Time Crunch

The trouble with writing is that it takes time
How much time can you spend that isn't money?

A ten-minute time frame contains this project
To make it feasible today

Doctor William Carlos Williams typed poems
"At full speed" between patients' exigencies

How much can I write under constraint?
Will compression explode in a flash of light?

How much that matters will get said in six hundred seconds?
Clearly more than in another day of neglecting the work

When Handel wrote The Messiah
He revived previous labors, operas that were then out of fashion
Music long silent

He pumped out the next big thing in a couple of weeks
Hallelujah!

Kitchen

The tile had to go
Fine, $15,000 later, gone!

Diane didn't know that she is a serious foodie until the kitchen revival
Now it smells like herbs of which I'd never heard

She tried to make a vegetarian of me
I nearly starved
So we compromised and did it my way
Until she seduced me with salads from the Elysian fields

And flowers from her garden
Gladiolas are blooming now
Those that collapsed in the rain adorn our table
A heavy glass vase supports the tall luxurious boughs

The sun also rises on our silestone counter tops
And stainless steel refrigerator and range

Jaybirds in the firs outside are stunned
In their blue reflections
Their mockery of the serenity within

The kitchen has tasted festivities
Flirtations
Feuds
Gravel-like gluten-free bread

The silestone will survive us

Begin Again

She wants to begin again
In the end there is a horizon, unknown in seasons of growth

If there is no harvest for all our sweat
Maybe the river isn't dry, but why try?

Too much angry ambition
Greed, aimless speed
Blind ambition!

In the failures
Or failures of nerve
We begin to see again

The light in the garden
And in her eyes

We begin again

7 Minute Autobiography with One Lie

Dry heat and subzero blizzards savaged the Montana railroad town
Mom didn't want to marry a farmer
Dad was a good candidate, he had a railroad job
His Italian family was not what the Norwegians on Mom's side expected, or hoped for
Everybody got used to the idea, some time after I was born

We were railroaded from Montana to Minnesota then to Oregon
In elementary school I heard of the Puritans but visited the Plains Indians and their graves
By junior high we were in Minnesota
The land of 1000 Lakes and the Hamm's Beer Bear
Southern Oregon
In high school I studied math, physics, and football

The Vietnam war got me into college
I was a straight-A student
You don't have to believe that

Still, my years at the University of Oregon were a renaissance
I couldn't get over the girl back home, so I studied Shakespeare
We'd been to a festival in Ashland, Shakespeare under the stars
The bard wasn't the same without her, but I persisted
History, philosophy

I had learned to sing in church
A choir at the university opened my ears to Bach, Handel, and Mozart
I breathed deeper and rejoiced
Every day since, I've opened my mouth to sing
The war ended before I got a degree

But music followed me even working in Portland
A few years as a salesman, and I went to Seattle to sing opera
I drove a truck and moved furniture
Got married and divorced
Sold the business to save the house

Then my career as a singer really took off
Three years in the chorus
Tannhauser, Der Ring des Niebelungen
La Forza del Destino, The Marriage of Figaro
I was born to sing
In the shower

Operatic romance was better offstage
We hiked in the North Cascades
Buried my sister

I negotiated peace between music and business
And have lived happier ever after

I married another singer

Art and Truth; Is Truth Enervating?

Is art that is truthful will-shattering?  Art that reveals the meaninglessness and arbitrary violence of the world destroys the will to maintain an arduous struggle toward virtue or artistic elegance.  After Schopenhauer's descent into chaos and futility, Friedrich Nietzsche posed a solution to the dilemma of will-shattering truth. 

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy describes the tension that he found in the Greek tragedies between Dionysian and Apollonian art.  Dionysian art embodies the chaotic energy of the world, which in Greek thought is antithetical to reality as differentiated by form delineated in Apollonian art and philosophy.

Nietzsche was for a time an admirer and promoter of the music dramas of Richard Wagner.  He saw in Wagner's music an illusion that could sustain the will against the chaos of Dionysus. 

Here are a few references that may be useful:
Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy
Arthur Schopenhauer
Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche; Art and Truth

To put the quesion in more contemporary setting, here is a link to my review of a book by Carson Holloway titled All Shook Up; Music, Passion, and Politics.

The question of art and will makes an interesting discussion.  How is an artist to persist against the banality and chaos of the world?

It's not Vertigo

She gets mild light headedness
Mild but frequent enough to be disturbing
Too often it comes on when she sings
With the expansive breathing

It started after several phone calls to her aunt in Cincinnati
The last of which was to security at the senior residence
Who had to force the door
To find Alice cold on the floor

The last of three sisters
This memorial service was the end
Her father had been gone three years by then
No more trips to Cincinnati

The doctors have suspected low blood pressure
Ear infections
Ménière's disease
And one by one eliminated each as a diagnosis

The disorienting illusion persists
Usually in the afternoon
Exercise seems to ward it off in the morning
Physical therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists seemed to help

A number of them have applied their cures
Now a cranial-sacral deep tissue masseuse
Recommends books by Illuminati
The saints, medieval and modern are strewn about our cushy chairs

They variously recommend living with the disturbance
Asking what it has to tell us
Being in the joy and pain of here and now
Outside the window it's warmer than it appears

The wind is mild, spacious with a few flecks of rain
A walk to the mailbox is not unpleasant
Despite bills from physicians and labs that insurance won't pay
And the HSA can't seem to process

A maple is red against the firs
This sky has many shades of grey
And opens to infinity beyond what ails us here
Its coming in would elicit a sensation like vertigo

Fruit on Grafted Branches

In 1963 the railroad moved us to Oregon
Dad had not seen his cousins Sam and Savario since the war
It must have been during his six months at the Vancouver Barracks
After twenty years, we drove to visit them in Washington

At the table in Grandma's kitchen I'd heard their names
These sons of Italy and of my grandfather's brother
I knew them as well as I knew my grandfather
He died before I was born

Puget Sound and the Olympics were the only landmarks Dad needed
to find their houses on the Hilltop in Tacoma, a safer neighborhood then
I hadn't imagined they'd heard of me
But when we arrived, they knew my name

The Calabrese dialect was rich on the men's tongues
Ida and Yolanda, sisters-in-law, told the stories for my sister and me
I was fourteen and my sister ten
Ida told stories we didn't understand
but Yolanda spoke well

Of how Sam and Savario together built Savario's and Yolanda's house
The spacious brick house on Wilkeson Street
In the back yard they grafted apple, pear, peach, and plum branches into a single tree

Next door, on the corner, they built Sam's and Ida's place
A smaller, white wood-frame house

Savario worked as a longshoreman
Sam building cabinetry

Savario spoke jovial Italo-American
When English failed him, Yolanda explained

Mom tried to follow Ida in Calabrese
Dad remembered the dialect and explained both ways

If Sam and Savario were my father's cousins
What did that make their kids to my sister and me?
Julie, Patty, Joey, Cecilia, and Sammy
We got acquainted in the shade of Sam's fig tree

We saw that Joey's speech was slow
His eyes were full of love
But punks on the block bullied him
Sammy was then too small to intervene
Defending her brother, Cecilia was tough

The girls taught my sister a few words
The Italian for eggs, toast, a cup of coffee
In the morning Yolanda verified her nascent diction

We wandered to an elementary school yard
Sammy played in the sand
Aspiring to be in a muscle magazine
I did pull-ups on a galvanized bar

Domenic, their friend, was learning to drive
He came by and took Patty for a ride



Ten years after we went home to Oregon
the University of Washington brought me back again

I drove past the port, up to the Hilltop neighborhood
By the reservoir and elementary school

Savario and Yolanda hadn't changed
Sam had more English by then
The houses were the same
They knew my name

Both families came to my first wedding
The mafia, my former brother-in-law said
Sam offered to help with repairs to the old house I'd bought
Five years later the house was not my problem

