Poem: Losing what we may not know we have

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Oxford, England

Too late I heard that yesterday was the last class of one of our treasured professors. I don't know what I would have done had I known. The colleague who told me it was Tess's last class also told me that back in the day, the department's faculty and staff would gather in the hallway outside a retiring professor's classroom at the close of their final class, and then erupt into applause as a collegial and hearty Well Done. I'm sad that we don't do this now in our department, and that I didn't even know what I'd missed, like so many things that have flowed off downstream and become part of our subconscious past.

Losing what we may not know we have

for Tess

Today I imagine you
in a late April room,
oak-trimmed and bright
with towered light leaning
on wide, flaking sills

your courageous falsetto,
the tone of women
from a certain age that is gone,
a time of white
gloves and great human

decency one to another.
Your final literature class
at university, and you, the last
medieval scholar. A boy
slouches, his phlegmatic leg

stretched long toward the girl’s
desk across the aisle
where her graced contours in black
leggings make him melancholy.
You incant the mysteries

of the humours, while blood
springs in these children
like fountains, splashing. I see you
last summer in Oxford,
your white-gloved finger lifting

the edge of parchment
of an ancient book in a Bodleian
room where the same sun
through oak windows
backlights the stirring leaves

of a plane tree, applauding you
in whispers from the splash
of its heart — O blood-sap,
Our lady professor, the river
of life through

your body of work,
your gravid body, the spray
of wrinkled hair, your
crackling voice, its spatter
on heavy stone where a black

bird lifts off, wings
billowing like a don’s sleeves,
silken, rippling against the sky.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

NOTE: It may well be that if one has to wear white gloves to touch a medieval book in the Bodleian Library, that sunlight is not allowed any more than a finger's oils. But humour me in your bilious objection, my friends, as I take poetic license.

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Poem: The Past speaks

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The Past is a prayer
for this future,

his flannel cuffs
rolled up to the elbows

where tattooed forearms
descend
and veined wrists
rise up like a sunrise,

his knuckles chapped
rocky hills

with outcropping
thumbs hooked in belt loops
on a pair of corduroy trousers,

their velvet
time-scraped
at the knees.

He shifts his big-boot feet
and finally raises his eyes,
staring straight from under

hooded brows
at me
his reckless daughter,
removing his belt,

I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this . . .

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Impermanence, and what endures

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The tavern in the middle of our town looked like one of those windowless bars I rode by when I was a kid in the back of the station wagon on trips when for apparently moral reasons we couldn’t use the neon sign’s “Q” in “Liquor” for the alphabet game. Covered windows or no windows at all, I envisioned those bars dark, dirty and mysteriously bad inside, with men hunched under the roof around brown bottles of beer, like trolls under a bridge around unspeakable loot.

Don and I have lived a few years on a country road two miles from a town where a tavern has presided over its comings and goings for decades. Every weekday I drive through the village's eclectic row of houses and the four corners of downtown on my way to and from work. There is an alternate route I could take, but the town reassures me, with its thousand people who know each other and on summer evenings buy ice cream cones at the general store across from the tavern, leaning on posts while they lick Rocky Road, or lounging on the store steps smoking cigarettes. I fill up my gas tank on the third corner at the BP, deciding to support a business in town even as I support a company that administered a disaster. Maybe my gas money will help someone get compensation for the oil spill too. I can hope.

The tavern across from the general store is in a building that is 150 years old. That's when the Civil War began. We got to know the tavern, where neighbors and friends ate pizza and drank beer, Harley bikers stopped for breakfast on their smooth Sunday rides across the state, and cyclists by the dozen stopped for lunch and a rest. On Memorial Day the end of May, the owner sold barbecued ribs and chicken from his trailer in the parking lot during the parade. Once a month or so we got a booth in the smoky old joint and ate bar burgers or all you can eat Friday fish fries when we didn’t feel like cooking.

The tavern burned Wednesday in the middle of the night, no one hurt thankfully. Workers pulled down the hollow brick walls the next day when the fire had been put out by firefighters from all over. When I drove home Thursday, sort of forgetting that the tavern was gone, I turned the corner onto Jackson Street between the square of charred piles of bricks of the tavern and the general store, and suddenly I had to stop. I was in the midst of a crowd of hundreds of residents (half the town) who were standing in a vigil in the middle of the street gathered around the tavern’s owner standing by his pickup, letting him know they love him and want him to rebuild. Hands were held high with cell phones snapping pictures as friends stepped forward to hug him one by one. There I was, driving my little Aveo through the crowd (it was impossible to go back the way I’d come) dividing it like Moses parting the Red Sea, with the sea of people closing in together behind me. I may not know anybody in this town (I'm fine with that, we have good friends and big families), but I felt bolstered by their group hug that surrounded me like a living piece of cloth being unzipped and rezipped by me in my car and all that love.

The "trolls":
our son's friend Stephen and our son Peter

when we took Stephen, a world traveling
cruise ship videographer, to the town tavern
when he visited from Vancouver last year 

 Photo from the Lansing State Journal

Don snapped this pic with his cell phone;

what's left of the building in this shot

was pulled down the next day

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Six wild mallard eggs for Easter

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Aren't they beautiful?

The mother found this teepee shelter in the black locust wood near the old fallen apple tree to build her nest. She will lay one egg a day until she decides her brood is enough — maybe 10, or as many as 18 eggs. Then she will set her warm body on them for about a month. The ducklings will all hatch the same day, whichever ones survive the coyotes, foxes, hawks and crows. The drake will hang around for a few days, lounging and dabbling in the nearby pond, which is about 200 feet away. He will moult all his beautifully colored feathers and be flightless for about a month, in the eclipse plumage phase. The hen will show her brood the way to the pond, where they will know by instinct how to catch insects to eat. Then she will go moult her feathers and be flightless for a while too. In about 10 weeks after hatching, the ducklings will have feathers that look like their mom's.

We are starting to search for morel mushrooms in this wood, and the woods by the pond. Gotta look out for sprouting poison ivy though.

Here are a female and male mallard from the river on my campus.

Happy Easter!

Saturday Nights in the Minister's House

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Before my time, my father was an itinerant preacher, driving his old car through the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia to four parishes, preaching sermons and ministering to the rural poor. They needed saving, and he had a heart for them. Maybe this is why he kept walking even long after he left Virginia for Michigan, where I was born. He was a walker, a bicycle rider, a car driver, a grocery store cart pusher. Get out the way of the good reverend.

Saturday nights, alone in the upstairs hall he paced in shirt and tie through a tunnel of ancient books with his shoes on, never in stocking feet or barefoot, on the velvet leaves of the Persian runner, rehearsing his Sunday sermon. Striding rhythmically by the books aligned at the edge of every shelf, his feet rang the steps from one end of the hall where his oak desk filled the bay window to the other end at the screen-doored balcony, the toes of his pendulum feet dotting each “i” and jotting every tittle of his Biblical speech.

Beneath him, I sat in the living room with the TV, hearing through the ceiling the creaking cadence of his feet. I prayed the walking would carry on, that he wouldn’t come down and see me watching and listening to a program he didn’t approve with a worldly man on the screen: Dean Martin, born forty years before me, the same year as my dad, but destined for a different vocation. In a black tuxedo, white shirt, and bow tie coming undone with one finger, he crooned. He stood on a different kind of platform, with another kind of mic than my father's. He sang me a rock glass lullaby, loving me with eyes half open from within a nimbus of cigarette smoke.

I had a thing for older men who looked different than my red-haired father. I went for men with dark hair and graying temples. If they were olive-skinned and brown-eyed, I was smitten. Even as a teenaged girl riding on airplanes to visit my sister in Chicago, I kept my eye on the middle-aged gentlemen in suits. I was too innocent, and outwardly aloof, to fall prey to the wrong kind of man, but I had fantasies of their attentions. Dean Martin was the model older man of my daydreams — beautiful, charming and funny.

If my dad paused in place in the hallway above me, suddenly silent, my heart would stop. I’d watch with anxiety for him to appear at the French doors. Then the old oak floorboards above me would chirp again and chide: a phrase in the sermon had been wrong. He’d stopped his hallway itinerary, corrected the line or word, and his steps were off again, pacing steadily, my heart commencing its beat.

