Poetry Thursday: "how to love this world"

Spring

by Mary Oliver







Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

[via Poetry Chaikhana]

apropopisms

That's the unwieldy word I just coined for the more aptly named Eggcorns, misspelled terms that yield suprising new meanings.

A mere day after I was tipped off to this excellent database, I was sent a draft letter containing a worthy little Eggcorn. In the letter, an otherwise beautifully worded protest of the D.C. school district's decision to simultaneously upgrade some facilities and close others while instituting completely new classroom educational standards, the letter writer asserted "they are biting off more than they can choose."

Indeed.

Please don't get me started.



Anyway. Happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts.

Eggcorns. Ah, yes.

I do so enjoy a propirious slip of the tongue, don't you?



[Tip of the Eggcorns via Shawn Lea. Image via Heraclitean Fire]

wonderful finds

I have made not one but two new bliends in a matter of days:

Grammaticus (see also this post),

and

Liz Elayne at be present, be here.









[image via be present, be here]

"Mary Kay Place, Mary Kay Place!"

I was never the only Lisa in the class.

No, never. All those years during the sixties and seventies, there were always like four of us.

And I know why.

My mother was one of the few women in the nation who actually admitted that in the hot and steamy summer of 1963 she and millions of other American women named their baby daughters Lisa in tribute to headstrong, beautiful ne'er doin' better Lisa Shea on As the World Turns.

(Lisa Miller Hughes Eldridge Shea Colman McColl Mitchell Grimaldi, that is).

None of this explains my later fascination with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, of course.

Oh sure, there was the summer I spent each evening carefully circling the TV shows I'd be watching the next day--half hour by painstaking half hour, from say 10 a.m. until 5 pm. And even though, that summer, I was totally addicted to Ryan's Hope, and almost as much to The Young and the Restless ...and then, in college summers, to Santa Barbara...

But this isn't about me.

Wait, wait, that's not right. I blog, therefore this is about me. Kewl.

No simple series of events can explain my forbidden love for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Nor can any of these events from my past explain how MHMH came suddenly to occupy a principal position in my occipital and temporal lobes at about 10:20 pm EST Sunday night.

There's a simple enough explanation for that. I can sum it up in three words:

Mary. Kay. Place.

She's excellent. She's eminently watchable. And she's on HBO's newest series and Six Feet Under wannabe, Big Love.

Currently rated BD at our house, for Benefit of the Doubt.

(Because it's too hard to keep repeating WTHSIATS, for What the Hell, Since It's After the Sopranos, that's why).

Anyway. MKP is a lovely actress, too seldom seen (though with a thriving career, thriving enough to entitle her to her own Six Degrees game, check it). But looks like all that modest ubiquity might be about to change, with the release of two excellent-looking indy picks in Nine Lives and Lonesome Jim.

Which I won't be seeing in the theatres.

Because I have kids, that's why.

Now wipe your mouth and go get your pajamas on.

Whatever. So, damned if I can figure out how to sign the petition to bring out MHMH on DVD without signing on to still another time-sucking e-list of amusements, but it's here if you want to add in.

my friend amy...

...was minding her own business last week when suddenly the Shadow crossed her path.

Before it did, she crossed the path of a more benign shadow: that of a bicycle being lovingly rendered by one Ellis Gallagher, an artist and self-appointed shadow-tracer in Amy's neck of the woods (that's Brooklyn to you).

Amy has to travel this week, away from these friendly neighborhood shadows and toward the Shadow that falls every which way around us all, all the time.

Safe journey, Amy. Come home whole.

A Word for Sunday

pellucid: [[L pellucidus <: pellucere, to shine through < per + lucere]]

[word via Grammaticus; picture via Echinodorus online]

Poetry Thursday Doubleheader: This Just In

Nadine, one of my students in the American Voice class at Emerson, just created this poem for us over at the class blog, and I think it deserves a wider readership.








You

by Nadine A.