When the families came to my parents 50th wedding anniversary, I had remarried
Julie and Patty had children of their own
In a Lutheran Church, we sang  love songs from Broadway shows
My Norwegian mother won the Reformation at home

How did another ten years pass?
We started getting together for funerals

The last time I walked with the men through the neighborhood
Sam said of Savario, "He forget everything."
My father was there, before he too began to forget

When Savario died, St. Rita's Church consoled survivors around his casket

Sam died in his chair, his memory intact, of a heart attack
Another line of people stood at the altar of St. Rita's

Sam's offer of help with my first house was not uncommon
Neighbors didn't call the plumber, they called Sam

A woman, whom as a girl, Sam and Ida had loved
Stood to lament the passing of her friend
She had frequently stayed for dinner

Her father was a deserter
Her mother worked nights
Sam always waited for her to put the napkin on her lap

He saved every ripe fig for Ida

Everybody worried about Joey, a still boyish, fiftyish man
The priest said, "You'll have to help your mother.
"Are you OK?"
Joey was calm and said he was OK

Cecilia and Sam Jr. check on their mom
Joey works part-time at the YMCA
He knows a lot of baseball statistics from watching TV
Occasional he goes to a Pilots' game
The house is the same

Not long after Sam's funeral, Yolanda began to forget
Julie and Patty, retired from teaching, cared for her
She seemed content until she was gone

Two years ago, we got together at Cecilia's for Christmas dinner
Dad and Mom came on the train
There was a football game on Art's big screen

Ida held my hand in hers again
Come and see us, she said

I said that we would
The crucifixes in those houses know my name

The Drama of a Grey Day

A Douglas Fir towers in the sky
Magnolia blossoms still cling to branches where they dried

Workmen in leather gloves raise the dust
A laboring engine pumps slurry under sinking concrete

In our friends absence
After seven or eight weeks, their house sold

Rao left supervision of a hundred engineers
To assist Nirupama during her father's heart surgery in India

The decision to sell the house...
Dissatisfaction with career, interviews with a competitor

Family concerns
The house has too many stairs if the parents move here

Recovery presumed, Nirupama's father abruptly died
Prayers to Jesus and the gods still hang in the air

Yesterday or a month ago, we laughed together
Their brown-eyed boy, Anniru, climbed my chair

Rao has returned to the apartment and work
Nirupama says later in September

After she settles her worst ordeal ever

Twenty Fifth Anniversary # 25!

Punctuate it!
Twenty five years 25!
! #25
Since the day we were married

Dinner at The Pomegranate
Didn't do it

The trip to Spain?
We didn't do it

Twenty five years
Since we were younger
Now we're better
Not at tennis
Which we've neglected

But our legs have gone the distance
Rocky and Apollo Creed
We've slugged it out
We keep bouncing back

You are the most inspirational player on our team
A dream team

Sweetheart
Lover
Best friend
Wife
The joy of my life

Best friend and only lover
Best lover and only friend
Aaaaaakk!

I love you
I am inspired
To sing with you
An everlasting duet

This is a silver-haired anniversary for you
A sparse-haired anniversary for me

I tend toward histrionics
At any thought of your absence
While I abandon you for days to work
But this afternoon, you've left me
For four hours

Time to contemplate the trip to Spain
That we didn't do
A week and four days ago
On the actual 25th anniversary of our marriage

Time to imagine another 25 years
In compensation for an event without punctuation
A celebration in prose, in lower case
It didn't hurt much after singing poetry for so long
Our symphony of love songs

Where are we going next?
It seems having not gone, or not often, anyway
Has been a confinement that made us sing
Like the caged bird of that novel that I didn't read
Having sung behind bars long enough on my own
And then in joyful ardor, knowing you

We began, having more fun together than lunging at life alone
Then about sunset before an evening at the opera
I asked, what is love and are we in it?
Your smile answered my jest
And somehow you sustained the humor
For months that resembled immolations that night on the stage

