Poem: 29 Ways of the Soul on February 29

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29 Ways of the Soul on February 29

1
The soul is free
of pain, nothing
quick or slow,
hot or cold,
heavy or airborne.

2
Color—
the copper mum almost silent
until the polishing light
of a stormy sky.
This July memory.

3
Rosemary mid-winter.
Silver threads,
smoke and camphor.

4
Drops of rain
hanging on
to the tips
of pine needles.
Not the rain,
the needles.

5
Five shades of green
in one square inch of grass.
One bent yellow blade.

6
A head inside
a tight hood; sounds muffled:
feet falling; rain falling;
heart falling.

7
Muddy deer hooves
in the woods fidgeting
while my eyes
seek the bottom
of two-pronged well-tracks
filling with water.

8
The wind
when it stops.

9
Patches of snow
on the ground
look like clouds.
This source.

10
The wet log.
That darkness.
That shine.

11
The hiding place
inside the log.

12
The log hibernating
inside the arcing
bare forsythia.

13
The desire to move.

14
The longing to be still.

15
The sky sitting
on the earth
like Buddha.

16
My arms swinging
when my legs walk.
My heart floating
like my head.
I’m not sure what,
or who, does the carrying.

17
Glasses pearled
with rain. Seeing anyway
with everything else
a little.

18
No birds
to be seen. But
they’re here.

19
The cry of a bird
in the sumac when I walk past.
Intuition. His and mine.

20
Beneath the rust
of the sumac,
the curve of the blossom.

21
This white page
before I typed
the words
that were already here.

22
The countries
on my shoulders
that hurt, where wings
could be.
Flying above
that failing.

23
The space that desire
plows ahead of itself.

24
The courage
of one foot. One leaf.
One inch. The courage
not to measure.

25
Arousal’s eddies
at the edges of the ocean,
which is far from here.
But I feel the pull
in this spray.

26
Mountains with snow.
Or these no-mountain
fields. I am at the top.
Is there a difference?

27
The fur around my face,
synthetic, that tells me
there is another
that is animal and alive.
We are real.

28
The number 29
in February—nowhere—
until it pierces time
out of nonexistence.

29
Out of emptiness
she comes talking
just like dawn
opening the fog.
But not every day
that I can tell.

February 29, 2012

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Poem: Bamboo in Winter

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Bamboo in Winter

Wind blurs the bamboo branches into 
     spinning ribbons of two-toned sage.
It is a singular being with root-stalks rattling
     out of the snowed and heavy ground.
Or is it the other bamboo sticks' chiming I hear?
     The ones the children tied with shells and twine
when Summer jumped the wind with lissome limbs?

Winter bones now rattle the wind, unfastened
     in tatters. Skeletal bells from porch hooks
keep flapping. What did we carry from Summer,
     in the hands of the children?
Keep on, keep on, call the bamboo chimes
     to their living kin across Winter’s yard.
Bend quietly, dear sons and daughters.
     Bend lithely, while you can. And the shells clap
their hands like cymbals, hearing
     Summer's tide in the sound of the wind.


February 2012

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A fine edge, a jag

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The maids are long gone who dusted the porcelain and fluffed the down. Bone-white pressed linens on pillows and perpetual shine on mahogany are visions of the past. A few of my grandmother’s things are here on windowsills and in corners, some broken—the Staffordshire cow and calf with a horn missing, a gap in a piece of trim on the Hepplewhite, the lip of the Baccarat decanter chipped, a threadbare velvet ribbon streaming down like a wilted vine from the needlepoint stool where a fine 19th century bustled lady picks flowers in accumulated dust. It is no longer fashionable to be counted among the 1%, though courting fashion has little to do with why we live here on this piece of land, with no hired help, and time-worn buildings.

Here they are, lovely whatsits transported from a fine house, yet belonging in this old farmhouse with us, though I do not love them well enough. In my way, I kiss them all—the crystal arcs on the hip of the decanter, rising like a tide in waves along the sand, one by one. Such a fine edge on each scallop—perfect ellipses, lip upon lip, then the smooth neck, and finally the jag where someone (maybe a servant) banged it on the mouth with the stopper or a glass, and perhaps cognac bled to the floor. I love her, that maidservant, and the lady who yelled at her too.

Somebody loves us all, Elizabeth Bishop said. What a privilege. See how someone planted the trees—to stand, long-necked, perpetually being, shading—and simply and dotingly witnessed.

 Mr. Baccarat decanter with a broken lip seems to watch

the maple sap buckets on the trees

and wonder how much of that elixir has accumulated overnight 

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poem: "the dreams that you dare to dream"

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“the dreams that you dare to dream”

goes the song
about somewhere

far enough away
to be uncompromised,

yet for a few minutes a day
plays in this room

when the sun and cut glass conspire
to drop a rainbow

on old cement
where the feet and guano

of chickens once fell
when it was a pecking house

of life, an egg factory,
before someone opened

a way in for more light
at the peak facing east,

a leaded glass window
that breaks the sun-yolk

onto the floor
into something dreamy

here and now,
something I haven’t

yet understood the truth of,
how and what happens

when life falls out
of the breaking and orderly
mechanisms of this world

February 2012

These shelves were the chicken roosts.

  photos from my atelier in warmer days;

once a chicken coop, which Don and Peter

transformed into
another kind of living and working space;

my Grandma Olive's easel from art school,

with Lesley's sunflower picture

from her art school days;

my paint brushes, cairn, jump rope

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For loving days: another farm wedding!

