Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 5, 2008

When Hayden Carruth died this week at 87 from a series of strokes at his home in upstate New York, American letters lost another colossus. He was an infantryman in World War II and came home to battle -- in prose and verse -- for causes ranging from nuclear disarmament to ecological farming. Like Robert Frost, he drew on the rural landscape and characters. He could orchestrate a symphony from plain American speech. "Regarding Chainsaws" opens when the admittedly "greenhorn" speaker is given an old chainsaw: "Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,/though I've had enemies couldn't of done/no worse." He gets "a bursitis in the elbow" after yanking the cord "450 times." Eventually, Old Stan (a neighbor) buys it from him. But a few days later when he asks how the chainsaw is working, Stan says, "I tooken/it down to scrap, and I buried it in three/separate places yonder on the upper side/of the potato piece. You can't be too careful/. . . when you're disposing of a hex."

Unlike Frost's wise old country titans, these men fight with modern machinery in a climate where they, too, face becoming rusty and obsolete:

I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I

don't feel so good about that neither. . . .

. . . Stan was taken away

to the nursing home, and then he died. I always

remember how he planted them pieces of spooked

McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time

I went up and dug, and I took the old

sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it

on the windowsill right there next to the

butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.

I'd like to end with one of the tender love lyrics he assembled during his late marriage to poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth:

Forty-Five

When I was forty-five I lay for hours

beside a pool, the green hazy

springtime water, and watched

the salamanders coupling, how they drifted lazily,

their little hands floating before them,

aimlessly in and out of the shadows, fifteen

or twenty of them, and suddenly two

would dart together and clasp

one another belly to belly

the way we do, tender and vigorous, and then

would let go and drift away

at peace, lazily

in the green pool that was their world

and for a while was mine.

Carruth was ours for a while, and the green world was greener for his words.

"Regarding Ch ainsaws" is from "Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991" (Copper Canyon, 1992). "F orty-Five" is from "Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995" (Copper Canyon, 1996). Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."