Poems for Free

My Other Blog

2011-04-23T09:51:00.003-04:00

A friend suggested that I link to the poetry blog that I'm posting on now--so I am. The new blog is "Glad Errand" and it's now in the blogroll. Theoretically.

Return

2011-03-07T07:15:00.001-05:00

Should I post poems here again? It seems that I get a reader now and again. I'll check the stats and comments for the next few weeks. In the meantime, poems are also at http://gladerrand.wordpress.com/

2011-01-19T10:53:00.001-05:00

2010-07-22T19:41:00.001-04:00

I'm staying with wordpress for now, unless there is a public clamor (readers of "Pogo" will know the reference).

2010-07-16T17:28:00.001-04:00

Do any of my followers have opinions about which blog works best?

2010-07-11T07:05:00.002-04:00

And I'm thinking of moving back here because I'm remembering why I don't like wordpress's formatting. I'll give it another week. . .

I'm moving!

2010-07-01T10:53:00.003-04:00

From now on, I'll be posting poems on a new blog--

http://gladerrand.wordpress.com/

I find that blogspot is easier for me to format, but Wordpress does free stats. So--hope I'll see you there!

INTERVIEWING MRS. WILKINSON: THE FAIRIES

2010-06-28T06:29:00.000-04:00

THE FAIRIES

Their land is bigger than you’d suppose.

Like the sea it disappears into the sky,

above the trees, one smudgy line.

First time I went there, the Queen took me,

wanted me to marry her youngest.

I wouldn’t.

He was handsome enough, but

there was something

not quite right about him:

the way he smiled, maybe the way

his nails grew long and blue-tipped

instead of white and pink.

Some people think it’s those big ones

who cause the troubles.

But it’s the little ones, imps, I call them.

They’ll sour the milk and stale up the bread,

leave footprints all over a fresh-iced cake

just for the fun of it.

Now and then I find in my dresser drawers

the handkerchiefs all rearranged. Once

an embroidered one folded like a bedroll.

And then there’s changelings.

Happens all the time.

There’s at least three in this town I know of.

I’ve seen those babies they took

when I’ve been over in their land--

they don’t remember their mothers,

but sometimes, early mornings,

they get a longing look.

They’re mostly happy;

fairies take good care of them.

Back here the mothers

say “Trouble. This baby

is high-strung trouble.”

They wouldn’t believe me if I told.

But those big ones now, on their horses so white

it looks like the moon is out even when it isn’t,

they go about their own business.

‘Course they can be dangerous if you don’t watch out,

but so is anything worthwhile.

As long as you use your head, they’ll do you no harm.

Used to be, folks didn’t talk about them,

or they called them other names.

But if they’re fairies, why not say so?

Truth is truth, and it will out, like they say.

It hasn’t done me any harm I can tell of.

INTERVIEWING MRS. WILKINSON: GRAM

2010-06-25T18:25:00.000-04:00

By the 1990’s, Mrs. Wilkinson was the only person on this side of the bridge who believed in fairies anymore. The people across the river, in the hills, have never stopped believing. The houses over there are far apart, and the roads through the woods are lonely.

~A History of West Wilton, Vermont

GRAM

Gram came down to live with us after Mother died.

Mother fell down the stairs and hit her head, Gram said,

but I was really little, so I don’t remember.

Anyway, Gram came from up there, the other side of the river.

Folks are different up there, they live different,

don’t visit much. It’s like they’re on their own.

We were always poor, but Gram made the best of everything:

drapes out of sheets, dresses out of drapes,

dinner from whatever was at hand--squirrel sometimes.

She was a real good shot.

When my sister cried for a dressing table

Gram made her one out of an old carton,

covered it with some magazine pictures she saved

and stuck on a coffee can lid for a mirror.

They said she was a pretty woman

when she was young, but when she got old

she had squinty eyes from looking at the fairies.

Some people have that kind of vision, like cats.

Owls. They can see in the dark.

Gram was real good at games.

She made a game out of being quiet

those times Daddy was sleeping it off,

and she taught us I Spy, to pass the time afternoons

we had to sit outside the hotel, waiting for him.

But then there was the accident

the summer I turned fourteen.

They put her in jail.

Once when I went to see her there,

she told me the Queen had come,

tried to get her out,

but the bars were iron

so she couldn’t pass.

PERSPECTIVE--prose

2010-06-20T06:27:00.001-04:00

Over the course of the years, I have been visited several times by people who sell aerial photographs. They will fly over my house, they tell me, and take a picture, and enlarge it and frame it so that I can hang it on my wall. I have on these occasions explained to them that my husband is both a pilot and a photographer. But if he were not--if I had not had the opportunity to see our little house and yard from the air--I would buy such a photograph, and I’d look at it often. “There is my vegetable garden,” I’d say, “and there is the clothesline, and over there is the little plum tree, and you can almost make out the bird bath there on the edge of the lawn.”

I also like to climb a hill near my house and look down at the place where my house is--I can see the houses of a couple of neighbors from that hill, and I can just see a bit of our garage roof. In fact, whenever I climb a mountain around here, the first thing I do is turn and look toward home. And whenever I’ve flown anywhere away from home or back again, I’ve leaned toward the airplaine window and looked out for the railroad tracks, the river, the old White Pigment Plant--for familiar landmarks. It’s an odd thing, when I think about it. From the air, or from a distant hill, I cannot know the details of my place that so delight me when I’m there. I can’t see the flowers in my garden, or smell my neighbor’s silage, or hear the wood thrush singing away in the trees. But I like to see it from above: it gives me a new sense of the relationships between things. I can see how close we really are to the train tracks, for example, and I can see where the pine woods ends and the old pasturelands begin.

I know I’m not the only one who likes the birds’-eye view of home. People buy those aerial photographs; people like maps and drawings that pinpoint the pieces of Earth where they live. Birds’-eye lithographs of towns were very popular years ago--they’re on exhibit in libraries, sometimes; I still love to look at the ones of places I know, to recognize the familiar things, to note the changes.

It gives us a security to know that home is there, even if we’re not. We were once in a commuter plane over the Hudson, and among our fellow passengers were members of a well-known rock band. They were tired, unglamorous middle-aged guys who told us they’d been on the road for two months. When my husband asked “Where are you going?” one of them answered, “I don’t know. I don’t even know where I was yesterday. We just go where they send us.” But suddenly, looking out the window, this same man grew alert and animated. “There’s my house!” he said, pointing at a place along the river. “That’s the closest I’ve been to home for a long time.” And he turned his head and looked until his place was no longer in sight, and he sat back in his seat and closed his eyes.

In all the wonders of space, the astronauts have spoken and written most eloquently of the far, far view of the little wet blue-green place they left behind. That luminous image of our Earth hangs on walls and graces flags and t-shirts and bumper stickers: “You are here,” that picture says. “You are somehow defined by this.”

I think that the desire for the long perspective is built into us. When children begin to get a sense of scale, they like to draw pictures of the globe with little dots showing their houses; they like to string out their addresses: “Mary Pratt, My House, New Haven, Addison County, Vermont, New England, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe, Cosmos, Mind of God.” Defining our place helps us to feel at least a little bit safe as we tip and reel through our lives, on this wild round space ship.

But there is a practical side to having a long perspective, a very practical and important side. My town is revising our Town Plan; we’re trying to figure out what’s best for the future of the whole town. From my back porch, I can’t see the whole town: I can’t even see my whole yard. I certainly can’t see my neighbors’ pastures and hayfields and houses and barns and businesses. And there is no way at all that I can see my neighbors’ hopes and dreams and worries and fears about their lives and their places in this town. But those invisible things are the things that make up the shapes of the places we live, those things determine what is bought and sold, what is built and destroyed. Those things determine who lives where, who gets to do what, who pays how much in taxes. Those things determine which hills get climbed and which grazed and which covered in new houses. Our hopes and fears determine the size of our school, and the state of our roads. And they determine perhaps most importantly the way we know (or refuse to know) and treat (or mistreat) our neighbors, and the way we welcome (or don’t welcome) newcomers. Gathering to talk about those things is like climbing a hill above home, or like taking an aerial photograph--only together can we get a good complete perspective, a real sense of this whole place and the people who live here with us.

I have a house and a yard that I consider mine, but they’re only mine because the land that surrounds them is not mine. This place where I live is nobody else’s place. And just so, this town is ours because it is surrounded by towns that are not ours; and this state is surrounded by states that are not Vermont; and this Earth, ultimately, is surrounded by space that is not Earth. And after that? Well, who knows?

MFCP--This was published in Five Town News years ago, before Google Earth.

SHAPE SHIFTING

2010-06-17T06:51:00.000-04:00

Last night for my dinner

I slit open a womb of squash,

scooped out the papery ivory eggs,

sliced a green-white onion body so wet and alive

the two halves would not fit tight together.

I made a salad of living things,

infants of broccoli and radish;

dressed it with the blood of olive and grape.

The boundaries are not clear.

This morning the dog dug a nest of mice

out of long grass, swallowed the babies

like little pink pills. They slid easy

down her throat: wriggling embryos

dissolving in her stomach,

becoming dog.

I commend them to their god.

And there was a time I read an article

about a wildlife biologist summoned

to investigate the death of a woman

by mountain lion. It happens more often

than you’d think. He tracked the beast,

found its cache in a litter of leaves.

He said, “I hate to tell you, but what was left

looked an awful lot like meat.”

MFCP-- this was a Grolier/Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize Runner-up in 2001

TURNING A BATTLESHIP

2010-06-15T06:23:00.000-04:00

They say it’s like turning a battleship.

They say they’re making progress:

the vast bulk of iron against the swell

that rises and rises and against the wind

that never, ever, for a moment, lets up.

All hands are doing what sailors do--

--turning cranks, watching dials,

running to and fro. It was more obvious

when the ships were under sail,

when it had to do with lowering and raising,

with ropes and anchors and chains.

Like turning a battleship, they say.

Something that big, pounding along in a fixed direction,

thousands of tons afloat

inflexible, ungraceful, lumbering, loud,

not like, say, whales,

who turn their enormity

graceful and swiftly, who breach and sing and whisper and fly--

and porpoises--

and kayaks, currochs, dugouts,

sailboards and surfboards

skimming and slipping the surface--

and leaves in autumn--

russet from the ash trees, red from the maple,

brown from the oak--

and golden birch leaves--

how they blow light and high, following

every whisp

of wind--

and ravens somersaulting-- and hawks--

and little birds

flipping so easy above the corn--

and snowflakes and snowboarders and

children on swings and monkey-bars--

and ballerinas, gymnasts,

contra-dancers,

parachutists, politicians, bass guitarists--

and all those World Cup footballers

turning on a dime.

MFCP, 2006

APPLE TREES

2010-06-11T06:26:00.000-04:00

I have spent time among trees:

their cambium pulling juices from air, from stone,

roots of my planting deep in the Earth,

life packed into ripening skin,

strong fingers like twigs

dripping fruit.

FILED AWAY

2010-06-07T06:34:00.000-04:00

Poor wee things, headless,

buried all along the edges of the forest path,

or in the pasture, in secret.

It’s their ghosts that haunt you at night,

the plots that twist and flutter through your dreams:

that house on the hill full of flowers,

geologist found in his field with a rock hammer in his head,

Magi on their way to Bethlehem: Druid, Bodhisattva, and African witch,

the girl who ran away to dance and was shot by a clown,

the church haunted by the specter of an evil priest.

Someday, you tell them,

I will try to resurrect you.

But they twitch and turn

in their shallow graves, unbelieving:

those wasted carcasses,

uneasy dead.

MFCP--Feb. 10, 2004

THE HEIFER

2010-06-04T06:56:00.001-04:00

Once, long ago, on a morning yellow and cold,

I walked by a brook through an overgrown wood

where heifers grazed. Snuffling and wary they followed.

I walked with care around their tender curiosity.

I was walking by a brook through an overgrown wood.

