A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

-

-

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?

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

-

-

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.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Sonnet: Praise for ordinary wonder

-

-

Killdeer, by John James Audubon
from the book The Birds of America

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work,
we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies."

—Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p. 25

Praise for ordinary wonder

The linen of a killdeer’s breast below

his throated rings flies suddenly before

the car and dips beneath a corn row.

Mundane the days can stretch, an endless floor

of samenesses, the tapering of leaves

of each and every fern, the ottoman

with piled familiar books, where villainies

and graces eternally have fallen.

But always I will honor the counting

of ten toes, digging into the blanket

in the burial of the day, not mourning

next day’s clone of this one with regret.

For in between the copies of each day’s

roads and words, a bird flies, and I'm amazed.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Memory: Seduction

-

I was already convinced this was the sky I wanted to sleep under, having met him that autumn on the mountain, walking back from the library to the house where my roommates were studying. My eyes had been down, my Clarks scrambling the gravel of the drive. I had been thinking about Hopi Indians who lived in the valley, and the paper I was writing. We do that, attach pen to paper after reading, sure that we know. That’s when he, the sky, pulled my gaze up like a hand and he was a Hopi dancer wearing indigo who’d just tossed his white feathers over his shoulder. He stomped his foot and said, Look: The sky was covered with a cloud of stardust.

Weeks later grounds keeper Bob dropped me off in a wilderness forest in the dark indigo of night miles away from our small campus. That term I was the only student taking the professors up on the offer of extra credit for a solo campout. With a flashlight Bob helped me find a tree, and in a couple of minutes I heard his truck drive away. I mummified in a sleeping bag under a low pine bow. I shivered with fright and human loneliness. I listened to sounds I knew nothing of. How far I was from being a daughter of the earth, lying there on top of the ground.

The night passed slowly. I never once heard the Hopi dancer stomp his foot. In truth, I hid from him under the arm of the Ponderosa pine.

In the morning light, I saw where I had slept. A forest red with pine needles, and fifty feet away, a lookout to the valley, which I hadn’t seen in the darkness. I pulled on my sweatshirt, dug into my pack for a jar of instant coffee, bottle of water, tin coffee pot, mug, and matches. I picked up sticks and walked to the edge of the valley. I built a fire in the dirt.

Before me, across the valley was Mt. Shasta, and what do you know, I saw where the Hopi dancer had tossed his white feathers, and I thought, where is he now. Asleep. Naked. Me forgotten.

Creative Commons photo of Mt. Shasta shared by renedrivers

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Dancers

-

-

Dorothea and Francesca, by Cecilia Beaux, 1898

Dancers

inspired by the painting "Dorothea and Francesca"
by Cecilia Beaux

I am dancing like that.
I am there
in the pink satin folds
of their blousing
though not the blouse or skirt
themselves
but riding them
as a cork
rides waves
just dipped under the silk.
I am the curl
of the mother’s hair
as if I were smoke
and she the fire.
I am the rubbed flower
their shoes
point to outside the frame,
fragrance alone.
I am the rain
outside the house,
my drops
traipsing down
inside the silver of each
blade of grass,
imperceptible.
I am dancing like that.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: 'bellwether' ~ for Char

-

-

Char's image at her post wondering

bellwether

she has gone before

us

you and I

loping along

in this woolly herd

looking for something

green to eat

and return it

to the earth

transformed

I hear the distant

tinkle

of a bell

softened

in the rising earth

of the hill between us

My heart doesn't understand what my ears hear. Our friend Char of ramblins passed away suddenly June 6. She was just 53 years young. On the sidebar at her blog she had said:

life is too short to waste a single day:
eat cookies, dance when no one is looking,
and try to be as happy as you can.

She also quoted Charles de Lint:

When it's all said and done, all roads lead to the same end. 

So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it. 

 Another way of saying it is in one of her images — always simple, luxuriant and tender . . . 

You seem to be gone, but I still see, hear, and feel you, friend.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Serenade to a rose: Stella by Starlight

-

-

". . . not a dream,

My heart and I agree."

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Ars Poetica

 -

-

Ars Poetica

A poem makes the impossible
possible.

