He couldn’t tell her
this wasn’t the petting zoo.
Little Maureen stood
in streetlight rain
by bus stop, patting
his horny face.
Goat wants to gore a Saab.
But he lets her tie yarn
to his horn stubs, and sits
calm, dog-like, smelling rain.
Goat drove the elephants over
Special Sam the Ringmaster
over Kogie the Bagel Clown
over Zumo the Lion Whipper
through rows of bleacher faced people
and three tons of elephant shit
to the open fields
where they did tricks with small trees
and waited for the Bambino Brothers
to bring them back
Have a fragrant evening, Fat Ram
told him. He smelled like seed.
Goat gunnysack slung over back
between teeth had half a mind
and half of that told him he
should eat the moon, big & fat
in his lean eye holes. But he let
it be, instead he gave Fat Ram
a hard swift kick in the hams,
rattling laughter off clouds
The green pastures
of Harvard University
withstood sneakers
but Goat, tenured
white tick bag,
found the president
stuck in a hedge
He would please
the gods,
he thought.
Get
Out she said real
Animals always
Try too hard
Winded, Goat
rounded rock bend
eyes shale, horns
hardly hearing
night birds
following him down
Lino block by Tom Williams
Late night, December 5, 1986, halfway through my senior year of college, I started working on a sequence of 45 ten-line poems about a character named GOAT. I’d been carrying this idea in my head for about a week, and had jotted down a list of titles on a piece of paper. Six hours and four hundred and fifty lines later, right as the sun was rising over the Cascadilla Creek Gorge on the morning of December 6, I finished typing in the last line of the last poem.
It was not my first all-nighter, but it was, I knew even then, my first piece of mature verse; of something I thought would last a little longer than most undergraduate-age work. A few years later, in my small press days with a gang of college friends and an old Challenge proofing press, I published GOAT in a limited edition letterpress printed, hand-sewn format, with half a dozen lino-block illustrations by a young art student named Tom Williams. Twelve years later, when I co-founded a print-on-demand self-publishing company Greatunpublished.com, later to be called Booksurge, GOAT was the first volume off the press and through the binder and trimmer.
Hand-marbled endpaper from the Pathos Press edition of GOAT.
Every year on December 6th across these three decades I have set aside a little time to mark the anniversary of those six hours of writing that resulted in this complete sequence. It has remained a pleasant and quiet anniversary, even with the thrashing of stubby (and stubborn) horns throughout these poems, the destructive romp through MOMA with Troll, an incident with escaped zoo elephants, guest appearances by Jerry Falwell and Johnny Carson and Andy Warhol, and a singularly devastating meeting in a subway train involving Chicken Little…
Since GOAT is mostly narrative and broken up into these ten line poems, I thought this year I could share it as a kind of serial poem, with perhaps two installments a day, and see if anyone else enjoys inhabiting the strange little world captured so many moons ago in that one long night of writing. The next post on this site will be the first of forty-five. I hope a few of you come along for the ride. The hills, I hear, are full of rocks and beasts.
The first poem in GOAT, from the Pathos Press edition. The typeface is Centaur Roman.
That’s right, literary holiday shopper! Buy a set of letterpress-printed haiku drink coasters and I will compose a haiku including any three words of your choice to pack along with your coasters. This is a neat and unique gift for anyone who loves poetry and coffee or tea or alcoholic beverages (errr, maybe even fine for someone who just plain likes alcoholic beverages, ya never know) and can make a great conversation piece at your next book club soiree!
The coaster set is beautifully designed and printed at St Brigid Press just on the other side of yonder Afton Mountain here in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. It consists of eight linked haiku entitled “Night Walk on Cape Cod.” You can see images of each coaster on the site. Look, here’s a sample right here:
To buy, just click the coaster picture in the top right corner of the front page, or go to the Books page.
To claim your custom haiku, send a copy of your receipt to me at jeffrey.schwaner@gmail.com along with the three words you want included in the poem, and I’ll get right to work on your haiku.
This is a limited edition set–I’ve only got about ten of these left, so think up your words and think them up quick, to misquote Dr. Seuss. And no matter what purchasing decisions you make this Cyber Monday and beyond, have a safe and joyous holiday!
An old white ash in the backyard of the abandoned house next door. It was a dry, cold, still day, weeks after the maple and walnut trees around it had lost their leaves but this tree still had hundreds which had not fallen, very large leaves bigger than your hands. I was out in my backyard with the dogs. With no cause such as a gust of wind and in the space of a few minutes, almost all the leaves of the ash tree fell to the ground. They were dry but heavy and dropped straight down like a bundle of mail or a suitcase, without the ceremony of wafting or drifting. As if the tree had just gotten the worst news in the world, perhaps that another tree it loved on the other side of the world had died, and dropped everything about itself onto its home’s floor that morning upon receiving the news. It was over in a hundred seconds. If I had not seen it I never would have noticed, or I would have noticed and not believed that something so sudden could have happened and thought simply Oh the ash tree finally lost its leaves while I was not paying attention. Not as if everything in the world had suddenly changed for it. In fact afterwards the tree essentially looked the same to me. I stood there a bit stunned watching those leaves fall, and then awhile longer watching the tree, still standing there, anticipating that it might shrug or even uproot itself and go marching off toward the mountain, but it looked unchanged to the rest of the world just as perhaps the rest of the world was now entirely foreign to it, and I remained there as rooted as anything in the yard, realizing how little we witness any of these moments in others, feeling that somewhere around the corner is a phone call or a letter or a conversation where we’ll each know exactly what it’s like to be that tree, and have the same chance to stay, rooted in what we most deeply are, unchanged to others even while dropping everything.
First to hold the snow
Is the unspilled leaf, roof-bound,
Tin-eared, found groundless
The half moon rides high in the ninth hour of morning.
The leaves on the ground are raising their hands
As if they all have the answer
To a question I am not ready to ask.
Through this small city most of the river is submerged
But I see it just past the fire station emerge like the ground
Hog nobody was waiting on and sniff the grass and its first
Frost. Then it dives back under a chunk of rock and
The express hotel beyond. Standing on that same grass,
Listening to its reminders, I almost reach down
To touch the silvered signature, but don’t. I know it will
Not be the last frost I see. But if it were
Would I want the thaw of the first and last
Of anything on my hands? Nor will
This memory melt, nor river run over.
Translations from the English 