The Interior Castle: Chagall, Rilke & a new Rilke Blog

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Segment 1 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

In this late afternoon blue winter light, as the window of one year is being shuttered and a new one about to be opened with the flare of a candle, thoughts about an artist and a poet are synchronizing in me.

Segment 2 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

Wednesday I had the mighty joy of standing in the radiance of Marc Chagall’s stained glass "America Windows" at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he created expressly for the museum out of appreciation. Newly cleaned and returned to the Art Institute in its new modern wing, Chagall’s blues, reds, yellows and pink are as resplendent as they must have been when he completed them in 1977. (If you are interested in learning more about the windows and how Chagall created them out of gratitude for the Art Institute's dedication of a gallery to him, go here; if you ever make it to the Midwest, I feel a trip to the Art Institute is worthwhile for these windows alone.)

Segment 3 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

"America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago 

(this photo from The History Blog)

As you may have noticed I have been posting a lot of poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke these last few months. His focus on the inner landscape is right up my alley, and with every new poem I read, my heart expands a bit more.

What came together for me as Don and I walked the streets of Chicago were the parallels between Marc Chagall and Rainer Maria Rilke. For both men, Russia is incredibly important. Chagall was born there (in Vitebsk, Belarus, in 1887 – he died in 1985), and Rilke (born in Prague in 1875, and died December 29 in 1926 in Switzerland) spent many months there with his dear friend Lou Andreas-Salomé. For Chagall, though he left Vitebsk for Paris and other parts of the world for good when he was 36, Russia remained his soul’s home throughout his 97 years of life. For Rilke, after just a few months in Russia, he claimed it as his heartland and felt that no people understood spirituality more than the Russians. Both men lived through World War I and struggled to make sense of a world in which such a war could happen. Both men migrated to Paris and found intense inspiration from artists there. For both of them, angels populate their work. Chagall’s windows and paintings are sprinkled with angels flying in the skies. For ten years Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, of which angels are a central theme.

What most impresses me in connecting Chagall and Rilke is how they carried the world consciously in their souls. Chagall left his hometown of Vitebsk, but it was so dear to him that he kept painting it in signs and symbols in many of his paintings, often with his beloved wife Bella as a personal representation of Russia, his soul’s home. Rilke too transformed the stuff of life – things -- into inner material that could remain with him always. And always he was trying to reconcile the true and even dark facts of the world into a harmony of the soul. You can see what I mean in the poem of his I’m posting, below.

In the mind-boggling and cumbersome intensity of the world’s problems bending the corner with us into the new year, I am inspired by these two who continually processed and transformed the facts of the world into the truth of the soul, where our response to the world is what matters. Through creative expressions, we can love this place of ours.

Out of the deep admiration that my friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist’s Pillow and I feel for Rilke’s poetry, and because there is a new volume of daily readings titled A Year with Rilke (translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows), we are launching a new blog containing these daily passages, much like my blog RUMI DAYS, which shares readings from another HarperOne publication, A Year With Rumi. Our blog A Year With Rilke will offer passages of letters, prose and poems of Rainer Maria Rilke exactly as published in that book, except that we will add images to the readings. The blog is live, and daily postings will begin January 1. The following poem will be featured at the blog March 18 and expresses what I have shared today.




The Interior Castle

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.

Our lives are constant transformations. The external

grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,

now a mental image takes its place,

almost as if it were all in the imagination.

Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,

as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.

Temples are no longer known. In our hearts

these can be secretly saved. Where one survives—

a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—

its true nature seems already to have passed

into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,

and do not seize the chance to build it

inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.

~ from the Seventh Duino Elegy 

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Lake Michigan: lines and curves, with Beat poet William Everson

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I hope you enjoyed a beautiful Christmas and are resting warmly in the afterglow, as I am. Stay snug and comfortable while I share some scenes of winter here.

In our world that is filled with straight and rigid lines constructed by men, it is needful to find balance in the feminine, curving complement of Nature. In their rectangular New York apartment my daughter and her husband grow a pot of basil, its mouth-leaves open to the sun on a wide kitchen windowsill. Nearly all the concrete streets of our towns and cities are softened by trees, their round domes curling up and down curb-shores as if avenues are rivers. Trees grow straight, like roads and buildings, yet they are simultaneously round in girth and leaves.

