Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for December, 2023

Foreshadowing

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2023| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by
Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]
 . 
For the Children
 . 
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up as we all
go down.
 . 
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
 . 
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
 . 
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
 . 
Gary Snyder
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.
 . 
Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.
 . 
Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.
 . 
Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?
 . 
Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
notes for the early journey
+++ for j.v.k.
 . 
somewhere along the way you will need to lean
over a bluff’s edge   drop you shoes and keep moving   use
the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide   if a
rainbow confuses you   which end   go the third
way   on the mountain you’ll remember   climb on
up to where the aspens tremble   you will be alone   these
high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags   but for you
 . 
there’s nothing to worry about   breathe   sniff the air like
a bloodhound and head the opposite way   find the
place where the land dissolves into sand   keep walking   when
that sand becomes sea   speak a bridge into being
I know you can do it   your father’s son ain’t
heard of can’t   follow the song   don’t stop until you’re south
of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine   I never
once stumbled on such a place   hard to say if a brown child
is the last four hundred years has had such
a luscious dream   day or night   but this is your mother’s
lullaby   I know she meant you to sleep sweet
 . 
Evie Shockley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.
 . 
This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words,  but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.
 . 
And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!
 . 
❦
 . 
More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order,  HERE
 . 
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What Kind of Times Are These
 . 
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
 . 
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
+++ be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
 . 
I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
 . 
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
 . 
Adrienne Rich
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
 . 

Read Full Post »

Immanence

Posted in Christian themes, family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 22, 2023| 15 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Stephen Dunn]
 . 
Returning from an Artist’s Studio
 . 
Late at night in my one life
I see fireflies scintillating a field
and a fullish moon up there working
on its reputation, which I thought
was secure. And though I’m not one
to stop my car for beauty
I stop, get out, begin to understand
how the first stories winked
of another world. It’s as if
I’m witness to some quiet carnival
of the gods, or the unrisen dead
speaking in code.
 . 
Insects are eating each other. Stunned
beyond fear, mice are being given
their first and last flights,
talons holding them dear.
The fox has found a warren.
Everything I can’t see
is at least as real as what I can.
If I stand here long enough
I’ll hear a bark and a squeal.
 . 
The artist had an eye for exaggerated sunsets
splashed with rain, odd collisions
of roots, animals, seeds.
I didn’t like a thing I saw,
so much effort to be strange.
The moon is hanging from a leafy branch.
The fireflies are libidinous
and will not be denied.
 . 
Stephen Dunn
from Different Hours, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, NY. © 2000
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Its birthday is three days from now: Monday, December 25. It will be two years old. Call it, perhaps, a mote which from where we stand is invisible. Or better, call it an eye, one that sees into almost everything. Best of all, in this season of visionaries who seek truth and meaning as they follow stars, call this a new-born star. There it glints, locked in thrall of its own near infinitely larger star, to which it turns its back and pays no attention at all.
 . 
The James Webb Space Telescope launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on December 25, 2021. Within a few weeks it maneuvered into its orbit around the Sun, 1.5 million km from Earth, and unfolded its mirror of bright hexagons, gold-plated beryllium, the ommatidia of its compound eye. It sees the light of galaxies emitted 13.1 billion years in the past (13.1 billion light-years distant). It is already shattering theories about the earliest times of our universe’s creation. Primordial black holes, early giant stars, galaxy clusters – is this inconceivable vastness really the Universe of which our own little planet is the center?
 . 
We choose December 25 to celebrate the birthday of a human being who represents God’s tangible presence here on earth. Immanuel, God-with-us. Jesus, in halo orbit around the Lagrange point of God’s gravitational unity – in the phraseology of Process Theology, “perfectly synchronized to God at all moments of life”; “fully and in every way responsive to God’s call.” This is how I yearn to experience my God – fully present in the wild aster seeds I gathered and sowed yesterday, and equally present throughout a universe spanning some 10*30 cubic light years. If the JWST reveals more wonders and marvels than I could ever dream, do I deny the nature of reality or shall I enlarge my notion of God?
 . 
Here’s my mission this Christmas season. First, to shift myself off center. As much as I’m able, to remember that the Universe does not really revolve around me; to open myself to the persuasive power of love pushing me to its Lagrange point. Second, to unfold my compound eye. To look out as far as it takes, and as deep within, to discover God in constant process of moving and becoming. And at the same time to discover what it is that I am called to become.
 . 
 , 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Before the Sky Darkens
 . 
Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy – maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to. At least then
there might be moments of vanishing beauty
before the sky darkens,
and the expectation of happiness
would hardly exist
and therefore might be possible.
 . 
More and more you learn to live
with the unacceptable.
You sense the ever-hidden God
retreating even farther,
terrified or embarrassed.
You might as well be a clown,
big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.
 . 
That’s how you feel, say, on a Tuesday.
Then out of the daily wreckage
comes an invitation
with your name on it. Or more likely,
that best girl of yours offers you,
once again, a small local kindness.
 . 
You open your windows to good air
blowing in from who knows where,
which you gulp and deeply inhale
as if you have a death sentence. You have.
All your life, it seems, you’ve been appealing it.
Night sweats and useless strategem. Reprieves.
 . 
Stephen Dunn
from Different Hours, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, NY. © 2000
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
So many bookcases. In this house are many mansions. A few days ago, on one of the less accessible shelves, I noticed a book I hadn’t opened in years. I couldn’t recall the specifics of the poems it contains but just looking at its cover recalled emotions from when I last read it: warmth, questioning, surprise, discovery, assurance that this process of living is valid, valuable, and even in its fearfulness to be cherished. Then I opened Stephen Dunn’s Different Hours and found this:
 . 
 . 
Twenty-three Christmases ago. I wonder how my parents selected this particular book for me? It had just been published but I don’t imagine it greeting folks boisterously as they entered the door at Barnes & Noble. Did Mom and Dad realize the book would win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry? As well as I can recall, the only other book of poetry they every bought me was Maya Angelou. And then there’s the inscription, from “Dad and Mom,” although this is certainly my mother’s handwriting, still elegant and strong at the beginning of the century.
 . 
All these questions. In spite of them, I see that it was the perfect book for me then and that this is the perfect week to rediscover it. Stephen Dunn explores love, its foolishness and its bedrock. He explores death, of those people and things we love and our own racing toward us. And within the “different hours” of doubt and questioning, of emptiness and aimlessness, he hints at hope and wonder within this elusive reality we occupy.
 . 
After Christmas, as new books heap themselves on my desk, I’ll return this one to its safe berth. Whenever I next happen to chance upon it, I know it will again be the perfect time.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Metaphysicians of South Jersey
 . 
Because in large cities the famous truths
already had been plumbed and debated,
the metaphysicians of South Jersey lowered
their gaze, just tried to be themselves.
They’d gather at coffee shops in Vineland
and deserted shacks deep in the Pine Barrens.
Nothing they came up with mattered
so they were free to be eclectic, and as odd
as getting to the heart of things demanded.
They walked undisguised on the boardwalk.
At the Hamilton Mall they blended
with the bargain-hunters and the feckless.
Almost everything amazed them,
the last hour of a county fair,
blueberry fields covered with mist.
They sought the approximate weight of sadness,
its measure and coloration. But they liked
a good ball game too, well pitched, lots of zeroes
on the scoreboard. At night when they lay down,
exhausted and enthralled, their spouses knew
it was too soon to ask any hard questions.
Come breakfast, as always, the metaphysicians
would begin to list the many small things
they’d observed and thought, unable to stop talking
about this place and what a world it was.
 . 
Stephen Dunn
from Different Hours, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, NY. © 2000
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The James Webb Space Telescope is located near (in a “halo orbit” that keeps it in the vicinity of) the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange Point. A Lagrange Point is an area of gravitational equilibrium in relationship to two massive bodies: Sun-Earth, Earth-Moon, etc. Positioning JWST in this way requires less energy to maintain and allows a longer functional lifespan.
 . 
More about the James Webb Space Telescope, and some literally awesome photographs, HERE
 . 
More about Process Theology, which states that each instant of Being is ever in the process of Becoming, HERE
 . 
Stephen Dunn (1939-2021) as described by The Poetry Foundation: Dunn’s poetry reflects the social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical territory of the American middle class; his intelligent, lyrical poems narrate the regular episodes of an everyman speaker’s growth, both as an individual and as part of a married—and later divorced—couple. His poetry is concerned with the anxieties, fears, joys, and problems of how to coexist in the world with all those who are part of our daily lives.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

Read Full Post »

Speaking in Tongues

Posted in Imagery, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on December 15, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 4 poems by Kim Hayes]
 . 
Winter Wind and Chimes
 . 
All this winter, the wind has moaned,
its deep modal harmonies
rolling up the valley’s throat
like a procession of monks, chanting.
And at the darkened door,
they strike the chimes –
cowled visitors
shifting restlessly, foot to foot,
on the icy steps.
 . 
All this winter, like metronomes,
two ghostly porch chairs
have, in unison, rocked a rhythm
for strange sulfurous chords;
invented, frenzied arpeggios;
or just one strident not repeated,
brassy as a storefront bell –
wind and chimes tangled in
an endless ensemble.
 . 
All this winter, she has listened,
even going out once to tie a string
around one pitchless chime,
hoping to set it better in tune.
But the wind worried loose the knot
and snatched it off.
Come spring, she thought,
I will take down these chimes.
 . 
All this winter, the wind has composed
for chimes and chairs and a woman
who will, on second thought,
let the wind have its way,
leave the chimes alone
to be played by softer breezes
on a warm summer day.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Technical challenge, that’s one of the reasons I love choral singing. Will I even be able to learn this tenor part with its oddball intervals and syncopation? Can I project a clear open tone all the way up to that G sharp, maybe the A? Can I keep balance & rhythm and avoid falling off the stage when the time signature flips from 6/8 to 2/2? Can I listen so perfectly to this alto standing next to me that our voices may create something beyond the sum of us two?
 . 
This last challenge transcends technical. In an ensemble, the emphasis is not on the individual but the communal voice. Perhaps blend and modulation are learned skills, but the birth of art is in the give and take, the sharing, the group coming together as a single organism. What a fine metaphor for poetry. Writer and reader are not performer and audience. The poet can learn craft, devise image and simile, tinker with language and rhythm, but all the poem’s music is flat until the reader breathes it in and the lines begin to sing in her heart.
 . 
This is the spark both music and poetry yearn to ignite: beyond technical and communal, the beauty and truth which burn into us and set us afire. Several times in this season of many rehearsals and concerts I have felt a moment’s elevation to that mysterious plateau. In a blink, the magic of notes, harmonies, lyrical language swell my heart until I can’t read the score for my tears. I couldn’t say the epiphany arises from the instruments, from the lines of verse, from the voices surrounding me – it takes life from all of these together. The music communicates its message directly to the heart.
 . 
The choir releases its music into the air. The poet surrenders her lines to the universe. A new language is revealed. A new voice speaks from which some ear, some mind may discover some new life never before imagined. Our spirit breathes in these vaporous things and is exalted.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Grandmothers
 . 
Thanksgiving morning,
before the sun, I wait
in the dark kitchen
for the gentle ghosts
of my grandmothers.
 . 
I welcome them
as I heat the oven,
feel them gathering,
like the warm aromas
of brown sugar and
cinnamon, to watch me
as I baste and bake.
 . 
In the drifting dust of sifted flour,
their hands guide mine:
a pinch more of this or
a little salt in the broth or
give that a stir before it sticks.
 . 
A I set the table, they lean in,
sighing, fingers smoothing,
lingering over each fine stitch
in the embroidered
tablecloth, handed down,
daughter to daughter;
they smile as I take out
the old rose-patterned
wedding china.
 . 
And so, they keep me company,
chat, chuckle and chide
all morning long as they
share my kitchen,
the grandmothers who,
by being who there were,
make me who I am.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
. . . as long as she kept [her words] to herself, they were one language. Her language. It was only when she gave them up, like babies for adoption, that they slipped from her grasp and became subject to interpretation. . . . No translation was the same. No understanding was universal. The language of her words unfolded into many languages, many understandings, as if she spoke in tongues.
 . 
From the Author’s Note in As If She Spoke in Tongues by Kim Hayes, this is a mysterious and provoking expression of the potential and power of words. Innocent-sounding words spoken with heat might spark a conflagration. Words fumbling for meaning may yet reach their mark and forge strong bonds. Even we writers with the opportunity to pause and ponder, we who strive to select from all options the perfect words, can never know how they will be received. From this mystery rises poetry’s power to connect.
 . 
The poems in Kim’s collection connect in all these mysterious ways. Her poems span generations and geographies. The speaker may be obvious and defined or intentionally obscure, thereby becoming universal. We humans are not, thank all stars, telepathic. Therefore from the writer’s images and memories we must create our own imagery and resurrect our own memories. And doesn’t this surprising connection we discover within ourselves also fire a feeling of connection to the writer?
 . 
We cast our words into the breeze like feathered seeds and cannot know what will bloom. As in this line from Adrienne Rich, But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know. And these lines from Poems for Sale by Kim Hayes: a poem like a trick of the eye, / peripheral flicker – / what might or might not be, / glimpsed and gone; // I have for you today . . .
 . 
[Order As If She Spoke in Tongues   HERE  ]
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Rocks and Hard Places
 . 
Barefoot, I walk
on a dream road
paved with all your
rocks and hard places,
misery and discontent.
“I only had to bury him once,” you said.
“It’s the god-damned memories that won’t
stay in the ground.”
 . 
Sharp-honed memories like flint shards,
chiseled by every hard place
you ever knew ( and there were plenty),
stabbing themselves upward to the surface,
resurrected and designed to cut deep.
 . 
My feet are bleeding now.
 . 
But tonight, I still plan to dance
with your unearthed undead,
twirling on yet another hard place,
by bloody footprints leaving
gritty, blushing rosettes,
 . 
while you wait somewhere in the dark,
another rock in your hand.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Heart of Stone
 . 
Running a thumb over
the worn and rounded edges
of this cold, found rock,
I try to think
of strength.
 . 
This worry stone,
gemstone,
whetstone,
pocked and veined
with sparks
of fool’s gold, cools
 . 
as I hold it,
no heart to part
with it today, although
I have often thought of
giving it away, until
 . 
feeling the pull of it,
charged, magnetic,
I always come home,
press my heart of stone
into the warm palm of
your open hand.
 . 
Kim Hayes
from As If She Spoke in Tongues, Grateful Steps Foundation, Asheville, NC; © 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_1948
 . 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »