First outdoor blessings with my grandson, 4 months old

1
I have never been a farmer, or farmer’s wife, sweating
fruit lost to hard frost, and livelihood, or praying for rain.
I have never wanted to. (Will you?) We play here.
Our fingers are smooth. But we grieve
our lost plums so soon come. And we will feel
the cold stone in the barn
on a scorching day, and sigh.

2
I have been trying to tell you
about the fanned gusts from hummingbirds.
Look out!
for their ferocious beauty.

3
Are you as warm as I am?
Perfectly?

4
Just between us, we know the
cool cave of solitude
of the mouth
and when to open it.

5
Do you think the bee
was confused when the sage
bloomed plum petals
that look like iris
through needles of rosemary?

6
I wonder when you will first feel
that the road
your tongue takes
out of your own heart’s gate
is one of loneliness?
This is a mixed up place.
For now, join all these birds singing together.

7
Hear the poplars?
They are saying a dappled hello from
Courbet, Sisley and van Gogh.
(See, it isn't always lonely.)

8
This air is a bridge
between us
and all.
All!

9
Creation is what you make
of what you are given
and also
what you are not.
The path in the woods,
and what it passes through.

10
Please feel all this emptiness.
It is absolutely necessary.
May what you give back to it
always be as true
as the small clear stars
of your voice today.


June 2012

It is a hobby farm we live on. We have absolutely not a single apple on our three apple trees, or a single pear on our pear, or plum on our plum. But it is the fruit farmers in Michigan this season I really feel for. The heat in March brought out early blossoms on the trees, and then a hard killing frost in April annihilated the fruit. Pretty much the entire cherry crop has been destroyed, and Michigan is the source of 80% of the world's tart cherries, so you can imagine the impact this has on our state's already wobbly economy. I posted about cherries up North three years ago here.

Here is a minute and a half of video and audio accompaniment out of James's first real outing a couple of weeks ago. I was very moved by the undulations of his tongue, showing that he was meeting nature with it as much as with his ears, eyes and skin. You will hear a small interruption of James's grandpa laughing, then asking me "Where'd Brian go?" and me, grammy, answering, "talkin' to his mom" and you'll see James's grandpa watering his garden. The way James kept gurgling outside when I introduced him to the trees on a walk later made me feel he is simpatico about nature.

-

-

Carpe viam

-

-

Carpe viam

"seize the road"

was Horace's alternative

in space

instead of time

diem and viam

both symbols

of the circle

we live

the simple flight

of stones

seized and thrown

first rising

then falling

to become the road

in the end
(that never ends)

June 2012

-

-

To be, so unlike another

-

-

To be, so unlike another

Discomfited in a room where I
have never been nor will ever be.
No lace. No flowers. Unrecognizable
to myself. Yet bending

to sit in your imagined chair
by your particular window.
Mountain witness, sea air. A series
of paintings in red and blue by Hokusai.

How much useless effort I have spent
climbing into that chair.
Or marching against the wind
of your breath, not floating in it.

I accept at last my discomfiture
with myself, with you; never mind,
and run alone through slats of sun
with cavorting birds who are anything

but silent. Free to say that I want to love
myself the way I want you to love me:
Under song. In and out of tree-stripe
shadows, one limb after another.

As far as the sun’s eye sees along
a flat land where orange hawkweeds
swell in the random mist of spider laces.
In the morning. In the morning.

May 2012

-

-

After reading Frank O'Hara

-

-

Frank O'Hara's perspective is profoundly urban, and I love his leaps and dives. The poem I read before my foray in the garden was not this one, a favorite, and with rare observations of nature. But it ended up inspiring mine. I don't know how he does it, just what he describes, to deepen you with his quickness. He catches that sense we get from a poem when you simultaneously feel you've discovered the deepest truth for the first time, but that you also knew it all along.

POETRY

by Frank O'Hara

The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be quiet as if
I were used to you; as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.

I actually wrote my poem below after reading another O'Hara poem, "Meditations in an Emergency" with the lines:

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

After reading Frank O’Hara

I am weeding
the bed of mint—
spearmint peppermint
chocolate —
and feel the quick stab
of stinging nettles
through garden gloves

the damn leaves
almost the same
and while I rub
the tender spot
you tell me
it is good
for pain

No kidding, I think

But what you mean
is that its extract
relieves pain
in joints and such

and so I squat back
down in the delicious air
and let the pain
surprise my hands
with goodness
before
they feel it


May 2012

-

-

Shelved

-

-

I began this poem by cataloging things that are set away for another time. While writing I became nostalgic and thought of my Uncle Jimmie, and the grief of his life when he lost his wife, my Aunt Ginny, first to mental illness shortly after their daughter, my only cousin, was born, then sometime not too long after, to death. Later he lost their daughter, too, much too young. Then the poem slipped into fiction, as he never lived on a farm that I know of, and he did find love again with a second wife, though he outlived her, too. So this is about a farmer who was not as fortunate as my uncle perhaps, but who I'm sure must have lived like this. I don’t write many rhyming poems, but rhymes seem suited for nostalgia.

Shelved

Bone plates in the cupboard
for blackberries and pears;
onions in a basket flaking
down the basement stair;

photos crammed in shoeboxes
behind the cabinet’s frieze;
winter boots under winter coats,
and under the lid: piano keys;

clippers in a copper bowl,
mauve eggs in the house of wrens;
golf clubs in the attic next to
the glass ballerina “Madeleine”;

amber rectangle of Chanel
shining at the bottom of a vial,
sleeping eyes and teeth and tongue
in the silent accumulation of bile;

poems in books, bats in the barn,
attar in furrows of unopened roses,
the moon and stars in the light of day,
the sun, after night’s closet closes;

needles and yarn in an old crewel bag,
half-finished sweater, an undarned sock,
piles of cotton, batting and lace,
a refashioned dress just ready to smock;

shovels and rakes hung head up
between the nails of the shed,
firewood honeycombed along a wall,
the axe asleep in its bed

like old Uncle Jim, love-lost and meek
when at last we laid him in earth;
wind in the crotch of the giant oak,
hens lined up on their berth;

his heart in its shell as snug as an egg
dropped warm from its mother hen,
eclipsed by a shroud when Aunt Ginny died
and it never came out again.



May 2012

Poetry should be heard.

-

-

Moose

-

-

This poem is an attempt at plagiarism. I come from poetry lessons with Robert Kelly and Diane Wakoski who taught that copying the poems of others was something like what the copyists at the Louvre did who learned from the masters. But in writing a poem, perhaps unlike painting, even when you try to copy another poet your own voice is bound to come out and no one might be the wiser as to what the original inspiration was. In an interesting project Robert Kelly wrote “into” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” adding his own text, thereby creating a new poem in book form, also called Mont Blanc. Diane Wakoski taught that if you take a poem and change the words to be your own, you are creating something completely new.

The past couple of mornings I’ve read and reread a poem by Native American poet Joy Harjo called “Eagle Poem,” which was the Writers Almanac entry for May 9. I was swept up in it, soothed, transported. Then I remembered a morning like hers when I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon the autumn of 1976, the semester I lived up the mountain from Ashland with twenty-two students and six professors studying philosophy, literature, science and nature. One morning of the five mornings on the trail, I met a moose, an animal whose size can only be imagined, until you stand within a few feet of him.

Here’s my poem, a “plagiarism” perhaps of Harjo’s “Eagle Poem,” which I’ve included below mine. Of course plagiarism is not acceptable in prose. Is it in poetry? In this case, I am not stealing imagery or word combinations; I’m stealing the poet's pose as prompt. Maybe it is simply imitation, a form of flattery and praise for Joy Harjo.

Moose

To forage in a dark forest alone,
nudging underneath all that has dried
for a bit of life, for what keeps you going
another day. To believe you will find it
in a green leaf tipped up and up
by a breeze, or in tufts of grass
as fresh in your mouth as water.
To trek on into the black and brown
for more, always more,
trusting there will be enough green
to fill your huge being. Like the moose
at Moss Springs standing broadside
when as a college co-ed I lumbered
around the bend a mile ahead
of the trekking pack, mindlessly
lost in myself, our distance
less than his height. In his eyes
such questions, not of justice
or ethics, but of balance.
We each stood our ground
watching the other. How long?

This long. Still. As long as it takes
I know that it was on that woody hill
my clumsy shyness grew less; alone
with another I found patience to watch.
And suddenly the forest crashed
into awakeness when the bull ran off,
impossible barrel on table-legs, his crown
tipping up and up, like oak leaves.


