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.

The Man On The Rock \ Approaching Equinox

Alan: One of my favorite books as a child was Wee Gillis by Monroe Leaf with drawings by Robert Lawson.  I hadn’t thought of it in decades when it floated back to the surface carrying a new meaning alongside recollected pleasures. 

The Man On The Rock

The image came to me of a large man sitting on a rock,

head bowed, disconsolate –

a man as knobby and rough as his tweeds,

in a landscape sloping and barren but for boulders and thistles.

Beside him, a huge leather sack and some sticks at odd angles –

the biggest bagpipes in all Scotland –

for which he had not the lungs.

I remembered then the story of Wee Gillis,

how in childhood he spent his summers in the Highlands

stalking the stags for his thin uncle and his winters in the Lowlands

calling the cows for his stout uncle,

and who just now comes into view, 

halfway between the Highlands and the Lowlands,

at that time in his life when he has to choose.

Wee Gillis ponders.  The uncles follow behind, then

stand nearby, reasoning, arguing, shouting, jumping up and down

and finally giving up and sitting, each on his boulder, silent.

Wee Gillis has by now lungs that can hold the breath long, long, long

while stalking the stags, and that can call the cows

loud, loud, loud through the densest mist, lungs and a voice

that can make the glens ring dizzy and the becks run uphill.

The uncles attempt the bagpipes, fail, and sit back down defeated.

Wee Gillis looks at them and keeps looking until the man asks would he like to try?

Wee Gillis takes hold of the biggest bagpipes in all Scotland, fills his immense

lungs, and blows such a blast as knocks both uncles and the large man

off their boulders backwards and he has found his calling.

As a child I thought this story was about Wee Gillis

and that I, too, would some day find my calling

and a way to assuage the feuding parties in my life,

but now I think it was about the large despondent man

who had tried a thing too great for his abilities,

and who, hearing that terrible sound,

teaches Wee Gillis to tame it into tunes,

and is never heard from again.

Nancy: The equinox, coming today with a new moon, marks the beginning (again) of a letting go, another chance to practice that drawn-out sigh...

Approaching Equinox

A friend came in, said

    ice on the windshield this morning.

I said

    No.

No when I meant to say, Ah.

    Ah.

A word of acceptance,

    and I know again

how unlike a holy hermit I am,

    that I would look at the last bag

of rice, the ice on the cliff

    and say No.

All these years and

    I still fail in equanimity

fail to grasp the power

    of Ah.

Radio \ September, Breathes The Meadow

Alan: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ "The Lark Ascending" seems to vibrate midway between heaven and earth, like the skylark itself in its spring display.  Hearing it now, 100 years after its composition, I can’t help but feel a melancholy pang running through the promise of renewed life.

Radio

Needy for something, punching “on,”

filling the car at random –

last slow-spooling notes of “The Lark Ascending.”

     Quiet, he stands in shadow,

     transfixed by some half-seen motion

     above the glare of stubble fields.

Follow that lone violin

arabesqueing upward to vanish

in an ache of blue.

     He turns, retraces his steps

     while the bird, invisible now,

     still rises, singing in his mind.

A leaf curlicues across the road.

“Poplar,” I think.

“Still green,” I think.

“Summer’s ending now,” I think.

Nancy: Picking up speed, the year rushes on; I feel trapped in a car on the Coney Island ferris wheel.  Stop!  Stop!  Too late.  I shoot out into space.

September, Breathes The Meadow

Visible breath of September

    mist

    gray of the neck feathers of the dove

    rose gray

    there, and there

    mist ephemeral

    made real in the seeding grass

    translucent as the leaves of the iris

    gracefully yielding up life

July's breath

the breath of August

    was often French horns

    might have been flutes

    spoke with the strength of pan pipes

    a pulse of stone

    a pulse of life

This morning

    the meadow is silent

    familiar

    one elm tree standing alone

    fir, eternally green

Familiar

    and yet

    mist

    a quick stop and start of the heart

    I see

    I see and I know

that the meadow is breathing September.

Cascade Canyon \ What Do You Need?

Alan:  A journal-poem of a long day-hike in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.  The poem keeps my memory of it vivid, even if eventually – like all peak experiences – it slipped into a lower register, tarnished a little in the retelling.

Cascade Canyon

1.  Jenny Lake

Under the weatherproof lid, a notebook on a chain and a stubby

pencil to write down where you are going in case you need help.

