Optimism and a poem

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Jane Hirshfield

Allegro Ma Non Troppo

Assisi, from Rocca Maggiore, as the morning fog clears.

A few weeks ago I fell madly in love with the poetry of Wislawa Szymborksa. I enjoyed the coincidence of meeting this Szymborska poem a day after I got back from Assisí. One morning in Assisi I dutifully recited all the Italian words I knew for my Italian breakfast companion at the B & B. I started strong, with the smattering of Italian I'd learned for the trip, and by the end of the performance, as la italiana enthusiastically cheered me on, I found the words I'd learned as a child reading sheet music: andante, vivace, lento, and, yes, allegro ma non troppo. Who says childhood piano lessons don't pay off?


Allegro Ma Non Troppo

Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightengaley,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I'm always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, irreverent face,
soaring in the winds of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren't conceived myself!

Life (I say) I've no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the cone's clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order - gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don't want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millenia, I've been trying
to appease you with my smile.

I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Poems, New and Collected, 1957 - 1997
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh


I have always loved the sound of the Polish language, a common sound in Chicago, and I have to say, Syzmborska has me tempted to try to learn a bit, if only to read her poems as she wrote them.

The vortex in my cortex

A wandering woman in Spain

Sought limericks to help her stay sane,

But they curled in her cortex

And formed a verse vortex

That drained the remains of her brain.



Very generously left in the comment box of this old post about limericks, by Virgil Keys, aka Phunicular. Check out the old post; Virgil wrote one of the limericks I posted way back then, too. The man's got a way with a rhyme. Thank you, Virgil!

Poetry Thursday II: A little girl walks San Pablo with her parents

I call it "Three seconds of eternity"

I don’t know what her parents have planned for her. What school they’ll send her to, what career they’ll point her toward. I don’t know what her goals will be, how she’ll plan out her career. Whether she’ll marry well. Gift her mother with grandchildren. I don’t know how they’ll plan for old age, whether she’ll be ready to take care of her parents and later, herself. If they plan to bring her a brother or sister to play and grow old with.

I only know her as she is now. This moment. Face pressed against the window glass, two plump hands plastered to the pane above her. A lost sprite wandered in from the forest, jubilant at the sight of people. Singing HOLA! HOLA! HOLA! Loud as she can, louder with every motherly tug on her sleeve. Blue eyes dancing, dark silken curls leaping round her head. HOLA! HOLA! HOLA!

I only know her ecstasy.

Poetry Thursday - Favorite Lines

Poetry Thursday's prompt this week was favorite lines - a favorite line of poetry.

My favorite lines are the lines that have inexplicably stuck with me, lines that float up, seemingly uninvited, when I least expect them.

Some of my lines float up in English, some in Spanish. I linked to a poem with 2 of those always present English lines for me - its first and last - in a previous Poetry Thursday post: Robert Frost's Directive. The first line rolls off my tongue like almost no other: "Back out of all this now to much for us." Might be that I used to live my life deep in the "too much for us". Whatever it is, when I find myself there again, that line is all I need to mentally take the walk Frost takes in the poem, and slow down.


Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver, holds another of my very favorite lines:
"You only have to let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves. "

Wild Geese


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work

Twister

While I am in an old writing class folder, here's an old scribble.

I am going to Rhode Island in just about a month, for my mother's 70th birthday and all I can eat of her Thanksgiving classics. I will have the rare chance, as well, to spend lots of time with a friend I've had almost all my life.

She was on my mind when I played with this, back in the same class: (I can't get this to space right in blogger and just want to move on to other things, so I'll apologize for the spacing; normally it has the back and forth of a Twister mat....)

A Game of Twister


Spin. Left foot blue.


I'll stretch. If you lean
left I'll weave my left
leg through this tunnel and…
there.


Spin. Right hand red.


When we laid the mat
one June night 30 Junes
back, Did you know?


Spin. Left hand green.


Did you know we'd be at this for life?


Matted circles spread
out in my pool room. Red,
yellow, green,
blue. Spinner flicked into a dizzying



Spin. Right foot yellow.


I hear the mat crinkle even when I can't see you.
I lean back and feel you bend,
a crazy straw of twisted limbs.
Hearts, breath, bodies. Lives.



Spin. Left hand blue.


30 Junes passed
the braid is a knot, fixed.
Boyfriends, husbands, baby boys,
Births. Storms. Death. Tears.

Miracles.

Spin

I let Frost have his say

There are lines that just stay with you, you know? I seldom hear the word "wall", or see a wall, without "something there is that doesn't love a wall" tumbling out of my New England born mouth.


To cheer myself up after the day's news, here's the source of the title of the previous post: a lovely, wise poem from a favorite fellow New Englander:


Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Robert Frost

Poetry Thursday: Everyday poetry

This week's Poetry Thursday prompt was "everyday" - using an everyday phrase, something you say all the time, as fodder for a poem.

