September Poem: The Ride

   “This day is not replicable.” Abraham Schechter

Riding my bike up 77, past the neat stables

of the Equestrian School, noticing how

the great chestnut-colored horses

lazy and gentle

delicately munch the grass-tips, mashing

and chewing,

and then on over two hills to the playing-fields on the Cape,

and getting off to run some at the track

and watching a little dachshund

chasing the seagulls from the soccer field,

scampering, ears flapping,

then riding again, up over Old Orchard House Road

and past the stately homes set back

among stone walls and chestnut trees,

and the thorny shells of the fallen chestnuts

crackling under my humming tires,

And oh the flickering glimpses of sea and sea-mist

as I climbed the winding hills

and the long meadows and the pale sun

and the sounding of the horns from the two lighthouses,

yes, and the little startled goldfinches

bursting from hedgerows and then diving

back in, and then horses again,

and the not unwelcome odor

of manure, and then

on to the park by the lighthouse

and stopping to rest on the rocks with the sea crashing,

and out on the water the fishing boats

chugging home, and then, oh,

the sad mysterious sight

of a great blue heron lying dead,

sprawled in the grass,

and on my mind all day were long thoughts

of my old friend, Jan, who'd died

with all her children

and her grandchildren gathered to her,

and them singing the old hymns and thanking God

for the great and lasting gift of her life

and all the many years

of her valiant love,

and so, back on the bike again and home,

struggling a little and tired I was,

racing the sun, knowing now

the light wouldn't last,

but not unhappy.

Upon Being Awakened in the Middle of the Night by a Bat in My Room

[I was awakened last night by a bat in my room. Who knows how it got in! Not a fan of bats flying in frantic circles above my head while I try to sleep. So I got up, ducking and bobbing to avoid the bat, opened a window wide and took the screen out, then escaped from the room, shutting the door behind me. After a while the damn thing found its way out the window, but I got a poem out of the experience.]

Lively wisp,
animated blur,
trace of charcoal
on a page of night,
flapping shadow,
black beast,
manic, mapcap,
monstrous, small,
less than sparrow,
more than moth,
frantic flyer
in a sea of dark,
crazy stranger,
sleep-disturber,
mind-invader,
peace-thief,
tiny nightmare,

why don't you go
and hang yourself!

August Poem: Sonnet with Disney Birds

August already? I've actually got a couple of poems in the pipeline, but I don't want to hit you guys all at once! This one I wrote this morning while listening to the little birds greet the dawn.

Sonnet with Disney Birds

It has always seemed to me that the birds
with all their chipping and cheeping
every morning are simply saying,
“Lighten the heck up, Mack,”

yes, in just that Disney-America slang,
as they skip from one branch to another,
as they flit, as they flutter, as they grasp
fearlessly the stinging nettle,

“Lighten the heck up! Make room,
you cantankerous old rattlebag,
for singing like the sun's coming,
like the sun's just now breaking out

from its long oblivion, like the sun
is back! Don't you give a damn?”

July Poem: Lilies

Lilies

Tender yellow trumpets
swaying and bowing like
brightly-robed monks,

all in a row and welcoming
you to come down among
the green blades and the mulch

and to open up to the sun
and to stand there drinking in the warm light
and if it rains, then the rain.

Someday you may consider this
by far the most beautiful day
you have ever lived.

Two Poets

I've been reading poetry all my life. When I was a kid, when I wasn't collecting baseball cards or listening to the Phillies on my transistor radio tucked under my pillow, I was copying out Poe and Frost and Longfellow in a little spiral notebook. I made my own anthology of favorite poems that way.

I don't read nearly as much poetry nowadays, and have become rather a tyrannical reader. I'm very impatient and don't think much of most of the poetry I encounter in lit journals (so I don't read then any more). I still love Frost (above all others) and his younger "followers" Richard Wilbur and Robert Francis. Of contemporary poets I love the work of Mary Oliver most of all, and it's her kind of poetry I sometimes try to emulate.

In the mid-20th century there was a poet named James Wright, whose work appeared in a lot of anthologies (and I suppose still does). I love three or four of his poems, and that's a pretty good record. Perhaps his most often anthologized poem is "A Blessing."

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

That's lovely, isn't it? It's observant of both the outer and the inner realities, and careful of both.

So anyway, today I discovered a blog called Kingdom Poets, which features "poets of the Christian faith." That's where I found this remarkable poem by James Wright's son, Franz Wright. Together these two are the only father and son combination to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Here is "Cloudless Snowfall."

Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.

This is fine stuff. Thanks to D. S. Martin at Kingdom Poets for making my day.

