Poem: Losing what we may not know we have

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Oxford, England

Too late I heard that yesterday was the last class of one of our treasured professors. I don't know what I would have done had I known. The colleague who told me it was Tess's last class also told me that back in the day, the department's faculty and staff would gather in the hallway outside a retiring professor's classroom at the close of their final class, and then erupt into applause as a collegial and hearty Well Done. I'm sad that we don't do this now in our department, and that I didn't even know what I'd missed, like so many things that have flowed off downstream and become part of our subconscious past.

Losing what we may not know we have

for Tess

Today I imagine you
in a late April room,
oak-trimmed and bright
with towered light leaning
on wide, flaking sills

your courageous falsetto,
the tone of women
from a certain age that is gone,
a time of white
gloves and great human

decency one to another.
Your final literature class
at university, and you, the last
medieval scholar. A boy
slouches, his phlegmatic leg

stretched long toward the girl’s
desk across the aisle
where her graced contours in black
leggings make him melancholy.
You incant the mysteries

of the humours, while blood
springs in these children
like fountains, splashing. I see you
last summer in Oxford,
your white-gloved finger lifting

the edge of parchment
of an ancient book in a Bodleian
room where the same sun
through oak windows
backlights the stirring leaves

of a plane tree, applauding you
in whispers from the splash
of its heart — O blood-sap,
Our lady professor, the river
of life through

your body of work,
your gravid body, the spray
of wrinkled hair, your
crackling voice, its spatter
on heavy stone where a black

bird lifts off, wings
billowing like a don’s sleeves,
silken, rippling against the sky.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

NOTE: It may well be that if one has to wear white gloves to touch a medieval book in the Bodleian Library, that sunlight is not allowed any more than a finger's oils. But humour me in your bilious objection, my friends, as I take poetic license.

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Here, have a chocolate chip waffle

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This image is the gate to the delights of my friend Terresa Wellborn, who has been generously featuring poets from the blogosphere during National Poetry Month at her blog The Chocolate Chip Waffle.

Today, I am her featured guest! What a wonder. You can get there from here.

I'll take this chance to tell you if you have not already passed through her gate that Terresa is a force of nature, as delicate and as strong as a cosmos flower rising up through a crack in the sidewalk.


Here is a sample of Terresa's poetry I especially like.

Red Shoes

I was thirty-three,
I wasn't sure I could carry it off,
throated birds sprouting as feet,
sunsets,
a catastrophe.

They rushed over my toes,
I couldn't help it,
they spoke in slick tongues,
an August heat.

They unbuckled like the
back porch unlocking rain,
the color you hear in
veins, colliding.

I wear them now
every day,
they speak nothing of
desire.

-Terresa Wellborn

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Poem: The Past speaks

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The Past is a prayer
for this future,

his flannel cuffs
rolled up to the elbows

where tattooed forearms
descend
and veined wrists
rise up like a sunrise,

his knuckles chapped
rocky hills

with outcropping
thumbs hooked in belt loops
on a pair of corduroy trousers,

their velvet
time-scraped
at the knees.

He shifts his big-boot feet
and finally raises his eyes,
staring straight from under

hooded brows
at me
his reckless daughter,
removing his belt,

I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this . . .

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Must we choose?

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April wind sounds like a jet plane outside the window,
so near I can feel the hum on the pane.
I am happy to sit under an afghan
on my heavy gold chair
Sunday afternoon
like an old woman awaiting visitors.

A ladybug alights on my lap, tucks in her wings,
and we are quiet together.

On my tongue are memories of lunch.

What else should occupy
our time on a Sunday afternoon
but the memory of food, and succumbing to sleep
as it drones us under its cloud?
I feel myself traveling through the sky
to a snack bar in Florence.

I have decided not to choose favorites, I say to the ladybug.

What would lime be without avocado? Onion without fried potatoes? Can you imagine basil without tomatoes, or cheese without vino rosso? How pointless to think of pesto without crostini— just Vaudevillian plaid pants dancing from a spoon onto the stage of your tongue, no toast, dry and white, to spread it upon. You open the cupboard for crostini again and again, only to remember with disappointment, Oh yes, pesto was our favorite food, we thought we had to compare and choose, forgetting
that pesto is nothing without the vessel of toast to carry it
farther into our being.

The ladybug is fast asleep,
the roar of wind is gone, blowing somewhere
over the Atlantic on its way to Florence,
the favorite city of someone,
and my memories from there join me as visitors.

Florence —

a physical place apart, a presence in the heart,
never lost,
a stone bridge, a painting, a dome, a statue,
a young groom and his bride carrying calla lilies through a square
toward their new life, that
in their existence alone, rebirth me

— What would Florence be
without this ponte of a stone white sky between us,
an ordinary white wafer carrying the salty tears
from Michelangelo’s pietà, never lost, to my tongue
on a Palm Sunday afternoon?
What would my window be without the sky,
the bridge to everything.

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Poem: A world, and you in it

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A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts
of maps parenthesize
us

as if we are together
though you (you)
are on the East Coast

and you (you)
are on the West —
as far from me as when the thin

membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you (you & you) —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with yours (yours & yours)
inside its coasts.

With many thanks to Brendan for his suggestions, I have revised the poem to what I feel is a better version, and recorded it. You can listen here.

A world, and you in it

The lines on the coasts

of maps parenthesize 

us

— mother, daughter and son
as if we are together

though one of you

is on the East Coast 


and the other
 is on the West —

as far from me as when the thin
membranes of my womb di-
vided me from you —
the waters of the world

holding in
the fleshy matter
that strangely

does not dissolve
what lies inside
the slippery, beating edges

but contains it without
effort or intrusion
as if we would never

mind separation
as long as one thing
holds us together — like blood

or my one body
with both of yours
inside its coasts.

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Diane Wakoski's poetry lessons

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To read a poem is to stroll on a warm October afternoon into the artist square Place du Tertre in Montmartre in Paris, and have an artist tap you on the shoulder and ask if they can sketch your portrait. You read a couple of lines, shrug and say Sure, why not. You hear the poet scratching away with their charcoal pencil, and when you’re done reading, you either say, Yes, I recognize myself! Or you say, Who the hell is that?

Reading a poem by Diane Wakoski is like putting on a long flowing hippie dress of Bohemian cotton and walking through an orange grove in southern California or a book-lined New York City apartment where your friend is making an apple torte while you talk about a movie you just watched together. You become a woman who navigates her life through the sensualities of love, food, movies, and popular culture.

In one of her many, many books of poetry, The Butcher’s Apron, you dance through sensual visions of food and drink, sampling Viennese coffee at a train station or figs on the Adriatic Coast. It is in these poems of hers that I most recognize myself. At Diane’s real pine table, I have drunk blooming jasmine tea and eaten countless fragrant green salads with divine vinaigrette that I can never replicate, and pesto made with twenty-five cloves of garlic and basil her husband Robert grew in their front yard. I have also workshopped poems, first as a student in five of Diane’s poetry classes, then with former students around her supper table, pens in hand and minds ready to try on poems and see if they fit. It has been brilliant to study with a teacher who still maintains personal relationships with her students, inviting them into her home lined floor to ceiling with books.

The essentials for writing good poetry that Diane hammered into us students week after week are: A good poem must at the very least have lyrical language (added note after Robert's comment: lyricism in a limited and minimal sense of "the sound of the words" being important) and a trope or metaphor. (Another note: the poem itself can be the metaphor.) Then it must have absolutely NO clichés. If you write about tears as rain or love as fire, you're gonna really get the belt. Don't forget William Carlos Williams' advice: No ideas but in things. And, if you can possibly include something of your personal mythology, you might have a winner.

Professor Wakoski is teaching for three more weeks as Distinguished Poet in Residence in my English department, then she retires. One evening of her last week of class a bunch of former students will stand under her office window outside our building and serenade her with her own poems. Below is one of the three I’ll be reading, from The Butcher’s Apron.

The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful biography of Diane here.

Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives

by Diane Wakoski

for Walter’s Aunt Libby’s

diligence in making olives

As some women love jewels
and drape themselves with ropes of pearls, and stud their ears
with diamonds, band themselves with heavy gold,
have emeralds on their fingers or
opals on white bosoms,
I love the still life
of grapes whose skins frost over with the sugar forming inside,
hard apples, and delicate pears;
cheeses,
from the sharp fontina, to icy bleu,
the aromatic chèvres, boursault, boursin, a litany of
thick breads, dark wines,
pasta with garlic,
soups full of potato and onion;
and butter and cream,
like the skins of beautiful women, are on my sideboard.

These words are to say thank you
to
Walter’s Aunt Libby
for her wonderful olives;
oily green knobs in lemon
that I add to the feast when they get here from Lebanon
where men are fighting, as her sisters have been fighting
for years, over whose house the company stays in
and whose recipes for kibbee or dolmas or houmas
are passed along.

