The Nasty, The Crude and The Beauty of The Truth

To be honest, I had never heard of Dan Fante until catching the end of an interview he gave with Terry Gross earlier this week. He’s a writer, the son of a famous writer and a very interesting person who has dealt with many demons in life. He had a very introspective, thoughtful way about answering the few questions, which made my ears perk up, and then, something I think even the interviewer didn’t believe would happen, happened. Dan Fante cried, sort of began to sob when asked to read a favorite passage from one of his father’s books—a man he never got along with but eventually learned to “understand.” (For the record, Dan Fante’s father, John, as a writer Charles Bukowski hailed as "my God" and basically made the elder Fante famous with his praise.)


Dan Fante is a guy who put himself through a meat slicer of life and, once through it, decided to make himself into a steak— or, after that terrible metaphor, become better for it. What I like most about him is that he doesn’t mess around; he’s blunt, crude, descriptive, all-in, balls-up honest. How can you not admire a guy with a volume of poetry titled “A Gin-Pissing-Raw-Meat-Dual-Carburetor-V8-Son-Of-A-BitchFrom Los Angeles.” Seriously?

But serious he is. Dan’s life was tragically drug and alcoholically influenced for years until he found sobriety the better part of a decade or two ago. Rather than ignore his past, Fante decided to create an alter-ego, Bruno Dante, who is very much like him during his days of using. If this sounds insane, it might be, but when hearing him talk about it, the whole arrangement sounds more like great therapy than a man writing a fictional memoir of his “bad” years.

Again, I am newly introduced to this author so will not fully form an opinion until I read one of his books, but he has written a poem from the volume referenced above that I can’t get out of my head. Some of the lines ring so true to me that it’s worth sharing:

Asking

For years I thought that

talking to the Gods

was an exercise

done privately

under

unforgiving

distant stars


ridiculous unrequited prayer

done by staring

at old cold books

with mean small print


But then I discovered

that just

ain’t

it at all


God can be found in the ‘thank you’ voice of the guy at the counter

at the 7-11

or

the quietness of a stranger’s parking lot smile

or

the rattle of weeds across a dry summer Mojave

or

watching my untethered fingers jump jump jumping

across the keys

deep in the middle of typing three hours worth of truth


God – for me – turned out to be

a conscious choice

a self-evoked experience

just

like

love

Aging with the Seasons

Today marked the first chilly morning of a new season with gusts of swirling air passing through DC’s architectural wind-tunnels and I realized it’s really fall. I’m not sure where the summer went or if we even had one, considering the lack of stickiness and intense 100 degree days, but I’m not sure if seasons really matter any longer with climate change and anomalies galore. My younger sister now lives in a place where seasonal change is minimal but we grew up in a place with four distinct separations of weather patterns and at least once a year we always went to the beach, which sometimes was colder in the summer than late winter. Rather than write a long introduction about this poem, I’ll just let it speak for itself and let the reader take away from it freely. A first draft of this was written about 12 years ago and while it’s changed a little over time, the meaning has remained the same. Revisiting this one today amidst the onset of fall makes me smile.

Message in a Bottle

We watched our shadowed outlines

walk along the shore

and hers would bend to touch her hand

as she reached for a shell.

She stepped inside my footprints

before the tide filled them up

and fed me sandcakes and saltwater

after burying me alive.


Turning cartwheels she spun and whirled,

landing delicate as a leaf,

yet my attempt

landed with a thud

and I sank into the softened earth

falling miles into the sea.


It was there I have remained,

despite a tireless struggle,

breathing rocks and playing

with my new friends the sea anemones

flooding and drying, filling and sanding.


They say one day her shadow


will again catch up to mine.

But the days are long and lonely

for me out at sea,

and the winds are sandpaper

scratching at my face.

Perhaps she too remembers

this beach, our sacred place.

Man-Made Boundaries: Walling In and Walling Out

The idea that “good fences make good neighbors,” postulated in Robert Frost’s well known “Mending Wall,” is oft quoted and used as to describe a suburban truth where everyone lives within their own spaces. However, that was only one half of the conversation in that poem and it was the neighbor who held this view. Frost’s narrator voice, by contrast, didn’t really see the need for a fence and said as much in lines that are less revisited:


“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.”

I was thinking of this today while reading the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine which highlights Hadrian’s Wall which stretches the width of Britain. While its stones no longer top their original 15 feet in height and in some places the wall itself is just a small rock outline, now 84 miles of this stone wall's middle flows alongside a refurbished National Trail and may be host to new visitors rather than a few historians and hard core hikers.  (See the article at www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Trekking-Hadrians-Wall.html)

From nearly the oldest recorded history to modern architecture walls have been constructed as barriers, to keep invaders or others out, which is the purpose and definition of a wall generally—a partition, a separation—of one room or side or people, from another. That was the purpose behind the most famous Great Wall, to protect China from raids of Mongols, Turks and other tribes from invading their lands.

But what of the Berlin Wall? Was it really constructed to physically keep people from crossing over? Maybe, but plenty of people were able to gain transport to and from either side legally, (through Checkpoint Charlie), or illegally by sneaking around or under or through by disguise. The Berlin Wall was a symbolic barrier, a separation of ideologies, powers.

Coming full circle, and perhaps the central theme in my mind when reading about Hadrian's Wall, is to return to Britain. Roman Emperor Hadrian—that is Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus--commissioned the wall that bears his name after travelling to his conquered outlier and ordered it built across the land in 122 AD. One of the most interesting passages of the Smithsonian article had me nodding my head and smiling…for once archaeological findings are in agreement with sociologists, political scientists and even psychologists. Why did Hadrian have this wall built, to ward off the invading or offending Brits? Sadly there was hardly a Braveheart type of atmosphere at that time. Here’s what the experts say:

“What were the Romans so worried about? [Scottish Archaeologist David] Breeze says the Roman frontier wasn’t primarily about defending the empire against barbarian attacks, as some archaeologists have argued. 'Built frontiers aren’t necessarily about armies attacking but about controlling the movement of people. The only way you can really control things is to build a barrier.'"

It seems that over the ages the British learned well from being subjects of the imposing Romans. We all know their colonial history, but when it comes to psychological walls well built, the checkpoints coming in and out of Northern Ireland were perhaps the best psychical representations of how modern day control is meant to appear. I bet most people who live there, or lived there up until the late 1990’s before most were dismantled, would tell you the checkpoint towers set up along the border of Northern Ireland did more to the psyche than actually keep people from going in or out. They were intimidating agents, a show of who was in charge—after all, who feels invited to enter a place with soldiers holding machine guns in towers? And I bet that's what the Romans figured.

