A new season, maybe a new dailiness for poems...

It's cool and rainy today. Students are streaming onto campus, moving in... Here's a poem from a notebook I've been carrying since mid-May. Draft #15 I think.


Double Negative

Until then everything we knew about it
had to do with rabbits;
bunnies to be precise---
Our father's hands plunged
into a blue pail filled with water
as he crouched in the space
beneath the porch.
We hid to watch.
Curious.
She was busy with a baby
while he dispatched the newborns
orphaned by our cat.

So much of this is human-
made, the cat domesticated
but not, the man a few years out
of the caves of Tarawa, silent,
now our father taking those little lives
because death comes one way
or another; sooner or slower;
harder.

Her suicide became the cat;
the shock of her dead body water
in a pail. So he turned his back to us and began
his own drowning while we watched,
knowing it would not not happen.

okay, so I'm a failure at regular blogging, but....AND outlawing language

I'm back here to brag a little tiny bit. And to post the link for The Guidebook, which is where my poem "Homesick" has been published, and where they will also publish my first poem translation of an Italian poet. So stay tuned.

I'm also going to work on getting daily poems going for the summer. Stay tuned for that too, those faithful followers of mine who haven't heard from me in more than half a year deserve something for not abandoning me altogether.

And here's something to think about,

I'm editing a book on Basque Politics and have just finished the section on all of the ways that the Spanish and French states have tried to extinguish Basque language and culture for good. Although many were sweeping acts of legislative tyranny, one in particular has grabbed my attention. On September 25, 1936 the (Spanish) military commandant of Lizarra (a Basque city known to Basques as 'Estalla' (city of stars) put an ordinance in place that prohibited the use of the Basque word 'agur' which means 'good-bye'. I think, for that reason alone, if there was ever a word that deserved its own poem, it would have to be 'agur'. I'll begin to work on it!

First official translated poem coming soon!

Hi All My Dear Followers,

I wanted to share that, finally, I have a poem I translated from Italian coming out in a journal. The journal is called The Guide Book. Look for it online and in print in April. The poem is titled "Canto 18". It will be published along with an original poem of mine "Sesso e l'Anima: Sex and the Soul".

I'll be posting more here in about 6 weeks, after the semester's dust settles.

Bless you all,
Miriam

Daily smaily, writing, but not here

A none-poetry entry just to tell my 7-8 followers that I know I've been silent on these pages, but I AM getting a little bit out writing done and I HAVE intentions of getting back here soon.

Translating Italian several hours a week now, if not every day. I'm also putting some of my own poems into Italian to share with a friend.

Reading Cattafi in Italian and some in English.

Grading papers again, it pays the bills.

Stay tuned. And thanks for being out there.

M.

making borscht in September

Shred the beets
simmer them in broth and onions
until tender

add white potatoes
green cabbage
a bouquet garni

of parsley and bay.
Bring to a boil
and simmer for an hour.

Walk the dog,
put away the towels.
Scrape the chopping boards clean.

Your mother's voice won't help this,
but sing; even though she's not listening
and doesn't know that you remember everything.

trying to get back

Belonging

I don't join well;
don't walk into the midst
with confidence. Once
I thought I'd make a habit
of prayer, but even God
seemed difficult to be with. Maybe
I'd be asked for what I didn't have.

When I do decide I'm in
I've usually missed the fine print,
been subject to the only caveat
about membership; tried
too hard; believed my own fear. Maybe
I belong somewhere else

and that's why my heart
is so easily strained.
It has no group memory;
no impulse to open or offer access. Maybe
that's why I end up staring
confusedly around the crowded room.

from scratch because I have an itch a 'splendid' revision

From Scratch Because I Have An Itch


The day your sister disses you on Facebook
because you spelled your niece's name wrong
you want to split
the atom or a blister on your
heel, you're not supposed to, but

if you don't know something
you have a hard time getting it right,
you might even do it all wrong
though you mean well.
And you know

family is the torque
of the spinning pot
standing on its lone foot.
Who knows
how it does that?

Daily Poem - July 29, 2010

Retrieve

My husband has shut me in my room.
This happens sometimes.

I am reading lines from Mary Daly's
Sin Big, 'Decode their mysteries...'.

He is making a narrow space
where our puppy can learn retrieving.

Only one person at a time can train a dog
but each can reinforce the good behavior.

It begins with a pair of socks
curled heel to toe into a sack

he tosses the length of two closed doors
toward a closed window.

The pup must wait for the command.
Fetch. The trainer must not delay the pup

too long or berate too harshly
or interest wanes, the retrieve will never happen.

When their session's done they go downstairs.
My door's still shut. So I open it.

Working on this one today- A poem from March to cool us off in blistering July heat!

Residue

My neighbor is burning his brush
in spite of the wind, which means
all day the pale blue smoke of briar and leaf
will roll over the fields and Howland Pond,
nest in dropped bittersweet, the gooseberry
thickets and cat tails that narrow Shingle Brook
to a leaf-brown thread
that falls through the little woods,
finds the Eel River,
where there are no more eels
or elvers. When the smoke clears
the ash-black scab on the old hay will glitter,
bits of sky trapped in pools
of hose water will tremble.
For a little while
soft cinders will go on falling.