I often wonder,
had I been born beautiful,
a Venus on the California seashore,
if I’d have learned to eat and drink so well?
For, with hummingbirds outside my kitchen window
to remind of small elegance,
and mourning doves in the pines & cedar, speaking with grace,
and the beautiful bodies
of lean blond surfers,
dancing on terraces,
surely had I a beautiful face or elegant body,
surely I would not have found such pleasure
in food?
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
than like a sapphire?
But with mockers flying in and out of orange groves,
and brown pelicans dipping into the Pacific,
looking at camellias and fuchsia,
and abundance of rose, and the brilliant purple ice plant
which lined the cliffs to the beach,
life was a “Still Life” for me.
And a feast.
I wish I’d known then
the paintings of Rubens or David,
where beauty was not only
thin, tan, California girls,
but included all abundance.

As some women love jewels,
I love the jewels of life.
And were you,
the man I love
to cover me (naked) with diamonds,
I would accept them too.

Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter’s Aunt Libby’s wonderful olives from Lebanon.

Thank you, Aunt Libby,
from a failed beach girl,
out of the West.

from Waiting for the King of Spain
and Emerald Ice

Diane's "Sapphos" when we all read at a reading in 2009

—Courtney, Sarah, Carrie, MJ, Diane, me, Heather—
I am old enough to be mother to everyone but Diane.

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Poem: The Great Gray Owl

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It was disappointing Sunday when I was sitting outside in the summery breeze, writing on the laptop, and Don came rushing up to call me back to the pines where he had seen a great gray owl. I went with him, also rushing, then creeping quietly when we got to the pines. We searched high and low in stealth, but he was gone. I have never seen an owl outside a zoo, though I have heard them at the farm. Don looked into eyes just like these. We did find three pellets on the ground, things that Don's third grade students dissected in his classroom last year, and that was thrilling. (Owl pellets are regurgitated; they're not poo. You can read about owl digestion here, it's fascinating.) As the experience worked in my consciousness, other things floated up and into a poem.

The Great Gray Owl

When I was a girl, at night
I stood in the shower
like a shivering field mouse
afraid of yellow eyes
behind the curtain, the man who wasn’t
there
          the man
not from the street, or the window,
but from the shadowed attic,
or the basement, clammy and dark,
the invisible one who came behind
my skittering heels
while I carried a can of beans upstairs. If only
I had the swiveling head of an owl to always
see the predator,
though what good would a swiveling head do
if he is invisible?

There was a great gray owl in the pines
on a summery day in April
when the wind pushed the bamboo
like dainty bending ballerinas in a row,
first this way, their thin arms up, swaying,
then the other way, leaning at the waist.
My husband came running to me, to pull me back
to the woods to see those black and yellow eyes,
staring as my grandfather’s
had from a sepia portrait
at the top of the stairs
when, the youngest, I had to go to bed
before everyone.
          A man
I did not know, a figment, a phantom.
Handsome, dignified, staring, terrifying.
How could I know — That he,
if he had really been there,
not just gray eyes in yellow skin, flat
man on a flat wall, if he had been full and flesh
as he was at last one year visiting from New Jersey,
that he would torment me on his aging,
bouncing wool gabardine knees with foolish mischief,
teasing until I would gasp
between a giggle and a sob. O too soon
when we buried him he was skin and bones, leaving me
to wonder if ever, ever
I would know for certain that a man was really there,
and whether he was benevolent, or cruel.

The owl was not there.
He had flown. On the ground we found
three owl pellets — hair-covered remains of mice, rabbits, moles —
cocooned bits of skull, white ribs, vertabraic knuckles, teeth.
No eyes. Nothing
but gray shrouds of fur.
What the owl could eat, he ate, then gratefully,
even compassionately it seemed,
delivered them up — whole, like small torsos
without need for arms or feet, beautifully
and purposefully wrapped, woven in wool, napped
and cowlicked, tweedy, suited for the earth,
elegantly prepared for burial.

one of the owl pellets we found; owls regurgitate them, they're not poo;
for more on owl digestion (fascinating), read here

Great Gray Owl photo found here.

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Poem: Timbre

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Timbre

It was at the pinprick
of dawn when I removed the pot to pour my cup —

an overflow of coffee sizzled in vibrato
on the heated element of the coffee maker,
the high-partialed wind chime
on the porch tinkled brightly,
the fore-eye of the firebrand sun singed
the tips of low-lying needles on pines behind the meadow,
rising up at just the same exact slow heave
as yesterday

that I thought

This is constraint without limitation,
the sound of the sunrise
that prolongs my life
even one more day.

