This second poem in the collection was written, I think, with a place I went camping as a Boy Scout in mind. It is one of the group of poems I identified in the selection as 'Imagist'. After I submitted it, I went back at some point and cleaned it up a bit. There are a couple of lines I will remove today, but the biggest change is a gender change.At the time I wrote most of these poems, I was very much under the influence of feminist poets, especially Adrienne Rich. My previous reading of poetry had been eclectic to say the least, with William Carlos Williams being the second most influential. However, for some reason, I tended in these poems to identify the poet as female. Connecting with my anima? I don't know. But now it seems contrived. In the original, then, where it read 'her', I have replaced it with 'his'. I obviously was referring to myself when I imagined the plunge into the ever-moving stream. Photo found here.
Purling rivelette running downward Between pools , those icy keeps. Running downward , swirling over Stones made smooth and ledges Softened under your unceasing Presence. Snow water synthesizes purity of form and motion, swirls and Gurgles over sand and stone, But always running day and night Always headed downward.
Catch morning sunlight glitters, Drink midnight darkness, Absorb all the light into Your crystalline nature. Purified in icy clarity.
You suck the breath from swimmer's chest - Goose flesh shocked; Lace icy thongs around The swimmer's temples, And bring him gasping Through your surface. The mirrored clouds scatter From him skitter on the waves.
Without ceasing, china ribbon, You run down from these snow Mountains and barren forests - You run downward To the sea.
So, another brilliant afternoon in Maine, bruised gin martini at hand (as in "shaken not stirred"); David Sanborn on iTunes (blast form my past) and two movies to talk about. Both movies deserve a sequel, but to be honest, I am only looking forward to one.
Robin Hood? OK. Ever since Elizabeth, I have had a crush on that tomboy-ish Kate Blanchette. Put her in armor and I am there. And Russell Crowe is OK in my book (see Master and Commander and Gladiator), so in spite of the tepid reviews, I was prepared to enjoy Robin Hood and Hell, I did! What's not to love about medieval England? I have been to a Renaissance Faire or two, after all. I am down with the whole the Dark Ages weren't really that dark. And Ridley Scott is , after all Ridley Scott (Hello, on my top 40 movies of all time - the Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Kingdom of Heaven (which this movie most resembles), Gladiator). Great fighting scenes in that quick time/slow time way of Gladiator. Lot's of realism.
What nags me about Robin Hood is the obvious setting up of the sequel, the franchise, the bloody POC - let's get kids eating their lunches from our lunch boxes and sleeping in our tie-in sheets and thinking Jack Sparrow is cool- feel to the movie. A prequel indeed! The movie stuck me over and over again as introduction of characters and setting of foundations for the next movie. Take the character of the Sheriff of Nottingham, really important to this episode? Not so much. NEXT episode, you bet. But they had to introduce him now to set the table for the next movie. Friar Tuck? Same deal. The 'Lost Boys of the Hood', come on?, it just goes on and on. The only interesting part was King John - good guy? bad guy? Who can tell?
(Sidebar comment - Test for a villain? Shaved head. Sorry, Jon Luc Picard. You know if the guy shaves his head, he is, by default , the villain. True for both movies, by the way)
Will I go see the sequel (oh there is a sequel, make no mistake)? Probably, but like watching Pirates of the Caribbean or eating at a McDonald's, the experience will be unhealthy and boring, predictable in a word.
Some movies you can watch, enjoy and forget. Others stick with you. Robin Hood is the former. I haven't given it a thought. (OK maybe a fleeting thought about Lady Marian in her PJ's by the firelight, but give me a break.) District Nine is one of the latter. There are unanswered questions - What happened to the aliens to bring them here? Why didn't they use their superior technology? How could we have treated them the way we did? What would I do?
Both movies trade in archetypes and myths. And you would think for all the stagecraft, Robin Hood would come out as the winner, but Wikus van de Merw is Everyman called to be something higher and better than when he starts. (And he may just be the Prometheus of this myth in part 2.) Maybe Robin Hood suffers because it is historical - we know how the Welch, the Scots and especially the Irish will benefit from English democracy won from King John. And the zenophobia in District Nine has its analogue in Robin Hood, the French are little better than the 'Prawns'. Maybe it is precisely the modernity of District Nine that makes it compelling? It is, after all, as much about African politics and culture, black and white, as it is about aliens. There is just something that rings truer in District Nine, more compelling and more human to me - for good or ill.
