Verbose Sidenotes

Say "Goodnight," Gracie.

2009-07-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve devoted a lot to Grace Poems, and it’s hard to let go. But, then, that has been much of the poems’ point: knowing how to let go and learning what can be held.

This poem is held together, if at all, by tensions. It tries hard to turn attention to the transcendent, but earthly desire and memory always threaten to convert religious contemplation and prayer back to longing and regret. Too, the transcendent is always seen, as probably it must, through metaphors from lived experience.

Although the tenuous, even fragile tone of “Threshold of Return” seems to lack intention, it in fact intends the tenuous and fragile. Turmoil and insight and will and devotion do not balance harmoniously but are held both together and apart by a dynamic tension that is tenuous and fragile and, hopefully, beautiful.

At any rate, it is the only way I know that Grace Poems can conclude.

THE THRESHOLD OF RETURN

Men are made of what is made,
The meat, the drink, the life, the corn,
Laid up by them, in them reborn.
And self-begotten cycles close
About our way; indigenous art
And simple spells make unafraid
The haunted labyrinths of the heart
And with our wild successions braid
The resurrection of the rose.

—Edwin Muir, “The Island”

Grace stirs Faith’s soup in a dented copper pot and
hums old hymns then breathes, “Let first things be first,” and

Mother of mercy:
You walk in bright sun,
your silky hair whispering
in the warm slow wind.

(“He passed from men’s memory
in l’an trentuniesme de son eage.
In any case he is almost certainly
in that section of the country,
in one town or another.”)

To thee do we come:
I look at myself
and hope you will see me and
pray, too, you will not.

tastes for what she forgot. She nods and whispers low,
“Every love that lasts begins in love of earth.”

Before thee we stand:
You kneel beside a
shallow pool and dimple it
with your fingertip.

(My life had been drawing on resources
that I did not have.)

Thine eyes of mercy toward us:
I do not know what
your tiny smile means when your
reflection ripples.

Echoes of those before send blessings to the bread
then take a turn and settle softly to their place.

Despise not our petitions:
Will you see how weak
my hands have become and how
dirty they have been?

(I do not hope Faith will be sparkling and golden,
but soft in her brow and firm in her how as love
and justice grab her up now and leave her
to carve her name in granite.)

Pray for us sinners:
Will you see just how
this old coat hangs threadbare on
my shrunken shoulders?

They remember with you words your Lord Jesus said
and hand in hand look with you to His Way of ways.

Be at my side:
My hands lie inert
on my knees and pray—quiet—
that you will take them.

Each thing that is worthy converges in its worth.
Every love that lasts begins in love of earth.

Mourning and weeping in this valley:
Your hand pulls me from
this maze that is not all but
just a way of ways.

(My songs look eagerly into faces,
searching for their lost dead, brides and brothers.
We must now sing of weight that forms places.
Only in minute particulars do we good to others.)

My Guardian, to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this night be at my side
ever this night be at my side
ever this night
ever this night

ever this night.

Amen.

Palm Sunday

2009-06-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Poetry is difficult. Making the sound match the sense, evoking the emotion through the image, matching the understanding to a construct, showing the notion in the poetry--as much as the craft at all times demands, the demand escalates as the notion expands. When the "Idea" becomes more encompassing, the metaphors are taxed more heavily, less likely to carry the freight, and the language cannot craft the solution. A brilliant poet of the personal is hard enough to come by; a brilliant poet of the cultural (who also must be a poet of the personal in order to get the point across) is exceedingly rare.

In large part this owes to the fact that the expansive notion insists on the presence of patterns that are not immediately apparent, which depends increasingly on metaphor up to the task. In Poetics XXII, Aristotle writes, "But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of dis-similars."

Certainly my offering here is not genius, but I hope the effort is evident. Faulkner called The Sound and the Fury a "splendid failure." I can't possibly fear artistic failure, but I can hope at least it may occasionally hint at something splendid.

The first stanza (a sonnet) intends standard "Confessional" fare (cf. Lowell, Sexton, Plath) centered on the "problem" of hope: does it "anchor the soul" (Hebrews 6:19) or prolong pain (Nietzsche), or something else?

The remaining stanzas take hope as the given, then turn, in characteristic Grace fashion, the problem to, "Hope for what?"

Selah. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selah

PALM SUNDAY

The first time the Devil robbed her, Grace thought
her life, too, would end in the sudden, sharp
cramp that spat the crimson clot onto her
thigh where, in due time, it surprised her eyes
in the store changing room. The first time, her
womb withered, too, in her wail-numbed mind as
the clot withered and cracked on her surprised
thigh while she squeezed her knees to her chest and
cried through clerks knocking and asking was she
alright, till the police pried her to the
hospital for the night where she cried. The
first time. Experiences weathered her somewhat
around the hope that anchored her soul—or
prolonged her pain—till Faith came on Palm Sunday,

and dandelion down smeared Grace’s filmy gaze
at the yellow haze of harsh morning
framing the blanket covered lumps
she thought must be her own
feet.

Under the shrouded window,
the wide doctor cars
she waddled between the noon before
sun-gleamed like the king’s treasure
on a dais at the cathedral gates,
“that cannot drive my new baby Faith
to Green Gowan Brae.”

Lord on his donkey rides into the capital—
flea-bitten stinking threadbare
no two cloaks through the eye
of the needle.
“Exalted ourselves too near the sun,
burns the peaches’ skins,
can’t cut them into eighths
to share with my new baby Faith.”

And the palms shadows
wind waved lushly
on the baked hill road.
Selah
Selah
Selah

Unlearn Longing

2009-06-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

One of the most persistent themes of Grace Poems is coping with absence and longing and attempting to transform—however fleetingly—that complex of emotions into insight and consolation.

The emotional problem underlying these poems is that the narrator’s intensity of affection and admiration for Grace remains unrequited. Worse than the initial romantic straitjacket, as the narrator and Grace have aged throughout the course of Grace Poems, their lives diverge into very different directions, thus dissipating their constant camaraderie and intuitive friendship into occasional, semi-detached visits blooded merely (and meekly) by reminiscences and what-ifs.

As Dante teaches us, those earthy emotional experiences also parallel and reveal the religious dimension of love and longing for the presence of God. The absence inflicts awareness, with often excruciating minutiae, of what we need, and our vision of the fulfillment of that need suggests the experience of Paradiso. Of course, as Dante everywhere emphasizes, no earthly satisfaction ever comes close, and the pitfalls of idolatry will accompany the pursuit.

For the artist, this is the point at which the nature of metaphor in its ultimate form reveals itself. The familiar experience (metaphier) can be used to suggest the unfamiliar or unknowable (metaphrand), but it cannot substitute. In this context, it would be to hold the earthly experience to an impossibly high standard, degrade the divine reality, and flatten what is unique about each.

And so, while the emotional experience of absence of and longing for an actual person can be momentarily converted to insight about what we need and why we hope (in religious terms), the longing itself remains—as does the actual person. At best, the “Dante” figure hopes to travel a spiral in which the comforts of insight and the reality of actual experience continually arise and nourish one another: he refuses to be overwhelmed by the emotion, but he rejects mere retreat into ideas and sentiment.

But even that is just philosophy. The question remains, “How?” One approach, as suggested back in “Christening,” is through art. There the narrator created a sculpture of Grace in such a way that each detail he carved would independently remind him of Grace and return her to him for an instant. Of course, the Grace Poems cycle is itself a meta-version of that same undertaking. By now, in “Unlearn Longing,” he has begun to do the same with his experience of daily life. Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless.

UNLEARN LONGING

A sign of a particular person
instantiates a quality
that may flash from a stranger
and return us for a moment
to the company we miss.

I learned I can, at times, govern longing
by glimpsing Grace each day in a face or
perfumed ringlets billowing at each stride
of a familiar pace.

Butterflies light
on bayonets and roasted chestnuts are
recalled in the stench of blackened parapets.

What ease, in peace, of unlearning longing
in the passing breeze on a beaded brow.

In the Garden

2009-05-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to say about this one. My hubris leads me to say that the poem speaks for itself and stands apart from any interpretation I could give it. It either moves you, or it doesn't.

I don't think this poem overtly borrows from anyone, but upon re-reading it I can't help but think of Anne Sexton's "My Little String Bean," which may have been casting around somewhere in my head when I wrote it.

The final stanza contains the evidently inevitable esoteric bit, but the speaker at least here has stopped butting his head against the experience and just lets it take him. The religious aestheticism here is strongly Thomist. See Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas.

IN THE GARDEN

Under its sunned linen
her stomach sinew still lay lined
like an Olympian’s. I thought,
A baby grows in there,
crescent sea-creature,
pliable rice in slime
with tail and obsidian
pebble eyes,
a constant warmth humming forth
from the point of a pin,
hopefully to look one day
wholly like Grace.

I thought how only her hands
ever showed any age,
worked and washed and wrung
till the veins undulated under skin
that bunched when pressed
and always scented
of scoured oranges and coffee,
though she kept her nails
capable of tatting
uncertainties on the tabletop.

I watched across a summer array
of pie tins, vegetable trays
and sun tea in two-gallon pickle-jars
amid hugs and congratulations
under striped awning.
I saw her press
her work-hardened palm
on the still plain of her pelvis,
and I thought,
A baby grows in there,
crescent sea-creature,
pliable rice in slime
with tail and obsidian
pebble eyes,
a constant warmth humming forth
from the point of a pin,
hopefully to look one day
wholly like Grace.

In winter her sinew succumbed
at her swollen ankles and finger flesh
growing over its adornments.
The fleshmoon she carried
and hips held forth
murmured with warmth,
and I thought,
A baby grows in there,
impatiently pedaling, roiling folds
of purple plush, slick and insistent
with shaking fists and furrowed brow,
hopefully to look one day
wholly like Grace.

Hearing her Christmas shearling slippers
scuffing wide,
I thought, She will phone her mother
when the baby pulls her ears,
will one day stop wincing at the stench
and even forget she has just changed
a diaper, will wrestle like an oiled
Greek ancient to administer medicine,
will wonder when she’s away
and call five times a day,
will ask her vainest college roommate
how she ever got back into shape,
will sing along with cartoons
while gathering toys from every room,
will steal a sonnet at naptime
on a Saturday then herself
will steal some sleep.

Peering at the corner,
I saw her pausing in the hall, staring down
at my old blanket coat and
stroking it slowly once before
clearing her throat
and continuing to the door.
My coat still murmured her warmth
and I glanced to where she had held
it to her and thought,
A baby grows in there,
impatiently pedaling, roiling folds
of purple plush, slick and insistent
with shaking fists and furrowed brow,
hopefully to look one day
wholly like Grace.

Mere apprehension of beauty pleases; knowledge
of its interior grants moments of repose.
Grant us Thy peace. Grant us Thy mercy. Wonder of
what moves us! Is it peace, alone among desires
referring to no other, the aim of all else?
Or does peace, demanding it be in terms of the
good, merely consummate what we seek—an Idea
we hope to help enact so to participate?
Grant us Thy peace—please. The wonder of what moves us!
It will be Grace’s to pass on what was passed on,
steward lessons she worked hard from the twists of life,
to convey what she has learned of purpose, strength and
beauty. As it should be, for what I know of those
I learned whole in glimpses of Grace in the garden.

All in a Day's Work?

2009-04-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

(*This poem was supposed to come before "Thy Faithful One." I don't know how I managed to mess up the sequence.)

Of the purposes of allusion, one is an effort to apply experiences from the past to life in the present. By inserting antique references into conspicuously modern events, a poem can suggest the persisting relevance of the past while shunning mere nostalgia: the past informs the present, but the present must recontextualize past experience (see again the "verdant tangle" way back in "Christening"). In part I try to do that here by casting Grace in The Odyssey but, rather than put her in the conventional role of waiting Penelope, I have her playing the role of Odysseus' father, Laertes, who's devotion to working the land rebukes his son's lust for adventure.

The effort is not just to pay homage but to fashion what Van Wyck Brooks called "a usable past." It isn't easy. Any reference to tradition and history as repositories for enduring wisdom invites an immediate rejoinder pointing to the injustices and hardships of history. The task, then, is to consider what has been gained as well as lost in the march of "progress" and to cast a wide net in search of a vision of the good life rather than devolve into misty nostalgia or petty progressivism.

The discovery of a usable past is no less problematic in our conception of work. The culture seems to view traditional work in polar terms: either it is unmitigated drudgery or pastoral bliss--a slow, back-breaking march toward ingnoble death or a meditative oneness with the natural rhythms of life.

The question as this poem poses it is one of how our experience and conception of labor color our view of "first things" (the motivating cliche of Grace Poems being, "First things first"). To what does our view of work connect us and from what does it alienate us?

