The Garden of Verse: The Gifts of September

 

            The gifts of September's Verse-Virtual, the online journal that publishes scores of new poems every month, keep calling, showing me new wonders each time I unwrap them. Here are a few of the poems I keep going back to.

            Betsy Mars's beautifully phrased praise-poem to canine virtues, "What Is Essential," kept me re-reading to appreciate fully these essentials:

"you know

language is the source of misunderstandings",

            Instead, as the poem details the essentials of the dog's understanding:

"You understand the necessity

of keeping the baobabs at bay

and raking out the volcanos –

even the ones that might be extinct.

You dig out roots in the yard

and rake the carpet into submission."

            The poem goes on from here to detail the sublimely wordless understanding between person and dog. How can we fail to appreciate a pet that holds trees at bay and keeps carpets from pulling a fast one?

 

I was drawn into Sean Kelbley's poem "Explanation" right from the beginning when the speaker's "Oma" explains where her home was.

"Batschka,

Oma said, and ran her palms across her face

as if to smooth a map. At the center of the map,

her eyes burned like specific villages."

            Those two similes, one for the old woman's gesture --"as if to smooth a map" -- and the second, for her eyes -- "burned like specific villages" -- tell us that the road to an 'explanation' is not going to be all sweetness and light. 

 

September includes two beautifully haunting poems by Jeff Burt. While "Snowflakes" finds reasons for 'angels' everywhere, the poem titled "Flash" intrigues and moves us with explanations for a mysterious light phenomenon:

"Once I thought it was the acrylic panel on my luggage

reflecting the nose light of an airliner about to crash.

Once I thought it was a beacon calling me

to read Hafiz on indulging joy

when knowing God surprises us

by awkward revelations when we least expect them."

            The poem convinces me that 'revelations'  are likely to be awkward. I'll stop complaining about the noise in the street now. Maybe it's trying to tell me something.

 

So many of the wonder creatures in September's poems are dogs; a few are angels. The subjects of Irving Feldman's poem “Of, course we would wish“ are compared to angels at one point, but they're really not. They are, as the poet's note tells us," artist George Segal’s plaster casts" viewed at an exhibition. We'd like these plaster casts to appear e 'angelic,' the poem knowingly explains, tells us, but in fact "it's the dead themselves they resemble,..."

            This terrible resemblance is so beautifully expressed that we can't pull ourselves away:

"It hurts to see them so decent and poor.

And it does no good to scold them for it,

to shout at these newly impoverished relations

crowding timidly in the narrow hallway,

or recall to them the old extravagance,

or tempt them back with favorite morsels

and the glowing tales that made the hearth warmer."

            This poem doesn't simply describe a work of art. It gets inside it (and us too.).

 

 

Marjorie Moorhead's  "Catching My Eye" begins with these carefully laid out lines, like clues to a mystery:

"Imagine a church pew lady’s glove.

White lacy upturned palm,

cupping bees and butterflies,

swaying gently on long stem,

leaves like feathers of a green bird.

Many tiny blossoms together

in a circle-burst of celebration

decorating hot July fields,..."

             At this point I'm betting "Queen Anne's Lace." That turns out to be just one of the contenders in this poem's name game. But all the names and the all imagery the poem offers to make the inward eyes envision this summer marvel are equally winners:

            Call it summer time, the poem tells us:

"Heat waving

off pavement. Fields buzzing alive."

            I do call it summer time. And this poem nails it.

 

William Greenway's two intensely realized personal history poems got inside me as well. "Last Rites: Shark Week" alludes with a dark irony to an invitation to the rite of Communion. Of course the poem's darkly ironic invitation , as revealed in the poem's richly language, is offered by a shark:

"[I] never dreamed

back then how quickly things unseen

could rise from down below,

and how you could hear

not get out, now, but

Happy are those who are called

to his supper."

            It's a poem well worth rereading in its entirety. Something of the same tone is captured by a second poem, "Spooky Nook Road," that looks forward to the "scabrous scarecrows" and "headless horsemen" of that celebrated autumn holiday.

            I don't celebrate the end of summer. I miss it. But September 2020 shows us how much we have to look forward to.

            You can find all these poems here: 

Verse-Virtual September 2020 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poems of Love, Sorrow, Remembrance and Earth's Enduring Beauty in September's Verse-Virtual

The September 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual, the online journal with a full bloom of new poems every month, takes us many places.  

Alan Walowitz, the issue's guest editor, recalls being “short-armed" by the local cop known as “Old Trench Coat” and ethnically profiled into a police line-up. The blues were looking for a guy who was "out jacking radios on Jewel" and who, we learn, looks Jewish. It's fall, the poem tells us, and

the light drops early
the way it does
this time of year in Queens

As it does throughout the Northeast, even in New England's Berkshire hills, where I'm writing this. But the light -- strong, indifferent, ascending, declining -- is always part of the picture, and I'm happy the poem, "Hardboiled," shows it to us here 

Verse-Virtual editor Jim Lewis recommends Steve Klepetar’s poem “Forgiving Hands,” a dreamy folk tale or parable, with a hint of magic realism. After drinking too much wine to take an older person to the hospital, the poem's "we" awake guiltily and discover that the older person up and cooking pasta. "every one of us was still alive," the poem tells us, then adds, perhaps chillingly, "or so we thought..." Read the rest in September 2020.

Jim Lewis also recommends Tamara Madison’s "The Nicest Man," a poem about a father’s surprising late-in-life discovery of a PBS role model. 

You can also find Lewis's own parable of our own pandemic times, "tell me why, tell me where," a tightly told tale of mask-wearing in a correctional setting. 

And three poems about an initial visit to Israel by Donna Hilbert, who says, “I miss the adventure of being in a country for the first time.” Altogether, the September issue features original work by 57 poets, a whale of a poetic haul. 

Finally, as you will not be surprised to learn, the issue includes three of my poems. 

I'll post below my own nostalgic ode to the swiftly passing season, "The Truth About 'Summer,'" a time of year I love and hope will linger in its best mellow, late-season fashion. I wrote this poem while listening to the instrumental song titled "Summer," written by Peter Kater.  

The Truth About 'Summer'*

Your gentle flutes, 
oh, too gentle for what we know of you
here on earth beneath your scorching eye 
How the wind blows! the rain lashes! 
We beg for your peace, implore the god of Weather,
that unending scroll of profane Revelations,
for the mercy of your milder face  
not only for mariners naked in the vulnerability 
of all who cannot walk on water,
 
but those who live by sewing life 
into the earth, and pray for rain, 
     but not too much,
who feed grass to beasts, dread bugs, pick infested leaves
off tomato plants,
Sing "Glory in the Morning" to Morning Glories 
Escape the heat in river sloughs,
Hunger for shorelines, 
for shallows lacking all creatures 
    that sting or bite,
Secure their harvests, their orchards, their vines, 
their trees with paper spells
     purchased from witch doctors 
 
Inspect their animals for signs of plague 
Protect their children from signs of plague 
Lift their prayers to the skies, 
stuff raspberries into the freezer 
when the growing is good
and fill all the world's vases, old wine bottles, occasional canteens, 
     and other vessels 
with the severed stems of beautiful things 
that cannot in the nature of things — 
     in the Nature of anything —
endure 
 
But listen! Listen to this fluted voice
of the praise singer,
Think of red fruit, and the dried and frozen sustenance of 
     winters, all those other days, 
those other seasons, 
when the sweetest song — song of fluted praise... 
floats immaculately away
 
*After Peter Kater's "Summer," in a version heard on Spotify  
08.05.20
                        

 

The Garden of Verse: Finding the Right Words in August's Verse-Virtual

So many excellent poems in the August 2020 issue of  Verse-Virtual -- Here are a few of my favorites.

Robert Wexelblatt's poem "On the Road Near Chiangling the Poet Chen Hsi-wei
Encounters a Young Musician, Summer, 597" follows his Hsi-wei Tales, a newly published collection of stories about the vagabond peasant-poet who wanders through China during the Sui period. Its opening stanza is a stylish evocation of that point in the summer when we've all had a bit too much of it:

"Prickly lettuce and withered jasmine

lie flat, like bing cakes baking on the dirt.

Paving tiles burn right through straw sandals."

            The young musician of the poem's title then surprises the poet by expressing love for one of his early poems. The final lines contain an image that beautifully sums up the meaning, and the feeling, of the encounter:

"Taking up her liuqin, she begins to sing

and it’s like running water by a dusty road.

I feel my forgotten poem surfacing from

Lake Weishan itself transformed, summoned

by the sudden beauty of this butterfly."

David Graham finds the right words as well in "News That Stays News," a poem about reading great poems: "Now nearing midnight, wind raises

its wordless ruckus all over town—

that great nothing that is something—"

            That's what wind is, isn't it, "a wordless ruckus"? And it's also, perhaps like so many of the world's ordinary gifts, a "great nothing that is something."

            Something about winter, and the winter of life, permeates a second poem, "A Winter Drive With Dad," concerning a day when an older relative transcends the routine plague of remembering names:

"these taunting glimpses,

 these lucid landmarks lost in ice fog."

 

            It's the language in Kate Sontag's "Covid Notes On A Silver Standard Poodle" that turns a quotidian dog walk into a regal procession. There's "nothing standard," the poem observes, about the pet's 

"legendary lavender tint revealed through wanton

brown cover-girl curls poofed as a topiary lamb,

sprouting surreal head to tail. Oh puppy, we stare

in disbelief at such Brothers Grimm style, pointed

snout gleaming in profile wolfish as Little Red

Riding Hood’s grandma, velvety eight-month-old

face shaved to show off an authentic silver lining,

topknot and ears bouffant as a woodsman’s wooly

cap, laps flying mid-air, equally animal and human..."

