is my esteemed yoga teacher,
and she's Irish like me.
Robert was Irish too, Tibetan-Irish actually.
We scattered the corn chips, two-years-old.
They were in a glass jar in the kitchen for two years,
since Robert died.
I told dunja, “The corn chips are getting old. We can’t keep everything.”
She said, “Let me taste one – Yes, they’re rancid.”
That’s what she said.
This is a faithful recording of the event,
The scattering of the corn chips on the
Second Anniversary of the Poet’s Death,
scattering corn chips in the garden to feed the mice.
Robert had a relationship with mice,
which was problematic.
The corn chips are gone.
Dunja left to do her business.
I threw out the rest of the old food in the ice box
and scrubbed it down – the old mold is gone now.
The ice box smells fresh and sweet and new.
Otherwise nothing has changed and
everything is in its place.
Robert's Biography. This website will get you to his biography and his poetry.
That's all I have to say about Robert today. I could tell you a lot more if you're interested. Just let me know.
What follows is something I wrote a few years ago. It's an experiment called Robert Sund's Soliloquy -- this is me imagining what he might have been thinking.
Robert Sund's Soliloquy
Guiding a stray bee out of the house—enough work for one day!
The sun was still high in the sky, but the air felt like evening. Robert Sund came inside the Boom Shack and went over to his stand-up writing desk. He picked up a small book of his own poems and looked them over.
It is time for the ink to spill this summer evening, he thought, and make more poems.
If I make a dot of ink as big as a dime, I can almost see my reflection in the glossy surface. I could see the future or past lives if I were interested, or the Jersey cows back on the farm where I grew up. I can see many things. And then the black ink dries and dulls as it settles into the paper, going to a charcoal matte finish, which does not reflect, and leaves no image, but for me, I can even peer deeper into ---- into what? I see a merry old man sitting by a small river under a blossoming almond tree. If I look closer – ah, the old man is drinking plum wine, he shouts in a drunken glee, “I am a fish. I am a golden diamond fish. I am the husband and the wife and the child. I drink this plum wine and I become a family of wild creatures.” The old man stood up, stripped down and jumped into the flowing river, waist-high, roaring with pleasure, scattering the ducks.
That’s how I find my poems, from this ink bottle. I see the old man sitting by the river. He is as real as my own thumb, but does it make a poem? Are the words, right? And is it true? More than anything a poem must be true.
It wasn’t like this when I was a schoolboy in Chehalis writing on Big Indian Chief tablets, that rough paper with light blue lines widely spaced for young hands to try their pens. I often smeared my long-sleeves into the ink when I was in the third grade.
My mother would scold me when I came home. Her scolding was so light it was almost a pleasure, if I could only make myself not smile at her. If I smiled at her she would have to start all over again, “Robert, you made a mess with the ink. You must be more careful. I have to scrub your shirt now, so it won’t stain.”
Then I would bow my head and wait a little, and then I could smile warmly at her, looking up. She was only a little taller than me.
I came to the farm in Chehalis as a bundle in a blanket, to this Swedish home with cedar rail fences and a pasture leading down to the river, full of old stumps. It was 1929, Herbert Hoover was President, and I was a baby in a blanket, and much loved, but even then somehow I knew I was a replacement for my brother Don who had died two years earlier from diphtheria. Don was buried in the church yard not too far from our farm and my mother and father never ceased to mourn. I was supposed to make them happy, and I almost did. I wished I could sing for them or do something to make them happy, but I was only a baby and my mother gave me a warm bath every day, until I grew up and ran in the fields and became a school boy.
My father, he knew how many beautiful August evenings surround an ear of corn.
And my mother, she knew that without love of Earth there is no love of heaven.
That’s how I wrote about my mother and father, with tears in my eyes. They loved me as much as they could, as much as I needed, but I felt different just the same, and the sorrow never left our home, like a dampness in the corners even on the driest, hottest days of August -- the tears and the dampness were only put away for a while. I smiled and chattered and played with small stones in the yard, making stone diagrams of houses and forts. I took fern leaves from the bushes and made fern railroads coming up to the houses in this tiny Swedish village where I daydreamed of lingonberry syrup on pancakes. In my play village the people were genuinely happy. I could even hear light laughter.
I worked hard enough in later years on the farm, doing chores, but it was never going to be my farm. My father knew that, he never said it would come down to me. He knew that I was not his true heir and he would not force me to be what I could never be.
It was a good home, but it was sad. I loved them as much as I could, but I was only a replacement.
Is this too simple to say? I watched the Chehalis River flowing and wanted to go downstream to Grays Harbor, leaving this farm. I knew I would never come back.
I found poetry at the University – I began to keep a small book and put words together. I left school and went over to the Eastern Cascades, to the Palouse, to work on dry-land farms under skies that never ended. I bucked hay in the heat and dust. I loaded wheat in the silo and almost died in an explosion. The farmers understood me – who I was and why I was there.
I came there to learn from the farmers because I thought I was special, and they taught me in the wheat field that I was only dust in the wind. They were true Buddhists. No reason, no meaning, no hope, and no chance of heaven. What a relief!
I returned to Seattle and lived in Cloud House. I married a woman because she was kind to me.
I left my wife in Seattle and moved to Shi-Shi Beach. That was my time on the wild ocean shore. It was so much bigger than the river. I sat there long enough -- it took years – but I sat and sat in a shelter under the wind until all my poetry dissolved into nothing. Then one day a raccoon told me I was getting lazy. He stole my last handful of Cracker Jacks. I chased him out of camp before I realized how much he was disturbing me. Oh, Raccoon Teacher – what were you telling me?
Telling me to leave Shi-Shi Beach and go back to town. It was time to listen to those busy town voices. So, I came to LaConner and lived in a room upstairs at the Planter Hotel. I had no money. I made calligraphies on expensive paper. I sold one or two. I played pool at the tavern, I kept making poems and I refused to work.
No money for rent! Hunger! The Muse pays so poorly, but she is so lovely. She lulled me to sleep in the early hours before dawn.
But I suffered. I was lonely. I was bitter and proud. I hated the world of success spinning all around me like jets flying overhead. I got drunk. I laughed but it was forced.
I know I am worse than anyone. I am guilty. My poetry is all lies, but I never tell this to anyone.
Now I have this small cabin in town, courtesy of Nelson Hardware. My poems amuse the Nelson family. They let me off easy for the rent, which I haven’t got anyway. Why do they trust me? I am a fraud. I owe money all over town. I clutch these papers and say this is my work and it has great value. The days are hard, but late at night, when the moon is quiet and bright, I see it all coming true and beautiful.
That’s when Jimmy and Hitch and Aurora Jellybean showed up slinging cold beer on their shoulders. “Hey Robert. Hi-ho. Are you thirsty?”
Note: Words in italics are from Shack Medicine, one of the Robert Sund’s chap books of poetry
|
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment