words: SIX TREASURED THINGS: A ZUIHITSU

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.

words: SESTINA FOR THE SUMMER OF 2020

 

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. 

words: OBSERVATIONS ON A HOT SUMMER MORNING

raven

flimsy

brush

live

set 

crane

worry

 

 

OBSERVATIONS ON A HOT SUMMER MORNING

I recognize my friends by the worry behind their masks.

In town, the biggest crane we’ve ever seen

looms like something in a surreal movie set. 

 

Early this morning, I walked past a meadow

overgrown with weeds, the hopeless sticks of elm.

Raven flew close, brushed me with the shadow of her wing.

 

What does it mean to live these complicated days?

Have all days been this way, and ourselves

too caught up in flimsy occupation to notice?

Because I have to write something

ANOTHER ZUIHITSU because I have to write something

1.

It’s as if someone is deliberately making things so bad that nobody can stand it. Almost enough to make me believe in the Beast, the AntiChrist, or something like that.

2.

We hoard dark roasted coffee beans in little brown bags in the freezer. I think I have enough now.

3.

I’ve been trying not to look at the news every hour, but I can’t help it. It’s the only way I can participate, living here, in this little green bowl. 

4.

Chipmunks live under the front steps. They scurry out to get food, scurry back in for fear of hawks and weasels and our dog. But they’re never safe from weasels.

5.

A very satisfying conputer game: drag random clusters of jewels into rows and columns on a board laid out in squares. When I place a cluster, I hear a lovely “click.” When I complete a row or column, I hear a very satisfying “ping.” I can’t stop playing this game even though it makes my neck sore.

6.

I had to get coffee beans out of the freezer last night. They were so hard that I couldn’t grind them till this morning. I know that some people don’t like to freeze beans, and some people say one should grind the beans right before brewing, but I don’t care.

7.

I have painted a piece of cardboard with a color called “Tea Room”—one of those small samples of paint available for a dollar at the paint store. When the paint was dry, I drew square tiles with a black marker and installed it in the cardboard box castle we made to illustrate fairy tales for the grandchildren.

8.

The Great Crested Flycatcher sits on a high perch to hunt for insects. If she misses an insect on her first pass, she pursues it in the air. Unless her nestlings object, she offers the whole insect, wings and all. If they do object, she pummels the insect until the offending wings break off.

9.

Many twigs, new-leafed, blew off the trees last night in the wind. When I walked the dog down the driveway early this morniung, I picked them up—at least, most of them—and tossed them back among the trees so they wouldn’t have to dry and turn to dust on the driveway stones.

words: Zuihitsu for the 51st Day

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

RESETTING

 

 

RESETTING

1. 

Not the old patterns,

or variations printed on different cloth. 

Orange fleece instead of black wool.

The kind of comfortable shoes, but red.

Yellow candles.

The same time, but silence instead of prayers.

Most of the people, but not all.

What the crows talk about.

Where the bobcat crosses the road.

Music in a different key.

Cypriot O Antiphons.

Black currant juice, rye bread.

Things that smell like roses.

White tulips. Marigolds.

 

2.

I do it all the time.

Twice a year, all the clocks.

The weather station

whenever something goes awry.

The computer to accomodate

change, to fix a glitch.

The stove, the microwave

anytime the power goes off.

Why not now

during this long and changing time

of glitch, outage, awry?

 

3.

How should I pray?

No bloody psalm cries

and paeans to a thunder god.

No reconstructed ritual.

No begging for heaven;

I don’t have a soul to save.

 

I know a different god,

not father, but

farther, unbribeable,

god of asteroids, black holes,

god of hurricanes and floods.

Job’s god, who makes no sense,

no sense that matters now.

 

Jesus died for love 

and we’ve overburdened him.

Byzantine, Victorian, 

witch-hunter,  rough-rider,

Supreme Court Judge.

The wineskins split

and the wine is spilt away.

Salt has lost its savor,

and someone turned out the light.

 

The wind blows where it wills,

and not where we expect.

Over the shattered walls

of shuttered holy houses,

through boreal and coral forests.

It breathes in the hearts of foxes,

between the beaks of owls.

The sun is warm but the wind

is cold and carries too much rain.

 

Teach me to pray.

For John

FOR JOHN

Fifty years have passed since I learned

it is possible to hear snow fall,

it is possible to choose and stay.

And though times and places flicker

on the periphery and people come and go,

always you remain in focus at the center,

standing in the forest in your thin black boots

listening to the falling snow.

HER LAST MORNING IN STONE HALL

This is a curious piece, a fiction about the old building where when I was a child I went to summer camp and where later I was a counselor and an adult staff member.The description of the building is fairly accurate–it was not in very good shape even in my childhood–but of course the character and her situation are entirely made up. The building burned down a few months before renovations were to have begun, and I often think of it. Clearly it was quite wonderful.

