Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TRINC: PRAISES II, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TRINC: PRAISES II, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Once, when the grand nudes, golden as fields of grain
Last Line: Hallelujah! For the people's beer! And for all his comrades: praise!
Subject(s): Alcoholism & Alcoholics; Beer; Drinks & Drinking; Native Americans; Ale; Wine; Indians Of America; American Indians; Indians Of South America


Once, when the grand nudes, golden as fields of grain --
But touched with a rose flush like homeric cliches of dawn! --
Dreamed in prudential calm above the parochial lightning
Of bad whiskey;
and when the contentious and turbulent General,
Handcrafted of fringed buckskin, legend, aromatic gunsmoke,
On the Greasygrass Little Bighorn lay down his long blond hair
At last at peace
in his quiet kingdom
over the back-bar:
Then: the myth of Beer was born and the continental thirst!

O Beer we praise thee and honor thy apostolic ways!
Primero: for the glory of thy simple and earthy ancestors! As:
Instance: the noble Barley, its hairy and patriarchal
Vigor: golden
in the windy lagers of manfarmed machine-framed fields;
Or in shocks or stooks
tented
like Biblical tribes
bearded
(But without the badrap of their barbaric god) gay,
Insouciant as encampments of the old Oglalla Sioux
Where each lodge opens eastward to the Land of the Morning Sun!

Praise for:
segundo: the lacy and feminine elegance of the hops
Raising into the sun their herbal essence, medicinal,
Of the scent of the righttime rain fallen on rich earth.
They lift their tiny skirts -- of Linnean Latin made!
Like those great nudes of the barrooms: souls of the newborn beer!

And we praise also Yeast: the tireless marine motors
Of its enigmatic enzymes, and its esters: like the submarine stars
Of astral rivers and horoscopic estuaries shining.

And we praise, last, the secret virtue of pure water,
A high lord among the Five Elements, gift of the heavens,
Its mineral integrity and the savor of secret iron!

Guitars are distilled from wine: from the politics of moonlight,
From the disasters of tequila and the edible worm in the deep well
Of mescal.
But from beer comes banjos and jazz bands ecstatic
Trumpets midnight Chicago early thirties Bix.

It was Beer that invented Sunday from the long and salty days
Of the workday week:
that from the fast beer on horseback or the warm
Beer of the burning fields of the harvest, when the barley comes in,
Fermented the sabbatarian leisure;
that, in the eye of the workstorm,
For the assemblyline robotniki and the miner who all week long
Must cool his thirst at the root of the dark flower of the coal
Offered reprieve;
and for slow men on tractors (overalled
And perpetually horny) turned off their motors for the Sabbath calm.

------------------------------------------------------------

It is farther from Sunday to Monday than to any other day of the week.
And Monday begins farther from home than a month of Sundays.
It begins in a deeper darkness than other days, and comes
From farther away, but swifter, to the sounds of alarums and whistles.
Six hours ahead of the sun it appears: first in dreams
Where we shudder, smelling the strength of sweat from the earlier east,
(Already at hard labor) and our sleep is filling with fireflies
From ancient forges, the hot sparks flying; then
It appears as grief for a lost world: that round song and commune
When work was a handclasp -- before it built fences around us.

Monday is a thief: he carries in his weak and tiny fist
A wilted flower wrenched from our Sunday garden ... still blue
With hope: but fast fading in the heat of his metal grasp.

Tuesday is born and borne like an old horse, coming
Home to the stall from the salt of the harvest fields, where, hitched
To sun and stubble, flyplagued and harness galled, sweatcrusted,
(The lather from under his collar whitening the martingales)
Teamed up he lugged the stammering machines through the twenty one-mile rounds
On the slowly narrowing field ...
Tuesday comes without flowers --
Neither Queen Anne's lace nor even Yarrow or Golden Rod --
(Most colorless of all the days of our week and work)
without thunder,
(Like the old horse too tired to roll in the dust)
without even
The anguish of Monday exile. It follows us home from our work.

Wednesday is born in the midweek waste like the High Sierra
Rising out of the desert, Continental Divide
In the long division of the septimal and sennight thirst;
from where,
At Bridger's Pass or near Pike's Peak, at the last pine,
Cold, in the Wednesday snow, we halt for a moment and see:
Faraway, shining, the saltwhite glow of that Promised Land:
The Coast of Sunday --
gold and maltgold --
beyond Thursday's Mohave heat.

But Thursday is born in that mid-point halt at the hinge of the week
Where we seem too tired to push open the ancient five-barred gate
That lets on flowery holts and heaths and the faraway antic hay
Where leisure sprawls and dances in the fair of work-free fun ...
Here thirst compounds his salty rectitudes: in Skinny Thursday:
That midweek Dog Day curse in Monday's cast-off shoes!

