The Garden of the Seasons: Finding the Light in the Snows of February

Still Falling 

You can almost see it falling, that nearly immaterial impersonation of matter 

Light sees it, catches it

Says 'I know a secret'

It's quiet

Its plan is to slip down, after dark, 

when no one can see it,

one can almost never hear it

one can feel it, if you remove your hat

turn your face up to the sky, the deep blue night

and taste the winter

the softer air

the ambient light 

the subtly melting crystals

on your tongue 

                              Sky Writing

 

The sky is yellow, lemonish

pink, somewhat insinuated by the lemon ice of snow-set tones

a softer blush

an inscrutable silence

that impinges on the the skeletal branches

like jewels in your hair 

Ravine 

Looking down from the path, the water slips beneath our feet, intent on its own progress, 

a dance of elements, throwing off radiance, a harvest of winter sunlight, incidental, as if a mere byproduct,

an accident of water, hurrying to itself 

Photographic Evidence

Old sheds in Iowa? Another winter day on the prairie?

The fence worn, swaying to the march of the seasons 

Branches catch the powder of the quiet fall, 

Another day of timeless snow: the element that teases the senses, erases the centuries, scrambles what we think we know 

Tinting 

Trees yellowing their hair

Where does the color come from? what time of day or night pastels the sky with the flat edge of some tool unavailable to human fingers

Tricks of the season

Threads of time, woven 

in a soft fall 

one of those hundreds of Eskimo names whose speech 

we have yet to learn 

The Garden of Verse Stirs Up the Garden of the Seasons: Three Poems on the Many Faces of March

The March 2021 issue of Verse-Virtual offers poems by 71 poets, an astonishing number and range of participants. In tune with the season, editor Jim Lewis chose an optional theme of "lions and lambs."

 I offered three poems written in March of last year, right before (and as) everything changed. While I didn’t quite enjamb the “lambs” in any of these, I did get “sheepish” in one of these poems. And in another I gave pride of place, in its conclusion, to "lions."

The poem "Sipping About" laments the absence of normal 'spring weather,' whatever that is. And also takes note of what was, last year, an almost snowless winter.  Here's the beginning:

Skipping About 

All winter freakishly quiet 
as if someone had put a bag
over its mouth 
and told it, sternly, 
to calm down, 

we have other things to think about...

Lions come in for a cameo at the end of this poem. 

          The poem "Stoppage" bears witness to that strangest of moments last year when the world seemed to stop. Here's the beginning. 

Stoppage

Sometime 
Thursday afternoon
 
They canceled the world
The trees began disappearing from 
my neighbor's yard, one by
incautious one,
forced to stop growing
by powers who knew better 
 
The cars on the street sheepishly parked in front 
of neighbors’ houses by those 
who have too many vehicles 
for their driveways 
strangely disappear 
and, 
       already, 
           I miss them 

To read the rest of these two poems, 

and the whole of the poem "March Winds"

go here Robert Knox  

To access the full range of poems available in 

the March 2021 issue, see Poems and Articles 

The Garden of the Seasons: The Winter King Is in the Skies

 

Slipping By Unnoticed

All the little roofs

All the quiet worlds 

beneath

the fading of the night

All the magic taking place 

overhead

Someone is drawing on 

the heavens

with the paintbox 

of the sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's Further

The clock of the seasons 

winds down 

cray-pas, watercolors, pastels, 

pencils with 

those liquid-like paints

We groundlings 

can manage a season 

without color

because the color is in the sky

 First Comes the Gold

Do not ask 'what color 

is the sky?'

It is the color 

it chooses to be

when the sun slices 

its rays so thin, 

the colors slide into view

Those who are more 

accustomed to seeing 

find a place as well 

on the dance cards 

of time

twilight's winter fashions

the unsung songs 

the dances of the animal 

masks, the brilliance 

of lost sunsets

escaping the prison house 

of transitory beasts

Charcoal Blue

Our city

somebody's city

city of mineral kings

abstractions made stone

The birds have fled

the lines are sharp

the sky is smoke

the music gray

The water swallows 

the light

breathes a long story 

in a hidden tongue

 Moving Parts

That someone, 

that invisible hand

who deals out of sight 

of earthlings

to keep things moving

whose sheep are 

the gray ships 

of evening

seamlessly, silently

going somewhere

when there is no "where"

we'll ever see

Terrified

Nothing stays put here

The ineffable is eff-ing

How dull is our light

How certain the dark hands

that wash their fingers 

in our humble water

and conduct their shadows 

across the highways 

we will never see

This Plant 

Has never blossomed

so much white or shown 

such ribs

It births its multitudes

in a nursery of snow

Party Lights

Whatever's going on 

below

a festival of light 

and color

dances, songs, or simply 

too much electronics

It's only a room, a cellar

upstairs the giants are 

singing

Do Not Believe

Everything you hear

Ah, those pale and flimsy 

cottony briefs

wave in a sea of blue

But fires burn on 

a distant continent

an ocean, maybe

with a self-consuming love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Garden of Verse embraces the Garden of the Seasons: Three Poems in February's Verse-Virtual

We want it lighter: A seasonal message for the mid-winter in a northern climate. I have three poems in the February issue of Verse-Virtual, the poetry journal, and community, I have contributed to regularly since the final month of 2015. All three reflect on seasonal themes belonging to the end of the year. The holidays are behind us, and lots of winter lies still ahead, with vaccination-rendezvouses likely on our minds. Nevertheless these three story-poems look back on the holiday season and the winter solstice.

