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?
OPEN STUDIO POEM #16
makeup
cattywumpus
kerfuffle
erase
I’m going back to makeup.
Not the kerfuffle of my youth,
with eyeliner cattywumpus
to each brow,
not a sad attempt to erase
my decades on the road.
Just a streak of red on the lip,
a little taupe along the lid.
Since July, I’ve been attending an online Open Studio with four artists, who are now my friends. Most weeks, they give me words to use as prompts so I can practice my art while they do theirs. This week, I think they were out to get me.
tough sleeve bag wave half fire
l.
WHAT WE CARRY
Each of us carries a bag, a tough bag,
filled with the weight of our times and years.
Each of us is half-dead these days. We wave
to one another across the firewall.
We wave, and blink our eyes. For each is still
alive, one sleeve rolled up, scrubbing along
however we can, lugging our bags,
bearing our bit of the impossible load.
rigid draw meadow peer lemon cap
(another one with those words)
SIX TREASURED THINGS: A ZUIHITSU
1. A rigid plastic lawn chair, one of four that my parents kept on the deck of their condominium. I keep it on the front step from spring till snow. I sit there at sunrise and sunset, watching the yellow light flicker like sparks between the leaves.
2. The white linen cap I bought in Traverse City in a shop that sold hats and, unexpectedly, wine-making supplies. A young friend told me that when I wear it, I remind him of Yoko Ono. I wear it often.
3. Our backyard. It was forest, then meadow, then lawn, and it is now growing up again into forest. We’ve reserved a patch of grass around the house, and bits for vegetables and flowers, but what was barren lawn is filling up with grasses and goldenrod, bramble and sumac, gray dogwood and pine and oak. Five years ago, I planted one solemn young chestnut tree as an act of defiance.
4.The drawing of a cat we had for a few months. Her name was Nanette, and she was tri-colored, and very small. The old woman who gave her to us could not keep her. “There’s something wrong with her,” she told us, and there was. In the drawing, Nanette is curled, sleeping, in a chair that once was in the living room and is now in the kitchen. The drawing was made by an artist friend who stayed with us for a summer—along with her husband and three children—in the room that once was our guest room, and is now the study where I write.
5. The lemons I always have by me. Here is a new maxim I try to live by: When in doubt, add lemon. To vegetables, to pastas, to soda water, to soup. The scent of lemon revives me and a lick of lemon opens my senses to all the good in the world that remains.
6. Ursula Le Guin wrote “There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.” I treasure a company of peers—poets, artists, women who keep doing the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.
cap rigid lemon peer draw meadow
SESTINA FOR THE SUMMER OF 2020
Like a drawing by Van Gogh,
I stand rigid in the meadow. I wear my white cap.
I peel a lemon, and peer at the trees.
I wear my white cap
though the brim is too rigid
for me to bend against the lemon-
brightness of the sun. I stand alone, peer
into the middle distance like a drawing
by Van Gogh of a woman in a meadow.
It is August, and the earth is dry. The meadow
crackles with brown grasses capped
with seeds. The summer draws
to a close. Have we yet let go our rigid
sense of what is real? My peers
cannot guess. News sours me, like lemon.
When I was young, I wore lemon
cologne. I lay in this meadow
beside a man—my peerless
lover—who wore a Greek fishing cap.
But our bones have gone rigid
with the years. We have drawn
living water so long. Now we draw
water grown bitter, like lemon
rind, and brackish, from a rigid
bottle. A butterfly wavers over the meadow
searching for one plant to cap
with one pale egg. I peer
at her with shaded eyes, my only peer
now in this tight-drawn
season, this heated season, capped
with grasses the color of dried lemon
peel. Under my feet, the meadow
soil is hard, cracked, rigid
with the hard rigidity
of this rainless summer, a peerless
summer of an anxiety that a meadow
cannot know. The trees live on, drawing
their life from deeper water. The lemon
sun beats and beats on my white cap.
with thanks to Kathy, David, Kathy, and Wanda
lazy
looking glass
friend
pluck
OPEN STUDIO POEM 2
Too lazy today to pay attention
to the face in the looking glass—
mirror, mirror on the wall—
Does it matter what we look like?
I’m learning lately to be
my own friend. The kind
of friend I need. A friend
with pluck. Spunk. The kind
of nerve it takes to ignore
the face and see
what’s on the other side.
NESTING
wall
kindle
fragile
flight
This morning, something— a gesture?
a word? a scrap of dream?—kindled
a yen for flight beyond
these walls of age and time
and choices made. But I remain,
grounded in every sense, rooted
in a garden of my own construction.
A robin is building her nest
outside the window of the room
where I write, shaping the sticks
and grass with her muddy breast.
In the budding lilac, her mate sings.
If fates and jays agree, nestlings shall fledge,
fragile as imagined wings.
I wrote this years ago for my friend Maggie, who at age 80 started modeling for art students, because, she said, “They need to know what old people look like.” She liked the poem, and recorded herself reading it back to me. She died a couple of years ago, in her 90s. I miss her.