The poet becomes
a flying proboscis

extracting nectar
from material and

immaterial things.
Then comes the metamorphosis

of the honey. Or
a fly in the attic

descends onto a dusty old book,
which is really the poet,

and the fly’s nomadic feet feel
at home

on the mellow skin of her pages,
as light and moveable

as glyphs and black letters.
Or three minds

become three blackbirds
of a silhouetted tree

transposing notes
into black flames

breathed onto the musical score
of a telephone line.

We know what becomes
of what is written,

the little curled tongues floating
down

on the current of creaking
and arid

centuries:
They are firebirds

whose truth-wings
burn, dissolving into us

in ash, and then one day
right here in the wet ink

from our pollen-laden pen
get reconstituted

into the dewy surprise
of a just-born flyer.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Argument

 -

-

Argument

My flesh and blood argue

with my breath. The orchid

on the sill, whose velvet-violet heads

turn away, pressed against the window,

gazing out at the natural world

in psychic intercourse, transmutes

energy as to a distant tribe.

The barn there

with its doors open, darkness

inside, like a drum’s, light streaming

between the boards

in discourse, the way the mind speaks

through the body, or the soul through

the seam with the mind, where wind

rushes through and stirs these witnesses—

the vocabulary of dust.

Note: "Psychic intercourse" is a phrase I borrow

from Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography

when she writes about Walt Whitman:

"Whitman preached empathy, concord in discord,

oneness in diversity. Psychic intercourse with 

everything, everybody . . ." (p. 31)

On Photography, Picador Press, 1973

-

Assistir Filme »

Rumi: Beyond Love Stories

-

-

Love comes with a knife,
not some shy question,
and not with fears for its reputation.

I say these things disinterestedly.
Accept them in kind.

Love is a madman,
working his wild schemes,
tearing off his clothes,
drinking poison, and now quietly
choosing annihilation.

A tiny spider tries to wrap
an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb
woven across the cave where Muhammed slept.

There are love stories,
and there is obliteration into love.

You have been walking the ocean's edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive deeper under,
a thousand times deeper.

Love flows down. The ground
submits to the sky and suffers what comes.

Is the ground worse for giving like that?
Do not put blankets over the drum.
Open completely.

Let your spirit ear listen
to the green dome's passionate murmur.

Let the cords of your robe be untied.
Shiver in this new love
beyond all above and below.

The sun rises,
but which way does the night go?

I have no more words.
Let the soul speak
with the silent articulation of a face.

~ Rumi

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Birth mandala, baby poem, and a wee announcement

-

I wrote a poem for my friend, the Renaissance woman Dutchbaby, at her request for the occasion of a baby shower for a friend. Dutchbaby introduced me to the idea of birth mandalas, which take Carl Jung's concept of mandalas representing the Self, to the next level: an image for a mother to focus her imagination on the emerging identity of her baby. That's one of Jung's mandalas at the right, which I happened upon after writing the poem, with its image of paisley.

Dutchbaby colored a mandala, below (from online mandala coloring pages), in PhotoShop for her expecting friend, who has Swedish heritage. From it I feel my own connection with Sweden through Grandma Olive. The blue and yellow remind me of tole painting on a pitcher or a barn's peak, or in Carl Larsson's kitchen. Dutchbaby paired my poem with her mandala as a gift to the mom-to-be Saturday. (Bless this baby, oh universe.)

Dutchbaby did not know when she requested the poem that we have our own baby on the way. I am going to be a gramma! And so I offer this poem not only to a friend's friend, but also for my daughter Lesley, and the little poppy seed growing inside her to the great size of a kidney bean at this moment, with webbed feet, a bulging head, and joints in her/his knees. Imagine.

Don and I are over the moon, and no amount of exclamatory punctuation is enough for what I feel, so I used just the one, but picture exclam-infinity. (Bless this baby, oh universe.) How about this photo of them with my nephew's baby, Evangeline? (Bless Eva, too.)

The multi-bonus is that Lesley & Brian are moving to Michigan where he begins a teaching job in the fall (exclam-infinity). We will be close by when baby enters the world (due in January), no need for booking flights at just the right time to NYC. Just hop in the car and drive an hour and a half.

