Crabgrass is lounging across the lawn and embedded in the garden beds, acting as if it had been there all along, which perhaps it was, abiding and biding its August time to stretch and lie languid, ducking its head under my mower, its roots defying my pull. Some tuberous rooted thing has lunged up in several places in the garden. What on earth is it? On earth indeed, in earth, and I can’t be bothered to unearth it, curious to see what it’s flowering into, sure I’ll regret it next year, as it takes over some corner of the yard. Witness the uninvited goldenrod, the drunken little asters propping each other up behind the deck, whatever that would-be bush that inserts itself everywhere. Some plants arrive dropped by bird poop, and I think about the seeds’ adventures: extruded from a root, nipped by a beak, floated through a digestive system, briefly flying through the air as part of a splat, and splat, dirt, rooted again. And again and again. A reminder of what can come of chance meetings, what glory can rise from a small hard thing.
Here is a little gem of a haiku by Barbara Ungar. It was published in bottle rockets: the journal.
the perennials you planted for me notes from underground
I have a couple of writing projects I’ve started, and I’m just avoiding them thoroughly. Inching around the file. I can’t get near the page. Much of my avoidance is, I think, due to my overall discouragement with the publishing part, the effort it takes to take a finished product to the reader. It’s a bit cart-before-horse-y, I know, to think about publishing something I haven’t even completed. But there it is, the dark cloud of grim possibility, lurking down the road. YES I recently got into one of my aspirational lit mags (DIAGRAM!!) Yes, I have books. But oy, the effort, and the low rate of return for my efforts. Oy, the rejections rejections rejection. I just can’t even.
I thought successes would build on themselves, that momentum would be created. But that is not how it’s worked for me. Every project is a new beginning exactly like the old ones; every publishing effort is a grind, like that last hill home at the end of every bike ride. It’s always there, and I have to downshift and pedal. If I had enough breath to sigh, I’d sigh.
I wish I didn’t care. I wish I were one of those people who say “oh, I just do it for the sheer pleasure of doing.” Apparently, I do not. I’m in it, apparently, for the glory. That’s a joke. I wish I were one of those dissheveled and earnest near-hermits who disappear into their imaginations and hours go by until they arrive back to the present, hair sticking up, clothes awry, having missed a meal or two. I’m not. I don’t really have dissheveled hair. I don’t really even have to brush it, and it generally looks okay. My shirts are generally relatively clean. I always know what time it is. I would never miss a meal.
Oh, to be a wild thing instead of this tame creature looking around at faces for encouragement, at eyes for approval, like my friend’s anxious German shepherd.
Here’s a poem by Alan Feldman about a creature whose got some chutzpa and devil-may-care. Maybe I should miss a few meals. Or maybe I should just write the damn things first.
The Coyote
Alan Feldman
If you stripped a dog of its social eagerness, gave it a loping indifference to human presence and starved it, you’d have a coyote, stalking like a shadow among the garbage cans at the top of Pearl Street, near the Fine Arts Work Center. We’re heading back to our car through a fine mist, the streetlights haloing amid the black trees, and we stop, watching him appear and disappear gaunt as a Giacometti. He’s nothing like a dog bounding into the street. Does he care if this is a street?–or just a hard place under his paws. Ever since childhood I’ve tried to be alert to what people are up to, but why not see the coyote’s point of view?– how he prefers to ignore them, following his own track through the darkness.
I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.
I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.
Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.
And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.
But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.
Mystic
Sylvia Plath
The air is a mill of hooks — Questions without answer, Glittering and drunk as flies Whose kiss stings unbearably In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
I remember The dead smell of sun on wood cabins, The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets. Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used, Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagration, the stains That lengthen from ancient cathedrals What is the remedy?
The pill of the Communion tablet, The walking beside still water? Memory? Or picking up the bright pieces Of Christ in the faces of rodents, The tame flower-nibblers, the ones
Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable — The humpback in his small, washed cottage Under the spokes of the clematis. Is there no great love, only tenderness? Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it? Meaning leaks from the molecules. The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats, The children leap in their cots. The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
When our friend the artist announced she was going to Antarctica with a science research group led by a local scientist for some ridiculously long time, we, her friends, said, um, we want to meet this dude, so we know whether this is a reasonable idea or not. So we made her throw a little party where she introduced us all and he gave us an overview of his research. We liked him, and his research was focused on this odd and interesting single celled creature about which he was weirdly and wonderfully excited, so we gave our general approval to the journey. Reader, she married him. And so began my personal journey with the foraminifera. These single celled organisms live throughout the ocean, some on the ocean floor, have a shifty relationship with oxygen, and have survived any number of earthly cataclysms to live out their little lives, making their little stone shells with their sort-of-arms, and eating whatever it is they eat, procreating in, well, I can’t keep track of what all they do. I’ve written poetry inspired by them, made videopoems. And you know how sometimes when you encounter something randomly and all of a sudden see it everywhere? I now find foraminifera in odd places in my reading journeys. One day I had some time to kill so went to the local library, found myself in the poetry section, randomly pulled out a volume of Wislawa Szymblorska, opened it at random, and, yes. So this post and poem goes out to my friend Sam.
