This was my New Year’s Day poem for 2000. (Remember Y2K?)
snow fog at dawn
the wingbeats of a maybe crow
fade into the would-be distance
What grows
I remember as a child being especially fond of songs with accretionary verses. You know, like the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” or “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” A collection of Pennsylvania German songs in the book Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (edited by George Korson, Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), which I picked up at the same used book sale where I found Gerard’s Herball last month, includes some charming examples. Here’s one I especially liked.
I have, perhaps foolishly, mucked with the rather stilted translation a bit, despite my complete ignorance of the source language. According to the modern German-English dictionary I consulted, the verb wachs-en (wachst) means grow, sprout, come up, extend, increase, thrive. This verb is dropped in the middle verses (in favor of is), then reappears in the last two. Though in the latter case I have elected to go with “lies (with),” the choice of the original (and possibly prudish) translators, I think the shared meaning-element of growth and extension is a key to the whole song. Complimenting this verb, the noun Hecke also occupies a pivotal position, and seems to mean copse, thicket, hedge, underbrush, and also branch or twig by synecdoche, as with the English wood (a cognate of wild) coming to mean lumber. This simple song speaks volumes about the pre-modern European way of seeing the forest. I’ll give the German for the first and last verses and for each new noun as it crops up.
Was wachst in diesem Wald? (What Grows in This Wood?)
Sung by Emma Diehl at Freiburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania, 1938. Recorded by Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
En wunderscheener Bí¢m.
Bí¢m in di Hecke,
Zwishich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.
What grows in this wood?
A very beautiful tree.
Tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.
What grows on this tree?
A very beautiful limb (Nascht).
Limb on the tree, tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.
What grows on this limb?
A very beautiful branch (Heck).
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree . . .
What grows on this branch?
Very beautiful leaves (Lí¢b).
Leaves on the branch, branch on the limb . . .
What is in these leaves?
A very beautiful nest (Nescht).
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch . . .
What is in this nest?
A very beautiful egg (Oi).
Egg in the nest, nest in the leaves . . .
What is in this egg?
A very beautiful bird (Vojjel).
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest . . .
What is on this bird?
A very beautiful feather (Fedder).
Feather on the bird, bird in the egg . . .
What is in this feather?
A very beautiful bed (Bett).
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird . . .
What lies in this bed?
A very beautiful woman (Dí¢m).
Woman in the bed, bed in the feather . . .
Was wachst in diesem Dí¢m?
En wunderscheener Schatz.
Schatz im Dí¢m, Dí¢m im Bett,
Bett im Fedder, Fedder am Vojjel,
Vojjel im Oi, Oi im Nescht,
Nescht im Lí¢b, Lí¢b am Hecke,
Hecke am Nascht, Nascht am Bí¢m,
Bí¢m in di Hecke, zwischich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.
Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.
Janus poem
Mirror, mirror
Hello, silk: a girdled witch hazel switch, curdled-milk yellow.
The stark noose of bare wood bears no tooth mark.
Light snow fogs the view, logs glow white
as egrets, Victoria’s secrets, as
hope against hope.
Wake
The English language is unusually rich, they say, in words to describe silence, quiet, stillness, noiselessness, peace. I wonder if it isn’t in the nature of things for a language to multiply expressions for whatever an economic system based on scarcity renders dear? Water is the most ubiquitous and necessary substance on the planet, but how many ways do we have to describe it?
Lately I have found myself wishing especially for a richer vocabulary for the sounds of water. We’ve had two full years of record-setting precipitation here, and with my porch right at the headwaters of Plummer’s Hollow Run, I’m learning to distinguish subtle nuances of trickle, burble, flow. Every season but the heart of winter is mud season now. A year ago, when I started this blog, I think I imagined I’d be dealing more with images of blankness, the smooth refusal of fresh snow. Instead, I have begun visualizing the via negativa as a place where fresh boot prints fill quickly with water. It’s a bit like the 8th-century Japanese priest Sami Mansei’s one surviving poem. To what shall I compare the world? A boat that rows off with morning, leaving no trace behind, he wrote in one, almost continuous arabesque of ink, the brush sliding wetly over the scented paper. This was a culture, let’s remember, where in order to be thought attractive women had to blacken their teeth and draw faint clouds on their foreheads an inch above the place where their eyebrows had been. People took ink and lacquerware seriously. Occlusion was honored.
No road, no trace of a path, nothing more than the briefest of wakes: only the anonymous authors of the Daodejing thought this sufficient to base a coherent philosophy upon. But it’s not as if no one else ever took notice of such things. There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four things which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid (Proverbs 30:18-19). I am not sure in what manner Agur ben Yakeh committed his words to writing – quill and papyrus? But of course this may have been a popular saying for generations before this otherwise unknown sheik captured and preserved it – just the shell, no soft vowels – on whatever scroll.
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting out on my porch at quarter till five in the morning, still warm from my shower, when a flock of tundra swans went over – the only swans any of us heard all autumn. After last spring’s glorious northward migration, it was a bit of a disappointment. What I heard might well have been simply the last flock in a nightlong caravan. Steering by the stars as they do, the swans would’ve had to fly high to clear the clouds that had settled in around us. With the stream so loud and my windows all shut, I wouldn’t have heard anything.
Or perhaps the muffling effect of the fog made them sound higher and farther away than they were? In any case, I remember the auditory wake that followed their passage.
An hour before dawn, voices
drift down through the fog
like the first & most perfect
snow crystals of the year.I picture fast moving shadows
against the stars, snow disappearing
into dark water, a far-off tundra
where the night goes on for months.I lean out over the porch rail.
The creek runs high from all the recent rains.
Two weeks later I’m still hearing
the last treble notes.
Old poem
Stop me if you’ve read this one before.
SKETCH FOR A STILL LIFE WITH SAXOPHONE
What a quaint notion–that life
could be anything but kinetic,
frenetic, in full
swing! But let’s have a galvanized steel
bucket of ice sent up & see
what happens. Something
to shine, to gleam.
And a wooden bowl of felt-
&-plastic fruit on
a low table. And for
the proper contrast, for corners
appropriately dark, Japan’s
the place: the traditional-style
half of a hotel suite, say,
in a seaside resort just
beginning to fall
on hard times. The once-full
register showing
alarming gaps, the heat
turned off in the hall . . .
but still not a speck of dust.
Simply an air of genteel poverty
essential to the timeless equipoise
of things in their rightful places,
from the imitation paper windows
to the Zen-inspired alcove
with scroll & spray of blossoms
to the thrumming of some distant
power source–a drone
as melancholy as any chorus
of autumn crickets.
Let the uncorked chardonnay
take what it needs of oxygen & light.
Let nothing discompose
this most exotic
of guests: the saxophone
resting in the corner
like a golden carp. See
how at home it looks?
ready for the oddly missing shoe
to begin tapping.
Surrender
They have gone away. You can see it in the lichen spreading straight across the front walk and the tree seedlings sprouting from the gutters. The starlings have taken up residence in the hollow near the top of the pear tree; it would’ve killed him. Every few minutes something falls from the eaves and lands soundlessly in the dried leaves the wind has piled on the lee side of the house. In a forgotten corner of what used to be a garden, the sundial has tipped so far over that noon’s finger stretches halfway to the ground even in June. Come November, the whole place has sunk so deep into shadow, you can hear a screech owl’s querulous trill at four in the afternoon. Its last inhabitants rarely even think about the place any more. The clapboard warps, turns green. Even snow’s great eraser won’t be able to hide the fact of its abandonment, fallen the way a woman falls who cheats on her doting husband a single time and then spends the rest of her life in fear that he will find out, warping, turning green with jealousy at the merest hint of another woman’s interest in him. The frames don’t have to go too far off true to make the windows stick forever as they were left: all shut but one, the high sliding window above the stove, so easy to forget. But for the wind and the rain, for the white-footed mice, it’s enough. From that one omission begins the surrender to another, more impartial kind of care.
Here comes the candle
Who reads blogs on a holiday, anyway? Worse yet: Who writes in them?
Creatures with teeth, things with talons, O Daddimommigod with eyes like saucers and bellies that drag along the ground, your laughter frightens me. I eat mash in clabbered milk and feel it drip through my crop. I gobble corn and hear metal, steel against stone. You have us where you want us. What more do you want? Numbers, numbers. Wings that flop like fish on the end of a line. I clasp my two helpings of darkness to my side with great thanksgiving.
Creatures made of blood and pus and shit, things full of sickness and bad medicine, shears that show off shapely legs on which they never once have had to stand. Empty eye sockets, a dictator in designer glasses pretending to admire my beak, snip! Sorted by lot, we grow so full of sleep it’s hard to keep our backward knees from buckling. The floor isn’t something I’d want to touch with any other part of me than my armored feet: it crawls. It writhes.
Creatures without teeth, things without bones, O Daddimommigod let me hide my head in the down of your breast, so tender and plump. Hour by hour the sky grows whiter, harder. Now, even when I’m awake I drum and drum against it with my stump of a pecker. I’ve swallowed everything until I can hardly turn, I can barely breathe. My knocks are growing feebler. I’m beginning to think there’s nothing on the other side.
But wait – what’s that rumble? What new thing comes flickering along the horizon? These flying drops of moisture, so sweet! More and more of it, a wall of water. I close my eyes and tilt my head back. It strips me of dirt, of feathers, of skin, of flesh. All head and tail I am swimming upstream, one blind whip against the world.
Retired pianist
Lines fine as spider silk
that craze a surface once
adored for sleekness,
ripples where a frog jumped in,
oh flesh that sags, corners
that wander off true: with
these very claws fumbling
for the keys I have found
a way to go on without regret.
My love, oh world, I give you
pearly everlasting. Let happiness
spread like the spot in this
November sky where the sun
used to make a blazon of
your virtues. Let outlines grow
fuzzy, liberated from their shadows.
Play all the fractional notes
between white & black, hemidemi-
semiquavers in milkweed pods,
seed-clouds of goldenrod, bare
branches. Their ordnance spent,
freed of primary obligations,
the empty casings have room
for more world – rain wind snow
wakefulness sleep – & thereby,
my dear sir or madam, more
resonance. More give. More play.
Holding without having, we learn
at last how to keep.
Shall we dance?
Natalie suggested that each participating blogger follow our comma-free, one-sentence posts with additional sentences, continuing the same story line, so I did. But this is one of those stories where you, dear reader, must do all the work, supplying plot, character and motive along with the commas. You can star in this one yourself, if you like. Someone has to take the initiative around here!
Shall we play Twenty Questions the way we used to when we were small and crammed together into the back seat with almost the whole vacation behind us now & spotting license plates had begun to wear thin (though some of us had hated that game from the moment it got started) & we added a fourth category to the traditional three so Ideas were included which often of course made it impossible to solve in just 20 questions because how in the hell do you decide whether or not Democracy is bigger than a breadbox?
Or should we instead aspire to levity as on the evening of an alcohol-free family get-together on New Year’s Eve & take the questions dealt for us from decks not of our own imagining but focus our attention instead on the progress of plastic surrogates around a racetrack where the outcome seems heavily weighted in favor of those with the best memories for all the momentous events in the life of this particular colony of yeast?
And if we ever settle on a medium then shall we decide who asks whom the way one might volley for a serve or choose first move in a chess match based on the color of pawns held tight in a pick of fists?
First draft, best draft
The above dictum would hold true only for gravity-fed systems. With forced carbonation, the first draft is of course mostly foam.
*
THE FUTURE ABBESS PICKS SPILLED LENTILS OFF THE COUNTERTOP
This love
is no excuse for clumsiness. I must
start paying better attention. Or is it
simply distraction I’ve been craving?
No, No. Come here, damn you! I want
to make a plain stew with onions,
a porridge with garlic – what Esau
bought so dearly, starved & sweaty,
hot from the hunt. These small red
lentils slip so nimbly from between
forefinger & thumb! Good thing
they don’t roll, too. I picture bracelets,
a little choker with five decades of red.
One tells a rosary, yes? Would drilled
lentils listen better, fall in line?
A wheel of fortune for levelers: no
matter where I stop counting – whether
I stop – the same mellifluous prayer,
half a pair of wings. Easy does it,
sister. Don’t hold your breath. But
why not just lick my finger, forget
the clumsy thumb? Ah, I can pick up
two, three, four at once! I point.
They stick.