September Soup: For Lydia

Another autumn day
of perfect beauty,
Perfect light.
Clouds forming
On the mountains,
Crows noisy
In the cottonwoods
Outside the kitchen window
Where I am chopping celery
Peeling onions,
Making soup.
All day long
My hands will smell of
Garlic, onions, tumeric,
Marjoram and sage
I gathered from the pots
Behind the house.

Salting the broth
With tears I cannot stop,
I think of you,
Your animals,
Gardens, birds.
How you loved to cook,
To share the Magpie bounty
With friends and
Passing strangers.

All that I can do
Is offer this as prayer:
Last small tomatoes
Waiting to be picked,
Yellow leaves, the steaming soup,
Flickers calling from the trees
In fields beyond the wall.
Tears, and memory.
Autumn light.
Dear heart, you will be missed.

Poem In October

I was a sixteen year old girl in a school desk, trying to make it through English class to lunch time; when Sister Mary Michael told us to open our books to a certain page, and proceeded  to read the poem on the page to us in her musical Irish accent.  The top of my head blew off as I listened, that's the only way I know how to say it.   It was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.  I read it over and over again the rest of that day, and have read it over many times since. It is the poem that woke  my heart up to the love of words,  the love of poetry itself, how the heart's truth could be sung.  It opened the door to a lifetime of reading poetry, writing poetry, loving poetry. These blustery October days of wild winds, warm sun, cold nights, bring it back to me, make me love it all over again.


Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas

Brewer's Wednesday Poetry Prompt, July 14: After The Rain

 

 After A Dream of Rain


Clouds pile up daily over the Sandias.
We can see it raining sometimes on the Crest.
Dry Thunder rumbles in the south
Over the Manzanos,
In the middle of the hottest afternoons.

Here in the Valley we wait and watch and pray.
The wind comes up in the evenings
Bringing smoke from fires in the mountains.
The news reports tell us it is raining other places,
Storms in Las Cruces, Roswell, Tucumcari.

Last night, sleeping with the windows open,
I dreamed the smell of rain.
Felt the drops coming in over the bed.
Daybreak woke me to reality.
After a dream of rain, empty water barrels.

Thalassa, Thalassa

Hard to believe that two months have flowed past since April's poetry challenge had me writing a poem a day.  May and June have been busy with my last classes of my ESL career (as I see it from here, but you never know) and with rage, grief, and constant reading of news about the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I have been on Facebook more often than not, reading news, posting items on my own page, sharing feelings about this event with like-minded friends. I don't know what this social networking is for others, but I see it as the reason the Internet was invented.  I have found a community of interesting, sensitive, compassionate, politically savvy friends via this medium.  They are people I know in the Real World, mostly people with whom I had long ago lost touch, as well as people I know only in the Virtual World, some for many years, some for the past months only. Having this medium to vent feelings, gather and share information, has kept me from going completely mad during the past two months since Deepwater Horizon first blew.

If you have read any of my poems on this blog, you know I write about small quotidian bits of life - birds, gardens, weather, food, the conjunction of any of the above - and this Gulf disaster is far too big a subject for my heart to encompass, for my brain to form words.  I think about it all the time, I wake in the night imagining the loss of the marshes, the plight of the birds, turtles, sea mammals.  I go to the river, the Rio Bravo, or Rio Grande as we call it now, and send my prayers for all of the creatures floating down the redbrown muddy currents to where it empties into the Gulf.  A very valuable new friend found on Facebook is a writer named Julia Whitty.  She has written quite a few books, and is also an environmental writer for Mother Jones.  Her blog, titled, like her most recent book, Deep Blue Home,  is on my daily reading list.  She has a lovely habit of posting poetry on Sundays, and this one stopped my breath, went straight to my aching heart:

THE SEA CHEWS THINGS UP
by Cleopatra Mathis
 
    When I woke, the waves had gone black,
    turning over the macerated
    curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge
    onto the beach. Some storm far out, I thought,
    had ravaged the sea, stirred up its bed,
    sent the whole mess flying to shore.
    At my feet I found a grave of starfish,
    broken and gnarled among the fleshy
    snipes and heads. Every shade of death
    covered the sand. It looked hopeless
    in the pale day but for the birds,
    a congress of gulls, terns, and the rarest plovers,
    calm for once, satiated, a measure of
    the one law: this sea will claim it all—
    feed them, catch them, grind their complicated bones.

Gary Snyder, Poet of Wild Mind

Today is International Migratory Bird Day.  It is also the 80th birthday of the poet Gary Snyder.  It is also one of the many days that wildlife volunteers along the Gulf Coast will be rescuing animals from the oil spill, cleaning them, hoping for their survival.  I find this an ironic conjunction of events on one day. I hope for Snyder some good years yet to come.  As of 2007, he was still writing.  This event in the Gulf must be a huge heartache for him, lover of the wild that he is. He was an early influence on my own writing, I found in him a very kindred spirit.  To honor his birthday I took my ancient copy of Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems off the shelf and read through it.  This 1956 poem from Riprap is another bit of conjunction to the day. I hope you are well, Gary Snyder.

    Migration of Birds

         Gary Snyder

It started just now with a hummingbird
Hovering over the porch two yards away
                                    then gone,
It stopped me studying.
I saw the redwood post
Leaning in clod ground
Tangled in a bush of yellow flowers
Higher than my head, through which we push
Every time we come inside -
The shadow network of the sunshine
Through its vines. White crowned sparrows
Make tremendous singings in the trees
The rooster down the valley crows and crows.
Jack Kerouac outside, behind my back
Reads the Diamond Sutra in the sun.
Yesterday I read Migration of Birds;
The Golden Plover and the Arctic Tern.
Today that big abstraction's at our door
For juncoes and the robins all have left,
Broody scrabblers pick up bits of string
And in this hazy day
Of April summer heat
Across the hill the seabirds
Chase Spring north along the coast:
Nesting in Alaska
In six weeks.

Morning Haibun

May Morning

All night the canyon winds have slammed the house, loud noises keeping us awake and anxious. This morning gravel paths are strewn with rose petals, hollyhock leaves, small limbs of cottonwood.  Front porch pots knocked over, lying on their sides, their leaves like tangled hair.

     Big orange cat

     Crouched under the feeders

     Waits for hummingbird brunch

PAD Day 30 - Letting Go

 Letting Them Go

I have held this hornet swarm of anger

Within my heart too long,

The venom, buzz and sting

All painful things

But real enough 
To fill the place deserted

By the soft round bees of love.

Purpose of bees in flowers,

Presence of honey,

Sound of bees in the sun,

Gone from a hive left empty.

Honeycomb abandoned,

Rotted into something

Unbearable to touch, to hold.

A place where angry hornets

Were welcome to move in,

Take space, make noise,

Pour poison through my empty veins.

This could be a way to live.

Yet, in early morning dampness

Comes a vision of release.

I could let them go.

Cup them in the hollow of my hands

Stinging for the last time.

Open hive and heart,

Let them rise into the trees,

Watching as they go.

Clean out the hive,

Stay empty, live bereft,

Wait to see what next moves in.

PAD Day 29 - And Suddenly______

Evening, Fly-In, Bosque Del Apache

A cold wet afternoon of birding

hiking soggy edges of the fields,

the trail along the river,

following the muddy

footprints of the deer.

December sun sank

behind the mountains,

cloud reflections in the ponds

caught fire.

And suddenly 
the sky was filled with cranes.

PAD Day 28 - End of the Line

Shipwreck

Never did I plan,

nor was it my intention,

to spend my life asleep

on a deserted beach

with the moonlight on the dunes,

landscape of a dream,
alone when it rains in the night.

Yet here I am

curled in a hollow of sand

against the tossing sea,

the raindrops on my cheeks.

Since this was not my plan,

nor my intention,

it all could be a dream,

and these may be tears,

not rain.

Which does not lessen the darkness,

nor leave me any less alone.

PAD Day 27 - Hopeful/or/Hopeless

Small Bones of Time

These may be all we have:

moments picked as clean

as I have seen

gull bones on the sand,

mouse bones in the dust

behind a cupboard door,

the fox skull I found once

in a field.

These may be all we have.

Small bones of time

empty as abandoned shells,

clean as stones

wavewashed endlessly.

These may be all we have.

PAD Day 26 - More Than Five Times *

The Serendipity of Gardens

I’ve tried to write this poem

Five times now 
Today and yesterday,

Pruning the vitex and desert willow

Trimming back the  Russian sage

Thinking what to put in that border

Where  purple sage and Mexican sunflowers

Were a riot of color last year.

In fact, probably more than five times

While weeding the evening primroses

Digging out the irises that won’t bloom

Deep under the plum trees 

Too far from morning sun.

In the kitchen for some toast,

A coffee, pomegranate jam,

I think maybe I’ll give up now

And just pay attention

To the serendipity of flowers

Forget the impossible poem.

PAD Day 25 - Poem Inspired By A Song

Bird On A Wire

Migrants coming through

Backyard birds nesting

Constant motion at the feeders

Appeasing avian hunger

Small birds in the pines

Pyracantha, Spanish broom

Then,  midday silence

Nothing moves

The answer on the powerline

Cooper’s hawk overhead

Later, in the evening

Feathers on the gravel

Unkind hawk, flying free,

Has moved on

(Song: Bird On A Wire, Leonard Cohen, 1968

PAD Day 24 - Evening

Celebration

We went to the Earth Day Party

At the Co-Op in Nob Hill,

Bought an iceplant for the berm

 at the Santa Ana Nursery,

Listened to Brazilian jazz

And danced our asses off

Under the music tent.

Then walked home through

Unfamiliar neighborhoods,

As the moon rose over the Sandias,

Breathing the purple air

Of lilacs and wisteria,

Listening to the evening doves.

As dusk fell, the wind came up.

Dogs barked behind adobe walls.

Home now, tired and sunburnt,

Feeding the cats late dinner,

Ending a perfect day.

PAD Day 23 - Exhaustion *

Naps

They found the old iron bed

In a junkshop on Route Six,

Loaded it in the truck,

And took it home.

It took four weeks

In the sun by the barn

To sand it, paint it white.

They've moved the bed  with them

Several times across the country.

By now it needs repainting.

But it’s under the east window

In the bedroom at the back

Of the house,

Where they go on the days

When a nap is both necessary

And possible.

Crawl under the quilt Ren bought

 At the Texas flea market

On a Hill Country visit

 When everyone was still alive,

The hard times out there

Waiting for them then.

A nap under that quilt,

Dream filled journey in the

White iron bed,

On a bleak winter afternoon

Or a summer day with the

Ceiling fan turning

Can feel like the only thing

Saving them

 temporarily

 from the boneyard.

PAD Day 22 - Earth

At Twilight

Yesterday at twilight as I crossed the lawn

something moved above my field of vision.

Up where woods' edge slopes to lilac bushes,

children's sandbox, kitchen windows.

In that zone between the secrecy of forest

and the known of human dwelling,

three deer:  two doe, one halfgrown fawn,

stood still as trees in trees' grey shadow.

Longlegged bandits from the forest,

wary eyed, curious and hungry,

they had come to browse the garden:

mint, tomato plants, sweet basil,

tender leaves of newly sprouted spinach.

Hours in the mud spent digging, planting,

weeding, moving stones, seemed unimportant

to defend against such beauty.

For this I would have planted twenty gardens
Grace was what I needed more than food.

PAD Day 21- According To______

Life According To Hoyle

 How would it  be

If being a human

Was like bridge

Or poker or chess,

And it came to us

Complete with a book

Of rules and instructions,

Life according to Hoyle?

No more agonizing,

Making decisions:

Who to marry

Where to live

What to do

What to name the baby

Where to take our vacation

Divest or invest this year?

All the answers

Would be found in Life's pages.

No doubt or confusion remaining

Look each one up in the index

Final directions found here.

