Poem: Ode to a Turkey Vulture

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Ode to a Turkey Vulture

“The other world is to be found, as usual,
inside this one.” ~ Susan Sontag

O companion of my heart,
I am kneeling at the long
window, hushed with you,
statuesque
gargoyle grotesque
on the cathedral barn.

In this, the attentiveness
of longing, you wait
in your placid eye,
onyx bead embedded
in the corrugated heart
of your featherless head.
You hunger, like me, taciturn
in a violent world. You lift

off into the blue
without sound, to travel
like John in the wilderness.
O calm and golden remiges,
soft oars stippled with sun,
my love, my inspiration,
my ferryman to the flowing sky,

your peaceful floating
a surrender to what rises,
the kitely sails of your wings
tilting, lilting on tides of heat
that carry fragrance
of decay. In this air,
what is death is your joy.

All the suffering in these little
ones who bring you sustenance
you did not wield with talon
or tooth. The pink and gray
fleshes gurgle over the gullet
stones of your hearted throat, all
their silenced cries,
their chests opened, every
disappointed beat and falling
enveloped in your beak,
lifted up, a mercy
in this fractured air.

And long
in the shadow of the tree
you clean yourself. Through you
all is purified. Tonight the moon shines cool
in a black No Man's Land, and we sleep.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Notes:

gargoyle - originally gargouille in French means throat or gullet;
the downspout for rain at the outer edges of roofs of churches
and other buildings; grotesques were gargoyles of fantastical
creatures that were not waterspouts but were meant to scare off
harmful spirits

remiges (pronounced ree-meks) - the flight feather of a bird’s wing,
its origin from the Latin for oarsman

Read my prose poem about a turkey vulture in a previous post here.

The Turkey Vulture's cousin - King Vulture porcelain

 

This King Vulture porcelain is in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the AIC's booklet writeup about the piece: Around 1728 Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, conceived of replicating the animal and bird kingdoms in porcelain. By 1733 more than 30 different models of birds and almost 40 animals had been made, many by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler. Kändler modeled this King Vulture from life, which allowed him to animate the creature’s quintessential spirit. Such porcelain animals remain the most vivid expression of Augustus’s wish to possess and rule over the natural world.

See scanned turkey vulture (and other bird) feathers like the ones below at The Feather Atlas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

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Poem: The body elastic

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The body elastic

On a day too hot to walk the asphalt
of the outdoor city, we maneuver
through the cool black of museum rooms
where human cadavers — preserved
in polymer — stretch and bend in elegant
leanness, all musculature and bone.

As I examine a half-skinned woman
kneeling on one knee, her other leg bent
and poised forward, toes pointed,
I touch the wave of my clavicle involuntarily.

Her breasts thrust ahead — full, nippled,
intact, sheathing her torso like a vest,
while the rest of her is naked muscle,
ligament, ribcage, spine, and behind

her sacrum the phalanges — still
fingernailed — trickling breezily from her
backward-flowing arms, curved
like the winged Nike of Samothrace.

The pointing finger of my splayed hand
supports the jugular notch of my sternum
while I lean toward the pink beltstrap
muscles of her neck. Her head arcs back,
eyes watching into stars to join the far-flung
head of her petrified sister, the Victory.

After the exhibit we emerge from the
museum’s stone passage into a sea of heat.
Trees stand masted and green against the blue
sky, and behind them the towering skyline
of man’s intransigence, where we are attracted
irresistibly, on the tide of our humanness.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

The exhibit we saw was "Body Worlds" by Gunther von Hagens at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was a transforming experience, to see bodies at various stages of aging, and organs in states of disease and health. Please go if it comes near you. The Kneeling Woman can be found here. This page shows where Body Worlds exhibits are and will be.

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Poem: Departures

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I am on vacation (stay-cation) and am 'supposed' to be working on my book this morning, a self publishing project that I hope to have ready in the fall for anyone interested. Well, I came across this poem in that partial volume, written in 1994, and I thought I'd post it. I am the youngest of eight children. This is about my next older sibling, four years my senior. He doesn't read my blog, but even if he did, I'm not sure he'd find anything in this poem that is untrue or unfair. He was my best buddy growing up. He tried to teach me to laugh at myself when I struck out at neighborhood baseball. He didn't succeed, but I love him for trying.