We have the future
It need not resemble the past
Though we surely could have done worse
We might yet break the world record for bliss

We wanted to live in the nineteenth century with Verdi, Brahms, and Schumann
The world made us work as if their art had never existed

You fought attorneys and wrote land-use code
I wrangled truck drivers, worked as a medical tech
Then I discovered C++  and read Microcosm
We skimmed the twentieth century and landed in the twenty first
Where ever we're going, it will be high-tech

This is the only way I can get you to read my blog
So what I have I got to make it worth the click?
Where is my paean to a gorgeous goddess?
Ha!  It was a trick
You'll have to keep reading week after week.

Watching Tomatoes Ripen

Sunshine has been a slow starter this year
A neighbor called it summer in September
Now it's eight-five degrees and dry
A couple of more months of this will be fine

Squash and tomatoes are trying to ripen
The fig tree is loaded with figs, still green
Inhale the peaceful flood of this day
Wait for red, yellow, and brown in the leaves

It always takes me by surprise
The plulse of the earth in the yard
In here it's too still to breathe
And  the sky...    Let's go back outside

What a Party!

Joy is fifty
could be forty
she is accomplished
a software developer
singer
flautist
She has a baggy-eyed Basset Hound

And husband, also accomplished
Dean recently achieved
liberation from an oppressive job and boss
He's happier than I've seen him
maybe ever!
He's ready to party with Joy
and the dog who sings along

Introductions
hors d' oeuvres
There's a lot of good food here
Nice home and weather
a little cool for August
Cedars and salal
beyond a country half acre

Stu says he and Dean are flying friends
Dean gave Stu the unfinished garage aircraft
a model abandoned due to six or seven crashes
four or five deaths among other users
I'd prefer radio control over canyons
But now there are modifications to the design
Fine

A guitarist's nimble athleticism on strings
rings a bell I can't not answer
those runs keep interrupting me
eventually I tell the guitarist he's the real deal
No kidding, you really play!
Most guitar players bang on the thing.
I could listen to you all day

More food, folks, and cordial conversations
in several accented voices, Russian, Nigerian
Eastern European, now accompanied by Spanish guitar
The inner strings revive
I had to fight sleep on the drive
but I made it without interrupting Diane
studying her music for The Fat Chance Opera

The Fat Chance is two weeks off
but there is an opera on the veranda of this house
Joy sings with the guitarist and a violin
and Sasha on electric piano, an angel and harp
I'm filled, thrilled
where did Joy find this orchestra?
Among friends

The birds can't do this
Alto and soprano
A duet, Joy and Diane
Man, oh man oh!
Sorry, Woman, oh Woman!
Other side of those Cedars
Must be an envious eagle

The guitarist is a double threat
he plays and sings
with Joy in another duet
Or is it a trio?
How does he do vocal harmony and strings?
Razzle dazzle!
No thanks, I don't want to sing, I'm happily frazzled

After another trip to the table
we eat salmon and steak on the back half acre
Joy stops everything for a prayer by Julie
beautifully said in Nigerian English
Everybody seems ok with Jesus
One never knows
Conversation with the guitarist is interrupted by seating arrangements

There is agreement at my table
We abhor the politics of debt
and making more of it
Where will it end?
Neither taxes nor atrocities in entitlements will suffice
Senators Jackson, Magnuson, now Murry had money to burn
but Republicans are as bad when it's their turn

More music after dinner
Diane and Sasha sing and play
Richard the guitarist and I reminisce
compare numbers in the draft lottery during our twentieth year
of driving trucks and riding trains
his commitment to music, Bach, Segovia
teaching kids who want to get famous without theory or technique

It's late
I like my job
I'll work in the morning
A few more words won't sustain the party
But maybe Richard's music can
This is the song I didn't sing
Listen... www.richrorex.com

Smoke on Glass

A faded mirror in the attic
after the fire
burned the roof off a life
Lift from the ashes
a necklace of memories
Pearls of innocence
each a pale child
Smoke in the open rafters
Night comes in

