“I am going to lay a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will deliver Israel by my hand, as you have said.” And it was so. When [Gideon] rose early next morning and squeezed the fleece, he wrung enough dew from the fleece to fill a bowl with water. 

Judges 6: 37-38

VEEDON FLEECE

1.

With thanks to CA Conrad’s “From Whitman to Walmart”

No, it’s nothing, you said,

or was that the furnace

roaring to keep the house

at sixty‐five degrees?

When you first read Whitman

you probably started with Song

of Myself, “For every atom

belonging to me as good

belongs to you,” and as the sense

of democratic, American poetry

builds with each line, an energizing

and confident voice that becomes

everyone, including you, as it

asks you to leave it behind:

“If you want me again look for me

under your boot‐soles.” Reading

some of my own poems written

ten or twelve years ago to my brother

‐in‐law Walter, he exults in the youthful

energy found therein, back when

I didn’t know many of those I now

love or they were still alive

or hadn’t yet been born. The mind

denies a full catalog of changes

but the old loneliness, the love

of New York and the Chinese language

have decomposed and made way

for a simplicity that includes them all,

what Walter’s grandmother Ruth Stone called

“the need to be worn away.” This brings

one back to the opening of Song of Myself,

what used to be nothing more than introductory

lines, “I, now thirty‐seven years old in perfect

health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death,”

take on a new meaning, an encouragement,

a promise to still go at it full bore

in middle age even if Whitman

didn’t add these lines until he was in

his sixties. Compelled by Whitman’s

desire to add to the mythos of his own story,

I had to know if he spoke plainly or not:

after a little number crunching I found

that Whitman was a year off and only 36

when Leaves of Grass was published 1.

From this discrepancy a split begins

in the song, the self sung not from within

but into an ideal form, and when one learns

of Whitman’s informal racist chats

with his biographer2, every atom did not

as good belong to you for him, the tear widens

and ethos falls from the music.

___________________

1) There could be more to the equation, and maybe it’s my math that is wrong. Even if he sought to allude to Dante’s midway-through-life-starting-an-epic-poem trope—and how could he have known when he’d die unless he actually edited this section as part of his deathbed edition—he would have been correct if he just put his actual age at time of publication. He died at 72!

2) In the entry, “Saturday, September 8th, 1888.” in Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 2 (1915), Whitman makes a number of racist comments, from his opposition to interracial relationships to comparing Native Americans and African Americans to rats that will eventually be “cleared out” by “a superior grade of rat.”

II.

Van Morrison, 73 as of this writing,

was in his late twenties when he recorded

his fourth album, Veedon Fleece. On the cover,

in a colorized black‐and‐white photo,

mostly everything is green: the field

in which Morrison crouches in a black suit,

the trees obscuring a lovely yellow

Irish house in the background, Morrison

in between two Irish Wolfhounds

and a cloudless blue sky. Returning

to his ancestral home (though not the north

where he was from because of The Troubles)

freshly divorced and re‐engaged, Morrison

in three weeks’ time wrote and recorded

an album less memorable in the cultural

consciousness than Astral Weeks, but more

ambitious, complex, and sprawling, a sorting

out of a life rising and falling in various

measures in the only way he knew how, through

epic compositions and strange lyrics with stories

that embrace mystery. To an undiscerning or unkind

ear , it is a mess, all random flutes and plucked

strings and lines about “William Blake and the Sisters

of Mercy / Looking for the Veedon Fleece.” Five minutes

into the song, “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t

Push the River,” you feel that you are on this journey yourself,

not exactly sure what the fleece or who your companions

might be, but the adventure invigorates you, your hand

on the back of an overlarge, scraggly dog, love to which

you don’t quite understand and surely don’t deserve

or thought you deserved is all around you, the piano’s chords

bang into the flute, leading you astray as it’s the only way

forward and how is it that I have this voice to sing?

———————————————

3) Jim Miller, in his review for Rolling Stone in January of 1975, excoriated the album, calling it “pompous tripe” that “flounders in Morrison’s own cliches,” “suggests a pinched vocal nerve drowning in porridge,” and “mood music for mature hippies.”

III.

Going on a road trip years back with two of my oldest

friends (hometown friends, friends I still talk to

and see during the Perseid Meteor Shower, Jake and Russ)

—more than ten years ago now, second to last spring break

as a student, I’d written a series of short poems

about the trip, typed them up on my grandfather’s

typewriter, and sent them to anyone who wanted

a copy. At the Had it Bad Reading Series, my bio read:

Ben Pease is a poet about to finish his MFA at Columbia, amateur bread baker, and creator/host of scatteredrhymes.com, an online radio show where poets read and discuss their work. Most of the poems in the thesis he will be turning in in August he classifies as failed love poems. You can read that as either poems about failed love or failed poems about love. If you would like to read more of his stuff, he will trade you a copy of his handmade chapbook, Trans-American Sketches, for a beer.

If I remember correctly, I traded Paul Hlava one

for said beer, and Bianca and I got Chinese food after,

our second date, memorialized forever in her poem

“My Herd”: “The dumplings are steaming between us,”

she wrote, “Kiss me over the dumplings.” I didn’t

kiss her during our meal but most certainly after

on the roof of her friend’s apartment and again

on the street and again before I went home

for the night. The style of the road‐trip poems

attempted understated wonder by presenting

observations from our travels in a minimalistic style:

The first time the three of us

stopped for gas, the water jug

stationed above the backseat

refused to close all the way,

spritzing our sleeping bags

with a mist of distilled water.

In twenty poems under a thousand words,

the brief sections suggested, I hoped,

long stretches of time where the roads

blurred into one—a few misshapen words

on motel signs and peaceful quiet

between friends.

HIGH PLAINS HOSPITALITY

CLEAN ROOMS * GREAT RATES

Microwaves * Refrigerators * Cable

NIC ECLEANR OOMS

D D     PHONES

FREE ESP

Even in workshop the poems got away scot‐free,

but it was one of my fellow travelers who took

issue with part of the poem three‐quarters

of the way through:

I am stationed at a picnic

bench in Macon, Missouri

waiting for Jake and Russ

to return with the car from

the auto body, Jake’s stuff

in a pile outside the room

I just checked us out of—

across the street the green

arrow & pink neon of

the Travelier Motel’s

signage, the words “No

Vacancy” unlit in favor

of “Welcome.” It’s been

two hours since they left

and no one has noticed me

now standing atop the table

reading aloud from Swann’s

Way: “And in myself, too,

many things have perished

which, I imagined, would

last forever.” Just then Jake

calls to tell me a wheel

has fallen off the car.

‡

On a factual level, the poem is true

with one exception—I did not stand

on top of a picnic table and read

Proust aloud. If anything, I allowed

Proust to speak of a phenomenon in life

that each of the traveling companions was

experiencing in one way or another,

but Russ noticed the exaggerated antics

and said little else of the piece

as if it alone was enough to question

the veracity of the whole contraption.