Reflections: 5 + 9

Reflections on Turning 59:

Sometimes I am arrogant enough to think my death will mean that no one will be reading books the way I do--and the world will suffer--and I mean that far less selfishly and less egotistically than that may sound.  Feel free to laugh.

I mean that I have read and have trained and have practiced to be a Reader, so I should be able to recognize and understand what is true and what is not true--and others will not have trained so long or so hard or so well as I have.

That's been my motivation as a teacher since 1990 (and even before, as a friend): to share, to guide, to model.

Reading well takes practice and guidance and more practice.

I think I have been a true reader since my early teens, and I have worked at it for decades and decades, trying to teach my own students to Read Like Readers, but more importantly to Read Like Writers.

I still need to write the books I want to write.

Not done yet.  That's the battle-cry.

Moya Cannon: "Openings" & "Still Life"

OPENINGS

In my chest a rusted metal door
is creaking open,
the door of a decompression chamber
cranked up on barnacled chains.

The rush of air hurts and hurts
as larks fly
in and out,
in and out
between my bended ribs.

--Moya Cannon

STILL LIFE

Much though we love best
those intersections of time and space
where we are love's playthings,
a sweet anonymity of flesh --
life's blessed rhythm
loving itself through us,
two human bodies tuned
to the whirring stars --

this is almost nothing
without the small, quotidian gifts,
habitual caresses which hinder fears,
the grace of small services rendered --
two bowls of blueberries and yoghurt,
two cups of coffee,
two spoons,
laid out on a wooden table
in October sunlight.

--Moya Cannon

-- from Moya Cannon's Hands,

Carcanet Press Limited,

Manchester, UK, 2011

Louise Gluck's "Dawn"

DAWN

1

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.

2

They’ve  just met, now
they’re sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them
that what they remember of  the night is correct,
now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:
socks half  hidden under a dirty mat,
quilt decorated with green leaves —

the sunlight specifying
these but not other objects,
setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing
each thing in detail,
fastidious, like a composition in English,
even a little blood on the sheets —

3

Afterward, they separate for the day.
Even later, at a desk, in the market,
the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,
the berries moldy under the topmost layer —

so that one withdraws from the world
even as one continues to take action in it —

You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.
Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

--LOUISE GLUCK


(Thank you, AB, for the gift of the collected works!)

Star Power: Clay Cup

Cup by Star.
Thank you so much.

Blow, West Wind, Blow

A bit of blarney for the season.

Cocktail Party: Eight Fingers of Fun

Octorina, at play, with Ophelia Rising in her background.

Kudos to CL for the octopus.

Sinead Morrissey: "& Forgive Us Our Trespasses"

& FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES  

Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn’t foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we’ve tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh -
they come back like the tide. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love – their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our lives and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.   

--Sinead Morrissey

"A Seed-Sower": M.C. Richards

It took me half my life to come to believe that I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad.  My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering.  I found myself at odds with the propaganda of the times.  One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition.  Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize.  Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the true seat of power.  One is supposed to concentrate and not spread oneself too thin, as the jargon goes.  And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one's freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free.  Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower.  Not to worry about which seeds sprout.  But to give them as my gift in good faith.

--Mary Caroline Richards,
Centering: In Pottery, In Poetry, and the Person, 1964.


(Thank you, JMcC, for first pointing me toward Richards' book.)

Grape Jellyfish

Grape Jellyfish: aquatic beadwork from my friend CL.

You may recognize her work here as well in Octorina, the jaunty octopus.

Boland: "Atlantis -- A Lost Sonnet"

ATLANTIS -- A LOST SONNET

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades, 
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all 
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting 
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe 
what really happened is 

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and 
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of 

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

--Eavan Boland

Thanks, EHS, for sharing.

Charm: Fare Far, Fare Well

Pathway Charm: sculpture mix; jade green glaze, barely, for relief effect.  (The design is borrowed from an old Norse monument.  I have a metal ornament that I pressed into the clay.)  A blessing piece, as it were: Strength-in-Adversity.

"May you have a good voyage, where'er you fare, here and hereafter."

Shakespeare's Sonnet 122: "Thy Gift, Thy Tables"

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity; 
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart 
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd. 
That poor retention could not so much hold, 
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score; 
Therefore to give them from me was I bold, 
To trust those tables that receive thee more: 
   To keep an adjunct to remember thee 
   Were to import forgetfulness in me.

         --William Shakespeare

A Jaunty Octopus

Octorina, enjoying a moment of Northern California beach-time: thanks to my friend CL, who brought this creature to life for me.

Octorina, beachcombing.

Tony Hoagland's "Field Guide"

FIELD GUIDE


Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in the most precious element of all,


I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water


at the very instant when a dragonfly, 
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,


hovered over it, then lit, then rested.
That's all.


I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page


in certain library books,
so the the next reader will know


where to look for the good parts.

--Tony Hoagland,
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty,
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010.


This book was a gift from my friend Meredith, and I appreciate the giving and the given.

Sam Hamill's "The Gift of Tongues," the Generous Spirit, and PIracy

THE GIFT OF TONGUES


Everything I steal, I give away.
Once, in pines almost as tall as these,
same crescent moon sliding gently by,
I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend,
sipping tea, swapping Coyote tales and lies. 


He said something to me
about words, that each is a name,
and that every name is God's. I who have
no god sat in the vast emptiness silent
as I could be. A way that can be named

is not the way. Each word reflects
the Spirit which can't be named. Each word
a gift, its value in exact proportion
to the spirit in which it is given.
Thus spoken, these words I give 


by way of Lao Tzu's old Chinese, stolen
by a humble thief twenty-five centuries later.
The Word is only evidence of the real:
in the Hopi tongue, there is no whale;
and, in American English, no Fourth World. 

--Sam Hamill ~


"The Gift of Tongues," for me, voices a certain generosity of spirit that I admire, a certain spiritual perspective or dilemma that I sometimes inhabit.

Hamill's poem also speaks to the linkages of appropriation and use that ought to be infused with that sense of generosity in ways that parallel, say, Gary Snyder in his poem "Axe Handles" and in his life as well.

Hamill's poem came up in a conversation with a friend about piracy, Internet and media piracy in context, but generally piracy vs. theft and piracy vs. copying.  I quoted the above poem's opening line--"Everything I steal, I give away"--to highlight what I feel is the proper generous spirit of Internet sharing, say, or of classroom teaching.  Give credit where credit is due,  certainly, and encourage everyone to seek out the originals in whatever format, whatever venue.  (I quote Shakespeare or Byron in part to foster an interest in, a curiosity about, such writers.)

Piracy lacks such a generous spirit, despite all the attractive emblems of the piratical.

"Take what you can." 
"And give nothing back."
--those sentiments belong at best in a Hollywood fantasy, not the real world.

And while I love those lines in the moment of watching that first Pirates of the Caribbean film,  I think part of the charm of such costumed and indulgent selfishness comes from context, as ever.  These are down-and-out, though irrepressible ne'er-do-wells--Captain Jack Sparrow and his first mate, Mr. Gibbs--and such voicing of the pirate's code is as much fantasy-projection for them as it is for most of us in the audience.  The lines would have a much different flavor being spoken by Wall Street bankers and brokers, suited up but ties loosened, perhaps, with whiskeys in hand.


Sam Hamill, Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995, 
White Pine Press: Fredonia, New York, 1995.

(Thanks to MR for the conversation.)

The poster presented at the top is self-expressive, a wonderful promotional tool and work of art for a worthy anthology from an excellent publishing house: Copper Canyon Press.  In that particular anthology I first encounted Hamill's poem quoted above, though I have just reread and presented the poem from Hamill's volume Destination Zero.

Robert Graves: Gift, Glance, Green, Glint

Four poems by Robert Graves:

GIFT OF SIGHT
I had long known the diverse tastes of the wood,
Each leaf, each bark, rank earth from every hollow;
Knew the smells of bird's breath and of bat's wing;
Yet sight I lacked; until you stole upon me,
Touching my eyelids with light finger-tips.
The trees blazed out, their colours whirled together,
Nor ever before had I been aware of sky.


AT FIRST SIGHT
'Love at first sight,' some say, misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.

But friendship at first sight?  This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches and then blushes.


VARIABLES OF GREEN
Grass-green and aspen-green,
Laurel-green and sea-green,
Fine-emerald green,
And many another hue:
As green commands the variables of green
So love my loves of you.


CHANGE
'This year she has changed greatly'--meaning you--
My sanguine friends agree,
And hope thereby to reassure me.

No, child, you never change; neither do I.
Indeed all our lives long
We are still fated to do wrong,

Too fast caught by care of humankind,
Easily vexed and grieved,
Foolishly flattered and deceived;

And yet each knows that the changeless other
Must love and pardon still,
Be the new error what it will:

Assured by that same glint of deathlessness
Which neither can surprise
In any other pair of eyes.

Robert Graves, New Collected Poems, Doubleday & Company, Inc: Garden City, New York: 1977.

"Car 54, Where Are You?"

This is a gift from a student on the eighth anniversary of my father's death. This student has lost his father as well, quite recently.

We've been reading Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano's Flotsametrics and the Floating World in class, which features plastic ducks and other toys (among other things) caught in the Pacific gyres . . . .

Thanks, B.B.