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The best posts, based mostly on author preference but influenced also by reader reaction.
Ty Isaf is not merely a postal address and a property of moderate grandeur and repute; it is also a work in progress, a collaboration between Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Peter Wakelin, their team of highly skilled workmen, and the various wild and domesticated beings they share the property with, including a small colony of pipistrelle bats in the attic and a noisy rookery in the treetops adjacent to the house.
Continue reading “Visiting Ty Isaf”
My favorite place in London was Kew Gardens. I visited twice and shot some 300 photos, mostly inside the three enormous glass houses. Kew hosts the oldest and largest collection of living plants in the world, representing some 30,000 species, and for a plant lover like me, it’s something damn close to paradise.
Continue reading “Among the orchids”
Time-travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Shortly before I left, I heard a mention on the radio about the effects of jet lag on memory — it sounds worse than marijuana by far. I heeded the advice to expose myself to plenty of sunshine, though (I was fortunate that my visit to Wales and England coincided with an unusually sunny period) and managed to reset my body clock fairly quickly. What I didn’t get used to was the longer day. I would wake up when the blackbirds started singing at dawn and discover that it was only 4:30 in the morning.
Traveling home, of course, I got back the time I lost on the flight over. It was just about the longest morning of my life, starting at midnight when I was en route on the express train from London to the Birmingham airport, continuing for many hours at the airport lounge (I didn’t bother getting a motel room), and then on the flight itself, which left at 9:00, lasted for seven and a half hours, and arrived at noon. I had a window seat at the very back of the plane, and spent much of the time gazing at the tops of clouds from 35,000 feet in a state of mild stupefaction, the combined effect of sleep deprivation, a recently contracted head cold, and the sheer wonder of it all.
The plane was a Boeing 767 and bucked and heaved a lot more than I remembered from my previous intercontinental flights on 747s, and this combined with the wave-like tops of the clouds made it feel almost like a sea voyage. From time to time I’d switch on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me to check our position and verify that we were, in fact, hurtling along at 500 miles per hour. I thought back to my very first day in Wales, when I got a chance to ride in a small, flat-bottomed boat known as a coracle, a version of which the Irish St. Brendan supposedly crossed the North Atlantic in. Thousands of newly hatched mayflies were rising off the river as we took turns trying to pilot the rudderless, slow-going craft against the current.
The boat had just been made two days before by John and Cathryn Warren, the next-door neighbors to my hosts in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Wakelin (that’s Peter in the coracle after me; Clive’s voice is in the soundtrack, and he did the filming while I took a turn in the thing). I had simply happened to mention that a good friend of mine in the States was crazy about coracles, and asked if they knew where I might see one.
Somehow the unreality of flying across the Atlantic in a few hours was balanced by the unreality of having my desire to see a coracle instantly granted, sitting in it and finding myself unable to go anywhere very quickly except in circles. In fact, at that moment, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. Though the ancient ocean-going coracles did probably have rudders (and according to The Voyage of St. Brendan, could be fitted with a sail), their relative unsteerability constituted part of their attraction to Celtic monks, for whom the ideal form of travel involved surrendering to the will of God and going wherever the winds and currents took them. Some of the more God-besotted ones set off without even an oar. I could see their point. Almost everything — trees, wildflowers, birdsong — was new and miraculous to me, and I wanted nothing more than to stop and soak it in.
*
UPDATE (5/19): I’m honored to report that this post has spawned not one, but two responses from my friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott. Check out “Coracles and Communication,” which includes a poem called “Coracle of Prayer,” at her personal blog, and “Coracles and Currents” at Liberation Theology Lutheran.
Pick-up Lines
You’re 50; I’m 50. So what do you want
to do about it? Even Emerson had cabin
fever. Being in the woods so much,
you’d like just once to feel the mud.
All that walking about, carrying the soul
like glowing embers in buckets. That’s
too big a responsibility. And when
something’s hot like that, it’s better off
meeting something just as hot.
How about we try for some joy?
Response
Correction, I’m not quite 50. And mud is no
big deal, since women have typically more to do
with it than fussing over how their boots have gotten
dirty (have you tried to get it off denim or canvas?)
—Walking, walking, with no destination or design,
no pressing agenda other than reflection: now that’s
something I’d like to have the leisure to do. Scribble
in a notebook, pause, scribble again; look up in the trees
where the squirrels run like thoughts as yet unbound;
then come in at no set time to tea, or rum; or more quiet.
As for those glowing embers we carry around in buckets–
I’ve come to love the way they burn like gathered stems
of flame willow, like fiery clusters on flame trees: staunch,
insistent, not so easily summed up or dismissed; vivid
hurt against silver-white canes of the ghost bramble.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Perhaps you are right and this is the most
one could ever hope to distill from any moment,
the loveliness that puckers and flares
in such heady directions through half-
leafed-out trees— Scent escaping the white
lilacs’ quilled skirts of alabaster and eggshell,
the small fingerprint of a kiss you leave
on my lips each time you go. We’ll grow old
in the aftermath of the question, but not
its flicker. I’m the one who counts the cost of each
lingering: the stubborn dreams ignite, reckless,
despite their long habit of rootedness.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
We found the feathered body
beneath the window, red claws
stiffened into lower case C’s.
*
Whose voice is that then,
launching its frisson of a rising trill
across the field?
*
So little time: I clasp
the little tremor in my throat,
your hand under the table.
*
We pass the cup’s
clear lake of green
tea between us.
*
The French lilac answers,
its bright shimmer
backlit by the sun.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This is the third of four books that Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I are encouraging others to also read and blog about this month. (You can order from the publisher before the end of the month and receive 15% off.) Send me the link to your blog post and I’ll update to include it. Posts so far include:
Rachel Barenblat @ Velveteen Rabbi: “Ren Powell’s Mercy Island”
Carolee Sherwood: “reading mercy island by ren powell”
Writing Our Way Home blog: “An interview with poet Ren Powell”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott: “Holy Week Readings of ‘Mercy Island’ by Ren Powell”
Deb Scott @ Stoney Moss: “Reading Mercy Island”
Dorothee Lang @ Daily s-Press: “Mercy Island – Ren Powell (Phoenicia)”
What follows is most emphatically not a review; some of these lines relate only tangentially to Ren’s poems (which is why I don’t name the poems). But obviously it isn’t every book that so moves me to write and to remember.
(p. 1) The head of state, polished to a high sheen, is not the kind of god to submit to questioning.
(2) I remember $24.95 in saved allowance, dimes & quarters stacked on the counter of the camera store in exchange for that black box, my Instamatic! And taking a photo of my shadow beside the pigs.
(3) Grandma had a slingshot she used on the guinea fowl, those perpetually agitated gray commas.
(4) When Elvis died, I knew it was because he had maligned the innocent hounds.
(6) Going home from the pet store, the goldfish on the back seat beside me vibrated in its plastic bag of water. Three days later, it died of loneliness.
(7) The brutal screwing of Muscovy ducks in a muddy ditch was my introduction to reproduction: The enormous male crushing the female, pushing her head under the water, threading her with a white rope.
(8-9) I hated everything about shooting groundhogs, especially when their big soft bodies slid off the shovel or when, wounded, they escaped a second shot.
(11) Starting to drown in the ocean, that second or two of great silence under the waves — yet another project I didn’t finish.
(12) Out of all the days I’ve lived in blessed doubt, the two when I flirted with certainty were enough to make me burn forever.
(13) Behind the barn, behind the barn! The place where chicken-killing dogs were shot. There alone we could curse to our heart’s content.
(15) I measure my life in generations of 17-year cicadas, Brood X. I was 9 the first time. In a jar at the back of a drawer, I still have one or two of those transparent shells with exit wounds in lieu of wings.
(16) Clowning in the lunch room, he pulled the neck of a turtleneck shirt up over his head & in a matter of moments earned the nickname that would follow him to the grave.
(18) My brother yelled “copperhead!” when my foot was in mid-air & I launched into flight. That evening we found the reason why it couldn’t move, its shed skin.
(20) I once paid a statue to talk. She was loud with rust.
(21) In one well we had what we called a mudpuppy, but it was only a newt.
(22) Whoever invented the kaleidoscope must’ve had a childhood like mine: no TV, no visits to amusement parks, plenty of time to look at each odd thing from every angle.
(23) In the 4th Grade I learned that the body is made up of rooms too small to see. I was a city! And there were whole districts that never slept.
(24) We brought one runner sled, red as a red wagon, down with us from Maine in our red VW bus. In summer, we built mazes of tunnels through the tall grass.
(26) Our sky was narrow but dark then. I used to feel sorry for the light of distant stars that had been traveling so long just to enter my eye.
(27) The only thing about highways I didn’t hate was the shimmering water that wasn’t there, what it taught me about thirst.
(28) We had roosters, so our breakfast eggs were always fertile. I dreamt of chicks hatching in my stomach.
(29) Escaped garden plants have taken over half the forest. A curse is nothing but a blessing turned feral.
(30) If a bachelor dreams hard enough, he can give birth to a migraine.
(32) She left a letter with the stain of a dead centipede & several promises.
(34) Ah, romance. I remember corn silk, the wet trail of a slug.
(35) I remember scraping the roosts, nostrils burning with ammonia, and that big black rubber tub bulging with chickenshit.
(36) Feathers falling from the sky are commonplace. What seems incredible now is that Grandpa actually took up arms against a hawk. But Bontas must’ve all been like that once. We drank, we gambled, we owned other human beings, we shot hawks out of the sky.
(41) I was a gardener of little faith. When seedlings came up, I was astonished. I couldn’t bear to thin.
(43) The back of a shy man’s neck is red from scratching. You wouldn’t guess how I know.
(44) We keep calling them mountains, these hills, in the hope they’ll outgrow us.
(46) Birds from the tropics fly here every year to sing. Also to make new birds, yes — & teach them the songs they never sing in the tropics.
(47) Surely the near eradication of lice and fleas on humans has done our species a great disservice. Books & scrolls are a poor substitute for that daily close reading of each other’s primary texts.
(49) I learned early how to hold my breath: at the conference about my unruly behavior, the exophthalmic teacher waiting for me to speak. Strapped in for the orthodontist whose fat fingers tasted like garlic.
(52) Missing for most of my life, I remember being stoned and present for a mother who placed my hand on her child’s bare belly to feel the sickness — blood flukes, perhaps? — like a burl on a tree. I showed her my wallet, already emptied for other mendicants, & said nothing about the belt full of bills against my skin.
(53) We just can’t help stealing each other’s souls.
(54) No sane person looks forward to a trip. I look forward to having traveled.
(55) I miss the two or three male friends I used to open up to, our shared vulnerability over open beers, the layers of blue smoke that wreathed our heads.
(57) You might not believe it, but the part of a woman’s body I most miss touching is the back, below the shoulder blades & above the hips, that flat pastureland with its single ridge.
(58) Tiger beetles anywhere in the world turn my older brother into a predatory beast, one who stiffens, crouches, springs.
(60) That the wind signed its name on our fingertips before we were born — well, I call it wind. Some impersonal force random enough to convey uniqueness.
(63) The idea of the Sahara: not the shadow of civilization but its impact crater.
(64) I used to trace veins of quartz in the local bedrock; now it’s threads of moss that draw my eye. I have left off believing in heaven even as a metaphor. I am homesick for earth.
(65) Night/soil.
(66) Only nonsense can save us now.
(67-68) Garlic & mint, mint & garlic: I would join any church that had that for a catechism.
