February – Not Everywhere

Such days, when trees run downwind,
their arms stretched before them.

Such days, when the sun’s in a drawer
and the drawer is locked.

When the meadow is dead, is a carpet
thin and shabby, with no pattern

and at bus stops people retract into collars
their faces like fists.

- And when, in a firelit room, a mother looks
at her four seasons, her little boy,

in the centre of everything, with still pools
of shadows and a fire throwing flowers.

Norman MacCaig

*

Gigha

That firewood pale with salt and burning green
Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning
Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay.

W.S. Graham

*

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

— Rachel Contreni Flynn

from The Gladdest Thing

In my WST 501 class this week we have been discussing the slave history of France and Canada. The following poem was written in response to Claire de Duras’ Ourika.

À la recherche de la vérité

Vous qui êtes tombé
avec les dernières feuilles,
je vous parle
dans cette langue emprunté.

Vous avez défraîchi
de ce que vous avez caché-
qu’est ce que vous avez ?
Vous dit simplement
ma position et ma couleur -
est-ce que c’est vrais ?

Confiez-moi votre secret!
Les autres dit c’est l’amour non récompensé,
l’ évasion, ou la disparition lente,
mais moi je pense
que c’est la résistance silencieuse.

Bienvenue, Pierre !

His pea coat button
nose shocked me cold
into my metamorphosis
to a walking, toy shopping
high-voiced-baby-talking
poop scooper.

I had originally planed on writing about our former home, Estabrooke in a fiction class I took last semester (what else is the Brooke but a fiction?), but while writing my thesis I could not devote the time to it. However, from this I began to realize that perhaps the Brooke is not a fiction, but a poem. I don’t often write in form, but the idea of writing an elegy for an inanimate object (was it?) seemed intriguing. Following, is the first poem about the Brooke, in true Brooke fashion beginning with the end.

ON THE CLOSING OF ESTABROOKE

I.

Honorably built sanctuary for women,
Ma Estabrooke would cry to see her
smoke filled carpets and moldered walls,
the glass elevators, her pride now barred,
her windows cracked and brick face marred.

No feet dance in the ballroom,
warm home of Spring Flings.
The slate pool table has been sold,
the lights all turned off and cues removed.
All 162 doors are closed, their locks tightly in place.
The clanging radiators have been silenced.
No clammy bodies sleep on the gritty floor.
The evidence of weekend drunks,
exams and poetry no longer
surrounds the welcome bench.

II.

You housed our debauchery
and heartbreaks with open doors,
what strange magic! You bounded us,
Mother of we tired passions, and held fast
until each was strong enough
to lock the door fast behind
and smoke one last cigarette, shivering.

III.

Your basement will again
be the site of after parties,
laughter will spill out of
the windows and elevators.
Cards will be shuffled
and lipsticked lips will whisper
secrets over wine glasses
of a new Hellion crew.

As many probably have, once I began studying poetry seriously, I abandoned the haiku as an amateurish form taught to grade schoolers. However, while planning a workshop for teens with a writer friend the time constraints made us start thinking of short forms we could give the students for in class exercises. The six word story was a natural choice for fiction, but what about poetry? Sonnets and other such forms, as well as imitating other writers would take a significant amount of time to do well and be useful-more time than we would have. My friend suggested the haiku as a possibility. While I was hesitant, I began creating a worksheet on the form. Much to my surprise, examples of the 5-7-5 form I had been taught as a child were almost impossible to find online, taken over by 3-5-3 and countless other English variations. This sparked a new interest for me in haiku and its related forms. Might there be something I was missing about haiku, a hidden value in that small form’s ability to communicate an image or insight into human nature in such a clear, compact form? Perhaps….

Tiny wings flutter
red sugar addiction fed
the sweet buzz after

THE POET

Conceals herself in the powdery pages piled on your nightstand. Here you cannot coerce her to elucidate the trysts you are not over. These personal problems of the quotidian, such feelings, do not interest her. It is to do her bidding that this relationship exists, after all. Get up!

Working down on the coast has been inspiring me to write about the ocean again, something I haven’t done since I began working on Le Pays de Nulle Part. Below, the most recent fruit of this inspiration:

SEA WIFE

The smell of the seaman
just after the haul,
the clam diggers hands
cut and grainy,
the taste of fog
and salt on their lips-
clams and haddock cooking
on the beach fire at dusk.
These men, this ocean
forever home.

