Driving with pink angels

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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.

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April wind

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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 

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How to Bloom: chicks, blossoms, and a Rilke poem

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After a couple of years Don has resurrected the chicken yard with 22 white Leghorns, 2 Barred Rocks (these photographed are a Leghorn and Barred Rock), 4 Aracaunas, 2 Rhode Island Reds, 2 Isa Reds, a white turkey, a bronze turkey, and 12 quail. It is good to have their chirps again, and soon enough, eggs. The quail will lay by June, and the chickens by September.

The ornamental crabapple and many other fruit trees are bursting.

On Easter Sunday morning, I feel this blooming, and marvel, along with Rilke.

How to Bloom

The almond trees in bloom: all we can accomplish here is to ever know ourselves in our earthly appearance.

I endlessly marvel at you, blissful ones—at your demeanor, the way you bear your vanishing adornment with timeless purpose. Ah, to understand how to bloom: then would the heart be carried beyond all milder dangers, to be consoled in the great one.

    ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

Happy Easter

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Tulip

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It is hard to imagine that these supple, sensuous flowers grew wild in the mountains of Central Asia before they were brought to Europe from the Ottoman Empire and became so wildly valuable in the Dutch Golden Age that some single tulip bulbs were worth more then ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman in 1637. "Tulip mania" is still the term for a maniacal financial bubble. The wealthiest era of the Ottoman Empire is called the "Tulip Era."

I love these flowers myself (though I didn't ransom the farm for them) and decided I had to create a slideshow of my photos in their honor. Most were photographed here on the farm, but some are at my university campus and in Holland, Michigan, where there is a Tulip Time festival every May. Temperatures were hot in March, and tulips are already blooming here (though these photos are from previous years), so I don't know what tulips will be left for Tulip Time. You'll see some little ones dressed up in Dutch costumes at Tulip Time a few years ago.

Happy Birthday to my husband, with whom I lived in the Ottoman Empire once upon a time, . . . oh wait, I guess he isn't that old! It was called Turkey by then.

I've paired Carla Cook singing Duke Ellington's classic "Tulip or Turnip" which really warms up my spring fever. Full screen is best (at YouTube if you can't enlarge it here).

Tell me, tell me, tell me, dreamface,
what am I to you?

Poem: Out or In

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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

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Poem: Spring again, and Bill Evans' "Peace Piece"

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Can it be a year since the Japanese tsunami, and the flowering of the Arab Spring? These, as well as horrors in other places, and Bill Evans' "Peace Piece" were on my mind all morning while this small poem came together. Yesterday it was warm for Michigan, in the 60s (15-20°C); beds got raked out, revealing crocuses in bloom. After a while, listening to the songs and calls of the birds, I could hear them say things I wanted to say. Which led to the Bill Evans song, because it also gives me calm beauty when I need it. And then the poem, which only seems to offer a bit of a framework for far more that wants to be said, and you know, sometimes only improvised songs can do it. You can read this back story about Bill Evans' intoxicating song "Peace Piece," recorded in 1958, including how he did not much like performing it upon request, as it was an inspiration of the moment, not something that could be recreated. Thankfully it was recorded, so it can be listened to, with peace rising like spring again and again.

Spring again

Woodpeckers nail octaves
to limbs
in another delicate scaffold of spring

while the mourning dove
coos a bass ostinato
out of

the bottom line,
ever below
the laughing glissando

of the Northern Flicker
and the
tinkling dee-dee-dee

of the chickadee;
note by ceremonial note
their steady spirit

tinkers with my hammering heart
to build even just one season
of peace, peace.

March 2012

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Poem: Cactus bloom . . .

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Cactus bloom picks up where the moon leaves off

Pink spark rising
after the sleepless Night
upheld the moon
(her shield d’amour).
Now, hold the field of day.

Then, at day's end,
dive like Joan with sword,
immanently mortal,
perpetually young,
softly arcing to earth
like the moon along her
battle for the night sky.



January 2012

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Poem: The Soul in November

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The Soul in November

How she looks I cannot say,
although the petal-less heads
of goldenrod, not flaming

yellow any longer,
are something like her
stillness

and so they must be the reason
I go out, after reading
the morning’s poems

written by others
at their desks, on typewriters,
or by hand in fine black ink,

and be with the blank
desaturated truth of them
standing alone

without any topaz,
though their sun-flares
are a visible memory.

Birds circle us
from tree to tree
in their orbit of the dun meadow.

Then I walk back to the house,
to my red chair,
the laptop, the empty

white sky of the page
and remember from scratch
my own small explosion.

Poetry should be heard.

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Poem: Blue star highway

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Blue star highway

For a few weeks of summer I drive
or ride my bike between blue chicory flowers,
like lookouts by the wayside. Two redwing
blackbirds chase a crow from the field
across the road. They guard
their own world, unlocked as it is.

What kingdom is this
I ride through, fenced with blue sentinels,
thin and frail, who keep nothing in, nothing
out, common blue stitches in a common cloth
of earth, their roots harvested for poor
prisoners’ coffee, the brew of everyman,
everywoman. What love

like a crossroads
is here where the human with
nature and spirit meet, what crucibles
forged these stars, glaze of tiles,
calm blue flames lighting the path
into Beauty, into the star of self,

the kingdom where the commoner
is royal, and the redwing blackbird
is farmer-king who scoffs his wing at me
incredulously as I snap their picture,
kneeling, as if for knighthood,
when he has work to do.

