Nagano \ Backroads Beauty

Alan: With the Sochi Olympics underway this week, it’s time to remember the Nagano Winter Olympics of 1998, in which the Zen poet Ryokan, who transcends time and space, played a crucial if unacknowledged part.

Nagano

The good people of Nagano

have raised the gates.

To rhythmic chants, a thousand villagers

rope skyward eight two-ton pillars,

hewings of the local forest.

Through these paired uprights, from the four directions,

Sumo wrestlers, men-mountains, five-hundred-pounders,

process at a stately waddle, bare

but for loincloths, massive bodies

symbols of cleanliness and strength.

Banish all demons!  Purify the earth!

Grand Champion Akebono

in the middle of the bullseyed drum,

raises his leg, thick as a treetrunk, then

thumps it down, thunderous, to a massed shout!

But what is this?

An uneasy murmur in the crowd.  A strange

disturbance of atmosphere, faltering of ritual

in the face of so much hoopla, so many contrary nations.

A milling about of officials.

A making of smalltalk by sportscasters.

A beaming worldwide of perplexity, dead air.

Finally: agreement.

Ryokan is helped from his seat.

Frail now, at two hundred forty years,

he makes his way, supported by each arm, to the center of the ring,

stands, a tiny robed figure, unmoving –

all grows silent, the wrestlers

pensive on their vast haunches – the minutes flow on –

at last, he lifts his stick

one inch, three, six,

taps it down soundlessly – nods.

The demons are gone.  It is done.

Let the games begin!

Nancy: The house has never seen paint.  The truck sagging into the mud may never run again.  But the geraniums are bright, and there are morning glories on a post by the door.

Backroads Beauty

We ask green things to stand for us

against reality.

Those plants, lined up along the sill,

defy the snow,

and steal the meager winter light,

and grow.

And gardens live in tins

and tires,

to bloom against unpainted walls,

to shut out heat,

and dust;

to fight defeat.

And will they stand for us when we are gone –

a flower in the woods,

a tree,

a shadow on the wall –

become reality?

Wind Mountain: My Brother's Ashes \ Mother

Alan: When we climbed Mt. Rattlesnake in New Hampshire to scatter Don’s ashes, it seemed we had stepped into the photo by E.A. Curtis that I wrote about in “Over Wind Mountain” (posted March 23, 2011).  And then it was over.

Wind Mountain: My Brother’s Ashes

Across the water (the water

which we all must cross)

rises Wind Mountain

above its shore: a worn, wooded

core.  It is time: water

calm, boat ready.

We will cross and, for the first

and last time, climb the steep

slope.  At the top

we will gather

and look beyond (and back,

we must not forget that);

the wind will rise up

and scatter us like dust,

like pollen (never to be here together,

gathered together in this way

ever again).

Nancy: To see, to reconcile, to come to terms with the face looking out at me from the reflection...

Mother

I’m afraid of my mother.

She hangs over my head like slow death,

nothing of my life must be known to her.

Mother –

Let me weep with you for the alien child,

the son I never was, the girl

I could not be, the failures,

lost gloves, discarded dolls –

Let me weep.

Mother?

You inhabit me.

You lie with me in the arms of my lovers.

You peer at me from shop windows.

I’m so frightened of your gray rigidity.

MOTHER!

STOP!

Stop.

Let us strip.

Like two mourners,

let us weep for the firstborn child

(she of your dreams, stillborn).

Let us bury her.

Naked by the grave

we are women,

mothers and daughters.

Mother,

we are sisters.

Give me your hand.

Duck \ Trap Lines In Winter

Nancy: A loaded pulp truck coming toward you presents one sort of threat and, oddly enough, one in front is also dangerous.  Even though accidents are rare, except for rolling and spilling the load like pickup sticks, they’re often so grotesque, so tragic, that they’re memorable.

Duck

When I was a kid I was afraid

TB would get me.

The last few years I’ve been worried

about pulp trucks.

The way they come up behind you

until their radiator grill fills

your rear view mirror.

Or coming at you – is the boom locked

down?  Could it swing free and drop?

I could be flattened, just like that couple

up in the County.

And they overload them.  They do.  And then

it only takes one low overpass

and wham!  One of those logs gets knocked

back just like a pile driver

through the windshield.

Or they roll.

Oh God, the driver

just takes a curve a little too fast – 

the ambulance crew is holding a guy,

he’s shouting, “I know that car, I know

that car”– he breaks loose and starts

pulling at the logs with his fingers.

It happens.

I don’t like crowds.  I hate people coughing

anywhere near me.  I’m really glad

I never have to ride a subway.

But they tell me a fully loaded pulp truck

weights 100,000 pounds.  50 tons!

And who knows how often they check

those brakes?