            The parade of language goes on from there, convincing me that even non-pet owners would worship this "anthropomorphic princess." 

            Kate's poem Corona Triolets -- a triolet, one discovers (who knew?), is a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout -- offers another splendid dish of word music, from its opening line, "This new form of distancing gives me pause/

with every breath." right to the end. It's the poem's repetition of the rhyming phrases, I think, that makes me think of music. And that first sentence evokes the pace of moving in Corona time: "distancing --pause -- breath."  

 

Felicia Chernesky's "Castles" is a seasonal poem that seems to have all the right words working together. You can practically hear the ocean approach in two sweet lines, playing with both consonants and vowels:

"Each surge of surf that sweeps

your summer castles clean away"...

And see the insubstantiality of those sandy constructions in the lines that follow:  

"builds such dreams          

on briny foam and tiny grains"

How can we not love the music of "briny foam and tiny grains"?

I could go on quoting the word music, but I don't want to spoil the ending.

 

            I'm a sucker for poems with a late 60s flavor, and Sharon Waller Knutson's two concise narrative poems deliver the goods. The nut of the story in "Santa Monica Dec. 3, 1969" is a  similarity in appearance shared by the narrator and one of the defendants in the notorious murder case that unfolded on that date. But appearances mislead, the poem tells us:

"After the press conference, her hands

are cuffed behind her back, while mine grip

the steering wheel and type the story."

            Appearances mislead as well in "Hollywood 67" when a drab "cleaning lady" turns out to be a famous comedian. 

 

            Another striking reminiscence poem, Steve Klepetar's "Privilege" offers an unbeatable metaphor: "Privilege is a white bird streaking the sky." We absolutely know why that bird is "white," regardless of whether many of us find ourselves still 'streaking' or not. In the lines that follow the poem efficiently evokes a youthful moment of ordinary pleasures, cum philosophical sophistication: 

            "We are young and white and none of this is real."

            Those were the days, my friends.

           

So many strong poems appear in the August 2020 issue. The more I look into its virtual pages, the more I find.

Find these poems and many others at 

 http://verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html 

 

 

 

The Garden of Memory: Memory Pictures of Beirut

My daughter Sonya lived and worked in Lebanon for 15 years. Now she's raising money to help that country recover from a disaster that killed many and left thousands homeless. If you can't go to her meeting, there's a place here to leave a donation. Please help if you can.

 https://www.facebook.com/events/1286644688333624/

 

 

 

Pictures of Beirut

 

In my earliest photos of Lebanon, taken on film, not the tiny ‘card’ I coax out of my camera these days with aging fingers,

the sky is so blue the technician in the shop that developed them questioned me on my use of a blue filter. No, the only blue filter was the sky of that dry

and sunny climate in a country, where the French poet called his home in the valley of the Bekaa region the most beautiful place in the world.

That sky was October. We never visited in the thicker skies of summer. 

We stayed, that first time, in the English hotel, ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast, grabbed fries and shwarma from fast-food restaurants, encouraged coffee houses to try making ‘iced coffee’ – ‘it’s big back in Boston,’ we assured the shopkeepers.

 

We dined on rooftops long after dark, on ‘room temperature’ evenings,

perspired in the ‘interior’ hills of Balbec among monuments the Romans made bigger there than anywhere else outside their own land,

as explained by a Lebanese guide who knew eleven tongues, including Russian,

and left exposed to the casual inspections of early 21st century wanderers such as ourselves.

 

And, on at least one occasion, talked politics in the streets of the Christian neighborhood.

“Tell Bush,” a man told me, “to make the Syrians leave.”

The Lebanese knew the names of American Senators better than we did. They knew who, at least in that decade, held the cards.

 

One tough neighborhood, I wrote afterward,

After Syria pulled their troops from Beiruti checkpoints --

and before that tragic land suffered its own implosion --

before the Israelis, once again, bombed Beirut and were driven back to their own borders by Hezbollah.

Later in Boston, while being treated for prostate, my doctor’s resident, a Lebanese, told us Israel’s bombs had turned the stones where Christ walked into dust .

 

There were no beggars in Beirut. When a woman on a minibus, the country’s informal public transport, showed us her baby and opened her palm, our daughter, defender of her adopted country, dismissed her as a ‘gypsy.’

 

After the Arab Spring faded into the Syrian disaster, things changed. We gave a few Lebanese lira to sidewalk Madonnas, wearing black in the sunlight, holding children.