A flash bolder than the fire

through the smoke

reflects translucent sky

Leave in the ashes

Chains of experience

each link an illusion

estrangement, contusion, or defeat

Mist in the broken rafters

Inhabit the dawn

Poets West on the Air

Poets Reading aloud

PoetsWest at KSER 90.7 FM Thursday, July 21 at 6:30 p.m. (PST)— HAIKU NW 2011

If you are out of range for this station, the broadcast is available worldwide via streaming by going to http://www.kser.org/ and following the Listen Live links. Or you can listen to this program and one other recent program on our web site if you have high speed internet: www.poetswest.com underPoetsWest Radio Programs

An Argument for Reading Poetry Aloud

By Glynn Young

I’m at a suburban St. Louis festival, with food booths and politicians campaigning and jugglers and pony rides for the children, plus craft and antique booths for the adults. And bands are scheduled to play throughout the day, and I can hear Dixieland jazz floating over a summer afternoon. 

Not surprisingly, I’m in the pavilion for the used book sale, which raises funds for a local orchestra. It’s smallish by used book fair standards, but it’s has about 2,000 books sorted by category. I find one small shelf titled “POETRY,” and I spot the smallest book on the smallest shelf. Interestingly enough, it’s not a poetry book, but an essay written by a poet. 

Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was an Irish writer who worked in most genres – poetry, biography, fiction, children’s stories, literary criticism and folklore among them. He was one of the leading lights of the so-called Celtic Revival, which stretched from the 18^th until well into the 20^th century. Colum was close friends with William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, among a host of other literary figures; he actually helped Joyce in the transcription of Finnegan’s Wake.   

In 1927, Colum published a book of essays called The Fountain of Youth. Among them was one entitled Story Telling New and Old, a kind of apologetic for oral storytelling for children and reading poetry and having children memorize poems--not exactly the current fashion in education circles today. This essay was reissued as a single, small volume by The Macmillan Company in 1961, when Colum received the Regina Medal of the Catholic Library Association. 

This was the small book I held in my hands at the used book sale. I knew who Padraic Colum was, but I had only read a few of his poems. The sales price was all of $2, so I bought it. When I got home, I discovered it was actually signed by the author. It will forever remain a mystery how an autographed book half a century old ended up at a festival book sale in St. Louis.  

“It has been discovered,” Colum writes, “that there is still a place in the world for an oral art – for story-telling.” He describes the kind of storytellers he knew as a child, adults who told a story well but who also essentially acted it out, with sounds and noises, gestures, body movements and facial expressions. “He told his stories in the evening; he told them by the light of a candle and a peat fire – often by the light of a peat fire only. There were shadows upon the walls around.” Describing the storyteller and his art becomes, for Colum, a kind of story in and of itself. 

He then moves on to poetry, “…in so far as it is oral, in connection with oral stories. Children should be got not merely to read and know poetry, but to possess some part of the heritage of poetry. They should know poems by heart – a dozen, twenty, forty, fifty poems.” This is more than only about poetry; this is learning culture, and a culture, and how to learn culture. And it is about what “holds our attention,  that helps us to bring our minds to a focus. That underlying something is rhythm.” He goes on to say that it also teaching ethics, and that every child should be taught some system of ethics. 

What’s particularly interesting is how Colum links memorization of poems with creativity. Through the possession or a part of the heritage of poetry, of story, children can enter or keep in the world that has been spoken about – the world of imagination, thought , and intuition.” 

I went looking for Colum’s poems. The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine, has put its entire collection on the web, and there I found many of his poems when they were first published (and before they were collected). 

The March 1914 edition is rather amazing to sift through. There are several poems by Carl Sandburg, including “Chicago,” with its “City of Big Shoulders” line. You can find poems by Sara Teasdale and Edwin Arlington Robinson and extended editorial comments by Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. And two poems by Colum – “The Sea Bird to the Wave” and “Three Spinning Songs.” Here is the third of the three spinning songs: 

An old woman sings:

   There was an oul trooper went riding by

   On the road to Carricknabauna,

   And sorrow is better to sing than cry,

   On the way to Carricknabauna.