 

 

She awakened to the sound of rain falling on the steep slate roof, dripping from the eaves, rustling through the vines clinging to the stone walls. She lay in her bed for awhile, just listening. Rain had not always been welcome to her, in this place. When the children were here, and it rained for days and days, it had been hard to keep them occupied. But now, it didn’t matter. She liked the rain. But it was time to get up, time for prayers. She pulled the woolen blanket smooth over the thin white sheets and straightened her pillow. The small bed and the wooden chest-of-drawers were the only pieces of furniture left in the long, narrow room. All the other third-floor rooms were bare of furniture, but there was an untidy pile of fragile, leather-bound books on the floor in the room at the other end of the hall. The door of that room was closed, and she would not open it again. 

She dressed quickly in her tan slacks and soft blue shirt and padded down the hall to the bathroom, a basic room, utilitarian. Her towel and bar of soap and toothbrush were its only furnishings now. Thin, rattly metal showers had replaced the bathtubs years ago. They were rusty now, and each sink had an iron stain beneath the faucet. The toilets were only half-concealed behind cheap plastic doors. The room still smelled of toothpaste and strong soap. She rinsed and wrung out the underwear and socks that had been soaking in one of the sinks, and climbed out the window onto the fire escape where her wooden drying rack stood, sheltered under the deep eaves. It didn’t really matter now, she thought as she hung her things up. They’d dry soon enough.

She walked slowly down the two flights of the wide staircase with its comfortable bannister to the hallway that split the main floor in two. She turned right, toward the kitchen. It had been the busiest room, once. The cook had always been there before anyone, pouring juice into the the small tumblers for the children to drink before they went to prayers. The cook fried donuts on Mondays and Thursdays, and every day she made the breakfasts and lunches and dinners that sustained them, perhaps as much as the prayers did. But the kitchen was quiet. In the big, deep sink where once she’d scrubbed the huge kettles and pans, there was only a teacup. 

Nancy opened the refrigerator and took out the pitcher of juice, just enough left for this morning, just enough to fill the one small plastic tumbler that remained. She drank, put the tumbler in the sink beside the teacup, and left the kitchen. Turned right again, into the cavernous dining room with its tall, uncurtained windows and deep windowsills. The trees outside were still dripping with rain, but the clouds were beginning to show firm edges and there was a strip of blue sky in the west. It would be a sunny day. Through the dining room, she passed into the tower room, its gray floor spattered with paint from years of art projects. The easels were gone, the shelf that had held the paints was empty. But the bell rope still hung down through the hole from the sacristy above. They’d always taken turns ringing the bell on the Fourth of July, before they went out to watch the fireworks across the lake. She climbed the creaky winding back staircase as she had every morning.

A tiny landing opened into the chapel. She picked up the package of matches on the windowsill as she entered, and  lit the candle in the bowl in the center of the carved wooden altar. She stopped then, as she always did, to gaze at the Eastern window. The light was still too low to illuminate the glass, but she knew the outlines of the figures as well as she knew the outlines of her hands: Mary Magdalene, Mary the Blessed Mother, the Other Mary, and the angel before the empty tomb. Beneath their feet, the blue and white flowers that graced the forest around the Stone Hall bloomed once again, one last time. She breathed in the smell of the chapel: old wood, the ghosts of incense and beeswax and wine. 

The little sacristy was empty now except for the bare cupboard and the bell rope with its two knots, spaced to fit her hands. The old rope was rough, the knots greasy with age. She rang three times, and looked out the narrow window to watch the pigeons circle the tower as they did every day, four times a day. The bell never disturbed the bats, though now and then, in the summer, a bat had made its way down from the belfry and swooped through the chapel. She had killed one once, with a broom, because it had frightened the children. Thinking about that always made her sad. Down the road and up the hill, she could just see the cemetery where the dust of so many dear ones lay under their stones. 

Back in the chapel, she sat in the old carved chair in front of the prie-dieux. The red cushion was mended. Her prayer book was mended, too, with heavy linen tape. It opened by itself to the morning office. She sang the psalms, her strong voice echoing from the stenciled vaulting and she sensed the change in the light as the sun rose between the layered clouds. 

Once, on the wall opposite the altar, there had been a tiny pipe organ with foot-pump bellows. That had been the first thing taken away, then the pews with their carved crosses, then the old brass altar cross and candlesticks.  When they had gone and the sounds of workers’ voices and their power tools were silenced, she had placed the blue pottery bowl on the altar, and set a thick candle in its center. When there were flowers in the meadows, she arranged them around the candle. When there were not, she used bits of evergreen. In Lent, the bowl was empty of both candle and greenery. Now, in Ordinary Time, in late Spring, the candle was surrounded with a few sprigs of vetch and a precious branch of wild plum blossom.

Once, when Compline was over and the children had gone to bed and the grown-ups had gone down to the Common Room to drink wine and tell stories, she had sat alone for awhile in the chapel, in the quiet darkness. And suddenly, a sharp wind had filled the room, rattling the windows and slamming the door, and the candlewicks lighted again into pointed flame. But the children in their beds had not been alarmed, and the people in the Common Room had not heard a wind.