Note: "Blue flower" is a symbol in Romanticism of inspiration, desire, longing for beauty, and the thinking and feeling self, as first introduced by Novalis in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. For more information about blue flower, including what it represented for C.S. Lewis, read the wiki article here.

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Poem: Summer labor

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Summer labor

I walked to the house
from the laundry line, the heat
already steamrolling fringes of color out
of the air at nine in the morning.

I was wearing the frumpy
loose dress I fell in love with on the
mannequin but which seemed to olden
on me the first time I wore it.

There I was, shuffling
past the pitiable lavender bed
clutched by weeds and grass,
with here and there pincushion heads

of powdery purple trying
to be charming, reaching out to me,
as if I were the woman
to free them into their full sun

potential. Had they been words
to be weeded into poems, I’d have sat
with them in the latitude of the morning,
yanking away grasses of the outer

world, spreading apart their leggy stems, reaching
in for heads, coaxing them into the bright air
to breathe their wild and dusty breath,
fighting for their very life from within.

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A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

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A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

The bee balm are bursting in air—
fireworks above the bright stars
of evening primrose. At dusk fireflies
flare up like breaths of economy
among these bulwarks
of gallantly parading flowers.

   What madness to erupt and effuse
   for hours, even days on end

the fireflies seem to say as they
hold then release their neon light.

Oh, which is right?
The greed I feel for
the glare of light now, all—

or the occasional throbbing of it, in its
transience, like the firefly’s?

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Poem: Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

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Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

I
My friend warned me he would die someday
soon and I thought
but I don’t even know you
yet.

II
On the same leaf
the fly with wings
shining silvery in the mouth
of sunlight
faced the butterfly with threadbare wings.
Together they equaled
atonement.

III
If I were clever enough
I would teach my tongue
to curl through hoops of fire
unscathed.
Only cleaner.

IV
We are victims
of life, uninformed in
moony fogs without
compassion
for what is possible.
Life needs amnesty.

V
The way heads of grasses
hang over the path
in the meadow is
more beautiful
than flowers.
In my humble opinion.
(I hang my head shamefully
to compare anything of beauty.)

VI
Sadly, I don’t like tea,
because the luster
of a teacup
makes me want to drink it
sitting in a room with happiness,
shadows, and a window.

VII
I am either the mother
of becoming or
the becoming of mother
or I may have it all wrong
and I’m really the skeleton
sphere
of a new world.
Don’t you love Plato, and Blake?

VIII
I do not think
the cosmos is a symphony
where the spirit sings
accompaniment.
I think you are a symphony
and the cosmos backs
you up.

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Serenade to a rose: Stella by Starlight

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". . . not a dream,

My heart and I agree."

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Poem: Battle over the Meadow

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Battle over the Meadow

You wouldn’t know it
but there is a battle
over the meadow

and if you have
emperor eyes
from thirty feet

you can see a spark
of red iridescently, and green
the color of a mallard’s

cravat, flashing
like tiny, distant epaulettes
of a Russian

officer under the almost
melancholy gaze
of Napoleon

across a field
assessing numbers, the
morning, the sun’s saber,

the black locust tree’s strategic
conversation with
robin about the worm,

the bottle-green line
of spider silk
crossed and recrossed

in the attack of the dragonflies
whose wings pulse and quiver
in the sun, shuttling

and defending their snatch
of gnats
and mosquitoes

whose air belongs to them
fleetingly
but deliciously, the morning

being so frangible
with almost
immortality

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Poem: This Tired Body

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We rode with 3,000 or so people in the Zoo-de-Mack from Boyne Highlands to Mackinaw City Saturday. Mackinaw City is where the Mackinaw Bridge crosses from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan into the Upper Peninsula. It was wonderful to ride and play with our son Peter and his girlfriend for the weekend, one of the last times before they move to Los Angeles in a couple of weeks. (I am trying not to think about that.)

This Tired Body

This tired body settles into stillness
as if it is trillium floating
on the forest floor that I biked past for hours
two days ago. It did not appear to be reaching

for sun, the layered white spread
of it lying in repose under hemlocks like tossed
handkerchiefs waiting to be picked
up and returned to the fainting ladies
who dropped them.

Today the memory of climbing, of coasting, of steadying on,
coalesces with the bed of silence inside,
gently tugging me back to myself, to the rest
only I can grant, the surrender to age,
to the uphill bodily climb
of what remains of my life.

If only the mind, and the heart
were all of what it takes to live
and this tired body
were as light as tissue
petals reaching, finding pockets of light
even in deepest shadow.

I pedaled 51 miles, a triumph,
and now I languish, a weary kind of human
who could coast toward a finish line, but I want instead
to find sun at the leafy edges of my fingernails, wind
in my gnatty eyelashes, to keep finding a heart in
steady, pedaling thumps, pushing on,
pointing toward the light inside this life.

trillium for miles

coasting downhill, ahhhh

 trillium covered the forest floor

Mackinaw Bridge

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what is inside

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When what is inside comes out

the order of the world

finds form

that looks like you

I've added a photo of a morel mushroom to the ones of lilacs, after some of the comments.

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