Poetry Emerging from Unrelated Cues

Pieces of poetry don't always arrive in conjunction with the seasons. They just show up, triggered most often by something unrelated to the eventual poem. I've written Christmas poetry in July and pieces about spring flowers in December. Perhapes I see something that would make a perfect gift - but pass on it, because I have difficulty keeping secrets for so long. Or watching the world outside be transformed by the first snows might generate poetry about what rests in my garden until the time is right for new things to push through half-frozen snow. 

Poetry is like that. Just as many of the insights we have that show up, when we are looking somewhere else.

This particular piece came in the August heat, from noticing small black scale insects on the hoya that hangs by a back window.

Contemplation in Sun-Warmth

early spring and turtles line
the old dead tree, slanted\
over a small pond, its branches
shorn of life long ago

its grey trunk polished
over long winters, imprinted
in turtle-memories
along with the sun's warmth

from a distance. the turtles
look like black scale insects
adhered to sturdy stems,
no space left vacant

one quick motion -
startled turtles disappear,
dark water settles
into the silence that conceals

they slide into familiar muck
to wait for safety, in this place 
of return that perserves
through the frozen time

then the lure of sun-warmth
coaxs small heads to peer
just above the water,
then they scramble onto the old tree

        to resume contemplation 

                         Elizabeth                   

Tricyrtis Discovery

I had challenged one of our young grandchildren to see what could be found in our autum garden. Kneeling alongside the path, the assortment of leaves was parted, and  close to the ground our eyes peered at the place I thought something special could be seen . . . at least, I hoped it was still be there.
 

It was found and 

I heard a quiet declaration—
"this is the most beautiful
flower I have ever seen!”

My grandchild uncovered the diminutive, orchid-like blooms of the Toad Lily (Tricyrtis sp.). The flowers are exotic and intricate. White with violet spotted petals. Asked if the other flower buds would open soon, I replied

"Honestly
I don’t know.”

Much older now — my grandchild left a month ago for a first trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
 

My secret wish for you was that you would find the BWCA

‘the most beautiful place you have ever seen.’

That you watch long-hidden stars being freed to shine.

See points of light dancing on the smooth, night water

before you turn in for a well-deserved night’s rest.

Wonder how the rock upon which you are sitting

came to be so smooth.

“this is the most beautiful flower

I have ever seen.”

Sometimes a person simply has to be patient,

be open to looking, and

to pay attention to little things.

      Clem     

Twinflower is Linnaea borealis

(the only plant that Linnaeus

named after himself.

It was his favorite flower.)



















Toad Lily Tricyrtis sp.
Twinflower Linnaea borealis
(the only plant that Linnaeus
named after himself. It was his
favorite flower.)

Maybe my grandchild will find Twinflowers in full bloom and declare again, to no one in particular,

Geode

I listen to
inner cries of cracking
unheard by many until
a piece falls away.

heart beat of stone
at times deafening
but always steady
pulsing through time

glacial erratic stands
near Nerstrand Woods -
where did you
come from?

shiny flat pavers
wander through our garden
harvested along a stream bed
in a North Carolina wilderness

their embedded
mica-stars are
points of hope
walking through life

I notice each one

we are stones from
mountains worn down
forged by ice and wind
adversity and hopelessness

stones have secrets
only sometimes
do they share their legends 
with river bottoms

shared only with
the begruding tenacity
of stones
determined to survive

                 Clem

Listening to Rocks

I always have said that someday I will study and learn everything about geology. Rocks in particular. But I never get around to it. However, I pay attention to rocks and have since childhood.

Like sucking on pebbles to keep my mouth from drying out on blistering hot days, while hiking alone on a prairie road . Or finding shale, splitting it into thin little slabs, and passing them around to boyhood friends. We would moisten them with our tongues, stick them to our lower lips, and then try to talk.

And there was skipping stones over the water. While swimming at "the lake," we would send messages to each other. We tapped two stones together in an improvised Morse code. It is amazing how far sound travels through water.

Even now, when I come upon a huge boulder anywhere, I sometimes put my ear to it and listen for what I might hear.