Pulp truck: a truck used for hauling pulpwood or whole logs, often overloaded

Alan: My only poem, so far, to inspire a title for a novel.  True, a pulp western, but still, I’m happy to be associated with anything written by John Harvey, in this case The Skinning Place, number 10 in his Hart The Regulator series, from 1982. 

Trap Lines In Winter

Again now

doing what comes utterly

unnaturally

forcing thick feet

one and then one

to slow traverse

of white

A trick-track beaten

on my own

for my own use only

A cold occupation

digging out snares

set months ago

Some lost

some dragged off

by snow ghosts

some, with luck, frozen

tight into fur

Each seems hardly dead

as if come across

by accident

never lived

could be breathed warm

lifted tenderly

set walking

If I ever turned back

at each rise would see

no tracks

not me at all.

The red mouth

the skinning place

a voice

“Trap Lines In Winter” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

Meal Stop, Ninety-seven Miles From Bangor Airport \ Ted And Sylvia

Nancy: The only time I ever fell asleep at the wheel – only seconds but enough to come to my senses, enough to print the night, the diner, the men in my mind forever.

Meal Stop, Ninety-seven Miles From Bangor Airport

Behind me, two men sat talking of women

and fishing and faith,

as I came awake over a plate of potatoes

pooled in ketchup.

Out on the road I’d fallen asleep,

drugged with finality,

and out of the grating slew of gravel

had fumbled into the hot oil spoon clatter

only twenty miles from home.

Coffee – please –

elbow propped thinking sugar maybe

and making whirlpools in the thin stuff.

I couldn’t finish the fries; pushing away

I left them tumbled like peeled posts

on the plate.

Behind me, the men went on to pie;

one said,

       “She’s not much for speed,

        but she’s got quite a roll to her”

– but I’d lost track

and didn’t know whether they were talking

about women or boats,

and will never know, for I went

back to the road

and did the last twenty miles slowly,

carefully, in the fog.

Alan:  Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath still seem bound tight, more than fifty years after her suicide and fifteen years after his death during cancer treatments.  I wonder sometimes if the myth of the Poet killed them both.

Ted And Sylvia

Sylvia was “Ariel,” is Ariel to us now,

but who was she really, behind the closed door?

And Ted?  Self-styled wild thing of the woods?

Or just a man consumed by appetite and then remorse?

(She ever off the table in subsequent public discourse.)

Who consumed whom in each other’s mythy dreams?

And whom do we consume?

My father sought his archetypes in dreams

that he could then reduce to formal verse:

Joseph Campbell a congenial, gentle guide.

But his me-myth eluded him behind his own doors,

each one smaller than the night before

until at the end all he saw

was an impenetrable garden wall.

I have been advised that we should be

the heroes of our own stories, make of ourselves a myth,

so that tomorrow, when we are dead – what? –

our friends will say, “He thought much of himself”?  (Too much.)

Narcissus with broadaxe and horned helmet?

Or just Polonius embarrassed to be stabbed

under a threadbare pelmet?

Living the quotidian is unmythic in the extreme, and better for it.  

Let others make us myths,

or more likely forget us, the way we forget

what we ate last Tuesday, although we know we ate.

Our pleasures the pleasures of a moment,

alive on the surface tension of this dew-drop world,

we are most of us, to be frank, not quite second-rate.

Even the Buddha, despite his self-placed honorific,

was nothing but human, although inhumanly awake.

True, he denied all categorizations, but

it was left to others to abstract 

his innumerable qualities, give them the artifacts

we crave: arms and auras, faces mild or fierce.

The carefully placed hand above the perfectly placed wrist. 

So, let us, first and last, be unknowable to ourselves,

and ever a surprise and a disturbance, 

no more Ariel, no more Wodwo, no more Buddha or Bodhisattva

than the neighbor boy who, daydreaming and careless,

trips on the sidewalk, running to the house,

and catches himself, and then looks up,

astonished.  Suddenly aware.

"The Relatively Unproductive Chaparral" \ Riprap

Nancy:  I never looked at a Manzanita and saw BTUs, but after hearing a neighbor suggest that we could solve our waste disposal problem by sending it on rail cars to the Grand Canyon...

“The Relatively Unproductive Chaparral”

                                                                            Keuster, Davis & Bagby

                                                                                                     Nature 2/23/84

Passing into, passing through,

hunkered under the Manzanita,

expectant of birds, I love the chaparral,

chaparral between me and the desert,

chaparral between me and the mountains,

chaparral between me and the sun.

And I love the life of the chaparral,

the wings in the chaparral,

the wild black bees in the chaparral,

the pungent sweet honeycombed chaparral

humming in the sun.

Industrious America!  Biomass!

