Happy Valentines Day – Celebrating Lasting Love

Tags

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Kahlil Gibran, Love, Madeleine L 'Engle, Marriage, poetry, Valentines Day

“The Turning of the Tide” by Charles Dana Gibson

I’m reprinting a post I wrote two years ago, the first to be Freshly Pressed. Hope you enjoy it.

They say opposites attract. That was true when my husband and I first met. I found in him everything I felt missing in myself—he was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident, practical, capable, a man of the world. I was shy, timid, uncertain of myself, a romantic, an idealist, inexperienced. I was a senior in High School. He was a marine returning home from two years in Viet Nam. I thought I had found my soul mate, we seemed to complement each other so well, like two halves of a whole, yin and yang.

The truth is, we were just what we needed at the time. This dark, moody often angry young man who could also be so sweet and loving fulfilled a romantic yearning in me to sooth the savaged soul—Beauty and the Beast, after all, had always been my favorite fairy tale. And he was sorely needing the sweetness and innocence he saw in me, after the things he had witnessed in war. We fit together perfectly in each other’s arms. We still do.

But now I no longer believe in soul mates. I discovered that all the things I was attracted to in him, that seemed to be missing pieces of me, were really undeveloped parts of myself, and a sense of “completion” could not come from outside me but from within. Once I realized that and began to discover that I too was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident and capable, I no longer yearned for a soul mate. I could stand upright and free even while fully committed to our marriage. We did not need each other, but we chose to be together. We were committed to creating a life that we both could love and enjoy together.

I had always loved what Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet had written about marriage, and came to see the wisdom of his words:

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I also came to realize what Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From The Sea” wrote:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

And finally, I whole-heartedly embraced what Madeleine L’Engle in “The Irrational Season” wrote:

“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take . . . . If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”

My husband and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary last week. Here’s what I’ve learned about lasting love:

That marriage is a journey, not a destination, and the way will be hard, and filled with obstacles and challenges and heartache. That real love is not “true love.” It’s not a given. It doesn’t come ready-made. You have to fight for it, you have to work for it, you have to shake it out from time to time, and mend it and keep adding stitch after stitch, row after row, if you want to make it big enough and strong enough to last a lifetime.

Our marriage quilt is a tattered thing, but beautiful in its homeliness, in the places where its obvious rips and tears have been mended over and over again, the places where it’s grown thin and threadbare and had to be reinforced, as well as the places where it’s warm and soft and scented with memories that bring deep pleasure.

Loveliest of all are the stitches we are still sowing day by day, moment by moment, hand in hand, together.

I will end this series of posts on love and marriage with the last love poem I wrote my husband, a few years after our marriage had almost ended.

It is a simple, playful poem, meant to please a man who is not a lover of poetry, but loves the woman who writes it.

To Dale, On Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary

Sometimes you ask me if I really love you,
Like the answers hid behind a lock and key
You are my love and all the world must know it
For it’s scattered ‘cross the land and half the sea.

There are winds and waves much sweetened by our pleasure,
Rocks and sand well smoothed by hips and thighs,
Grass that grows much greener from our nearness,
And trees that rustle still with sated sighs.

If you climb a certain stream that flows near Big Sur
You’ll find a rock well made for lying on,
It knew our love before it was made sacred
And longs to feel our lover’s urge again.

While high along the rugged spine of Baja,
Where boney cliffs fall far to find the sea,
We saw the world stripped bare of all but beauty
And we alone like Adam and his Eve.

The moon once tipped the hills beyond Coyote
And laced Conception Bay with fluorescent light,
We swam out naked through those silken waters
Where you would me round your hips and held me tight.

And cupped within the palm of Virgin Gorda
Lies an island and a secret, sandy cove,
Where we waded from the sea like mating mermen
And stretched upon the sand to prove our love.

The wind once made an early morning visit
As we rolled upon a hook in Carib Bight,
While sweeping down the hatch it caught us naked
And added its cool breath to our delight.

Now wind and sea and rock and tree can tell you
The answer that you say you do not know,
You are my love and all the world’s a witness
For its sung wherever winds and waves do blow.

