The way I want Christmas

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     The way I want Christmas is withdrawn, but attentive, and giving. Like a woman. During holiday hullabaloo the thrusts of commerce, and even sometimes of the church, impose upon the quiet of inner space. Any day of the year, whether in a state of joy, sorrow, or even turmoil, I want to rise and fall gently on the day's currents--nose flared, eyes raised, hands unclasped, ears unlocked. But some of the air is raucous, rank, deafening, false, and deadening. At home I pull down Christmas tubs and unsnap lids. Out with the ribbons and glitter spirals the remembered scent of oranges studded with cloves. It is a woman’s fragrance, the earth. My mother.

     And out comes the 1955 Christmas songbook, dull matte blue with worn embossed singing angels on the cover, its spine reinforced with duct tape by my father. Mom’s dark eyes ignite in candlelight at the mahogany piano, and blue-ridge vein rivers roll over her knuckles while she plays Go Tell It on the Mountain. Hip-to-hip on the needlepointed piano bench we sit where she has also taught me to play in hours of tearful frustration. But as if turning out the lamps and lighting the tree and candles illuminates a different piano and alternate faces, during these easy-going Christmas carol hours there is no tension, no mother-daughter resistance or pride. She plays and plays, and I sing, and turn the page to the next. The music floats in flakes of effortless snowfall. Many songs are foreign, strange, and special, never appearing in a church hymnal. They are haunting in their folk lyrics and minor keys. They are of woods and tender brown animals. They bloom with holly leaves and stars. They rasp with bagpipe and fiddle. They are blue, cold nights of Croatian shepherds, French rushes of wings, and a hand hewn rocking cradle of Czechoslovakia. They are whisper-sung by a woman in front of a fire, baby at her breast, fat cheeks aglow and rosy-warm, drinking the quieting calm that streams from inside a woman. Christmas is my mother’s lullaby.

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

to sit beside someone and be there.

I would like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I would like to be the one in the house

who knew: The night was cold.

And I would like to listen in and listen out

into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below one last, strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow in 1991)

Sleep, little Jesus, my treasure, my blessing,

While Mary comforts Thee, tender, caressing.

Lullaby, little one, in loving arms lying,

Guarding my darling and stilling Thy crying.

~ Polish Lullaby
(translated by Henry W. Simon)
from my mom's Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,
which I posted about previously here

Please listen to Edyta Górniak tenderly whisper-sing this lullaby in Polish, 

called 'Lulajże Jezuniu', here

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Used Beauty

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There were days in the 1970s when I was a young married woman that dried flowers were very hip. You could go to a fancy gift shop and buy a beautiful cachepot of dried purple larkspur and status, faded roses, and baby’s breath. I loved them, but I didn't buy them. If I was given fresh flowers for a special occasion, when they began to droop, I hung them upside down to dry them, and then arranged them in vessels around the house. I buried delicate heads of Queen Anne’s lace in silica sand to remove moisture for a few days and preserve them for mounting on cards and decoupage.

Then suddenly one day in the late eighties or early nineties I read somewhere someone challenging the idea of putting out dead flowers on tabletops or walls. “I don’t want anything dead decorating my house,” she wrote. “I only want fresh flowers.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time that I didn’t agree with her. Dried flowers were fading from vogue. Carolyne Roehm was publishing large gorgeous picture books on how to arrange fresh flowers, and I was buying them or receiving them as gifts. When Kirstie Alley kicked her cocaine habit, she decided to spend the same amount of money that she had spent weekly on cocaine on fresh flowers. Elton John had two full time staffers just arranging fresh flowers for the rooms of his mansion. At the house where we lived then, we had a dozen pink and fuchsia peony bushes, and I cut some of them for vases. It was a “free” luxury and added life to our rooms.

I spend little time cutting or arranging flowers now, and I’d rather not receive purchased flowers from a florist for a special occasion, feeling that the flower industry is a gigantic waste of resources, shipping them all the way from the Netherlands so I can have them on my table. Here on the farm, hydrangeas in front of the green barn blossom like fine Battenburg lace every spring and stay moist and lovely most of the summer. When the lush petals begin to dry, I think they are still as beautiful, if not even more so, and I know that soon snow will fall and accentuate the shapes and splay of the dried heads.

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What Matters Most

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"What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"

- Title borrowed from the title of Charles Bukowski’s 1999 book of poems, 

after reading a poem of his in The Writer’s Almanac

In the dark of morning the day begins

with another couple of logs snugged into the

cast iron box of the wood stove

after stoking the night’s starry embers.

If the embers aren’t first stoked with the brass poker

the logs take much longer to ignite.

I open the news pages on my laptop

and on one I read about the long iron rod of rape

by Congolese men who enslave 11-year-olds

to mine tin, tungsten, tantalum

the metals used to magically ignite this screen I read.

