Before the First Fist Flies

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

My first job as a bartender was at the age of four, at the Cave Inn in Byron, Illinois. This is a story I rarely tell, because when I do people generally assume I'm joking. I'm not joking. I was four years old, and on certain evenings my father would finish his shift at Quality Metal Finishing and come home to collect my mother for a night of drinking. Since my brother and I were too young to be left home alone, we went along. The Cave Inn was a small dive bar on Byron's main street. The owner at the time was a man named Ray, and everyone thought it was just about the funniest thing in the world to see a four-year-old boy standing behind the bar setting up drinks for the customers. So that's what I did. I got behind the bar and set up drinks, and the adults laughed, and everybody had a wonderful time. Or at least that's how I remember the adults seeing it.

Heineken?...

At home, I was also employed in the beverage service industry, although my duties were considerably less glamorous. Mostly I retrieved an apparently inexhaustible supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the refrigerator. If carrying beer to adults qualifies as bartending, I had already established a fairly respectable résumé before entering kindergarten. I was also, in a manner of speaking, the bouncer.

My parents had married in their teens, and I was born shortly thereafter. This was during the closing years of the Vietnam War, and our house was frequently filled with music, alcohol, and young people. They were all very young, I realize now. Much younger than I am today, and in some ways younger than I ever felt I was allowed to be. Some were Midwestern shitkickers from the lower working class. Others were young men who had returned from Vietnam. They worked hard, drank hard, listened to country music, and occasionally settled their differences in ways that didn't involve a great deal of conversation. Surprisingly, considering the era, I don't remember illicit drugs being part of the picture. These were not hippies sitting around smoking marijuana and discussing the meaning of life. Think of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." The drug of choice was alcohol, specifically beer, and nobody needed anything more exotic to get themselves into trouble. There was plenty of trouble to be had.

Violence was never some distant possibility that existed in another neighborhood or another kind of household. It was an ordinary feature of the environment, something that could materialize with very little warning. A conversation could change direction. Someone could say the wrong thing. A joke could stop being funny. A person who had been laughing thirty seconds earlier could suddenly become dangerous. I learned to recognize these transitions at an extraordinarily young age. I learned to watch people, to listen to the inflection of their voices, to notice changes in posture and expression, to recognize the moment when an interaction was moving toward something nobody was going to enjoy. Sometimes I could tell someone was about to become violent before that person seemed to know it himself. This was not a hobby. It was not an intellectual exercise in human psychology. It was a survival skill. If I couldn't recognize what was about to happen, somebody might get hurt. Sometimes that somebody might be me. I don't know that I would have survived my childhood without developing those abilities. I certainly wouldn't have survived it in the same way.

By the time I reached adolescence, I had made a fairly sensible decision about alcohol. I wasn't interested. I'd seen enough of what it did to people to conclude that there were better ways to spend my time. For a while, I managed to stay away from it. Then, in my late twenties, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. Around the same time, my first serious relationship ended, bringing the first stage of my adult life to a close. I found myself approaching thirty, working for a company delivering refrigerators for Sears, and wondering what exactly I'd been doing with my life. It seemed to me that I'd lived a rather dull existence.

The crew I worked with liked to go to a local bar called The Scoreboard, where they played something called NTN Trivia. This was an electronic trivia game played in bars, and my coworkers knew I had an unusually large collection of useless information stored in my head. They convinced me to come along one evening and put some of it to use. My mother had just died. My relationship was over. I didn't have a great many compelling reasons not to drink. So I started drinking. That summer, the company I was working for fired me for writing a book of poetry. That's another story, and one I won't attempt to explain here, except to say that it happened. That weekend I was at The Scoreboard when the manager asked if I wanted to bartend. I said yes. And just like that, nearly twenty-five years after my first shift at the Cave Inn, I was back behind a bar.

For much of the next fifteen years, there were very few nights when I wasn't in a bar somewhere, either working or drinking. Sometimes both. I worked in strip clubs, country clubs, fine dining establishments, sports bars, and dive bars. I tended bar, bounced, and spent an enormous amount of time observing people engaged in the ancient human enterprise of making fools of themselves. And I discovered that I was exceptionally good at the business. Not necessarily because I was the strongest person in the room or the most intimidating. I wasn't particularly interested in fighting people. What I possessed was something much more useful. I could tell when a fight was going to happen long before anyone threw a punch. In fact, I came to believe that if a punch had been thrown, I'd already failed at my job.

People have a peculiar understanding of what makes a good bouncer. They imagine some enormous man standing at the door waiting for an opportunity to throw somebody through a window. Patrick Swayze's character Dalton in Road House is a much better approximation of the philosophy, if not necessarily the reality, of the profession. The point isn't to win fights. The point is to prevent them. You lose control of a room long before the first fist flies. There are warnings, little shifts in behavior, challenges to authority, confrontations that begin as jokes, people testing how much they can get away with. If you're paying attention, you can recognize these things and intervene before the situation becomes physical. If you're waiting for somebody to throw a punch, you've waited too long. And if you allow the room to deteriorate to that point, you've failed utterly.

I was good at recognizing those moments because I'd spent my childhood recognizing them. The people drinking in front of me were not particularly mysterious. I'd known versions of them since I was four years old. I understood their behavior, their insecurities, their sudden changes in temperament, and the peculiar relationship between alcohol and the human ego. I'd been studying drunks long before I became one.

There was another aspect of my life that was developing alongside all this. I'd been in love with the written word since childhood, and poetry in particular. At some point I discovered Charles Bukowski, whose work seemed to possess a plainspoken honesty that corresponded almost exactly to my own understanding of human behavior. Bukowski wrote about drunks, losers, barrooms, desperation, sex, cruelty, humiliation, and the countless small indignities people inflict upon themselves and one another. There wasn't much sentimentality in his work, and that appealed to me. He didn't seem interested in pretending people were better than they were. Like a great many small press poets of that period, I became overly influenced by Bukowski. I imitated his style, his cynicism, his apparent indifference to conventional literary refinement. Looking back, this seems almost comically unnecessary.

I didn't need to imitate Charles Bukowski. I was living in Charles Bukowski's world every night. There was one important difference, however. Bukowski was usually the drunk being thrown out of the bar. I was the bartender or bouncer throwing Bukowski out. I occupied the other side of the transaction. I watched the spectacle from behind the counter, from the doorway, from the position of the person who had to clean up the mess after everybody else had finished enjoying themselves. I saw the same desperation, the same absurdity, the same miserable little dramas, but I was responsible for making sure nobody got killed before closing time. There is a difference between romanticizing the degradation of human behavior and being the person who has to deal with it.

