Christmas comes on a sleigh

Snow on the bank where the Great Blue Heron stood in summer, searching, 

like Ungerer's Three Robbers, for victims.

It is cold again this year, as it was during this earlier winter,

on the backs of the Little Union Canal..

Yesterday there were many more ducks in the water than this;

how do they stay warm???  jhh

Snowflakes

In my country, there is no one 
who had never been photographed.
Being shot in the face is a way of life.
Frying is not so bad as losing
a photograph of the fried one.
If you spot an egg dying on the sidewalk
you are free to take its picture.
Some prefer to place a friend next to it
but who that might be is up to you.
No two people are alike, although they look
exactly the same. Like snowflakes.
My country is a country of snowflakes,
people just pile up to your wonderment
or disgust (whatever you think is OK).
People take a lot of pictures at Christmas.
People place tiny decorated trees on graves.
Snow country, like the novel by Kawabata.
Everyone wants to live here because we have
invisible fences so if a dog leaves the yard
he's snapped right back in.
You can buy garbage bags with the scent of lemons
or wildflowers. Everyone has a choice.
A man was hired to see if spice scented bags
sold well, if the people liked them, and they
did not, so they took them away.
Don't worry if you are thinking
you'd like something different for your children,
for your own unique little snowflakes,
because we have wonderful schooling in privacy
where a child must stare at a glass of milk
three hours, or until its surroundings grow dark,
whichever comes first.
And children are encouraged to draw, 
always to draw. Christmas comes on a sleigh.
They get their first camera in a pouch.
The wet polaroid slips into their hand,
a memory from the moment of birth.
Another face is born.
My country grows on the deep freeze door
and my country grows in the snowy night.
But no two countries are alike.

Mary Ruefle

Post Meridian, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 
Pittsburgh, PA, 2000, pages 56-57.


I find nothing in my life that I can’t find more of in books. 

With the exception of walking on the beach, in the snowy woods, and swimming underwater. That is one of the saddest journal entries I ever made when I was young. --Mary Ruefle

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/mary-ruefle

Someone Reading a Book 

Is a Sign of Order in the World: 

Mary Ruefle

Someone writing a poem that just moves along

and moves along, and moves along,

is a sign of the magic of language,

and of the discovery of interesting sound and meaning

in unlikely juxtapositions. 

June Hopper Hymas

I don't know what kind of bird I am.

It snowed again today; and since the flakes came down so slowly,

it was strangely unsatisfying. This is another version of the squirrel nest

photo from the other day, as modified by the Mondrian filter in Prisma.

Race With the Wind

Blue day! Blue day! ah! ah!

What a strange thing to say.

Ho can anyone understand?

I love the queer birds,

standing under a tree

with my head stuck up inside.

I thought you could read my mind

but I see you see leaves.

When a bird flies from a tree

something happens.

That is how you know

something is going to happen.

What the thrush said was

I don't know what kind of bird I am.

Put your bird on my shoulder.

You have to catch it first.

Gently! The breast is soft

like the center of a baby's head

before it learns to count.

Poor bird, out of his wits:

his heart is racing with the wind.

One to a zillion.

You'd think there was a bird inside!

This doesn't imply another and another.

It implies only one. Just one.

Mary Ruefle

Post Meridian; poems by Mary Ruefle

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000, page 55.

The amount of punctuation in this poem is very interesting,

In a work of your own that is of medium length, try varied line lengths and plenty of punctuation.  jhh

Circular Ideas

Someone I love likes to decorate! I've been fond of her

Christmas smirker!

Intermittence

The anxiety of spring will come

and the birds build nests

out of circular ideas.

Slender of means, sparing of words,

the rain will fall.

The sun will shine and make things certain.

These things will remain a mystery.

Next no contra from anywhere

and the air be seriously entangled.

Mary Ruefle  

Tristimania, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004, page 29. (Ruefle's eighth book of poems.)

I was reminded today of one of my favorites, Mary Ruefle, when the Paris Review posted a link to their interview of her on Facebook. 

I have posted many of her short pieces on this blog.   Click the link above to see them.

Your task: write a poem of nine lines in one,

two and three-line stanzas. Express a philosophy based on ruminations about the natural world and its interface with our world. Or something. . .

Go ahead, try!

Night came, and the moon with it

The last few days have brought rain at night and spectacular clouds

on the Daily Walk. This is from yesterday's Walk.

Today had surprises, and after all, no room for the Walk.

Today's mail brought me a new book by my favorite, Mary Ruefle. 

I am sorry to have to report that the soft creamy, art-paper cover 

as on her other books is no more. We have instead a nice 

orangey-red with white sort-of-handwriting that one cannot read 

running parallel to the spine of the book. But Mary is still inside, 

and I am looking forward to a few nourishing reads.

A CERTAIN SWIRL

The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty,

and the sentence on the board was frightened to

find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to

read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a

noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of

some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-

tance that contained within itself a certain swirl not

unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe,

but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it

was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had

left the room and turned out the lights. Night came, 

and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board

and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one

read it.

Mary Ruefle      (born 1952)

THE MOST OF IT. Wave Books, 2008, page 55.

One thing I noticed about typing this is that the linebreaks

are very useful, giving a little shot of importance to words

at the ends or especially at the beginnings of lines. 

One task for us might be to try typing paragraphs of

our writing, or journal writing, to a certain point, and 
then breaking the line. One could look to similar sized lines,
as here, or . . .?  jhh

Inglenook

On a porch in Arkansas, my grandmother's extended family assembles. This is a scan of a bent photocopy of a copy, but you get the idea. My father's mother (Marjory Ann Carr) is at far right in the middle row, with the bangs and the row of buttons. Her arrow says "mother" She was born in 1874. Her father died when she was only six months old. Her mother died when she was nine, so I think these two sisters has already been orphaned when this picture was taken. Her sister, Lillian is on the far right; her arrow says "Auntie" which was what she was called by my father. Lillian never married and lived with her sister's family. Here is a passage from Marjory's autobiographical record:

"My Mother left Miss Co. soon after my father's death and went to Woodruff Co. Ark. She took her [his] three small girls Elizabeth, Lillian and Marjory Ann with her.

She bought a farm six miles from Augusta the County seat for Woodruff Co. The oldest girl Elizabeth died when she was 4 yrs old and was buried at a country grave yard near our farm.

My Mother Minnie Ann Carr died when I was 9 years old. After her death, my sister Lillian and I made our home with our mother's brother, Ollie Johnson's family who lived in Augusta.

I stayed there til I was 16 yrs old. I then took an examination and taught several country schools. Finally when almost 20 I took another examination and got a scholarship to enter Peabody Normal College in Nashville, Tenn. I boarded with my father's brothers family (Uncle [Niel] Carr) the three years I was in college. After I graduated I went to my old house in Augusta, Arkansas, and taught 4 yrs in the school where I went as a child.

During my stay in Augusta I met John R. Hopper and we were married in Nashville, Tenn June 12, 1901."
                                          *********


This is quite an inspirational story, don't you think? And probably no different than many other life stories of people who lived in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century in the United States.

I wanted to chose a picture of some vintage to go with this recent poem from The New Yorker. I think because of the old-fashionedness of the words "ingle" and "nook" which are combined in the word inglenook, which was produced from old words for fire/fireplace and nook, meaning a corner.

Notice how in the poem below, Mary Ruefle has made two new compound-words: face-wash and tooth-clean. I imagine my grandmother might have known this word: inglenook. It's a word I like and carries shreds of antiquity within itself. Make up compound words of your own for your poems, if you can,

I grew up in New York State and my grandmother lived in Yuma, Arizona, so I never knew her well. It's a loss, I think. Now I wonder if this is Ollie Johnson and his wife standing in the doorway of the picture above.


INGLENOOK

I live in the museum of
everyday life,
where the thimble is hidden
anew every week and often
takes five days to find.
Once it was simply lying
(laying?) on the floor
and I missed it,
looking inside my mouth.
A grease fire in the inglenook!
That took a lot of soda!
Free admission, but guests
are required to face-wash
before entering and 
tooth-clean before leaving.
Open daily, the doorknobs
are covered with curated
fingerprints, and pass
on the latest news.

Mary Ruefle
      
The New Yorker, June 1, 2015, page 64.

Ways of Looking

Where the stream bends; the grassy bank beyond the tree is where the ducks often take the sun.

The World as I Left It

     

Wood, cement, steel, polyester

Glass, marble, ink and ether.

Water, ash, asphalt and leather. Plastic.

Stone, fur, copper and silk. Silver, cotton,

paper and clay. Bone, horn, coal, gold,

gas, soil, rubber and cardboard. Mud. Tin.

Wool, wax, lead. Ice, oil, paint and bronze.

Rayon, cork, vinyl and sand. Numbers.

Dust, slate, graphite and glue.

I was almost happy.

Mary Ruefle

Tristimania, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004, page 21.

Another task. Try making a poem out of the names of materials, either the types of things used here, furniture, tools, or household objects, or something else tangible. Or list intangibles for another kind of poem. Do the sounds of the named things suggest other words to you? Look at the sounds in Ruefle's poem. 

Were you surprised by Ruefle's last sentence?? Look up the word Tristimania; what single word would be a good title for your book with your poem in it?

Lapland

I took this today through my bedroom window. 
When I turned on my camera, there were twelve wood ducks perched here. 
Wood Ducks sit on this fence all the time; they are tree ducks. 
The mallards are puddle ducks, or dabbling ducks. 
I have never seen a mallard sit on the fence before, but here she is!
It is a good indication of the size differences between the two kinds of duck.

LAPLAND

The little Lap girl wanders around picking cloudberries
while the bluethroat sings one of his hundred songs.
There are tiny white flowers, too, angelica,
and the wild white ranunculus.
The reindeer eat lichen and moss under the melting snow.
Some of the lichen are a thousand years old
and do not recognize the modern world.
The geography lessons are young in comparison,
though this one is older than most, since
Lapland lies on no map and the little Lap girl
must be at least eighty by the looks of the book.
It is doubtful she remembers the day
of this photograph. The pencil-stroke of a birch
can be seen in the distance. Once in a while
she must still hear the bluethroat and think
of her childhood. Out of a hundred songs
he has not forgotten the one he sang
on an afternoon when the snow left and
the wild white white ranunculus took its place.
But he is the peripheral sort 
and not at the center of anything.

Mary Ruefle
Apparition Hill, CavanKerry Press Ltd., 2002, page 3.

I had a book like this many years ago. I used to look at the bright costumes in the illustrations and wonder what cloudberries tasted like. The reindeer/caribou looked friendly on the painted page.
When I think about Global Warming and The Sixth Extinction, I think about the changes in places like this. I need to find out about old lichen.

Noticing

I took this quite a while back---in rain, in the Feather River Canyon---

near my son's home, one of the world's beautiful places.

Tonight, another thoughtful, and playful, poem by Mary Ruefle.
Alert: I have several more marked in her Selected Poems, to share here. Get this book!
I also have Madness, Rack and Honey; collected lectures, Wave Books, 2012, which I must read in smaller bites, because the thought is so rich and compressed. Both of these books, as well as the small one of her erasure poems, A Little White Shadow, have the most beautiful, soft, simple, off-white paper covers. Lovely to hold in the hand! The same publisher has issued Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior in a similar cover. Love it!

After a Rain

They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing
kind of person, and so they left the dictionary
out in the rain and I noticed it,
I noticed it was open to the rain page,
much harm had come to it, it had aged to the age
of ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbow
follows rain in the book, just as it does on
earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to
notice so much but I noticed there is no stationary
in heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand like
there is no tomorrow, while the very aged
will give you a weightless hand for the same reason,
I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlocked
and others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),
I noticed whoever I met in my search for entrance
into this world went too far (but that was their
destination) and I noticed the road followed roughly
the route of a zipper around a closed case,
I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,
and that some birds have the wingspan of an inch
and some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the two
are very well suited to each other, I noticed that.
There are eight major emotional states but I forget
seven of them, I can hear the ambulance singing
but I don’t think it will stop for me,
because I noticed the space between the waterfall and
the rock and I am safe there, resting in
the cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse
(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweed
and rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,
enough astonishment over this fact, so now I will
withdraw my interest in the whole external world
while I am in the noticing mode, notice how I
talk to you just as if you were sitting on my lap
and not as if it were raining, not as if there were
a sheet of water between us or anything else.

Mary Ruefle

Selected Poems, Wave Books, Seattle WA, 2010, pages 132-133.

And from September in Michigan, deer graze in light rain. See how it darkens their coats?

Crushed and Sparkling

This is the dainty Mrs. Wood Duck posing for me. 

It is often difficult, in all that flurry about cracked corn,

 to make portraits of individuals.

She doesn't dress showoffily like her mate, 

but there is a lot of color hiding beneath the wings and

I am always fascinated by the white oval around her eye

that reminds me of the makeup Elizabeth Taylor wore as Cleopatra.

Tonight's poem is by Mary Ruefle, whose work grows ever more interesting to me,
and whose poem I was extra-pleased to find in the 2014 Best American Poetry!

SAGA

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging---crushed
and sparkling---in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.
In particular there is a rift through everything.
There is a rift running the length of Iceland
and so a rift runs through every family
and between families a feud.
It’s called a saga. Rifts and sagas
fill the air, and beautiful old women
sing of them, so the air is filled with
music and the smell of berries and apples
and shouting when a gun goes off
and crying in closed rooms.
Faces, who needs them?
Eating the blood of oranges
I in my alcove could use one.
Abbas and ammas!
come out of your huts, travel
halfway around the world,
inspect my secret bank account of joy!
My face is a jar of honey
you can look through,
you can see everything
is muted, so terribly muted,
who could ever speak of it,
sealed and held up for all?

Mary Ruefle
Best American Poetry, 2014 (at 57% mark of) Kindle Edition.

And this is Mrs. Mallard in an autumn portrait.

Raindrops and a Lullaby

Today it rained, off and on, for much of the day. When I saw these raindrops through the window I was out there in a flash! I am beginning to think that pink is my favorite color, as these few buds unfold. I counted today and there are still three buds left. 

Two of us went for lunch with an old friend today. She was fun to be with! 

For tonight's poem, the last one in the book of 

Mary Ruefle's Selected Poems, Wave Press, 2010, page 142. 

Lullaby

My inability to express myself

is astounding. It is not curious or

even faintly interesting, but like

some fathomless sum, a number,

a number the sum of equally fathomless

numbers, each one the sole representative

of an ever-ripening infinity

that will never reach the weight

required by the sun to fall.

There is nothing on the ground

to pick up and examine.

It is too far back among the leaves

to reach. And here I am walking 

idly, passing it from below,

with only a faint breeze to remind me

there is anything there,

the merest rustle of which

quiets me down to the point

I am able to sleep at all.

And now it really is time for bed!!!

Perhaps there is a free lunch?

Aunt Kim was out delivering the mail; she called us about the free hot dogs, which turned out to be very tasty indeed. This was during the wonderful summer visit last year. Tonight I found this photo of Logan with his mustard dog while I was messing with photographs. There were free drinks and free strings of beads that day, too. I can't wait for picnic time to come 'round again. For some other adventures of Logan, search this blog with his name, which will also give you a post on the poet William Logan.

The rest of Mary Ruefle came today, and I love what I got. There is a delicate, tiny book called A Little White Shadow, that reproduces a small book of very short erasure poems made from an old book that has most of the words whited-out, leaving the only words chosen for the poem visible in a white ground on tannish paper. It is most (and very) appealing in this facsimile form, but just for fun, here is one of the poems all by itself:

                     he

                       quickly

     spoke fluently in many languages,

                 a human humming bird

(an erasure poem by Mary Ruefle from A Little White Shadow, Wave Books, 2006)

I have seen other erasure poems, but usually the covered words are scribbled out in ballpoint pen, or something else dark. Part of the genius in this volume is in the use of white-out.

The other book is Madness, Rack and Honey, Wave Books, 2012. It is a collection of lectures about poetry by Ms. Ruefle who teaches at Vermont College. Through dipping-in, I know I am going to like this book very much. It should contain many serious and interesting things to think about. Here is a passage from the Introduction.

"I always looked askance at writing on writing, but I'm intelligent enough to see that writing is writing. Still, my allegiance to poetry, to art, is greater than my allegiance to knowledge and intelligence, and that stance is harder and harder to maintain in today's world, because knowledge and intelligence form the corporate umbrella (the academy) that shelters and protects poetry in a culture that cares about other things. On the other hand, the evening news tells us a corporation is not interested in protecting anything, other than itself. This is best contemplated by the younger generation, on whom it will have the greatest impact." Page VII

Possibilities, like buds

More yesterday from the lavender rose; the other one with the sweet scent seems to be the one we lost, and we have forgotten the name of this one, too. One always wants a record, when it is too late to begin keeping one. I remember reading about keeping a garden journal early on; I sort of planned to do so, there are lists here and there inside the back covers of gardening books. I know a fellow, DM, who has kept a journal of the books he has read for many, many years, He showed it to me once, and I was alive with jealously. The other day I found the only one I ever started--it is in a blank book with a Gnome on the cover, a Gnomebook. Remeember when those gnomes were ALL THE RAGE?? Must have been the 1980s. I didn't even keep it for even a year. And with this Kindle and the Amazon used books thing, I start many more books than I finish these days. One more whine and then the poem. Today I read the book Urban Sketching by Thomas Thorspecken, Barrons, 2014. He has been sketching EVERY DAY FOR FIVE YEARS and posting the sketches on his blog. These sketches take him one to two hours EVERY DAY! And I was so proud of my one-year-plus daily blog!! The other day Mary Ruefle was recommended to me and her book came yesterday. So tonight, here she is with a wild rose, instead of a tame hybrid tea, as in the picture.

The Wild Rose Bush

Undone chore: pruning the wild rose bush. If
I had pruned the wild rose bush today, my life
could continue walking on new stilts, I would have
a better view of the future and be able to go further
than I can imagine at this moment. But the bush
has been pruned many times already, it has lived through
sixty years of childhood, it has felt its hips swell
and offered their red pips to the birds, it has watched
the bee pumping the foxglove, swelling her cups
with astonishing quickness, and heard the enormous rose
applauding, it has died of embarrassment and never been able
to so a thing about it, the way I can't bring myself to do
a simple chore like pruning, which is good for the world,
which pulls the world back from the brink of disaster,
which helps it forget its recent grief and not so recent grief
and ancient grief. You can hardly call me human, 
though I own a pair of clippers. I have never suffered
and I have never known a hero. My father never said or did
anything of interest. He never said "If you are angry
pour everything you have ever eaten into the sea,
let the sea foam at the mouth, keep your own lips clean."
He never said that. He just sat in a comfortable chair
and let the news slip out of his hands and onto the floor.
He could not compete with it. He didn't even try. He seemed
to reach a point where he realized the news would go on 
without him, long after his little nap, and later his death.
When he reached that point his head lolled to one side,
the way a rose will if left unwatered.
Sometimes I say he was saved.

from Mary Ruefle, Selected Poems, 
Wave Books, 2010, pp. 60-61.

Follow the play of the mind (with its surprising shifrts) through this poem. Although at one point you feel she is being unfair to her dad, it turns out OK and anyway, he has gone beyond caring. Take a look at some chore and see if you can let your mind play silly games, See what youcan come up with. I think my library used to have a children's book called Write Me A Poem, Baby! so that's what we ought to do tomorrow.Tonight it is really too late to get started.

We took the remaining dog with us on the Daily Walk today, It wasn't that long -- (and we didn't meet any other dogs) just around a long block, but she licked the bottoms of her feet for a long time after we got home. Not used to sidewalks, I guess. She has been sleeping ever since we got back.

Material and what you make of it

This is another of those desert scenes from our ramblings across the American West. I have thought it would make a fine painting, and I mean to try that. I see the lilac undershadow on the clouds and the yellow tips on the rabbitbrush just coming into bloom. The cloud shapes and the varying sizes of the clumps of brush, the horizontal sweep of the mountains and the road. Tonight I have been reading a book of the letters between Gabriele Munter and Wassily Kandinsky. The book is called Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter; letters and reminiscences,  1902-1914, Prestel Verlag, Munich, 1994. I have never been a big fan of Kandinsky, although the rest of the Blue Rider guys are great! And now I am less than a fan of the man Kandinsky, but you will have to read the book yourself and make up your own mind. Maybe I am too harsh. And, on the basis of what I have seen, I like Munter's paintings very much. They have a simplified and colorful beauty that is very compelling.

Here is a link to Kandinsky's painting of Munter at work. 

And here are the things that people have put on Pinterest that show her paintings.

And here are some self-portraits by Munter,

Some people felt that what Kandinsky and Munter and the rest of the Blue Riger gang was doing was not really painting, but something closer to the crayon drawings of children.. Some people say there is no such thing as prose poetry; it is either poetry or not and one can tell! But this prose poem by Mary Ruefle that I found tonight in the Best American Poetry 2013 pleased me very much. I think I will find her book of them.

Little Golf Pencil

At headquarters they asked me for something dry and understated. Mary, they said, it’s called a statement. They took me out back to a courtyard where they always ate lunch and showed me a little tree that was, sadly, dying. Something with four legs had eaten it rather badly. Don’t over-emote, they said. I promised I wouldn’t but I was thinking to myself that the something-with-four-legs had certainly over-emoted and that the tree, in response, was over-emoting now, being in the strange little position of dying. All the cops were sitting around eating sandwich halves and offered me one. This one’s delicious, said a lieutenant, my wife made it. Seeing as it was peanut butter and jelly I thought he was over-emoting, but I didn’t say anything. I just sat looking at the tree and eating my sandwich half. When I was ready I asked for a pencil and they gave me one of those little golf pencils. I didn’t say anything about that, either. I just wrote my statement and handed it over—it was a description of the tree which they intended to give to their captain as a Christmas present—I mean my description—because the captain, well, he loved that tree and he loved my writing and every one of the cops hoped to be promoted in the captain’s heart and, who knows, maybe get a raise. Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they’re all so young.

--Mary Ruefle

                                 ************************

Now go and write a little story like that! You won't need to worry (this time) about lineation or rhyme. Sleep well.