Your Own Place

I have only had a couple of poems published. This is one of them, published in the Puckerbrush Review in 1983.  Readers will notice my love for alliteration and internal rhymes exhibited in this poem. The line I recall most often is "That water will move to the sea without your worried circumspection." - how true.  Also, the word concupiscence is used deliberately.  It was written with a work colleague and friend in mind who was a young mother and professional.  She often spoke of her struggles to balance being a good wife, mother and her job.  At the time, Dawn and I were living in an apartment in Bangor; had no children and had little of the responsibilities that would later characterize our lives.  When this poem was published, we were living in Westport, Connecticut and had just come back from spending time traveling in Europe.

It seems like a good poem to re-start this blog.  I have been under water at work for the last 8 weeks and finally had a chance this past week to stop and recharge.  This  poem is about stopping and recharging, but underlying that theme is the idea of lost youth and innocence; those lost, open days of childhood before responsibilities for home and hearth; a time and space in which your thoughts can idly move forward and backward in time.


YOUR OWN PLACE
 for p

Go, I pray, to this place
of that; seek the stream bank
where the wind will quiet
all the clatter of the china you
carry, the children, the
concupiscence, and the hissing
of the passing traffic in the streets.

Seek out a lingering place of
sun-warmed ledges, of reeds moving
lightly against the shore.
Forget the great river's run;
that water will move to the sea
without your worried circumspection.

The dove's wings creak in the forest behind you,
flickering through leaf-filtered light,
until she breaks past vine and bough
into the hard plane of river light.
The white wings take no more than dancing air,
cupped in feathered fold;
she dips near the water and arcs
up into the forest again.

Do you remember your own tiny cup
of silver, your christening cup?
Your own white-gloved hand on
the swan boats edge?
How daisies slipped from your fingertips,
lingered, floating on the darker water,
then were drawn away into the
current's sweeping breast?

Is there no way back to places
so long forgotten?

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Arcana of Grief

After last week, I was ready to plunge into that period of my life from 1977 to 1980 that represented my interest in politics and religion.  My desire at the time was to understand and articulate a Christian Socialism that would be radical and yet still steeped in the mythic and mystical traditions of my faith. I dug out my political books and began to review a few poems, but paused. I need to think about this before I go further.  Writing poems about nature or my feelings as a writer or about my lover is one thing - politics? something else. First, I am just not sure how good these poems are.  They were written with specific events in the forefront of my mind at the time.  And unlike most of the other items I have put in this blog so far, they weren't organized to be published.  So in the meantime, I am going to work backwards chronologically and hopefully be able to discern the line between good work and juvenalia.

Today's poem was written for my sister, Kate, on June 24, 1989 on the death of a beloved cat of hers.  Since we are going to be celebrating Christmas at Kate's lake house and she is cooking, I have also included a short poem quoted in Observations on Popular Antiquities by John Brand, London 1913, from the section Yule Doughs, Mince Pies, etc. (Oddly, I just noticed it mentions rosemary as well. hmmm.)


ARCANA OF GRIEF


This is for Hank.


Pillowcase,  rosemary for remembrance.
Put this into the earth
Cold fur    dry eyes    stiff limbs
Decompose into Earth, Water
Fire and Air.


Say the words of ritual.


Already your thoughts are cleansed
In the pool of memory and 
You seek about for a new
Repository of care;


The delicacy of drink and 
Sleep curled bed,
The face at the window and
Voice of insistence.
You seek a living companion.


His loss twist and changes everything
In the retort of death.


"Even in the mostcoming wind, we breathe parting."


Say the word


                       Say it.


And the ritual will be complete.

 

They are likewise indicated in King's Art of Cookery - 


"At Christmas time --
Then if you wou'd send up the Brawner's Head,
Sweet Rosemary and Bays around it spread;
His foaming tusks let some large Pippin grace,
Or 'midst these thundring spears an Orange place;
Sauce, like himself, offensive to its foes,
The roguish Mustard, dang'rous to the nose,
Sack, and well spic'd Hippocras the wine
Wassail the bowl with antient ribbands fine,
Porridge with Plumbs and Turkeys with the chine.

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Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin

To my knowledge, no picture exists of me during my last years of college.  Therefore, you must imagine me and my friend, Gary Borders, trudging through the snow in Orono in our long black wool coats.  Gary's hat was classic proletarian, mine was a black Greek fisherman's cap;  our beards the pure righteous darkness of youth.  In our bags were Gramsci and Lenin and Mao; and articles for the Maine Peace Action Committee newsletter. We saw ourselves (sometimes, anyway) as the rearguard of a revolutionary vanguard.  After Vietnam . . . before anti-nukes . . .Nicaragua was a chance be on the right side for a change . .  lost Lefties, really. Who knew what lay before us in the coming decades?  Certainly we didn't.  We imagined a revolution of some kind . . . listened to our Holly Near and looked back on the pure politics of the 60's.  We knew that it was up to us, up to the 'New Intellectuals' to define the cause, to understand and articulate what was the motor force of History.  Who knew?

Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin


We sit huddled in our dingy kitchen
over a pot of chicken soup.
Bleary-eyed and tired,
I think of
Russian peasant suppers,
of heavy boots on earthen floors
thick-bearded men and broad shouldered
women in scarves.
I think of
kulaks, purges, police;
of knocks on doors,
laughing apparatchiks,           of Stalin.
Of huddled men in the arctic night.
I think 
and am reminded that 
the struggle goes on
                               and on
                                           and on.




