Island Schoolteacher

Monhegan Island with Manana beyond

This poem is inspired by a 2004 oil painting by Jamie Wyeth (born 1946). 
 http://www.wikiart.org/en/jamie-wyeth/monhegan-s-schoolteacher-2004

  ISLAND SCHOOLTEACHER
                        After Jamie Wyeth

            a wink on the distant western horizon
            Pemaquid Light greets the early morning
            skies still star rich with dawn’s approach
            beyond her window Manana a silent sentinel
            snow blanketed it is impossible to chance
            upon Norse runes etched in its coarse granite
            somewhere near its hidden bleating foghorn
            a rising tide washes around Casket Rock
            as it slowly vanishes into its watery crypt
            harbor emptied of all boats the island
            lobstermen gone to sea to pull their traps
            the Laura B rounding Nigh Duck passing
            Smutty Nose to the rime-encrusted wharf
            this is what she sees from her cottage
            secreted above dark village & quiet harbor
            she sits naked at her bare morning table
            fresh from a bath her hair towel wrapped
            it drapes across her back & thigh cloaking
            her modesty from the gaze of no one present
            she does not stare toward the winter sea
            the village houses rising like tombstones
             from the snowfields beyond her window
            her attention rests only on an open book
            a piece of toast clenched between her teeth  
            she quietly plans her day’s lessons dismissing
            another long night of tired lonesomeness
            & dreams of a day she boards the Laura B
            when it takes her quickly & far from this place

My Abigail

Photograph by Spencer Stewart

Later this month my wife and I will celebrate our 41st anniversary.  When we first dated in college I used to write her poems and tack them to a bulletin board in the theater's green room.  She responded with a pen and ink drawing.  I'm still writing and now she paints.  This poem is for her.

MY ABIGAIL
           - For SallyAnn

            in these most foiling of times
            when I find myself at odds
            with friends and foe alike
            I think of you as my Abigail
            my rock   my wife   but most of all
            my friend   my best of friends
            without whom I am nothing
            but a tattered banner flying
            in the weakest of winds
            you are the mast to which I
            tether my greatest hopes and ambitions
            if I do not tell you this enough
            it is only a weakness in my character
            you are my country   its hope
            its flag   its sweetest anthem
            I can say no more than this
            you are its tallest shadow
            when the sun shines its brightest

Rain

        
I spent much of the month of October traveling throughout Germany, and during a week in Berlin I had an opportunity to visit some of the refugee and migrant processing centers in and around the city.  This was at a time when Germany had graciously opened its borders to what Carolyn Forché has called the victims of extremity . . . this at a time when they were arriving faster than the German authorities could handle them . . . at a time when other so-called civilized European nations were turning their backs on this tormented migration . . . at a time when other Islamic countries were quick to turn them away.  It is one thing to see their plight on television.  It is another thing to observe it up close and personal.  

This poem was written one evening in Berlin after a day of witnessing first hand what happens when much of the civilized world, including the United States, turns its back on the innocent victims of incivility in its most heinous aspect.
 
            RAIN

            a rainy evening on Alexanderplatz
            a Schnell Imbiss on Greifwalderstrasse           
            drinking Turkish beer a döner box
            to nourish me at the end of the day

            sitting alone here watching Erdogan
            on the big screen in the back
            a pause in a soccer match played
            in Monchen-Gladbach in the rain
            the fellow who made my dinner
            shakes his fist at the TV
            “lanet herif!!” he curses     
            that modern sultan who smiles
            in Ankara not hearing this
            the pleas of his own people
            this obscene taunting in rainy Berlin

            smiling I try to forget this morning
            in a park in Alt-Moabit a steady
            swarm of migrants stamping its feet
            standing numb in a line steaming
            in the rain I study each sad imprimatur
            anguish etching many damp faces
            no Azhan called out by a muezzin
            only the Johanneskirche bells tolling
            reminding them who and where they are
           
            they who are beyond their ken and culture
            they who transited Erdogan’s land
            crossing the vast Anatolian plains
            searching for lives better than
            the shattered ones they left behind
            they who put children in tenuous boats
            believing the Aegean safer than land