“You”, what a large word that is to me
Your soul, Your personality, Your spirit
Bringing me a gift, more of it everyday
Hungry for you

You show me all I want to know of you and
Your soul, Your personality, Your spirit
There are no missing puzzle pieces

You allow me to enjoy
Your soul, Your personality, Your spirit
Bringing me joy

“You” what a large word that is to me



[Puzzle quilt image courtesy of Benartex.com]

Poetry Thursday: “hands were some of the best things/he’d ever done”

God Went to Beauty School

by Cynthia Rylant

He went there to learn how
to give a good perm
and ended up just crazy about nails
so He opened up His own shop.
"Nails by Jim" He called it.
He was afraid to call it
Nails by God.
He was sure people would
think He was being
disrespectful and using
His own name in vain
and nobody would tip.
He got into nails, of course,
because He'd always loved
hands--hands were some of the best things
He'd ever done
and this way He could just
hold one in His
and admire those delicate
bones just above the knuckles,
delicate as birds' wings, and after He'd done that
awhile,
He could paint all the nails
any color He wanted,
then say,
"Beautiful,"
and mean it.

[From God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant. Copyright © 2003 by Cynthia Rylant. More on Cynthia Rylant at HarperCollins Children's Books. Image: Hand of God with Blue Eye]

so true

"The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say."

Tom Stoppard

odd and lovely ideas: part two

I especially like the children's option at this new organization, whose name, Birthright Unplugged, is a direct response to the umbrella group Birthright Israel.

Now, first things first. Birthright Israel sponsors absolutely free trips to Israel for North American Jews ages 18-26. Who doesn't like a good deal, right?

But these trips--supported and organized by the State of Israel and a wide variety of Jewish groups, are not the straightforward, "feel-good," family affairs they purport to be. If so, why target them to the youngest and most mobile adults? In other words, the ones most likely to fall for the romance of t'shuva, to drop everything and resettle overseas? A variety of sponsors ensures "diverse" experiences of the Holy Land from an Israel-centered perch, with a heavy dollop of American Zionist romanticism thrown in.

Consider the Birthright Unplugged alternative--trips for any non-Israeli Jews to Palestine, comparably free (a small $350 program cost gets you in), dicier in terms of safety perhaps, open to all ages (though younger people are emphasized), and definitely agenda'ed (is that a word?).

Nu? You were expecting maybe trips to Palestine for only olives and photographs? Of course they are agenda'ed. But unlike their bigger sibling, they go beyond the boundaries of the accepted trip to the Promised Land. Plus, the group uses its international clout to offer this exchange camp for Palestinian kids, Birthright Re-plugged, which permits them to cross into Israel and actually learn about it, while staying with Palestinian families who are already there.

[via Andrew Schamess at Semitism]

Poetry Thursday: Jack Agüeros

Sonnet Substantially Like the Words of Fulano Rodriguez One Position Ahead of Me On the Unemployment Line

Jack Agüeros

It happens to me all the time--business
Goes up and down but I'm the yo-yo spun
Into the high speed trick called sleeping
Such as I am fast standing in this line now.

Maybe I am also a top; they too sleep
While standing, tightly twirling in place.
I wish I could step out and listen for
The sort of music that I must make.

But this is where the state celebrates its sport.
From cushioned chairs the agents turn your ample
Time against you through a box of lines.
Your string is both your leash and lash.

The faster you spin, the stiller you look.
There's something to learn in that, but what?

[Poem from Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers by Jack Agüeros, published by Hanging Loose Press. © 1991. Used here for personal and educational purposes only. Image of day laborers from North County Times, California]

odd and lovely ideas: part one

The Fallen Fruit project.

["Floating Mangoes" by Keith Bland]

Poetry Thursday: Early Spring

I'm posting this a day early, appropriately enough.

Thy fingers make early flowers of

ee cummings

Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings,saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says;singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death,Thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing,it shall not stop kissing).

Best Of...(imho)

The Tao is the One,
From the One come yin and yang;
From these two, creative energy;
From energy, the ten thousand things;
The forms of all creation.

