Poetry Challenge 35

In honor of the turning of the year–past the solstice and heading for a new year and new decade, go back to something you wrote long ago and look at it again.  Find something you like about it and give it a fresh start–either rewriting from the seed of the old material,  or just dusting it off and reading it with new eyes, as my old friend Larry Laraby did with this poem:

The Light Waits (a winter solstice poem)

The inexorable movement of darkness
Slow accumulation of night
We gather the multitude of dark hours
And cast them to the sun
Light waits behind the closed
Doors of winter
Light that waits to dance
That waits to sing
The sun’s day
Solstice
In that immense moment
The earth stops its turning
And we celebrate
The retreating night.

(Thanks, Larry!)

—————————————-

A Response from Glow:

“At dawn she went to the ridge to wait.”

For years, I have wondered
why she waited
and for what?
Did her wait turn fruitful?
Did she come, did the letter arrive, was the child born?
The news arrive? The medicine turn up? The mystery solved?

There is a drawing,
the title is the mystery phrase:
at dawn she went to the ridge to wait.
butch dyke in a woman’s cloak
a stout walking stick held before her
a tiny grassland village hunched on the ridge
folded into the valley below her.

For me the mystery is double.
I both wrote the title and drew the drawing.
I do not know what either mean.
Only that I, too, will eventually recognize
the ridge in the drawing
it will manifest into reality some dawn
I will grasp my sturdy walking stick
climb up the hill in the early twilight
and wait.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

The solstice has turned—now, incrementally, we’re heading to brighter days. It has been a tough fall in the Interior. Each of us has experienced it in different ways that have accumulated gradually, but definitely, so that any two of us meeting at Fred Meyers near the mesh bags of tiny oranges, would find ourselves saying, “It’s been a rough fall,” and nodding, saying nothing for a beat, then moving the conversation along to the turning year.

I’m not sure where the run of bad luck started for me. Was it returning from two weeks in New Jersey to find an old friend and ally struck down in his dining room—the true meaning of stroke—and getting there in time to attend his cremation ceremony? Was it the day I knew the whole stack of hay had molded? Was it learning that my dancer son had been sucker punched while doing a good deed? Was it the other deaths and illnesses that seemed to accumulate as we head into the dark time of year?

Living in the Interior makes us survivors. We think nothing of going out and living our lives at twenty, thirty, forty below. We layer up and plug in our cars. We leave no skin exposed. Walking out to feed the horses in the dark of morning at twenty below, I begin to judge temperature by what freezes. Nose hairs: twenty below, eyelashes: thirty below, scarf to face, including nose and eyelashes: forty below. We know how far we can go without danger of hypothermia. We know how long our fingers can manipulate the metal hooks on the horse blanket before we have to run for the warmth of the house to warm hands and gloves, so we can go out and blanket another horse.

It makes a difference to my attitude to spend time outside. Though I rarely see Mattie and Sam in daylight as the fall semester winds down, there are those moments in the morning when I trudge out sleepy-eyed, yawning in the cold air, and watch the light spread on the southern horizon over the fold of the Alaska Range. It’s just past night at 9:30 or 10, on the days I can sleep that late, and the horizon is a deep smoky orange, the sky nearly black.

Today, the last day of grading final papers, I woke even later, still tired from finals week and the near constant reading of student writing. As I walked out, there was a blue-gray light in the sky, just enough to see without turning on the floodlights. Jeter, the still-adolescent poodle, went bounding on ahead as I got Mattie and Sam’s morning armfuls of hay. The air had warmed to nearly zero, and I could feel the returning moisture in the air. Mattie’s back was covered with frost and shavings as she waited for me to toss her hay.

After I threw the hay to each of them, I ducked under the fence, dog in the lead, and walked over to scratch Sam on the neck under his mane. His coat is out to my second knuckle now, dense and warm. I took a flake of hay and divided it into two parts to tuck in two old tires in the corral. They like to eat from the tires, then flip them in the air, looking for scraps of hay. As I walked back into Mattie’s side of the corral, I heard a sharp “Caw” and sensed motion above me. I looked up to see a half dozen ravens circling in the air.

The sky was lightening, the ravens dark against the gray sky. They circled on an eddy of air, catching up to and tumbling around each other. It seemed like one raven led the circling—a choreographer of air—as they glided and flapped and glided again, all in a slow gyre above my head.

Later, I read a poem by Yeats that used that word, “gyre,” his word for the order or was it disorder inherent in the world. These ravens didn’t seem to be playing, though they didn’t seem dreary or even to be hunting. They almost seemed to be circling me and the horses and the dog, as if we were an audience for their art, and all they wanted was to be seen by us. It was as if they were caught in the eddy at the heart of the turning year and were dramatizing it—the essence of solstice—right above my corral.

