Franz Schubert: "Coronach"

I have finished my book of elegies; it's in the mail to my most trusted teacher. I made it as good as I could, as heartfelt as I could, as it is my last love letter to Harvey. Twenty-five years ago this week, we met for the first time. We were married less than six months later, three months after our first date. He's been dead nearly 16 months.

I don't want to share these elegies just yet, even though one has been in print--and one is coming out in Best New Poets. (We have received our galleys for the book--mine is the only prose poem. ????!!!!????).

Instead of posting an elegy, here's some Schubert for you; I needed it today. A coronach is a keening, and I feel the loss of Harvey--and what I was when I was with him--very keenly indeed.

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"Live Oak with Moss" (from Whitman's Calamus)

2.

I SAW in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous
leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself,
But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves,
standing alone there, without its friend, its lover
near—for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves
upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away—and I have placed it in sight in
my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear
friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token—it makes me think
of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in
Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a
lover, near,
I know very well I could not.
______

Harvey wrote the lines "uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover near. I know very well I could not." He drew two live oaks intertwined, and hidden in each tree, comprising each scrimshaw branch, in tiny calligraphy, are our names. (It's his way of carving a heart and putting our initials in it. Did I mention he was a romantic?)

He never had to...and how did he know that?
______

Prayer: Walt Whitman

O great grey poet
whose beard itself is Spanish
moss perpended from

that face I love; o
lover of men, lover of
women, as now I

revisit my own
amputation--o how can
I? do I? will I?

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Checklistless

Today I'm wearing Harvey's navy cashmere sweater, which is certainly older than our marriage. I remember him draping it over my shoulders when I was shivering at the lake on our first picnic--we were dating then. This sweater still smells a little bit like cigarettes and sugar cookies. Soon it will have to be dry cleaned and I will never have that tantalizing scent of tobacco and vanilla and simple sweetness again--but I have it tonight. I thought I had lost everything that smelled of Harvey, and to find this has been a real blessing. I would rather have this scent than the biggest bottle of Chanel No. 5 or Joy.

It's too hard to start over...but I start over every morning. Every day brings with it a little startle, because I still expect to see Harvey first thing, just as Shadow still runs down the steps whenever he hears keys rattling in the door. He looks so surprised when it's just Raleigh, or infrequently Dan. It's never whom Shadow adored best. And I am a shadow of myself, as well. I cry every day going to teach and every day coming home, because there is no one who smiles when I walk through the door, and there is no one to kiss hello, or goodbye. There's no one who gets excited about my Elizabeth Bishop punctuation discoveries, no one who commiserates when the Paradise Lost lesson becomes the Boredom Found class period and my students' catatonia is so evident that even I see it.

My Mammaw used to say, "If God didn't make little green apples...she'd still find a way to bellyache." And I am belly aching and heart aching and lag-a-bed-and-whine aching. It seems as though all I do is cry and complain: I am a regular dormouse in a too-big sweater, with a box of Kleenex at the ready.

Wasn't this supposed to be over in a year? 15 months, 1 week, 4 hours and 52 minutes.

It's never going to be over, and it already is.

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Roses and Guns N Roses

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Pablo + Tillie Equals Poem

I've been reordering my manuscript to send to my old teacher, and I found this poem, which was sparked by this Picasso and by Tillie Olsen's magnificent story. I post a link to it here today, to remind myself that yes, you can finish a poem.

PS I love this Picasso--you can already tell he's going to crack two dimensions in his search for the third. I also didn't realize this was part of the Stieglitz collection. Even though it probably isn't, the woman looks like O'Keefe.

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Forgiveness: Yom Kippur

I feel shriven. I have asked for forgiveness for the promises that I have made that I haven't kept. I have extended forgiveness to those who have broken promises and vows to me. I hope that these broken promises are truly erased and not palimpsests that will arise like floaters in spring....If love is an action and requires willpower sometimes, then forgiveness may be, too!

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BARBRA STREISAND - AVINU MALKEINU

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Kol Nidre by Johnny Mathis

See you on the 8th.

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Time is Ephemeral, and Eternity is Elliptical

The clock indicates the moment, but what does eternity indicate?

(Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass)

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Stroke, Stroke, Stricken--5 minute freewriting

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I FALL AT THE MOVIES, CAN'T GET UP, FLATLINE FOR NINETY SECONDS

Every breath, every beat, every inspiration, every expiration, every systole, every diastole--caesura. Cannot breathe. Remember to breathe. Time ran down like an old phonograph.