Flesh Wounds and Submerged Structure by Thomas L. Vaultonburg from Zombie Logic Press

During those years I wrote two books, Flesh Wounds and Submerged Structure. They are cynical, pessimistic collections of poetry, filled with observations about the less attractive aspects of human existence. At the time, I thought I was writing with a kind of brutal honesty. I wasn't interested in making people look good. I wasn't interested in redemption or uplifting conclusions. I wrote about what I saw. And what I saw was frequently ugly. The strange thing is that I rarely had to invent anything. The material presented itself night after night. Human beings supplied an apparently limitless collection of examples of cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, loneliness, and self-destruction. All I had to do was pay attention and write things down. I had spent my childhood learning to pay attention. By the time I was writing those books, I had become very good at it.

I don't particularly enjoy looking at Flesh Wounds or Submerged Structure today. In fact, I find them deeply unpleasant. They remind me of a period of my life I don't especially care to revisit, and of an understanding of human nature I would sometimes prefer not to possess. I can recognize the Bukowski influence now, and I can recognize the limitations of my own perspective. Cynicism can become a habit, just as drinking can. Spend enough time looking for the worst in people and you will certainly find it. But that doesn't mean what I wrote was dishonest. Those books are records of a particular time in my life, and of the things I witnessed while living it. They aren't necessarily the books I would write today, and they don't necessarily represent the entirety of what I believe about people. They represent what I knew then. And I knew it firsthand.

I began my education in human behavior at four years old, standing behind the bar at the Cave Inn while adults laughed at the novelty of a child serving drinks. I continued that education in a house where violence could emerge from an ordinary evening without much warning. And I eventually returned to the same world as an adult, where the ability to recognize impending violence became one of the most valuable professional skills I possessed. There is nothing particularly romantic about any of this. I sometimes wonder what I might have written if I'd grown up in a different environment, or if I'd spent those fifteen years doing something other than watching people drink themselves into trouble. Perhaps the poems would have been more optimistic. Perhaps I would have developed a more generous understanding of human nature. Perhaps I would have written better books. I don't know.

What I do know is that I never had the luxury of regarding violence as an abstraction. It was something I encountered in the environment around me, something I learned to recognize, anticipate, and, when I finally had some authority over my surroundings, occasionally prevent. I didn't learn those things from books. And although I don't much like reading the books I wrote as a result, I won't apologize for them.

I earned every word.

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The Midnight Hour (1985): Going Home to Byron, the Ghosts of High School, and the Halloween Movie I Missed

The Midnight Hour (1985): Going Home to Byron, the Ghosts of High School, and the Halloween Movie I Missed

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Zombie Logic Blog

On Friday, November 1, 1985, ABC premiered a made-for-television horror movie called The Midnight Hour. I didn't see it. I was attending a Byron Tigers football game in Byron, Illinois, the little rural community where I grew up. I wouldn't actually see the movie until roughly 2020, thirty-five years after its original broadcast. By then, the world it depicted had disappeared almost completely, and so had the version of myself who would have watched it. But something about the movie immediately transported me back to that particular moment in American history, when Ronald Reagan was president, high school football was one of the organizing principles of small-town life, and being a nerd or a geek meant something considerably different than it does today.

Last Friday, nearly forty-one years after that November night in 1985, I returned to Byron High School for another Tigers football game. It was the first time I'd attended one since that evening. The circumstances were different, of course. I was now 57 years old, the Byron Tigers had become multiple-time Illinois state football champions, and my youngest brother was the school's Activities Director. Because of his position, I had access to the building and an opportunity to explore a place that had once been such a significant part of my life. I even got to put on the tiger mascot head. Because of course I did. If someone offers you the opportunity to become a giant tiger at 57 years old, you don't spend a lot of time debating the philosophical implications.

BYRON, ILLINOIS — OCTOBER 2026

But the experience turned out to be more emotionally complicated than I expected. Returning to the school, walking through the building, and watching the football game brought back memories I hadn't thought about in decades. Some were pleasant, some less so, and some seemed to belong to a person I could barely remember being. What surprised me most was how much the school had changed. I suppose I expected to find something resembling the rural high school I attended in the early 1980s, perhaps with some renovations and new equipment. Instead, I encountered a thoroughly modern facility that seemed almost impossibly advanced compared with the institution I remembered.

The School That Time Didn't Leave Behind

There is a popular conception of small-town America as a place that has been left behind by history. We see it constantly in movies, television, political rhetoric, and nostalgic accounts of the American past. The buildings are aging, the institutions are deteriorating, and the people are supposedly clinging to a way of life that no longer exists. Sometimes that depiction is justified. Plenty of communities have suffered enormously from economic decline, population loss, and the deterioration of their public institutions. But walking through Byron High School, I found something very different.

Everything seemed top of the line. The facilities were modern, the technology was impressive, and the school appeared to have invested substantially in providing its students with resources that would have been unimaginable when I attended. In a country where so much of our public infrastructure seems to be falling apart, it was genuinely encouraging to encounter an institution that appeared to be moving forward rather than backward. Whatever else has changed about America in the past forty years, this particular school had not been standing still.

The scoreboard alone was something to behold. My brother, demonstrating the sort of humor that apparently runs in our family, arranged to have my freshman high school photograph displayed on its enormous video screen. There I was, a 14-year-old boy from Reagan's America, looking out over a football field in 2026. And there I was again, standing beneath it at 57, looking up at a face I hadn't worn in more than four decades.

THEN AND NOW — THE BYRON TIGERS SCOREBOARD

There is something profoundly strange about seeing your younger self projected onto a screen that large. At fourteen, I had very little idea what kind of life I would have, what I would accomplish, what I would survive, or even who I would eventually become. I certainly couldn't have imagined returning to that same football field at 57 and seeing my own freshman photograph towering over the proceedings. The boy in the picture knew nothing about the next forty years. The man looking at him knew quite a bit. For a moment, the distance between us seemed both enormous and almost nonexistent.

And then there was the tiger head.

I don't know exactly what possessed me to put it on, except that I have never been particularly good at resisting opportunities for harmless absurdity. There is something wonderfully liberating about being an adult who no longer feels compelled to maintain an appearance of dignity at all times. At fourteen, I would have worried about what people thought of me. At 57, I was perfectly happy to walk around wearing an enormous tiger head. Perhaps that's progress. Or perhaps I've simply become more comfortable being the person I always was.

