Poem: The intelligence of snow

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The intelligence of snow

To float

from the massive

cloud of unknowing

down

without hurry

or tension

into the amplitude open

above fields humped and blurry

and the gentle

geometry of roofs

falling

with no clear

apprehension

loose—adrift, or cast—

resting and feathering

across downy light,

or, becoming light

without edge

descending

and hovering

where buzzards meditate

a white spider

hanging and swinging

(without gossamer thread)

into the quietude

of outstretching spruces

tossed and bob-slipping

past treetops

beside

blue jays jerking

and nuthatches skipping

at last touching

into place

with soft pliancy

weightless wafer

on the bird feeder’s lip

onto one black seed

instantly scooped

The solitary

snow flake

dissolving

in the mitered beak

of the cardinal

in its ultimate

and particular

gesture of praise

December 2011

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Christmas angels from the farm: photos and music

To my friends near and far, I've put together some photos of Christmas on the farm and linked them with jazz singer Abbey Lincoln singing "Christmas Cheer." I wish you Merry Christmas, and as Abbey sings, Here's to love . . . now . . . and throughout the year.

You'll see a couple of angels given to me by my mom, the first at 0:28, a woodland musician I treasure. Another is the colorful grosgrain one at about minute 3:45, who looks a little worn, but still cheerful. Christmas and my mother are linked, with memories of sitting at the piano with her while she played carols from the big blue book, and I sang songs like "The Holly and the Ivy," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," and "Good King Wenceslas." Toward the end you'll see a portrait of my small mom with Matroyshka dolls. After the video, I'm sharing a new angel who flew in from my brother Nelson this week, too late to include in this slideshow. She is holding a red bird like the cardinals in the video and seems to have just alighted from the meadow, so beautiful.

Have a happy weekend, quiet or loud, at home or in someone else's, with all your angels large and small.

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Dylan Thomas: A Child's Christmas in Wales

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Back in November I scanned a few of Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations of A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas to share with you, and I had already typed up the start of the story, and loaded the YouTube. Bear with me as I nurse my hands a little longer. On the horizon: voice recognition software for my computer. Merry Christmas to me!

This is a boy's adventure I post, in honor of my soon-to-be-born grandson. Dylan Thomas's fantastically and mythically detailed descriptions should prompt us all to get our own memories of Christmas down, and giggle again and again. OK, on with the master.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in my snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

Pull up a child, and continue reading here . . .

Listen to Dylan Thomas himself read the story in his lugubrious but simultaneously old-child-joyful voice below . . .

The audio recording of Dylan Thomas reading it, what a voice . . .

Text copyright 1954 by New Directions.
Illustrations copyright 1985 by Trina Schart Hyman.

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Poem: Beating flames

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Beating flames

Rain falls
in the rhythm
of a bird’s heartbeat;

but when the crow cries,
his raucous call
does not pierce
this thrumming trance.

Rather,
like the cast iron
of the wood stove—black body,
rising up—he carries
the beating flame, hungry
and consuming, crackling
the language of the heart.

Illustration by Ива́н Я́ковлевич Били́бин, aka Ivan Bilibin (thanks, Montag!), for Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's poem "Two Crow." Unrelated to my poem, but interesting anyway, from wiki on "Twa corbies" (or "The Three Ravens): " . . . a 1828 partial translation of the French translation of Sir Walter Scott's Border Poems. It includes the poem entitled 'Шотландская песня' (Scottish Song), which has become known to almost every literate Russian-speaking person. Pushkin's translation contains only the first half of the poem, ending with 'and the mistress awaits for her lover, not the killed one, but the alive one', thus making a dark hint the central point of the story. Many composers of the time wrote musical interpretations of the poem."

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May heaven be hospitable to you, George Whitman

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“Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise”

I should not be typing up a blog post. Thanks to those of you who have been concerned about my hands, arm and shoulder, which are giving me grief from inflammation due to work on the computer. I am trying to be good and limit typing to university work. But I cannot neglect posting on the peaceful-in-his-sleep passing of American George Whitman, owner of the Shakespeare & Co bookstore in the Latin Quarter of Paris since 1951, at age 98. The quote above is painted above the lintel of a doorway in the happily disheveled shop, where books are roughly categorized by type, and you worry that you will topple a pile of them when you squeeze around a corner into the next room.