Departures

He arrived home like a Fenian
in his long-haired sheep coat,
dirty from bus sides, the smell of English
cigarettes a celebration in his hair,
maroon patent platforms cracked
from two lavish weeks on London sidewalks,
fulvous Lennon wire-rims the keystone,
his mark of triumph.

At 18,
he had pocketed his tuition money and cast
the coins over his shoulder into the Thames.

I noticed him camber slightly
as they stepped from the station wagon,
then straighten to the same height as Dad,
the first time my brother ever appeared
a stranger in our town, combating the gravel
of the driveway, so unlike Dad, even calumnious
in his gait, the jingle of foreign currency
audible above the restraint of our welcome.

It was then I knew he had entered a mezzanine
decade or century or maybe an island
where he began to linger
away from us, although 25 years later
he still lives in the same town.
He approached my mother and me on the porch
and, looking me in the eye,
departed across the channel, oars cocked.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Photo still of London in 1970 from the movie "Follow Me" found here.

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Poem: The Moon's Question

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The Moon's Question

The half-cut moon gleams across the dock
like a riddle of God, and I, a sphinx, guard

the entrance. On the lake’s shore, bound
in soil, a stone shines, a pearl in the dark,

like the tensile eye of Isaac from the altar,
bulging, uncloven, watching for an angel

to illumine the question of surrender, at the
moment of fullness when two realities exist —

one rising, shining, alive, and one falling back,
hidden, the seemingly silent side of the moon.

Illustration of the moonhair woman by Arthur Rackham

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Poem: The earth's economy

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The earth's economy

Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate

of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill —

the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the
special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,

the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull —

I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon

and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber —
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred

years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry

as much as she could carry

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poem: In the heat

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no, it's not raining here, this is a memory

In the heat

       I remember
the smother of hot nights,
the dark shiftless touch
of maple leaves palmed against the screen
of my second storey window, the street
light outshining the fingernail moon,

      the whole damp town
a small comfort, clapboard houses
porched and facelit, parked cars
hulking shadows sleeping along
to the church, like everyone
but me

               and falling back onto moist
sheets where I imagined hovering
like a cloud, lit from within
by lightning’s quick but
far-fingering promise,
unafraid of distant thunder,
believing he spoke of rain.

Poem: Blue star highway

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Blue star highway

For a few weeks of summer I drive
or ride my bike between blue chicory flowers,
like lookouts by the wayside. Two redwing
blackbirds chase a crow from the field
across the road. They guard
their own world, unlocked as it is.

What kingdom is this
I ride through, fenced with blue sentinels,
thin and frail, who keep nothing in, nothing
out, common blue stitches in a common cloth
of earth, their roots harvested for poor
prisoners’ coffee, the brew of everyman,
everywoman. What love

like a crossroads
is here where the human with
nature and spirit meet, what crucibles
forged these stars, glaze of tiles,
calm blue flames lighting the path
into Beauty, into the star of self,

the kingdom where the commoner
is royal, and the redwing blackbird
is farmer-king who scoffs his wing at me
incredulously as I snap their picture,
kneeling, as if for knighthood,
when he has work to do.

Note: "Blue flower" is a symbol in Romanticism of inspiration, desire, longing for beauty, and the thinking and feeling self, as first introduced by Novalis in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. For more information about blue flower, including what it represented for C.S. Lewis, read the wiki article here.

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Poem: Church

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I haven't said much here about my journey away from religion. I'd rather not get into it much on the blog, as it's a conversation best done in person, where the back and forth of body language, facial expressions and words are fuller and quicker. But for whatever reason, today I feel the urge to share a poem I wrote in 1995 at the nadir of my journey away from church. Of course by posting it, I am opening a window for conversation, and I'm OK with that, albeit somewhat tentatively. (I find it interesting how rules about not embarking in conversation on topics like religion and politics seem to have slipped aside to some degree in our blogs.) Maybe time will tell if I am courageous, or merely foolish, to post this.