Or maybe they were waiting for us to leave so they could snack on manure. In any case, a happy solstice to you: the return of light, the slow draining out of darkness from the coming new year.

Poetry Challenge 34

Busy days. Not much

time to write long poems. Darkest

days.  So write Haiku.

+

OK.  You can do

better than that one!  Write one

you like.  Post it here.

Poetry Challenge 33

Though we complain about it, there’s a sweetness to the dark time.  It’s as if our adult outer shell, tired of battling with slick roads, doing chores in the dark, numb fingers, and the sluggishness of moving about with layers of down, fleece, wool and whatever else we can use to keep the cold away from our skin, retreats for while in quiet moments and the child within returns.  For me, it’s an excess of Nutcrackers–I see the ballet two or three times a season for the way it brings me into the family the dancers create–or chocolates, or pies.  Sometimes, it’s the moment I take each morning to run my hand under the manes of the horses, lean in to their thick coats and breathe in their rich smell.

So, what  small thing or things do you do to keep the inner self energized during the cold season?  What do you look forward to that’s not part of the revved-up Christmas industry, but comes from the things all around you?

Dancing in the North

Tonight, as I sit sipping tea and grading student papers, I hear the strains of the Nutcracker in my mind.  Over at Hering Auditorium, the cast is running through its second full dress rehearsal for the young dancers of Cast B.  At 8pm, I hummed the sprightly music of the opening scene, which in our performance features young elves tidying up the drawing room of Clara’s house and spreading magic for the evening.  Later I heard the chorus of the Snow scene, my favorite, with the white romantic tutus—the long calf-length tulle gowns—and the crisp short tutu of the Snow Fairy as she is lifted through the falling snow by her cavalier.

This year, dancers who’ve gone off to start dance careers—including my son, Ira, who started as a seven-year-old boy cherub with a quiver of arrows—are returning to dance together again as professionals.  The younger girls of the corps de ballet—the snowflakes in those gauzy gowns and the flowers swaying in the breeze—are precise and beautiful.  The returning dancers give them something to aspire to.

It’s the deepening of the dark time of year.  We still remember summer, but in a couple of weeks we’ll be at the darkest day, winter solstice.  The Nutcracker with its sparkly music and comic second-act bits counters that darkness, somewhat, though if you listen closely, you can hear Tchaikovsky’s acknowledgement of darkness in the bassoons and deeper bass notes throughout.  The part where I tear up is always the Sugar Plum pas de deux, so full of strength, inspiration, yet deep longing and nostalgia.  In their perfection, the Sugar Plum and her Cavalier represent the best young Clara can aspire to as an emerging adult, yet we sense in the music the sorrow, regret, toil, and pain it takes to reach that point.  The Sugar Plum offers all that richness to a young girl in love with a wooden soldier doll, then offers her the Kingdom of Sweets, a real prince, and a chance to find out for herself.

To me this is the metaphor of Nutcracker: the younger dancers reaching and reaching for the “plum” roles and the older dancers returning, some of them year after year, to mentor them to reach that point, just as Clara is mentored in the various possibilities of her womanhood-to-be by all the dances of the second act.

And behind it all is our Drosselmeyer, Norman Shelburne, who patiently teaches the young dancers the roles in a year-after-year progression till they, too, go off to their own adult Kingdom, with memories of all this sweetness and tunes of the Sugar Plum in their heads forever.

So, if you’re in Fairbanks, don’t miss it this weekend—Friday and Saturday at 8pm; Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.  See you there.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

The day after Thanksgiving.  The weather has warmed so that going outside is comfortable again, though the paths and roads are slick.  All day yesterday, we could hear the snow sliding off the roof.   We sat and ate turkey and pie and talked about the sorrows that have come into our community lately—too soon in winter for so much inexplicable pain.

It’s hard to write about, so here’s a poem.

The way “November”

settles in the mouth:

the dark “n” and “v”, the chilly

“b” and “r”, the hum of “m”

at the heart.  The name of the month

rumbles through our days,

dragging the shadowed season

with it.  Snow falls and packs

beneath our feet.   The moon hangs

half-hearted in the dark afternoon

sky; the night a tunnel we

plunge into with hope

that when daylight comes,

we all wake from darkness

to morning, rich with coffee,

the air tart with cut oranges,

with deep umber light

spreading to pink in the sky.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

Twenty-plus below

Deep cold sets in once again.  I am back in Ed’s chair, blanket and laptop on my lap, listening to the hiss of the teakettle on the woodstove.  Outside, it’s twenty-five below under a flat black sky, glittering with stars.  To the south, Orion hangs drunkenly from his belt, leaning precariously over the river and the flats beyond.