When she had finished the morning prayers, she blew the candle out and left the chapel through the main door, which she closed behind her, quietly. The bedrooms on the second floor, like the ones on the third floor, had been emptied long ago. The iron beds had been sold as scrap, the old mattresses taken to the dump, the dressers and little tables had been sold, too, or given away. The paint on the floors was peeling, the holes here and there in the white plaster walls the lath showed through holes in the plaster. But she had kept the windows as clean as she could, and she stepped into one of the rooms and looked out over the ragged green lawn and the trees toward the lake and the mountains. 

When she was a girl, the trees had been saplings, and she had been able to see the lake, which was now just a glimmer between the leaves.She would not go down to the lake again. It was all different. The old split-willow on the edge of the smooth stone shore had blown down, and the path to the pebbly beach was eroded by the passage of too many feet. The ashes of too many fires, and memories of too many stories told by too many people long gone: the man who had never seen fireflies, the man whose grandfather had been shot in the village square, the woman who no longer believed in the resurrection. The ghost. This was the room where once she had sung lullabies to a small homesick girl. She’d walked the hallway in the dark, quieting the restless children, comforting the sad, calming those who were afraid of the ghost. 

In the mornings, back then, they’d all arisen at the sound of the morning bell and dressed in silence, and third floor and second floor children had filed downstairs together. Juice in the dining room, up the back stairs to the chapel for prayers, back down the main stairs to the dining room for breakfast, completing the circle, all together.

But now, she made the circle alone. When everyone had left the Hall, she had said that she would stay, and no one seemed to mind. 

There was one table in the dining room—not one of the long tables where they’d sat and sung together after their meals, but the little serving table, painted green. She took her bowl and spoon from a shelf in the kitchen, and poured out her cereal—the last in the box. She sat in the only chair, eating slowly, gazing out across the little table toward the windows. 

Once, between each pair of windows, there had hung a painted shield, symbolic of a saint. The shields were gone. She did not remember what had happened to them. It had been long ago. 

Sunlight dazzled the raindrops on the trees in the forest. She would not go there again, down the wide path to the altar in the grove of trees. They had always been silent when they approached that altar, and silent around it: no jabbering or teasing, no sound but prayer, and their singing. A wild, strange wind had blown through there once, too, on a sad day, long ago. And beyond the altar, the sharp stone cliff, the sunset point, the steep drop to the lake below. She had not been there for many years, but the memory was sharp, and in her dreams the place was always shining.

When she had finished eating, she washed her bowl and spoon and the teacup in the big sink, and put them away on the shelf, though she knew it did not matter. She closed the kitchen door behind her and stepped once more into the Common Room. Above the mantlepiece, a single nail showed where another shield had hung—a painting of the rocky cliff and the single rock below it that was the symbol of Stone Hall. Sometimes, in this lovely old room, she thought she could hear voices, echoes of stories and songs tucked between the cracks in the wainscoting. But not this morning. All was empty, hollow, in order. She closed the door of the Common Room.

She opened the heavy front door and stood again on the porch. The sun had risen over the mountains, over the clouds, and the light slanted across the tops of the trees. She knew that the ripples on the lake were glinting in that new light. Everywhere she went this morning, she found a memory of music, and on the porch, too, a memory of moonlight. There were maple seedlings between the stones of the front walk. This last spring, she had not bothered to weed them away.

She left the front door open when she turned back inside. The empty library on the right still smelled like books, but all the shelves were bare. There had been charades here, once, and music lessons, and now and then people in love who wanted to be alone.

But now she must say farewell to the cellar, through the last door on the right, down the steep stairs. She did not turn on the light. No chairs, no tables now, the murals on the walls mildewed away. But in the dark, at the end of a cobwebbed passage, a low door opened to the tiny room at the center, the most secret place, named for the Joseph who had given his tomb. A stone altar, bare. A wooden cross, empty. Earthen floor. Light from a slit high in the wall, a gap in the stone foundation. Everything here was as it had always been. She stood there until the light spread across the surface of the altar, until everything she remembered grew clear and hard. She turned away, closed the door and locked it with the iron key she wore on a cord around her neck.

The hallway was filled with sunlight, coming in through the open door. Nancy opened the back door, too, and left it open, propped with a wooden wedge. In the old days, the children had always come and gone by that door. She walked down the steps quickly, lightly, and turned onto the winding road and up the hill. She did not look back.

 

THE LAST SONG

Last night, the chorus I sing in had its last practice with our long-time conductor. I wrote this this morning, thinking of her and our time together:

 

THE LAST SONG

~for Susan Borg

Every song is the last.

How can I keep from singing

that group in the church loft,

remember? and we stopped

and looked around, amazed.

No audience but ourselves.

Francois and Chuck over the rainbow,

with tears in their eyes and our eyes.

Hallelujah on New Year’s Eve

and the audience sang, too.

Hearth and Fire that last night,

all together, my voice breaking

as I met your eyes. Every song

is the last—each song, each time,

these singers, where they are,

what they carry, what they hold,

what they let go.