I wondered what he had rewritten in the pause, and hallowed in cradling breath, what halo of dust was stirred up around his hesitating feet. What would I hear Sunday morning from the pulpit microphone that he had altered, out of some fault that needed forgiving, so that this time his voice would sound something like crooning?




 


Photo credits:
Top: Rolfe Horn
Bottom: "Candy Cigarette" by Sally Mann

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Must we choose?

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April wind sounds like a jet plane outside the window,
so near I can feel the hum on the pane.
I am happy to sit under an afghan
on my heavy gold chair
Sunday afternoon
like an old woman awaiting visitors.

A ladybug alights on my lap, tucks in her wings,
and we are quiet together.

On my tongue are memories of lunch.

What else should occupy
our time on a Sunday afternoon
but the memory of food, and succumbing to sleep
as it drones us under its cloud?
I feel myself traveling through the sky
to a snack bar in Florence.

I have decided not to choose favorites, I say to the ladybug.

What would lime be without avocado? Onion without fried potatoes? Can you imagine basil without tomatoes, or cheese without vino rosso? How pointless to think of pesto without crostini— just Vaudevillian plaid pants dancing from a spoon onto the stage of your tongue, no toast, dry and white, to spread it upon. You open the cupboard for crostini again and again, only to remember with disappointment, Oh yes, pesto was our favorite food, we thought we had to compare and choose, forgetting
that pesto is nothing without the vessel of toast to carry it
farther into our being.

The ladybug is fast asleep,
the roar of wind is gone, blowing somewhere
over the Atlantic on its way to Florence,
the favorite city of someone,
and my memories from there join me as visitors.

Florence —

a physical place apart, a presence in the heart,
never lost,
a stone bridge, a painting, a dome, a statue,
a young groom and his bride carrying calla lilies through a square
toward their new life, that
in their existence alone, rebirth me

— What would Florence be
without this ponte of a stone white sky between us,
an ordinary white wafer carrying the salty tears
from Michelangelo’s pietà, never lost, to my tongue
on a Palm Sunday afternoon?
What would my window be without the sky,
the bridge to everything.

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Poem: A world, and you in it

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A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts
of maps parenthesize
us

as if we are together
though you (you)
are on the East Coast

and you (you)
are on the West —
as far from me as when the thin

membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you (you & you) —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with yours (yours & yours)
inside its coasts.

With many thanks to Brendan for his suggestions, I have revised the poem to what I feel is a better version, and recorded it. You can listen here.

A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts

of maps parenthesize 

us

— mother, daughter and son
as if we are together

though one of you

is on the East Coast 


and the other
 is on the West —

as far from me as when the thin
membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with both of yours
inside its coasts.

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Diane Wakoski's poetry lessons

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To read a poem is to stroll on a warm October afternoon into the artist square Place du Tertre in Montmartre in Paris, and have an artist tap you on the shoulder and ask if they can sketch your portrait. You read a couple of lines, shrug and say Sure, why not. You hear the poet scratching away with their charcoal pencil, and when you’re done reading, you either say, Yes, I recognize myself! Or you say, Who the hell is that?

Reading a poem by Diane Wakoski is like putting on a long flowing hippie dress of Bohemian cotton and walking through an orange grove in southern California or a book-lined New York City apartment where your friend is making an apple torte while you talk about a movie you just watched together. You become a woman who navigates her life through the sensualities of love, food, movies, and popular culture.

In one of her many, many books of poetry, The Butcher’s Apron, you dance through sensual visions of food and drink, sampling Viennese coffee at a train station or figs on the Adriatic Coast. It is in these poems of hers that I most recognize myself. At Diane’s real pine table, I have drunk blooming jasmine tea and eaten countless fragrant green salads with divine vinaigrette that I can never replicate, and pesto made with twenty-five cloves of garlic and basil her husband Robert grew in their front yard. I have also workshopped poems, first as a student in five of Diane’s poetry classes, then with former students around her supper table, pens in hand and minds ready to try on poems and see if they fit. It has been brilliant to study with a teacher who still maintains personal relationships with her students, inviting them into her home lined floor to ceiling with books.

