Poem: The Arrival

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The Arrival

On a smooth spring day
    they alighted
    like the wispy feet of a wren
    hugging the twig of my upper lip —

the descent of my mother’s pout-wrinkles
    there in the rear view mirror
    on me.

I thought perhaps I could perpetuate
    a smile
    from then
      on

spreading them
    as beautifully as a bird’s wing in flight
    across my face
    and no one
    would be the wiser.

Then it came to me

that we are given every feather
    for flight

though we tuck them in
    so deftly
       satinly
          shiningly

All the feathers
    there at birth!
    Even in the lentil bean
    in the womb
    all the feathers

for flying arcs
    across the face of the sun
    setting as he does
    taking with him
    the rays of our young smile

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Skin

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deer hide near the road where we bike

You lay your skin aside like a towel, to dry, until next time. You return to it and find it stiffly weathered, caked with rain and air.

What did you feel while it was hanging there, removed from your body? Did you notice how the rain seemed to tap on every cell of you, each drop on your moist flesh a pinprick?

The breeze was a flame, not a drink quenching your skin’s thirst for refreshment. Your eyes and ears remembered, longing to share the pleasure with your cheeks.

What did your lover’s fingertips feel like, unable to slide like the wind down your back, curling up and over sun-warmed peaks? Their touch burned and halted, antagonized, wounded.

What did you long for while your skin was off? You asked to hurt less, and feel more. To read pain in the news and heal with just your bare touch. You said that you would lie under boards of a stormed and crumpled house, waiting to be rescued, if only you could put your skin back on, and feel the weight, the darkness and mystery of what it is to be found, alive.

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Nouvelle 55: Four Directions - The Star

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"Four Directions" by stained glass artist Stratoz

My friend Stratoz invited me to write a Nouvelle 55 based upon one of his stunning stained glass pieces. This poem is the result. I feel drawn to connect Stratoz' piece with art by Marc Chagall and Carl Jung (who found in mandalas representations of the Self), two people whose souls exploded in creativity, as bright and wild as Stratoz' "Four Directions." This piece is a square mandala, when most manadalas are a circle (some with a square inside). Read Stratoz' post about the healing ways of mandalas here.

The story of Israel — of Jews, of Arabs— of the great conflicts that never end, was made more poignant for me this morning when I read that the large Arab population in the Galilee region of Israel is predominantly Druze. Some believe that the Druze people descended from the Tribe of Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Oh that the tribes of the world could be joined as skillfully as Stratoz melds the living colors of his stained glass, and as Chagall did his stained glass, and as Jung did the colors of the unbreakable self.

The Star

prompted by Stratoz' "Four Directions"

Break the mirror.
Four-square hands
reunite in sacred sand.

Gather saturation,
arrowed imagination

east-ended by the sea
a sky-blue Galilee

in the colors of this dream.
Gate my red
leaf-paint the green

Bright my heart—
     good this art
circling the sacred soul apart.

Pull into light, my star—
Self, borne into near
and far

Lithograph, by Marc Chagall

"The Tribe of Zebulun"

from The Twelve Maquettes
Of Stained Glass Windows
For Jerusalem, 1964

found here

The Red Cross, Carl Jung's illustration from The Red Book

Nouvelle 55 is a flash fiction written in exactly 55 words, based on a piece of art. 

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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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Cow

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Cow

I love the trapezoid of your broad side:

Blank writing tablet in the grass.
Brown four-legged stool in snow.
Hand rest. Slice of bread, toasted.
Platter. Room divider. Steady wall
for shouldering, thinking. Wagon.
Tank standing or rumbling, peacefully.
Wardrobe, portmanteau, closet.
Leather travel chest. Longing.
Shield. Mother. Father.
Hooved bathtub. Man’s chest.
Bed. Melancholy. Repose.

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Poem: Digging for Now

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Digging for Now

In the womb of a candle glass, the flame bobs like a bird’s head,

wary of what comes on a breeze that is able to snuff it out.

Birdsong clings and cloys while I dig for the silent center

with ungloved hands, opening my ribs on their hinges,

tugging at roots for what is weed, what is flower, what

is food. My pen remembers what I cannot: The moment,

the now, your olamic eyes. The water in them, the sea in waves.

Your knees folded, and dark invisible walls, one single flame with

infinite poses. Who am I? Where can I retrieve your eyes under their

turban brows when you said against each second’s flash:

Yes, Yes, unceasingly Yes

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poem: Thanking Diane Wakoski for Poetry Lessons

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Persephone, by Anita Huffington, 1999

Diane Wakoski not only taught me about writing poems, she helped me excavate the pieces of my religious past. Last week thirteen of Diane's former students read tributes to her in a reading celebrating her and 35 years as Poet-in-Residence at my university upon her retirement. I wrote this poem a couple of months ago for the occasion and read it to her at Thursday's event as she sat in the front row. The title is an allusion to Diane's poem "Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons". . .

         I want to thank
my mother for working and always paying for
my piano lessons
before she paid the Bank of America loan
or bought the groceries
or had our old rattling Ford repaired. (excerpt from Wakoski's poem)

My poem is a palindrome, and in this case, at the middle the lines repeat in reverse order. (Palindromes can also repeat words or letters in reverse, as in the sentence, "Madam, I'm Adam.") If you are not familiar with the Greek myths of Persephone and Demeter (Proserpine and Ceres in Roman mythology), and of Orpheus and Eurydice, you can link to them in the names. To read about Diane Wakoski's important place in American poetry, go to the Poetry Foundation's page about her here.

Thanking Diane Wakoski for Poetry Lessons

Is it the pomegranate juice you pour
from an earthen pitcher at your table
that draws me into this world of dark fruits
my mother hid from me?

I leave her and the hymned piano lessons,
in a missionary field of corn,
and you, Poetry, appear like Charon
ferrying me across the Hudson.

Even after death she, like Demeter
and Orpheus, searches for me among sepulchers of jazz,
but I am innocent in these tombs of joy!
I crave cigarette torches in dark tunnels
where little deaths are a relief from high heavens.

Where little deaths are a relief from high heavens,
I crave cigarette torches in dark tunnels
but I am innocent in these tombs of joy,
and Orpheus searches for me among sepulchers of jazz,
even after death, like Demeter,

ferrying me across the Hudson,
and you, Poetry, appear like Charon
in a missionary field of corn.
I leave her and the hymned piano lessons.

My mother hid from me.
That draws me into this world of dark fruits
from an earthen pitcher at your table.

Is it pomegranate juice you pour?

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Demeter and her daughter Persephone

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