When I stopped, heifers startled, blundered away.

Had I walked with care around their tender curiosity?

The few thin beech trees trembled their amber leaves.

When I stopped, the heifers startled, blundered away;

I wondered at the violence I had done, unmeaning.

The few thin beeches stood with amber trembling leaves;

pine needles, hemlock needles edged with sunlight.

I wondered at the violence I had done, unmeaning.

When I stood silent, one Jersey fawn came down alone--

pine needles, hemlock needles edged with sunlight--

her footprints soft brown hollows in the earth.

When I stood silent, one Jersey fawn came down alone.

She cocked her head, regarded me with solemnity,

her footprints soft brown hollows in the earth,

her brown eyes deep and questing, unafraid.

She cocked her head, regarded me with solemnity,

then kicked her heels, turned and disappeared between the trees.

Her brown eyes were deep and questing, unafraid,

once, long ago, on a morning yellow and cold.

MFCP, January, 2006

This is in the pantoum form

THE WITCH'S FOREST

2010-06-02T06:44:00.001-04:00

I am a native Vermonter, an increasingly rare species. I have for years resented the intrusions of tourists, the suggestions of experts, the "improvements" of technology.

And yet, I am a newcomer here, an alien in a place that was old and worn before I was born. When I moved to Essex Junction in 1961, it was a small sleepy town with a railroad station in the middle. Our high school even had a cheer about that for awhile: "Thunder, thunder, thunderation/Our town has a railroad station./Trains go by, toot-toot-toot,/All those for Essex, stand up and root!" The five main streets of the town all met in the center: the notorious "five corners." There was not a traffic light system there, merely five stop signs and a great deal of driver eye contact. I learned to drive before the coming of the traffic lights.

But shortly after my family's move to Essex, IBM expanded its plant, and people started moving in. We lived in a little Cape Cod style house in what was then one of Essex's three housing developments--Indian Acres. Our house was on Abnaki Avenue; the next street down was Seneca Avenue, my younger sisters and brother went to elementary school on Hiawatha Avenue.

The development was surrounded by the remains of a woods, and beyond that what was left of an orchard. All of the neighborhood children spent a great deal of time in the woods. I can still walk through it in my mind. The path in had a froggy place on the right hand side. In the spring, we caught frogs there, and pollywogs, and we could hear the peepers every spring evening. They would all stop their peeping when they heard us walk past, as if they were holding their breaths, and then they would start again, one at a time, tentatively. The path was well worn and dappled on sunny days with patterns made by the birch and hemlock trees overhead. I know now that that kind of woods is a relatively new woods, an overgrown pasture, most likely, but when I was young, it was primeval. There was a rocky ridge, a backbone, that crossed the path a few hundred yards in. I met a neighbor boy there once, shooting at squirrels with a bb gun. And on the other side of the ridge, after another patch of fine ferny dappled woods was what we called the Witch's Forest. A tall, dense growth of old pine trees with no relief of green underfoot, only some pale mushrooms and the accumulation of years of pine needles. Beyond the Witch's Forest again was an overgrown pasture, this one full of dainty little pine trees that gleamed silver in the morning dew. This was, of course, the Fairy Forest. But it was as dangerous as the Witch's Forest for children.

We called it the Witch's Forest for a good reason. The danger and the charm of the place was the chance of meeting there the Witch--an old woman who lived in a shabby old white farmhouse on the edge of the old orchard, an old woman who was bent nearly double and who always wore a shawl over her head when she walked in the woods. "I know you," she'd say to us in her cracked old voice. "I know you, and I know your dog. Get out of here or I'll call the police." And we would flee--we'd run until we reached the ridge. As if it were magical, the Witch never passed that place. Our parents told us that she was just a poor eccentric old woman who lived in her little house with--of course--several dozen cats.

But I wonder now, if we were walking through the woods next to the pastures of her farm. Did she stand on the ridge when she was a young woman and watch the sun set over the lush green meadow where the gentle Jerseys grazed? Could she hear the peepers from there, too, and did her children catch frogs in the old swamp, and collect their pollywogs in jars? Did she help to gather the hay in the Fairy Forest before seedlings of the old pines took it over? Was her farmhouse full of children's clutter and the smells of canning tomatoes and applesauce? Did her barns burn down, or tumble down, or were they dismantled and reassambled as houses on the edges of some exotic suburb?

When we were in Ireland, we stopped to look at the Gallarus Oratory, a very old and very beautiful dry-stone work chapel surrounded by rocky pastures full of the black-faced Donegal sheep. Sitting on the stone wall near the oratory was a thin old man in a tweed coat and cap, a walking stick at his side and a Border Collie at his feet. I decided to be friendly to him after I had examined the chapel, and I walked up to his seat and said good-morning. "Where are your from, now?" he said to me in a hard, cold voice. "Germany? France?" I told him I was from the U.S., and added, hopefully, that my father's family had come from Ireland. "Well, you'll be giving me a good tip now," he said. I wanted suddenly in my anger and my shame to knock him down. Who was he to demand money from me, when he had done nothing but expose me as a stranger, an imposter, a gawker at his home? Who was he to connect me to the Witch again, to show me myself through her eyes?

The Witch's Forest is now a playground with the latest kinds of safe swings and climbing equipment. People don't go there after dark. The Fairy Forest is full of houses, as is the dappled woods, and the swamp. The ridge itself was blasted and bulldozed away, and I can't remember exactly where it was anymore. There is an Orchard Terrace where the orchard was. But the Witch's house is still there, although I'm sure she died long ago.

I have a kind of plan, which I shall probably never carry through, to go to the Town Clerk's Office to find out who she was. I will find then where she is buried, and I will make a pilgrimage to her grave. I will leave there a pine bough and an apple and a stone from the Gallarus Oratory, and I will ask her pardon and her blessing.

I wrote this many years ago. I still haven't carried out the plan, but am quite aware of my own potential as a Witch in the Forest.

FAIRY TALE

2010-05-31T07:12:00.000-04:00

Walking in the woods

always birds

often deer

often coyote

once turning a corner

face to face with a fox

equally surprised

once moose tracks

What am I looking for?

monkeys swinging in a branch of pine

seals basking on the old beaver dam

flamingos wading through cattails

or like in a story I read once upon a time

a little door low down in a tree

the golden key in my pocket

MFCP, 1998

IN THE KITCHEN

2010-05-28T06:52:00.000-04:00

I like it when he comes in here, after supper,

when the washing up is mostly done

and I’m just mopping the table

and setting things to rights.

He sits on the flour barrel in the corner

and plays his music, and sings.

We don’t talk much.

I don’t suppose there would be trouble if we did--

who cares what an old Irishman

and an old woman like me do in our free time?

Mam said I was lucky to get this work,

but I think not lucky--I’m a good cook,

and they know it. At least I got a couple things

out of the plantation--cooking, and my baby.

I’m glad she’s up north now.

It’s not safe here for a pretty girl like her,

and the lady of the house where she works

is teaching her to read in the evenings.

These railroad men don’t scare me:

I’ve seen it all.

I can take care of myself.

And he comes in to sing

just at the dangerous time of day,

looks after me, in a way,

reminds me to bolt the car door behind

when he goes.

This is part of my American Folk Song Suite.

ALPHABET

2010-05-26T07:08:00.001-04:00

Art the Accident.

Beauty the Broken.

Creation the Crisis,

Duty the Death,

Entropy the Elegy.

Fantasy the Fear.

Gentleness the Grief.

Hidden the Hunger,

Ignorant the Instance.

Juggle the Joy.

Killer the Kiss.

Listen the Liking.

Music the Miracle.

Never the Necessity,

Only the Ordinary.

Portion the Present.

Question the Queen.

Restore the Ridiculous,

Sing the Synchronous.

Terrible the Telling

Under the Umbrella.

Verify the Verse:

Wish the Words,

Exercise the Excellent.

Yesterday the Yes,

and Z, after which

the silence

NOT MOMMY

2010-05-25T06:38:00.000-04:00

-for Henry and Heather

I do not get up at night to feed you. I do not

hold your hand, or tell you where to go. I do not

take care of you, any more. I do not

want to be mommy to you, to anyone, at all, but

something longer, higher, broader:

something open wide as vulture wings;

tough as stems of witchgrass overgrown;

solid as beach sand packed hard by winter tide.

And I would be audacious as first green leaves unfurling;

bracing as lightning bugs, as yellow flag, as frogs.

I who am not mommy shall yet be

woman, window, candle, friend.

I will not love you from my need--

but love like wind loves poplar leaves,

like fire loves the dark of autumn stones,

like light loves the slow drip and freeze of water from the eaves.

You are free as earthquakes;

free as snowgeese, as summer rain.

I will be free as wild apples,

a cranky old crow flapping over in late September skies.

For Graduation & wedding season!

MFCP June 2001

Free Focus, spring 2004

NAMING THE POWERS

2010-05-24T07:08:00.000-04:00

Ariel, you were, and Tiriel,

Gabriel, Uriel. And elsewhere

Isma’il, Uthra, Susniel, Melha.

Mercury, too, one of the names you bore

as you pushed through the ether

bearing light, news, the necessities of your time.

You are still there, and not just

in intrigue, memory, myth.

You traffic inside, but outside, too,

the small circle of solar light,

beyond the milky path

of your old confinement.

We are learning your names again;

we call you Quark, Neutrino, Positron.

You are Muon, Pion, Kaon.

Ah, you who spin the Cosmos,

who sing the notes we hear

on our borders, in the dark,

I name you Uncertainty,

I name you Quanta.

I name you Gravity’s Speed.

MFCP, 2003

NOT LIKE A DOVE

2010-05-23T06:52:00.000-04:00

Come Holy Spirit, come

like a red eft creeping out

from under wet leaves,

crossing the travelled highway

at night after rain.

Come like the brown anole comes north

unexpected in bananas or limes;

like a gecko hunting roaches on a wall.

Come like chameleon;

like iguana still as deep green death

flittering a cloven tongue.

Come like Komodo parting the ways

with your stinking breath. Come

clear the carrion from this isle.

Come Holy Spirit

come like the Dragon remembered of old

rattling and clanking on golden wings.

Seize our treasures for your twinkling hoard.

Burn away all that will burn.

MFCP, published in The Other Side, May & June, 2003

EVERY CORNCRAKE COUNTS

2010-05-22T06:40:00.002-04:00

A number of factors affecting Corncrakes:

loss of long vegetation along hedgerows,

drainage of small marsh areas

where reeds, white-grass and flag iris provide early cover,

more closely grazed pasture,

marginal land going out of production.

Rotary cutters cut very close to the ground.

Any species attempting to nest

on the ground in a hay meadow is at risk.

Cutting from the headlands towards the centre kills birds.

Chicks in particular are reluctant to cross mown ground

where they are at risk from predators like hooded crows,

tend to stay in long grass where they are often killed

when the last swathes at the centre of the field are cut.

When a Corncrake loses a clutch

--for example in a silage field--but survives herself,

she will lay again often in a hay meadow

which may also be cut before the eggs hatch.

In this way, a female may lay three of four clutches

but succeed in hatching few or no chicks.

Listen for Corncrakes on your land.

Listen for their calling at night.

The male Corncrake usually calls from the same spot.

You may be able to work out which field the nest is in.

If you have a Corncrake on your land

leave areas of rough vegetation on the farm uncut.

Marshy corners, patches of flag iris and nettles

all provide suitable early nest sites.

Ensure that the headlands have taller grass than the rest of the field

when the Corncrakes arrive.

With a little care and patience, fields can be cut in a way

that will drive Corncrake adults and chicks

to the safety of the field margins.

It will be necessary to work the field

in an anti-clockwise direction.

Headlands at the field ends are cut first

to provide a turning circle.

Leave a swathe uncut in the headlands.

Cut the field slowly.

