-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

April 11, 2015

I watched this lithe girl and I fell in her trance
As she whirled and cartwheeled in her Pauline’s Dance
She pressed me to her body, whispered, “Take a chance,”
And we did

There was the smell of wildflowers and Queen Ann’s Lace
And the color of the dark of the moon in her face
When she gave me her pale body as a resting place
It was soft

Then she was with child, we exchanged clover rings
Our friends gave us infant clothes and rattley things
And we gave us our bodies and made baby names:
Jasmine or James

On a hot August night she awoke in our bed
And she screamed—the mattress was soaked crimson red
And I gave of my body to our baby dead
And still

In fall, a grim reaper paid a visit to her
And she grew horribly thin, she could barely stir
And I would give her my body as a holy shelter
And cry

In the dead of brittle winter, in ice and white snow
We buried her body in the wildflower meadow
And I gave her my body’s long, weeping shadow
And mourned

I write this poem as an old man and bent
My body bruised, broken from a life well spent
And her body feeds wildflowers and succulents
And senses

And they Pauline Dance.

To the memory of Pauline Whelan

April 10, 2015

The naked trees dressed up tonight
In emeralds and feathers
And all the ladies gathered

The bullfrogs and the peepers piped
In ruby eyes and gaiters
And played a show of waltzes

Coyote yipped haunting fanfares
Cocooned in bright butter moon
Then sang his plaintive poems

Owl asked existential questions
In a hood of bark and leaves
And the rabbit chorus wailed

Raccoon babes rolled in the meadow
In charcoal masks and striping
And chanted nursery rhymes

The naked trees dressed up tonight
In emeralds and feathers
And all the ladies gathered

The denizens all gathered

April 9, 2015

I shop at Aldi—you got a problem with that? Yes, it can take twenty minutes to find that one box of strawberries that might be perfect, and you might bump elbows with some fierce fruit lovers in the process. Aldi shoppers are much more aggressive than are Schnucks shoppers. Schnucks shoppers wear fine gowns and suits and have valets roll their carts for them.

This morning at Aldi, I rooted around for strawberries (slide the top box over and reveal the unmolested box below where the strawberries haven’t been mangled yet) and bananas and a pineapple and some other stuff.

And I hear singing.

I step around to the far aisle, and there is a cute African American woman of thirty-something and her two kids, a boy and a girl sitting in their shopping cart. And they are singing a broccoli song: “Point, point, point-point-point, point that broccoli/Point, point, point-point-point, we love our broccoli!”

Whereupon Mom reaches in the freezer and pulls out a couple of bags of frozen broccoli and pops them into her cart, and the kids are singing like they’re watching Elmo on “Sesame Street,” I mean they are happy, and Mom starts the “point, point” song again and does a 360 dance move. And sees me.

“Oh-oh,” the smiling woman says, rearranging her luxuriant curly hair, “you think I have lost my mind.”

“Not at all,” I say. “I just wish I had known that method when I had little girls that would not eat broccoli. Amazing.”

“We love broccoli, Mister,” the tiny, girl says.

“It works. Turn any problem into a song,” Mom tells me. “Sing it and dance with them.”

Turn any problem into a song. Hear that, Hillary Clinton and “Latino Jeb” Bush (he listed himself as Puerto Rican on his voter registration card), and the boobs at Fox News?

Young parents: Imagine a pooping song, where you dance and sing along. Report back to me.

Be happy. And eat your broccoli.

April 5, 2015

I had the blahs last evening so I drove toward Alton. The bars were crammed with customers, but nearly everything else was shut down.

On the beltway I saw a familiar neon restaurant sign and a parking lot full of people. I drove there and treated myself to a milkshake and a sandwich. Okay. People were post-Easter feast and dressed down to my all-the-time-level.

The manager, a forty-something, portly, balding guy came over and struck up a conversation: How was I? How was he? Okay.

And I had my sandwich and I slurped up every drop of my strawberry-with chocolate-on-top milkshake. Two teen waitresses, one black, one white, cleared tables. Life was okay.

I walked to the cash register to pay my bill. The manger was talking to a couple my age. The subject was handguns. And, you know, when you’re in a line in this neck of the woods, you wait. They talked Glocks and Colts, and what kind of gun was behind the counter, and the husband of the couple said he had multiple guns.

It all seems absurd to me–gun talk. I don’t get it. I will never get it–that level of fear. But I perked up when the manager mentioned incongruously that his choice of handgun was dictated by his other job: bounty hunter in St. Louis.