The Midnight Hour and the Small-Town America of 1985

Which brings me back to The Midnight Hour, the movie I missed that November evening in 1985. Directed by Jack Bender and written by William Bleich, the film premiered on ABC on Friday, November 1, from 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern. It starred Shari Belafonte, LeVar Burton, Lee Montgomery, Peter DeLuise, Dedee Pfeiffer, Jonna Lee, and several familiar character actors, including Kevin McCarthy, Dick Van Patten, and Kurtwood Smith. It was a made-for-television Halloween horror comedy, the sort of production that once occupied an important place in American popular culture before streaming services, endless cable channels, and the fragmentation of television audiences changed the way we experienced movies.

The story takes place in Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, a fictional New England town with a history of witchcraft, buried secrets, and the usual collection of teenagers who don't fully appreciate the consequences of meddling with the supernatural. A group of high school friends steals costumes and artifacts from a local museum, discovers an ancient scroll, and unwittingly unleashes a curse that raises the dead. Soon the town is overrun with witches, vampires, zombies, and other creatures who have apparently decided that Halloween is an excellent opportunity to resume their social lives.

On paper, it sounds like a fairly conventional 1980s horror comedy. And in some respects it is. The teenagers are recognizable types, the supernatural mythology is cheerfully ridiculous, and the movie combines horror, comedy, romance, and music without worrying too much about whether all those elements belong together. There is even an elaborate musical number, "Get Dead," performed by Shari Belafonte, which owes a considerable debt to Michael Jackson's Thriller. The movie seems perfectly comfortable interrupting its supernatural apocalypse for a little singing and dancing. I admire that sort of confidence in a production.

But what struck me when I finally watched The Midnight Hour around 2020 wasn't its horror elements or even its peculiar charm as a television movie. It was the atmosphere. The high school students, the Halloween decorations, the houses, the streets, the music, the clothes, the hairstyles, and the social rituals all seemed to belong to a world I recognized immediately. The movie was ostensibly set in New England, but it might just as easily have been set in the small Illinois towns I knew during the early 1980s. It captured something about the emotional geography of that period that I find increasingly difficult to describe to people who didn't experience it.

When Being a Nerd Wasn't a Fashion Statement

One of the things that modern nostalgia for the 1980s tends to overlook is that being a nerd or a geek wasn't necessarily considered desirable. Today, those identities have been absorbed into mainstream culture. Comic books dominate the movie industry, science fiction franchises generate billions of dollars, and people proudly identify themselves as geeks. There is an entire economy built around celebrating interests that once marked people as outsiders. But in the small-town America of my adolescence, those distinctions could carry considerably more social weight.

If you were interested in horror movies, comic books, science fiction, obscure music, or other pursuits that didn't fit comfortably into the prevailing social order, you might find yourself regarded as strange. There were certainly people who shared those interests, but finding them wasn't always easy. There was no internet to connect you with thousands of other people who liked the same things. You had your friends, the local library, whatever appeared on television, and the occasional discovery at a video rental store. The world was smaller in some ways, but it also contained an extraordinary amount of mystery.

Movies like The Midnight Hour understood the importance of high school social hierarchies because those hierarchies were such a dominant feature of teenage life. The athletes, the popular kids, the outsiders, the misfits, and the people who didn't quite belong all occupied recognizable positions. Those categories weren't absolute, and people moved between them, but the distinctions mattered. The idea that a shy or awkward teenager might become the hero of a supernatural adventure carried a certain emotional appeal. It offered the possibility that the qualities that made someone an outsider in ordinary life might become valuable under extraordinary circumstances.

I think that is one reason The Midnight Hour resonated with me so strongly when I finally saw it. It wasn't simply reminding me of the movies I watched as a teenager. It was reminding me of what it felt like to be that teenager.

Phil, Sandy, and the Girl From Another Time

At the center of The Midnight Hour is Phil Grenville, played by Lee Montgomery, a relatively unassuming high school student who becomes involved in the supernatural chaos after his friends awaken an ancient evil. Phil isn't the loudest or most socially dominant member of the group. He is thoughtful, somewhat awkward, and considerably more sympathetic than some of his companions. As the situation deteriorates, he encounters Sandy Matthews, played by Jonna Lee, a mysterious girl dressed as a cheerleader from the 1950s.

Sandy seems to belong to another era, which, as it turns out, she does. She helps Phil understand the supernatural threat and eventually becomes his romantic interest. Their relationship gives the movie an unexpectedly melancholy emotional center. Beneath the monsters, costumes, and musical numbers is a story about two young people separated by time. Phil belongs to the present, Sandy to the past, and their brief connection can exist only because the ordinary rules separating the living from the dead have temporarily been suspended.

This is where I think the movie becomes more interesting than its modest ambitions might suggest. The supernatural premise allows Phil to encounter someone from a vanished world, someone who carries the manners, clothing, and emotional sensibilities of an earlier generation. Their relationship is impossible, but for a few hours it feels completely natural. The past has returned, not as a historical lesson or a collection of artifacts, but as a living presence capable of loving and being loved.

I must confess there was someone I have had a crush on since the third grade I was hoping to see Friday night. I didn't. Perhaps for the best. One happy memory and instance of reclaimed past may have been all i was allotted in this instance

When I watched the movie decades after its original broadcast, I found myself in a situation not entirely unlike Phil's. I was encountering a world that no longer existed, populated by people who looked and behaved like people I had known. The movie itself had become a kind of ghost, a surviving artifact of 1985 that could temporarily restore the atmosphere of a vanished moment. And because I hadn't seen it when it originally aired, it carried none of the specific memories that usually accompany a beloved childhood movie. Instead, it seemed to contain the general atmosphere of an entire period of my life.

I was nostalgic for a movie I had never seen.

The Ghosts of the 1950s Haunting the 1980s

One of the more interesting things about The Midnight Hour is the way it layers different periods of American history. Its central story takes place in the 1980s, but the town is haunted by events from centuries earlier, while Sandy brings the 1950s into the present. The film's soundtrack mixes contemporary sensibilities with older rock and soul music, including recordings associated with Wilson Pickett, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, and Three Dog Night. Wolfman Jack even appears as a radio disc jockey, bringing his distinctive voice and the mythology of American rock-and-roll radio into the proceedings.