PAD Day 20- Looking Back / Forward

In Defense of Looking Back

Don’t look at me like that.

I know you think me cowardly,

Call me slow and weak.

If you had ever loved this way

You would have done the same.

Half mad with grief and loss

All I wanted was to touch her,

Look at her once more.

I thought I’d saved her from the Underworld.

I didn’t know the fury of the gods.

How could I not look back?

PAD Day 19 - A Person

Thomas Jefferson’s Poppies

  

It couldn’t have been easy.

As founding father, empire builder,

philosopher of state,

He suffered headaches, persistent diarrhea,

Insomnia into the small night hours.

For him the pursuit of happiness

Was an often distant, difficult ideal.

Remember though, he was a gardener,

The Monticello gardens laboratories

Of plants from every corner of the world.

And in those Virginia gardens grew  exotic poppies,

White and purple plants of joy,

Papaver somneriferum,

Sleepbringer to the ancients,

Milk of paradise,

For Kubla Khan the very hand of god.

Jefferson, a man of industry and contradiction

At work atop his mountain

Craved sleep, deep dreams, and peace,

Ever independent and industrious

Took matters into his own hands.

From his botanic pharmacy opium poppies

Offered comfort, brought release.

PAD Day 18 - To_____

To Be A Bird Next Time

If we return,

And mind you,

I’m not saying

That I think we will,

I’d like to be a bird.

Probably a raptor,

A Cooper’s Hawk, or Kestrel,

Something light and free and fast,

Fierce of talon, eye and beak,

Swift to hunt and kill.

Able to spread my wings

And ride the thermals

On a high blue October afternoon.

If we come back,

And who knows?

Perhaps we do,

It’s time to start working

On my karma.

I’m certainly not yet worthy

To be a hawk

Or any other bird.

PAD Day 17 -Science

In The Presence Of Chlorophyll

 When Mike came to prune the trees in late September, he said the cottonwood outside our kitchen window was slowly dying from the inside out. This winter I thought at last it’s over, we’ll have dead limbs the flickers will enjoy, and when we take it down only a stump. Then two weeks ago I noticed tiny heartshaped leaves were blowing in the early April winds.

Light energy

Carbon dioxide and water

Photosynthesis

PAD Day 16 - Death

Pulling Weeds
 

An afternoon of weeding by the neighbor’s low stone wall,

Begun in sunshine, ended in thunder and rain. We come inside for supper.

My hands smell like mustard and dirt.

Under the Russian olive

White-crowned sparrow corpse

In the foxtail grass

PAD Day 15 - Deadlines

A Deadline Missed

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, sun so hot I have to get my hat, put sunscreen on,

I wander through the garden, noticing the changes after the windstorms and the rain.

Here are lilacs in full bloom, the desert willow by the shed is proudly budding,

Prairie sage beside the fence already growing tall.

It’s just mid-April but I can see that spring is almost gone

Stone birdbath full of robins

Hummers buzzing by

Too late to plant the lettuce

PAD Day 14 - Island

At The Nature Center

They’ve been sitting on their nests

For weeks now

On the islands

In the middle of the pond

Taking turns on the eggs

 As the days grew warm.

Today, while humans worried about taxes

 A better species left the safety of their island

 Led a string of six small yellow goslings

Out onto the water

Proudly introduced them to the world.

PAD Challenge Day 13 - A Love Poem *

The Prompt was actually "A Love Poem or An Anti-Love Poem"

Thirty Years Without A Love Poem

How long has it been

Since I wrote you a love poem?

How many years has it been?

Almost thirty years now since

I begged you - run away with me to Paris,

Tahiti, the Greek Islands, anywhere.

It hasn’t been the life we dreamed of, has it?

We haven’t been to Paris yet.

But every morning yours is the face

That I wake up to, discuss the day with,

Over tea and cereal.

Every night your kisses

Are the last thing that I know

Before the darkness takes me under.

Thirty years without a love poem

Have been thirty years of love,

Sometimes sorrow, often joy.

This is just another Tuesday afternoon,

I’ve gone shopping for our dinner.