All life embodies the yin
And embraces yang,
Through their union
Achieving harmony.

--Tao Te Ching

Yes, readers, it's come to this. I am re-running a favorite old post from last year.

I guess it's really true that what goes around comes around.

Ooohhhhhmmmmmmm....

From August 2005:

The image accompanying this post is one of many ink drawings by Sengai Gibon (1750-1838), a Zen priest known for his witty renderings of Buddhist principles. This figure of three shapes represents Lao Tze's configuration of all reality as ten thousand things derived from and returning to an original unity.

The circle represents the origin and unity of all things, the triangle represents the creation of material reality from that oneness, and the square represents the endless replication of triangles into all that we know. I suppose you could say this is an ancient and enduring notation of the unified field theory our scientists still seek.

Ever since I began working on a book whose long title includes the words One Thousand, I have been drawn to all things thousand. Last year when I was teaching high school I stumbled across Sengai's work and found the image deeply moving. Its simplicity helped me unlock the delicate, interlocking processes of writing and revision for my students, whose natural abilities had been all but extinguished by years of conventional "writing" training.

As often happens, when I was careening around the Internet universe looking for good links to this topic today, I came across a link at the New York Review of Books on a little-known 1955 novel, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. In its time it won kudos from, among others, Eudora Welty.

What got my attention is that Robert Creeley, among my favorite poets, made a compelling comparison of Dermout's writing to that of Michael Ondaatje:"you get the tone that makes you recognize that [Ondaatje is] part of a culture, not simply a singular writer; he's part of a whole way of seeing reality."

Another way of seeing reality? That's all I needed to hear. Immediately Dermout went on my to-read list, which is already too long, longer than my eyes' life might be. Oh, well.

And while I'm throwing a whole lot of the world's glorious things at you, I will tell you that one of my favorite websites to stroll through is Michael Garofalo's Spirit of Gardening, which has a lot to say about complexity and simplicity. And I also have discovered another excellent miscellany, Balke Leyh's The Ten Thousand Things, a music site with MP3 offerings from artists like (at the moment) Alpha Blondy, David Byrne, Steve Reich, Hitchcock-film composer Bernard Herrmann, and assorted Nepali hip-hop artists.

Did I forget anything?

oohhmmmmm.

categories:garden home life miscellany religion thought

Poetry Thursday: Margo Button

Verses 5, 6, and 7 from the exquisitely long "Blue Dahlias," by Margo Button.

5

The heron's beak points next door but her jaundiced eye
focuses on the koi pond. I'm keeping count.

Chasing barn swallows, the dog's in her glory.
In the Yuchi language God is a verb

and there is no word for temptation.
Bird feeders hang from the eaves beyond reach.

Grief / weighs down the see-saw; / joy cannot budge it.
I do not subscribe to this. Cannot.

The dog explodes into motion. A race horse
out of the gates. Exuberant as a springbok.

6

Tent caterpillars burst with a pop, spraying
the sandstone rust and lime. I have no mercy.

In the yard, the music of bronzed Greek gods
with rippling muscles. Play at work, work at play.

I'm feeling déracinée while new plants take root.
Will the gardeners ever leave? And the turquoise port-a-potty?

At the club an oak limb fell and demolished three cars.
In summer there's no warning. And in winter?

Natalie picks up their soft weightless bodies, mesmerized
as they curl around her fingers.

7

The dog brings home a finch
throbbing in her loose, soft mouth. No harm meant.

After the upheaval of moving, the soul requires
months to catch up. Dig earth, pull weeds, feed birds.

White spots on the caterpillars' heads are fly eggs.
Don't kill those. Remember the Jains.

Swoosh. Two mallards skid on to the pond,
rise on struts, fan and shower. Welcome.

Rhodos in tarty dress, plain-Jane grasses,
crone oaks rigid with vines. Everyone gathers.

[Image: "Dahlia" by Steven N. Meyers, via the New York Public Library Art Shop]