The first time I "met" Mr. Whitman was in 1997, one of the thousands (millions?) of strangers who have visited him there, caught in the above photo, taken by my sister Nancy. She and I spent two weeks in Paris after our mother died with Alzheimer's. Nancy had been Mom's primary caregiver for six months, and this was Nancy's much deserved vacation; she invited me along. Mr. Whitman stamped my Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin with this emblem of the shop (right). Read my first blog post at my Paris blog (Paris Deconstructed) in April 2006, about the time Mr. Whitman asked if I had a place to sleep, here.

I would love to type up more for you to read about George Whitman, but I must keep this short. You can read his story in this NYTimes article upon his death yesterday. He was a legend, and in case you're wondering, the NYTimes article seems to lay to rest the question about whether George was related to Walt Whitman. I will always think fondly of him, for the way he opened his arms to me one day in 2004 and asked if I had a place to sleep. Has anyone ever been sorry they had a place to sleep? I was that day, and I regretted saying, "yes."

My then sister-in-law Donica snapped this photo in 2004
 of George Whitman while he was asking me 
if I had a pillow for the night (fuller story here);

he invited writers and bibliophiles to sleep in his upstairs guest room, 
as long as they agreed to sweep up and help around the shop;
but my sister Boots (Ginnie)
and her then wife Donica and I already had a place

 

an upstairs room before a poetry reading (not by me!) on my solo trip in 2006; 
authors and poets like Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett,
 James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg read in his bookshop  

I love this board in front of the bookshop, with his brief but wonderful
autobio that ends with ". . . it is my daughter's turn" which refers to

Sylvia Beach Whitman, who now runs the store and was 

named for Sylvia Beach, the woman 
who owned the first Shakespeare & Co bookstore; 
history of Shakespeare & Co at wiki here

me in front of the bookstore in 2004;

George Whitman was already old then,

and I wondered if he'd live to be 100

Oh, and in case you have never seen it, you can witness
the extraordinary way Mr. Whitman "cut" his hair in this video;
there is a bonus if you watch and listen.

Below is the view of the Notre Dame cathedral just across the Seine

from Shakespeare & Co, when Don and I

stepped out of the bookstore in 2003, and a storm was brewing.

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Poem: the turquoise sea for Christmas

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I read a billboard:

Gifting made easy.
I mourned suddenly
the loss of giving.

And I thought
of the green-glazed vase
curved like cupped hands
(or your opalescent cheek)
on top of the cabinet.

Or the perfect green field
and the turquoise sea.

I would like to give
them all to you.
But they
are already yours.

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Winter slideshow with the Esbjörn Svensson Trio

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It's been a busy and tiring week, but a good one. I have not been blogging today, but I will respond to comments and visit blogs soon. My mother-in-law is doing so well she won't need any more dialysis and may go home early next week!

This morning I felt the need to be quiet. So I spent some time gathering photos and making a slideshow. I've paired my winter photos with Esbjörn Svensson Trio's song "Winter in Venice." Wouldn't that be pretty, to walk in Venice in winter?

Starting at around minute 4:15 on, the photos are from today. I hope the images and music will help you feel peaceful. I am always drawn to solitary things in photographs, and while taking them.

Full screen with headphones is nice.

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Poem: Dark winter morning with the dogs

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Dark winter morning with the dogs

Dog stars Sirius and Aludra gnaw
the bones of the black locust trees;
a rout of coyotes behind the woods
barks and sings a round for the chickens,
gone these three years from their shallow roosts;
a meteor falls like a seed of fire
into that sleeping corner of the barn
and lights up its empty boxes; see
the straw mixed with chicken guano
that remains after three summer gardens, ablaze
and still abundant on the floor; my sleeping husband
dreams of the next planting, starting with the shovel
and the shit, the wheel barrow, the eternal stew;
Murzim howls, Muliphen listens, and Aludra,
a virgin, hungers with everlasting heat.

