Category Archives: poetry

down but not out yet

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What is my problem!!
The sun is out, my seedlings are thriving, I’m taking my 60 milligrams of happy pill every day, we have hospice available (including a social worker for moral support), and my mom is still sleeping a lot.
I should be feeling a whole lot better than I do. I shouldn’t be feeling this “stuck.” I should have more energy.
Maybe I have spring fever. Maybe it’s the just-past full moon. Maybe the loss is greater than I thought.

Elevator
Jim Culleny
Be still in a field of
slowly falling snow
and renounce focus
Peer into the distance
to where the hare
hunkers under a log
and the coy dog
waits for it to move
Let a billion dropping flakes
inundate your vision
unselfconsciously
and find yourself rising,
taking the forest with you,
taking it all,
riding the snow-snuffed
woods into a gray sky,
levitating at the pace
of cool, languid
precipitation,
rising gently weightless
with pine and spruce
and the white-clad carcasses
of busted oak and ash
and every crystal-buried
stalk of undergrowth,
—the graygreen scales of lichen,
the silent future of mushrooms
underneath awaiting
the blessed touch
of damp and sun,
take with you the lights
of a distant house
and the wisps that unwind
from its chimney
like tendrils of love
of a blazing heart,
find yourself rising
unfettered as a hawk on a thermal
a dandelion tuft on a whistled breath
a balloon let loose from the grip of a child
ride upward,
easy,
weightless as a well-lived
soul


The above from one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails.

in memory of myrln

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My once-husband was my Monday guest blogger, Myrln (AKA William A. Frankonis), who passed away lalst Thursday. In honor of his memory, our daughter asked me to post the following, which she found in his extensive files of his own writings. He doesn’t have to be here to be here.

Lessons from the Wonderground: a Father to his Children

ONE
Try not to hurt anyone, which includes yourself.

TWO
Try to make yourself whole, knowing all the while that’s a lifelong process.

THREE
Be true to yourself, whatever that is at the time, for like everything else, your self changes.

FOUR
Speak out against wrong, however you define it and no matter who is the culprit.

FIVE
Honor children and always listen carefully to them; they are all smarter than we credit them and beyond you, they may have no voice but yours.

SIX
Find and honor all the wonder in all of Nature and in all of yourself, and reconnect, for you, too, are a part of Nature.

SEVEN
Keep close to family, blood or otherwise, for you are, and always will be part of each other.

EIGHT
Remember the dead in your heart, but honor life and the living with your time and attention because afterwards it is too late.

NINE
Laugh often, cry as necessary, fear what should be feared, love deeply, hurt when there’s pain, be courageous, know the holy value of breathing and of everything else that makes up living.

TEN
Find and regularly visit the stillness at the heart of life.
I love you dad.
namaste

“seated on waves”

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For Bill, who will soon be seated on waves.

The Same
Pablo Neruda
It costs much to grow old:
I’ve fondled the Springs
like sticks of new furniture
with the wood still sweet to the smell, suave
in the grain, and hidden away in its lockers,
I’ve stored my wild honey.
That’s why the bell tolled
bearing its sound to the dead,
out of range of my reason:
one grows used to one’s skin,
the cut of one’s nose, one’s good looks,
while summer by summer, the sun
sinks in it’s brazier.
Noting the sea’s health,
its insistence and turbulence,
I kept skimming the beaches;
now seated on waves
I keep the bitter green smell
of a lifetime’s apprenticeship
to live on in the whole of my motion.


Coincidentally, this is a recent one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails.

we tabled it

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My mom and I eat in front of the television set in her little sitting room. She sits in her soft recliner in front of a tray table. I balance it all on my lap.
The kitchen table is littered with boxes of her favorite cookies, her can of fake coffee, glasses half-filled with water, a water jug (we have a really stinky well), her container of pills for the day, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and other assorted objects, including a pair of my reading glasses.
For the more than a quarter of a century during which I lived alone before this, I rarely sat and ate at my table unless I was reading while I was eating. I don’t think we are very different from many people these days. For the most part, we’ve tabled the table.
Oh there are exceptions, even for me. I have a chance to sit with a family and have dinner when I’m visiting my daughter. We even have conversations — this is when we can get a word in among the energetic chatter of my 5 year old grandson.
And one of my greatest pleasures these days is getting together around a table with my women friends, which I can’t do very often because they live too far away. But when we meet, it’s always around a table where we spend hours eating and laughing, talking politics and movies, and men.
And so when the following poem from Jim Culleny appeared in my in-box, I couldn’t help but be moved by it.

Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.


Soon enough, I will have time again at the table.

powwow at the end of the world

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I repost this poem from Jim Culleny’s entry here at 3 quarks daily.

Powwow at the End of the World
Sherman Alexie
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
………………………………………………………………………………….

Sherman Alexie, “The Powwow at the End of the World” from The Summer of Black Widows by Sherman Alexie; Hanging Loose Press.


Meanwhile, all around the rest of us, politicians spin us into oblivion.

this for you

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This is for you, my offspring, both of whom have the gift of insightful sight.

Snapshot
Charles Tomlinson
for Yoshikazu Uehata
Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus —that
is as it should be too,
for, once seen, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup
all we might have missed
in the gone moment when
we were living it.

Thanks to Jim Culleny‘s daily poetry emails for the above poem.
I wrote a poem long ago about a photograph. And I posted it, along with the image.
And because of that post, I’ve been translated into Chinese by Yan, who left a comment to let me know.
I just love the Web.

I should be doing laundry….

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… but, instead I’ve turned my back on the chaos of clothes surrounding me and lose myself in the only space of mine in which I have any control.
My email includes one of Jim Culleny’s daily poems.
I get to the last line and my heart leaps into my throat.

Personal Helicon
Seamus Heany
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I blog to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

that creature of habit

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She has trained me to adapt to her routines, my fat old lady cat. You can train a dog, but your cat trains you.
Each morning, after she eats and comes down the stairs, she goes to the door to the breezeway and waits for me to open it so that she can look out through the patio doors and check the weather. Of course, I comply.
When she decides to go out, she likes to go out the front door, take a stroll around the house, check for new scents, and then sit at the back door expecting to be let in. I have learned her “constitutional” routine, and now I obediently give her enough time for her walk and then obediently open the back door for her.
She likes her tablespoon treat of wet cat food twice a day at mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and if I forget, she comes and finds me and gives me a sharp tap on my leg to let me know that she’s waiting.
I have become a creature of her habits.
The affection that so many of us have for out cats made this poem (one of Jim Culleny’s daily ones) even more poignant.

A Cat in an Empty Apartment
Wistawa Szymborska
Dying–you wouldn’t do that to a cat.
For what is a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb up the walls?
Brush up against the furniture?
Nothing here seems changed,
and yet something has changed.
Nothing has been moved,
and yet there’s more room.
And in the evenings the lamp is not on.
One hears footsteps on the stairs,
but they’re not the same.
Neither is the hand
that puts a fish on the plate.
Something here isn’t starting
at its usual time.
Something here isn’t happening
as it should.
Somebody has been here and has been,
and then has suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent.
All the closets have been scanned
and all the shelves run through.
Slipping under the carpet and checking came to nothing.
The rule has even been broken and all the papers scattered.
What else is there to do?
Sleep and wait.
Just let him come back,
let him show up.
Then he’ll find out
that you don’t do that to a cat.
Going toward him
faking reluctance,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
And no jumping, purring at first.

mother to son

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The following poem is from one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails:

Mother to Son
Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.