With a broken-down hot tub, last winter’s night sky had to shine without us. We think of the hot tub as a vacation, spread out through the year. Even on the coldest nights (0º F, -18º C), we don stocking caps and soak for thirty minutes, groaning out the stresses of the workday, our heads laid back, eyes closed, then opened to behold the velvet sky-field with its distant lighted windows. So it was sublime when Don made a trade deal with our neighbor Bill across the road: Don’s 1974 International Harvester lawn tractor and trailer (we still have a John Deere for mowing) for a five-year-old hot tub and a face cord of cherry firewood. The hot tub needs a new pump, and then with a little Sawzall action to cut up our kaput twenty-five-year-old hot tub and get it off the deck, we’ll be back under the starry dome where the International Space Station blinks at us now and then, just after the gasp of a falling star.
Under an autumn night sky
Tree toads and crickets
have cupboarded up their cheer
for another year
while the wood stove commences
his chirp-and-clicky blaze.
Leaves of poplars
have waved farewell, tumbling
off like pilgrims down the windy road
to their southland. Above us
bony maple and locust branches
point toward the baptismal
pool of midnight.
The milk-blue moon
rolls over the barn
like a sacred rock of Sisyphus,
lifting to her white breast
the burdens of our day.
The Seven Sisters blink
twittery poems for the man
across the hot tub. Orion unhooks
a notch in his belt, beguiling me
with his bright torch. Then suddenly
the clattering season of O Henry,
Dickens and Thomas
hoofs up the fern-lined stony hill
in her shiny black Goodwill shoes
and we are children again, sitting
in this farm nave of holy velvet,
saintly candles lit on all sides
while we congregants listen quietly
for praise from the overturned font
above the meadow, and hum along.
When I love myself least, I am least able to love someone else.
When I am least in love with myself, I am the most self-centered.
I think Narcissists do not love themselves well enough.
When I most love my own soul, I am most capable of loving the souls and selves of others.
When I most love my soul, I am most able to love my self
—my personality, my aging body and face, my limited mind—
my every failing.
If I love myself, perfectly, I do not need anyone else to love me.
It is no one’s job to love me but my own.
If I do not rely on someone else to love me, I am more capable of being happy.
If I love myself as I am, in spite of my failings, I can love someone else in spite of theirs.
(I am in the process of even learning to love my failings; the correlative impact this will have
on how I view the failings of others is interesting to think about.)
James Hillman, who died Thursday, said, Why try to eradicate your demons?
Better to learn to live with them.
I think a demon is one part of a whole. Think positive archetype and negative archetype.
Example: mother/victim. If I fall into the victim role (a lifetime habit), perhaps it’s time
to mother myself. There there, Ruth, that doesn’t feel good does it, tell me about it,
says my mother self sitting on the edge of the bed of my pouting, victim self.
No one else should have to do this for me.
A poet read at the open mic: an old bright star. As a child her small eyes and mouth were shuttered in the Warsaw ghetto. Then she was passed off like a loaf of bread on a black train, first to be hidden from the danger of the camp to where her family was cargoed and killed, then shuttled from village to village on more black trains until she was fifteen to work in fields like a beast of burden.
It is easy for my mind to glaze over in numbness when I hear another story about the holocaust, until I meet a survivor. (Have you seen and touched a forearm with a tattooed identification number?) I drove home under the magic silver light of the old Jewish poetess, hearing her speak through that wide smile, line after line, her child-slow English spoken in staccato sibilants through beautiful teeth, until a key word in her second poem, one bead of mercury: the Polish word pamiętaj: remember.
Pamiętaj the wound, I thought, not the fear. I followed her silver star and drove home in the dark, wondering, where from, her bright and clear joy out of so much darkness? When suddenly a doe from out of the farmer's dark field appeared and shocked the windshield and me, the reflection of my car light in her eye a shooting star! In a second her umber-and-ivory-hided body jerked into a dancing constellation with my silver spinning car. The star you are following is suddenly everywhere, rays splayed to the horizon. She dives into the moment of you, the moment after fear, just before the wound blossoms.
Thanks for relishing with me the beautiful time at the lake with Inge, what we think of as our autumn writing retreat. Besides our luxurious hours reading and conversing, I did not do any new writing there, but I did edit, shuffle and organize poems for the book I want to self publish. I was encouraged because I got farther than I expected, with even a tentative title and cover design. I have much to learn about publishing, ISBNs, and all sorts of things I would rather not be bothered about. A dear blog friend has been of great help and is giving me time on the phone today to answer questions. While I don't care all that much about "marketing" this book, seeing it as more of a small offering to those who have asked for something like this from me (so very kindly), I suppose it would be negligent of me to press ahead without ample forethought.
