Grief Poetry

So, you may have noticed that I posted nothing for around 7 months. There's actually a reason for this, other than lameness.

Back in October 2009, a friend of mine died. I wrote a poem, which I had intended to bring to his funeral and/or share at his memorial service, and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. It was freaking breaking my heart.

In August 2008, two of my grandparents (one from each side of the family) died. I hadn't really gotten over that. I don't think I really have even now. Last summer, the mother of a very good friend died much too early. I only met her two or three times, but she was amazingly cool, and I was really looking forward to getting to know her. And then she died.

And then Bill died. It wasn't unexpected. He had cancer. His decline had been slow and steady. He'd been wheelchair-bound for several months. I liked him tremendously. He reminded me strongly of the grandfather I lost when I was 13. We shared a love of geology and the natural world. His passing, on top of all the other deaths in my life, just got to me.

I froze up after that. I wrote one other poem after his poem about how the grief inside me was paralyzing me (I can't find it now). And then I just stopped writing. Anything. I didn't touch any of my blogs, at all, for months.

Last month, I took a weekend off. I went away and spent time entirely alone. I thought hard about all the stuff that's been weighing on me. I made an org chart of my life - if it had been a web site design, it would have failed miserably: too complex. But examining my life opened something up, and I started writing again, posting my first poem since last October.

So I think it's time I fessed up. I haven't been writing, in part because I've been lame, but also because I've been really, really sad for the past two years. It's a hard thing to talk about, especially years later. There's nothing new to say, or add, other than the obvious: I still miss them. Now, days go by without my thinking about my grandfather or Bill, but then something will remind me, and all that pain comes back again, sharper from disuse.

I once sprained my right ankle so badly that I was on crutches for a month, and I couldn't run for over a year. Sometimes, just putting my foot down hard caused pain to flare through my foot. Today, nearly twenty years later, I really only notice it in tree pose, where my right leg has a harder time maintaining balance than my left.

My grief feels like this. It's still tender and complains bitterly when poked at. But I can take a few tottering first steps again. So here is the wholly inadequate poem I couldn't bear to share before, my first attempt at regaining my balance.

Metamorphosis
For Bill

How can I hope to hold
all the sedimentary layers
of your life, like ages of a sea,
the silty bands of infancy,
childhood, youth, adolescence,
soldier, husband, father, grandpa,
friend, neighbor, lover of stone,
in words on a flat page?

I heard of your death
in a Santa Fe café
where you should have been, too,
exploring the geology
of the New Mexico landscape:
orbicular granite, gypsum sands,
meters-deep volcanic tuff.
You would have wanted
to focus on minerals:
the pink calcite that names the Sandias,
flourite and mica from abandoned mines.

Instead, your stratified existence,
under pressure I can scarcely imagine,
underwent metamorphosis
when I wasn’t looking.
Limestone to marble? No,
whatever you have become
anew defies classification.

The Economic Realities of Modern Poetry

Let's face it: poetry does not pay.

If you're a working poet, you'll quickly find that the vast majority of poetry markets pay absolutely nothing. Diddly. Squat. Really, they're doing you a favor by putting your work in print. Maybe they'll deign to give you a free copy of their publication.

Yes, there are paying markets out there. I have, in fact, sold one poem to the now defunct Terra Incognita magazine. But finding them and managing to actually sell to them is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. I've given up sending out poetry. The reward is just too small.

But I still write poetry. I still like reading my poetry to audiences. I founded and still help run a successful poetry series in Cambridge, and I have set for myself a goal of bringing a new poem to read at the open mike each month. If I enjoy writing poetry, and I enjoy sharing poetry, and I expect no more remuneration than the pleasure of others, then really, the Internet is the perfect medium for my poetry.

Henceforth and forthwith (What great words! Why do we never use them, except sarcastically?), I'm going to publish my poems on this blog for whoever cares to read them. If you'd like to print them in your magazine, journal, chapbook, or just email them around to your friends, feel free, but please note that I retain copyright place a Creative Commons license on all my work, and if you intend to make money off of my work, you had better obtain my permission first.

Duality

05/05/2010

I am and I am not.
I am and we are.