This blending of eras was particularly characteristic of the 1980s, a decade that was itself fascinated by the 1950s. Movies like Back to the Future, television shows like Happy Days, and the continued popularity of oldies music reflected a widespread cultural interest in an idealized postwar America. For teenagers growing up in the 1980s, the 1950s seemed impossibly distant, a world of sock hops, diners, letter jackets, and early rock and roll. Yet the adults around us had lived through that period, and its cultural influence remained everywhere.

Now, of course, the 1980s occupy a similar position in the popular imagination. Shows like Stranger Things reconstruct the decade through its clothing, music, technology, suburban landscapes, and adolescent social dynamics. For younger viewers, that world can seem exotic or charmingly primitive. For those of us who lived through it, the experience is more complicated. We recognize the details, but we also remember the things that don't translate easily into nostalgia: the anxieties, the social pressures, the loneliness, and the uncertainty of being young in a world that seemed to have already decided what kind of person you were supposed to become.

A Halloween Movie That Understands the Meaning of Halloween

Halloween is a holiday built around the temporary collapse of boundaries. The living dress as the dead. Children become monsters. Ordinary neighborhoods become landscapes of imagined danger. People disguise themselves, adopt different identities, and briefly participate in a world where the usual rules no longer apply. The Midnight Hour takes that premise literally. When the dead rise from their graves, they enter a town already populated by people pretending to be supernatural creatures. For a while, nobody can distinguish the real monsters from the costumed partygoers.

There is a clever observation about appearances buried beneath the movie's comedy. Halloween allows people to become something other than themselves, but it also makes it difficult to recognize what anyone actually is. The undead blend into the festivities because the living have already disguised themselves as the dead. The boundary between reality and performance disappears. It is an idea that could have supported a much darker film, but The Midnight Hour is more interested in having fun with it.

The movie's relatively gentle tone is part of its appeal. This is not George Romero's vision of the apocalypse, with its dismemberments, social collapse, and increasingly hopeless assessment of human nature. The Midnight Hour belongs to a different tradition, one in which monsters can be frightening without becoming unbearable and the supernatural can be dangerous without eliminating the possibility of romance, humor, or redemption. It is a Halloween movie in the old-fashioned sense, designed to be enjoyed as part of the holiday rather than endured as an exercise in terror.

And yet its ending is genuinely bittersweet. Phil succeeds in reversing the curse, but doing so means losing Sandy, whose temporary return to the living world must come to an end. The supernatural adventure concludes, ordinary life resumes, and the past retreats to wherever it belongs. The final radio dedication suggests that their connection has not been entirely erased, but it cannot continue in the ordinary world. Phil has experienced something extraordinary, and now he must live with the memory.

That seems to me a remarkably appropriate ending for a movie about Halloween, and perhaps for a movie about nostalgia as well. The past can visit us. It cannot stay.

Returning to the Scene of the Memory

I've heard psychologists discuss the idea that returning to a place associated with difficult experiences and creating new, positive memories there can help change our emotional relationship with the past. I don't know how universally applicable that principle is, and I wouldn't suggest that a single pleasant afternoon can erase everything that happened decades earlier. But I do think there is something to it. Places acquire emotional significance through the things that happen to us there, and sometimes those associations remain long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared.

My years at Byron High School were certainly not all negative. Far from it. There were friendships, discoveries, experiences, and moments of genuine happiness that I wouldn't trade for anything. But adolescence is a difficult period under even the best circumstances, and I was no exception. Like many teenagers, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand where I belonged, what other people expected of me, and how much of myself I was willing to surrender in order to fit in. Some of those questions followed me long after I graduated.

Returning to Byron High School at 57 gave me an opportunity to experience the place without those old pressures. I wasn't a student anymore. I wasn't trying to impress anyone, avoid anyone, or negotiate my position in the complicated social hierarchy of a small-town high school. I was simply a visitor, enjoying a football game, spending time with my brother, and exploring a building that had once occupied such a large part of my world. The experience was unexpectedly liberating.

Forty-one years after my last Byron Tigers football game, I finally got to wear the tiger head.

And perhaps the most encouraging thing was discovering that the school itself had continued to evolve. The students attending Byron High School today inhabit a world radically different from the one I knew. They have access to technology, facilities, and opportunities that would have seemed almost futuristic to us. The football program has achieved extraordinary success, and the institution appears to have developed a confidence and ambition that reflect those accomplishments. Whatever difficulties contemporary America may be experiencing, there are still places where people are building things, improving institutions, and giving young people reasons to believe in the future.

It would be easy to romanticize the school I attended in the 1980s, just as it would be easy to romanticize the decade itself. But nostalgia can become a trap when it convinces us that everything worthwhile happened in the past. The Byron High School I visited in 2026 wasn't a diminished version of the one I remembered. In many respects, it was a better one. That seems worth celebrating.

The Boy on the Scoreboard

Of everything that happened during my visit, the image of my freshman photograph on the scoreboard will probably stay with me the longest. There was something simultaneously ridiculous and moving about seeing that face displayed above the football field. My brother had intended it as a joke, and it was a good one. But it also produced an unexpected moment of recognition.

My brother put my freshman photograph on the Byron Tigers scoreboard. Fourteen years old again, at least for a moment.

I was looking at a boy who hadn't yet encountered most of the experiences that would define his life. He didn't know the people he would meet, the books he would write, the places he would go, or the things he would lose. He was living in a small Illinois town during the Reagan administration, surrounded by the particular cultural atmosphere of the early 1980s. He liked strange movies, unusual ideas, and things that didn't always make sense to the people around him. He was trying to figure out how to become himself.

I suppose I could tell him that everything would work out, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Some things worked out. Some didn't. There were successes, disappointments, unexpected turns, and experiences I never could have anticipated. But I could tell him that he would eventually reach an age when he no longer felt obligated to apologize for being interested in the things that interested him. And that one day he would return to the same football field, see his picture on an enormous scoreboard, and put on a tiger mascot head simply because the opportunity presented itself.

I think he would have liked that.

The Midnight Hour and the Strange Business of Going Home

The more I think about The Midnight Hour, the more appropriate it seems that I missed its original broadcast because I was attending a high school football game. The movie is about teenagers in a small town, the persistence of the past, and the strange ways people from different periods can briefly encounter one another. Its central romance involves a boy from the 1980s and a girl from the 1950s, two people whose lives ordinarily could never have intersected. Their meeting is possible only because Halloween has temporarily suspended the usual boundaries between past and present.

My return to Byron High School wasn't quite so supernatural, although seeing my fourteen-year-old face towering over the football field came close. But it produced a similar sensation of different periods of my life occupying the same space. The boy from 1985 and the man from 2026 were both present in some peculiar way, separated by forty-one years but connected by a place that had survived us both.

