Holly J. Hughes, “Desire Lines”

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I want to remind you again that I am reading — one of five readers — at Edmonds Bookshop this Thursday evening. To see more information, you can click on the “Upcoming Events” tab above.

Speaking of “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” (Hopkins), I want to once again recommend Sailing by Ravens by Holly J. Hughes  for an immersion lesson into all things watery. (To see my review and links to others, click here.)

I was thinking of Holly’s book because I spent yesterday at a family party hosted by my sister and brother-in-law. My mom was there, holding court, as well as a few of her sisters and a few of our cousins. Lots of family stories. And Mom, of course, perpetually conversing with the people long dead. My sister brought out a family album and I started thinking that I could write a poem about my grandfather. So, to inspire me (surely an exercise right out of her book with Brenda Miller, The Pen and the Bell), here is Holly’s prose poem, “Desire Lines”:

DESIRE LINES

Desire lines: where people have walked, made their own paths

About her great-grandfather, the English sea captain, she knows less. As the family story goes, the ship he commanded set sail from London, a seventeen-year-old Spanish girl of noble blood aboard bound for finishing school in Cuba. When the ship docked in New Orleans, they eloped. So much the story doesn’t say. What were her first words to him, the stately captain? How many days out from port before he gazed into the vanishing horizon of her eyes? When did they stand at the bow, glimpse together a future glimmering? At what precise coordinate did they cross desire’s shimmering line? Where in the vast Atlantic, as the ship steamed south, did their bodies know they would not — could not — return to the lives they’d left behind?

By Thursday night, maybe I’ll have a logging poem for you about my grandfather.

Wendell Berry, “The Meadow”

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To read more about Wendell Berry, click on his name.

THE MEADOW

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself
of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last
who knew the faces who had these names are dead,
and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild
as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.
Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become
a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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And here is another poem I would like to memorize. (I cannot get the indents to work!!! You’ll have to click on this link to see it in its original form.)

Who dares use the great Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as a model? You could keep it simple. Write a poem about dappled things, or about “gear and tackle and trim.” Write a poem about simple things.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

pied beauty

Laura Kasischke, “I am the coward who did not pick up the phone”

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Mary Cassatt, “Maternal Caress”

After an argument — over the phone, at dinner — with my youngest daughter (I am supposed to be on a getaway with my husband), I spent a sleepless night. This morning when writing in my journal didn’t resolve all my angst, I went on-line and looked up articles on how to fight fair with teenage daughters. Don’t try to oppose her growing up and finding her own identity. Don’t sweat the small stuff (hair, clothes). Be awake to the big stuff (drugs, alcohol, sex). Look for the win-win. Be responsible. Expect responsibility. Expect that your daughter will want to be with her friends rather than you; spend time with her anyway.

Then I looked for “I am” poems, and I found this. Somehow, it made me see some possibilities I hadn’t before. When I looked up the poet, Laura Kasischke, at the Poetry Foundation, I found this commentary:

“Kasischke’s poetry is noted for its intelligent, honest portrayal of domestic and familial life; its explosively accurate imagery and dense soundscapes; and its idiosyncratic use of narrative. According to Stephen Burt in the New York Times: ‘No poet has tried so hard to cut through suburban American illusion while respecting the lives, young and old, that it nurtures or saves. No poet has joined the chasm of ontological despair to the pathos of household frustration so well as Kasischke at her best.’”

The chasm of ontological despair IN household frustration!

Now that you’ve drafted (yesterday?) a list of I am lines, maybe this will give you an idea of where to go next.

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone, so as never to know.
So many clocks and yardsticks dumped into an ocean.

I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight into
the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side, never looking
back at all those floating envelopes and postcards, the wet ashes of
some loved one’s screams.

How was I to know?

I am the warrior who killed a sparrow with a cannon. I am the
guardian who led the child by the hand into the cloud, and emerged
holding only an empty glove. Oh —

the digital ringing of it. The string of a kite of it, which I let go of.
Oh, the commotion in the attic of it — in the front yard, in the back yard,
in the driveway — all of which I heard nothing of, because I am the
one who closed the windows and said, This has nothing to with us.

In fact, I am the one singing this so loudly I cannot hear you even now.

(Mama, what’s happening outside? Honey, is that the phone?)

I am the one who sings, The bones and shells of us.
The organic broth of us.
The zen gong of us.

Oblivious, oblivious, oblivious.