Clem

embodied summer time

hot sweaty body,
dirt between my toes,
smears from a grubby hand
brushing away mosquitoes
up one leg, down an arm
and across my cheek,
tired sore muscles and
satisfaction of hard physical work
bring a garden of beauty to life

ahh - body memories

cold clear water from
swimming pools, mountain streams,
blueberry picking time,
one eye alert for bears,
the other on ice cream buckets
slowly filling with blue fragrance,
car trips and camping expeditions,
adventures with children,
backyard barbeques of chicken
with secret sauce,
fresh buttered ears of corn,
big pitchers of minted tea

evening loon calls
under star-studded skies,
full days of paddling a canoe,
flea market bargins
repaired and stripped of paint,
frosty tall glasses of lemonade,
nine months pregnant,
ripe red tomatos, sweet basil,
yellow squash fried up with
onions and fresh dill

lazy summer days,
it seemed
they'd last forever
                    and forever

from Waiting for the Heat to Pass,
            Elizabeth

Sociology 101: The Digitalization of Culture

Or should it be Anthropology 101? What ever you call it, the digital transformation of our culture as we know it has only just begun.

Case in point. This morning's slim newspaper (of course news is sparse on Monday - despite the international dateline, in which Monday here is not Monday at other parts of the earth) had no less than three articles about the cultural changes arising out of this sweet little computer that allows me to have this conversation with you.

The first article: The possible demise of Barnes and Noble, an institution we have come to accept as permanent (remember the short  B. Dalton era). Big-box book stores are sliding into impending doom. Leaving malls who have built their success around bookstores the way Sears and Penney's used to be the anchors. It's those electronic books, online publishing, and a host of other technological factors. Since there are some of us who still like holding printed books in our hands (probably not wise to read your Kindle while soaking in the bathtub), books are not likely to disappear altogether. But the way books arrive in our hands is on the move, along with the potential loss of the Barnes and Noble Reading Room.

The second article: Remember all those advantages of working at home? No rush-hour traffic jams, no work wardrobes, flexible hours, and other advantages. There is a new work trend arising. Computer screens just aren't a substitute for the energy of people at the next desk. People who operate one-person businesses (from their home offices and computers) are now finding communal office space. The person in the next desk may not know anything about your business, but there is a real live person at the next desk. A bit like writers who do all their writing in coffee shops and the like, because the isolation of writing at home doesn't do it. Just like reading books at Barnes and Noble is akin to reading at the library. After all, we are social creatures.

The third article: There are now online sites hosted by (get this) major publishing houses where writers can post excerpts of manuscripts - while working at their laptops at Barnes and Noble. Readers of these sites can indicate their favorites. Not only does the writer get feedback while engaged in a solitary calling, the hosts of such sites monitor the responses. For example, at ww.inkpop.com operated by HarperCollins, the five writers per month with the most hits are invited to send in their manuscripts. No literary agents needed and an amazing chance at having a major publisher print your work.

A cursory look at all of this techno-driven phenomena might suggest the usual arguments of distress. The computer with its social networking options is tying more people to a screen rather than spending real face-to-face time. Look a little deeper! Workings at home in your PJ's may be more efficient, but where is the energy buzz of other people? And the odds of a major publishing house accepting a first-time writer is about 0.0001.

We need each other. Technology offers options beyond our wildest imaginations to access each other. Voila' - cultural changes happening all around us.

Did I say that Monday's news was sparse . . .

Elizabeth

August Heat

This past week will be remembered in January as the week it was hot. Not that the temperature was so high. It was the air so saturated with moisture that every evening as it cooled, it rained. Traditional August in Minnesota means brown lawns. Not this year! We are as verdant green as an English countryside.

The plants in my garden are confused. Spring came almost a month sooner. Some  plants bloomed early that mature in sync with the number of days after it thaws. Other plants,which time themselves with the patterns of shifting daylight hours, decided to keep their usual schedule. The result - the usual progression of flowers in the garden was replaced by a new order. Checking the garden after breakfast often meant surprises.

I know there are places where weather is a non-issue. San Jose, Costa Rica is a city of perpetual spring. When I was there near the Panama border, I remember trying to explain "cold" to people who had never been cold.- and the concept of "furnace" was incomprehensible. Perhaps if I had spoken Spanish . . .

Other places depend on the regularity of dry seasons and rainy seasons. Birds migrate to places they find suitable for breeding and to winter. Arctic Terns celebrate summer twice each year, breeding in the Arctic summer and returning to oceans around Antarctica for the southern hemisphere's summer. They live most of their lives in perpetual daylight.

When weather patterns don't perform on schedule, it is not only the plants who are confused. We are creatures of habit, influenced by the geography of home with its accompanying seasons. The winter when it did not snow in Minnesota meant a lot of anxiety and "craziness" by March, despite blessed relief from snow-shoveling. It was not a good year for cross-country skiing. Or hardware stores selling snow shovels.