Anyway, this poem was written after returning home. It almost sounds as though I could use another retreat, but don't worry: winter is coming, with plenty of time for naps near the wood stove on weekends.
Stacking in October
For a few minutes’ interlude from Sunday rest
I stack firewood in the corncrib from the pile
at its door. Wrists ache. My body is heated
from within by menopausal hot flashes. I am not
exhilarated by the exercise, feeling my age. I must
sweep off the curled, dried leaves on the porch
before the wicker and potted wilting impatiens
are mere crispy mounds, like bracken covered in kudzu.
So, too, I must pluck hairs from my chin. How like
honey the sun flavors the quiet air—my one clear hope
and pleasure in these autumn minutes, until powder
rifles and shotguns ring peals from neighboring land.
Prizes are claimed, herds thinned. Winter is coming
with its losses, its sleep, and its recycled comforts.
Inge and I are away at the lake with our books and writing tablets, tucked in under the rickrack of oak leaves outside. Indoors, surrounded by knotty pine, we're reading, writing and talking by the fire. Each fall and spring we escape after work for a weekend at my family’s cottage where it seems that within minutes of arriving our spirits are relit.
We quietly watch logs in the fireplace, like our souls: steady, certain, whole. Strike a match, light kindling, and flames cup and curl around them, like our spirits, which must be fed by some fuel. Without time in solitude, away from pressing routines, even for a few minutes a day in my red chair at home, my spirit lags. I must locate my soul, hidden in the thick maze of this chaotic life. I must hold her face in my hands. I remember, then, what it is I want. This is not narcissistic hedonism, but a force divine and true that guides me in calibrating my steps through this hectic and crazy-making world.
There is the delusion of falling in love with love. My unborn grandson is a fragile being (and also powerful), and within minutes of his birth (maybe even mere seconds), his foibles will begin to appear, and my own will keep unwrapping, in our miraculous humanness. Something of love’s litany of pleasures remains in the heart, so that we seek another new love. We might reap more joy than sorrow, once again, this time. And when the new love is imperfect, meaning that we, or they, are disappointed, we come to the next fork in the road, able to choose: I will love you even if you do not want me in the way I envision. I will love you even when you are so different than the boy of my dreams. Is a dream a fallacy? Reality’s moment hoped into fairy kingdoms? O blessed are the realities that exceed our dreams. But set my heart in the fertile ground that includes poo in the compost. Rotting matter is what feeds the next fruit of abundance.
“Pins and needles” tingle
in my fingers
while I push
a tiny needle
through calico
in a quilt for my
unborn grandson.
Years on computer keys
and the bands over nerves
in my wrists
tightened
like a swaddling blanket
too snug: carpal tunnel. However,
my forearms are mighty,
said the chiropractor.
Like the pen.
But not my hands. Knitters fly,
their needles flapping wool sleeves
like the startled wings of pigeons.
I can’t fly that way.
The baby who will squirm
in this quilt will be startled
and cry. Right here in this quilt,
and it will likely be me
who will one day alarm him
with inadvertent
painful surprise
to us both
and I, too, will cry.
This baby will understand
much. He will surprise me
with the utterly
new and completely ordinary
all his own.
My aching hands will pick
him up, worrying
that I could drop him
in a terrifying
moment of weakness. Causing
pain
like when my son
two days old felt the poke
of a needle into his heel
in a bilirubin test
poor jaundiced boy, intentionally
bled for the good of the whole.
I had to escape
to the soft hall
to muffle his cry through the door
like feeling the needle poke
through these cotton layers to find
my left middle finger
on the other side!
Nice name for a boy, bilirubin: Billy Reuben. Grandpa Reuben. O happy bouncing
knees of old time me. I did not understand
the pain of losing his gabardine lap
in one stroke. Sad, shiny wheel chair.
Downturned moustache.
I’ll wheel him around, this one
before he can walk. Happy
prospect: You will walk.
I have one life to give you.
And you will run it through
in the meadow like
this tiny needle through calico —
goldenrod, Timothy grass, thistle.
Our street might as well have been the River Jordan.
In my small town growing up our church anchored one corner, and another church the corner opposite, both large, dominant brick structures. Nothing about this arrangement seemed strange to me since it was all I knew.
Our house was the parsonage for the Baptist church, with a porch the size of a ship’s stateroom. When rainstorms battered the neighborhood and filled the air with the scent of wet dust and worms, preventing us from riding bikes, swirling hula hoops or roller skating, we sat on the porch furniture inherited from Grandma Olive and happily witnessed the deluge. We felt the spray on our skin as if we were skimming the surface of the Atlantic from the deck of a vessel cutting through the waves.
