Fievel Crane Posts

Fielder’s Choice, or, Defensive Indifference
for Stevie Smith

I do not write poems that rhyme.
It’s not that I don’t have the time,
It’s that I lack the aptitude.
And furthermore, my attitude
Is that rhyming poems just aren’t as deep.
They have a tendency to creep
Close to what we might call song,
And while that brings the crowds along,
It doesn’t pierce the constant gloom.
I prefer to sit here in my room
And scribble down my verses free
Of what has always seemed to me
Like poetry made for a kid –
Oh look at what I’ve gone and did.

/ / /

11 February 2026
Charlottesville VA

Nostalgia is a gun that backfires

Alan Watts drank himself to death at 58.
Ralph Towner died at 85 years old.
My grandparents lived into their 90s.
Me, I’m looking through old photos
on a hard drive in my bedroom,
wondering where the years have gone
and what I was doing while they were passing.
I see my friends’ kids laughing.
My own kids laughing.
There are former lovers and partners,
friends and collaborators,
minor celebrities and major heartbreaks.
Ones and zeroes translated into
ones I remember and ones I try to forget.
But there is no forgetting, just incorporating
the names and faces and feelings
into a new version of who I am.
This version will be out of date
by the time I finish this poem,
replaced by a new me who’ll load
the same bullet into the same chamber,
having learned no lessons.
Nostalgia is a gun that backfires,
the shot echoing through the house.

/ / /

21 January 2026
Charlottesville VA

Barlow Knives And Magazines

The man in the video is holding a Barlow knife.
He has dry hands. American men have dry hands.
He’s talking about listening to his dad
and his dad’s friends
swap stories in the garage, always embelleshing.

I grew up listening to women, sometimes in the kitchen,
more often in the living room.
They also swapped stories, embellishing just like the men.
Where the men focused on deeds,
the women focused on tragedy.

The man in the video has a workbench cluttered with tools.
There are watch batteries in a package,
knives of various descriptions,
a large mallet, a pair of needle-nose pliers,
a vice grip because there is always a vice grip.

I grew up with magazines, lined up on the cedar chest.
The cedar chest that we used as a coffee table.
It was made by my grandfather, who was either
not in the room or so quiet that he might as well have been missing.
The magazines had recipes and photos of lovely, silent rooms.

The man in the video remembers watching The Lone Ranger as a kid.
He remembers having his first pocket knife as a kid, too.
He went to high school in the 70s, right around the time I was born.
One of his knives is from the bicentennial.
Another commemorates Reagan’s presidency.

I remember watching Reagan get shot on the TV.
I remember watching the pope get shot on the TV.
I remember going to the school office and my mom being on the phone.
She told me the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.
I wonder if the man in the video remembers that.

/ / /

1/1/26
Charlottesville VA