Word of the Week - 86

Painting "One Flew Over the Wasps Nest" by Vladimir Kush.

Word of the Week:  DUALITY

Want

by Carrie Fountain 

 

The wasps outside
the kitchen window
are making that
thick, unraveling sound
again, floating in
and out of the bald head
of their nest,
seeming not to move
while moving,
and it has just occurred
to me, standing,
washing the coffeepot,
watching them hang
loosely in the air—thin
wings; thick, elongated
abdomens; sad, down—
pointing antennae—
that this
is the heart’s constant
project: this simple
learning; learning
how to hold
hopelessness
and hope together;
to see on the unharmed
surface of one
the great scar
of the other; to recognize
both and to make
something of both;
to desire everything
and nothing
at once and to desire it
all the time;
and to contain that desire
fleshly, in a body;
to wash it and rest it
and feed it; to learn
its name and from whence
it came; and to speak
to it—oh, most of all
to speak to it—
every day, every day,
saying to one part,
“Well, maybe this is all
you get,” while saying
to the other, “Go on,
break it open, let it go.”

“Want” by Carrie Fountain from Burn Lake. © Penguin, 2010. Reprinted with permission. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word of the Week - 56

 Wislawa Szymborska

Word of the Week:  POSSIBILITIES

Here, giving the broadest possible definition for this week's word, is the poem by Polish poet and translator Wislawa Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012). In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Upon announcing the prize, the Nobel commission noted her reputation as “the Mozart of poetry” but aptly added that there is also “something of the fury of Beethoven in her creative work.”

"To me, she is nothing short of Bach, that great cosmologist of the human spirit."  (this quote from Maria Popova, creator of BRAIN PICKINGS where writer and musician Amanda Palmer may be heard reading POSSIBILITIES.)

POSSIBILITIES
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

On poetry and Manhattan

Red Manhattan by John Held Jr.

E. B. White and Cat Power on the Literary Jukebox.

Poem: BASEBALL by Gail Mazur

Baseball

By Gail Mazur

for John Limon

The game of baseball is not a metaphor   

and I know it’s not really life.   

The chalky green diamond, the lovely   

dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes   

multiplying around the cities   

are only neat playing fields.   

Their structure is not the frame   

of history carved out of forest,   

that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,

the veteran catcher guiding the young   

pitcher through the innings, the line   

of concentration between them,   

that delicate filament is not   

like the way you are helping me,   

only it reminds me when I strain   

for analogies, the way a rookie strains   

for perfection, and the veteran,   

in his wisdom, seems to promise it,   

it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me

in the grandstand, drinking banana   

daiquiris from a thermos,

continuing through a whole dinner

to the aromatic cigar even as our team

is shut out, nearly hitless, he is

not like the farmer that Auden speaks   

of in Breughel’s Icarus,

or the four inevitable woman-hating   

drunkards, yelling, hugging

each other and moving up and down   

continuously for more beer

and the young wife trying to understand   

what a full count could be

to please her husband happy in   

his old dreams, or the little boy

in the Yankees cap already nodding   

off to sleep against his father,

program and popcorn memories   

sliding into the future,

and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,   

screaming at the Yankee slugger   

with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,   

not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,

when the greatest hitter mysteriously   

goes hitless for weeks, or

the pitcher’s stuff is all junk

who threw like a magician all last month,   

or the days when our guys look

like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping   

each other, then suddenly, the play

that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid   

we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,   

leaps into the air to catch a ball

that should have gone downtown,   

and coming off the field is hugged   

and bottom-slapped by the sudden   

sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man   

slump when his form, his eye,

his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t   

like the bad luck that hounds us,   

and his frustration in the games   

not like our deep rage

for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,

manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,   

and the order of the ball game,   

the firm structure with the mystery   

of accidents always contained,   

not the wild field we wander in,   

where I’m trying to recite the rules,   

to repeat the statistics of the game,

and the wind keeps carrying my words away

"this little piece of earth"

Found via a link borrowed with extravagant ease from Susan T. Landry for the sheer wonder and beauty of the poem.  From James Lineberger.

Goshen

 We don't talk about it but her garden
 began as a healing device
 and perhaps a form of meditation as well,
 for at the most basic level, she's much like her mother,
 a pill junkie herself, who has always
 had a love for plants, and passed that on to T., along
 with all the rest of it, the anxiety, the hunger,
 the embittered need to fight things out on her own,
 but this little piece of earth that T. has laid claim to was already
 a garden of sorts before she took hold of it
 and started digging big holes two and three feet deep into which
 she pours the potting soil to cushion her
 tiny-root darlings who have no need for such extravagant comforts,
 or the fertilizer, either, from Lowe's,
 which she mixes up by the bucket, some fancy green stuff
 that killed off
 half the annuals the first time she applied it because she
 poured it over the flowers and leaves, not
 the soil, shocking them to death with the sudden
 ferocity of their commingling,
 an act her mama would laugh at were she not so senile now
 so into her "dementia" as the doctors are prone
 to describe it, that she can no longer dial 911, let alone place
 a call to T., who has been forbidden to talk to her
 anyway by the younger sister, K., who got herself appointed POA
 and controls all of mama's funds, dribbling it out
 to T. in niggardly amounts while she spends outrageous sums
 (T. grumbles) on herself and her husband
 and their lazy married daughters,
 thoughts which trouble T. less and less, however, as she digs up
 and discards the Iris bulbs
 my mother sent down here from her New Jersey backyard
 before she died, hoping
 to leave something behind, she said, for she knew about
 the Alzheimer's already, knew she wouldn't
 outlive her second husband after all, and wanted, nay,
 prayed for, some corner where her soul might linger in peace,
 but they never bloomed, those Irises,
 God knows why, coming back stubbornly every year,
 only to leaf out, sans flowers,
 sans any overt reason for their being save this: save
 the spirt that dwelt within,
 that grew up on her own mother's hardscrabble farm
 where every flap and fragment of everything
 was saved, used, cooked, or disemboweled, and none of it
 abandoned ever, including the feathers,
 but now, in the name of beauty, of art, of that mysterious will
 to carry on, T. has shoveled
 up the miserable transplanted bulbs and tossed them in the wheelbarrow
 along with the red dirt and crabgrass, working even, get this,
 by flashlight, arms in the wet hole
 up to her elbows as she digs anew,
 unanointed shepherd to her Zinnias and Petunias and Persian Shields,
 but as close to God as the dust, the wind, the broken wings
 of his cherubim.

James Lineberger

Rosa Mira Books and Melissa Green

If we are fortunate or paying attention, beauty dances across our path more times a day than we can count.  I will take this occasion to share a bit.  Before I link you to the announcement by Rosa Mira Books of the newest work from poet Melissa Green, I wanted to include DAPHNE IN MOURNING, which was printed in the New York Review of Books.

Daphne in Mourning

July 19, 2001

Melissa Green

Palm fronds have woven out the sky.
Fog has infiltrated every vein.
My hair has interlaced with vines.
Cobwebs lash their gauze across my eyes.

I’ve stood so since the world began,
and turned almost to stone some years ago.
Who passes by perceives a lichened post,
my girlish features, ghostly, nearly gone.

My bark is warmer than the dead’s.
Human blood still lulls the underside of leaves.
My fingers hold the very dress I loved
to dance in, when dancing mattered—and it did.

And now, the unveiling of Rosa Mira's and Melissa's collaboration.  A gift for us all.  Hooray to everyone concerned.

Rosa Mira Books: Melissa Green, poet extraordinaire, writes memoir

Poetry and dream

Water Dreaming 072 by Walangari Kamtawarra, on-line gallery here

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."
Audre Lorde

----------

When one is not a poet, the only choice left is to get as close as possible. The apprenticeship is forever and worth each agonizing, deleted, reconsidered word that moves one forward.

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Running a day behind

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." 

William Butler Yeats


Through not-surprising inattention, I missed that yesterday was Yeats' birthday. My thanks to Susan T. Landry for the reminder and the poem she shared. In another life, century and state-of-mind, I was a student in Modern Poetry 101. It was there that I met Yeats and there that I was taught the only way to appreciate poetry was to know precisely what the poet meant in every word, phrase, pause, line break and nuance. It should have been called Deconstruction 101 and it nearly ruined poetry for me and me for it. I suspect the baffling process of snipping, with finely-pointed embroidery scissors, all the stitches out of art quilts made of words contributed to a once long-held belief that my brain was not quite equal to the task of participating.

Then, in a new century and with luck the leprechauns would envy, my heart was yanked back to Yeats and others previously unknown. Catapulted into the midst of an ongoing banquet hosted with patience and generosity by poets around the world, I learned that I could appreciate Yeats in my unscholarly fashion and not be wrong. I met a friend, a mentor who invited me to love the words I loved for how they spoke to, how they moved me, as I remained often clueless about the intent or the back story.

Being a day behind the celebrating of Mr. Yeats is a forgivable omission. Surely there are poets born on June 14. We may not know their names; we don't need to. We can thank them in their anonymity for all the ways they make our lives richer, for the fact they may overlook our possibly uninformed personal and emotional responses to their work. Happy Birthday, poets.

“The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.” 

― Jane Kenyon

TO WRITE IT

Thanks to MG for the gift of this today.

TO WRITE IT

You must always be alone.

But don't beg a soupscrap of charity

or birdcrumb of tolerance.

Shift for yourself.

As furniture heaves off your life

you'll love your deliverance.

Until loneliness slips in, scrawny

and hungry, Miss Loneliness, over the

barrenness, bribing with company.

Restlessness, one of her attendants.

And the drunk twins, of course,

Memory and Remorse.

Refuse them. Stay faithful to Silence, just

Silence, sliding between that breath

and now this breath, severing the tick

from the tock on the alarm clock,

measuring the absence of all else.

And the presence, the privilege.

Anne Stevenson

Love letter to Lynda Barry's mind

This morning I typed Lynda Barry's name in at YouTube, looking for her brief explanation of how one can keep a diary in four minutes a day.  But I found this instead.

Giving us lots of time to prepare, the Academy of American Poets has sent out reminders that April 26 is "Poem In Your Pocket Day."  As they describe it,

"The idea is simple, select a poem you love, carry it with you,  and share it with co-workers, family, and friends..."

WHAT IF  we had poems in our pockets AND had memorized them?  I know this is not new thinking for many of you and I ask your patience with me, still breaking in my poetry shoes, trying to remember that I can wear them for every day and not just save them for good.

Lynda Barry's mind, as expressed in this video and her various works, ought to be declared a national treasure.  That she is aware of the mind, generally, as a pearl of great price makes me feel as though I just woke up from a mediocrity-induced coma.  It is not just what she says, but the uniquely plain-spoken AND sort of revolutionary way she says it.  Poetry traveling to us through time.  My embarrassingly low-brow response is, Duh.

We are encircled by fires, asked to extinguish the minor blazes of how to fix this, how to heal that, where can we find the money, time or energy for at least nine minor-to-major situations on what seems a daily basis.  Behind those pesky and attention-demanding fires are the others, the real fires, the ones that are not meant to be dampened but fanned.  They are our sources of light; they are our light.  Here we are, back again, caught by the inexpert attempt at balance that is life.  How do we keep our small worlds from falling into the chaos of under-attended ordinary existence AND continue to be flames, or at least embers, of all that is soaring, expanding, contributing and becoming?  We just do because we must. 

This year

"Leroy says, ah, keep on rockin', girl. Yeah, keep on rockin'."

This year I remembered...I have faerie folk in my lineage.

Previously, poetry grabbed me by "the sharp lapels of my checkered coat" and this year a teacher/friend/mentor/poet/angel appeared who reminds me that I can know with my heart and need not care so much about gaps in my formal education, yet steadily, subversively, affectionately, addresses them as well.

Those who would be called angels are abundant in my life, shoring up the still-skeletal hull of this vessel I decided to build in my second-floor living room. I have their unspoken promises to help me launch it. For today, we are not required to know how. It seems I have what I need to do my work. This year delivered my two assignments: show up and get out of the way.

It is a job of paring, paring, discarding and evaluating, finding how to keep the good from being siphoned off for no purpose. This year I have begun to see options where before there appeared to be none. I make my best choice and reserve the right to change my mind.

This year, as do all my years and other measures of time, evaporated. I am less and less inclined to count or quantify, growing closer to allowing events to unfold as they do. Unfolding is not a process to be hurried. Trusting it is no job for the impatient. At times the fluid quality of my days hisses at me about idleness. It may be true but I now have just the one speed and am learning not to call it by unloving names.

There have been miracles this year, as there have in years past, whether I recognized them in the moment or needed distance to clear my vision. Either I've relaxed my earlier definition of the miraculous or, as I suspect, it is ever more plentiful. What more could be asked of any year?