Devotions

This entry is part 24 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

“…Mothers weep in the corners of those paintings
while a man, each morning, sweeps the church floor.”
~ Connie Voisine, “The Altar” by George Herbert

Every day, dirt prints on the kitchen floor,
and under the furniture, thick new pelts
of dust. Perhaps this detritus that gathers

is the sediment of dried-up tears? Taking out
the trash and pushing the bin against the far end
of the driveway, I see petite roses in bloom.

Blood-red, pressed between the fence and the water
meter. Pitimini, once I heard a woman call them:
she made floral arrangements for the church, came in

the side door of the rectory, careful to take off
her shoes and coat in the vestibule. Unrolling sheets
of newsprint on tile, she laid out ferns, divided

showy chrysanthemums from tall gladioli; and, finishing,
tucked the slighter blooms in between the hardier stems—
baby’s breath, those miniature roses. Her hands did not seem

to mind delving into their cache of sharp hooks,
guiding scratchy stems into clear vases filled with water.
I cannot remember whether she was Isabel, or Delia, or Florinda.

She came to freshen the flowers every other day, before the sun
was up. I don’t know why the ghost of her name meets me here
at the end of the driveway, pointing out the flowers.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley

I Was the Jukebox I Was the JukeboxSandra Beasley; W.W. Norton 2010WorldCatLibraryThingGoogle BooksBookFinder 
Sandra Beasley has soul. This is useful to keep in mind the third time you encounter a title following the pattern “Another Failed Poem About X,” or when you labor through a sestina with “ginger” as one of its line-ending words for no good reason that you can see. Yes, genius can be annoying: how many of us would resist the urge to be clever at the expense of emotional impact if we had anything approximating Beasley’s gifts?

Once I asked a broker what he loved
about his job, and he said Making a killing.
Once I asked a serial killer what made him
get up in the morning, and he said The people.
(“Vocation”)

But even her less-than-fully-successful poems are still pretty damn impressive. This book deserved its place on everyone’s top poetry lists last year. I don’t know what made me break my usual pattern of studiously ignoring whatever everyone else is hyping — possibly the fact that Beasley is a long-time blogger, or that she’s a Facebook contact — but I’m glad I did.

Why do I say Beasley has soul? Because she throws her voice like nobody’s business, taking on the personas not only of inanimate objects, plants and dead gods, but also historical events (“The World War Speaks”) and plural beings (“The Sand Speaks”):

Mothers, brush me from the hands

of your children. Lovers, shake me
from the cuffs of your pants. Draw
a line, make it my mouth: I’ll name
your country. I’m a Yes-man at heart.

Because, unlike so many young poets of a surrealist bent, she stays relatively down-to-earth and tends to give the uninitiated reader something to grab on to, even when writing a modern-day allegory (“Beauty”).

That night, something howled outside.
I opened the door. It was Beauty. Beauty
was muddy and senseless. I let her in.
I tried to towel her off, and she bit me.

Because she is so fond of apostrophe, she has written love poems to college, oxidation, and Wednesday.

You are the loneliest of the three bears, hoping
to come home and find somebody in your bed.
(“Love Poem for Wednesday”)

And now and then there’s a poem that appears to be autobiographical nonfiction, such as “Antietam,” and it’s all the more affecting for coming in the midst of wilder and woolier stuff. The narrator is on a school field trip to the Civil War battlefield.

Our guide said that sometimes, the land still let go
of fragments from the war—a gold button, a bullet,
a tooth migrating to the surface. We searched around.
On the way back to the bus a boy tripped me and I fell—
skidding hard along the ground, gravel lodging
in the skin of my palms. I cried the whole way home.
After a week, the rocks were gone.
My mother said our bodies can digest anything,
but that’s a lie. Sometimes, at night, I feel
the battlefield moving inside of me.

I Was the Jukebox has been very widely reviewed, and since I have to go to bed early tonight, I’m going to slack off a little and just point you toward the links on the Open Library page. I do however want to say a little about the book’s packaging, trivial as that may seem. I was a little turned off by the publisher’s decision to put a short blurb right on the front cover, up at the top — that’s just tacky. The cover design is a mess. But both these failings are off-set, for me, by the pleasingly grainy surface of the paperback cover. There’s a lot to be said for a book that feels good in the hands. It won’t slide off the couch as easily easily as a book with a glossy cover. And like sand on the beach, it makes you want to dive in.

Todd Davis on National Poetry Month

NPM Daily:

And as far as cruelty goes, I think T.S. Eliot was being a bit overly dramatic when he suggested that these 30 greening days in the fourth month of the year were the cruelest. I can think of many other months that offer far more by way of cruelty.

Perhaps as a Midwesterner transplanted to England, Eliot never had the opportunity to walk deep into a northern forest in the first days of March—snows slowly pulling their tongues back into the earth’s mouth—to see winterkill huddled beneath hemlock boughs: the carcasses of deer withered on January’s barren fruit; the corpses of porcupines who weren’t fast enough to evade the brutal teeth of fisher; or even the rare bear who trudged too soon from slumber and found nothing but the empty taste of ashes in its belly.

By April, at least here in central Pennsylvania, the entire ridge-side is burgundy with the tiny blossoms of sugar and red maples. The coltsfoot has already discarded its yellow-fringed flower, and May apple is unfurling the glossy umbrella that will hide its fruit in June and July.

Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

Flowers of a Moment (Lannan Translation Selection Series) Flowers of a Moment (Lannan Translation Selection Series)Ko Un; BOA Editions 2006WorldCatLibraryThingGoogle BooksBookFinder 
Tonight, I don’t feel like pretending to be a book reviewer. (Does it really matter what I have to say about a guy who’s been nominated so many times for the Nobel Prize?) Tonight I would rather respond to a few of Ko Un’s brief poems as if he were right here, sharing drinks and conversation.

I have spent the whole day talking about other people again
and the trees are watching me
as I go home

Sometimes I confuse the road with the map and everything on either side with terra incognita.

Exhausted
the mother has fallen asleep
so her baby is listening all alone
to the sound of the night train

The spider spends 99 percent of her lifetime waiting, suspended among her knitting, yet will perish before the first of her children hatch.

Outside the cave the howling wind and rain
Inside
the silent speech of bats filling the ceiling

Today, I read about a study that found that plants emit and respond to sonic vibrations. With their large ears attuned to ultrasonic sounds, I wonder if bats can hear the questing rootlets of the oaks over their heads?

We went to Auschwitz
saw the mounds of glasses
saw the piles of shoes
On the way back
we each stared out of a different window

Every window has its own fragile truth. Once, in a basement dangerous with broken bottles, a thug threw me against a wall and my glasses flew off. I became half-blind and sober at the same time.

Beneath the heavens with their scattered clouds
here and there are fools

Some of us are expanding, some shrinking, some taking a leak with a beer in one hand.

Crayfish, why are you so complicated?

with your feelers
your jaw legs
your hairy legs
your chest legs
your belly legs
and all the rest

My god! How is it that I missed my calling to be an egg?

In the old days a poet once said
our nation is destroyed
yet the mountains and rivers survive

Today’s poet says
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
yet our nation survives

Tomorrow’s poet will say
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
our nation is destroyed and Alas!
you and I are completely destroyed

Isn’t there some way we can destroy all these pesky poets?

Look at the nose of a baby rabbit
look at the tail of a dog—
that’s the kind of world I’m living in

Look at those three bs in “baby rabbit,” then look at the small g in “dog” — the alert way a prey animal sits, the alert way a predator lies in wait.

A thousand drops
hanging from a dead branch

The rain did not fall for nothing

Today I watched a crowd of mayapple parasols down by the streambank thrown into disarray by one simple snowfall. Some turned completely over, their flower buds like thumbs pointed at the sky.

One spring night, the sound of a child weeping
One autumn night, the sound of laundry being pounded
This
was a place where people were really alive

As I passed the field fertilized with their shit
involuntarily I bowed my head

I was going to say that I have never grown anything with compost made from my own excrement, but then I remembered I’m a writer.

From across the river
the sound of a bell reached the two of us
for us to listen to together
The sound of a bell reached us

We had decided to part
but then we decided not to part

I remember the big bronze temple bells in Japan, how they boomed rather than clanged, the sound going on and on: the bells of Mt. Hiei that I listened to with a lover as we gazed into each other’s eyes, and the bell at Ikkyu’s old temple in the country where I trespassed one night so I could stand inside it, whispering hello to the spiders and the thousand-year-old bronze.

No need to know its whereabouts

A small spring in a mountain ravine
is like a sister
a younger sister
like a long lost younger sister
now found again

The whole point of drinking, it seems to me, is that moment of recognition. I’ve had brotherly feelings toward mosquitos sinking their drilling rigs into my arm.

The top is spinning
Yesterday the poet Midang departed
today old Oh from next door departed
How can death concern only one or two?
The child’s top is surrounded by every kind of death

The rubber ball, the spinning jacks — how many can you keep in play? Between one bounce and the next they can all fall down.

A warship moves through the sea
near Paekryong Island in the Yellow Sea
Not one seagull’s in sight
The sea
looks as if someone has disappeared in it
I’m carrying an empty soju bottle

When war becomes permanent, who but a poet or a crackpot remembers the kind of peace that doesn’t involve desolation? The deafening howl of A-10 fighter jets can linger for half a minute after they’ve passed from view, the air like a fresh wound that hasn’t yet learned how to bleed. Then, slowly, the whine of cicadas, and this old wrinkle of earth goes back to being a mountain.

Rift

This entry is part 23 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Unto every one that hath shall be given, says the sky:
and so the flowerbeds spread their skirts lined with mulch,
and the odor rose into the air, mold of wood mingled
with the fragrance of budding things. And the frost
that earlier rimmed the outlines of each blade
of grass: overtaken by rain, so many needles
running stitches into the earth.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Walden by Haiku, by Ian Marshall

Walden by haiku Walden by haikuMarshall, Ian; University of Georgia Press 2009WorldCatLibraryThingGoogle BooksBookFinder

the old pond
not one wrinkle
after all its ripples

That’s one of Ian Marshall’s “found haiku” from Walden, “The Ponds” chapter. Here’s the original passage, helpfully included — as are the sources for each of the haiku from the main section of the book — in Part 2, “Sources and Commentary”:

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve the honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip, apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. [emphasis added]

If you’re a haiku purist, or if the idea of rewriting a hallowed classic fills you with horror, you won’t like this book. I thought it was a blast, not least because even when I was young and impressionable I found Thoreau a little too long-winded, self-righteous, and apt to treat nature as an excuse to indulge in airy philosophizing (though as Marshall points out, this tendency diminished over time). Transcendentalism is utter crap as far as I am concerned, and nothing could be father from the Zen spirit of haiku as Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki practiced it. So to me, Marshall’s distillations offer an almost ideal condensed version of Walden, cutting all the parts I don’t like and highlighting almost everything I do. In essence, he’s applied Thoreau’s famous directive, “Simplify, simplify” to the text in which it appears.

I’ll admit I didn’t read all of Part 2. I would’ve dipped into it much more often if the publisher had made it easier to quickly locate the source and commentary for a haiku in the first half, e.g. by including referenced page numbers in the top margin, as more scholarly books with extensive end-notes often do. Walden by Haiku is kind of a hybrid between a scholarly work of ecocriticism and a popularly accessible primer on haiku, and possibly the author or editor figured it would scare off potential readers to treat Part 2 strictly as end-notes.

Not that the main section of the book is lacking in a critical apparatus, however. Following a very readable 17-page introduction explaining the project and describing haiku aesthetics in general terms, the haiku are presented in the order in which Marshall “found” them in the book, chapter by chapter, each section followed by a few pages of additional commentary expanding on some aspect of haiku aesthetics as it might relate to Thoreau’s writing. It kind of reminded me of one of those volumes from Doubleday’s Anchor Bible translation, with the translation of each passage followed by two or three sections of increasingly arcane commentary and notes.

And in fact translation is how I’d describe this project. As I’m sure I’ve said here more than once before, I’ve personally found translation to be an invaluable aid to attentiveness, kind of the apotheosis of reading, which is why I think every serious poet should give it a shot. It’s clear from Marshall’s commentary that, despite the dozens of times he’s taught the book, the countless times he’s read it and the hundreds of journal articles and books about it that he must’ve read in the course of his career, translating Walden into haiku revealed new puns and other layers of meaning in the text that he’d never noticed before. Though Thoreau himself was unfamiliar with the haiku tradition, like any writer who goes outside of himself for moments of authentic contact and insight, many of his best passages can readily be translated by a skilled poet into approximations of English-language haiku. And Marshall is nothing if not a skilled poet. Here are a few other examples of Walden translated into haiku:

furniture on the grass
white sand and water
scrubbing the cabin floor

fishing for pouts
baiting the hooks
with darkness

a cool evening
the sound of a flute
stars over far fields

mortaring the chimney
our knives thrust into the earth
to scour them

after a cold night
my axe on the ice
resounding

Most of the poetry I’ve read this month has been in the form of chapbooks or shorter full-length collections, but I thought it was worth compromising on my book-a-day pace to fit this one in; I’ve been meaning to read it ever since it came out. Marshall is a friend of the family, so I suppose I should issue a disclaimer — except that many of the authors whose works I’ve blogged about this month have been friends or acquaintances. If I’d read the book and not liked it, I simply wouldn’t have blogged about it. And I’m not sure how much Ian will appreciate my slighting comments about Thoreau! But for the majority of readers who presumably hold more reverent attitudes toward ol’ Hank: I can assure you that there’s hardly a trace of arrogance in Marshall’s commentary. These are not appropriations but homages, I think. He’s very aware of the audacity of this project, his conclusions are cautious, and his general attitude toward his source comes across as an apprentice-like humility. In my translator analogy, he would be a W. S. Merwin rather than a Robert Bly or a Stephen Mitchell: someone determined to try and capture the voice of the original author rather than to impose his own.

Let me conclude with an example of Marshall’s semi-populist, semi-scholarly analysis: part of his commentary on the “old pond” haiku I quoted at the outset. This follows his quote of the source passage.

Again, I cannot help but see this passage and haiku as invoking the most famous and thoroughly analyzed haiku of all, Bashō’s “the old pond / a frog jumps / the sound of water.” Thinking of Walden as Bashō’s old pond [which Marshall also did at the beginning of the introduction] makes this passage as resonant as Thoreau’s “hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove” parable. The pond retains its purity and remains undamaged and unchanging even after all its far-reaching ripples—far-reaching in terms of both time and geography—and even after the ice-men (critics?) have done their skimming. And every time we find something new in Bashō’s old pond, the change is all in us. … Bashō’s pond haiku has been extensively commented upon, imitated, and evoked—as I have done one more time by arranging Thoreau’s comment here in the form of a haiku that echoes once again the sound of water Bashō heard over three hundred years ago. And still—all these wide ripples later—no wrinkles on the pond.

(Note, by the way, that the hardcover edition I’ve linked to at Open Library has been supplemented by paperback and electronic editions. Click on the publisher link for information about all three.)

Founding

This entry is part 22 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Of brass and iron, of bronze or bell metal, a house
within which the clapper might sound— What slips

into the wind, sometimes slight as a prayer?
A warbler’s call before it fades,

the curl of incense bearing the names
of all we’ve lost, all we seek—

Hour upon hour is struck: diligent notes that echo
to the yoke and crown, to the waist and lip—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Words on the Street

Homeless guy with sign: Consuming Mindfully Since 2004

 

Happy Earth Day. Even if the earth is about to pound the east coast of the U.S. and Canada with a winter storm after weeks of unseasonably warm weather. “Global weirding,” here we come!

Night Watch

And if I say heat, expected rain, lassitude— the hollows of my bones begin to mimic the throats of brittle plants. I was seized by thirst, reading a catalogue of inks: morning glory, transparent blue as raindrops on its cheek; moonlight, brazen crimson of azaleas. Purple berries, named after the lady-in-waiting who wrote the first novel. The names of women were not even recorded in her time. I think of her, restless on her sleeping mattress, mining the indigo shade of night after night for illumination. Green sentinels of bamboo; ochre fields, stalks bursting with grain— each pointed like a nib.

 

In response to New year's resolutions: the most beautiful thing.

Nocturnes by Kathleen Kirk

Nocturnes NocturnesKathleen Kirk; Hyacinth Girl Press 2012WorldCatLibraryThingGoogle BooksBookFinder
This was the perfect companion for a quiet, rainy spring night. Kathleen Kirk‘s latest chapbook gathers 20 night-themed poems that together trace a landscape of loss and yearning, peopled by memories, dreams, ghosts, lovers and various errant moons. The book begins in Cuba, with a striking image of women wearing fireflies in their hair nets (“Cucuyo”) followed by several pieces from the perspective of a Cuban exile’s family, culminating in the grotesque “Our Son Dreams of the Beast Shark.” It then segues into “Stargazing with My Son,” introducing an astronomical theme that continues off and on throughout the book, mingled with, increasingly, poems about love and desire.

All of which is to say that the book is very well put together. As someone who has written several themed collections myself, I can attest to the difficulty of maintaining a good balance between unity and diversity, as Kirk does here.

Three of the poems are ekphrastic, responses to Whistler’s “nocturne” paintings — not surprising, considering that Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life, a magazine devoted to the intersection between visual and literary arts. But even poems that weren’t sparked by paintings abound with painterly details: “A grey glob” of mortar “lands wet and heavy / on the plastic sheet / like a body part” (“Losing Cuba”), and the narrator’s skin is likened to “these moon-colored leaves (touch them!) / trembling in the moments / just before rain” (“Last Leaves”).

“Almost an Aubade” references Edward Hopper, his subjects “shining in their loneliness,” but unexpectedly turns into a love poem: “After the sharp dream of another, I come back to you…” The book is full of such artful inversions. Possibly the most unexpected poem, “When We Lived at Night” — my favorite in the collection — goes deep into our pre-human past, when “there was no time, / only the moment” and “we lay along the wide limb / of our new existence / in the trees, nocturnal together.”

What’s left of my reptilian brain
still longs to live in the moment,
that wretched clawing in the dust
suspended forever.
But there was no forever.

I relate to the poems about sleeplessness, “Acorns Rolling Off the Roof” and “Naked Dance”:

It’s three oh three,
I’ve dreamed a giant red poppy,
tall as a small tree …

It’s good to be lonely

at a time like this.
I wouldn’t want to wake the sleeping world
from its soft desserts.

There’s only one explicit reference to blues in this book, but if you love blues music as I do, the dominant mood should feel very familiar, that same mix of melancholy and exultation. Like good blues, these poems are never lugubrious, and aim to turn losses into something salutary: “When the time comes, / juncos will feast on this cold” (“Almost Winter”). Or as Kirk says at the end of “Cosmonaut”:

This shining loss is now a thing to be praised,
as stunning as a comet’s tail
or a transit of Venus,
or a black hole swallowing up life as we know it
and spitting it back out whole
somewhere else, without any teeth marks.

Kudos to Hyacinth Girl Press for their selection of this surprising and delightful book.