Poetry – Page 4

52 Photos ~ Something really small

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

–Wallace Stevens

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Dessert

Recipe

Declare a day of gluttony.
Chill the Western hemisphere.
Over a base of granite, soil, clay,
wheat and corn fields, drizzle
rivers.
Lay down thick, black ribbons
of tar and concrete
from one ocean to the other.
Reread the recipe.
Assemble all ingredients
in a four-wheeled box.
Agitate steadily for a day.
Liberally distribute
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.
Periodically, open the doors,
to allow in the chilled air,
wind, exhaust, light,
sounds of gravel.
Be quiet.
When golden, remove
and let warm in the kitchen.
Share the crumbs, too.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can find the recipe for the really delicious molasses-spice pumpkin pie filling I used here.

52 Photos ~ Round

Once More, the Round

What’s greater, Pebble or Pond?
What can be known? The Unknown.
My true self runs toward a Hill
More! O More! visible.

Now I adore my life
With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,
With the Fish, the questing Snail,
And the Eye altering All;
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love’s sake;

And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

–Theodore Roethke

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

October, beguile us in the way you know

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

–Robert Frost, from A Boy’s Will, 1913

52 Photos ~ Gold

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

–William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds. 1899.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Caught off guard

The end of August.

Just two weeks ago we were in the full langour of summer. And now? It’s decidedly fall. You’d think after all these years I’d be used to the sudden tilt toward September, but it takes me by surprise every year.

Unlike the linear transition from spring to summer, this time of year has a somewhat Möbius logic, the seasons fighting each other for possession of each day.

The mornings begin in a cool autumnal fog, the ground between the house and the barn littered with freshly fallen maple leaves, the filmy webs in the grass speckled with dew. By mid-morning, the sun’s burnt through the fog and the slanting light glances off the apple trees’ browning leaves. In the afternoon, the puffy clouds are riding the hill ridge, and the air is warm and humid. Thunderstorms are possible. And cookouts. Summer teases again until the early sunset when the cool air rushes in. Fall again.

This time of year, I feel like I’m sitting on the pin of a hinge. Neither here nor there. I can see in both directions: backward to the long lazy days and the porch-sitting nights; forward to the apple pies and glowing pumpkins. I like both views. It would be nice to be able to stay here for awhile and savor the vista.

But, as it always does, time rushes forward and we must get to doing things.

School has begun. High school, mind you. And it’s grand. So far.

I didn’t take a first-day-of-school picture of H this year because it just didn’t seem right. She was in a hurry out the door in the morning and seemed too grown up for that. But I have a picture in my heart, snapped in the school parking lot at the end of the first day: her close-mouthed (grown up), wide smile, a pair of uplifted eyebrows, and a “thumbs up” sign. “I LOVE high school!”

And with that, the end of August has kicked us into action. The firewood is all stacked (oh, I have pictures to show you, I do!), M’s been building things. We made jars and jars of pickles. And we’re finally back to making real cheese. Tomato jam, we made that, too, and have been wondering if there’s anything it wouldn’t taste good on (so far, the answer is “no”, although Avgolemeno is probably an unlikely pairing).

And did I tell you I actually got brave enough to meet with a cello teacher, and I’ve now had two lessons and last lesson I played a whole song accompanied on piano by my cello teacher? A whole song.