NOTE:  This ends a series of posts that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are the first four posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. 

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

Blogging A Trail of Bread Crumbs – 2014 Recap

Tags

2014 review, Blog, Blogging, favorite blog posts, freshly pressed, poetry, Recap, writing

Blog posts are like a trail of bread crumbs leading you back through a misty past. They tell you where you were, not where you’re going. I can’t say I’m unhappy to leave 2014 behind. And if a few of those bread crumbs get gobbled up by birds, so much the better.

Still, it’s instructive, looking back before you plow forward. Here are a few trends, challenges, and highlights from my last year of blogging.

Is Less More, or Just Less?

I wrote fewer posts on this blog in 2014 than in previous years. But I’ve always been a slow blogger. Even at the beginning in 2012 I was posting only twice a week. Eventually it turned into once a week, then every ten days of so. I’ve gone as long as two weeks between posts now. I seem to be racing toward some decline. But it worries me. I don’t want to stop blogging. I don’t want to lose you, the readers who have come to mean so much to me. I love blogging. I want less to be more. Is that possible?

Into the Pit and Out Again

One reason I’ve blogged less is because I’ve been challenged more–both personally and professionally. Early last year, I thought I lost my son to addiction for good. I’d given up hope. In desperation, I created a new, anonymous blog, just to vent all the rage and grief and craziness I was feeling. And it helped. It brought me back from the brink, and him as well. Now he has 8 months of recovery behind him and still going stronger than ever. Still, we take it one day at a time. There’s no other way.

Professionally, I was thrown down into the pit as well. I finished the last draft of my novel in December 2013.  2014 was supposed to be the year I sent this darling out to agents and publishers. I put it aside for a few weeks so I could re-read it fresh. That’s when it all came crashing down. I hated my novel!

I was devastated. After so many years of tender loving care, this baby too was lost to me. In a frantic, I reached out to a few writer friends and researched the web, searching for a life-line, hoping this was a normal reaction. Did all writers end up hating their novels? It turns out, most don’t, but some do. It’s not uncommon. I found a new beta reader and, working with her strong encouragement and deep insight, went through the draft one more time. (Thank you, Kerri!). Now I’m back on track again. I’ve finished what I hope will be my final draft, and set it aside for another read. I’m keeping my fingers crossed I won’t hate it this time.

I had one more personal crisis in 2014, but I’m saving that for another blog post. All this did slow me down and drain away some of the energy and inspiration for keeping this blog going. In retrospect, I’m surprised I wrote as much as I did. Maybe I’m more resilient than I thought.

Now for the 2014 highlights:

Most Viewed Posts: A Blast From the Past

According to my WordPress Annual Report, my most viewed posts in 2014 were written in 2013. Hmmm. What does that mean? Well, I could take it sunny-side up: My writing has staying power, or so WordPress euphemistically suggests.  Or it could mean my best blogging is behind me. Well, time will tell. Here’s my two most viewed posts:

• Blogging and “The Accident of Touching” (Freshly Pressed in 2013)
• Growing Up in a Haunted House (part of a series of blog posts I wrote in 2013 and re-blogged last Halloween)

Binge Blogging

Series are all the rage now, both in television viewing and reading. We love characters who linger, whose stories become our stories, who return to us day after day, week after week. Even season after season and book after book. We boast of our binges: mine was Downton Abbey last week. I re-watched all of Season 4 during the afternoon, then watched the premier of Season 5 that evening. I went to bed fully sated.

Binge blogging, sadly, is not quite the same. It’s done less for the pleasure of readers and more to accommodate long-winded writers. Like me. I take more pleasure in my series than my readers do. It’s a guilty indulgence.

The first one was a 4-part literary deconstruction, tying together the themes found in the writings of Milton, Wordsworth, and Lacan. (I know, ouch!) The first and last posts in the series are listed below.

