Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey

Isn't that a great title?  It's the title of a book of terrific poems by Hayden Carruth, who I started reading many, many years ago--probably when I was in high school and stumbled on Carruth's stuff when I was prowling the public library in Grand Forks, North Dakota, as I did habitually and compulsively.  

I've been reading Carruth off and on ever since, and a couple years ago I picked up SCRAMBLED EGGS & WHISKEY.  I've been reading and re-reading the poems in it every night lately, just as I did last year around this same time.  I have no idea why I've been reading him in the early fall, but I have.  Maybe this is the best time for good poetry.  A good, wool-gathering time of the year.

Hayden Carruth...one of the great writers of the past century and then some.  I salute him here for all the years I've considered him my own, which is the highest compliment any reader can pay any writer.

QUALITY OF WINE

BY HAYDEN CARRUTH

This wine is really awful

I’ve been drinking for a year now, my

retirement, Rossi Chablis in a jug

from Oneida Liquors, the best

I can afford. Awful. But at least

I can afford it, I don’t need to go out and beg

on the street like the guys

on South Warren in Syracuse, eyes

burning in their sockets like acid.

And my sweetheart rubs my back when I’m

knotted in arthritis and swollen

muscles. The five stages of death

are fear, anger, resentment, renunciation,

and –? Apparently the book doesn’t say

what the fifth stage is. And neither

does the wine. Is it happiness? That’s

what I think anyway, and I know I’ve been

through fear and anger and resentment and at least

part way through renunciation too, maybe

almost the whole way. A slow procedure,

like calling the Medicare office, on hold

for hours and then the recorded voice says, “Hang up

and dial again.” Yet the days

hasten, they

go by fast enough. They fucking fly like the wind. Oh,

Sweetheart, Mrs. Manitou of the Stockbridge Valley,

my Red Head, my Absecon Lakshmi of the Marshlights,

my beautiful, beautiful Baby Doll,

let the dying be long.