It's important that you know that I hold nothing against church going in general. I know that there are many good reasons for it, including spiritual bliss, which I've experienced. But I like you knowing something of my own lifelong process of looking for spirituality beneath religion. This is a quest I have felt since my earliest memories, even when my own father preached sermons from a Baptist pulpit. My father and mother were some of the most beautiful Christians I have known, with deep felt and earnest beliefs, often taking them in directions starkly contradicting the convictions of people in their own parish. I admire them for this strength, sincerity and zeal. That I was wounded somewhat in the unfolding of their lives is perhaps ultimately more about me than them. I understand also that some of the very symbols that cause me distress, are deeply and joyfully meaningful to others. I hope my poem doesn't hurt or offend anyone, as that is the last thing I want.

Lest you worry when reading the poem that there was any abuse toward me personally or from my parents toward anyone, there was none. While the poem is very personal in a spiritual sense of woundedness, it is more general in the literal.

Anyway, here is one expression of my spiritual journey. I wonder what it will mean, to you. While I love some churches and cathedrals — sitting in them, wandering in them, looking at icons, smelling burning candles, feeling the cool quiet when it is hot and boisterous outside, praying, listening to silence or to music — Church — for me — is another thing altogether.

I welcome your responses, to the poem, or to my opening remarks.

Church

I saw a red window.

Through it the sun in swords.
When light attacks
the skin of pews,
dissolves the frames of fifty strong
sets of arms
and wrought iron lights puncture
and nail supplications
along ceiling beams,

then I know that there are secrets
that wait like wine in cups,
undergarments stained,
wads of bandages under the altar,
some plotting of ambushes
in the marbled veins of windows,
boxes of medals and strategies hidden
in baptistry dust,
the old anticipation of hymns
lined up in battalions,
of the coming,
the coming of a great army,
a mighty platoon dragging all the prohibitions
like sediment, bottles, broken machinery,
parachutes, collapsed
benevolences.

I shoulder this window,
jagged, perforating my skin,
a thorny cross,
a house with wounded furnishings,
a drape of walls hanging
like rags from a carcass,
a make-shift hospital vacated
after the troops have lost
their legs, their arms.

It is only a window,
a sanctuary,
a sifter of days.

1995

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Poem: Summer labor

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Summer labor

I walked to the house
from the laundry line, the heat
already steamrolling fringes of color out
of the air at nine in the morning.

I was wearing the frumpy
loose dress I fell in love with on the
mannequin but which seemed to olden
on me the first time I wore it.

There I was, shuffling
past the pitiable lavender bed
clutched by weeds and grass,
with here and there pincushion heads

of powdery purple trying
to be charming, reaching out to me,
as if I were the woman
to free them into their full sun

potential. Had they been words
to be weeded into poems, I’d have sat
with them in the latitude of the morning,
yanking away grasses of the outer

world, spreading apart their leggy stems, reaching
in for heads, coaxing them into the bright air
to breathe their wild and dusty breath,
fighting for their very life from within.

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Poem: Morning praise

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Morning praise

“You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”
     ~ Diane Arbus

I drive onto campus where trees, shrubs and curvaceous
roads, easing through roundabouts, soften the hard and fast
boxes, wings, rises, windows and corners of university halls.
I’m grateful these mornings for the continual parade

of flowery trims and perpetual grooming the horticulture
students slavishly maintain so that I can find relief
from steel, chrome, glass and brick hardnesses.
My small car follows the same route like a silvery beetle

who knows the way, and I casually eye students up and down,
admiring bodies, remembering my own smooth
skin and streaming hair. We who are not students now
laugh at the changing uniforms students don — one year it’s plunging

necklines, another, skintight leggings and flowing blouses, this
year hip-high shorts and skirts, and my imagination curls
into the non-academic rhetoric these long legs create.
A beautiful student walks the sidewalk, her long billowing hair

the color of the Red Cedar River, and shining that way,
rippling as if over rocks, with the cadence of feathered
wings flapping up behind. I see that her hair jerks
up and down more than it should, more violently than a breeze

on such a sultry summer day would blow it, and in my momentary
and casual passing, in my need to balance the ugly structures
of the world with something lovely of visual or philosophical
pleasure, I recognize that one of her legs is much shorter

than the other, in movements that cause her to travel nearly as far
between ground and sky as she does on her horizontal path, her
left shoulder diving down toward the sidewalk when her left foot
steps, and swinging back up with the right leg’s rise. The effect

mesmerizes me as her hair sweeps the air like the rhythmic
motion of a broom reaching down from the sky to brush
the sidewalk, but never getting close enough to touch it.
Almost hypnotized, I follow her dancing hair.