Hurricane Divide.

Number in party: one.

Closing the lid,

frost

across

these words.

2.  The path

is found in guide

books only

3.  Above Hidden Falls

and above me on two sides

peaks blossom whitely

in arrangements of photographs.

Below, voices.

I spook

up the next six switchbacks.

4.  More things falling

The grove of small cottonwoods

is half gilded

and full of the sound of water dripping from leaves.

The pinnacle spruce are coming into their own with snow on their noses

but this also is melting

in a sound of leaves and even some needles dropping

disguising the rustling patter of the warblers

picking through the trees on their way south

gleaning

High on the sky rim

a crack

of rockfall.

5.  Farther up the trail and beyond the forks

This is my

one day to be alone.

You people

that I keep meeting,

why do you always offer me

things which are irresistible? –

conversation

and once

an orange.

6.  The glacier

It takes a long time

to get up close

and it is still

far away     filling the horizon

between two cliffs.

Broken snout

and lips

hang above a pool

the color of concrete.

The stonepile     blocking the water

feels     like it could move     with a shove

 – is avoided

on the route past.

The glacier tells

that in the winter which is soon

it will make up for

this silence.

7.  Out in the open

At ten thousand feet

the overwhelming smell of

licorice.

Just one kind of plant grows here.  I pick a twig

and am woozy with licorice.

For all I know the rocks and yellow lichens smell the same but

     I’m too tired to get on hands and knees.

The rock-colored pikas beeent sarcastically

and scurry to gather licorice for the winter.

The marmots are too tame, obviously

stupefied on licorice.

At the top of the switchbacks the smell vanishes

as it has when at the bottom

I pull a couple of crushed leaves

from my pocket.

8.  Hurricane Divide

It’s funny how the mountains

having come this far

back down

gracefully.

Those must be potato fields in Idaho

way over there.

On a gravel flat not far below me

a pack train sorts itself out,

uninterested in the view.

They come on with jangling and clapping,

the horses slipping if they get off onto the snow.

At the crest each cowboy in turn, seeing my side of things,

yodels

or whoops

or shouts to those following.

They have turned along the ridge

dwindled

and disappeared.

The wilderness is narrow.

After all the commotion

it is good to look back

over where I’ve come

and at every inch of the three Tetons

painfully bright

as high

and far from me as ever.

9.  Running back the way I’ve come

and running

and running

and on the levels

walking

fast

Bathing my feet at the bridge

I have a good laugh

with my socks

10.  On out

The peaks tighten again toward the mouth of the canyon

but just here the creek has room to wind.

Those dark dots in the shadows across where it’s marshy

are moose grazing.

The bull’s antlers catch the sun as he lifts his head.

Perhaps he feels autumn coming on.

Why must I leave

this wide place

so soon?

11.  Inspiration Point

The boatman’s

half across the lake!

No running –

desperate galloping!

My pack gouging!  my

shoulderblades

hating it!

Making it.

12.  Hitchhiking

Our eyes see only what moves.

A still object moves in the minute flickering of our eyes.

Otherwise we could not see it.

To see something move, or to stand still and then move past it

makes it substantial,

time adding to depth.

Sounds and smells carry on currents of air.

If we wait, they reveal themselves to us calmly.

Rushing past we stampede them from cover.

To travel a path in sections, with rests

and then at a later time run it in reverse

creates a bubble of sensation which floats in and

half rising above

the inhospitable surface of memory.

I would like to do this with whole stages of my life

but must be content

with short and easy journeys.

13.  Afterward

only

tiredness.  Those gleaming

mountains

offer themselves

to every

trespasser.

14.  I continue

The journey is trampled

like September frost under fresh bootprints

or disperses within me

like the fluid in my healing feet.

Nancy:  Do you know what you need to feel that you’re home?  That this is the place that’s been waiting for you?  Not a space, but a place?

What Do You Need?

to hear a canyon wren

to see grain, grass, soybeans

to hear water run downhill

is it sunset on red cliffs

or feeling, seeing, smelling

moss, ferns, bog, wood

steel cutting wood

as you go out

is it this place or that place

the cornfield.  the sea.

when you’re there you know

when you’re lost you know

is it something that’s gone

paved, cut, filled, emptied

gone   gone    gone

where do you keep it

how do you keep it

do you sing to it

tide stone feather moon

blood bones heart

here, can you say

here, put my bones down here

“Cascade Canyon” first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.