First Chapbook

House of Tamarack:
The Poetic Memoir of a Twentieth Century Pioneer
by Jodeen Wink

Table of Contents

After the Fire
Pioneers 1
Chinking Instructions: Recipes, Words of Caution and Advice
Chinking
Some Wouldn’t
Liberation
Living Lineage of Chris Carstenson
Pioneers 2
Pioneer Mind
Mice
Ratmare
The Teacher
Mother’s Night Walk in August
It’s Sad When Flowers Die
The Seed Collector
Our Summer
The First Snowstorm of 1991
Welfare Mother’s Lament
Cabin Fever
Promises
As it Stands
Pioneers 3

After the Fire

Sunshine pours through holes
in your roof casting angular
shadows of charred rafters
down on debris.
How many times had I wished for this?
What a cold place you were
infested by mice and rats.
Like a prayer answered
old fuses in your attic melted
the tin box sputtered and fried
black smoke billowed
the town came running
yet none of us was hurt.

You’d been trying to burn down.
Your wood cook-stove
set its chimney on fire
the winter before
as if you were wishing riddance
to the lean-to kitchen
like a tumor grown on you.

Now even the heat of this day
cannot dry musty insulation
plaster, sheetrock strewn knee-deep.
Mice who once called you home
have fled to the fields
long-tailed rats gone too.
Bees make hives, centipedes
race toward dark cracks
bats dive and sway through rooms
and neighbors pass frowning
black water squishing under their shoes.
Their pitying eyes
pick at your wreckage and dread
your rusted nails, broken glass.
Soot fumes and scorched wires
trial from your walls in coppery twists.

But I don’t give a damn.
You were an ugly house anyway
and you knew it.
“It’s a shame,” I say
but I’m thinking “Good purge.”

The neighbors tip-toe away
and for the hell of it, I hook
my tire iron in plaster and lathing
and gouge down a dusty heap.
A tamarack timber peeks through.
I yank down more old plaster
to find log stacked on log
at the heart of cheap paneling
and linoleum you’ve become.
After more than a century
here you stand still
for a moment.

And in the quiet
I sit on a littered step
staring at those timbers
wondering how long
to liberate the whole place
and could I?
Wind wishes in branches
beyond broken panes
song birds sing and
I close my eyes and
my freaky mind imagines
some spirit whispering
make it so. . .
make it so again. . .

Or maybe it’s the wind.

Pioneers 1

That’s the landowner, poor as hell
with his wife, his eight children
his old house, and when it rains outside
it rains inside too. It even rains
inside his light bulbs and the whole family
walks in tall boots
mudded to the hilt.
And he keeps surviving, this landowner
on his dream--God’s dream
that he should speak to America
about its Vietnam War.
His wife stirs the pots and
he milks his cow by hand
morning and evening
says his prayers
home-schools eight children
in his rainy house.

And there’s the neighbor, a Polack.
A bit slow, they say, but smart enough
on his tractor to know how far
he’s come through his generations
and across the rolling fields
to a modern farmhouse with in-door plumbing.
He paces circles around the renter
who digs a hole for her outhouse
strikes water, fills the hole, digs another
strikes water again. “Get your landlord
to put a toilet in that cabin,” says the Polack,
“Won’t take no room at all,”
but the danged woman just keeps digging.

And here’s what the landowner calls
a Hardy Renter. A Welfare Mother.
She could survive fire
pry his charred farmhouse away
from the pioneer cabin at its core
and live there in return for free rent
because she does not fit
into subsidized housing. Her life is not
one of America’s projects
but everyone knows she’s cracked.
Soles of her bare feet so calloused
she spends summer walking
on nails and broken glass
and if she prays, it’s only to the weeds
but the landowner shrugs that away.
He has faith.

And these are the three innocents
she dragged with her, all daughters.
Too young to know where they’d be
if she hadn’t brought them here
or how other children live.
They eat peanut butter on bread
in the wreck of a burned home torn down
rising up again chink by
chink, like dream stuff.
They smile easy, playing in sheds and barns
with goats and cats, making nests
in grasses taller than they are.
Grime creases their damp palms
but out here grime is fine because man
was cast up from clay and
Jesus was a poor child and life is dirt
and they are seeds.

