Archive for September, 2009

Poetry Challenge 30

September 29, 2009

A Birthday Poem

It’s always a challenge to write an occasional poem without getting totally sappy.  So take the challenge–write about an event or occasion: birthday, wedding, farewell to travelers, etc.–without getting, well, mushy.  This works for me as an exercise in negative space–writing about what surrounds the occasion, such as details, objects, images, rather than about the occasion itself.

I’ll post my attempt at this tomorrow.  Send me yours.

(Happy Birthday, Ira)

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Here’s a poem in response to the prompt–for all September birthdays.  There seem to be a cluster of them. (By the way, I’m not sure what happens to the formatting of these poems when I place them in a post.  I’ll keep working on that! For now, I’ll try to trick the formatting with extra periods.)

.

The Way the Season Goes Sometimes:

.

a flock of yellow warblers

fills a willow just as a few commas

of yellow leaves appear;

then yellow in the birches,

on the hearts of zucchini leaves,

in the ring of petals of a late sunflower,

or an agate shaped tomato.

.

Then the sky: yellow to orange

to deep rose, the dusky smudge

of clouds on the horizon, above white

peaks, the jig-saw at the edge

of our sight.

.

We should have known. The season

teeters on brilliance; noon

gleams with light, the blue

stretch of sky, the tease–near

warmth–of September.

.

In our hurry, these days,

to stack wood, put away

the hose, eat all the lettuce

we can, something falls

from a pocket, or flutters

from a car door to the ground.

A few white flakes zig-zag

down. The things we drop

get buried in forgetful fluff

for months to come, wait

.

for our return,

shaking off the journey

through winter,

to emerge.

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And this from Claire:

30

A vegan sheet cake cooked with love
before I even knew you
braces, bowl cut, tie-dyed shirt
a photo that didn’t capture the beauty of the moment

the cook since married and gone
mother of two, distant and unknowable
those singing to you, now scattered across the country.
It is the last day of September and I’m in California
watching the fog push up against the hills
and reveling in the last days of summer.
But superimposed on the San Francisco sun is an eastern fall
and despite it all my mouth fills with the memory of melted wax on frosting.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

September 22, 2009

First snow.

In the morning, when I went to feed the horses, the sky was flat gray and a drop or two of drizzle fell—not enough to wet the hay I threw out to them, but enough to serve as a warning.  The greenhouse was still above 40 degrees and I gambled that the snow that had been predicted would hold off till I came home from school in the afternoon.  But as I was packing my laptop and finishing my coffee and getting ready to leave for my 9:45 class, I noticed the first bit of white fluff among the quickening rain, as if someone were shaking a down jacket with a tear—a few fat flakes mixed among the gray.  So, instead of leisurely swallows of coffee, I went out on the deck and brought in the still-blooming geraniums, the pots of thyme, oregano, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, then took scissors and snipped clusters of still-green sungold tomatoes from the deck tomato plants.

Tonight, I went to dinner with Sam’s former owner, Kathy, and Avrille, who rode Sam two summers ago and who just had a baby. Avrille’s mother was visiting the new, three-week-old grandson—the occasion for the dinner, and we sat in Kathy’s living room in the gray light of gathering dusk mixed with snow and talked about horses, babies, dogs.  Kathy’s elderly appaloosa, Prince, wandered in the yard outside the window, grazing on the last of the summer’s grass, his back gray from the rain.  I held Oscar, the baby, for a long time, feeling his sleepy breathing and letting myself drift on the conversation and the gathering night.

We forget about night in the summers here.  We expect to be outside in the light at all hours, in mild air, and amidst the rampant green of our gardens.  Now, after the fall equinox, we begin to realize the inevitable—night is overtaking us.  We are leaving the realm of the outer, the literal, the sun-edged and settling down to the dream-like state of winter.  Not yet, not quite yet—the leaves are still orange-gold, the grass green and spiky, the sunflower still has buds, the broccoli has new sprouts, and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are just turning from green to yellow to red.

When I got home, I gave the horses an extra layer of spruce shavings and filled a five-gallon jug with hot water and took it to the greenhouse to counteract what temperatures night might bring.  I said a thank-you to the still blooming petunias that may not make tonight.  I contemplated all the chores that need to be done before snow settles in for real for the winter: rolling up the hose, taking up the portable electric fence that let Mattie and Sam graze the lawn, covering the horse trailer with a tarp, plugging in the water tank heater, and, sigh, emptying out the greenhouse.  I’ll bring a few pepper and eggplant plants in to coax a bit more growth, and pick the remaining Black Krim, Chianti Rose, and Pompeii Roma tomatoes to ripen in a drawer for the rest of fall.   Then there are the root crops—and once again, I may be chopping them out from under a frozen top layer of dirt.

