Led Zeppelin, Little Country Giants, Maxine W. Kumin, The Envy Corps and Joe Cocker … Mountain Mama finds herself halfway home

Hi there … and welcome to Mountain Mama’s Earth Music … home grown and halfway home

Here’s this script for this week’s show, and here’s the link if you want to give er a listen
http://www.kdrt.org/station/archives/123

1) Pitchfork, Joshua James 4:06
2) Hats Off To Harper, Led Zeppelin 3:39
3) Last Lonely Goodbye, Little Country Giants 2:51

Your Family Reunion
By Perie Longo

I will never be able to keep your family straight.
Is the one with the short, brown hair the sister
or cousin of the woman who was the wife
of a polygamist and why won’t she talk to her?
What’s the name of the one with the dark hair,
who looks like she stopped drinking
since the last reunion? The pretty, young girl
with the very flat stomach and belly button ring,
is she the one who doesn’t know who her father is
or the other one holding a knife in the air?
And the man with his camping site set up
like he invented the whole idea, with a two-foot flame
under a ten-quart kettle, who is he the son of?
How about the one who rewired our camper
so the lights work off the city power
while we’re deep in the woods with no hookup,
is he the ex-nuclear submarine commander?
Who is the mother, again, of those three sisters
the one who ran off with the best friend
of their father? I’m the only one here
without your family strain, the only one
looking up who wonders when the rain will hit
and if your father, whose ashes sit
on the back shelf of the camper, knows
what a rough trip it’s been getting here
in the heat and no air conditioning
and rough roads. I wonder if he’ll be glad
To finally get some peace, which will be a trick,
since he knows who everyone is.

4) Will My Mother Know Me There, The Whites with Ricky Skaggs 3:04
5) Mexican Home, John Prine, 4:17

Family Reunion
by Maxine W. Kumin
The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case home-grown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wine.

Nothing is cost-effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
hand sown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.

In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps the raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.

Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!

Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.

6) Driftless, Greg Brown 3:03
7) Down Home Girl, Old Crowe Medicine Show 3:48
8) Long Journey Home, South Austin Jug Band 2:55

The Ladies Hat Party
By Nancy Bodily

Once a year in June we drift down
follow the wandering Bear River
through desert sage mountains
into an unfolding sky of blue knowing

Gypsies in the gleaming afternoon light
mountain women shedding the skin of an ordinary Saturday
dressed in aerophane and batiste

Bereft of jeans and cotton
our dresses celebrate young
chartreuse nights when we floated
indulged bra black tight laced fetishes
came to know the scarlett organza of loss

And to top it all off
the mighty hats shimmer in music and light
their baubles dance and shine
and the embossed sun sinks fierce
in a damask weave of fertility and tequila.

10) You Can Leave Your Hat On, Joe Cocker 4:13
11) El Camino, Elizabeth Cook 2:44
12) Story Problem, The Envy Corps 4:35

The Approaches
By Harry Clifton
A childless, futureless road
And then nothing. . . Is that it?
Or start believing in a God
Beyond the temporal limit

Of westering skies, wide, melancholy,
Uncut fields and paced-out walls
As we drive towards it slowly,
The house that has us both in thrall.

They are gone, now, the hours of light
It took to get here. Might-have-beens,
Lost wanderyears. But that’s alright—
We are trading it in, the seen

For the experienced, the car keys
For the end of the journey,
When distances have lost their power
And the heart beats slower

In tomorrow’s cold, a coming weather
One degree north of yesterday.
High latitudes—as they say,
There is nothing up here

But wind and silence, passing clouds,
Light diminished half a tone,
A dish left out all night for the gods
By morning turned to stone.

So take a right, go down two gears
And stay in second, where the church is
And the pig farm. Only the approaches
Are terrible, only the years,

The getting here, which takes forever.
A boy in tears, a barren crone
On a bicycle, a man alone—
They’re waving. . . It’s now or never

For the final self, I assume—
For the shape of the house
On the skyline, the release
Into childhood, and the coming home.

12) Idaho, Gregory Alan Isakov 4:43
13) Losing You, John Butler Trio 3:47

Mountain Mama’s Earth Music is heard here on KDRT 95.7 FM, in Davis, CA and you can check out today’s play list, listen to the show or any of other great shows any old time by logging onto KDRT.org.
Thanks for listening in to this show about how sometimes I wish I could be two places at once and instead I end up feeling like I’m only halfway home

Peace
14) Wild Mountain Honey, The Steve Miller Band 4:55