She slips into my rearview mirror, and I know what I want
to believe: that there is purpose in beauty, a cleansing of the
air, or the path, the way raking the stones of a Zen garden gives peace
to the soul, organizing them in gestures that are steady, meandering,

repeated, in parallel lines, drawing me forward where I ride
and rest in their mindless destinations, somewhere between
heaven, and earth, with here and there a rock, a bench, a stream,
or an oscillating wing, surprising me with spontaneous irregularity.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Nouvelle 55: Vulnerability

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Vulnerability

The world is not delicate
on the whole. I feel it here
in my sternum, my ribs,
lying on my back under you,
stars distant, tree immense.
The world is not delicate
and the plum leaf is strong,
even when the beetle nibbles
her into lace, making room
for more stars to be
strung between her veins.

Painting: Georgia O'Keeffe's 'The Lawrence Tree,' painted on her first visit to New Mexico, when she visited D.H. Lawrence's ranch. This tree was in front of his house, with a bench under it, and she lay back on the bench to paint the tree. 

Nouvelle 55 is a flash fiction or poem in 55 words based upon a work of art.

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Ode to a Cantaloupe

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Ode to a Cantaloupe

Ripe woman

so long in the sun,

skin thick, leathery, with veins

etched like filigree scars

of knowing,

one flat cheek

where you listened

to the earth,

I feel for you

among the rock hards,

fingertips perching, alert

on heads, searching

for you alone,

who have begun to return

inside to the waters

of yourself,

retreating slightly

at the meridians

that circle like rivers

to enter you.

With simple hope,

I carry you home

tucked in my elbow,

sweet

mystery.

On the board

on the table,

at the horizon

of the knife, heavily,

with a groan,

you fall open, glistening —

Rippling sunrise of fruits!

ascending

from Michigan lakes

and soil,

pastel and vibrant orange

wet soft firmness,

mellow honey,

gentle watery

weight.

A good spoon

and I scoop

dripping seeds out

of your natural bowl

then slide into the easy

flesh, shining spoon

cradling a moon bite

to my

warm trembling

tongue, momentarily

apprehensive

of flavorless

disappointment.

But you are achingly yes —

cool, tender,

a velvet miracle

of flesh,

light

and water,

part musk, part honey,

a quiet rising,

unearthed, clean

into sky,

morning sun

baptized into my happy,

eager

new-day body.

A poem about something I love, humbly, in the tradition of Pablo Neruda, master of elementary odes.

Photo of cantaloupe shared via Creative Commons by John Bosley.

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A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

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A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

The bee balm are bursting in air—
fireworks above the bright stars
of evening primrose. At dusk fireflies
flare up like breaths of economy
among these bulwarks
of gallantly parading flowers.

   What madness to erupt and effuse
   for hours, even days on end

the fireflies seem to say as they
hold then release their neon light.

Oh, which is right?
The greed I feel for
the glare of light now, all—

or the occasional throbbing of it, in its
transience, like the firefly’s?

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Poem: Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

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Nostalgia at the intersection of the teacup

I
My friend warned me he would die someday
soon and I thought
but I don’t even know you
yet.

II
On the same leaf
the fly with wings
shining silvery in the mouth
of sunlight
faced the butterfly with threadbare wings.
Together they equaled
atonement.

III
If I were clever enough
I would teach my tongue
to curl through hoops of fire
unscathed.
Only cleaner.

IV
We are victims
of life, uninformed in
moony fogs without
compassion
for what is possible.
Life needs amnesty.

V
The way heads of grasses
hang over the path
in the meadow is
more beautiful
than flowers.
In my humble opinion.
(I hang my head shamefully
to compare anything of beauty.)