When I started this blog, it was January, the heart of winter.  Ever so slightly the days were getting longer, and I had the luxury of a semester’s sabbatical to watch its progress and write it here.  Now, it’s fall, and we are sliding deeper into winter.   Earlier in fall, when we had an unusually long run of warm sunny weather, I kept meaning to dig out my winter boots and mittens.  Somehow, each  time the temperature dropped a bit more, I would run across just the item I needed—my warm fleece mittens from Apocalypse Design, my fleece-lined boots, the down liner for my coat, the flat, circular fleece hat made for me years ago by my friend Kelly, who traced the pattern from a pie plate.   I’m ready.  I plug the car in at night and when I get to the university, and it runs faithfully.   I haul water to the horses to keep the water level in their tank above the heating element in the bottom, so it doesn’t freeze.  I soak their beet pellets and some extra brome pellets in warm water for a warming mash at night.

Last night, around eleven, I decided that the temperature was really going to drop, as predicted, and I went out to blanket the horses.  Mattie and Sam grow thick warm coats in winter.  Sam’s gets nearly four inches long by late spring and grows in dense like a caribou’s.  Mattie’s coat develops longer guard hairs like a dog’s, with a fluff of undercoat.   She glistens in the sun, looks velvety in flat light.   Sam, despite his trickster nature, invites hugs with his teddy-bear coat.

Still, I know their coats will continue to thicken and grow in with the cold and dark, but this is the first deep cold.  I have brought the thick winter blankets inside to stay warm and, last night, spread them out on the kitchen floor and folded them so that the withers end was down and could I could drape them and unfold them from their shoulders back.

But going out in these temperatures is not as graceful as going out to the corral in summer.  I wear my Muck boots—Arctic Sports, lined with the same neoprene that divers use in cold water—my lined Carhartts, a down vest, wool sweater, lined jacket, fleece hat and smoke ring, insulated gloves.  When it gets colder—thirty or forty below—I’ll layer up even more, but this is enough to make walking slow and to increase my dimensions just enough to make me bump into things as I move around in the house with the heavy blanket in my arms.

I had the floodlight on, shining into the corral.  Out above the corral fence, the stars glittered.  Mattie came out of the dark—a darker shadow, nickering for hay.  I let her smell the blanket, then haltered her and draped it over her shoulders.  It had come a bit unfolded in my messing around carrying it out of the house, and parts of it were folded under on her back at first.   I unfolded the blanket, smoothed it back over her rump, then reached under her belly for the straps to fasten it to her.  She moved away a little, suspicious, as if I had lost my mind to be out putting anything on her back at that time of night, but, as usual, she seemed to relax into the warmth of the blanket and let me reach under her belly and run the leg straps around her hind legs to keep the blanket from slipping.  For a moment, I leaned into her flank as I reached under her stifle for the strap.  Her coat is soft, and she was calm.  We had a quiet moment in the cold and dark.

Sam was a different matter.  He snorted when I came into his side of the corral, and walked away from me, even though he had sniffed the blanket.  He walked around the corral and I walked with him, swinging the lead rope in lazy circles as if I were driving him along.  From time to time I flicked him in the rump, just so he shared my illusion.  Finally he got tired of that game—I had beet pellets in my pocket, after all—and he turned to face me.  I draped the rope around his neck and tied on the rope halter.  Sam has been bored since school started—particularly now that I am coming home in the dark—and he teased me, bumping me with his nose or draping his head over me while I was trying to buckle the front of his blanket and keep my hands warm at the same time.  Once it warms up enough, we’ll be back to clicker training on weekends.  Last night, I just wanted to get his blanket on.

Now they look like medieval horses, draped in their royal blue and Black Watch plaid blankets.   They are hungry with cold, and I’m giving them a little extra hay, but not too much.  This is our first cold, but not our last, and they have to toughen for forty below at some point, maybe colder.   We all do, and like blanketing horses, we all will do what we can to help each other through to spring.

 

Poetry Challenge 32

Darker mornings now, the moon hovering above the hills like a scoop of snow waiting to tip and spill down on us.

Write about anticipation–what it’s like to wait, not knowing how the waited-for moment will turn out.  Write about what you do in the meantime.  What objects occupy your attention during the wait?  How do you move through the time?

Post your poem as a comment and I’ll post it here.