            I try to forget the image of the Syrian boy
            drowned and washed ashore in Turkey
            Erdogan still smiling in Ankara
            while the whole world watches in horror
            its tears like so much dismal rain

He has Earned His Sleep - In Memory of Tomas Tranströmer

On March 26th, poet, translator and psychologist Tomas Tranströmer passed away in Stockholm, Sweden at the age of 83.  And although his collected works occupy very little space on a bookshelf, the response to his poems, both in Sweden and abroad, has been immense, the honors many and impressive, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

Robert Bly, a prominent translator of Tranströmer, noted that when Tranströmer began to craft his early poems in the 1950s, it was still possible to write a nature poem in which nothing technological entered.  As his career progressed, however, it was not so easy to separate the two, as we see in his 1974 long poem Östersjöar [Baltics] and the mingling of maritime life in that wonderful labyrinth of forested islands and the waters of his native Stockholm Archipelago along the Baltic Sea coastline.  We marvel that the poetry of earth is never truly dead.

The American poet and critic Stephen Burt tells us: “More than most poets, Tranströmer survives translation, since his effects so often come from metaphors, images and situations.  Other effects come from silence, from negative space . . . .” 

In memory of Tranströmer’s passing, I would like to share one of his earliest poems, “Solitary Swedish Houses,” which was published in his second collection of poems, Hemligheter på vägen  [Secrets on the Way] (1958), and translated by Robin Fulton.  I first heard Tranströmer read this poem in Tucson, in 1974, and again a decade later, in Stockholm:

“Solitary Swedish Houses”

A mix-max of black spruce
and smoking moonbeams.
Here’s the croft lying low
and not a sign of life.

Till the morning dew murmurs
and an old man opens
– with a shaky hand – his window
and lets out an owl.

Further off, the new building
stands steaming
with the laundry butterfly
fluttering at the corner

in the middle of a dying wood
where the mouldering reads
through spectacles of sap
the proceedings of the bark-drillers.

Summer with flaxen-haired rain
or one solitary thunder-cloud
above a barking dog.
The seed is kicking inside the earth.

Agitated voices, faces
fly in the telephone wires
on stunted rapid wings
across the moorland miles.

The house on an island in the river
brooding on its stony foundations.
Perpetual smoke – they’re burning
the forest’s secret papers.

The rain wheels in the sky.
The light coils in the river.
Houses on the slope supervise
the waterfall’s white oxen.

Autumn with a gang of starlings
holding dawn in check.
The people move stiffly
in the lamplight’s theatre.

Let them feel without alarm
the camouflaged wings
and God’s energy
coiled up in the dark.

Tranströmer  was a hugely popular, almost rock star figure in his native land.  One American critic referred to him as “Sweden’s Robert Frost.”   So in closing, let me paraphrase that American bard:  The woods are lovely, dark and deep;  he has shared his music . . . and earned his sleep.

Je Suis Charlie!

At the Pond's Edge - A Tribute to Donald Hall

This past week The Washington Post reviewed Donald Hall’s newly-published volume, Essays After Eighty.  At the age of 86 he describes himself inhabiting an “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” that is old age.  It has become, sadly, “a ceremony of losses” of lovers, family and friends, including fellow poet Galway Kinnell who passed away just a couple months ago (see my November 9, 2014 tribute).  Hall freely admits that at his age he feels complacent about death.  I am reminded of his poem “Affirmation,” the open line that reads: “To grow old is to lose everything.”  And after a litany of losses encountered throughout life, it ends with a pledge to “affirm that it is fitting / and delicious to lose everything” in the muddy edge of the pond that is life.  Another loss he recognizes yet without mourning is poetry.  After a rich poetic life, Hall believes poetry has abandoned him in old age.   He has felt it gradually sliding away.  “I had 60 years of it; I can’t regret it.”  Thankfully, his prose endures. 

So, as a tribute to Mr. Hall and in celebration of his most recent volume of essays, I am going to share with you one of my favorite of his poems, a poem about the poet and one of his readings.  “To a Waterfowl,” should not to be confused with a similarly titled and mostly forgotten poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant first published in 1818.  Yet, perhaps like Bryant’s poem, Hall speaks to the idea of being alone in the world.  Even more so now in that “unanticipated galaxy” of his final years on earth, wondering about the direction that poetry has taken him.  “Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels,” he writes. “The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual.”

TO A WATER FOWL

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close briefcases and ask, “What are you in?”
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,

and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
“Oh, yeah?” they say, developing an interest in clouds.
“My wife, she likes that sort of thing?  Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I’d better watch my grammar, huh?”
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women’s Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey’s Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges,
and I read them “The Erotic Crocodile,” and “Eating You.”
Ah, when I have concluded the disbursement of sonorities,

crooning, “High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!” —and so forth—
they spank their wide hands, they smile like Jell-O,
and they say, “Hah-hah? My goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?”
“Thank you, indeed,” I say; “it brings home the bacon.”

But now, my poems, now I have returned to the motel,
returned to l’eternel retour of the Holiday Inn,
naked, lying on the bed, watching Godzilla Sucks Mt. Fuji,
addressing my poems, feeling superior, and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.

And what about you?  You, laughing?  You, in bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.
__________

* "To a Waterfowl," published in The Town of Hill (1975)

The Stone Table - A Tribute to Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

Galway Kinnell passed away at his farm in Sheffield, Vermont on October 28th.  He was 87.  “The Stone Table” is one of Galway Kinnell’s most recent collected poems and contains imagery also found in The Book of Nightmares dating back over forty years to the early phase of his career as a poet.  Unlike the despair pervading this earlier collection, the more recent poem  exudes hope even as the poet realizes his career and life are approaching their eventual end.  Describing “The Stone Table: “It feels very heavy. It is in bondage to narrative, familiar surfaces, and an expected outcome, a poem composed on earth,” in this instance, his farm in Sheffield, Vermont.  The stone table becomes a resting place that later meditates on the poet Donald Hall's daily trips to Jane Kenyon's grave near their home in Wilmot, NH, and to its ironic epitaph.  The stone table, at the poem’s conclusion, demonstrates the poet's own strong desire to remain fixed to earth. Sadly, Kinnell has flown free from us now, leaving us wanting.  Hall survives.

THE STONE TABLE

Here on the hill behind the house,
we sit with our feet up on the edge
of the eight-by-ten stone slab
that was once the floor of the cow pass
that the cows used, getting from one pasture
to the other without setting a hoof
on the dirt road lying between them.

From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
the maple sapling the moose slashed
with his cutting teeth, turning it
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
flown from now, the one tree left
of the ancient orchard popped out
all over with saffron and rosy,
subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted
with scions of old varieties, Freedom,
Sops-of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees
we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps.

We speak in whispers: fifty feet away,
under a red spruce, a yearling bear
lolls on its belly eating clover.
Abruptly it sits up. Did I touch my wine glass
to the table, setting it humming?
The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness
of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.
It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us,
whirls, and plunges into the woods—
a few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still.

As often happens, we find ourselves
thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend
who lives to the south of that row of peaks
burnt yellow in the sunset. About now,
he will be paying his daily visit to her grave,
reading by heart the words, cut into black granite,
that she had written for him, when they
both thought he would die first:
I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT
PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME.
Or is he back by now, in his half-empty house,
talking in ink to a piece of paper?

I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely,
like scions of Sheffield Seek-No-Furthers
grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise root-stock.         
__________
* "The Stone Table," published in Strong Is our Hold (2006), 

Autumn Coming and Going and Coming Again

This is an excerpt from a posting to my blogspot - Looking Toward Portugal - on October 10, 2014.  It was presented at the Iota Club & Cafe, in Arlington, Virginia, on the evening of October 12, 2014.