In perhaps the most irony, here is a poem for the day by the British Rudyard Kipling, born in India, educated in Britain and then, when back in India, wrote this poem, about the thoughts of a lonely guard in the Roman Empire, sitting atop Hadrian’s Wall.

Walls, mental, metaphorical, physical or imagined, seem to be very powerful indeed. So often the Other being banned from the those sitting inside the walls, have so much more in common, so much more history together than anyone else. Kipling knows that well and articulates it in the voice of the Roman who doesn’t want to leave Britain.


The Roman Centurion's Song

By Rudyard Kipling


LEGATE, I had the news last night--my cohort ordered home
By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome.
I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below;
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!

I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall.
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done;
Here where my dearest dead are laid--my wife--my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove?

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze--
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

You'll follow widening Rodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean
To Arelate's triple gate: but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!

You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but--will you e'er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?

Let me work here for Britain's sake--at any task you will--
A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep.

Legate, I come to you in tears--My cohort ordered home!
I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind--the only life I know,
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

The Art of Losing

Loss isn’t a word associated with many things that are pleasant-- the only exception I can think of is a reduction of poundage from our too large human frames—and it is most associated with the loss of human life. Death is one way of losing something or someone you love and it happens all of the time, a pet, a relative, an admired celebrity or anyone we have come to know.

Living life after you’ve lost something that’s still alive can be considerably more painful to come to terms with. Maybe it’s the loss of a friend you didn’t mean to lose touch with, but it just sort of happened, or the loss of knowledge of a place you once knew by heart. It is the nature of our composition and the trajectory of human life that at some point we all lose something. Some losses are inevitable and some are surprising and sometimes losing something you love happens painfully, over time.

Whatever it is, loss hurts and I don’t think it is something I’ll ever master. Elizabeth Bishop is the author of my favorite poem on this topic—from losing keys to someone she loved the most, his short poem is magnificent. I first read it over 15 years ago and thought I got it at the time but I think it’s more special to me after experiencing loss of my own. Below is Bishop’s poem followed by my response to her poem, dedicated to her.

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.


Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.


Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.


I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.


I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


In so many ways I wish Bishop were here to talk about what she really says here, that losing someone you love does feel like utter disaster, and how it made it onto her page.  I cannot top this but I would let her read my own offering and I wonder what she would say about it if we sat down for coffee.

Your Art

(For Elizabeth Bishop)
by Nicole Speulda

A body

words to make love by

loss wrapped in a blank page

your bleeding pen revives,


A lover, lost lover

a pair of scantily clothed ideas

damp and drying on the line,


But your art endures

shadows coming and going

the presence of people

and warm fingered frames of mind.


You left us with song

plucked from the crisp wing

of his brisk departure.

A tune of grief perhaps

a sinking ship, flag half mast.

Or is loss freedom,

a nakedness removed of that part

the silent one art?

In Sports and Poetry, Playing with Class

Today was an unusually gray day in DC and it rained the spittle type of precipitation that I know well from my hometown. Normally, as with a lot of things in our nation’s capital, rains are big and loud and in your face, but just for a few minutes, thunderstorms, but then the clouds part and it’s mostly sunny again. But today felt fitting and I embraced the weather, for it was college football game day yet again and I loved the drizzle that drove me inside to await the Duck game.

Watching these games makes me feel closer to my family-- all three of my immediate family members are U of O Alumni-- and my favorite friends and relatives are either at the game or watching. It helps when your own University didn’t even have a football program, but if it had, I will forever feel connected to Autzen Stadium, the place I grew up watching my high school football team play Friday nights, the Ducks on Saturdays and more than once my own sports teams raised money for our athletic programs by picking up the trash in the bleachers and entire field in the aftermath of several Grateful Dead concerts (for the record, that’s not a pleasant job even with gloves on).

But, really, I just want to be part of the action in Eugene, even after, or perhaps especially after the horrible start to the season that has come to be known as “Punch Gate.” The Oregon athletic program, and head coach Chip Kelly in particular, were praised for the way they handled the incident in which star running back LeGarrett Blount went nuts after their first game in a hostile Boise State stadium that resulted in a loss for the Ducks and a season-long suspension for Blount.

They say a test of character is how a person acts in the midst of adversity, or perhaps an entire team reacts to setbacks. I was amazed to learn this week of yet another reason I’ve come to really admire and respect Coach Kelly. Here are the simple facts: Oregon Alumni (1996) and season ticket holder Tony Seminary was so disappointed about the Duck’s performance he witnessed at Boise State, even before Blount’s punch was thrown, that when he got back to his Portland office, he decided to email Coach Kelly an invoice for his personal expenses for making what he considered to be a worthless trip. Here are the contents of that email:

"I was so angry with the game (even before the post-game melee) I am sending you an invoice for my trip to Boise. The product on the field Thursday night is not something I was at all proud of, and I feel as though I’m entitled to my money back for the trip. Please see my invoice attached in this email. I will happily send along receipts if need be."

It seems the coach himself was in agreement, so he sent a terse one liner back, “what is your mailing address,” and proceeded to take out his personal checkbook, honor the invoice’s demand of $439 and sign it, Charles Kelly. (Dan Snyder would be well served to take this from Kelly’s playbook.) What happened next is wonderful—Seminary said his original email was sent in a somewhat joking nature and that all he wanted to do was register his disappointment. He returned the uncashed check to Kelly (after making copies to show his friends) with a note and newfound respect for the rookie coach and says he will remain a devoted fan even if they lose the rest of their games. Now that’s a sports team I want to be associated with. It feels even better after today’s performance, a blow-out of #6 ranked Cal at home on a blue sky day and it really feels like the season has taken a turn for the better.

But what of sports poetry and how do the two even relate today? When I asked myself to name my top five favorite sports poems, I’m sad to say I had a terribly difficult time. I can name a few songs that rank up there, but I wanted true piece of poetry about sports, and then remembered a quote, perhaps one of the most uttered mantras of modern day organized sports for kids—‘it’s not who won or lost the game, but how you played it’. That’s the sort of thing that anyone who has played sports nods their head in agreement for team spirit but really feels, deep down, that the game IS about the win or loss at the time.

Grantland Rice lived in another century, but he is the man responsible for writing that one line still used to console little leaguers across all sports and generations-- “not that you won or lost - but how you played the Game.” Given the truly unsportsmanlike conduct of parents of kids who play sports, kids and young athletes themselves, even the highest profile professional athletes, and yes, our very own public officials, it feels like everyone would do well to read the full length of the poem from whence the quote came. Put into context I have a newfound respect for this piece of writing and I like the whole of it much more than its one famous line.

Given the actions of Chip Kelly and the words of Rice, it's possible to see how sports really do serve as a metaphor for life: It is your actions and how you choose to live it that truly count.


Alumnus Football

By Grantland Rice


Bill Jones had been the shining star upon his college team.

His tackling was ferocious and his bucking was a dream.

When husky William took the ball beneath his brawny arm

They had two extra men to ring the ambulance alarm.


Bill hit the line and ran the ends like some mad bull amuck.

The other team would shiver when they saw him start to buck.

And when some rival tackler tried to block his dashing pace,

On waking up, he'd ask, "Who drove that truck across my face?"


Bill had the speed-Bill had the weight-Bill never bucked in vain;

From goal to goal he whizzed along while fragments, strewed the plain,

And there had been a standing bet, which no one tried to call,

That he could make his distance through a ten-foot granite wall.


When he wound up his college course each student's heart was sore.

They wept to think bull-throated Bill would sock the line no more.

Not so with William - in his dreams he saw the Field of Fame,

Where he would buck to glory in the swirl of Life's big game.


Sweet are the dreams of college life, before our faith is nicked-

The world is but a cherry tree that's waiting to be picked;

The world is but an open road-until we find, one day,

How far away the goal posts are that called us to the play.


So, with the sheepskin tucked beneath his arm in football style,

Bill put on steam and dashed into the thickest of the pile;

With eyes ablaze he sprinted where the laureled highway led-

When Bill woke up his scalp hung loose and knots adorned his head.


He tried to run the ends of life, but with rib-crushing toss

A rent collector tackled him and threw him for a loss.

And when he switched his course again and dashed into the line

The massive Guard named Failure did a toddle on his spine.


Bill tried to punt out of the rut, but ere he turned the trick

Right Tackle Competition scuttled through and blocked the kick.

And when he tackled at Success in one long, vicious prod

The Fullback Disappointment steered his features in sod.


Bill was no quitter, so he tried a buck in higher gear,

But Left Guard Envy broke it up and stood him on his ear.

Whereat he aimed a forward pass, but in two vicious bounds

Big Center Greed slipped through a hole and rammed him out of bounds.


But one day, when across the Field of Fame the goal seemed dim,

The wise old coach, Experience, came up and spoke to him.

"Oh Boy," he said, "the main point now before you win your bout

Is keep on bucking Failure till you've worn the piker out!"


"And, kid, cut out this fancy stuff - go in there, low and hard;

Just keep your eye upon the ball and plug on, yard by yard,

And more than all, when you are thrown or tumbled with a crack,

Don't sit there whining-hustle up and keep on coming back;


"Keep coming back with all you've got, without an alibi,

If Competition trips you up or lands upon your eye,

Until at last above the din you hear this sentence spilled:

'We might as well let this bird through before we all get killed.'


"You'll find the road is long and rough, with soft spots far apart,

Where only those can make the grade who have the Uphill Heart.

And when they stop you with a thud or halt you with a crack,

Let Courage call the signals as you keep on coming back.


"Keep coming back, and though the world may romp across your spine,

Let every game's end find you still upon the battling line;

For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,

He writes - not that you won or lost - but how you played the Game."

Public Transport & Poetry’s Transportation

Living in any large city most often involves a lot of walking, riding trains and taking buses—or some combination of all three. I used to ride my bike more often than I do now, but the lack of bike lanes in DC make it a very dangerous space to ride the way riding a bike is meant to be—fast downhill and thigh-shaking uphill-- which works in Rock Creek Park, but not in grid plan with diagonal streets and circles where even the most cautious riders and, yes, joggers are being hit by vehicles.

When I moved here for the first time 14 years ago I thought Metro and my own two feet were the only ways to go, but a few years ago, I found the bus. Unlike the only bus system I knew based on one experience on the west coast, turns out vagrants, rodents and criminals aren’t the only people who ride buses-- in fact, most people don suits, school uniforms, tourist fanny packs and plain old jeans. Real people ride the bus in DC and I find myself on one line or another a lot these days. Two weeks ago I found myself having to temper my, well…temper over having to wait an unusually long and unexpected amount of time for any given bus. There really is no schedule and each day is different, which used to frustrate me until I remembered 1998.

In 1998 I studied in Dublin and when I went there, I thought I’d live in Dublin. I did, technically, but the lovely Haberlin family actually lived in a village just outside Dublin called Raheny. Since all of my schooling and interviews were in Dublin the city, I had two ways to get there each day: the DART (an elevated train, which looks and operates much more like a freight train until you reach Dublin, where a few sticks support it’s “elevation”) or the bus. Both ways involved waiting, sometimes 20-30 minutes just to catch a 20-30 minute ride into the city most days, and it was winter, cold and raining. And then one day I bought a small pocketbook of Yeats for 60p (that was maybe 50cents before Ireland boomed and joined Euro currency status). It was a small book, fit in any jacket pocket and as each day went by I fiercely protected each one of its 60 feather thin pages and memorized the book. From then on out, I never considered my time waiting a waste, rather a time to learn the cadence of Yeats.

This is where worlds merge and things change. A few days ago, while anxiously staring down at my watch, and up 14th street in search of the front white grilled teeth and glowing lights of my non-existent bus, I started singing in my head, “Where dips the rocky highland of Sleuth wood in the lake, there lies a leafy island where flapping herons wake, the drowsy water rats…” That is the beginning of The Stolen Child, one of my favorite memorized poems from that small pocketbook of poetry. My days as a commuter and learning to be patient have come back to me:

Yeats is in,

my iPOD is out—

unless I’m working out.

I cannot tote around my old Yeats book, it’s battered and fragile and was actually signed, by Gerry Adams and an MP during a hike up Vinegar Hill in Wexford when I had a chance to interview Adams. Of course it was raining and I was devastated after a heavy droplet landed on the fresh ink forever staining the page, but it’s been preserved well and looking at it today, it’s quite fitting the pen was slightly obscured by rain. If the book was in mint condition today, I would never be able to feel myself in that damp moment where hardy, soggy people hiked up a hill to hear the modern day Irish Nationalist speak.

(Later that month, Adams wrote an expanded version of his Wexford commemoration entitled “Hope and History Rhyme,” published here: http://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/15185)

Today, I bought a thin volume of Yeats, not for my pocket this time, but it’s just about as small and fits perfectly in my green bag. There is something really lovely about coming back to an old friend and not caring about when public transport will arrive. With Yeats, I can go anywhere waiting on the pavement.