These are all the people there are
lined up along the winding road
just this side of the marsh
of snake and creek and red-winged blackbird
of cattail, willow, muck, and mosquito
and out there farther a tribe
of trickster tamarack stands dead but not dead
and up around them all the hugging arms
of Wisconsin hills roll into bluff and top field
where whippoorwill sings in summer
and wind howls down your shirt-neck
in winter. Keep a close eye
‘cos it’s likely God walks this valley.

Chinking Instructions:
Recipes, Words of Caution and Advice

Take crowbar and hammer to the old chinks.
Pound out loose chunks till the sun gushes in.
Note that some is mortar patch
and some is strung with long hairs, and some
is the same brown clay that sucks the shoes off your feet.
Now you know where that Irish settler got his.

If you buy yours, here’s the recipe:
three shovels-full sand
three shovels-full mortar
one shovel-full lime.
Mix thoroughly in a wheelbarrow
then add water slowly while stirring
till putty consistency.
You get the hang of it eventually.
Sweep logs clean before applying.

You will need:
a hundred pairs of rubber gloves
a hundred plastic bread bags.

Caution:
by the time mortar has eaten through gloves
it will also have eaten through skin.
(Put bread bags under gloves. Keep chinking.)
You will flake and burn.

You may sign your name
draw pictures, write poetry in it.
Chinking makes a cabin solid,
keeps out most weather and large critters.
It takes six or seven people one week
to chink the inside.

Caution:
if the six or seven people are children
they will tire after a week.
You will chink the outside by yourself.
Estimated amount of mortar: 3,000 pounds.

Advice:
When the cabin needs re-chinking, move.

Chinking

I mortared between these logs
white lime and sand grit stinging
finger tips rubbed raw
beneath ragged gloves.
Up and down the ladder endlessly
mind lost, time stopped
world gone, eyes burnt,
sweat diamonds
falling from my head.

Back and forth my hands went
sealing gaps, smoothing flat
eyes hunting for little cracks
days and days and days
mind fixed on a phantom
stalking my chinks.
January was coming
from a long way off
on silent feet.

Some ghost, I swear, watched me
that summer or maybe it was the sun
bearing down on my back.
Some mind lingered obsessed
where dirt swallowed sweat, walls
gnawed flesh, flesh
in crazed motion, flesh
against the wind, eyes
possessed.

Some Wouldn’t

Some wouldn’t live here
without air conditioning
without a garbage disposal
with no place to set a microwave.
Some wouldn’t walk outside
for relief in the night
or when it’s cold
atop a dark hole in the ground.

Some wouldn’t like
the rough tamarack walls
the dip and creak of gray
tongue and groove floors
the crooked sills encasing
leaded windows rippling
or the slant of the door-jamb.
Some couldn’t tolerate
the resident farm mice
rampaging cupboards
eating uncooked spaghetti
leaving turds in pancake mix
or the song of fat black cricket
ringing conniption under the stairs.

Some wouldn’t bathe
In the Rocket Steel Co.
cow tank under the full moon
out in the yard.
Some wouldn’t sleep
on a homemade bed
four feet from the floor
wind pelting rain
on the roof sway.

Some wouldn’t like
smelling walnut in autumn
or thunder rumbling
sinister in the distance.
And some wouldn’t trek
up the hill drive
when walnut leaves had flown
in deep snow
or live one minute
without a telephone. No.

Liberation

First of all, understand there’s no way to seal
a real pioneer cabin. It doesn’t matter
what you stuff, spray, pack, or nail.
Rain’s gonna’ fall, wind’s gonna’ drive it
through the walls to the middle
of saggy floors in dusty puddles.
There’ll be shafts of sun stealing
round the doorframe, winter sifting in
thread crevices where timber ends
and roof begins, winter under the quilts.

He’ll say, “Oh, it’s a nice little
summer dwelling.” He’ll say, “You have quite
the imagination.” You’ll ignore him, kind of,
and stay away, opting to visit him
on his high hill from time to time.
Then the furnace will break down
so you’ll visit him more often
and he’ll regard you with a smirk.

But come spring spiders hatch
and thistle tufts in clay do sprout.
You bathe in fifty-degree mist
while Orion slides down the black sky
and in June thousands of fire flies
star the marsh.

In summer he’ll stroll among your delphiniums,
declaring, “It really turned out bountiful. . .
in spite of everything!”
But, with the onset of autumn he arrives one day
meticulously squirting foam
in all the open places. He leaves content
he’s saved you from another bleak season.

But soon enough sleet beats the walls
rain trickles through air pockets
in hardened foam. You laugh
because not ten minutes ago
wind blew the chimney
right off the house, and because you know
there’s no way to seal a real pioneer cabin
and he could never save you.

Living Lineage of Chris Carstenson


Old Grampa was a spindly thread on the hem
and breeze was blowing him loose
by the time I arrived so more than him
I remember his tea roses,
a straw hat, a pair of suspenders, a pipe.
that he pissed in the garage & yelled in his sleep
and when his thread let go his stories
unraveled from his daughter’s mouth
and into my ears where they might be
one of the last places to catch.

He wasn’t going to be forced into the Danish army
on the eve of WWI, and
he liked to drink & chase, and
he outlived two wives: one gone in a wagon wreck
the other an Irish girl—Hazel Henry—mean & musical,
whose songs he helped broadcast vaudeville-style
along with the seeds of his gardens
that are still singing up through all of our flesh.

His daughter Loraine said, “When my folks
were ready to move they just got up
and walked out the door,
left the plates on the table.”

She wrote that her dad was a postman
and a cowboy and he built a railroad in 1908
and she was born a twin in a sod house
in North Dakota on January 1st in 1913
and she saw the prairies burning,
hooves burned off the cattle, and
when she was five, Old Grandpa
brought them back to the Wisconsin woods
in a covered wagon.

All my life she said when she got too old
to work, my grandpa Carl
would go out in the woods
and build her a log house, but
grandpa Carl got old and died
and then my grandma Loraine died
so I am living in a log house in Wisconsin.

Pioneers 2

Inspired by the writings
of Laura Ingalls Wilder and O. E. Rølvaag
with just a smidge of influence by Edward Abbey

His children awake in locust time.
By forenoon his mule
blows through a hole in the roof.
The sky is fire and lightning.
The milk-cow starves to death by noon.
By sundown the thin man gets up from table
and pulls the door open on a cyclone.
His wife goes mad and by midnight
the door drifts shut leaving her to freeze.
In spring the panic grass grows up through her mouth.
Silence sings up through that grass.

Pioneer Mind

I understand the inclination
toward starvation, storms, and illness
a lightening strike on a dry prairie.

I believe in hobo cats
the migration of robins
the slutty behavior of seeds.

I know human over-bright capabilities
the business of budgeting subsidies
pipelines to satellites, trenches to food pantries.

I recognize the need
to pit one’s self against the progress
of one’s insanity.

I long for a particular terror
a house with its roof blown off
my whole damned life burned to the ground.

I understand the inclination
to walk out leaving plates on the table
and shit in the mailbox.

Mice

There are mice in this house.
Each morning a speckled sink.
Turn over a cook pot and a pair dash out.
Their slight weight thuds over counter
as they scurry up timber walls
behind corner junk, behind the stove.
From behind cupboard door, they leap
prickly claws dust my foot-top
and turn to shadowys--my poor eyes.
If I had a weak heart, I’d be done for
but I’m not afraid of little mice.

There are quite a few mice in this house.
They’ve chewed a hole in Sophie’s purple jumper,
chewed holes in the knees of the honey bear bottle.
Late at night when I was sitting quiet
looking down into the trash can
I found him silver, shiny, soft.
I wanted to run my knuckle along
his smooth spine, but he jumped up and down
up and down, and ran in worried circles,
worried circles till I stuck my
broom handle in and set him free.
Then he lugged a corn chip up the steps
and sat crunching under my bed.

Still, there are so many mice in this house
that one day I opened the door and Big Ornery Cat
came in on her hind feet boxing the air, as usual,
so I let her stay and she lay on sofa, licking paws
watching TV, and purring herself to sleep
while the mice laid dark streaks
back and forth all over this house.

Ratmare

Black rats run humpy lines
along cold cement walls
All night I try to sleep
but rats keep running scurvy circles

Tails and teeth

They run round Sophie’s pink feet
In the dark a white nighty
cries, The rats are chewing on me!
beside my bed

The Teacher

Night.
Bedded child
practices whistling.
Outside window
whippoorwill sings.