And just so, in the comfort of my red leather chair

just then, the logs take fire. I hear

the knock as the metal expands, I see the shimmering

orange flames behind the creosoted glass

crisscrossed with a pattern of black iron

and I see that the fire is caged, a tiger

burning bright, all the sun’s heat reborn right here

in my own dark cave, working for me,

warming me, controlled by me, Imagine!

just with a poke of my brass rod

~ Ruth M.

Read Ashley Judd's devastating article about conflict minerals, which are mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo so you and I can have cell phones and laptops, titled Costs of Convenience here.

Read what Business for Social Responsibility said about conflict minerals here.

Read what Steve Jobs said about conflict minerals and his industry here.

Read one take on the Financial Reform bill in the U.S. that includes legislation about conflict minerals and disclosure here.

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Giving thanks for the greatest days of our lives

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     Thanksgiving weekend we wound through towns with names from my childhood on the road to the old family cottage – Betsie, Beulah, Benzie, Mesick -- on our drive north to “the Cape Cod of the Midwest": northwest Michigan. The childhood cottage was the lake place my great grandfather and great-uncle built, of the hoity toities from Chicago, the ones with money who I was sure I should have been born among. Had there been some mistake? I was the youngest of the born-again Baptist minister’s family, all ten of us. We must have been a visual diversion when descending upon the Congregational Assembly at Crystal Lake just a mile from Lake Michigan, tumbling out of the old fifties Woody wagon, carrying brown paper bags from the trailer bursting with clothes and groceries, then changing into hand-me-down cotton bathing suits and running to the beach. How I loved the smell of fusty leaves around the white painted porch and its slamming wood screen door, then the hot asphalt road I skimmed across barefoot to the fine white sand edging the lapis blue lake, and at last digging my fingers down beneath hot sand to cool clay, clawing it into my fist, then sculpting bowls to be lined up to dry in the sun in preparation for some imagined feast.

     So when we drove up this Thanksgiving weekend to a lake inn down the road from that old glory of a place, with foot-thick birches and old wooden porches, I was five again, smelling lake water lapping the firm white beach. I was walking the lane through deep oak woods and a tunnel of white cottages to Lake Michigan where we’d watch the sun set. Back at the cottage before bed, with sore sunburned skin, I’d sit on my fifteen-year-old sister’s lap during family devotions in warm lamp light and learn to read by following her fingertip guiding my eyes over the black print on thin Bible paper in passages Dad picked. We ten sat in wicker sofas and chairs around the unlit fireplace, my long-legged sisters and brothers shifting and rearranging the cushions, while they imagined the other cottage teenagers dancing at the rec hall.

     This year’s Thanksgiving weekend was an anniversary ball to celebrate my nephew’s wedding to a brilliant woman who survived breast cancer last year. In a little black dress and heels I sat on the edge of the dance floor watching two dozen kids dance with abandon. Others joined me sitting there between dances, observing the Bacchanalia of movement, sweat and wildness of the three-to-twenty-year-olds. We reminisced back to our own quiet and sober wedding celebrations, utterly devoid of wine, song or dance in the basements of Baptist churches. How far we’ve come, we said, how free we are now, sculpting memories of dance and lining them up like clay vessels to be filled with the wine of wedding after wedding, then dashing them to pieces in the fireplace with joyful abandon, until the next wild-heart celebration.

     Just then four-year-old Greta hoofed by yelling, “This is the greatest day of my life . . .” above the speakers blaring Cake’s “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” as her cousins pulled her back into their line dance.

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A Note of Thanks

To my Blog Friends on Thanksgiving ~

In the rare hush over America
when Thanksgiving closes out November,
when Democrats and Republicans shelve their squeaky horns,
and early commercial Christmas crooners mute their carols,
in this silence when the sibilance of our familial

kissing and embracing,
back slapping and handshaking,
head bowing and glass raising

whispers sighs and murmurs of thanks,

I want to say thank you to You.

You shine your flashlight on aspects of life
and the world that no one else illuminates.
You help me think. You teach me your ways,
and you listen to mine.
I learn about music, art, biographies, history, culture, travel, films, books
all through your inimitable voices.
You write wild and wise stories and poems.
You show nature surrounding you through luminous photographs.
You let me see your grandchildren, and I pretend to hold them.
When I am afraid, you give me tips!
We play, you make me laugh!
You teach me to cook!
When you get sick, I pray.
When we’re happy, we’re happy together.
When we’re sad, ours is a chorus of weeping.

Thank you, my friends, for what you bring to this place,
which is not held captive in screeny web boxes,
but suffuses and inspires my heart-mind.
Yes, you're here, in my heart,
which is full and fat, and still hungry for more.
Soon it will have to lie on its side
like the 200-pound pumpkin Don grew!