Here is an Ireland inspired poem of my own for the day:

Grass Shroud

Archaeology

reconstruction of the past

using physical remains-

a science undertaking

historical preservation of life,

environment and civilisation.


These passageways to the past

are lined with ancient stone

balanced in a precarious mound

of prehistoric ingenuity

decorated in patterns of the earth

and all its rhythms.


Yet none can say

if the incantations of their language

rose and fell like the tide,

or if it moved brisk

as a horsetail flicks a fly.

What did they dream of

while dragging boulders from the Boyne

to construct a domed tomb

on a hill an acre wide?


No one can carbon-date

the human pulse of memory

or soft-brush the pattern

of erstwhile winds.


I came to study this land

by its people of today

to see how conflict of the past

eats lives in radioactive decay,

hoping the roof-box of their presence

will share a winter solstice ray of light,

to solve the unanswered questions

of future archaeologists

revealing our rubble

and red-rosed bordered hem of troubles

in sea-swept agony.


I have felt the enigmatic wind

blow circles in my hair

and seen the pair of wrinkles

ripple across the outer lips

in a riverbed rim

carrying the sorrow

of aged children on its back.


If point of view were a science

and premonition a trade

goosebumps and heartache

would grace the pages of history,

reminding those yet to come

how to feel and live another day.

In Name of The Word, The Book and The Holy Song

As a lover of language and styles, one of the first books I fell in love with for its uniqueness was The Color Purple, if only for the reason that I learned that it was written in epistolary form and is one of the first books I remember reading that I felt was somewhat of a scandalous read. I had heard it was banned in other places in the country, and since I was parentally banned from the vulgarities of MTV and movies like Dirty Dancing (in hindsight, thanks mom and dad for that—both were highly overrated), it made me feel like I was part of a group of kids who knew something other people didn’t. And that’s the best feeling when you’re young. Holden Caulfield was cool, but a bit phony himself. These women were the real deal.


The Color Purple is also one of the few books that made it to the big screen that I love equally or more than the text itself. (I’m offering a challenge for everyone to name of the book you love in text and after it was made into a film—the few you found the visual experience equal or better to the reading experience).

One of my favorites parts of the movie The Color Purple is the music, especially the Shug’s song to Celie. It is a crucial moment, but in reading, sound does not emanate from the page. Not even in my most heightened imaginative state could have conjured something that sounds this great. That scene changed the way I view the book—and in the best way. Margaret Avery is the woman who brought voice and body to Shug and there is no other rendition or voice I will ever be able to hear sing the part.

I’d loved this song for years, but it could not be found, even on iTUNES until recently, after it became a Broadway hit—(and no, I'm not going to talk about Oprah's role in either the movie or the play). I’m talking about searching for this song since the 1990’s. My very own beautiful sister found it for me three years ago and it’s now of my favorite listens. Some may say the Blues, as a genre, is full of sadness. But so much of the blues is uplifting and these days I love the way some songs just say ‘yeah, this is a problem, let’s work it out,’ and inspires me to do better. This is one of them. It’s empowering and especially important to uplift and support the women who support and uplift you.

My Katie, this is for you, as well as my first pen, rather, "epistol-pal" before email and oldest friend Emily, and the divine Miss Aisling, without email I have no idea what we would do:


Miss Celie's Blues (Sister)

Song from The Color Purple

Ummm, Ummm…Ummm.Ummm..(Harmonica)

Sister, you've been on my mind

Sister, we're two of a kind

So, sister, I'm keepin' my eye on you.



I betcha think I don't know nothin'

But singin' the blues, oh, sister,

Have I got news for you, I'm something,

I hope you think that you're something too



Scufflin', I been up that lonesome road

And I seen alot of suns going down

Oh, but trust me,

No-o low life's gonna run me around.



So let me tell you something Sister,

Remember your name, No twister

Gonna steal your stuff away, my sister,

We sho' ain't got a whole lot of time,

So-o-o shake your shimmy Sister,

'Cause honey

the 'Shug' is feelin' fine.

Fresh Air: A New Season

Today is the first day of fall, of the autumnal equinox (at 5:18pm EDT) where the sun crossed the equator at the same time from north to south, fall for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere (not you Aisling).

Yesterday I was reminded of this occurrence by my wonderful yoga instructor, Margaret, when she decided to quote to us the derivation of the words “aequus” (equal) and “nox” (night), while our class was in full inversion-stance—I was in forearm stand against the wall, others were handstanding, but you get the picture—and let me tell you how long these very definitions can be when fully upside down!

That said, the reason I love my yoga classes is that each one is different when it comes to movements and poses, but it’s the same mentally—everyone is encouraged to do each pose to your own body’s ability each day. There is no competition, there is no “I could sink lower in pigeon pose yesterday, so I’ll force myself to get there again today,” sort of thinking allowed. You do what your body tells you to do each practice and as long as you breathe, any position is okay. I’m learning a lot from my yoga instructors and I feel that they are very wise. I also know that when I was a kid I probably joked about yoga being for hippies or strange people who hum to themselves.  Now that I know what it entails, it's really hard.  But as I'm learning with each day, anyone be a yogi if they want to and I fully believe that anyone can be a poet, if they want to.

Here is a poem about an average person, looking at a leaf, feeling a new season and in a moment, becoming a poet-- because that's all it takes.

The Poet

Builder of words

streamliner of sentences,

the poet pens that sensation

fallen from the lower section

of the stomach's breath,

perhaps the breath after having sat too long alone.



Simply pitting adjectives

in the privacy of the mind,

the poet is a simpleton

who picks up a piece of everyday

and sews it in your pocket,

preserving fragments of days

shards of night shadows,

they rest on a patched pillow

unmoved and unmoving,

a passive epilogue

to a marathon of moments.



You, labeled unpoetic, bent down,

removed the midsummer leaf

newly fallen from a brittle tree,

off the shoe trodden pavement.



Perhaps a particle of your iris

saw its own image

in the red flush

smeared in wax

across its paper frame-

a crimson apparition

of a fall not yet conceived.

Tiny Dancer

Tonight, one of my favorite television shows, Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) kicked off its new season. Ten years ago I would have shaken my head in disbelief if someone had told me I would ever write that sentence. That I like DWTS was a surprise to me in the beginning, but I do. As I said in a previous post, I can’t carry a tune, and while I wasn’t exactly a ballerina growing up, I knew the rhythm of a basketball court and the way to play a mean piano tune or two. I’m sad to say, that resume probably qualifies me to be a contender on the show this season over many of this week’s contestants.

I was disappointed going into this season with the flock of celebrity dancers competing, as it seemed as if they traded their usual gathering up of “celebrity has-beens” for “celebrity-who’s?” But one contestant stood out, and not in a good way. When former House Majority Leader, Tom Delay, tried to shake his conservative Texas boobs/stomach/booty region, (trust me, all three looked and gyrated like one congealed jell-o shot) on live national television—the gag reflex kicked in. Honestly, it was ugly, like watching a 73 year old Councilman Marion Barry get arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend (this summer), but I digress…back to Delay:

Here are the first three things out of the mouths of the three judges after watching his performance, in order: “You are crazier than Sarah Palin,” says Bruno Tonioli, himself, hands down the craziest judge on the panel. A more diplomatic Carrie Anne Inaba said, “That was surreal,” which is exactly what I was thinking, followed by “Parts were mantic, parts were tragic,” from veteran professional and consummate gentleman, Len Goodman. Yikes. My only hope is that he is voted out early.

Let me put it bluntly: The ONLY thing I want to see shimmy from a Washington, DC representative is her lovely branches…here is a poem dedicated to my favorite place and view in the city I have come to call my second home. I fell in love with this place in college, just northwest of Lincoln, slightly north of the Vietnam Memorial on the mall and generally overlooked by tourists. I visited it on bike recently.

The Performer

The wind exhales

beneath a shallow sky

and the weeping willow

hangs a sheer moon-gown

loosely about her frail frame.


Flailing in a jagged ballet

bending bows fumble in the wind

each shaken leaf dancing

in tempestuous rhythm.

Stung with water

in an unexpected drizzle

she quickens the pace.

Raindrops beat into their seas

an enduring symphony

played upon her fragile arms.

The sullen tree moves her branches

passionately mourning

the loss of her children

to the change of season.

Ahh, Venice

For 1,400 years Venice, the city with more monikers than naturally grown food products, (‘the city of light, ‘the city of bridges,’ ‘the city of water’ etc.) has been steadily sinking. While it is a city, it consists of 118 small islands in the saltwater marsh of the Venetian Lagoon adjacent to the Adriatic Sea, and was built by man from piles of wood. What I was fascinated to learn when I visited the magical place eleven years ago was that wood doesn’t decay under water, but petrifies because of the minerals surrounding it in the sea. The geniuses who constructed it made it so the wood piles were stacked closely enough together and sort of fused to become nearly concrete. What they probably didn’t anticipate was global warming and decades of sea change.


This morning I woke up just as NPR’s Weekend Edition went live to Venice to their long-time Italy reporter, Sylvia Pujoli, giving an in-depth update on the latest being done to combat the sinking problem. (You can read her report at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112995748)

Since I’m not an engineer and this is not the space to go into it, the important part of the story is that Venice has been sinking probably since it was built and for decades has had to deal with the high and low tides of the day--no one inhabits the first floors of their own buildings any longer. The rising sea level and life or death predicament of this drowning city has been the preoccupation of some of the most prestigious scientists, some of whom say it’s simply easier to raise the entire city itself rather than keep the water out.

But, the largest project to help save the city has been underway for years and I think of it as being a New Orleans type of levy construction, only done properly and on scientific steroids. Or, probably using technology that engineers trying to make sure the Katrina disaster doesn’t happen again should be using.

The project acronym is MOSE -- (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), which is also the Italian word for Moses, recalling the biblical parting of the sea-- and involves laying a series of 78 mobile flood gates across the sea bed at the three entrances to the lagoon. The idea is that these mobile devices sit at the bottom of the lagoon and when a high tide is forecast, the gates rise up from the water and shut out the incoming water. Work on MOSE is set to be complete in 2014.

It’s controversial, as no one knows how keeping the natural ebb and flow of water will impact local ecosystems, or if it will work. I’m fascinated by all of the plans people have had over the years to help save the city and was so enchanted by the place itself, wrote this piece about the place. What’s more, something I didn’t fully realize until today, is how much news items and scientific developments influence what I like to write about. While I walked and glided upon the sinking city of Venice in 1998, visiting islands where men blow into tubes of fiery glass that then expand and twist it into beautiful shapes, I also learned that ice was found on the moon. What an interesting world we live in.

Venezia

City of masked players

two-headed, three nosed,

skin surrenders to this

eyes-only cover of plaster

drilling the excrements of time

through ice blocks on the moon.



Lifeline possibilities

frozen expectations

oxygen trapped within.

The ambitious mold of its surface,

two-toned attempts at perfection

fused halves of comedy

and hollow tragedy

wring color out of gray



Under the mask

germinates chalk,

a dust bin of atoms

churn beneath milky skin.

A thin finger

moves behind the lampshade soil

a shadow of what was

and a sliver yet to live,

preserved in solid apprehension

like skin across the face

and ice blocks on the moon.



This place is sinking,

soon to disappear,

buried by tidal sand

and seaweed shells

that swam the tides Shakespeare wrote

and garnished Caesar's crown,

in times where tales of Homer sang

all glanced upon the moon-

the very moon swallowing the city now,

laying it to rest

in a saltwater coffin-

a catastrophic masquerade

oversaturated death of bones

and teeth and people hair.

The iceblocks comb the city straight,

split canals open wide

and end this carnival of faces.

The Lighter Side of Life

While it’s true most poetry is generally thought of as being fairly serious or as a genre more in tune with tackling the larger human emotions of love, longing, yearning, mourning, or commemoration, I love poems that have the ability to strike your funny bone. Billy Collins is perhaps my favorite contemporary writer of such verse and I was happy when, in 2001 he was named U.S. Poet Laureate, if only so that others may have been able to experience his humor and general grace. It makes me wonder if Emily Dickenson ever wrote a silly ditty, a book of jokes or something else that we have yet to discover. I can see her now, staring out her window laughing at some foolish irony that caught her eye.


Here is a Collins poem I admire most for his humor, especially when he reads it aloud, in a dry, flat tone as if he is trying to bait the audience into thinking this is a serious and dramatic narrative on aging. Hilarious:

The Golden Years
by Billy Collins

All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

Published at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278


As for me, I spent most of my day thinking about a poem I'm working on and realized that some days you just feel more lighthearted and want to sit around and watch college football and make something delicious to eat. While my fairly serious poem was on my mind, it wasn’t until watching my hometown Eugene Oregon Ducks play their game today that I remembered that poetry can be funny too, particularly after an ad for a very important piece of Duck label outerwear that inspired this piece written today:

An Ode to Fall

An hour into the football game,
the chill of too conditioned air hit my face,
and neck and feet and even my hair.
Summer is over, gone without a trace.

It felt like too much work to reach
for the hooded sweatshirt draped over the couch
and my former struggle with the blanket at my feet
dissuaded me from further entanglement.

Then I remembered the ad from earlier in the day--
a perfectly groomed male model wrapped toga style
head to toe in his Duck Snuggie, Roman Godlike, in a way.

As I reached for my phone to order one, I recalled
the Halloween I went out bound in a roll of red paper—
a crayon complete with that conical sharpened headdress of mine
and wondered how on earth the model would relieve himself at halftime?
So I put down the phone in favor of socks
And up-ticked the temp on my thermostat box.

Nicole Speulda 9/19/09

To view (or purchase) the “official” Oregon Duck Snuggie, feel free to click on the following:
http://www.shop.com/Oregon+Ducks+Green+Team+Logo+Print+Unisex+Snuggie+Blanket-239946636-p+.xhtml

Finally, here is another Collins work that makes me smile:

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

Over the Rainbow

I can't carry a tune to save my life, but have an overwhelming appreciation for music and especially songs with great lyrics. Some of my favorite contemporary artists are women who write their own songs, sing them and play their own instruments-- women like Regina Spektor and Jill Sobule-- and their artistry is profound poetry. Will their songs endure the test of time or even make it into the mainstream of music? I don't know. But it occurred to me recently that while new music is exciting to discover and keeps things fresh, there are some songs/poems that have touched generations and provide a story so innately human it can be re-done in a variety of ways, from arrangement to artist.


Today I realized that I have not one or two, but three versions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on my iPOD recorded by different singers and set to different instruments. Turns out, three versions probably isn’t enough. I have found so many takes on iTunes alone that are beautiful. To get an idea of the diversity of genre and format in which the song has been recorded after the Judy Garland debut, here is a short list out of the hundreds who have given the song voice: Placito Domingo, Jewel, Patti LaBelle, Tony Bennett, Carly Simon, Grace Kelly, Eric Clapton, Kylie Minogue, Ella Fitzgerald, Tori Amos, Willie Nelson, and my two favorites, Eva Cassidy and Rufus Wainwright. Countless Philharmonic orchestras and even a tripped out version by the phunky band Phish have found this song a home in their repertoire.

Who was the poet behind the curtain? Turns out the music was written by Harold Arlen and the lyrics were penned by Y.E. Harburg. While I appreciate the music, it’s the lyrics I love and because of the words, the music has been changed and re-interpreted over the decades. Y.E. “Yip” Harburg not only wrote the Rainbow lyrics, but penned all of the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz as well as the classics “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” “April in Paris” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” He was a contemporary and long time friend of Ira Gershwin—the two met working on their high school newspaper—and it was Gershwin who persuaded him to start writing song lyrics after his personal business crashed with the Stock Market in 1929. Here is his masterful work:


Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high,

There's a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue,

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far

Behind me.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly.

Birds fly over the rainbow.

Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can't I?


One of my favorite writers of all time, Salman Rushdie, was so inspired by the movie and the song in particular after seeing it as a 10 year old in 1950’s Bombay, that the first short story he ever wrote was called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Later in life he wrote a small book about the movie and how the song was his first literary influence. Recently, NPR’s Studio 360 played the audio of Rushdie speaking about this to an audience in Vancouver. This is what he has to say:

“Anyone who has swallowed the scriptwriter’s notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away,” that the moral of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly sweet as an embroidered sampler, “east west/home’s best,” “there’s no place like home” would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts upward towards the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving. A dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams. But as the music swells and that big clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color. Of making a new life in a place where there isn’t any trouble. “Over the Rainbow” is or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn, the hymn, to elsewhere.”

I couldn’t agree more with Rushdie’s idea that the song is a celebration of going away, being adventurous and finding a way to move forward in life. My “going away” in 1998 was into a land Rushdie wrote about in comparison with his native India: Ireland. Both former British colonies, home to great writers, were no strangers with being the “world’s migrants” as he calls them. Ironically, I went from the gray most of the year Oregon of my childhood to an Ireland, and then in 2000 Northern Ireland, which couldn’t have been any grayer. However, it was a place where everyone dreamed for a land they knew of once in a lullaby, and they sang about it. Here is one of my poems about that time:

Awakenings

The sun never sets in Belfast

in fact it hardly rises.

By chance you can catch it

a dim egg yolk on the horizon

breaking its way in fits and starts

through the blank sheets of night.



By mid-morning it has already begun

its cautious tiptoe through the sky

dipping in and out of the vast pool

gauging the pulse of the city below.



The sun never sets in Belfast,

but hovers eternally

in the damp blouses hanging

on pairs of sagging shoulders.



City shoppers and market goers

cut daily paths through faintness,

donned in gray cloaks, chatting of yesterday--

a habit like the drooping spittle of rain.



Does the weather breed skepticism

or do skeptics control the weather?

Maybe it has gone too long unnoticed

as a line of wash left battling the wind.



The sun never sets in Belfast

but erases like a spelling error,

corrected into memory by repetition

humbled in brief crimson,

embarrassment of unacceptance

the indefensible horror of being wrong.



This land harbors insomniacs,

and breeds ignorance in birds

who begin a chorus of morning songs

in the middle of the night.



The sun never sets in Belfast

in fact it hardly rises,

but if you’re are lucky you may see it ,

greet the dawn or whisper at dusk,



This is my new way of life,

learning to read the layers of the sky.


To listen to Kurt Andersen's Studio 360 audio click on this link: http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2009/08/28

Poetry in Voice: Remembering Mary Travers

Today was a busy day and public transportation was not my friend. But no matter what, I made it to the places I had to be and home again with a general sigh of relief and overall gratefulness.


That said, the half baked poem I concocted on the bus from the Cathedral home tonight will not be posted. Instead this space will be dedicated to the great Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame who died tonight at the age of 72.

I first heard Mary Travers perform live at the Wolftrap just outside of DC in late August of 1995, a summer in which Peter, Paul & Mary were as active as ever-- just that May they took the stage at Kent State to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the historic shootings. It was my first weekend in DC and I went with 5 other kids who had come to live and study in Washington and we ended up being best friends through college. Even though the legendary trio had been performing for over 30 years by then, their voices were pure, beautiful, and their humor and grace went beyond what I imagined from their "protest song" label.

In 2006 I had the privilege of seeing the three of them again at Wolftrap, after she had undergone successful bone marrow transplants to treat her leukemia. She sounded great, had more energy and voice than I would have expected and you could tell she had a special kind of wisdom about life emanating from her very bones.

While Travers herself is not noted for penning many of her own songs, she sang those of others in collaboration and with heart. Below is one of my favorite songs she sang and they sang together courtesy of John Denver. Pure poetry. She sang this song and to me it was hers, and my favorite. It is also worth noting that she didn’t always sing the same lyrics posted here—instead she was able to change some of the lyrics depending on venue and perhaps how the group was feeling over the decades. That’s also pure poetry.

I have to say I got a little choked up reading what Peter Yarrow and (Noel) Paul Stookey had to say about their friend and life-long collaborator: (http://marytravers.com/)

Safe travels, Mary, we will miss you.

Leavin’ on a Jet Plane

All my bags are packed

I’m ready to go

I’m standin here outside your door

I hate to wake you up to say goodbye

But the dawn is breakin

Its early morn

The taxis waitin

He’s blowin his horn

Already I’m so lonesome

I could die



So kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you’ll wait for me

Hold me like you’ll never let me go

cause I’m leavin on a jet plane

Don’t know when I’ll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go



There’s so many times I’ve let you down

So many times I’ve played around

I tell you now, they don’t mean a thing

Ev’ry place I go, I’ll think of you

Ev’ry song I sing, I’ll sing for you

When I come back, I’ll bring your wedding ring



So kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you’ll wait for me

Hold me like you’ll never let me go

cause I’m leavin on a jet plane

Don’t know when I’ll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go



Now the time has come to leave you

One more time

Let me kiss you

Then close your eyes

I’ll be on my way

Dream about the days to come

When I won’t have to leave alone

About the times, I won’t have to say



Oh, kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you’ll wait for me

Hold me like you’ll never let me go

cause I’m leavin on a jet plane

Don’t know when I’ll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go



But, I’m leavin on a jet plane

Don’t know when I’ll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go

Kaleidoscope

While Miroslav Holub, in his broad lamentation "Although," (posted here at the Treegap) says that one cannot enter the same poem twice, I disagree.  You may not always come out with the same poem, but I do believe it's possible to enter into and figure out how you feel about the broader meaning of a poem and change the way you originally envisioned it.

In the next few days I hope to challenge, re-envision and have fun with Holub's Although.  Meanwhile, here is a poem I entered twice, once at age twenty one and then now.

A New Mirror

At twenty one I sat languid
like mercury the solid
and the liquid.
Lethargy
seeping into the chair
spreading like a chorus of yawns.

Now a woman evades my effusion
collecting her wrinkles
as she does herbs from her garden
with the symmetry of a zebra
eroding in the floodplains of their skin.

Time transforms, at times domesticates
even the most youthful of souls.
And then there is my mother--
transformed yet undomesticated
she goes her own way these days.

Now I stand powerfully in tree position
look down at my upturned palms,
sink down, rise up, breathe and fold.
Metamorphosis begins within
and ends only in self resignation.
I choose plank, upward dog
and breathing in and out again
as a path
on a mat
to everlasting beauty.

Her Story In Verse

I began this blog with a fond memory of my Nana who died ten years ago this summer, a person I loved writing for and reading with. In an odd parallel, a few weeks ago we found out my grandma Julie died. While it should be a sad time for me or our family, it is just strange and means the end of something that was the mystery of a lifetime: My dad's lifetime, to be exact. It was his mother, her mysteriousness and a family I learned more about when I went to Ireland in 1998 at the age of twenty than I ever had in all my years living before or after. Meeting two of her remaining family members in Longford that year in the actual stone home in which she was born was something I'll remember always. But what came out of the conversations was not pretty, much like life.

In the order of honoring her memory, or how I have come to terms with being most honest about her memory, here is a poem I started a few years ago but could not finish until her death. It is worth noting that the meaningfulness she brought to my life is extremely underrated. While she was never around, we did exchange letters in 2001-2002 and the energy I spent tracking down facts and official documents, asking questions and trying to piece together some kind of reasonable explanation why...made me feel strangely close to her in many ways and she and my dad are the only two left with her green eyes. That said, we will never know the true story or stories and for many reasons, I'm so glad they lived in an era before cell phone cameras and Google searches. While it's not pretty, there's comfort in being able to take the facts and use my own imagination:


A Photograph Never Taken

There she stood
in an A-line peasant skirt,
age eleven,
with nondescript, indeterminate
immigrant blood
thrashing through tiny veins.

Julia, called Junie, became Julie,
and in the final document Smyth
read Smith, and the last stamp
said, nothing will be the same.

Even her birthdate was misplaced—
no, purposefully wrong.
She was not the intended traveller,
the one to leave, dock, set foot.

She made three sandwiches
of soda and cheese
wrapped in paper for a sister
two years older.

But in Longford, the pit of Irish turf,
fog deceived and disease consumed
children, mothers, husbands and yes,
even the youth starving to leave.
She was next in line.

In the middle of tragedy,
before the third member
of the family was buried,
Junie, my wee grandmother
boarded the boat and was gone.

In my daydreams of her moment
first there on Ellis Island,
I think she had the feeling
in my body the early morning
my plane, headed for Dublin,
touched down.

The rush of adventure, effervescent
thrill of a new land and independence,
she was on her own
and surely the sun shone that day
when she stepped out and thought
what next?

Then her aunts shouted out
the wrong name, but saw the same face
they expected to appear,
for she was one of them.
In a building of rats, condemned
to living their way of life.

It wasn’t Ireland,
but the whisky smelled the same,
and prohibition meant profit—
the bigger the bathtub,
the more to green to gain.
An entire social network
dancing to the pulse of their
gin-tub main.

When they met she was older
but hardly taller,
a slight beauty they say
in mildly porcelain skin.

She was straight from the land
Of small sprites and birds in hand
And faery tales that dance in the wind.

Enchanted, he was,
with this woman-sparrow
and she loved the uniformed
forearm of the sea-fearing officer.

A medal and two salty years later
they married in 1933,
the beginning of
a severed family tree.


He had a sort-of German last name,
an Anglo-American work-ethic
from middle-America, little pretentia,
and a heart that bled purple for the
god-blessed US of A.

He smoked a pipe and cigarettes
intensely as if they were breaths,
walked long steps, loved war maps,
and called all Asians Japs.

From conception my father
and his two brothers
didn’t know how very old
their parents ages ranged.
They couldn’t foresee
how clipped and unsung
a relationship speaking
in separate tongues
could actually be.

At night she went away
to the pubs to dance and whirl
drink and sing until night became day
and lived like a firefly in seasonal magic.

What happened is tragic:
the family fractured like messy glass
irreparably damaged, increasable pants.
Roused mid night, the boys piled in
And they drove all night, all day, all night
Through a warm, too quiet, California.

Tossing and turning the four rode,
hills too woven, through backroads
into the intimate hinterlands of our state—
Oregon-- awaiting prosecution.

My father’s father was a fugitive
from the Irishwoman, his own wife.
And she never went after them,
never searched for her sons, her life.

This is the fiction based on fact
The truth is Grandma Julie died
May seventh two thousand and nine
At the age of ninety four.
I wish I could say more.
She made my dad and I love her for that.

Health Care Reform At It's Most Inspiring: Miroslav Holub

While the US government tries to figure out how to make reforms during our health care crisis, I've been thinking more and more about a poet who shaped the way I think about poetry. Czech Poet Miroslav Holub was a truly talented human being. In fact, "poet" is not the first title for which he should be recognized. He was an immunologist with a brilliant scientific mind. His writing on medicine and human biology lent itself well to speaking about life generally. What appealed greatly to me, when I first found him in 1996 (two years before he died) was his amazing chronicle of life and the way his writing was built on being alive during some of the most challenging periods in history (he was born in 1923). Below is a poem entitled "Although" (Ackoli), from his collection of writing of the same name published in 1969.

I share this particular work because for over a decade I've been writing various versions of my response to this poem. It changes daily in the way I think about some of the issues he brings up here and to me that makes it a timeless piece of genius.

FYI: Because of formatting in Blogspot, some of the lines run over, so follow the punctuation, or just read it however you feel like it!


Although

Although a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done, although a poem is a last attempt at order when one can't stand the disorder any longer,
although poets are most needed when freedom, vitamin C, communications, laws, and hypertension therapy are also most needed,
although to be an artist is to fail and art is fidelity to failure, as Samuel Beckett says,
a poem is not one of the last but of the first things of man.

Certainly a poem is only a game.
Certainly a poem exists only at the moment of origin and at the moment of reading. And at best in the shadow-play of memory.
Certainly one can't enter the same poem twice.
Certainly a poet has the impression from the beginning that no purpose exists, as Henry Miller has said.
Certainly art becomes generally acceptable only when it declines into a mechanism and its order becomes a habit.
But in its aimlessness, in its desperate commitment to the word, in its primal order of birth and re-birth, a poem remains the most general guarantee that we can still do something, that we can still do something against emptiness, that we haven't given in but are giving ourselves to something.
The most general guarantee that we are not composed only of facts, of facts which, as Ernst Fischer says, are deeds withered into things.
Provided a poem, which is the poet's modest attempt to put off disintegration for a while, is not regarded as the philosopher's stone, bringing salvation and deliverance to stupefied mankind.
For art doesn't solve problems but only wears them out.
For art is fidelity to failure.
For a poem is when nothing else remains.
Although ...

Day Two

Continuing the theme from yesterday, I've been thinking about the reopening of the Statue of Liberty and how I'd like to visit it again someday. I was there once and climbed up into the head, this was before 9/11, in 1998, one of my first trips to New York City. Walking up the winding staircase wasn't difficult, rather, believing you weren't going to fall from the sky when a gust of wind came up and the entire tower swayed side to side was the hard part. I'm so glad she has been renovated and hope to see her and Ellis Island soon.


Beacon of Freedom


A woman made of stone
naked knees to nipples
negligeed in a rippling flag.

She is tightly engraved
etched in stone-heavy grooves
god-like, museum worthy:
Temple-of-the-woman
wearing the nation.

Seasonally weeping acid rain
loosely preserved,
going gray with guano
the idol of forgotten masses
forgotten for forgotten reasons
guiding emigrental progress
sleepy-eyed process
eroding the memory
of presence
in speech.

9/11 Eight Years Ago

Kicking off this blog this day was important to me. Here is the poem I started in the air, was inspired by in Canada and finished at home. As a preface I was flying from Heathrow to San Francisco that day with a further connection to Oregon...It didn't occur to me my family had never seen it until today.

United, 955

What I see is a sprawling earth
dirt filling the drying seas,
where land drowned is reborn
in Christian waters, jihad blood
in the rain-filled mosses
bloated with redemption.
I want so much to believe
in whole thoughts, a pinch of reality.
But I am in pieces, root, bark and leaf
parched and hovering like a bird of prey,
to fall, envision and clutch
the colors of life.

Right now San Francisco
is covered with American flags
and the family I’ve not seen
in days, months, almost a year
has been on the road for nine hours
to take me back to my childhood bed.
Yet the sleep would not be unbroken,
the roses were waning,
the ocean tide cooling
and leaves were hurling themselves
onto the pavement like kamikazes.
But in the moment of our touchdown
confined to the cabin we first heard the news,
the landing was perfect, the land an oasis
a feast for my eyes that were born here,
and I was grateful, silent and thankful
for the chance to return to my home.

Welcome To Treegap, Words Everlasting

Welcome to Treegap Poets, a space for ideas, conversation, and mostly poetry, but here any form of self expression goes. The book that shaped my childhood and the inspiration for this blog, "Tuck Everlasting," captured my imagination and inspired a love of reading and writing, but not always in a conventional way-- like the book I always wanted to capture a mood, a scene. Poems always felt a better fit for that, yet at the same time I became so self critical of each word that my writing waned in the last decade.

This summer marks the 10th anniversary of my Nana’s death, the woman who loved reading to me, sometimes in funny animated voices, and who loved reading anything and everything I wrote. I never felt judged or nervous about sharing anything with her. This space is an effort to pay homage to her and of all of the goodness she inspired, but also to pay respect to the person I wanted to be when she was still living.

I’ve issued myself a challenge: A poem a day for a year. I’ve tried to do this before but it’s easy to quit when you write in a journal and don’t tell anyone. It’s easy to quit any plan if you simply don’t show up. This blog is about showing up every day, even if it’s the worst poem ever written. My rules for myself are:

1) Try to be thoughtful—nothing recycled entirely, but don’t cop out by posting crappy poems written in college.

2) Not everything needs to be a masterpiece. Give up trying to create “the one” in a day and just learn to make the best I can that day and be happy with the process.

3) No length requirements. I went through a few Haiku phases and once spent days on three lines trying to make the best one word, syllabically interesting three line poem (two bad examples below) and that’s not what this is about, unless I’m inspired to do it in a day. That said, length doesn’t represent effort or inspiration:

Sun

Triumphant
Precipitation
Disappears

Upon a One Word Haiku

Conceptualize
Phonologicalism
Morphologically

Life has taught me that it really does help to set goals and live each day one day at a time, making each 24 hours count. I hope creative minds join in and are unafraid to share poems, prose, good reads, or whatever is on your mind.

Your Treegap Caretaker,

Ghibli