The Garden of Verse: Wisdom in Gurus, Mothers, Vermont, and Flecks of Cappuccino Foam

             I found not only a lot of fine poems in the February edition of Verse-Virtual, but a lot of wisdom. Poems live in our thoughts not for what they say so much as how they say it. We may 'know' these truths, or realize we've been told them (or shown them) before, but now we feel them as well.

            In his poem "Mahayana in Vermont," Sydney Lea is telling us that 'nothing' happens in the course of a long hike taken "with three dogs through the rain." But we know what 'nothing' means after hearing about the grouse, and the deer flies, and the "late trillium," and the counted steps. We know that 'nothing' actually means 'everything,' and are not surprised, but in fact happily gratified when the poem sums this 'nothing' up as "a mystic sense of well-being/ in quietly chanted numbers."

       

            In Alan Walowitz's poem "String Theory," a guru morphs into a Jewish mother when he responds to a bill of complaints with the advice "Things could be worse." It's a pleasing conjunction, offering an insight into both roles. Our guru may not know everything; and our mothers (Jewish or otherwise) are likely to know something valuable about their children. This recognition leads to a slightly shocking, but worthily eye-opening embrace of peace from an unconventional perspective (which I won't completely spoil by quoting it here). Aging brings complaints, but it beats the alternatives.

            In Penelope Moffat's poem "My Cat is the Buddha," the pleasure lies in how the proposition is advanced.

Yea though I do call her Smoke
her name is God.
Though I murmur “silly child”
she is intellect made flesh.

Serious things can be said lightly, and the wonderfully ear-pleasing arcane vernacular of sacred texts is out there for us to play with, as this poem so pleasurably does.

            The fleshly intellect of the cat called "Smoke" is realized in warm fur, a "nubbly tongue," and the virtue of breathing her "honest breath" into a bedside water glass. Animals too can be a sacred text. What pleasure to read about this one.

            Playful and fun as well, Kate Sontag's poem “The Many Lives of Foam,” invents a new world of "karma," the February issue theme that got me noticing the wisdom of these poems. It turns out that foam gets around. It's "a fleck of cappuccino... a white mustache on my future lover’s upper lip," also the "lather on your father's face," and the bubbling creation of "soap & glycerin" that finds a kind of ultimate release in a "roving rainbow." And a lot of other stages in between. Sometimes in the karmic journey of rebirths, everything  is relative. Sometimes the thing to do is just look at it from a different angle.

            Judy Kronenfield's moving and impressive series of poems "Saving the Dead" suggests to me that we 'save' them best by remembering them. I'm particularly moved by a poem about the acute memory loss in parents or other aged relatives (that many of us have already experienced in family members), a condition described in the acutely titled "The Withering of Their State."

"...the scales fall
from their eyes, and they fall asleep
in each other's chairs, and thine
is mine, and now is then, and mildly,
with the most gracious of oh?s,
they allow themselves to be
removed..."

            The wisdom here consists of seeing things as they are, offering the compassion that we would wish shown to ourselves... and simply letting be.  

            Tom Montag's fine contribution to the February issue of five concentrated reflections includes a couple of unblinking looks at the persistence of darkness in all lives. A kind of insight and wisdom that perhaps flows from "the stranger/ angel in my nature," to quote from his poem "The Sadness of Happiness." As this poem says, "between kiss and climax/
there is always this darkness."

            The somewhat longer lyric "Walking the Tracks on a Warm December Day" suggests a particulary Decemberish insight consistent with the time of year when the light is at its briefest, the dark its longest. The poem asks, "Train in the distance, or not?" But the poem knows the train is always out there, and will someday arrive.

            These are a few of the poems that spoke me in the February Verse-Virtual. Many other fine poems can found at
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html