The essentials for writing good poetry that Diane hammered into us students week after week are: A good poem must at the very least have lyrical language (added note after Robert's comment: lyricism in a limited and minimal sense of "the sound of the words" being important) and a trope or metaphor. (Another note: the poem itself can be the metaphor.) Then it must have absolutely NO clichés. If you write about tears as rain or love as fire, you're gonna really get the belt. Don't forget William Carlos Williams' advice: No ideas but in things. And, if you can possibly include something of your personal mythology, you might have a winner.

Professor Wakoski is teaching for three more weeks as Distinguished Poet in Residence in my English department, then she retires. One evening of her last week of class a bunch of former students will stand under her office window outside our building and serenade her with her own poems. Below is one of the three I’ll be reading, from The Butcher’s Apron.

The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful biography of Diane here.

Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives

by Diane Wakoski

for Walter’s Aunt Libby’s

diligence in making olives

As some women love jewels
and drape themselves with ropes of pearls, and stud their ears
with diamonds, band themselves with heavy gold,
have emeralds on their fingers or
opals on white bosoms,
I love the still life
of grapes whose skins frost over with the sugar forming inside,
hard apples, and delicate pears;
cheeses,
from the sharp fontina, to icy bleu,
the aromatic chèvres, boursault, boursin, a litany of
thick breads, dark wines,
pasta with garlic,
soups full of potato and onion;
and butter and cream,
like the skins of beautiful women, are on my sideboard.

These words are to say thank you
to
Walter’s Aunt Libby
for her wonderful olives;
oily green knobs in lemon
that I add to the feast when they get here from Lebanon
where men are fighting, as her sisters have been fighting
for years, over whose house the company stays in
and whose recipes for kibbee or dolmas or houmas
are passed along.

I often wonder,
had I been born beautiful,
a Venus on the California seashore,
if I’d have learned to eat and drink so well?
For, with hummingbirds outside my kitchen window
to remind of small elegance,
and mourning doves in the pines & cedar, speaking with grace,
and the beautiful bodies
of lean blond surfers,
dancing on terraces,
surely had I a beautiful face or elegant body,
surely I would not have found such pleasure
in food?
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
than like a sapphire?
But with mockers flying in and out of orange groves,
and brown pelicans dipping into the Pacific,
looking at camellias and fuchsia,
and abundance of rose, and the brilliant purple ice plant
which lined the cliffs to the beach,
life was a “Still Life” for me.
And a feast.
I wish I’d known then
the paintings of Rubens or David,
where beauty was not only
thin, tan, California girls,
but included all abundance.

As some women love jewels,
I love the jewels of life.
And were you,
the man I love
to cover me (naked) with diamonds,
I would accept them too.

Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter’s Aunt Libby’s wonderful olives from Lebanon.

Thank you, Aunt Libby,
from a failed beach girl,
out of the West.

from Waiting for the King of Spain
and Emerald Ice

Diane's "Sapphos" when we all read at a reading in 2009

—Courtney, Sarah, Carrie, MJ, Diane, me, Heather—
I am old enough to be mother to everyone but Diane.

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Poem: The Great Gray Owl

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It was disappointing Sunday when I was sitting outside in the summery breeze, writing on the laptop, and Don came rushing up to call me back to the pines where he had seen a great gray owl. I went with him, also rushing, then creeping quietly when we got to the pines. We searched high and low in stealth, but he was gone. I have never seen an owl outside a zoo, though I have heard them at the farm. Don looked into eyes just like these. We did find three pellets on the ground, things that Don's third grade students dissected in his classroom last year, and that was thrilling. (Owl pellets are regurgitated; they're not poo. You can read about owl digestion here, it's fascinating.) As the experience worked in my consciousness, other things floated up and into a poem.

The Great Gray Owl

When I was a girl, at night
I stood in the shower
like a shivering field mouse
afraid of yellow eyes
behind the curtain, the man who wasn’t
there
          the man
not from the street, or the window,
but from the shadowed attic,
or the basement, clammy and dark,
the invisible one who came behind
my skittering heels
while I carried a can of beans upstairs. If only
I had the swiveling head of an owl to always
see the predator,
though what good would a swiveling head do
if he is invisible?

