BEGINNING
The book cover shines gold
in the lamplight.
Small birds irrupted from the north
cluster around the feeders.
I’m an old woman now
and none the wiser, but
at least I can define
emotion with precision.
The landscape of exploration
looms underground.
Forty years but surely not wasted.
Are we between wars
or is there simply one war.
Was there ever only one?
WITHOUT EVENT—A ZUIHITSU AGAIN
~with thanks to Ray for showing me the form
1.
Our son sent a photo of our grandson at his pre-school graduation ceremony. He’s sitting in the backseat of the car wearing a cardboard hat with “2020” painted on in glitter. He looks so happy and proud. I’ve heard there are juniors at the High School here who want to do a drive-in graduation next year, because it is so much more “personal.”
2
I have seen—has the world seen?—the photo of a black grandfather carrying a wounded white racist to safety. ‘I’m protecting our kids,” he said. Take up your cross and follow me.
3.
I don’t have Big Girl Underpants—mine are all the same—so this morning I put on my Big Girl Lipstick and brushed my hair behind my ears and took the dog for a walk again.
4.
In the late 1880s, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem in honor of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez. This is how it ends:
. . . . . .while there went/ Those years and years by of world without event/ That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
5.
The prayer beads I carry in the pocket of my jeans are mostly wooden relics of my old Camp Fire Girl days. Four onyx beads. Two pewter suns salvaged from broken earrings. A tiny diary key. And an onyx cross, maybe half an inch long.
6.
Ever since that first Gulf War I’ve had doubts about intercessory prayer. What about all those people who don’t get prayed for except in a generic way (Dear God, bless all the people in the world.)? I pray in a generic way these days. May all beings be free from suffering. At least that reminds me that I’m not alone, which may be the whole point.
7.
As I walked this morning, I noticed a tiger swallow-tail fluttering along the roadside, parallel to my path. She seemed to be looking for flowers, which are fairly scarce along that shady stretch. She ignored a patch of spindly buttercups, landed finally on a plant I didn’t recognize, and began feeding on what I would hardly call flowers, just nubs of pale greenish white, hanging in clusters at the ends of the leaves.
Zuihitsu for the 51st Day
1. I have never paced when I am in distress. I stand, rooted, staring, generally out the kitchen window at whatever birds I can notice eating the suet that we hang in little wire baskets from the canopy supports on the deck. This morning, I saw a pair of white-throated sparrows and a pair of catbirds and a pair of cardinals and a single male downy woodpecker.
2. The route of my morning walk is flat for awhile, then slopes gently downhill to a worn-out barn on the brink of a gully. Jim keeps old-fashioned electric Christmas candles in the barn windows. The road then slants uphill until on the left there is an unpaved side road going farther up past an old hillfarm cemetery before connecting back to a main road. My road flattens out again to a swamp where grackles and red-winged black birds and swamp sparrows are nesting now.
3. Our granddaughter extended her hand toward the web camera to show us a book. She recited Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “The Swing Song” for me. My mother, for whom she is named, taught it to me when I was three, and our son taught it to our grandchildren.
4. I wish I could come up with an idea for a big project: a play, or a series of poems. I simply don’t have enough energy to extend myself much beyond the usual “poem a day,” and even those are getting sillier.
5. Nettles are creeping down the driveway from the little patch I planted ten years ago so I could harvest them for tea. I don’t harvest them. I’m trying to pull them up by the roots so they won’t take over the whole place. “Remember . . /the nettles that methodically overgrow /the abandoned homes of exiles.” (Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh)
6. I told our grandson I heard a towhee this morning. Our son asked him if he remembered what they say. “Drink your tee hee hee hee,” he answered, smiling his slanty little smile.
7. My husband is extending his trip out into the world today—not just the usual route to the grocery store and home again, but a side trip to the pharmacy to get medicine for the cat’s hair loss and more milk thistle and vitamin D for us. He brought two pairs of gloves.
8. Linda emailed a poem to me, “the one she’s been waiting for,” she said. Nadine Anne Hura wrote it, “for Papatuanuku, Mother Earth.” She calls on the Mother to “Breathe easy and settle,” and tells her “We’ll stop, we’ll cease/We’ll slow down and stay home” It would be a change of pace—hell, it would be a change of everything these days to have a president who shares poetry with us, or who even reads poetry. Or anything, for that matter.
9. Just after sunset, I took Julie down the driveway as usual. It was clear and pleasant, so I did not hurry, but strolled along at her doggy pace. Watching her check the smells—deer? rabbits? that bear our neighbor saw?—along the way puts a fresh slant on things.
A zuihitsu is a Japanese form, consisting of loosely connected fragments written mostly in response to the writer’s surroundings. The word means “follow the brushstroke.” For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillow_Book
THE END OF POETRY MONTH
~a manifesto, or possibly just a rant
People who write poems do it ALL THE TIME.
Even when they aren’t writing.
When they’re walking, eating,
sitting in the coffee shop staring out the window.
When they’re watching movies,
running errands,
drinking with friends.
ALL THE TIME.
And once a year,
in the cruelest month,
you haul them out,
put them on display,
act like you care.