May 2012

Eagle Poem

by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

"Eagle Poem" by Joy Harjo, from In Mad Love and War. © Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Photo of Mount Hood Wilderness near Ramona Falls from Wikipedia Commons

-

-

Shades of Red

-

-

Shades of Red

A man will tell you
if you say
The dress was coral
that he doesn’t know
what color that is.
It’s a funny joke
that a man can’t identify
shades of ruby, rose or russet.
Don’t specify
cadmium, crimson,
carmine or cardinal
or burden him
with the fiery folly of mauve,
maroon and magenta;
these will topple him
into a raspberry of despair;
you won’t get to his heart
through his stomach
describing anything as
candy apple, cherry,
tangerine or strawberry.
Just call it red.
You and I know
it doesn’t mean he
doesn’t care about the dress;
it may mean he doesn’t understand
the subtle species of your feelings
separated into seed packets
in the complex filing
system of your spirit;
it means he would like
you to hit the broad red
side of the barn
with your meaning
so that he can love you
with his strong brick red heart.


May 2012

-

-

Bonfirebird

 -

-

Bonfirebird

We circle ‘round

a bonfire at midnight.

The fire is warm, and dangerous.

We can’t turn our faces

away from its seductions

yet only get so close.

Next gray morning it feels safe

to poke the nest of ash and char

with a cold black stick,

looking for the truth of fire

in what is left behind.

But, O Soul, don’t hide

your face and wait like that; turn

over the crimson ember-eggs

of desire buried in ash; pile on

dried spikenard and fig,

almond and cherry; smell

as they crackle to life; feel

how voluptuously

your flame-wings rise up!

May 2012

Art notes

Top: Costume Design for The Firebird, by Leon Bakst

Bottom: Cover of the book The Firebird, by Konstantin Somov

-
-

Caravanserai

-

-

Caravanserai

Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks
and passes of my body, a traveling

miracle, while I read the news,
all of which barely reaches me—

economies of elections, wars, and
minerals harvested from asteroids

in the celestial commerce of billionaires.
Numb with armchair trade,

I remember the seduction
of the Silk Road. Quieted, I hear

spirit through the flutes of my bones—
the music of the steppes, the tinkle of pots

on your back. I smell the fust of Turkish
rugs on the floor and know

I would walk a thousand miles
to curl up on felt-covered stone with you

and these other traveling strangers, harbored
inside trusted walls, away from danger.

In the morning we finger sunrise apricots
in a copper breakfast bowl

before recommencing our planetary
journey, a mouthful of sweet chai, and I ask

what you know of the soul’s trade—
its breakdowns, its tinkerings

its thieves and swindlers? And you say,
Tonight we will come again to a caravanserai,

a courtyard of companionship, a warm stop
on the long road. Nothing else matters.


April 2012

Note: One of the thrills of my life was staying with Don, our two children, and my sister in a Caravanserai in Turkey, an outpost along the Silk Road where for centuries caravaners were given three nights free lodging, food and fodder for their animals. It was far from “free” as a hotel when we lodged, but worth every penny to me. These stone fortresses were built in a huge square, with one front portal large enough for camels to pass through. Rooms for sleeping were around the outer edge on the second floor, while service rooms, including a Turkish bath and shops to repair horseshoes, filled the lower floor. In the middle was a courtyard where goods and animals were kept. When we stayed at the Caravanserai in Kuşadası, transformed into a hotel, we dined in the courtyard. The best part of the experience for me was the two-foot thick stone wall that made our room’s window wells large enough for a small child to sleep in. My imagination has never rested since those nights.

Posted for DVerse Open Link Night, hosted this week by Brian Miller. Join the community.

 

-

-

Letters from home

-

-

Maybe it's because of National Poetry Month that I've been reflecting a lot on why I write poems. This blog has changed dramatically since I began in 2006, and these last couple of years it has become almost exclusively a poetry blog. I never intended it! It's just how things want to come out, a sort of shyness, not wanting to say things directly. I don't apologize, but I do realize poetry isn't for everyone. Funny, this write began as prose. I had every intention of writing prose! But it shaped itself into a poem. What is a person to do when a poem asserts itself?

Letters from home

That’s what poems are.

We are migrants from

somewhere that loves us.

Poems come from there.

News of a death,

news of a birth, both

in one letter. We want only

the truth, and nothing

held back. Things that

have come to pass,

and dreams held fast.

Read them again;

read them over again,
softened with time

in the shifting dust

of this foreign place.

April 2012

Note: The painting is Saudade by Brazilian painter José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, painted in 1899.

The word saudade is a Portuguese-Galacian word that has no true equivalent in the English language. Wiki calls it a "deep emotional state of nostalgic longing" for someone, or something absent. Saudades are woven in the fabric of Brazilian music (I've shared one below). There is a fine, in-depth write about saudade at wiki here. However, I get the feeling that it can never really be understood by anyone who doesn't come from a culture where it is profoundly felt by its entire people. For instance, Brazil has a day of saudade on January 30, out of longing for the Portuguese homeland. I only recently discovered the word, and its melancholy and provenance have put me in a state of saudade for saudade, it is so beautiful. I find this helpful from wiki:

The "Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa" defines saudade (or saudades) as "A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived."

The Dictionary from the Royal Galician Academy, on the other hand, defines saudade as an "intimate feeling and mood caused by the longing for something absent that is being missed. This can take different aspects, from concrete realities (a loved one, a friend, the motherland, the homeland...) to the mysterious and transcendant. It's quite prevalent and characteristic of the Galician-Portuguese world, but it can also be found in other cultures."

The similar feeling of morriña is defined as "Feelings and mood of melancholy and depression, particularly when caused by nostalgia for the motherland".

Maria Bethânia sings "Saudade" in Portuguese
(sorry I don't know who the gentleman is with her).

Music is the language of the heart, so for us

who don't know more than a few words of Portuguese,
even without understanding the words
we can feel the melancholy.
But if you're curious like me,
you can put the lyrics, below,
through an online translator.
There is moon, and sea . . .

Saudade a lua brilha na lagoa

Saudade a luz que sobra da pessoa

Saudade igual farol engana o mar

Imita o sol

Saudade sal e dor que o vento traz

Saudade o som do tempo que ressoa

Saudade o céu cinzento a garôa

Saudade desigual

Nunca termina no final

Saudade eterno filme em cartaz

A casa da saudade é o vazio

O acaso da saudade fogo frio

Quem foge da saudade

Preso por um fio

Se afoga em outras águas

Mas do mesmo rio.

-

-

Dancing at dawn

-

-

Dancing at dawn

I sit alone, like a pocketed wheel snail
snugged in sandy dawn, the sun
angling for salmon behind the barn’s thistle weeds;
off to the side the sky is the color of shallow tide
around the moon soon to be a filament
of film clipped on daylight’s floor.
The birds sing all at once and more, without
bounds and oversound the shells
of my ears with sea.
I bob and skim my chest at the edge
of the hot tub, the way seahorses slowly rock
intoxicated with love on YouTube
for us who only swim among the kind
of coral that grows neon in the sky.


April 2012

Poetry should be heard.

And a less "produced" version, after a few helpful comments...

-

-

Driving with pink angels

-

-

Driving with pink angels

Pink of the dissolving petals, pouring out of the tree
and pink in the palms of my hands. Pink dangling
tongue over lips,
coffee spilling into my throat;
spring and pink allergic eyes
tearing in the presence of fragrance.

Sing for us, Joni,
with packed pink linens
in your traveling bag.
I do not move
here in this weighted world
but only through our music.

Your pink sunset is my sunrise
ahead of the weekday road, what lowers
my feet into slippers
morning by morning; black crow
wings and a beak tearing pink breakfast;
rise again, pull again, lift the
pink-skinned sun across the sky
into night as satin as your wings.

April in wind, April in rain.
April pansies and hyacinth;
phlox, quince, alyssum;
crystal vase on a black piano,
pink tulips opening, floating
like windblown hair, or
jet trails from California
to Michigan, traveling on
a blue string song.

My body pink under
freshwater pearls; the painted stripe
on rainbow trout in my rivers,
wiggling like ribbons;
hands spilling over ivory stones
in your memory, every song
a fish swimming into my next poem.

Mother, where have you gone,
pink woman of the keys,
white and even like your teeth?
My poisoned hands play jazz
out of your hymns
in this sobbing flesh of ours. Pink mother
with fragrant goodnight lips,
pink moon of hearts
cracked in crater-places
healing under black-winged nights
that rise with the crow
every time I pass.

An angel in pink walks up to me
in my satin wedding gown
with pink ribbon ‘round the waist,
her pearlescent high heeled shoes
bright as the diadems of her eyes,
pink lipstick and raven hair.
The rush of her wings says

Poems live.
Flesh from soul.
Sing, body.
Play the fractured song,
pour Brandywine and redbud,
maple fringe and weigela,
pink as a baby just out
of her mother’s bleeding peony.

April 2012


Poetry should be heard.

