Morning Song \ In The Late Garden

Nancy: What a sound of contentment and peace – the thump of the dog’s tail on the kitchen floor.

Morning Song

A soundless high scud shreds the milky sky

just before dawn, southwest to northeast,

raggedy precursor of rain, or the ground so cold,

ice.  My dog has led me around the dry cornstalks,

past the heavy knots of calendulas in seed,

past the deer-bitten apple tree and turned –

all is well, says his tail, all is safe.

Now the day is mine, to feed the coals in the stove,

to break the silence grinding coffee beans,

to watch the sky bury the dawn in clouds.

The dog opens one eye and says with his tail,

again, all is well, all is safe, and I say yes yes,

as I stack wood on the fire and go about my chores

humming.

Alan: Once my garden was an assertion of order as I measured out the space between seeds, between rows.  The years taught me that nothing comes up or comes out quite as we expect.  And perhaps that’s better.

In The Late Garden

In the clearing

surrounded by spruce trees –

woods that were field and pasture

within our memories –

in the clearing growing back

to goldenrod, aster, hardhack,

field roses, and the shrubs we planted –

hydrangeas, ninebarks, azaleas, overgrown

or choked –

in the wildering space

I still dig over

a few square feet

within this leaning fence.

Within this fenced garden

ramshackle now and weedy

with witch grass, chickweed,

mulleins, self-seeded hollyhocks,

a few calendulas,

I still dig,

turning over the soil for garlic,

preparing the soil

for next year’s beans.

A few square feet

is all we need now

or can manage.

I am in this garden

with my whole body, digging

and pulling weeds, and listening,

seeing the soil come up in clots

at my feet, shaking it from the roots,

my skin alert to the air,

its motions of Fall mixing warm and chill.

Raven sits on the highest spruce

just out of sight behind the wood’s edge

and comments.

“Garock-garock.  Garock-garock”

says Raven.  “Raven,” I say,

“is this a greeting?”  “Garock-garock.”

“Do you keep watch over this place

even when we’re gone?”

I surmise this but can’t know.

I think of Raven as beneficent,

never my father’s “dark, malevolent shapes”

(the ignorance of fear).

As wise, even, and far-seeing.

But I can’t know, really.

“Garock-garock.”

                                    Oh, Raven,

today or some day years off,

may I feel death come over me in this garden

and, falling, turn to face Sky.

Fly down then from your hidden perch.

Walk around me three or four times, inspecting.

Cock your head, attending.

Pry out the blue grapes from my face

before Crow or Vulture, Coyote or Fox

can find me.

Carry them back and swallow,

so that I may see, through you, in death

what in life I could not discern,

even to the azure limits;

so you will know what love grew,

and what questions, what suppositions

and what longing,

in this narrow, earth-bound skull.

Aunt Nannie Said Lordy Lordy, A Ghost Story \ Jizo

Nancy: How I loved it when Aunt Nannie (my grandmother’s aunt) visited.  “What have you been doing, child,” she asked as I sat on her bed while she unpacked her suitcase full of salves and tinctures and told stories her own aunts and grandmothers had told her.

Aunt Nannie Said Lordy Lordy, A Ghost Story

Aunt Nannie – her ghost, actually

but not at all

                     ectoplasmic

                     phantasmagoric –

her ghost came in and stood behind me.

                     bosomy

                     camphor scented

                     fresh ironed starched cotton

I was filling a rough brown vase with late flowers

and scarlet leaves and my hand stopped

                    mid-air.

Aunt Nannie, who loved flowers

Aunt Nannie, who loved bright colors

Aunt Nannie, who loved me

                    stood behind me

                    smiling

(I know she was smiling)

                    Lordy Lordy, she said

                    Lordy Lordy, child

I could hear the smile.

Alan:  Some things you never get over.  You may get used to them, but they are always there.

Jizo

         for Nancy

I.

When they took it away from you,

they didn’t.

When they took away the he and she of it,

the unnamed name of it,

the unlived life of it.

When they put you back in your own life

to stagger forward as best you could,

it followed.  On its tiny imagined feet

it followed you, all those decades

to now, to this late August day.

When, once again, staring out at the gravel

and the grass cut short as a shorn sheep and as pale,

you remember – can’t help but remember –

when they took it away from you.

When they didn’t.

II.