There was a great gray owl in the pines
on a summery day in April
when the wind pushed the bamboo
like dainty bending ballerinas in a row,
first this way, their thin arms up, swaying,
then the other way, leaning at the waist.
My husband came running to me, to pull me back
to the woods to see those black and yellow eyes,
staring as my grandfather’s
had from a sepia portrait
at the top of the stairs
when, the youngest, I had to go to bed
before everyone.
          A man
I did not know, a figment, a phantom.
Handsome, dignified, staring, terrifying.
How could I know — That he,
if he had really been there,
not just gray eyes in yellow skin, flat
man on a flat wall, if he had been full and flesh
as he was at last one year visiting from New Jersey,
that he would torment me on his aging,
bouncing wool gabardine knees with foolish mischief,
teasing until I would gasp
between a giggle and a sob. O too soon
when we buried him he was skin and bones, leaving me
to wonder if ever, ever
I would know for certain that a man was really there,
and whether he was benevolent, or cruel.

The owl was not there.
He had flown. On the ground we found
three owl pellets — hair-covered remains of mice, rabbits, moles —
cocooned bits of skull, white ribs, vertabraic knuckles, teeth.
No eyes. Nothing
but gray shrouds of fur.
What the owl could eat, he ate, then gratefully,
even compassionately it seemed,
delivered them up — whole, like small torsos
without need for arms or feet, beautifully
and purposefully wrapped, woven in wool, napped
and cowlicked, tweedy, suited for the earth,
elegantly prepared for burial.

one of the owl pellets we found; owls regurgitate them, they're not poo;
for more on owl digestion (fascinating), read here

Great Gray Owl photo found here.

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Poem: Timbre

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Timbre

It was at the pinprick
of dawn when I removed the pot to pour my cup —

an overflow of coffee sizzled in vibrato
on the heated element of the coffee maker,
the high-partialed wind chime
on the porch tinkled brightly,
the fore-eye of the firebrand sun singed
the tips of low-lying needles on pines behind the meadow,
rising up at just the same exact slow heave
as yesterday

that I thought

This is constraint without limitation,
the sound of the sunrise
that prolongs my life
even one more day.

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"April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, plus a poetry game: Oulipo

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Central Park, NYC, April 2009

April Rain Song

by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

 Me in Central Park, April 2009

I appreciate the childlike pleasure in rain of Langston Hughes' lines. When do people learn to dislike rain? When I was little I played outside in it, stomping and sploshing in the wade-able gutters. Or I played indoors—Chinese checkers, Sorry, Scrabble, crosswords and word searches, or "house." I created divine and elaborate "mansions" with folios for walls, and my mother's jewelry boxes for furniture. (An open necklace box makes a perfect Davenport sofa for a paper doll, and embroidered handkerchiefs make elegant bedspreads.) Having to stay inside the walls of our house during inclement weather made us focus our creative attentions differently, and it was no less enjoyable to me than running in yard games or riding my bike 'round and 'round the block. In fact, I preferred the quieter play and bodily stillness of the cozy indoors, though I broke into somersaults and head stands if there were too many rainy days in a row.

I've been looking into poetic forms this poetry month. Part of me likes the "walls" and constraints of formal poetry like sonnets or villanelles. Focusing on a limited range of words that rhyme, or fit a certain metric, points my focus on what's inside me that wants to be written by eliminating the clutter of unnecessary material, and illuminating language choices in a smaller more limited range.

In these wanderings I discovered Oulipo. This "workshop of potential literature" (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) was begun by a loose group of mathematicians, mostly French, who seek "new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

I played their N+7 game, remaking a couple of poems. (It's sometimes called S+7; N=Noun, S=Substantive.) What mathematicians and I like about N+7 is how it's both fixed and random. (How thrilling to have something in common with mathematicians.) What you do is this: Take an existing poem, like Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" and replace each noun with the noun seven entries after it in the dictionary.

