Psalm For the January Thaw

Unknown

Psalm For the January Thaw Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage, including the soggy gray mess on the deck like an abandoned mattress that has lost its inner spring. For the gurgle of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when I step off the porch. For slush. For the glisten on the sidewalk that only wets the foot sole and doesn't send me slithering. Everything is alert to this melting, the slow flow of it, the declaration of intent, the liquidation. Glory be to God for changes. For bulbs breaking the darkness with their green beaks. For moles and moths and velvet green moss waiting to fill the driveway cracks. For the way the sun pierces the window minutes earlier each day. For earthquakes and tectonic plates-earth's bump and grind-and new mountains pushing up like teeth in a one-year-old. For melodrama— lightning on the sky stage, and the burst of applause that follows. Praise him for day and night, and light switches by the door. For seasons, for cycles and bicycles, for whales and waterspouts, for watersheds and waterfalls and waking and the letter W, for the waxing and waning of weather so that we never get complacent. For all the world, and for the way it twirls on its axis like an exotic dancer. For the north pole and the south pole and the equator and everything between. Luci Shaw She covers it all. "For day and night, and light switches by the door." That one makes me laugh. Too true. I'm full of it today. It wants to spill out. Blessed be God! This is a long list of thanks, and if I add my own, it just gets longer. All I can say is, it's a good day to give thanks.

The Way it Is

Illustration from "The Princess and the Goblin" by George Macdonald, (still searching for name of the artist)

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

It's that simple. You know, it makes me laugh, some poems sweep you up in a grand theme, some have little pyrotechnic charges in each stanza, have musical lilts to them, or tell a story. But then there's this kind. A flat-out statement. No music. (You could almost miss that it's a poem - which made me think just now - what isn't a poem? Maybe poetry is a way of seeing, a way of thinking. Maybe everything is poetry - difficult, terrible, painful, beautiful poetry - when the veil is moved aside.) For me though, Stafford has merely spoken my state of being aloud. I hold to the thread. ("The Princess and the Goblin" by George MacDonald, which the image comes from, is a children's story about holding to the thread. Worth a read.)

Mirror

Francine Van Hove

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns back to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back and I reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath


This poem is the opposite perspective of Robert Grave's "The Face In the Mirror" (posted Oct.29, 2016) in which a man looks at himself in a mirror. Here the mirror talks back. It reminds me of of Alice in Wonderland's "Through the Looking Glass", where Lewis Carroll questions what the world "over there" is all about and why everything is reversed in it. It's the old question of image vs. identity. Plath is a brilliantly sharp writer, and "Mirror" has teeth, which might not be what you want in a poem, but it's useful, and poetry should be useful. The mirror describes itself, "Silver and exact/no preconceptions/unmisted by love or dislike..", the sense is there of a dispassionate faithfulness to truth (with a dash of malevolence!). The mirror knows that it is important to the woman but it has no feeling for her (as it seems to for the wall). And for all it says it is "only truthful", it lies, it does not "see". It is not an eye, it is entirely blind. It is a reflector, a surface. It wants something, too. It wants to be worshiped, "a little four-cornered god". It pretends to have depths because it wants to swallow and drown. And the woman searches it for what she really is. There's the bite right there. 



 

Work Song Part 2 A Vision (Epilogue)

Maxfield Parrish

Work Song Part 2 - A Vision (Epilogue)

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…

The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

Wendell Berry
from "New Collected Poems" 

I read this poem for the first time the other day and it seemed like it was meant to flow naturally from the last one ("Grass", by Carl Sandburg). Continuing the slow organic reclaiming of the landscape up from the grass and into the tree-trunks and branches. That image of ourselves as rich soil and old forest for generations in the future is so reinforcing. If we can just survive our wars, our ignorance, our tragedies ( I mean this is the personal sense as well, our individual downfall and undoing) and "stand like slow growing trees", just stand, our lives will feed those around us, and those to come, layer upon layer, like the leaves feed the roots of the forest. It's an incredible image, that of the rivers running clear, new memories becoming old stories and songs, the ruined landscape recovering its health and becoming, as Dylan Thomas says ("Poem in October") "a green chapel" full of parables and mysteries and abundance. That is something to hold on to, that. That is something to help one to stand. Not without struggle, but with hope nonetheless.

Grass

Jeanette Rehahn - Fruition

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 

Shovel them under and let me work— 

                                          I am the grass; I cover all. 

And pile them high at Gettysburg 

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 

Shovel them under and let me work. 

