As a writer and artist publishing for the last three decades, Stephen
Mead has finally gotten around to getting links to his poetry still
online at various zines available in one place:
http://stephenmead.weebly.com/ links-to/poetry-on-the-line- stephen-mead
His latest Amazon release is entitled "Our Spirit Life”", a poetry/art
meditation on family heritage, love, and the evanescence of time.
http://www.amazon.com/Stephen- Mead/e/B002P5TVQC/ref=ntt_dp_ epwbk_0/178-9316259-8711759
~Stephen Mead
http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-
Impressions from the Land of Vanished Beautiful Things (I)
In my
mind's eye floats a photograph. The photograph, in turn, is also the
memory of an actual door. This is how the mind can function as both
microscope and telescope; moving in, drawing back,
knobs turning lenses from blurriness to magnified clarity. Writing
this makes the whole business sound detached. Would it be too
sentimental, but also more accurate, to say that this invisible
mechanism exists in my heart, the entire DNA and cells of my
being?
Photo of Stephen and his brother in front of the porch. |
The
door is made of sturdy metal and shimmers as if with an invitation to a
magpie or crow. Due to being connected to a central spring it squeaks
with a metallic rubber band sound when opening
and closing, but the central spring prevents a slam. This is the front
porch door to the house I grew up in, and the photograph is actually of
a shadow of the lower part of the door which creates a cursive M on the
white-washed wall adjacent. The M stands
for Mead and I can see it forming as if via filigree and mercury, the
intricate scrollwork of soldering creating, against the glass it rests
upon, a pleasing design of positive and negative space.
I am
maybe eighteen, nineteen, or in my early twenties, when I take this
photograph with a wonderfully compact 110 camera. I am undergoing some
creative stage of unconscious instinct, obsessed
with shadows and reflections, their dreamy capacity to create secret,
through-the-looking-glass messages; to become worlds unto themselves. I
get lost from moments to hours at a time with this 110 camera which
also, here, now, helps me remember other details
of the porch. In another photo from this time period there are flowers
my sister got from a then-current beau. I bring them out to the
greenhouse light of the porch and photograph the rose and lily petals of
their actuality with the vase wrapped in the
swirl of a mustard-colored wool coat from the 1940s. Again I also
photograph their shadows splayed against the aged white interior of yet
another door which leads directly into the kitchen of the house.
These
doors, these memories, are like Russian nesting dolls. Under the vase
is a long moss-emerald green runner with black fuzzy threads marbling
the weaving. I love the earth tones of this
runner both against the yellow wool texture of the coat, but also on
their own, especially when captured by squares and rectangles of sun. I
love the warmth of those rectangles where the frames of the porch
windows are projected. I would like to be a cat
curled in up that buttery warmth. At the end of the runner is a black
rubber welcome mat and on top of that another mat of rubber ribbon coils
set in grids to wipe mud off. Ingeniously, my mother has decided that
under this mat is a good place to hide the
front door key.
Along
the walls by the front door I can picture galoshes and also boots with
bread bag-linings set on top of newspapers. The dryer vents, with a
long-ribbed white hose, across the gray poured
concrete of this porch and out the propped metal door with the M in its
bottom pane. The porch shelters the original white shingled exterior of
the house, becoming insulation, though of course, depending on the
season, drafts or summer heat still leak past.
This porch is a truncated L-shape, and between the four original
windows of the house on the interior and the series of windows which
line both sides of the exterior, the radiance housed can be a glorious
honey-butterscotch.
Some
days I can smell the dust and dryer lint of it which still manages to
come across as misty but clean. Other days we do not use the dryer but
make use of the clothesline the length of the
front. Sometimes we use both but in either case the smell of wet
fabric drying is comfort.
On
not-too-cold, rainy days, for something to do, go out on the porch with
jacks, marbles and a small easily-squeezed, red rubber ball. It doesn't
matter if you don't know the rules. The game
is Pretend; spiral the jacks like miniature ballerinas in
pirouette; spin the smooth cat-eyes, watch them become worlds. Don't
forget the "Bowl A Strike!" game; setting up the plastic pins in a
perfect triangle and letting the lightweight black plastic
ball, complete with indentations for holes, set sail! Remember, at
Christmas, hang that large Santa head, a print glued on cardboard and
only flaking off slightly as the years go by. Tack him to the top of the
front center window lined up with all those other
old little tack holes from Decembers past. There he is: beard of
curls, red sleeve of fur trim, red gloved hand with index finger to lips
as he winks. On the other interior windows are pinecones painted with
glitter, strung with green velvet ribbon. At
night their glitter shimmers with reflections pouring from the
Christmas tree lights.
Later
you are old enough to help with porch maintenance: sweeping, mopping
the cool gray concrete, chasing out the spiders, vacuuming the
occasional cobweb with its mummified flies. Every few
years there is also re-painting, learning how to use a putty knife,
scrape away cracked chunks around panes, layer in just-the-right-amount
of fresh adhesion with a downward swipe. Develop a rhythm for this.
Use a ladder and also help change the windows
for screens. Remember to hose them out front before hooking in place.
Wash the winter windows with vinegar before propping against the wall,
your hands puckered with news ink. What is the antique window glass
made of that, though clear, seeing-through it
is to notice slightly miniature ripples, a slight bluish greenish tint,
as if the material is similar to that of the glass insulators on
telephone poles? Press head or hands against glass or mesh. It is
meditative but also sometimes a symptom of intense
boredom. Take note of the trumpet vine, the wisteria flowering to the
far right, its bark twisting thick as grape vines. Occasionally a
humming bird buzzes; a reverie of rarity.
Not a
lot of drama occurs on this porch, though occasionally the front door
key is not under the mat and a little panic stirs until my brother
figures out how to sneak in through a basement window.
Then of course there are the usual calls of hello and goodbye, the
family standing along the porch waving at the vehicle crunching up the
gravel driveway.
One
late purple afternoon of January winds a hobo huddles on the front
porch, stands by the circular silver dryer outlet. My Mother and I can
see the bulk of his shape from the living room and
are afraid, but both go out. "Feel my hands," he keeps saying to my
mom, holding out what looks like thickly veined and roughened ham
hocks. "They are so cold." This is what pain, pity and pathos looks
like.
Mom
finds Dad who drives the hobo to the railroad station a few miles off.
Apparently there is something like a canteen there where he can get a
hot meal and coffee. This is the story I am given
anyway and also how Dad's Mom, during the Depression, like many a
farmer's wife, fed the hobos passing from the trains; how occasionally
they would help with a chore or work the fields then be on their way.
On July
nights the porch sparkles with fireflies teeming in the meadows.
Peepers and cicada make a racket amid the intermittent squeal and clang
of the rails. Moths dance like snowflakes, flutter
against screens along with giant grasshoppers climbing. We are used to
this bug life.
In the winter when the moon is full, reflecting on snows, the porch is
polar too, and the house feels far away from everything. There is a
porch light however, under a thick chalk-pale shade
that has a gothic acorn shape. We leave the light on when the whole
family is out somewhere, maybe the drive-ins, and also only when one or
two of us might not be home. There is a sense of loneliness or being
disowned if that light accidently gets switched
off or the bulb burns out, but in my mind's eye I can still see it now
shining through the distant darkness, giving a glow to all the front
porch windows; a melancholy balm for homesickness, a beacon which
whispers like a lullaby:
home safe, safe home.
~Stephen Mead