"Thaw"

This happens to be the exact time of year when I look up a favorite poem of mine entitled "Thaw" by the English poet, Edward Thomas (1878-1917).  Since I cannot determine whether the poem is in the public domain, I will not write it out but will, at the bottom, post a link so that you can call it up.  It is four lines only and lovely in its simplicity and ease in telling a little story that so well illustrates this particular seasonal moment.  To paraphrase the poem:  a thaw covers the countryside as the birds in the trees overhead can see what we on the ground do not yet see--the passing of winter.  Stirring words for those of us who shut down in early November when the time and light change, only to revive when the time and light change again and we ease into spring finding ourselves stepping out without coat, mitts, boots.  Opening an outside door for a moment of sweet fresh air.  Catching the sun's new angle as it now floods the room.

Yes, winter is over.  That doesn't mean we won't get more snow, but the chances are good it won't amount to much.  In fact, I always leave my snow shovel out until April 15th.  But in the meantime, the snow-pack will melt and crocuses will appear.

In looking up more about Edward Thomas, I found that he and Robert Frost were great friends, living for a time near each other during the Frosts' stay in England.  They were such good friends, in fact, that Frost managed to persuade Thomas, a writer, to try writing poetry.  Frost also put the idea in Thomas's bonnet to take his wife and children and go live in New England where they could be neighbors once again and encourage each other as poets, neither of whom was having all that much success just then.

Frost and Thomas also took frequent walks together with Thomas often trying to decide which path to take when they came to a fork, wanting to show his good friend something he thought was in one direction but that turned out not to be.  It seems they even joked about it so that when Frost returned to New Hampshire, he sent his friend a copy of his new work, "The Road Not Taken," intending it to be light amusement.

But Thomas was at a grave cross-roads.  The Great War had begun and though he was a family man and of an age when he need not go, he was trying to decide whether to enlist or not.  (Or maybe move to New Hampshire.)  He didn't really want to go to war, but he did want to meet full-on a depression and what he considered to be a lack of courage that had haunted him for some time.  Reading Frost's poem turned out to be one more kick that contributed to his decision to enlist.  He was killed in action after only two months in France.  He was thirty-nine.

Edward Thomas is one of sixteen Great War poets listed on a memorial in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.


Link to "Thaw"

Some Favorite Quotations

Over the years, I've made lists of quotations from my reading that I'm then never quite sure what to do with.  What it mostly amounts to is running into them when cleaning out my office files.  Now, I ask myself, why not share a few with you?


          Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.
                   Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

          Life is always this choice--to choose an old house nearer the office or the new one sitting amidst coconut gardens.
                    Raja Rao, The Cat and Shakespeare

          You mean can one be "just angry" with nothing extra--like a thunderstorm that comes and goes?  Gosh, I wish I could do that.
                    Zen Master Suzuki Roshi

          Committee Defined:  A group of people who, individually, can do nothing, but collectively can meet and decide that nothing can be done.
                    Thomas L. Martin, Jr., Malice in Blunderland

          .... he had endless time on his hands, which in itself is the mark of a great soul.
                    Henry Miller, Colossus of Maroussi

          Just watch the movie of life, without judging it, avoiding it, grasping it, pushing it, or pulling it.  You merely Witness it ....
                    Ken Wilber, One Taste

          .... the nature of politics is to subtract meaning from language.
                    Bernard S. Bowdlerberg

          Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
                    Mae West

          We stand today at a crossroads:  One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.  The other leads to total extinction.  Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.
                    Woody Allen

   

An Experiment

Some months ago when I became particularly disgruntled with both the national and world scenes, I decided to turn to things that gave me energy rather than depleted it.  Consciously not pay attention to the shenanigans going on or fill myself with a mindset that would just twist me up like a wet dish cloth.  So I opened cook books for inspiring (and simple) dishes to make.  I bought yarn and knit a winter scarf for a friend.  I decided to consider some future home/garden improvements.  Maybe a new bathroom floor ... a paint job in a bedroom ... a labyrinth in the garden.  I also worked on cleaning out old files, doing research on prospective blog projects, reading more poetry ... and ... trying my hand at writing haiku.