June Poem: When the Great Day Comes

The sense of something about to happen,
The sense of something looming, eminent, soon-coming.
You walk around with your brights full on;
you're waiting, expectant,
a little fearful.

"In the fullness of time," the old ones used to say,
and at last you think you know what they mean.
But perhaps they didn't understand
that the fullness is now, here,

and what is about to happen
is going to stop clocks, reverse spins,
and cause new stars to burst forth in the firmament.

Is it such foolishness to live this way?
Nothing as we know it will remain as we know it
when the Great Day comes.

"And what I say to you I say to all:
Stay awake."

April Bonus Poem: I Will Build My Cottage

April is National Poetry Month (silly concept, actually) and I happen to have been writing a lot of them lately (for me). I think of poetry as speech that is skewed toward the numinous, making compromises with sense in order to draw up something unexpected and until then hidden. With a definition like that, you can write prose poetry, you can play with formalities any way you like.

I love poetry but do not read much of it any more. What I love is that people write poems, and hardly know themselves what for. It will always be a minority report, misfit ruminations. In the case of my own poems, I think of them as rudimentary observations. Very simple, very tonal and moody. Certainly not deep.

Anyway, a couple of mornings back while jogging I passed a purple and orange house with lobster traps stacked in the side yard, and I thought, "I'd like to build a little cottage in the back of that house," and knew then that I had a poem in mind. It recalls an old poem by William Butler Yeats, Lake Isle of Innisfree. That one begins:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I knew immediately that the poem gestating in me as I ran would be a kind of Lake Isle poem, so, well, I jogged home and wrote it. I'm calling it, I Will Build My Cottage.

I will build my cottage
in the back yard of the purple and orange house
on the pebble road to the beach, the one
with the lobster traps stacked
against the green fence,

under the old willow,
and it will be made of sea wrack
and sea foam, and painted the color of islands,
and flash in the light like a gull’s wing
in the morning,

and there will I wile my time,
lost to the world of plans and contingencies,
carefully sculpting my stories,
becoming a legend.

April Poem: Gulls in the Wind

Who of us knows the weather
like the gull knows it, from high above
or deep within, how he knows, how he knows
and understands, how he soars,
hovers, dives, according to
the weather’s plan.

And how, sometimes, he casts down
his single cry, which rides
on invisible streams
to the ears

of height-fearing crawlers,
here below.

Warning: Prose Poetry Ahead

A Monday in April

Everything looks, feels, particularly dramatic this morning. I don’t know what it is, but it’s as if this was the Monday that changed the world forever. Something about the sky. Something about the shadow of the house on the neighbor’s stockade fence. Something about the sound of the wind in the still leafless trees. What’s going on here? What’s happening? I hear a dog barking. I hear the pat-pat-pat of a jogger going by. I hear the single cry of a gull, up in the wind, and then a flurry of remarks from a nearby crow. Is this the Monday that changes everything? Is this the moment before the earthquake, or is a star exploding somewhere far away, or is your brother thinking of calling you with some deeply consequential news? On this day, I will write in my journal, everything changed. On this day, the sky opened. On this day, light shone in the dark. It was Monday, and the world was new.

Poem for a Good Friday

Did the hammer fall
from the hands of the man
who drove the bolts home
in the hands of the One
who cried when He died
and into the hands
of the Father had flown?

It ought to be known.
Did the steel-hard hands
of the nail-driving man
release their hard hold,
letting the hammer go?

And did the hammer-man cry
when the Man who had died
in the sixth-hour dark,
having finished His work,
cried, "Father forgive,
though I die let them live"?

Did the hammer fall?
And did the man cry?

Random Saturday

Ah, Saturday!

And a 3-day weekend, to boot!  [Patriot's Day weekend.  It's a Maine and Massachusetts thing.]

Having our eldest, Nate, back in the house for a few days has been nice. We'll be celebrating his birthday (which was yesterday) on Monday, since he's been out "gigging" in the remoter parts of Maine this weekend.  [That way, too, we can decouple his birthday from 3 negatives: tax day, the sinking of the Titanic, and the death of Abraham Lincoln.  Sheesh!]

I'm really taking to this ereader thingie like a fish to water. I downloaded a couple of free Bible translations (ESV, HCSB) from B&N, and an old book called Bible Holiness. So it's pretty obvious, I like free stuff.

I'm sitting in the library right now. A quiet place full of printed books. But most of the people here are plugging away on computers.

It's National Poetry Month, so they've got a special display of poetry books, from which I selected Mary Oliver's Owl and Other Fantasies. Mary Oliver is one of my three favorite poets, for sure.

The downside of etexts on these ereaders: illustrations (maps, for example) are almost useless. Also, at least in the book I'm reading just now, you get a lot of typos. A lot. It gives you the sense that the makers are slipshod, careless, but I suppose it's all to be blamed on the software or something.