I am always keeping my eyes open for that first suggestion of autumn.  I spend my summers in Maine, and come August, just three short months after the trees begin to leaf out in spring, there are always a few maples with branch tips beginning to flare red.  It seems a bit curious to be swimming in a small lake while trees bordering its shores are already exhibiting the first flashes of color bespeaking the colder temperatures and cooling waters that can’t be that far off. 

September is the month when one feels what Truman Capote called the “first ripple chills of autumn,” when the fall colors arrive in earnest in northern New England.  The first to turn are the swampmaples and popple in low wet areas.  Then come the various shades of reds, oranges and russet among the red and sugar maples, scarlet oak, and sumac; the ash trees’ deep purple; the yellows among the popple, birch and willows; and finally the more subtle tans and browns among the oak, beech, and sycamore.  With these early chills the color increases almost daily in its proportions and brilliance. The leaf peepers also arrive around mid-month; they come, they look, and they are gone again by mid-October.  They have little understanding of the full evolution of a northern New England autumn.  It’s too bad they are unable or unwilling to experience its entire range and spectrum, from the onset of color as well as its evanescence.  I honestly believe that autumn in no more colorful, nor more awe-inspiring than it is in these northern climes.  For this reason alone I always try to postpone my annual trip south until after the autumn colors have reached their zenith. 

With the onset of the killing frosts of October the season is better disposed to the arrival of winter.  Cold rains will mute the colors, and as they fade, the leaves will quickly forsake the trees and fall to the ground much too soon.  Not all of the leaves will fall, however.  A few drained of their color will continue to flutter through the stiffening gusts of winter.  No surrender.  It is not uncommon for snow to fall by Halloween, first at the higher latitudes and elevations, but quickly enough snow is common place when November arrives.  The leaves are raked against foundations for insulation as houses and out buildings are tucked up for the winter.  The calendar may say it’s still autumn, but our senses tell us something different.  Truly a touching end to the briefest and most poignant of seasons.

Boissevain

                                   BOISSEVAIN
       (You Probably Thought This Poem Was About You)

       Vermont is where philosophy professors go to summer,
        where poets and novelists hide in secluded cabins,
        cottages, trailers, sequestered in rooms with wood stoves,
        scribbling with pencils, tapping typewriters, staring
        at the ghosts on their computer screens.

        A philosopher poet sneaks into Vermont
        from the north, no flatlander seeking respite
        from Boston, Hartford, New York. He wanders
        down from Montréal, the mean streets of Maisonneuve,
        seeking solace in a Church Street bar
        far from any other philosophers and poets.

        Burlington’s businessmen drinks their beers,
        nurse a scotch and water, a dry martini.
        Some eye the pretty girl as she tends bar.
        The philosophical poet is happy to be here.
        “Mademoiselle, un autre biere si vous plait.”   
        He forgets he can order his beers in English,
        flirt with the barmaid who smiles, not telling
        him to fuck off in the language of love.

        At a corner table a young woman sits alone,
        sipping a glass of white wine and reading
        a dog-eared volume of Vincent Millay’s poetry.
        The poet cleverly inquires why she reads Millay.
        She smiles at him; does not tell him to fuck off.
        He sits, they eat, drink, and laugh through
        the evening, leaving the Church Street bar
        in the wee hours, footsteps hushed by the
        the wind-driven onslaught of snowflakes hexagonal.
        Strange how poetry seems to unlock all doors.

        Later the poet stares beyond her darkened window;
        the snow a hushed veil of urgent whiteness obscuring
        the lake and the vestiges of the Adirondacks beyond.
        Farther south the Taconic ridge where Vincent lived
        at Steepletop, where she died alone and where
        she now lies buried.  She did not hide away in Vermont,
        choosing Berkshire foothills over Green Mountains.
        All the poet sees from this window is the snow ticking
        in night shades, no three long mountains and a wood,
        no three islands in a bay.  There is only darkness.

        In the morning the poet heads north and homeward,
        along Lake Champlain and beside the Rivière Richelieu,
        homeward to the eastern precincts of Montréal.
        Who said it is Vermont where professors summer,
        where poets and novelists go to find a reasons to write?
        The poet can think only of a fleeting winter’s night of passion;
        of poor Vincent, her bones in death’s cruel embrace.
        In Maisonneuve he sits alone and tries to write a poem about it.
        “Mademoiselle, un autre biere si vous plait.”