While I was mowing the lawn after watching District Nine, I got to thinking about how we treat minorities throughout history. That led me to consider our own genocidal treatment of Native Americans (Google Seminoles, for one example of how they were hunted after expulsion from Florida.) What if there had been some devastating illness in the New World that decimated the European population instead of the other way around? What if Native Americans had gained a technological advantage over whites in the New World? (Maybe by way of contact with the Chinese or Arabs from Muslim Spain.) What if there was a nation of English whites along the eastern seaboard and a Spanish nation along the western seaboard, but the rest of the country belong to the native nations? Say from Tennessee to Colorado was in native nation hands? The farmlands of Ohio, the mines of the Rockies, the oil in the Gulf, all in native nation hands? How would that have changed the course of history?
So District Ten ('I will return in three years') could be a very interesting movie. Unpredictable. How will we fare? Independence Day all over again? Or something different? I am excited to think about what the next chapter of our relationship with the 'prawns' might be.
"Robin Hood: Outlaw of Nottingham"? I can guess. Marian is kidnapped; Robin must save her by infiltrating Nottingham; assisted by the lost boys of the hood who Little John makes into a fighting force; King John finally forced to sign the Magna Carta at the end.
Myths are always predictable: we all know the stories before we hear and see them presented. But which myth? What is the story we are watching? That what sometimes makes the narrative compelling.
This poem was originally published by the Maine Sunday Telegram. One of only three poems I have had published. It went through some revision from the version submitted in the Charles Street manuscript. Most notably, there was a couple of lines around Line 15 that referred to a hunting cat and rats in the hay mow. There was also some lines about swallow babies. I took them out since I felt they were trite and more importantly, it took away from the obvious punchline at the end. Oh, yeah, that's right. . . . that's why they are here. Protection? From whom or what? I cannot remember ever going into the barn and the cattle not being awake and alert; old instincts of the herd that would not go away. That was the genesis of this poem. what are they waiting for, if anything? I don't know about the 'dark wind', but I like the reinforcing power of alliteration. . . maybe more than rhyme. In the published version I changed 'cough' to 'breath' in line 10 to alliterate with betray, but 'calves' and 'cough' work just as well.
Summer has come to Maine. The day is warm and there is a breeze in the oaks outside my window. I am sitting in my oxblood room with a cold beer and a two inch folder of printed and handwritten pages on the desk beside me. My old friend Hal is playing "Thingamajig" from his CD, "People Wave" in the background. I am about to embark on a project that I have had for many months now; a project that was the genesis of this blog, to a certain extent. What a perfect day for it.
From the time I was about 15 years old, I wrote almost every day, certainly every week. This writing continued throughout college and into the first years of my marriage. Eventually the writing subsided to a trickle, but continues to this day, off and on. My preferred medium was the poem, as you can no doubt tell from this blog. I feel the poem is to writing what espresso is to coffee, a fast hit meant to capture the moment. I have great admiration for novelists and short story writers and would love to try my hand. Who knows? But historically, my output has been in verse. What I propose to do is share that with you.
To a certain extent, all writing is self-indulgent. And with this medium of blog self, anybody can 'publish' their thoughts. My goal is to share my writing in the hopes that it may inspire others who love language. My second goal is to preserve on the web my writing and hence my self-history. Honestly, the latter is more important to me than the former. Pretty early on, I realized that I was writing to understand myself more than to entertain or inform others. No poet ever writes for commercial reasons.
In January of 1981, I entered a poetry contest put on by Loyola College to be published in the Charles Street Press Folio Chapbook Series. I submitted 12 poems that were my best work. I paid a $1.00 reading fee. My poems were all rejected. (Later, I published one of them in the Portland Sunday Telegram when they still published poems every week.) Afterward, I wrote notes to myself outlining what I was trying to convey in the poems. This document was probably my high water mark, so it seems a good place to start. Finally, I will say that as I publish, I feel no guilt about editing as I see fit. This is not Coleridge's notebooks here, nobody is going to be scouring these post for insights into my poetic process. Seem fair?
Oh yeah, of course I had the merit badge. Life Scout.
Well, the boat got sold and is gone. A family with young children and a friend that knows fiberglass bought it for a song. Sad to see the empty space in the back lawn, but I am glad to have it go to someone who might actually get a few more years out of it. My history with the boat (it never really had a name), was mixed at best. Emica and I were remembering sailing on the Saco and I was knocked out of the boat and she sailed away for about 50 feet or so before the boat came around into the wind and broached. I can close my eyes and remember the watching that beautiful boat in water and thinking how sweetly it sailed in the same moment terrified that Emica was alone in the boat. Fortunately, Emica is a natural fish and just swam away when the boat went over. OF COURSE, we were both wearing PFDs, as all boaters big and small should. That and the storm on the lake are probably my worst memories, but I do have good ones of looking up at the sun flashing off the bowed sail and the gurgle of the water under the hull and thinking this was/is the life. Well it was fun while it lasted, I guess.
