Everyday Boy

A Remedy For Insomnia

Every April (National Poetry month) I have signed up for Knopf Poetry's a poem-a-day.  April 9th's poem this past year was a beauty, and I look forward to picking up this collection of poetry:

A Remedy For Insomnia

Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling—
count the ones you loved,
the former tenants of dreams
who would keep you awake,
once meant the world to you,
rocked you in their arms,
those who loved you...
You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.

Vera Pavlova, If There Is Something To Desire
Translated by Steven Seymour

The World Was Blooming

Stars

I signed up for astronomy in college
Just to be close to a girl
I lost before the course was over. She’d seen me
Walking below some cherry trees on campus.
“The world was blooming,” she wrote.
“And you trudged through, looking at the ground.”

The outrage this inspired me was like
The solar wind I imagined –
Not the airy plasma of deep space,
But a righteous blast of heat. I telephoned
And roared it in her ear.
She answered, “You’re not really mad at me.”

To this day I get taken by surprise.
I look up and the world
Is clotted with snow or flowers, stars have pricked
The breathless, late, blue evening sky, my children
Have tiptoed in beside me,
And my response is “Please! Leave me alone!”

Then, I have to say, “Don’t listen to me.”
I repeat it to myself,
“Don’t listen.” And I still confuse the rain,
Seething across a parking lot at dusk,
And the other inner downpour
That I shake off with a curse and an excuse.

I want to be like you, poised, placid stars,
Too far away to threaten
With you own throbbing storms and fields of force,
Like you, like lights pinned to a sphere of glass
Turned by love itself –
To give up to your peace, turned by love.

(42, 43)

Mark Jarman, Questions for Ecclesiastes

Tell Me Your Despair

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

Love Poem

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine.  Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams.  You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away.  The night, the world, the wind
      spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

- Pablo Neruda

Bread & Poetry

There was a monster in our refrigerator when I lived in a community house with six other people.  We were introduced to it by our housemate Sarah.  After we let it out to play, she politely reminded us to make sure to feed it before it went back to hibernate beside the baking soda.  Our little monster helped some delicious soft golden biscuits rise gracefully for dinner one night - so I came to appreciate it's adoption into our family.

Bread seems like such a basic thing, and yet, like so many things in our world it has been mass produced and plastic wrapped, becoming yet another processed product for us to buy. rather than make ourselves. I grew accustomed to going to the local bakery where the dough is at least closer to my own rising - it's flesh fashioned closer to my own.  On an odd occasion I even managed to take our own bread machine for a spin and bake a few loaves myself some mornings, but to make bread from scratch... it has been awhile, and it takes some learning.

It takes time to bake bread.  Time I sometimes think would be better spent some other way.   But time I feel I need to recapture.  Ordinary time for ordinary tasks.  I like how Pablo Neruda compares it with writing poetry in his Nobel Lecture, Towards The Splendid City (December 13, 1971).  Both take effort and time, yielding a basic nourishment and upholding an obscure art:

The poet is not a little god.  No, he is not a little god.  He is not picked out by a mystical destiny in preference to those who follow other crafts and professions. I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god.  He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colors and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship.  And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread, truth, wine, dreams.  If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his undertaking, his effort and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity.  Only in this indispensable way of being ordinary people shall we give back to poetry the mighty breadth which has been pared away from it little by little in every epoch, just as we ourselves have been whittled down in every epoch.

Turning & Turning

I have been listening to Joni Mitchell's album Shine ever since we saw her ballet The Fiddle & the Drum. Here is a glimpse of the ballet. The song is Slouching Toward Bethlehem, based on a W. B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity....

1920

Berlin In Winter

Another favorite winter poem:

Horses

From the window I saw the horses.

I was in Berlin, in winter. The light
was without light, the sky skyless.

The air white like a moistened loaf.

From my window, I could see a deserted arena,
a circle bitten out by the teeth of winter.

All at once, led out by a single man,
ten horses, were stepping, stepping into the snow.

Scarcely had they rippled into existence
like flame, than they filled the whole world of my eyes,
empty til now. Faultless, flaming,
they stepped like ten gods on broad clean hoof,
their manes recalling a dream of salt spray.

Their rumps were globes, were oranges.

Their color was amber and honey, was on fire.

Their necks were towers
carved from the stone of pride,
and in their furious eyes, sheer energy
showed itself, a prisoner inside them.

And there, in the silence, at the mid-
point of the day, in a dirty, disgruntled winter,
the horses' intense presence was blood,
was rhythm, was the beckoning light of all being.

I saw, I saw, and seeing, I came to life.
There was the unwitting fountain, the dance of gold, the sky,
the fire that sprang to life in beautiful things.

I have obliterated that gloomy Berlin winter.

I shall not forget the light from these horses.

- Pablo Neruda
Translated by Alastair Reid

Bright Star

I almost wish we were butterflies, and live but three summer days, three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

- John Keats in a letter to Fanny Brawn

Roger Ebert recommends reading Grace Wangs's poetic review of the film Bright Star:

...based on the last three years of life of John Keats, one of the great Romantics poets, who passed after a mere quarter century on this earth and left behind a wealth of sensual imagery in words that would be celebrated eternally worldwide.

Waking Up

Try to love everything that gets in your way:

- Alison Luterman, From the poem
Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle

I encourage you to pick up a copy of the January 2010 issue of The Sun magazine, which contains 3 wonderful poems by Alison Luterman.  One of those is the following:

Waking Up

Six-thirty in the morning, in the black belly of winter.
At the kitchen table he eats sausages and reads
the New York Times online, occasionally
chuckling or grunting.  I sip coffee and write.
The cat is trying every strategy she can think of
to get onto his lap and closer to those sausages.
The fact that she fails again and again
does not discourage her.

She reminds me of myself, all the long years
I searched for exactly this and failed and fell,
over and over.  Mingled smells of cooking and sleep,
the warmth of his absent-minded hand on my thigh,
surprise of long arms wrapped hard around my waist
as I stand washing dishes, the radio switched on
reminding us we are lucky, lucky, lucky.

I'm there at the sink now, writing done, rocking back
on my heels into the long curve of his body
that fits mine like a parenthesis fits the word it encloses.
News of the world's dangers and beauties
murmurs around us as the sun rises,
spreading a white veil over the yellow grass.

(23)

This Space, This Silence

A perfect winter poem by Alison Pick:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

I come to the desk in my flannel pajamas, carrying a cup of black coffee.  Print the last page, make some corrections.  It's cold, and the thermostat cranky.  Put on a sweater, then take it off.  Out in the field, nothing needs changing: the field goes about the business of dying with the perfect belief in the spring.  Last night

it snowed but this morning it sticks, coats the gravel driveway, the road, in a ribbon of white all the way to the lake.  Michael has written, saying he doesn't believe the divine intervention thing.  Neither do I.  But somehow the field is focused in frost, somehow the stars go out and come back.  Somehow the moon spins on its axis, opens and closes it's mouth without making a sound.  Now my love comes into

the room, wearing long-underwear, sleep in his hair.  He puts on the Schubert.  We drink our coffee in front of the window, fat flakes of snow falling into the water.  This and each morning we try not to speak.  Soon I will put my sweater back on, move to the desk.  This space, this silence, someone who loves me: over the field the clouds shift their shadows.  When the last change is made I will sit by the blank paper, listening.

(33)

Question & Answer