Bannister's Landscapes

Hay Gatherers

There’s hayseed in the air. I’m off work, having sold two

Barbizon moonscapes, so this day is free from after-shaves

and hair cream–Christiana’s at the barber shop till six.

I feel so alive under stratus clouds, September’s sky that’s

mottled a mile above a restive sea. At Purgatory Chasm

I spot green herons in the field where six hay gatherers

ease their backs, take breakfast with bread and water.

Maybe their grannies hail from Surinam, the sweat

of their brows betokens living on borrowed time.

Two women scythe vetch now, others, too young to kiss,

load the ox-bright carriages. In the distance, you can hear

a locomotive plummet towards the setting sun. Here,

as all along the crumbling Underground Railroad,

the passing Pullman dining cars are lit by kerosene.

Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses

This raft of Medusa is foundering off Holetown,

wrecked by the wrath of a nameless storm, 1891–

sibyls are dirty and mud-caked, the ship’s men

dead-tired, having suffered being turned to swine,

having had enough of rum, ruin, spiny mermaids

from the bottom of the sea. Twin peaks, dense

Brazilian selvas surface through a haze of sun

that warms a thousand years before its time. Giant

yuccas and bananas fan out on wetlands freezing

as an Ice Age pivots into place. Ulysses, idiot-

malcontent, wishes he had a daughter to offer

to the gods of Euboea. Instead, he ravages

the sea to bargain with a white goddess, who rests

her forearm on his groin, before she takes the plunge.

Coal Dock, East Providence

It’s cold on the coal dock, here in the land of steady habits.

I’ve got coal dust in my lungs, it feels like chunks of anthracite,

Liverpool coal, a blanket smell of burning oil, the moon

enticing two tow boats toward the Seekonk shore, just

upriver from where Roger Williams, at Tockwotten,

cheered for a chaste-free God who promised us nothing

but providence. A shot glass of Monongahela whiskey,

my palette poised upon a shuttle bin. In the filth,

I have some hope for purity of soul, the night

casting its pall on God’s creatures: farriers, Negro

bootblacks, an Irish soapmaker, blind in one eye,

groups of toughs shoving proper ladies off the sidewalk.

A half-eaten calf, consumed by worms who’ve supped on kings.

Ursa Minor taints the sky. I wonder how, through whom, and why.

Return of the Herd

How to paint light at the water’s edge? Or how to image silence?

After printing tintypes at Dorrance Street till noon,

I set up oils and easel in the hawk-fed meadows.

Lorries with bottled cream jog their way up to Pawtucket.

Noon gives in to afternoon and shadows. Just when

I thought this tiny pied a terre was uninhabited,

a herd returns, prodded by a dark and barefoot girl,

two cattle dogs nipping at the heels of every steer.

Thistles burst. Stone walls, as sturdy as New Brunswick’s,

define a distance between the apprenticed and the free.

A killdeer limps with a broken wing. A white bullock

falls behind–the edge of my unschooled, harmonic grid.

To paint what’s not to be seen? No, not me–I, indivisible,

brush myself into the circle of light that one cow stands in.

Squall, Brenton’s Point

Lear's worst enemy couldn't have promised such a storm.

Eider ducks bob on the eight-foot surf, take wing for shelter

on land as a mass of grave, gray cumuli descend. A lone ship,

outward bound for the black Atlantic and Middle Passage

can scarce be seen for a tempest building breath by breath.

Crashing waves along the reef: shore dump, sea foam, spurge,

witch invective in the rising surge. Closer, a clump of sedge

withstands the Piterak, a single luna moth still clings

to a stalk. The white spume–the whites are blasted heath.

Water is colored like burgoo­–or crimson incense–or

a thousand starfish thrown upon the dunes. Exodus to

Robertsport, Monrovia--all forgotten in the turbulence.

Seaweed gatherers, drenched by red rain, run for cover.

The sea has no mercy. This wind is howling me home.

Neutaconkanut

I’m up on this Wachusett hilltop, when I had to get away,

to a serpent mound such as you find in fugitive Ohio,

an alienist as he studies the wrinkles of a brow.

How many distant cotton mills are burning now?

A quadroon and friend was dragged to his death

this morning on Transit Street–I escape to try to say

what it was, from up here where an osprey fastens

on a weasel the color of his burrow. I can almost

see a slaver pushing up East Passage, bound

for Charleston, for trading in men and molasses.

