There must be another life

 

Andrea Kowch     The Reunion

I love this; borrowed from the Facebook page, Ravenous Butterflies:

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

Virginia Woolf

I think I've said how much I love the paintings of Andrea Kowch.

Here's another one:

Andrea Kowch The Light Keepers

We are all keeping the Light today, and hopefully heading for a reunion of Democracy!

Now that I am old and wise

 I saw this meme on Facebook today, and nodded my head.  It is so true!

I've only written one or two poems on this theme, but here is one of them:

Riding El Rapido, 1970

 

 

Somewhere between Lisbon

and Salamanca

in the hot, dry July,

so different from humid home,

I noticed my hair, long then,

to my elbows, felt

sleek and straight as it never was before,

and never was again.

 

He smoothed it, praising thick silk of it,

all spun cherry wood gold in the desert sun.

The rattling train stopped frequently.

He'd jump off and buy us wine and bread.

 

By sunset, we shared our third class compartment

with a famiy of six, baby crying,

chickens coughing the dry dust.

 

We were 22 then,

just out of college.

Everything was romance.

Our lives, El Rapido.

 

 

There's a better one about hitch hiking in Ireland, but I can't find it now.  Will repost when I do.

I found it!   It was never published in my books, but was there in my "30-30" file:

Hitchhiking in Ireland, 1970

 

Myself on the road on a sunny September morning,

the rain having stopped just now,

with my brown hair plaited,

thick braids thumping on my back,

yellow raincoat, moldy brown shoes

and my thumb out,

standing by the deserted road.

A frowsy black sedan stops.

Skinny man with stubbly cheeks,

random teeth,

grins and opens the passenger door.

I climb in, onto the torn leather seat.

He's asking me about my boyfriend.

I tell him I'm engaged.

I notice that his worn black trousers have a large hole

in the thigh.

Shortly down the road

he pulls over by tall green hedge

and gets out.

Come on, he says, I want to

show you something.

I follow him a brief way

into a pasture.

What's here? I say, seeing nothing

but a pasture in the sun.

He's frail, skinny, and short

almost as me, and poor.

He doesn't know what to do with me.

I huff past him and say

there's nothing here. I'll go

no farther with you.

He gets in his car

and drives away.

 

I call to myself, down thirty seven years,

watching the road, watching the rusty car

sputter into the distance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Still Don't Know

 

who will win this very close election.  

My various Facebook friends have contributed some memorable posts:

and

and

and so we wait.

Election Day

 

One headline titled us "The United Hates of America."  How tragic is that?  How close to the truth!  

Gene Weingarten, in a piece in the Sunday Washington Post Magazine, talked about that. One of the things he said that really hit me was:

( about Trump): 

"Mostly, I cannot forgive him for what he has taken from me, personally. … What h has taken from me are two things: First, my genuine lifelong feeling that the United States, for all its weaknesses and failures, deserves, and has always deserved, the benefit of the doubt.  Second:  I find myself profoundly disliking and disrespecting almost half of my countrymen and women – that is, the group of Americans that support Trump.  I have never felt such antipathy before, even in other sharply polarizing times, and it feels absolutely terrible. 

…What is hard to understand – almost impossible to understand – is the way the Trump presidency has divided seemingly like-minded people of goodwill: friends, relatives, neighbors, professional colleagues – people of similar backgrounds and who theoretically should align politically, but don’t. And who have a hard time feeling anything but contempt for the other."

I am praying that Joe Biden wins the election, and that the Democrats take the Senate.  Many of my cousins and my high school - and college- classmates - are praying for the exact opposite.

Time will tell.

All Souls Day

 

Days Outside of Time:

Dia de los Muertos

A Poem for All Saints Day

 

"All Saints Day' [by Amy Gerstler]

All Saints Day

The holiday arrives
quietly like phrases
of faint praise
in Braille. Famous
saints bow at the waist,
then step back, making
room for scores
of unknown saints,
to whom this day
also belongs. Not
a glamorous bunch,
these uncanonized,
unsung ones, shading
their eyes shyly
in the backs of the minds
of the few who knew them.
Hung-over, mute, confused,
hunched, clumsy, blue,
pinched, rigid or fidgety,
unable to look the radioactive,
well-dressed major saints
in the eye, they wonder
terrified: What (the fuck)
Am I Doing Here? Still
drenched, the tobacco
spitting fisherman who dove
after a dog swept downriver
looks in vain for a towel,
too timid to ask. (His dog
now sports a halo, too.)
Robed in volcanic ash,
a brave Pompeii matron
is mistaken by St. Catherine
for a sooty statue. An old
coot who serenaded
his dying wife with her
favorite ukulele tunes
is still trying to find her,
as his map of the afterlife
proved unreliable. What can
we offer these reticent saints
who lacked press agents?
Flowers? Lit candles? Floating
lanterns? The nerdy
fat whistle-blower from
the chemical plant
whose plaid slacks
made his coworkers
laugh behind his back
nervously jokes sotto
voce that he’d give
his soul for a Coke,
but no one can hear him.

