For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Today’s poem from me is one I obviously had to post today:
Easter Morn
My grandfather rises from the grave to embody the man in the pew in front of me. It's the scent of Camels, Aqua Velva mixed, the Confederate-grey blazer that doesn't fit, the drop of sweat just beneath the ear like when my grandfather played steel guitar, or that keyboard my aunt and uncle gave him the Christmas before he passed away. It's how he reaches down, pats the head of the little girl beside him and smiles, how my grandfather tousled my sister's hair, or how when he presses his hands together to pray, his hands appear time-wrinkled like my grandfather's. When he closes his eyes, he looks so calm and peaceful.
As mentioned Thursday, in July of 1995, before I got married, I spent six weeks on a retreat at Mt. Saviour Monastery above Elmira, N.Y. where a handful of other young men and I lived with the Benedictine monks there. While there, I ended up writing a couple of poems. This is another one of them, on the great philosopher monk Thomas Merton.
Transfiguration
-- at Mount Saviour Monastery, July 1995
The clouds of unknowing roll over me, nuclear in their design, probably like those that carried him, his spirit out to the Pacific and beyond
the vapor trail I view on the horizon now. An airliner lifts off, brushes the cross on the steeple, the silence into sonic resonances.
Like the SAC bomber that buzzed across his hermitage's roof (its bay doors, the jaws of Apocalypse, if opened could swallow the countryside).
The same type of bomber that took him stateside. On Sunday after Mass, I listen to the blues in the common room, ponder the irony of lyrics, saints' fates.
As always, this poem is best read in desktop and landscape on your browser of choice.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Today’s poem from me is one I wrote for my poetry reading in 2004. At the time, I worked for a weekly newspaper and this poem touched on my job, which normally I didn’t talk about.
Ash Wednesday, 2004
What must it like to be born with a hole in your heart, to live for 39 years, then die, I will never know, but it is on this, I meditate this morning as I receive ashes, think of the funerals I’m missing: of a friend’s girlfriend who died with just such a condition, the other funerals of family members of people I have met through work, of the councilman in the nearby borough who died, and I didn’t even know it. I’m so sorry to hear of your loss seems so hollow. If there’s anything I can do, as if we could resurrect their loved ones from the cold, dark ground with empty words.
As usual, the above poem is best read in desktop and landscape on your browser of choice to preserve the line breaks the way I intended them.
Every Thursday I share three good things from today, in the past week, and/or in the week or weeks to come, to focus on what is good. I encourage you to share in the comments your three good things too, ifyou want. I was introduced to thinking on three good things for the week byDeb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz who lists hers every Sunday on her blog.
A poem a day
For National Poetry Month, I’ve been posting a poem a day that I’ve written. I’ve also been sharing a poem from one of three websites that share a poem each day. If you would like to check them out, go here. I had most of the poems chosen at the end of March, which has helped.
Three days off for my wife…
…and two days off for me this coming weekend, which comes at a much needed time for her. She has cellulitis again in one of her legs, which unfortunately is one of the things that people with lymphedema are susceptible to. At least, the first couple of times she has had this year, including this time, have been caught early – unlike last year, which ended with her being in the hospital for a month. It doesn’t make it any less painful or annoying for her, but she is on an antibiotic that will help get rid of the infection. Unfortunately, because of medications she is on for her heart, there is not much she can take for the pain: Tylenol, which does almost nothing for the pain. All this said, at least she has a few days that hopefully will help with the healing. UPDATE @ 2:40 p.m., also on Thursday: She called for an appointment at the wound care center in Williamsport and was able to get in Monday afternoon before she goes to work at 6 p.m.So there is a fourth good thing.
Because of the cellulitis, we aren’t going anywhere for Easter, but we have, as usual, silly TV planned and we also will be peeking in on a few artists at Coachella for its second weekend this (most we don’t know and, to be honest, don’t want to know).
A day off today
I also a off today and while I often do laundry at the laundromat when I have a spare day, today I decided to postpone the chore until later in the weekend or early next week. This morning, I read some of Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don’t Manage You by Ethan Kross and might read a bit more after putting this up. I probably will unwind with my ongoing alternating of watching Bones and Castle. I’m in Season 5 for both, so no spoilers, please, if you have seen either or both of them.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
In July of 1995, before I got married, I spent six weeks on a retreat at Mt. Saviour Monastery above Elmira, N.Y. where a handful of other young men and I lived with the Benedictine monks there. While there, I ended up writing a couple of poems. This is one of them when I went on a solo retreat in a hermitage in the woods on the property.
Discernment
--- at Mount Saviour Monastery, July 1995
Squawk from the laurel breaks my psalm-chant. Expecting a raven, I cross the threshold of contemplation only to find the unexpected staring me down just off the four-wheel path. He paces around the hermitage like the hunter that he is, telling me to leave him to his prey, probably the wild turkey clan that hobbled by earlier. So a fellow brother later tells me. I do not know that now, think this creature some manifestation of evil come to interrupt my prayer. I rebuke him, rattling my beads at him, warding off his wiles, his deceitful beauty. Yet he remains, crying, circling me, vigilant in his torment, testing my motives for invading his territory, my will to stay. Later that night I imagine his den underneath my cot, him scratching at my floorboards. For now I return to my lectio, his forlorn cry just a hue of the creation, the eternal now like temptation, suffering, death. Inescapable.