A zen master, observing a waterfall, said:
We are all part of the stream.
When we pass over the lip of a cliff,
we separate into droplets.
These are our lives: individual, separate,
distinct.
At the end, we rejoin the stream.
That brief moment of existence
as individuals
is an anomaly, an illusion,
an artifact of semantics.
In truth, we are, and always have been
the stream.

We are and we are not.
I was not and I am.

A solitary electron, passing through a tiny hole,
behaves, not like a particle, but like a wave.
If there are two electrons,
passing through two parallel slits,
they interact like ripples in a pond
from two identical drops,
overlapping, intersecting, interfering.
Electrons act like waves until struck
by a photon - in fact,
until they are observed.
The act of observation collapses them,
pins them down, reduces them to mere points
instead of endless, expanding
possibilities.
This is called wave-particle duality.
It drives physicists mad.

They are. We are. I am.
I was. I will be.

People say, plan as though you'll live forever.
Live each day like it's your last.
Both are true cases.
You will not be tomorrow
the person you are now.
The self, reading this poem,
in this precise moment
expands outward in time,
unspooling twine through every branch
of time's unfolding labyrinth.
Along this path, you live.
Another path, you die.
An infinity of choices and outcomes,
all yours until you stop to look
and collapse again into your present.
Everything that you can be
you already are.

You are. I am. We.

We pass through the tiny slit of this moment.
My wave form reaches out, touches yours.
My existence is part of yours, you are part
of mine, we interfere and combine.
Which part of you is me?
Where am I in you? Don't look -
if we stop to think, to observe,
we'll collapse back into ourselves,
side by side but separate,
solitary, self-contained.

Or is identity illusion,
formed by a flash of light,
a shadow on the cave wall,
when the light fades,
and no one is looking?

I am you. You are me.
We have always been the stream.

Second Draft: Lost Poems

I help run the Fireside Reading Series (which I keep forgetting to promote here), and I have a standing rule that I will not read at the open mic unless I have written a new poem. I quite forgot that there was a reading tonight until I noticed it on Molly Lynn Watt's Facebook page, and of course, I hadn't written a new poem. I thought about this, fuming, all the way home from work, and about all the poems I'd had ideas for but never gotten the chance to write.

And that gave me an idea. So during dinner, I wrote the first draft of this poem on the back of an envelope and read it at the reading tonight. Here it is in its second draft.


Lost Poems

Where do they go,
those poems that whisper
in your ear
while you're driving
or working
or hip-deep in laundry?
Willful as soap bubbles,
they pop into existence,
then drift away, out of reach,
lost to cooking or taxes
or the mere lack of a pencil.

My lost poems
must be stashed
alongside single socks
and gloves, loosened buttons,
in a mislaid pocket of reality:
that verse about Abuela's tortillas,
a pair of shoes in the road,
pumpkins in a tree,
and countless more
too fleeting to form words,
ephemeral and real
as the scent of baking bread,
words, feelings, cadences
that wandered by
and left.

If there is a Heaven,
I want it to be a place
where I can gather my lost poems
like snowflakes on my tongue

Finished Poem: Dark Water

About a month ago, I promised a friend that I'd post this. He'd had this sort of a day. Sorry, John. It seems rather appropriate today, with all the rain. This was originally written in June 2002.

Dark Water

On Boston Harbor, in twenty-knot wind,
I learn to spot the footprints of the wind on the water,
Dark patches, tight-packed with tiny ripples,
what sailors call cats’ paws.
These presage a coming gust, creeping up behind us,
to catch at our sails and beat us off course.

We were warned to stay close to the harbor,
but in the rush of wind, the mad tipping of the boat,
we quickly skate past Logan, and the passage of aircraft
hardly ruffles us, so strong and fierce is the wind behind us.
Dark footprints come more and more often, until,
at last, the ocean is evenly dark, sharp-peaked, foam-clawed.

Free of the harbor, we jibe
for the small boats channel, and as we turn, we spot
the dark line of clouds and crack of distant lightning.
A squall is coming,
and it will catch us already wet and wind-weary.