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"April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, plus a poetry game: Oulipo

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Central Park, NYC, April 2009

April Rain Song

by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

 Me in Central Park, April 2009

I appreciate the childlike pleasure in rain of Langston Hughes' lines. When do people learn to dislike rain? When I was little I played outside in it, stomping and sploshing in the wade-able gutters. Or I played indoors—Chinese checkers, Sorry, Scrabble, crosswords and word searches, or "house." I created divine and elaborate "mansions" with folios for walls, and my mother's jewelry boxes for furniture. (An open necklace box makes a perfect Davenport sofa for a paper doll, and embroidered handkerchiefs make elegant bedspreads.) Having to stay inside the walls of our house during inclement weather made us focus our creative attentions differently, and it was no less enjoyable to me than running in yard games or riding my bike 'round and 'round the block. In fact, I preferred the quieter play and bodily stillness of the cozy indoors, though I broke into somersaults and head stands if there were too many rainy days in a row.

I've been looking into poetic forms this poetry month. Part of me likes the "walls" and constraints of formal poetry like sonnets or villanelles. Focusing on a limited range of words that rhyme, or fit a certain metric, points my focus on what's inside me that wants to be written by eliminating the clutter of unnecessary material, and illuminating language choices in a smaller more limited range.

In these wanderings I discovered Oulipo. This "workshop of potential literature" (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) was begun by a loose group of mathematicians, mostly French, who seek "new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

I played their N+7 game, remaking a couple of poems. (It's sometimes called S+7; N=Noun, S=Substantive.) What mathematicians and I like about N+7 is how it's both fixed and random. (How thrilling to have something in common with mathematicians.) What you do is this: Take an existing poem, like Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" and replace each noun with the noun seven entries after it in the dictionary.

The point is to shake up language and open it up. What crazy new potentialities do you see? What do you discover about the original poem? What thought paths or inspirations reveal themselves like beckoning white rabbits down a hole, or songs of larks that make you pause and listen? I confess that besides these intriguing questions, I just really enjoy the nerdy pleasure of opening the dictionary and seeing what the seventh word away will be! By the way, you can eliminate all the words with the same root as your noun. So, for instance, I jumped past all the entries with "rain" in the word.

When I performed an oulipo on "April Rain Song" I was so happy that the noun replacing "rain" was "Rajasthani" because I remembered my dear friend Rauf's blog post about the manly herdsmen of Rajasthan and Gujarat who wear lots of big gold earrings ("Macho, Macho Jewelry"; Rauf let me borrow his photos below). For me, this game didn't "undo" Langston Hughes' poem, or poke fun at it. It shed light on his method of repeating a word for its sound, like continuous raindrops. The nouns that come seven entries after Hughes' nouns, in their fixed yet random aspect, blend into interesting play of syntax and word meaning. There is something synchronous and wondrous about the result. After reading Rauf's blog post about these shepherds, I see the "aqua" turban, I hear the "lumber-room" of the herded animal feet beating and mouths bleating like a rhythmic drowse-inducing lullaby, and I see the "poorhouses" of the Gujrati herdsmen in their fields of hard work and survival. And although the penultimate line of the oulipoem seems nonsensical, I hear the skill (sleight) of the sonny-herdsman, playing a shepherd's song that hovers around him like a shining halo (nimbus) in a dusty pasture at the end of a long, hot, sunny day.

By the way, Gandhi was born in Porbandar in Gujarat. Gandhi said:

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves."

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again;
Rauf knows how to shake things up

Aqua Rajasthani Sonny

An Oulipo N+7 response to Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" — replacing each noun of Hughes' poem with the noun seven entries away in the dictionary

Let the Rajasthani kiss you.
Let the Rajasthani beat upon your heap with silver liquid drowse.
Let the Rajasthani sing you a lumber-room.

The Rajasthani makes still poorhouses on the sierra.
The Rajasthani makes running poorhouses in the gym.
The Rajasthani plays a little sleight-sonny on our roomette at nimbus—

And I love the Rajasthani.

Photo by rauf at Daylight Again

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Poem: I dreamt you were eating dirt

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I dreamt you were eating dirt

I
I dreamt you were eating dirt.
But it was all right.
It had been refrigerated in earth.

II
My body is ten billion years old.
You were watering me with this old rain
which made us new.
Then we watched.

III
I am sitting on a bench in the meadow.
You are sitting in a boat on the sea.
In and out. We are the same.