In the graveyards of Japan, under the dripping pines,

the stone Jizos stand or sit in meditation along the walls,

the mossy stones, and at the intersections of paths.

These are not the tall monk

with his staff and wish-fulfilling gem

who guides souls lost in the hells

but small things, alike or almost so, with

outsized infant heads and barely suggested hands

raised in prayerful greeting.  Some

wear knitted baby hats or bibs.  

If you took Jizo and placed him,

with reverence and perhaps some tears,

on your garden wall, in a niche

or at the base of a flowering shrub,

or even on your desk or bedside table,

it would not finally go away – it will never

go away – but it would at least

acquire form. This emptiness, at last,

would take form.

Hungry Woman Exorcism \ When It Ended

Nancy: Have you ever known someone who seems so intense – so needy – who makes you feel like a picked bone?

Hungry Woman Exorcism

Some folks

can slip your bones out through your skin

suck your breath

steal your soul

folks with the no-smile smile

             What you can do

             is spell the words wrong

             say the names backwards

             hold your hand over your heart

Some folks

can shoot needles out of their eyes

you feel your soul

beating its wings

folks with the no-smile eyes

             What you can do

             is sit way back

             look away

             walk backwards fast

Some folks,

hungry folks, make me nervous

That woman there

makes me nervous

I don’t want to see her back teeth

when she smiles

             What I gotta do

             is sit way back, far back

             on the other side

             keep my mouth shut

             keep my hand over my heart

Hungry folks like that

give me a flutter in my soul.

Alan: If a world ends and nobody notices, does it really happen?

When It Ended

In that year, the tree frogs

did not clatter from their April puddles

at the feet of the spruce trees,

and the peepers’ helium chorus

failed to echo from the swamps by night.

In that year, the green frogs

no longer tuned their banjos – boing! –

in their pools, nor did the pickerel frogs

creak from the grassy edges.

Even the bull frogs went teetotal:

no more jug-o’-rums from the summer lakes and ponds.

The salamanders, the newts and efts,

silent already, went missing from the woods,

and the toads’ midnight trills

that once had electrified spring’s horizons

shorted out completely.

Country folk, who might have wondered,

felt their ears full of pulsings and fretted not.

Perhaps they imposed memory on absence,

or perhaps it had all been prerecorded from the start.

Everyone, country or city, in that year

and afterwards, had faces of the palest blue, and white eyes,

and they could not notice what they no longer cared about

anyway.

“When It Ended” is from a work in progress, Annals Of The Nearer Soon (preliminary title).

Pasture \ Memento Mori

Nancy: How many wise sayings, aphorisms, memoirs could be summed up in the word “change”?

Pasture

We call it the “pasture,”

but it’s filled with trees.

Time and growth invalidate our terms.

It was a pasture once –

when I was green, and young,

and loved from need,

and never got enough of summer and of sun.

How saplings change!

We kept that pasture in our minds

with words: an artifact.

I don’t know when it happened,

but I grew –

and growing things don’t stay the same.

We use the old words still,

we call it love,

but change won’t stop for words.

We’re living in the pasture;

we’re living in the shadows of the trees.

Alan: The winter Ryokan came into my life, poems flowed quickly.  As spring advanced and I busied myself outdoors, his visits grew few, fewer.  Almost forgotten.

Memento Mori

It’s been months since I’ve seen him –

all hectic summer not even a glimpse.

Now, after first hard frost,

clearing the wrecked garden, under squash vines

I find his half-rotted cloak,

a nest for mice and bees.

Finding Equilibrium \ Deficient Moon

Nancy: There are days when I would – if I could – spread my wings and float, ride the variable winds on fixed wings.

Finding Equilibrium

the crow

         chooses

the highest, most slender

branch

every morning

         crow

– from this lectern –

gives a teaching

folds his black robes

         leaves

leaves me in thought

today

let it be my practice

to seek

to choose

         as crow

to find equilibrium

Alan: I’ll watch the moon tonight waxing from crescent; soon enough it will reach full and decline.  Crazy to try to hold it, like trying to hold time itself.

Deficient Moon

Surprised

to see the moon half-vanished –

where did the days go? –

one thin cloud

in an otherwise empty sky

pulling away from it’s whiteness

cotton from a boll

seeds from milkweed

in the wind

Just like the moon

to wander away when it’s most

needed

Just like us

to want it –

to always want it whole.