A girl named Asia levers a hoop off a basalt cliff,

everything smells like sumac. For now, sounds

of a harvest pow-wow draw me back to this world,

back from a picture of the restlessness of nature.

Newspaper Boy

I marvel at the youth as if he were my own, dancing about

a cooky stand downtown and blurting out advertisements

that pleasure men to spend their pennies. Joseph Wiggins

is arrested for stealing a loaf of bread! Fire on a hay train.

Nashville wakes to Ku Klux Klan. Coup d’etat in Port-au-

Prince! On Weybosset Street all wrath is out: guttersnipes,

match girls, boilermakers, chimney sweeps, an El Dorado

of the northern market square: Hopkins Magic Gold Dust

for thrush and grease heels, carpet sewing machine pins,

German bitters, two-bit box shooks, 5-cent Indian cigars,

spindles, cassimeres, wood pulp ware, Eiffel collar buttons,

ships’ windlasses, young men’s underwear. All industry! –

as I eye the newsboy who unpacks his paper stack, dreams

he’s another Frederick Douglass, another leader of free men.

Blue Hill (Near Boston)

Put yourself in the middle of a blue teal flyway:

hemlocks thirst for water, quivering like dowsing sticks,

a marten naps fitfully until cannon fire implodes.

Nothing else stirs: not like Milk Street in the city,

the Crispus Attucks choir-boy songs and cries

of angels emblazoning the earth. No sachems

at the creek swell–only a mill wheel on the river

turning sludge to sludge–paradise of cotton,

gin shops, rum holes, teetotalers. Remember

when you lay in snow here as if to rest forever?

The candle-light dusk is sulky, grum, and chill.

We are as poor as Job’s turkey, but I’ve got a

horse and buggy to reach Blue Hill. July is here–

cicadas trill–my only thoughts are to expunge

the war drums from the shadow of these oaks.

Dutch Cow, Girl, Meadow

At Kaaterskill, I stop to paint clouds, as thin wisps sift

across the Hudson, on the trip home from the Centennial,

where my ‘Under the Oaks’ won bronze, but guards would not

acknowledge it as mine. I’m still a ‘coloured’ on the train,

even though my palette doesn’t favor black or white.

I loved “ The Death of Cleopatra,” the pomological displays,

a giant, wheeling Corliss engine, screw machines, kennel dogs,

a distant cricket match, a peek at the Hermit Kingdom

of Korea, and early grass and butter. A whole day devoted

to the rhododendron, but still it is a two-tiered walk.

Reconstruction is a wreck. Transcendentalists are mute

and no one now speaks about reincarnation. A Dutch cow,

a girl in a meadow–they are my only gauge of the colors

of mankind, a sky as blue as the sea of my beloved home.

Rowboat in a Storm

In this crayon study, I'm somewhere off Porcupine Island, near

Georges Bank, not far from where Mother brought us up,

me in my sailboat named Fanchon. I'm off the coast of Eden,

Maine, near a landlocked spermaceti works, the Cyclops caves

where the ocean's offal bakes. The wind comes up, I reef sail

and come to. At home, 93 Benevolent, I splatch impasto,

eat canned Crimean eggs, and crank the telephone to speak

with Gustine Hurd, a colleague from the Ann-Eliza Club,

who lectures me on life in the year 2000, when four towers

beam light across the city, Freetown girls travel by balloon,

and a gladiator coliseum looms over Roger Williams Park.

I'm happy with summer pudding, wine, and pepper pot,

because–as I look at it again–an indistinctive something

in the painting stirs, emerging from inscrutable fog and dark.

The Drinking Pool

for Jesse Murry

Perhaps I too am a shade, as you turn to speak with someone

standing by. We loiter at the center of the pavilion, but even

a Garrison or Bronte will look straight through us, now that

the war is over, the fight for equal rights is done. What have

we won? I have my private atelier, my leisure time to paint,

and you, your flourishing Madame Carteaux, Hair Doctress

salons and your society. The drinking pool, as I capture it,

is bottomless, feeding creatures of the world that fly at night

to siphon goats’ blood and bison gall when it’s cool. Fire-

red sun sets over a pond of evergreens. My Lisbon bakers

cry saudade, longing for a place that isn’t anywhere, a state

of mind that can’t be bought but in a meadowscape I try

to paint before evening falls. A lark lets out a single note

as if to say, I would have made out very poorly were it not for you.