• “Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire
• “Thou Art That” – Part IV, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

The next 2-part series on Annie Dillard’s writing and my own was much more popular:

• Dialogue with Annie Dillard on “The Writing Life”
• More on “The Writing Life” with Annie Dillard

Hu-More, Not Less

Three personal favorite, which readers also seemed to enjoy, were attempts to lighten an otherwise overly heavy and oh-so-serious blog load. Not to mention, help me lift my head out of those pits I mentioned earlier, if for just a moment. It was quite refreshing. Maybe I need to hu-more in the future.

• Humor, It’s Serious Stuff
• Selling My Babies. Where’s the Joy?
• Dreaming of Death—Oops, Bears

Freshly Pressed (Again!)

I’ve been freshly pressed three times now. Each time is a surprise and delight. Gifts that come from out of the blue. The last time was in June 2014. This one’s about marriage: drifting apart, pulling together, and finding that magic balance.

• On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing

My First Guest Post!

I was also honored, and delighted, to be invited to write a guest post on poetry for the lovely Luanne’s blog, Writer Site. I posted it on my site as well.

• A Cranky Reader: What I Crave When I Read Poetry

Your Favorites and Mine

Surprisingly, and happily, some of my readers’ favorite posts were mine as well, and several featured my poetry. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is. I haven’t written much poetry in my life, but all of it is deeply personal. I think sometimes that to truly know me, who I am at heart, you would have to read my poetry. And you have. Without blogging–without my poetry being read–large, intimate parts of me would remain relatively unknown.

Three of your favorite posts featuring my poetry:

• “Taste and see – I am spare”
• The Slant of Afternoon, Playing with Light
• Song from a Dream – “My Queen’s Soul Lies Naked”

Two of my favorite posts featuring poetry from my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens:

• Cultivating “a mind of winter”
• Downward into Darkness on Extended Wings

Two of your non-poetry favorites this year was a photo-essay on fallen oak trees, and a list and lament about all the books I’ve abandoned this past year.

• My Roman Oaks
• Books I’ve Abandoned

Hugs and Kisses

Thank you for bearing with me through this long post, and through this last challenging year of infrequent posts–those bread crumbs scattered along a dark trail with its few gleams of light, and rare laughter.

Your comments and encouragements have meant the world to me, and made all the difference. May you all have a truly marvelous 2015.

A Cranky Reader: What I Crave When I Read Poetry

Tags

Ars Poetica, contemporary poetry, Creative Nonfiction, critique, Emily Dickinson, modern poetry, poetry, reading poetry, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens, what is poetry

I was invited to write a guest blog post about poetry on Luanne Castle’s Writer Site. The following was first published on her site in a slightly different version.

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry lately, how some speaks to me and some not at all. While reading recent issues of prestigious literary journals, I was surprised to find that not one poem—not one—moved me. Amazing!

Most seemed like intellectual exercises or obtuse offerings of random thoughts and images. None engaged me intellectually, or stimulated my sensibilities, or even challenged me—let alone invited me—to a second reading. Instead they were studies in disappointment. I left them unfulfilled, still hungry and, admittedly, cranky.

Is it me? Is it them? (Sigh).

Just what is it I crave from poetry?

Wallace Stevens once famously said: “You can’t get the news from poems, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.”

That’s what I want: The thing we die from lack of. That’s why I read poetry. What I look for in other works of art too—in prose and painting and music that rise to the level of poetry.

I want what Emily Dickinson referred to when she says, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Something that tickles the hintermost parts of my brain, where I feel the synapses stretch and snap, reaching toward something just past my grasp.

I want what T.S. Elliot meant to when he writes that “poetry is a raid on the inarticulate.” Something dark and dormant, lying just below consciousness, rising into the light: a curved fin, a humped back, gliding momentarily along the surface of thought before dipping below again.

We have all felt that, I’m sure. Something deep and delicious, once known and now forgotten, woken momentarily. Something within us re-ignited, flashing briefly before dissolving into darkness again.

In “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish says: “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit.”

He says: “A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds.”

He says:

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

Reading his poem, I’m with him. I’m saying: Yes!

But then he almost ruins it with the last two lines:

A poem should not mean
But be.

Pointing to something static. Not in motion. Art for art’s sake. An artifact showcased in a museum.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages–
And it is easier to stay at home,
The nice beer ready.

If it doesn’t make us squirm, if it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t urge voyages, is it art? Is it poetry?

Stevens calls modern poetry “the poem of the mind.” It’s “the act of finding what will suffice.”

He says:

It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.

A poem must construct something that it inhabits, that speaks to the reader, in the “delicatest ear of the mind,” “exactly, that which it wants to hear,” what the reader, that invisible audience, wants to hear—which is not the play, not the poem, but “itself.” Itself “expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two emotions becoming one.”

It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Stevens is saying that a poem can no more “be” than “mean.” Rather, it must act. It must unite poet and reader in the act of finding what will suffice.

It is not static: It is “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing.” It is always moving. It moves us to capture it in its passing. It moves us beyond ourselves, where the top of our head lifts away and there we go unbounded, grasping for a brief moment what lies always, already, just beyond our grasp.

That which suffices. That which the lack thereof we die of every day. That’s what I’m looking for when I read poetry.

I want to feel my synapses snapping.

Happiness Like Holiness

Tags

happiness, holiness, inspiration, Mary Oliver, Nature, poetry, Poppies

Poppies by The Yes Man under Creative Commons Licence

I’ve been ill–nothing serious–but lying in bed day after day, even surrounded by good books, tends toward melancholy. Reading Mary Oliver’s poetry this morning is the perfect cure. This one especially speaks to me.

Poppies
by Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

“The Mountain of My Love” – Poem by Hayden Carruth

Tags

Aging, Hayden Carruth, Love, Marriage, poetry

The Lovers by William Powell Frith, Public Domain

In the graduation speech that went viral last year, George Saunders wrote:

“Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was ‘mostly Love, now.'”

For a long time I could not find the poem he mentioned. But a reader who heard about my search found the poem and kindly shared it with me. Now I share it with you, a deeply moving testament to love and marriage, as our lives wind down.

Testament

by Hayden Carruth

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

 

Downward into Darkness on Extended Wings

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, downward into darkness, poem, poetry, Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning” ends with these lines:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

I love the final image—that graceful downward swoop into darkness, held aloft by the lightness of wings fully extended. That final juxtaposition of dark and light, I find deeply moving.

Steven’s poetry has been a huge influence on me. I see traces of it everywhere in my writing.

The final lines of this poem introduce a short story I wrote, Tamara in Her Garden, where a woman who has been deeply traumatized by life finds healing in her garden–not just in the beauty she find there, but in the natural decay and death that comes with it. She tells us:

Sometimes when I kneel in the grass at the edge of my flowerbed, leaning out over the border of sweet alyssum that is heaped like snow, leaning so close that my face feathers the fragrant petals, and then breathe–breathe deeply, I sense that with each breath I am gathering up a huge lungful of myriad, microscopic creatures that course through my nose and mouth and throat in a rhythmic pattern of respiration perhaps eons longer than the life-spans of such tiny beings. And I feel lightheaded, what with the deep breathing, the heady fragrance, the thought that so much life and so much death passes with such pleasure through me. I sway when I rise. My bare knees and tops of feet bear a moist imprint–a fine cross-hatching of grasses.

While some think she’s hiding more than healing in her garden, she sees it differently—and here’s where Steven’s influence is clearly seen:

I see my garden as highly invigorating and precarious, teeming with raw necessity, a microcosm of all the life and beauty, decay and death, that ever was. Sometimes I stand in my round garden as if standing upon the edge of a precipice, poised for flight. Not to fly away as I once had supposed, but to delve ever more deeply.

That “delving ever more deeply” is what interests me, the fact that we have to explore the dark places in life in order to grow, for that’s the only way to bring in the light. We’re not sustained by beauty and lightness alone, but by seeing the beauty and lightness in the dark places, in the brokenness that lies all around us, seeing it in the very places where it doesn’t seem to exist. And seeing how the beauty and lightness is nurtured in the dark places of our own lives.

