If You Can Still Dance With It: Stone Belly & Cold
Mountain
Poems by Michael Adams
Kittredge, CO: Turkey Buzzard Press, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0-9450-94586
37 pages
$12.00
Review by David P. Miller
Poet and musician Michael Adams presents poems in three
personae. These are Stone Belly, his “nom
de plume or alter ego”; Cold Mountain, Adams’ rendering of T’ang Dynasty
poet Han Shan in mid-20th century Appalachia; and in his own person,
following a diagnosis of multiple myeloma. This brief volume introduces me to
the work of a writer of great heart and broad life experience, from the blue
collar communities near Pittsburgh to his current residence in Northern
Colorado. More of his work, including sample poems, publications, and an audio
selection, is available at www.michaeladamspoetry.com.
The image of the recluse poet retains a powerful attraction.
Most of us would find it difficult to survive for more than a couple of days in
a simple mountaintop dwelling, entirely self-reliant for food and heat. But
there’s much to be desired in this picture: solitude, the freedom to simply
concentrate on one’s own work, and the requirement to distill the complexities
of living to essentials. It’s intriguing that Adams presents this image in
twinned voices. The Stone Belly poems begin with the longer “Stone Belly in the
Mountains.” Here we seem to see the recluse we imagine:
Wandering
in the mountains,
lost
amongst pines,
Stone
Belly grows hard and lean,
chewing
on poems.
Removed from the thick of society, he’s not unaffected by it
nor attached to it:
Third
day of snow, power lines
down
all over the mountain.
But
Stone Belly gets his juice
from
other realms –
wood, whiskey, and fiery chili.
Discusses
eternity with the stars.
He
hasn’t been this happy all year.
He “daydreams of a girl he hasn’t seen in 20 years” and is
prepared for friends to visit, with:
Eight
bottles of bourbon, four cases of beer,
twenty
pounds of rice, one change of clothes,
what’s
left of last fall’s elk,
buried
in a cooler in the snow.
This push and pull between the joyous strenuousness of a
life apart and the desire for humankind’s web (in “Stone Belly in Texas” he
fruitlessly hitchhikes across the Southwest to find a girl he barely knew),
slowly results in self-knowledge:
I am
not very good
at the
world’s business –
the
building and trading
of
fortunes and goods.
I know
well enough
the
quarters of the winds,
the
fluid ways of waters,
the
turning of,
and
movement through,
the
seasons.
With his Cold Mountain poems, Adams directly confronts the
very archetype of the poet as solitary. His versions are inspired by the
translations of Red Pine, Gary Snyder, and R.P. Seaton. Not a reader of
Mandarin, he presents his versions with the hope that readers will also seek the
work of those translators. Poking through my bookshelves, I discovered
translations by Snyder and Burton Watson, a surprise anecdotally confirming the
subtle pervading of the older Chinese poet (I hadn’t intended to collect
versions, but now I have three). Adams’ Cold Mountain writings often, to my
ear, have the pungency of other versions, but with a clearly North American
flavor:
Pickled
pig’s feet in Manhattan –
Some
people say they’re the best.
Men who
live too close to power
love
things that dogs won’t touch.
Again here, we have
the reality that this life, for all its rewards, is not to be romanticized:
I’m
sick all the time,
but
that’s my burden.
My face
looks like an old squash
that
someone forgot
and
left out all winter.
I’m
happy with the mountains
and a
warm thick blanket.
The sequence ends with lines that point straight at the
crossing between wonder and annihilation, with impermanence as the solitary’s
food:
Bone-weary
I
reached the top
of the
cliff at sundown.
An
ancient snag rose at the edge
bereft
of leaves, barren
against
the blazing sky.
It
looked like it had stood
for a
thousand years.
Now
it’s just a pile of ashes
that
kept me warm
through
the long night.
The image in this final stanza is a hinge opening on “After
the Ashes,” the title of both the third set of poems and the first poem in the
set. This simple phrase is rich with multiple meanings. It takes us from the
contemplative conclusion of the Cold Mountain poems into the reality of Adams’
diagnosis with a type of incurable cancer. Although his stated aim with these
poems is to “examine what it is like to be confronted with a life-threatening
disease without prematurely seeking answers, solutions, or solace,” the phrase
here suggests a sense of ashes in the mouth. However, in this poem, the phrase,
now punctuated, regains calm as part of a view of “the long story of our lives
/ along with the sounds of love, the wordless / speech of tongues groping
beyond themselves in the furnace of another’s mouth”:
... A
campfire beneath white granite
and
stars, and, after, the ashes.
This final set is filled with a great love for “The World As
it Is” (the title of another in the set) and the command to prepare to say
goodbye. The volume concludes with perhaps my favorite, “The Ones Who Get the
World Ready.” As Adams, sleepless at 2 A.M., sits with paper and pen,
... the
dog
comes
in, settles at your side.
You
stare at the window and your own face
stares
back, with nothing to say.
Don’t
think this is a poem about searching
for
inspiration. It’s just a man who can’t sleep
and
doesn’t want to bother his wife
with
his restlessness.
But as he sits, he remembers the men and women who rise
early,
... the
ones who make the world
solid
and familiar for the rest of us. Trash haulers and policemen,
paper
carriers, nurses, truck drivers, bakers. Resolute, even brave,
with a
dogged, determinedly unreflective bravery, they grope
with
blind hands in the dark, clutching at the anchors
that
will secure us all for one more day to our common lives.
Michael Adams tells us to remember the bravery we all need,
and can all manifest, as we move through our common lives, intimately dependent
on each other, and all “staring the monster right in the face” (“Send Some
Angels”).
