Maturity and Experience

Those little stubby antlers were coming along nicely last year. Because of the new rule that bucks must now have four points (not just three) on each side to be legally taken during hunting season, I am hopeful that he might have made it through another year. But, of course, if I spot him, we will not recognize each other! The word "antler" puzzled me as a child. I encountered it, probably in The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (one of the three-named writers, as am I) and confused it with something religious like "altar" -- it took me years to straighten that out and to reform my odd in-between pronunciation. I still can never remember how to say the word "cicada" because of a similar early confusion.

One of the most "mature" poets I have met was Czeslaw Milosz. He really was a grownup! I mentioned before that I have been going through his 1987-88 journal A Year of the Hunter, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. on the same days this year. Here is the complete entry for today, March 7, 1988,

March 7, 1988

I cannot grasp in verse my basic theme. Experience teaches that in such cases one has to wait.  Let's say for several months. But my hope that I will succeed in catching it is contradicted by my resignation, because, after all, the time will come when one does not write poems anymore.

And there you have it, at least for tonight.

Lots of 'either/or' Polarities; Blue Ink

             Recovered from my mother's archives: things to think about.      

Rediscovering Walter Pavlich from the Laurel Review introduced me to his Swan Scythe Press, 2001, book The Spirit of Blue Ink. Then I went in search of inkish images in my Magic Flour Barrel. My mother was working to understand herself her whole long life. Above is one remnant of her process; it looks as if she worked on it over a period of time. It is also interesting for the variety of inks.

Here is the title poem from Pavlich's book. Pages 47-48. Sadly, he died unexpectedly in 2002.

The Spirit of Blue Ink

What, this morning, do I have
As I put out my welcome mat for hope?

Enough millet for six months to keep
My bargain with the finches---I fill,

They eat, and then they fly away.
A yard of Thoreau on the bookshelf,

In case I want a paragraph on sweetgrass,
Floating-heart, or pigweed. Or the dry

Field Guide to the Ocean, the sea
Still in print, with punctuation.

A gospel record, Christ in vinyl from
The Fifties, 33 1/2 hallellujahs

Per minute. A school bell across
The street teaches the lessons

Of time, velocity
And hard music. A mirror waiting . . .

A morning movie shot during
The previous war, smiles and cigarettes,

Bright songs and cocktails.
And if I'm lucky, I can approach

The spirit of blue ink, the glory
Of the hand that works the difficult

And the dead, that waits out the past,
Attached as it is, not to a wrist,

But the heart, The heart that is
The leaf, that blows its way to you.

--Walter Pavlich

I like the movement of the mind through this poem. I also like the little extra formality of the Initial Capitals on each line. I like reading and writing poems that meander through physical objects and into surprising alleyways and gentle, loving conclusions. Now I am thinking of working some more in this way.

When searching through scanned inky delights, I first chose the one below, the first page of a Christmas thank-you to a grandparent from a 9 year old. This was also recovered from my mother's archive. Upon closer reading, I see that the ink was then PURPLE. And then I found the other one. I have more. Scanner's are a true hoarder's delight, if you find little treasures like these. Sleep well.

Dad trims Sis's hooves, I hold her

A memory thread from one of my mother's slides. We've just moved here from the Village of Scotia. This is Sis, the impulse-purchase horse. Cindy was $75 and if we took Sis, also, she would be $10 off. Both mares were pregnant. I am a sophomore in high school, illustrating how difficult it was then to find clothes for a tall girl. My father is illustrating his all-around competence.

I'd like to give you a haiku tonight: This is from a recent book of haiku, New Sprouts; with illustrations by Delia White, by my friend and haiku mentor, Jerry Ball, who lives in Walnut Creek.

a field of fresh grass
we fancy ourselves pilgrims
crossing a green sea

Jerry Ball

Moving to the Farm was a pivotal experience for our family!

Tonight's Sunset and Judy Garland Laughing

This iPhone photo of a slice of tonight's sunset is brought to you through the courtesy of the stop light at Coleman Avenue and Almaden Expressway. I keep wanting to trek up to Quicksilver Park--below those clouds--but today we took an old dog to the vet (her leg isn't broken, just strained) and picked up the cleaned rugs and took some clothes to another cleaner, and ate Chinese Food. Sort of took care of photo sessions!

Last night I mentioned the Laurel Review and my poem that was published there. I was always pleased that my poem was on a page facing a poem by Walter Pavlich, who was at the Foothill Writer's Conference some years ago. I always liked him (he died suddenly, very young) and I was pleased to be in the same magazine. He had two poems there. This is the second one, I'll probably post the other one soon.

Judy Garland Laughing

Not the nervous TV Judy
narcotized, befuddled under
the unkind lights, searching
for the next note, sluggish
uncertain quaver into the wrong
camera, bowing not in triumph
but in relief with a sloshy
neat gin not-so-hidden
behind the scrim.

This is the Judy soon
after Oz, on the Charlie
McCarthy radio show.
The war needed laughs.
So she played to
the extemporizing dummy
with the warm hand
up its back and could not
stop laughing, the audience
at home smiling with its
eyes closed, while the bombs
fell somewhere else.

Walter Pavlich, in The Laurel Review, Volume 27, No, 1, Winter, 1993, page 74.

Since I remember what we will always call "The War" very well and heard Charlie many times in The Years Before Television Ruined Thanksgiving (and all the other holidays) and turned us willy-nilly into Football Nation, this poem has a special resonance for me, although I doubt I heard that broadcast.
And of course I remember how nice Walter was at the conference! So this is a true Memory Thread. Note that the structure of this poem is quite simple: two stanzas. The first one, a description of the Later Judy, makes this memory of Young Judy in the second stanza more poignant. And the terrible touch of the war--which most of us, especially children, only imagined--puts our simple pleasures into a larger and more terrible frame.

Simplicity or excess

Since my mother was 29, when she had me (her oldest child) and had always loved and wanted babies, perhaps she overdid the doll thing, but hey, here I am with the proof that I had a well-stocked doll nursery. Do you spot Charlie McCarthy, top-hatted in the back??

John Ciardi was a Reigning Grey Eminence when I was a young woman and my Aunt Louise sent me her old Saturday Review magazines which he edited. He influenced many younger poets at that time. His collected poems is still ranking up good scores on Goodreads, which sort of surprised me, since it has been 20 years since I looked at one of his books. But I needed a poem about dolls and found this one, which I love because it goes beyond dolls to all the little effigies that have been unearthed from Prehistoric Times, and which have fascinated me for years. And, below Ciardi's poem, I have posted one of mine on that topic that was published in the Laurel Review years ago.

The Dolls
By John Ciardi

Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff
by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich,
on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground—
wherever the children slept, dolls have been found
in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again
by the Finders After Everything. Down lay
the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night
grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright
buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down
through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground
the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved
changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved
dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug,
sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog,
and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept
their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.

John Ciardi, “The Dolls” from In the Stoneworks 

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961)

Not Like The Red Paint Peoples' Burials 

by June Hopper Hymas

Cause of death unknown, and, like my father,
too natural to autopsy, a Brewer's blackbird
drops from phone wires above us.
She leaves no books, no photo albums, no polyester raiment.
No mourners now assemble; although, soon,
ants will string a line across the pavement.
How could we honor from this sidewalk
her flexed claw lifting upward
if she had fallen ten feet from us in the weeds—
or witness the regard of her still unclouded eye?
Not like the Red Paint Peoples' burials:
his face down, head to the west, auk beaks in whorls
over his body's red ochre covering. Not armed
with a bone dagger, patterned with aligned dots.
Nor ornamented like her young body
with a necklace of teeth, nor supplied
with a waterbird engraved on an ivory comb.
But dressed only in brown feathers,
cooling on cement, still so warm
the tiny lice in the neck feathers suspect no change.

June Hopper Hymas, The Laurel Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1993, page 72.

Now that I look at it, I think I might perhaps have broken it into more bite-sized chunks. And said "father's" in the first line. It may have been an article in National Geographic that introduced me to the red-paint people; I'll have to look it up. The bird did fall from the sky almost onto me and my friend Diane. I've wondered why it died.

How doth the little busy bee . . .

This was taken maybe 20 years ago, on Kodak film, when there still were bees, in my mother's garden (illegal in her condominium complex--but that's another memory thread) in Provo, Utah.

Just this last Thursday, the man who does an annual cleanup on our yard sent his brother to trim the tall hedge between our yard and the yard to the east. While Brother had the motorized trimmer in his hand he reduced the blossoming germander, three clumps of budded-out and beginning-to-bloom Spanish Lavender and some rosemary and ceanothus "Carmel Creeper" into either small unattractive cubes or flat remnants. Heartbreak! Then he rang the bell and asked me how I wanted the ugly short hedge near the driveway trimmed. (Doesn't matter, it will still be too big and still be ugly.) No sense getting, as we used to say, one's "tail in a knot" over something without a remedy that will grow back! I think the rosemary and ceanothus might even benefit. But I had actually seen TWO bees working over the lavendar, and I had been very glad to see them. Tonight's pictured bee brought up what I've heard called a "tag-end" this: "How doth the little busy bee?? . . . " So I looked it up (Ahhh, Google!) and it is one of the instructive verses for children by Isaac Watts. Lewis Carroll parodied these verses in Alice in Wonderland (I first typed "Alive in Wonderland," which isn't bad either!) Here is Carroll's utterly superb little verse:

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 2.0

 Below is one sample of Isaac Watts's very popular didactic poems for children:

"How doth the Little Bee"

How doth the little busy Bee
Improve each shining Hour,
And gather Honey all the day
From every opening Flower!

How skilfully she builds her Cell!
How neat she spreads the Wax!
And labours hard to store it well
With the sweet Food she makes.

In Works of Labour or of Skill
I would be busy too:
For Satan finds some Mischief still
For idle Hands to do.

Isaac Watts, from the World Wide Web

NOTE: I am obliged to relate that my mother used to recite this whole poem to me to promote my industry! I supposed it worked somewhat . . . . . ..

333

In Books, or Work, or healthful Play
Let my first Years be past,
That I may give for every Day
Some good Account at last.

Today's blossoms

s

                         Sufficient unto the day are the blossoms thereof. Today on the Daily Walk.

The work of Wislawa Szymborska was unknown to me until she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Good stuff! Born in 1923, she lived through some tough postwar times in Poland, but lived to see some better days. She lived to be 88 years old. She was also an artist, as you might guess from this poem.



IN PRAISE OF DREAMS

In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.

I drive a car
that does what I want it to.

I am gifted
and write mighty epics.

I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.

Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.

I’ve got no problem
breathing under water.

I can’t complain:
I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.

It’s gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.

I’m a child of my age,
but I don’t have to be.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.

Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaus Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh, from View with a Grain of Sand, Harcourt Brace, 1996, pages 87-88.

In this poem, each two-line stanza is one sentence, on a separate topic and ends with a period. See what you might do with this form. Sleep well; I saw blossoms today and that means spring, beloved of haiku poets, is really beginning!