Poetry should be heard.

Quite literally the other morning, a shooting star fell behind the barn, right there, while coyotes clamored, either after, or in preparation, for their early morning hunt.


Hubble image of Canis Major's "evil eyes" found here.
For information about Canis Major and the stars that shine in the constellation, go here.

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Hot and Cold ruminations

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You’re getting warmer. Warmer. WARMER. You’re HOT! Oh you’re so HOT!

This was not the game of dating come-ons. It was the game of HOT and COLD, a hide-and-seek pastime. The person who is “it” goes out of the room while the others remain, and one person hides an object. When the It girl returns, she is coaxed along by clues of warm and cool, hot and cold, depending on her proximity to the hidden object. When she is across the room from it, she is cold. When she is close, she is warm. At times her fingers hover above the object, unbeknownst to her, and the others are screaming HOT HOT HOT—SO HOT YOU’RE BURNING UP HOT, incredulous that she could be missing the object, laughing in glee that she is!

Now I’m playing another game of hot and cold in my menopausal radiance. So hot in a flash that all the A/C in the car at fan speed FOUR does not cool enough. So hot that a walk in winter is the freshest and easiest to take: remove the moisture, let me swallow clear oxygen. I sit in the hot tub, half submerged in hot water (103°F, 39.5°C), half above water, exposed to the cold morning breeze. This is heavenly balance.

In legend, myth and poetry, winter is something to survive, with a sprinkling of Christmas in the middle to lighten its heavy load. I read Rumi and Rilke, and winter is the opposite of love; it is the time when the lover is absent; winter is longing without reward. Or in the Persephone myth, winter is Demeter’s time of grief, when she absents herself to seek her lost daughter in the Underworld.

I’ve always preferred cold to heat, putting a sweater on more than a bikini at the beach. I’d rather seek than find; stand in the corner removed, not in the center of the hot crowd. So what’s the matter with me, who loved winter long before I needed to plunge into ice to escape hot flashes? Maybe the matter is a binary, “fundamentalist” view. After writing these thoughts, I read this from Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul:

Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism. I am not referring to any particular group or sects, but to a point of view that can seize any of us about anything. One way to describe the nature of fundamentalism is through a musical analogy. If you go to a piano and strike a low C rather hard, you will hear, whether you know it or not, a whole series of tones. You hear the “fundamental” note clearly, but it would sound very strange if it didn’t also include its overtones—C’s and G’s and E’s and even B-flat. I would define fundamentalism as a defense against the overtones of life, the richness and polytheism of imagination.

. . . The intellect wants a summary meaning . . . but the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations.

(pp 235-6; my bold)

Maybe winter is not simply: cold. It is cold with overtones of cool, warm, and much that is not about temperature. I am a polytheistic lover of winter! And stay warm, because I'm going to keep writing about it.

Painting: Pablo Picasso's The Red Armchair
Photo: Bishop and me stepping through a winter nuance

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Poem: Woman and cloud

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Woman and cloud

From her propped hospital bed
the old woman who nearly died
a few days ago now talks and
talks, while a continental drift of cloud
passes over the hospital and suburbs.
They are each unaware of the other,
the sheeted woman and the gray cloud;
both snowcapped, and round at the edges;
both moving in the minimal float
that seems a physical impossibility
when gravid with so much fluid;
there is much winter to come, and harshly;
they hold it up like a woman’s flounces.

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A home in winter

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I am not much use with my hands. I have bent them to work in an office on computers. They are weak, sore, pitiful. I hold a needle to a quilt a short while, the fabric and batting gathered and bunched in my left hand, the needle a steel splinter of my once-magic wand arm in my right; then my hands collapse, in pain or icy numbness, in the calico on my lap. The most basic tools have no moneyback guarantee.