I just finished finalizing the PDF file for Albatross #20 and will be sending it along to the printer.  I like to print 100 copies so that there are some in print out there in the world.  I guess I’m still stuck in the age of print literacy.  But I’ve seen too many poetry websites (and too many of my published poems) disappear when the website becomes a dead link.  This way, the poets, a handful of subscribers, and a few university libraries that archive small press poetry all have a hard copy.  This way, I’ll feel like I’ve left something behind in the world, something of value, something real.

In the process of laying out the journals, I type the entire poem in and then proofread it a number of times, so I come to know the poems quite intimately.  I always have a few that are my favorites.  I posted one by Andy Roberts titled “Standoff” in my last post.   It’s not very profound; it’s a simple poem, with a simple enough message, but I chuckle every time I read the ending, and that’s been a good 10-12 times of late.  Every time I read it I have the same response, so I thought I’d write about it here.

The poem describes an encounter that the persona has with a pair of Canadian geese, who loudly defend their nest, which happens to be on the well-worn path s/he (we’ll call him or her “the poet” from here on out) has been walking regularly for 30 years.  After introducing this scene, Roberts concludes:

I will not win this argument
against pink hissing tongues.
I will not win this argument,
not in a million years.

I love this.  It’s so simple but so true.  We are at present losing the argument with nature, and it will only get worse before it gets better.

This poem could easily have appeared in Billy Collins “Poetry 180” anthologies.  In the introduction to the first one, Collins writes,

The idea behind this printed collection. . . was to assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically “get” on first hearing–poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate.

Collins developed these anthologies to try to reconnect poetry to high school students who too often experience poetry as a painful process of reading dense and opaque writing that doesn’t seem to make much sense.  As Collins demonstrates–not only in these anthologies but in his own poetry as well–this does not have to be the case.

Poetry–like many forms of art–is an act of communication, and Andy Roberts’ poem does a good job of doing just that.

STANDOFF by Andy Roberts

I’ve been walking this trail thirty years
but today I have to change course
because a pair of Canadian geese
have built a nest on the left.
The male hisses and rushes at me.
I stand my ground but he won’t give up.
This is life and death to them,
and the pair are screaming their outrage,
defending the nest.
It becomes clear
I will not win this argument
against pink hissing tongues.
I will not win this argument,
not in a million years.

I attended Tom Sexton’s reading in Lowell MA the other day.  He was visiting town for his high school reunion.  I made sure to attend because we published Tom way back in 1987, in our third issue.  Tom agreed to let me republish the poem from that issue here:

ON THE NENANA RIVER

No path led from the cabin
to a clearing
or to an abandoned garden.

Inside a sour smell,
slivers of bone, a shrew’s skull,
bits of fur.

On the sill of the single window
placed to catch the light
a mason jar of water from the glacial river,

above the silt
a bud of light as epitaph:
I made this water pure and then departed.

Sexton has done well for himself since then.  His third book of poetry was published by Salmon Poetry, and the book I bought at the reading, titled A Clock With No Hands (Adastra Press, 2007), features his hometown Lowell.  Many in attendance at the reading recognized characters and places from the Lowell of his childhood.  I was happy that he inscribed the book as follows:  “For Richard:  Who was there for me at the beginning.”  I’m hoping that he sends two unpublished poems that he read at the reading for ALBATROSS #20: they were beautiful!

I just posted the winner of the 2008 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest:  William Keener’s Gold Leaf on Granite.  The poem I chose as the example for the announcement page is one titled “Take This Page,” a poem that embodies the awareness of energy flow, of “emergy” (embodied energy), that my concept of energonomics (the main focus of another blog of mine, which this post echoes for the most part) tries to express.  I will post the poem in its entirety:

Take This Page

Look past
the distraction of words,
our endless procession
of letters.

In the presence of white,
touch the page itself,
this rectangle,
this empty room,

a place for meditation,
if we ignore
the black scuff marks
on its ivory floor.

Let natural light
reflect the textures
of felted fibers,
cotton and flax,

egg shell, bread dough,
wool and bone,
the pressed shirt,
the linen shroud,

smooth, uncreased,
a sheet of paper deep
as any world we enter
through a book.

