Country Bumpkins
(See "Editor's Gloss" below.)

by Nicholas Momurray

Country bumpkins, eh? Yep, that's us.
Ain't never been no farther than the county seat
and plumb glad to get back home then.
Nosireebob, I ain't jist awolfin'.
Me and my kin, we like it just fine right here,
share-croppin' the land my daddy and his daddy
worked every dadgum year of their lives.
I know, I know. It ain't much, jist twenty billion
light-years from corner to crick, but that's
plenty good for folks like us. Fair weather
and we work the whole blamed thing. Foul
and we do just a piece here, a piece there.
What more could we want, us un's, than
folds of furrows, folds of flesh, and when
we're curiouser than a cat in heat far-flung
folds of time-space its own self. Dadgummit
if that ain't enough to keep a man innersted
three score and ten I don't know what is.

END

Possibly Helpful Gloss
by the Editor of Magellan's Log
on This Ridiculously Obscure Poem

Miffed at Nicholas Momurray's willful obscurantism, I accepted this piece for publication only because Mr. Momurray has done so much for Magellan's Log in the past.

More miffed as the poem was HTML-ed and I was forced to re-read it several times, I determined--both for my sake and that of our readers--to hold Mr. Momurray's feet to the fire. Finally tracking him down at a Kapalua Bay time-share on Maui, I told him that if I, with the several academic albatrosses of advanced degrees hanging around my neck, could make neither heads nor tails of his work, what did he think our typical reader in Pago Pago was going to get out of it.

My experience with poets is that they fall into one of two categories. They are either pathologically anti-social (think Emily Dickinson) or pathologically exhibitionistic (think Allen Ginsberg). Nicholas Momurray belongs to the Dickinson group. Thus it was only after some minutes of trans-Pacific prodding that I finally got him to talk--if you can call the occasionally isolated syllable followed by a long silence followed by another syllable, talk. After some two hours of this, we more or less agreed it was time to hang up.

The following is my attempt to render Mr. Momurray's "remarks" re "Country Bumpkins" in coherent prose.

The very title and the rural rhetoric ("ain't", "plumb", etc.) he sees as a set-up, a little trap he's laying for the literate reader, who will immediately assume an attitude of cultural superiority to this hillbilly voice that's going on about life in narrow rural confines.

Then in line 8, Mr. Momurray says, he springs the trap, jolting us out of the tiny world of share-cropping into twenty billion light-years, his point being that, for all our vaunted scientific knowledge, we are still basically just a bunch of country bumpkins who can't imagine anything beyond the nearest county seat.

He claims to be delineating very carefully our main interests: either we're caught up in survival tasks at hand ("folds of furrows" = tilling the soil, doing a job) or in sex ("folds of flesh"). Even when we lift our eyes we still stop looking when we get to the horizon ("folds of space and time"), whether we're doing science, art, or religion.

Not only, he concludes, do we accept these self-imposed limitations, we rejoice in them ("enough to keep a man innersted").

Mr. Momurray's closing remark--the one followed by the longest silence and then our mutal hang-up--was that the most important part of the poem is in what's NOT said, namely that life beyond folds of furrows, folds of flesh, and folds of space and time is where it's really at. Maybe.
                                                                          --Doc Cuddy, Editor.

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