Nowhere could the contrast between Man’s straight architecture and Nature’s roundness be more evident than at Lake Michigan a week ago. I walked the woods and beaches of Grand Haven and Hoffmaster, up and down hilly dunes that rise like a woman’s hips (and I felt the strain in mine). At Grand Haven (photos below), the yardstick-straight concrete pier with its iron catwalk reaches out into the teal water with a cherry red light tower in the middle and lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the end. The pier withstands violent storms, and sadly people have been swept away while walking there. (I posted photos of a more dramatic winter scene three years ago here.) Even on the man-made pier, Nature festoons circular knobs and curlicues on the steel. Waves curl around metal. Sand, water, wind and freezing temperatures wrinkle and pile circular sculptures on the beach.  I find man-made structures more intriguingly beautiful when Nature has weathered them with her own patina.

There is a poet of the Pacific Northwest who respected Nature and tried to live in its rhythms as much as a person can.  William Everson (1912-1994) spent three lifetimes writing about Nature's seasons and the tension between man and Nature -- three lifetimes because he dramatically changed his circumstances twice, leaving a secular life to become a Dominican monk – “Brother Antoninus” -- and then returning to secular life again. He was haunted by the violence we are susceptible to in the world of Nature, and in our own hearts; he was a conscientious objector in WWII. After becoming a monk and one of the original Renaissance Poets – which came to be known as the Beat poets (he was “the Beat friar”) -- he began the third part of his life when just after taking vows for the priesthood, he publicly read his love poem to a woman “Tendril in the Mesh,” threw off his monk’s robe, and chose Nature's dance with her as his spiritual practice. William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, was a farmer, a fine-press printer, and the only monk among the Beat poets. Everson’s poems remained often erotic and mystical throughout the phases of his life, including the period in the Dominican order. (He famously and controversially wrote erotic poems about his soul's relationship with God, as shown in Dark god of Eros.) There is a very nice bio of him at the Poetry Foundation site here. A few of Everson's poems that can be found online are here.

I'll post one lovely poem of Everson's.

San Joaquin

by William Everson

This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling,

Though our city-folk scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter,

And flee it—Yosemite and the sea.

They seek splendor, who would touch them must stun them;

The nerve that is dying needs thunder to rouse it.

I in the vineyard, in green-time and dead-time, come to it dearly,

And take nature neither freaked nor amazing,

But the secret shining, the soft unutterable sundowns;

And love as the leaf does the bough.

Accompanying Lake Michigan photos from last week I'd like to share a further peek into Everson’s mind-heart, from a book transcription of his “meditations” presented in his year-long course on the poet’s call he taught at Kresge College (UCSC) in the 1970s. The book is titled Birth of a Poet, and these quote-meditations are from Chapter two: Identity. At the foundation of my writing life in the early 1990s, this book helped give shape to my own poet identity, as well as my perspective of Nature and its rhythms.

I would be remiss if I did not mention how very present George's images of beauty in unexpected places were in my mind this day at the beach. If you have not yet visited George's blog Transit Notes, I highly recommend it for more along these lines (and curves) of living in rhythm with Nature.

 

“Cyclical time is very jealous of itself. When you enter its world of myth and dream, of ritual and wonder, there is an innate revulsion from the processes of linear time.”

“Often, the most profound signature of cyclical time, the spoken voice, simply won’t communicate into linear pattern of print. . . . The page simply can’t register what the voice is saying.”

“When your whole life is structured around winning and losing as key to identity it becomes, literally, a crucifixion.”

“Emily Dickinson wasn’t mad, because she possessed her vocation. It enabled her to skate on the brink of insanity, yet retain her complete integrity. All the hell the Victorians were trying to deny through the accumulation of wealth, she lived out in her beautifully skeptical intelligence. She took nothing for granted, but possessed the sovereign right to see everything to its essential core.”

“Even after eighteen years in a monastery, I can’t claim to be an angelic man. I don’t have the particular kind of vision called the angelic intelligence. I am a sensual man, and my sensual needs become the law of my being. I live out the physical vibration as the impulse of my life, and through its exercise, rather than its denial, I fulfill what I am. That’s a terrible thing. And a terrible beauty.”

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“All great art is gauged on that dimension, and, setting aside the collective liturgies, and the detachment of contemplation, it is the most direct means we have of bringing us back into harmony. Art is the aperture through which we slip inside the threshold, momentarily at least, to gain a vision of the two points of view as they come together.”

"I am trembling a bit just going through all of this in my head. I'm like an escapee who trembles when he reapproaches the Iron Curtain, with all its barb wire, electrical charges, and hidden explosives. But the Iron Curtain is really only a symbol of that threshold. We must penetrate it in order to obtain our wholeness, our beatitude. You possess both worlds within you, they are each yours by right. You must not let that outside world, with its emphasis on the linear, deny you your deeper self, which is of the cyclical mode. Your course in life must always be to hold both realms in your being. Your vocation is the process by which you bring them together."