With the whorls
of our fingertips
we can read beneath
the watermarks,

between the laid lines,
faint patterns
left by the mesh
where pale pulp dried,

the cellulose in its slurry,
the wood chips, sawdust,
splinters, bark,
the cambium, the core

of a tree giving ground,
a legion of trees, a forest,
the billion leaves
they gird on every year,

their green machinery,
the sugars in the sap,
oxygen, carbon, lignin,
every molecule made

with heat, the photons
charging through space
from the flares of our sun,
its fiery hydrogen

burned into this room,
written into this page,
this book,
this volume of light.

This is a powerful poem for many reasons.  I especially like the syntactic build-up at the end of the poem:  you can feel the energy building as you are swept along by the syntax, as the poet leads us from the page that we are reading to the pulp of the page and through it to the very photons flowing from the sun that made possible the life of the tree which we have translated into “this book/this volume of light.”  The poem is wonderful insofar as it introduces and embodies all of these complex scientific concepts without burdening the reader with jargon or complicated language.  It brings us to an awareness of our basis in energy–it reminds us that we are beings of energy, that all, ultimately, is energy.

Congratulations to William Keener for having the clarity of mind and simplicity of insight to recognize and capture these truths in a truly beautiful way.

WINTER WOODS by Michael S. Lewis-Beck

Breath cold, full moon behind a gray veil,
the tree tops map the moon.

Three pairs of socks, through my boots
my toes are still cold.

Three hours of hard wood in the Vermont casting
lifts the cabin from 13 to 38.

Vegetable soup and a bottle of Gigondas,
read Frost by bed candle.

Sleep to wind in high trees.

6

“Hush” was featured today as the Daily Poem on Poetry Friends. To read “Hush”, visit:

http://poetryfriends.blogspot.com/2008/06/poem-by-nicole-nicholson.html

-Nicole

WHALES AT SUNSET by Eric Paul Shaffer

At sunset, we sit on sand and watch whales leap from the sea.
The dying sun sets their breath aflame. The plumes gleam
for a moment before becoming a wind that blows ashore,
casting sand in our eyes. Kaho’olawe marks the horizon.

Behind us, Haleakala rises like a wave surging to shore.
On sand surely the only testament of time, we linger over legends
as light wanes. Centuries ago, the sea seethed
with the play of whales. Now, the ocean blackens with night.

Never has a day felt more final, and darkness comes
faster than light fades. As the sun sinks, shadow swells.
Every wave scales the shore
with the same determined hiss of triumph, loses strength,

and wanders back as the sea recalls the tide. Venus burns,
then dives after day. There is nothing
to distinguish this dusk from any other. Yet there is
an end in this evening for which I am not prepared.

The tourboats are returning, black against dark waves,
points of light pale, but piercing twilight, gathering shadows
as foil for their narrow glow.
Free of us, the whales seek peace in the night below night.

As they winter in these waters, we hunt them, gawking,
pointing and screaming with delight, from groaning boats
belching exhaust and dumping excrement
into the sea whales fill with song. I do nothing but watch.

I’m only human. I no longer wonder at myself and my kind
who kill and call killing a living. As surf sighs
under stars scattered on the island’s edge, I am resigned.
We are everywhere now. May night come swiftly.

May the whales never hate us as much as we love ourselves.
And by the shore of this restless black sea,
these blue stars, and the waning crescent yet to rise,
may we kill ourselves before we kill the last of them.

Yet who am I to abandon humanity, one truth about all of us
none of us can change? I am no more than any one of us,
no more right, no more wise, no more blind,
and my petty resignation is my own, a fate awful and just.

For athwart the stem at the whaleboat’s bow,
I would have held the harpoon myself,
and in the killing thrill of my kind, thrust the barbed iron
point deep into black and barnacled hide,

then crouched beneath peaked oars and gunwales,
full of fear and glee, while the struck whale ran
and flying line sang through the bounding craft
and plunged smoking into the sea.

I, too, would have cast the blood of kin on cold waves,
and seeking the heart, driven the long lance into lungs,
dyeing the sea with the hot, red rush,
darkening even the turquoise waters of paradise,

and after, I would have carved scenes of sailing ships
at sunset on their teeth and seasoned bones,
and written poetry in the warm golden light of oil
rendered from their sacred, slaughtered flesh.