Grove of Maples

This is one of my favorite things to drive past. 

In a few places nearby, a grove of sugar maples 

has established itself in the middle of a pasture. 

The trees together form a large shape 

resembling one tree. 

The family that owns this one usually runs cattle in this field, 

but one year they put an electric fence around the grove 

and used it as a picnic ground. 

Made me jealous! 

We are here for one more week and already 

the leaves that turned first have fallen. 

I took this just this afternoon, 

so we still have some autumn color left and it is still raining, 

which seems to intensify how the colors shine 

even as it knocks some leaves to the ground.

DIM SUM

     I'm thinking of the smooth green hills where writing comes from, leaf-tips barely peeking from twig-tips, cat's-eye green, the air cooly smooth against the cheek as a refrigerated egg.

     The new green hills are green, as green as memory, and as old. The house, as usual, a wreck, the first sowbug of spring advancing across the floorboards, beyond control, the millipede that rushes up, all summery, from the bathtub drain. Come Sunday we'll go out for dim sum again, the elderly at rest behind their newspapers, the young in party clothes, the moonwhite noodles thick and fragrant on the plate. That the living can feed upon such stuff. Dead matter, dead meat.

     If a word is repeated, let it be the contexts that rhyme. Not glibness, that party trick -- having to dunk one's head in a martini reciting "Skunk Hour" over and over, until you're sick. 

     No language now, only the day and circumstance. Not the pedigree of words, what they might be in French, or whether this is of significance.

     I'm thinking of the smooth green hills where writing comes from. Two kinds of thinking. What kind of writing when it rains.

Roo Borson, Water Memory, McClelland & Stewart, Inc, Canada, 1996, page 17.

Roo Boorson again tonight because I will most probably leave her books in my book room here. I do admire the movement and variety of thought in this poem. This discovery of her and through that anthology, other Canadian poets has been a highlight of this year.

And this is my own grove, which I will leave soon to manage itself until next year.

Under the Great Bowl of Sky

My daughter's farm and her 120 year-old house that was the homestead for this tract of land

 that we wound up buying part of and later made into a Nature Preserve under 

the auspices of the Little Traverse Conservancy. It is beautiful country, in many ways 

similar to where I grew up in New York State near the Mohawk River. 

Tonight's poem is by one of my summer discoveries, Canadian poet Roo Borson.

Blowing Clouds

Some say the sky is the last great wilderness.

But the last great wilderness 

has always been the one just outside this door.

Never since the birth of the first person

has there been such a wilderness.

That person was never born.

The flowers we call baby blue eyes

can't even see us, so small and blue,

their blueness is lost in the meadow. Some

say the sky

is the last great wilderness,

that never since the birth of the first person

has there been a wilderness

that person was never born into,

a door so small and blue

the flowers can't see into it.

Lost and not lost, at home in the marvellous,

in the meadow's unbreakable blue.

One day in the ravine near my house I looked up into a sky so blue

it was as if a door had opened into another world. When I looked down again I noticed that baby blue eyes were blooming everywhere in the as yet uncut grass. Facing the sky again, standing amongst those flowers, that hidden near-mirror symmetry seemed a formal demonstration, a proof, as it were, in a style of logical argument now long obsolete.

Roo Borson, Rain, road, an open boat, McClelland and Stuart, 2012, pages 35 and 36. This book was the winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Let's take a brief look at some of the strategies of this poem. It is in two-line stanzas, except for the last line, which gives that line an emphasis. It does not have a metrical or stress pattern, but some fine attention has been paid to the linebreaks. Many of the poems in this book are partnered with, or interspersed with, paragraphs of prose relating, in some way, to the poem. It makes for a pleasant reading experience, and is a strategy I like very much here.

Greenwood Cemetery

We went to the Greenwood Cemetery in Petoskey today for a simple graveyard service for the gentle man who helped me so much in my garden last year all summer long. There were many neighbors there who are members of his extended family. His family, perhaps from Poland, spell their three-syllable name at least four different ways, I wondered if that was from the time when the Ellis Island employees just wrote down what they thought they heard. It was amazing to see so many neighboring monuments standing near each other with variations of the same name. It was a beautiful day at the cemetery, probably at the most lovely time of year there. I would have loved to stay and wander around looking at markers and autumn foliage; I haven't spent much time in cemeteries. It had rained earlier, so everything glistened, but the sky was clear for the short speech and a prayer. The death had been sudden, violent and unexpected. I was introduced to many of his kinfolk, who were welcoming and friendly. I have been thinking about extended families ever since. 

My parents left Arizona with my father's work for General Electric in New York State. So my experience with extended families is limited to the families of my mother's brothers, who also moved East. We only saw them once or twice a year, most years.

turning leaves--

how he loved to garden

all his cut-short life

jhh

"tell each other everything we can"

When the sun shafts peek through, Michigan is especially beautiful!

And soon it will be time for ice-fishing, Sigh.

A couple of nights ago, I stumbled upon this poem while I was looking for something else. There are a lot of New Yorker poems on their website. I didn't know about this poet, but he is in Wikipedia and has published seven books with good poetry publishers and won quite a few awards. Poets are flying under my radar quite a bit; a major reward of keeping this blog is finding out about new poets. Hicok spent most of his life in Michigan and now teaches in Virginia. I like the movement of the mind throughout this poem.

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Bob Hicok
The New Yorker, May 18, 2008

"family, or the fragile earth"

This is the shifting light of autumn; some other beauty anywhere I turn.   jhh

Last night I introduced you to Tim Bowling, the boy in the library at dusk who grew up to be the Canadian poet. Now, here is one of his poems. I am still thinking about Carolyn Kizer, too, so recently dead. I have always thought of her as sort of an Empress of Poetry, and was sad to learn that she had been suffering from dementia.

Meditation on a Fall Day

To be sad before the occasion of sadness --

the apogee of wisdom, or some sickness 

of the spirit, leaf gone to earth in summer,

the salmon spreading its milt far out at sea?

A social worker my brother once dated

summarizing our melancholy brood, looked deep

into his onyx eyes, with sympathy, and said,

"you're all in a state of premature grief."

Elderly parents so loved, one with kidney illness

and the other worn out from nursing and worry.

Yet can love be too much love that it makes us

immortally distant from the gift of our mortality?

Autumnal now the years and skies, autumnal the heart

that walks its fawn's fear over twigs and starts

at every sound that augurs the sound of absence,

a siren to my siblings, the shrill cry of a phone.

What binds us firm must pain us to the very quick

when it has gone, love, memory, the familiar joke

told in the comforting tongue. But until gone,

wisdom must contain defiant glee when flesh is warm.

So to revel in what we cannot bear to lose, family

or the fragile earth, is mortality made wisest: the sea

is salt but clear of milt that serves no purpose, the sky

is without leaf but cannot stop the ascent of the forest.

Tim Bowling, The Thin Smoke of the Heart, McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada, 2000, pages 26-27.

"at once the flame, the wick, the smoke and the char . . "

More playing about with photographs of my autumn woods and the Phone app Waterlogue.

A while ago, looking for another poem on the internet, I found this poem by Roo Boorson "Upset, Unable to Sleep, I Go for a Walk and Stumble Upon Some Geese". The name "Roo" pleased me and so did the poem, which I used on this blog. I looked her up. She's a Canadian poet. Looking for her work on Amazon, I found this: Open Wide a Wilderness; Canadian Nature Poems.  Since then I've been using some of these poems here and exploring other Canadian poets included in this anthology, most of whom were unfamiliar to me. One of these is Tim Bowling, a poet and bibliophile whose book, In the Suicide's Library: a book lover's journey, recently attracted me. (I had been following my interest in personal libraries and reading projects through several other books recently. Which is another story.) This particular book's journey began with his discovery of a book of Wallace Stevens' poetry with Weldon Kees' name inscribed on the flyleaf in Kees' characteristic bold hand. After talking about suicide for a long time, Kees had (many years prior to Bowling's find) most probably jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of forty-one. His body was never found, but his car was left nearby. Here is a passage from Bowling, this life-long reader, taken from early in the book.

"Here is a Saturday late afternoon in October. Twilight on the verge of darkness. Wisps of rainfall becoming visible in the street lamp light. I am the last patron in the tiny one-floor public library, moving down the skinny aisles like a Dickens urchin down the mews, or hunched over an open book like a gargoyle over a Seine of print. The elderly librarian smiles. She tells me it is time to go home, the library is closing, bring your books to the counter. As the darkness thickens, the glow of the library deepens, until the two of us are standing inside a lit jack-o'-lantern, safe and hidden, observing the strange world of which we are a part and not a part, looking at life through the ever-altering prism of ink, at once the flame, the wick, the smoke and the char, everything it is possible to be if you're human and can read, almost more than a single life can imagine, a chameleon in a world with no limits to touch and color."

Tim Bowling, In the Suicide's Library, Gaspereau Press, Canada, 2010, page 46.

October Light

Today the October light changed every few minutes all day long. 

I was out on the porch any number of times to take more pictures.

This is one of them.

There is a Gold light in Certain Old Paintings

1

There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
I say the song went this way: O prolong
Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

Donald Justice

from the Paris Review Blog, December 1, 2011

This is an elegant poem in three six-line parts. The first is the visual idea, the second an old story that is related to it, and the third, the conclusions the poet reaches through his process of thought. This would make a nice structure to try with a poem of your own. If you would like to use a photograph to start the process, there is a wide variety here for you to download at my Flickr site. Photos are available for your personal use at no charge.

And this today in the back yard.