The Garden of Verse: Poems in May Grow Flowers, Fathers, and the Hard To Explain

            We may be celebrating Mother's Day this month, but fathers are also showing up big in some poems in May's Verse-Virtual. So are flowers, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the season. So is the uncanny.

            In Laurie Bryo's poem "Mask," the soul of a father appears to have spread itself over the natural realm, in a raccoon that "swaggers" into the house and in further reflections of the forest:

 "wing for hair,
leaves for mouth, stream for skin."

            Then the imagery leaves natural correspondences behind:

"Meanwhile,
rain fills each empty shoe.  A lost shoe on the moon fills
with stardust. Meanwhile, each courage teacher covers her eyes with brown pebbles, removes a periwinkle shell
battered from tumble. A lawyer soothes his throat with honey
bees."

            The imagery lets go. It's eerie, but also wonderful -- and beautiful.

            Sarah White's "Poems by Sons," tells us that men often write about their fathers. Again, we're offered tantalizing images:

"as a man looking out
the window at a lone crow on the road,
or a man shaving while steam
from a small boy’s adoration
rises and clouds the mirror."

            I particularly like the cinematic close-up of a father "looking out the window at the lone crow," but the poem points out the weakness of the second picture.

            As the son realizes when he becomes a father, it's unlikely that Dad shaves with a cloudy mirror. These "Poems by Sons" may tell us little about the fathers, but a good deal more about the sons.

            Why do gardeners make a fuss over their flowering plants? Maybe because they keep teaching the same lesson -- that nothing in life lasts forever, yet life keeps coming. -- and we keep needing to learn it. Linda Fischer's "A Field of Flowers" depicts the gardener "edging a length of the garden
as precisely as a rolled hem."

            The poem takes the comparison further: "Like the gown I once stitched,
languishing in a closet of clothes
I can no longer wear,
horticulture knows but a brief
season."

            But I'm not finding a poem about the futility of labor here. Read what the gardener's "hands reach for" at the end of this poem.

            There is more to heaven and earth than we can find a place for in our philosophy, as comprehensive as we try to make it. In Michael Minassian's surprise-packed fantasy "In the Back Yard I Found a Rotary Phone," we discover that rotary phone humming in the 'garden,' an unidentified "she," a wingless "angel," "tiny gods in aero planes," and the contemplation of a "lamb's kiss."

            Best of all we have this vision:  

"flowers stood about

at the end of their wits"

            Sometime I know just how those flowers feel. We're 'projecting,' of course. This poem makes us stand up and take notice.

            In an "Unnamed Country" by Mary Makofske, life's garden has narrowed to a single tulip on the pavement -- dropped by a hurrying "flower vendor" or perhaps a "husband bearing from the florist shop
an anniversary bouquet."

            In the panic of the moment, no one among the few who slink beside the buildings will stoop to pick that it up. Once again, a poem makes us see ourselves in flowers -- a solitary flower reduced to "these yellow petals and this fragile throat." The starkly abandoned flower tells us all we need to know of what has happened here.

            Angels, those products of poetic imagination without whom we simply cannot do (Rilke, famously, couldn't) make a forceful appearance in Penny Harter's "Honoring Angels":

"one grabbed my hair
and swung me round and round as if we were
playing a child’s game. I knew she would
soon let go, flinging me into the coral mist
surrounding us both..."

            This visionary image, the poem tells us, can be understood in more than one way. In the grasp of that angel, we pay close attention.

            More transcendent images appear in Tricia Knoll's poem with the Yeatsian title "The Opera Company Sells Its Costumes":

"Clouds
hover as we wrap up inside sequined warrior
fatigues, mummy wraps, gowns smirched with blood
from spousal blows, neoprene court jackets,
or wool doublets of shepherds."

            The poem soars, leaving the material facts of the weather charts -- "clouds" -- behind. Sometimes leaving our everyday language behind is the only way to fly. And what an interesting sound that word "neoprene" makes. I had to look it up and was rewarded with this mouthful: "neoprene: synthetic polymer resembling rubber, resistant to oil, heat, and weathering." Poems are also resistant to weathering.

            In Robert Wexelblatt's "A Moment's Change," we meet another flower:

"Imagine her coming into the room
smiling because she knows you still love
her; how then that smile shrivels
promptly as Mojave mariposas."

             Mojave mariposas, another wonderful mouthful, are also new to me. Poems send us to places we haven't been (Mojave in my case). But we're familiar with the concept of 'quick-blooming,' as we are as well with the word "prognosis," which follows quickly in this tightly-written, devastating poem.

            In Michael Gessner's beautifully written poem "Painted Hands," we learn:

"The ancients used slick swells of stone
walls and ceilings to give the impression
of moving upward in the flickering light,
often found in recesses absent
of any forms of human life
as if yearning had no body."

           

            The phrase "as if yearning had no body" responds to the image of handprints on stone that accompanies this poem so perfectly that we already have more than enough here to remember. But this poem has more for us, especially its final speculation on what these images of ancient hands on stone may say to us about the longing for community, or perhaps 'communion.'

            A lot of wonderful poems in this May 2018 issue of Verse-Virtual, with a lot to say to us. 

            You can find them here: http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html