This poem is not a program, nor is it an economic theory. It falls woefully short on both counts and, really, offers no plausible possibilities for structuring an economic life. What I hope it does offer is the occasion to think again about the meaning of work.

"A Hundred Timbers and Seven Resolves" ransacks the literary history of work and economy, alluding to The Great Gatsby, Poor Richard's Almanack, The Odyssey, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Heart of Darkness as well as Kafka's "Metamorphosis", Sandburg's Chicago, Pound's Moeurs Contemporaires, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and of course Hesiod's Works of Days.

Also, please forgive the poem's political bluntness, but it also sprinkles quotes from Ronald Reagan's criticism of those who did not share his glib capitalist optimism.

A HUNDRED TIMBERS AND SEVEN RESOLVES

My First General Resolve:
(Our optimism has once again been turned loose . . .)
Early to bed and early to rise,
I shall awake to my numerous legs
pitifully thin stemming from my bulk
and waving before my eyes.

I first thought to husband
a family, write poems,
and grow vegetables.
Or was it husband poems,
grow a family, and write
vegetables? I never know.

My Second General Resolve:
(Little men with loud voices cry doom,)
I shall spend my breakfast inching in a steel box
tall and tough enough to climb mountain rocks
and lay me down to an anvil, O God,
to beat me into but a bolt
that binds together this thing I drive.

When I came upon Grace’s hunched toil,
I leaned my hand against a pear tree in sorrow.
“Will you wander now twenty years far from your country’s soil?”
“No, Grace, just buying you a tractor, and I’ll be back tomorrow.”

My Third General Resolve:
(talk about the age of limits . . .)
I shall spend my work and days sighing
in a low-walled box so my boss can see
that I don’t cheat the clocks or break
down crying (Mr. Styrax does not believe
in aesthetics. “Believe me, Mr. Manager,
my character is ‘unrealized.’”)

She incanted something about meandering drones,
laborless, sense deceived by gain, out for the ultimate lay,
seeking travel on ships (meaning loss) not knowing to keep close,
steal by tongue and think their wagons built, but base gain
is bad as ruin, and wisdom acts and remembers
to lay up in the barn a year’s victuals, and a hundred timbers.

My Fourth General Resolve:
(really talking about their own limits,)
I shall eat my lunch in a greasy slab handed through
my down-rolled window (no plate where a question
drops; neither rebellious nor faithful) and daydream
of drifting where people play polo or of squirting lead
into a continent. The age demands its image—
a papier-mâché Mephistopheles, my body without
form or shape like the bodies on TV, I shall
hide it in baggy clothes so no one can see and pay
a gym for sweat and heavy lifting while I sit at work
all day, filing, sorting and sifting.

The following dusk, Grace cast dust into her hair
and planted forty fig, ten apple trees, and thirteen pear.

My Fifth General Resolve:
(not America’s.)
I shall bring forth no new life, impart no wisdom to
hope they implement. Babies would only fatten
my wife. Foul factories of puke and excrement.
Commitment, permanent, labor pains, money drains,
interfere with careers and suck one’s life away.

“Would the Holy Mother have loved Him less
had He been just a boy from Nazareth,
born to bow in fear before Roman sneers,
father mortal sons and daughters, scrounge for
drops, not walk on water, and labor long
in shriveling sun until death? Would she
then have wished Him unborn? So whom would you
have fathers follow and mothers model?”

My Sixth General Resolve:
(It’s morning again)
I shall feed no hungry, clothe no shivering, give
no government back to you. I shall serve silk suits
that sit and preen among columns of cash, save six
cents on a can of beans, and board the windows on
mom and pop shops. No voting with dollars, either.

“When I was a kid, with sunburned little
arms and white-blond hair, my Uncle Ronny
knelt with me beside the garden and put
my hands deep into the soil. It was cool
and black and fine and soft and, ‘It’ll grow the
best stuff in the world,’ he said, like it was
a sermon. When I grew up I watched a
frowning man thinking about something else
scoop it by the ton and dump it into
trucks with tires taller than my Uncle and
me combined. What was left was fierce and hard and thrown
together and would not grow anything at all.”

My Seventh General Resolve:
(in America.)
I shall spend my life trying to look tough, but the world
will see soon enough that I am but a minor cautionary
tale, best forgotten at the first glass to a pompous ass
of stout and brown-nutted ale, and to the happiness derby,
of course, where I, the three-legged horse—pompous,
cantankerous and past-dated—shall not keep up with the
pomp I stated. It accelerates a grimace, at times almost
ridiculous, yet I shall show a willingness of the heart
(volition a relation between our self and states of mind).

Through glass I saw Grace,
young, but taught beyond her years,
knelt at her flowers,
French braid like a raven vine
curling over her shoulder.
The baby slept in
a pack on her back while lithe
sun-browned arms worked the
black ground. My hand pressed on the
glass, and I swallowed a sound.

Be Still

2009-03-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

“Be still.”
–My Grandma, on many, many occasions.

In Grace I try to understand and depict a character who, unlike perhaps the majority of modern Americans, defines her life primarily in terms of presence rather than absence, in terms of what she has and what she belongs to rather than what she desires and what she wants to escape.

At the same time, this effort examines the question of necessity, of what is necessary, what is the minimum threshold of “presence” in one’s life before one exits the deprivation state. It assumes that the issue of necessity is primarily qualitative and that an abundance of treasures will not make up for a lack of what is necessary, of first things. In other words, what is important, what do we need, what makes life worth living, and at what point do we need to shut the hell up and enjoy what we have?

But, too, how do we know when what we crave and what we obtain really are what is starving us, when we think we are striving but really have settled for the second-rate and manifestly dissatisfying?

This poem posits that the answer lies in part in the method of answering: there is a point, a still point, at which philosophizing, theorizing and systematizing must end, and the answer (or something approximating it) can only be observed, hopefully lived, and only minimally described. Yet here the poet cannot help but continue to insert himself, to require instruction, and Grace (once again echoing much of the scolding “Beatrice” lays on “Dante”) magnanimously provides it. The rest of the poem, so far as I know, overtly borrows from no one.

THY FAITHFUL ONE

Grace donned her gardening cap,
bought for a song at a flea market
along a gravel road
where she once got lost.
Clouds blotched the olive canvas
where she had sweated it through
and she thought, “It doesn’t matter
if my hair is matted and flat
under my ratty garden hat.”
She walked out of her new house—
“not built to last”—
past the base of the staircase
that so soon showed its seams
where the walls were taped together.
“In Green Gowan Brae
we accumulate our house:
stones stacked,
quarried from monuments
to the emperor’s gods
and cathedrals then built
for God’s emperors
long ago.
We know what we build with
and where it comes from,
what work and genius
harvested these stones
and cut them to fit,
what (false) grandeur they intended
that we then picked apart
to make squat whitewashed huts,
and we made a statement
about real greatness
and knew it
but remembered to marvel
at the old cutter’s craft.”