This poem by Richard Wilbur has nothing to do with boats or sailing, but it does have to do with beauty, so there. From Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, Volume II published by Macmillian. I carried this book with me in Spring of 2003 and remember reading it often in Machias while I was on site there for an implementation. I marked this poem then. I especially liked the second stanza.
THE BEAUTIFUL CHANGES
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous-blue Lucerne.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. (1947)
Well, I am out of work. . . . for a week anyway. Emica asked me yesterday what motivated me and I couldn't come up with a quick answer. My first response was , "Well, I just put one foot in front of the other." Work motivates me, I guess. One of the things that I like about work, but hate at the same time, is how it defines and organizes my day. I get up when I get up so that I can be at work at a certain time. My in-box, Outlook calendar, and boss's current preoccupation defines the hour by hour of my day. Then I come home and make dinner (lately) if Dawn isn't home, or wait for it if she is. The evening unravels until bedtime and I start all over again. One of the reasons I always feel a little uneasy when my vacation starts is that dis-juncture from my regular schedule. What am I going to do, now? Not that I don't have many things to do around the house, or distractions like movies or games, but I don't have any structure or organization or guiding principle, like I do when I am at work.
So the question is , does work therefore define who I am? Really. I don't really have any hobbies or things that I am passionate about like the Red Sox or a boat. My life is mostly defined by my work. OK good or bad, it is what it is. The nagging doubt I have now is not that work is bad, per se. It is, by letting work define who I am am I running toward myself or running away? I don't agree with those people who say work is evil and inauthentic. Be damned! When I look at my achievements a significant number (but not all, girls) are what I have achieved at work. The question is, if it were all taken away - my work, that is - what would be left of me? By allowing work to define the content of my life, am I avoiding the hard work of defining myself? Who am I? What does motivate me? What are my values? I think this is an area I need to explore.
Recently, we visited a financial advisor for the first time (not counting advice from parents, thank you very much.) We discovered that we were actually in pretty good shape for retirement, all things considered. Sure, there could be some catastrophes lurking just around the corner or windfalls that we don't know about. But all in all, we are in pretty good shape. That is due mostly to Dawn's fiscal prudence. And I think it is also due to values we honed from years of relative poverty. My co-workers are silent about my bringing my lunch with me every day, but they are incredulous when I bring something I bought at Marden's or Ocean State Job Lot, or amused that when I travel I will often pass up the client-paid dinner in a restaurant for a visit to the grocery store salad bar. I can't imagine we would every buy clothes at retail or electronics that weren't from a discount outlet. And , mostly, what we eat is meat that has been marked down or bread that is near expiration. It is just the way we are and how we have raised our children. We buy all our groceries and gas on credit cards - for the points. We have no debt, other than our mortgage. Sorry, let climb off my high horse.
The point is, that visit has got me thinking about what retirement would be like. I have some time, but I need to start thinking about my priorities . . start visualizing what a world without work might be like. Well at least until 12/21/2012 of course, after that . . . anybody's guess.
I chose this poem by searching the Internet I will admit, but I have read and own some Gary Snyder poetry. I know him from his interest in Eastern religions and I remember a moving poem in which he gives his son a bath, I think. Anyway, I immediately related to this poem since I can remember the same thought in the hayloft when I was a kid.
He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous Mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, ---The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--- "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done."
So, I injured my back this week doing the stupidest of things, reaching for a spoon I had dropped behind my desk. Pretty soon I couldn't stand or move without a nagging pull in my lower back. So I started on the Ibuprofen and graduated to Aleve and now I am wearing this stick-on heating pad that is only slightly less embarrassing than a Depend.
For all the pleasures I have given this body, I should have know it would betray me in the end; they always do. My secret pleasure at being the most healthy in the family is gone ("Hell, I never get sick."). Pride Goeth Before the Fall (or reach as the case may be). This morning, however, my anger at my body for betraying me turned to fear. Like the metaphor of the frog in the pot, you don't realize the water is getting slowly warmer and warmer until you are frog soup. That is, until some little thing like back pain reminds you that every day is a struggle against death. Pretty soon all sorts of bits and pieces will fail until finally the parts that don't work will outnumber the parts that do.
That is not a bad thing to realize, in fact I think it is a good thing. "Clay lies still, but bloods a rover." I ain't dead yet, but I am dying a little every day. We all are, it is just a matter of time. So get up and do what needs to be done, I tell myself. Drink the good wine, not the cheap stuff; Stop and smell the damned flowers once in a while; Keep hitting up the goddess you live with for a little 'afternoon delight' while you can. Here's a poem I wrote:
