 |
| Photo by Harley Deuce |
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Christopher Fox Graham Portrait #4 by Harley Deuce
 |
Photo by Harley Deuce Performing a line from the poem "We Call Him Papa," about my grandfather Frank Buster Redfield. The line captured here is "he carved and crafted rifles / like Stradivarius made violins / and the first recoil / was a symphony / compressed to a split second." |
We Call Him Papa
For my grandfather, Frank 'Buster' Redfield
May 14, 1925 - 11 a.m. Oct. 31, 2004
we call him Papa
and he could move mountains with his silence
he fathered a family of artists
who all spoke a different language
who knew the value of labor
the efficiency of expression
if it is unclear, rephrase it
if it is unusable, remove it
if it is imperfect, rework it
until it is as much a part of you
as a limb
he never said this
but through his life, he taught us
his stone eyes
edited lies from our speech
before we could speak them
his hands held me tight once
after I sinned
they held me soft
when my father translated himself
into a mythology
I've since ceased believing in
his hands were the tools
with which he spoke through his silence
he carved and crafted rifles
like Stradivarius made violins
and the first recoil
was a symphony
compressed to a split second
he brought wood to life
as though generations of forests grew
to make the right grain
the right feel worthy of his talent
he did not build airplanes,
he built aircraft with the precision of a heart surgeon
knowing a loose screw, one misaligned wire
could transform a craft of beauty
into a coffin
and wife like his into a widow
he made no widows
except his own
he crafted art that soared like mechanical angels
and made us feel
how he must have felt with Grandma
even in his absence he scares me
because he was so much more
of what a man should be
than the men I see around me
than the man who fathered me
he was sometimes the machine moving me
he was sometimes the monster under my bed
keeping me from going gently into the night
without fighting the darkness
he was sometimes a giant
stretching hands from horizon to horizon
holding down the sun and moon
and dictating their rising
I am convinced that eastern Montana
is so perfectly flat
in fear of him
we call him Papa
and he could move mountains with his silence
I never heard him say he loved her
not in words
not in a way I could steal
not in a way that the cheap poet in me
could have plagiarized into a stanza
for some mediocre poem unworthy of his memory
I never heard him say he loved her with words
he said it with his eyes
he said it in the stories my mother would tell me
about how he would raise armies and wage wars
just to bring her flowers
he said it with the way he told me
about driving across Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania every weekend
just to see her for two hours between college classes and curfews
he said it by playing "Waltzing Matilda" on a harmonica
as he was dying
like he was asking her to dance again
for the very first time
he said he loved her
by showing us how good man
should love a woman right
we call him Papa
and he could move mountains with his silence
he is the poet
me, his eldest grandchild,
I am just his microphone
Frank Leslie “Buster” Redfield, age 79, passed away from natural causes on Sunday - October 31, 2004 at the Odyssey Hospice Medical Center in Chandler, Arizona. Services are planned for Friday – November 12, 2004 at 2:00 P.M. at the United Methodist Church in Opheim, Montana. Memorial services were held November 8 in Chandler, AZ. Funeral services will be November 12 at 2 pm at the United Methodist Church in Opheim with burial on the family farm. Bell Mortuary is in charge of arrangements. Pallbearers are his grandsons Logan, Cole and Chase Redfield, Jeremy and Ryan Thievin, and Zachary Cherry. Honorary pallbearers are Lanny Hanson, Tom Hanson, Larry French, Lowell Hallock, C.D. Markle, and his sons-in-laws Bill Elliott, Hank Sheer, Al Cherry, and Marty Thievin. Memorials may be made to the Opheim United Methodist Church or the Opheim High School Library. He was preceded in death by his parents and one grandson, Lane Redfield.
Frank Leslie (Buster) Redfield, Jr., 79, died October 31 in Chandler, AZ. He was born May 14, 1925 in Glasgow, MT to Mary and Frank Redfield, Sr. and attended school in Glasgow and Opheim. He served in the Navy on the USS Princeton and in the Army during World War II. He married Sylvia Slife on Dec. 6, 1947 in Atlanta, GA. They lived in Montana during 1948 and 1949 where their first child was born and then moved back to Georgia where he served on the Atlanta police force from 1951 until 1956 when they returned to Montana to farm with his father. He loved motorcycles and airplanes and was a spray pilot for many years. Since 1989 Frank and Sylvia have spent winters in Chandler, AZ and summers at home on the farm near Opheim. He was a member of the Opheim Methodist Church, the American Legion, the Masons, the Shriners, and the York Rite Bodies.
Survivors include his wife, Sylvia; three sons, Alan (Laurie) of Pray, MT, Les (Lisa) and Myron (Alice) of Opheim; four daughters, Georgia Sheer (Hank) of Louisville, KY, Lynn Cherry (AI) of Fayettville, NC, Sylvia Elliott (Bill) of Chandler, AZ, and Lisa Thievin (Marty) of Richland; 17 grandchildren, Erin Sheer, Jason and Zachary Cherry, Katie and Jodie Redfield, Chase, Tatum, and Haylee Redfield, Christopher Fox and Nicholas Graham, Jessica, Danielle, and Kristina Elliott, Logan and Cole Redfield, and Jeremy and Ryan Thievin; one sister, Dorothy Fossum of Richland, and many nieces and nephews.