-- Amy Gerstler

When shadows appear on the ceilings and walls

 

"To all the ancient ones from their houses, the Old Ones from above and below. In this time the Gods of the Earth touch our feet, bare upon the ground. Spirits of the Air whisper in our hair and chill our bodies, and from the dark portions watch and wait the Faery Folk that they may join the circle and leave their track upon the ground. It is the time of the waning year. Winter is upon us. The corn is golden in the winnow heaps. Rains will soon wash sleep into the life-bringing Earth. We are not without fear, we are not without sorrow...Before us are all the signs of Death: the ear of corn is no more green and life is not in it. The Earth is cold and no more will grasses spring jubilant. The Sun but glances upon his sister, the earth..... It is so....Even now....But here also are the signs of life, the eternal promise given to our people. In the death of the corn there is the seed--which is both food for the season of Death and the Beacon which will signal green-growing time and life returning.In the cold of the Earth there is but sleep wherein She will awaken refreshed and renewed, her journey into the Dark Lands ended. And where the Sun journeys he gains new vigor and potency; that in the spring, his blessings shall come ever young!"

-  Two Samhain Rituals, Compost Coveners, 1980  

They huddled here in harmony

 

Here's another seasonal poem by Robert Graves:

Ghost Music

Robert Graves - 1895-1985

 

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,

Bent-backed and blind the organist.

From rafters looming shadowy,

From the pipes’ tuneful company,

Drifted together drowsily,

Innumerable, formless, dim,

The ghosts of long-dead melodies,

Of anthems, stately, thunderous,

Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:

In melancholy drowsy-sweet

They huddled there in harmony.

Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Halloween 1911    by Stewart MacGeorge

Mornings are Dark

 

October           by Hilaire Belloc

Look, how those steep woods on the mountain's face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year's grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I'll stretch and steaming beast I'll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

Elders have stopped reading the news

 

Igor Oleynikov       A Strange Night

I read this poem last night; it was posted on another blog. It hit me hard.

Elegy for the Mourning of my Death

by Risa Denenberg

Elders have stopped reading the news. We dream
            of serious play down on our knees—
cat’s eyes, jacks, the kiss that’s for keeps.
           
We know spring will come again and again, but not for us. 
            We fill pauses with baskets of laundry
and potsful of soup. We can’t reassemble the bones

of our dead or carry chrysanthemums to the cremated.
            We read the old cryptic texts on how
to greet aging. Should we speak or wire our mouths shut?

We prepare for endings, try to be thankful. 
           We nap in the afternoon.
We’ve already witnessed the future, while time lags behind. 

The whole lot must be coursework
            for something else—
the way the body is water, yet manages not to seem so.

The way an egg could feed a child
           or beget a chicken.
It barely matters now. Still, on that morning,

I hope to wake in my own bed, softly
            wrapped in the praxis
of long having known this day would come.

Then, let my fresh carbon mingle with the coal of my ancestors.

 

 

Under a Cold October Sky

 

Halloween Walk        Leigh Ann Lilly

Here's a great seasonal poem by David Haven:

Under the cold October Sky

By David Haven

Under the cold October sky
as the veil of Samhain grows thin
the seasons of planting and harvest are gone
and fall’s in the air again.
When summer has passed into Autumn chill
and the days ever shorter go by
spirits arise and they roam the earth
under the cold night sky.

All through the long and the lonely night
like restless waves on the sand
the moon in the sky with the clouds drifting by
make shadows pass over the land.
Outside of the window see them moving
from leaves swaying in the breeze.
Some of them seem to reach out and grab
like the bare crooked branches of trees.
Some shadows are cast by a firelight
and they flicker and dance on the ground
But some shadows are from dead things
that rise from their graves
when they get up and walk around!

Down a dark and lonely road
a graveyard stands alone
with fallen leaves all scattered around
among the grey tombstones.
Where weeds and brambles freely grow
without a soul to care
with unbroken solitude
for the living rarely enter there.

All through the heat of summer days
the wind there blows a chill
although the sun is pressing down
and all is quiet and still.
Sunlight and shadows dance and play
in movements through the trees
and the voices of the dead speak

soft

as a whisper on a breeze.

But summer days have fled away.
The fields are bare and cold.
And eventide comes quicker
as the year is growing old.
As night descends on hearth and home
and evening shadows grow
from the cold and dark folks gather
around the fireside glow.
When those to their houses for refuge have gone
and the windows and doors have been fastened tight.
When shadows appear on the ceilings and walls
from the flickering candle lights.

Locked windows and doors may keep thieves away
Intruders that murder and steal.
And the wind and the rain or the sleet and the snow
are kept out at the window seal.
As the veil that separates the world
of the living and dead grows thin
no window or door although fastened tight
keep the dead from entering in!

You Cannot Conquer Time

 

You cannot conquer Time

 

The other day, in my Modernity in Literature class, I taught them about the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden.

As I was working through it with them, it occurred to me that the central theme of all the literature I had chosen to teach for this course is TIME.

I won’t go into all of the texts now, but trust me: it is.

