Scribe

--Norman Finkelstein

You enter the city with harps and with flutes,

with drums and with baskets

of grapes and pomegranates.

You enter the city of blue ash and blue spruce,

that terraced city rumored of the spirit.

You come there as would a fire,

but neither you nor anything you touch is burned.

There is no sign upon you,

but there are signs upon the doorposts,

amulets of silver shaped like a hand

with letters upon the palm and fingers.

You wander into the little streets

unguarded by leopards or the statues of leopards,

where love is brought to you like an offering

stolen from the altar of a civic deity

who blesses the family with contentment.

You may say you have failed your calling,

that your riches and your debts have taken you this far

and will take you farther, you who have traded

upon yourself and upon the idols that you broke and reassembled.

You have written a history of renunciation

and a genealogy of indulgence,

mistaking pleasure for experience

and experience for wisdom.

You have raised your voice against the sufficiency of silence,

and answered by silence you were silenced,

but never with sufficient severity

and never without sufficient hope.

You have heeded the word of the outside god

and you have heeded the word of no god at all,

like a prophet turned archaeologist,

a scribe turned into a scribe.

 

Excerpt from 'Track"

--Norman Finkelstein

       #

Listen to the children

who know their way about the forest

and return with stories

which the thief steals

exchanging them

for a kind of music.

        #

Listen to the music

which knows its way about the forest

and returns with stories

which the thief steals

obsessively

thinking they're allegories.

        #

Independent as any wife

or thief before his arrest

the stories in the forest

at home in the forest

wait there patiently

to be exchanged for music.

        ##

In some versions

there is a home among the trees

and in some versions

they live apart

so there are only the letters

In some versions they never meet at all.

        #

In some versions

there are many versions 

and in some versions only one

around which the commentators

weave endless versions

as if to explain.

        #

In these explanations

no single

cause or image

Eden calling

endless promise

endless disaster.

 

[ Goshikibara ; Hiroshi Yoshida (1926) ]

 

I am Standing

--Mary Oliver

I am standing

on the dunes

in the heat of summer

and I am listening

to mockingbird again

who is tonguing

his embellishments

and, in the distance,

the shy

weed loving sparrow

who has but one

soft song

which he sings

again and again

and something

somewhere inside

my own unmusical self

begins humming:

thanks for the beauty of the world.

Thanks for my life.

 

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, "Stay awhile."

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,

"and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine."

         --Mary Oliver

 

Of the Empire

--Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death

and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the

many. We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the

world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity. And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say also that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

 

[ Le Bistrot or The Wine Shop ; Edward Hopper ]

 

Playing with the Moon

--David Lee Garrison

       

My dog doesn't howl at the moon,

she plays with it, even though

she's slowing down and soon

will crawl into the lap of the universe.

Ninety-eight in human years,

she wraps night sky around her

in the summer like a patchwork

quilt of warmth and wonder,

knowing she belongs to the cosmos,

to everything that was and is.

 

At the Market With Philip Roth

--Athar C. Pavis

       

"Children are always disappointing,"

one friend announced.

And so are parents — expectations —

only the moment counts,

the "pointless meaningfulness of living,"

you say, and you are right.

The way the fish in rigor mortis

shine silver on the counter,

fruit overflowing in street markets,

figs bursting at the center,

the spectacle of their abundance,

seed-filled, in purple splendor.

Something about the saffron-colored

girolles piled up beside

eggplants, in polished black, and bulbous,

returns me to the world —

its cornucopia of things passing,

pointless, but what I need.

Because I want, despite the children,

disappointing or not,

this paean to the earth it raises

so many live without —

and every day a thing of beauty

I had not thought about.

 

So This Is Nebraska 

--Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop

over the fields, the telephone lines

streaming behind, its billow of dust

full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,

the loosening barns, their little windows

dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs

hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fenders off

and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting

your tires go flat, like letting the mice

build a nest in your muffler, like being

no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey

or holding a skinny old man in your lap

while he watches the road, waiting

for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car

and dancing around on the road. You wave

instead and leave your hand out gliding

larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

 

[ Evening ; Tuco Amalfi (2010) ]

 

Miracle Fair

--Wisława Szymborska

[trans. by Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak]

Commonplace miracle:

that so many commonplace miracles take place.

The usual miracle:

invisible dogs barking

in the dead of night.

One of many miracles:

a small and airy cloud

is able to upstage the massive moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder is reflected in the water

and is reversed from left to right

and grows from crown to root

and never hits bottom

though the water isn’t deep.

A run-of-the-mill miracle:

winds mild to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

A miracle in the first place:

cows will be cows.