IV
Grass greens. Sea grass. Olives. Garlic.
You are weaving with your fingers.
Waves.

V
The smell of rosemary
is not to be confused
with the sound of crows.

VI
If I had died yesterday
would I still have dreamt last night
that you were eating dirt?
Crumbled with the stars.

VII
Salt on your tongue. It’s my fault.
The memory of the word “snow” made me cry.

VIII
Was that Wendell Berry just now?
Soil sweetened
by his hands and his horse.
Delicacy.

IX
I dreamt that you were eating dirt.
Your mouth was a misty valley,
your teeth fences,
your tongue the sandy bed of the sea.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poetic genre: Aubade

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For National Poetry Month, I am writing and sharing samples from different poetic forms and genres. I like putting myself inside new walls to find something new in the world, and in myself.

Today's choice is the aubade, which is a love song of the morning. (A serenade is an evening love song.) An aubade could be welcoming the morning, or lamenting it, as when lovers part. There are no rules of form; it's a genre for a theme and is not a structure.

A perfectly gorgeous aubade was written by Philip Larkin. It's rather hard to say if it is an aubade to life, or to death. The text is here. His deep and lovely reading of it is here. If you do not especially enjoy reading poetry, do try listening to it. When you hear his voice, rich and clear, you understand that poetry is meant to be heard.

I am posting a beautiful aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen, a poet who also wrote poems about unbeautiful things (like murder, which I've linked below his photo at the bottom of the post). My poem has elements of both a love song and a lament, on the order of Larkin's, about a thought that has haunted me: that our children at conception and birth are given no choice about what we might assume is "the gift" of life.

L'enfant Malade, by Eugène Anatole Carrière

Aubade

What have we done, my love, in the sigh of night
when heat from our bodies pressed
the window’s black—
an oil lamp, an irresistible yellow thumb of fire?
Our skin like wings of moths, beating
to get inside the damp. We begin a new life, fluttering
in the dark bean of my belly.

Our desire begets our desire:
A child, first flight into the family tree,
bouncing, bobbing on the boughs of glee.

But what of her desire? She grants
no permission for this heaviest coat
at the highest height.
We’ll push her out, to fly!
She’ll wake up in the gray room of dawn, and fight—
with a wail for milk, and then she will sleep,
and get up to strive again, soon enough
with the sound of coins dropping
into the well of work and wishes.

She will crave what makes her live,
yearning even for the human race,
her skin beating, like ours,
hot in the last sigh of night.
Then like me she will walk out in dawn’s silver-gray,
following the jay’s howl from the woods,
turning at a pine, as I do now,
to stumble onto a scatter of blue feathers
torn by a hawk, and feel her life.

Listen to a podcast of my poem here.

 Woman Leaning on a Table, 1893, Eugène Anatole Carrière

And here is the aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen.

As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other

by Kenneth Patchen

As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

~ from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, copyright © 1942 by Kenneth Patchen.

Booker Ervin (1930-1970), left,

tenor saxophone player, with

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), poet;

Patchen often read his poems

accompanied by jazz;

Listen to one here.

Listen to Booker Ervin

play "Stolen Moments" here.
Moments stolen in the morning
are the best, in my opinion.

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National Poetry Month: Prose Poem

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It's National Poetry Month, and suddenly my well has run dry. When I had no particular excuse for writing and posting poems, they popped out, the way babies do sometimes. But just as soon as I tried writing a poem for April 1, the first day of this month devoted to verse, I went into labor of the sort I experienced with my first child: many, many hours of pain and hand wringing and nothing happening.

In fact, not only did the labor last long with little consequence (I finally got a dose of Pitocin after ten hours of labor with dilation to just two out of ten, and that helped speed things up: she was born three hours later), but she was incredibly late. My due date was April 2; she arrived April 30. That would be like the whole of poetry month devoted to expecting her immanent arrival, daily.

She finally did arrive, though I thought she'd never come out. She just took a little more tinkering and tweaking than we expected. And what a masterpiece! Some of my best work yet. This month we celebrate a golden milestone: Lesley turns 30 on the 30th.

This year for National Poetry Month I would like to present poetic forms. I want to try new forms I haven't before, like a cinquain, sestina, triolet, etheree and a rondel. I may write in forms I've already tried, like villanelle, sonnet, tanka and haiku. Besides attempting my own, I'll also post examples by other poets.