   And as the oul trooper went riding on

   He heard this sung by a crone, a crone

   On the road to Carricknabauna. 

   “I’ll spread my cloak for you, young lad,

   Were it only the breadth of a farthen’

   And if your mind was as good as your word,

   In troth, it’s you I’d rather!

   In dread of any jealousy

   And before we go any farther

   Carry me up to the top of the hill

   And show me Carricknabauna!” 

   “Carricknabauna, Carricknabauna,

   Would you show me Carricknabauna?

   I lost a horse at Cruckmoylinn –

   At the cross of Bunratty I lost a limb –

   But I left my youth on the crown of the hill

   Over by Carricknabauna!”

                Girls, young girls, the rush-light is done.

                What will I do when my thread is spun? 

To read it is one experience; to read it aloud – as Colum would have intended – is a totally different experience. You catch the language, the sounds and the rhythm. It indeed becomes more memorable, and hearing your voice tell the story helps explain what is happening, and what this “song” is really about.

 

This isn’t simply a literary argument in favor of reading stories and poetry aloud. “For the human voice,” he says in his essay, when it can really charge itself with what is in a poem or a story, more powerfully than any other agency, can put into our deeper consciousness those lasting patterns which belong to the deeper consciousness of the race.” 

Show me Carricknabauna!

Empire

Uratha, Queen of Beagles and Dachshunds
Enthroned on a velvet chair
Robed in a faded kimono
Crowned with smoke-yellowed hair

The domain you ruled has slipped from your grasp
From your curling tendril-like nails
But all that you've lost was a veil on your charms
A mute on relinquishing laughter in gasps

Prince Rupert attends to the garden
The fattest of the hounds at his tail
With a shovel, he scrapes up indiscretions
And drops them in a pail

Ripe tomatoes blush and roses drip
The aroma of his pipe in a blue vein of smoke twists
While a match still burns like the sun in his grip
Rupe pulls up his pants with both wrists

Distinguished Authors I have Second-Handedly Known

Back in the 1970s

A professor

At the University of Washington

Who had known Theodore Roethke

Told me

“You’d see him

At the Mechanical Engineering Building

Or Hutchinson Hall

"He was a tall imposing man

‘Hi-ya, Sucker’, he’d say

One of his poems

Was about crows

That flew into his eyes

Back in his head

Far back…

About his latest Guggenheim fellowship

He said

‘pshaw!

It won’t even keep me in liquor.’”

"Occasionally

When in need of company

He was exceptionally friendly

You knew

The invitation could not be refused

To be kept for a very long time

At a bar

While the poet held forth"

Professor Harris also knew Saul Bellow

He was commissioned to ferry him around

While Bellow was visiting lecturer

His Herzog was the talk of Chicago and New York

In Seattle academics had heard of it

And “I think he was working

On Augie March,

The Adventures of

The books were nice

With great sex"

The language noble

The sentiments true

If less than noble

It seems the sex in the books

Was not fictional

And the visiting writer

Was mostly in need

For the night or the week

Of a woman

In his sojourn

Out West

In the fish mongering town

Professor Harris said

“I could have helped him

But it was not in me

To direct him to a prospect

Or two

For the urgency

He made quite evident,

When he said,

‘Would you mind

If I lay down on the floor

Over there

And groaned?’”

At après lecture cocktails

The great man had found his mark

He was making progress too

But he went upstairs

To relieve the pressure

Of liquor he’d consumed

In this unfortunate interlude

A homosexual of the faculty

Propositioned him

He flew

In a rage

Back down to the festivities

Remember, circa 1968,

It was  acceptable

To be pissed

At a faculty gathering

About an outrage

Such as this

As the visiting writer clearly was

The host tried to console him

In his great loss

The opportunity

Now had eluded him

For the duration of his visit

He left in a huff

With the host at his elbow

Trying manfully to calm the fury

“Yeah, Saul

You’re right, Saul

That’s right!”