Still, the traditionalist's nostalgia for printed text on paper seems overdone to me. I run into this a lot among library people. But isn't it the words themselves, not the technology by which they're reproduced, which transport us? And that's why we love books, mainly. The words, conveying as they do all kinds of excitement, deep thinking, emotion, and the sense of dramatic motion . . . simply getting caught up in a story . . . these things transport us. Right?

Here's the start of a Mary Oliver poem to leave you with. The poem is called, "Herons in Winter in a Frozen Marsh."

All winter

two blue herons

hunkered in the frozen marsh,

like two columns of blue smoke. 

Song for Debi

She'd been through more hell
than most, I suppose.

Her faith was weak, and she leaned
on a lot of thin reeds.

The way she "coped" was with make-up, booze,
and right theology.

Many pastors tried to help, but one
was a vicious brute.

In the end, she received her visitors
propped in a bed in the kitchen
with the TV going, smokes
and whiskey at hand.

She'd say her husband couldn't wait
to get rid of her, and it seemed hard for her
to pretend she was just kidding.

Her husband would say no no that isn't true, my love,
then show you the pics of the house
he was planning to buy

after the funeral. Out in the country,
plenty of room, he'd say.

Spread your wings.

The March Poem

Getting late in the month, so it's time I wrote the March poem. I've been writing a poem per month for over a year now, and a couple of my readers seem to really enjoy the work (I'm grateful for them!). I began this monthly-poem series as a way to simply keep alive in myself a way of using words and images that I have always taken great pleasure in. But for me the poetic instinct needs to be fanned now and then, or the flame dies out. Pleasure, believe it or not, is a big part of why I do this!

Anyway, not feeling particularly inspired, I decided to let the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke fire up the receptors. This is almost a sure-fire way to prompt a poem. Just start with an image, or in this case a set of images, that someone else (in this case, Rilke) has used, and see where it takes you. Rilke, by the way, is one of my favorite poets, but he is strange and enigmatic and dream-like, so a poem inspired by Rilke will likely be the same.

The Rilke poem I used as my prompt was Annunciation (2). I think it's a very beautiful poem, very stirring. It's images stick with you. And this morning something about the feel of this poem reminded me of a few verses in the 12th chapter of Ecclesiastes (especially verse 6). So I put together some things from Rilke, and a little bit from Ecclesiastes, shook them all together, spread them on the table and let the light glint off them in new ways. That's how poems often work for me. The words are not intended to "mean" in the common sense, but maybe to glint with light from levels deeper than words can go.

Anyway,here it is. I guess I'll call it "A Love Story: After Rilke"

1.

I was the ear your song
was seeking, and I was the gate
you entered secretly.

Mine were the leaves
your breezes stirred, and yours
was the dream my tossing sleep disturbed.

2.

I stood on the ramparts and listened for
your fractal music.

I opened all my windows
to your incandescent rain.

3.

And now, the broken pitcher by the well
is mended,

and the wheel once shattered turns again,
as it was long intended.

4.

When the leaves are stirred,
the dreamer wakes,

and when the dreamer wakes
the unheard music sings
in his sleeping ears.

The Baptizer

1.

You come from the margins, that hazy place where the known world fades into the unknown, where just to live is to exclude the comfortable, to accept without dismay the de-exalted self. Even your food is hard to come by. You fully expect to decrease, to fall behind, to become nothing. You go about shouting, "Turn! Turn!" You have nothing to lose.

2.

You come from the margins. The center seems strange to you, so full of itself, as if everything else needed its example to aspire to. It is crowded with people pretending to be necessary, pretending to do essential things. You, of all people, cannot be fooled. You shout, "Turn! Turn!" It is what the margin says to the center, always, and it is always dangerous.

3.

You come from the margins, from the fringes of the familiar, where absolutely nothing has been shaped for the task of creating the illusion of ease, and where all things crumble to dust except that which cannot crumble. So, you have developed the capacity to recognize unshakable things. Therefore, you will always be the frightening stranger, the fascinating fool, wrapped in animal skins and smelling of sand and sweat and shouting, "Turn! Turn!"

4.

You come from the margins. Like those wanderers from the east who knew when they saw the newborn in the cattle stall in the dusty nondescript village under its peculiar star that this was the King they sought, like them you will know, you will recognize your kin, the One who cannot be shaken. Everything changes now. Everything. "Turn!"

Conversations with Men: A Summary

One man speaks of his exploits on a motorcycle.
Another man of how he told his boss just where to get off.
One man says when he was young he could run like the wind, he could really fly,
and another tells of a big storm, long ago, and he was far from home.