Speed kills, and is not vital

MFCP--This is the first poem I "found." It's in “Every Corncrake Counts,” an Irish Wildbird Conservancy pamphlet

written by Eleanor Mayes. I think of bobolinks in the fields around here, now that people are already haying.

STARTING OVER

2010-05-21T06:42:00.001-04:00

--and do you remember the night the long rain stopped?

We woke to silence, and moonlight through the high window.

No sound but the animals breathing in their sleep--

--and the owls---

It was so hard to wait

but when the dove did not return

you worked open the swollen latch

and we pushed the ladder out.

I shooed away the chickens--

all those chickens underfoot.

You insisted on going first

even though your rheumatism was bad--

and I came down right behind you

with my knees not so much better.

Soft wet dirt, all the swamp stink,

but not a cloud in sight.

On top of the hill, that one tree

--Olive--with little leaves unfolding,

beginnings of buds where new olives would be--

The children crowded down behind.

Everything that could fly flew;

and the mice and monkeys, squirrels, possums,

horses, camels, cats and dogs.

Stones everywhere, like bones;

and bones, so many bones.

I scattered the seeds I’d saved on the slick and blackened ground.

You made a pile of stones, went back in and fetched a lamb, a calf.

The sun warmed my face--

We brought fire from the little lamp

while the bow shimmered there, hanging there--

Somehow the freedom of it--

so strange even now remembering it, believing it--

knowing that we are the ones--

the making and mending, the losing, yielding,

how it all comes out--

So soon the olives bloomed, blossoms fell,

little seeds grew up to grain.

We made wine from the grapes;

apples ripened red, so sweet,

on every clean-picked twig the nub of next year’s fruit;

in each white heart one strange and impeccable star.

MFCP--a Spring poem

RIDING A TRICYCLE ALL NIGHT LONG

2010-05-19T07:13:00.001-04:00

She did not leave a note.

They had not believed her about the dinosaurs;

why would they believe she needed to travel?

The roads were good, even the clabbered ones.

She stopped at a castle and left her trike in the lot

since tricycle parking was free on Tuesdays.

She wandered the gardens, the garderobes,

climbed the narrow winding stair.

The view from the parapegm was not remarkable.

She was afraid she could not get down.

A woman who translates for cats

(at night the big white ones yell “Guys? Guys?”)

talked her down--“Just don’t notice”--

one level at a time, so easy she did not notice

when she reached the green Mosaic floor.

Back on the road,

there was the usual difficulty

about bathrooms

but she found one in time, clean,

in a schoolhouse.

Someone had written the alphabet

in perfect currish

all over all the ceilings and the walls.

She saw lions playing in the meadows

as she drove through the countryside,

but she was not afraid.

She knew they were too young

to harm her, too young

to have intractable claws.

In the college town,

at the complicant intersection,

someone she could not see--

perhaps one of the younger dinosaurs--

jumped on the back of the trike to give her directions,

but she could not say where they were going.

Maybe Montana.

Maybe home.

Here's what the weird words mean:

complicant: folded over

currish: like a cur!

parapegm: Gk. a tablet on which laws were engraved set on a pillar

MFCP March , 2007

TWELVE SECRETS OF THE WOODS

2010-05-17T19:03:00.001-04:00

found in the 1920 Girl Scout Handbook

the umbrella that stands up spread

to show that there is a restaurant in the cellar

the manna-food that grows on the rocks

and holds up its hands in the Indian sign

of innocence so all may know how good it is

the vine that climbs above the sedge

to whisper on the wind

there are cocoanuts in my basement

the rabbit puts his hind feet down

ahead of his front ones as he runs

the squirrel buries every other nut

and who it was that planted

those shag-barks along the fence

what the woodchuck does in midwinter

and on what day

the pale villain of the open woods--

the deadly amanita--for whose fearful poison

no remedy is known

poison ivy that was once so feared--

now so lightly held by those who know

the balsam fir in all its fourfold gifts--

as Christmas tree,

as healing balm,

as consecrated bed,

as wood of friction fire

the wonderful medicine that is in the sky

the bread of wisdom,

the treasure that cures much ignorance,

that is buried in the aisle

of Jack-o-Pulpit’s Church

what walked around your tent

on the thirtieth night of your camp-out

USE A WORD THREE TIMES AND IT IS YOURS

2010-05-15T06:52:00.003-04:00

Chalaza:

1. During the production of megaspores,

the chalaza isn’t a good hangout for someone with allergies.

2. Without a chalaza, where do the integuments and nucelluses join?

3. If you stand with your back to the chalaza,

on a sunny day you can see light coming through the micropyle.

Parallelepipedon:

1. The bareback rider leaped from the galloping horse

and landed gracefully on the smooth silver top of the parallelepipedon.

2. After much searching, the antique dealer

found a parallelepipedonic jewelry box for the completion of my collection.

3. She felt tired, unbalanced, as if a giant hand had pulled her normally cubic form

into a parallelepipedon.

Smouch:

1. Jeremiah smouched a lavender-scented Tum from his mother’s handbag.

2. Creeping around through the kitchen door, the wily dog smouched

the leg of lamb that Cook was planning to roast for the family’s dinner.

3. In the soft summer evening, under the moon, he smouched a smooch.

Gyacutus:

1. The gyacuti, wary of the influx of flatlanders to Vermont,

are migrating in large numbers to the Canadian Rockies.

2. The orthopedist told me that if I didn’t get a lift in my left shoe, I’d walk like a gyacutus.

3. It is now believed by reputable ecologists that sidehill erosion in many New England localities

was not the result of overgrazing by sheep in the 1800’s,

but by herds of post-glacial gyacuti.

Tarantism:

1. When the baby heard the old man singing “Don’t fence me in,”

she was seized with tarantism, and bobbed up and down,

up and down, on her mother’s lap.

2. I suffered from tarantism once, but after several years in a support group,

I find that I can stand still on most rhythmic occasions.

3. There is nothing in nature that can be compared to the sight of a herd of gyacuti

in the grip of their springtime tarantism.

MFCP

ANY MORE UGLY FURNITURE

2010-05-13T06:51:00.001-04:00

In the night while I slept,

someone sneaked into my house and left

two mis-matched chairs, a dented coffee table,

a broken-backed sofa covered in shabby gray.

When I awoke hours later,

I saw only my own old things.

I’d been thinking about reupholstering;

I’d been thinking about flowers.

Under the snow sleep pink peonies,

bluebells, tulips of orange and red.

Each bulb of daffodil has in its center

a thin whip of gold, ready to go.

Every spring they do it again.

Last night in my bed I walked

along in the dark, up a steep hill.

When a light clicked on,

I saw where I was, and slid down

into a drift of snow where a woman

with daffodils in her hair stood waiting,

waving a scrap of yellow cloth.

MFCP

COMPREHENDING CASSATT

2010-05-08T09:08:00.002-04:00

I did not like the paintings

of Mary Cassatt:

female licking an envelope flap,

two females drinking tea.

Seductive children: the slip

sliding off a shoulder,

a mother absently fondling

or turned away.

I did not like Mary Cassatt--

this cool objectifier--

until I looked anew and saw

in painting after painting

the expressions in the eyes,

those women and children bored

and beautifully dressed,

reading or drinking cups of tea,

staring into into space,

focused so softly

on nothing at all.

GREEN UP DAY WITH LIZZIE

2010-05-02T07:09:00.002-04:00

Cocky as the angle of her baseball cap,

sharp as the blades of her hockey skates,

she’s not quite twelve, ready for Junior High.

I did a project about women in the Civil War,

she tells me as we pick beer bottles from the roadside.

They took care of the farms, they sent food to the army;

some of them disguised themselves as men to fight.

I’d hate to live near a battle field, where all those people died.

An empty potato chip bag, full of cigarette butts.

This is disgusting! My Dad quit smoking

when Mom had us, she tells me, and leaps

across the muddy ditch for a McDonald’s cup.

It’s a long road uphill between pastures and woods.

Old foundations, wrecked barns, not many houses.

There’s a bag of rotting deer parts by the culvert;

we mark it for the road crew. That’s awful.

It’s wasteful. I think they should let deer hunt people,

she says. The Indians used everything:

skins for clothes, bones for needles,

teeth for jewelry. My Dad quit hunting

when we were born so there wouldn’t be guns in the house.

Another green bag is full; we leave it on the shoulder.

I write poetry, she tells me.

Lots of it is sad, like when our dog died.

A large man in a pickup drives slowly past,

turns around and comes back.

What’s he doing? Following us?

Decoys in the truck bed; shotgun in the rack.

Hunting, I say. Spring turkeys.

I hate it when they do that.

She adjusts her cap, I open another bag

and we watch as he parks, opens the door,

goes off behind the brambles with his gun.

MFCP--I wrote this 7 years ago, after doing a Vermont Green Up Day with a feisty young neighbor.

THE MUSIC OF AGGRESSION

2010-04-28T07:04:00.000-04:00

The robin is not chirping cheerily of cheeriness,

nor is the chestnut-sided warbler pleased to meet you.

The black-throated green warbler

does not croon of murmuring trees.

The song sparrow is not inviting you

to put on the kettle for tea.

No.

Each tiny indignant property-rights advocate

sitting in his tree or straddling his fence

is hollering loud and clearly:

POSTED. NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT.

Out of here, quickly.

Flee, flee, or I’ll shoot you.

These are my trees.

If you know what’s good for you, you’ll skeedaddle.

The red-eyed vireo says it plain:

Here I am; where are you?

This is mine; go away.

MFCP, Spring 2009

SONNET

2010-04-24T06:40:00.001-04:00

To hold the holy water, dig a well,

To keep the notes in check, compose a score.

Heaven’s for the good guys; send the rest to hell.

Pay out your tithe, but not a nickel more.

Iambic meter holds the words together

The way an iron stove holds in the flame.

The airs and seas contain the planet’s weather.

Wild things are known, we think, when called by name.

Bras and jockstraps mash the flesh in place

As locks and dams are built to stem the flood.

We like to sit refined, without a trace

Of sweat or piss or passion, shit or blood.

Then what will happen when it is our turn

To flow, to sing, to burst, to give, to burn?

MFCP--This was my first poem to be published, in Amelia: #27, 1995

DANCE OF THE WOODCOCKS

2010-04-20T06:55:00.002-04:00

I wrote this years ago--it was published in "The Five Town News," that great little local monthly. I haven't heard woodcocks near our place for several years now, but I see them regularly in the woods, so they're still around.

The first time I heard about them was in early April, 1979. My husband came home from a sunset walk in a field near the house where we were living then, and said that he had heard a strange bird singing: first a repeated beeping from the bushes on the edge of the field, and then a wild twittering up into the sky, and then a chirping high overhead before the beeping started again. We looked it up, and discovered that it was a Woodcock, doing its Spring Dance. The male bird makes what the bird books call a “peenting” sound, then flies up about two or three hundred feet into the air, circling and twittering his wings. At the very peak of his flight, he sings a little song, and dives back to the ground. He does this dance at sunset and sunrise, presumably to mark his territory and to impress females.

The next evening, my husband and our small son and I went to the field together at dusk, and waited quietly, and heard the beep and the twitter, and saw the woodcock silhouetted against the last color of the sunset when he rose and then again when he plummeted to the ground. And the next night, fascinated, my son and I went back, determined to see the bird up close. After the dance had begun, we paid attention to where the beeps were coming from: this particular bird was beeping fairly consistently from a clump of shrubs in a low wet spot. As soon as he rose into the air, we moved as quickly as we could to that spot, freezing in place whenever we heard the twittering begin. It took us a long time to reach his little territory, and it was very wet where we sat down to wait. But either our presence or the increasing darkness had ended that evening’s performance.