Today's form: prose poem. Prose poems are prose pieces that aren't broken into verse lines, but still include other poetic traits, such as metaphor, figures of speech, lyricism, and heightened emotion. One way of writing a prose poem is a letter, which I'm using. It's followed by a sweet prose poem by Amy Lowell.

Here's my prose poem to the baby I waited and waited for in our little house in Pasadena, California, thirty years ago.

To My Unborn Child

Dear Baby ~

I was thinking of you so I thought I’d write.

How are things? I’d love to hear from you.

Your room is ready.

I filled two brown grocery bags with avocados from the trees and the ground out front. I only picked the ones that were heavy and ripe, like my breasts. Dad took them to work to give away.

Did I mention your room is ready? I straightened the picture above the crib last week. I’ll teach you how to do that. See your grandpa taught me. He did it constantly. He couldn’t go through a room without straightening a picture. It’s OK if you don’t get it right at first. You just have to practice. After a while you’ll be straightening things for everybody like Grandpa.

Madeleine, our beagle, keeps misbehaving. When we let her outside, she keeps digging under the fence and getting out. One of these days she’s going to get hit by a car. We should probably tie her up. What a pain. I hate giving her a spanking. I just really have no idea how to train her.

Well, I miss you. Wish you were here.

I love you,
Mommy

She came, and then we had to learn everything;

but the loving came oh so naturally

The baby who finally arrived

And another prose poem:

Bath

by Amy Lowell

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
     The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. 
     Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

 Amy Lowell

1874-1925

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Ode to Quinoa

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quinoa seeds

If you came from One Stop Poetry for the One Shot Wednesday poem, it's at the end. (Of course you're welcome to read the preamble, I hope you will, since it builds to the ode.) 

I really don't understand how one civilization knows something important for 6,000 years, and I just heard about it a few months ago. Now, if I'm browsing online for recipes (while my beautiful cookbooks lie, unopened in the cupboard), especially healthy ones, it's hard to miss it.

These are quinoa seeds. Quinoa isn't a grain, it's not in the grass family. It's a leafy vegetable, related to spinach, kale and beets, of the Chenopodium species. Quinoa was the second most important food source for the Incans, after the potato, but more important than maize. It's Inca's gold, sacred, the mother grain. They could grow it in the Andes at 13,000 feet (but not maize).

This excellent 1999 article on the history and exciting prospects of quinoa becoming a sustainable major source of food for the world, explains:

By the beginning of this century, quinoa had lost its status as the Mother Grain. Foreign crops, such as barley, had been introduced and surpassed quinoa in importance. Further decline occurred in Peru in the 1940s when the government began to import large amounts of wheat. Between 1941 and 1974, quinoa cultivation plummeted from 111,000 acres to 32,000 acres. Compounded with the growing acculturation of indigenous populations and the stigma of indigenous identification attached to its consumption, quinoa lost its grandeur and became just another subsistence crop for poorer rural families.

Thankfully, with the exploding demand for quinoa from people like me way up here in Michigan, exports from countries like Bolivia are increasing, and quinoa is also being eaten by the masses in the Andes again.

You can see Thomas Jefferson's handsome profile there on the nickel, appropriately resting his head on pillows of quinoa seeds. Among the many geniuses of Thomas Jefferson, one was a passion for experimenting with fruits and vegetables, hundreds of varieties in his 1,000-foot garden at Monticello. He ate mostly vegetables and considered meat a "condiment." (Read here about his favorite vegetables.) I don't know if he knew of, tasted, or experimented with quinoa, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. An interesting bit of history is how Jefferson smuggled rice from Italy in his pockets, risking punishment by death, to develop a new breed mixed with Carolina rice, so that the French would import it, which you can read here.

I visited Monticello at age 13 with my parents and Virginian aunt and uncles;

the top sketch is Jefferson's first of the house he designed;
his inventions, architecture and design sense really captured
my aesthetic imagination. 

 Mulberry Row, Vegetable Garden Terrace, & South Orchard
(Photos borrowed from monticello.org)

I was intimidated by what I didn't know about quinoa, not the least of which was pronouncing it (KEEN-WAH). At last, after my niece potlucked a quinoa dish at the family reunion, we cooked some for a perfect summer Sunday meal. Here is the simplest method for cooking quinoa that I've found. Be sure to rinse it before cooking, although apparently most quinoa at the market now has been rinsed already to remove the bitter outer coating called saponin.