Whereupon the wife, fresh from her Christ-filled Easter said, “How do you tell them apart?” And she and the hubby began laughing–I was standing behind her. And she turned and saw me and said merrily, “They all look alike!” Haw, haw, haw!

I said, “You racist bitch.”

She choked, as though her laughter was a solid object constricting her throat. Her husband said to her, “What did that guy say to you?”

I turned and walked out, half expecting gun play. I drove west, my arms shaking. I got home and I didn’t kick the cat.

And I seethed.

April 5, 2015

The riverstreams are stained with stands of green cane, hepatica white, doll’s eyes, wake robin and golden seal.

And little girls’ Easter dresses mirror these colors. Children have come to Grandma’s house, for the Easter egg hunt and the ham and the green bean casserole. And the one little lad who can’t find a single egg and he bawls and a mom cries, “There’s a pink one.”

The mothers bend in the wind, their dresses pressing into the spaces between their legs, overseeing the hunt while the fathers, trousers legs flapping, huddle by the house and the grill and hold beer cans and smoke cigarettes and look inward.

This is a hollow walk. I have widely scattered family, so I send the day alone and only get nostalgic when I see a tiny princess riding her daddy’s shoulders, and I say, “Little girl, you have four legs—how is that?” And she shrieks with pleasure, revealing tiny, poky front teeth.

The forest paths are draped in bloodroot and spring beauty and Jacob’s ladder, and Jack-in-the-pulpit unfolding languidly. Dwarf larkspur pokes through the dead leaves and toothwort shudders in the breeze along the ground. These are the wildflowers, their seeds passed through the guts of birds and squirrels and shat on the loam and swallowed by the loam.

Waves of blackbirds form Baroque glissandos on the sky. What might have the pianist Glen Gould made of the music? A committee of turkey vultures perch in a circle on the ground, flapping their wings and calling the meeting to order, their voices harsh.

Last call—last frost—time to plant to winnow to separate to prune to pull from the fecund soil. Oh, the babies, the babies and

(the riverstreams stained with stands of green cane, hepatica white, doll’s eyes, wake robin and golden seal).

April 2, 2015

There is that old wives tale that says the first mosquito bite of the season is a harbinger of bad things. I got my first bite this morning, on my right shoulder blade where I couldn’t reach it. It’s been downhill since.

The Carolina wren, about which I wrote yesterday, was back at it, tearing apart my welcome mat for nesting material, its head covered with a crown of welcome mat fiber. It was charming yesterday, but today, with only seven-eighths of a welcome mat left, I opened the door.

That should have ended it right there. I am, after all seventy times bigger than a Carolina wren. The wren adjusted its crown of welcome mat fibers and . . . gave me the finger. (I know what you’re thinking. But you haven’t had a wren give YOU the finger.)

I slammed the door, stomped into my office, went online and researched wrens. (Did you know there are eighty species of wren, and they come from the family “Troglodytidae?” That’s right—they’re troglodytes.) After an hour, I found an old Audubon Society document headed: “Rules for Wren Behavior.” It seems that wrens are unionized, part of the SEIU since 1998. Continue reading →

April 1, 2015

On the Genehouse walk, I can’t get out the front door—the action is that good. Through the window I see a tiny Carolina wren on my porch, a guy with cool black streaks on the sides of his fingertip-size head, shredding my welcome mat to pieces, stuffing his beak with nesting material. Housefinches sound heavenly—until you hear a Carolina wren sing for his girlfriend. Wrens are the opera singers of the bird world.

On the walk, I meet a man and his dog, at the bottom of the wooded section of La Vista Park. The pup, four months old, is a Weimaraner, gray with turquoise-blue eyes, and she flops on her back and I scratch her belly. Her paws are enormous; she will be a giantess.

A shadow flies over us and the man says, “Holy crap.” A barred owl has landed in the tree branch over our heads, a black snake writhing in its beak. I know the snake’s name: Lunch. The pup barks and the owl takes flight. This is the same tree branch I wrote about last fall, when an owl attacked a squirrel and lofted up to that tree. I know that owl.

For the fourth time I walk through the exhibit of “The Artist of the Stone Gallery Across from the Island Below the White Birds.” I know: this is a private showing; this is for me. For you need “the eye”: how archaeologists refer to persons who possess sixth sight.