Undaunted, we returned again the next evening. This time, we left home before sunset, and brought scraps of board to sit on, and settled ourselves in the place we had selected the night before. It was damp and cool in the bushes; we did not talk or move. I still marvel that a six year old child could sit still for as long as Henry did. What we heard and saw was well worth the half hour of cramped legs and wet feet. The woodcock beeped suddenly right behind us, and beeped again and again while we scarcely dared to breathe. When he took flight, his wings twittered close over my shoulder. We listened to him rise, heard the crazy circling chirping apex of the dance and the short silence of the descent, and then a soft plop not ten feet away. In the half-dark, Henry and I watched the woodcock walk around in little circles, beeping as he bobbed his strange long-billed head up and down.

I’ve seen many woodcocks since that night. On almost any evening in early spring we can hear them all around our house. We have startled them out of clumps of woods in the daytime. They nest directly on the ground, counting on camouflage for protection. I know now that nesting females will act wounded to draw predators away from their young; I know that woodcocks take earthworms out of the ground with those long bills. But no matter how many times I see them, no matter how much I learn about them, whenever I hear that unmistakable peent that marks for me the beginning of spring, I am carried back to a soggy twilit field where I sat for a long time with a little boy, waiting to see for the first time how the woodcocks dance.

GARDEN PARTY

2010-04-16T06:44:00.001-04:00

in honor of ol’ Walt Kelly

We are dancing on a dingbat

in the fury of a gale

while a wiley alligator

winds a kitestring on his tail,

and we do not have to worry

if the fury can’t abate,

for the foolish old bassoon man

has a catfish on his plate

and the streamlined fancy foremast

casts a shadow on our fate.

O, the moral of the story

is the wellspring of the fool,

and the quarrel of the sorry

is the spinning of the spool.

When the roses grow forgotten

in the gardens of the moon

and the chickens all fly skyward

on the string of the balloon,

when the demons do their darndest

to knock acorns from the tree

and the long-awaited pirate ship

comes sailing from the sea,

then we’ll know it’s time to cut the cake

and have a cup of tea.

O, the moral of the story

is the wellspring of the fool,

and the quarrel of the sorry

is the spinning of the spool.

MFCP--published in a Quatrain Chapbook: Beachbag Poems

THE OLD LADY DISCOVERS FACEBOOK AND OFFERS A SORT OF APOLOGY

2010-04-14T07:01:00.000-04:00

All you want to do

is touch. It used to be easy,

while winnowing grain or stalking beasts.

Your bodies remember

the smell of sweat in the longhouse,

gossip by the well,

embraces under the trees.

Once you spoke while hanging wash

or mending nets or minding babies

or scything hay or boiling sap

or making shoes or spinning thread

or pounding nails or stitching quilts.

Now

you are scattered like chaff,

dispersed as hunted game,

and so are we.

Oh, children, do not complain at us!

We are as exiled as you.

Like you we want to find our friends

and digging is so hard.

Disembodied

as you, we post lines

and flickers to our tornaway tribes.

Now the ether carries in bits

our sketchy sentences, our loneliness,

tears that this strange communication

without skin or breath can maybe begin to mend.

MFCP

DANCING ON--for Poetry Month

2010-04-10T07:12:00.001-04:00

DANCING ON

Orion is hunting woodcocks by the light of the moon.

He’s heading under for the summer;

soon he’ll rise at dawn, then at noon.

He’ll stalk only daytime prey, for awhile:

the hot sidewalk pigeons, sparrows,

dogs panting on steaming lawns.

The woodcock peents his pitiful twilight call,

nods his heavy head, whistles his wings,

chirps and spirals, falls like a shooting star.

Somewhere on the meadow edge his lady watches.

Once while he was dancing in the sky

I slogged through soggy mosquito ground

to see him bobbing in the last light, close enough to touch.

Tonight I sat with poets in a bookstore.

Together we chased our quarry around the rim,

tuned our hearts for all to hear.

One black-eyed boy took a fistful of poems from his wallet,

twittered his longing for a golden girl.

We old poets know our places in the quadrille,

but the floor slips away beneath our feet,

the orchestra shifts like seasons,

the music will never repeat.

Even in the silences between

there are voices in the street, under the lamps.

We can never know where the fire will descend;

when, precisely, the stars will come to ground.

MFCP--this was a runner-up for the 2001 Grolier Poetry Prize--now the Ellen LaForge prize.

SIT AND SMELL

2010-04-07T07:11:00.002-04:00

What is this life if busy as hell

We have no time to sit and smell?

No time to sit beside the bogs

And smell as long as cats or dogs,

No time to scent when fields we pass

Where some one stopped to drag his ass,

No time to find, as though alone,

Where someone chucked a chicken bone,

No time to ponder every track

Of every deer passing onward, back,

To use your nose to best avail

To search the neighbor’s garbage pail,

No time to sit and contemplate

What each and every neighbor ate.

A poor life this, if busy as hell

We have no time to sit and smell.

MFCP--This is obviously after the poem "Leisure" by W. H. Davies. It was inspired by our old dog.

EXSULTET

2010-04-03T07:18:00.003-04:00

This is the Light surrounding the smallness of the engendering explosion

flashing in the lingering raindrop on the unfolding olive leaf carried swift through the clearing sky

glancing from the stone knife trembling over the heart of the bound and plighted child

pulling and driving the fretting dancing slaves through the desert and the sea.

This is the Light beckoning from the doorway of the stable in the rock

spilling red and warm and glistening from the cup he holds between trembling hands

dazzling and glittering around the tomb’s heavy seal in the deepest night of Earth

burning passageways in the dark:

one path for every soul.

MFCP--1998

This is a poetic version of the ancient hymn to the Light of Christ that has been sung by deacons since at least the third century. It was published in The Living Church, Easter 1999. That publication did not notify me that they were publishing it--in fact, I found out from someone else that they had. Meanwhile, the poem had been accepted by The Other Side, a now defunct Christian magazine that was all about peace-making, justice, compassion--the radical, liberating Gospel. When I called to tell them that the poem had already been published, the editor called The Living Church editor and he said it could not be reprinted without HIS permission. She decided to print it anyway. "It's a justice issue," she said. She was also appalled that I hadn't been paid for it--poor as they were, The Other Side editors paid poets.

GOSPEL

2010-04-01T07:14:00.001-04:00

Every now and then some good news--

almost too good in this twisting world to be true--

for example, the Western Tree Frogs surviving

Mount St. Helen’s fierce and deathly blow.

They crept out from their mud in the spring,

to Marscape desolation, moved across the ash

from gray puddle to gray puddle, laying

their tender little blobs of eggdots and slip,

and now on the greening slope they are singing,

still singing. What else might be possible?

MFCP--A really old one, but I still like it--July 19. 1999

OZ

2010-03-28T07:15:00.000-04:00

You have brains, he said, a heart,

all the courage you need.

And here I am, here,

my feet on the home ground.

Funny how long it took to know:

questions, obstacles, witches, friends.

And he? Not Great and Terrible

as I was taught, but little,

a small still voice, tiny flame,

that glimmer of grace

behind the curtain of my skin.

MFCP

IT'S MARCH IN VERMONT

2010-03-25T10:25:00.001-04:00

The Muse must be in Miami,

drinking sweet tough coffee in a Cuban café,

laughing when a rat scurries across the sidewalk,

listening to the brown-legged mothers scold.

She must be spending afternoons walking

where the água meets the blanca,

watching one porpoise cruising,

one small airplane dragging its ad,

one plump woman airing her tits in the sun.

Evenings she goes to the Italian Restaurant

where three waiters in tight black pants

attend to her.

They offer soft ripe cheeses and red wine,

lightly brush her shoulder when they pass,

tell her the tiramisu was made just for her.

When they bring the bill, they touch

her sunburned hand, sigh when she rises to go.

They promise her

they’ll count the moments till she comes again.

MFCP--ELLEN LAFORGE/GROLIER POETRY CONTEST, RUNNER UP, 2007

I RUN, I RUN, DOING THINGS THAT MUST BE DONE

2010-03-23T10:00:00.001-04:00

I run like a little animal across the road,

a squirrel confused by traffic,

doing things that must be done.

Would someone come place me on a rock in the sun--

a squirrel confused by traffic--

where I could watch the soft waving grasses?

Would someone come place me on a rock in the sun

where the yellow flowers shimmer in the meadow,

where I could watch the soft waving grasses?

I set out like a red eft after rain--

where the yellow flowers shimmer in the meadow--

wanting to be somewhere else.

I set out like a red eft after rain,

while the traffic turns around me its dangerous wheels

wanting to be somewhere else.

I cannot see my way.

While the traffic turns around me its dangerous wheels

would someone please pluck me from the hard bewildering road

(I cannot see my way)

and set me down among the ferns?

Would someone please pluck me from the hard bewildering road--

doing things that must be done--

and set me down among the ferns?

I run like a little animal across the road.

MFCP--I'm posting this in honor of the salamander migrations going on in Vermont now. My husband and I escorted 48 of them across the road last night, in the rain.

SIGNS OF SPRING--prose

2010-03-18T07:27:00.000-04:00

“Looking for signs of spring” has been a game in my family for years and years, and as in all family games, ritual is important. Whenever I come home excited, claiming the first singing robin, it is traditional for my husband to say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I heard one last week.” I’ve missed several of the firsts this spring: my husband claims that he heard robins two weeks ago, my neighbor Jean heard bluebirds on March sixteenth, a friend saw redwinged blackbirds on March first. I did see the first turkey vulture and the first harrier, both on March 17. I’ve also seen the owl who ate frogs from our pond last spring, hanging around on the edges of the field out back, and in the woods; I’ve seen the crows chasing it. The pond is still frozen solid, so there are no early frogs for it to be eating.

But one year, I also saw the best sign of spring ever, one that I’d never seen before and likely will not see again. I saw it on a gray, ugly day in early March. It was slushy with a little damp wind blowing, the sky was heavy with approching rain or maybe soaking cold snow. When I was a kid, it was on such days that my father would threaten to “transfer to Arizona,” and all of us children would carry on about how we couldn’t possibly leave Vermont. (Now that I’m grown up, on such days, Arizona sounds pretty good to me.) I was in my office at the church where I was working then, sorting through a pile of mail that was not much more inspirational than the piles of filthy snow outside, when the phone rang. It was a woman whom I will call Jane, a chronically needy person whom I’d known for years.

Jane had been terribly disadvantaged and disabled all her life, and regularly she came to me for things: money for gas, a little help with her rent. And usually I helped her out of the fund that I had for such things. That morning Jane told me that she needed a coat. Her old one had worn out, she said, and there weren’t any her size at the Salvation Army or at the local thrift store. Usually in cases like this, I’d call around to other places I knew; I would have dug up something somewhere. But that morning--not out of kindness, but because I didn’t feel like chasing around-- I told her to meet me at KMart after lunch.

She was late. Her miserable old wreck of a car had a flat tire on the way up, she told me. But she was as excited as a little child to be in a store looking for a new coat, and I felt ashamed that I was doing this for my own convenience. We found a rack of spring coats that were her size, and she picked one out--a bright yellow one--and she put it on, and smiled like I’d never seen her smile. It looked good on her, I said, and I meant it. I paid for it, and she stuffed her ratty torn old navy blue coat into the plastic KMart bag and wore her new one out. I watched Jane cross the parking lot, a spot of cheer, a sign of Spring shining through the dismal gray drizzle.

That year, I conceded the first robin to my husband, but I think I got the better deal: I saw Jane in a yellow spring coat.

THE PARABLE OF THE DILIGENT SON

2010-03-16T07:18:00.000-04:00

Son, thou art ever with me,

and all that I have is thine.

~Luke 15:31

Every day he got up before cockcrow

to milk the cows and clean the gutters.

He cut and stacked and hauled,

came into the house every evening

sticky with sweat

and fell asleep right after supper.

His face was always sunburned,

his hands were rough and scored with cuts.

The work was his, and the worry:

the price of milk and grain,

drought or fields too wet to mow.

And the beauty was his as well:

warblers trilling in the hedges,

soft tongues of calves,

the scent of ripening corn.

Raspberries, blackberries,

early apples, sour and green.

Then that brother came home

and there was the party.

A little calf killed,

the beer drunk up,

litter all over the lawn,

and for what?

To celebrate the return

of a wastrel they were better

off without. And his father,

bewildered and happy,

standing in the kitchen explaining.

I know he’s no good.

I know he’ll be off again.

But all he’ll ever get is a party.

Let him enjoy it,

and later, when they’ve all gone

downtown to the bars,

you and I will have a single malt

out on the porch

and watch the stars.

TRAVELING BACK HOME--some prose

2010-03-12T06:50:00.001-05:00

The weather in Ireland in May was terrible. We wore sweaters every day, and piled quilts over our down sleeping bags every night. But we were there again to climb mountains, and so we did: in gale-force winds, sometimes-- winds that drove veils of rain and fog over our heads and through our clothes.

Ben Bulben, that strange ship-shaped mountain with a smooth green turf top and sloping stone sides, was unhappy about our coming. Although the day of its climbing dawned clear and bright, being superstitious we brought rain pants and ponchos and a compass. We were half-way up the steep slope, striding boldly through heather and bright moss, with the ewes and new lambs calling to each other around us, when we turned to see the view below us. The valley had vanished, like Brigadoon, in a dense fog rolling up from the sea. And when we looked up again to where the flat top of the mountain had been, it too had disappeared suddenly, under a cap of mist. We were caught like the filling of a sandwich, but we laughed, and took our bearings, and continued to climb. There was no view from the top at all, only a glimpse of a neighboring mountain appearing like the Matterhorn through breaks in the swirling clouds. We picked our way down, hunting for fossils and bones in the stream beds.

That night we stayed in a hostel that had been partly dug into the side of the hill above Glencolumbcille. The warden, a small and cheerful woman named Mary who rubbed her hands together when she talked, listened clicking her tongue and shaking her head to our account of the climb. "Perhaps it was the fairies," she said. We ate our supper that night overlooking a brown hill with a stone watch-tower on the edge. On the seaward side, the hill sloped sharply down to a curved white-sand and green-water bay. We watched the sun set over the water in the cloudless sky.

Why do we travel? To climb mountains three thousand miles and five hours away from home? To exclaim over the architectural and archaeological ruins of civilizations long gone? To comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the cares and hopes of humanity are universal, and to hear of them in accents and metaphors a world away from our own? Yes.

But we travel, too, in order to come home: to see the reassuring curve of Boston Harbor under the airplane's wing, to feel a catch in the throat when, stepping off the plane, we see the sign welcoming us to the United States of America. We travel to count the landmarks as we return: the New Hampshire State Line, the Veterans' Hospital in White River Junction, the capitol dome and the Goddess of Agriculture gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine, Taft's Corners, the Cheese Factory in Hinesburg, Monkton Pond, Route 7, New Haven Junction.

The leaves have opened since we've been gone; the neighbors took photographs of our tulips, which were magnificent. The peas didn't come up very well since it was wet and cold here, too; but there are new chives and Egyptian onions in the garden, and dandelions in the grass. The mosquitoes have emerged from the ponds and puddles, the pollywogs have hatched, the bobolinks toss above the hayfields, the orioles are back. We missed the trout-lilies, but the gay-wings and foam flowers are lighting up the corners of the woods, and there are a thousand shades of green on the hillsides.

We travel so that we might see home with a new clarity. I imagine myself coming to Vermont from Ireland for the first time: there is no jade-green sea here, eating slowly away at straight-sided headlands; there are no stone ring-forts or castles, no ruined abbeys or cathedrals. But the land here is not eroded with over-grazing and peat-cutting. Here there are forests on the hills; here the wind does not blow endlessly.

Late in our travels, as I stood in the courtyard of another hostel, pulling baggage once again from a bread-box-sized rental car, I stopped to listen to a Blackbird singing in a tree. The Irish Blackbird is a thrush, shaped like an American Robin, but coal-black and red-billed. His song is very like, but not quite like, an American Robin's song. This one sang in a tree that was very like, but not quite like, a sugar maple. And as I watched and listened, I felt a tugging at my heart, and I understood in a small immediate way the longing of the immigrant, the pain of the exile. To leave one's home and never see it again--never again to hear a Robin or to stand in the shade of a maple--

We've puzzled about the Irish people's indifference toward their beautiful hills; we've laughed about stone-aged monuments sitting unmarked in cow-pastures. But now we are home, with new eyes. Now we are strangers for a little while in our own place, finding wonder in our backyard, hearing the Robins' songs afresh. We travel to come home.

June, 1994

LOOKING DOWN

2010-03-11T07:13:00.000-05:00

So much roadside flotsam:

bits of broken dish and doll,

a stained apron, a plastic sword,

three toy cars, a sparkplug wrench.

Once a pair of felt clogs that fit.

Once a black and white kitten

who followed me home

and grew into a quiet cat.

Once a silver bracelet

with a handmade moon

slipped off my wrist

while I was looking down.

I haven’t found the Buddha

(I met Jesus once,

but didn’t kill him

since they already had),

so still I scan the road for treasure:

a jacknife, a single earring,

an cattleman’s orange cane,

the illustrated pamphlet that will explain it all.

MFCP, Spring, 2009

ALL THE BETTER TO SEE

2010-03-09T07:05:00.001-05:00

--for Kathy

I have a friend who sees through dreams.

Lately I dream about coyotes, I tell her.

They’re trying to get into my house.

Sometimes I’m walking in the field out back

and they chase me in,

then they sit outside, waiting.

Only they aren’t like coyotes.

I mean, even in the dreams I know

that if we had wolves around here,

they’d be wolves.

They’re too big for coyotes,

too shaggy.

They move easy,

yawn wide, stretch loose,

like they know where they are,

and it’s the only place they can be.

This place, this way,

or nothing.

Coyotes aren’t like that:

they’re wary and slinky,

they can eat anything,

fit in anywhere.

Like me, I laugh.

But there are no wolves around here.

So I know, in the dreams,

they must be coyotes.

My friend narrows her eyes at me.

Don’t be so sure, she says.

Why don’t you open the door?

MFCP, December, 1998

TO THE PLASTER PEOPLE

2010-03-07T07:22:00.000-05:00

Plaster People

Wipe Feet!

Do not go in Gallery!!

Clean up downstairs

and exit Out Back

--sign in the hallway outside sculpture studio, Castleton State College

Among the paintings,

installations of true Art

the Plaster People blunder,

powdery tracks wrecking

the good carpet,

powdery fingerprints

defacing all that is

canonical and clear.

One can’t have them

scattering their dust,

clouds and billows,

the stuff of stars.

The Plaster People in their

poofy hordes trample

up from the foundations.

They have buried

every civilization in turn.

Oh, look on their creative

struction, and despair!

HATTERAS

2010-03-04T07:18:00.000-05:00

I remember the day I first smelled the sea,

how it tugged at my sprouting romantic soul.

For hours I walked the sheltered shore, picking shells;

the stranger gulls sang my song.

I believed that everything perfect could be gathered,

tied in a bag to bring home.

I believed, then, in beauty unchanging,

truth frozen like figures on an Attic vase.

But on this other shore I see there are no perfect shells.

I have gathered what I could:

thick worn slabs of helmet shell, crackled cockle,

crescent moonshells thinned to thumbnails,

black oysters like footbones, black spirals of whelk,

Mother-of-Pearl all pummeled away.

I have watched my footprints disappear,

watched pelicans disappear behind green glass waves,

long brown waves breaking to purple and white.

Gannets are falling straight as feathered spears

among silver flanked foam-grazing dolphins.

Down the transient gold sifting shell-powder sand

where gull and plover patter, picking death,

the gorgeous dried guts of a giant fish

twist away from salt black leather hide.

Shapeshifting dunes blow slow along this one black road

and gulls drop shells to feast on what they find.

HOWLING AT THE MOON--prose

2010-03-03T10:46:00.000-05:00

Howling at the Moon

There is a tribe of coyotes living in the woods somewhere behind our house; we heard them for the first time on a moonlit night in winter. We were skiing in the fields, enjoying the silence and the whiteness and admiring our moonshadows in the snow. But the coyote voices broke through the silence around us: first a single high yip that slid into a drawn-out howl, then a whole choir of voices with the unmistakable yapping of pups rising above the lower notes. I'm not afraid of coyotes. And yet, I have somewhere in my brain the memory of being prey, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I wanted to run from their eerie song. My logical mind knew that they were not hunting me, but my body wanted to head back to the cave and the fire. I stayed, though, and listened long while they sang somewhere on the edge of the woods.

We've heard them many times since then, always after dark. They sometimes feed on the remains of calves that our farmer neighbor leaves on the edge of a hayfield. On the mornings after the concerts we find scattered bones and bits of black and white hair and hide in the field, and in the winter the blood and tracks and flattened-out places where the coyotes have rolled like domestic dogs in the snow.

Our most dramatic encounter with a coyote happened on a January day. We were walking with our dog in the little overgrown-pasture woods west of our house, when a grey-brown blur streaked toward us down the path, and, as if it had come by to pick up escape velocity, careened off at a tangent into the trees. The dog, panting hard, followed hopelessly a few seconds later. If I had been standing still, prepared and waiting for the coyote to appear, I would not have seen more than the blur, although had I been ready, I might have held out my hand to feel its cold coarse fur as it passed.

And then there was the time, on a warm August evening, that my husband and I came upon a young coyote feeding on the very foul carcass of a calf that had been lying on the bone-pile for quite some time. We could see his profile as he sat between bites; we watched him throw a bone in the air and catch it; we saw him hold down a piece of bone and flesh with his forepaws and tear at it with his teeth. When he finally saw us, he ran away instantly, his long dark tail and hindquarters held low, as if he were afraid that we'd grab him from behind. If we carry an ancestral memory of him as our ancient predator, the memory he carries of us is more recent. Later, in the light of the half-moon, we heard a single coyote howl, and in the morning, the remains of the calf were gone.

But it was when the Gulf War was raging and the reports of deaths and burning oil wells and fouled water supplies were coming in, that the coyotes gave me the gift of hope. Late at night, I was awakened by worries and dreams, and called by the full moon shining through the window, I put on a coat and stepped out into the frosty yard and heard the coyotes singing. I fancied first that they were mourning for the dying creatures of the desert half a world away, but that was my song, not theirs. As their voices rose and fell and intertwined, I could see them in my mind's eye, chasing each other, throwing bones in the air, rolling in the snow, lifting their heads and singing with all their hearts in celebration of the life that somehow, by some grace, manages always to break through the darkest nights that we know. If these elusive, hated, hunted scavenger brothers and sisters of mine can sing through the sorrows of Earth, then, maybe, there is some hope for us all.

From "The Five Town News," February, 1993

IMPIOUS THOUGHT

2010-03-02T07:27:00.000-05:00

Keeping Lent?

Why would I want to keep it?

I’d rather toss it out,

put it in a box for the rummage sale,

give it to the Deserving Poor.

I certainly don’t need it:

it doesn’t fit any more,

and besides,

I never liked the color.

MFCP, written on April 1, 1999, perhaps an Ash Wednesday?

WHAT YOU'VE TAUGHT US

2010-02-28T07:34:00.002-05:00

for Sarah Hughes

Not for gold, but for love--

your arms light and supple like wings.

Little hawklet, eaglet,

skipping along the wind in the joy,

diamonds following your flying feet.

So desperate we’ve been, for so long.

Faces tight as tambourines jangling

our despair, our hearts pounding

prophecies of destruction.

We’ve moved in spasms,

like marionettes with tangled strings.

Perhaps there is no music,

no pattern anymore.

Perhaps there never was.

But here you are at last, lovely one,

here you are laughing

as you spin and spin perfection

all around the margins of the dark.

With nothing to lose, you lost nothing,

and nothing at last was lost.

MFCP. I wrote this during the 2002 Olympics, after watching Sarah Hughes win the gold medal. Remember? It was such a dark time, with the Iraq war in its terrible early stages, and she was such a delight to watch.

ORNITHISCHIAN BEHAVIOR, part two

2010-02-27T07:27:00.000-05:00

BEHAVIOR

Territory

Size: 2-4 Square Miles

Main Behaviors: See-sawing, Twigger-Call, Song

The size of a T. Rex pair’s territory depends upon the availability and variety of food sources. The male begins to claim a territory late in the dry season by standing on a hill or ridge of ground near the center of the desired area and See-sawing, while giving Song. Usually there is little competition, but occasionally another male will approach the See-sawing male while its back is turned and begin See-sawing without Song. When the intruder’s presence is recognized by the first dinosaur, a Display Fight generally ensues. The vanquished dinosaur will back away from the victor, who immediately continues See-sawing and increasingly loud Song. Females within the area watch these behaviors closely and initiate courtship immediately after Territory is established.

Mating

Main Behaviors: Side Hopping, Necking, Peel--Call, Bibble-bibble-Call

Once the male has established a Territory, an interested female will approach Side Hopping. If the male reciprocates, Necking and copulation follow very quickly, and continue for several hours. Females may travel great distances before they find Territories that are satisfactory and males that will accept them. This appears to be the case especially when food is scarce, perhaps acting as a control on population.

Nesting

Main Behaviors: Horizontal Fluff, Twigger-call

The nest is built by the female alone, while the male watches to keep intruders away with the Horizontal Fluff display. The female scratches a rudimentary hole in the dust, and lines it with grass stems and dead fronds. Between five and twelve pale blue oval eggs are laid at the rate of one or two a day, and brooding begins after all eggs have been laid. The male shares brooding, and the non-brooding T. Rex will generally leave the area to hunt. Because eggs are one of the favored foods of carnivorous dinosaurs, nests are guarded closely. Observers have not seen a T.Rex consume eggs of its own species if the nest is guarded, but an unguarded nest, though very rare, is considered fair game.

Nestlings and Fledglings

Main Behaviors: Side Hop, Begging, Horizontal Fluff, Peel-Call, Twigger-Call

Eggs hatch within a few hours of one another, usually during a two-day period. Nestlings are covered with fine dull gray feathers, which fluff out within a few hours. The nestlings are brooded by the female only, while the male hunts. He feeds the female first, bringing her large pieces of meat, then regurgitates a semi-digested “Tyrannosaurus Milk” to the young. Commonly only three or four young survive this stage, since competition for food is vigorous. After six or seven days, the young begin to leave the nest for short periods, but never stray far. The male then takes his turn guarding the young, freeing the female to hunt on her own. Both parents Feed. When the young are hopping about strongly--in about ten days--the parents lead them away from the nest, in single file, with the female (usually) in the lead and the male bringing up the rear. Along the way, both parents hunt small game and bring it live to the young ones who attempt complete the kill. After another week, the young generally hunt well enough on their own to venture short distances away from the parents, but the parents are still watchful, and remain so until the young are nearly full grown. During the entire period, the young are protected from predators by the parents, first by warning calls, then by direct attack, if necessary. However, once the young are half-grown, the only serious threats to them are environmental.

Group Behavior

Main Behaviors: Bibble-bibble-Call, Display Fighting (among males), Twigger-Call

After the nesting season is over, the T. Rex family groups stay together until mating season begins again. They hunt, sometimes cooperatively. When food is abundant, there is no competition between family groups, but in times of scarcity, both sexes may give the Twigger-Call, and males may engage in Display Fighting. Just before sunset, they settle on a rise in the land, often an old nest site, and the young run around for an hour or so until nearly dark, at which time the family group huddles together for warmth.

Near the beginning of the following dry season, the juveniles lose all but their head feathers and leave their parents. Each group of siblings will stay together for another year. They may form larger flocks with one or two other juvenile groups. When they reach sexual maturity at the age of three, these flocks disperse and the young dinosaurs go off alone to find their own Territories and mates.

ORNITHISCHIAN BEHAVIOR, part one

2010-02-26T07:31:00.003-05:00

after Bird Behavior by Donald & Lillian Stokes

Tyrannosaurus Rex:

AUDITORY DISPLAYS

Song

A rapid, rising bubbly song with a bounce. Distinguished by a “Bibble-bibble” at the end of each sequence.

Males only

CONTEXT On territory at beginning of breeding season

Calls

Twigger-Call

“TWIG’GER-TWIG’ER-TWIG’GER-TWIG’GER”

Male or female

A low buzzy call with a strong accent on the first syllable. May be repeated up to five times, growing louder and higher each time.

CONTEXT On territory at beginning of breeding season by male; by either male or female when nest is approached. Occasionally while hunting, when prey is scarce.

Peel-Call

“PEEEL, PEEEL, PEEEEL”

Male or female

Soft, high-pitched, each syllable distinct.

CONTEXT During courting behavior, between parents and young during feeding.

Bibble-bibble-Call

“BIBBLE, BIBBLE”

Male or Female

Bubbly, rapid, rising and falling in pitch. May be repeated many times.

CONTEXT Between male and female during mating, also during nest-building and between members of a flock while hunting.

VISUAL DISPLAYS

See-sawing

Male

Front feet are held out to the sides to aid balance while the dinosaur alternately raises and lowers his tail and head in see-saw fashion and shuffles his feet to turn slowly in a circle. Usually occurs on rise of ground.

CALLS Twigger-call or Song

CONTEXT On territory at beginning of breeding season, and for a few days after arrival of females.

Display Fighting

Males

Two males bang the tops of their heads together while gnashing their teeth and scrabbling at one another with front feet. Very rarely results in injury.

CALLS None.

CONTEXT On territory, after one male has challenged another.

Horizontal Fluff

Male or Female

Stretched in a horizontal posture, the dinosaur fluffs its head feathers. The mouth is open.

CALL Twigger-call

CONTEXT Given when another T. Rex approaches nesting area. Occasionally directed at other dinosaur species as well.

Side Hop

Male or Female

Dinosaur with food in its mouth hops sideways toward another and passes the food.

CALL Peel-call or Bibble-bibble-call

CONTEXT A courtship behavior initiated by the female. If the male accepts the food, she waits while he finds and brings a piece of food to her. If he does not accept it, she may try again, but will generally leave his territory and approach another male. Also occasionally between a mother and a fledgling. Observed on rare occasions between two females.

Necking

Male and Female

A mated pair rub heads and entwine necks while clicking teeth

CALL Bibble-bibble-call

CONTEXT Before and after copulation

Begging

Male or Female Young

Arms are held at sides and fluttered up and down while the dinosaur leans forward with its mouth open wide

CALL Peel--call

CONTEXT Given by nestlings and fledglings when they receive food from parents.

(I'm posting this in honor of the coming Spring. If birds evolved from dinosaurs, why not bird behaviors?)

WORKING ON IT WHILE I DREAM

2010-02-24T06:47:00.000-05:00

The night after my doctor put me in a nursing home

I got a job in a restaurant under new management

but at the training meeting I took off the dirty apron

they’d given me and said I couldn’t be a waitress

after all because I could never remember

why I got up from my own table to go into the kitchen

so how could I remember what a customer wanted

and the management agreed it would be silly

to have good food and lousy service and

I think it was my roommate in the nursing home

a fine old lady who encouraged me to leave

because I didn’t belong there after all since

I was as healthy and strong as I could be

who also gave me the guts to quit the serving job

before I even started it even though I did apply

because though I’m working at it I’m not there yet

MFCP, April Fools' Day, 2003

LAST OF THE DADAIST LETTERS

2010-02-23T07:35:00.001-05:00

To Clara Schumann:

Whatever can I say? How can I possibly apologize enough? My only excuse, which is of course inexcusable, is that I didn’t know how deeply involved you were with him. Of course I’ll never, ever see him again, and of course I’ve burned the photograph. I hope in time you’ll forgive me.

To John Locke:

The air this morning is like clear green tea, and the mists are draping over the hills like little lacy handkerchiefs. Oh, I know you accuse me of being sentimental, and I suppose I am, but I keep expecting you to appear between the trees like a Knight on Horseback, or better, the King of Ireland’s Son.

To Hilary Clinton:

She had the baby, did Mother tell you? And she still won’t say who its father is. It’s a big child, with clear gray eyes and long fingers. I strongly suspect the oboeist, but I may be wrong. I wish you hadn’t left her in the station that night, but there it is. I know quite well how difficult she can be.

To Han Solo:

Would anyone be surprised if I did it? Would anyone say, “She was so competent, usually cheerful. I think she had a lot on her mind lately, but she didn’t seem especially depressed.” Sometimes I wonder if anyone would even notice. I didn’t write a poem today when I first got up. This means that I’ve missed that odd loose brain state--emergence from the fragmenting, defragging stuff of dreams.

To Sir Isaac Newton:

Chimpanzees don’t get backaches. Maybe if you could grow longer arms? Knuckle across the ground? Would you then worry about leopards? We’d have to live in pods then, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to fish for termites, either.

To Werner von Braun:

When they said “We have died with Christ,” maybe they meant “We have accepted the inevitablity of our death, so that we may fully live.” This day stretches ahead of me like an old rubber band that holds together a bundle of letters or a tattered cookbook.

To Lao Tzu:

Oversleeping leaves a part of my consciousness abandoned in dream. I probably shouldn’t try to write until I find it, but there doesn’t seem to be a map. Maybe another cup of tea? I’ve been drinking the strong English Breakfast stuff, brewed in a little red ceramic pot.

To Martha Washington:

I’ve been meaning to write, but somehow the time just slips by. I’m occupied, it seems, with many things: reading to the cats, making mittens from milkweed fluff, carving swans from bars of soap. Have you stopped stressing out on your own personality? I am simply trying (oh, once again!) to accept the snippiness in myself. I would think that the Right Man would accept it in you.

To Albert Einstein:

I’ve been reading bits of Levertov’s Memoirs--they make my own childhood life so humdrum that I’ve decided to invent one . Watch out! Only you and a few other old friends will know what really didn’t happen.

and more DADAIST LETTERS

2010-02-21T06:53:00.001-05:00

To Princess Diana:

Enclosed are 3 photographs. One was taken on Dover Beach, right before the war. The others are obviously photos of you when you were a little child. Funny how much you resemble yourself, even then.

To Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

I’d like to go to Paris, or Tokyo--someplace big and confusing where I can’t speak the language. I need a navy blue sweater with white, narrow stripes and some white pants to wear. And red shoes. I don’t want to take my mother.

To Margaret Mead:

I must sign off so I can get this to the Post Office today. It takes several hours to walk there, now that the bridge is out. I carry scraps of bread and chicken bones to divert the foxes, who can be harrassing this time of year.

To Ophelia:

Birding in the Azores? What will you be doing next? I’m sure things will work out with Sue Ann. She’s a good soul, but needs lots of space, and less time. Buy her a green balloon next time you go to the zoo.

To Dr. Kevorkian:

I’m so sorry we didn’t make it to the party--by all accounts it was fabulous! I had no idea your daughter was so accomplished--and the flowers! and the music! Next year, I promise you, we’ll be in Taos for the season.

To Emily Dickinson:

Thank you so much for the vase. Just knowing its lineage makes it precious to me--Ludwig, and the Washingtons, Marvin and Ann-Louise. But it’s beautiful, too--the shape and the way the light plays around the thin clear rim. I shall keep it filled with apricot-colored roses, in memory of our times at the Cape.

MORE DADAIST LETTERS

2010-02-19T06:59:00.002-05:00

To Elizabeth Bishop:

I do like the obituaries you send: so many interesting lives, so many different ways of composing them. But most of all, I want to thank you for naming how badly I need a daughter! I’d really, really like a daughter. Interestingly, I’m finally able to appreciate my mother’s love for me, something I didn’t do when I was younger. At last. She seems to want to talk a great deal about that period of her life, which is so good, since we know nothing about it.