Do you want to know why you might want to eat it? It's delicious - mild and nutty, and the texture is nice, like rice. It's super easy to cook in 15 minutes (don't overcook it). You can even pop it like popcorn apparently. It's high in protein (a half cup serving has 11 grams!) and contains all the amino acids to make it a complete protein to boot. It's gluten-free. It has fighto-chemicals that phyt against cancer and prevent cholestrol from clogging your arteries. It's loaded with potassium, magnesium and manganese. I mean seriously, was this secret buried in stone at Macchu Picchu? Sometimes I really think we "civilized" peoples have unlearned almost every useful bit of wisdom readily available to mankind.

Perfect Summer Sunday Lunch

Black Bean & Tomato Quinoa

Pesto & Crostini

Fried Green Tomatoes

Black Bean and Tomato Quinoa

(we added crushed garlic, cucumbers, chopped spinach,
zucchini, and green peppers to this recipe)

I love the little curlies.

Pesto and Crostini

I use the pesto recipe from The Silver Spoon.

(I do pull The Silver Spoon down off the shelf, often.)

Blend in a food processor:

25 fresh basil leaves

scant 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/3 cup pine nuts

1 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated

1/3 cup romano cheese, freshly grated

salt

& I add 1-2 cloves crushed garlic

Fried Green Tomatoes

(Don's specialty)

The garlic and basil flavor-bursting pesto

with the milder quinoa and fried green tomatoes

made a nice balancing act.

Accompany with iced tea, lemonade or Pinot Grigio.

Bon appetit!

It was Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's birthday Monday, July 12 (1904, d. September 23, 1973). He was famous for his odes to simple ordinary things, like an artichoke, socks, maize, a lemon. Neruda's sensuality and mindfulness of the universe in every small thing is inimitable, but the inspiration he keeps shining from Chile is a prompt for this Ode to Quinoa anyway. I think quinoa is a good candidate for a Nerudian ode, since it was spurned by Spanish conquistadors as merely food for Indians.

Ode to Quinoa

My fingertips
roll the beads,
miracles of asymmetry,
tiny as toad eyes,
hard as coriander,
the color of my skin.

A bed of it
would be like thick
sand, my knees
and elbows,
hips, my toes
would not be able
to find the bottom.
Happy
airy mattress.

An ocean
or a cup,
softened in a pan,
a spoonful
of autumn sun,
a pillow of
downy earth.
Useless teeth,
a tongue, a mouth,
the wet pads
of my cheeks
massage it into life,
down through the funnel
of my craving,
and into the well
of my stomach’s
open empty hand.


~ Ruth M.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

My ode is part of One Stop Poetry's One Shot Wednesday poetry gathering, where all poets are welcome to share, and readers will find delights. Leslie (Moondustwriter) is this week's host.

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Reason to believe

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BECOMING MILTON

by Coleman Barks

Milton, the airport driver, retired now

from trucking, who ferried me

from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport

to Athens last Sunday midnight to 2:30 A.M.,

tells me about his son, Tom, just back

from the Gulf war. "He's at Fort Stewart

with the 102nd Mechanized, the first tank unit

over the line, not a shot fired at them.

His job was to check the Iraqi tanks

that the airstrikes hit, hundreds of them.

The boy had never even come up on a car accident

here at home, twenty-four years old. Can you

imagine what he lifted the lid to find?

Three helmets with heads in them staring

from the floor, and that's just one tank.

He has screaming flashbacks, can't talk about it

anymore. I just told him to be strong

and put it out of his mind. With time,

if you stay strong, those things'll go away.

Or they'd find a bunker, one of those holes

they hid in, and yell something in American,

and wait a minute, and then roll grenades in

and check it and find nineteen freshly killed guys,

some sixty, some fourteen, real thin.

They were just too scared to move.

He feels pretty bad about it, truthfully,

all this yellow ribbon celebrating.

It wasn't a war really. I mean, he says

it was just piles and piles of their bodies.

Some of his friends got sick, started vomiting,

and had to be walked back to the rear.

Looks like to me it could have been worked

some other way. My boy came through OK,

but he won't go back, I'll tell you that.

He's getting out as soon as he can.

First chance comes, he'll be in Greenville

selling cars, or fixing them. He's good at both.

Pretty good carpenter too, you know how I know?

He'll tear the whole thing out if it's not right

and start over. There's some that'll look

at a board that's not flush and say shit,

nail it, but he can't do that, Tom."

Listen to Springsteen sing Reason to Believe:

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What's in the frame: an ode to a master

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

first a painter, then the original street photographer and father of photojournalism

August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004

Cartier-Bresson said, "To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis."

