Joannie Stangeland’s In Both Hands

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Should you wonder, I can’t italicize words in the post title, which is why the titles of books are not. Furthermore, Joannie Stangeland’s book has “both” italicized, so, In Both Hands.

And this is a book you’ll want to hold onto with both hands — it has flying horses, furious skies, lakes that rise into the air — all in all, a volatile place to lose yourself for an hour or two.

I chose this poem (below) for you to read out loud and savor, because of the final tercet. As the poem begins with “Words tonight fly out as black as crows,” I can guess that the home the poet refers to is language (perhaps more complex than that). But having spent an hour with my mother today, at her care home, attempting to have a conversation with this dearly beloved woman who can no longer carry the thread of a conversation, the poem rings true for me on an even deeper level.  Let me add to that comment, that many of the poems in this book are about mothers and daughters. I have read most of the poems before; and I suspect I will read them many times again. I hadn’t sat and read them all at once, and it was a lovely and resonant choice, particularly today.

Roost

Words tonight fly out as black as crows,
oily and stubborn, ruffled and sharp.
Feathers may litter the floor.

The air holds a fever, a taut pitch,
a howl we hitch to, each unsure
of our turf. Bristling, a hiss—

and it isn’t the kettle or the cat.
But we swallow the rest, stinging
until the barbs wing into the night.

We settle our worries like eggs.
Tomorrow, we draw the same breath
when we see the mountains rising

into morning, as white as clouds.
A crow’s nest is a sloppy mess,
a loose muddle of twigs in a tree.

Love is like that—on a hard day, held
with spit and bits of string—
on a good day, home.

—Joannie Stangeland

Ruth Stone’s Ordinary Words

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I’m so grateful for those of you reading along with me this month (just the blogposts, or your own deep-dive into poetry to celebrate April), but even if I were simply shouting into the void, I’m glad I took on this project.

One thing I learned with this post, is that there is a Ruth Stone Foundation, dedicated to preserving her home and legacy.

It’s been a while since I read her work, and though I often think of Ruth Stone (1915-2011) along the lines of girls in dresses of Alice blue, and mares beneath the apple trees, I was pleasingly surprised at how bawdy Stone’s poetry is. Men line up like silverback gorillas at the counter of the donut shop. At the bus station, “two couples are not just kissing / they are dry fucking.” In these poems we are not allowed to forget that we have bodies. A younger sister lies in the grave, her breasts, “wizened flaps.” A husband dead of suicide haunts the poems (an insistent “you”). Time doesn’t merely pass, but runs through our fingers as we clutch at what cannot be held onto. The title of the book, Ordinary Words, seems to insist on the humble subjects and (sometimes) plain speech of the poems. But I tiptoe through these poems, never sure where a trap will spring open.

Then 

That summer, from the back porch,
we would hear the storm like a train,
the Doppler effect compressing the air;
the rain, a heavy machine, coming up
from below the orchard, rushing toward us.
My trouble was I could not keep you dead.
You entered even the inanimate,
returning in endless guises.
And that winter an ermine moved into the house.
It was so cold the beams cracked.
The ermine’s fur was creamy white
with the last half of the tail soot black.
Its body about ten inches long,
it slipped through small holes.
It watched us from a high shelf in the kitchen.
In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things
as though it had a meaning for us,
as though we moved slowly over the acreage,
as though the ground modulated like water.
The floors and the cupboards slanted toward the West,
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.
The children and I sitting together waiting,
there on the back porch, the massive engine
of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth,
pounding toward us.

–Ruth Stone, Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 1999)

Samuel Green’s All That Might Be Done

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This is a book I immediately wanted to share with my friend Paul, who hails from my neck of the woods. Logging, fishing, pouring cement, planing wood, working on boats — Samuel Green covers all of them. Shades of my childhood.

And this poem: which simply has to have been written about one or another of my uncles.

After the Argument

He spent the afternoon pulling nails
from salvaged boards. Each yank
of the crowbar brought a scream
from the wood. Then he hammered them
on a chunk of railroad steel,
threw them into a coffee can
on the workbench, knowing
they were straight, merely by the feel.

Samuel Green, All That Might Be Done (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014)

I would love to share two or three more poems, but let’s take a moment just to appreciate the complexity on the other side of the simplicity here. The way the rhymes (steel and feel being the only obvious ones) add up (the slant rhymes, too, nails with the other l words; yank with can; scream with them). The emotion of the poem hammered out and emphasized at the self-same time.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Late in the Day

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Although Ursula K. Le Guin died this past January, I would like to argue that we have not lost her voice, or her capacious and expansive soul.

I fell in love with this hardback book, Late in the Day (PM Press, 2016) and its gorgeous cover. Each time I saw it in the bookstore, I picked it up and reread the first poem, this one:

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

Le Guin was best known as a writer of science fiction, but she was also an essayist and a teacher (read her Steering the Craft, for an excellent example). What I notice about this poem, “The Small Indian Pestle,”  is that it is a little craft lesson all on its own. Its 16 lines in iambic pentameter are also a single sentence (the : may be cheating). It doesn’t rhyme, but the words are so strong–“Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt”–and the repetitions are so well-executed that it’s music.

Elsewhere in the book, she plays very deliberately with form and rhyme (and writes about it in a closing essay). I’m going to break with my usual routine and share one more poem, a rhymed one, that touched me in a very deep place.

Between 

Between the acts, the interval.
The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.

“Between” is deceptively simple. It shows us how one needn’t be showy and ostentatious in order to be profound.