FFF: Peace / Piecing

Nora's theme for yesterday was "Peace" - and she was good enough to announce it ahead of time. Despite this, it seemed to be a week without much peace in terms of my inner landscape. Denise Levertov's bleakly beautiful poem "Zeroing In" aptly describes what I am talking about.

But today has been a good day, and I've found a nicer landscape waiting for me inside. I attribute this mainly to what I have done in the kitchen today (cinnamon rolls for tomorrow! meatloaf! crazy 1907 onion soup!) and also that I was able to sit in front of my sewing machine and experiment with some ideas. Here are the photos:

Long Live the Kitchen Table

There have been a couple times in the last few weeks when I have been in the kitchen and felt entirely at peace - which is a funny thing to say, because it is usually the times when I have two things going on the stove and something in progress on the counter, and a growing sink of dishes. It's like that old saying about the duck - serenely floating above the water, paddling like mad beneath - except that for once I actually feel like the top part of the duck!

(And here is how life with Cora is currently affecting me: I have an irresistible need to say Guess what? Duck butt!)

I am having a good and successful time using up nearly everything from our Harmony Valley CSA box. (I cannot say enough good things about Harmony Valley.) I found a new cobbler recipe that is quick and easy and comes out the way I want it to. I made a cherry pie with cherries from a friend's trees that I loved, which is amazing, because I have not, historically, had much interest in cherry pies.

Every summer it seems like there are a few dishes that become the Dish of the Summer and that get made about every other week, or more frequently. And I'm not just talking about things like quesadillas or ham and pea pasta! Last summer it was a black-eyed pea-feta-and tomato salad. This summer it has been my version of a Rick Bayless Beans-Greens-and-Chorizo taco filling and a wilted spinach and bacon and egg salad. What I find astonishing here is the presence of greens and spinach - not previously staples of our table - but this summer we are all about the greens. Even Cora, though she is a dedicated raw food purist when it comes to her vegetables. And her fruits - she is not a fan of pie. Or cobbler. Or tarts. Or even blueberry pancakes (!!) - she wants her blueberries on the side, please.

The kitchen often feels like the one area of the house, and my life, that I am in control of, or where I feel fully prepared and competent. Even though our kitchen is off in a corner of the house, it feels like the center. And if I can keep centered there, then I can carry that into the other areas.

I admit it: lately I envision myself as an octopus. Only psychically, of course. Or does that sound worse? But, I do try to pull myself, my tendrils or tentacles, from that center, that calm and knowing center, rather than from the places where it all feels like chaos and limbo and anger and sadness. Those are the places I am not enjoying finding myself lately. Not much gets created in those places that is going to nourish anyone.

Today I ran into the poem "Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo. Her first line is "The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live." And later she writes "It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human."

Oh yes. And this summer, I would say that the instructions served up by our kitchen table are: Be creative. Learn to love what you thought you would not. Make something your own. Know where you are safe, and how to carry that safety with you.

One Art

I am sitting in a motel room in WI, Cora asleep in the bed, Chris at a concert, the room filling up with darkness as the world beyond the open window fills with evening birdsong and highway thrum, and I am thinking about that Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" and in particular, these lines:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I think I am thinking about these lines because earlier this evening we were all down
in the motel pool and at the end I was sitting and waiting for Chris to coax Cora out of the
water and my mind wandered to memories of our backyard pool when I was in high school,
 and I was thinking that having that pool was one of the very best things about high school,
as I see it now. I loved being in that pool, lying on hot cement next to it after being in the
water for a long time, the feeling of the heat soaking into a wet suit. I would read stretched
out on the diving board. My brothers and I played games there - made up games of baseball
while sitting perched on boogie boards.

And I was thinking about places, bodies of water, I've left behind - that pool, the ocean,
a beloved lake, and soon a river, and those lines popped into my head. I am finding there is
something about a motel room, a cool evening, birdsong, a highway, and a sleeping child that
all conspire to make it very easy to think about loss. That is the art in Bishop's poem, after all,
the art of losing.

How not to expect

On the fridge we have a little poem by Galway Kinnell (ok, we have lots of stuff up on our fridge aside from this one little scrap of paper). Here it is:

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

I can no longer remember where it came from - it looks like I cut it out of something like a newsletter or other piece of mail. Something that was folded, and there's a crease running across the paper just below Kinnell's name. But, I thought of this poem this morning as I tried to derail my brain's worrying at the usual topics (are we moving? when will we know? when will they call? what if they don't? what will we do? are we moving? when will we know?...).

