Jacob the Crow

Jacob the Crow

Every now and then something comes along and really jolts me. YesterdayI got an anonymous letter in the mail. Well, not entirely anonymous -- the return address is from "G. O. Deliverer, Burnsville MN."

I have gotten crank mail before, usually after a politically tinged letter to the editor exposes me to these kindsof postal slings and arrows.

This was different -- it was from someone who is powerfully disgusted by me, not as an advocate, but as a poet. Your soul stinks, is the basic message of the letter.

I have uploaded the letter to this URL, with a scan of the accompanying envelope. If you are into intrigue, stalking, and poetic put-downs, have a look at it.

I don't know what to feel. First, I felt complimented that someone read my work so closely -- though he clearly despises it. I mean, poetry just doesn't get read, period. I must have been doing something compelling to warrant this spiritual megatonnage. He quotes a dozen poems of mine in his poem -- so, despite the arrows sticking in me, I felt "quotable" and therefore "canonical," you know, available to quote from. Who would bother to quote from Nobody? So I'm somebody -- somebody despicable!

The poem/critique seems inspired by a poem I wrote but never published, about an experience I had down by Crosby Farm about 5 years ago. It was cold, and I was out with my dog, and I heard what I thought was a boy's voice calling out behind me -- a voice in anguish. It freaked me out, especially when all I could see was a crow departing from a branch.

My imagination got to work, as I assessed the shivery feelings I had, and I cooked up a poem about an Ovidian metamorphosis about a boy turned into a crow. In Minnesota we have a famous crime in which a boy named Jacob Wetterling disappeared, back in the 1980s. I gave the boy in my poem Jacob's name -- it amounted, in my mind, to a prayer that God would save the kidnapped boy much as Zeus transformed maidens about to be raped into persimmon trees.

Now, I knew something was wrong with this concept, and my poet friend Rich Broderick (vote for him for School Board this November) warned me in an early draft not to put on another's suffering as if it were your own in a poem. Meaning I was posing in the victim's role in my early version of "Jacob the Crow."

I must tell you that I had never thought of that before, but I agreed with the principle. It is unseemly to steal another's pain and write it up as if it were yours. And I thought my final versions of the poem sidestepped this problem -- making me someone who wished God had swooped up the boy and saved him, not as a stand-in for the boy.

But clearly, the writer of this poem/critique thinks I am still guilty of spiritual theft. I will have to re-read the Jacob poem to see if I agree or not. It is here.

G.O.D.'s central accusation, as I understand him,is that I am a manipulative egomaniac not to be trusted around sensitive minds. If so, you probably shouldn't be reading this, unless you, like me, wickedly slow down to get a look at flaming car crashes. There is something perverse in our fascination with pain and misery, no doubt about it.

I confess I have led an emotionally lurid life. I have not just felt things, I have tried to feel them even more – like Tolstoy, sprinkling cayenne down his throat so he could write about the feeling. When asked what is the matter with me, why I feel so intense, my answer is that I am naturally on the hyper-emotional side of things -- that I feel things intensely. Intense embarrassment, anger, resentment, self-pity, humor, the works.

I once had a reader write, about my brain tumor book, that I "milked" the audience, made them feel as creepy about having something the size of a baby’s arm inside my head as I do myself. It was the same accusation.Basically, that I write self-indulgently about suffering, and it's abusive to the reader.

I fully sense how annoying this would be to someone who has a better handle on himself emotionally. I wish I was Gary Cooper, but I'm afraid Iam closer to Peter Lorre -- haunted, childlike, guilty and confused.

I am trying to be more optimistic and less lurid. One thing I pray for is not be a prick and not to inflict myself on people. Not to be the Old Man of the Sea, perching and preying on people’s sympathies. I’m trying. I meditate, I exercise, I pray.

But it may be a futile prayer, because God (the real one) seems to have made me this way in his mysterious pretzel logic, twisted and salty like a fossilized tear.

Butthank you to G.O.D. of Burnsville (Burnsville, get it?) for the love in this poem, that comes all knotted up with your own hot emotions.

UPDATE: I have been asked if I know who G.O.D. is. No, I don't. It could be an old friend who knows me too well. More likely, it is someone I never have met. Several friends advise me that the letter feels likea death threat -- and that the letter seems to be both blaming me for the boy's abduction, and taking credit it for it himself. Like the references to the Zumbro River -- I have never written anything like that, so that part is all him.

