Echoes in a Hollow Space

Poetry is not personal.

And so, the spring!
Green grass, fog, blossoms,
the daffodils headless
after the gardener passed through.

Birdsong, God yes, birdsong,
morning, noon, twilight,
even a damned nightingale
passing through on its way
from point A to points farther north.

The crack of the bat,
the smell of the crowd,
young bodies turning to fancy,
fancy bodies turning to fever.

Bleating lambs with gay
red X’s spray painted on their coats,
and orange tags stapled to their ears,
frolicking and jumping while
they still have a chance
to be something more than chops.

And so, the spring!
(Nothing personal.)

 

*For the poetry project, phase one go here.

*For a definition of Phase 2, go here.

*To see all the poems in one place go here.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

The daffodils have
finally woken, dancing
along the garden
wall, dreaming faces turned to
the sun after long, dark sleep.

 

 

*For a definition of what constitutes haiku, tanka, and cinquains, and for an explanation of this poetry project, go here.

*To see all the poems in one place go here.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Oh

Spring, oh spring, you break my heart
with the gaudy riot you splash against my eyes,
with the sweet winds and misting torrents,
you crack my heart wide open, thrusting life
where I have carefully kept it out.

Oh spring, oh spring, how can I deny you
when all around the yellow and red burn,
burn and burst and foment and fly?
Oh spring.
Oh.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Spring Again

  "If they do these things in the green tree,
  what shall be done in the dry? "
            —Luke xxiii

At the end of that lengthy winter, after the snow
Had vanished into the ground, leaving on top
The refuse of a dead season—leaves and stalks
And all possible forms of pastness, withered and brown—
It was hard to be sure
That the land would heave again, and breathe, and proceed
With the vast labor of spring. At least, for an author,
The chance that the annual miracle might not occur
Was worth some attention, since there was always
Some kind of market somewhere for Fantasy Fiction.

He could describe the annual chores—the turning of earth,
The raking, clearing, seeding, planting—based
On the normal and healthy assumption that this year, like last,
Something would come of it all, something green, something edible,
And life with corn and potatoes would go on.
And then he could switch to the faces of men and describe
All the mounting phases of loss,
As the spring that was not to be spring advanced, and the summer
That never would come
Hovered where bluejays and larks would have been, if only
A valve or a switch or a faucet no one could fix
Had not, after all these years, somehow got clogged.

So ran an author's thoughts in that season of brown,
Thoughts of a new Jeremiah looking for something
Salable even as shoots of green began groping
Their way in the dark to the surface of things,
And robins appeared on schedule, and buds swelled.

—Reed Whittemore

This holiday is always a triple-bang for me.

First, because my biological father fought in World War I. He lied about his age to get into the big fight, and I was born when he was retirement age. What a chasm of time existed there. Yet I still think of the doughboys on this day with a personal reverberation of sadness that most folks under the age of seventy don't have. Dad returned, and was mustered out as an old man of nineteen from an Army hospital because he'd inhaled some gas on the battlefield. His lungs betrayed him eventually.

Second, my step-dad, my true father in many ways, was a baby blue Marine during World War II, First Marine Division. He made five landings in the Pacific campaign, was first wave on Palau, known in those days as Peleliu, one of the fiercest landings of the campaign. No sand on the beach, you see. They had to chip their foxholes out of the coral reef while the Japanese rained hellfire on them. He made it home again, also at the ripe old age of nineteen, without a scratch—physically, that is. Later, he fought in Korea, Inchon basin, where many combatants froze to death. The circulation in his feet was never quite the same after that, and though he grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, he left the East Coast for good after that war. He just couldn't stand snow anymore.

Third, and far from least important, my aunt who died of breast cancer a few years ago, was born on November 11. Her dad insisted on naming her Armista in honor of the day, but nobody else in the family liked it, so they called her Maxine. She had it legally changed when she was old enough. Hard to say what caused Maxie's cancer, but she had a hard, hard life, plagued by "war memories" of her own.

I wrote a poem for Maxine when she died, but the hope in it applies to all three of my "missing in action"—and to all the others, really, who have fought the good fight and paid the price.


Maxine

Spring went screaming through the hills—
orange yellow green white purple
dying to be noticed, all along the road
as we drove away from your sickbed.

“Life gives us clichés,” I said.
But the harsh comfort of spring remained.

The dark sky broke apart, the sun
muscled through, burning on the hills,
forcing on us the heartbreak of blue sky.

I want to believe you are in that sky.
I do believe you are in that sky,
or laughing in the hills you loved,
bare toes trailing clouds of wildflowers.

I had a great trip, saw lots of wonderful things, and I'm still jet lagged, but I've returned. I didn't do much writing while I was gone, though I'd taken a journal (a real, paper one) thinking I might jot a bit. I jotted the second day out, then my subconscious apparently decided I needed a vacation from writing, too. I felt absolutely no urge to communicate for two solid weeks. Largely I felt the need to Be, to experience the moment, take things as they came without analysis. I took a lot of photos, but not nearly as many as I usually do. I preferred not having filters between me and what I saw, what I experienced. It felt damned good, since I'm usually doing the opposite.

Being back home seems rather unreal. Monday I was at Stonehenge and today I'm back at work. It's a strange world. I'm still feeling kind of not-writey, so here’s my one journal entry, after waking up at 3 a.m. local time:

Friday, April 23, 5:00 a.m., Lyme Regis, England

Lovely views of the city from my window, watching dawn slowly creep into the sky while I sit wide-awake.

The thing about all these views is that a place is never just one sight, that one thing that made it famous or notable. A place is composed of a thousand views, ten thousand, a million. Some are pleasing, many are not. The more places you visit, the more you realize it's not what's famous about a place that makes it memorable—it's the combined effect of all its aspects. If you concentrate on views, you miss the experience, then all experience seems flat and disappointing.

The most memorable parts of traveling are not the self-conscious things that feature in the guidebooks and postcards. That which stays with the traveler are the individual, ephemeral moments that can never be included in any book: the quack of ducks in a dark river; the kindness of the young man at a gas station for a fumbling tourist; the stickiness of the mud on a hillside; the undulating light and shadow on hills gone bright with blossoms and green; the sweet smile of the woman who served your dinner; the cry of gulls in the dawn; small bats flying back and forth across the river walk; the chorus of songbirds in a room high on a hill; a ghost glimpsed running down the dawning street—the runner appearing and going behind trees and never coming out the other side. So many blossoms along the road: the yellow-orange of the gorse; the blazing white of the hawthorn; the white-pink of apple; the near-neon yellow of rape blossoms along highway after highway, filling a field, two, ten, a hundred; the quieter yellow broom blossoms and their sweet, heady fragrance; the vanilla-spice smell of the gorse.

All of these moments of brief intersection, gone forever, are what makes a trip—and traveling—valuable. They will ultimately be what makes the traveler conclude whether it was a good trip or a bad.

When planning the trip, that first day lost in transit across the continent and over the ocean, and the one following lost in jet lag, seemed a much bigger deal then they turned out to be. In fact, other days along the road were so full of exquisite moments they seemed like extra days. They filled me up, perpetually in bloom.