These are old ideas, of course–how the transience of beauty intensifies its pleasure. How the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows, how both together help us to see the object and its roundness more clearly. It’s a theme that is played over and over in poetry and literature and art. We never tire of it because it’s so rich in associations and, at the same time, still so veiled and mysterious. We sense the deepness there, some truth not fully plumbed. We walk around it and around it, but never fully grasp it. Perhaps that’s why we return to it so often in our art, not to touch it, but to be touched by it.

Sometimes that touch is healing, as in the garden I wrote about. Sometimes it is transforming. It tears us to pieces in order to create us anew.

I wrote about this in my poem “Walking Among Flowers.” Here’s an excerpt from a blog post that tells how this came about:

Walking through the village on Nuka Hiva down narrow, winding roads, past pastel-colored houses surrounded by gardens overflowing with flowers and dense tropical foliage, melting in the heat and humidity and the perfumed air . . . . . I felt physically and mentally assaulted, overcome by the intensity of the colors and the abundance of the beauty that surrounded me.

Colors exploding all around me, shattering the senses—sight, smell, and sound washing together. Undulating waves of color, wrapping around me, streaming through me, carrying me away.

Sometimes it was a soft, sensual immersion. Sometimes a harsh, brutal slaying. It knocked me off my feet and broke me open. I swallowed it whole.

In the poem I tried to capture how the brutal beauty of the experience tore me apart, leaving me bloody and trampled. Yet out of this seeming “death” rose something new, ethereal, like light, and powerful. Here’s where we see Steven’s influence, in the final downward swoop:

 I lay like a light on the garden wall

then swooping, swallow, flowers and all.

The same “beauty and brutality” that tore me apart, transforms me, and allows me to partake of its wholeness, to become one with the wholeness, and holiness, of life.

It’s odd though. I don’t think of the beauty and brutality in equal terms. In this life, as we normally experience it, the brutality, the darkness, is the shadow side of something that is “real” in a way that the shadow itself is not. We still experience it, it still gives depth to the wholeness of our experience. It still shapes us, even as it torments us or tears us apart. It’s very “real” in those harsh, experiential ways. It’s perhaps part of the birthing process, but it’s not the birth itself, or the thing we’re giving birth to.

But what it is, is not something we can easily put our finger on.  So we write poetry about it instead. And we feel it, as we too swoop “downward into darkness on extended wings.”

Song from a Dream – “My Queen’s Soul Lies Naked”

Tags

ancient rituals, chants, Dreams, nursery rhymes, poetry, songs

Henri Rousseau – Il Sogno

My dreams have always been enticingly rich and evocative. Often it’s as if I’m watching an elaborate film in gorgeous Technicolor, exquisitely choreographed. Sometimes I am a character in that film. But often I’m standing outside the action, waiting to see what happens.

When we were sailing my dreams were especially vivid. One morning I woke with a song playing in my mind that had been sung in my dream by the people of some ancient kingdom. It was almost as if they were chanting it, as if they were singing something that had been handed down to them over the ages, something to be sung on special occasions.

I had the feeling upon waking that something momentous was about to take place. A royal wedding? A coronation? A sacred initiation?

Upon waking I wrote down all that I remembered—which is quite unlike anything else I’ve written. But all these years later, I am still mesmerized by its beauty.

Truly, it is not mine, but something I overheard. It’s time I share it.

Song from A Dream

Five golden rings adorn her toes,
But the Queen’s sole lies naked.

Garlands of lilies lace buttocks to hips,
But between them her belly beckons.

Sashes of satin encircle her waist,
But her legs lie loose and languid.

Sapphires and rubies stream from her neck,
But her breasts are bare as mountains.

Bracelets of silver ring her wrists,
But her arms are free and fervent.

Rivers of ribbon flow through her hair
But her back is a gleaming dessert.

Ashes of coal shadow her lids,
But her eyes are two burning candles.

Juice from wild cherries stain her lips,
But her breath is the Khamsin blowing.

Mysteries and marvels flow from her mouth,
But my Queen’s soul lies naked.

