Month: October 2022

And Life Be As Sweet

Happy Halloween!

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Henry David Thoreau

The Pumpkin

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 
Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon,
Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam,
In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!
 
Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better
E’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!
Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,
Brighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!
And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,
Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,
That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,
And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,
And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky
Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!
 
 

Haunted Houses (An Excerpt)

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

The Fret Of Tangled Purposes

Life

by Henrietta Cordelia Ray

Life! Ay, what is it? E’en a moment spun
From cycles of eternity. And yet,
What wrestling ’mid the fever and the fret
Of tangled purposes and hopes undone!
What affluence of love! What vict’ries won
In agonies of silence, ere trust met
A manifold fulfillment, and the wet,
Beseeching eyes saw splendors past the sun!
What struggle in the web of circumstance,
And yearning in the wingèd music! All,
One restless strife from fetters to be free;
Till, gathered to eternity’s expanse,
Is that brief moment at the Father’s call.
Life! Ay, at best, ’tis but a mystery.

 
 

Sonnet 35

 
by William Shakespeare
 
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authórizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
   That I an áccessory needs must be
   To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.
 

My True Verse

IMG_1389
Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis MN

The following is a re-posting from October of 2017 of a portion of one of the first blog entries on Fourteenlines in honor of my Mother’s birthday.  If you would like to read the entire post use the calendar side bar to revisit it.

__________________________

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

October in Minneapolis is a sacred month.   It has the last warm days of the season mixed with a visual feast of greens, yellows, orange and reds beneath a blue harvest sky.  Minnesotans know what’s coming next; cold weather, snow, icy sidewalks, short foggy grey overcast days and leafless trees.  Please, don’t ruin our enjoyment of being sozzled by beauty for a couple of weeks by reminding us of our winter hangover that is yet to come.  Nature throws a hell of party at summer’s closing time in Minneapolis, with a last round of a Kaleidoscope of colors for our bacchanalian fall over indulgence.

October is sacred for another reason for me personally.  It is the month of my mother’s birth and the one year anniversary of her ashes being interred at Lakewood Cemetery, next to her parents and grandmother.

The only reason I am a poet and writing this blog is because of my mother.   Poetry was and is a visceral connection to her. She and I shared a love of poetry going back to my childhood but it intensified as time went on.   My mother returned to Minnesota for the last four years of her life, after 28 years of living in other parts of the world, always pronouncing steadfastly during short visits, that she would never return to live here again.   That she relented on that declaration was a gift beyond measure.  Her return to Minneapolis, coming full circle back to the neighborhood where she grew up and first taught grade school after graduating from the University of Minnesota,  allowed me and my oldest sister to spend time with her on a weekly basis, as she lived less than two miles away from each of us in those remaining years.

IMG_1425
Mary Fry

Soon after she returned, my mother and I created a tradition called poetry night.  It started out informally but grew to have regular rules.   We each would pick out 5 or 6 poems to read aloud to each other and eat a meal together once every 3 or 4 months.  The rule was you had to read each poem twice (her rule, in part because of her struggles with hearing aids, but also so that you can listen carefully and internalize more of the poem the second time through).   We would take turns, alternating, reading each poem we had selected one at a time,  then asking each other questions, laughing, telling stories, talking about the author and why we chose each poem, before moving on to the next.  We were planning another poetry night shortly before she died. It was a lovely way to spend 3 hours in her presence.  Here is a poem I had set aside to read to her on our next poetry night.

Love is a Place

by e. e. cummings

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)  all worlds

My mother lived and lives in a yes world, and wished for all of her family and friends to live a loving life with brightness of peace.

It is a daunting thing to try and write something in honor of your mother.   Words never measure up.   I wrote the following poem as part of my grief process.  It began as a sonnet, but it morphed a little to become something sonnet-light.  The day of her internment was overcast, grey and slightly rainy.  I read it before the small group of family and friends that had gathered to remember and celebrate her life.

Happy Birthday Mom.

My True Verse

by T. A. Fry

Laid bare before life’s mighty eyes,
Farewell beloved I leave behind.
Look past the rain, the grey torn sky.
And if you weep this day, then go resigned.
Keep no somber vigil by silent ash.
As my spirit lives with those I loved.
For I lay beyond mere earthen cache,
My love of you forever proved.
So when in need of kindly word,
Amid drag and drone of a rambling curse.
Listen for my voice in brook or bird.
And hear the truest of my true verse.

This Is The Barrenness

Louise Gluck

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

Louis Gluck

All Hallows

By Louise Gluck 
 
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
 
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
 
And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Sonnet 100

by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville (1554 – 1628)

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils

How Huge The World Must Be

David Baker

Poems happen for me–when they happen–not in the writing but in the rewriting. They emerge.

David Baker

Dust To Dust (An Excerpt)

by David Baker
 
2.
 
All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come
calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze.
 
It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes
over the far, darkening fields and many trees.
 
How huge the world must be to hear so far
beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night.
 
There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly.
And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm.
 
Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter
all the way back while its car-locks bang.
 
Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke,
and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle.
 
How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long.
It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider.
 
5.
 
Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque.
The many children quieted by baths, put to bed—
 
they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains.
One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow.
 
Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop.
But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off
 
the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked
their knees to pack tightly back into earth.
 
How small a world it is to want such work.
I will come here only once more to lie down too,
 
having lived to praise one thing made so well
it sings with each slow passage, rimmed
 
with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds.
Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.