Professor Mark Harris said

Bellow promised

To read his own novel

Recently released

I read it

Mark was pleased

That a student had actually read

High Morning Fog

It was there in the library

Next to Joel Chandler Harris

Tales of Uncle Remus

A long time

After the incident

The visitation

The distinguished author

Wrote a letter to the professor

"I picked up your book

while at my publisher

the other day

It was a cookbook"

These things happen

Mark said

Books are commodities

In New York

Even in Seattle

It could have been a mistake

The cover on the wrong book

Yesterday

I worked late

But I had meant to attend

The award ceremony

For a distinguished poet

It was going to be an ordeal

In traffic

Finding parking at the art museum

Who was this writer

To be honored

For his struggles

Against addictions

Yet inspirational for Art

Faith

Mystery?

The Internet is a marvel

In minutes I found poetry

By Franz Wright

The recipient of many awards

And fellowships

Including the Guggenheim

Whiting

The National Endowment for the Arts

For poems about drinking binges

Last year my sister died

She fell on the stairs

In her dismal house

Then suffocated

Unable to move

Against the weight of her body

And twenty years of alcohol abuse

She used to drink with my ex-wife

Whom I divorced

Then along with my faith

Lately

I’ve found little art or mystery

In poetry about addiction

I went home and had dinner

Such as it was

Had a pleasant telephone conversation

With my parents

I read Michael Novak

The Universal Hunger for Liberty

In it I find the recapitulation

Of art in the old idealism

The nobility of Schiller

The musical incarnation by Verdi

Of Don Carlo

Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro

If there is to be a Renaissance

It will resemble the 16th century

A revival of virtuous classicism

Art of the past

Holding up the mirror

To our decadence

We will go blind

Listening to church bands

And the dissonance of art

Deaf

This is a great mystery

May 18, 2005

Poetry by Heidi Stahl

On the Cliff Between Far and Near East Beaches

Indralaya, Orcas Island

Where does this wind come from?

Who else has it touched?

Did it caress the bell

in the white steeple?

This wind--

kissing my face at 2:30 this afternoon--

who did it kiss at 9:15 this morning?

My downward thoughts,

carried away

Do they break up--

Disperse--

like sea foam?

Do they reincarnate

ten years from now

as white fawn lilies

on some unseen hillside?

Who is writing this poem?

The wind?

The eagle whose shadow

just passed over my face?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes Gifts Come Later

The worn wood

of the store's front porch

The chipped, glossy red paint

of the iron wheel

on the old coffee mill

December afternoon light

fading lavender

The wool jackets

work gloves

puffs of steam

of the neighbors

assembling the luminaria

along the road

The trail of lights

rising and falling

receding into the dusk

These gifts come back

having silently roosted for years

summoned, perhaps,

by a sadness

barely perceptible

bringing their balm

their solace

of merely being

Poetry by Heidi Stahl

On the Cliff Between Far and Near East Beaches

Indralaya, Orcas Island

Where does this wind come from?

Who else has it touched?

Did it caress the bell

in the white steeple?

This wind--

kissing my face at 2:30 this afternoon--

who did it kiss at 9:15 this morning?

My downward thoughts,

carried away

Do they break up--

Disperse--

like sea foam?

Do they reincarnate

ten years from now

as white fawn lilies

on some unseen hillside?

Who is writing this poem?

The wind?

The eagle whose shadow

just passed over my face?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes Gifts Come Later

The worn wood

of the store's front porch

The chipped, glossy red paint

of the iron wheel

on the old coffee mill

December afternoon light

fading lavender

The wool jackets

work gloves

puffs of steam

of the neighbors

assembling the luminaria

along the road

The trail of lights

rising and falling

receding into the dusk

These gifts come back

having silently roosted for years

summoned, perhaps,

by a sadness

barely perceptible

bringing their balm

their solace

of merely being