Light, darkness, old friends and a dream

Today there was a remembrance service for Jack Haeger, who used to work with S in the English Department at San Jose State, and chaired the department for many years. It was moving and varied, since his many friends had been part of so many different things in his life. He played bridge, chess, could make or fix anything, and seemed to make a society quickly wherever he went. His children and siblings also spoke. On the way back we stopped in Los Gatos for an expensive snack, below this fingernail moon.

Yes, that's it, the tiny white smirch in the blackness near the center of the picture! No time for a better shot as the others were hurrying toward the restaurant with the two-hour wait. (We wound up changing to another place, where we ate in the bar. Bright Lights! Big City!  sort of . . .)

When we came out, that's when I saw the skinny-legged mannequins wearing what looks like used boy clothing. (Above.) I couldn't resist the way they were lit from above. Photography is all about light anyway.

Tonight I am thinking back on the years we have spent here, with this crowd of literature teachers, many of whom came, now silver-headed, to this event. I took not a single picture, even of the small dog, which erupted in delightful short fusillades of barking, now and again.

I have been reading All Roads Lead to France, an excellent biography of the British poet, Edward Thomas, who was killed in World War I. He had been a prose writer, but over two short years just before his death, he wrote his poems, good ones.

Here is a short one from the free Kindle Book Last Poems by Edward Thomas.

A DREAM

       Over known fields with an old friend in dream
I walked, but came sudden to a strange stream.
Its dark waters were bursting out most bright
From a great mountain's heart into the light.
They ran a short course under the sun, then back
Into a pit they plunged, once more as black
As at their birth; and I stood thinking there
How white, had the day shone on them, they were,
Heaving and coiling. So by the roar and hiss
And by the mighty motion of the abyss
I was bemused, that I forgot my friend
And neither saw nor sought him till the end,
When I awoke from waters unto men
Saying, "I shall be here again."

Thomas seems to have had a difficult time managing what sounds pretty much like what we might call clinical depression, and was pretty tough on others as well as on himself. I'll probably be talking more about him later, when I have finished the biography and read the poems. He had a very deep friendship with Robert Frost, who had moved to England at that time and published his first book, A Boy's Will, there.

The cheerfulness of my garden

I love flowers, and I particularly love flowering bushes or perennials. Annuals -- come and gone -- are probably the most showy, but things that come back please me most in my own garden. I also find blue and purple flowers difficult to photograph (this reminds me of my mother, who was always trying to get a photo of her morning glories that was the right shade of blue, and whinging about the developing) so I was pleased with the way the iPhone rendered this early bloom on the germander. You can see some of the whitish stems on the new growth of the plant in this picture. The entire bush is the freshest thing in the garden right now. Breath of spring!

Li Po wrote of springtime, too. Peach blossoms!

ON VISITING A TAOIST MASTER 

ON THE TAI T'IEN MOUNTAINS AND 

NOT FINDING HIM

Where the dogs bark

by roaring waters,

whose spray darkens

the petals' colours

Deep in the woods

deer at times are seen;

The valley noon:

one can hear no bell,

But wild bamboos

cut across bright clouds,

Flying cascades

hang from jasper peaks;

No one here knows

which way you have gone:

Two, now three pines

I have leant against!

From Penguin Classics Li Po and Tu Fu; poems selected and translated with an introduction and notes by Arthur Cooper. 1973. Page 105. In this book, there is also a discussion of this poem as it relates to the philosophy of teaching without words. The master will not even meet him but allow him to learn by looking about. This is compared to Wittgenstein's, "Don't think: Look!"

Visiting A Taoist On Tiatien Mountain


Amongst bubbling streams
a dog barks; peach blossom
is heavy with dew; here
and there a deer can
be seen in forest glades!
No sound of the mid-day
bell enters this fastness
where blue mist rises
from bamboo groves;
down from a high peak
hangs a waterfall;
no one knows where he has gone, so sadly I rest,
with my back leaning
against a pine.

Li Po

This is another version I found here, at the Poem Hunter.  You will see that there is a dog and there is a bell! These poems illustrate the difficulties we can have when knowing about poetry in languages which are not are own. Still, I think the effort is interesting and very rewarding.

Wind stunted tree at the edge of Lake Superior

I am feeling somewhat like this tree tonight: hanging in there and getting the job done, and maybe just a little battered.

And then there was this street tree on one of the daily walks we managed this week. As a harbinger of spring, it has managed to put out blossoms right at the trunk! So I need to think about blossoming where you have been planted. It's been an odd day.

Quite a while back, Issa wrote an early spring haiku. This is the David Lanoue translation from his Haiku Guy website:

spring begins
as it has deigned to do
for a thousand ages

Issa

Well, yes. . .

I am looking for a picture to go with Mahler's music

                    And have decided on this one with clouds from last year.

And on this poem by Robert Pinsky, though it is about a different time of day. It is in Robert Pinsky Selected Poems, FSG, 2011, pages 73-74. The poem was also published as Section 2 of the "City Elegies" in The Figured Wheel; new and collected poems, 1966-1996, Farrar Straus Giroux,1996.  You can read all of these elegies together here. They are delicious, melodic and not difficult to understand.

House Hour

Now the pale honey of a kitchen light
Burns at an upstairs window, the sash a cross.
Milky daylight moon,
Sky scored by phone lines. Houses in rows
Patient as cows.

Dormers and gables of an immigrant street
In a small city, the wind-worn afternoon
Shading into night.

Hundreds of times before
I have felt it in some district
Of shingle and downspout at just this hour.
The renter walking home from the bus
Carrying a crisp bag. Maybe a store
Visible at the corner, neon at dusk.
Macaroni mist fogging the glass.

Unwilled, seductive as music, brief
As dusk itself, the forgotten mirror
Brushed for dozens of years
By the same gray light, the same shadows
Of soffit and beam end, a reef
Of old snow glowing along the walk.

If I am hollow, or if I am heavy with longing, the same:
The ponderous houses of siding,
Fir framing, horsehair plaster, fired bricks
In a certain light, changing nothing, but touching
Those separate hours of the past
And now at this one time
Of day touching this one, last spokes
Of light silvering the attic dust.

Think about writing elegies to a place, a place at a particular time. Notice in this poem, for instance , the details of older home construction, accumulated snow, and immigrant neighborhoods that are specific to older Eastern cities. Often elegies are written for a person who has died, but an elegy for a place can also contain a quality of remembrance of what has passed and gone. Specific details, as in these poems, focus the attention.

The poem is lyrical, but not regular in line length, number of stresses per line, nor lines per stanza. Each line begins with a capital letter, regular punctuation is used and often the line breaks are concurrent with phrases, but not always. There are some very elegant linebreaks in this poem that will repay your attention. Read it out loud!

I also think the next to last word is very interesting because it brings in the suggestion of Attic, which refers to Ancient Greece and takes one even further back in time.

One of my favorite camellias, Purity

We have grown this camellia in a tub near our front door for many years. It is just beginning to bloom now. It has lots of buds and will continue to bloom for quite some time. When I worked at the library, I used to wear one in my hair and it lasted all day. 

It is brilliantly white, like one of the well-laundered shirts my father always wore to work at the General Electric Company. When they were no longer suitable for work, he cut the collar off the band and wore one to work in the garden, or on all the house improvements he made. He would roll up the sleeves first, and then in summer cut off the lower parts of the sleeves. For a long time he had these shirts done at a laundry. They came back wrapped around a cardboard (these "shirt cardboards" were a favored art material and much prized by us.) Later, the shirts were also wrapped in a plastic bag imprinted with the legend, "LOOK NIFTY, BE THRIFTY, USE SWIFTY. (Swift Cleaners) This was before the time of Ziplocs--we re-used these bags for everything. Just the other day, I found one wrapped around a doll I had before I went to school. I will scan it soon, and add that to my collection of sacred family artifacts. 

Tonight, a poem that I have loved for many years, since I first hear the poet read it here in California about the time his book, THE WANT BONE, came out. Some of the reasons I love it are personal, like my love of textile details and sewing. I also like all the labor history and specificity about the Triangle Fire, and the differing places and circumstances where clothing is made. I like VERY MUCH all the specific details that are recounted so clearly and in such a loving way. I admire the organization of the poem in three-line stanzas. It contains lists, stories and all sorts of material in this form. It is a truly admirable piece of work and unlike any other poem I know.

If you get a chance to hear this poet read in person, be sure to take it. He is s superb enunciator of poems.

Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

From Robert Pinsky Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2011, pages 102-104

My Birches

I love these trees at the edge of my Michigan yard and am posting them now to make myself feel better, because last night's phone post didn't go up, and I just discovered that and reposted it. So then I started a short post (for tonight) about the moon and Mahler's music. I must have deleted it instead of saving it, because it is gone, gone, gone gone! And I don't have the photo handy now because I had saved it in an earlier uncompleted post. Now I'll stop whining. Maybe for a long time.

I just got back from my poetry writing group! I was so glad to see my gang again! We all do such interesting work! And now to bed, and tomorrow night a better effort here. . .

Electrical Tower

This is a replica of the solution to downtown lighting nearly 100 years ago. The City Fathers arranged for a tall tower to be constructed at the main downtown intersection of San Jose, California.

It is slightly funny now, but it must have been a real disappointment when it didn't shed enough light that far to be useful. In loving memory, the structure has been duplicated in San Jose's history park. This is a delightful place to visit and walk around and take pictures of your children! 

No poem tonight, but this is sort of a poetic structure. Come and visit!