One man speaks of a woman who turned on him for no reason,
and another of a woman who loved him, but he didn't love her back.
One man speaks of all the drugs he used to take, back in the day,
and another of how he heard the voice of God in his heart.

And then there's all the men who say,

if only my father had been there for me,
if only I had (or hadn't) placed that bet,
if only my teachers hadn't conspired against me,
if only I had been sober,
if only my mother had been kinder,
if only my wife had been happy with what she had,
if only I could have told here how I feel,
instead of saying what I said, or saying it differently,

or if I hadn't lied,
or if I hadn't trusted the wrong people,
or if I had just kept my mouth shut,
or if all my hopes hadn't shattered on the rocks of circumstance.

And then there are those who remember how something felt:

how it felt like a dream,
or it felt like a kick in the gut,
or it felt like flying,
or it felt like sex.

And they say,

back when I was in the Navy,
back when I was slim,
back when I triumphed over all my foes,
back when I fought for a righteous cause,
back when I had all the girls chasing after me,
back when I was young,

way back when.

The Story of Fire

Theirs was the story of fire,
day by day, that inexplicable light
descending in long dramatic arcs--
trajectories of gold--

while night by night
their flickering hearths
flashed forth in characters of flame
a nimble pantomime.

What teller maker singer builder
filled the sprawling stage of space
with these blazing soliloquies,
His combustible voice

booming from the shadowy balcony--
singing His story home.

The Gardener

These poems almost always come to me as I walk, or are inspired by something I've seen while out walking. In this case, both. Sometime last year, walking past an assisted living facility, I saw the man described in this poem. Then, just this morning, he came back to my thoughts complete with a story to tell, so I tell it here.

There is this man
who lives in the assisted
living facility, the one
on State Street, across from
the closed up church
with the no trespassing sign
on the big wooden doors
and the pigeons settled
and cooing in the loft
of the bell-less steeple,

and this man, this man
once kept a garden,
this man and his wife,
in their back yard,
the most beautiful
garden, with big red
tomatoes to die for,
snap peas and green peppers,
lettuce and kale and parsley,
and sweet strawberries
like red jewels,

and this man’s wife
through all the years
would bring him lemonade
and she’d call him dear
as he weeded on his hands
and knees, down among
the string beans,

as he built soil,
as he dug and hauled
and pruned and grafted,
as he whistled, as he hummed,
as he strode from tool shed
to garden to tool shed
again, again, again,
from season to season,
from year to year,

and she’d say--he
would always remember
her saying--this will be
a salad for the ages.

He never dreamed
of a world without her,
or a world without
a garden to tend
and make prosper.

Sometimes, he palms
the butter knife from
the breakfast commons,
and drops it in his pocket,

and later can be found
out on the treeless plaza
among the benches and
the pigeons, down
on his hands and knees again,
scratching up the little weeds
that grow between the bricks.

And on his face you’ll see
anger and perseverance and shame,
for they have taken his tools,
his tools are gone, and they
will come for him soon
he knows, they will come
for him, though his work
is not yet done.

3 poems (2nd edition)

It's a longish post, all of which is more than worth your time, but the main reason I'm linking is the poem by William Stafford. The Thoreau quote is awesome too. Oh heck, be sure you read the whole dang thing, and thanks to Nance Marie for tipping me to this one.

Barry MacSweeny's No Such Thing. Read it a few times. It's worth it.

And a little beauty by L. E. Leone, found at the wonderful blog, Robert Frost's Banjo.

And speaking of Robert Frost, it was he who said that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." I'll buy that.

3 Poems

You may have noticed, you who pay attention to the poetry posts here at WF, that my favored poetry prompt is bird watching. Almost all of my poems feature birds. That's why I was attracted to this lovely example of bird-inspired poetry By Simmons Buntin. The language here flows in a birdsong-like torrent. It's really outstanding, and you'd better read it!

John Hayes' January Morning is really, really wonderful. Really. I want to write something half that beautiful someday.

And a haiku from Wendell Berry. It's amazing how such a small form cab carry so much weight. A well-made haiku is a tiny diamond, and this one is particularly fine.

A Poem Must Always Begin with the Facts

I saw a crow
with a cigarette butt
dangling from the side of his glossy beak,
Bogie style.

I said,
Humphrey, my God,
how long has it been?
It seems like a thousand years,
since Rick's place,
Casablanca,
all that.

And I said,
did you ever, you know,
find her again?
The one.

And the crow said,
beat it kid, scram, take a powder,
you're blowin' my cover.

The cigarette bobbed as he spoke,
but remained in place.
And he said,

Go on, make like a tree
and leave.