Always, thy faithful one has need of thee.
My familiar title merely captions
the photos our friends once used to taunt us.
“Turn, Grace, turn thy eyes,” they all incanted.
“Thy faithful one, to see thee, journeys hard.”

She strolled with shoulders
broad for her frame
and capped by almond-shaped and
striated
workers that fit in the cup
of my palm when I greeted her
with stealth—
shoulders dimple-backed,
dimples where my thumb could lay
when I said hello.

If stones that love of wrong things accreted
did not hang so heavy from my proud neck,
you might then notice me here on my knees
and lift up my beard to rebuke my eyes
and say, “In the distance, you could better
see the beauty you believe shows in me,
yet you let the space make me less precious.”
I should have seen the window to wisdom:
that knowing one cannot hold may alone
show what one may keep even in the deep.
But instead I drew darkness from true light.

Her Grace grin growing—
crooked with a curled upper lip—
she caressed her wrist with corn silks
and said to the stalks and ears,
“You don’t care whether I’m pretty or thin.”
She chanted quietly,
“O bury me not on the lone’ prairie
And bury me not in the deep dark sea.
Scatter me instead at the wrinkled roots
And someday return me in black oak leaves.
When fall rain blows
Let me stick to the dark wood of a door
In Green Gowan Brae
And no one notice me—pray!”
then thought,
“No one here complains I sing in a screech.”

“What of me you longed for participates
in the good and thus drives you to seek it
and flee the vulgar crowd. No waters yet,
drunk from grain or from Lethe, have taken your
fixation on longing and loss. Your lost
dreams lost you the dream. Groping here and there
for what cannot be held, you lost what none
could take. And you forsake us both. Alas!”

She stooped to preen
lima leaves
and said sonorously,
“Whether they think I’m smart enough
won’t grow a hill of beans.”

Thy friend, no friend of fortune, struggling with
a boulder path, turning back for fear—fear
he would never . . . What grief if you berate
him too late for his relief! Thy faithful!

She returned to the house at dusk, thinking,
“In Green Gowan Brae
your staircase knows your name
and calculates in an instant
the strain of your weight,
and it remembers when you could only crawl.”

What Fresh Hell is This? (sorry, Dot)

2009-02-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown wrote with characteristic overkill, “A pregnant emptiness. Object-loss, world-loss, is the precondition for all creation. Creation is out of the void, ex nihilo.” Paul Ricoeur argued in The Symbolism of Evil that it is only through the loss of the sacred that we come to learn why it was sacred. Or, as John Lee Hooker sings, “You don’t miss your water till your well run dry.”

This is by far the most ambitious piece in the Grace Poems collection. It attempts to complete the project I discussed in the preamble to “Feign” (see “The Young and the Feckless”) by marrying a studied use of language and imagery to a contextualization of the underlying emotion within myth and allusion. The goal is to take an emotion that is frequently—and usually badly—handled in poetry and try to (1) invoke it in the response of the reader, and (2) grant insight into the emotion and its meaning by constellating it with other stories (as Eliot wrote of Joyce’s Ulysses, by “manipulating a continuous parallel” with myth and allusion).

Here the emotional occasion arises from the speaker’s contemplation of “losing” Grace, either because she decides that he is more trouble than he is worth or because some tragedy has befallen her. In literary terms, these are actually two separate genres: “lost love” and “elegy,” but the claim of the poem itself is that the speaker’s “loss” of Grace—whatever its form—would fall into a unique emotional category approachable only through a ransacking of all we know about suffering: damnation (Stanza 1), crushed hope (S. 2), rejection (S. 3), death (S. 4), exile (S. 5), dis-aster (that is, loss of the promise of heaven) (S. 6), and physical fear and agony (S. 7).

Make no mistake, this poem does plenty of ransacking, despite the speaker’s claims to the contrary (“none are anthologized that I may pillage”—the best narrators are always suspect, although he is quite right that perhaps no one literary genre or work is adequate to describe Grace-loss). The poem invokes Inferno (Virgil will lead the speaker through this hell, although, frankly, the narrative reminds me more of A Christmas Carol than it does Inferno), paraphrases Eliot throughout (“Hamlet and His Problems,” “Prufrock,” Four Quartets, “Gerontion”), alludes generally to Rilke’s Duino Elegies and specifically to Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the idea of who has the “right” to grieve fascinates me), Hamlet, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, and Dostoevsky’s Possessed.

Obviously, there’s more at stake here than the loss of the person of Grace, but that’s the whole point of the collection. At the same time, it’s probably the best “love poem” I’ve ever written even though it doesn’t look like one—and that’s probably why it’s the best. Altogether, it tries to approach a partial answer to the perennial question, “What does love teach us about the sacred and divine?”

IN FEAR OF HER LOSS

When good fortune prevails, life provides the image
simultaneous to the emotion. Not here.
None are anthologized that I may pillage nor
artifice supplied to objectify my fear.
Though we cannot bear very much reality,
to ready me for dread eventuality
Grace sent a Virgil to lay before me the way
I would wander and perhaps stay.
I would rather tear and paw a wound exquisite
than one day discorporate and wail What Is It?
And, morbid boding masks beneath detection a
tribute to the compressed fire of our affection.

“Mortals put faith first in romance, then friendship, then
in parenthood, imposing upon each in turn
burdens no human relation can sustain. Yet
it is not faith misplaced but misperceived: in the
rapture of romance, security of friendship,
hope of parenthood, you might glimpse participants
in the height of paradise. In loss, longing and
dread: inferno and purgatory. Your desire
and desiring, sorrow and sorrowing, blind. Pray,
lacking the vision, dwell at least on things, not
ideas, seeing her first and then what the nameless
emotion reflects, though missing its telescope.

“And there! Look there: there, she still lives, in courageous,
exasperated indifference to you that
afflicts you as punishment as well as a loss, as
choice not chance or circumstance. As she stands, sad, at
her tasks at the sink and tries not to think of your
loss that is hers, you slink like a guilty thing in
her mind’s drizzled streets and alleyways you once sunned
together. Knowing any forgiveness would be
unmerited, you might glimpse: a flicker of grace.
In longing for it: the mortal need. Heeding the
lines set by her indifference: the eternal
through the ethical. Pray, do not exasperate.

