Poems – Page 3 – Poetry Is Salt

Strings cross the lyre

Strings cross the lyre,
nothing wasted – mother’s song
in starlit glory.

I’m preparing to share at church on November 27th. My task is to transition from Thanksgiving to the advent season in a thirty minute window, and I want to do it in a single haiku. In researching the Hebrew words for thanks and gratitude, I rediscovered the psalm of thanksgiving King David sang as he danced before the ark of the covenant on its return home in 1 Chronicles 16. It’s a neat story. He was so elated by the return of the ark, the physical manifestation of the presence of God on earth, that he dared to dance and sing and instructed priests to play lyres, harps, cymbals and trumpets before the ark in celebration. He was willing to appear foolish in public, to drop the regal facade, to do justice to the depth of his gratitude, to be transparent about his thanks. (See if you can spot the easy application.) Beyond that, I found a lyre or kinnor, the national instrument of the Jewish people, has strings traditionally made from the small intestine of a sheep. The ethic of making full use of an animal to dignify its sacrifice of life resonates for me at Thanksgiving when I think about the dignity granted our personal sacrifices when we allow their repurposing to help others. Nothing in our lives is wasted when we turn it outward, in due time, and use it to comfort or console someone in need. We become part of communal solace and wisdom, and that makes me grateful. Finally, the strings are the perfect hinge or kireji to enter advent. In the gospel of Luke, Mary treasures the return of the physical manifestation of the presence of God on earth quietly, under heavens ringing with rowdy angels. She’ll come to know deep sacrifice in time, of her own lamb, and his sacrifice will also be dignified by the full use of every drop. Nothing will be wasted in her efforts or in his. I like thinking of the strings of the lyre singing the glory of their own sacrifice. I like equating that thanksgiving to the generosity of a woman willing to carry a burden in order to bless others. I like thinking, under the stars, after the angels, Mary sang. Happy Thanksgiving.

Our flag rustles

Our flag rustles,
old woman searching her purse for a tissue
to dab her sudden tears.

Lately I’m learning the potent juxtaposition of paired images in haiku. Leaving two images beside each other joins them across the hinge, or kireji, creating a natural association. The poem acts as a reversible metaphor where each image can be at once the reality and the comparison. Here, the flag is the woman searching her purse. Equally so, the woman’s searching through tears is the national symbol. Last week, in the wake of the election, I took the opportunity to comfort my distressed students and equip them with the most precious coping tools we have: hope and gratitude. I think their distress was, more than mere partisanship, a product of the adults in their lives acting out of fear and anger, which the young always internalize. Enduring brief glimpses of rioting in Portland, I think of all the in-fighting and needless destruction the flag has witnessed, and she does remind me of a strong and aging woman momentarily overcome. I’m drawn by the ambiguity of the tears. Are they a form of longing for a peace that’s only ever existed as an ideal? Are they sorrow or dismay for children who lack the perspective and experience to sooth themselves less violently? The brevity of haiku also evokes, for me, that briefest verse: “Jesus wept.” In that story, he stands before the tomb of Lazarus. He already knows he’ll raise Lazarus and has come to the site for that sole purpose. He knows there is joy waiting brief moments away. Yet he weeps for the pain of his friends in the anguish of the moment. This pair of images is from a longer poem about my nieces climbing the tree in my parents’ backyard. In its original context, it’s surrounded by much more movement and promise. Here, as a gesture of quiet compassion, I excerpt it as a haiku for my friends who are troubled. May joy come with the morning.

Not Him

When she is three, she makes her choice: a skeleton
for a father. No one can convince her otherwise.

In her wisdom she turns him
to absence, the man who’s naught.

Her mother – a radiologist –
knows the eclipse: dancing

bones and empty grin
between the mirror and herself.

And so, when the child paints,
her sky is wider, less like a pot lid

settled on the box of house, people
in the windows thin as straw.

When she sings, her words are little planets
passing into careless shadow

cast by an opiate moon.
Her cuffs drop down, covering her hands.

Prayer for Quiet Waters

—–for Kristi

Make her thoughts a pencil sketch
empty of all but line, untroubled

nation of clear bounds,
unquestioned loyalties and love, still,

calm as springs rising from the
hidden source. There is an

aquifer beneath our words. She knows: that
heart, that lamb, that longing to be held.

Last week, a friend’s son was able to draw a clear and basic map of South America. This is a boy on the autism spectrum whose secondary diagnosis is Developmental Motor Coordination Disorder. His mother posted the drawing with the note, “Hope is alive!” I’m mindful of that drawing in the first two stanzas here – the way it simplifies borders and removes the human web of complication. This poem is for the nonverbal daughter of another friend who loves Psalm 23. When she speculates on what Kristi’s thought life is like, she conceives of it as quiet. Thinking of these children who may know still and quiet waters more than most, I decided to continue my experimentation with acrostic poems and take Psalm 23 as a starting point. The Hebrew word for quiet is menuchah, the feminine form meaning resting place or peaceful repose. It serves as my acrostic guide. I see the poem working as a prayer for each of us who needs a little rest and quiet of mind. I’m taken with the aquifer metaphor as a way of thinking about what happens in thought beneath speech. If God, as shepherd, leads beside those still waters that emerge from underground springs, perhaps we needn’t struggle so hard to articulate or justify. Perhaps that’s part of what rest is – a settling into places language doesn’t reach. In our exhaustion, may we tap into that reserve and rest.

For Mothers Losing

You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief,
one set in motion hard upon the stars.
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

In photos of the Earth from space, bright sieve
where children strain from parents’ longing arms,
you share tonight the planet’s oldest grief.

In skins of animals now marked for death,
the shock of curse and labor, agate scars –
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

In your own womb, it’s hardest to believe
a man could dwell, could birth his private wars.
You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief.

God doesn’t show his face, just passing breeze
to touch you gently through the loss’s bars.
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

He honors you, though that must seem naïve.
Your task is holding what must fall apart.
You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief:
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

This poem is for a friend. Her adult son died suddenly, as every death is sudden. While trying to touch her grief and acknowledge it somehow in words, I began thinking of Eve and the fact that the first death in the Bible was the death of a grown son, Abel. The first loss was a mother’s loss, inverting the expected order of parents leaving children behind. After Abel’s death, Eve’s older son Cain left. We expect adult children to leave home, but the distances are still as shocking, at first, as if each child were in exile. Mothers and fathers have the terrible privilege of sustaining unthinkable losses. For the believer, these losses echo the pain of separation the Father must feel when His children stray. This poem emerged from earlier drafts into a villanelle, a poetic form built around repeating lines. Lines one and three in the first stanza repeat as the alternating last lines of the succeeding stanzas, and conclude the poem as the final couplet. There’s also a rhyme scheme of ABA throughout, so the first and third lines always rhyme, and the second line of every stanza rhymes with all the other second lines. It’s a poetic form of return and refrain. It honors, I hope, particular losses, connecting grieving mothers to a community that shares their anguish, while also locating them within the human history of loss and the tender place it holds in the divine heart.

I Hand My Heavy Body Over for Massage

I’ve brought you sadness
near the bone, trained to work
for nothing but the slim
reward of shouldering a truth:

outside this body, hurricanes are
narrowing their eyes,
turning toward tin roofing, concrete, sticks –
open gashes weeping in the wind.

Facts do carry on.
This body holds such data tight, muscles
hard with every name and town.
Each Jérémie, Au Cayes is

knowledge
internally displaced – that’s the formal
name for daughters of rubble, mothers’
disbelief – and I,

easy in my standing home, bear
rocks inside my skin, stiff homage to the crumbling
gingerbread house. I’m here to
ask: can you restore my frame?

Ready as a child to receive the father’s
tender kiss outside the school, I wait,
even in the smallness of my will, my
narrow range of motion.

I’m sharing this fresh draft for its process more than its product, which is so new that I’ll need to let it sit for a while before I can tell what it needs. The process was fun, though, because I set myself a series of tasks and then watched what invention those limitations would invite. I knew I wanted to write about the helplessness I feel in the face of the devastation in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew (though it’s possible to substitute any of the endless stream of tragedies, national or personal, that pass by in grim parade in any given week). A conversation with a massage therapist reminded me of just how much we carry global pain in our own bodies, and the ways we transfer that pain to one another through acts like physical touch. And I’ve also been working with my creative writing classes on using the acrostic form as a revision tool, and writing from art in what is called ekphrastic poetry. So I decided to choose a photograph that, for me, portrayed a transfer of burden, and use that photograph’s title as the acrostic guide to my poem, and then use the image in the photograph someplace in the poem itself, though the poem wouldn’t be about the photograph directly. This was the result. The photograph is Hans Staub’s “In Front of the Kindergarten” and you’ll notice the poem spells the title down its left margin, and the image informs the simile in the final stanza. I took other language, such as “internally displaced,” city names, and gingerbread houses – an architectural style of home in Haiti that’s disappearing because of the cost of restoration – from a little research on Haiti and the storm. All this is framed inside a request to a master of massage to take my body into her hands and lift the burden out of the muscles that store this information in their fatigue and tension. In short, there’s a lot happening here. I tell my classes that poets set up weird rules for themselves just to see if they can still make meaning inside the restrictions, and to strengthen new muscles. This is a bit of strength training that has taught me a process I’ll likely use again.

Nature Has No Goals for Itself

_____“Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza.”
_____– Nicole Krauss

Nothing so wrong
with sitting still
to watch, some days,
when rain keeps falling
farther from the sky,
weeds keep stretching
farther from the ground,
the neighborhood dog,
forgetting all loyalty,
crosses highways in traffic
like the adopted son he is,
while you reflect
your genius
in the glass.

Nothing so wrong
with staying where you are,
waiting on cause
and effect to roust you
from your chair,
mathematical as rain
or blades of grass,
inevitable as a dog
digging after some first home.
At least, you think,
there is no sliding from this spot
where you belong, not now,
when everything is –
lucid as a photograph.

And yet,
the dog begins
to look like you
through glare
and shadow
on the pane
you thought was clear.
The bell
on his collar
jingles close to your ear,
reminder
of something you meant,
or were meant,
to do.

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch philosopher, wrote, “Nature has no goals for itself. All consequences are results of human inventions.” On rainy afternoons that’s an easy thought. The world meanders in the rain. Little feels purposeful. All my observation is merely window-shopping with no real intent to buy. And yet there are actions, urges and whims in nature, that seem more driven, and I’m reminded I believe in purpose, even when it feels as distant as a thought that won’t stay put or a forgotten name on the tip of my tongue. I believe the risks and digging will accomplish something I was meant for, that this is more than a chain of dominoes, one breath ticking to the next until the final stop. I remember that the window is a lie. I’m not so separate as I feel. There is work to do that lasts.

Tell Me How You Spend Your Day

There’s reassurance in recounting the hours
strung one to another like a paper chain
and what holds them there, affixed,
is the loop of the next moment, then the next,
when I tell you what it held.

You’re a doorway between two houses –
one where I live, cook, sit, sleep,
and one farther down the hill
where I hang secrets like glass globes
and wait on them for light.

This week, my creative writing classes are working with metaphor in poems, and it strikes me again the profound magic of the equation, one thing to another, that reshapes the world. A trusted confidant is a door, and suddenly, immediately, fleet as thought, the qualities transfer. The protection within the relationship, the possibilities and opportunities gained through relationship, even the ways we open one another up to private rooms within ourselves maybe we didn’t even know about – all of it expands and then contracts again to dwell in the efficient, quiet phrase. I have a recurring dream about a house I own, but it’s a secret, second house, down a hill from my shared and conscious home. Rather than a retreat or hideout, I think it’s a place that grows out of the conversations that show me who I am, conversations where I am known. We truly do become sanctuaries for a close few, another mysterious gift of equation.

Long Drive

Sister, listen.
Zeus swallowed his first wife.

So why should it surprise me when,
after driving in silence for hours,

my husband knocks me back
in one quick gulp?

Here I sit, captive in the belly,
composing songs on the lining of his stomach.

I clang them on his xylophone of ribs.
(I am furious with his ribs.)

He inside his husk of solitude
(I am angry with this husk) is happy.

I have only my unruly brood of thoughts
for company, and they have found a stick

with which they poke his shriveled liver
like tending a sick flame.

From deep within, I hear a waterfall,
echo of myself, the way it empties

without fear of emptiness.
Perhaps he fears a flood.

I would hardly have capsized the car.
I would have let him keep his thunderbolt.

Instead, he disgorges me at the rest stop 300 miles north
where I totter in the sunlight, parched,
and wonder where we’ve been.

Road trips are trying. They seem exciting at first, but past one hundred miles, they’re just a lot of hours in a car. My husband is a quiet man. He can go hundreds of minutes without speaking and feel utterly content, while that kind of silence swallows me whole. I like the absurd extremity of Zeus swallowing Metis, goddess of wisdom and good counsel, out of his fear of her potentially powerful children. Sometimes I imagine my mate desperate to stifle my own outpouring of creativity and counsel. Sometimes his quiet just makes me mad. (I imagine I share this with myriad wives.) As a space-filler, I have had to learn he’s not angry when he’s mute, nor is he withholding all his deep thoughts from me. Often, when we emerge into the sunlight, I discover I have imprisoned myself and he’s been totally oblivious to my captivity. Darn it.

Angers

—–after a photograph by Sally Mann

Mine are named Emmet, Jessie, and Virginia,
bare-chested children
with a gaze like gall.

I step in close to photograph their bellies –
naked seed heads,
all the florets blown.

Emmet smashes a lens
into the petals of a rose
to ask if beauty can withstand attack,

his love locked
at an elbow cuffed with bracelets,
his limbs strung from twine.

Jessie grips a beetle in her fist,
daring weakling life to try.
Sick legs wriggle at her palm.

Virginia’s hands are empty
accusations of what she won’t receive.
River-cold, her anger

is to fear
as faith is to belief – radiant action,
call to revolutionary growth.

They are gruff as cherry pits,
shrapnel
looking for a purchase in the dirt.

I’m fascinated by Sally Mann’s photograph, “Emmett, Jessie and Virginia.” There’s a weight and challenge in the gazes of these children that belies their youth and makes me wonder about the relationship between innocence and anger. In rereading To Kill a Mockingbird with my high school freshmen last year, it struck me that children in the novel cry over injustice, when cruelty and prejudice are blatant and obscene. When adults cry, the cause is kindness, quiet grace. Children cry when the world is not as it should be; adults cry when, for a moment, it is as it could be. In this poem, I use the photograph to examine my own angers. Through the children, I challenge beauty to stand up and survive in the face of violence; I defy life to triumph over loss; I dare the universe to offer blessings not squeezed from stone. In these challenges, I’m working to understand anger as action, a force that might do some good. I don’t work fluently in anger as a medium. This is my attempt to grapple with where growth might come from in the form of seed after fruit is stripped and gone.

Category: Poems