I don’t know what the song means, if anything. It reminds me of a favorite nursery rhyme:

With rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes,
She shall make music wherever she goes.

This nursery rhyme has no meaning that I know. Nonetheless, its playful images are so enticing.

This dream fragment may be like that. But I sense there’s something deeper going on, which the play on the words sole and soul in the first and last lines calls to mind—a reminder perhaps that for all our attempts to adorn ourselves, our most pleasing and precious parts, our very essence, our souls, perhaps, are best seen naked.

What do you think? Is this a meaningless but pleasing rhyme? Or something deeper?

Your guess is as good as mine. I was only taking dictation.

The Slant of Afternoon, Playing with Light

Tags

afternoon. playing with light, light and shadow, Nature, personal, poetry, rhyme, rhyming poetry, rhythm, writing

Afternoon_Stroll_by_William_Merritt_Chase

A notebook full of poetry I had worked on for years has disappeared. Vanished. Many of the poems I never copied into a word document. They may be lost forever. But several I know by heart, I’ve recited them so often. They are heavy with rhyme and rhythm, and I know that is why I remember them. The bards of long ago who sang their stories knew that we remember best verses that rhyme. Somehow our brains are made to carry these tunes in our swaying bodies. We feel them in our bones.

Here’s one I remember well, that I wrote when we were sailing, anchored in Bora Bora, of all places. It’s a “light” poem, pun intended. In fact, it was first entitled “Light Thoughts.” I’ve renamed it below, but reserve the right to switch it back. You never know.

I like it for its lightness. And I hesitate to share it for the same reason. It’s lightness, and its use of rhyme and rhythm, which serious poets seldom use today. For obvious reasons. Use of rhyme and rhythm seems too heavy-handed, too showy and childish, decidedly old-fashioned.

Serious poetry loses something when it rhymes. Alexander Pope and Shakespeare, and some of the other old masters could pull it off—-it was all the rage then. But now it sounds too much like greeting cards or the jingles you hear on TV to sell soap and cat litter. Or the picture books we read to children. The nursery rhymes we all grew up with, if we were lucky.

This poem could be found in a book of poetry for children. But it was written for adults. For me, to be more precise. And for others like me who see the world in a particular slant of light, and like to play with it.

Playing With Light

I like the slant of afternoon,
The shadows cut so clear,
Light lays down as if it’s found
A home on earth more pure.

I like the way each melting ray
Slides across the land,
To flow beneath the lowest leaf
And lift it in its hand.

The smallest stone is sudden grown,
A blade of grass stands tall.
The hills unwind one at a time
To dance before us all.

I like the way light likes to play
And catch me from behind,
Igniting hair with light so rare
It catapults the mind.

Yet when the light is laid so low
It tumbles from the earth,
And afternoon succumbs too soon
Mere embers on the hearth,

I find in night a keener light
To prick the bounds of thought.
Upon the spires of whirling stars
My reeling mind is caught.

In Limbo, While Live Lambs Burn

Tags

betrayal, lambs, Limbo, poetry, writing

I won’t be writing here for awhile. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.

I’ve started several blog posts but can’t finish them. All my energy is drawn elsewhere. As if I’m in Limbo, waiting for some axe to fall.

Here’s a pretty poem to tide you over until I return. Something I wrote years ago. Hid away.

See if you can guess what it’s about.

All the Little Lambs

I swear

Sometimes I feel like
I lay in a loft,

Peeking
Through a warped
floorboard,

Watching havoc
burn hay.

And I feel
Distant, somehow,
Remote, dismayed.

While live lambs
Burn
Below
Betrayed.

Easter and Earth Day – “O Sweet Irrational Worship”

Tags

Earth Day, Easter, Nature, spirituality, Thomas Merton, worship

A timely blending to celebrate Easter and Earth Day by poet, monk, and mystic, Thomas Merton.

O Sweet Irrational Worship

Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.

When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart’s love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Field and valley
Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart
Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds
His foolish worship.

by Thomas Merton

Many thanks to Nancy Adam and her lovely blog Saints and Trees for bringing this poem to my attention. Read her commentary about the poem HERE.