When I finally watched The Midnight Hour around 2020, I had no idea that I would eventually return to Byron High School and attend another football game. I certainly didn't know that my brother would put my freshman photograph on the scoreboard or that I would end up wearing the mascot head. But those experiences now seem inseparable from the movie. The fictional town of Pitchford Cove and the very real town of Byron, Illinois, have become connected in my memory, along with dozens of other movies, television programs, songs, and experiences from that period.

This is one of the things I find most fascinating about popular culture. A movie doesn't have to be a masterpiece to become meaningful. Sometimes its importance has less to do with its artistic accomplishments than with the memories and associations it awakens. The Midnight Hour is an entertaining, occasionally silly, unexpectedly touching made-for-television horror movie. I wouldn't place it alongside Romero's original Living Dead trilogy as a major achievement in horror cinema. But it accomplishes something that many more ambitious films cannot. It preserves the atmosphere of a particular time and place so effectively that watching it can feel like visiting a world that has disappeared.

And in my case, it preserved a world I was actually living in on the night it premiered, even though I wasn't watching.

Forty-One Years Later

There is a temptation, as we get older, to imagine that the past was somehow more authentic than the present. The music was better, the movies were better, the communities were closer, and people understood things that subsequent generations have forgotten. I don't entirely subscribe to that view. There were wonderful things about growing up in the 1980s, but there were also plenty of things I wouldn't care to experience again. The world was smaller, and that could be both comforting and suffocating. Being different could be difficult. Information was harder to find. Opportunities were limited by geography, circumstance, and the expectations of the people around you.

But I wouldn't trade my experience of growing up in that world for anything. The isolation encouraged curiosity. The scarcity of information made discoveries feel important. The absence of an enormous online community meant that finding someone who shared your interests could feel like a minor miracle. Movies, books, records, and television programs weren't simply entertainment. They were ways of discovering that other people, somewhere beyond the boundaries of your little town, might see the world the way you did.

That's what movies like The Midnight Hour represent to me now. Not simply a collection of familiar hairstyles, clothes, songs, and cultural references, but an entire way of experiencing the world. A world in which a teenager might spend Friday night at a football game, come home to a house with a handful of television channels, and have no idea that a Halloween movie was being broadcast that he wouldn't discover for another thirty-five years.

And somehow, forty-one years later, that same teenager could return to the same football field, stand beneath an enormous photograph of his younger self, and discover that the place he remembered had become something new.

Maybe that's the real lesson of The Midnight Hour. The past isn't something we can permanently recover, and perhaps we shouldn't want to. We can visit it through memories, movies, photographs, music, and the occasional return to a place that once mattered to us. We can acknowledge the things that hurt, appreciate the things that were wonderful, and recognize that the people we used to be are still part of us, even when we barely recognize their faces.

And sometimes we can make new memories in old places.

On November 1, 1985, I attended a Byron Tigers football game instead of watching The Midnight Hour. On October 9, 2026, I returned to Byron High School for another football game, almost forty-one years later. Somewhere between those two evenings, I grew up, got older, wrote some books, watched an enormous number of horror movies, and eventually discovered the peculiar little Halloween film I had missed.

I also learned that you can go home again, although the home you return to may be very different from the one you left.

And if somebody offers you a tiger mascot head, put it on.

You never know when you'll get another chance.

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Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

 

Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

Wild Cogs is a small book that came out of SECOND NATURE, our October 2026 Fall ArtScene exhibition at Rockford Art Deli.

For SECOND NATURE, Rockford artist Michael Zant created sculptures of animals and other forms from salvaged metal—the discarded mechanical stuff of human life reassembled into birds, bears, frogs, turtles, insects, and other creatures.

Tré and I wrote haiku to accompany Michael’s sculptures.

We approached the poems the same way we approached our earlier book Moonscape: Haiku Phase I: two poets looking at the same world from slightly different places. The haiku alternate between us, sometimes answering one another, sometimes wandering off in different directions.

Those poems became Wild Cogs, a 40-page pocket-sized collection published by Wolf Twin Books.

Here are a few of the conversations from the book.

Pawpaw

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

our mouths travel
over wild custard—
picaresque

Tré

pairings

Frog, turtle, salamander

Plum Blossom

first plum blossom—
I almost tell you
everything again

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

not letting go
ice over
plum petals

Tré

Bear claw, lotus flower, dragonfly

The idea behind SECOND NATURE was simple: take what we've discarded and return it to the living world.

Michael did that with metal. Tré and I tried to do it with words.

The result is Wild Cogs—a little handmade record of the strange intersection between machinery, animals, poetry, friendship, and the natural world.

Wild Cogs
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2026
40 pages
$10

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Is It Time to Start Considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg One of the Greatest Haiku Poets Ever?

By Haruki Nishimura
Seishin Institute for Literary Studies, Kyoto

The title of this essay embarrasses me, which is perhaps a useful place to begin. Anyone who has spent a life reading haiku learns to distrust greatness. Haiku itself distrusts greatness. The form has traditionally been hospitable to frogs, crows, cicadas, weeds, cold rain, worn sandals, summer grasses, old ponds. It possesses very little natural sympathy for the monumental. Even Bashō, whom we have made monumental, repeatedly directs our attention away from himself and toward something small. So when I am asked whether Thomas L. Vaultonburg should be considered one of the great haiku poets, my first response is resistance. Then I read the poems again, and the question becomes less ridiculous.

Haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Consider first a poem of almost unreasonable economy:

fog
borrows
the bridge

Three words. There is scarcely a poem here in the conventional sense. Yet the poem performs an operation fundamental to haiku: it changes the ownership of the visible world. A bridge belongs to human beings. We design it, engineer it, name it, maintain it. It is one of our declarations of permanence. Fog possesses nothing. It has no architecture and leaves no monument. For several minutes, however, fog takes the bridge. The verb “borrows” is crucial. “Covers” would merely report weather. “Hides” would impose a little drama. “Swallows” would impose too much. “Borrows” establishes an unexpectedly gentle relationship between the permanent and impermanent. The bridge will be returned. This is very close to the deepest temporal intelligence of haiku: everything we believe we possess is merely on loan. Vaultonburg accomplishes this without announcing the thought. The philosophy exists because the image exists; remove the image and there is no philosophy.