To His Holiness the Dalai Lama:

I’m re-re-re-re-reading Little Women, of all things, and find it a great deal more moralizing than I did when I was young. And women’s laughter--the Heretics group I’m in (all of us over fifty) laugh a great deal when we’re together--not necessarily even about anything. We were getting to be a bunch of boring old people sitting around telling the same stories all the time.

To St. Francis:

Well, as you said, I’m about to ramble. I planted Swiss chard this morning, and gladiolas, and cherry tomatoes in pots. I love gardening! Well, the Apocalypse didn’t come yesterday--were you surprised? I hope that you are all better after your “very, very, VERY rare” experience. The chorus I sing in is preparing the “Laudamus Te” and the “Magnificat” from the Solemn Vespers for our spring concert, and I got to thinking that maybe the whole suffering bleeding mess of the world has been worth it for that music. It’s political, but we came at it obliquely, through Vikings and El Salvador and the Crusades and the Trojan War, for example.

To Christopher Robin and Pooh

I think it was Martin Smith who said/wrote that women’s soul work is different from men’s. “Holy detachment.” I want to come visit you soon. Maybe I shall. I miss you. What would it be like to be in that café and see people Raptured away? And speaking of books, I now have The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary. I have been wanting one for awhile.

To Robert Frost:

How many cats do you think is normal? Is three pushing the limit? I think it depends on the cats: some are equivalent to more or less than one. I think that our 3 are in reality (whatever that means) 5 1/2 cats. That doesn’t, of course, include the 4 5/8 dog.

To Martha Stewart:

How many times do I have to tell you that if you don’t write to me once a week, I go crazy? Yesterday I broke a frying pan, banging it on the front walk. I cracked the cement, too. PLEASE WRITE!!!

TO LUCY

2010-02-17T06:56:00.004-05:00

TO LUCY

Australopithecus afarensis

I sit on the bones of my pelvis

wondering if you looked into my eyes

you’d see an explanation,

a daughter you’d recognize.

You would know me by my hands adept with tools.

You’d hear me singing with my friends,

watch me bounce my baby nephew on my knee.

You could meet me on a summer morning,

help me gather arnica and goosefoot greens.

So much I want to know of you:

did you fish for termites, crack nuts, chew leaves,

pull strips of flesh from antelopes and birds?

Did you awaken stiff and scared from twitching dreams?

I would tell you that when I wake from mine,

I remember my Nana’s lullabies;

I want to know if someone sang for you.

What did you make of your life?

What did you understand?

When it came your time to die, were you afraid?

Were you surprised?

Your Great Rift Valley was a careless archivist:

in her sandstone house she stashed

scrapbooks of mysteries,

a trunk of discarded fashions.

She tossed the crumbled pages

of your story in the river, to the wind.

Some artist made a grinning baby

of that ball of bones

from Afar’s nipple-pointed hills:

knees, milk teeth, tiny toes,

one finger curled, brown skull

returning from the dust.

Through dust of volcanoes

on feet like mine your people walked.

I would like to walk

into your landscape:

the yellow grass and scrub,

the seeps and gullies of home.

In this cold land of glacial till

and blue lake bottom clay

I press my feet into ground,

footbones with their musical names:

talus, calcaneus, cuboid, navicular,

cuneiform, metatarsal, infantry of phalanges.

Across years and continents

these bones have arched their way.

Southern Ape from Afar,

where have we arrived,

our footprints everywhere?

We trail white vapor through the skies;

broken machines encircle us,

the crawling increase of our kind.

We’ve made our own volcanic air.

Our children are sorted into rooms,

our babies lie crying, all alone.

We make beautiful and deadly tools.

Our music would break your heart.

Our lives shatter, our bones come apart.

Brooding over you, I dreamed

I lost my way. I stopped

at a café where they were butchering

a road-kill fawn. A baby escaped

from my suitcase. I had to walk

home in the dark and I could

not find my shoes.

My journals are out of order,

unsorted letters in shoeboxes.

Unnamed ancestors smile in sepia.

In one musty drawer I keep an envelope

with two baby teeth, a cheap bracelet,

my grandmother’s amber beads.

Now that I am old,

I need a Nana most of all

to sit with in the dappled shade,

to speak of things encrypted

under layers of language,

this endless chatter in my enormous brain.

I cannot look too long

in any eyes. Before I see

the hawk, I feel its gaze.

There is something wholesome

in the taste of green.

I lie awake when the moon is full

and when the moon is new.

I remember where the plums

and wild asparagus grow.

Even now I know by smell

when the snow will come.

How hard, to evolve,

walk down across the land,

feel the twinges of selection:

bones growing longer,

speech changing the brain.

All around the world is turning,

brown and yellow and green.

Stars change the sky.

Do you remember?

Did you know?

Out of time, you walk with me

toward an Earth

as strange and familiar

as that house I sometimes dream

where once we lived,

that house I’ve never seen. .

~ for Barbara J. King

MFCP--I wrote this over a period of months in 2007, inspired by some Barbara J. King's Teaching Company lectures "Biological Anthropology, an Evolutionary Perspective," and "Roots of Human Behavior." It's a research poem--I did a great deal of reading and checked out the science with Barbara, which is another reason this poem is for her. She has a new book out--Being with Animals, and a Friday Blog about animals--both really good stuff!

DADAIST LETTERS

2010-02-16T07:02:00.002-05:00

My friend Karin taught me about these--you put slips of paper with the names of "recipients" written on them into a hat, and a bunch of sentences (or poem fragments) on slips of paper into another hat, and draw them out to make random letters. Here are some of my favorites, preceded by a little poem I wrote about writing them:

Writing imaginary letters

I feel my thinking

expand into places unexplored:

fields beneath the ocean,

valleys on the mountaintops,

the woods above the treeline.

To the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture:

I much like that after fifty, women stop being “female impersonators.” Last year they ate a nest full of baby robins just outside our living room window. This grieving business is VERY complicated, isn’t it? The older I get, the more certain I am that nobody can FIX anybody else. Certainly no one has every succeeded in fixing me, and not for lack of trying!

To a Tufted Titmouse:

I might spend some time in meditation working on an exercise Brendan taught me--he’d ask me to picture a situation and ask “whose eyes are you looking through?” and I discovered that very often they were not my own.

To Persephone:

I have finished reading Writing a Woman’s Life and liked it very much. Among my favorite bits is “Exceptional women are the chief imprisoners of nonexceptional women.” The Ethics Question about the letters: there is one, and I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll put some old fleece out for the squirrel to use--as if we need to encourage the squirrels around here. We sang a five-minute bit of Mendelssohn’s 2nd: “The night is departing,” a lovely bombastic thing. The orchestra is pretty good, and we were, too, so that was a satisfying way to end the choral season.

To Mary Wollestonecraft:

The creation, as you say, is full of Wild Cards. Apartheid, the end of slavery in Britain and the U.S., child labor laws (here, anyway), and now the amazing growing Eat Local movement, and Farmers’ Markets springing up like mushrooms! I love your fox story. There is a red squirrel trying to remove from an odd wooden person who stands in our front yard a scarf that I made from some old flannel. It’s funny to see her tugging away at it.

PLANET OF THE APES

2010-02-14T06:59:00.001-05:00

It hasn’t been that long, you know--

we’ve only just planted the garden.

We’ve only just come away

from our clustered huts beside the river.

Now we find ourselves surrounded

by things that click and break,

things we make but barely understand.

I wonder where we’re going,

since the process does not stop

despite what we can do,

despite the way we splice and grow.

It’s been hard, too--beasts, weather,

those other tribes across the way--

no surprise that we still know best

to fight, or cower, or run.

Though we wish and wish an Eden

once upon a time the people were not nice.

Arrow-pierced skulls decorate the shrines;

babies’ bones sanctify foundations.

The horns of the altars are stained with human blood.

It will take a long time to learn

to be quiet inside, not to

hit back, not to be afraid.

How long will it take to shoo the gods away?

Can you imagine what could be next,

what possible world might come

since nothing impossible has happened,

and nothing happens that cannot change?

MFCP I wrote this several years ago, after reading a great deal of biological anthropology and seeing the original "Planet of the Apes" film.

FILED AWAY

2010-02-12T10:23:00.001-05:00

Poor wee things, headless,

buried all along the edges of the forest path,

or in the pasture, in secret.

It’s their ghosts that haunt you at night,

the plots that twist and flutter through your dreams:

that house on the hill full of flowers,

geologist found in his field with a rock hammer in his head,

Magi on their way to Bethlehem: Druid, Bodhisattva, and African witch,

the girl who ran away to dance and was shot by a clown,

the church haunted by the specter of an evil priest.

Someday, you tell them,

I will try to resurrect you.

But they twitch and turn

in their shallow graves, unbelieving:

those wasted carcasses,

uneasy dead.

MFCP--This is about ideas for stories that never happened, just in case you can't figure that out. I wrote it in Feb., 2004

TRACKS

2010-02-10T07:15:00.002-05:00

Years ago, I wrote a column for a wonderful monthly local paper called "Five Town News." The pieces were not poems, but sometimes came close, and sometimes inspired poems. I'll occasionally post one of the columns here, and, as with the poems, feel free to copy and share--and I'd love to know if you shared one, and where.

TRACKS

There is a fox living in the bank bulldozed up years ago on the edge of the little woods near the house; every snowy morning I see his trotting tracks skirting the edge of the field; I see his little scent marks on tufts of grass. One morning, I found a clump of bloody rabbit fur that he had dropped on his way home. The next morning, the fur was gone, and the perfect print of a bird's spread wings, each feather clear in the fine snow, showed where the crow had come to tidy up.

There are more bird prints in the woods: around the hemlocks that have dropped their cones in the wind; there is a place I know where a mouse's tracks end in a scurry and a drop of blood under the feather-marks and talon prints of an owl.

But more usually the tracks of mice end in holes, edged with the ice-crystals formed from their tiny breaths. I leave sunflower seed outside the holes, believing in a vague and silly way that if I feed them in the woods, they will stay out of the heating system and the air filter of my car. Mice are a dreadful nuisance in the house, but how can I set traps for people whose tracks are the prints of perfect, miniature hands?

The skunks are up and about now, lumbering through the deep snow on their ridiculously tiny feet. And the turkeys are scratching here and there, and the partridges are wandering around in a way that looks to me to be totally random, but no doubt they have routes and schedules and businesses of their own. They have been sleeping in their deep tunnels near the path; I hope that I'm never too jaded to feel my heart jump wildly when a partridge takes its noisy whistling flight from a spot next to where I stand.

There is a place where squirrels live and dig for their stores under tree roots. There is a place, not far from the fox's den, where the rabbits come to dance and to feed and to be fed upon at night.

During one summer, there was a lone beaver trying to make a living in a long-abandoned beaver pond in the woods, and he dammed up a trickling winter run-off stream to make a secondary puddle on the pond's edge. He left flat, slappy tracks in the muddy slide between his ponds. But he is gone now, and what was once his domain is nothing but a pile of rotting sticks where the chickadees perch, leaving their thin stick-like tracks in the fine snow.

If someone were to track me, what would she find? First, the clumsy, inorganic snowshoe marks, made by the only creature who can't go comfortably barefoot in its own winter yard. Then, the packed down place where the snowshoes came off and my old felt-pack tracks led to the house. Then tiny puddles through the hall, into the kitchen, and to the back door of this mudroomless house where the boots were changed for clogs. And then nothing.

The tracker could follow me to work, sometimes, maybe, if she were clever: my smaller suede boot prints leading to the car, the marks of my tires on the road, my boot prints disappearing into the thousands of other prints on the streets of the city where I work. She would notice, if she tracked carefully, that sometimes the car stops and the boots track wetly into places where food is stored, and gathered, and paid for. And now and then, she'd find evidence of meetings, the remnants of shared meals, the prints of dancing shoes.