A Narrative Poem for Michael Finley

(slightly revised from the original)
by Anonymous
Date of publication: October, 2003,
On the occasion of the 14th anniversary
Of the disappearance of Jacob Wetterling

[NOTE FROM MIKE: The links are to poems of mine that this writer is quoting]
Michael Finley
God knows
About your sins under the flag
And about how certain gases contrive with stones
And I know
I know about down by the Zumbro River, too
Where there is a beach of sand
And what was a former cinder pit
Now replaced with charred wood and sand
From the occasional flood
You're a dud; I'll tell you why
You make people cry
Mean people suck
Your flag of sin on that lascivious ocean
Shows no regret for that which turned in space
A hidden clue
Binoculars
Watching Jacob and more
You are that whirlpool of blood
Down by the Zumbro River
Where the crows call out in the cold
Not far past the now closed-off bridge
Only several hundred yards
To your private graveyard beach
Where you again and again reach
To plant your flag of sin
But you don't win
Because God knows what you did
To that nice kid, Jacob
Who never was a crow
Again, a hidden clue
Binocular-vision from above
Hello, Victim, from New York
A questioning clue ...

[next page]
What was a Minnesotan doing in New York
Being generous because of excitement
Then calling the one who needs peace
Peace, not at all like crystal snow
On unmarked graves
Knaves
Don't believe in God
Fools disapprove of heaven
That's where boys are still alive
They have friends to play with
And the ability to plot against
Those who would benefit from a ferocious beating
That's why there are times when you, Michael
Want to burst out crying and tell them everything
Where is your faith
Is it stored as heat from Chevrolet floorboards
Speeding through the night
Racing past the: pump and cornfields. etc.
Why would you be proud to the tooth
For fooling God and man
This is not your country
You cannot assign sin to the American flag
Not funny, but true
You want to tell the secret
That has been choking you for years
You want forgiveness for rude and
Seemingly forgetful crimes; not yet
You have a debt
For bullets pumped out coldly
Coldness not worth more verse
Your wickedness being dispersed
You are the worst
And these are only words, not bullets
Be angry and sin not
When you see something bad coming
You should stop, turn around
And go the other way
Bastard; you said it about yourself
Help us locate the children locked away
But don't tell us about a boy's death in poem
Again, like it was your original idea
You feel only a prick, not the stab
Of a boy's passing
The crumplingof the parents
What is sweetness and horror on one page
What is sweet about murder and rape
Mysterious man
[page 2]
Mess-making machine
Render of night
Who still can't make art worthy of admiration
Only sick words.
Again not funny, but true
You are a remainder
A dirty garment tucked under knees
Eager for instruction and keen for meaning
About evil
You sleep on your hands
Atoning for numerous crimes and greedy indignities
You sleep on your hands
To stop yourself from killing again
For when you are gone
And even your molecules are gone
In that blink of time
When a day is as a thousand years
A million years later you will still be guilty
Unresolved in that giddy sprawl of green
Father God is capitalized
And, yes, a Jew died for you, too
What is nonsense
Your needless carnage
When you used to drink until dry
Thinking not only of beaches
But of envy and hatred, consumed
You are the one' doomed
Making the swift tumble coming soon
Do you mind that I copy your words
Your wretched words
Soon, every siren shearing the dark
Will be headed toward your part of town
St. Paul, Minnesota
Because of your once-discouraged Chevy
Running wrong down gravel roads
Not funny, but true
My prophecy to you is plain, Michael
You, sharing the name of a good angel
My prophecy to
You is plain
Future pain
My prediction: an unfulfilled ego-maniac
Anton's Syndrome sounds devilish
It must look to you like spotlights shining
On skaters at night
The light you see is false
But down by the, Zumbro river
The crows are still calling out to you in the cold
[page 3]
So now it is your turn to jerk around
Your hairs must stand spike upright
Then pass down through your brain
Sending you crashing through screen-doors
Making you run half-crazy through unfamiliar places
Searching for that same peace
Others so desperately pray for
To the God you don't believe in
A hatchback is not a lid.
And trunks don't have floorboards
What is a Chevette
Why seek him here
Why not seek him there under your flag of sin
Why not God would ask
For he Is NOT flown
And the eyes that adored every wild thing
Are watching you, now
Why do you blink, Michael
Over what your heart has to endure
Because you are like an evil black crow
Begging to be set loose
Begging to be set loose
Begging to be set loose
It will be you braying
Not praying
Not thriving on predictable dreams, either
You, a scavenger of bloodthirsty words
No good at the truth
Behind your dull black bead of eye
Is darkness deeper than a well
For you are cold! and pitiless
And your heart cannot endure
what winter cannot kill
The crystal snow of each winter
On an unmarked grave down by the Zumbro river
Under your flag of sin
Where the crows are calling out to you still
Calling out for you to confess
So many lives can begin anew
It's not funny, but it's all true

[end]

sent to me anonymously October 2, 2003
in this envelope: