We're grateful to the library for the use of this lovely auditorium and to CATS for videoing our show.
Thank you Jim Mannion and all the rest of the staff of CATS that have been here since one o'clock. The
Free Verse Poets are delighted recipients of a BCAC grant and we also want to thank our generous sponsors,
Blooming Foods, Body Poetry Soaps, Caviar Emptor, Grant Street, and Tesoro Mio.
I want to acknowledge the help all my fellow poets have given me in putting this performance together,
and in particular, Charles, John, Roger, Antonia, and of course, Carol Hovis, who has again designed
our posters and invitations. In addition, I thank each of our entire cast for being so willing to put
up posters and distribute flyers.
We poets are also indebted to these musicians and windfall dancers who've so willingly offered us their
creativity, special talents, and been so generous with their time. I'd like to mention that an arts
community spotlight is on the Bloomington Free Verse Poets in the most recent edition of Wind Magazine,
number 86, which features a number of poems by each of our members.
And we're delighted that the editor of Wind, Chris Green, is up here from Lexington, Kentucky to see
our show, Welcome, Chris. The magazine will be available at some of the local bookstores for anyone
interested in reading more of our work. We'll have an intermission of 10 minutes and I ask you please
to contain your delight and only applaud then and at the end.
Origins. I am who I am, a coincidence no less unthinkable than any other. I didn't get a choice either,
but I can't complain. Wislawa Jamborska.
Our days are numbered. Imagine taking something so completely dark into dawn and then morning and long
afternoon blended evening to midnight and dawn to sunrise and calling it the ninth or the 23rd.
Imagine that. And how about taking minds away from sleep, stars, sleep, dream and awaken as birds sing
in dear mood.
Trees sway so worms crawl and deer move again with the whippoorwills crawling in sleep, stars, dream.
Taking this away by making up little earth spin sections to call hours and designate six o'clock or
1159. Not mentioning the so many years we've invented and monikered things like 108 BC or 1984. Who
could imagine this first?
And after they did, what options did H. sapiens really have? Crowding into every decent cow pasture,
swarming the river basins, thronging all the poor old globe, having to make things up like math itself,
and like religion's a useful filament of our collective imagination. Since if most people were to think
more about, or especially to feel more for themselves of what's going on,
outside calendar and clock, we might not so blithely watch it be numbered away. Waiting and waiting
for amen. I am not from a house. Where I am from there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house.
If I blew peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where
the outdoor staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens in diamond-shaped bars, does that make
a house? I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and
the U-Haul.
I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
never mine. I am from laundry and unopened mail, and I marry whomever I like. I am doomed to a world
of women, one wife,
one daughter, three sisters, and a mother. No brother shared the womb, and no son shared the seed. I
was the last of us four, and my father said he did not look at my face for a week, to which my mother
always replied with her, oh, John. Her hand brought up to catch a laugh. But her hand there, nevertheless,
necessary to show that while her God permits a little fun, he prefers it doesn't run amok.
I was the last of us four and did not suffer hand-me-downs or share boyfriends or giggly gossip in the
North Room upstairs. I ran the creek with my dog, glad I wasn't a girl to sit in the North Room, though
I did wish dogs could talk back with something other than their ears and tails and eternal sardonic
smiles. Right now, it's just me, my wife and daughter, and the latter is the boss of the ranch, telling
us when to get up, when to sleep, when to go to the kitchen,
not that his son would be any different. I used to run our house, I'm sure, crowing in Hoosier what
I wanted from my iron daybed off the kitchen, where we pumped water, made soap, canned the South 40
or so it seemed, and baked enough bread so no miracles would be necessary if Jesus came to call, so
long as he brought his own fish. Where we acted out our self-sufficient lives a generation later than
the rest of the country,
and did not know we had been passed by until we at last turned to plastic and found the others returning
to wood. I am doomed to a world of women not complaining mind you, just relating that part of my history
so that when you see the agency deliver a boy and see my mighty grin, you'll understand that my son
will be my brother in a manner of being a companion against hair curlers and gossip.
and all those north rooms up all those stairs, past and present. And if you want us, you'll do well
to go downstairs and outside on the front, where we'll be sitting talking mint talk about such things
as poetry and sunsets and running collies to the creek.
Granny Leah's house, the upper edge of the cupboard door, slanted to match the camber of the stairs.
A small closing, and behind it, from Russian days, some toys I carried into the garden while the grown-ups,
voices rising at times, talked on the brick stoop, and Lizzie brought the tea.
I liked the tin cups and plates for sips of pretend juice and double crumbs I fed an austere doll, her
painted hair shiny above staring eyes, her limp dress frayed. One bodice button lost, but my favorite
plaything was the set of six hollow lacquer dolls, one within the other, each with floral headscarf
and folded hands.
but my favorite thing. The largest's upper half, twisted from its lower, revealed a smaller doll, pregnant
with her own smaller sister. Again, again, and again, the glassy toys squeaked open at the waist, littler
and littler, until the tiniest, a solid thumb of a doll, stood mute. Careful to close each one when
I'd freed the next. I always lined the siblings up,
as if it were possible to have everyone together and in accord. This poem is set in England. Revisiting
an old love. When we arrived, the sea was flatish, brown, but smelled right.
and the bladder-racked seaweed still popped underfoot. The donkeys trotted along the sand. The pier
still stretched on stilts into the tide. And the promenade wall where I had sat upright, smiling in
my beret for a picture. Here, because I was a poorly child, needing sea air, still kept its curve around
the bay. Later, on Breen Down,
We walked through the ghosts of a Roman temple and ancient British forts to the point. I watched the
opposing tides rush together and the small boats navigate the channel. Fingering the wild thyme, I sat
by the cliff's edge and my heart floated, gull-like, over the waves, tasting the spray.
Unpack. Don't you know I can stand in an empty refrigerator box in any secular city and be home? Constant
five-note melody of fruit bat, low-grown twisted frangipangy, white sap washed off fingers, and fruit
bats bing-bong, dee-dee-dee, out the supper window. Everybody 12 years old and twisting,
everybody's fingers in my hair, night hot, day hot, everybody poor but us, everybody else rich but us,
everybody in church cool, everybody in the sand stuck, broken bottle triangles on every compound wall,
us in church, us always in church, us always swaying, giving, counting,
us always missionaries, always upfront, always hot and cold in church. For my poem on origins, I'm going
to go very far back and a long way out and try to fit my brief, short, and tiny life into what I call
the wilderness of time.
As a child, I wrapped myself in blankets on snowy nights, pushed aside the curtain and peered out at
the delicate swirling flakes creating my personal playground. I asked for nothing more of snow. I did
not have the patience to sit one winter's night by the edge of a pond to see the ice form. Now I see
the graffiti of gods.
Miles of lines and bedrock scrawled by boulders gripped in the arms of ice inscribing time across entire
continents, the press of the hand unperceivable by the narrow senses of a life. I have read that there
are more galaxies than grains of sand on the entire earth. I do not know if this is true. I know that
stars and insects, ideas and fears
are comprehended in numbers of wonder, for I have the mind and senses of a man adrift in a universe
of dreams and illusions. The age of the sun exceeds four billion years, and I am as thankful for its
warmth and light as if it were my private miracle. I cannot know the eons that created dew-covered webs
in summer fields where the sweet, sharp cheering of crickets
rises in urgency. Some say in deep space the music of the spheres is silence. Some say a cosmic whisper.
I wonder if it is only the fluttering of our imagination. All civilizations fail and disappear. All
mountains rot and decay with a slowness that mocks our histories. Spread by tangled rivers into oceans,
the peaks settle into mud,
and hardened to rock. The moving earth raises the depths into mountains again or drives them into the
infernal undercontinents, splitting the earth, raising from fire new lands where the first unfolding
flower is the genesis of all gods. In the wilderness of time, rocks are the only texts, the only prophets.
An outcrop of weathered
Rounded sandstone is an ancient altar where I sit to be calmed by their long endurance, the gathered
days and nights of millions of years. Beyond that, I am lost. I live on the precipice of eternity moment
by moment. The stars keep their own time, different from mine. I am not a mountain. I am not a river.
I am the one who perceives their glory and stumbles mute as the stones into every morning. Sunday Drive.
In the spring, when rivers rise, I return to where the river rose in southern Indiana as we drove the
back roads after Sunday dinner.
sightseeing in our blue Chevy. Among derelict houses, men and women sat in boats half sunk with the
weight of their lives. Tables, chairs, machinery salvaged from barns and porches, quilts stacked or
strewn, their frayed edges dragging in the muddy water, animals gathered oddly quiet. With trust, my
father said,
remembering the flood of 37. And when we stopped and pointed, awed by the power of rain become river,
patiently lapping at the road's edge as I danced back, a child laughing, unable to imagine tractors
plowing bottom land, dust rising sunshot with the planting of corn. At the end of the road, we found
again the rundown filling station, only a hard rain from going under,
where I drank my mother's promised treat, an orange crush, and nothing more, she said, recalling the
shock of chocolate bars alive with worms the year before. And then, on higher ground, I slept the highway
home. The second theme is hearth.
And Mary Oliver has written, whatever a house is to the heart and body of man, refuge, comfort, luxury,
surely it's as much or more to the spirit.
Frost Warning. The weather report gives a frost warning, so I start my winter routine, squeezing into
the coral space to seal the vents and turn off the outside water. In the utility room, I clean the furnace
pilot light, re-tape the duct joints, then go from room to room, closing the storm windows. Finally,
in the evening,
I make myself go upstairs. The empty quiet, the clean paint shiny in the electric light, startle me.
And the space below my ribs gives its familiar, unpredictable lurch. There are no radios tuned to different
stations, no clatter along the hallway or feet loud on the stairs. I stand still for a moment, then
open the whole closet.
No babies swaddled like eisenglass eggs nap on the shelves. No toddlers scramble down, chortling like
starlings. No adolescents blower like gargoyles from the corners. I see a jumble of stuffed toys, puzzles,
old yearbooks. Behind the children's doors, there's more empty silence. I shut their bedroom vents.
fasten the last storm window and ready myself to face this new winter. In the sleeping room, whales
and storms rock the steam. Man and boys breathe tea kettles, car crashes, doorbells over the rough-layered
in-out wheeze.
hanging out the wash. High clouds to the west predict rain, but not soon. I lift the wet lumps from
the basket, lay them across my arm, then toss each item along the line. Spread, pin, spread, pin. Piece
to piece. Shorts, shirts, and socks. Billow and swing. Thoughts turn inward. My mind rests. The morning
chorus of birds sings as it does every day of every spring.
Blood circles endlessly, sown seed is harvested and sown again. Persistent prayer moves from mindless
repetition to trance to healing. I wash the dishes, sweep the floor, weed the garden, satisfied with
each small completion, beads along the ambiguous years. In the afternoon I loosen the pins, pile the
dry sweetened clothes in baskets, fold,
into drawers and return to writing this poem. February Promises. Each day now is an inkling longer.
Each keeps the cold gray until one sudden full blue sky warms the air enough by noon that brushing shaggy
horses lets float in the brightness of first flurry of hair.
hint of the heavy shedding to come when more weeks of the harsh and drifting than of the sleeting days
are done. And a flapping racket at the only liquid edge of the pond marks this first day of courtship
for the geese, precursors their desperate social couplings before the weeks of privation, females starving
and paling on nests, the belligerent gander's guard. With no promise that pert goslings will grow,
voracious in a new green, to learn by mimicking the gaggle's choreography. No promise beyond this ending
afternoon's quick drop back to sharp air, which holds the last sun as horses nose their hay and the
flock settles into drab grass, clean eyes keeping each moment toward the night.
Plus and minus. My father's rear was flat as pita bread, his imagination dull as beige. A domed brow
encased such mathematical expertise that full-blown bewilderment with sums provoked impatience with
his own daughter's ineptitude.
I've no voluptuous hind curves, and true, I cannot add. But oh, come close. In summer's broil, I have
pockets filled with snow. Haiti, Iraq, Bosnia.
The backyard a church of sorts, maple leaves dying a brilliant death, sky the blue of my mother's Sunday
dress. When she called last night, my wife and I had just sat down to watch the news after catching
a tree frog crawling up the living room wall, no doubt from one of the plants brought in from the cold.
My mother had news of her own about a deer that left the fence to eat pears.
How raccoons raided the garden behind the garage and cleaned out the last of the corn. Just called to
talk, she said, and we did until the news was over and rain began, pouring a lovely sound like a rush
of wings or a timpani of brushed leaves.
I am not from a house. Where I am from, there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house. If I blew
peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where the outdoor
staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens and diamond-shaped bars, does that make a house?
I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and the U-Haul.
I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
never mind. I am from laundry and unopened mail, and I marry whomever I like.
I have always been a little afraid of July. I suppose because of the electrical storms I endured as
a child, sitting with siblings in the kitchen, puppy huddled around mother, shivering when the lightning
flashed and cracked across the sky, counting the seconds between flashes and pops to determine how close
they were, and finding ourselves out counted sometimes as the false daylight would hit our front porch
and knock that electrical thing off the wall time and time again.
When dad was there, we didn't huddle but only spoke more softly and carried lamps and flashlights around
the farmhouse, giving Halloween scenery to non-October nights. But with him gone, it was necessary to
group ourselves and shake, praying for the storm to go away and come again when we were not there. And
it was not until I, as an adult, faced the storms that I realized that my mother was as frightened as
we all were and must have drawn comfort from four warm bodies near her
our need of her strength giving her hers. Heat lightning was bad enough. Flashing spastically in the
western sky outlined against the trees on the hill, we could see through the small bathroom window with
the real crackerjack electrical storms with the brilliant smashing light that let us see the barn in
unreal detail. The loud horrible noise of the thunder coming at us again and again and again
was something that still draws me away from windows and makes me sit in walled rooms, in the middle,
on a dry wooden chair with rubber leg tips, as I count the seconds, knowing not how close it was, but
only that once again I wasn't hit. I live in the tropics now. We have rain but a ton and other things
to scare us. And thunder is a surprise said in sentences like,
Was that thunder or an airplane? And it is with the greatest of relief that I face July, sitting proudly,
defiantly, near windows with my feet wet, touching metal, my tongue aimed at the sky in a Bronx cheer,
that I am not condemned to an Indiana farmhouse to wait out the month until sultry, languid August takes
over, too lazy, I suppose, to conjure up the displays in the sky,
that July had so rudely given us once again. In the living room after dinner. Sitting next to each other,
my mother smiling and holding his hand. My dad tells about his four widow women in the neighborhood,
their needs and worries, the funny sad stories they become.
these women who call on him to fix things, replace a broken pane, mandatory screen, recalk the tub or
sink. And even though a stroke has left him legally blind, my mother, his octogenarian chauffeur to
his chagrin, he still can read up close and at a slant, see well enough to please these women in their
widowhood.
We are the anger family, looking for the last straw. I was taught and I'm teaching you fate. We are
on the mad seesaw. We drop our things where we stand, let them fall, strike now, notice damage later.
We are the anger family, here comes the last straw. Smart, so smart.
Brilliant screaming raw. We understand all the wrong things. Who can wait? We are on the mad seesaw.
With 20 minutes between now and your dark bed scared, you bait me. We shout in the anger family, choke
on our last straw. I yank you to the anger playground. We claw and swarm the fury monkey bars.
We are booby skaters on a collision course with the mad seesaw. Swift, we are kings of the castle indignant
behind our safe draw. Who will depose us, hammer the alligators? We are the crowned anger family, ha,
the final straw. We are the dynasty on the mad seesaw.
How strange to awake in a city and hear grown men shouting in the night. Robert Bly.
I'd really like to get a job so I can get out more and see people. You might like to pay me with one
of those paychecks and I could come here into your office. I'd like a job very much. I will punch the
clock hard. I will punch it flying and everyone will like me. I will put on clean clothes, throw away
all my old smelly things and walk to work in the fresh air. Oh, I will be a civic leader.
And with my crisp paycheck, I will build sidewalks and massage parlors. The people will throng to the
gleaming M. Dear Plaza and shop and mingle, drink double lattes under Chairman Mao-sized portraits of
me. They will clog the courtyard drains with cherry pits. I would so dearly like a job.
This poem was inspired by a concert in Bryant Park, part of the Music in the Park series that occurs
every summer in Bloomington. It's called Jazz in the Park. Syncopated people converge, sit down,
tune up, lie flat, watching chimney swifts slide by, chattering to the bouncing beat of basketballs.
People walk, people talk over the crescendo of cymbals and drums.
Kids run, improvising, ignoring the runs on the keyboard. Unannounced, maroon shirt, long sleeved, over
long arms, blue jeans woman. Black hair, pressed with a silver clip, falls to the hollow of her back.
Graceful face, deep brown skin, resonating.
A chin composed on thin arms resting on thin knees. She sits alone surrounded by dogs and dogs snarling
and sniffing with no cats to vex. A little wine and cheese intervene. Tipsy glasses on uneven ground.
Up on stage, strict interpretations of mutable sounds.
She looks around, glances at her timing, rises, arranges the long strap of her purse over her narrow
shoulder, walks emphatically to the playground swings.
and swings and swings from the strings, long hair flying out, high and higher she swings, other swingers
all around, a dizziness of ups and downs, accompanied by the tenor sax, threading the reds and greens
and browns, white and black jam of people, old, young, older, young, in between the high and the low solos.
I did not know her, probably never will. Her tall, long-legged stride as she glides from the park before
it is all over. But the band plays on until, thanks for coming folks, the crowd thins and the beat slows
to the last few people and their jazzed up lives, leaving me wondering if I understand jazz.
a poem about Madrid before I ever went. Madrid, images of orange and brown and specks of black, dust
over most things, old wood. Women standing in doorways one step up from the brick street, looking with
wrinkles at you, the stranger. Greeting you with a frown more against the sun over your shoulder than
against you. Then smiling as you smile. And saying you'll never before use tongue.
Madrid, images of children kicking a small ball, hitting it with a stick, posters of Franco and the
new king, churches and church music, widows praying with widows, young men in shirts and slacks too
small, a bit brown, moorish blood, curly hair, teeth set off with a darker face, talking to women with
long black hair, snappy eyes and white blouses,
Sitting in the plaza as the sun makes everything about copy itself in long black duplicates across the
square. Madrid, images of orange and brown and specks of black. I wonder when I get there if I shall
have the same images for my return.
Old, bold town square is the stone core of so many hard yards, straight streets, clerk's works, and
now this chilly and overgrown with brown weeds vacant lot. Being rummaged by an offhand, don't push
me now because it's winter, soft-eyed possum. My car is stuck deep in downtown snow.
I borrow a shovel from a wrinkled woman with wig awry, selling guns. Amid all the rifles that could
blast my life away, a shovel to dig myself out, not under. Elevators glide, all glass and shaftless,
up a wide-walled atrium core of plush downtown hotel, where light cathedral-like begins a downward play
to foliage, fountain, and humans thronged, jabbering, showing no alarm at such a lofty silence of no
birds. Bradford Pears. Gloriously bridal, Bradford Pears are neatly queued along the streets,
A hazard, I should think, for drivers and pedestrians alike, their eyes dangerously distracted. To make
things delightfully worse, the wind, like a jealous sister come to town, is brewing trouble, as much
as she can muster. Dresses whipping and rising like a kind of laughter, undoing hair and hats. In fact,
forget the hats.
They're often a hoot of their own, a few in the trees like, look at me, even though the brightest can't
compete with Bradford pears in April bloom. Washington Square, San Francisco, 1995. Called here 30 years
by a trout fishing in America book cover picture of this
Stone Ben Franklin, and slim poplars towering south across Filbert from high pink church spires. Finally,
I stand in the park, famous this morning with a loose phalanx of Chinese flowing with their live leaders
slow motion boxing with eternity. While ponytail joggers and bright bandanaed moms strolling babies
watch too.
across the dewy and new green April sunrise. In feathered hats and goatskin lace nightgown, I plan to
take an amble into town. I'll visit a store that's staffed by urban sheep whose job it is to count you
off to sleep because they peddle a range of colored dreams they parcel and string
in palest blues and creams. Our cafe, gaming snakes and ladders alone, with for dice a heart-shaped
milk white stone. While I one by one some almonds, roasted light, and count the abacus hours left till
night. Our granola old men hungry on a bench, then strut my stuff like any strumpet wench.
The traffic will slow its onward-rhythmic stream in case I wish, although their light is green, to cross
on my way home to where such blooms are sold for long-stemmed radiance and perfumes. Arms laden with
stacked boxes on my head, the woodlands. And I'll mount the steps to bed, but first arrange the flowers
in Lalique vase.
And all my dreams I'll pour in antique jars at my bedside. So wide and full I'll breathe, floor to ceiling
tapestries I'll weave, and one with metaphor, rhyme, and symbol leap among mythical beasts and sonnets
in my sleep.
We go beyond walls. A few lines from Adrian Rich. Nights like this. On the cold apple bough,
a white star, then another, exploding out of the bark. On the ground, moonlight, picking at small stones.
My son-in-law told me of this event from his school days. I knew there was a poem there. The Dauntless,
Pennsylvania, 1960, for Jameis. It's been snowing steadily for days. Amid indistinct trees blurring
the angles of classroom buildings, the severity of dormitories drifts back high as the second floor.
When naked boys shift and shove at a window, faces bright with dares, dog dares, double and double dog
dares. One flings the window wide. In quick succession, arms flailing, they leap, shrieking into the
freezing white, sinking ice shafts the depth of body weight, then burrowing out, frantic, trembling.
And there's the cellar door, and beyond it a wood stove,
warmth. Circling. When I leave the trail and come through woods to the edge of a pond, a heron rises
and flies away over the water on ancient wings.
And when everything is still again, I look across the pond to the circling hills, tree covered and sloping
to the water's edge. And although the leaves have fallen, there is still color. Narrow twigs make a
net of gray. The bark on branches and trees is dappled with brown and orange. And leaves on the ground
like ruffled water reflect the colors.
Although I'm in southern Indiana, the grass at my feet still green, the pond high from last week's rain,
ripples made as a fish jumps running down an otter's slide, keeping it slick and moist. I imagine those
sleek creatures tumbling down into the small oxbow the nearby creek has abandoned. When I look at those
trees and that color again,
I am standing with you in desert country, mountains to the north and south, dry mesquite scattered land
stretched around us, the hot wind in our ears, buzzards endlessly circling.
Hands that pick cotton have held my body, touched it, made my soul tingle and my spirit rise. Brown
hands surround me in patterns, reminding me of the familiarity of 20 years. She would lie down in fields
when the smell of cotton in the heat of the sun overwhelmed, letting those hands rest, not knowing they
would belong to me in a few short years. Soon, she would begin again to pluck the bulls in her practiced way,
sweaters would start to live. She has not picked cotton since we met, nor have I handled plows, discs,
or harrows in all those springs since we inevitably found one another. Only later did I dream of images
of her, lying on a half-filled sack in an Arkansas cotton field, wondering whose body she would give
those hands to once she had done with cotton in Arkansas.
and the necessities of her childhood gave way to the luxuries of being an adult. Walking with Henry.
Having turned 50, I consider going down on all fours to bark at the wind just for the feel of it.
Instead, I walk a while with Henry, the springer spaniel who came scratching at our door last November,
a good dog and forgiving of my initial doubt. I ask if he knows why we are taking this rare walk together.
He stops to sniff and pee, then runs ahead, nose to the ground, tunneling fields until his neck and
ears are burred green.
no matter. It is enough to be alive with a dog on a country road, now and then a thrash of quail or
a hawk's slow spiral. Turning back, I call Henry home where we sit as I ruffle then unravel his knotted
fur and whisper in his ear, Henry, Henry, you dog, you, to which he whines and dances
his bobbed tail signing the air. A garden plot. The garden was becoming overpopulated, what was panthers,
parrots, frogs, raccoons, Adam, Eve, and now William Tell,
Drawn by that apple, he spied in Eve's hand. Bo taught, squinting his arrow's length, Tell was planning
to invite Adam to join him in a spot of fun. When he overheard Eve telling her rib man, Will could split
my Granny Smith in two clean halves, and was charmed. Eve, bored with unrelenting bliss, begged Will
to promise Adam there was small risk,
and he, with apple steady, could stand against the tree of good and evil over there. Adam, miserable,
but compliant by nature and irritated by the serpent hissing, sissy, sissy, balanced the granny Smith
green upon his head and driven by nerves, mouthed the first prayer.
This poem was inspired by a visit to Ocracoke Island off the North Carolina coast. Island shore. By
day the surf line seems scarce of life, small nervous fish and trods between waves, coquinas burrowing
quickly when the water withdraws. But there is more. From earliest light into darkness, sanderlings
and willets pace the shore, driving their long bills into the sand.
I walk the fringe where the birds feed, but find no trace of their prey. At night, things become clear.
When the birds have gone, the prey rises. As each wave slides back to the sea, its place on the shore
glows with luminescent splotches. I take a light into my hand, pale blue crustacean the size of a seed
from a sunflower.
A great calm envelops me, deep silence emanating from this small pulsing creature, food of the shore
birds, a meagerness that pulls on me like a star, mysteries gravity. In my 55th year, I finally understand
where I am in our galaxy. The Milky Way, scattered above in a broad fluorescent band,
far away flecks of light breathing in a time and space I struggle to comprehend is also here, wriggling
in the palm of my hand. Regeneration. My wife and I rose in a plane from Indiana fields.
soared over Colorado peaks, remembering the quick decade when both children blossomed in hardwooded,
wabash ribs of the continent, before each left to follow an earth-encircling dream. Now both were back
from Pacific sojourns, Kenai, Shinjuku, Mooresby, Balboa, Wanaroo, and both newlywed. To make us a fresh
six, first mixing at that strand,
where sea lions lolled on coast rocks sprung up sheer from the frothing sea. Clear streams descended
through redwoods to wind heathery bluffs and embrace the ebbing sea. As the young ones compared new
plans for Sonoma and Seoul, I could hear my mother's old refrains. Four brothers came from Scotland
to the hills of Tennessee. As a girl, great-grandmother sailed from Montrose
to Grand Manin Island off the coast of Maine. Then twilight stilled the Mendocino shore, crimson sky
patch and seabird calls all gone. And breathing eucalyptus, we walked together out the loop in dunes
to open darkling beach, where land was one dim line, tied all the power. And stars came high and random,
soft, quick, new.
In Kenya, have you ever heard an elephant trumpet across the dark? That sound still haunts me.
Kiliguni Lodge, bamboo easy chairs on an open fan veranda. We look across night felt toward a floodlit
water hole. Not a twig snaps as elephants glide from darkness. Siphon water with frowning trunks, heads
tilted to squirt a gush into deep,
peony mouths. Some zebra glance up, continue drinking as if being behind bars protects them. Warthogs
jostle for space well away from elephant legs. Those tree bowls, flat ends ringed by great pale half
moon toenails. In a minor key, a lurching melancholy looms cadences against the night.
Let's take a 10 minute intermission and come back after the second part of the program. Chris Green,
the editor of Wind Magazine, has asked me to hold it up so that any of you interested in getting it
can recognize it. It will be available at the book corner.
In a space, I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. That is why I often think up an imaginary
companion to have breakfast with. Yesterday morning I ate my oatmeal, porridge as he called it, with
John Keats, Galway Canal.
Dreaming with my feet. My feet sleep, spiny lobsters trekking the ocean floor. I walk to make them wake,
sand becoming the street in front of my house. My wife greets me, wondering where I've been. Dreaming
with my feet, I say. She looks disappointed, knowing it's the truth again.
Barstools, solid, black, and shiny, reflect the red sign floating in a cloud-mottled sky. The black-white
checkered floor fades away, and the clouds, drifting like smoke, obscure the rest of the diner. A cat's
huge transparent face, tabby gray, looms below the sign. Large aquamarine eyes,
draw me in. Do you wonder what I have to say? My cloudy sky eyes unblinking, bewildering, promise you
something beyond the checkered floor, shiny stools, neon diner light. Your eyes trace the pattern of
my dappled fur, but you don't reach to stroke me. Me, the lost love,
The love you never had. The love you don't understand. Walk beyond the stools. Risk the blue space.
I sit on a stool, not knowing which way to face. No counter, only this cat mural. But there are stools
and the neon sign. Excuse me, I say to no one in particular. Yes.
I spin around, no one there. You want something? I spin around again. To what direction shall I speak?
Well, yes, something to eat. Like what? The voice is wispy, neither old nor young, female nor male.
Oh, some sort of sandwich, a veggie burger maybe, or tuna fish salad.
I could have sworn something smacked its lips. That could be done. Oh good, something to drink too.
Yes, the voice almost croons. I find myself saying milk in a saucer and then don't bother with the bread,
just tuna on a plate. Come on in.
Either, jumping down, I pad into the cloudy sky, licking my lips, or I think I want out, I say, as the
clouds come closer.
dog religion. I'm up on the roof trimming branches that whip our shingles in high wind when my dog comes
trotting around the corner of the house and a heavy pine bough whooshes toward her on the path below.
She swings easily out of the way and turns to sniff the bough
then sniffs all the others landed nearby and without looking up trots on. Everything smells okay to
her, so my dog doesn't care about what's overhead making branches fall from the sky. Whether more will
fall tomorrow and surely not about who might have made the tree.
I'm going to date myself with a reference to Frankie Avalon in this poem, which is titled The Pleasures
of Bathing. In frequent tubs of deep, warm water, I trim my nails and raise white sails on the numinous
Nile, or, like a rugged Frankie Avalon, camp at night on a bongo beach along the Amazon. Granted, my
mind's not what it used to be, but given the cost of travel,
It's still the cheaper agency. As we all know, unexpected things do happen. The bottom line. So you
stir at 6 a.m. and all's humming along nicely. Boring even. So you doze away again.
An hour later, you wake, and the large red job's gone berserk. No kidding. 140 beats a minute, and not
a steady one, two, one, two. Uh-oh. A ruckus of stumblings and spikes. And when you stand up thinking,
maybe this is for the last time, you really feel like the buffalo are running and you're the range.
Of course, it's not an actual attack, you know that.
but it's not hard to label anarchy when the hullabaloo's on the inside. Next thing, you're all hung
up with a drip, and they've even x-rayed the bellows, and you've oxygen spurting up your breather through
little green pipes. When the doctor, cool Charlie, blows in and says, don't you do something on the
radio, I recognize your voice.
In Memphis, Tennessee, Tuesdays at the zoo were reserved for blacks, which is another way of saying
Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were not. On Tuesdays only, the giraffes
came onto the grass and let the boys and girls slide down their necks. On Tuesdays at the zoo in Memphis,
Tennessee, peacocks brought forth six gorgeous feathers hidden in their tails for six days.
On Tuesdays, flamingos lifted both feet in the air and remained aloft. On Tuesdays in Memphis, Tennessee,
even the snakes behaved. My future wife chose a wildebeest to put golden flowers in her hair, then whispered
to her of Serengeti. She placed her red shoes on his hind feet, and they danced, laughing, laughing.
Finally, suddenly, at five o'clock,
Little girls cried and hugged the bears goodbye. Cats licked boys' faces and rubbed their purring chins
against nappy heads. The white guards awoke and cage doors rang shut.
The energy eddies in so many flickering things. Like this splash of water, protein dash and pinch of
salt, I am. Pink and white and hardening green against the spring sky, buds wave. And candles take night
like horses throat the silence of a lake at dawn.
Camellias in my ginger jar glow the moon's light day long above their tense leaves' darkness.
The old horse, belly full and head drooped, eyes the slow staccato lifting line of turf a mole works
in dusk outside the stall as black holes make eternity.
and morning lights the bright scarves of lychee vendors in Bombay. Sealed, taut gold, blanketed in white
rind, its seeds fanning out like dancers. How entire the inner rhythm, the solitude of the orange.
This is a prose poem titled Grady's Choice. Under the influence of his own imagination, Grady rises
from the comfort of a deck chair and walks to the center of his backyard where luminous ropes are being
lowered from a fleet of cumulus clouds. All he has to do is grab one and hang on. No climbing, so it
isn't a matter of being in shape, which he isn't.
just hang on to the rope of his choice, and he will slowly ascend until he passes through the soft structure,
becoming its pilot. As such, he will gently bump other clouds, merge and share their power before emerging
reshaped and rerouted, though anywhere the sky is can serve as a port of call. A patient man,
Grady sits, then lies down,
his hands locked finger-woven under his head, a martini glowing in the grass beside him. As the clouds
float overhead with a barely audible hum, Grady already knows which one he will choose. In the distance,
a dark balloon appears on the horizon, grating the silence with its repeated blasts of hot air. A vulgar
choice, Grady thinks.
Some impatient fool has made a vulgar choice. Surely she was lovely before age and illness penned lines,
hollows into their own gaunt tale. Supported by her husband at the doctor's office, she sinks stiffly
into a chair.
Whistling softly, lifting gloved fingers up before her face, she capers them back and forth,
pauses to ask, aren't they pretty? You scare the people half to death, Mother, the old man smiles, one
hand on her arm. Do you need anything, Papo? She answers. Are you all right? I'm just fine, he says.
And again, for her dancing fingers, she's whistling. One chickadee perky in his skull cap,
pops onto the feeder near the window. See the little bird, mother? Will you just look at that? Her tune
fluting from purse flips. She glances outside, returns to frolicking her fingers, stops long enough
to ask, aren't they pretty? Journeys. End of the line.
I ride beyond the end of the line. Thomas Tranströmer.
I brought you into a fruitful land to enjoy the fruits and the goodness of it. But when you entered
upon it, you defiled it and made my heritage an abomination. Jeremiah 2-7. Pilgrimage. Blocked inside,
dazed and sullen, I drive for hours. I despair of people. All the beauty blotted out.
All the harshness draining from greed, all lies heavy in my gut, contorting me with confusion and ruinous
anger. I arch my shoulders, breathe deeply, but the tightness remains. I drive on, do not speak, just
drive to get there, to be there on that clear, wild lake. At dusk, standing beside the water, I choose
a stone from the cobbled shore
Hold it tightly in my hand, press its coolness to my belly. Take this constriction, these tentacles
that grip me, pull them into the pores and cracks of this deep and aged vessel. I fling the stone far
into the lake. Wash out this hardness, grind our arrogance to sand. Another rock, resplendent from eons
of violence, I hold, implore,
and pitch away, another and another, until I am finally easy, reassured. Slowly, the hardness will resolve
to this mellic and graceful shore. I 70 West.
But sore from driving all day in an 82 Civic, he tries to imagine a hundred years ago, Kansas cowboys
riding these green and yellow hills, rousting strays out of dry riverbeds, as he tames his thirst with
beer, his hunger with a bag of stale chips, thinking what this good old boy needs is an air-conditioned
cable TV, motel, bar, and grill.
beside the pool, a woman built like a Dallas cheerleader, though down on her luck, her body oiled like
an Oklahoma gusher, primed for a chance encounter with a big buckle, good time son of the plane.
I am not from a house. Where I am from, there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house. If I blew
peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where the outdoor
staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens in diamond-shaped bars, does that make a house?