Foraminifera
Wislawa Szymborska (tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)
Why not, let’s take the Foraminifera. They lived, since they were, and were, since they lived. The did what they could since they were able. In the plural since the plural, although each one on its own, in its own, since in its own small limestone shell. Time summarized them later in layers, since layers, without going into details, since there’s pity in the details. And so I have before me two views in one: a mournful cemetery made of tiny eternal rests or, rising from the sea, the azure sea, dazzling white cliffs, cliffs that are here because they are.
Occasionally I’m oddly undone by a casual comment. A month ago I ran into an old colleague, someone to whom I feel warmly and always enjoy seeing her. But she said two innocuous things that left my brain whirring around and my pie hole flappin soundlessly. She said, “You look good.” Comments about my looks always throw me. What do I say? I don’t really pay much attention to my looks, don’t think about them much. I mean, I try to look presentable. But beyond that I’m not always sure what I look like. What does “good” mean in the context of an aging chick who glances in the mirror and figures good enough? And do I say, “So do you” right away, or does that seem too…I don’t know…insincere or transactional. So I smiled brightly, I think, and said something like, “Oh.” Then she said, again, perfectly inoccuously and in that way of idle small talk, “Busy summer?” It threw me into this thoughtswirl of, oh yes, I guess it is summer, but it’s really only just started, and it’s not my favorite season so I pretty much just wait for it to be over, and I just got back from a trip so do I tell her that or was that really “spring” not summer and so doesn’t really answer her question and anyway am I going to have a busy summer? do I actually have anything planned… At which point I figured my silence was very awkward so I think I said something like, “Oh…” And then we had to part to find our seats at the performance at which we had run into each other, me feeling like an idiot and her probably wondering what had happened to me. All this to say that the quotidian can seem bizarre, thoughts can go spurting off like a just-burst balloon around the room, and the brain is a funny thing of words, sometimes. Which I guess is why I’m a writer. I love this poem by Victoria Chang for its wrestling with all kinds of little things and big. I found it on a recent OnlyPoems.com issue:
Fig. 15
Victoria Chang
Someone said metaphor is making the strange familiar. All this time, I’ve been trying to make the
familiar strange. Now I can’t decide if the sky is familiar or strange. Whether I should describe it as blue or
as a creditor. If it is endless or walked on. Whether something that has no width or height should be
described. In the drawing, the lines look like electricity. They are trying to say something that I can’t read but
I can feel. Something about our desire to name all the roads and then cut them off. Something about
our desire to make everything an heirloom. I can only read the small p in the upper left-hand corner. Or it is the
only thing I think I can read. The wires are a language. The buildings are a language. My skin is a language.
What do I do now if it peels off. Each day I pick at small flakes. Pull down time like a cord. What if all
along my hormones weren’t true. I’ve been peeling the flakes off for months, wondering when I will get down
to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What happens when the forests are gone but the trees are still
here? How can I be an animal and have the form of a tree? Once I am no longer a woman, the narrative poem will
finally turn into a lyric one. Maybe war is our insistence on the narrative when we are descendants of the lyric.
I attended a concert by highly accomplished students and teachers from a music camp nearby, and I was awestruck by their skill. And envious of their world of music. And grateful too, that I’d had some experience through my voice studies of what it’s like to settle deeper and deeper into a piece of music, to gain levels of intimacy with the music, the composer’s intentions, and with the other musicians on stage. I loved the process of the awkward first encounters with a piece, all angles and unexpected rhythms and shifts, and then the parsing it down to movement and segment, then the managing of tricky bits, the technical stuff of managing the breath and sound, and even eventually the I-am-sick-to-death-of-this-piece-let’s-just-do-the-damn-concert. It’s an amazing experience. I realized after watching these musicians that even after ten years of study I never quite gained the level of confidence to be a comfortable performer. What is confidence? Is it a skill that can be learned, a muscle to be trained? Whatever it was, I just never quite managed it — I didn’t trust my voice not to do something funny on me, or my body to not falter with my breath, or my brain not to stumble over the words. Trust on shaky ground. I thought too of that other nuance of the word: a confidence, as in a secret shared “with trust.” And I think it’s that sense of sharing a confidence with a confidant that animates this lovely poem by Tina Kelley from her new book, Field Guide to North American Words.