Haiku, as you know, is a Japanese-style poem of three lines using only seventeen syllables--five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the last.  I'd never written haiku, so this would be an experiment.  But I also wanted to have fun with it and not get too fussy by feeling I absolutely had to adhere to the five-seven-five structure.  If I deviated a bit here and there, well then, I deviated.

     January 2016

     Now, with winter,
     Ice-crusted apples still on the tree
     Fall to the ground


     Looking Out into the Garden After a Winter Storm

     As if in a bath
     Of bubbles, the Buddha sits
     Half covered in snow


     A Winter Afternoon

     A full-bodied red
     Like Homer's wine-dark sea
     Fills my Riedel glass


     Looking Out the Train Window in Late February
     Along the Mohawk River

     Ducks at river's edge
     Gather beside last ice chunks
     To sun in silence


     April No-Fool

     Gloomy but warmish
     April wisps into being
     Whoop-dee-do!  Welcome!

     April 28th

     Pink white blue purple
     Violets carpet the grass.
     For red, a cardinal


     How Emily Carr, the Canadian Artist,
     Compares Old Age to Fruit on a Tree

     Ripe is good, yes, ripe
     Just not so rotten you fall
    And land with a squish

Facing West

Growing up on California's shores, I used to feel that this poem was speaking to me ... especially since I wanted to circle the world and connect with the geography Whitman mentions.  As a child here in Santa Barbara, I did indeed stand at the Pacific's edge, at the very edge of the land where I lived--I could go no further--and long to cross that wide ocean, wondering what it would be like to make that far-away part of the world my own for a time.  Lucky me, as the years went on, I did just that.

Now, having been there, I'm back on these same shores celebrating the poem again after so many years.  Of course, seeking a geographical solution is what I might call the literal interpretation.  But there is also the metaphorical one of circling around from childhood to old age.   And, yes, I'm now standing there, as well.



"Facing West from California's Shores"  *  Walt Whitman
 

Facing west from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

(Note:  public-domain-poetry.com lists this as being in the public domain which indicates that I can copy this without needing permission.)

Poetry Month

Yes, April is National Poetry Month.  If you like, go to this link to have Knopf email you a poem each day for the month.  

In celebration, I'm including one that I have long enjoyed--Dippold the Optician, part of The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters.  Published in 1915, now in the public domain.


Dippold the Optician

What do you see now?
Globes of red, yellow, purple.
Just a moment!  And now?
My father and mother and sisters.
Yes!  And now?
Knights at arms, beautiful women, kind faces.
Try this.
A field of grain--a city.
Very good!  And now?
A young woman with angels bending over her.
A heavier lens!  And now?
Many women with bright eyes and open lips.
Try this.
Just a goblet on a table.
Oh I see!  Try this lens!
Just an open space--I see nothing in particular.
Well, now!
Pine trees, a lake, a summer sky.
That's better.  And now?
A book.
Read a page for me.
I can't.  My eyes are carried beyond the page.
Try this lens.
Depths of air.
Excellent!  And now?
Light, just light, making everything below it a toy world.
Very well, we'll make the glasses accordingly.

How Flowers Grow When No One's Looking

#1

I was standing at my easel one day painting flowers.  Rather than using watercolor, as with most of my other flower paintings, I was using oils which I was mixing with wax the consistency of butter.  Rather than paper or canvas, I was using a masonite panel.  And rather than working from life, I was working from a watercolor painting I'd already made--elaborating on that, expanding my interpretation to produce something playful and loose.

#2

I did four in all.  But as I was working on one of the early ones, a thought came to me that I was painting what the flowers looked like when no one was looking at them.  When they were their own magical, private little selves.  When they could spin their own tales, live their own secret lives, and dress however they liked ...  of course, to promptly "switch back on" if anyone so much as glanced their way.

I interrupted my work to sit down and write this:

How Flowers Grow When No One's Looking

They sing Lena Horne songs

They paraphrase Wallace Stevens

They sway to Benny Goodman

They practice posing for calendar shots

They enter relationships with passing bees

They let butterfly wings caress their corolla

They recite quatrains to the night

They breathe in the molecules of morning

They sass the wind

They drip, languish, melt, refine, define

They hand down recipes for scarlet petals

They trade in colors bent by prisms

They try on fin de siècle jewelry

They bow to the rain

They meditate within their sangha

And practice dying using their ribs and veins to tell time

#3

#4

Magnetic Spring: Photos and Poems

Icicles in drip-time

March is that month when the snow piles melt, Canada Geese jabber down by the river, and crocuses appear ... when the land is soggy, dirt roads become ruinous masses of mud, and the maple sugaring finishes up.

The last of the snow

Sugaring ... though most tapping is now done with plastic tubing

Along with the crocuses, tiny snowdrop blossoms announce the coming round of color as I rake the still-yellow-brown lawn and pick up the sticks that winter winds always leave in my yard.  Raking is almost as good as meditating as I gather autumn's left-over leaves into a heap to toss over my back hill--the same that slopes down toward a deer run amidst deciduous, hemlock, and white pine.  Some mornings, I've looked out to see deer asleep in those woods.  Or they'll twitch an ear and look around if they hear my friendly tap on the window.

The deer in my woods

The spring poems I'd love to include here are all too recent to be in the public domain.  So I will include two I composed using those refrigerator magnets.

after sleep

I lick white honey from the sky
and tell the wind
to bare sweet whisperings
& flood the moment with one raw spring
& imagine shadows playing music

Forced forsythia

near those only forests

when blue sleep falls cool
     over fiddleful arms
shot black music springs
   sweetly
about the raw day
chanting dreams away &
     telling skin to ache.

Ahhhh ...

Celebrating November

The price of gold hovers around $1,750 an ounce.  But the gold that fills the landscape, glinting the hills, dressing the countryside, the streets, the lawns, is now raked up and bagged or left for the deer to walk on.  Blowing machines hum around town.  No longer obscured by leafy trees, road-side corners are easier to maneuver.  Low-lit afternoons reveal open spaces between the branches.

And in that low-light of even early afternoon, I walk beside the West River before the days become too cold and the wind whistling down the river, too fierce.  All is quiet except for a single crow and the inconsequential hum of cars.  Even the river is silent.  Only an occasional brown oak leaf floats along its placid, ripple-less sun-lit surface.  The corn field is now stubble.  If I were to paint what I see, I would get out tubes of raw sienna and raw umber.  A pewter grey for tree trunks and shadows.  All to render the prickles, twigs, fluff, seed heads, bare branches, bittersweet berries, dead curled leaves.

Back home, cup of tea in hand, I get out my poetry books.

November Night (Adelaide Crapsey 1878-1914)

Listen ...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Fall, Leaves, Fall (Emily Brontë 1818-1848)

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

And, in a more contemporary vein:

leaves

these cool blowy days
          rip time
shaking the garden bare above
shadows windful & aching with
          raw light
as whispers sit through moments
          gone
falling like my summer sleep

(I wrote that using those refrigerator poetry magnets)

Once above, now below

Pumpkin Time

I don't think I've been anywhere--and that includes parts of Europe and Asia--that wasn't beautiful in October.  To me, this glorious month never makes a mistake.  There's something about the lowering light, the glowing color, the crisp air .... I even wrote a poem about it once.

          The Mature Beauty of These Pumpkin-Colored Days

          In sumac shoes and scarves
          from the silk of Indian corn,

          in gowns of wildflower prints, shawls
          from challis-soft leaves of the tupelo,

          in goldenrod necklaces and rings of amethyst asters
          (her hair stuck up with scarlet pins),

          she weaves ochres, madders and siennas
          into honeyed dawns and gingered dusks,

          knowing the angels have charge over her
          and that her hour is nearly come.