We turn back to the harbor, beating hard against the wind.
Dark water surrounds us, vicious and clever.
At each hard-earned boatlength, the water turns darker.
We ride the mad wind on the side of the tiny boat.
I stand on the nigh horizontal mast, and when
the rudder pulls free of the water,
sending us out of control, straight for a pier,
I cannot loose the jib sheet and must kick it from its cleat
to let it fly.

At once, the jib deafens us with its flapping,
and the boat drops safely back into the water.
But the vengeful wind has torn our jib to pieces,
the price of our escape. Dark water has won,
and we must be towed home.

Work in Progress: Rare Breed

This is a long, rambling, maudlin poem, but I'm hoping that if I type it out here, it will tighten up a bit, maybe find a little meter.
--------
Rare Breed

for my grandfather, one year later

Flipping through the Field Guide to Cattle,
I find, unexpectedly, my grandfather's cows,
a cow and a heifer mugging for the camera.
listed as "Hays Converter," page 72.
This surprises the hell out of me
because they're Canadian, bred out of Calgary,
a hybrid of Holstein crossed with Hereford
and American Brown Swiss with Hereford again.
They're dairy cows that we raised as beef,
though my grandfather bred them
with Angus and Longhorn.
Our family recounts legendary tales
of the mean-tempered white Longhorn bull
and how my grandfather played toreador
that day a hot air balloon landed in his field.

The Field Guide to Cattle
describes Hays Converter
as increasingly rare.
This brings tears to my eyes
because, of course, we sold them all
when my grandfather grew too old
- 90 years! - to lift bales of alfalfa
to feed them. Rare, too, are the bales,
the very last alfalfa harvest
mown down last weekend, baled up today,
and sold. The fields now will be
put out to pasture, a wide and lovely
low maintenance, utterly pointless
expanse of grasses. Rarer still,
the farm itself, just five acres left
of the original eighty-eight
in a pocket of anachronism
one mile from downtown Albuquerque,
perfect for subdivision.
But, then
what would happen to the heirloom apples -
banana, transparent manzanos del sol -
and the sugar pears, lincoln pears, cherries and quince?
None of which we have the time to harvest.
And I have no right to use the plural "we."
I live in Massachusetts, my sister in Iowa,
which leaves my widowed grandmother,
my parents in their sixties, my mother barely walking,
and my brother, just my brother, able and willing,
working full time machining parts for cars and planes,
then working the farm and still somehow trying
to have time for his art, a life for himself.
How long can that last? How long should it?

Which makes Abuelo the rarest of breeds:
hispanic gentleman urban farmer,
quite possibly extinct,
as of one year ago.

Work in Progress: False Chanterelle

False Chanterelle
July 15, 2009

There.
Just in the corner of my eye
as I drive past, a flash of orange.
Driving back, more slowly now,
I spy, nestled amidst the moss
on a steep embankment held
in the grasping roots of a spreading oak
a field of tiny, curl-lipped trumpets.
I return a few days later
on a weekend when no one is likely
to mind or to witness me.
I stop the car under the oak.
The bank is a mycological wonder:
two large, ominous black puffballs,
a cluster of yellow hats fit for gnomes,
a bolete I might have found at Whole Foods,
small white flutes stained sickly pink on top.
Most of all, dozens of pumpkin-colored 'shrooms
that I am sure are chanterelles.
I gather five of the largest, no more
than three inches tall, half that across,
and take them home, despite their lack
of signature apricot perfume.

At my desk, site after site,
many similar-not-identical photos,
gradually convince me that I am correct.
And so I take one hopeful nibble.
For one anticlimactic moment,
I taste nothing. No fruit, just flesh.
Then the mushroom bites me back.
Its strong, peppery flavor sizzles
on my tongue, and so I sprint
for the kitchen sink to rinse it all out.
I never swallowed.

Was my pick a Jack-o-Lantern,
poisonous? No, too small and fails
to glow in the dark at all.
A more thorough search reveals
the dainty false chanterelle,
distinguishable from the red chanterelle
only by a stem lacking gills.
Not truly poisonous, some think it edible
if you can stand the gastric upset.
Later, sheepish and chagrined,
I stop to wonder - does the chanterelle
imitate its less edible cousin?
Perhaps it is the panworthy variety
who's truly false.