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Merry Christmas

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Come in from a cold deep walk in the night

Where stars and moon peg indigo with white 

Curl up by the fire or lounge by the tree

Drink from a spicy cup

Here next to me.

Let’s warm up together like birds on a bough

And remember the year we’ve shared until now

Our flights have been wild, our songs wide and clear

May we scout, soar and sing

Even freer next year!

Blogger buried in poetry avalanche . . . new poem found in the rubble

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Her family had warned her, but it made no difference. The stack of poetry books on the table by her red leather chair grew and grew, as if in competition with the Christmas tree by which it loomed. It happened gradually, as things do, one book pulled from the bookcase and added to the pile one week, two more the next, and then another, and another. Finally one day, the inevitable happened. It was just before Christmas, the house aglow with candle spirits. A spicy Cabernet had been poured. The woman in the red chair hunkered down for an evening's read under the alpenglow of her poetry mountain, the crackle and hiss of the woodstove in her ears. But alas, when she slid Keats out from the foundation, the whole damn tower tumbled and buried our poor sitting duck. When they dug her out, a miracle had occurred. She lived! And the volumes of poems had coalesced into a condensed Pompeii of a poem, layered and conglomerate. Two lines of poetry from each book had tumbled out from precisely the pages where their bookmarks were tucked, not one page in either direction, beautifully inscribed through some unknown alchemy on a page of freshly scraped parchment. And, these couplets were joined in exactly the order in which the books had been stacked (except that rebel Bukowski tried to get to the bottom after being on the top; he's a reverse elitist, you know).

Our bruised and concussed woman has requested the help of her blog friends to interpret the mystery revealed in these aggregated lines before she sends them off to Dan Brown. She feels there must be great portent after a near poetic death by suffocation. Please read the mystery poem and leave your interpretation (or get well wishes) in the comment box.

(You will find a list of poems, poets and the volumes of poetry in the Babel-rabble (or is it Babel-rubble?) at the bottom of this post, with links to the poems that are available online. There is a podcast of the poem here, which somehow begins to make sense of these joined couplets.

Avalanche Poem
          a conglomerate of couplets from fifteen poems by other poets

Twas the night before Christmas
when all through the house

The tastes come from afar
and slowly grow nameless on the tongue

There is a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox

Misquote me and cause confusion, there is a voice that
doesn’t use words. Listen

He says, “There is nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.

Once I looked inside
the darkness

as the shadows assume
shapes

The nights are not made for the masses.
Night divides you from your neighbor,

Once in a while someone will make a pronouncement
about the movement of the stars, the density of silence,

and in the wild transparency submerged
your celestial geometry of flight.

Those who have chosen to pass the night
Entertaining friends

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning

A quiet family, one mother one father one
toddler, around them the breath of the earth,

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.

O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,
That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

- by the following poets . . .

Listen to a podcast of this found poem here, recorded by the recovering woman of the avalanche.

Couplets are from the following poems and books, in the order that the books were stacked (except for that rebel Bukowski), and only lines from poems at the place of each bookmark were magically contributed to the new poem:

"A Visit from St. Nicholas" - Clement Moore, Christmas Poems
"Summer Fruit" - Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year with Rilke
"Fasting" - Rumi, A Year with Rumi
"Being Slow to Blame" - Rumi, The Soul of Rumi
"The Sunrise Ruby" - Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love
"The Hermit Crab" - Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems
"Cornered" - Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
"Human Beings at Night" - Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images
"The First Geniuses" - Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
"Not Alone the Albatross" - Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems
"Violent Storm" - Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving
"Four Quartets" - T.S. Eliot
"Unknown" - Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room
"Afternoon in the House" - Jane Kenyon, Otherwise
"Endymion" - John Keats, The Complete Poems

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Bluebird

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Because of some beautiful experiences with bluebirds (especially this one I posted about), I have paid close attention to them. Being blue, they also represent the throat chakra, the energy devoted to communication. Their quiet nature and melodic song resonate with my own inner call. I found the card in the photo above at the bookstore yesterday on my outing with Inge and knew I just had to have it. It's a Mountain Bluebird. The second photo, below, is an Eastern Bluebird. The third is a porcelain my sister Nancy gave me; he sits on my dressing table near a candle I light every morning. Do you feel a strong affinity for a certain animal? Here's a little poem about mine, with some first words of Rilke's.

Bluebird

What I lay claim to

is like anything

unpossessed

by anyone

yet on I go holding

the ache of blue

he empties in scalloping arcs around

the stubbled meadow

blue eye

in the eyelids of branches

witnessed

just a few times a year

cheer of song

the animal voice

I decided was mine one weightless day --

-- my spirit guide --

telling the truth

through the branched world

of my throated heart

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Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

By the way, I just viewed my blog in Internet Explore on my husband's computer (I don't have IE on my Macbook), and the formatting is in disarray. I wonder if this always happens in my posts. It must be annoying to view, if so. So sorry. I always post and view in Firefox or Safari.

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Dickens' Christmas Spirit

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Not having taken part in any of the true miseries known to man, I only know about them through words and images shared by others. The plight of the poor throughout history, and now on the very planet I inhabit, is beyond the comprehension of someone like me who lives in the best of comfort and health. As I prepared this post, I read about the Poor Laws in Britain’s history, fascinating and horrifying. (You can read a good wiki article about Britain’s Poor Laws here.) The New Poor Law of 1834, enacted a decade before Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, was a huge legislation to ensure that no one would receive relief from poverty outside the parish workhouses, which were intentionally kept miserable so that a person wouldn’t be tempted to rely on them out of indolence. Dickens himself had to work at a factory as a child, and the anguish he experienced remained with him his whole life, infusing it in his novels that are so poignantly sympathetic to the poor.

Earlier the same year that he published A Christmas Carol . . .

Dickens was keenly touched by the lot of poor children . . . In early 1843, he toured the Cornish tin mines where he saw children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children. Inspired by the February 1843 parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon poor children called Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission, Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, "An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child" but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. He wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "[Y]ou will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea." The pamphlet would become A Christmas Carol. (Copied from this wiki article)

After re-watching the 1938 film "A Christmas Carol" with Reginald Owen on the weekend, I was reminded what the magic and mystery of Christmas is. We have the Christmas energy inside us all the time, all the love we have ever encountered with family, friends and even strangers. The joy of human connection, even in the most dire of circumstances, even when we are surrounded by greed. The possibility that with the right outlook, joy is always possible, and can always be spread to another. At Christmas, we pull out our lifetime of stored love when we re-open Christmas boxes. White lights remind us of stars that have shone on every man and woman in history – the same stars. Imagine. We are all one human organism. The magic we share is available outside of Christmas! For some, it seems especially hidden at Christmas. What a shame, if we forget it after Christmas, or miss it during Christmas when it is eclipsed by commercialism.

For me, old decorations and illustrations bring out a special nostalgic feeling that makes Christmas special. I am a big fan of Arthur Rackham (good bio here), the British illustrator who was hugely successful at the turn of the 20th century known for his "depictions of gnomes, goblins, witches, and fairies, as well as his anthropomorphized trees," so I am posting five of his illustrations for the 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol, along with a few quotes from Dickens’ classic novel. Can you imagine a world without this story? Apparently the greeting “Merry Christmas” was first used after this novel. 

Bob Cratchit went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 
twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve.

Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,

which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"How now?" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever

"What do you want with me?"

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in

restless haste and moaning as they went

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea -- on, on -- until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.


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"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can."


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"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit."
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Winter at last: nostalgia

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Lately, my thoughts want to come out in poems. I don't know what has happened, it's never been like this before. I think I just long for an economy of words. I am also reading more poems than anything else. Mary Oliver. Rainer Maria Rilke. Rumi. Charles Bukowski. Mark Strand. Whatever Garrison Keillor offers in the daily Writer's Almanac. The poems you write. Or, if I read a book or an article, I read them in short bursts, as if a paragraph is a prose poem. I force myself to read a few Op Eds in the NY Times or BBC online. Have you ever read David Brooks or Paul Krugman with an eye to metaphor? OK, I just clicked on the Opinion page to find some good metaphors to show you what I mean, and guess what? Paul Krugman's piece today is titled: Block those Metaphors. I'm not kidding, it happened just like that, synchronously. Is he saying he doesn't want me to co-opt his column as poetry?

Anyway. When the snow finally arrived on the weekend, I felt at ease, at last. A poem-memory slid out. Also, because of the nostalgia, I turned the photos sepia. Don't get me wrong. I love the blue of winter, and I'll show you plenty of it in the months to come. But for this first snowfall, let me take you back . . .