Lockerbie

                                         For my friend Michael Bernstein,
                                               murdered by terrorists, December 21, 1988
                           
       The plane ascends beyond Heathrow.
        I stare out at the dimming countryside,
        as wing lights tick through clouds,
        rivulets of rain streaking my face's reflection.

        There is an explosive device beneath my seat,
        plastique wired to a timer, fused long
        to detonate in winter darkness.
        Soon my tattered flesh hangs
        from the bulkheads, bone and sinew
        vaporized in a heart's pulse.
        My eyes float through the broken fuselage.
        Wreckage and human carnage rain
        from the night sky, the whine of vertical velocity
        masking the screams of those still living,
        if only for a few moments longer.
           
        I ask myself why.   
        I have hurt no one, offended no one.
        Yet I am a victim of invisible terrorists.
        They do not know me, they will never know me.
        I no longer exist.  They have seen to that.
        But I know them. (I have always known them).
        They cannot remain invisible forever.
        My eyes are still floating, watching.

Williston Road (Fathers & Sons)

                        Te szegény, szegény.
                        [You poor man, you poor man.]
                             "Nem én kiáltok," Attila József

                              I
                    fifty years ago
                    his eye fixated
                    dark vacant stare
                    two steel barrels
                    silent & not vacant
                    trigger gently fingered
                    squeezed firmly
                    & eternity rushed in
                    his disappearance
                    echoed along Wood River
                    passing beyond Sawtooths
                    who was he
                    avatar for all fathers
                    who look at their sons
                    pondering & wondering
                    how they failed them
                    wanting desperately
                    not to fail them
                    one more time

                               II
                    many times I traveled
                    down Williston Road
                    once while a storm
                    blew in off the Gulf
                    once in a swamp fog
                    once on a gibbous moon
                    waning & questioning
                    why you also chose
                    to disappear shedding
                    family & friends
                    suddenly & so easily
                    gone yet in plain view
                    many times I traveled
                    down this long road

                                III
                    traveling Williston Road
                    this time the last time
                    there will be no explanation
                    to my question why
                    no words at all this time
                    a plastic esophagus
                    offering bagged nutrients
                    respirator a constant clicking

                                IV
                    returning home now
                    this painfully familiar road
                    its skirtings of live oak
                    burdened with Spanish moss
                    approaching storms
                    swamp fogs & moons
                    whether waning or waxing       
                    all soon to be forgotten
                    once blue edged flame
                    has taken all that remained
                    to its final disappearance

Storm-Petrels

                        Birds call us into the moment.
                                Victor Emanuel

                    at every compass point
                    fog gauzes horizons
                    northward Egg Rocks
                    sulking stone rookeries
                    westward bay’s edges
                    southward open water
                    thousands of miles only
                    sea its many mysteries
                    eastward Monhegan Island
                    somewhere mist growing
                    thicker we sail deeper
                    our bow quickly scatters
                    delicate-legged storm-petrels
                    rafting in gentle seas
                    dancing across waters
                    separated into oblique
                    gray-green sea foam
                    levitating wings arced
                    facing vertical wind gradients
                    above wavelets they patter
                    surface film foraging food
                    plankton tiny crustaceans
                    fishing boats chummed detritus
                    white-patched rumps flashing
                    undertails as they skim
                    skitter in every direction
                    dark wing points meeting water
                    they disappear into fog
                    reappearing in different places
                    to dance again disappear again
                    Gorky called them streaks of black
                    lightning soaring proud free
                    over gray sea plains
                    gregarious pelagic tempest
                    messengers shunning land
                    preferring migrating life
                    soon they depart these waters
                    returning south nesting rocks
                    Tierra del Fuego & South Georgia
                    distant antarctic climes
                    as lifting fog dissolves
                    channel buoys clang & moan
                    gull screech & cackle announcing
                    slow approach to Monhegan
                    Duck Rocks & Smutty Nose reveal
                    shadowy waterlines to starboard
                    to port darkening shores hint
                    early morning sun reveals
                    storm-petrels disappearing
                    taking little interest in landfalls