Our son Peter (right, with his sister on her 30th birthday this year) just moved to L.A. to join his band Lord Huron (all the band members are from Michigan). Such is life, the child who lived close moves far away, and the one who lived far away moves close. But we are incredibly excited for Peter and feel, well . . . expectant about this change for him.

Dutchbaby's mandala and my poem are below.

A note about koans (in the poem title): When Dutchbaby told me that the expectant mom said the baby was "sitting like Buddha" in her belly, I decided to shape the poem in koan-like questions. (The image of a sitting Buddha also made me think of paisley.) A koan is a question a Zen sage asks a pupil that does not have an answer from the reasoning mind. A famous koan is: What is the sound of one hand clapping? "The master is not looking for a specific answer but for evidence that the disciple has grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself." More on koans here. Samples of koans at The Gateless Gate. If you listen carefully to the podcast of the poem, you can hear the birds that chirp incessantly outside my office window. Does a bird's song answer the heart's questions?

Koan-like Questions of a Mother to her Unborn Child

Is there something quieter than sleep?

      My whispers circle you like jasmine vine, the way

      my arms want to, when my palm will cup your head,

      my thumb in the shallow petal of your temple.

      Terrace.

Where is the pocket in the nightshirt of early morning?

      You didn’t notice just now that I turned over in bed, rolling

      first onto my right side, then onto my left.

      Leaves everywhere on blue-white cotton.

What shape are you?

      In my teardrop body you sleep, sucking your thumb —

      puzzle piece in the circle of your mouth.

      Paisley baby, paisley thumb,

      paisley me, paisley breast. Lace.

What is grace?

      I pull myself up, like a camel, into a sitting position,

      lean left, push off, grunt, rise, stand, and low into the sway

      of this me, your cradle, creaking at my hips.

      Caravanserai.

Do you remember it, that hymn from the old church

through the window as we slowly climbed the stair?

      Holding the bedpost, carved like an altar,

      my eyes closed, up from the organ

      in my chest the music — unnamed song

      through the vibrating reed of my watery throat.

      Repeat.

      Stained glass moon. Bosphorus.

Can you see me in the dark?

      My hand rests on the olive of your shoulder,

      or is that a heel? Hush, keep sleeping, don’t worry

      about positions. You are touching everything

      in any case.

      Mountain magnolia blossom.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here. (You can hear the birds outside my office window if you listen carefully.)

Poem notes: 

Caravanserai: the fortress-like hostelries for sojourners on the Silk Road.

Bosphorus: the body of water between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul; 'bosphorus' means 'throat' in Turkish; Lesley went to school on the European side, crossing the Bosphorus every morning and evening from and to our home on the Asian side.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Morning Vanity

-

-

Morning Vanity

Sitting at my vanity, the lighted mirror
blinks on and hovers like a moon. The
chiaroscuro room is dark outside
the nimbus of light. A glazed vintage
dimestore bluebird seems to sleep
at my elbow, while outside the window,
birdsong hooks and whips morning awake.
What are we to them in our daily ritual
of rekindled radiance? My eyebrow brush
nudges an orderly code. Pastel blush roses
my cheeks that puff out like clouds. Off goes
the moon with a click. A lacquered kiss
with a licked finish, and the sun rises.

-

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: The Mystery of an Unopened Box

-

-

I have moved a lot of times. After growing up in one Michigan town (we moved away for one year to a town north of that town when I was in fifth grade), I moved to Chicago for college. From Chicago to Oregon. Back to Michigan, then to California where the kids were born, and from there to Istanbul for three years. Then back to Michigan where we've been these 23 years. (We've also moved many times within Michigan since then, to four different houses in four different towns.)

This summer our children are both making big moves to different parts of the country from where they have been. For some reason this morning I saw their moves to new locales the way I see these boxes in my collection of boxes.

The poem may be oblique, I can't tell sometimes what will speak to you, and what will be silent. Why can't you just read my mind? and vice versa? (I do so thank you for reading.) There may be too many metaphors, and it could no doubt use more work. But I am posting it all the same, for something in its wandering fits the occasion of these moves for me, as I look back on my own moves and changes, realizing that I was always still me, myself, the becoming I, even when what arranged itself around me was in flux. Well, when aren't things in flux? And for that matter, when is a poem ever finished?