-

-

after the lame goat in Rumi's poem

-

-

after the lame goat in Rumi’s poem

not everything is beautiful
said the gods of guilt
and fear

and I understood
suddenly
after the mountain’s
height over the misty blue valley
and its rocks underfoot

that I like this hobbled life
with its three legs of joy
and one of wounds

for the pace
drummed slowly and syncopated
by that one


April 2012 

art note: "composition with a goat" by Marc Chagall
Rumi note: I am referring to the poem "The Lame Goat"

-

-

April wind

-

-

April wind

On a day when April wind
has tumbled clouds into mile-high
snowy hills like in Chinese paintings

I wonder what strength
and precision it costs the honey bee
to aim his hovering windblown tongue

into frail blossoms fluttering open
out of tight Brandywine buds.
And how he does not spill nectar-

drops on me lying on the blanket—
a risk under sky and tree to him, to me
and to the small gold star of a spider

walking ellipses across my gold pillow
suddenly visible in movement
like the satellite we wait and watch for

every night, “There!” as it crawls
toward the sun on the other side
of the world on its articulate path
that looks so random to me.


April 2012 

-

-

Acrobat

-

-

Acrobat

I have nowhere
to put my arms away
for the night and so I avoid
taking them off, which
only causes more problems.

Lying on my back is novel.
I could write a poem in my sleep,
for instance.

Sooner or later, however,
my spine takes on a limb of its own
and the inferior mattress is just too much
there.

I have considered a futon
of the roll-up variety in my Zen arcs.
Head on oblong block. Face open

to the closed eyes of night,
floating along in space
in tandem with the poem
that flies through the air
with the greatest of ease

and gets up and walks
on its hands
come morning.


April 2012

 

Art notes:

top: blue acrobat by Picasso

second: acrobat by Picasso

third: acrobat with flowers by Marc Chagall 

-

-

Resurrection

-

-

Resurrection pulses through me like a river
pushing aside moments of death. My foot steps
ahead toward the Russian olive, solitary, about
to bloom in the meadow, fresh-mown for summer.

But for now it is spring, the season of risings.
What good are prayers for the already dead? Where
does that love go? I see the raccoon’s den-hole
beside the grass-covered log long fallen,

its dark opening only he can trust. I hear
the watery throat of a cowbird and know it
as the same stream, already across the pasture
where I follow. I watch her fly away, and disappear.


April 2012

-

-

Alone

-

-

When I feel most alone, no matter

if life and love remain all around,

when body and mind are too much,

I need to leave the bread at the table,

go out and walk the orchard or the lake,
find the star, the moon, or the last loaf of sun.

Nothing there, nothing
between me and the Scotch pine,

nothing between me and loss,
no bridge across the distance,

only the dissolving heart, alive, the way

the sun sinks slowly, without a body, everywhere,

and try not to be afraid.

-

-

Poem: The Soul's Correspondence

-

-

The Soul’s Correspondence

Freely, the black locusts bend and wave
from limbs and fingers, waterfall
spray across their stone slab of sky.
The older the tree, and taller,
the greater the grace. The young
birch and plum imitate with curtsies
in their small way, new to the wind.
The spruce’s scraggles heave and flutter.
Bamboo hisses; leafless poplar echoes.
They write poems with ease,
roots deepening below them in the earth.
Not buried exactly. But weighted,
spindling toward magnetic center.
Listen birds, stop squawking at me.
I want to hear the Soul’s correspondence
through the spirits of trees, while I rest
hands in my lap. No writing. No work.
Up from the essence of survival. No,
listen. It is far more than that.


March 2012

-

-

Poem: What they'll say when she's gone

-

-

Here's a bit of experimentation as I contemplate what lasts.

What they’ll say when she’s gone

I can’t believe I will never hear her
____________ again, reminds me of
the way I felt after I lost ___________.
I wish she would have left me
her blue ___________, so delicate, irreplaceably
graceful. I was smitten with something in her eyes
when she talked, the ____________ of her
lips, the blossom on her _______________,
the way ____________ fell on her hair every autumn.
I was surprised and taken with
her handwriting, as elegant as a __________
flying from her hand, gone forever.
She was an excellent listmaker, but
she could never finish her _____________.
The _____________ she made was divine,
but her ______________ was an utter flop.
The attention she gave to every
_______________ overcame the way
she _____________. Her love of _____________
made her do things
I would never, could never do.

But I have to say, it was the way she ___________,
always there, that I will try to never forget. She did it like
no one I knew, or read of, or could
possibly imagine. She’s stayed in my dreams
more than she’ll ever know, and less
than I now believe, or remember.


March 2012

 -

-

Poem: Out or In

-

-

Out or In

Here is a young tree
stretching its bark
in a new spring. Its
ghostly blossoms erupt
like longing, so small in the air
that you must hover close
to ascertain fragrance.

I have broken beyond
fences, with spirits
benevolent and not. Who can say
for certain which breed
kicks down the gate, and whether
I am going out, or in?


March 2012

the wedding plum

-

-