Sherry Chandler » A Perfect Mid-March Day
A Perfect Mid-March Day
I found myself in Frankfort yesterday afternoon. It was a brilliant day, so I drove through the old cemetery and up around Boone’s grave, looked out over the bluffs at our little river-nestled state capitol, then on home by way of the Forks of the Elkhorn and the Jim Beam distillery. The grass had greened up, the sky was a perfect blue, and the ponds and streams – even the standing puddles – were a glittering steel blue, except for the big streams, the Elkhorn, the Kentucky. They were running high and muddy from all the week’s rain.
I had gone to Frankfort to help judge the poetry competition of the Kentucky Junior Historical Society. This was my fifth year judging the contest, invited by Joanie DiMartino, a poet and a historian, to read poems by students trying their hands at being historians and poets. Not an easy task, really. The children must not only write a poem but also show evidence of research and cite sources. Easier to judge than to do.
While I was there, I dropped by Poor Richard’s and bought my copy of Girty, Richard Taylor’s experimental novel about the frontier’s great antagonist to Boone. Dirty dirty Simon Girty was the bogeyman with whom settlers scared their children into good behavior. Wind Publications has done us the service of re-issuing this work, as brilliant as yesterday’s running streams.
I can’t recommend it more highly. Here’s a snippet, a portrait of Girty in old age, retired to a farm in Canada, the battle for the frontier lost:
Reconciliation
The sleep I sleep
is gorged with war,
my dreams are charred
as droves of bony widows
scrape their razors on my door,
lay orphans at my feet.
Waking now to milky light,
the cabin blanched with mutton snow,
my world made chaste again,
through window-glaze my breath melts
I squint to see my speckled hen,
that beauty
balanced on one sacrificial leg,
the other lifted snug in feathers
as she hops off one and then the other
in deference to the cold.
The truce she makes
I make my own.
I shift my stance
I change my gait,
I dress to suit the weather.
The perfect friction with the world
is snow that falls on water.
– Richard Taylor, from Girty
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Good on Barney Frank; he has impressed me lately, although my only previous knowledge of him was through...
2 Comments
1. Brooks Carver replies at 16th March 2006, 8:28 am :
I’ve not heart of this work, Sherry. I’ll pick it up from our fine little local library. No doubt they will have to order it. “Dirty dirty Simon Gurty” isn’t real well known up here on the prairie. Boone’s antagonist you say? Should be interesting.
Thanks for the tip.
Brooks
2. sherry replies at 16th March 2006, 9:38 am :
As it happens, the most direct clash between Boone and Girty occurred at the Battle of Blue Licks, where there is now a state resort park that will be the site of the KSPS Annual Awards Weekend.
A couple of years ago, Joanie DiMartino did a reading series on the settlement of Kentucky. We read — oh my goodness – six or seven works that dealt in one way or another with Boone, Simon Kenton, and Girty. So I know more than probably I really need to know about this man who “went native.”
The – what would you call it? spin? zeitgeist? – had it that Boone was the great white woodsman who could out-Indian the Indians while Girty was the evil white turned more-savage-than-the-savages. One explanation for this that I read was that, in setting up this antagonism, the prevailing culture was able to pretty much by-pass the native Americans altogether. No mere Algonquin could make a suitable foil for Boone. That mustn’t be. But voila! Girty!
Leave a comment