Last fall, I remember feeling a sense of promise at this change of season, and I’m feeling it again. This is not like me, but it seems to be becoming me. I’d just like to linger here for awhile, feeling freshly woken from a warm, slumbery season. I wish it would last.

~~~~~~

What I wrote above, I wrote on Thursday, full of optimism. And on Friday, I learned that Seamus Heaney had died, and I was heartbroken.

I suppose that could seem odd. After all, I didn’t know him personally. I did meet him once, when he was visiting my university, a guest of my Irish literature professor. He briefly visited our class; he gave a reading later that week. I have the date, time, and classroom number penned into my copy of his collected poems. It was the beginning of my new relationship with poetry. When I learned what a poem could do to your head and your heart, how it could unscrew your scalp and let the universe pour in.

No, I didn’t know him personally, but I think it won’t surprise you to know that I felt I knew him personally, or, rather, that his poems became personal to me, and that he and they became a thread woven through my life, our lives. The books and the readings (three in all I was lucky enough to attend, two with Michael). The orange and white kitten I named after him. The leather-bound volume M gave me one year for my birthday. The paperback copy of Seeing Things we bought in a bookstore in Dublin on our honeymoon. Precious because it was purchased in Ireland, and one of the few non-essential things I allowed space in my backpack.

But all those things aside, of course, it was the poems.

To think there will never be another one from him is part of what breaks my heart. I know I shouldn’t be so greedy. He’s already given us so many. And still I want more. To have my heart feel airy and full of wonder, huge and embracing, tender and concrete, filling with the air of September or October, neither here nor there, blown open by his words.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

–Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

52 Photos ~ Light and dark

The Forest at the Edge of the World

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of a maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
“Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,”
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment—
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence—
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself—
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs—
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see through branches to the sun—I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

For Hyla

Thirteen thoughts on your fourteenth birthday

When the moon shines on the water with the twinkling distant suns,
You would need a calculator just to count the lucky ones.
— Cheryl Wheeler

I
Before you were born,
you were always with me.
When I woke, I carried you
with me to the shower
to the kitchen, to the car.
I buckled the both of us up.
At work, we took a secret nap at 3.
You were always with me.

II
A girl and a Singapura
are one.
A girl and a Singapura
and a raccoon dog and a minnow
are one.

III
This first word we recognized was “dog”.
Or maybe it “dad”.
You said your word
over and over
to the dog
to your father
to me.
You named us all a word.
You claimed us all with a word.

IV
“Girls’ Wednesday”
You’re in a car seat in the backseat,
waving a hot dog in your hand.
We’re singing along with the radio.
“This is the best day of my life” you say.
And I think.

V
I love you.
I love you more.
I love you most.
I love you more than toast.

VI
Whatever is the now
is the only thing that counts,
The thing you have in your fist
is worth two in the bush.
The now, the now, the now
is what you remind us to hold.

VII
On the school swing set,
you sang the swing as high as it would go:
“Down in St. Mary’s county, headed south from Baltimore”.
You taught the littler girls to do the same.
In Chicago, you sang “O mio babbino caro”
In the science museum’s whispering gallery
In the art institute’s stock exchange trading room,
to an audience of two.
When I was a girl, I sang songs to myself
all the way from school to home.
Every day.
When you’re in a sunny mood, you hum
Christmas carols,
even in the summer.
Your father revs out “Jingle Bells”
with the brush cutter.
You come by it honestly.

VIII
Three weeks old,
September evening.
You and I had a day.
You were not yet you,
and I was still learning how to be a mother.

You sat in your buzzy seat,
my little growly monster,
and watched as I
hustled around the kitchen
piecing together a dinner
one-handed.

I stopped in my rush to
watch the slanted evening light fall
across your face.
Your eyes were wide
with some emotion neither of us knew.

I smiled to reassure you,
and said something, maybe your name.
I saw the twitch of your first smile
as subtle as the first flutter
I felt when you were a mere seed inside.
And I knew who you were.

IX
The iron-tinted river is flowing.
You must be swimming.

X
I love you this much.
I love you from here to the moon.
I love you from here to the moon and back.
I love you from here to the moon and back.
Plus infinity.

XI
The perseids were sailing across the sky
all night.
We were oblivious.
Focused only on the brewing storm,
of your arrival,
and the thunder outside.

XII
Your bedroom floor,
is littered with books
like leaves on a forest floor,
or bones around an ancient fire pit,
radiating out from your bed
where you devour one by one
toss the finished one away
and reach for the next course.

XIII
Every day, you
write, you breathe, you blink, you
write, you see, you eat, you
write, you laugh, you think, you
write, you furrow and bristle, you
write, you crave, you sleep, you
write, you write your
first sentence
of the novel
of your
life.

52 Photos ~ Layers and stacks

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.