Two new poems

2 thoughts on “Two new poems”

1. Hey, they’re poems all right. I especially Dom Trans, the word play.

   Here’s my “edifice” story.

   Cooty’s Cabin 24.03.22

   (For Monadnock Conservancy Talk Thursday, March 22, 2024)
   by Ernest Hebert

   When I was coming of age as a fiction writer, I built a 12-by-16-foot cabin on a piece of forest land that I bought from dear friends and neighbors on Valley Road in Sullivan. It was my belly flop into the counterculture of the 1970s. My cabin was crude, built with recycled barn boards, salvage, and rough-cut pine boards I bought cheap from Cote and Reny Lumber Company in Grantham. I liked it crude. Show pic of cabin before deck finished

   I had a dream of expanding the cabin into my version of a back-to-the-land homestead inspired by THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS and LIVING THE GOOD LIFE by Helen and Scott Nearing. However, my wife Medora had the strange and peculiar idea of starting a family in a residential neighborhood in a nice community.

   So I had a choice, a family or a dream. Easy decision. I chose family, but I didn’t quit the dream. I re-dreamed the cabin as real estate for my literary world.

   I rented the material world cabin to Marjie, a young woman who was trying to live the counterculture life. I never saw a woman dress so down–baggy blue jeans, work boots, flannel shirt, no make up, no evidence that her hair was ever brushed or combed. When I would come by to pick up the rent money she seemed withdrawn and terribly unhappy. I tried to strike up conversations, but I sensed she was afraid of me, so I backed off. One day she was gone. She needed somebody or something in her life, I don’t know what. The problem for her, I think, was she didn’t know either. I hope somewhere along the line she found it, whatever “it” was.

   I sold the cabin and acreage to Rob, known locally as a crazy man. It was said he had “a plate in his head,” that he was a traumatized Vietnam War veteran. That last part I’m sure was true. He’d installed a privy, which he said “kicked.” If it got too bad he treated the waste the way GI’s did in Vietnam. Dump gasoline on it and light a match. Not only did we napalm the local people, we napalmed our own piles of shit.

   Several years later in a moment of wistfulness, I visited Rob to gaze at my former cabin and land. Everything looked normal, except the door was open. I could see a half a cup of coffee on the tiny table that I had whacked out from salvaged barn boards. On the outside deck of the cabin Rob had placed a refrigerator where an extension cord ran along the ground to a hook-up on a utility pole.

   I opened the fridge. It was crammed, but the only details I remember are a jar of Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise and ground beef wrapped in butcher paper. I headed home, which at the time was in West Lebanon.

   Flash ahead to 1993. I returned to the cabin on a winter day. My goal was to photograph it for the cover of a book that the University Press of New England was printing, THE KINSHIP, which included two of my then out-of-print Darby novels, A LITTLE MORE THAN KIN and THE PASSION OF ESTELLE JORDAN, plus a long essay I’d written about the idea of “kinship” in the Jordan clan. I was hoping to reunite with Rob, hoping that he had gotten over his war trauma.

   No answer to my knock on the door. I peeked through the window from the deck. Everything looked the same, including the coffee cup on the little table. I noticed now that the extension cord from the fridge to the utility pole was gone, so no electric power. I opened the refrigerator. Nothing had changed. I was curious to unwrap the butcher paper and see what a pound of ground beef looked like after 15 or so years, but I was halted by a wave of squeamishness.

   Medora had become a professional photographer working for the Valley News in Lebanon, and she had loaned me one of her Nikon SLR’s, but I didn’t bother to learn how to operate it. Result: lousy pictures. The design people at the press fudged my amateurish photography and came up with a passable cover for THE KINSHIP, though the cabin is obscured. Show THE KINSHIP book.

   I made some inquiries, and discovered that Rob had moved to Florida. Later still, I learned he’d died, probably a suicide.

   Four or five more years passed. I returned to the cabin with my childhood friend Dennis Patnode on a hot summer day. The door to the cabin was now padlocked. Everything looked the same as it did a decade earlier, including the coffee cup on the tiny table. I opened the fridge still in its place on the deck, wondering if there’d be a bad smell, but of course there was none. Anything organic must have dried out long ago. I have in memory the sight of the jar of Hellman’s Real mayonnaise. The oil had separated and floated to the top, the color and consistency of Grade B maple syrup. Below was a gray sludge. The meat package still retained its shape. What does burger meat look like after decades wrapped in its original butcher paper in a non-functioning refrigerator exposed to extreme heat in the summer and extreme cold in the winter? I don’t know. The experience messed up my head–I was trespassing and just wanted to get out of there.

   Another decade-plus went by before I returned to the property in 2022. The cabin was gone, the site scraped, but up slope where I had dug a shallow well was a new plywood structure bigger and uglier than my cabin, more like the shacks I imagined that my Jordan clan inhabited. I was swept by a grief and some other unpleasant emotion I cannot pin down. Guilt maybe. I never should have built the cabin. It ended up an eyesore to the people of Sullivan and a disappointment to its inhabitants.

   The cabin is not lost. It exists in a space between memory and imagination that constitute my Darby novels, the current resident, my fictional hermit, Cooty Patterson. What I regret today is my inability to form some kind of bond between myself and Marjie, that troubled young woman who rented the cabin, and Rob, the troubled young veteran, who bought it. In my mind the two of them represent the tragedies of competing politics that continue in present day.

   What else in present day? My dear friends and neighbors? Divorced, their homestead sold. My childhood friend, Dennis? Dead. Me? I can’t get over the feeling that I owe something to somebody in a valley of broken dreams.

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   1. Oh my goodness, Ernie! What a pleasure it was to read your Monadnock Conservatory talk! I can just imagine that you were thinking about your cabin when you were inventing Cooty. And thanks for your kind words about my latest, and certainly not very poetic, scribblings. But you know how it is, an idea pops into your head and you can’t go on to more profitable pursuits until you put pen to paper (oaky, fingertips to keyboard!). For my cabin for my head I was thinking about my next older brother, who fled the US in 1968 and moved to the wilderness in British Columbia, where he built by hand a sturdy log cabin that still stands today. (He went on to become a very successful, and wealthy, lawyer!) And yes, I couldn’t resist that meet/meat word play for my Dom Trans piece, although I did resist substituting “cum” for “come”!

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