How close am I now to the creatures in the woods? My booted feet trace my journeys far from my den; I do not search desperately for lost acorns in the snow; the strong smell of the fox does not freeze me into immobile terror. And yet, as I walk to and fro--in the woods, in the city, through the market--I know that my little activities are the same as theirs: I hunt, I gather, I build, I fight, I flee. And sometimes, I even dance in the dark with my companions.

March, 1993

MANNERS FOR GENTLEMEN

2010-02-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

MANNERS FOR GENTLEMEN

A gentleman should never question a lady's poems.

~Ray Hudson

A gentleman always pours wine for a lady

so that the fire under her skin

will not set the alcohol ablaze.

A gentleman always precedes a lady into a crowd

to shield the innocent

from the power of her gaze.

A gentleman always seizes his hatbrim when a lady passes

so that the whirlwind that follows her

will not carry it off into the street.

A gentleman always opens a door for a lady

so that she may have her sword arm free

to vanquish the villans lurking behind.

(This is also why he carries her packages.)

A gentleman always walks on the streetside of a lady

so that she may, with a white-gloved finger,

tap into place any loose bricks

in the foundations of civilization.

A gentlemen always follows a lady into a carriage

so that he will not be in the way

if she must stun the driver, seize the reins,

and gallop resolutely toward the invading hordes.

MFCP--published in ATLANTA REVIEW, Fall, 2008

SEVEN BIRDBOOKS

2010-02-08T07:07:00.001-05:00

White-breasted nuthatch--

the fellow outside my window now--

its smooth black head,

V of black feathers on its grey back,

white underside intricately patterned in chestnut brown.

Inverted, it picks a seed from the hanging feeder,

flies away, returns to pick again.

And juncos, titmouses, chickadees--

common birds in winter, in Vermont--

hopping down the branches,

opening their orange mouths,

scratching in the snow.

Blue jays, goldfinches, cardinals--

the way they cock their heads,

twitch their tails, curve their wings.

Mourning doves perched placid on the fence

until the sharp-shinned hawk

rockets down and sends them whistling away.

I have seven birdbooks

and I am too heavy to understand a world

where crows survey the town from treetops

and rooftops, calling out their private news.

MFCP--I wrote this quick one on Feb. 8, 2008

JEWELS

2010-02-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

The moon in a mackerel sky

suggested spring snow that would not come;

and in the frozen orchard a deer lay dying,

her belly swollen with fawn unborn.

In the road, blood, a piece of headlamp, hair.

Francis came to shoot her

since she could not die.

Not a man to preach to the birds,

this Francis plows winter roads,

cleans the ditches of gravel and trash,

gave his niece money for a honeymoon in Vegas.

He parked his gray pickup in the drive,

walked between bare apple trees,

between winter prunings, with his gun.

I think that each soul looks like a jewel

resting in God’s great dark hand.

I think the deer is red, a garnet;

Francis a diamond, carbon compressed.

I think from his place that saint

calls down the crows, the hungry coyotes,

each to its consecrated task.

MFCP

This was published in Writers’ Journal, May/June 2004

RIDDLES #5

2010-02-03T06:42:00.001-05:00

THE FOOT

It came to nothing--

Mother’s ambition,

my sacrifice.

I always knew

that she was the one--

everything they look for--

that hair, those eyes,

the tiny foot.

Mine healed badly.

I shall always hobble.

No one ever told me

what was required

for balance,

what was required

for love.

RIDDLES #4

2010-02-02T07:04:00.001-05:00

A DIARY

Today is cold, but there is no wind.

I found a robin redbreast, frozen, by the water.

It made me sadder than usual.

They caught Willow, in the forest.

She had gone early, to pick new blossoms.

People get careless; people forget so soon.

I dreamed I swept the churchyard,

brushed the pebbles into piles.

There were no candles anymore.

The children were playing at hunting

in the spring meadow this morning--

stalking one another,

smelling, tasting the windy air.

It felt good to laugh again--

the first time since Grandmother--

since she’s been gone.

RIDDLES #3

2010-02-01T06:54:00.001-05:00

THE BIRD

Her hunger was terrible:

few seeds, and drought

had driven the earthworms deep.

Only one nestling still lived.

The others--poor scraps

of down and bone--too pitiful

even for the crows.

But then, along the forest floor,

winding through the tall black trees,

a trailing of coarse brown crumbs.

RIDDLES, #2

2010-01-31T07:24:00.000-05:00

THE CORPSE

It was such a little thing,

with its soft spotted hide

and pointed feet.

It lies there now, nearly invisible

in the brown leaves,

its little chest opened,

ribs cracked,

its child-sized heart cut away.

RIDDLES, #1

2010-01-30T09:46:00.001-05:00

THE HOUSE

Front step broken,

front door deeply cracked,

generations of paint.

Scratches around the keyhole,

fingerprints around the knob.

On the hall table a notebook:

lists of the birds that come,

sketches of children

playing in the snow.

A little too much furniture:

rickety tables, one broken chair,

iron plant stands with potted ferns.

A battered dresser: chipped crockery,

a few old letters, knick-knackery.

Upstairs, the unmade beds.

On the walls, crayoned pictures:

apple trees and beehives, a sleeping child,

the smiling sun shining on a cottage

with its red roof, ascending smoke.

Fo the next few days, I'll post poems that are the back stories for some fairy tales. See you can guess which ones.

REVOLUTION

2010-01-29T07:34:00.001-05:00

Every spring she lifted

the carpet in the lounge

where the old boys

sat drinking their single-malts.

She turned the good brown soil

and planted seeds: radishes and lettuces,

and as the days grew warmer,

chard and onions, tomatoes and squash.

Still they sat, dozing,

while the warm room filled

with leaf and vine, the scents of ripening.

Every day she came and watered and hoed,

and every day they sat,

reading their papers,

talking of business, the progress

of their cold gray war.

She filled apple baskets in autumn

and left them on the roadsides

for squirrels and children and crows.

The old boys grew thinner,

more querulous. When they rose

to go to the bathroom or the bar

they were careful not to dirty their shoes.

They would not speak to her.

When winter came

she tacked the carpet back down,

swept up the last dry leaves

and followed the boys to the sea.

There, while they sat

in the sun on their private beach

building castles of golden sand,

she went to work with her tiny trowel.

Little by little, so slowly they didn’t notice,

fresh water flowed between their striped cabanas,

the tall grasses grew in a river over their heads.

Crocodiles came by quietly, looking around.

With her trouser legs rolled she waded

through the warm green water;

her wide feet pressing into soft sand

eons of white shells and bones.

MFCP--I wrote the first draft of this on Jan. 29, 2007.

INVERTED PSEUDO DEMI-SONNET #1

2010-01-27T07:25:00.002-05:00

White egg, full moon of spring

above the hill. White wings

of geese in silver strings

spread out against the dark

last night. They flew

and pierced my heart

like light.

Thank you.

MFCP

My friend and fellow poet David Weinstock once said that a friend of his mentioned that poetry readings typically end with the lines, ". . . like light." (Pause) "Thank you." So I wrote a poem that ended like that.

IN HERITANCE

2010-01-25T07:21:00.001-05:00

All of us started in the same house;

climbing the spiral stair

so treacherous, so slippery with blood.

We took the same names:

God-Fighter,

One-Who-Fills-Graves-With-Bones,

Conqueror-Of-Mountains,

She-Who-Always-Stands-Alone.

Our story began when we opened our mouths

for the wrong food,

set our feet upon the wrong road.

I abandoned my Mother,

betrayed my Father,

raped my Sister,

murdered my Brother

Our gods in fortified heavens

hurled thunderbolts and curses.

We never believed

we were at home.

No one taught us--

we never learned--

a way to tame the four-armed dragons

breeding in the caves below.

We never learned--

no one taught us--

to unfurl our tight-skinned arms,

to grow fragrant feathers and happy eyes,

to drift easy over this soft green blue

cloud-veiled home that had been ours always.

We keep climbing the stairs.

Our gods keep hitting us.

We do not know we have wings;

We have never learned to sing our other names.

I wrote this poem for "Quatrain," a performance group that worked together for several years. The different colors represent different speakers, and the lines in black were spoken all together. I think we did this in a show about fairy tales.

WHERE IS YOUR RESISTANCE?

2010-01-22T07:21:00.000-05:00

WHERE IS YOUR RESISTANCE?

~question asked by a voice teacher

In the soles of my feet. The ground

is rough, and uneven. I sink

into the earth, stumble over roots;

my shoes are covered with clay.

In my belly. I can not digest

leftovers, cold vegetables or surprises.

Every adventure

pulls the system down,

yet my heart beats too fast against

the insistence of ordinary days,

as if everything in my horrific

imagination is forever coming true.

My eyes close against

shattered scenery I cannot repair;

my throat against the possibility

of anything beyond my present range.

It’s in the imperfection,

uncertainty of the times,

that’s where it is. I only want

everything always to be all right.

MFCP, February 13, 2009

CATCHING LULLABIES

2010-01-21T06:36:00.001-05:00

There may be butterflies around here, too, but these are lullabies.

~Jennifer’s nephew Gus, age 2 1/2

How quickly you comprehended

the correction; the lullabies

were relieved that they could stay.

You had captured this one with difficulty,

displayed it on your upturned palm

to your aunt, invited her

to touch its wings gently.

Outside, the last of winter

blew the snow against the windows.

The hard crystalline structure

of frozen soil in tiny ice towers

waited for the collapsing sun.

Tornadoes twisted somewhere else,

and far away there were bombs

but there in your room,

the lullabies were saved.

I would like to see them myself,

hovering around my room

when I am too weary for sleep:

my father’s voice remembered,

the one old song he used to sing.

MFCP, published in Bellowing Ark, 2006

OLD MAN WINTER--a sing-along

2010-01-20T07:16:00.001-05:00

Old man Winter, that Old Man Winter,

He don’t need nothing; he must want something.

He just keeps blowing, he keeps on snowing along.

He don’t wear sweaters, he don’t wear longjohns,

And them what wears them will soon be bygones,

He just keeps blowing, he keeps on snowing along.

You and me, we shovel and strain,

Backs all aching and wracked with pain:

Clear that walk! Chop that ice!

Vermont Life makes the winter look nice.

I get weary, and sick of freezing,

I’m tired of sniffling, and tired of sneezing,

But Old Man Winter, he just keeps blowing along.

ESAU

2010-01-19T06:54:00.002-05:00

I am the oldest child

They come to me for blessing

the sixteen-year old girl with a baby and a three hundred-dollar electric bill

the mummified beggar asking on his knees for three dollars for mouthwash

the old man whose brain has left him only the memory of loss

the mother by the bed of her tube-filled beautiful brain-injured child

I give them what I can

I tell them

God loves you God is with you even

in the dark even in places where you can't

feel your cross is carried

Jesus has overcome

all shall be well

and all manner of thing--

I lug them around

and I lift them up

and up over and

over praying in the

dark that I'm right

Hast thou

but one

blessing

my father

bless me

even me

also

O my

father

MFCP --I wrote this years ago, when I was doing parish ministry. Esau was the oldest child of Isaac. His younger brother Jacob got the blessing that should have been Esau's, and his lament, which is the last stanza here, has always touched me. This isn't the best poem I've ever written, but somehow it reminds me of what's going on in Haiti.

SHAPE OF SOULS

2010-01-18T07:04:00.000-05:00

That one is crumpled like a scrap of paper

she thought she didn’t want,

but changed her mind, and salvaged,

smoothed out as well as she could.

His is small and bouncy,

no one can catch it--

it’s slippery, elusive--

a transparent glitter-filled superball.

That one is thin, lean, hard, strong,

a wing bone.

It moves swift, deliberate,

no time, no flesh, to waste.

This one: an empty flower pot

stained with moss.

This one: a formal garden

with no weeds, nothing out of place.

Here is one large and welcoming,

wide, soft, slow: a sofa soul that holds

between the plushy cushions

secrets, like lint and scattered change.