A Poem and a Writing Prompt

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I decided two weeks ago that I would read some poetry each morning–searching for peace & justice there, if lacking elsewhere–and write something of my own. My general feeling is to put more into the world of what I want to be there. 

For the last two days I’ve been reading Koon Woon‘s Water Chasing Water (Kaya Press, 2013) and feeling my own heart swell upwards as if on a rising tide. Other reviewers have described him as a “writer of solitudes,” but I love the community Koon Woon invokes in almost every poem. I love his poems for his father, poems about sleeping under bridges, about the Chinese waiter reading Nietzsche and dreaming a writing life into being. In this time of madness and isolation, he gives me hope.

Yesterday I copied out this poem:

Around Us

I know now the startling animals and their flying droves
in my wooded new neighborhood,
see the sadness waiting for the return of warm spring rains,
the threat of inverse proportional air
and the sped-up activities of clouds
as winds blow and roll empty trash cans down the street.
Pears and peaches, store-bought, slowly rot
in the fridge, and unattended bills continue to penalize
regardless of who is president of the land.

Jazz and espresso will be as permanent as the Statue of Liberty;
at the tea shop ladies lament that the waitress will grow old.
Rivers burn in the middle of December,
and veterans of unsung daily battles for bread
think in their meditative moments of bovine pastures.
I try to keep an orderly room so that chaos is minimal
because nightly a startling feeling inside my sleep
makes me flee across the pillows of a Third Avenue hotel,
and this time I am fleeing with a ledger,
with the photo of the last girl,
and, hatless in a light rain, seeing
all the cigarette butts in North Beach as the Normandy Invasion.
I shrug, shrug and am gone.

-Koon Woon

My assignment then, was to look carefully–lovingly, compassionately–at all that was going on around me and try to create my own catalog to hold it.

Koon once told me–quoting Confucius–“you must go where your heart goes.” Where is your heart going today?

 

Holly J. Hughes

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HOLD FAST, Holly J. Hughes. Empty Bowl, 14172 Madrona Drive, Anacortes, Washington 98221, 2020, 115 pages, $16 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

Rereading Hold Fast made my day. Among other superlatives I can offer about this collection, it’s a perfect book to hole up with during a pandemic. I knew this before Claudia Castro Luna, writing for The Seattle Times, closed her editorial (“Sheltering in Place, Our Inner Poet Soars”) with Hughes’s poem, “Holdfast.” (Click on the link to read Castro Luna’s wise words.)

One paradox of these poems is the way Hughes manages a deft and powerful critique of the world, while celebrating it: “all that can’t be said…./ the bodies, the dreams, the shattered stars flowing down / to where the river weaves the mustn’t tell with the imagined, / the unseen, the unheard, the fragile….” (“If the River”).

And the epigraphs! This one, amid others:

If there is a world, let me be in it.
Let fires arise and pass…
Let the old hopes be made new.
Let stacks of clouds blacken if they have to
but never let the people in this town go hungry….
If there is a world where we feel very little,
let it not be our world.

–Joanna Klink, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

It was difficult to choose just one poem to share. But I think this one:

Against Apocalypse

No more crying over spilt milk, turned wine, over rain
that won’t fall, over calendar pages leafing in the wind

as decades blow past, wind that once lifted tenderly
each blade of grass now taking down towns.

Meanwhile, the earth spins on her axis, day and night arrive
on schedule, but seasons on strike, certainties flown

with the birds, ocean lapping, hungry at the shore.
Why do so few say it: the end of the world at hand. 

Still we post photos of risotto, take selfies
at the beach of our bodies buried in the sand.

We hunker down with YouTube, binge
on Netflix, take up Zumba. Meanwhile

politicians lead us like lemmings for the cliffs,
while the rest freeze in future’s brights.

Meanwhile, the earth keeps spinning. Sun rises & sets.
Civilizations come & go. We won’t be the first,

though we may be the last. But remember your neighbor,
who showed up with a pot of chicken soup, still steaming,

the day you lost power. Another who shoveled you out,
drove you to the ferry in his battered four-wheel drive.

Who knows what’s ahead: fast burn or slow freeze,
asteroids, black holes, exploding galaxies?

If someday none of us can see the sun,
remember this: the world you want to inhabit.

I’m so glad to be in the world amid these poets and these books. Thank you for reading along with me.

C. J. Prince

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BLONDE NOIRE, C. J. Prince. Ravens’ Song Press, Bellingham, WA, 24 pages, $5 paper.

I tried looking up Ravens’ Song Press, but the Internet didn’t offer anything. No matter. All you have to do to get your hands on this book is drive to Bellingham, drop in on almost any poetry reading, and ask for C. J. She’s probably there.

Well, after the Pandemic you can find her.

As you know if you have been following my blog for long, I have been writing a mystery novel. It is now 95,000 words and I’m going on 3 years on this project. Meanwhile, C. J. has written a mystery–a sort of an old-time riff on a film script of a movie you must have seen before / poetry mash up–in 24 very small pages. It has a detective, Mr. Colavita, and a “dame,” Blondie, who “warbles like a nightingale.” Here’s an excerpt:

I got money, Mr. Colavita. Please.

Blondie snaps open her beaded black purse.

See? I got a deposit here. 

She leans out of the booth,
nervous-like
and checks the front door.

I think I’m being followed. 

She’s a dish worth chasing
but murder’s another story.

Tomorrow morning (I know the date says it’s already tomorrow) I’ll have the last book for you. Thanks for reading along. If you ever want to borrow any of these books, look me up. 😉

Norah Pollard

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DEATH & RAPTURE IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, Norah Pollard. Antrim House Books, P.O. Box 111, Tariffville, CT 06081, 2009, 116 pages, $19 paper, www.antrimhousebooks.com.

Oh, my! I hardly know what to say about this book. I first saw it at my friend Madelon’s house. I asked about it and she read a poem (the one I’m sharing below), I went straight home and ordered my own copy, and though I had read around in it, today I read it straight through, from cover to cover. This, I recommend.

Pollard has divided this collection into three parts (“Norah”; “Michael,” her brother whose death continues to haunt her; and “Jimmy,” a lover who is…complicated). Several poems skirt around her father, Red Pollard of Seabiscuit fame (“My father was unable to hug me / or talk to me,” one poem begins), and many many of them are about loss. Reading all of these poems in one afternoon and evening (it took a while), was like reading a novel, or three novellas. My head is swimming.

The poems are about loss, but also about love, and sex, and poetry’s sustaining fire. In the second poem (in this section the poems are largely about her childhood), “What the Poet Knows,” she writes: “I fell into the condition of poetry.” Aren’t we glad? But here’s the poem I promised:

She Dreamed of Cows

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything —
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief —
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

— Norah Pollard