July 13, 2010 - no poem yet

I've been re-reading Eavan Boland's, essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. Who ever you are, female or male, if you want to understand some things basic to the way women have written in the 20th century, go read this essay. But be sure to question her claims too. After all, she writes about having identified herself as a writer before she became a wife and mother, at which time, she was thrown from her own center as a writer, to the hinterlands, so to speak, of those other roles.
I can't identify with that experience, having come to my self-identity as a writer long into my careers as wife and mother, having had no such 'center' for the first half of my life. It was a hidden part of me, one I protected and did not invite scrutiny of, in case I was wrong, in case I was pathetically presumptuous of my own ambition.
In fact I don't know many women who started out as Boland did. That has much to do with the fact that I left college within a year of arriving and was a wife and mother by the time I was 19. I did not move in the collegial or academic spaces where a woman in the early 1970's might begin to believe such things about her self. The women writers I know, are, by and large, former closet writers whose love of the practice was for long years, subservient to other practices including spousehood, parenthood, the work of making a living, etc.
I also realize that much of that lack of self-confidence came directly from that fact that I did use the lens of the canon to evaluate the worthiness of my own themes and subject matter in my poems.
So I do agree with so much of what Boland has to say about 'ghosts' and her discussion of Adrienne Rich's idea that we are 'drenched in assumptions.' That is, that women, at least into the mid-late 20th century, took their cues of their poems' poetic worthiness from themes and approaches the male poets had established, ie: we assumed the value of a topic based on what had already been found valuable to the canon. AND I agree with Boland that we owe the ghosts of other women and our own pasts their due in poetry.


This part of her discussion reminded me of a line from a poem by Louise Bogan, which reads in part "women have no wilderness in them". Bogan was not fond of many women poets and their work it seems. Or maybe it was that she was, herself, too drenched in those assumptions to see any other way of writing.

Go read this essay. I'm sure it's online somewhere. I'm reading it in my copy of Poetry in Theory, an anthology of essays on poetic theory by a staggering range of writers, from poets, to philosophers, to literary critics.

I'll go write on paper now and maybe have something to post by the end of the day.

Daily poem June 25, 2010

The Dance

It was winter in Vermont,
When Agha Shahid Ali,
poet and samba man extraordinaire
whirled me in tight circles in the Commons,
his grip so tight we became a single
centrifuge, our sweat and laughter mingling.
My breath forced out to my skirt hem, which flew
wider and wider, opening the space around us,
the rhythm of my heart wilder
than bounding doe's.
Snow howled on the porch, pressing for admission.
Revelers stamped in and out.
The ring of women around us,
human manadala, rosary,
crop circle, druid choir,
called out their ullulations
to the Kashmiri exile
poet and the middle-class visitor from Massachusetts---
both of whose eyes were shining,
open--- in that moment
we have no ancestors.
There is nothing else to believe.

Beginning of Summer, 3 days late, Here's hoping for daily poems again!

Homesick

On the eleventh day
I weary of my beloved
Italian,
its noise in my head.
Like wind
it rattles the loose
shutters of English words
I use to cool my rooms.

My mind refuses to translate;
can't hear the conjugated verbs---
so often in the third person,
so often irregular.
I find myself listening only for
the familiar---
the direct address.
The you: present
form, ending almost every time
in i.

May 24, 2010 - revised July 13, 2010

Faith

Churches, I suddenly think--- no,
hear the word
and see the cathedral at Trani

above the harbor in misting rain---
dun and taupe against the blue gray sky,
clouds stained lilac,

fissures of pink
where the setting sun tries to pierce them.
In Ostuni, the narrow fresco of Santa Elisabeth,

the small church, painted white
as all buildings must be in the centro storica.

When the allies bombed
the harbor there the people rushed
to pile sandbags against the saints

to shield them from percussions that shook down old walls
all over town.
They saved Santa Elisabeth, Santa Maria, Giuseppe,

at least in part---
When we stand before her we cannot fathom the fear
or faith of that time;

or our fathers high above
where the saints are invisible---
where longitude and latitude

joined
like hands in prayer.

Summer is almost here. I'm writing again.

Song

Upstairs my husband
plays a riff in a minor key
which I once explained to my students is
the key of sorrows, but also
revery. Outside the sky is
mute in wooly nimbus beds
and an osprey rises in widening gyros
above the little pond where every Spring
the State dumps farmed trout
that are gone by summer.

All day we have stayed at home.
No business to take us further than the barn
or garden. The clouds have hidden all the contrails
of the planes bound for Europe---
Crows have fed on the robins' worms.

It isn't that we don't care to travel.
Sometime we simply cannot think
of where to go, or why to leave the room.
Still, all day I've been remembering
the Adriatic; mowed meadows
running down to that blue---
the tattered scatter
rug we found beside the road, its fringe
half torn, pattern obscured
by a thousand fallen olive blossoms.

Not a prayer rug; a prayer.
I carried it all the way back
here. Upstairs, song ended,
I hear the click of case clasps---
footfall down the stairs.