So much to do, and, now that there’s night, I just want to curl up under a quilt and sleep till spring.

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We Tempt Our Luck

September 21, 2009

The title poem from my new chapbook,  We Tempt Our Luck:

We Tempt Our Luck


Where we walk

there’s sun over everything:

a field of purple vetch,

yarrow, the peppery smell

of July.  Still heat, still

glinting light, still green

leaves–jagged, feathery–

but the day’s slipped

a little south now;

beneath all, a whisper

of cool.

We know what will come.

The fields lie mowed, the barley

raked in gray-green rows

for the baler.  The next field’s

plowed for seeding.  The mushroom

backs of cranes move

like shadows, dinosaur

necks stretch down

for bits of grain, insects.

A boy sits in the road

beside them, writing, dreaming

wanting his luck to stay.

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Poetry Challenge 29

September 13, 2009

Hidden Things

Yesterday, among the zucchini leaves, I found a large zuke, as long as my forearm, lying in the dirt under a yellowing leaf.  It had been there a while.  There were pale scallop-edged patches where voles had gnawed through the skin.  I had no idea it was there, and it felt like discovering a mysterious treasure.

So, write about something that has been hidden, but emerges–an object, a feeling, a person.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

September 7, 2009

A lovely evening tonight.

Around 10pm, I went out to take a bag of spruce shavings to the horses to bed down their run-in shed. The air was cooling enough that I wore my horse club hoodie, but I still wore shorts. The sky was still clear—had been clear since Thursday—and there was a deep aqua light in the northwest sky, fading to cobalt to the south. It was deep dusk, but I could see well enough to drag the black plastic bag of shavings under the fence to the run-in shed and divide it between the two stalls. As I walked back to the corral, I could see Sam’s coat gleam in the fading light where he nibbled the last of his evening’s hay. Mattie, in her side of the corral, was a blacker spot in the deepening darkness. Above the southeast horizon floated an egg-shaped gibbous moon, pale orange, as if about to hatch more of the deep yellow birch and aspen leaves that we’re seeing increase each day. As I walked past Sam, back to the house, it felt like a pause in time, as if the season had hit a balance, a perfect pose like the moment a dancer poses in arabesque on pointe and we catch our breath and believe she can stay in that balance forever. I could stay in this season forever if it would delay what is to come.

We were haying all weekend. Yesterday we went out to the Quist farm at the end of Rosie Creek Road, the fields spread out green on a rolling bench of land along the Tanana River. To get there, we drive along a pot-holed dirt road through spruce and birch, past five-acre “homesteads,” then suddenly there’s the farm, the green fields striped with darker raked hay or dotted with squares of ten bales that tip out of the small trailer towed by the baler. Yesterday, the hay was still too wet, so today we gathered up another crew: Mike, Ira, Tobin, Peter, me, and rattled through the dust and potholes to the farm, then filled the trucks one-by-one with brome hay. The bales were still a bit heavy but dry enough that they (I hope) won’t start to mold before freeze up.

It was nearly seventy—not too hot, but warm and dry enough to dry the hay. We took turns tossing and stacking, and those of us not driving a particular truck, sat on the bales as we drove along the field from square to square. Rufus the farm dog came running up to check on us sometimes, and at the end of the field, a flock of a half dozen sandhill cranes moved slowly over the cut grass, their necks snaked down to find insects in the dirt.

When we showed up in our yard with truckloads of hay, Sam whinnied. He’s in the front side of the corral today, though I’ve been switching them about once a week to keep them entertained. When Mattie’s in the front and hay arrives, she leans into the fence and stretches her neck as long as she can to grab a mouthful as the truck backs up to the hay barn. Sam stood and watched intently, waiting for us to bring some to him. This says a lot about the difference between the two.

After we stacked the hay—the harder part of the job. I made a big bowl of penne pasta with tomato and Italian sausage sauce and carrots and purple and yellow cauliflower from the garden as finger food. We sat on the deck in the gathering dark, looking out across the river at the Tanana flats—gold patches of bright birch and aspen, dark streaks of spruce—the gold and dark green together are especially dramatic now. I said, “Sometimes I wish it could stay like this for a whole season.” Usually these colors fade in a week or two, usually with the first September rains. Then I realized that if the yellow were around long enough, we’d get tired of it and long for snow—or, as I am now, for spring again.

Robert Frost knew about yellow things: “Nothing gold can stay,” he says in his tiny poem about early spring leaves, dawn, and the sweet melancholy of transitions. For now we revel in the gold of our leaves–like the sun reflecting back to us twice—and we store it up to get us through the dark winter days ahead.

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