“And there! Look there: Death possesses the virtue of
finality, but here also it would excuse
the mute awkward strain masking impropriety
the sound of her name writes on your face. And would it
be some blend of proper and improper—blending
making it both and neither, blameless—or her real
ghost, shimmering like a continuous breeze on
the brown down of your neck, quivering a whispered
‘What of me?’ and imageless emotions, nameless?
That look—fixed—of longing, loss, wondering, worry,
regret, passion, secrecy. But, then, age dictates
ultimately that all your emotions be mixed.

“And there! Look there: you repose, still and shallow-breathed
in a second-hand rocking chair, brain crackling and
throbbing. What right to grief? What right even to your
reminiscences? Grief enough due to queue to
compete. Hoarse, contorted mother yanking throttle-
fisted at her lace collar. Orating father,
sawing air, his flex-jawed son blaming him. You are
a stranger to them. And perhaps then some other
would charge your claims like a bull elephant, and you
would repose and agree—heart twisted in your chest
like a wrung washcloth as your brain crackles and throbs—
silent and still in a rocking chair not your own.

“And there! Look there: some sacred marble marvel made
a hovel. Sweated, strained to height then maintenance
for time immemorial, sanctioned, sanctified
and made holy by a necessity long since
receded. How can it help but be a hovel
when only the holy remains? Where the romance
cradling the ritual decedent never had legs
its own? Ah, but have you mortal coils abundant
misperceived necessity, your afflictions and
your salves redundant? You may yet weep for your old
gods. The comforts and shelter of love and law fade
to indulgence in nature’s reddened tooth and claw.

“And there! Look there: boiling pitch between your fingers
where your mythopoeia merely malingers.
Shadowed corners weeping, rooted spine near shallow
cackling, washing, ink, becoming sheer shackling, down
along the bones, scraping. Hovering, receding,
at its tail leaving twin mottled worm-scars on the
skin. Jawbone grinding stubborn tastes left in the teeth,
eyelids clinching against suspected lies beneath
words gently spoken as a softness on the brow,
heart fearing the past will rise up against it now.
Ardent oaths rot in your throat and choke. Fingertips,
unpressed, numb. You could not even kiss her goodbye.”

When good fortune prevails, life provides the image
simultaneous to the emotion. Not here.
None are anthologized that I may pillage nor
artifice supplied to objectify my fear.

The Young and the Feckless

2009-02-05T09:49:00.000-08:00

For modern readers, “Dante’s” vaunted love for “Beatrice” seems pretty . . . pathetic. We want Dante to grow the guts to just walk up and tell Beatrice that he’s crazy about her and always has been. Little wonder that Dante was such a perfect vehicle for T.S. Eliot to hitchhike in his sustained meditations on the poetic psyche that lacks the courage of its eros. (Both “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” are absolute and invincible masterpieces, lest anthology lovers protest.)

“Dante” and “Eliot” are siblings readily forgiven because their poetry is outstanding and their romantic fecklessness so metaphorized and mythically situated. But, stripped of all that, pathetic longing and unrequited love are such ubiquitous poetic themes that they present tough artistic problems for anyone trying to broach them without being trite and rightly cast into the dust bin of sentimental, versified . . . crap. (That same fixation on pathetic longing is probably also partly why the poets’ beloved often think them cute and endearing but ultimately undesirable wusses.)

The answer, in part, lies in craft. That is to say, I don’t think the artistic problem is in the familiarity of the emotion or its over-representation in poetry. Indeed, the ubiquity and power of the emotion begs for poetic expression. And, though the limit to the variety of emotions may perhaps be learned, the particular instances that trigger them—combined with particular ways of communicating them—are probably inexhaustible. The task of the poet, then, is not to in all instances reject “trite” emotions but to find new and better ways of engaging them. I think the way to begin that project lies in the inventive use of language and imagery that, rather than describing the emotions, triggers in the reader memory of them (Eliot’s “objective correlative” and Pound’s “Image”).

This is no small task, considering how many clichés the poetry of unattainable love has generated over the centuries—clichés that set us on a hair trigger to roll our eyes the moment we smell them moldering in the verse.

I don’t pose my poem here as a good example but just as an effort guided by the theory. My particular objectives, though, were modest: concrete imagery—hopefully not over-familiar or sentimental—and a frank acknowledgement of the fecklessness tied to the poet’s unrequited love.

DEAR GRACE: FEIGN (UNSENT)

My car windows were fogged, and innocence
feigned, by words we did not say and touches
felt but never made. Laughing, running in
the rain to bongo jazz and spoons ringing
on coffee cups, surprising tenderness
rising up, I sprinted alone down dead
end streets while you again went home to a lump
snoring in twisted sheets. And where was I
to go? With my surprising tenderness
shuffling alone under the dim dumpster
light, in a wet-dog alleyway under
my empty flat? Now that I have run to
my own snoring sheets and it is you there
alone, I cannot feign. So to silence.

Conversations are like icebergs . . .

2009-01-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

One of the chief premises underlying my poems is that present thoughts, feelings, emotions, words and actions always express some take (either conscious or unconscious) on past experience and that the accumulation of experiences, as translated through evolving perception, form a kind of "verdant tangle" (see "Christening") which generates all "meaning." That verdant tangle is also made up of "cultural" experiences that are either overt (e.g., you've read Pride and Prejudice five times and intentionally use it as a lens for life, or you intentionally mimic John Wayne, etc., etc.) or more unconcious (e.g., you've seen so many advertisements that you intuitively believe that Bacardi makes you attractive and well-dressed, or you think McDonalds makes for happy families, etc.) Thus, much of my poetry turns on depictions of experiences, both personal and cultural, that interpret each other in sometimes unexpected ways.

It's worth admitting (if not already obvious) that this view is normative in that it also preaches (1) the moral value and necessity of detailed attention to concrete experiences and to the particularity of everything that populates them, and (2) the requirement that we do all we can to learn from experience and apply it to living as better human beings (of course, the entire project of Grace Poems is to sketch a suggestion of what a "better human being" might be).

The technique here is familiar Modernist material, superimposing dialog on superficially unrelated events. Here. though, the relationship between the two is perhaps more obvious than usual in that the dialog distills and points to the past experience underlying the present conversation.

AUBADE ALMOST

“Every day is an effort
to keep my body hard
and my mind supple.
This gets harder with age.”

“You’ve got spine,” I said.

