Lightning on the Hill

Excerpts from a Country Poet’s Notebooks

One Dark Night

One dark night when the trees are bare Owl comes to perch in a scrawny oak. Clouds part, and Moon appears. “Who?” asks Owl, alarmed By a face so bright, so near. Moon smiles her soft reply. “Who?” demands Owl, feathers a-bristle. Moon draws a veil across her face.

Cows in Springtime

Cows in the barn smell the mild March wind, Grow restless in their stalls, rubbing hides raw ’Gainst the rough boards that hem them in. I, too, grow restless in my papered cell, Sniffing teasing tender breezes. My heart rubs eagerly against my ribs, Raw places that only I can see.

October 7, 1914

Dear Author,

Thank you for sending us a sample of your work. The volume of submissions we receive makes an individual comment impossible, but we regret that your poems do not suit our present needs. Don’t hesitate, however, to try us again with your new work.

Sincerely, the Editors
The Chicago Review

October 14, 1914. Guess I’m just a lousy poet. It’s all Miss Jensen’s fault, since she was the one who made us think we could do it. She said we should confide our deepest thoughts and feelings to ourselves in verse, and we’d discover truths we could find in no other way. Maybe she was right, but these poems I’ve been tinkering with strike me now as obvious and trite. Schoolgirl clichés. If only Pa had let me go off to college—but there’s no use going on about that. Look at Emily Dickinson, she never went to college, Miss Jensen would say.

Of course Emily lived on a college campus, and eminent men came to dinner all the time. Lovestruck swains hung around her parlor and front porch, vying for a bit of her time. The only time I ever get any intelligent conversation is when my cousins, Christian and Bernard, spend their summers here on the farm. Pa doesn’t pay them much, aside from their room and board, but Uncle Nick always says it’s good for his boys to get outdoors in the summer to learn the hard life of us farmers. Well, they sure enough learn that here! Pa works everybody hard—you’d think we were his mules instead of his family.

Christian didn’t come this past summer. He’s twenty-three now and has a job at the Good Hope rail depot as assistant shipping agent. Bernard’s always been my favorite anyway, and he was here for nearly three months. He’s a year younger than I am and just finished his sophomore year at the university up in Madison. We had some wonderful talks about his courses—English literature, classics, anthropology, ancient history. Lord, I wish I could do what he’s doing, but Pa is such a skinflint he’d never pay for it, and where would I get the money? The little Ma gives me I spend on books or clothes—not that I care about clothes, but I have to look decent when we go to church on Sunday. Pa insists on that—everybody in their “Sunday best,” so as to bring credit to the family.

We all sit in the third pew on the left—just across from Uncle John and his family, with Uncle Nick and his family just behind us. Pa takes the seat on the aisle with Ma next to him. Then Edward and his wife, Hildy, with her baby on her lap, then Martin, then me. I reckon the sky would fall if we didn’t all line up just like that every Sunday. Old Pastor Hannemann might think he was going blind—or deaf, since Pa and his brothers always see who can sing the loudest on certain hymns that go heavy on the bass. Once in a while you can hear Ma’s wavering contralto, or Edward’s clear true tenor, and every so often baby Violet will chime in with one of her wails. It’s all pretty...