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: 

                                          What place is this? 

                                          Where are we now? 

                                          I am the grass. 

                                          Let me work.

Carl Sandburg

I recently watched the documentary "A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did", which is basically the story of two men whose fathers were prominent Nazis during WW2, and who were responsible for the death of the family of the man interviewing them. It's disturbing, as you can imagine, but the moment that moved me the most was one in which the three are standing at the site of a mass grave ( 3,000 people including the members of the interviewer's family). It's just a field of wild grass with a monument. There is no sign of what happened all those years ago. They stand by the field in silence, and the grass moves in the wind. I watched it sway, and those words came to my mind - "I am the grass; I cover all."  It strikes me that grass, a symbol of human frailty, should also be the thing that covers our dead. Frailty upon frailty. It's a bleak image in some ways, and yet, I find the grass so beautiful, so much a symbol to me of endurance, resistance, and vigor. Persistence! That's it. Life, human and otherwise, returning. "I'm the grass. Let me work."

Otherwise

"In the Kitchen" Brita Granström

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Jane Kenyon

from Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, Joan Murray 

I've had a couple of events happen recently that made me realize just how close we are to having things be "otherwise". It's something worth reflecting on, that the things we did and saw and people we spent time with - might have been otherwise. That car might not have stopped in time, it might not have been so easy to move or take a breath. I hate cooking dinner? But my arms and hands work well together, and I have food to cook. These are tremendous gifts. Kenyon goes through the small events of her day as if counting her blessings. That's what counting blessings means - seeing clearly that things might be otherwise.

The Boy Who Sells Sweet Oranges

Oranges with Purple Tissue by Denise Mickilowski

The Boy Who Sells Sweet Oranges

The boy who sells sweet oranges

Is rich with an abundance

Which nothing can exhaust

The boy who sells sweet oranges

In his patched clothes

Has maps of a world

Unknown to other map-makers.

The boy who sells sweet oranges

Carries a bittersweet gold mine

In his basket.

The rich children seeing him

From their high balconies

Think it funny that he is happy

With no shoes on.

They have no idea that his clothes

Are maps of a world

Unknown to other map-makers

And that there hangs from his arm

A bittersweet gold mine

Given him by the mountain.

Alicia Cadilla

Translated by H. R. Hays

"An abundance which nothing can exhaust"... This poem reminds me how upside down our values are. We have riches all around us, beauty, love - the limits are in ourselves, not in our resources.

Whale at Twilight

David Blackwood,
"Sounding Whale - Labrador Sea"

Whale at Twilight

The sea is enormous, but calm with evening and sunset,

rearranging its islands for the night, changing its own blues,

smoothing itself against the rocks, without playfulness, without thought.

No stars are out, only sea birds flying to distant reefs.

No vessels intrude, no lobstermen haul their pots.

Only somewhere out towards the horizon a thin column of water appears

and disappears again, and then rises once more,

tranquil as a fountain in a garden where no wind blows.

Elizabeth Coatsworth

How many poems are there with whales in them? I should Google that. (Probably more than there are poems about garlic.) Sometimes a descriptive poem is a relief - no layers of meaning, just the scene or the thing itself - it's restful for the mind. And this poem is restful, the description of the sea as something enormous but calm and tranquil, alive and moving, but without intent or thought - is lulling.




 

Poetry

Esa Riippa

Poetry

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind

Pablo Neruda

It's about time we had a poem about poetry. Not the poem itself, but Neruda's sense of being "searched out for" or "summoned" by poetry. Neruda doesn't look for things to write about, they look for him. And he doesn't know what to say! "My mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind"... It reminds me of how God called Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery, and Moses protested that he couldn't speak well. Neruda talks about "the branches of night", and "violent fires" - isn't that like a burning bush? And Neruda wasn't prepared for the work either. So how did he become the master of words that we read here? "Fever or forgotten wings"? "Deciphering that fire"? All we know is that the heavens "unfastened" and opened, and he saw that small and limited as he was, he was a part of the infinite mystery, had a place in the great wonder, and his heart "broke loose". (I've been thinking about what it means to have one's heart break loose. Is it that it breaks free of "me"? That I leave self-centeredness for my true center?) It's clear that Neruda considers poetry a calling, and this comforts me. Poetry is hard to account for. Poets don't get much respect, or at least not the right kind of respect (that of being useful and necessary in everyday people's lives), they would need a good reason to do the work at all, if you ask me - a reason like Neruda's - "I was summoned",  and like Moses' - "God gave me these words."