Finally, a daily poem! April 22, 2010

Behind The City Gate

At White Horse Point,
from the water by kayak
I see two kids kissing
behind the City Gate,
a rock as high as a fortress wall
his jams sluicing the glassy flow,
her suit straps dropped and slack against her arms.


They are out of time;
out of the view from her parents'
window on the road above---
One body nut brown, one pink with sun,
both halved by water.

They don't care about the oceanic wilderness
beyond us; that blue, glittering vastness
so much smaller
than the span of his hands
on her hips. Her brown bangs
flutter when she leans
against the slick rock looking up, looking
only at the fringe of his pale lashes,
her brown fingers meet
across his narrow back.

Silver-sides flash; a burst
of white sparks in water. My boat rides
the single ripple that slides
between them then away
when she pulls him closer,
into rock-green shade.

2 rough daily poems for January 19th, 2010

For Charlie In Winter

To wake beneath the wing of night
and know your heart
is to know that the dark has no intentions
and only you can distract yourself
from your fear of hearing
the mother-bird's awful shriek
as she lowers her deep crop, reaching---
Is to know you are never abandoned child.
You are never abandoned.

(Khidr [hidder] is the guide of souls in Sufi Mystic belief)


When Khidr Greets You

Because I can see you without seeing you
but I cannot recall your smell,

because I can bear the bell note of your laughter without hearing
but cannot call back your touch,

You have become a vision
in a song,

who once breathed persimmon sweetness upon my cheek,
and parted my hair with kisses.

It is not enough, this longing in my other senses.
And it is all.

A 2nd daily poem for January 8, 2010.

Ran out of time last night. (Don't let Heidegger hear me way that!) Here's what I wrote yesterday.

Entering

not sunlight, just
(a word we hardly ever use in poems)
snow gleam lifted by lamps in windows
from the yard up to a lesser dark
above the fields where perhaps
(that word we often use in poems but not in life)
a half dozen geese flap into the open water
in Howland Pond I am in the kitchen rinsing
a glass my reflection on the glass
a part of that other scene of resettling
wings over my forehead below the red valance
then off my right breast collage
of field kitchen and the ersatz palms
that pretend to sway on the chintz
every day we say maybe
if
but
no every day
without meaning to we
yes

First daily poem of January 8, 2010

I've been reading Rumi. Trying to learn how to walk in circles with happiness.

Thief

I say this isn’t me
but the rose gold wristlet
on the floor of the thrift
store says otherwise,
a little gold snake beneath
a dark and downy cloud— medium
women’s winter jackets.

Acedia: the frenzy of need
that believes in itself. Without
thinking I kneel, palm the bracelet.
All day, like a karmic bell it rings
in my pocket beside my hip.

The next day I go back
to who I was. It’s embarrassing,
the clerk’s straight stare. Is she trying
to comprehend my happiness?

I go home. No ringing.
I write this poem about a thief.

My first daily poem of 2010. Hoping to begin anew.

The Fold

Waking up at dawn that woman
pulls on her jeans one leg at a time
and stands up.

She’s dreamed of cowhands,
the ones who sometimes turn out to be poets:
just as sweet and mean as anyone who sleeps
with one ear to the ground
and the other open to the stars.

She buttons her fly
one button at a time. Cinches
her belt. She knows she’s left
too much undone,
tack unmended, muck in the barn.
They’ll say she’s a lousy horsewoman.
But she’s not in it for perfection or even duty.
She has a horse that trusts her, that’s enough.
Someone else will have to clean up.

A friend asked her once why
she likes to ride alone in lonely spaces.
As if friendship should be enough.
As if the animal in her could not exist
out there
on its own.

She spins her spurs’ wheels
as she oils them, listening to
wing-it-wing-it-wingit—
their little jingle hits the rafters,
vibrates in the loose hay—

Wing-it-wing-it-wing-it—
If you let it
be it’s that simple.

From riding out she’s learned
there’s always a place that’s hidden in the landscape,
like the flesh on the under-curve of the breast
or the fissure between scapula and rib
when the lover’s back’s flexed in climax—
Some place where in Spring the quail covey
or the wild ponies crop at the sparse early grass.

When her father died she found it
behind his ear where his silken scalp followed
the velvet question mark of his old man’s hair.
She remembers how, as he lay in the coffin
she rode down that hidden valley once with her left thumb.
An anger and a tenderness of palomino proportions rearing inside her

and all that afternoon
the sheen of his hair oil on her skin like a talisman;
her father-wounded sisters
unaware of where she’d been.

This morning, satisfied
in her grief she faces the flatland.

Knowing it’s there somewhere,
she rides
toward the fold

revised poems begin today. Here's the first one. Let me hear from you.

Keeping Love's Habit

We carry it around inside us
like an infant or a frail elder
whose feet cannot hold it upright.
We listen to its speech and speak back.

We say, there, there; even kiss its bald head,
as all the while we await the day when the child will walk;
the old woman’s face will melt into peace.

Imagine
how we will begin anew. We will
lift the emptiness
as if we know what we are doing.