That distinction is important because many contemporary short poems are aphorisms wearing the clothing of haiku. Vaultonburg’s strongest poems behave differently. They allow perception to generate thought. Consider another:

night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence

Here we encounter one of Vaultonburg’s characteristic techniques. He makes an abstract condition behave as though it were physical matter. Silence can be broken. This is familiar language and therefore nearly dead language. But silence being thinned is different. Suddenly silence possesses density. The almost imperceptible movement of a horse does not destroy the night; it changes its viscosity. This is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and the poem also understands scale. Nothing “happens.” A horse does not gallop. It does not whinny. It merely shifts its weight. The poet notices the smallest possible disturbance and discovers that the entire acoustic architecture of the pasture has changed. A lesser poet would make the horse more dramatic. Vaultonburg makes the horse less dramatic, and the world consequently becomes more mysterious.

This ability appears repeatedly in his work:

marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray

Again, the poem depends upon a verb. The heron does not emerge from the fog. It is “assembled” from it. We watch matter organize itself into life. The poem therefore occupies a strange border between observation and creation myth. Anyone who has watched a great blue heron become visible through marsh fog recognizes the accuracy of the perception. Yet the poem also suggests, very quietly, that perhaps this is how a heron actually comes into existence: the morning collects sufficient grayness and constructs a bird. This is one of Vaultonburg’s most distinctive gifts. His surrealism frequently arrives through literal observation. The world becomes strange because he has looked at it long enough.

There is another excellent example:

blackwater creek—
a turtle sinks
until air forgets it

What does it mean for air to forget a turtle? Logically, nothing. Poetically, almost everything. The turtle passes from one medium into another. At first it remains conceptually attached to the surface. Then it descends farther. Eventually the world above closes. “Air forgets it” transforms disappearance into a relationship between elements. Air and water momentarily become two territories of consciousness. Notice also the patience of the poem. The important word may actually be “until.” We are required to remain beside the creek and watch the turtle continue downward. The poem takes perhaps three seconds to read and considerably longer to finish happening. That is one measure of successful haiku: the best examples possess an unusual ratio between textual size and experiential duration. A few words may continue unfolding in consciousness for minutes, years, sometimes decades.

Vaultonburg’s strongest poems also demonstrate another characteristic worth examining: the final line does not explain the first two lines but destabilizes them.

mud puddle—
the crow leaves behind
less sky

The first line gives us something almost contemptibly small: a mud puddle. The final line gives us the sky. Between them stands a crow. The optical event is simple. Sky is reflected in water, and the movement of the crow changes what is visible. But Vaultonburg converts this tiny phenomenon into a problem of subtraction. Can a crow remove sky? For the duration of the poem, yes. This movement between the immense and insignificant is deeply congenial to haiku. A puddle contains the heavens; a bird alters them. Vaultonburg returns to this vertical relationship elsewhere:

noon sun—
the stars
somewhere inside blue

The stars have not disappeared merely because daylight prevents us from seeing them. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody experiences the knowledge. The haiku restores the experience. That distinction—between knowing something and suddenly perceiving what one already knows—is central to the form. Haiku at its best does not necessarily provide information. It produces recognition.

One feels this even more strongly in another poem:

power outage
the stars resume
their old jobs

This poem could easily have become sentimental. Instead, its humor saves it. The stars have apparently been unemployed by electricity; when human illumination fails, they return to work. The joke contains an ecological criticism, but the poem wisely refuses to state it. The hierarchy between human civilization and the natural world is reversed through eight ordinary words. Vaultonburg’s humor deserves greater attention because it protects his poetry from solemnity, and the most obvious example may be:

the undertaker
waves from his bicycle—
mulberry season

I admire this poem enormously. The undertaker carries the unavoidable association of death. The bicycle introduces almost comic lightness. Mulberry season introduces abundance, sweetness and summer. Death rides through ripeness and waves. Nothing is resolved, and that refusal to resolve the contradiction is precisely what gives the poem life. The undertaker is not transformed into a symbol; he remains an undertaker riding a bicycle. Mulberries remain mulberries. Yet the juxtaposition generates something larger than either fact.

This is classical haiku machinery operating in a distinctly American landscape, and the distinction matters. Vaultonburg does not attempt to write Japanese haiku in English. He does something more difficult: he accepts the perceptual discipline of haiku while allowing his actual world to enter the form. Quarries appear. Underpasses appear. Estate auctions appear. Canadian wildfire smoke enters an American city. Abandoned infrastructure exists beside birds and weather.

underpass puddle—
the city skyline
shaken by sparrows

This could not have been written by Bashō, nor should it have been. Its world is infrastructural, urban, damaged and ordinary. Yet its mechanism would be immediately recognizable to an older haiku consciousness: large and small encounter one another, permanence is exposed as temporary, and the human world is altered by creatures that do not acknowledge its importance. The skyline appears monumental until sparrows shake it. There is something almost democratic about Vaultonburg’s imagination. Nothing remains safely above anything else.

A similar transformation occurs in one of his most ambitious poems:

old mineshaft—
a wheel of bats
rebuilds the darkness

The verb “rebuilds” is audacious. Darkness is normally understood as absence, and one does not build absence. But the circling bats appear to manufacture darkness through motion. The abandoned mine—the remnant of human extraction—has been repossessed by animal life. Yet “rebuilds” complicates the easy ecological reading. The bats are not merely inhabitants. They have become laborers of darkness. A human industrial site has acquired a new industry. The poem contains history without discussing history.

That ability becomes even clearer in:

estate auction—
the quilts
open to another winter

Here the human story is almost entirely missing, and because it is missing we feel it more strongly. Whose quilts? Whose house? Why are they being auctioned? Death, debt, relocation, the dissolution of a family? Vaultonburg refuses to tell us. Instead the quilts open. “Another winter” may belong to another household, another generation, another life. The physical object continues after the circumstances that gathered it into one particular home have disappeared. This is an exceptionally mature haiku because its emotion resides largely in what the poet declines to say.

There are places where Vaultonburg approaches lyricism more directly:

early lilacs—
grief caught
without its coat

Here the personification is unmistakable. Grief has become a figure surprised by spring. Normally I would distrust such a maneuver in haiku because it risks converting the observed world into a vehicle for the poet’s feelings. But “without its coat” rescues the poem. The phrase is slightly comic, slightly domestic and physically imaginable. Grief has dressed for winter and suddenly discovers lilacs. The season has changed before sorrow was prepared for it. This is not the claim that spring cures grief. Something more convincing happens: grief finds itself temporarily overdressed.

