Poem: The Moon's Question

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The Moon's Question

The half-cut moon gleams across the dock
like a riddle of God, and I, a sphinx, guard

the entrance. On the lake’s shore, bound
in soil, a stone shines, a pearl in the dark,

like the tensile eye of Isaac from the altar,
bulging, uncloven, watching for an angel

to illumine the question of surrender, at the
moment of fullness when two realities exist —

one rising, shining, alive, and one falling back,
hidden, the seemingly silent side of the moon.

Illustration of the moonhair woman by Arthur Rackham

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'A Distant City': Moving is done

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The view from Brian & Lesley's new apartment in Michigan;

that's a corn field on the horizon;

see the brown grass, the need for rain;

rain was light while we unloaded the truck,

then it let loose in a full-clapping thunderstorm welcome

when the helpers had gone home

I want to thank you for your kind wishes, thoughts and prayers for the Big Move. They bore fruit. The immense heat broke in a gentle rain Sunday night in NYC, before we packed the truck to the gills Monday. Then the rain held off while we loaded, letting loose again while we drove out of the city that afternoon. The drive through five states, including Pennsylvania, where veils of gauzy mist demurely covered the shoulders of the Poconos, was uneventful and easy. (I fell in love with Lesley & Brian’s VW Jetta, hardly letting Lesley drive; the guys drove the moving truck.) Yesterday, unloading with family in Michigan into their roomy apartment was exquisitely sweaty and leg-aching (third floor, no elevator).

Now the four of us (five with Poppy Seed, who is now the size of an apple; imagine, trading one Apple for another in one day!) are resting and recuperating at the lake for a few days. It is raining on this cottage’s tin roof in the early morning dark. I hear it patting oak leaves that surround us, insisting we stay indoors and sleep: Don’t move unless you absolutely have to. Moving is done.

 Their balcony is more like a porch, deep and partially covered.

Lesley's plants emigrated safely from a NYC windowsill

and now sit bookended by potted herbs and a tomato plant

we grew on the farm. Rain. The plants revel, as we do.

The Queens kitchen they left behind, with its street view;

that's the windowsill where the plants lived

(this photo was taken last year)

In my glad hours, I will make a city of your smile, 
a distant city that shines and lives.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from "In My Glad Hours"

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I don't wanna miss a thing

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I'm going to be away for a brief little while, moving our daughter, her husband and our gestating grandbabe from NYC to Michigan. My gleeps know no bounds.

Don't do anything while I'm away. I don't wanna miss a thing.

POMPLAMOOSE DOES AEROSMITH

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Poem: The earth's economy

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The earth's economy

Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate

of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill —

the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the
special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,

the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull —

I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon

and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber —
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred

years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry

as much as she could carry

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poem: In the heat

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no, it's not raining here, this is a memory

In the heat

       I remember
the smother of hot nights,
the dark shiftless touch
of maple leaves palmed against the screen
of my second storey window, the street
light outshining the fingernail moon,

      the whole damp town
a small comfort, clapboard houses
porched and facelit, parked cars
hulking shadows sleeping along
to the church, like everyone
but me

               and falling back onto moist
sheets where I imagined hovering
like a cloud, lit from within
by lightning’s quick but
far-fingering promise,
unafraid of distant thunder,
believing he spoke of rain.

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Poem: Blue star highway

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Blue star highway

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

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

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

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

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

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Poem: Church

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I haven't said much here about my journey away from religion. I'd rather not get into it much on the blog, as it's a conversation best done in person, where the back and forth of body language, facial expressions and words are fuller and quicker. But for whatever reason, today I feel the urge to share a poem I wrote in 1995 at the nadir of my journey away from church. Of course by posting it, I am opening a window for conversation, and I'm OK with that, albeit somewhat tentatively. (I find it interesting how rules about not embarking in conversation on topics like religion and politics seem to have slipped aside to some degree in our blogs.) Maybe time will tell if I am courageous, or merely foolish, to post this.

It's important that you know that I hold nothing against church going in general. I know that there are many good reasons for it, including spiritual bliss, which I've experienced. But I like you knowing something of my own lifelong process of looking for spirituality beneath religion. This is a quest I have felt since my earliest memories, even when my own father preached sermons from a Baptist pulpit. My father and mother were some of the most beautiful Christians I have known, with deep felt and earnest beliefs, often taking them in directions starkly contradicting the convictions of people in their own parish. I admire them for this strength, sincerity and zeal. That I was wounded somewhat in the unfolding of their lives is perhaps ultimately more about me than them. I understand also that some of the very symbols that cause me distress, are deeply and joyfully meaningful to others. I hope my poem doesn't hurt or offend anyone, as that is the last thing I want.

Lest you worry when reading the poem that there was any abuse toward me personally or from my parents toward anyone, there was none. While the poem is very personal in a spiritual sense of woundedness, it is more general in the literal.

Anyway, here is one expression of my spiritual journey. I wonder what it will mean, to you. While I love some churches and cathedrals — sitting in them, wandering in them, looking at icons, smelling burning candles, feeling the cool quiet when it is hot and boisterous outside, praying, listening to silence or to music — Church — for me — is another thing altogether.

I welcome your responses, to the poem, or to my opening remarks.

Church

I saw a red window.

Through it the sun in swords.
When light attacks
the skin of pews,
dissolves the frames of fifty strong
sets of arms
and wrought iron lights puncture
and nail supplications
along ceiling beams,

then I know that there are secrets
that wait like wine in cups,
undergarments stained,
wads of bandages under the altar,
some plotting of ambushes
in the marbled veins of windows,
boxes of medals and strategies hidden
in baptistry dust,
the old anticipation of hymns
lined up in battalions,
of the coming,
the coming of a great army,
a mighty platoon dragging all the prohibitions
like sediment, bottles, broken machinery,
parachutes, collapsed
benevolences.

I shoulder this window,
jagged, perforating my skin,
a thorny cross,
a house with wounded furnishings,
a drape of walls hanging
like rags from a carcass,
a make-shift hospital vacated
after the troops have lost
their legs, their arms.

It is only a window,
a sanctuary,
a sifter of days.

1995

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