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Blue Juniata

By Malcolm Cowley 1898–1989 Malcolm Cowley

Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide

scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch

empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here

there is no house at all—

only the bones of a house,

lilacs growing beside them,

roses in clumps between them,

honeysuckle over;

a gap for a door, a chimney

mud-chinked, an immense fireplace,

the skeleton of a pine,

and gandy dancers working on the rails

that run not thirty yards from the once door.

I heard a gandy dancer playing on a jew’s harp

Where is now that merry party I remember long ago?

Nelly was a lady ... twice ... Old Black Joe,

as if he laid his right hand on my shoulder,

saying, “Your father lived here long ago,

your father’s father built the house, lies buried

under the pine—”

Sing Nelly was a lady

... Blue Juniata ... Old Black Joe:

for sometimes a familiar music hammers

like blood against the eardrums, paints a mist

across the eyes, as if the smells of lilacs,

moss roses, and the past became a music

made visible, a monument of air.

Malcolm Cowley, “Blue Juniata” from Blue Juniata: A Life. Copyright © 1985 by Malcolm Cowley. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Source: Poetry (November 1926).

Biography

In 1934 Malcolm Cowley published an autobiographical literary history, Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas, and established himself as an important writer. Three decades later in 1965 the editor of Literary Times would write, "Malcolm Cowley is, next to Edmund Wilson, the finest literary historian and critic . . . in America today."

While in the early 1930s Cowley's name was often associated with Communism and the political . . .

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