In Auden’s poem, written in 1937, he has a narrator, and two speakers:  the lovers, and the clocks.

The lovers are lyrical and delirious and full of hyperbole in the first half of the poem, and then the clocks take up their song, which basically is that “You cannot conquer Time.”

The lines that hit me this year :  The clocks sing:

“Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.”

It’s like a prophecy of COVID.

 

The other day I received news that Ted Torrance, one of my old teachers from Bishop Shanahan, had died at age 88, not from COVID, but still.   He was the history teacher and also our moderator for our folk music group, The Hillside Singers.  We gave concerts at Shanahan, but also at some other nearby Catholic high schools.  We were good!   One of our classmates, Jerry Klein, a “techy guy” even back then,recorded two of our concerts and in recent years, burned them into a CD and then to an MP3,

I downloaded them again and have been listening to them. 

We weren’t all that good, but we were full of life.  Some of us droned and were flat. But our harmonies were pretty good.

“A race around the stars,

A journey through the universe ablaze

With Changes.”

Lines from Phil Ochs, who died of a broken heart, and suicide, in 1976.

 

What did we know, we eighteen year olds, of the vagaries of Time?

Christian Schloe       Night with a View

Counting the days

 I keep doing this, but I really don't know why.  It doesn't make me less worried about the election.

Here are some wonderful woodcuts by artist Ian MacCulloch.  They lift my spirits.

O Lift Me Over the Threshold

 

Here's a poem by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge:

The Witch    by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

 

I  have walked a great while over the snow
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have
Who plead for their heart's desire.
She came - she came - and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

 

 

Pumpkin Time

 

"Perhaps the most famous icon of the holiday is the jack-o-lantern.  Various authorities attribute it to either Scottish or Irish origin.  However, it seems clear that it was used as a lantern by people who traveled the road this night, the scary face to frighten away spirits or faeries who might otherwise lead one astray.  Set on porches and in windows, they cast the same spell of protection over the household.  (The American pumpkin seems to have forever superseded the European gourd as the jack-o-lantern of choice.)  Bobbing for apples may well represent the remnants of a Pagan 'baptism' rite called a 'seining', according to some writers.  The water-filled tub is a latter-day Cauldron of Regeneration, into which the novice's head is immersed.  The fact that the participant in this folk game was usually blindfolded with hands tied behind the back also puts one in mind of a traditional Craft initiation ceremony."

-   Mike Nichols, All Hallow's Eve

James Wyeth     Pumpkins at Sea

Andrea Kowch      In the Hollow

What I Love is Near at Hand

 

Here's a poem by Theodore Roethke:

 

"I have come to a still, but not a deep center, 
A point outside the glittering current; 
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, 
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, 
My mind moves in more than one place, 
In a country half-land, half-water. 
I am renewed by death, thought of my death, 
The dry scent of a dying garden in September, 
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. 
What I love is near at hand, 
Always, in earth and air."

-  Theodore Roethke, The Far Field    

 

In the name of the daybreak

 

here's a poem/ prayer by Diane Ackerman:

In the name of the daybreak

and the eyelids of morning

and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor

my soul with hatred,

but offer myself humbly

as a guardian of nature,

as a healer of misery,

as a messenger of wonder,

as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the day that embraces it

and the cloud veils drawn over it

and the uttermost night

and the male and the female

and the plants bursting with seed

and the crowning seasons

of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life

—wherever and in whatever form

it may dwell—on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

 

Diane Ackerman

 

This about sums it up:

That handsome FBI agent from Twin Peaks...

Here's a poem by Elizabeth Jennings:

 

Ghosts 

Those houses haunt in which we leave
Something undone. It is not those
Great words or silence of love
That spread their echoes through a place
And fill the locked-up, unbreathed gloom.
Ghosts do not haunt with any face
That we have known; they only come
With arrogance to thrust at us
Our own omissions in a room.
The words we would not speak they use,
The deeds we dared not act they flaunt,
Our nervous silences they bruise;
It is our helplessness they choose
And our refusals that they haunt.

 
 

October Roses

 Thirty-six degrees this morning.  Frost on the far meadow.  I think the courtyard is still protected, but the killing frost isn't far away.

I love this photo of  roses by Julie Zickefoose, from her garden:

I love this poem by Clare Pollard:

OCTOBER ROSES

Roses this October
burnt red like plague posies —
rash for the world’s fever,
a curse on our houses.

But then you were born in
the season’s strange mildness.
My heart rose as you rose
in my arms, small witness.

With your nails as tiny
as droplets of spittle,
and your fragile mouth that
is like a dropped petal.

In far away lands there
are poor babies crying,
with milk-coloured eyes
that the black flies are circling,

and tree-tops are falling,
the birds falling with them.
The season is bleak but
new life can still blossom.

The October roses
burn, burn in the darkness.
Beautiful despite, no,
because of their lateness.

© Clare Pollard
Publisher: First published on PIW, 2008

 

Just look at them closely in Autumn

 

Wonderful poem by Eugenio Montejo