Christopher Fox Graham Portrait #1 by Harley Deuce
 |
| Photo by Harley Deuce |
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
"Scars Open Letter to Hollywood from Heath Ledger," by Marshall Soulful Jones
"Scars:
Open Letter to Hollywood from Heath Ledger"
Written and performed by Marshall "Soulful" Jones
Produced by: Hans Zimmer
Re-imagined by: Fiya Divine
He's not
I'm not
And I'm sure you'd like to know why we're not Ill tell you ....
He loved her
And she's not here right now because of you
....Fame is a disease
We all got it We're all sharing needles with it If you're not careful
You will die before you die
I mean, look at us
NO!
NO!
Silly!
Put the suicide note down
AND LOOK AT US
Half of these things I cant even pronounce
But
Did you notice "Xanax" reads the same forward and backward?
No?
I thought it was funny
Anyway
Apparently my apartment on Broome Street
Did not sweep enough under the rug
So now you see what you've done
Now you know how I got these scars
See, the camera keeps rolling
Like a wheel
Turning your insides
You can't have a normal life
Without a production team
With a search warrant for your bad day
How many tabloids do you think it took to ruin him, hmm?
How many gossip sites did it take?
How many lines of cocaine do you think we need to forget
That everyday we're getting farther and farther away
FROM EVERYTHING We love
Oh you thought he was acting?
Oh You think I'm not real
Oh I'm real
REEL TO REEL
And when you 're sick with fame like him
You need people like me to keep you laughing
So when the lady left with everything
I said "Why So Serious?"
Just take two Ambien
Those are good for the nightmares
Take one of these
Two of those
A whole fuckload of these
I kept the bathroom cabinets jokes coming
Because Painkillers can shove your mistakes off a balcony
And you can still smile about it
You think you know him
You don't
I was there
I was there to tell him that if were gonna go anywhere
We were gonna go out with a bang!
So WHY SO SERIOUS!?!
 |
| Marshall "Soulful" Jones |
Be it the humor of today's technology, the vulnerability of true manhood or the somber conditions of African-American life Soulful desires to touch everyone.Whether slamming or simply sharing, his drive and passion for the art are apparent in his delivery and his presence.
Bio from Words With a Pulse.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Worst time to busk ... or newest Jaguar Paw song?
Jaguar Paw is a Sedona Dada punk band. The song will likely be on the forthcoming album.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Saturday, October 1, 2011
"A Constellation of Scars" by Christopher Fox Graham
"A Constellation of Scars"
By Christopher Fox Graham
only long-term lovers take the time
to ponder the origins of marks on skin
the first thing I notice are her scars:
she's a wandering tomboy
with more cuts and scrapes
than a hardbody Buick in an action film
but she's never been broken
I chart them as she sleeps so I can write poems later
these fingertips can still recall them
the way surgeons never have nightmares
about patients they save
but they’re haunted by the faces they lost
I chart them like Galileo
trying to map her ancestry
circumnavigating her body as if Magellan
hired me as helmsman
and only I can get us safely home
every scar has a story
the way men who ink themselves
on every square inch
from big toe to eyebrow
can name the tattoo artist
and heartbreak behind each symbol
if she let you close enough to nap with an ear on her chest
you could hear the heartbreaking discord
as her mother's violin and father's oboe
played so selfishly
they forgot they had a daughter in the orchestra
trying to make peace between the melodies
that hadn't played the same song in decades
but open wounds grow a thicker skin
and 24 years of a bleeding heart
made her impregnable
the manufacturers of castles,
SWAT team body armor
and 747 black boxes
are negotiation to duplicate her skin as a prototype
but she only answers e-mails from war orphans
and young widowers who bury their first loves
because only they understand
what she teaches:
how to survive after the world ends
and do it with a smile
and the belief that everything is still beautiful
whatever doesn't kill you becomes a cliché
and every time some failed love
broke her in half
her heart phoenixed and doubled in size
so by the time she climbed into my arms
I could climb inside her chest
as if she made herself into a hammock
by taking all the times she whispered “I love you” to a stranger
but never heard back
wove them together
so that when she met a lover
who wanted to study the stories of her scars
he would have a place to sleep between shifts
I studied her scars like a crime scene
trying to figure out which cuts were misdemeanors
and which were alibis for felonies
until I came across the last one
on which she had written in invisible ink,
that only glowed when I kissed her
drunk with love
“there is no mystery to solve, boy,
I just wanted someone to come this far”
by then I learned her scars so well
that if they sang musical notes
I could play her like a symphony in the dark
the strings of her arms hummed work songs
learned alongside peasants in El Salvador
the percussion of her feet
beat bass rhythms of the wandering road
snare-drumming stories to mark the miles
between hitchhiking pickup spots
the brass of her legs intoned harmonies with strangers
like she was rearranging the stars
as if Rigel, Mintaka and the Horsehead Nebula
separated by thousands of light years
had any clue we call them Orion
and that in the bed of a pickup truck
in an empty parking lot
she and I use that unexpected relationship
between irrelevant clumps of hydrogen
to ignore the sheer absurdity
of how strangers become lovers
to kiss for the first time
“you see,” she says “why I wear these scars like a constellation”
shooting stars scar the face of Sagittarius
or cut Hercules in half
but once they fall to Earth
it's as if they never happened
and no matter how many broken satellites
may scar the sky in your brief lifetime
we are just the dust of stars
condensed into living stories
the burning suns that make up these limbs
have been on fire for eons
shooting stars only last a second
but you can wish on these scars
until we swirl together as stardust
and burn bright as sun
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)