At Stroke Hill, Hummingbird Man, his blond ponytail almost down to his waist, rides a mountain bike. He could be a circus performer, all ropy muscle and balance. He pulls the bike onto the rear tire and does three 360 degree turns, lands, shifts his weight and rises on the front tire, does three 360 degree turns, lifts himself by the handlebars and rotates the bike under his torso three 360 degree turns, lands, stops, and says, “Hey, Gene.”

We talk hummingbirds—what else? Put up one feeder next week, we agree; there’s always on outlier birdkid with a duck’s ass haircut arriving early. We know.

I know spring has come. The wisteria has popped as have the weeping willows, and the mustard colors gleam in the sunlight. The dogwoods and magnolias and redbuds are sprouted and pushing. Every bush and thornplant and ivy and tuft of grass and Rose of Sharon and bloodroot and yellow trillium and snowdrop anemone have turned to green, all the leaves and strands coming to unfolding leaf.

When I arrive home, a container of my neighbor Irene’s zucchini spaghetti is on the front porch. I have eaten this delicacy before, and I know:

Mighty good eating.

March 31, 2015

On Saturday, her art appeared along the River Road walk from Clifton Terrace to Stanka Lane, twenty-one installations of found materials atop boulders and tree stumps and in the crooks of trees. Eighteen of the pieces stood alone. The other four nestled together, two and two, in family groups of mothers and children.

I know the artist is a woman. The few footprints I saw were slight. There was much leaning across on the balls of the tiny feet. The arrangements came from the imagination of a maternal soul. And it was all so so so so beautiful.

All the figures and shapes are fashioned of stacked pieces of limestone, a couple of stacks delicate and precarious, a mere three or four inches in height, others over a foot high, the slabs and pieces arranged geometrically to show us kneeling postures, and seeking and serenity and depth.

I have passed the exhibit three times now, each trip seeing new things, understanding new things. How is roundness achieved with angular limestone? She knows, the Artist of the Stone Gallery Exhibit Across from the Island and Below the White Birds. Continue reading →

March 25, 2015

“Oh, your poetry,” a reader wrote to me recently. “Your pastoral musing, your innocence of nature.”

Fie on poetry. As a character in my short story “The Stalker” observes: “It is all sex.” And that rhymes with “vex,” which leads to “concupiscent” which rhymes with “nuisance” (not really: poetic license, but you get my drift) which means, “Sweet birds of youth! Knock it off!

Two days ago, I’m motoring up the driveway when I see a wounded starling rolling in the gravel. Oh no, I think, I have to put the poor thing out of its misery. I climb out of the car preparing myself to bash a bird brain. And then the one becomes two—two starlings clenched in a ball and, uh, doing it. The male rides on top and curses at me: “Old man! Get the eff away from me and my girlfriend!” And to his girl: “Don’t stop, don’t stop!”

I back away. I’m a guy—no guy every wants to horn in on another guy’s action. But the female starts shrieking like a girl. It’s over for her. She tosses her hapless guy into my neighbor Irene’s yard and waddles up to Clifton Terrace Road. The guy is rolling around calling, “Yo, Adrian! I love youse! Noooooooo!”

He rises into the air flapping his wings with ferocity and poops vigorously on my windshield. Adrian flies into the woods. There is nothing more pathetic than a blackbird with blue balls.

“I’m sorry,” I call out.

A few days ago I noted that a pair of housefinches had taken to sleeping on the tops of the support beams which hold up the eave over my front porch. The scarlet-headed male would perch on the left support and his girl on the right. And they would sing to the sunset. And Scout the Cat would watch out the window from the back of the love seat and clack her teeth and do epee moves with her whiskers.

Tonight (‘tonight won’t be just any night’) a gentle rain falls and Scout is asleep and there is no finch song and I look out through the front door curtain and there is the girlfriend on her perch but the guy is nowhere to be seen—

OMG. The guy is underneath the girl and she raises her butt and— Continue reading →

March 17, 2015

There is a juicy news story going round, about millionaire Robert Durst who may have murdered at least three people, including his wife, in 1982. HBO has been showing a six-part documentary on the subject.

During a taping, Durst, forgetting he had a wireless microphone clipped to him, started talking to himself in his bathroom while he was peeing. He was heard muttering, “What did I do? Killed them all, of course.” It was two years later that the film makers realized they had this audio.

Robert Durst has been arrested. This may be the most extreme example of pee talk, but one suspects that many people, in their bathroom sanctuaries, may be talking to themselves.

Sometime in the early 90s. I was playwright-in-residence at Washington Irving School on the near west side of Chicago, a mostly Hispanic and black student body, led by a dynamic principal, Madeleine Maraldi. Continue reading →