I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and the U-Haul.
I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
never mind. I am from laundry and unopened mail. And I marry whomever I like.
winter visit at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, England. A brisk walk, the air's skin tingling, crows and church
bells sound across frosted thatch and field. Darkening day leans against leaded panes, beach and the
broad stone grate draws fire, flares, oak hunks
Bark deep-scored burn with slow vehemence. Sudden crunch of tires on gravel. They're back. These have
been quiet hours. A 200-year-old house silent behind replastered walls. The boisterous polarities of
children for a while elsewhere.
Left in the wake of grandchildren's zest, outside the circle of my children's sufficiency, thoughts
mint a simple stepping into final shadows, but fail to conjure the swift fade. Late, an owl's ethereal
hoo-hoo spans the negative of night.
Ia Formosa, an island over the ocean west. And my teacher showed old ways, saying, eat nothing but fresh
papaya fruit. And so I did, three times a day. All I wanted of the firm, sweet fruit meat, with only
lime to boost the clean, wide taste. Papaya piled like fish at market stalls.
translucent treat, though the best never left a tangled mountain's feet, kept there by a village man
who offered them from his trees. Past the last bus stop, I'd walk to his hut and trade for fruit, then
sit in the shade to eat. And this is what let me forget about food. Let me know new paths.
Behind the village, hiking big noons, sheen white, over all a mountainside of breathing green.
Quick snakes, striving full, so hot a heaven of leaves. So back here now, I know about walking away
again. South this time, perhaps, where papaya began, when seasons were time and no trees sailed yet
for Goa, Manila, Macau, or for that island,
Where surely now a man will be at his hut with new fruit and the folds of a mountain opening down, profligate
with green. Met an Englishman once, asked him what he did and he said, I drive a lorry.
A simple statement, yet one remarked with eyes averted and head set rather at an angle between the ashamed
and the defiant, somewhere near where all those of the spat upon class of English folk hold their heads
when talking to their betters. And I said, interesting work that.
And he, with relief, took up the task to explain the ins and outs of what I secretly felt to be a boring,
tiring job, one that fitted in somewhere classes below my university parchment and work experience.
Yet, with my background of mortgaged farms and ruined businessmen and wooden churches needing paint,
what could I say but interesting work that?
as if I really cared, and yet I found I did. But what I most remember is not what he told me when I
urged him on with my slap on the back quote, but the pain he endured in that interminable silence between
his reply and my response to it, when I could have cut him cold and no angry retort of his would have
come near my sneer and slight sniff as I searched for something to say to that lesser sort. But instead
I remembered in that same silence
my own and myself. And I came across, I hope like kin, when I said as matter-of-factly as I
could, interesting work that. Always with us, Frank Tennessee. In a field on the edge of the continent state,
I find a Civil War graveyard. I climb a stone stile, stoop under the low maples, and come to the foot
of a slope. Lines of square, small stones stretch almost to the top of the hill, like broken teeth sewn
in the short, thick grass. The historical marker reports more than a thousand soldiers buried by landowners
and his slaves.
Out of the woods, gray line shining, a sudden evening rain advances across the meadow. My fathers, stenciled
in uneven letters on the rough wood,
12091, Major A.C. Stedman.
had not been long in this country when I wrote this poem. Night journeying across Nebraska, at a train
window I watch evening descend upon the land. The Platte River, stubble fields, cottonwoods are a woman's
body seen through her dark nightgown.
As she withdraws, I linger, recalling a South African countryside of years ago. Rocked by the syncopation
along narrow gauge tracks from Transvaal to Cape, with a varnish teak compartments behind me, I gaze
through corridor windows, small head of a springbok etched on every pane, absorbing the deepening dusk
of the Karoo. White thorns of a Durin boom snagging the last light,
stony outcrops, scrubby tussets, tree aloes all streaking by. Gripping the corridor rail, swaying with
a rhythmic ta-ta-ta-ta beneath my feet, I was a child present while her motherland, readying for sleep,
dimmed the light. But a stranger here now, I turned my eyes away.
A belated note to an old landlady of mine. Forgive me, Frau Erhard. You must have died, but I'm juicy
and breathing in pink, and if you're still decked out in your teeth, sitting up nights with the TV lights,
waiting for me to come door-slamming home, I'll eat your garden mud clogs. I never wrote you in 20 years,
in Buschgewand, whatever that means in Buschgewand, but you can't have died, 100 years old, and still
parading me to the neighbors, the butcher, hands off the prize, big American girl, the grin, your steering
elbow. You must have died, your grandchildren, grandparents, but who then is chopping the wood for the bath?
Who will you let touch your 50s kitchen? I'll eat your TV and your beer and your teeth and your short
white fence and your apron flowers if you are not sitting there, watching my phantom fingers go like
crazy, nights in your living room, letters out, typing save me, you praising my worklust. You just won't
teach me what you know, hands off the axe, away from the stove,
I'm sorry you're dead if you're dead, but if you're bright alive, I'll eat the underpants off the line.
You're wool ones that keep you warm, and mine. And the final category of the evening is beyond. Mary
Oliver said,
At any cost, it is the dangerous and marvelous future I mean to find.
I always seem to be turning on the shower or arriving at Kennedy Street on the bus or answering the
phone at work, reaching over to push down the lighted button to get staccatos of words punctuated with
questions. Some things we do that we seem always to do when we do them, forgetting completely about
them the rest of the time until we do them once again and think to ourselves, I always seem to be doing
this. Not a disturbing thought, but certainly a recurrent one.
If it is a morning thing, we wonder where our days go, always seeming to be getting them started but
never seeing them end, or if it is evening coming to the same kind of question from the other side.