Next but not least:

just this cherry orchard

from just this cherry pit.

A miracle minus top hat and tails:

fluttering white doves.

A miracle (what else can you call it):

the sun rose today at three fourteen A.M.

and will set tonight at one past eight.

A miracle that’s lost on us:

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers

but still it’s got more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:

the inescapable earth.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:

the unthinkable

can be thought.

 

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything

and loves the flaw.

Nothing is heavier than its spirit,

nothing more landlocked than the body within it.

Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns

bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine

your mind wandering without its logic,

your body the sides of a riverbed giving in (…) Oh

let it touch you…

The porch is sharply lit — little box of the body —

and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.

Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze

the fat tobacco slums,

the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill. (…)

Nothing will catch you.

Nothing will let you go.

We call it blossoming —

the spirit breaks from you and you remain.

--Jorie Graham, “Tennessee June” in The Dream of the Unified Fields: Poems

 

I won’t be able to write from the grave

so let me tell you what I love:

oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,

cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,

the children nearby, poems and songs,

a friend sleeping in my bed—

and the short northern nights.

--Fanny Howe

 

[ Summer Moon ; Pat Steir (2005) ]

 

Against Distance

--Trey Moody

I don’t know who needs to hear this

other than me, but the moon will never leave

you, you are good enough for the moon

and the moon is good enough for you,

because you are here and the moon is there

every time the moon is supposed to be

there, and isn’t it interesting when we want

to show up for each other we say we are

counting on it and what else but numbers

teach us we are each one, and what else

but the moon teaches us we are each many,

so when you try counting  your remaining

moments with the moon, the moon

that will never, ever leave you, give up.

Even the moon inches a little more distant

every year. I’ve heard grief is only love

with nowhere to go. But then you look up.

 

The Renaissance

--Trey Moody

I said hello. Then you said you said

hello. In this way, we were touching touching

clouds. Such mannerisms endured throughout

the sixteenth century, when bread was scarce, words

for clouds scarcer. Of course we were younger

then, when all the lakes we wanted belonged

to the aristocracy, so we swam in nothing

but our suffering. As they do, centuries passed.

We kept thinking there were only so many ways

to light a fire. Now, it’s just as likely you’ll call

after a Sunday dip. Usual, you map the passing time

in the shape of a cumulonimbus. I say how quiet quiet

can be when your face is this close to the painting.

 

 

A Story about a Story about Death

--Trey Moody

I am old. My grown daughter is helping me fall

asleep, telling me a story she once heard

as a little girl. My daughter is holding my hand

the way the ground holds a greedy shadow. The story

goes like this—a little girl’s father lived

to be a cottonwood. Every day, the girl read books

entangled in branches. Evenings, the moon

swam between leaves. Interrupting the story,

my grown daughter nods toward the dark

window. In it, a soft painting of a child

caring for a tree. That’s when I know

I’m asleep, pretending to be a white sheet

of paper. All around, June wind blows

the limbs’ whispers like familiar snow.

 

[ Contact ; James Jean (2022) ]

 

ICU

--Spencer Reece

For A.J. Verdelle

Those mornings I traveled north on I91,

passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock

where the elms discussed their genealogies.

I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,

took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,

learned I was an I drawn to Es.

In small group I said, “I do not like it—

the way so many young black men die here

unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,

their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.”

On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,

blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes.

A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,

their eyelids the film on old water in a well,

their faces resigned in their see-through attics,

their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.

It is correct to love even at the wrong time.

On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one

like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:

I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

 

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

--Spencer Reece

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,

the wood thrush calls to the monks,

pausing upon the stone crucifix,

singing: “I am marvelous alone!”

Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:

rows of marrow and bone undone.

The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,

sealing the blue hills with vermilion.

Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.

The cemetery expands its borders—

little milky crosses grow like teeth.

How kind time is, altering space

so nothing stays wrong; and light,

more new light, always arrives.

 

María Magdalena

--Spencer Reece

For Laura García-Lorca De Los Ríos

        I kept vigil. Preferred shadows.

When I spoke, a man interrupted me.

Someone called me a bitch. The bird

on the branch then suddenly, it's gone.

I forgot your name. Yelled from a ditch.

You've no idea what it was like.

Occupied my sex, barely, but—

        Remember the rain?

The tree in silence, but suddenly,

the wind. Some talked about the past.

Whatever was the point of it all?

I held on through such argument!

Wished I winced less, but—

I was alone. The moon fondled me.

Was thrilled to be fondled. I ached

in the arches of my feet. I was wrong—

About much.