And pumpkins, always the totally right color for the season, seem a jolly symbol whether they lie out in a field, are picked up, scooped out, and turned into jack-o'-lanterns (we used to spread the seeds on a newspaper to dry in the sun ... and then eat them), or are baked into a tea cake topped with an orange-flavored butter cream and a bit of candied ginger.  

A local farm, part of an apple orchard.  These outbuildings were filmed as the bunkhouse in "The Cider House Rules"

Same farm.

Outside a farm stand in another part of town.

How's that for a pumpkin!

A week ago, I found myself in the town of Keene, New Hampshire, population 23,000, just as they were getting ready for that weekend's annual pumpkin festival for which they've broken records for having the most lit jack-o'-lanterns in one place.  More pumpkins than population.  I've never been, not wanting to contend with the 70,000 on-lookers, but I did scout out their website which showed some impressive photos.  (Here's the link.)

Without crossing the busy round-about that encircled the town square, I got a couple of shots that show workers building what would become a tree-tall structure with planks to display as many jack-o'-lanterns as could fit. Others would fill the square and border the streets.

Getting ready for pumpkin time in the Keene town square.

The same square with its lit-up "Pumpkin Drop Off" sign.

What Makes October October

Attending a Sunday afternoon Bach concert
Finding that recipe for pumpkin muffins
Carving jack o' lanterns
Coming up with costumes for the little ones
Putting the garden to bed--hoses, flower pots, outdoor furniture
Getting the double-pane windows in place
In other words ... battening down the hatches

It's 4:53: Who Will It Be? Chris Matthews or Robert Frost?

If I had a hammock, I'd go lie in it these mid-summer afternoons, but since I don't, I settle in a chair around 4:30, put up my feet, and sit a bit, putting aside the busy part of the day and shifting to a time that will rest my bones.  I've figured out supper, maybe even done a bit of prep work.  I've poured something refreshing to drink.  I pick up a newly-arrived New Yorker.  Or, lately, with the news heating up, I watch Chris Matthews at 5:00, even with its interruptions, everyone talking at once, and head butting stuff.  But, soon enough (usually by the first commercial), what with all the partisan nonsense, political grid-lock, and posturing, I shake my head and turn it off.

(A bit of background here now.)  Sometimes, realizing I haven't turned to them in quite awhile, I make a project of re-listening to my old 33 RPM records ... or re-reading my books of poems.  Recently, not wanting to keep filling my head with those Beltway bashings, I got out my Robert Frost from college days, set it on the coffee table (where I'd be reminded to read it), and then went about my work.  A good solid Modern Library edition, it's a sturdy little book, easy to handle, easy to flip through.  As I set it down, I decided that Frost was possibly my favorite poet.  

A bit later, when it was in fact time to put up my feet, I sat awhile then saw that it was 4:53, nearly top-of-the-hour Chris Matthews time.  I looked at the remote control there beside me ... and I looked at my old college book there on the coffee table in front of me.  Which would I choose?  Voting for something meadowy, I picked up Frost and spent the rest of the afternoon amid stone walls, pasture springs, and star-like fireflies in the garden.

I've always liked Frost's common sense, his matter-of-factness, his home truths, edginess, and little surprises co-mingled with such language as "By June our brook's run out of song and speed." (1)  Or "Never tell me that not one star of all/That slip from heaven at night and softly fall/Has been picked up with stones to build a wall." (2) 

As I sat there, I re-read the two poems ingrained into the national psyche--Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ("Whose woods these are I think I know...") and The Road Not Taken ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...").  And the only poem I still remember by heart because, after a dear friend gave me a broadside of it that she'd made in a letter-press printing class, I hung it up and so see it everyday.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

I also re-discovered Mowing, Mending Wall, The Oven Bird, A Time to Talk, New Hampshire, A Question, Fire and Ice.  And these:

Devotion

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Happiness Makes Up in Height For What It Lacks in Length

Oh, stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun's brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view--
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day's perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

A Frostian scene with its New England stone wall

(1) Hyla Brook
(2) A Star in a Stone-Boat

(Since Frost's poems are now in the public domain, it's okay to include them here.)