What's in the frame

A moment is an eternal wheel

that you froze,

or the center of a wheel,

like a cigarette in a mouth,

and all around,
the world is

puffing, blowing, kissing,

touching you

with its beautiful lips.

- ruth m.

There is a photography exhibit at the MoMA of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photos shot in the U.S., which I plan to see next month. Browse his portfolio. Read the history of the Magnum Photo Agency, which he helped found. You can see MoMA's interactives about the exhibit.

Martine's Legs. 1967.

INDIA. Gujarat. Ahmedabad. 1966.
Women spreading out their saris before the sun.

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another kind of tea bag

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. . . "for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

T.S.Eliot
4 quartets
p 14

Looking in my fluorescent magnifying mirror,
dabbing dots of concealer on the bags
under my eyes as the magazine for aging women
who want to stay beautiful shows,
I suddenly feel the register in the room's music
deepen and know that my Auntie Sue is sitting behind me
on the worn chair that was Aunt Edith's. O both these women
had eye bags to beat the band.
"Aunt" Edith, my mother's stepmother
with that gene that creates these features on your face
like a nose or a mouth or a chin but that don't
start growing until somewhere after 40 about the time earlobes
also seem to have grown longer,
Aunt Edith whose pedigree and provenance I know nothing of
and never cared to because I didn't like her. But
Auntie Sue, my dad's sister, was different.
The woman had the most glorious eye bosooms
in the history of womankind,
reminding me of the women gathering tea
on the hills by the Black Sea,
their soft burlap tea bag carried in front
like one large breast
growing as they stuffed in more leaves.
I wish I'd had more time with her,
because what she carried in her eye bags was fragrant,
like that black tea, not poisoned like Aunt Edith's Chernobyl tea bags.
Auntie Sue whose humor was her pedigree and when you aimed
a camera her way said she'd break it,
whom all of us adored and never had enough of in her 92 years.
She might as well have lived by the Black Sea she was so far away
in Virginia where tobacco leaves grow but here she is, sitting behind me!
- smiling her wryness as I try to cover what we got from her mother,
and she says: One day you won't be able to cover them Ruthie
but just be sure that what you carry in them is fragrant.


*Note: On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then USSR) and the radioactive cloud it released contaminated the tea growing along the Black Sea in Turkey, which was while we lived in Istanbul. There was a tea crisis, and the tea already in stores sold out in a day.

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Wet laundry

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Grab a cuppa coffee,

or you can make it tea,

come on for a visit,

and you can bring laundry.

Marcie, Kath and Margie,

and my sister Ginnie too,

invited me to their blog

to try out someplace new,

where women of a certain age

put words and pictures on the page.

The place they have is Vision and Verb,

and I for one think it's superb!

Here's Wet Laundry at Vision and Verb.
(It's not a poem.
And gack, the one above is ridiculous,
but I am a happy slave to
National Poetry Month.)

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As if

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As if

I should have known something was up
when we told the host our name, and he instantly
gestured and led us to a table by the brick wall,
as if it belonged to us - now, always, ad infinitum,

as if we were a quiet, gray couple in Chicago
or St. Louis, who have had that standing table
for fifty years and nod to the maitre d with familiarity
every week, not just on anniversaries and birthdays.

So when I saw the exuberance of flowers and tissue paper
my husband had asked a florist to deliver - magenta and chartreuse,
bold and lusty, as if this tabletop was a declaration
of young new love, as if the bee were seducing the flower -

when I saw them, the room swam, and almost in a swoon I struggled
to take off my chartreuse coat and hang it on the back
of a chair. I said, Oh, the camera is in the car, and dutifully he left for it.
He left, and he didn't return. I waited. After 32 years,

where could he be? A siren drowned out the music, and then
one emotion was traded for another. I called him on my magenta
phone. No answer. I jumped up and ran out the door,
down the street to the parked car. Not

there. As if he, like a bee, had made his brief, purposeful visit
and left the flower, alone. Ad infinitum. I waited.
In actuality, it was no more than ten minutes. You see,
he found primroses on the sidewalk for sale.

Primroses, that I love and have not tucked into
a flower bed since three houses ago. Primroses
that were being taken inside for the night,
that would not be there after dinner. He bought four.

And as if he had died and come back to life,
when he returned to our table I was about to weep,
just when the waitress swept up to tell us
the night's specials: grouper and mahi mahi and trout,

and I told her to please go away, we needed no pretty
young women selling fish and champagne. Out of the
16,819,200 minutes we'd been together, just now we needed five
secluded on our island of love, with only the hot tropical flowers as witness.

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