JOURNAL 1

RODNEY JONES

The Assault on the Fields

It was like snow, if snow could blend with air and hover,

     making, at first,

A rolling boil, mottling the pine thickets behind the fields,

     but then flattening

As it spread above the fenceposts and the whiteface cattle,

     an enormous, luminous tablet,

A shimmering, an efflorescence, through which my father

     rode on his tractor,

Masked like the Martian or a god to create the cloud where

     he kept vanishing;

Though, of course, it was not a cloud or snow, but poison,

     dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,

The word like a bramble of black locust on the tongue,

     and, after a while,

It would fill the entire valley, as, one night in spring,

     five years earlier,

A man from Joe Wheeler Electric had touched a switch

     and our houses filled with light.

Already some of the music from the radio went with me

     when the radio was off.

The bass, the kiss of the snare.  Some of the thereness

     rubbing off on the hereness.

But home place still meant family.  Misfortune was a well 
     of yellowish sulfur water.

The Flowerses lived next door.  Coyd drove a road grader

     for the county.

Martha baked, sewed, or cleaned, complaining beautifully

     of the dust

Covering her new Formica counters.  Martha and Coyd,

     Coyd Jr., Linda, and Jenny.

How were they different from us?  They owned

     a television,

Knew by heart each of the couples on Dick Clark’s

     American Bandstand.

At dust Junior, the terrible, would beat on a cracked

     and unfrettable Silvertone guitar.

While he pitched from the top of his wayward voice

     one of a dozen songs

He’d written for petulant freshman girls. ‘Little Patti,’

     ‘Matilda,’

‘Sweet Bonnie G.’ What did the white dust have to do

     with anything?

For Junior, that year, it was rock’n’roll; if not rock’n’roll,

     then abstract expressionism –

One painting comes back.  Black frame.  Black canvas –

     ‘I call it Death,’ he would say,

Then stomp out onto the front lawn to shoot his .22 rifle

     straight into the sky above his head.

Surely if Joel Shapiro’s installation of barbed wire and

     crumbled concrete blocks,

In a side room of the most coveted space in Manhattan,

     pays homage

To the most coveted space in Manhattan, then Junior

     Flowers’s Death,

Hanging on a wall dingy with soot in North Albama,

     is a comment, too.

Are they the same thing?  I do not know that they are not

     the same thing.

And the white dust, so magical, so poisonous: how does it

     differ from snow?

As it thins gradually over many nights, we don’t notice

     it; once the golden

Carp have rotted from the surfaces of ponds, there is no

     stench to it;

It is more of an absence of things barely apprehended,

     of flies, of moths;

Until one day the hawks who patrolled the air over

     the chicken coops are gone;

And when a woman, who was a girl then, finds a lump,

     what does it have to do

With the green fields and the white dust boiling

     and hovering?

When I think of the name Jenny Flowers, it is that

     whiteness I think of.

Some bits have fallen to clump against a sheet of tin

     roofing

The tornado left folded in the ditch, and the stoops there

     to gather

A handful of chalk to mark the grounds for hopscotch.

“The Assault on the Fields” by Rodney Jones is a 12-stanza poem in free verse that comments on the reality of pesticides.  Jones takes his time to recount his personal experience with the white dust of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. His tone is serious, but charmingly intimate.  His early use of alliteration (“Masked like a Martian,” “bramble of black”) alludes to the initially casual way people responded to the poisonous dusting.  His conversational sound weaves together with his generously detailed and punctuated long lines to remind us of real lives that were affected by use of this pesticide and the duration of its impact.  He takes the time to illustrate coverage, significance and the long-term effect with two metaphors: describing the dust as filling the valley as electric power had done with light five years before and how music from the radio was beginning to stay with him after he had turned the radio off.  These images not only help to instill his point, but also provide a historical context for the poem.

“Dear sisters and brothers,

we urge all of you

not to stop living,

to be a part of the rebirth of utopias,

to recover and defend the struggling dream

of Appalachia itself.

For it is the weak things of this world

which seem like folly

that the Spirit takes up

and makes its own.

The dream of the mountains’ struggle,

and the dream of simplicity

and of justice,

like so many other repressed visions

is, we believe,

the voice of the Lord among us.

In taking them up again,

Hopefully the church

might once again

be known as

• a center of the Spirit,
• a place where poetry dares to speak,
• where the song reigns unchallenged,
• where art flourishes,
• where nature is welcome,
• where humble people and humble needs come first,
• where justice speaks loudly,
• where in a wilderness of idolatrous

destruction the great voice of God

still cries out for Life.”

This poem, the closing prayerful plea of the 1975 Appalachian Pastoral Letter, This Land is Home to me, follows a carefully crafted, poetic discussion assembled and indorsed by the Catholic Bishops of Appalachia.  The document, and this poem, detail the injustices brought to the people and land of Appalachia.  As I read this piece after having considered “The Assault on the Fields,” my mind is filled with its visualizations.  As the father and neighbor woman in “Assault” proceed blindly through the fallen poison, I am struck with the feeling that they aren’t living in the sense employed by the Bishops.  They are not alive to the world and the destruction that engulfs them.  As Jones describes the haunt and effect of the “snow” on his community he, as an observer in this piece, takes on the action that the Bishops cry to see.  I have the sense, however, that in the heart of the experience, Jones was just a boy.  He was not the mover, shaker and muckraker that the Bishops hope the Catholic church can be.  As I read these poems together, I am filled with the longing for the church, as it is envisioned, to be a place where Jones’ poetry of justice can be heard and acted upon and where Junior and Jenny’s art and lives can grow and be connected to the reality of their situations and be appreciated.

Disconnect

Sitting next to you I wonder:

How is your grandmother?

How old were you when you lost your first tooth?

Who has caused that shadow on your heart?

Humans, we are

Sometimes only remotely connected.

We see

But won’t allow

Meaning.

Do we not trust our intuitions?

Or, do we

Just not want to spend

The time.

In nature I see no

WALLS

No place where boundaries

Clash.

Differences of opinion flit

But connectedness is king.

The shape of your silhouette

May be all I remember

When I stand up

Having not made you

Real to me.

___
 

Jones, Rodney. “Assault on the Fields.” Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent
     Spring. Ed. Burnside, John, Maurice Riordan. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. 24. Print.

Catholic Bishops of Appalachia. This Land is Home to Me. Martin: Catholic Committee on Appalachia, 1975.
     Print.