The Garden of Verse: Desert Rain, the Man in the Moon, and Dali's Melting Clocks in November's Verse-Virtual

         I tend to see everything through the lens of the seasons. Every season has not only its weather, but its mood and its landscape.

           The onset of winter in the desert is viewed through the memory of  the "long, dry summer" in "A Day’s Rain" by David Chorlton, a poem that gives us both a vivid depiction of both landscape and mood.

"There go
the devils who fanned
the sun’s flames at noon. It’s the time
of starlings and Purple sage. And raindrops
hang in the melancholy air..."

            Winters have their discontents. Barbara Crooker's  POEM WITH AN EMBEDDED LINE BY SUSAN COHEN

alludes to these (without naming them) in a reference to the "terrible politicians" and "their terrible politics," and then makes the political personal.

"At my kitchen table, all will be fed.  I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments:  the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us."

            Bees and trees and beautiful twilights: that's a recipe for survival.

            The seasons of a human life are with us as well, as the striking first line of Frederick Feirstein's poem "​Aging" reminds us: "After a while we learn to mourn ourselves."

            The poem then attunes our sensibility to the mood of the seasons and of those we care for in this lovely piece of word painting:

"Downstairs our precious block was being lit
For Christmas, strings of lights on all the trees,
Snow falling bit by bit by bit.
You kneeled at the window, childlike on your knees."

            We know the scene is indeed 'precious,' because we remember that first line.

            Linda M. Fischer's poem "The Persistence of Memory" offers us a depiction of the melting landscape "from the painting by Dali."

            Once more I'm startled by a first line, "This is no landscape for humans" with its echo from Yeats ("no country for old men"). And the word-painting imagery that follows:

"the foreground ocherous or black,
a cheerless sky, the hanging tree—
and time beginning its slow descent,
dragging me, unwilling, into that airless
vortex.  I feel myself shrinking..."

            A strong poem to share the page (and a title) with Dali's unforgettable image.

           

            For a change of mood, Jim Lewis offers a highly literate parody of the physical examination protocol in "the man in the moon gets an ultrasound," a poem that leaves me with a moon-faced smile. We turn from landscape to moonscape in lines like these:

"history of present illness:
round-faced male, brought in by cloudless skies
presenting complaint—persistent headache
admits to receiving multiple blows to the face
remote onset, exact date unknown,
most recent occurrence earlier tonight
before he walked up the eastern stellar stairway.."

            The entire poem is a a witty appropriation of the oh-so-professional and de-humanized jargon of an encounter we have all experienced: up close and impersonal.

            On the subject of lightening the mood, both personally and politically, Steve Klepetar's "I Reach a Plea Deal with Robert Mueller" explores the landscape of satirical self-revelation. The poem is a happy confessional of sinful self-indulgences combined with allusions to our ongoing national drama:

"I plead guilty for snitching peanuts in the middle of the day.
I plead guilty for watching Game of Thrones.
When I admit reading all the books, Mueller sighs
and shakes his head. What depravity he has seen in his long career!
I plead guilty for posting my poetry publications on Facebook
and counting up the likes the way a miser would let gold coins
spill across his hands."

            I love the image of Mueller sighing and shaking his head (that hit long-form series coming to a screening service near you). And as for the Facebook confession, I am quite sure members of this jury would vote to acquit. A splendid comic poem.

            It's holiday season, too, which inevitably brings thoughts of family. "The Greatest Generation," the just-right title of this poem by Alan Walowitz, belongs (in my mind at least) to the genre I call 'what our fathers would and would not talk about.' The opening lines --

"My father didn’t need to go anywhere
since he’d done the continent all-expenses-paid— 
they even gave him grenade and gun."

            -- reminded me of my father's expressed determination never to travel overseas: He'd already been there. The men who 'went to the war' paid a price, even if they came back in one piece. This poem, based on an attempt to please a father by sparking a memory, tells a story of

about the price one of that 'greatest generation' paid.

           

             And, at the end, November's issue is graced by Marilyn Taylor  "At the End." Too deep for many words here , the poem evokes the funerary rituals of another age in concrete images --

"and a twist of her gray hair
been dipped in oil
and set alight, releasing the essence

of her life’s elixir, pricking
the nostrils of her children
and her children’s children"...

-- and then offers a final devastating image of one of our rituals.  

            In completely objective perspective, tone and voice, the poem speaks to us of deeply personal matters. We can't evade its impact.

            Read these poems and the many other fine offerings in November's Verse-Virtual at http://www.verse-virtual.com/alan-walowitz-2018-november.html