Gripping her lunchbox,
Grace sat lotus-like at the fringed hem
of her mother’s pink robe
and watched the dangling bulb
flash on the fur’s matted nap.
They sniffled in steady time
with the old ironing board’s squeak,
and her mother occasionally winced
at the swelling in her cheek.
They missed the school bus horn’s
repeated rebuke.

“I think my mother takes my grit
as a judgment
on her never leaving my father.
Or maybe she wonders
why I used it all
protecting my brother and sister.”

“Not if she knows why she used
what she had
protecting the three of you.”

Ale foam silently sizzling
into his coarse black whiskers,
he dented the soft pine tabletop
and geysered a slosh
across his Thanksgiving plate.
“Just you wait
till the world convinces you
that you can’t be great,
daughter of mine.”
Grace wiped the spill
for her mother’s sake
and muttered, “I learn I can’t be great
every time I let you
get under my skin.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Nevermind.”

“Think it’ll rain today?” I asked.

“It never rains.”

“Back home it never stops.”

“Hot today.”

“I don’t remember it being this hot
when we were kids.”

“I wonder if we’ll ever throw
snowballs again.”

“You could never throw them, anyway.”

Squatting ape-armed and barefoot
in fine soggy sand,
Grace cleared a sun-whitened spiral
loosed from her niece’s braid
and helped count again
the shells in the bucket.
A needle of fear
crackled her brain.
Courage then in an instant..

She pinched the end of her nose
and squinted at the haze.
“I look out at the trees,
and it’s worse than we’re not needed.”

Life Happens

2009-01-20T16:38:00.000-08:00

When I set out to write Grace Poems I ordained that one of the rules would be that Grace would have a life and not just an existence as a metaphor. Partly this is because I think the finest sense of metaphor turns to crap without a finer sense of life for it to indicate, but mostly because I thought that without the grit these poems would not only fail to pay tribute to what the character of "Grace" stands for but would also betray it.

I used no special technique here and had no particular literary tradition in mind. I do think that the image of "muddy grass" may be stolen from a poem by (I think) Ford Madox Ford about World War I or some such, and the bleat of "O Caina" obviously owes to Genesis as well as Inferno and one of Pound's Cantos (can't recall which one). On reflection, the structure also reminds me of "My Last Duchess."

This poem does carry some technical significance in that it alludes to prior poems in the Grace collection and foreshadows others, thus attempting to confer some kind of intra-referential coherence to the whole. Green Gowan Brae makes another appearance (as it will again), and its normative role in Grace's imagination becomes a bit clearer. This poem also suggests the significance of Grace's nieces from the previous poem (and one future) and introduces the sister who garners another mention in a later poem. In more general terms, this poem begins to thicken the depiction of Grace's family context as earlier suggested (see esp. "Table").

HER SISTER’S KEEPER

Grace in the rain, sprayed in the face from splatter
flung from shine of mirrored alabaster—
her fingertips traced where hammer had forced
a chisel to name her prayer and its course.
“Your fun puffed away angles from your face.
It battered your beauty. You mentioned names
then waking. I got what you weren’t saying.
I told you that, in Green Gowan Brae, boys
strut compassion, not fear or frustration.
In Green Gowan Brae, girls glory more in
works than in what envy and erections
their bodies can inspire. You resented
pity, love, rejection and judgment and
begged for them and didn’t know the difference

all in one tale. I didn’t crave to save
you. And couldn’t. I didn’t want to love
you but did. I wanted to hold you and
diligently stroke your ashtray hair so
you could cry your fermented tears but you’d
do it all again at the fall of night.
I would rather you had forgotten me
but remembered what I saw in you and
believed in it.” Grace in rain, shivering,
her chanting then went to wailing as she
rocked on her haunches in the muddy grass:
“Keeper, keep her. Where shall I go now? Where?
O Caina awaits! Forgive, forgive us!
Forgive us our trespasses! O Caina!”

The Gift of Good Land

2009-01-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

The Garden. The Promised Land. The Land of Milk and Honey. The Homeland. The Motherland. The Lake Isle of Innis Free. Sacred places--even if (especially if?) they only exist in the mind of the tribe--are as important to knowing our best idea of ourselves as are our heroes and sacred stories.

Of course, Grace has one of her own: Green Gowan Brae. It occurred to me that most ideas of the Good Land in current circulation imagine, really, no place at all--just a state of effortless and stupefied bliss. Even the earthly versions contemplate little more than endless leisure and empty pleasure in infinite supply. One thought of Grace's Good Land told me such a notion would not do. For Grace, the paradise to be desired nourishes and rewards the virtues she admires. And that's another reason she is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

GREEN GOWAN BRAE

Only then can we look up and see
Grace with three nieces at her feet.
She begins then to read
from her brown leather journal
husks of meaning, grown thick
around a kernel formed
by memory and desire.
As if wrapped in a quilt
and rocking by the fire,
she raises a finger and begins to say,
“Life is hard and happy
in Green Gowan Brae.

“The winter is cold, the summer is hot.
We have to chop our own wood
and there is wood to be chopped.
We have to grow our own food,
and there’s good ground to grow it
in Green Gowan Brae.

“We can work hard if we want to,
and there’s plenty of work to be had.
Efficiency lends to the leisure
of mind and work-hardened hands,
not to the captains’ riches
in Green Gowan Brae.

“Upslope, small slate-roofed
houses hover, stone painted heavy
layers of white, tight wooden
doors as thick as
a man’s fist is wide.
Downvalley, the roots, come
shallow from the rain
that rarely stopped one
summer that the locals recall,
coil and crest along
the spongy ground.

“Words are not what they name,
describe or express.
What marks are made
by the living in a place
are not the life of the place.
What is written on the surface
and in the earth
is not the life of the earth.

“Know well what is written.
Know well what is said.
The words, the ways,
the marks of days
passed with thoughts
of Green Gowan Brae.
Though these, too,
are not the Kingdom,
know well what is written.
Know well what is said.

“Daily I will fail in this,
then make amends,
go to bed,
and daily start again with
thoughts of Green Gowan Brae.”

Grace Tzu

2009-01-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

Usually my aesthetic crudely mimics ancient Taoist art and philosophy. Here I use Chuang Tzu-style parable and Lao Tzu-style didacticism and juxtapose them (my favorite aesthetic device). Grace here is in her sagely state, and what could be more Tao than a mule?

PATIENCE

Know this: the mule remained a mule
and all that that implies.