Mother’s Night Walk in August

Full moon hazy and red-ringed
fresh cut hay, a hint of man sweat
sunflowers in moon confusion.
From grass waves a stegosaurus rises
with a snake slung in its jaws.
It flaps in wind, thins to bones, and decays.
Shadows of a woman and her cat pass over
glowing milkweed leaves and under
the still gaze of a fossil farm machine
stretching its phosphorescent neck
from its rusted carcass in weeds.

Packs of dogs howl up the fogged valley.
They plow wet tunnels through cattails.
She hears them coming, snapping vicious.
Cat hisses, tail twitches, and far, far
back down the road she sees the walnut tree
its long branches slithering against the sky
casting dreadful shadows down
on the tiny cabin, so squat and square
where her children lie sleeping alone
each one two three but a wisp
blown through a dream.

Why has she gone so far away?

It’s Sad When Flowers Die

All winter I lived on dreams of spring planting.
In April, before ground thawed
I dug the icy earth, gathered heavy stones.
Robins returned to walnut tree
chattering of their journeys.
Beneath a feverish sky
I sweat in the chill of first rains
but the sunflowers came up sturdy
with leaves like umbrellas.

When they grew breast-high
a wicked storm
broke one’s spine in two. Her life
dangled by a couple coarse threads.
Masking taped together with walnut splints
she survived until Mother Goat
pruned all of her leaves.

I thought of that flower’s death
but limbless and braced
she shot upward with the others.
And when they were taller than I
a herd of goats turned all my flowers
to sad shreds, jagged stumps.
Lilly buds hacked off
zinnias beheaded
gladiolas dressed in limp strips.
One of the few left standing
was the splinted sunflower
leaning against her sisters
face torn off.

And the children trod over them.

And when that man came to put a window upstairs
his chainsaw growled, ripped
through the timbers, mortar flew.
Deep purple petunias
blood-red nicotania bombarded.
Their broken faces smashed into the clay
looked like women trying to survive.
Even now young goats slip through a fence
I’ve cobbled with sticks and bailer twine.
After the damage they go away
wait for these flowers to recompose.
When that happens, they’ll be back hungry.
I know they will. I’ve seen it before.
It’s sad how women live.

The Seed Collector

While you were out gathering
wildflower seeds, you caught
the owl’s feather. I imagine your
hard, white hands plucking it
from pollen heads of golden rod
your tangled blond hair
falling across scarlet flannel
in yellow afternoon.
I see you bent at the rim
of the marsh running
your calloused finger along
the curve of owl’s feather
rippling into stripes hair by hair
your lips thinned to a grin.

In my brass base swamp grass flares
above burgundy pods
swollen and slit.
I barely touch and they spill seed.

This poem is to thank you for the day
I came in from tight places
to find a bouquet wrapped in
scarlet ribbons and the night
when my hair was still long
how you chose one curved lock
drew it down between my breasts
with slow, broad fingers
looked at me a long time
said I was beautiful.

Our summer

A heavy sky moves in
beneath the summer blue
absorbs the color
sucks the heat
and wind slaps the face
of a stiffening planet

Poor leaves turn under
wince
and give in
dust, the dried
whipped bits, the shreds
of things alight
for blown miles
of shifting journeys
with high black specks
of birds

Now into the ground
go the frost-wilted vines
the death-scythe sunflower
stands sentinel
at the cabin door

Wooly sleeves
and tall stockings
emerge from behind
steamed windows
out from the bed
into weak light
each morning
comes the pale face
the red lipstick
the fingers on cold hands
that brace the child up
and plodding slow
down the hill
two of us--small women
move careful
to cross the slick sheen
and let you go

The First Snowstorm of 1991

forced itself in round
gap-edged frames
of bending crackling glass
all the way to the center
of the small old room
shifted form in silence
danced again
that slow gray dance.
The land stiffened
stark and unyielding.
Its bony knuckle
still whines across the pane.

