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Hot Mustard & Lay Me Down, by Paul r. Harding

en theos Press, (New Directions in Poetry)

www.entheospress.com

2003, 73 pages, $12.95

Reviewed by Thomas Hubbard

You're an airplane with hidden controls, and taking off from the Brooklyn of his past, Paul Harding commands the cockpit, touching all your invisible buttons in just the correct sequence as he pilots you around his world, your world, THE world. If your downhomework is complete, you'll understand. But you really don't need to see how he does it, just go ahead on and fly.

In his new book, Hot Mustard & Lay Me Down, Paul r. Harding extends a logical progression of poetics rooted in the works of such giants as E.E. Cummings, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. It's like he's up at the mike, singing improv and all of Black Culture dancing and doing harmony behind him while America — not commercial, mainstream America but the real America — is his back-up choir.

So if you've been listening closely to jazz and blues for the past few decades, and if you know more about black history than what you got from yearly schoolhouse celebrations on Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, and if you've experienced life without the filter of social privilege, you may just be carried away by Paul r. Harding's images that he strings together like freight cars in a long, fast train.

If you'd like to visit a romance that sizzles with adolescent possibilities, consider the opening stanza of “Hot Mustard,” his piece about high school sweethearts skipping school for the afternoon:

chinese incoming tide yellow
cloudy day. the two
of us cut school. held her
ritz cracker colored hand.
practically deserted subway.
looking forward to a nathan hot dog,
sauerkraut an' mustard. mid-
day when certain parts of brooklyn
quiet as pigeon eyed dawn re-
assuring good smell from german deli
'round the corner from prospect park....

For raw lust that just doesn't trust sitting room couches or first class coaches (and probably couldn't afford them anyhow) check out “Alice Like.”

with her rusty knees up,
her kid ory colored knees up,
her billie gardenia middle cup,
no in-between back
down on the nude earth —
some boy? some girl! ...

Harding's is the kind of poetry that you inhale, and if one of his images should miss your experience, your recognition, you don't stop; you just keep on breathing in because whether you recognized it or not, that image just made its connection in your soul and is carrying you ahead to wherever you're headed. You can always go back later and clean up the scraps.

In his piece, “Quietly,” Harding brings you as close as you're apt to get, close to experiencing brown-skinned serenity in a world that just never, ever seems to comprehend.

...street-light yesterdays
bouncing against hand-ball
courts late 50s rhythm n
blues, quiet —
ly

between screaming ambulance fire
black fingers the penguins earth
angles snap to, art blakey
& the jazz messengers moan to,
dixie peach hair wavin'
hot-comb to; quiet —
ly ...

And please excuse the butchery this review lays on Harding's work: His poetry bleeds no matter where you cut it. It is alive.

In the last poem of this book, “Lay Me Down,” Harding asks for a place between the extremes of our warped, crippling society — amid calamity, inequity and opulence, for there he will find forgiveness, love, and peace.

....Seat my black soul right in the middle of
The subway broken hearts between too short lived
Lives that didn't make it home from
Wall Street to Canarsie to Queens, but in —
stead became missing limbs, body parts
found and unfound in death's aroma
Over the Brooklyn bridge, dearest
Lord.

Bed me down with the real estate moguls and the homeless.
Put up my tent with the life insurance vampires and
every single parent weeping alcohol and dope tears of
their hard street sons and daughters....

Harding ends his book with an epilogue about where he's been, music he's listened to, writers he's read, and how he came up. It's almost another poem.

This is not a book that shows you where poetry is headed: What other poet will be able to draw upon this much experience and insight without being too old for writing? Nor is this a book that shows where poetry has been: Some of the masters have come close to this, but without the searing, rush-over-the-waterfalls momentum that Harding builds.

No, all this book will show you is salty water in your eyes, new respect in your walk, and a place down inside that you really need to visit again and again.

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Since retiring from his teaching position on Tulalip Rez, Thomas Hubbard has published Wisdom for a Dance in the Street, (a spoken word CD) by Dave Caserio, Nailed to The Sky, (a poetry collection) by M. Anne Sweet, and Junkyard Dogz, a chapbook of his own poetry and graphics, all under his gazoobi tales imprint. These add to his previously published Nail and other Hardworking Poems (Year of the Dragon Press, 1994) and Children Remeber Their Fathers, an anthology of poems about fathers. In the works are an anthology of poems about mothers, and a collection of writings to be entitled Living With Proud Mary. He is currently gathering works for an anthology of indigenous writers. He lives aboard a sloop at the Port of Everett.