Rain flooded the street’s gutters between our house and church and the house and church across the street: the Methodist church and parsonage. Occasionally true to our Baptist belief that immersion is better than sprinkling, and that our feet needed washing, we jumped in and splashed in the rushing water.
But never did we venture into the Methodist church. I played Combat with the neighborhood kids all around its periphery, hiding in the alcoves, which were perfectly suited for our play as American soldiers against German Nazis. This was a couple of decades after the end of WWII, but we had a TV show that all of us loved called “Combat” with Vic Morrow as Sgt. Saunders and Rick Jason as Lt. Hanley. In my memory these soldiers are calm and peaceful purveyors of the gospel of goodness and light.
Besides being the setting for the enemy we searched and shot to peaces in combat play, the Methodist church was where they conducted dances in the basement. Now dancing was forbidden in our Baptist circles as sinful (in spite of scriptures about David dancing before the Lord). After football games I stood in the high school gym under the sparkling ball and watched my friends dance. I never went to the junior-senior prom, though my football player boyfriend asked me. I didn’t even consider consulting my parents, though I longed to go. We must be separate, holy.
Surely the God of the Methodists was more understanding and fun-loving than the God of the Baptists. Dances in a church basement must be safe, wholesome and bright, not tawdry like the close body-pressing in dark, smoky jazz clubs of my mother’s pre-Christian past. There must be a world where dancing (and card playing and saxophones and sex) was a natural and delicious response to the human urge to move, to feel the body’s presence in the air, like the fragrance a rose emits naturally, with no effort, and without any particular end. I had no way to understand the possible harmony of God and dance.
After my parents died my sister and I crossed the Atlantic for two weeks in Paris in 1997. One night we wound down a stair into a subterranean jazz club near the Luxembourg, drank gin and tonics, and listened to an American singer croon standards with a soft jazz ensemble. We were adults now with no parents to protect us from unholy endeavors. Among the tables and chairs with barely enough room for bodies there was no room for a dance floor, but I assure you, we were dancing, in paradise. God was everywhere.
Our days run on in mundane, ordinary echoes of each other.
But think of honey from the tessellations of a honeycomb.
Consider the patient migration of a turtle in his symmetrical coat of arms.
What warm energy pushes within facsimiles and repetitions?
And what do their tiled borderings make possible,
like the scales of a snake’s skin that enable him
to undulate like an S of smoke sideways across the grass?
Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania
one of the rare natural tesselations on the earth's surface;
I danced but one waltz and fell into my chair by Mr. Tolstoy, where I listened to music and conversation much of the night. You were all so charming and bright, but I had awakened too early the night before and could not keep my eyelid shades up. In a few moments of drowse, a dream-poem found and sailed me back to the farm, where remnants of the sea floated and mingled in the strange dance of the mind. The room spun slowly down to stillness.
Doorstep of a dream
In a dream, a house is my self,
each room an aspect,
their windows a glaze of eyes,
as these poem lines
are my skin, the letters ears—
small shells
that hear the weeping
overflow of the apple tree,
which exhales tales of the sea
in waves, of its lost city,
fragged stones on a mythic beach,
which is anyway
and after all lozenged
here in the house of me.
On the doorstep of a dream,
or in the sand of this poem
leaves fallen on the ground
are my next hands
recasting what would otherwise
be blown, buried or
forgotten, into this day's
room, with a window, open.
As Winter gets ready to hook her come-hither finger around the neck of the sun, our inner rooms begin to come alive with the warm glow of lamps, candles, a fireplace or wood stove, and a samovar for tea. It can only mean that the holidays are coming, and to start the season off properly, the Lady of Willow Manor shall throw her annual ball where everyone is welcome, no one excluded. With our bloggy imaginations we can publish fantasies right here with our fingers, choosing our dream escort and rich attire to adorn our perfect bodies. We are able to dance like gods and goddesses all cyber-night long. Maybe every girl who dreams of her someday-wedding gown at age five is really just dreaming of a ball. Which of us dreamed of anything as elegant (and sizzingly fun!) as Willow's Ball? And guess what, it's on the night of the full moon. With or without a full moon, no matter how perfectly envisioned and planned, things can go wildly out of control; you would not believe the stories from years gone by! Half the fun is reading reports of goings-on in the comments at Willow's blog the night of the ball! (Last year's here.) The ball is tomorrow, there's still time to gather your accoutrements and wits. Your invitation is here; Tess will have a Mr. Linky up in the next 24 hours or so. I didn't think I was in the mood for a ball, and here I am going on and on!