I will be away for a few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-P
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Little One

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Little One

my own thoughted crumb,

what will you be?

seated, windowed, bound and papered
here

like me?

or full-sailed, wind-carried, faraway and

wild

like the constant, bumping sea?

light in my window, ink

on my page, you are mine,

but remember

as I say this

I set you free

~ Ruth M.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

I was going to leave it there, this post. But I just read something by Robert Frost that echoes this small poem of mine. "Little One" could be about a poem, or a future grandchild. Which? Who knows, and that is the surprise of it. Which brings me to Frost.

I've had Robert Frost on my mind. The reason? Because this week marks the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), an event I always think of as Thanksgiving approaches. I often associate JFK with the image of 86-year-old Robert Frost in black and white at the JFK inaugural lectern January 20, 1961 (I was four), that bitterly cold day when he couldn't read the words of the poem he'd hand written for the inauguration, so instead he recited another from memory. (Read both the dedication poem he intended to read, but couldn't because of poor eyesight, and the poem he actually recited that cold day, "The Gift Outright," here.)

In 1939, Frost wrote an essay about writing poems titled The Figure a Poem Makes. I hadn't read it before today, after finishing my small poem, above. I agree completely with his claim, that a poem must reveal itself, that you can't know at the outset of writing what it will become. You can read the entire essay The Figure a Poem Makes here. Below I will quote passages that resonated for me today:

quotes from The Figure a Poem Makes, by Robert Frost

~ If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. 

~ It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

~ No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. 

~ The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

~ I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. 

~ Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. 

~ For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

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Painting: Clouds and Water, by Arthur Dove

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What came into my head when I saw a pair of panties lying on the sidewalk

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I emerged from the parking structure into the dove gray morning of campus. Gold leaves and black branches of the beech tree behind the white sycamore pulled my eyes toward the bell tower. All within sight was earthy, even the old red brick buildings and gray sidewalks, winding like streams among oaks and maples. But there, within a few feet of me, rumpled on the sidewalk near the stairs of my building, was something arresting in the muted November landscape. When I got to it, I could see that it was a pair of woman’s panties -- cotton, white, and huddled, like a bunny shivering in the wind.

Those underpants lay there unattached, like the ones I didn’t need in the hospital, tucked into my bag in the birthing room when I was in labor for my first child. You don’t need anything between your bare perspiring skin and that thread-bare cotton gown, which is only a pretense of modesty, helping you feel less exposed, but open in the back and tied at the neck. With my feet in stirrups, legs V’ed for the doctor to check my dilation, which was taking forever to get from 2 to 4, let alone the pushing goal of 10, in walked a cohort of interns and their instructing doctor, with me and my birth canal a specimen for instruction on their teaching couch. I felt my spirit climb the wall to the ceiling as if to an observation balcony behind glass, looking down at a woman’s body being examined by my doctor and five strangers whose faces I blocked out in my dissipating fog of modesty. And I was afraid, not knowing what it was going to feel like to push a baby out of me, but wanting desperately to get it out.

The panties lay there on the sidewalk as if they had mischievously tumbled from a laundry basket, clean and white, flirting and wanting to get back in the dirt. Or maybe they had fallen from my Marks & Spencer shopping bag onto the sidewalk on King’s Road in London where I bought underwear a week after a bomb blew up a double-decker bus at Tavistock Square, a block from the dorm where my students lived. A two-foot-wide ribbon of red metal was peeled, and stuck out from the bus’s side like an artery from a neck, while feet, legs, arms, shoes, and other items of clothing were blown from people’s bodies into the air along with the top of the bus.

The woman’s panties lay there on the sidewalk in a soft fleshy pile, like the ones clutched by Lois, our friends’ daughter who was abducted from our Pasadena shopping mall, on the escalator down to the parking garage under Lord & Taylor. At gunpoint the young men made her take them to her car and drive to the abandoned dry aqueduct where they entered her, again and again, in the same V place where her infant daughter had entered the world from the opposite direction a couple of years before. When they were done they shot her in the head and left her to lie with her remaining hours gazing at the yellow-orange Royal Ann cherry of a sun as it slipped from the sky behind hazy Los Angeles, her panties twisted in her fist.

I crouched down and touched the white cotton panties, ready to pick them up, then turned my head to find a trash bin close. I was embarrassed that they were there, out in the open. Students were walking toward me from every direction on their way to class. I panicked, not wanting them to think the fallen panties were mine, though I felt utterly as if they were mine, as if they were every woman’s. I abandoned them there suddenly and dashed up the stairs of my building, as if some unknown, unholy terror was at my heels, and I was afraid, or unable, to defend what belonged to me.

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