—————

Here’s one from biker poet Tim (AKA Mr Murphrey):

Stealing Pynchon

I picked him up from where he lay
because he needed me;
small and unassuming,
curled and packed so tightly
with paranoia.
I picked him up because he needed help
talking over people’s heads
from the desk where I found him
laying prone and alone.
Do I believe there are mysteries hidden
in symbols and allusions,
or patterns behind the rainbow of medications
that I imagine he takes, or is given,
in small dose cups?
I picked him up because I wanted to believe
that words weave just so,
and that there is more to everything
than nothing.
I put him back where I found him, bound,
and continued to rifle through
the desk, with leather gloves and flashlight,
because I didn’t understand a damned word
he was saying.

———

And one from Glow:

my nerves shiver
waiting for the nanosecond
when the coating of pure rosin
ridging the horsehair of the bow
twinges the golden E string
of the fiddle
a note pure as cantaloup dawn
sweet like spruce sap
piercing like twenty below
shimmers and hums
in the spaces among us
can there be a more perfect note
than an F on a golden E?
We must wait to see if there is more.

———————————————-

And this from Mikey, visiting New York, found in some graffiti on a wall.  He’s looking for the source.  Does anyone know?

Found poem on anticipation:

On the beaches of hesitation
Bleach the bones of millions
Who

Upon the dawn of victory
Sat and waited
And while waiting

Perished.

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

Lingering fall.  Yesterday, driving home on a long westward stretch of road, I saw a half moon, burnt orange, resting on the mountains at the horizon, as if too reluctant or too tired to slip down below the rim to what lay beyond.  As I drove the road’s few turns, the moon seemed to duck out of sight then reappear through the spruces, as if it were playing with me as I drove through the deep darkness of a snowless fall night.  This reluctant moon, the lingering fall, all set an odd tone for the end of October here.

It’s global warming, perhaps.  We’ve seen other effects here in the Interior: the million-acre wildfires and the smoke that settles across the valley and flats in summer; the spruce-bark beetle and leaf miners that feed on our native trees; the early planting and late harvest; and on the Arctic Coast, the melting ice pack, stranding seals, walrus, polar bears.  Much of this is in the range of normal.  For every, “This is strange weather,” there’s a sourdough, “I remember when…” to top it all.  Those of us who have lived in Interior Alaska for many years, hesitate to generalize about the weather here, except to say that there’s no predicting one year by the other.

And we’re not complaining, really—even the dog mushers and skiers.  The skies are clear and sunny by day, warming to the high 30s and 40s, which is warm enough to take off gloves and hats to work with horses.  And though we have less light every day, it’s still light enough at 6:30 or 7 to do a few outdoor things, like groom a horse or roll up the hose for the second time this fall.

Today, I went out to work with Mattie, to reinforce the progress we made with longeing this summer.  She went out on the line fine, then stopped and turned towards me, ears back.  She no longer intimidates me with this–perhaps because I’ve learned to read when to back off with her.  We tried a few more starts in that direction, and I turned her to trot to the other direction.  She went a little, but I let us end with walk and whoa and stand and back, things she does automatically.  I haven’t worked with her much in the past two weeks—teaching and all that goes into it fills my days, and the weekends pass so quickly.  But it was good to run a brush and my bare hands over the deepening plush of her coat and to walk alongside her as she walked and trotted, however reluctantly.  Like the moon.

We are reluctant to give up what’s left of good weather, but we know we’re on borrowed time.  There are still green blades of grass, and a few hardy plants on the hillside perk up again at mid day.  The first real snow will be a sharp wake up to winter for us, but perhaps not so bad, because we’ve had so much time to prepare.

Poetry Challenge 31

Honoring small things.

Glow, a frequent contributor to the poetry challenge, writes that her beloved kitty, Toklas, died yesterday.

So, write about something so small that we might overlook it, but that forms a kind of glue in daily life–the purr of a cat, the sound of a furnace in the background, the feel of a good writing pen, the taste of well-brewed coffee.  Write without sentimentality, but give the small thing its due, in honor of a yellow cat.

——————————————————–

Here’s Glow’s poem:

 

at home,
the river did not run wild
but flowed bounded
red dirt farms on one side
tame oak forests on the other
every day for fourteen years
I walked to the river
sat on the Rock and watched it pass
swam in summer with catfish
long as my arms
tempted lightning during storms
cried, raged, bathed, napped,
laughed, combed my hair,
made love, called kitties and goats and dogs,
giggled at puppies learning to swim,
did ritual, chatted with the neighbors,
listened to crickets, frogs, mockingbirds,
unseen rustlers in the brush,
hiked, found arrowheads,
picked mushrooms, built fires,
scratched chiggers, swatted bugs,
mapped the edges of the land,
but mostly just sat, watched, endured
daily tedium
released by the incessant brown water
just like hundreds of souls before me
who lived along the river
lulled by the flow of water
to carry on the duties of life and death