Poets Are Strange

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Poets are strange –
Why can’t they just call the spade
a spade? And what’s a rock but
rock: sandstone, shale from the tiredness
of weather? Coal and limestone, plant
and animal dross

— but nature wastes nothing.

Why do poets look for metaphors under
every rock, the walls that hold the creek, earth
that crumbled, forged resolute, and grew above
my grandmother’s rib, beat hard when she was
widowed with six children on the road

fleeing the Communists
fleeing the Communists
fleeing the Communists

and soldiers who ran out to drag their own
men screaming without their arm
back to the trenches in
too many battles and

and bald children in hospital beds who still
know how to laugh.

Why can’t poets be simple? They see
a crushing burial in heat and time:
marble, quartz, gneiss

— living, burnished beauty.

Poets. They think they can say it
better than
rock.

 

stargazers

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stargazers in furious
bloom – vanilla air –

are the only flowers
that trust me, tell me

i am not hopeless;
the juice in their veins, the way
they gulp the sun and meet my face,
their beauty and their business

say i don’t need a green thumb
and the riotous garden.

all one needs is a singular love.

 

stargazer

A New Earth

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Birdless sky swells grey blue against
trees that stand like brushes 
stiff in the cold

The penultimate breath
of a new earth

The dark disappears in a steadfast
philanthropy of color: red, orange, rose 
blush up from the land over lakes and hills 
and roof slats to tell the inhabitants

Night has not prevailed.

Earth  e x h a l e s
as the Sun spills her promise.


DAwnLake

I Would Gather All The Words

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If I could I would gather all the words
from the wild, pick them like berries
    and press them into these pages to
    bleed them, beautiful, into my notebook

I would chase syllable streams that
refresh dry banks and stop. at the quarry
where I will cut confused hands on stone,
    going through the   ruins of my  
    dreams and I will bottle my cries to
    pour over the altar of my art

If I could I would answer the laughter
in the wind, unravel the rhetoric of the rain,
    and walking dirt and gravel transcribe
    the vernacular of city streets

I would record every note of joy from children
and undo the silence of grandmothers,
    ask them   about dogged hope

I would keep on west of my despair,
right through the dying sun and spell
    the sunrise as it lights land and sea
    in the genius of resurrection.

The Obligation of Beauty

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It took me over a quarter of a century to realize beauty isn’t something frivolous. We need beauty in our life. This truth still takes my breath away. With no particular aesthetic gift or impulse, I was for much of my life satisfied if my purchases were functional. They didn’t have to be pretty. And so neither did I, because my brain got me around. It was my mind, not my appearance, that helped me achieve in school and life and build relationships. I now look with patience upon the black-and-white assertions we draw in youth.

In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert borrows from The Italians by Luigi Barzini to tease out “why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power. [His answers] have to do with a sad Italian history of corruption…and dominators…which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted…one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses. This is why Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas…actors, cooks, tailors…In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business – not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into rhetoric and plot.”

Gilbert goes on to describe how deep in the ruins of her marriage, she began to mend her soul by reading aloud Italian words out of a dictionary. I can relate. After my body broke down from stress and overwork in my 20s, I noticed the flowers for the first time. I had never seen them grace the cities I lived in. Too busy with things that mattered like studies and work, I had never looked. But in my frailty, I was ravished by their beauty, the force of their color. My spirit had fractured open, worn and thirsty for something beyond the dictates of duty. Eager for a song, not just the beat of the clock I raced. I didn’t understand why I took so hungrily to the flowers I had by practice dismissed. It took me years to realize that beauty is healing. And so the lyrical, sexy Italian sounds out of her mouth brought Gilbert healing joy. She says “the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity…You were given life; it is your duty…to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.”

I would take it a step further. Beauty is the very fabric of our world. Yes, we’ve screwed things up with crime, war, destruction, and the abuse of our natural resources. But beauty dances in the pageantry of the sunset and of the cosmos (who said Jupiter had to be so beautiful??), in the languages of men. Some days the California sky sprawls so magnificent, the clouds coiffed with a panache which in a painting would look overdone, too perfect. Beauty wasn’t an artful afterthought to this world. It obligated itself upon us. Beauty isn’t something to go looking for. It is the substance of this earth.

How does this belated dawning translate in my life? While I remain impressed with women who match head to toe, my regard for them is largely what I hold for curious lab specimens. I was taken by my mother-in-law’s response when I thanked her for a recent gift card saying I’ll get something to look pretty in for her son. “Get something nice to be pretty for yourself. Life is short. Someday, you will realize that you don’t have much time left over to enjoy what you have now.” I was reminded that while vanity is one thing, self-respect is another and taking care with my appearance is good for the soul. The series on beauty that’s around the corner will take us through the body, spirit, femininity, relationships, love, memory, pain, suffering, art. Please welcome the guests who have worked hard over their stories and are still bleeding from the edits – because beauty is worth it.

field of words

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this epicurean sea of wildflowers and opus
white blossoms stirs beneath a rising day

she spills seminal secrets as the bees and
winds drive pollen grains and promise past
the velvet parting into stigma and style

with the marksmanship of knowing.

this field, voluminous womb, awash with prose
drinks the sun that climaxes overhead. a rain
of white sapphire upon silken spires that
indemnifies last night’s shower,

and the dandelion memories too much
for me in the wind perish in a panoply of filaments

but here i lie on my earthen bed pregnant
with poetry, the story under stories of the grass,
translating the anatomy of nature’s mystery and
indulge myself upon this, my field of words.

We Dream Again

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What is it about the year-end? Makes us face our fears and disappointments, and count our hopes again like pieces of treasure in the palm? The seasons herald change as they fold into one another, but the calendar shows us we don’t cycle in place. We wheel forward—birthdays, anniversaries, “three years since” all touchstones across memory and longing, markers of time that leave no one unaffected. The Eve of all is a live wire between the past and future and with the turn of the year, we cross a mental threshold.

For some of us it’s simple math, only so many grains of sand left in the hourglass. We seek to balance the equation, weigh our dreams against the run of time. But it’s more than a race with the clock. No matter our age or station or story, the height of the new year holds out a second chance. We hope for better, of our life and of our self, because to be human means to grow. In character, strength, achievement there is room for more and we seize fresh opportunity. So we turn our feet toward our dreams, reset our compass to the hope of our winter sun.

Prague Astronomical Clock

Prague Astronomical Clock

Sleeping Beauty

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under a scant sun
winter throws his brume
of snow. fields lie
vanquished in lambent
splendor and robed in frost,
trees stand
in mute glory

under his imperial breath
creation covets the hearth
her haven, barren slumber:
a bold consummation
of autumn’s bounty

the earth waits, a sleeping beauty
’til spring breaks
upon the white spell and
redeems her joy.

the leaves of my poem

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i chew the leaves of my poem
they fan green and spirited
in the height of their hour
veins visible like these 
that inscribe my hand, run
with the life of dreams 
that have nowhere to go but 
back  down   to the 
branch to the root
you don't see

look:
        their asymmetry of being

red oak stained with rain pollen
much like the blemishes on my face
t o r n  by time and caterpillars 
that become f u l l   and
bloom into butterflies

the leaves testify to all the seasons

green ash have weathered the wild 
waltz of wind and rain
hungry for the sun 
they drink from the clouds

i feel the laugh lines on the maple
and swallow their history -
    this one, curled copper
    like rusted edges but it's
just the candor of time 

grain and weave of memories 
cru n ch between my teeth
composition on my tongue
i chew the leaves of my poem


Poem Leaf