Update: Willow has declared the ball open, there are already acres of cars parked and terabytes of blogs to visit. The festivities are here!
I chose the white lace dress with yellow trims by James Tissot, at top. The whole scene is evocative, and although the painting is titled The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), some call it Remembrance of an Onboard Ball. A ball on a small ship? Wow. The dress looks good from this side, I think, the side you see on the dance floor.
As for who will go with me, I don't plan on taking a chaperone, as in Tissot's painting. Just a man.
I learned last year, with my fine escort Fitzwilliam Darcy, that a dreamily handsome and charming date is not necessarily the best choice. I barely got one dance with him. He was popular even with the men! Quite a change from the snob who turned his nose up at dancing in certain ballrooms. But he had lost his pride, and anyway he could see that at Willow's Ball, everyone is a fine dance partner.
Because Leo Tolstoy has been my close companion for over a year (I hold him affectionately in my hands: War and Peace), after fingering through potential escorts in my heart's little black book, I realized he would be the perfect partner for the ball. After he picks me up in his skiff and we bob up river to the Manor, he will settle in with a book in a nook. (I offered him my Kindle—not Nook—to re-read W and P, but he said he's more interested in Rilke's letters from Russia.)
Tolstoy is not one for balls, despite his noble upbringing. But his choice of an ascetic life, he assures me, will not cause him undue discomfort in the presence of so much frivolous ruffle and draped satin. He craves the music. He is well on in years, and tired, so he will sit and listen, or read, while I dance the night away with whomever I wish. When I am fagged from waltzes and fox trots and need a few moments' rest, he will be waiting in his radiant corner to captivate me in conversation. Don’t worry about him being bored and neglected. See how he holds the chair open next to him? You too can sit and carry on discourse with Monsieur Tolstoy when you need a rest. I will concede this so long as I can cut in. I doubt very much that the chair will be empty for long, as we will all need a rest now and then, and hushed dialog about many things. (I want to tell him, for instance, what came of his epistolary acquaintance with Mohandas Gandhi a few decades after they corresponded for a year about nonviolent resistance until the end of his life in 1910.) At Tess’s Willow Ball, all things are possible, because while Monsieur Tolstoy speaks Russian and French, and I don't, we will magically understand one another.
Notes about the paintings:
The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), circa 1876, sometimes called Remembrance of an Onboard Ball, by James Tissot, Tate collection
"Tissot often painted a man with two women in order to explore the subtle nuances of flirtation and attraction through body language and facial expression. Here a chaperone separates the young naval officer from the object of his attentions, the woman hiding her enjoyment of his flirtation behind her fan. Tissot focuses here on the boundaries of Victorian propriety and social convention, and their transgression. The languid pose of the nearest woman, and Tissot’s frank concentration on her fashionable hour-glass figure, inevitably led to the picture being criticised when it was first exhibited. The author Henry James dismissed it as ‘hard, vulgar and banal’." (From the display caption August 2004)
Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak
This painting of my companion was done by Leonid Pasternak, father of the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, best known for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak was a friend of Tolstoy's and painted illustrations for Tolstoy's novels. More info about Pasternak in a short bit I wrote for the Rilke blog here.
André Rieu is rehearsing Shostakovich's Russian Waltz for tomorrow night!
The week walks like a little girl in a brand new pair of black patent leather shoes, in a full house, ready for a huge piece of pumpkin pie with real whipped cream.
1Wednesday Inge and I toasted to eight years of good health and friendship since her breast cancer diagnosis. There is no way to express what this person I trust with all my being, with whom I have shared every discovery in tandem, means to me.
2Saturday the five of us (Don, me, Lesley, Brian, Peter—six with Poppy Seed) squeezed into Don’s new Chevy Cruze to drive down and help Don’s 83-year-old parents move into their new apartment. While the men moved the heavy stuff, Lesley and I made three pies: two apple and one pumpkin that we roasted a couple weeks ago. (If you don't have molasses in your recipe, add two tablespoons; you'll thank me.) I made pie crust from scratch for the first time in I don’t know how many years, and it was well worth the effort. (Ina Garten’s recipe was perfect.) A rare-for-me baking fest felt so good. Then feeding it to the five weary men felt even better.
3Tuesday is my Rilke blog partner Lorenzo’s 55th birthday. (Oops, I didn't ask him if I could tell you that, hope he doesn't mind.) Who'da thunk I'd have a blog partner in Spain whom I've never met? It just shows that you don't have to be with someone physically to develop a close friendship. Lorenzo's blog The Alchemist's Pillow is a haven of art enthusiasm and history, poetry, Spanish culture and other beauties that belie categorization. Happy Birthday, Lorenzo!