Oxygen level 0. Ambu. Stay with me, stay with me, lady.

Oxygen and iron, blood. Oxygen and iron, rust. Iron Lung. So this is the dust that passes...Why can't I say the words?

Halo. Halo. Elf me.

I come from a long line of glassblowers; glass may look solid but it's still liquid, this art that makes you catch your breath. Each second burns, the bellows of my lungs fan the flames, my heart pumps--Up in the air and down--so why won't my left side--the sinister one--why then won't it o.

Back, she's back.

Where? From where? To what?
_____

(Nancy Willard's "Questions My Son Asked, Answers I Never Gave Him;" Stanley Plumly's "Iron Lung;" Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing" are referenced; these are actual lines of poetry that were going through my head in the Maiden Alley Cinema when I had my "serious" stroke).

Best of the Net Nomination/Blue Fifth Review

I am so happy and pleased by this nomination for "In Ictu Oculi," which is one of the first of my new poems that honor Harvey. I hope he would be proud of this.

Here's the poem:

In Ictu Oculi

“Sorrow is my own yard.”
William Carlos Williams, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”

My irises are blue,

Last November when weather was balmy,
Unexpected, sabres slashed up through
A scrim of gold gingko leaves; in early

milky with cataracts; still

December the last iris unfurled
Its frills, sinuous scallops bisected
Central from ciliary—blue ink pearled

I should have seen

From your fountain pen, blue lines crisscrossing
Your atlas, blue veins traversing your wrist.
An unseasonal gift that Christmas morning:

the cyanotic nails, looked

Blossom on the white wicker tray—the vase
That held the last iris was delicate,
A milky blue. “There’ll be more,” you said, “next

closely at your hands,

Spring. We’ll have iris for years and years.” Blades
Of green slice through the earth this autumn,
Your ashes in winter’s bedded gardens.

not what they held.

(for Harvey, 1964-2010)

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Time Past and Time Present: An Interior

Catalog with Illustrations

by Marvin Bell

The beauty of an old desk blotter where ink stains grew into the shapes of ships in a turbulent ocean,
and the ticking of the clock in the sunlight thickened by dust.
The clacking of the typewriter keys, the big zipper sound of the carriage return,
and the sound of the struck bell muffled in the drapes.
The air was rich with time, when there was still time.
The letter ripened slowly in the typewriter.
The minute hand took a second to move one digit.
Under the glass that covered the desktop, a map and family photos.

"Catalog with Illustrations" by Marvin Bell, from Rampant. © Copper Canyon Press, 2004

______

There was time back then, and time was circular, not digital. Antemeridian, postmeridian, second hand and minute hand and the hours circled round each other in a curious gavotte that I took (at the time) for granted. Now Dali's clocks melt into digital quartz on my nightstand, and I want only a clock with hands, I only want your hands.

There's no time for this mourning this morning.

(New York Interior, Edward Hopper)

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Intermissionary Position

I miss Harvey so badly that it just doesn't seem worth going on. But I do. And I don't know how I go, or where I go, just that I go. My children and parents, my friends and teachers and students, I do love you, and I'm sorry that I'm so frustrating. I just don't love this life, the way Harvey loved his life, don't love this world the way Harvey loved his world. But I will try to live in it just a little longer, because he loved it and me.

Tennyson and his damned tears.

Me and my damned undammed tears.

One of my favorite poems begins "And I'm sorry for myself." Now that one's confessional!

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Pendant Poems: Frost and Strand

Canis Major

The great Overdog.
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye,
Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.

I'm a poor underdog,
But tonight I will bark
With the great Overdog
That roams through the dark.

Robert Frost

_______

Eating Poetry Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man, I snarl at her and bark, I romp with joy in the bookish dark. ________________ Strand's poem depends on the Frost poem, much as a pearl depends on its chain. its lustre against the lustre of a woman's skin.

(Image by Tallmadge Doyle, "Canis Major," linked above. Go see all his work, especially the bee, which I'm saving up to buy).Publish Post

Melancholy, Baby

THE PROMISE--Jane Hirschfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

_____

All the heartache, all the headache, all the soul's ache--and there's balm in a poem like this. I'm so glad to read it today. I'll link above to all the poems in The Journal of Higher Education.

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