The Autumn Equinox

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Tomorrow — at 12:21 p.m., in my area at least — autumn begins. It seems an excellent time to write a fall poem. Here’s one that I’ve cribbed from the collection at https://www.poetryfoundation.org.

For the Chipmunk in My Yard

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

I am still reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter — an essay each week or so — and I just came across “The Beast in the Book.” She got me thinking about animals and how we share the world with them, not very politely, and how rich children’s literature is with animals. As Le Guin puts it:

The general purpose of a myth is to tell us who we are — who we are as a people. Mythic narrative affirms our community and our responsibilities, and is told in the form of teaching-stories both to children and adults.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin doesn’t find it at all curious that children learn to read by sounding out the words in “Peter Rabbit,” or that they weep over Black Beauty. She finds it a shame that as we grow older we lose our facility to identify with animals. I loved this paragraph, about T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone:

Merlyn undertakes Arthur’s education, which consists mostly of being turned into animals. Here we meet the great mythic theme of Transformation, which is a central act of shamanism, though Merlyn doesn’t make any fuss about it. The boy becomes a fish, a hawk, a snake, an owl, and a badger. He participates, at thirty years per minute, in the sentience of trees, and then, at two million years per second, in the sentience of stones. All these scenes of participation in nonhuman being are funny, vivid, startling, and wise.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

I think it’s that “sentience of trees” that really made that paragraph stick for me, as I’ve also been reading Peter  Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. 

My challenge for you this week is to write an autumn poem about some living being in your backyard or near environs. Like Robert Gibb’s chipmunk, how does this creature, with its small flame of wildness, teach you to be alive?

https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/species/tamiasciurus-douglasii

I don’t have chipmunks in my backyard, but we do have the small brown Douglas squirrels and the invasive, bigger gray squirrels. We sometimes have possums and raccoons; more rarely we’ve sighted deer and coyotes. Always, there are the birds: flickers, juncos, towhees, Stellar’s jays, flocks of crows each dusk. Last week, on a late walk with my dog, Pabu, I watched a flock of geese pass over, honking. The other day, my husband saw what he swears was a merlin, which is as good a sign of the changing season as any.

What I’m Reading

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These past few months I have been on a reading binge — dozens of mystery novels, of course, and tons of poetry. But I just finished reading a novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, by Eleanor Morse, that is so jaw-droppingly well-written and gripping that I want to buy a sackful of copies and give them to all of my friends. Barring that, telling you about it will have to suffice.

Set in Botswana in 1977, White Dog tells the intertwined stories of a South African medical student, Isaac Muthethe, who has had to flee his homeland; and Alice Mendelssohn, an American who followed her husband to Botswana, and, despite the end of her marriage, stays on. I don’t want to share much more of the plot than that. I think part of my pleasure in this book came from the unexpected and yet

Sunset, Casco Bay, Maine, 2019
Photo by Rhonda Berg

perfectly wrought twists of the track. Yes, at times it felt like watching a train wreck. At times, I wanted to set the novel aside and not read another word. I couldn’t help but plunge on.

Morse has a talent for letting ordinary descriptions shift into reverie:

The lilac-breasted roller flew again. [Alice] thought it must be the most beautiful bird ever created, with its shining wings, aqua tipped with deeper blue, its lilac throat and breast, white feathered forehead, and perfect dark eye. She thought of God speaking out of the whirlwind, how He reminded Job (as though he needed reminding by then) who had caused the morning stars to sing, who shut up the sea with doors and commanded the proud waves to come only this far, no farther. If He could harness the stars and the ocean, why could He not harness cruelty? Was it more powerful than all the stars and oceans? (289)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWiWl21F28c

I’m tempted to share one of the sweeping philosophical passages from late in the novel, but that, too, may give too much away. What I do want to convey is the lushness of Morse’s prose. It is never so ornate that it intrudes on the story, but enhances it, and becomes part of the trippiness of the whole experience. Sometimes beautiful, often brutal, it felt absolutely true. In this novel, there are no easy answers — no magical realism, no superpowers to help Isaac and Alice get out of their troubles. It doesn’t settle into that familiar track of the romance. All they have to work with are the truths of their time and place and their humanity.

