I think the whole office will be restless today.
There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer
everyone remembers now, and they can’t be sure
the lives they live in will discover it.
(From “Santa Barbara Road,” Robert Hass.)
poems
It’s Almost Time To Read Dandelion Wine Again
This poem was on the Writer’s Almanac this morning and it reminded me of the first long chapter of Dandelion Wine where Douglas realizes he’s alive (well, mortal; he’s 11 in the book so obviously he’s been alive and known about it for some time).
Anyway. Good old Mark Strand gives us another lovely poem:
My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
Robins: What Do They Do All Winter, Anyway?
Yesterday evening was so pretty; all the robins were singing. I’ve noticed them in the early mornings, too, which is my favorite part of late spring. So here is a poem about one bird starting to sing early, by our friend Wallace Stevens:
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Reading The Writer’s Almanac Again
I got caught up on The Writer’s Almanac site yesterday and saw this poem from last week, which suits the weather and the sort of watery, in-transition feelings from the last few months that are not quite dispersed yet:
Larry Smith, “In Early Spring”
Road catkins, russet and tan, let the
wind sweep over them as dusk
seeps in along the lake,
and I pass road puddles
swelling to ponds, mirroring
the sky’s own silveriness.
At the railroad tracks seven geese
veer off and set down in a field
so that only their necks
speak for them, telling us all
to go on while they rest
by the barn. Today a man
asked me if I were depressed,
and I looked up and smiled.
No more than these geese or catkins
as light falls around them, no
more than those pine boughs
lifting in the wind—just so,
life goes on.
Feel Free To Start Any Time, Spring
Now that it’s April, I can post the part from The Wasteland that everyone knows and uses to complain about the weather:
| APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding | |
| Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing | |
| Memory and desire, stirring | |
| Dull roots with spring rain. |
Something To Read While You’re Waiting To Start Working
I'm waiting to organize web copy today and that
reminded me of Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of
Order at Key West," which you can read in full
here.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
"Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still."
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, which reminded me of the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name. I wish I had studied this one in college, because I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than I’m getting now. It’s long; you can read it all here. But this excerpt from the end of the last section seemed to fit with the weather today and my general mood. (Not literally “the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation,” as Wikipedia says, but maybe the hope for spring? And better times?)
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Poem For A Sluggish Morning
“Waking From Sleep,” by Robert Bly:
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.
Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.
Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.
A Poem For Shopping
This was on the Writer’s Almanac site last month. Don’t worry, the deer is not being hunted…
A Deer in the Target
I only got a ten-second shot,
grainy footage of the huge deer
caught in the crosshairs
of a ceiling security camera, a scene
of utter chaos in a strip mall store,
shown on the late local news.
The beautiful beast clearly scared
to death in this fluorescent forest,
its once graceful legs giving out
on mopped floors, think Bambi
as a fawn its first time standing.
Seeing the scattering shoppers,
you’d think a demon had barged
into this temple of commerce,
as they sacrificed their merchandise,
stranded full carts and dove for cover.
And when the aisles were emptied
of these bargain hunters, who was left
but an army of brave red-shirted
team members, mobilized by
the store manager over the intercom
to drive this wild animal out.
I wager there’s nothing on this
in the How to Approach
an Unsatisfied Shopper
section in the Target employee handbook,
but there they were: the cashiers
and stockers, the Floor Supervisor,
the Assistant Floor Supervisor,
the Store Manager,
the Assistant Store Manager,
the District Associate Manager,
the District Supervisor,
the District Assistant Supervisor
and visiting members from
the Regional Corporate Office,
running after it, it running after
them, bull’s eye logos on their red golf shirts,
everyone frenzied and panting: razor hooves
clattering on the mirror-white floor tiles,
nostrils heaving, its rack clearing
off-season clothes from clearance racks.
All of them, in Target,
chasing the almighty buck.
Sorry, Parents. Here’s A Poem.
Sewing all day with only Toby for company this week has made me lose my focus: I’m having a hard time typing accurately; I didn’t give yesterday’s Project Roundup a clever title; and I let my cell phone sit in my car and die, thus panicking my parents, who thought I had suffered the same fate.
Fortunately, I am not dead and now I have an excuse to put up a poem about parenting. The Writers Almanac had this Ellen Bass piece up in the last week or so and it really resonated with me, even though I’m still just a cat parent. (I guess worry is a universal emotion.)
After Our Daughter’s Wedding
While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli’s pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
“Do you feel like you’ve given her away?” you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn’t
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.
She wasn’t crushed
under the mammoth wheels of a semi
on highway 17, wasn’t found
lying in the alley
that night after rehearsal
when I got the time wrong.
It’s animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there’s never been a moment
we could count on it.