Winter at last

When at last she comes

in the middle of December

Winter pulls our old toboggan of bamboo

by its curled bow

like a come-hither finger

“Sorry I’m late”

and in red and black woolens

I climb onto the vinyl pad

with three older brothers

me pocketed in the imperial front seat

of the curl

muscled by their weight behind

secure in their brotherly oar-like legs

shoving off the hill into the wild white

like Norse Vikings, my seven-year-old face

the brave winter-fairy figurehead

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Both a Breath and a Shout

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Liu Xiaobo's empty chair at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony

For the record:

Thank you to the powers that be and have been these two hundred thirty-four years. For being able to use words the way I want. For John Milton, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. For Noam Chomsky. (Even for Julian Assange?) For Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote: "Maybe we're here only to say: house, / bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window — / at most, pillar, tower ... but to say them, remember, / oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves / never dreamed of existing so intensely." For all words spoken and written. For blogging. For Blogger! For free, and for freedom. For you. For me. And especially today, for Liu Xiaobo.

Both a Breath and a Shout

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to praise him.

Loud as a trumpet

in the vanguard of the army,

I will run ahead and proclaim.

My words will be sweet to hear.

My people will drink them in like wine

and not get drunk.

And on moonless nights, when few remain

around my tent, I will make music as soft

as a last warm wind that hovers

late and tender before the winter's chill.

So my voice becomes both a breath and a shout.

One prepares the way, the other

surrounds my loneliness with angels.


~ from The Book of Hours, 1899-1903

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What a dance

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What a dance

Snow flakes fell every day

that I reclined sick

indoors watching them

probe

limbo

from the red chair

but still they

barely

fill the wrinkles

of ground I walk

after all that lying down

not having been able

to rest

themselves

being blown

continuously

around

like thoughts

that don’t

murmur

beyond seeds

Something

has happened

in the night while I

lay

sleepless and warm

walnut leaves lie coupled

stiffly

around the silent

chicken yard

bucks have rubbed

diadems

on the social thrift

of sumac

thistle heads toppled

and surrendered bladders

of silk

the fallen tree

is piled in half-chopped logs

like stacks of half-

read books

poke berries shine

like deer pellets

and deer pellets shine

like poke berries

the frozen white platter

of the pond

bears black marks

that twirl and slide

jump and land

such tiny paws

and large hooves

tied together

by claw-dragged lines

What a dance it must have been

for each one

going after the mystery

in their own way 

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.
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The way I want Christmas

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     The way I want Christmas is withdrawn, but attentive, and giving. Like a woman. During holiday hullabaloo the thrusts of commerce, and even sometimes of the church, impose upon the quiet of inner space. Any day of the year, whether in a state of joy, sorrow, or even turmoil, I want to rise and fall gently on the day's currents--nose flared, eyes raised, hands unclasped, ears unlocked. But some of the air is raucous, rank, deafening, false, and deadening. At home I pull down Christmas tubs and unsnap lids. Out with the ribbons and glitter spirals the remembered scent of oranges studded with cloves. It is a woman’s fragrance, the earth. My mother.

     And out comes the 1955 Christmas songbook, dull matte blue with worn embossed singing angels on the cover, its spine reinforced with duct tape by my father. Mom’s dark eyes ignite in candlelight at the mahogany piano, and blue-ridge vein rivers roll over her knuckles while she plays Go Tell It on the Mountain. Hip-to-hip on the needlepointed piano bench we sit where she has also taught me to play in hours of tearful frustration. But as if turning out the lamps and lighting the tree and candles illuminates a different piano and alternate faces, during these easy-going Christmas carol hours there is no tension, no mother-daughter resistance or pride. She plays and plays, and I sing, and turn the page to the next. The music floats in flakes of effortless snowfall. Many songs are foreign, strange, and special, never appearing in a church hymnal. They are haunting in their folk lyrics and minor keys. They are of woods and tender brown animals. They bloom with holly leaves and stars. They rasp with bagpipe and fiddle. They are blue, cold nights of Croatian shepherds, French rushes of wings, and a hand hewn rocking cradle of Czechoslovakia. They are whisper-sung by a woman in front of a fire, baby at her breast, fat cheeks aglow and rosy-warm, drinking the quieting calm that streams from inside a woman. Christmas is my mother’s lullaby.

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

to sit beside someone and be there.

I would like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I would like to be the one in the house

who knew: The night was cold.

And I would like to listen in and listen out

into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below one last, strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow in 1991)

Sleep, little Jesus, my treasure, my blessing,

While Mary comforts Thee, tender, caressing.

Lullaby, little one, in loving arms lying,

Guarding my darling and stilling Thy crying.

~ Polish Lullaby
(translated by Henry W. Simon)
from my mom's Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,
which I posted about previously here

Please listen to Edyta Górniak tenderly whisper-sing this lullaby in Polish, 

called 'Lulajże Jezuniu', here

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