Well, I didn't do that. Because this day I am diligently finishing up work and packing up belongings for a weekend away, I thought I'd post a little prose painting - of something I DO do everyday - watch the storks that live in Salamanca's steeples. I wrote this last summer, watching the baby storks leap off the New Cathedral as they learned to fly.

Here's a tiny prose celebration of the poetry in every day experiences, then, like glancing up to find flight school in session:

---

Learning to Fly

I see her pace out to the end of his nose. An ugly, cold stone gargoyle's nose, dark now from the dampness of the afternoon's rain. Then two leaps, two short half-pirouetting leaps like a barefoot child on hot sand and whoooosh, she does it. She throws her head forward, wind rushing through the fluffy down lining her tiny white head as she swoops off the gargoyle, kicking her red legs back behind her. She spreads her shaky young wings. I watch her experiment. First legs to the left, then legs to the right, finally legs straight below, bringing her long slender body into an odd sitting position. More like a feathered hang-glider than a stork student pilot. She picks up speed and loses speed. She celebrates her Cathedral near misses, perhaps just the fact that they stay near misses, with long slow ascents that end in quick, sudden dives. Exhilarating. For both of us. I suspect she is hearing her heart pound through her veins just as I am hearing mine. Pigeons caw, her parents rattle their beaks a bit, school children come shouting through the plaza, but she is silent, focused. Working. By the end of my half-an-hour watch, while I sit cross-legged against the cold, damp walls of Plaza John XXIII, feeling some 17th-century mason's stonework dig into the small of my back, she is gliding like her parents. Like a sailboat, struggling under the engine power of her wings until she finds it - a rush of warm air - and follows it, wherever it wants to take her. She spreads her wings wide as she can. Then, stretching her legs out behind her like a cliff diver, she stills and lets the warm current carry her, the wind just a whisper in her face.

Poetry Thursday: Words I love

Today's Poetry Thursday prompt was words we love, and words we hate, and while it sent me off in lots of fun directions - that many of my favorite words in Spanish are not words at all, but part of an elaborate second castellano of artful gestures and delicious facial expressions, for example (there's a lovely Salamanca poem in there, I just know it) -

in the end, I have come back to an old friend for Poetry Thursday this week. Here's to words!


Notes on the Art of Poetry
by Dylan Thomas

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

Poetry Thursday: Looking, Walking, Being

Happy Poetry Thursday!

Today I've decided to post another poem by Denise Levertov. I love reading this poem aloud; I love reciting it to myself while I wander strange places; I love becoming, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.

Enjoy!


Looking, Walking, Being

"The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in."
Mark Rudman


I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.


From Sands of the Well by Denise Levertov.
Copyright © 1996 by Denise Levertov.

Poetry Thursday, early

I'm too early to catch the prompt for Poetry Thursday this week, so I'll just post a new find, Living by Denise Levertov, the perfect send off to a week's wander through Ireland:



Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

Poetry Thursday: a spoken poem

Poetry Thursday's prompt this week was "a poem read out loud". I find poetry much more powerful read aloud; I believe poetry is meant to be spoken. A truly elegant poem lets its shape on the page tell you something the words can't, (don't you think?), while gently handing you the sheet music - the line breaks, the rhythm, the musical counterpoint - that takes you through the poem just as the poet would have read it aloud. So much of poetry's power, for me, is its musicality, the way the words roll off my tongue, the sounds they make as they leave my mouth, the contortions the poet sends my tongue into.

My poem for this week has yet to find its elegance on the page, but it is a poem I love to say. I've posted it here once before, but I couldn't resist repeating it when the prompt started me reading aloud.

I picked up an Irish tin whistle one day last winter and set my overachieving musician self to playing it. Didn't work. But it did teach me just what I needed to learn that day. I tried my best to reproduce the (sometimes painful) aural event in words:



A tin whistle tries to teach me to live softly.


In.
I attack
Lips pursed
Arms taut
Eyes focused
Ambition engaged.
A reel walks across the page.

Out.
She fights
back, a sleek black
tunnel of iced
metal a shot-up
tube a hole ridden backpocket
pipe.

In, hard and fast

Out.
Screech!
The piercing shriek
of an orphaned tea
kettle the doubletoned hiss
of a referee’s
warning

STOP!
STOP! Something’s wrong.

I sigh, discouraged.

Whistle coos.

Down here
Under your breath
It’s a whisper
of acceptance
an end of day sigh
a puff
a baritone cloud
a soft ceili breeze

In.
Shhhh
sings her bass string purr

Softly.

Forget everything you’ve learned.
Breathe

Out.
And just stop trying.

Poetry Thursday

Well, I have 4 minutes to make my first Poetry Thursday on time. It's 23:57.

And after the week I've had, of change, of the end of one chapter and the start of another, of immigration forms and business plans and workplace goodbyes that feel much more permanent that any of us will admit to,

after that week I knew I wanted Frost for Poetry Thursday. I've had a line from Directive running through my head:

Back out of all this now too much for us

as I've raced around all week, but Directive, a beautiful poem too long for this post (but you will go read it, won't you?) by this Thursday midnight has settled down and led me back to another Frost, a poem that feels like it's been with me forever. If it feels a little out of season, well, it isn't:

RELUCTANCE


Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

by Robert Frost




So there, a double dip of Frost!
If you don't know Poetry Thursday, surf over and check it out. You can post your own poems, or a favorite poem by someone else, or just write a post about poems...or.....

