February 10 blizzard photos

Sr.Francine Brown took these Tuesday night and Thursday morning. We've had about 50 inches between the two back-to-back storms.

Blizzard

Here is a poem I wrote back in 1979, in Emmitsburg, the last time we had a snow event this size:

Blizzard

The deaf snow speaks in sign like a prophet.
His fingers remark the landscape swiftly, stolidly.
They say
This time I am serious.
He cups his thick hand on the birdsnest,
levels the driveways,
leans on the trees,
pulls the sky down to the earth -
nebulae swirl by the second story windows.
This time I am serious.
This time you will hear me.

Snow Predictions

Dire predictions for blizzard conditions-
twelve to twenty inches possible
between tomorrow and Saturday.

I found this photo on hearingvoices.com - caption says it's from a friend of a friend in Missoula... The cat looks like Jerry, one of ours.

enthralled students

I've taken this photo from Roger Bourland's blog, but it reminds me of the atmosphere in my MOD CIV class... I'm the professor, mind you!
The class meets from 12:30-1:45 on Tuesdays-Thursdays, a sleepy time of the day anyway. But my PowerPoint lectures are clearly soporific. I've had a number of the students in other classes, and I know they can be lively and talkative. My challenge is to help them get that way in this class. I'm working on it...

Poem in The Coe Review

My poem "Sonnet on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop" is on p. 43 of the Fall 09 print edition of The Coe Review. I can't find it online, so here it is:



If you taste tears too often, inquisitive tongue,
you'll crave more salt on everything you eat,
taste blandness even in the rarest meat.
Tears tear, obscure the vision of the young.
too many elders leave their loss unsung,
often deny the pain they daily meet.
Inquisitive neighbors murmur and entreat;
tongue locks the secret grief away among
long stored up packets far back in the deep freeze.
Avoid the frequent tongue touch to your grief;
instead, taste food whose sweetness pain will ease
if you would seek a gossamer relief.
The tongue will savor sweetness more than salt;
with icing more than cheese your pain will halt.

A Hymn to Longwood Gardens

I grew up visiting Longwood Gardens, which was a ten minute drive from my home.

Here is a poem I wrote last year about the place:



Hymn to Longwood Gardens

How is it that I was born five miles from you,
born to walk your three hundred acres for twelve years?

Now, thirty years later,
in the satiny iced lawns of February,
I dream of your sumptuous beds
of lavender
glowing numinous in summer twilight,
your solitary fountain
stumbled upon in deep shade,
of thrush revealing her speckled breast in the mulch
behind the Italian water gardens.

I dream of my first love
plucking my hand into his,
a young, thin, fine, freckled hand,
the first holding of hands
as we entered the garden
for a fountain display
on a starlit July evening.

In those days, you were free.
Now, you have flourished,
and your entrance fee is costly.

Thinking of West Chester PA

I was going to drive to my hometown, West Chester PA, today, but changed my mind.
It snowed again last night, and show showers and bitter cold winds dominate the day.
I'll go tomorrow. But travelling to West Chester always makes me think of my parents,in the summer days when we went to Longwood Gardens, and the winter nights
in the kitchen at supper. I wrote a poem about that a number of years ago:


Four Thousand Suppers


At the kitchen table
at six o'clock.
Dark winter evenings
with my father in his winter underwear,
quilted like an astronaut.
Blue summer evenings
after my mother called my name
on the lilting breeze
which reached me
at far corners of the neighborhood,
her voice known
among all the others.

We ate four thousand suppers
in that small room together.
What did we discuss?
Linoleum and carpet, casement windows,
the wild McElroys,
the loud Mrs. Supportas,
scenes from the fifth grade,
my problems with bushels and pecks.

Four thousand suppers -
oceans of tea.
The man and woman at the table
grow grey.
I grow up -
feet finally
reach the floor.

The Book Thief

Over our semester break, I read this novel and loved it. I read it with a mind to assigning books for the MOD CIV class I'm teaching this semester, but this book will stay with me long after that course concludes.

The writing is loaded with figures of speech and images. I think the writing is superb. The narrator is Death - though not in any mordant or obnoxious way:
" I would introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away. At that moment, you will be lying there ( I rarely find people standing up) You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I'll hear after that will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps. The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?" (4)

Death tells the story of a young German girl in a small German town during WWII.
It's the most gripping story I've read in recent memory.

Blustery January Saturday

This photo came from Google images, from a blog called "Spike's Backyard" - but it looks like the scene at my window these days. A Carolina Wren comes regularly, along with a host of Chickdees, Nuthatches, Downies, Finches, etc.



On another subject... I'm writing again; first poems since the summer. Here is a draft of one I worked on yesterday. The end of the year, end of the decade has preoccupied me this past week. Re-reading my journals, I realize what a rough and momenous decade it has been in my life. This is very self-focused; I realize that the tragedies and losses this country has experienced, and the world! are so much larger. But anyway:


Spending down the Decade

Say the years like rosary beads:

Year of cobweb cancer cut from my nose,
Frankenstein scar from repairing graft,
Year of Alzheimer’s Father,
AWOL from the old folk’s home
In his soon to be confiscated car,
Driving hours in the snow
To the home town,
Chatty with the state police,
Surprised to see me there
To retrieve him.

Glory be

Year of Planes flying into tall buildings,
Melting the steel beams like licorice sticks,
Flames and people jumping,
Straight down collapse

Glory be

Year of spending down my parents’ money
To qualify for Medicaid.
None left for me.
Year to shun the fantasies
Of wealth and escape.
Year of Susan’s death,
Breast cancer chewing her liver.

