The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 31, 2011

My grandmother has been in my dreams lately.  She was a woman who painted, gardened, swam daily, and taught me to eat with the right fork.  I’ve been puzzling over her sudden return to my sleeping life.  Then, this week, I learned that a dear friend I met in my twenties, a painter, calligrapher, gardener, who also knew about the right fork and who spent her entire life living her own way, is in hospice care with terminal cancer.  Now, it seems clear that, in the way of dreams, she and my grandmother have conflated and that she, Kim, was tugging at the fabric of the collective unconscious to let me know that she was in this transitional time.

I will write more about Kim later.  Some of you reading this blog know her, by coincidence.  She would be abashed to know that I am writing about her.  For now, I’ll post this recent poem about my grandmother and, I see now, about Kim McDodge.

——————————-

I Dream of My Grandmother in a Frank Lloyd Wright House

 

The roof pebbled flat,

the rectangular windows,

white stucco walls.

 

Inside, the light, underwater green,

filtered through curtains.

 

I find she

isn’t  home.  She has gone

somewhere interesting

in a big car.

 

On the table:

her bracelets, a necklace,

a few crushed tissues,

a filmy scarf,

dull gold.  And pens

and magazines, detritus

of a life–

 

she can’t wait any

longer for me.  I stand

with my intentions

smelling the stale air

in the house—or

is it the exhale

of her impatience

as she gathered up her keys?

 

In any case, she is off,

driving away

her own self, now,

headed to a gathering

of clear minds

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

Dancing in the North

March 25, 2011

Spring Gala White on White

Tomorrow night, the North Star Ballet dancers will perform in their annual Spring Gala—a little early this year.  They will be performing Snow White—a ballet set to a composite of music, retelling the story in a way that allows the Senior Company dancers to take on more roles.  There’s a cat, complete with tail, who leaps about, bossing the dwarves around.  And there’s Snow White, herself, and the wicked stepmother Queen.  I’ll go Sunday to see the final performance—tomorrow is the John Haines memorial—but I’ll really be waiting for the second half of the show.

It’s not a bait and switch, exactly, but it has always seemed to me that Norman does the choreography that really engages and stretches him and the dancers in the second half of the Spring Gala.  While the story ballet in the first half lures in the parents with kids who want to dance, the second half demonstrates just how technically developed and with how much range the North Star dancers are.

This year, the company is doing John Luther Adams’ “Dream of White on White”—a ballet in unitards to Adams’ geography-inspired music, spare, luminous, with chime-like tones inspired by the Aeolian harp which make tones as the wind blows through it.  As the dancers move, the lighting changes—the ballet provides a chance for Kade Mandelowitz to use washes of colored light as integral to the play of sound and motion.

I have seen this piece several times before, but when I heard the first notes through the thin studio walls one night as I was doing plies in Adult Ballet, I felt happy with anticipation.  The next week, as I was changing and the girls were in the dressing room preparing for rehearsal, I asked them how they liked it.

“It’s interesting,” they said.  One even said it was cool.  These are ballet girls, used to dance that imitates flight, that defies gravity, poised and tall on the small square-inch toe of a pointe shoe.  Often, ballet trained dancers don’t adjust to the earth-hugging Modern style, but these kids do.  They go at it with all the precision of a ballet dancer—and the dance reflects their ability and their connection with the place they live.  They are all Alaskan kids, after all.

There are other pieces in the second half, including the technical, fast-moving Tarantella.  At the end of Sunday’s performance, the kids will gather behind the curtain and hug each other and cry.  Their parents and friends will take photos of them, clustered together, mascara streaking below their eyes, clutching roses and carnations.

There are a few seniors graduating and moving on, but coming along behind them are a larger group of younger dancers, mid training, with lots of North Star performances ahead of them.  They may get teary-eyed, too, not knowing why, but I do.  They have the chance to dance to the work of a living composer, moving to choreography set just for them.  It’s an opportunity so rare that they won’t fully understand it till years later.

But those of us watching will.