4Wednesday is the Willow Ball, and the moon goes harvest-full. Last week I wasn't feeling the ball thing, and then I got inspired. I'll tell you next post. I hope you'll go, because if you don't you'll feel like a slug. Everyone's invited. Go to the link and look at the invitation.
5Friday is our son Peter’s 29th birthday. He is now back in Michigan to live after moving to L.A. in the summer. All five of us are in Michigan now (six with Poppy Seed)! After Peter's accident last month, you can imagine my feelings hugging him a couple of weeks ago. His jaw is healing well; just a couple of more weeks of wiredness, and then we'll cut loose and celebrate his birthday a bit late with SOLID FOOD.
Now if only the Detroit Tigers win the American League title in the baseball playoffs against our son-in-law's Texas Rangers, we’ll be "hitting on all sixes ." To "hit on all sixes" is Jazz Age slang for performing at 100%, as in hitting on all six cylinders. Don's new Chevy Cruze doesn't have six cylinders, but it is a six-speed, the new Eco model. Sweet (but claustrophobic for five, especially when one of the five has a sixth in her).
The Wes Montgomery Quintet gets the idea of this glee in "Full House," recorded live in Berkeley in 1962. On Piano: Wynton Kelly; on tenor sax: Johnny Griffin; on bass: Paul Chambers; on drums: Jimmy Cobb. I love watching Wes's five l - o - n - g fingers on his right hand on the strings and the left five on the frets, then Wynton's five+five fingers on the keys while sun flare music and Wes's smile drive headlong on all six cylinders into my heart.
"In January it will be so nice while slipping on the sliding ice to sip hot chicken soup with rice . . . " (when I hold my brand new grandson). "Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice." (Maurice Sendak, Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months)
"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)
"Granny, what was it like when Mummy was me?" (Tasha Tudor, A Time to Keep: A Book of Holidays; this illustration is not from that book, and I'm sorry I don't know which it is from.)
“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, Arthur Rackham, illustrator)
"Well, please, North Wind, you are so beautiful, I am quite ready to go with you."
"You must not be ready to go with everything beautiful all at once, Diamond."
"But what's beautiful can't be bad. You're not bad, North Wind?"
"No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful."
"Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too."
"Ah, but there's another thing, Diamond:—What if I should look ugly without being bad—look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?—What then?"
"I don't quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then."
"Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife—even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife—you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?"
"Quite well," said little Diamond.
(George McDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, Arthur Hughes, illustrator)
"But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's garden and squeezed under the gate!" (Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit)
“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." (Christopher Robin, to Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne, E. H. Shepard, illustrator)
Every day I drive to work
and it is the same thing. Listen
to two minutes of political news
or economic disaster. Turn it off. Sail
past farmlands with birds.
Sit at my desk, answer, type, question.
Drive home between the same
houses for sale. Work to Friday.
On Saturday the sun shines down
on the oasis of meadow and I get up
to walk the still-wet grass into the end
of summer. Sunflowers fall away
from the sun, petal-stripped but big
bellies of seeds still feeding the traffic
of chickadees. Goldenrod and Canada
thistle sputter in ragged frizzles out of
dirty brown stems; royal pokeberries
droop down down down like antique
necklaces from the necks of dowagers.
Long they stood, these thin strong
spines, day in and out. Would I
complain in their constant stillness,
rejoice in the skyslide of a storm?
So slow ! this meadow watching, and yet
too rushed the machinery of what I live.
Now they fall headlong, tassels touching
each other over the path, weaving a baldachin
over half-moons of egg-yolk mushrooms.
Orbs of green walnuts revolve around them
in planetary randomness.
Rain on my glasses blurs sight:
My favorite red pines in a long row glowing
and backlit — Are needles dying among the soft green plumage? Tenderly I pull
a cluster, and without resistance they release
and fall into my palm, spent. Some blight
is taking the trees. O Beauty, where to?
I am always at the edge, this side of that. A fly
flies in and out, drawn to some heat
in me, or scent: the other. I am apart, skin
side out, embarking or disembarking
onto the path whose current pulls me
into the fields like kindness.
What honeyed dark energy sings
from the yellow soybeans in the field
next door as the beans dry brown, harvestable,
the green leaves going going almost gone?
Can the farmer, scientist
or economic analyst answer:
No matter the speed of matter,
no matter where we are falling,
what makes the heart keep accelerating?
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