The point is to shake up language and open it up. What crazy new potentialities do you see? What do you discover about the original poem? What thought paths or inspirations reveal themselves like beckoning white rabbits down a hole, or songs of larks that make you pause and listen? I confess that besides these intriguing questions, I just really enjoy the nerdy pleasure of opening the dictionary and seeing what the seventh word away will be! By the way, you can eliminate all the words with the same root as your noun. So, for instance, I jumped past all the entries with "rain" in the word.

When I performed an oulipo on "April Rain Song" I was so happy that the noun replacing "rain" was "Rajasthani" because I remembered my dear friend Rauf's blog post about the manly herdsmen of Rajasthan and Gujarat who wear lots of big gold earrings ("Macho, Macho Jewelry"; Rauf let me borrow his photos below). For me, this game didn't "undo" Langston Hughes' poem, or poke fun at it. It shed light on his method of repeating a word for its sound, like continuous raindrops. The nouns that come seven entries after Hughes' nouns, in their fixed yet random aspect, blend into interesting play of syntax and word meaning. There is something synchronous and wondrous about the result. After reading Rauf's blog post about these shepherds, I see the "aqua" turban, I hear the "lumber-room" of the herded animal feet beating and mouths bleating like a rhythmic drowse-inducing lullaby, and I see the "poorhouses" of the Gujrati herdsmen in their fields of hard work and survival. And although the penultimate line of the oulipoem seems nonsensical, I hear the skill (sleight) of the sonny-herdsman, playing a shepherd's song that hovers around him like a shining halo (nimbus) in a dusty pasture at the end of a long, hot, sunny day.

By the way, Gandhi was born in Porbandar in Gujarat. Gandhi said:

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves."

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again;
Rauf knows how to shake things up

Aqua Rajasthani Sonny

An Oulipo N+7 response to Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" — replacing each noun of Hughes' poem with the noun seven entries away in the dictionary

Let the Rajasthani kiss you.
Let the Rajasthani beat upon your heap with silver liquid drowse.
Let the Rajasthani sing you a lumber-room.

The Rajasthani makes still poorhouses on the sierra.
The Rajasthani makes running poorhouses in the gym.
The Rajasthani plays a little sleight-sonny on our roomette at nimbus—

And I love the Rajasthani.

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again

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Poem: I dreamt you were eating dirt

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I dreamt you were eating dirt

I
I dreamt you were eating dirt.
But it was all right.
It had been refrigerated in earth.

II
My body is ten billion years old.
You were watering me with this old rain
which made us new.
Then we watched.

III
I am sitting on a bench in the meadow.
You are sitting in a boat on the sea.
In and out. We are the same.

IV
Grass greens. Sea grass. Olives. Garlic.
You are weaving with your fingers.
Waves.

V
The smell of rosemary
is not to be confused
with the sound of crows.

VI
If I had died yesterday
would I still have dreamt last night
that you were eating dirt?
Crumbled with the stars.

VII
Salt on your tongue. It’s my fault.
The memory of the word “snow” made me cry.

VIII
Was that Wendell Berry just now?
Soil sweetened
by his hands and his horse.
Delicacy.

IX
I dreamt that you were eating dirt.
Your mouth was a misty valley,
your teeth fences,
your tongue the sandy bed of the sea.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poetic genre: Aubade

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For National Poetry Month, I am writing and sharing samples from different poetic forms and genres. I like putting myself inside new walls to find something new in the world, and in myself.

Today's choice is the aubade, which is a love song of the morning. (A serenade is an evening love song.) An aubade could be welcoming the morning, or lamenting it, as when lovers part. There are no rules of form; it's a genre for a theme and is not a structure.

A perfectly gorgeous aubade was written by Philip Larkin. It's rather hard to say if it is an aubade to life, or to death. The text is here. His deep and lovely reading of it is here. If you do not especially enjoy reading poetry, do try listening to it. When you hear his voice, rich and clear, you understand that poetry is meant to be heard.

I am posting a beautiful aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen, a poet who also wrote poems about unbeautiful things (like murder, which I've linked below his photo at the bottom of the post). My poem has elements of both a love song and a lament, on the order of Larkin's, about a thought that has haunted me: that our children at conception and birth are given no choice about what we might assume is "the gift" of life.