Maples Leaves

                            For Hugh MacLennan
                            (1907-1990)

                    sun setting beyond
                    the Citadel
                    fair Nova Scotia
                    with stars visible
                    & a quarter moon
                    over the Maritimes

                    farther west sun
                    dips behind Montréal
                    steep shadows sent
                    across city canyons
                    frozen St Lawrence
                    snow & ice
                    turned crimson
                    arboreal apparitions
                    dark along its banks
                    & all the while deep
                    waters pour seaward
                    across Québec
                    draining Great Lakes
                    into a dark Atlantic

                    sun passing westward
                    Ontario anomalous land
                    sprawling northern wastes
                    timber & rock & water
                    only animal footfalls
                    maniacal loon cries
                    towns tied together
                    by thin steel rails
                    cold macadam

                    prairies almost endless
                    Manitoba plains afternoon
                    bluish snow muted
                    & wind a continuous flux
                    scouring long drifts
                    over frozen seeds
                    of Saskatchewan wheat
                    through lonesome coulees
                    into the Cypress Hills

                    Alberta beyond
                    to the Rockies
                    & beyond them
                    British Columbia
                    & its island coda

                    a nation formed
                    Atlantic in the east
                    Pacific in the west
                    an unborn mightiness
                    unknown to itself

Emigrant, Montana

                                       For Jim Harrison

                    morning long before
                    sun’s rays
                    peer over Absarokas
                    snow-hushed peaks
                    quiet hours
                    gathering April daybreak
                    wandering fragrant
                    sagebrush hummocks
                    among tall grasses
                    reed-edged waters
                    stringing bamboo rods
                    tying tiny midge patterns
                    entice dormant cutthroats
                    rainbows venturing away
                    shadowy cutbanks & deep
                    pools nudging aside
                    winter silt bottom pebbles
                    emerging larval detritus
                    harbinger of Spring
                    warmth & evening hatches

Lutevile

                    föhn & trees quiver
                    body & mind shiver
                    disturbing moods curse
                    masks of Illuminati
                    katabatic wind melting
                    late spring snows 
                    rock jagged Kybfelsen
                    casting long shadows
                    dark forests most stygian
                    along peopled margins
                    & not deeper within

Halifax

                    walking along
                    Gottingen rain blows
                    hard & cold
                    she touching hands
                    whispering cryptic
                    words so gently
                    what is this place
                    why are we here
                    walking along
                    wet pavement
                    Gottingen in the rain
                    song says winter
                    is so cruel here
                    into a Sally Ann
                    seeking warmth
                    for heart & soul
                    nothing there for us
                    walking along
                    Gottingen rain blows
                    hard & cold

For Christian Petzold

                    night train brattling
                    in Strasbourg’s ambit
                    your mother reclining
                    no regard for her book
                    enigmatic smile flashing
                    hinting some secret
                    I will not know for years
                    behind dark eyes
                    aspect beyond inclusion
                    that faint neonate pulse
                    knowing you already 
                    had I grasped then
                    what she already knew
                    sensing an arcanum of you
                    stirring deep & mysterious
                    within her as she sat quietly
                    there would be no surprise
               
                    now I see you sitting there
                    tree-shaded Berlin café
                    four decades passing
                    since that night train
                    that enigmatic smile
                    your mother’s dark eyes
                    I wonder if you share
                    her secret of you

Looking for Linda Hinkley

                    now long buried
                    Lincoln Plat churchyard
                    never aging beyond
                    that long-ago girl
                    still searching for her
                    this place below
                    summit of Azichohos
                    where once she lived
                    staring at creased class
                    picture quietly standing
                    schoolhouse steps
                    front row so young
                    smock dress & sweater
                    white anklets collapsing
                    over rough shoes
                    years fade static youth