Welfare Mother’s Lament

Your friends
they call you lucky
call you free woman
because you’re out on your own
in the stars and the wind
the hills and the trees
and you sit up late at night
and you write your poems.
They sneer, “She’s prolific.”
Sometimes when you’re drunk
you think they begrudge you.
Your friends
sometimes they frustrate you
because they take it all for granted
tied to their ovens
chained to their TVs
their double incomes
and their sex lives.
They study women’s history.
They say, “The more things change
the more they stay the same,
but at least it’s not as bad
as it used to be.”
But you know
they won’t go without heat
this winter
and you know they can get
excited about working
part time for minimum wage
because hubby’s gonna’ bring home
the big stuff, the prestige
and they can afford
to piss and moan about boredom
or gloat about meaningful work.
When you work
for minimum wage
you’re still on Welfare.
You still embarrass America.
Your friends
don’t know anything.

Cabin Fever

I am a small room of rain-soaked logs.
Day upon day drizzle seeps in.
I am the rain streaming under the door.
I am the floor, splintered and soiled.
I am cobwebs thickening in corners.

I am the chill inside a shrinking room,
a handful of dried zinnias frosted on the sill,
the child’s torn snowflake glued to the pane.
I am a jar of cold honey collecting dust.
I am the break in a tall, straight mirror.

I am where The Starry Night dangles by one
rusted nail, the song of a cracked mandolin.
I am the way a woman wrings her hands
and one night sees her reflection in a window
against the blotting blur of a storm.

Promises

It was hard times.
The children hacked
under mounds of blankets.
The whippoorwill had long
quit whistling
her music a ghost.
The family huddled on a sofa
turned to face glowing coils
of an electric stove
breath always too visible
in this gray room.
Foot upon foot of snow fell
and I promised the girls
we’d leave come June.

So when he bounded over the grassy knoll
at the end of May, tall and strong
with this cabin reflecting in his eyes
I met him with a smile.
I claimed the place was enchanted:
Full moons magic enough
to yank him up from buried sleep
drag him down a blue road
leave him stranded in milkweeds
a lunatic.
I wasn’t lying.
I promised swamps full of fire flies
choruses of crickets, and steam rising
off the rippled lip of the cow tank
where he really could sit naked in daylight.
I promised this was nothing like Milwaukee.
He stayed for dinner.
Yes, those hills have caves in them.
Yes Man, spring water’s gonna’
Sparkle in your well.

Then he broke my heart
asking my opinion about linoleum
for floors, sheetrock for walls--
walls I chinked with bloody fingers—
and questioned my judgment about
the best place for a spice garden.
He planned to pull up the fences.

And I realized there were other promises
I could make:
In April his shiny car would get sucked down
in clay and stay till the sun got hot in May,
and those pretty goats the landlord promised he’d sell?
He’d never sell, and they’d eat every planted thing
not early on, but late, just before fruit, and the rain
was guaranteed to beat in threw the walls, and the furnace. . .
Should I make a promise about the furnace?

I bit my tongue.

As it Stands

When I go back now
there’s nothing but fields:
no stone, no sun flower, no foundation,
nor goats, nor barn, nor pile of junk,
no cabin standing up on the knoll
watching the marsh, and
only the Walnut remains
to know the long story.

I stand in a row of corn-stuble,
ghost in the gray-wind sky
waving her arms at a pick-up
tooling slowly down the road,
its driver staring up at me.

I used to live here in a cabin, I say.
So-And-So bought this place he says,
with suspicious eyes,
and he moved that cabin
back in the hills, and
I know where it is
but I’m not gonna’ tell you
‘cos aybe he don’t want nobody
walking around back there.


The red-winged black birds,
the whippoorwills and snakes,
the fire flies, the mad dogs, the bluffs,
even the full moon
that shines on milkweeds
reside on His land,
for now.

And the cabin has moved on
to live yet another life
somewhere quiet, I imagine
in the old woods
with wind howling,
through cold winters
and deep snow,
a home for mice and birds,
the songs of crickets
echoing in empty rooms,
chinks likely fallen out, and
the daylight likely seeping in.

Pioneers 3

What happens to people who aren’t team players
or corporate cheerleaders,
who won’t be appeased by shopping,
who want to leap from the tread mill,
for whom poverty would be a relief,

whose minds will not be silenced
by the white noise of computers,
or the continuous songs of cell phones,
who have eaten every antidepressant
insurance policies cover and still wither?

What happens to pioneers now
in subdivisions, on claustrophobic freeways
in Super Center parking lots?
Where’s the unpaved garden, the possible horizon?
Who--or what--should we kill to clear the way?

The End.