February, 1980

Ouroboros, For Breanne

 A short poem for Breanne on her birthday. Written December 13, 1988.

                                                                  OURBOROS
You gather her into your arms
And instantly she drops away into the deep.  
Tiny body, warm
 Against your hips: conforms
As one flesh, again complete.
The mind falls like a stone into sleep.

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The Full Moon

I woke up this morning thinking about the first lines of an old poem, one of my favorites.  The Harvest Moon shines tonight.  I wonder what we shall each reap?




The Full Moon
                           for BB


Bright white china face
Hanging over every tree
Crystalline and full of grace . . .


No wait.


So, I have a question.           Full stop.


Why does this stillborn corpse
Of unspeakable violence past,
This lost and ungrown twin,
Still circle us night after night?
Why does he try to steal the oceans
With every revolution?
Even in the daytime, he won't go away,
Skulks on the horizon, barely visible.

Pockmarked by insult and asteroid's crash,
The worst hidden from view, but still.
A dusty rock  . . . .a chunk of us, broken
Away but remaining in our path
Threatening to trip us in our grander
Flights around the Sun.


Purposeless and yet,
We would not be the same without him.







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My Affair with Ayn Rand

I know some of my friends will be shocked, but I have been flirting with Ayn Rand lately.  It started with a training I attended in which the presenter expressed his admiration for Objectivist economics and, of course, Adam Curry has been raving about Rand for years on No Agenda. . While I was in Texas, I picked up Atlas Shrugged and read about a hundred pages.  I stopped to listen to an unabridged reading of Ayn Rand and the World She Created and this weekend, I watched the movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand with Helen Mirren in the title role.  So now I am poised to listen to the unabridged reading of Atlas Shrugged which looks like it will take me months of commutes to work, based on the number of hours.

I am sure that I had heard of Ayn Rand when I was in school, but naturally I was travelling in other circles at the time.  I have friends (and relatives, I learned last weekend) who felt moved by her books and philosophy, as many do now, I think.  With the resurgence of Right-wing, Nativist, Free Market Capitalists in the form of the Tea Party, the notion of going to the roots is intriguing.  I wonder, however, if her philosophy will have the same effect on me now as it might have had when I was twenty?  O how the notion of the misunderstood genius, persecuted for his virtues, rings so true when you are young!  Whether on the left or the right, being misunderstood seems to be the norm for young people.  What about a person in middle age, jaded by a lifetime of real world experiences? Will I be moved in the same way?   I'll let you know.

Part of John Galt's speech, from Atlas Shrugged

In the name of the best within you.
do not sacrifice this world
                                            to those who are its worst.

In the name of values
                                           that keep you alive,
do not let your vision of man
be distorted by the ugly,
                                         the cowardly,
                                                     the mindless
in those who have never achieved
his title.

Do not lose your knowledge
that man's proper estate
                                          is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and
                                                        a step that travels
unlimited roads.

Do not let your fire go out,
                                                           spark by irreplacable spark,
in hopeless swamps of the approximate,
  the not-quite,
                            the not-yet,
                                                  the not-at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish,
in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved,
but have never been able to reach.

Check your road
                and the nature
of your battle.

The world you desired can be won,
it exists,
it is real,
it is possible,

it's yours.

The Poet is a Seashore Dweller

Tidal Pool, Innishmore

Rachel Carson once wrote: "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be."
Today's poem was the last one in the Charles Street Manuscript and was meant to express all I felt about what it meant to write and be a writer.  It owed a dept to Rich, of course and perhaps a bit to Eliot, but mostly I wanted to take something I knew well - the experience of ocean's edge - and imbue it with what I thought was a deeper, more symbolic meaning.  Every image here is symbolic, and the experience of the poet as standing on the edge was meant to be as well.  To write poetry is to stand on the shore between the symbolic, the magical, the sacred on the one hand and the mundane, the earthly , the profane on the other.  It is the poet's job to point out that sacred quality in everything they observe.  In that way, poetry differs from prose.  Good prose makes us think " Yes, I know that.  I understand that, I have experienced that."  Good poetry makes us feel " I have felt that way, I remember that experience, I have lived that."  I submitted this poem to the only writing course I have ever taken, an introduction to poetry with Constance Hunting.  Her comment was "Big stuff indeed".  Well, a good effort, I guess. My apprentice work, if not my masterpiece.

Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells.
To one side rolls and swells the grey
green back of the ocean depths, of icy murk.
Hidden there beneath the waves
the predatory sharks of guilt,
the sounding whales of wisdom deep,
the moving schools of caprice and quirk.
Mysteries glowing far below -
glowing, even deeper places showing;
lost to all but the the strongest swimmer
who dares to dive below, desires
to plumb the depths of his soul.


The other side is light and land
of reason and of everyday demands.
The beaches, in their season, filled
with youngsters, dogs and radios.  Tanning
faces turned to the sun; coconut and sand.
Young men run to fetch light cans
from their treasure chests of ice.
Yet even here the sea intrudes,
not obvious, the waves allude
to deeper places further off.
But the sea remains confined
in basins, algae lined, rocky places
where sun-warmed water small life breeds,
snails, crabs, bright glinting seaweeds.


Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells,
Neither the ocean of Being, holy space
and time; deepest feelings from whence
all living symbols come;
Nor beaches, dunes and land
of everyday and ordinary.  Not the 
sun-warmed rocks and sand, the solid 
experience of living here.


The poet is a seashore dweller
between the ocean and the land
seeking the experience
of the fuller life between;
so that both worlds 
he may command.