Come watch these dancers and hear John’s music tomorrow, March 26 at 2 or 8pm or Sunday, March 27 at 2pm.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Dancing in the North | Leave a Comment »

Poetry Challenge 65

March 22, 2011

We are well into the season of light here in the Interior.   Everywhere, the sun intensifies the whiteness of snow, or gleams off the slick patches of ice still on the road since November’s ice storm.  The air is warm during the day–or warm for us, in the 40s.   On the south-facing sides of snowbanks, the light is carving away the packed snow into the shape of a wave, arching and crashing slowly, in one-frame-at-a-time stop animation, into summer still months away.

Today I heard MFA student Eddie Kim present his poetry thesis and thought about how his poems both invited the reader, like the March sun does, and kept the reader at a distance, like the ice patches, or the below zero nights.   A poem lures us in then pushes us back, surprises us, or challenges us.  Do we make the meaning for the reader?  Is the meaning only in what the reader brings to the poem?  Or like  sun on snow, do we carve a new shape, a new vision for the reader so imperceptibly that he or she is moved without even knowing why or how?

Write about something that moves you and something that pushes you back.  Write about something beautiful in something unlovely.  Write about the profound in the ordinary.

Post it as a comment and I’ll add it to this post.

——————————

Here’s a poem from Greg at 21st Romantic:

Makeup

She paints herself
in long lines
and short punctuations of color, swings
open drawers, blasts

the hairdryer through her
thick black hair, hair as heavy
as night, not like
the light fluff

of shadows. Her lancing–so
purposeful, so
crafted, as if
appearance could be everything

in Art–pricks a
question: how much
does appearance matter
to an Artist? Is she

like a cook
protecting a secret ingredient?
The same ingredient mothers
stir in potatoes? And so what

more could he offer her, then? As he
drapes his arms over her
shoulders like two long, white locks
of hair, curling; both faces

reflect in her vanity
mirror, smiling. What was the man guarding
when he instructed her, “look at the us that we
will never be”?

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 3 Comments »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 8, 2011

Still thinking of John Haines.  The days are brighter now.  The morning sun glows through the glass southeast wall as I sit with my back, warm, to it, grading a few more papers and sipping coffee with honey.  In the late afternoon, returning from classes, meetings, e-mail, I head down the straight east-west course of Chena Pump Road, built, so a railroad friend tells me, along the old railbed of the Tanana Valley Railroad. The sun is high enough around five o’clock to flare in my eyes, driving straight into it, and the ice still thick on the road from last November’s three-day ice storm shines in a mirror of the sun’s glare.

 

Sunday night, coming home around seven from a gathering, I noticed that the light in the sky was soft pale blue, a bit yellow toward the hills where the sun had set an hour before.   This is a tender light, silvery in texture, that lingers longer as the days edge toward spring and summer.  This is a light that passes quickly in places closer to the equator, but that those of us who live here relish—it’s a light that is soft as a slow exhale into spring.

 

I thought of John that night as I drove through that light along a four-lane highway past a cluster of box stores, most less than five years old, none more than ten years old.  John hated such things, though he liked his comforts when they were offered to him—a good meal, someone’s car to drive, an apartment with running water.   For the twenty minutes it took me to drive home, I watched the sky darken, imagining how he might have seen it.  The light, a complex mix of pastel blues, pinks, yellows, spread ahead of me to the west.  The spruces along the ridgeline as I drove closer made a dark jagged line like teeth or fur against the palest light.  The slim fingernail of moon hung low and slipped gradually toward the western hills. For the sixty some years John lived in the Interior, he had seen these things, or sights like them—but had seen them without fast roads or chain stores, even after they were built.  To him, the development of recent years was a temporary phase, while the land was—is—enduring.

 

It occurred to me, on that drive, that I had let the vision in John’s poems–the spare images of the north, its wildness, its curmudgeonly truths, its tenderness toward the fellowship of others in this difficult place—dim in my own passage through winter and summer.  After all, I live in—or pretty near—town.  I spend my days in a large institution surrounded by people and infernal computers.  I’m keeping this blog, if erratically.  John was a typewriter man, the manual kind with all the satisfaction that pounding on the keys could bring.  I think that, in recent years, he may have learned to write on a computer, but I know that he didn’t hesitate to share his distrust of modern technology, even while he made use of it.

