Hired Hands
By John B. Lee
()
About this ebook
The hired hand of these poems was a stupid man. Nowadays he would be known as one of the employable retarded. Tom was lucky enough to find work and a home with the family of John B. Lee, people who understood him. And John B. Lee was lucky to have his whole life coloured by the presence of an apparently limited man who turns out to have been a poem. John B. Lee has with great tact and without a shred of patronizing found the words to make this inarticulate man live.
Hired Hands is a remarkable accomplishment.
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Hired Hands - John B. Lee
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lee, John B., 1951-
Hired Hands
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-771311-98-4
I. Title.
PS8573.E348H57 1986 C811′.54 C86-094131-0
PR9199.3.L44H57 1986
Copyright © John B. Lee, 1986, 1992.
The support of the Canada Council and The Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged.
Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada
www.brickbooks.ca
to Thomas Sheil Malott
*
He squares off
and heaves a bale
over his head.
His poem.
THE WELL
Tom peed the bed. For a boy of ten this was unusual. His father warned him not to pee the bed again or he would hang him upside down in the well, but Tom couldn't help it. His father hung him upside down with a rope tied around his feet. He dunked his head like a doughnut in coffee. This was the only justice Tom's father understood.
*
He remembers
what he likes —
not what happened
or is
or will be
but what he likes.
He is constantly
writing and rewriting
his life
for he remembers perfectly
what didn't happen
and why.
*
Through the corn
you see him squat to shit.
This is what poetry
ignores.
*
At the fair grounds
or in the field
there is a natural slovenliness
the world adapts to.
An abandoned cattle yard
grown up with weeds.
A corn crib broken down.
These are real.
We are incongruous.
God encourages us
to wear his dust
like plants.
Organisation is transgression.
We must be ugly to be beautiful.
*
His hair
like an ash tray was dumped on his head.
His close-set mud-brown eyes
look at you like a murky photograph
over a nose
too three-dimensional.
His thin lips
close over dentures
like melon rinds
or gums hard as rock candy.
Stretched over all of this is flesh
loose and bumpy and burlap brown
from weathering.
White chickens
beside a red wheel barrow.
This face too
is everything.
THE WELL
Tom was nine years old when he was born. Nine months, not years, I tried to tell him, but he told me again he was nine years old. He heard Blondie, the old German Shepherd, the one that got poisoned when he was a boy, he heard her come barking up the lane. She was barking because he was born.
When Tom