Every house has a story

The swish of the fabric of long skirts

and high-collared white blouses

the only sounds of a summer’s day

She feels the slight moisture

beading on her forehead

as she directs the maid in her dusting

She walks to the door, fanning herself

and looks out to the street

with its uninterrupted noonday quiet

She hears the faint clang:

the blacksmith hammering the anvil

a few blocks away in town

She waits, not sure if the waiting

will have its reward, but waiting

nonetheless for a whistled tune,

a throat cleared, the occasional song

The Poetry of Walking, History and Houses

I live in what is called the “Queen of the St. Louis suburbs,” the city of Kirkwood, population 27,540. Kirkwood is the oldest planned suburb west of the Mississippi River, founded in 1853 and named after the engineer who built the railroad west from St. Louis. James Pugh Kirkwood isn’t buried here; he made his fortune and returned to New York, his home state. But we still have the train station, and it still functions as one, serving the Amtrak line from St. Louis to Kansas City.

I live in the northeast quadrant of the town; the city center is 1.1 miles from my house. In nice weather, which we have generally not had this winter, I can walk to the library, the YMCA, the downtown business district, the farmer’s market, and the train station in under 20 minutes. For three years, I had an office in downtown Kirkwood, and truly does seem like you’re living and working in a small town.

Kirkwood is a walking kind of city. When I take walks, I think about writers and poets known for their walking, like Charles Dickens (up to 20 miles a day) and the Romantic poets, or the 17^th century poet Thomas Traherne, whose poem “Walking” is one of the best known of the poems about the subject.

On Saturday, I managed to slip a walk in between winter storms (the temperature actually reached in the 40s before the next storm hit Saturday night).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Kirkwood Train Station, via Wikipedia.

Poet Focus: Marianne Moore

I live in the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis, a town of 27,540 called Kirkwood. It became a town in 1853, when a rail line was extended west. The project manager for the line was a surveying engineer from New York named James Pugh Kirkwood.

For the first 40 or 50 years of its life, Kirkwood was likely typical of towns in the 19^th century Midwest – small town center serving both the rail line and the farms in the surrounding region. Merchants, clergymen, and others built homes near the town center, many of which survive today in good working order.

This was the town and culture where poet Marianne Moore was born in 1887. Her grandfather, the Rev. John Warner, had been a chaplain at the Battle of Gettysburg and was called to be pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood in 1867. Moore and her family lived with her grandparents until 1896, when Warner died and the family moved back to Pennsylvania. (The church still exists, although not the original church building.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

What I found at the festival

It’s time for another edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the intrepid Duane Scott.

I live in the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis, a small city of 27,000. We have our own police and fire departments; we have a mix of housing (from about 1857 to 2010) and incomes; our Kirkwood School District also includes a couple of neighboring municipalities. Our downtown is charming (mostly two-story buildings) and we have the oldest farmers’ market outside the granddaddy of them all in the city, Soulard Market.

We also have had more than our fair share of troubles. Two years ago, a disgruntled resident walked into a meeting of the city council, shooting and killing two policemen, two council members and the director of Public Works. He gravely wounded the mayor before being killed himself in a burst of police gunfire. The year before that, Shawn Hornbeck, a boy missing from his home in rural Missouri, was found during a massive police hunt for another kidnapped boy. Both were in the Kirkwood apartment of Michael Devlin, who is now serving numerous lives terms for kidnapping, abuse, and all kinds of awful crimes.

But in Kirkwood, in spite of it all, we persist.

Each year, usually around the second weekend in September, we have the Greentree Festival. It’s a fairly typical slice of small town in the big city Americana. We have a parade on Saturday morning. Then you head for Kirkwood Park, where you find craft booths, food of all kinds, and free music (our favorite this year was a group from the Missouri Fiddlers Association playing “I’ll Fly Away”).

And there’s a small used book fair. Which I had to check out. After all, all paperbacks are a buck, and when was the last time you paid a dollar for a paperback book?

It wasn’t a huge collection of books, but it was fine. I wandered around until I found the poetry, which was contained in all of about two small boxes.

And what did I find?

The first thing was a palm-sized volume, published in 1961, of an essay entitled “Story Telling New and Old” by the Irish novelist, playwright, essayist and poet Padraic Colum. The essay was first published in a 1927 collection called The Fountain of Youth. What a cool little volume, I thought. When I got home and looked through, I discovered it was autographed by the author.

Second was Early Poems by William Butler Yeats, which was placed right next to Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) by Richard Ellman.

Then I picked up a rather ratty looking uncorrected proof of Nikki Giovanni's Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems & Not Quite Poems. It was prominently stamped “Not for Resale.” Tell that to the cashier.

And then I see 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, a 1986 edition of a 1959 collection of poems published the University of Texas Press. In both Spanish and English, no less.

And then there were two books of poetry by Richard Beban, What the Heart Weighs and Young Girl Eating a Bird. Both were autographed with the inscription “To Beth - April 19, 2007. Thanks for you’re your h help with the SLWG. I figured the acronym out -- Beban had spoken or done a poetry reading at at a meeting of the St. Louis Writer's Guild.

Seven books, seven buck, and “I’ll Fly Away.” Not bad for a Saturday afternoon.

The Real E-Me

My friend Mike Dellosso had a neat post today -- taking us on an e-tour of his life and suggesting his readers do the same. So here goes.

This is the church I attend.

This is the company I work for as a public affairs director. One of the things my team does, by the way, is the corporate web site you're looking at. And right here is an article I wrote for the web site last fall.

This is the suburb of St. Louis I live in -- incorporated in 1853 and still with its own train station.

We have two newspapers -- the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Webster-Kirkwood Times (a weekly).

This is one of the trails I regularly bike. (I live a little over a mile north of the "8" designated on the map.) It's named after Ulysses S. Grant -- it goes right by White Haven, where Grant farmed before the Civil War and now a national historic site. The trail is also adjacent to Grant's Farm, owned for years by Anheuser-Busch (petting zoo plus free beer) and now owned by InBev AB. This farm is one of the locations where they keep the Clydesdale horses, and you can see the horses in the pasture next to the trail.

I don't listen to any particular local radio station, and I don't watch much television, so no helpful links there.

So that's a short e-tour of where I live and work.