Friday is born in desperation, in the shadow of parables,
In the tent of Surplus Value, in the hot breath of Profit.
Yet it cometh forth as a fawn, yea as a young lamb
It danceth on prophetic mountains whose feet the Jordan laves!
Here is the time of the Dream Drinking, where our loves and needs
Come under the same roof-tree.
Evening of hope.
Freer
Than manic Saturday and more adventurous than Sunday's calm.
Now we cast lots for our workweek clouts or put them in pawn!
And the night opens its enormous book wherein we invent our lives ...
Saturday's children had far to go. We arrive as strangers
Entering the Indian Nation in the paycheck's prairie schooner,
Homesteaders in the last free land of the West ...
Already
The Sooners, those Johnny-Come-Earlies and claim jumpers
On the choicest barstools assert their squatter's rights ...
They claim (these Dream Drinkers) -- 40 acres and a mule
Or a King Ranch bigger than all of Texas!
It is Time they would
Reclaim from the burntout wagon train of the workweek waste.
Here each is Prince in his Castle Keep, but, outside, Time
Elaborates warp and woof and the ancient Enemies gather ...
O blessed Beer, old Equalizer -- doom for Comanches:
Shot down on Saturday's mesa in the flash of a 6 pack of Schlitz!

Deadflower, harness, halt-in-the-snow, dogday, holy hour!
By these five signs and passages we knew the laboring week
As we traveled and travailled toward Castle Keep, Companeros Trabajeros!
And now, where Sundays buzz like flies caught in a web,
Drained of their workday strength, the golden spirit of Beer
Comes to lead us out of the net, if only a moment,
To where Possibility rolls out its secret roads
To picnic places where Potato Salad and the Olive and the Onion
And Ham-and-Cheese sandwiches position the kids on the grass;
Or to lazy creeks or lakes where the lunkers lounge and lunge,
Guides us;
or into the popcorn smell and afternoon rituals
Of baseball fields shills us:
where forever the high homer,
Smoking, of the great stars, writes their names on the sky ...
And later, the firefly-lighted evenings, on back porches --
The vegetable lightning of those small stars caught in the grass ...

Beer, birra, la biere, tiswin, pivo, cerveza --
In all its names and forms, like a polymorphic god, praise!
As, among Mexican stars and guitars: Cresta Blanca
And Cuautemoc: to be drunk under Popocatepetl
And Xochimilco;
and Fix
(named for Fuchs) in Greece,
Either in Ammonia Square where the poor go or in Syntagma
Where the umbrellas gather the bourgeoisie in their shade;
And San Miguel where the Philippines offer expendable chickens;
And Heineken cold as the Hans Brinker canals where the Dutch
Are skating around on tulips and wooden shoes; and Pilsener
Resurrected from Nazi and allied bombings, old-world gold,
Of the Czechs and Slavs;
and all the melodious beers of Spain;
And of England, land of the mild and bitter: O'Keefe's and Watney's
Ales;
And, of Ireland, Guinness Stout with its arms of turf and gunfire;
And Australia's Melbourne Bitter from way down under!

Beer which passes through vats like the multiple stomachs of ruminants
To be lagered in sunken cloisters in monkish gloom till the day
When, on the brewery dray, it is ceremonially borne
Through the sunny morning towns by those great and noble beasts
Those horses with necks of thunder and fetlocks like hairy paint brushes.

Beer of Milwaukee! Beer of St. Louis! Where Lewis and Clark
Passed in the days of the fur trade and the wide ranging voyageurs.
And pass still, like ghosts, day after day, unseen
And forgotten: still hunting that West that was lost as soon as found --
Legends in search of a legend:
As the new beers of the West
Lucky and Lone Star, Olympia, Grain Belt, Coors
Seek the phantom perfection of the mythic beers of the past!

Beer, not to be sipped but lifted against the palate --
Like the mystical cargo of argosies: lofted into the holds
Where the hideaway ports of the Spanish Main set their top-gallants
To drag their island-anchors into the New World!

Comestible beer that puts the hop in the Welsh Rabbit!
Beer-soup-du-jour that causes the cheese to sing!
Beer that transmogrifies the evening's peasant pot roast!
That metamorphizes the onion in the Sunday carbonade!

Praise, then, for pulque and kvass, for chang, for weissbier
For suk and sonshu, for bousa and all the hand-me-down
Home brews!
No firewater, aqua forte, blast-head or forty-rod
But heart medicine: made for fast days or fiesta:
For the worker in his vestments of salt at the end of our laboring days,
Or for corroboree and ceilidh where the poem sings and says:
Praise for the golden liquor of Wakan Tanka or god!
Praise for its holy office -- O offer hosanna and laud!
By sip, by sup, by tot, by tipple, by chuglug -- all ways:
Hallelujah! For the People's Beer! And for all His comrades: praise!


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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