The Mystery of an Unopened Box

When you move
to a new location
you stare at it
as at an unopened box.

All your changes
up till now lie across
your body, the zebra
stripes of your life, each with
its corners and turns, feathery
edges, some

elongated tapers
with the elegance of fingers
across familiar string
and fret, others
squat and fat,
nubbed keloid regrets,
missing buttons
from your shirt.

Like your preaching
grandfather’s
eyebrows on your face, or
the flaring keyholes
of your mother’s nostrils,
it is still your

face, just as it is
your box after all
that you will open
even though there are
traces of us others
and your own past
contained in it. They are your

nostrils open to their key—
the fragrance of each
fear, every engineering
angel’s highwayed labyrinth
that rises and
drops again over the velvet
hills, where

hope
like a Joshua tree
waits, arms lifted
for rain
that will most definitely fall
as the sky opens
onto the dusty floor
of a desert valley.

 -

-

Assistir Filme »

Poem: Battle over the Meadow

-

-

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

-

-

Assistir Filme »

The essentials you can't throw away

-

-

Jar of mayo, tub of Earth Balance, Thai dipping sauce, leftover brown rice, and so much other stuff that you wonder how it filled a fridge and why you needed it, stuff that enriches life but losing it does not take life away when it goes bad in a power outage — these dove into black trash bags last night. It just so happened that we cleaned out the powerless fridge 48 hours after losing power, and just about an hour before power was restored, which was a couple of days before it was expected by the power company.

While we camped out in our house without power or running water after high winds took out electric lines this week, I was unsettled. It took a couple of days to understand that although I was not unhappy or annoyed, I was strewn about inside, like the inside of a tent mid-vacation week.

I remember my ex-brother-in-law Hank whenever something got broken or ruined saying: No one died. Of course sometimes people do die. And then we cope differently. But these minor, no-death losses are the best ad hoc conferences, like pep rallies for the normal life we get lost in. I was knocked off-center for a couple of days, I had butterflies in my stomach. When I became aware of that, I got to thinking about what I need to do to get back to the center. Do I need running water and electricity for it?

Thoreau said:

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

So I ask myself, What are my essential riches (in the Thoreau sense)?

Solitude. Conversation with loved ones. A writing tablet and pen (or Microsoft Word). A few books of poetry. A window and a door, with Nature outside, even one leaf-bearing plant on a balcony.

And music.

Before the storm, several blog friends had posted about the death of Gil Scott-Heron, the guy that everyone had heard chanting and ranting “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Everyone except me. Right that moment, I wanted to ask all of you what your essential music is, what shaped you, what do you return to for comfort and soul centering? I wanted to ask you before one more minute was thrown into the past. As a preacher’s kid who thought it was oh-so-worldly when I received a radio for my twelfth birthday, on which I could listen to music from the pop charts, I missed a lot of great stuff that was played in different venues. My musical muse is Joni Mitchell, and she is far from shabby, even if the radio did play her song about being turned on like itself. But I missed Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Miles Davis, and so many other artists who play and sing the essential music of people's souls.

So, my post-ad hoc conference on the essentials of life leads me to confer with you wonderful folks. If you care to answer, what do you consider your essential music? Be specific please, and maybe not too prolific. Be easy on me. It could be you discovered it four decades ago, or last week, as I did Gil Scott-Heron. I will appreciate your response, and I will begin exploring, listening, choosing for myself and building a library rack for my iTunes turntable. I have the rest of my life to listen, however long or short that may be. As I evolve, maybe what will be essential to me ten years from now I haven't even heard of yet.

Postscript: I recognize that for some of you, this is like asking you to pick a wildflower from your meadow of uncountable flowers and tell me why it is your favorite. This is odd, and naïve, I feel how odd it is, like Music Essentials 101. It changes with the day and time. Ahhh, what I want is perhaps impossible to answer, to retrieve what I never had. Learning anything from lists may be a bad place to start. Suddenly I don't like my request. But I am going to leave it and see what comes of it. Maybe what will come of it is that this is not a good way to learn such things. Eh what?

How about this question: Today, what music does your soul long for?

-

-

Assistir Filme »