The Garden of Verse: The Great Egret Knows Who He is... The Poet Recalls How He Began

 

My photo of the Great Egret, who courteously posed for his picture

in an inlet off Boston Harbor, near Quincy's Wollaston Beach. The poem

responding to the photo appeared in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.org.

Here it is:

Great Egret

The name is no exaggeration 
A creature made of formal beauty
A head shaped like a woodcutter's wedge
            its plane horizontal, no top to its bottom 
The angle down the back more shapely
            than the angle down the front 
Its stance an unearthly walk upon the water,
its twin, a staged imitation –
            almost perfect, 
but upon inspection
possibly a little better 
Its color either white, all colors merged into one,
     or a single offering of light on water, 
the color of shimmer
 
Built for the job, or something grander
Shining like an idea in the eye of god

The June issue also includes a poem about some of my earliest

childhood 

memories. We lived with my grandmother (my mother's 

mother) in Flushing, Queens, NYC. The poem reports the 

little disturbances of childhood just as I recall them. 

Growing Pains

I am growing
Ever so small at the beginning of things,
yet I am growing
Kissena Park, Flushing, Queens, walking home 
     with Dad
who takes me, after work, to the playground
Freed of my daylong presence, Mom takes a pass 
After play time, the swings, perhaps monkey bars, 
I am enjoying the freedom of the warm evening 
     on the walk home 
when I slip, attempting some show-off gesture
a touch beyond my childish confidence
and fall, cutting my knee on something sharper 
     than mere earth,
my first wounding, by something harder 
     than mere flesh, 
though at so long a remove I will never recall 
     what dare I was taking, 
what test of my agility 
that resulted in a stumble.
“I told you not to do that!” Dad scolds
“Glass,” he reports to Mom. “I told him to watch out 
     for broken glass on the ground.”
“Not too bad,” she replies, seemingly unworried,
a pattern that repeats in my future stumbles,
which grow in severity as years advance
Glass, I think later: a reason for bleeding 
Everybody needs a reason for bleeding 
 
I do not feel the wound, at least not in memory,
but the disappointment
of failing to complete that little playful leap,
that stretching of my childish wings
 
2.
We live in Grandma’s house, the old brownstone
on a numbered street 
where the buses go by at night, every night 
in the summer dark, and I am exiled 
     from the company of humans
to dwell among the shadows 
     of the darkened bedroom 
above the night-clad street.
I hear the muttered exhalations, 
the squeeze of brakes, opening of doors
Upstairs in the big old house we left behind, 
     so memory insists, 
when I was only three –
Is this arrow from the past my first memory?
The wound in the park – 
Or, from that same-shadowed epoch, a cry 
     for my mother 
in fear of the shadows from the street playing
     on the wall opposite my child’s-bed –
“There are men in my room!” I insist, “Big men!”
“No one’s in your room,” Mom concludes, 
     using my full first name 
in token of her authority, 
after a skeptical examination 
     of the flicker-show.
“It’s only shadows.”
 
Shadows and cutting glass. Does she leave the door 
     ajar?
Downstairs the adults question, and her replies 
     betray an air of qualification  
replacing the reassurance offered 
to the bed-bound child. 
 
Early indications, I take it, that I am on my own.
The big people are at hand. They care for me,
but cannot be relied on for everything. 
No Odysseus, but I bear the scar. 

The Garden of the Seasons: The Garden Springs to Life in May

 

The Clematis vine climbs up our front porch. It blooms from around the third week of May through the month of June. We live Quincy, a small city that borders Boston, Mass.

Here's a poem inspired by our Clematis plant:

ClematisLooking Down at Us*

 

Like fallen stars

but oversized

great violet wheels descending on tame, unwary

    villages below

those little folk of summer

 

Wagging fat limbs, like octopi

bred on a diet of purple sun

Creatures from a universe of stronger light

     and the appetite of clouds

 

their slow motion tumble

the stopwatch of spring

 

*It was published by Turtle Island quarterly, back in February.

Blue Forget-Me-Not blooms under a Weeping Cherry tree. The white-blooming groundcover is Sweet Woodruff.

 

 

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award, and hHe was named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award. A book of linked short stories, titled "House Stories," has been accepted for publication by Adelaide Press.

Bleeding Heart blooms in April.

 

The tree-form of Peony, also known as the Chinese Peony, blooms early in May. Unlike the more common Peony, the stems are wood and do not wilt or die back in winter. And its blossoms are large.

I wrote this back in 2013:

With blossoms big as your hand, the “tree peony” was voted the “unofficial national flower” of China following a nationwide vote in the nineties. In Chinese culture, red is the color of good luck.