One day I yelled at a man who insisted he could polish my sneakers. On another Anne and I ran from the streets of Hamra, pursued with demonic persistence by a poor imp,orphan of her country’s devastation,

demanding more money than we had already given her.

Still, the enduring picture is a beautiful country, with a rare history, and a strong and varied people, savvy, with a clear sense of the ravages they had borne,  who knew more about the world than most of the world knew about itself.

Now bearing the new catastrophes of a political system that has never really worked, a century-long path of too many compromises with the greed, and the sectarian and doctrinal rigidity of a few,

And the warning signs blazoned in the towers of uncollected trash,too long ignored

Which other lands, including our own, appear likely to discover in the ruins of our own social explosions, exploited by the greed of a few, and the privileges of a favored caste,

The signs of our dissolution,

All about us,

Littering the roadside.

 

 

The Garden of the Seasons: The Daylilies Wear Us Out, But Beautifully

Every Day

there is one of you,

born anew 

Each as beautiful as the day before 

Everyday as the day wears out,

one less bloom to look forward too

Every day that passes is one less day for you

and for us too.

Good Morning, Morning Glories

We say it each good morning 

Greeting 'glory' in the morning 

It's glory in the morning to greet the Morning Glories 

Every day your stories are pretty much the same 

You're with us in the morning, and gone from us at noon

I like your working hours!, see you again real soon

Second Life Clematis

Second generation, you're smaller than the first. 

Just because you're second, doesn't mean you're worse 

The first guys, well they're big and bright, 

and took the princely share of all that's best, 

the water and the light 

But we don't look upon you

as something worse for wear 

We're delighted by your visit,

It's a miracle you're there!

Group Photo

So what's it like living so close together?

Don't you want your own nests, like birds of a feather?

I see yarrow tufted white, while blue balloons expand in upward flight 

Still other plants flower, some with black eyes,

mingling skyward, each one of the guys

No one's too little, no one's on top

Just a hunger for living, to go till they stop.

 Big Family

In the album of July, many flowers live their days

Often many lilies share their day, it's comfy in a kinship way

All these Hemerocallis blooms opened on a single day   

They swallowed sunshine, sniffed some air 

But just one day?

Some things don't seem fair!

Scarlet Women?

Or are they "dandies" dressed to show

what some dudes get up to 

some people never need to know?

I suppose I am deluded 

to see them in the style of us.

They're just being beautiful --

no need to make a fuss.

A Personal Point of View on "Arcadia" -- the perfect place -- in the August 2020 Verse-Virtual

 

"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?"

Keats once posed this rhetorical question, although in a poem that was actually, and famously, about autumn.

Well, here's one of them, up on the new August 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual.org. It's titled "Et in Arcadia Ego," and is actually about June, a month most of which makes it into the 'spring' category according to the astronomical calendar. (Meteorologists prefer to say summer begins on June 1.)

I wrote the poem looking at our perennial flower garden on a day in early June when the Iris were blooming and the blossoms on the lilac tree were still holding strong. The poem also names some of the other plants blooming within my viewspace on that day.

The title is the sort of phrase that people now call a "meme." Translated as "And I was in Arcadia." Or, "I too was in Arcadia," the phrase has been traced back to various origins. To famous paintings, in which the "I" stands for the figure of Death. To Virgil. To other other sources.

My understanding is that "Arcadia" means the most perfectly untouched natural paradise you can find on earth. One line of scholarship locates that place in the most remote rural part of Ancient Greece, where 'shepherds' -- another meme, standing for those who were naturally good and completely uncorrupted by civilization -- composed pastoral love songs in good clean unsophisticated fun.

This notion of "Arcadia" places it in the Greek peninsula -- called the Peloponnesus -- where Anne and I and our adult children visited a few years back. So, in one sense, I too have been in Arcadia.

My poem, of course, is simply about finding that perfectly natural place in your own backyard, or wherever your special places are. 

Here it is:

Et in Arcadia Ego

The characteristics of rustic charm:
Will an Adirondack chair do?
Temperature: near eighty
Companions: 
Summer Snowflake Viburnum, hands to the side, fingers stretched,
a don't-touch-me from the nervous bride. 
Flag iris, white also,  
and a couple blue, as if bidding for a role in the wedding.  
Sadly missing: the show-off yellow,
kidnapped, perhaps, by the steadily advancing shadow of 
Grandfather Oak.
Spreading Korean lilac, showing the Japanese maple and 
the two-toned fashion-plate Wiegelia
who's boss in this corner of things.  
Music? Piano melt.
Good government? Hmmm, I've heard the phrase
Sports? No. The multi-millionaires are squabbling. 
 
You can't have everything.
Enjoy the silence
while it lasts.
                        

I have two other poems in the August Verse-Virtual. You can find them here.

My Poems

To find all the poems and other content in this month's issue go here:

Table of Contents

Please take a look!

fer.. get ee  s... s s