Clyde Kessler and “Murray Eldon”
Clyde Kessler is a poet and naturalist from southwest Virginia. His work has appeared widely in literary journals, and Cedar Creek published his 2017 collection Fiddling at Midnight’s Farmhouse, illustrated by Kendall Kessler. Virginia Tech’s archives also record his work as a poet, naturalist, and university library staff member.
Issue 40 preserves “Murray Eldon,” a poem where a vanished jeans-factory job, winter fields, moldy denim, moss, slush, turnips, and family memory occupy the same landscape. The closing image reaches thirty years into the past as the speaker sees aunts leaning across sewing machines with sunlight around their hands.
Murray Eldon
It is winter smuggling the sky
past the jeans factory. I laugh
since I dream it like scissors
and bobbins and thread, knotted
into the horizon. My job’s gone
to the farm, I dig out a stump.
The wood feels like moldy denim
bundled in a dumpster. Moss
tries to sell its green against slush.
Joe-pye stalks are hiding turnips
and if I stand still, I see frozen mites
trying to thaw along the stems.
My mind is still jammed at the door:
even if plywood is nailed over
every window, I see my aunts
reaching across sewing machines,
sunlight caught like plastic beads
around their hands, thirty years gone.
Poetry and natural history
The Virginia Tech archive identifies Kessler as a poet and naturalist in southwest Virginia. Still and Cider Press Review document his continuing poetry publications and Fiddling at Midnight’s Farmhouse.