Glory be

Year of the hole in retina,
curtain of detachment
reattached,
but still, the central vision gone.

Glory be

Year of Paris, Lourdes,
Florence,
green Mediterranean heaving
On the rocks below Quercinella

Glory be



Year of the wide paintbrush of burning
Inside forearms and palms,
Heart Attack,
Recalling me to life,
Numb, relieved to
Flee from bombastic boss.

Glory be

Year of the Amish –
My newfound family tree,
Familiar faces in the farmformal dress,
Of the Nickel Mines massacre,
My cousin’s shattered mouth
Repaired, speaking to me.

Glory be



Year of my Father’s drowning
departure during his afternoon nap,
The sudden absence,
The rabbit’s comforting kiss.
Year of Scattered Showers

Glory be

Year of collapsing convent,
crumbling stock rock, shrinking savings,
lost fortunes.
Year of Pick it up and Read

Glory be


Year of Cervical Cancer,
terrible mating with radium,
flushed colon,
blurred vision,
months marooned,
recalled to life.
Year when lilacs were never so dear
Year of Bob’s Brain Cancer,
death by brain fever.
Year of How the Hand Behaves

Glory be
Amen.

Ring out the old, ring in the new...

I love this... heard it on NPR years ago. It's an old Welsh carol found and set to music by Benjamin Britten:

Here we bring new water from the well so clear,
For to worship God with, this happy new year;
Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine,
With seven bright gold wires, and bugles that do shine;

Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her toe;
Open you the west door and turn the old year go;
Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine,
With seven bright gold wires, and bugles that do shine;

Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her chin.
Open you the east door and let the new year in!
Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine,
With seven bright gold wires, and bugles that do shine.

Poem published in Common Ground Review

The poem is about my experience last winter - had cancer treatments which made me so ill that I was very dehydrated and had blurred vision - couldn't read from Feb. to May. Thought I'd never read again. That was worse than having cancer.


Marooned

I'm floating on a narrow mattress
on a desert island,
in an ocean of grey floor, pale green walls.
The plane has crashed.
I'm washed up,
stranded here,
cast away into a wilderness
of dehydrated silence.
Dissociated,
my blurred eyes cast about
for signs of health,
for signs of death.
But I am a castaway,
shipwrecked by broken bowels,
by waterstarved heart.

Snow was general all over Maryland...

It snowed again --- Friday night, Dec.18, all the way through to late Saturday night,
Dec.19. We had about 20 inches. Beautful in the sun today....
birds back and forth at my windowsill: Redbellies, Cardinals, Nuthatches, Chickadees, Titmice, House Finches, Goldfinches, Doves, Juncos, a female Purple Finch, and a Carolina Wren.

Surprise snow this week

It snowed beautifully Tuesday evening. My college students went out frolicking in it.

Somehow the snow in Emmitsburg seems poignant this year.

Field Mouse on the Bird Bell!

I didn't get a photo ( found this one on Google Images) and our mouse was feasting on one of those nut/birdseed bells wired to the windowscreen --- but three stories up! Saw him there last night,gorging himself, and he was still there this morning, sleeping on the birdbell!

My New Chapbook

due out from Finishing Line Press on November 30.

Cover photo and design by my friend Deborah Humphreys

In the Hand of the Bander

( photo from Google Images)








In the Hand of the Bander

Not named for the coarse open fabric of flags,
but named after sifting seeds,
after blue dye from hairy blooms of the legume family
in India, Indigo Buntings flash,
hue of the portion of the visible spectrum from blue to violet
evoked in the human observer
by radiant energy,
by iridescence in flight.
Female Indigo Bunting
in the hand of the bander,
more subtle than your glorious mate,
deceptively brown,
outraged at your capture,
you biting the hand of the bander,
fierce as a falcon.

October in Emmitsburg

Poem: The Cat and the Fireworks

The Cat and the Fireworks


At the first volley of fireworks,
unseen except for flashes
of lightening like light,
the calico cat sprang to alert.
leapt to the windowsill,
retreated under the bed,
then emerged and sprang to the
top of the bureau.
A low growl rumbled from
her belly-
a sound I never heard her make before.
Deep, rolling growl
sound radiating through fur
as she watched from
her patrol post
for the duration of the fireworks.
She became the cat in someone’s bedroom
in London,
on the first night of the Blitz.
She became the cat distracted from catching rats in the church
in Dresden,
as the planes rained down fire and boulders.

She became the cat cowering in the doorway
in Baghdad,
When the Americans bombed Saddam
back to his bunker.

All the cats
in all the arrowstruck, cannonstruck
cities down the centuries,
interrupted, startled,
terrified, growling deep,
feral, innocent,
instincts bristling.

Some recent poems

Binoculars

Catering to the desire to see
further than is possible
when using the naked eye,
the desire to see the
Yellow- breasted Chat
who chuckles in the Cape May sun
from a distant treetop,
Binoculars present the opportunity.
Objective lens,
Ocular lens,
Porro Prism
Provide precision,
and even better,
Eye Relief.

Rubber eyepieces now crumble
from age, sweat,
skin oil,
bug spray.
Still the collimation offers
perfect stereoscopic vision.
The interpupillary distance
between the pupils of the eyes
is different for each person.
Thus the central hinge
permits differentiation.

The Yellow-breasted Chat
glows buttery gold
in the sunlight,
appearing eight times
closer to me
than he actually is.
I can almost see the lustful glint
in his beady black eyes.

My garden is flourishing