It always seems to be 11.25 a.m., or else it's a quarter to three. My biological clock says to me to
look at my wrist twice a day, and it is at those two times that I promptly obey, and every so many times
say to myself,
It always seems to be 1125 or 245, even though it almost always never is. Life patterns, bits of our
lives held up to us by ourselves to look at and wonder why, just that, just then. Since we do so many
other things, arrive at so many other places every day of our lives. Don't I ever look up as I am arriving
at Ingraham like I did tonight in the rain?
or see what my watch has to say for itself at 422, or glance at my action of putting down my fork at
the end of the meat. These patterns, these indicators tell me that once again, it is morning,
it is evening. Once again, it is a quarter to three and another day has gone, leaving me wondering what
I did between 1125 and 1125 besides turn on the shower and see Kennedy Street loom up before me once again.
to go forward or beyond in this poem, we first have to go back. We have to imagine that we're in 1992
and we're looking ahead to the results. Election year, 1992. I am voting and remembering the 50s. Just
out of high school told rock and roll was savage, primitive, appeal to our baser instincts.
In hidden basement coffee houses, we tentatively moved from the formal waltz embrace and began to shake
it. A small rebellion, suppressed for me in teacher training college, where we were checked back in
at the porter's gate by 11 p.m. And as befitted young ladies entering the field of education, we signed
in at breakfast, washed, dressed, and in our right minds.
I'm voting for the dangerous edge, the glint in the eye, the dreamer who still dreams that dreams can
come true, and a remembered evening in Texas, driving with friends in a fast car across county lines
to a beer joint in the desert, the night wind in my hair, watching the stars. Then, going home in the
sunrise, the world unfolding ahead of us. So, I'm voting for hope
and change and dreams and youth and for the time when there was still possibilities, I'm voting for
Elvis A. Sheherazade in her bedroom. This is the story I finished before I died.
This is the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died. This is the crazy inner
voice that deranged the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died. This is the
strange and moon-like landscape that echoed the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted
at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died.
This is the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and moon-like landscape and silenced the
crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. This
is the lull in a thrilling story that comes in the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and
moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at
at gunpoint I finished the story before I died. Here is my sister who brought us the tea that filled
in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetened the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and
moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at gunpoint
I finished the story before I died. This is the man outside the window who eyed my sister
who brought us the tea that filled in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetened the rosy haze of morning
that softened the strange and moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the
man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. This is the sun that rose so swiftly
and lit up
the man outside the window which frightened my sister who spilled the tea that filled in the lull in
a thrilling story. The sun that burnt off the haze of morning and flooded the strange and moon-like
landscape, but shut out the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish
the story before I died. This is the evening that followed the day in which the sun rose up so swiftly.
The evening that swallowed the man at the window and sent home my sister who'd brought the tea that
filled in the lull in a thrilling story. The evening that echoed the haze of morning and deepened the
strange and moon-like landscape and brought back the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted,
at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. You go to sleep.
I'll stay up every night recalling the evening that follows the day that is over so fast when the sun
moves so swiftly, disclosing the man outside the window who frightens my sister, who brings the tea
that fills in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetens the rosy haze of morning that softens the strange
and moon-like landscape and silences crazy inner voices and soothes the man who murmurs in sleep
But I finished the story. Tomorrow I'll die. When we are old. When we are old, let the wind reel us
in from our field of play.
like airy things relieved of suits and masks. In evening light, we shall write out a stride a dream
of stars like a new constellation. And who will remember two who were suddenly gone in a rise of wind,
seen last together at the edge of the field of play.
fine line. In Zimbabwe, shaking in wind, high on the boulder-stroom metopus, desiccated clumps of stems
are hardly worth a second glance. But submerged one in water, watch it soak up life. I saw what was
drought-dead foliate, green as belief,
the resurrection plant. For a child, a fine line was erased. What's deemed lifeless can revive. I sought
my twin. In imagination, dug for her bones, laid those fragile remnants, the reassembled stems of Elizabeth.
to steep until they too fleshed and she lived again to play with me. Up on the metopus all is quiet
and dry, the way it is with graves.
in the winter river. From the bridge, long shadows and clear water are schools of fish in murky symmetry,
languidly swaying as one. Erratically, it seems, within the gray mass, one form turns, then another,
each emitting a silvery flash. As a child, I dropped stones to scatter the fish, to break the order.
I watched the slow flowing of a passing log spread to school like smoke in a breeze. Even the shadow
of my waving hand unsettles them. In my youth, I gave too much credit to stones. To wary fish, graceful
motion may shroud a stalking heron. Now I seek the stillness in all things.
In the pale green filigree of flowering maples simple in their eloquence, I measure my own dignity.
In the shining wetness of a stone wall after rain is the silent spirit of beings without life. When
Sirius is on the heel of Orion sweeping across the Milky Way in late summer, I enter the nearness of
those bright creatures
whose escape from the distant roar of death and birth of stars whispers them into myths. Now I school
with the fish, suspended through the night in our cold river as the snow deepens, clouding the water
above us, and I am leery of graceful shadows. But within the anonymity of the river, far into the harsh
distances of space,
Lost in the swaying mass, in the dull brown camouflage of despair, I too turn in silvery signal. Fountain
Void. This close vortex of the land
Corrugated yet in deep treed hollows, steeping ridges, vines sanctified and fast against the spill of
plains, holds a tight tap down through logic and illusion, through paleological prints of the gene,
to the fountain void past all desire. I am the million bees that tangle dogwood lit in greeny filtered
beams, the pillar oak,
slayed like raw hay in summer-churning bolts of storm, and smothered rock, earth-memoried, eon-capillaried,
mute, entropic ocean of our bones. O roiling woods, suspended sharp in the season's flashing eye, impart
the vast centripetal calm. Impel the lilting juggernaut of butterfly, transcending warmness,
its few days with no shackled dread, and loose the force that opens blossom, feather, leaf, and eye,
without a feathering cell of hope, to thrive and burst and nourish more in the everlasting flux.
Accepting snow. Perfection marred by erratic tracks suddenly overlapping, locked like magic rings. You
lie back dreaming the bird you found the winter you were nine, wings outspread in a sky of ice. Slowly,
the last breath like a sliver of glass drawn out the full length of your body.
You rise neither warm nor cold and wait unseen beside yourself.