The above poem is best read in desktop or landscape on your browser of choice.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Epilogue II
I myself am hell, Robert. Like the painter in Dali's "Impressions d'Afrique" at the easel, right hand extended out to his audience, eyes tracing it onto canvas with his left, I have been fascinated by the blisters on my middle finger, where the brush rests and by the bottoms of my fingernails turning lavender, the color of an illness. But I am tired of it. Everyone's tired of it. The cuticular colloquies. Climacteric epiphanies like "the painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light," and "my mind's not right." Isn't the subject of the painting what lies beyond this frame?
Today instead of sharing a poem from one of the poem-a-day websites, I thought I’d share a link to the poem I’m referencing above. That poem is “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell, whom I learned about in a poetry course in college. Lowell was the Father of Confessional Poetry, which focused on personal experiences and veered from traditional meter and form. My poem was an attempt at responding to his poem and the concept of confessional poetry too.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Today’s poem from me is about my lifelong love of books. This poem is best read in desktop or landscape on mobile on your browser of choice to preserve the line breaks as I intended them.
The Fountainhead
--- after smelling a dusty copy of a John McPhee book I picked up at the library for 50 cents
1.
I was biking down the Marsh Creek Road that day when I spied it, lying there, cover ripped off, inviting me to stop and pick it up. Inside its pages was a story of the architectural superiority of man, how he had built skyscrapers to show his greatness. I stooped down and learned to what heights men could climb. Later reading Jon Krakauer, I learned of men who failed to attain such heights alive, but for now, with one bare knee in the dirt, as I read her philosophical objectivism, I chose not think of how from dust I had come, to dust I would return. I let my thoughts soar higher.
2.
Or inside its pages was a song not of myself, but of America free, of Texas gaining its independence, of Alaska and Hawaii, and even farther out space, the final frontier of California and its Valley of the Dolls. We thumb through the lurid details of the lives of others, celebrities like they were going out of fashion, lurid details that is, but they're not, they are so chic, so in the moment, so...so.... ("a man breathes deep into his saxophone") American.
3.
From a satellite, I see that boy kneeling beside the back road, wish I could be like him. I need to be like him, in love with the printed word, (like my neighbor John, who has to print out articles from the Internet he wants to read -- he has to touch them, feel their weight, their heft to make it a corporeal presence like ink smudging on your fingers after reading a newspaper) not the digitized code a poem like this breaks down into eons later.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Yet here again I reference Wallace Stevens’ “mouse in the wall” and also another poem of his “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This was the last poem of the poetry reading I did back in 2004.
Poetry
It all starts with an ocean of words cascading, wind chimes carrying across suburban streets stray thoughts, counterintuitive.
I want my Sundays back, no baby back ribs to stir my dreams, and the will power to organize this life into some semblance of simple.
It's not that he minds the clutter as much as the appearance of clutter, it's what it appears his life is, what can be viewed by a passerby like that glance, half- glare, caught from a passing car.
Or the kids in the back of the bus giggling, snickering at those who follow too close what they say to each other about the middle-aged man in car, beat- up car. It's all self-referential.
**
Except for the man with the blue guitar who strums beside the white lake in winter, his fingers flow over the frets intuitively. (It all comes back to Wallace and the mouse in the wall, doesn't it?) This mystery for a moment becomes clear or not.
***
It was like one day in sixth grade when you looked up and the world became blue, tinted your perspective on everything.
The reds disappeared for a while but are back now in crimson, maroon, vermilion.
Now you become a chameleon rising out of the dust until the colors diffuse out across your horizons into your dreams.
Listen, the wind chimes.
The above poem is best read in desktop and landscape to preserve the integrity of the line breaks as I intended, especially in the first part of the poem.
Instead of leaving you with a poem from one of the three sites as I have been doing, I will refer you to Stevens’ poem aforementioned.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
The Poet
is reporting the world's wrinkles one whorl at a time, bouncing between worlds, this ring this love is real, this pen not so much.
His mind tilts. He thinks this is how kids lose their sense of reality, the belief this is not real, this is dream.
What is real is the minutiae visible on a hand, the intricate designs hieroglyphic in nature.
This is why they locked the Boston poet up, the Cambridge poet who saw the Apocalypse.
What mirror did such men hold up to themselves? Not a TV screen.
Nature's poles collide, only God can stop the poem. Man continues in a confessional mode, it peeks out from its lair:
work clouds the mind.
Who'll stop and hear the roses, Mary?
Dawn awaits creation to be birthed out of the skull.
The modern Russian novelist would understand,
the postmodern American pale- ontologist who says touching artifacts is like waking a stranger in one's own bed
he knows what it's like to wake that stranger every night
it's a dream the poet cannot identify, shake loose from.
For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.
Waking A Stranger
Touching something like that is like waking a stranger says the archaeologist this morning on the radio when asked what it's like excavating Native American remains in a nearby county. Driving to work, I think I know what she means: it's like catching the fleeting glance in the rearview of the person behind you that you don't know, but that you think you do for a moment. Or like when a painter is applying the brush to the canvas and something begins to take shape, but he doesn't know what yet. Or like the circles a pen makes when a writer is doodling, a knot of lines overlapping lines that form a hurricane whose eye he cannot see out of.
The above poem is best read in desktop and landscape modes on your browser of choice.
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