THEY ARE NOT LIKE A DISEASE
requiring an awareness month.
You do not pay them a thing
and they do not ask you to.
Maybe they should.
Maybe they should
go on strike.
In April.
No bookstore readings,
no interviews.
No new poems.
The extremists among them might
knock poetry books from library shelves,
might stand on street corners.
Their placards might read
NOT POETRY MONTH
HAVE YOU NOTICED?
THE POET’S STUDY
(oil on plywood, 4’ x 8’)
~after David Weinstock
Not a simple abstraction—
if there is such a thing
as simply abstract—
but layered.
Ghosted.
Under the brown glaze,
green—or rather,
greens—escaping
like leaves,
blades,
tattered flags.
The finest edgings
of red,
fingered outward
like flame.
Are those human faces
in the cloudiness
at the center,
or pomegranates?
or are they cats,
or planets circling
a central sun,
or is it—a bowl?
Or is it merely the gold
at the center of everything?
I HAVE FOUND MY CARAVAN
. . . someone untied your camel last night
For I hear its gentle voice
Calling for God in the desert.
~Hafiz, trans. Daniel Ladinsky
The camel loosed herself.
She ran off alone,
early in the morning
before I rose to load her
with the burdens of my day.
She was running free
between the dunes
as the Milky Way
faded into the silver of dawn.
When I whistled, she came,
docile, but with the wild gleam
of starlight deep
in her long-lashed eyes.
ADVICE
Write until you’re tired.
~Janice M. P.
Write till no more words
come out of your pen.
Till the skin wears off your fingers.
Write through the banal, the tedium,
the common feelings every animal knows.
There are no new feelings.
Even love is old.
Write until the metaphors are used up,
until the symbols are nothing but stupid.
Write until there is nothing left.
Not a wish, not a thought, not a care.
Then start the poem.
DOUBLE DACTYLS
Written over a period of several months. Try it sometime. . .
1.
Hopalong Cassidy
rode into London, his
horse was worn out from the
long ocean dip.
Hop said “The horse is so
antediluvian
next time I’ll make it an
aeroplane trip.”
2.
Thomas Sterns Eliot
wrote lots of poetry,
most of it excellent;
much of it sold.
Thomas, however, was
malasartorial–
pants were too long, so he
wore the things rolled.
3.
Theodore Roosevelt
went out a-trampling in-
to the deep forest in
search of big game.
There by a brook sat a
parasaurolophus–
long thought extinct, and
as huge as its name.
4.
Little Red Riding Hood
minded her mother and
went to her Grandma’s a-
long the right trail.
Wolf never met her, so
characteristically
old Jakob Grimm had to
make up the tale.
5.
Susan B. Anthony,
activist feminist,
thought if she worked hard she’d
get things to change.
Who could have guessed that such
antiestablishment
patterns of thinking would
still seem so strange?
6.
Frederick Wertheimer,
great Common Causer, be-
lieves the campaign style is
wicked and wrong.
Most politicians, so
unsocialistically’re
happy to sell out their
souls for a song.
7.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
dressed in his Sunday best
called on Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm.
He never liked her, so
unsympathetically
twisted her elbow which
caused her great harm.
8.
Jolly St. Nicholas,
frequently flying, one
eve in December a-
bandoned his flight:
“I’m sick of being so
omnidirectional.
Christmas be damned, and to
all a Good Night.”
9.
Princess Elizabeth
learned about protocol,
minded her manners and
kept her nails clean.
Good that she did, given
heritability:
when she was grown, they sang
God save the Queen.
10.
Jacqueline Kennedy,
so very stylish–de-
signers kept busy cre-
ating her shifts.
When she was widowed, she
un-Cassandra-ically
didn’t beware of a
Greek bearing gifts.
11.
President Kennedy
lived in the White House and
said “For your country ask
what you can do.”
I think up dactyls and
hypercompulsively
save them in notebooks. So–
how about you?
THE STORYTELLER
Oh, the wildness of the teller in her cave of bone!
She finds dragons in stumps, faces in every carpet—
how will she make it cohere?
Was it once upon a time, or ever after?
Snakes and bears are real enough,
and mirrors trying to reflect what’s fair.
She searches her fallible senses
entwined with shadowed remembrances
and pieces a pattern, a dream, a tale— something
that might be true, or that someone might believe.
The smell of whisky, the texture of satin,
a whisper behind a half-closed door—
10 RULES FOR POETRY, #9
Don’t keep anything for yourself:
the scent of white iris or wild grape flowers,
the empty spaces between stars,
the russet tail of the crested flycatcher
and his raucous, tuneless voice. Don’t keep
linnet’s wings, or the hummingbird
who bathed this morning
under the spray of your garden hose,
or the scarlet tanager, always just
out of sight in the oak.
And don’t keep uncertainty. And tell us
when you mourn. When you are afraid,
don’t hold it close. When the world
is too much with you, when darkness
comes every morning, when the center
cannot hold, when everything
you love is falling away, when dust
is rising and settling on every inch
of grass and skin, when the brief
candle flickers, don’t keep it.
Tell us, tell us how we aren’t alone.
Honorable mention Comstock Review contest, Fall/Winter 2016
GladErrand 