I Know The World

Philip Whalen (1923 – 2002)

My writing is a picture of the mind moving.

Philip Whalen

Vermont

by Phillip Widden

A white wood house defines the slope. The trees
Have gone to red and flame. A field beyond
Is spread with grass and granite rocks at ease.
This stonewall pattern thinks it holds a pond.
But it is free beneath October’s sun,
At least as free as anything can be
In fever such as we all know when, done
With heavy summer, eyes begin to see
The chill of air and glaze themselves with dreams.
Restrained. The farmhouse windows have their fire
Inside as well. Twilight is more it seems,
And maple facts can mesmerize desire.
A white wood house defines the slope of hill
Where people keep another autumn, still.

A Vision of the Bodhisattvas

By Philip Whalen
 
They pass before me one by one riding on animals
“What are you waiting for,” they want to know
 
Z—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me
“Some day you’ll drop everything & become a rishi, you know.”
 
I know
The forest is there, I’ve lived in it
    More certainly than this town? Irrelevant—
 
    What am I waiting for?
A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?
Who’s to make the change but me?
 
    “Returning again and again,” Amida says
 
Why’s that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house alone
Nothing but the clothes on my back, money or no
Down the road to the next place the highway leading to the   
mountains
From which I absolutely must come back
 
What business have I to do that?
I know the world and I love it too much and it
Is not the one I’d find outside this door.

I’m Your Guide Here

Maggie Smith

How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

First Fall

By Maggie Smith
 
I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.
 
 

Reading the Train Book, I Think of Lisa

by Maggie Smith
 
In the board book there is a train, not a train
but a picture of a train on thick cardboard pages
my son fumbles to turn. In the book with a spine
gummed soft, there is no car parked beside the tracks
and no black-haired woman standing by the car
not parked beside the tracks. In the book
there is a train, each car its own color, one car
heaped high with coal, not coal but a drawing of coal.
See the engine, the neat cloud of steam above it,
not steam at all, and the engineer in his striped cap
smiling in the little window, not a window.
In the book there is no black-haired woman
on the tracks, not tracks. I am holding my son
who is holding the train book and waiting
for me to sing the long, happy sound, not happy
but a warning, doubled and doubled again.
 

And We Still Had Hours

Kim Addonizio

“Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night.

Kim Addonizio

Stolen Moments

by Kim Addonizio

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory – an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his, 
the way he pushed me up against the fridge –
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex.  Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light.  Beside the stove
we ate an orange.   And there were purple flowers
on the table.  And we still had hours.  

First Poem For You

by Kim Addonizio

I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

Feel Me To Do Right

May Swenson (1913 – 1989)

The summer that I was ten – Can it be there was only one summer that I was ten? It must have been a long one then.

May Swenson

That The Soul May Wax Plump

by May Swenson

“He who has reached the highest degree of
emptiness will be secure in repose.”
—A Taoist saying

My dumpy little mother on the undertaker’s slab
had a mannequin’s grace. From chin to foot
the sheet outlined her, thin and tall. Her face
uptilted, bloodless, smooth, had a long smile.
Her head rested on a block under her nape,
her neck was long, her hair waved, upswept. But later,
at “the viewing,” sunk in the casket in pink tulle,
an expensive present that might spoil, dressed
in Eden’s green apron, organdy bonnet on,
she shrank, grew short again, and yellow. Who
put the gold-rimmed glasses on her shut face, who
laid her left hand with the wedding ring on
her stomach that really didn’t seem to be there
under the fake lace?

Mother’s work before she died was self-purification,
a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go
to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused)
with our father, in Heaven long since. She believed
in evacuation, an often and fierce purgation,
meant to teach the body to be hollow, that the soul
may wax plump. At the moment of her death, the wind
rushed out from all her pipes at once. Throat and rectum
sang together, a galvanic spasm, hiss of ecstasy.
Then, a flat collapse. Legs and arms flung wide,
like that female Spanish saint slung by the ankles
to a cross, her mouth stayed open in a dark O. So,
her vigorous soul whizzed free. On the undertaker’s slab,
she lay youthful, cool, triumphant, with a long smile.

 

Feel Me

By May Swenson 
 
“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me
to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt
through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument
our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always,
we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology
for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying,
as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide
gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me
to wait here, with the worms!”
 
Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate
among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right”
before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew
what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel
as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate
my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right
for the first time.” And then the vessel burst,
and we were kneeling around an emptiness.
 
We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us,
yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm,
the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek
his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word.
Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress—
a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we
could do right if we would bless him?
The dying must feel the pressure of that question—
lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot
cowards there above protesting their love, and saying,
“What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens
and the blue night pours through. “What can we do?
We want to do what’s right.”
 
“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be
with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”

The Sweet Promise of a Ripening Peril

The purpose in life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

 
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two, Sonnet XXIII

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Robert Temple

Call me to you when the hour turns away,
The one which always opposes you:
It is as close to you as a dog’s face
But then it wavers, forever eluding you,

Just when you thought it was yours.
All things which are taken from your grasp are most your own.
How free we are. We are shut out from
Just where we expected most to be warmly greeted.

We struggle anxiously for a hand-hold,
We who are perhaps too new for what is truly old,
But too old for that which has never yet been.

We are only correct insofar as we praise,
For we are both blade and branch,
We contain the sweet promise of a ripening peril.