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the bouquet I carried in our daughter's wedding, dried in l'atelier;

with my stick woman

I love a wedding, with its organza and lace, armfuls of flowers, pretty white chairs, music, sacred ceremony, and dancing, though part of me would like to avoid expensive wedding balls, if they are built on prestige and poppycock. As for Valentine's Day, I have always felt that love is for every day, and a box of chocolates, though tasty, lacks a bit by way of imagination.

But ain't love grand? Mais bien sûr! Our son is just engaged to be married to a woman he is in love with, and so are we. They will be married here on our hobby farm in August, three years to the month after his sister was married to her love here on the farm. (I posted about their wedding here.) Once again we get to mix satin and straw, quilts and lace with Queen Anne's lace, golden sunflowers and golden rings. There will be games, Mason jars with lemonade and beer, blackberries and golden raspberries, family and friends, torches and bonfires, music and laughter, kisses and tears. These are our children, grown and happy. And won't James be bouncy in his seven-month baby fat watching Unkie Pete wed his bride and new auntie? Or will he be crawling after a damselfly dressed up in gorgeously iridescent tulle wings?

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On becoming a doe

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What is it you feel on a walk in the woods when you know that suddenly you must stop, because the energy within you and surrounding you has become one? The white pines you love, from the tops of their sky-touching branches to the needled floor coppery and aching to be slept on, are full of deer-ness, though there is not one in sight. And, as though magically transposed into a doe yourself, at last you commence your walk, changed. Yet, as a deer, though you might have assumed before now that you would be fearful as one, you are not afraid; rather, you are attentive, listening, stepping foremost with your nose, black and moist, your ears and hide the color of the pine needles, together ruffling in the breeze.

And from where did it come, this deer-ness, and what does it matter, when next day on the next walk you remember that you are now a doe and instantly you hear a rustle by the pond, not thirty feet away. There, six does eat leaves of the poplar saplings and stop for you. O the moments when this transpires, the eternal moments when everything is one. They recognize you now. They have met you here for breakfast. They felt you within and without, walking in the air, eager to join them by the frozen pond table. They know that you are no longer separate. Yet it is their nature to bound off at last and leave you, alone, aware that you were the one who had this to learn.

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Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop

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To my cat's namesake, an honor of great love, for small and ordinary things, which Elizabeth Bishop attended to so well.

I like how in this poem she takes on that aloof and devil-may-care attitude of cats. Perhaps if we just go to sleep, better days will come, at least in our dreams.

Elizabeth Bishop, February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979.

Lullaby For the Cat

by Elizabeth Bishop


Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
Close your great big eyes;
Round your bed Events prepare
The pleasantest surprise.

Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.

Joy and Love will both be yours,
Minnow, don't be glum.
Happy days are coming soon —
Sleep, and let them come...

my Bishop

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Wisława Szymborska on loan

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Everything’s mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look. . . .

. . .

I won’t retain one blade of grass

as it’s truly seen. . . .

. . .

Salutation and farewell

in a single glance.

~ From the poem “Travel Elegy”
by Wisława Szymborska, 
who bid us farewell February 1st

"Think of your spine ending inside your head, not at the top of your neck, and feel your head floating there atop the spine," my Alexander teacher tells me as she helps me relearn the posture of a child, one of many tactics of a strategy I am waging to alleviate the pain of repetitive strain injury that radiates from my hands up to my neck. So I focus on the essence of that physical relationship, and the unlikelihood of carrying around an eight-pound weight upon something as thin as a spine, like a Chinese circus performer balancing a white plate vertically on the end of a stick. It is almost easier to picture my head invisible, like those of vestal virgins standing in stone along the lane of the Roman Forum. Those heads are gone from their bodies—weightless in their absence—yet their essence remains, sacred in memory and imagination. However I think of it, there needs to be mindfulness of my head and spine as one, in flow.

What is hidden within flesh and bone? What radiates in spite of them?

The 2009 head shot of Wisława Szymborska, above, magnetizes me. The face was on loan to her for a lifetime, evolving with age, yet momentary as a sunrise. It is now just a memory, a hint of earth on a bronze brow, eyes brown stones embedded in the palest rose sky, cheeks hill pastures in the morning sun, a trace of lipstick on an upwinged smile about to fly.

Wisława returns to the sky and the soil, a bridge between hello and good-bye. At birth and death, we attend to essence as to a smudge stick of dried and bundled sage, carefully lit at the start, held closely above a candle flame. Then small rosy ember-buds sketch fragrant shadows on air for a time, until at last they burn out, just dried leaf-sticks with singed heads. Yet how wild, musky and holy their scent remains as I hold them to my nostrils, opening heaven to earth, and earth to heaven, as if their flame never burns out at all. Wisława's writing strikes me as weight born like effortless floating, all flame and fragrance simultaneously . . .

. . . For surplus and absence alike,

a single action of the neck.            

 my sage smudge stick smells like heaven to me

Poem "Travel Elegy" by Wisława Szymborska from the selected poems titled 'view with a grain of sand' published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

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Poem: White plate

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White plate

The car on ice spins out at 70 miles an hour.
My sister throws herself over the banister
breaking both legs (but not her life,
which is what she wanted).
A wild man worries the locks
of the doors and windows
as I run just ahead with my little girl
to secure each one.

Just so, violence plays
in my dreams.

And in the light of day,
a tin can cuts my finger to the bone.
At work my ankle turns
above a wet shoe, and down I fall
flat on the linoleum
of the old department’s floor.
My anger at a co-worker’s refusals
throbs like my finger and hip.

We are torn, and we
tear; the throbbing vein
tells the truth. We wrap it
and unwrap it, and like the peels
and tendons of a pomegranate,
discard its stained residue
on a serene white plate.


February 2012

Painting "Dood snipje" by Jan Mankes, 1909

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