Telling God
Tina Kelley
I need you to know I laughed sometimes at this magnificent and puzzling planet. Ridiculously plentiful sandhill cranes taking off from the dawn lake, squawking. The bleating sheep and his poetry of complaint, the oarking elephant seal, I chuckled.
The healthy fox cutting through our backyard up the hill, the taste of snow in Idaho, the front seat of the roller coaster, the swooping fast fall. The hummingbird’s snore, a high descending wheeze, the bounty of beachcombing when I found thirty jingle shells.
Did you hear this laughter as prayer or praise? I hope so. Thank you for this knowledge: the moon is moving away from the earth an inch and a half a year. Exactly my height now, there’s a space in space that a planet used to roar through, noisily? Violently?
I try to put each minute to the highest possible use, but sometimes I wonder if I should just calm down about that. I really hope I’m doing this right. I suspect it’s the approach of a woman raised funny, in old-fashioned ways.
Thank you for the drawstring light of sunset. For the double-folded three-part iris heart, different color blooms smelling distinct. For phosphenes, glitter seen when rubbing eyes. For the wave-tracing, levitated scamper of sandpipers I’ve never nailed the metaphor for.
Also: I hope it turns out okay. The others around me, I love dozens of them, fiercely. We are tender and easily hurt so slow to understand no one gets off this planet alive. The Christmas card list shrinks. Yet we loved the myth of happy endings.
But maybe you should know: I heard one of us say, “A dying god is a reminder to shop more.” I don’t think that’s fair, but it explains full mall parking lots on sunny days.
I want to spend myself entirely, not leave any lines unwritten when it’s time to stop, to have given my all, empty at the end. That’s all that I want you to know. It’s likely not news to you now.
I have traveled a bit and have, wonderfully, a little mental cabinet of moments; they lie like orbs in the dark until I take them out into my mind’s light. One such is evoked by this poem by Lola Ridge. I had arrived after a journey to a hotel on the edge of things in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Spread out in front of my balcony were mountains that seemed so close I could reach out and stroke them like a beast. But a deep valley flew between me and the mountains, and up from its depth breezes came, and from around the mountains mists, and I spent a long time watching the show, and felt I could watch forever, or that forever itself was in front of me, and I was the brief show.
The Edge
Lola Ridge
I.
I thought to die that night in the solitude where they would never find me… But there was time… And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain staring into the abyss.
I do not know how long… I could not count the hours, they ran so fast– Like little bare-foot urchins–shaking my hands away. But I remember Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein… And a wind came out of the grass, Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.
As the night grew The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth Fell in ashen folds about the hills, Like hooded virgins pulling their cloaks about them… There must have been a spent moon, For the tall one’s veil held a shimmer of silver…
This too I remember, And the tenderly rocking mountain, Silence, And beating stars. …
II.
Dawn Lay like a waxen hand upon the world, And folded hills Broke into a solemn wonder of peaks stemming clear and cold, Till the Tall One bloomed like a lily, Flecked with sun Fine as a golden pollen. It seemed a wind might blow it from the snow.
I smelled the raw sweet essences of things, And heard spiders in the leaves, And ticking of little feet As tiny creatures came out of their doors To see God pouring light into his star.
It seemed life held No future and no past for me but this.
And I too got up stiffly from the earth And held my heart up like a cup.
I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?
This poem by Alison Luterman, from a recent issue of The Sun, was rather on point to my thinking.
Access Road
Alison Luterman
I don’t know if other people feel like there’s a life running alongside their so-called real life like an access road runs alongside the main highway. It’s funkier, lonelier; you didn’t expect to find yourself on this one- lane frontage path, you kept thinking you’d get on the freeway any minute now, where you fondly imagined yourself doing eighty, ninety, hurtling down the untrammeled autobahn of free will. That was the life you thought would be yours when you were young and everything seemed laid out as at a picnic with red gingham tablecloths. Only it was never like that, not really, you had just been raised with too many stories, always stories, not the real, ancient ones with burning bushes and three-headed dogs, but the whitewashed, idealized, candy-coated pap fed to children in mid- twentieth-century suburbs. And so in your fantasies you neglected to factor in the reality of ants crawling up your legs at the actual picnic, the way they tickle and sting, or the spilled juice and crumbled potato chips and your beautiful mother young again, and strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty because she, too, was always calibrating how reality didn’t measure up to the story. So you’ve inherited her dilemma, what else is new, and evening is drawing nigh, and you are still on that access road, which as it turns out is going to the same place the main road was headed all along.