            The tree peony grows taller and has more of a classic branching-out tree shape than the more common peony shrub. It has a woody trunk and branches like a tree, and you don’t trim the woody parts back

            And it seems to bloom earlier. I was surprised the first time it bloomed early in May. Last year it bloomed in April. This year, a cooler, slower spring, the flowers first showed on May 11.

            It’s hard not to stare at the blossoms if you’re nearby. They’re the neon signs in the Times Square of springtime’s Nature City.  

Eight years later, I'm still amazed by the blossoms every year.

The flowers pictured, from above, are an Icelandic Poppy (orange); a Korean lilac, very pale flowers, looking white in this photo; roses blooming over a Rhododendron; and Siberian Iris, that begin opening in late May.

Garden of the Seasons: Every Spring the World Begins Again

 

An afternoon in the first day of May

Shapes and color tones beginning to define themselves

In the third week of April, the weeping cherry tree blossoms. Most of the garden in the backyard of our house in a small Massachusetts city is still waking up, though the daffodils are in bloom.

A bird or two, always a purple finch, arrives at exactly this moment to drink the nectar, a tiny drop or two, from the blossoms. To do this the bird pulls the blossom off the branch with its beak and gives it a quick toss into the air. Sometimes this causes the blossoms to fall like snow and gather beneath the tree. Fearing to see the tree denuded while still in blossom, I run outdoors and scare them away. Within a few minutes they're back.  

Violets 

are blue,

and purple,

and sometimes white with fluted blue centers.

I find the combination exquisite.

These wild violets are among those I transplanted from our back garden where they emerge free for the taking every spring. Up before any of the large plants can block the sun or hog the ground, the plants flourish here along a low brick edging and in the sidewalk strip in front of our house where the only early season competition is the daffodils. 

The low groundcover with blue flowers is Vinca Minor. It grows all over our gardens. We transplanted it from our previous home, and from some wooded sites in Berkshire County. The flowers are darker, more purple than they appear in this photo. Vinca spreads quickly, and found its way over to this sideyard below the rhododendrons (the smaller one is in flower), a few years back. It's perfectly at home there now. 

Another late April moment from the back garden. The tall plant, not yet in flower here, is a a tree-form peony, from China. Its stems are woody and remain firm through the winters like tree trunks. Its flowers are bright red, and large. They bloom in mid-May (I'll post them next time). Violets and daffodils are the only blooms visible here in spring's first month, but the seasonal contours are forming on the ground.  

The Garden of Verse: These Poems Are Blooming in May

Outdoor days are back. Studies show that people feel better if they spend just twenty minutes a day outdoors. I know I feel good after spending time with plants.

“Recipe for a Curbside Strip” is an account of my efforts to keep a flower garden growing in a city by replanting the ground in front of our house after the city rebuilt our street and sidewalk. 

Here's an excerpt:

Recipe for a Curbside Strip

 

Begin again in Thanksgiving cold,

planting scores of daffodil starters,

those fat spuds of sunny potential,

in the city's gift of much-pebbled soil

Wait five months for the bloom,

add wild violets transferred by hand from

the fertile, weed-addicting earth of the perennial patches

out back,

plus other nameless wildthings, weeds

and a prominent invasive left to its own greedy device

Chip in some new Covid-priced annuals

(everything pretty much double this year)

Then out back again to hunt up more ground-hugging

violets to fill 

a few shyly embarrassed bare spots

like children with too much flesh

for last year's clothing

...

 The next two poems are responses to Covid Time.

An excerpt from:

Of Course the Poet Wears a Mask

 

Everybody wears a mask

the fender polisher wears a mask

the metallurgist

the surgeon in his lair

     to guard against the spatter

The actor with his shrewd demeanor

to take us into his confidence...

 

Who am I today?

the player asks

the politician with his broken staff

the weeping child

the disappointed lover

the confident despoiler

the rigger

the triggerman

...

 

And, finally from:

Accidental Collaborators

 

She turned to me, a look of distant rainbows

in her eyes

Kiss me, I said, you fool

...

 

To read the poems in their entirety, go to

 http://verse-virtual.org/2021/May/knox-robert-2021-may.html

Spring Offerings from the Poets of Verse-Virtual: The Birds Are Watching Us and Many Other Exceptional Visions

It's April, and some of are all about the great -- or even decently good -- outdoors. Flowers, greening lawns, birdsong at dawn (so they tell me) and in the last hour of the lengthening day. We even saw a deer in our city neighborhood last week. It took a good long look at us, and disappeared; undoubtedly the right decision. 

Poets, it turns out, are bird-watchers. Here's a piece with a different point of view on the observing the activity at the feeder. 

Marjorie Moorhead’s inventive and satisfying poem “At the Feeder” is (almost) all about the birds. The poem describes the gang at the feeder:

“Crescent-shaped Blue Back White-bellied

Long Beak, and Yellowneck Stripe-feathered

join me at the eating spot. Large Bark-peck-pecker

comes too, then flies his blackwhite feathers red-head

back to trunk..”

            But, if we’re paying attention (and I had to go back to the first lines) we notice something different about the perspective. The tip-off comes right at the start: “she has her black eyes out

again.” 

             She? With those long black eyes?... I think the birds are on to us.  

   

On a much different subject, Marilyn Taylor’s sonnet “Posthumous Instructions” is simply (and literally) awe-inspiring. The title clearly announces the poem’s theme To choose one stanza:

“Let me liberate the elements

that fused in me the morning I was formed

and offer them again, as evidence

that my short visit left this place unharmed.”

…But we need to read them all

We're back to birds In Mark Alan di Martino’s “To a Warbler,” but here the speaker has discovered the need to explain the unseasonably early appearance of a (once) migratory bird to his daughter. In its  inventive word music, the poem sings like, perhaps, the bird: 

“Math-eaten, climate-singed, the change

came quick. In the still small span of a few lifted lifelines—

dour warnings bedamned—our tempest tossed, its leafless trust

trussed to the wings of a hymnal, taxidermied, back-taxed

to the be-yonder.”

Our migratory birds are all canaries in the coal mine. Global warming is changing our world. 

 

I enjoyed all three excellent poems by David Graham. “Sea Turtle,” to choose one, is an unsentimental look at the lifestyle of an ancient life-form that persists by persisting, its challenges and responses rendered in aptly hard-bitten imagery:

“Your young will crawl toward the light

they think is moonlit sea—

pavement glittering with headlights.

A jeep will eat the eggs

ghost crabs cannot find. You'll butt

your nose raw on aquarium walls,

snap dangled fingers like snailshells.”

 

Alan Walowitz’s clever and eloquent poem “The nth degree,” thoughtfully provided an explanation of its title. While the poem’s first qualifying phrase – “in the meager math I learned” –captures my own background in this subject, the poem convinces me it knows what it's doing with this insight:

“I know from a close look

at those strange Celtic languages,

unless you have a vowel

it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference

between nth and nthng—“

and leaves me with a new appreciation for our own flexible, malleable alphabet: Let’s hear it for vowels!

 

And while we’re being philosophical, Robert Wexelblatt’s brilliant thought experiment “Six Mental Exercises” takes readers to faraway places that prove to be broadening, maybe even mind-refreshing, staycations. For example: “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet in ancient China.”

And “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet when and where you are living now…”

These are mind stretchers. As the poem suggests, in the first of these two, “the transfiguration of the smallest cloud [becomes]

more telling than a change of emperors…”

You can read these poems in their entirety, and fine works by many other poets in Verse-Virtual's April 2021 issue. Here's the link    Verse-Virtual

The Garden of Verse: These Poems Are Voting For April

I am delighted to have three poems in the April 2021 issue of Verse-Virtual: "Nature At Least Doesn't Stop," "It's As If The Ending Has Already Passed Go," and "Put Your Hands in the Soil" were all written a year ago, just as we were all exchanging Spring Time for Covid Time.

As I have said before, when it comes to Covid-19 versus spring, glorious spring, I am voting on April. Here is the first of my three poems of the season:

Nature At Least Doesn't Stop

 

Or else we might think that time itself will,

the blossoms roll back into the buds.

or hover breathlessly

like a wave refusing to break,

a dawn forever on the horizon

whispering its secrets

 

Whatever does the moon do but change?

Yet we love it

Old men die in places we will never see

and others are driven into the streets

where their great-grandfathers sold trinkets

in the dust

We, born to happier estates,

tiptoe through gardens of remembrances,

stopping at long trains of ancestry

spreading like boxcars on lines of enabling disasters

that cruise through whistle-stop lives

 

Those whose lives are on the line

beg us to put away the scissors

We limber up, stretch our legs

walk our miles forward into time,

into measureless years without increments of schooling,

feeling ever the pulse of close-of-day motions –

 

April has no need of such reassurances,

purple spirits cross the edges of social reminders

like money

like dead letters choosing its accidental targets

in the manner of gods,

dead ends for our feet just ahead,

but none for the narcissus, the purpling grape

the color of liquid

 

It is we who are in need of the lamps of evening

the madness of consumption

headlines, updates, inanities

 

We have the stars

Stars, we beg,

come down and live among us

Here's the link to read the other two poems April Poems

This link will get you to the contents page for all the poems in the April 2021

Verse-Virtual Verse-Virtual April 2021