I'll be doing it here every Thursday. (Hmmm and maybe in Spanish some, if I am really going to share favorites... )

A mighty kindness

Zero Circle
by Rumi

Be helpless, dumbfounded
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
that No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.



Picked up from Andrea at Superhero Journal, who always seems to hit me on just the right day.

There once was a blog from Nantucket...

Now this is fun.

I happened onto the "musical instrument" category, but you can punch in any old keywords you like and voila! limericks!

I feel a little guilty posting this without writing my own, but you should feel free to comment in limerick form. In fact, I'll invite you to always feel free to comment in limerick form. Or haiku if you prefer....

My two favorites from the music category:

Acoustically by John Weigel

On the Spanish guitar my technique

Of unamplified strums is unique.

I acoustically play

In my singular way,

Causing strings to detune and to squique.

aflaunt by Virge (Virgil Keys)

There was a fair flautist named Anna

Took to lying aflaunt on the piana.

Though her flute skills were flawed,

Anna's fans all adored

How she'd flaut in a flirtatious manner.

The author adds that, in his opinion, FLAUT really should be in the dictionary,and I, for one, agree with him.

Landfall

When I get to shore I want to take a good look around.
When I get to shore I want to sink my bare feet into the wet sand,
deep,
drill my way down to my ankles and calves
and watch the water rise around the edges of the foot-hole I've made.
When I get to shore I want to remember how it felt to be out here
swimming,
never tiring but never seeing land, just a horizon that goes on forever.
I remember that last piece of land,
sand
before I pushed off, fell asleep and
found myself floating effortlessly out here in the middle.

Preserving life with a jacket I can't see.

When I get to shore I'll stay close to the waves.
One quick tag and I'm gone again.

When I get to shore, I wonder.
Will it be the same shore?



my poem, not my photo...

To the little girl on C/San Pablo last Sunday

I call it "Three seconds of eternity"


I don’t know what her parents have planned for her. What school they’ll struggle to send her to, what career they’ll point her toward. I don’t know what her own goals will be, how she’ll plan out her career, whether she’ll marry well and gift her mother with grandchildren. I don’t know how they’ll all plan for old age, whether she’ll be ready to take care of her parents and later herself. Or if they plan to bring her a brother or sister to play and grow old with.

I only know her as she is right now, this moment. Face pressed against the window glass, two hands plastered to the pane above her. A lost sprite wandered in from the forest, jubilant at the sight of people. Singing. HOLA! HOLA! HOLA! Loud as she can, louder with every motherly tug on her sleeve. Blue eyes dancing, dark silken curls bouncing around her head. HOLA! HOLA! HOLA!

I only know her ecstasy.

All about a tin whistle, and good advice

It was the lack of a piano. I decided to pick up the Irish tin whistle that followed me home from Dublin all for the lack of a piano.

A tin whistle tries to teach me to live softly.

In.
I attack
Lips pursed
Arms taut
Eyes focused
Ambition engaged.
A reel walks across the page.

Out.
She fights
back, a sleek black
tunnel of iced
metal a shot-up
tube a hole ridden backpocket
pipe

In.
hard
and
fast

Out.
Screech
piercing shriek
of an orphaned tea
kettle the doubletoned hiss
of a referee’s
warning
STOP
STOP, something’s wrong

I sigh, discouraged.

Whistle coos.

Down here
Under your breath
It’s a whisper
of acceptance
an end of day sigh
a puff
a baritone cloud
a soft ceili breeze

In.
Shhhh
sings her bass string purr -

Softly.

Forget everything you’ve learned
Breathe

Out
And just stop trying.

The journey

Photo by my brother Hal, in 2001, back before I'd slowed down enough to do things like get up at 5 every day to watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon.


I said a while back I wanted to post another Mary Oliver poem; I so love how this woman writes. Those of you who knew me before this blog will see why this poem so resonates with me. I haven't been a quick traveler, but oh, I recognize this feeling:


The Journey
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

An afternoon in the stacks

An Afternoon In The Stacks

by Mary Oliver


Closing the book, I find I have left my head

inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open

their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,

words adjusting themselves to their meaning.

Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,

continuous from the title onward, hums

behind me. From in here, the world looms,

a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences

carved out when an author traveled and a reader

kept the way open. When this book ends

I will pull it inside-out like a sock

and throw it back in the library. But the rumor

of it will haunt all that follows in my life.

A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.




I fell in love with a poet today. The day´s post on Superhero Journal (see my sidebar) introduced me to Mary Oliver, and I just had to surf off in search of more. She beat the hell out of my day at work.

And now my mouth aches from grinning at An Afternoon in the Stacks and I have another all picked out for another day. This one was for the bookworms, growing fatter with every read............