Vaultonburg is particularly effective when his poems hover at precisely this boundary between sincerity and play. “berry thicket— / my hands / stained with wanting” begins with the literal stain of fruit and becomes desire without ceasing to be berry juice. In “ripe figs— / my mouth learns / another prayer,” taste becomes devotion without the poem ever specifying a deity. And in “deer at dusk— / her stillness / rearranges mine,” the animal does not become an emblem for some preexisting human idea. Instead, attention to the animal changes the observer’s physical state.

This last point may be the key to understanding Vaultonburg. His best haiku are not descriptions of nature so much as records of recalibration. Something enters perception—a horse, heron, turtle, crow, spider, deer—and the human observer’s relationship to the world changes by several degrees. Sometimes the transformation is almost microscopic:

fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg

There is almost no metaphor here, and none is necessary. The spider becomes nearly scientific in its delicacy. “Tests” is exactly the right verb because the extended leg appears simultaneously tentative and knowledgeable. The creature knows something about the air that the human observer does not. The hierarchy of perception reverses again: the poet watches the spider, but the spider reads the world. This humility before nonhuman intelligence connects Vaultonburg to an important current running through the history of haiku. Nature is not scenery surrounding the human subject. Human consciousness is only one local event occurring among many others.

This is why one of his simplest poems may ultimately be among his most revealing:

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Nothing has been gathered, and everything has been gathered. The basket is empty according to one economy and full according to another. It would be easy to dismiss this as charming, but one should resist doing so. The poem quietly asks what constitutes possession, harvest and value, and more importantly, it answers without argument. The person simply walks home.

There is also a regional dimension to Vaultonburg’s work that I suspect will become increasingly important. Haiku has always depended upon particularity of place. Yet American practitioners sometimes inherit the vocabulary of Japanese haiku without sufficiently transforming it, resulting in an imported landscape of moons, ponds, blossoms and temple bells. Vaultonburg’s landscape feels inhabited rather than inherited. Prairie, quarry, underpass, mulberry, pawpaw, smoke, mine, bicycle and estate auction coexist naturally with herons, spiders and plum blossoms because they belong to the same perceptual world.

Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this regional sensibility is:

across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback

The image risks extravagance, yet anyone who has stood beneath a Midwestern sky and watched a storm advance across open land understands its physical accuracy. Rain possesses distance, speed and a visible front. “On horseback” activates the historical imagination of the prairie without turning the poem into historical reenactment. Weather becomes rider; landscape becomes duration. The same rootedness appears more quietly in:

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

This poem has almost nothing to prove, which may be why I trust it. The sweetness is literal before it becomes emotional. Fruit remains on the hands. The road becomes associated with the taste. Home is therefore not defined geographically but sensually. The poem understands memory before memory has happened.

I have deliberately avoided one question until now: What would it actually mean to call someone “one of the greatest haiku poets ever”? There can be no objective measurement. Bashō transformed the form. Buson brought extraordinary visual precision. Issa expanded its emotional and creaturely universe. Shiki altered its modern conception. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced many extraordinary Japanese and international practitioners working under radically different linguistic conditions. To place an American poet casually among such figures would be unserious.

But there is another way to understand the question. Greatness in poetry is sometimes recognized not through historical rank but through the accumulation of individual poems that become difficult to imagine having been written any other way. That is the test I would apply to Vaultonburg. Could another poet have written “fog / borrows / the bridge”? Perhaps. But after reading it, “borrows” begins to feel inevitable. Could another poet have written of a heron “assembled from gray”? Perhaps. But afterward it becomes difficult to watch a heron emerge from fog without remembering the phrase. Could another poet have discovered that a horse shifting its weight “thins the silence”? Perhaps. But the language alters the experience it describes. And could another poet have watched a turtle descend until “air forgets it”? Perhaps. But once the poem exists, the world contains a possibility it did not quite contain before.

This is the severe test. A successful haiku records perception. A very good haiku changes perception. A great haiku permanently contaminates perception: after encountering it, one can no longer see the original phenomenon innocently. Fog may borrow things. Herons may assemble themselves. Silence may possess thickness. Sparrows may shake cities. Bats may manufacture darkness. A crow may leave behind less sky. This is not merely a collection of attractive metaphors. Across the poems, we encounter a coherent imaginative system. The supposedly solid becomes temporary. The supposedly empty becomes substantial. Human structures become fragile. Animals become agents. Weather becomes animate. The enormous enters the tiny. The dead remain beside the living without requiring explanation.

Most importantly, the poet himself repeatedly diminishes. The greatest danger in asking whether someone is a great poet is that the poet becomes larger than the poems, while haiku demands almost precisely the opposite. The poet should become smaller. In Vaultonburg’s strongest work he does. He becomes the person standing beside the puddle, watching the horse, carrying the basket, noticing the spider, tasting the fruit. The world does the rest.

So, is it time to begin considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg one of the greatest haiku poets? I would phrase the conclusion more carefully. It is time to take the possibility seriously. Not because he has written hundreds or thousands of haiku; quantity proves nothing. Not because he is American, contemporary, prolific or unusual. None of these establishes artistic importance. It is because within this body of work there are already individual poems possessing the compression, perceptual originality, linguistic inevitability and afterlife that we associate with lasting haiku. Others demonstrate the same power through radical brevity, humor, ecological perception and the transformation of ordinary American places into sites of revelation.

There is finally one poem I keep returning to:

pond surface—
a fish rises
through two worlds

The fish knows nothing of our argument. It rises through the surface and for an instant occupies two elements before the water closes again. Perhaps this is what the finest haiku have always done. They discover the almost invisible boundary between worlds and permit us, very briefly, to see something passing through it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg has learned how to stand beside that boundary and, more importantly, has learned when not to speak. In haiku, this may be where greatness begins.

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SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture and Haiku at Rockford Art Deli

Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg
A benefit for Wild Roots

On October 2 and 3, Rockford Art Deli will host SECOND NATURE, an exhibition bringing together the salvaged-metal animal sculptures of Michael Zant and the haiku of Tré and Thomas L. Vaultonburg of Wolf Twin Books.

Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each of Michael’s sculptures will be accompanied by two original haiku—one written by Tré and one by Vaultonburg—inspired by the animal or wild creature it depicts. The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden within discarded things, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature.

Michael builds his animals from metal objects that have already lived one life. Chains become tentacles. Old tools become claws, wings, legs, and bones. Parts once designed for work or machinery are rearranged until they begin to resemble something living. The finished sculptures retain the history of their materials while acquiring personalities of their own.