                                Believing I was alone. . .

I lingered, planted a garden,

hammered in stakes with names.

We waited. God did we wait.

I washed cutlery to make a music.

Complicated the horizon like a lilac.

No one noticed me. Not really.

Which was a relief.

        A bird in the wind—

brings the memory of you back.

Suddenly I see with the light of your eyes.

My country? Did I have a country?

¿Mi pais? ¿Tuve un país?

Stupid to bank on belonging,

I always knew that. I belonged to the Lord.

People laughed when I said that.

I no longer cared.

        When my nailed human was free,

                                                                                    I left. 

[ Green Hillside ; Eyvind Earle (1970) ]

 

Haiku- Spring 2024

vernal equinox,

for now it'll just have to be

some fragrant green tea

forgettable March,

footprints over the playground

go on and about

monday morning-

the priest's turn to fall asleep

sitting in sunshine

some morning bird songs

and rain on the umbrella

dancing with silence

a softly found breeze

slipping fronds of the willow

through the month of May

 

Nyctinastic 

Light slides off with incoming rainfall

so now I'll wait again for another chance

to drink the fluent forms of the sun

and until then, dark's a home with 

patience mortgaged into short stories

narrating beneath the dry wood rafters

through silence closed with ingredient-

protean like an element- developmental

as tension- potentials toward new bindings

of color that materialize through blooms

with a turn to become what can be done

with slightest aspects of this earth, small

purpose and inherently terminal for any

time beyond actuality of pavement, dog,

bird, cat, handwritten script, fragile truth. 

 

1947 - 2024

[ painting by Eduardo Lozano ]

I think a moment comes at around the age of about five or six when you have a thought and become capable of telling yourself, simultaneously, that you are thinking that thought. This doubling occurs when we begin to reflect on our own thinking. Once you can do that, you are able to tell the story of yourself to yourself. We all have a continuous, unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are, and we go on telling it every day of our lives. 

                       --Paul Auster

 

 

My Environs

--Martha Silano

I say warbling vireo and

a turbo-jet drops from my tongue.

I say trill while a mower groans away

the cottonwood breeze. A bird says If I see you,

I’m gonna seize you and squeeze you till you squirt

as a line of cars slashes its psalm like lenticels

on bark. How best to solve this natural/

unnatural dichotomy if not by clapping

one or both hands? Scritch, says the squirrel,

x, x, x, say those who solve for y, bye-bye

says the glacial moraine. I am multiplying

existence times the peculiar tufts of dozing

owls. Mice make their own sound. Who

can say who’s more astonished? A person

mishears momentous as moment, falls into

a verdant complacency, sleepy as a dog

on a rug where nothing/everything’s in flux.

 

Bumblebees Are Made of Ash

--Martha Silano

       

The day is a dragonfly hovering in the Timothy. It could rain for months

before the sun goes down. An orange buoy bobs while a sparrow

sings through a wall. The world smells of cedar, skunk spray,

a sedge's sharp edge. The cat's ears clear their throats,

prepare to speak. Kinnell called it "the inexhaustible

freshness of the sea." As if you could imitate

a preening cormorant. As if she'd said can't

learn this way, but you heard can't live,

destiny's dangling web. A horse

82 miles from its barn while

your brain swings open

like a giant pink

gate.

When I Can't Get Out of Bed

--Martha Silano

      

because my cat's snoring beside me, but also not wanting to begin

the work of the day, sink scrubbing and floor sweeping,

saving the bananas from the gnats,

washing the alphabet soup spray from the microwave, I turn to the news:

that the universe "and even ourselves" are holograms,

like those rainbow-y things on our credit cards.

Yes, the entire cosmos and everything in it is a rainbow, and also,

as if that's not enough, scientists can't figure out why

once two subatomic particles have rubbed electric

elbows, they never forget each other, are always in this position

they call super, always heads or tails, in this way forever

besties. The closest thing we have to magic,

one scientist said. Things are weirder than we ever imagined said

        another,

but when you think about it, it sort of makes sense

we're all the sum total of every atom

we've cavorted with. The other day I watched an irrigation sprinkler

become a rainbow in a hayfield on Best Road. Holograms?

We're a giant hologram? Well, okay,

but I still need to lecture today on the California drought,

on the tipping point, try my best to keep the band

from breaking up.

What do I tell them? That the geese are flying south. That the cat

is not both dead and alive but warm beside me,

curled into a little ball

like a bamboo basket, that she and you and I are all

every color of the rainbow, shimmering in a field

after a drenching rain.

 

[ Open Door on a Garden ; Konstantin Somov (1934) ]