Road to a House with a Red Roof

Gypsy caravan on the post road to Taunton. Two cars, a tent,

a skinny cat and dancing bears. I lie back and close my eyes:

black butterflies. Circassian beauties from the Black Sea, true

Caucasians for all the world to see. If it was Barnum, there’d

be hundreds of babies, and Schlitzie the Monkey Girl, his sister

Athelia hidden in an attic, the ‘Nondescript’ (another missing link,

named William Henry Johnson) and two white beluga whales

brought from Isle au Coudres, in a giant water tank on wheels

that stopped at shanty towns all the way down to New York.

Light-box panoramas of the West, a pink-ass Ourang Outan.

He says that people want picture shows. I want to sketch so

I can see, picturing this unordinary scene as if it’s all serene,

rising from my ribs through my hands to matte board, a hint

of my sullen temper in the guise of a road, a house, and trees.

Looking East from the Homeopathic Hospital

I’m sitting under a copper beech at Snowtown–torn up by rioting

as was Hardscrabble, just up the hill, when drunken sailors struck

with derringers at poor black working folk. There’s a monument

to the War between the States, a sort of garden of heroes, including

officers of the 54^th Infantry. Back then, this day would have been

Election Day, and some King Coromantee would be rapping

people’s shins with a bastinado–that’s all passed now, the only

dignity we find is what we make ourselves. I walk to Planet Street

and back, talking with a stevedore from Stockholm, promising

to paint his likeness before he ships to Guinea. I hear a washboard-

accordion shanty from a granddad and his little boy, as they trill out

bawdy songs from Boa Vista. Looking East from the homeopathic

hospital, I can see the coast at Plimouth and the Cape, the islands,

and the continent beyond, the one it’s not our place to speak about.

Twilight, Willows, Sheep

On Candlemas, I calm Christiana’s fears of dying penniless.

Spider mites in bed lace, broken windowpanes, frozen water

pipes until the fifth of March. Come spring, we’ll amble

in beach rose, listen to crickets in the wood, a saw-whet owl

at Sachuest, where a rock-face silhouette resembles Cato,

the ships’ cook I knew aboard a sloop they call the Venus.

We’ll walk in fields and toe through harvest aftermath:

corn husks, pumpkin, rue, and dill–the bones of a coyote kill.

Queen Anne’s lace, a kettle pond, a kingfisher with a carp.

It’s a stone’s throw to the roadside quarry on a day when

I will not paint, but pray that it won’t be me that sleeps

beneath North Burial Ground grass before I set you free.

A butterfly farm is dark as we reach the headland to the sea,

shepherds walking with a torch, looking for the one lost sheep.

About the Poems

Author's Statement - Poems to the National Endowment on the Arts

https://www.arts.gov/nea-literature-fellowships/bill-allen

I guess I'd have to say that I am a hay gatherer - or at least one of the ones who watch others gathering hay. For me, the axis of the world turns on interesting and intimate detail and the broad, revolutionary sweeps of actions that history makes sometimes clear to us. Or the music of the spheres.

As a poet, I am in love with the inexplicable, the mystery of not knowing, as long as it is inextricably bound up in the constraints of everyday life and a preternatural consciousness. As a painter, I'm like the seven-year old boy we saw on the F train yesterday-Christmas Day, 2008-with his favorite present, his first digital camera, framing shot after shot along the tracks at Seventh and Fourth Avenues in Brooklyn. "Perfect," he'd exclaim out loud for every click of the shutter! A kind of Platonic ecstasy in everything we do.

The poems read by the NEA panel are part of a fourteen-poem cycle-a response to Edward Mitchell Bannister's landscape paintings. I was intrigued with the painting titles, which suggested social and industrial-era issues in a way that his paintings, often bucolic and dreamy, do not. Not at first glance, anyhow. Bannister was a Romantic, an African-American painter, a lover of the sea, and sometimes social activist in the city of Providence in the late nineteenth century. Many of the paintings no longer exist, and I have taken license with their form and content, resurrecting some in my own way that might otherwise be lost for all eternity.

I'm a dad and a husband, too, and these things are central to who I am. Like supporting the ones who rely on me to be there. For me, the honor of achieving an NEA is grand, and helpful, for the life of a poet (who's married to a sculptor!) is never easy. But it is something we can't live without.