My Poems Are Like Whispers \ Out Of The Silence Stone Men Call Me Home

Alan: How can poetry flourish today?  It can shout along with the rest.  Or it can ask us to become that rare thing – quiet, attentive, open.

My Poems Are Like Whispers

My poems are like whispers

from the dying

or like a lover’s murmurs.

Do not talk loudly

if you wish to hear them.

Do not talk.

They are like a colloquy

of hidden selves;

they speak so softly

from the shadows, right

and left.

Be silent, O my soul;

incline your head gently

that your ear may fill

with the sound of the sea;

bend closer, my inheritors,

bend closer.

Nancy: The Stone Man, once standing in full view on ledge, is now hidden by spruces.  Words, however, still say “someone passed this way.”

Out Of The Silence Stone Men Call Me Home

Out Of The Silence

Before the City, there was a great

wide silence,

and day after day

no other men.  No one

to hail.  No open palm in greeting,

no signing of game.

If men passed

they left less sign than animals,

no scars

such as left by ice.  Wind

made a greater imprint

than the hunter alone

on the wide land.

No shadow

remained when the sun had gone,

when he had passed

into the silence.

Stone Men

The stone men come from those

long ago times

before the grandfathers were wise,

and there are no songs

holding the story.

No one

saw them born.

Yet the stone men cross the land,

breaking the silence

with their presence.  After

the hunter has gone,

the stone men cast a shadow over the land.

No longer

are we alone;

someone has passed this way.

Call Me Home

A stone man stands to the east,

speaking for the need of men to say:

I was here.

Day after day, his is the only break

in the silence.  No men

raise their hands in greeting.

This is the home I have chosen;

I have come here to give birth to words,

to poems.  They are like the stone men

across the beautiful wide land.

When my shadow has passed over

the bruised grass into silence, they

will call out: know this:

someone has passed this way.

“Out Of The Silence Stone Men Call Me Home” first appeared in East Of The Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984).

Monkey Mind \ Six Ways To Know Water

Alan:  Once, long ago, a friend told me this story from some TV show he’d seen.  At least that’s what came into my own Monkey Mind years later when I wrote the poem.  

Monkey Mind

Monkey is magic!  Monkey is power!

Monkey defeats all the animals in his net of words.

Monkey is quick!  Monkey is grasping!

Monkey taunts the world and races to the end of the universe,

relieves himself at the pillars marking the edge of space and time.

Oh Monkey, look at Buddha’s hand,

urine trickling down His palm.

You’d give anything to be with Him for a moment

and He’s always here, taking your abuse.

Monkey Mind, stop and realize:

He is always here.

Sit still, hold your tongue.

Do not defile the guardian of all worlds.

Nancy:  This poem wrote itself during a 10-mile car trip while I listened to a CBC radio program on the search for extraterrestrial water.  The first line came unbidden, and soon the rest followed.

Six Ways To Know Water

Feel the gush of it between your legs;

after nine months the child must leave

water, learn air.

Stand in the gorge, stand between the stones

in the spill of the dam and feel the heat

of the sun, the cold of the deep water.

Wait for a small dark hole to form in the pond.

Push the canoe out across the ice, which will

break slowly into diamonds.  Strike the crystals

until you are floating, until the ice

acknowledges April.

Fly through it in a small plane made of

sticks and fabric and yellow paint, always

staying in the center of the rainbow.

Watch the cold sea boil into the colder

air; watch it build the peaks and valleys

of a nameless range; watch them tear loose

and drift inland, dragging their shadows

over the barrens.

Query the planets:  Water?  Ask the moons,

look into the stars.  Water?  Are we alone?

Water?

Into Another Country \ A Bear Came

Alan: Right brain, left brain: outside the mind, life and death go on regardless.

Into Another Country

People tell me I do well what I can hardly do at all:

write clearly, organize my thoughts into little freighted trains,

ten cars or fifty cars long, carrying their meanings

down rails that join together like clasped hands in the distance.

And what I most want to do I am completely unable to accomplish:

cross those tracks into another country, the same

as this one but utterly unlike.

As I write this, the half-grown hare that the cat caught last night

is dying – perhaps from its wounds, or from being

one of (what we have to call) “nature’s mistakes,”

or perhaps from grief at being held this long,

out of harm’s way, in a strange and comfortless place

by people who meant only kindness.

Nancy: Bears meander through our lives here, following their own imperatives.  What would a bear’s calendar say? – “check out bird feeder”, “explore along bay”?

A Bear Came

One day this summer,

a bear came.

It wasn’t written on the calendar

– “bear coming” isn’t the sort of thing you write

in those boxes.  If it were,

who knows what I might write –

“have an insight”

“revelation”

(hopefully) “poem”.

My boxes were a ritual.  I filled them

with country things,

as if it were important that my days be seen to have order,

just as I swept clean floors.

Not on the calendar, then,

were many things that I looked at sideways,

as a shaman might trick charred bones

into yielding secrets.

The bear came.  My life is an incantation of boxes,

but even as I trim wicks and stack kindling

I watch the edges of the days.  There, perhaps,

(not on the calendar, these are not the things you find

on calendars) there I may find dream bears:

“who was I yesterday, and what of tomorrow?”

“where is next year?”

“are poems real?”

“A Bear Came” first appeared in East Of The Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984)

At The Door Of A Small House On An Old Cellar Hole On A June Night In Maine \ East Of The Light

Alan: To be centered in a place that feels right... what could be better?

At The Door Of A Small House On An Old Cellar Hole On A June Night In Maine

I would rather live

where I can hear the bullfrogs

a mile away up a silent road

and see ten thousand fireflies

doing their bugged-out strobe-dance

under a quarter moon

and shoo mosquitoes

so that the air near the roses

moves and scents the still night

than to be

     smarter

     better

     happier

     richer

anywhere else in this

sick old USA.

Nancy: Watching for whales as they pass through the East Quoddy channel is more accurately “listening for whales.”  The loud sound of their blow alerts you to scan the horizon.  Just as you find the exhaled cloud, they are into another dive.  Dive, feed on plankton, rise, blow, repeat.

East Of The Light

The whales say tchuf, tchuf,

hard, sharp,

and that’s all I know of whales,

tchuf, an eye,

flukes.

The islands behind the whales

are Wolves,

were wolves;

they will never catch the island called Moose.

The whales say tchuf

to me, tchuf;

I see the flukes, and then

nothing

nothing

nothing.

The whales are making love;

they are pursuing the naked sea butterflies;

the Wolves are tirelessly pursuing

the island called Moose.

The whales are eating the brilliant

red

and blue

naked sea butterflies; they are

making love.

Satiated,

they rise.

Tchuf.

I want, and do not want.

How would it be,

to swim to the east, east of the light,

breathing tso,

tso?

“East Of The Light” first appeared in Anthology Of Maine Women In The Arts (undated).