But once, after the supremacy of Sunday morning church and dinner, these hands of mine built a home. I was five. I had three construction assistants in the yard between the house and the church — ages nine, eleven and thirteen; male; also inexperienced builders. It had snowed; the snow was deep. Then it snowed some more. It was January, the snows piled like ancient stone-dust cities of the Holy Land pilgrimage our parents showed us in slides. Then it rained on our cotton and wool hooded snow suits and on the snow; the rain froze. The black metal clasps of my red rubber galoshes froze shut. If we were very delicate, we could walk atop the crusted snow. With straight-edge machete fingertips, from the large age thirteen size to the small five, we punched out big rectangular snow bricks. Deep, deep I still feel the way of precision, my fingertips in wool mittens slicing snow stones from the whole quarry yard for layering in the masonry of igloos. No one taught us this. When the walls were an inch higher than the thirteen-year-old, my brothers placed the plywood ceiling and finished the exterior with a roof of ice-and-snow slate. We packed white mortar in each gap; smoothed with pearl-iced mitten-index fingers: a ten by ten closet or a small bedroom where the four of us could lie side by side hidden in mystery in the expanse between our father's parsonage and the church. We slept quietly in our civilized and insulated imaginations. We could live there, and survive. So warm; so home. So temporary.

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Winter poem by Hayden Carruth: The Curtain

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Since I love exploring winter in all sorts of light, here is a tremendous winter poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) to spread out in — to feel the contrast between the romance and beauty of winter, and the pain of existence. Carruth was an American poet from Woodbury, Connecticut. I don't know his work well, though I've known of him for years, but I mean to.

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

The Curtain

by Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

*Note: This page says that Carruth's Selected Poetry was a finalist for the 1987 poetry Pulitzer, but I do not see evidence that he won for 1996, which the Poetry Foundation claims. He won the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey in 1996, the volume this poem is from. NPR has this moving article upon his death in 2008. Read more about him at the Poetry Foundation.
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Winter: getting what I want

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standing in the meadow path, facing the pine woods

I asked for snow in the morning (last post), and I got what I wanted that night. When I woke up, and the sun began to rise, these were the scenes around us. Sometimes we get what we want. And sometimes we want what we get. But often neither is true. I wonder about this. I love winter and welcome it with glee equal to what I feel in spring in intensity, but it is a very different feeling. Most people think winter is pretty with a clean covering of snow. But I have found that a rather small portion of the population likes to be in winter, with the cold. Even though my fingers ache as the cold grips them, I can't imagine myself without winter. Maybe my psyche is accustomed to the four seasons, having grown up in Michigan. When we lived in southern California five years, it never felt right to me. I don't want it warm year round! I don't want the lushness all the time of Birds of Paradise and jasmine vine. I want the smell of sunlight refrigerated in earth. I want the low light of the sun. I want frosty air on my face. I want things to stop growing a while. I want this.

the front yard; can you see a bit of our road on the right?

 Bishop loves the snow too; her coat is very thick

When she comes out of her heated garage bed in the morning,
she squirms around in the snow

looking toward the outbuildings from the house;
from left to right: barn, corncrib, shed, l'atelier

two maples Don taps for sap in March,
and the catalpa on the right line the driveway

the barn and corncrib

starting out on the path toward the meadow, looking toward the orchard
where Lesley and Brian were married;
corncrib is on the far right, where we store yard tools on one side
firewood on the other, and the Farmall tractor between;
l'atelier just behind

facing the back of the property where the meadow and woods await;

corncrib on the right, barn on the left,
with the lilac bush, blooming white "blossoms"

 barn and lilac

the beginning of the path to the meadow

the meadow, with lots of deer tracks!
sumac on the right

sumac silhouetted against the morning sky

meadow and pines

walnuts our neighbor planted next door to our pine woods;

many people here in Michigan planted walnut trees

as an investment; I wonder if they are still worth a lot

the way they were in the 1980s

the path through the pine woods

under a white pine, where I'd like to camp out one day,
maybe not in the winter; but who knows? 

I am experimenting with white balance for the first time;
I thought winter with snow is a good time to start shooting in RAW mode;
you can see different tones in these photos;
this may reflect my lack of expertise, but I have tried
to be true to the different tones of light on this morning;
maybe I should compile a Monet series
of specific scenes in varied times of day and seasons

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