 

John was a complex, difficult man, but now, with him a week gone, I find him in the spikes of spruce, the bite of cold in the morning, the gleam of March sun on snow.  By the south window, chickadees and redpolls dart up to the bird feeder.  The cat sits watching, tipping her head toward them as they swoop up and away.  I see the gray topline of the Alaska Range, irregular along the south horizon.  The valley and the flats stretch white, cross-hatched with darker spruce, all hundred fifty miles to the foothills of those peaks.  Out there, a musher may be following a trail John or someone he knew once followed.  The dogs rush on, panting, eager to lick at the wind they make.  The musher holds the sled and runs and rides behind.  The sky arcs over, darkening, with a hint of aurora, the ghosts of ancestors.  There’s John Haines.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | 2 Comments »

John Haines

March 3, 2011

I just got word that John Haines died today–or the day that just ended.  An article on the Fairbanks Daily News Miner’s website says he took a fall in December and never really recovered.  He died with friends around him here in Fairbanks.

Here’s a link to some of John’s poems.

I used to see John at events and in the hallway at the university.  Once John started going profoundly deaf, he became cranky, convinced that he wasn’t getting his due as a poet.  I believe he wasn’t, in part because he made it difficult for those who wanted to get to know him and for those who wanted to be his poetic peers.  But he appreciated a few things–good whiskey, good conversation, someone to set the mike levels properly for a reading, a bonfire now and again, attentive students, and friendships that stretched back to the more rugged days before the oil pipeline.

He had a melodious voice–almost too much so, since his audiences could become lulled by it in a warm room on a winter night.  His deafness dulled the edges of that voice so that his consonants disappeared and a sort of bass rumble took over.  When I organized readings for the Fairbanks Arts Association years ago, I would have him come in and read a bit about a half hour before the reading started, so I could adjust the sound levels on his voice, bumping up the treble to catch the consonants and lowering the bass.  Every time I did this, people would say it was the best Haines reading they had heard.  I don’t know if there are any recordings of his readings around, but he had friends in the music world–most notably John Luther Adams–so I imagine something of his voice remains behind.

Volumes of poems and essays do, and many students carry on the work of putting down the essence of the land and capturing in it the essence of human experience in the North and in the wider world.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Poetry Challenge 64

February 21, 2011

Winter Storm Advisory

Today I woke to small fast flakes falling straight down.  Out in the corral, the bottom rail of fence had disappeared under the top surface of the snow, and the wind swirled the falling and the accumulated snow from spruce branches into a gray mist above the impatient backs of the hungry horses.  When Jeter and I went out to feed them, we sank deep in it, fluffy and granular at once.  Out in the driveway, my car sat in snow up to the wheel wells.   Every step I took felt slowed-down and heavy, walking through all that knee-deep snow.  Jeter leapt from spot to spot rather than trying to walk in the stuff.

So, what should have been an ordinary Monday changed into a day spent shoveling snow, pushing it off the side of the driveway with snow scoops, then digging out the car and truck.   By late afternoon, we were done and sprawled out on the couch for a nap.

So, write about how the weather surprised you today–a small detail or an overwhelming one.  Write about the way that surprise changed a day, a moment, a thought.  See if a dog wanders through the poem.

—————

Here’s a response from Tim, a different take on snow:

 

I Jokes

I imagined that I chose to walk this morning
and found an old friend along the trail.
The frost bit our knuckles
when we each bared a right hand to shake
and ask “how’s the day?”
Snow fell down my collar, when I ducked
a branch so that we could walk side by side,
my breath taken for a moment.
Small things mattered: moose droppings on clean snow,
a weasel darting, angular and quick,
raven like a shade over our heads,
and the jokes we told, each trying
to insult the other: “how’s your wife,
and my kids?” nothing was sacred
except mothers.
For a long time we were loud and alive,
plumes of frosty laughter fogging the trail,
mukluks crunching crystals into hard pack,
pushing and pulling each other into diamond-hard willows
trying to win the day. Then the trail broke
into an open field; we had never walked this path.
Sun reflected off of the dust- soft snow,
so thick you knew it held the sound
of every small noise made in the night;
it was as if the light itself was noise
and the blanket of winter wanted the earth
to continue sleeping. Out of instinct, we tiptoed the periphery,
and told no jokes.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 2 Comments »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 16, 2011

Quest Finish

Still cold in the Interior.  The temperatures here on the ridge hovered around twenty below all day, slightly warmer than yesterday, but still cold to be out on the Chena River moving at a blazing five miles an hour behind a team of tired dogs.  As I went about my day of meetings and classes, phone calls and e-mails, part of my mind was always on the progress of mushers on the Quest trail.