NIŞANTAŞI

                        NIŞANTAŞI

                where mansions of pashas
                once stood among quiet hills
                harems and opium dens
                gardens of grand viziers
                where Ottoman princes plotted
                men in tea rooms   
                watch her quietly pass
                a scarfless girl dark haired
                her desires dream sequestered
                men’s eyes reaching out to touch
                what only eyes here may touch   
                her sandaled feet wandering
                deep shadowed Topağaci
                streets cobbled narrow
                stones obelisk shaped
                once targets for sultan’s archers

                in these plane tree hills
                where Atatürk played körebe
                where trams rails now jaw
                through Taksim Square
                clattering Beyoglu to Galata Bridge
                Golden Horn lies beyond
                neighborhoods like foreign lands
                a dying culture’s melancholia
                where her eyes search far
                distant landscapes Anatolian plains
                beyond the Bosphorus
                where women still hide
                their countenances behind scarves
                dreams still unmeasured
                even today

Listening to Black Elk

             LISTENING TO BLACK ELK

                     glinting parallel steel
                    Burlington Northern’s
                    imprimatur vanishes to
                    hazy distant horizons
                    Missouri oxbows below
                    Highway 2 it passes
                    through dusty scatterings
                    lifeless High-line towns
                    all streets sudden dead-ends
                    where nowhere begins
                    evanescing graffiti
                    warnings of crystal meth.
                    benchland of immense sky
                    long wind blowing down
                    from Saskatchewan a sea
                    of grasses ruffling
                    silent prairie hypnosis
                    farm reports emerge
                    from crisp radio static
                    cottonwoods and alders grow
                    tight to parched stream beds
                    cut through massive gray
                    shadows of Signal Butte
                    Lakota and trappers
                    took their reckoning
                    stockmen watch their
                    herds flow and ebb
                    this fenceless topography
                    the far side of yonder
                    remember all that you
                    have seen and found here
                    everything forgotten
                    returns to the circling wind

Along the Dry Line

                    ALONG THE DRY LINE

            panhandle winds east from Guymon
            afternoon skies quickly darken
            squall lines build frothing turbulence
            churning convection storms pulse
            to life along an advancing dry line
            lightning flickers yellowish sky tints
            thunder out past Boise City
            still too far away to hear
            dry lines are seldom dry juggernaut
            cleaving moist Gulf surface air
            desert’s dry breath displaced upward
            chuting the Rockies’ eastern pitch
            wedging its way across Great Plains
            a boundary slope reversal roiling
            dew point dropping in a dry punch
            anvil-headed cumulonimbus parade
            sanguine prairie schooners dissipating
            beckoned by the sun’s slow slide
            beyond another day’s purpling horizon
            quieter drier air returns with dusk    
            wind subsiding in invigorating darkness

A Small Town Library

This essay was originally published on my " Looking Toward Portugal" blogspot - www.lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com - on September 20, 2012.
 __________ 

There is something very special about a small town library. Living as I do in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, I am in a habit of frequenting large and often very impersonal libraries. For years I have wandered the cavernous reading rooms and the labyrinthine stacks of the Library of Congress. Then there are the many university libraries, the District of Columbia Public Library system, as well as those serving the suburban counties in Maryland and Virginia. During the summer I frequent the campus library at Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, where I have research and borrowing privileges so that I can work on my various projects while we are on our summer hiatus. In most of these libraries you pretty much need to know what you are looking for and how to find it. These institutions are manned by librarians and their acolytes and they are often pulled in so many directions that there is little opportunity for personal attention and consultation. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, and I have found individuals who are ready and willing to assist me. More times than not, however, I am left to fend for myself. And usually I prefer it that way. So a small town library is a welcome respite from the routine and one to be savored.