Here are two paragraphs from the first chapter, just to give you a taste. Isaac, who has been transported in the bottom of a hearse from South Africa to Botswana, wakes to this scene:

A thin white dog sat next to him, like a ghost. It frightened him when he turned his head and saw her. He was not expecting a dog, especially not a dog of that sort. Normally he would have chased a strange dog away. But there was no strength in his body. He could only lie on the ground. I am already dead, he thought, and this is my companion. When you die, you are given a brother or a sister for your journey, and this creature is white so it can be seen in the land of the dead. The white dog’s nose pointed away from him. From time to time, her eyes looked sideways in his direction and looked away. Her ears were back, her paws folded one over the other. She was a stately dog, a proper-acting dog.

A cigarette wrapper tumbled across the ground, stopped a moment, and blew on. A cream soda can lay under a stunted acacia, its orange label faded almost to white. Seeing those things, he thought, I am not dead. You would not be finding trash in the realm of the dead. (1-2)

In another book I just began reading this morning, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books, I came across a passage that does a fine job explaining why we read fiction. Le Guin also goes into how people often read: only for the operating instructions. But this is how Le Guin concludes her essay, “The Operating Instructions”:

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. (6)

 

 

Where to find me

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Your Poetry Assignment for the Week

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Every Wednesday afternoon I meet—either on Zoom or in person, if our outdoor cafe is a safe bet—with several other writers. We have two dedicated novelists, but the rest of us write mostly poetry. All of us, I should add, write poetry sometimes.

We’ve been meeting for 11 years. I think of myself as the facilitator of this group; they think of me as their fearless leader. Every Tuesday I email them a reminder and a poem (or, I send them a poem if I’m not too lazy and don’t forget) that they are welcome to think of as a prompt. I usually add a few sentences commenting on the poem. There are no rules in our group, but usually one or two writers end up bouncing off some idea this process has introduced. A while back we played around with a triolet by Barbara Crooker and I was tickled to see people still wrestling with the form last week.

Sometimes I send a poem, or a poet, that I’ve blogged about. Lately I’ve been telling myself that I really ought to blog once a week, and what if I married these two tasks together? This is my attempt to make it so.

I’ve been reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s 1995 book Kyrie, a series of poems set in 1918—during the (yep) flu epidemic. One poem begins “How we survived…” that is a perfect prompt, but it has an image in it that so freaked me out I don’t want to share it. I cast around, reading poem after poem: “You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth. / You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop. / What wouldn’t burn you boiled like applesauce / out beside the shed in the copper pot.”

And there’s this poem, the first in the collection, which seems to predict the future of that survival:

Prologue

After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alders filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?

—Ellen Bryant Voigt

My interest in Voigt’s book is personal, something to do with a novella I’d like to write; something to do with working on a manuscript of poems about a farm.

I am also compelled to tell you that I’m nearly all the way through a riveting memoir, House Lessons: Renovating a Life, by local author Erica Bauermeister. When her children were young, Bauermeister and her husband had the crazy idea to rescue a derelict house in Port Townsend and—well, you just have to read it to believe it.

My husband was, once upon a time, a building contractor, so, reading, I think: “Why didn’t we ever do something like this?” And then, reading on, I’m amazed at the work—when did she ever get any writing done? When 9 / 11 interrupts their progress, I found myself wanting to pick up the Voigt poems again. There’s a resonance between the two narratives that I wish I were more equal to describing. It has something to do with putting notes inside walls for future owners to find.

We create stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, and then cast them out into the world, talismans against the reality that life does not always tie up neatly, that it can come at you sideways, take away your breath, your life, your sustaining belief that everything will end up okay. We write our stories on paper, like wishes on New Year’s, and send them out into the world.

—Erica Bauermeister

In a summer when I’ve been feverishly reading doomsday accounts of what will happen to our planet because of climate change, it’s nice to imagine rescuing one house; it’s comforting to imagine how a family comes out the other end of a devastating world war and a pandemic; it’s even weirdly satisfying to imagine smashing down a wall with a sledgehammer.

So that’s your prompt this week. Cast yourself into the future and, looking back from that vantage, tell us, How did you survive?