
Photo by Phil Holland
Okay, I believe I might have a name for the blog. Don’t want to announce it yet because I want to make sure that it’s available. I will say that I LOVE all your suggestions.
This morning I received an email from our friend Phil Holland in Greece. He has composed another canto in his series The Dancer’s Craft, which is, essentially, a 30-year-long poem documenting the life, work and wild misadventures of choreographer/avant gardener Moses Pendleton. It doesn’t take 30 years to read it, you’ll read it very fast because it’s very good, but that’s how long Phil has been working on it, which just makes me love him. Sticktoitiveness is a trait I highly admire in others because I lack it so. I have general awfuggitiveness.
Today’s installment of The Dancer’s Craft reveals the persistence of our gardener friend and his monomaniacal determination to cultivate his beloved sunflowers no matter what fate has in store for him. We’ve had some fierce thunderstorms over the past few days (a girl and her horse were struck in a nearby town, but are thankfully okay), but Moses had sunflower seeds to sow, so, sow he did.
The canto is supposed to be divided into 4-line stanzas. But my software won’t allow me to separate the lines. When I copy text, in this newish format, I have to … oh never mind, it’s insanely frustrating. Just try to separate the stanzas in your mind. And enjoy:
Canto for the Month of June
The air was heavy, turbid, close,
and smelled of earth and rain –
the dancer raced the clouds to weed
again at Quincy Lane.
He takes his trusty hoe in hand,
whose blade is like a beak,
and solo in the fields shows off
his dancer’s-craft technique.
He twirls his hoe, he slices,
he hooks weeds out by the roots,
witch grass and vetch go flying,
untouched are his sunflower shoots.
He must be in New York by eight,
he churns like a machine,
fast-forwarding along the rows,
in a sweat laced with caffeine.
And then the western sky goes dark,
and a single tongue of breeze
licks up the undersides of leaves
and whitens all the trees.
The dancer hears approaching
a sound like a speeding train,
and then he’s hit full-bodily
by a wall of pelting rain.
And then the sky’s ripped open
by a jagged, flashing blade,
the thunderclap which follows
explodes like a grenade.
The dancer’s sheathed in water,
his steel hoe bites the sod,
its shank of ash tight in his hands,
he’s a human lightning rod.
He holds his ground, in a fury
he hacks at the weeds in the rows,
he roars at the storm like Lear and Tom,
if he goes in a flash, he goes.
The worst of the front passes over,
the rain becomes gentle, and then,
as he finishes weeding, the sun comes out,
and he gets in his car again.
– Phil Holland