A couple of years ago we finally discovered the village library serving New Gloucester, Maine, where we have spent our summers for the past 25 years. I don’t know why we did not visit it before since we use our summer sojourns at the lake to catch up on our reading. Early on these visits were for two or three weeks each summer and we usually brought enough reading material with us to keep us busy. Three summers ago, after my retirement, we began to spend the entire summer at the lake and we soon ran out of books to read. Good book stores can be few and far between up here (although there are some we do like to frequent) and so we decided to check out the local library to see if we could borrow books over the summer. We were delighted when we learned that we could, and even more delighted when we discovered it to be an absolutely charming place staffed by some absolutely charming people who have also become our friends and whom we look forward to seeing whenever we return to Maine.

One of the more charming and inviting aspects of the library is its location. It is situated on the Intervale Road in the heart of New Gloucester’s “Lower Village and adjacent to the Town Hall and Meeting House, and just around the corner from the large white-washed Congregational Church. It is housed in the former high school constructed in 1903 and closed in 1962 when the high schools in New Gloucester and neighboring Gray merged. The library, formerly housed in the town meeting hall, moved into the vacant building in 1998.

And then there are the people. We have come to know Suzan Hawkins and Carla Mcallister, the two librarians who always meet you with a big smile and a pleasant “hello.” They seem to know the names of everyone who visits the library and probably do. Everyone feels most welcome be they young or old. There is always something interesting to look at and usually one of the tables has a puzzle at some stage of completion.

A small town library is often the hub of the community, and this is certainly the case here in New Gloucester. It sponsors an annual challenge to see how many books its patrons can read over the summer. A small stone is placed into a large glass jar as each book is completed. This year the jar contained over 5000 stones when the challenge ended in late August, a sizeable increase over previous years. There is the annual pet show, book groups, a reading hour for the kids, and much, much more. It is just a great place to hang out. You feel the pulse of the community strong and clear when you visit.

This year I was honored to be part of what we hope will become an annual event . . . “Poetry in the Gazebo.” Earlier this past week those of us interested in sharing our work as well as our favorite poems by others gathered in the charming little gazebo behind the library. It was a cool evening signaling the approach of autumn. The trees were showing hints of color and what better way to celebrate poetry? We always hate to leave Maine and one of the things we miss most is the friendly folks and atmosphere at the New Gloucester Library. There is always next summer. It can’t come soon enough.

To John Haines on His 88th Birthday

Photo by Dan O'Neill

Today would have been John Haines' (1924-2011) 88th birthday.  John, who passed away in Alaska in March 2011, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a naval officer. As a boy, Haines attended school here in Washington, D.C., while his father was stationed at the Washington Navy Yard.

After serving on a navy destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II, Haines studied at American University and the National Art School, both in Washington, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 1947, Haines left Washington and eventually homesteaded acreage along the Richardson Highway approximately 68 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.  It was here that he spent much of the next four decades running his trap lines and living off the land while trying to realize his artistic talents.  It was here that he moved from the visual to the literary arts, and his experiences in the Alaskan wilderness were the inspiration for his early poetry collections - Winter News (1966) and The Stone Harp (1971), the essay collection Living Off the Country (1981), and the memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989).

Haines came back to Washington in 1991-92 as Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at the George Washington University, and visited Washington frequently during the last two decades of his life. He also taught at several other colleges and universities; his last academic appointment was as an instructor in the Honors Program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

His later books included New Poems 1980-88 (1990), The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993), Where the Twilight Never Ends (1994), Fables and Distances (1996), A Guide to the Four-Chambered Heart (1997), For the Century’s End: Poems 1990-1999 (2001), and Descent (2010).

Haines was honored for his writing, receiving the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Western States Book Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress, and the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, among others. He was also named a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1997.

I met John as a Jenny McKean Moore fellow at George Washington University in 1991 and we remained good friends during the final two decades of his life.  He was a guest in my home during his visits to Washington, and I look back with particular fondness on the days he and I spent together in Big  Sky, Montana in the autumn of 2004 following the release of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines which I edited and which was published by CavanKerry Press.

So Happy Birthday, John!  I miss you.

My thanks to my good friend Miles David Moore, who also studied with John at George Washington University, for his contributions to this posting.  He and I will be presenting another tribute to John at the Cafe Muse, in Friendship Heights, Maryland, on the evening of December 3, 2012.