The haiku approach the same animals from two different directions. Tré and Vaultonburg have collaborated before, most notably on Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, but SECOND NATURE gives that collaboration a new structure. Each poet responds independently to the same sculpture, creating a small conversation beside it. Sometimes the two poems occupy the same landscape. Sometimes they wander into entirely different worlds.

For Michael’s bear sculpture, Vaultonburg imagines a mother recording her family in the forest:

with one paw Mama Bear
carves in pine the names of
all five of her cubs

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Tré finds another bear who has become perhaps a little too comfortable around people:

veteran camper—
a black bear sitting
at the picnic table

—Tré

A sculpture with chains for tentacles inspired a pairing that moves from the history of the material into the strange physical presence of an octopus:

old chains
remembering how
to be tentacles

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

tasting the shape
of my face
all eight arms

—Tré

These poems will not be presented as conventional framed pieces hanging at a safe distance from the art. They will appear on small, simple displays beside the sculptures. The presentation is intentionally modest and low-tech, allowing the salvaged metal, the animals, and the words to remain the center of attention.

The project grew naturally from the shared interests of the three artists. Michael Zant transforms discarded materials into representations of living creatures. Tré and Vaultonburg write poems grounded in animals, seasons, observation, and the Midwestern landscape. Together, the sculptures and haiku ask viewers to look again—not only at things that have been thrown away, but at the wild lives that continue around us whether we notice them or not.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots. Copies of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, will be available at Rockford Art Deli, with $10 from every copy sold there donated to Wild Roots.

The exhibition is part of Rockford’s Fall ArtScene and is free to attend.

SECOND NATURE
Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Friday, October 2, 2026: 5–9 p.m.
Saturday, October 3, 2026: 4–9 p.m.

Rockford Art Deli
402 E. State St.
Rockford, Illinois

Admission is free.

More information: Rockford Art Deli

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Vanished Roads: Making a Haiku Collection Tell a Story

One thing that mattered to us from the beginning with Vanished Roads was that it become a whole book, not simply a stack of haiku that happened to have the same author's name on them.

                    

That distinction might seem small, especially with haiku. A haiku is designed to survive on its own. It has its own little weather system, its own moment, its own beginning and ending. You can open a collection almost anywhere, read one poem, close the book, and theoretically you have experienced something complete. There is nothing wrong with making a collection that way. But that wasn't what I wanted Vanished Roads to be.

The poems had accumulated over a long and difficult period of my life, and when I began looking at them together I realized they weren't actually separate. Certain things kept returning: abandoned places, animals, roads, weather, objects people had discarded, small signs of persistence, and moments when the natural world seemed to be quietly reclaiming whatever human beings had left behind. More importantly, the emotional atmosphere of the poems changed. There was movement in them.

Once I saw that, sequencing became part of the writing.

The book begins in a darker and more enclosed place and gradually moves outward. It doesn't suddenly announce that everything is better. I wouldn't have believed a book that did that, and I certainly couldn't have written one. Instead, little openings begin appearing. The world becomes visible again. Animals arrive. Light changes. Humor returns. The landscape starts becoming something other than a backdrop for loss.

That same movement became important visually.

Tré's cover for Vanished Roads isn't simply packaging placed around the poems after the fact. The enormous tree, the narrow passage through it, the distant light and the road continuing beyond it all belong to the same journey the poems are making. Her illustrations throughout the book work the same way. We wanted the visual and poetic elements to feel as though they had grown from the same landscape.

That's why Michael Dylan Welch's description of Vanished Roads as a “well-designed haiku collection” pleased me so much. He also described the experience of reading it as one of “enjoyable patience.” Both observations get at something we were consciously trying to accomplish. The book isn't asking the reader to race toward a conclusion. Its changes happen incrementally, poem by poem, image by image.

Maybe that's appropriate for haiku. Emergence doesn't require a trumpet blast.

Sometimes it's just the next thing you notice.

Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and illustrations by Tré, was published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026.

Vanished Roads at Wolf Twin Books

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Vanished Roads: A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

 Vanished Roads

A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

Thomas L. Vaultonburg’s Vanished Roads, a collection of haiku (and, to my mind, senryu), is a pleasure to read, possessing a satisfying variety united by thematic throughlines. The tone ranges from the homey to the surreal, the author's voice unobtrusive but personal. It has the feeling of a deep, light night conversation with an old friend: intimate, unforced, occasionally funny, and capable of sudden profundity.

Buy Vanished Roads

The volume features a number of stand-out poems, several of which I will examine. What strikes me is its genuine popular appeal: these poems have a muscular simplicity without sacrificing depth.

Vaultonburg demonstrates a highly developed sense of the possibilities of the micropoem. The poems drift from outside to inside, through the seasons, from lightness to grief, even in the same poem:

spin fast enough

and the wound

becomes a door

Here, strange logic brings the poem to a surreal conclusion. The imperative casts an immediate spell, pulling you into the orbit of the grotesque before abruptly opening a way out– or is it in? Vaultonburg makes use of the double meaning of ‘wound’– perhaps (because of the spinning) it’s the past participle of ‘wind’, like a watch. More likely, it’s an injury. Implication likens the latter to something else that both opens and serves as a barrier. If the body is a house, trauma is an unwelcome guest.

Grief lurks in the domestic– furniture, a coat, in a woodpile, in a door: Vaultonburg grounds regret, perseverance, transcendence, and joy in the concrete. The poems’ emotional and philosophical weight emerges through the transformation of ordinary objects and experiences.

The poems demonstrate effective use of Western literary techniques, while also displaying a wonderful sense of many Japanese aesthetics. Here, Vaultonburg’s use of personification has a plausible deniability– perhaps the author is not talking to a storm, but the reader.

storm clearing—

you too

are allowed to arrive

Below, the poet cultivates an atmosphere of holy mystery in just a few strokes. This haiku initiates the reader by calling attention to lapsed attention. Already we are focused on what is missing– the deer. Only, it hasn’t departed. It has transformed into something else, something that remains. This is yūgen, the grace that works beyond human ken.

not watching

the moment the deer

becomes the woods again

Vaultonburg’s poems are artless in the best sense– they don’t wear their artistry on their sleeve. They are accessible without becoming simple, sophisticated without becoming complicated. Again and again, things shift into other things: a wound becomes a door, a deer becomes the woods, a hat becomes a pilgrim. There is a weight that the artist refuses to succumb to, a tempered joy. A solid and satisfactory collection.

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