DRAWING LESSON
—in memory of Maggie Miller
Here you are, most with a world ahead,
some with half a world behind,
come to draw the human form.
And here I am naked before you
so comfortable, easy
in my eighty year old skin.
I love my folds,
metamorphosed mountains.
You think you can draw
an old woman, dear babies?
Lean in, look hard.
It will cost you all your life.
I have been down deep,
through muscle, sinew, bone.
Loved long a man long dead,
borne a son and let him go.
I am learning how to pray
and I laugh when you ask me to tell.
In my time I have come
to the heart’s solid core–
heat of life and more–
Now over you I pour
my fire like water.
From where I lie I see
the place the stars will rise.
FIRST LIGHT
~in astronomy, the first use of a telescope
1.
A wall is not a bad thing
when one is ten years old and afraid.
Imagination is a good wall:
the goddesses of ancient Greece,
the stories in the stars, the fairies
living under the grasses and in the trees.
And girls in books,
their strength like stone:
Jo and Meg, Velvet Brown, Anne.
God makes a good wall, the sturdy one
I met at St. Luke’s, who spoke Elizabethan
in Father Pickard’s imitation British,
who smiled down on pious children.
Hymns made a sure foundation,
the blue choir robe a kind of armor.
And when one came of age,
the flat dissolve of the wafer,
the strange warmth of wine.
2.
Hadrian built this wall
to keep wild blue people out.
On our side, sanitation, hot baths,
birthday parties and socks.
On their side, the gods only know.
Dirt-floored huts, animal skins,
raw meat eaten with the hands?
Superstition. Barbaric sacrifices.
Look over the wall, if you dare.
What is hiding behind those stones?
3.
Shall I list the things I fear,
what the walls keep out?
If I give them names,
will that give me power?
Can I clothe them,
give them form,
and seeing their weaknesses,
laugh them into oblivion?
Are they nothing
but shadows after all?
Bears under the bed?
Barbarians painted blue?
4.
Sixty years ago
I could not stand
in front of Mother and say
Daddy is drunk and I hate it.
I’m going out into the field
to pull myself together
and then I’ll come back
and get on with my life.
I want you and Daddy
to solve this.
Without my help.
5.
When my little grandson is afraid,
I can tell him:
This is what’s happening.
This will happen.
The mower is noisy
but we’re safe if we stand here.
The big truck will drive away.
The bird will not bite you.
Mommy will come back.
The shot will hurt and then
the hurt will stop.
I can tell myself:
This story is mine.
The barbarians
are my grandmothers.
Nothing lasts forever.
I can open any door.
FOUR POEMS FOR ELIZABETH
Feb. 1904–Sept. 1998
1.
You always made me tea.
The love and sorrow of your life
tangible in your kitchen
as sunlight through the windows:
your husband dead, your son,
barn crumbled, pastures overgrown.
You carried the tray yourself.
Slow, but I always get there.
At the table you poured Earl Grey
from the green pot into thin cups,
gave me homemade cake, a linen napkin.
Outside, daffodils and appletrees,
irises, roses, blew wild in tangled beds.
What’s the worst thing that can happen to me,
here, alone in this house? I’ll die?
Your elegant French gesture of dismissal,
the amusement in your eyes.
2.
One day I said had no time for tea
but you would not let me go:
Nonsense! No time!
We stood by the sink,
nibbled date cookies from a tin.
More; they’re so good.
I’ve been saving them for you.
Have more.
The first stroke carried you back
to the house by the lake
where you spent seventy summers.
You laughed from the hospital bed,
your eyes open to the sky.
Waves shimmered through your ceiling.
Can you smell the water?
Can you hear the gulls?
When that last boat came to carry you away
you shrugged and smiled again.
Home or abroad, it doesn’t really matter.
There’s goodness everywhere I go.
3.
The day you died, I was picking apples,
snapping them easy off the trees.
Above the orchard, two ravens
and a red-tailed hawk spiraled
in a kettle of rising air
and I heard your voice.
Acceptance, you said, remember.
Remember, to every thing a season.
When the harvest was over
I drove to your house alone.
Someone had raked the leaves from your garden,
piled pumpkins on the wide stone step.
Under the rippled clouds
a ragged scatter of snow geese
so high I could barely hear their call.
4.
You’d had a sheepdog years ago
who woke you one November night.
Your husband got up to open the door,
saw the heavy falling snow.
That dog went up the hill to find the sheep.
We didn’t even know it was snowing.
She put them all in the barn,
came in, lay down like nothing had happened
Why can’t people be like that?
Pay attention to things?
I don’t leave my friends,
I told you, but I did.
Somehow, with all the miles between,
I could not find a time.
We sat one afternoon
in your cooky-scented kitchen,
looked out at the snow falling on your garden.
You began Frost’s poem about the crow
and the hemlock, and I joined in.
We laughted to know
we loved it best.
I would like one more cup of tea with you,
just one more.
(It’s been 20 years, and I still miss her.)
RALPH NADING HILL CONTEST WINNER, MARCH 31, 2004
GladErrand 