What good will and patience Grace has for me—
patience in plenitude and with tenacity,
patience with my imperfections and my impatience.
Each time in ten, I fail to take a breath,
to pause for patience, and Grace asks,
“What will we miss in a moment
that lay beyond what the moment presents?
What flaws, mutually unforgiving, unforgiven,
blind?”

My father’s greatest great-grandfather flogged
a mudded mule that halted in pain at a secret
shard hidden in the hollow of its hoof.
Then, with healed hoof and bleeding back,
the baying beast never would track
for my father’s greatest great-grandfather
again.

What good will and patience Grace has for me—
patience in plenitude and with tenacity.
Grace awaits caterpillars’ transforming,
knowing they may not, and pauses to find
the furry worm as beautiful in itself
and its potential. I crave to fashion
a flickering reflection of the good will
and patience Grace has for me,
to pause through infuriating flaws with
tenacity.

Traded cheaply, where patience paused
the mule went on to plow without complaint
and revealed itself a selfless saint while
herding children playing too close to danger.

Trailer Park Dante

2008-12-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned at the start, Grace Poems takes much inspiration from the poetic figure of "Dante's" love for "Beatrice" (in quotes because a person can inspire art, but the art is never the person). In part my purpose is to situate that figure in a current and tactile environment. The speaker in each of the Grace poems (where there is a speaker) is meant to be just such a recontextualized "Dante" (the "Dante" of the Commedia and La Vita Nuova, that is).

One of the most famous and most touching episodes in Inferno is the tale of Paolo and Francesca's illicit love and its endurance despite eternal damnation and separation. That canto also stood as a kind of foil for Dante's unconsummated love for Beatrice that--because unconsummated--could be utterly transformed into an object for contemplation and a vehicle to approach a kind of understanding of the divine (God being pure love and all).

Despite the masterpiece of art and meditation that it produced, Dante's love for Beatrice remains for most of us hopelessly abstract--even boring, at least by modern standards. Dante, of course, knew this, too--and thus his generous lingering on Paolo and Francesca despite their sin and damnation.

Part of the task of Grace Poems is to maintain the objectification and insight of Dante's love for Beatrice but put it in the world and find, too, a moral insight in love a bit more "earthy."

In other words, where (if anywhere) does the love of Dante and Beatrice meet that of Paolo and Francesca? Perhaps outside a 24-hr. pancake shack.

THE IDEA

We, too, read Lancelot’s trial,
sat on the warped boards
of carved picnic tables
in a park misplaced
at the overpass
by the All-Nite Pancake & Truck Stop
through numerous summer
afternoons—

Grace guzzled orange soda pop
and clicked her thumbnail
under her front teeth
to think,
“What he must’ve felt
to write like that”—

read the kissed smile
and gawked glassy-eyed
at each other’s
lips
through numerous summer
afternoons.

We, too, read Lancelot’s trial,
but were not undone.
Gallehault fled from the Idea
in a jet-engine truck
sheering by.

I gaze at Grace eternal,
a hobbling wind between us.
God spares the hopeless gates.
God grants I may contemplate—
yet a fire that refines.

Grace's Greatest Hits

2008-12-11T06:28:00.000-08:00

"Table"--from the title onward--probably presents the most complete and concise portrait of Grace of any of the poems in the series. Grace's grace, her foundational compassion and agape, her self-reliant pragmatism and frugality, her grasp of proper priorities, and her hard-won and in-the-world resiliency--all organized by her basic belief--all reside in this poem.

This, too, is the most complete and concise tribute to those whose best features inspire these poems.

TABLE

Grace makes. Grace mends.
When Grace was ten, her
second-hand twin bed
broke at the grain of
its warped wood while her
parents, dangle-armed,
snored beer.
Grace makes. Grace mends.

Make room. Make room.
The Kingdom is an heirloom table, round,
welcoming all to full feast or meager
meal alike. Bring before it the sick and
weary. Bring forth both the ponderous and
the slight. Bring first the children, and delight.
Make room. Make room.

Grace makes. Grace mends.
Her tiny hand took dad’s
dusty hammer, tiny
fingers pinched rusty nails,
and she practiced till
she could drive them true
forever.
Grace makes. Grace mends.

Make room. Make room.
Do not discard the runts of the litter.
Do not leave behind the slow, the old or
the blind. Find a place at the table for
them beside the better able and give
them an extra forkful of food.
Make room. Make room.

Grace makes. Grace mends.
A table, lacking beginning
and end, first place and last,
lay legless on its back
till Grace found four pins that
fit. Now it sits with a
place always for friends.
Grace makes. Grace mends.

Grace's Grace

2008-10-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

This one is like the duffle bag I took to Wyoming: you wouldn't believe how much I tried to cram into it.

"Narcissists" starts with Christopher Lasch's basic insight that cultural narcissism is an effect not of selfishness but of consumerism-based anxiety. To that I attached Rilke's sort of modernist mystical romanticism (the realm of the Nameless--the pasture for unicorns, etc.) butted up against Wallace Stevens's ruminations on the dissolution of old houses. The style also intends a nod at Stevens's syntactical virtuosity.

I like this one because it shows Grace not just as a quirky savant but as a real thinker, and it's also the poem where I think she first earns her name: her relentless effort to understand all serves her goal to forgive all. But she is still holding out for the Idea.

NARCISSISTS

Wanting to forgive all (“like a Christian,” legion smugly sneered),
Grace accepted their selfishness, too, was fake—deeds desperate
to please the judge the newness commandment seated
and they feared,
and they rendered then sin and a common life
commensurate.

To watch an old house dispelled and dissolved
in mid-air is one
of the great overrated experiences we have done
dumb if fevered hands merely fondle (flaccid, idle,
shameless), not craft rubble to realm and image
appropriate, Nameless.

Cold Comfort

2008-10-14T06:19:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I indulge in the lyrical. I mostly do not for fear of getting carried away. This one rather blatantly alludes to Yeats's "Folly of Being Comforted" and even steals one of the weak rhymes (remember, Eliot wrote that immature poets borrow while mature poets steal). I like this one because I think it opens a new channel, showing the narrator and Grace have something of a shared history much more emotional and less abstract than in the first three poems of the cycle.

DEAR GRACE: WE SHALL NOT BE COMFORTED (UNSENT)

You shall not be comforted,
and I can offer none.
You grieve that he chose to leave even
though he first expressed
impressed surprise
that you read The New York Times.

He never chewed his lip or scratched his pate
to contemplate your philosophies,
but you will not hear it now from me.