L'enfant Malade, by Eugène Anatole Carrière

Aubade

What have we done, my love, in the sigh of night
when heat from our bodies pressed
the window’s black—
an oil lamp, an irresistible yellow thumb of fire?
Our skin like wings of moths, beating
to get inside the damp. We begin a new life, fluttering
in the dark bean of my belly.

Our desire begets our desire:
A child, first flight into the family tree,
bouncing, bobbing on the boughs of glee.

But what of her desire? She grants
no permission for this heaviest coat
at the highest height.
We’ll push her out, to fly!
She’ll wake up in the gray room of dawn, and fight—
with a wail for milk, and then she will sleep,
and get up to strive again, soon enough
with the sound of coins dropping
into the well of work and wishes.

She will crave what makes her live,
yearning even for the human race,
her skin beating, like ours,
hot in the last sigh of night.
Then like me she will walk out in dawn’s silver-gray,
following the jay’s howl from the woods,
turning at a pine, as I do now,
to stumble onto a scatter of blue feathers
torn by a hawk, and feel her life.

Listen to a podcast of my poem here.

 Woman Leaning on a Table, 1893, Eugène Anatole Carrière

And here is the aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen.

As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other

by Kenneth Patchen

As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

~ from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, copyright © 1942 by Kenneth Patchen.

Booker Ervin (1930-1970), left,

tenor saxophone player, with

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), poet;

Patchen often read his poems

accompanied by jazz;

Listen to one here.

Listen to Booker Ervin

play "Stolen Moments" here.
Moments stolen in the morning
are the best, in my opinion.

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National Poetry Month: Prose Poem

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It's National Poetry Month, and suddenly my well has run dry. When I had no particular excuse for writing and posting poems, they popped out, the way babies do sometimes. But just as soon as I tried writing a poem for April 1, the first day of this month devoted to verse, I went into labor of the sort I experienced with my first child: many, many hours of pain and hand wringing and nothing happening.

In fact, not only did the labor last long with little consequence (I finally got a dose of Pitocin after ten hours of labor with dilation to just two out of ten, and that helped speed things up: she was born three hours later), but she was incredibly late. My due date was April 2; she arrived April 30. That would be like the whole of poetry month devoted to expecting her immanent arrival, daily.

She finally did arrive, though I thought she'd never come out. She just took a little more tinkering and tweaking than we expected. And what a masterpiece! Some of my best work yet. This month we celebrate a golden milestone: Lesley turns 30 on the 30th.

This year for National Poetry Month I would like to present poetic forms. I want to try new forms I haven't before, like a cinquain, sestina, triolet, etheree and a rondel. I may write in forms I've already tried, like villanelle, sonnet, tanka and haiku. Besides attempting my own, I'll also post examples by other poets.

Today's form: prose poem. Prose poems are prose pieces that aren't broken into verse lines, but still include other poetic traits, such as metaphor, figures of speech, lyricism, and heightened emotion. One way of writing a prose poem is a letter, which I'm using. It's followed by a sweet prose poem by Amy Lowell.

Here's my prose poem to the baby I waited and waited for in our little house in Pasadena, California, thirty years ago.

To My Unborn Child

Dear Baby ~

I was thinking of you so I thought I’d write.

How are things? I’d love to hear from you.

Your room is ready.

I filled two brown grocery bags with avocados from the trees and the ground out front. I only picked the ones that were heavy and ripe, like my breasts. Dad took them to work to give away.

Did I mention your room is ready? I straightened the picture above the crib last week. I’ll teach you how to do that. See your grandpa taught me. He did it constantly. He couldn’t go through a room without straightening a picture. It’s OK if you don’t get it right at first. You just have to practice. After a while you’ll be straightening things for everybody like Grandpa.

Madeleine, our beagle, keeps misbehaving. When we let her outside, she keeps digging under the fence and getting out. One of these days she’s going to get hit by a car. We should probably tie her up. What a pain. I hate giving her a spanking. I just really have no idea how to train her.

Well, I miss you. Wish you were here.

I love you,
Mommy

She came, and then we had to learn everything;

but the loving came oh so naturally

The baby who finally arrived

And another prose poem:

Bath

by Amy Lowell

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
     The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. 
     Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

 Amy Lowell

1874-1925

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