The new chaparral, the ground-up, spit-out

feedstock/chaparral, the diesel fuel factory

between the desert and the mountains.

I loved the old and shining Manzanita,

the old days, wild and wasted days,

thunder and sun in the chaparral.

Alan: When I first read the series of haiku-like segments in Paz’ “Piedras sueltas,” it inspired me to try something similar using his headings, although not quite as compressed and with a seventh section that gives up entirely on the form.

Riprap

                  After Octavio Paz, “Piedras sueltas”

                    

1.     Flower

Rain-washed, polished by passing feet,

it’s all one to these stones.

Except here, at one side, these two give up their embrace

and part forever for this flower.

2.     She

She was a cat, an owl, an oasis,

a call that brings longing in the night.

As she was all shapes, no one guessed

as she drained through the stones, her death.

3.     Biography

It came and went so swiftly.

He held it all and it shattered.

A long time on his knees

cutting his hands on the pieces.

4.     Bells in the night

All day burning with sun,

now ice of stars and moon too old to rise.

I have waited here, waited

until at last the stones start ringing.

5.     At the door

I blink at the wind-whipped courtyard.

What do you all want?

Behind me silence, my own walls.

Threading the cobbles the million ants.

6.     Vision

He became everything at once.

A harrier quartered the lowest sky.

A mouse sprinted agonized among the blades.

He never found a way back to himself.

7.     Landscapes

Stones scale the slope, lifted on each others’ shoulders

and burst in waterfalls, glimpses

of armor hidden among trees.

Arrows, green feathers or the wings of mountains.

All the hills lift high in the shrill air

and circle away to the west.

Birds the color of sunset beat down as splintered rain.

We fear the storm as storm, as fear.

We slip, are carried downward,

as dead leaves, dead stems eddy together for comfort.

Cookie Fortune \ In The Bleak Mid-Winter

Nancy:  Cut loose from the future, a victim of fast-fading red ink.

Cookie Fortune

^   The ones that clearly were intended

for someone else at the table.

Those you can toss into the rice bowl,

laughing.

^   The ones that you read thinking,

if only I’d gotten this before my last

car, job, man, it is so right!

^   The ones that you read, clear your

throat, roll up into a little ball and

toss into the rice bowl while turning to

the person on your right and applauding

his/her excellent good fortune.

^   The ones that you slip into your wallet

and take home and add to the small fluttery

pile in the corner of a drawer.  Not you,

maybe, me, my little collection of papery

promises.        Just a joke.      Really.

#    I am going to tell you a terrible thing.

Until I opened the drawer this morning I

was witty and wise, admired, steadfast and

destined for fame.  Romance was mine and

fortune was on its way.  Until I opened the

drawer.  Until I saw the carefully smoothed

slips of blank paper, their messages degraded

to nothing more than faint discolorations.

I’m wiped out.  All my fortunes, all my futures

were written in fugitive ink.

Alan: How did Ryokan get through the winters in his little hut?  How do we get through our own harshest weathers, when it seems we having nothing left to sustain us?

In The Bleak Mid-Winter

Day after day it snows

filling the path

drifting high against the walls

of my hut.

Nothing to eat but old roots:

the mice and I hungry, hungry.

I’ve seen no one for weeks,

not even the sun peeping in.

Dying now, I won’t be found ‘til Spring.

Tayatha om: this is how it is:

burning my poems

to make one small flickering fire

after another.

In Memoriam \ New Year's Dawn

Nancy: Children play at this, letting their twigs race downstream.  Even as I dropped my broken bits into the currents and eddies, I was aware of racing to a new place, a new potential.

In Memoriam

I broke a stick into small pieces,

one for each year,

and dropped them into the stream.

They caught in an eddy and turned,

foam caught at them, the bark, the broken edges,

and then in a quick slide they went under the bridge.

What did I expect?  That they might knit

miraculously?  That I might go home laughing?

When I turned they were slipping downstream

pulled apart, jumbled, the way the years go,

here and there one catching the light.

Before I left, I drank, the water still tasting of ice

and now of the thrusting green shoots upstream,

and then I turned for the house.

A roof there, four walls.

My legs were tired and I had a long way to go.

Alan: While revelers sleep it off, I’d rather start the new year at daybreak.

New Year’s Dawn

Here

at the northeast corner of the country

at the east edge of the time zone

the light comes early, leaves early.

Half-past five.  Already

the air brightens to the southeast,

sculpting that long line of mountains

that grows each night from the sea

and dissolves again each day.

There, beyond the fields and scraggy woods,

beyond the barely perceptible, gentle

true horizon,

there they are once more

heavy and distant

and the arms of the sun behind them

reaching up to embrace

the cold, recumbent sky,

the still sleeping year.