We camped one summer in eastern Washington. The family next to us slept out under the stars and proclaimed that living in western Washington with so much rain must be unbearable. Later we stood in the mist by the railing of a ferry crossing Puget Sound. The family standing next to us declared how intolerable it must be to have to live in the arid eastern part of the state.

And there was the woman at the B&B where we stayed on the western coast of Vancouver Island. She confessed to us that she loved her husband dearly  - and he loved the temperate rain forest of the Island where he had lived all his life. But she found the lush woods claustrophobic - trees dripping with moisture and the forest floor carpeted with moss, ferns, and decaying logs. Sometimes at night, she said she would go down to the shore and stand. She would look out over the open Pacific, and remember her native Saskatchewan prairie. She would breath deep the wide open space of the immense ocean stretching uninterrupted all the way to Asia. Then she would climb back up the hill through the trees and slip into bed with her beloved.

Practice Run

Early yesterday morning, before the sweltering heat became oppressive, we dug our Yukon Gold potatoes. Big fat yellow potatoes. Waiting in the soil for us to harvest. They are an early potato and new for us to grow. So I cannot tell if  "early" means the beginning of August - or if, in more usual times (if there is such a thing anymore), they would be ready later in the month.

Even earlier in the morning at first light, we heard a flock of Canada Geese fly over. They were in conversation with each other. It is not a summer-sound, but happens when they are becoming restless. The gawky goslings are no longer teenagers. They need to practice with the adults before their long flight south to  marshes of the Gulf. How to fly in formation and how to take turns in being the lead goose, who breaks the way through the air and allows the rest of the flock some ease across the miles.

I wonder what they will find this year. The cleanup from the oil spill continues, but the contaminated oil is being dumped into land-fills from New Orleans to Florida. I think of earlier times in my life when the sound of geese practicing for migration was a wondrous and wild sound. No matter the circumstances in my life, I could count on the surety of migrating birds marking the seasons. They were doing so before I was born and I believed they would continue their ancient patterns long after I am gone.

When I would hear them fly over, I would always pause whatever I was doing. I would stand there and listen. Listen for the wildness they represent.

Elizabeth

The World, The World

Sometimes when you go to the library looking for something, you come home with something that proves to be a real treasure. Such was Norman Lewis' The World, The World. It is a book well worth going to the library and reading from beginning to end.

To call Lewis a travel writer would limit the scope of his writing. This particular book is part memoir, part cultural anthropology, and part political commentary. His descriptions of various places in the world are superb - as his obituary says, Lewis could make even a lorry interesting. His commentary about his marriage into an Italian Mafioso family and  as a member of the British Intelligence Corps during WWII, reflects a man with a zest for life and adventure. As he continued to travel to places whose cultures were still relatively untouched, his personal perspective became increasingly political.

Lewis goes to Indo-China -before the Vietnam war, before Nixon blasted it "back into the stone age." He spends time in Guatemala where oppression by the few, leads to the killing fields described by Rigoberta Menchu. He listens to Castro in Cuba and observes Castro's rise to power during the Cuban Revolution. He travels to Thailand when "staged experiences" for the tourists just were discovered to be lucrative and as it began to flourish as a center of the sex trade . He harshly describes how evangelicals, bandits, and the greedy all pressed their agendas on peoples who had lived peacefully together for centuries.

Lewis was fortunate to get an early manuscript published by one of the leading publishers in England - and his descriptions of the "courtship" process are hilarious. He had been ready to send a manuscript to a small publishing house when a friend challenged him to start at the top - a "what do you have to lose."

The pattern of his life becomes established with this bit of luck: travel somewhere where most people do not or cannot go. Then hole up somewhere for a year or more and write (I always wonder how people pull this off - I mean, where does the money come from to rent a house - and pay a housekeeper, modest as the house may be).

One writing place was the coast of Wales, where his housekeeper sings her way to God. Another was a small and isolated fishing village on the coast of Spain before developers destroyed the place with hi-rise condos and parking lots.

I will carry Norman Lewis around with me for a while: his thoughtfulness, his ease with the English language, his gift for describing people and places. And for the commentary of his life. The cultures he observed and their destruction. And the ways humans evolve of living together in communities.

In this connected global world, isolated places rapidly are ceasing to exist. We watch wars and oil spills as they happen. Protesters march in the streets and in our living rooms. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Immigration is not about starting over somewhere else without any connection with people left behind. As a cartoon in the New Yorker quipped: "honey, someday we can retire and sit on the couch and watch travel videos" - thanks to the likes of Rick Steves and Rudy Maxa.

Perhaps when we look at our own lives, we will discover that all of us have a little bit of Lewis within us - whether we have traveled far from home or not.

Elizabeth