Soon, you will be home, 

Your dear face tired and hungry.

I am writing you this love poem just to say

There are lilacs on the kitchen table, it is April,
Thirty years later we're still here.

PAD Day 12 - City

Duke City Contradictions

Mariachi music in the Plaza,

Gang  shootings every other day.

Techology corridors hang over

The river’s crumbling west bank.

Below, geese and ducks feed on sandbars

 In the middle of the thick brown flow.

Buried bones of mystery women on the Mesa

Tossed in  rocky pits, forgotten.

Murder links them to the violence lurking

Just below the surface everywhere,

Under cottonwoods and willows

Along  hiking trails and bike paths

Downtown bars and sidewalks after dark.

Families Sunday strolling by the water

Enjoying picnics in the park

Giraffe and hippo babies at the zoo.

A five-year-old smothered in the sandbox

Damaged children every evening on the news.

Here between  mountains and volcanoes we are living

Lives of paranoia, cultural celebrations,

Methamphetamine, and guns

PAD Day 11 - The Last______

 

(Saying Goodbye To Molly)    

One Last Time

 

I wrapped her in the old quilt

We’d had as long as we’d had her

Eighteen years or so

Ocean years in Delaware and Truro

Months of traveling across the country

In the camper or the truck

She didn’t care as long as we were there

On that late September afternoon
Two years ago

I held her in my arms

Pulled the yellow rocker out into the noonday sun

Our vet is kind and gentle

The end was easy

The old quilt comforted us both

In the peaceful autumn sunlight I held her in my arms

We let her fall  asleep one long last time.

PAD Day 10 - Horror

Transformations

Like a bear or werewolf

in a suit and tie,

silk stockings,

good wool coat,

Domesticated,

cooking meals,

laundering the bedclothes,

fingering my rosary beads.

And all the while

my claws grow longer;

during dinner conversation

I feel my own fangs

bite into my cheek.

Shaggy heart awakens

to household smells

of dung and blood.

Such a show of contemplation

  A black bear writing poetry,

  A werewolf reading verse.

Only listen:

Just beyond this room

the damp warm night is breathing.

I will rip the glasses from my muzzle,

throw the pen across the desk,

I will burst forth into the

hissing moonlight.

Believe me when I tell you

I will tear the beating heart
Out of your breast.

PAD Day 9 - Self-Portrait

Poem for Myself on Monday Morning                       

I stand among the blue tiles

brown and naked,

toweling my wet

and fragrant self,

feeling the beauty

of my own skin;

wondering     Degas,

where are you now?

Not here, to paint

the muscles in my back, bent,

the way my shoulder curves

to meet my arm,

wet nippled breasts

small shining,

the generous proportions

of my thighs.

My portrait will not

make an exhibition:

Woman Drying Body After Bath.

I will take my secret sculpture

out into the morning,

among the roses,

woman glorious,

alive.

PAD Day 8 - Tool *

 My Mother’s  Garden Knife

Blessed is she who weeds her mother’s gardens

And every garden that I've had was somehow hers.

Even this one, so unlike her Pennsylvania stone walls

 Enclosing rhubarb, rhododendron, and strawberries,

Roses, foxgloves, peonies, and mint.

She taught me everything I know about a garden,

How to plant, and how to weed

Garden knife in hand, long days’ Summer hours

On her knees beside the old red barn,

Her cats for companions in the catnip,

In the buzzing herb beds conversing with the bees.

Through years of pain and loss, depression,

In the herbs and flowers she knew joy.

Here in this dry and stony desert garden,

Her steel blade in my hand,

She gently whispers green thumbed lessons

Instructs me “Listen,

From the pines the doves are calling,

The redbud’s in full bloom.

Take comfort in the iris,

Take comfort where you can.”

PAD Day 7 - Until_______

Until The Lilacs Bloom  (With Apologies To TS Eliot)      

December’s not the hardest for a gardener

Bare branches, winter’s barren room.

No, that honor goes to early April

This cold impatient time spent waiting

For lilacs’ purple bursting into bloom.