Earth Apples
(Pommes de Terre)
The Poetry of Edward Abbey
Collected, Edited and Introduced by David Petersen
Edward Abbey
Earth Apples
Copyright © 1994 by Clarke C. Abbey
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795317545
Introduction
CONFESSIONS: 1951–1965
The Whole Fucking Crew
November, 1951—Edinburgh
December, 1951—Edinburgh
December, 1951—Edinburgh II
February, 1952—Edinburgh
Verse Provoked by a Recent Visit to the Stacks
January, 1952—Majorca
January, 1952—Majorca II
March, 1952—Edinburgh
April, 1952—on the North Sea
April, 1952—on the North Sea II
Brief Speech to a Weather Vane
April, 1952—on the North Sea III
May, 1952—Norway
May, 1952—Norway II
Feudalism
Terror and Desire
The Wild Dove
Flash Flood
August, 1956—Arches
August, 1956—Arches II
August, 1959—Albuquerque
The Writer
Ditty
July, 1965—Arches
Episodes and Visions
A Few Appropriate Lines from Burns
A Maxim
POEMS AND SHARDS: 1965–1970
Book I: Poems for Judy
Love Letter
The Gift
Love Poem
Song from the City
Soaring Song
North Rim
Idle Music
Book II: Occasions
A Simple-Minded Song of Hatred
One Thing at a Time, for Christ’s Sake
Manhattan at Twilight, Seen from the Palisades
Book III: Notes & Illuminations from a Burning Book
King Aethelstan to All Heads…
Pommes de Terre
A Dream
Last Rites
Peace & Plenty
From a Sundown Legend
Where Is Your Rock?
Due Notice
What Zapata Said
Inconsolable Memories
Essay on Time
Long Poem: A Few Words for Some of My Contemporaries
For the Old Man
On the Birth of My Son
Book IV: Love’s Bawdy
Frivolous Question
Two Profane Love Songs
I Wish
I Don’t Want Them All (I Just Want All the Ones I Want)
Mornings in Santa Fe, Dead in Death Valley
Book V: Desert Music
Black Sun
Down the River
The Dry Season
Ambition
American Picnic
An Evening Star
Desert Music
A Sonnet for Everett Ruess
CONFESSIONS: 1972–1989
Last Thoughts While Lost Below Lizard Rock
Three Limericks
For Marcel Proust, et al.
For Clarke
The Kowboy and His Kow
Benedictio
About the Author
About the Editor
Edward Paul Abbey was born on January 29, 1927, on a hillside farm in rural Pennsylvania. He died on March 14, 1989, at his Tucson home. In his sixty-two years, Abbey published eight novels—including the comedic-eco-anarchistic Monkey Wrench Gang—and fourteen volumes of nonfiction, among them the American classic Desert Solitaire. Two of Abbey’s novels have found their way to film, and a third is in the works. No other contemporary American literary and cultural figure is so widely loved, and hated, as Edward Abbey. “I write,” he liked to say, “to entertain my friends and infuriate our enemies.” He did both.
David Petersen knew Edward Abbey as a friend, a mentor, and a colleague in letters. In addition to this volume, Petersen also edited and introduced Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey. Petersen was born in 1946 and lives today with his wife Caroline in a self-built cabin in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. He is the author of three books of natural history, and has edited and introduced Big Sky, Fair Land, essays by Pulitzer-winning novelist A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Petersen’s own essays have been included in several anthologies. He is currently writing a book about grizzly bears in Colorado.
Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
So long.
Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.
—in a letter from Mrs. Melville to her mother, 1859,
as quoted in Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections
from the Journals of Edward Abbey
(July 26, 1972—Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona)
There was so much I wanted to say
and did not say.
There was so much I wanted to do
and did not do.
There was so much I wanted to be
and never was.
(August, 1977—Aztec Peak Lookout, Arizona)
#1
A modest young fellow named Morgan