When I arrived, a woman was sitting in the quiet at a side table in front of a laptop, looking pensive over the keyboard. Two people were setting up a table of books for sale. One by one people drifted in, slightly disheveled, many, some looking halt and infirm, then others arriving in twos and threes, more nimble, clutching bags and notebooks, chattering, some, others sitting quietly, men, more women, mostly middle aged and above, some scattered younger folks, one group looked like a parent and an adult child or two. Sneakers, light jackets against the rain shower, some cool glasses here and there. A writers festival, the mountains of northern New York State. I spoke to someone from Vermont, a woman from Texas visiting a daughter. That family I saw turned out to be locals. An old friend was there with his son, having traveled in from two other parts of the north to meet there. Fiction, mystery, romance, memoir, poetry, fantasy, plays, screenplays — all the minds roiling with ideas and the desire to write. In Ukraine, according to the article, the same, but younger, many wearing army fatigues, chatter, hugs, periodic evacuations because of the possibility of incoming missiles, all clutching bags of books, minds full of stories. Physicists are positing that all reality is relational, not material. We are many things, we problematic human species, but we are word lovers, tellers of tales, avid listeners, against odds of geography, war, life’s inherent limitations, large and small, grievous and petty. I am moved by this. Here is a poem from Kevin Young’s terrific new book, Night Watch.
VI. Underworld (Circle Three)
Kevin Young
We are born with all our grief already in us, like teeth,
& time works it out of us–our mouths–pain for a spell & then there
grief sits, a lifetime, shiny, lucky. Pomegranate. Made before I was unmade–
If not, the gaps where once milkteeth sat, replaced by these holes
I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.
portrait of the rain
by Jan Wagner, tr. by David Keplinger
it appears as a hand-kiss, gentle nudge, spray of memory: remember where you came from, frog.
or galloping, as a thundering horde, to tender unto caesar what is caesar’s, until everything flees into the entryways under the cover of newspapers and briefcases: whoever listens at the open window senses that he may be dry, but the weather has long since been inside him.
or how the gutters became musical, when laundry lifts off the lines and rivers flow out of their beds, and the secret scent of earth and asphalt unveils itself; when mushrooms, mosses, vineyard snails run rampant; it makes the outlines visible: where rain ends, we begin.
it treks across the landscape like a circus, the spectacle and curtain at the same time: scenery loft of the great weather- and wandering theaters; bestows upon blonds darker hair, and on the bald the radiance of billiard balls; to the hens it is a cage that doesn’t imprison them. so often divined, yet no church is founded on it.
good ears can still hear, if you bend low enough, the songs of humpback whales, glacier calving– one geyser over north america inspires umbrellas to blossom from shanghai to rome. each drop contains the whole book, water, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world.
resurrection–the easiest exercise. meanwhile it slumbers in car tires and from puddles and cisterns stares back toward its own origin, while the trees for hours and hours are immersed in their soliloquies.
the soothing swoosh between the radio transmitters. the wind in the forests yet to come.
regenporträt
erscheint als handkuß, als sanfter stubser, erinnerungsgischt: denke daran, wo du herkommst, lurch.
oder galoppierend, als donnernde horde, dem kaiser zu holen, was des kaisers ist, bis alles in die hauseingänge flieht im schutz von zeitungen und aktentaschen: wer lauschen darf am offenen fenster, ahnt, daß er zwar trocken, das wetter aber längst in ihm ist.
der gullis musikalisch werden läßt, wäsche von den leinen hebt und flüsse aus ihren betten, den geheimen duft von erde und asphalt enthüllt; läßt pilze, moose, weinbergschnecken wuchern, macht umrisse kenntlich: wo er aufhört, beginnen wir.
der über land zieht wie ein zirkus, spektakel und vorhang zugleich, schnürboden des großen wetter- und wandertheaters; der den blonden dunklere haare und kahlen den glanz von billardkugeln schenkt; den hühnern ein käfig, der hühner nicht einsperrt. so oft vorhergesagt, doch keine kirche, die auf ihm gründet.
für feine ohren noch zu hören, beugst du dich nah genug hinab, gesang von buckelwalen, gletscherkalben— der geysir über nordamerika läßt von shanghai bis rom die schirme blühen. in jedem tropfen das ganze buch wasser, partikel, pollen, all der dreck der welt.
auferstehung—die leichteste übung. schlummert einstweilen in autoreifen und starrt aus pfützen und zisternen zurück auf den eigenen ursprung, derweil die bäume noch stundenlang vertieft sind in ihr selbstgespräch.
das tröstende rauschen zwischen den sendern, der wind im künftigen wald.
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