VI
Sadly, I don’t like tea,
because the luster
of a teacup
makes me want to drink it
sitting in a room with happiness,
shadows, and a window.

VII
I am either the mother
of becoming or
the becoming of mother
or I may have it all wrong
and I’m really the skeleton
sphere
of a new world.
Don’t you love Plato, and Blake?

VIII
I do not think
the cosmos is a symphony
where the spirit sings
accompaniment.
I think you are a symphony
and the cosmos backs
you up.

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Sonnet: Praise for ordinary wonder

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Killdeer, by John James Audubon
from the book The Birds of America

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work,
we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies."

—Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p. 25

Praise for ordinary wonder

The linen of a killdeer’s breast below

his throated rings flies suddenly before

the car and dips beneath a corn row.

Mundane the days can stretch, an endless floor

of samenesses, the tapering of leaves

of each and every fern, the ottoman

with piled familiar books, where villainies

and graces eternally have fallen.

But always I will honor the counting

of ten toes, digging into the blanket

in the burial of the day, not mourning

next day’s clone of this one with regret.

For in between the copies of each day’s

roads and words, a bird flies, and I'm amazed.

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Poem: Dancers

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Dorothea and Francesca, by Cecilia Beaux, 1898

Dancers

inspired by the painting "Dorothea and Francesca"
by Cecilia Beaux

I am dancing like that.
I am there
in the pink satin folds
of their blousing
though not the blouse or skirt
themselves
but riding them
as a cork
rides waves
just dipped under the silk.
I am the curl
of the mother’s hair
as if I were smoke
and she the fire.
I am the rubbed flower
their shoes
point to outside the frame,
fragrance alone.
I am the rain
outside the house,
my drops
traipsing down
inside the silver of each
blade of grass,
imperceptible.
I am dancing like that.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Poem: 'bellwether' ~ for Char

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Char's image at her post wondering

bellwether

she has gone before

us

you and I

loping along

in this woolly herd

looking for something

green to eat

and return it

to the earth

transformed

I hear the distant

tinkle

of a bell

softened

in the rising earth

of the hill between us

My heart doesn't understand what my ears hear. Our friend Char of ramblins passed away suddenly June 6. She was just 53 years young. On the sidebar at her blog she had said:

life is too short to waste a single day:
eat cookies, dance when no one is looking,
and try to be as happy as you can.

She also quoted Charles de Lint:

When it's all said and done, all roads lead to the same end. 

So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it. 

 Another way of saying it is in one of her images — always simple, luxuriant and tender . . . 

You seem to be gone, but I still see, hear, and feel you, friend.

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Poem: Ars Poetica

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Ars Poetica

A poem makes the impossible
possible.

The poet becomes
a flying proboscis

extracting nectar
from material and

immaterial things.
Then comes the metamorphosis

of the honey. Or
a fly in the attic

descends onto a dusty old book,
which is really the poet,

and the fly’s nomadic feet feel
at home

on the mellow skin of her pages,
as light and moveable

as glyphs and black letters.
Or three minds

become three blackbirds
of a silhouetted tree

transposing notes
into black flames

breathed onto the musical score
of a telephone line.

We know what becomes
of what is written,

the little curled tongues floating
down

on the current of creaking
and arid

centuries:
They are firebirds

whose truth-wings
burn, dissolving into us

in ash, and then one day
right here in the wet ink

from our pollen-laden pen
get reconstituted

into the dewy surprise
of a just-born flyer.

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Poem: Argument

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Argument

My flesh and blood argue

with my breath. The orchid

on the sill, whose velvet-violet heads

turn away, pressed against the window,

gazing out at the natural world

in psychic intercourse, transmutes

energy as to a distant tribe.

The barn there

with its doors open, darkness

inside, like a drum’s, light streaming

between the boards

in discourse, the way the mind speaks

through the body, or the soul through

the seam with the mind, where wind

rushes through and stirs these witnesses—

the vocabulary of dust.

Note: "Psychic intercourse" is a phrase I borrow

from Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography

when she writes about Walt Whitman:

"Whitman preached empathy, concord in discord,

oneness in diversity. Psychic intercourse with 

everything, everybody . . ." (p. 31)

On Photography, Picador Press, 1973

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