I like the idea of this poem, I like it for many things. I like the idea of just wanting what happens next, whatever "what happens next" turns out to be. I often strive for that kind of expectant nonexpectancy. It is a harder struggle - of course it is - when I actually do have something specific that I want that whatever happens to be. And when I want it to be something good; when I expect something good. Or at least something more good than not.

I'm looking for a more nonexpectant attitude, even if just for today. I can be good at standing against the flow and I can be good at going with the flow, but I am not so good at hanging out in the eddies and waiting for the stream to start moving again. Is this about some kind of psychological inertia? Maybe.

One good side effect is that, in my desire to feel like something is moving forward, that there is movement for my psyche, I am reading a lot more. I hadn't been doing much since October - the busybusy fall, the illnesses, the stress and sadnesses of the holidays and January, all those things made it hard for me to focus on the page. But now...a different story. That part feels good. That part of right now I am enjoying, and I'm trying to keep that in mind.

More stuffing

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I've actually stopped teaching this poem, because I can't stand to read another paper about how this is *just like* grandpa's cabin up north. I mean, on the one hand I do appreciate that students love this poem and that they feel such a strong connection to it and it brings them pleasant associations. But, for me, one of the most poignant parts of this poem is that this place does not yet exist for the speaker. It is a place he plans and goes to in his imagination, in his "deep heart's core" while surrounded by grey pavement.

The description of his little cottage is so idyllic, so evocative, so detailed and divine (that "bee-loud glade" and those "veils of morning" - everything sounds shimmering and opalescent), that it seems it must exist. But, it is all what he will and shall do, one day, when he can escape the grey. Like many of us city-dwellers who do yearn for a simple life (or what we believe would be a simple life), growing something tasty, living among natural beauty, the low sounds of waves our new soundtrack.

You can hear Yeats read it - in a high and incantatory way - over at poets.org. It isn't the way I read it, or hear it in my head, but it's his way.

Stuffing my head with poems

Well, I suppose the universe isn't going to just dump beauty on me without me making room for it in this head that is so crowded right now with troubles and worries and sadness from a variety of sources from the personal to the global. So, I'm trying to make a little room, move things around, clear a little space. I thought I would start with a poem that not only will start this process for me, but reminds me why I need it.

Robert Hayden wrote this poem not so long ago (1966), but I imagine that as true as it is for me, it would be for people of any time and place.

Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

I have loved this poem for years - it was the poem that led me to discover the rest of Hayden's amazing poetry and its lines ran through my head repeatedly in the months following 9/11, and whenever I turn to the arts for solace and sustenance.

I love the way Hayden describes Monet's painting and how he tried to capture light, preserve a light that "was not, was, forever is" - though when I read this poem I usually think of the haystack series, Monet moving down a line of canvases as the light changed. How "the eye like the eye of faith" believes it is seeing waterlilies from a distance, that up close dissolve. And the description of that dissolution as being like seeing through tears, the way you do look at a world you have lost, even as you can still see "the shadow of its joy" - meaning perhaps that the world is not entirely lost, is within reach, if removed for a time.

Oh, right, I'm a poet, too!

Last night I did something I love to do and seldom do - I gave a poetry reading, with the other three members of my poetry writing group. It was at a local coffee shop, in a little room off to the side from the main room (where the lovely and loud espresso machine lives), and we had a nice audience - a full room! We each had about 11 minutes to read, which felt very short after all. One of the rules of the reading series is that you read your most recent poem, as well as whatever else you choose to read.

So, a couple things about this experience. Both teaching and readings appeal to the small portion of me that wants to have an audience and a chance to talk about a subject I am comfortable with and.or knowledgeable about. I do not typically like people staring at me, but it was okay and fun last night.

The last poem I read was one that I wrote two days ago. True, portions of it have been drifting around my head for a while, but I didn't start putting them together and filling in the connecting bits until this week. There was a particular image that so often rose in my mind while nursing Cora, and I really wanted to put it in a poem, and I finally found a way to do it.

A couple weeks ago I gathered up some poems for a chapbook, and sent that manuscript off to some competitions. That experience and then getting together poems for the reading, reading them, and hearing people's responses reminded me that I really am a poet. A good one, I think, and I should be doing more with this art I've been given and I've worked at.

So, here's a new summer resolution: send the poems out to magazines! Put the new manuscript together! Write more!

News of the world

Remember that section of William Carlos Williams's long poem "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower"? The one that talks about getting the news of the world from poetry? About how "it is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably everyday/for lack/of what is found there"?

Mary Oliver has a new book of poems out, Red Bird, that I just got from the library. This morning after putting Cora down for her nap I opened the book at random, to see what news there was for me. Here is what I found on page 45:

Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?