The poem "Twilight Kingdom" recalls a long-ago period in my life when I explored early winter twilights on the site of a no longer worked farm, with spirits in the air. 

The poem "We Went to Pick the Greens There" remembers a group of long-ago friends making an unconventional Christmas celebration. no family, no children, no parents. 

And the poem "you want it lighter" describes a solstice day expedition to another city to pay a holiday visit our daughter 

I'll post that poem below:  

 

You Want It Lighter 

Solstice Day:

Just wait,

whole seconds more of light coming tomorrow. 

You can see it in the silver-blue water of the harbor

pale with the reminiscence of ice: change is in the air.

We inch our way around the sun,

the suave conjunction of planetary influences

apparent, momentarily,

from a bridge over the Schuylkill River,

until clouds reform

to swallow the moment.

We arrive in the city of Daughterly Love

to find the light charmed into strings of tiny stars,

skilled hands brightening short days with carrot soup,

homegrown basil, morning mimosas

and all those other gifts of practical affection. 

 

For the others see Verse-Virtual

The Garden of Verse: January Poems in Verse-Virtual Show Poets Taking Stock at the Start of a New Year

 

 

I'm still working my way through all the poems in the January 2021

issue of Verse-Virtual, but here are some of my favorites.

 

 
Jefferson Carter’s poems often get to the place where it hurts to laugh.

In “Segue” the speaker is exhausted at the prospect of remaining on the

dance floor for a segue into “Chain Gang,” which obliges dancers to raise

“an imaginary pick ax over your head

on each “Hoh!” & striking on each “Ah!”

The image is immediately followed, no commentary required, by:

“Love, for a shy girl, you don’t sweat

much, meaning I love how you don’t sweat

being judged.”  And then by a sadder, wiser foreshadowing of the night

to come, “knowing

I’ll get up between nightmares six

or seven times to pee.”

Carter’s three February poems use self-satire along with social and

political commentary to show us to ourselves.

 

 

We find a similar pursuit of self-knowledge in “your bird does not speak english,”

Jim Lewis’s smartly titled poem that carries a bittersweet message revealed in

its conclusion. The poem offers various pleasures along the way, as in this

wonderfully precise depiction of the pet’s behavior:

 “i hear the rising volume

of a cockatiel's complaint

at being ignored. the near

train-whistle panic that you

have simply walked out of the room

without her on your shoulder”

 

I found much to admire in Penny Harter’s “Night Thoughts,” which culminates in

this beautiful word-music evocation of listening to one’s own heartbeat:

“I honor the

bloodlines that have brought me here,

 

this faithful heart that lets me fall asleep

again, wake again, stretch to  greet the

morning, breathe deeply, and rise.”

 

I like everything about Laurie Bryo’s “The Snow Angel,” a thought-dream about

the father “a wild-eyed charmer,” who returns from the afterlife

“to tell me that the dead aren’t worrying about the living, that

 

each snowflake falling is a wish spoken before it hits the earth.”

 The dialogue that follows between the living dreamer and the

spectral presence is priceless: 
“Tell me

 you aren’t disappointed dad, show me how you know

it’s all ok.  He guffaws his coffee. I would sleep like the dead.

Instead, I have dervish-toddlers, toothless men.  Mostly I have you.”

           We all have questions, the poem tells us. And dreams, perhaps, are the only

answers – and non-answers. Be sure to read the rest.

 

Tricia Knoll’s three seasonal poems deliver that cold-warm-cold feeling of

a northern winter. A stark, severe time to be existing on earth, glowing with

barely seen wonders, as envisioned in “Pagan Epiphany in the Night Woods.”

The poem evokes a sorcerer searching for truth 

“in a rarified sky,

for the Dipper pouring love

to the shivering.”

And finding this miracle: “Three sets of footprints. 

Red fox, bobcat, and doe

hold up to plummeting cold.

With what faith they cross

the road to the woods.”

            These poems shiver with insight.  

 

Tom Montag’s three selections from his ongoing lyrical epic, "The Woman

in an Imaginary Painting" continue to offer us little wonders as large as life:

“The permanence of art

is the same as death..”

            The third poem in this group walks a little circle inside a dark

museum, then comes back to its own self-mage: “She would turn

 

from darkness, yet it

holds her here. This stillness

is the same as death.”

            I am wondering if these selections share something with Whitman’s

famous assertion in “Song of Myself”: “And to die is different from what any

one supposed, and luckier.”

 

Keep reading, everybody. There’s plenty more where these came from.

The January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets.

Go here to find your way into the poems

January 2021

 

 

 

 

The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual Offers Poems for the First Month of a New Year, A Time of New Hopes and Sketchy Weather

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for managing once again to put together a marvelous new edition of Verse-Virtual. January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets, including new poems by Tom Montag (from his "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting" series), Jefferson Carter, Tricia Knoll, Michael Minassian, David Graham, Marilyn Taylor, Sylvia Cavanaugh, Steve Klepetar, Sharon Waller Knutson, Alan Walowitz and so many others.

The issue also includes my own poem "Calendar Days," a salute to the new year that takes a bittersweet look at the climatic possibilities of the upcoming months, particularly in atmospherically unpredictable New England.

Here’s my wintry forecast for the next three months:

Calendar Days

You cannot count on when the snows

will hide the ground and draw the flocks

January shifts its ground, confusing eager body clocks

Some days of rain refuse to freeze

Others tempt with softer breeze

February, much the same, is also March

Frost holds the ground, but seldom white

Some days are mild, the roots to stir

And thoughts of spring begin to whir

Then freezing spells turn hopes to spite

And then the month whose name is change

All months now are seeming March,

With chilly fingers in the wind

We stalk the sunny, sometime hours

Looking for foreshadowed flowers

To read the rest of the poem, my other two poems, and work by all poets in the January 2021 issue see

January 2021

The Garden of Fiction: Good Reads From 2020, the Otherworldly "Piranesi" and a Recollected Journey with Borges in Scotland

To start the new year, I'm recommending two books I enjoyed in the final days of the last one. The first,  "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke is simply the best fiction I've read since -- I can't remember. You may recognize her name if you read her earlier book, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell." 

I am partial to a little 'speculative fiction' along with my literary fiction, but Clarke's imaginative reach extends beyond any notion of genre. Her novel's nameless narrator -- "I believe I am between thirty and thirty-five years," he/she says -- is in the dark about everything. Piranesi's words betray him as the victim of abuse who thinks his master is the friend. 

His situation exemplifies the skeptical philosophical trope that asks, “How do we know what we think we know?” If we were born alone, a stranger in a strange land, how would we know whether anything is ‘true’? or, real? The novel’s narrator is in this predicament.

And then this book treats us to the always rich hypothetical, unprovable  (one way or another) but possible existence of other worlds. A speculative proposition, but hard, I would say impossible, to disprove by logic and reason alone.

Clarke's story begins with a human being alive in what to us is clearly an ‘other world,’ To the reader – but not to him – his world possesses a lot of resemblance to ours. And, oddly, he does not question this remarkable lack of knowledge about his own origins. Finally, his world include visits by another human, whom he simply calls ‘the other.’ The other's brief, though regularly scheduled visits are accepted by Piranesi as a cardinal fact, along with the tides, the weather, the seagulls, and the seemingly endless rooms of his otherwise solitary world filled with statues depicting human and animal forms.

            From this beginning, the novel opens its fan of complexities, including, of course, the existence and agencies of our ‘real’ world. Very little is predictable in this place. Every revelation is a stunner, helping to build a complex web of illusion over the haunting beauty of his world's material reality. 

            To me, Clarke's new book is speculative fiction at its best.

 

          The second book, "Borges and Me" by Jay Parini, is a less reliable pleasure. Here I think you could skim (or even skip) the first 50 pages. The memoir is the story of a young guy in the Vietnam era seeking to evade the draft, while writing an academic thesis and becoming a poet -- familiar ground, especially for my generation. 

But when the author gets himself to Scotland the book gains some traction, and when Argentine storyteller, poet and master of all literature Jorge Luis Borges turns up in Scotland -- we're being told this unlikely visit actually happened -- the book takes off. Borges who is of course blind is both an oracle and a pain in the ass... 

The author may have kept some good notes from that time, but even if he did I suspect he is "re-inventing" the shape of actual conversations prompted by the sites of their shared journey through the Scottish Highlands. I cannot imagine a memoir of events taking place a half century ago being written without relying on the technique of literary recreation. The encounters between the blind master for whom "the world is a library" and -- to take one example, the Loch Ness monster is Grendel, the embodiment of savagery in the Anglo-Saxon horror story "Beowulf" -- and the unself-confident American draft dodger grow in depth. They become two wanderers thrown together in unknown country, bumping against the limitations of their own visions. 

By the end, the reader finds himself himself rooting for everyone, even though the issue of those ominous letters from the local draft bureau back home is left unresolved. 

Still I liked his story, and identified with much of it. 

I can't say that I -- or anyone has ever in actuality experienced Piranesi's challenges. But anyone who dreams can imagine them.