You shall not believe in your beauty.
Striking enough, perhaps, to turn an empty head,
but, once known, once given, you will not believe
there is beauty to be seen. You shall not be comforted.

Your opinions, it is clear, shall resist gray and
gravity and wrinkles, but you will not hear from me
that they are beautiful.

You shall not believe in love,
except in its fact as a kind of smack
in the specie blood. You shall sneer at the addict
faces in the mall, and you shall retract
and rise above it all.

I shall not say
time will heal these wounds.
Time has not healed mine.
Dump your pain in mascara stains
on my shirt, and when asked
of your hurt you shall answer
that you are fine, as do I.
You shall not be comforted,
and I can offer none.

And now for something completely different, part deux: Chanoyu

2008-10-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Since these two poems are short, I decided to post two this week.

I experiment a lot with my poetry, but the basic aesthetic is from haiku. But that claims too much, since in reality it's haiku as pirated by Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and others around 1912-17 Europe.

At any rate, the effort is to concentrate a complex of emotions, ideas, etc., within a kind of "snapshot" and (keeping with the photography metaphor) to "crop" the image in order to focus attention and invite conjecture.

In "Grace Makes Tea" I attach that aesthetic to a vague reenactment of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu). Here we see Grace doesn't exactly always think in the most conventional terms, but she almost always means something.

GRACE MAKES TEA

The rough plywood ceiling
of the loft she lived in
slanted sharply over her bed
and sometimes skinned her knuckles
when she turned over in the night.
I said, “You only decorate
with squares, like you’re afraid
of circles, or something.”
She said, “I like squares
because they’re about choices.”
She unplugged the hot pot
and poured us both Earl Grey.
“Now, squares circumscribed . . . .”
Then with a sigh, “Oh, trust me,
you don’t have the time.”

And now for something completely different

2008-10-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

I told you they weren't all as lengthy as "Christening." And, unlike "Christening," this one actually utilizes a verse form rather than broken prose. "Poetry Lesson" intends two objectives: (1) Disciplining all subsequent poems away from anything flowery, and (2) giving Grace a bit of that personality I mentioned last time. As you can see here, Grace is more than happy to be a bit of a smart-ass provacateur in order to make a point.

I honestly don't remember what poetic "mode" I was in at the time, but at a glance I'd guess I had in mind William Carlos Williams sitting in one of Rimbaud's cafes.

POETRY LESSON

Grace ("Cafe Awning")
purse-lipped
deposed my fawning
that dripped,
"Beauty pink white pure."
She sniffed, "Art thou sure?
I pissyellow my fingerskin
with cigars borrowed from strangemen."

In the beginning

2008-10-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Due to popular demand (a.k.a., the prodding of one persistent person), I have begun a blog of my poetry. I will probably post one poem per week or so till I run out.

For now I will confine myself to Grace Poems, a collection of pieces I've been assembling for the past three years or so.

Grace Poems is a cycle of individual pieces unified by the character of Grace. Hopefully each poem can stand on its own, but they also hopefully all compliment one another and form a whole greater than the sum.

Grace herself is partly inspired by certain real people and is my tribute to them and to what (in my mind) they stand for. I also model Grace on poetic figures that may be a bit obvious (Dante's Beatrice and Yeats's Cathleen, Crazy Jane, etc.). My intent was to create in Grace a symbol of ideas, values, beliefs, emotions and myths. But I also wanted to give Grace a certain reality and personality.

I start with what for the moment is the first poem in the cycle, "Christening." This one uses a "juxtapositional" device that I borrow from French Symbolists and Modernists like Pound and Eliot. In "Christening" it essentially looks like three poems spliced together. The purpose is to suggest comparisons of things that may not seem related. From those comparisons I hope to suggest insights and meaning that live in patterns and interdependence rather than only in step-by-step explanations and hierarchies.

Don't worry: they're not all this lengthy. Also, I am still figuring out HTML tags, so this doesn't look quite right. It'll have to do for now.

CHRISTENING

If the mind has an eye
worth anything
it must have hands, too,
mutually transferring warmth.
In fall I returned to the
late summer image
of flashes of cathedral lights
on baptismal satin over
new thrashing legs
and held.

Grace declined social invitations for
a year and ate dinner from cans under
candlelight in a cold apartment. Two
months pay saved, she bought me a thousand-pound
marble block. Gleeful, I bound again the
splintered shaft of my hammer and re-forged
in charcoal glow chisels repeatedly
softened on scavenged granite scraps. I vowed
to transform the little obelisk to
the very face of my benefactor
then dreamt as the roof rained on me of my
masterpiece memorializing Grace.
Slabs slid with splashing crashes to the floor

If age brings not wisdom, at least let it
accumulate instances—images, sights, sounds,
smells, touches and tastes that may remain
with us as we fare forward.
Nostalgia turns the present to a pillar of salt.
Instances live, journeying with us, living as we
relive them, changing with us each time.
Accumulating instances, each accumulating meaning
and morphing features, ceasing, ceasing mere accumulation,
begin to grow together and become, with time
and revisiting, an increasingly verdant tangle,
chattering, chattering, insinuating with meaning
and context new experiences that pass into it,
speaking, speaking from the past and continually
revising it, interpreting the present,
and framing future expectation, fear,
hope, and faith.

of the abandoned garage and shook the
buckling wooden walls. I nightly renewed
my shabby tools and dreamt in the rain of
lasting reminiscence. I draped my work
in a scraggly quilt when Grace brought me hot
meals her mother made for her on covered
plates. As I sat and ate I tried to hide
from my dusty face a creeping shame that
my inept hands might waste Grace’s gift and
deprive me of my memento. Once while
taking back an emptied plate, she plucked from
the pile a marble shard and laid it on
my lap. “The panther buried in that—I

Wind over last leaves like restless legs
beneath new sheets, musk of brown leaves
fallen, wet from rain. The blouse I kept
that an old friend I never saw again
left on the couch
lost the last of its costly perfume
in the hall closet. I feigned I forgot it,
hummed the christener’s chant,
and went to rake the leaves
and smell them instead.

wish I had your gift to bring it forth; I’d
carry it in my pocket.” I thumbed the
surface of the instance to procure the
panther and coughed to answer with a weak
nodding gesture, “It doesn’t look like you,
the sculpture. Just angles and surfaces
jammed together that remind me of you,
that when I see one of them somewhere makes
me miss you a little less.” She then bent
forward to brush the dust from my brow for
a kiss before she left. I have carried
the panther with me from that moment since.