The Garden of Verse: Going Down the Dark Staircase with Beauty and Style

   

         This is the time of year when all of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere are coping with our fast-dwindling sun season. The summery luxuries of green acres, fresh fruits and flowers, beach days and lingering evenings diminish day by day. Shorter days. Cooler days. The certitude of more and more darkness until the sun tips back in our direction.

            It's no surprise, then, that themes both seasonal and enduring take us down the dark stairway in the October issue of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry journal found at http://www.verse-virtual.com/. 

            In "Departed," Joan Colby's gut-check poem on the misery of those who seek refuge by crossing America's southern border, the poet tells us:  

"The wind is harsh, it separates
The final leaf from the limb
And sweeps over the unforgiving acres
Where refugees move onward..."

            We can't read this poem without being reminded that 'departed' means both to leave a point on earth and to leave earth altogether. And without thinking of the ways (though the poem does not say this) our government's policies add to the number of refugees who die in the desert for the 'crime' of border crossing.

            Who these days remembers atrocities involved in crushing the Attica prison uprising, now decades ago? Its impact lasts, helping to establish the American policy presumption that 'prisoners' are not entitled to any right -- including, apparently, the 'right to life.' Sylvia Cavanaugh's "A Prayer for the Prisoners of the Attica Uprising" ends with a call for recognition of "the humanity of prisoners" with this striking image:

"Like indigo buntings,
those black birds of Spring,
who fasten the sky to their backs
and hoist it down to earth"

            Autumn's shorter days and longer nights make sky and sun even more important. In Barbara Crooker's "LUX PERPETUA," a poem dedicated to a recently departed friend, the poet tells us, "The sky is still heartache blue, but November
is coming, with its afghan of gray, threaded by geese,
everything gone to seed."

            'Heartache blue' is exactly the right encomium for autumn skies, whose contemplation helps us appreciate life's good gifts and the company of those we love. And an 'afghan' sky "threaded by geese" is simply a sublime image.   

            In 'times like these' (a phrase for which we probably all have our own meaning) it's no wonder that we turn to the consolations of the natural world, eternal truths, perfect moments.

            In a poem whose title is a poem in itself --

"IN WHICH A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MOON IS
ECLIPSED BY CLOUDS AND A WHITE-TAILED
DEER BOUNDS OFF INTO THE WOODS" --

            John Morgan offers us a beautifully nuanced happy-sad-ironical lyric that attests to the impossibility on holding on to a perfect moment:

"...but when you returned to the spot
it was not the same: it was yourself
in whom that rich and tragic place
called up the need to back away and stare
on emptiness, dusky, elusive,
and somehow hostile to the whole you sought,
a whole which continued to vanish
as you crept up lasso in hand."

            Got it. Been there (I think). Next time leave the lasso home. The poem maintains this richly enjoyable tone, while leading us back to that disappearing white-tailed deer.

            Donna Hilbert's poem "Teaching the Fish to Let Go," begins with a depiction of a fisherman casting flies -- an evocation of another of nature's lasting balms -- but soon dives into the depths.

            "Susan calls," the poem tells us, "we talk/ about death." We learn of a hospital stay that ends with the diagnosis: "you didn't swallow enough."
          Then we go back to the fisherman and are treated to an apt and wholly unexpected  hook-up between these two very different themes. As the wry title indicates, it's about letting go.

           

            In Michael Minassian's memory poem, "​FINGER PAINT AND BARE FEET," family gatherings in which all the kids are put to bed in one room are evoked by these lovely, homely images:

"sleep and dreams
torn off like windows
of gauze and drifting clouds—
washed away in the rain"

            And as Tom Montag notes in his poem "The Poet" we're...

"Often at the edge

of something
you can't quite touch."

Like so many of Tom's poems, this one goes right to that edge.

            Even if you can't hold on to the perfect moment, or control it with a "touch," there is consolation in knowing that nature's sublime offerings do keep coming. Penelope Moffat summons one beautifully in "It’s Only Dawn":

"Soon the sun will ride
high overhead,
soon the air will blue,
mirroring the lake below,
soon heat will rise without
a hint of smoke."

            Kate Sontag writes "Summer Song" in the form known as "pantoum" -- whose rules for patterning and repetition I can't begin to describe -- leading to praise-song stanzas like this:
"I want everyone I love to live forever and feast
Singing Lobsters, crabs, mussels, chanterelles  
Old Sadie dog swims in saltwater but refuses to eat
David bakes a golden loaf of cattail pollen bread"

            Just as the title promises, the poem truly is a song, sounding to me like a "round" to be sung outdoors beneath a setting sun,

or perhaps for that giant campfire at the end of the world.

            Or, if melancholy lingers still, then take the advice of the fictional comedian invented by Robert Wexelblatt's poem "The Comedian":

"Imagine, he said, a horseradish layer cake.
It took some time to conjure that up, then
a little more to get the point, nearly.
We guessed he meant you can make something
sweet out of what’s bitter, or that looks sweet,
or that the best jokes tend to bite back."

            That great last line contains a whole theory of humor.

            Finally, one of my own favorite sources of solace for the inevitable passing of summer: the late-season lovesong of the cricket. Marilyn Taylor's "Crickets: a Late Chorale"

is a rhetorical whole in five metered stanzas. The poem offers elegantly descriptive stanzas on the cricket's annual performance, followed by analysis of our response:

 "Repetitive cacophony
becomes the leitmotif—
they know their time to reproduce
is growing brief.

           

And we who listen will do one
of several likely things:
deny the deviousness of time,
or fold our wings"

            Don't fold your wings this month, folks, until you've read these and the many other fine poems in the October 2018 issue. http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html