(69) The trailer where we went one by one for IQ testing at the age of six smelled of new machines & fear. I remember being told I could watch myself on television — a closed-circuit TV, but I didn’t know that. The dim realization that fun was being had at my expense.
(70) The Flavored Nuts sign — conveniently posted at shoulder level — remained a site for teenaged pilgrimage long after the factory closed and cloying smells stopped emanating from its windows.
(75) Like a single Roman letter stretching into a cursive sentence, the great blue heron launched into flight.
(76) Do peaches float? I feel I should know this, I who once publicly embarrassed the author of a book called Stones Don’t Float with a piece of pumice.
(77) A mother grouse doing the injured-wing act led me to the edge of a near-cliff. I wanted to see just what malice she harbored in her speckled breast.
(79) There’s a desert under my floor where rain hasn’t fallen in 150 years — it’s dry as the Atacama. A strange hairy people live there. I hear them thumping rhythmically and moaning now & then.
(80) Grandma was the only person I’ve ever helped bury. She was anti-religious & unsentimental and wanted to be cremated. It still felt awkward to tamp down the soil, hopping on her grave in tight funeral shoes.
(83) Across the gulf of puberty I catch only the faintest echo now of my childhood misery. I wonder though if my frequent, public self-baring wasn’t essential training for the vocation of poet.
(86-87) In a world with lichen in it, nothing is lost. The fungi are farmers, pioneering the most desolate faces of rock.
Dear fellow wanderer, familiar now as my twin,
more handsome than my shadow: all these years
we’ve stopped at the same wayside inn to share
quick meals, a cup of coffee, talk about our days
and where we’ve been— And yet we never linger
longer than an hour, perhaps two, before the claims
of the world descend again. But now I don’t know
which is more magnetic: that tilt of sky, the road,
plain countryside rampant with scent, tall grass
where the wind could lift our names higher.
Memory or dream, was that your kiss under my
eyelid’s flicker? I miss you even before you’ve taken
leave. This morning is full of the cries of woodpeckers—
part ululation, part rusty hinge. Your heart goes
with them, or forages among the stones with sparrows,
trusting in what it finds. You never say So long
or Au revoir, only Next time will be sweeter.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Like a question surfacing in the mind of winter,
at last the red maple blossoms are open.
Rich red anthers, puffs of orange pollen—
they are why the white-throated sparrow sings
without stopping in the rain. How does such love happen
like a question surfacing in the mind of winter?
I trail my hand in shallow water, and dredge up
questions no one can answer. I have no weapon
against the richness of red, the puffs of orange pollen.
The lover asks, What need for questions,
when the soul has met its answer? Fire might dampen,
doubt flicker in the mind’s unfinished winter.
The bird sings its pure white carol in the leaves,
singing, singing— as if the heart knew no other burden,
only the richness of red, the tenderness of orange pollen.
I let it sing, I let you come to me as you have all these years.
I had been tired, I had been lonely. I wanted to open
like a question meeting its answer at the end of winter:
heart rich with red, its joys stippled like puffs of orange pollen.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Has the darkness lifted?
Is the round bud of the maple not filled with longing?
How close can a room hold two, not speaking or touching?
Does every thought glint, is every fire stolen?
Is everything in the world immersed in the petroleum of desire?
Have the clocks been wound, has the coffeemaker been unplugged?
Has the crying from behind the keyhole subsided?
Do you see where the fabric holds the shape of shoulders?
Do you feel how the music rinses us clear?
Has the rain fed you with riddles?
Have I not been permeable to everything that has come?
Would you tell me where to lay this burden down?
Do you love the sweetness that precedes decay?
Do you love the light behind every green blade?
Do you love me homely?
Do you take me plain?
Have I not met you at every detour?
Can you tell me what it is that brings you back?
Each time, have we bent our heads to drink the water?
Would you lie here with me beneath this ceiling of stars?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.