At the end of the day, I logged back into the Quest site to discover that there was a new leader, Dallas Seavey, a twenty-three-year-old rookie who planned on using the Quest as a training race for the Iditarod.   Rookies usually run this tough race a few years before they end up in the top four, but  Seavey isn’t a real rookie.  His father, Mitch, has been running long-distance dogs for years, and he is following the family tradition.   His bio says he’s been training dogs his whole life and this flawless run shows it.

But this race has been like a novel with its interwoven threads of drama.  I keep thinking of Jack London, a writer too often overlooked in the American literary canon, perhaps because his work–at least the Northern stories–seems so romanticized.  The relationships between men and dogs in White Fang and Call of the Wild seemed romantic to me before I lived in Alaska in their suggestion of  deep attachment between human and dog, yet that attachment is what a long race like the Quest is all about.  There’s also the race between mushers and their ultimate enemy, the cold.   Even the strongest musher can become slow-moving and slow-witted if some accident of the trail leaves him or her chilled.  Ghatt’s plunge into overflow, Neff’s delay by a blizzard at the most daunting summit of the trail, these are the accidents of the North, the luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We follow the Quest because it reminds us of our own fragile peace with the cold and dark of winter.  The race comes at the first return of light in February, when we start to consider the return of spring.  But winter hasn’t let go yet, as the temperatures of the last few days show.  I drove home today in dimming afternoon.  Behind me to the east, towards Canada and the path the mushers were on, the sky was slaty blue, darkening quickly.  Ahead of me, to the west there was a watery pale light lingering over the ridge.  I had plans of building a fire in the stove, feeding Mattie and Sam, eating a bit, then heading down to the river to see the first place winner come gliding in toward the finish.

But luck has its own ways.  The house was cold and it took me a while to realize that we were out of fuel oil and needed to make a run back to town for a gas can full to tide us over till the truck can come out tomorrow.  On the way down the hill, we saw what looked like a house fire on the flats–floodlights and smoke and flashing red and blue lights.  Like the mushers, we need to pay attention to what’s around us, to the details of survival that keep us going.

We came home and got the boiler going again.  The window in the woodstove is flickering with birch flames; the house is heating slowly.  Phoebe, the cat, is curled under my arm as I type, one paw resting on the laptop, purring slowly.  The remaining mushers on the trail will continue to come in over the next few days, including the handful of women on the trail, who I’ll write more about tomorrow.

Till then, congratulations to Dallas and to Sebastien, who followed him in short order.  Congratulations and a scratch on the ears for all good dogs who pay attention to the trail and lead us on.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 14, 2011

Yukon Quest

The leaders of the Yukon Quest are a day away from their finish in Fairbanks, after a long week and a half on the trail from White Horse, Yukon Territory.  When they left White Horse, the weather was balmy for the Interior in February–temperatures above zero, clear skies.  But in the last day or two temperatures in Fairbanks have dropped to thirty below, and for the mushers along the trail now between Dawson and Circle, strung out along the frozen Yukon or attempting Eagle Summit, it is even colder–in some spots nearly fifty below.

What started as a glorious race, the front-runners in high spirits about their dogs and their abilities, takes a perilous turn at about this point.  One musher, a multiple Quest winner, Hans Ghatt, broke through overflow–where water breaks over thick ice above  a stream–and became wet to his shoulders.  When  the next musher came upon him, he was going into hypothermia, and heard the musher approach as in a dream.  The second musher helped him back to the checkpoint, where he learned that he had frozen a couple of fingers, and, knowing when to accept the luck he had, he scratched from the race.

The leader, Hugh Neff, seemed to be burning up the trail, hours ahead of the others, but the cold and a storm on Eagle Summit stalled him and a second musher, who caught up with him and stalled as well.  A third musher came and helped Neff’s team up the hill, but near the summit, they turned and retreated back down the hill.  Now, the leaders have switched positions, and Neff may or may not get back on the trail again.

Whenever I have a good reason to, I have my students read London’s story, “To Build A Fire,” which has special significance to them if they’ve been here a few winters or have grown up anywhere in Alaska.  In the story, the man is condemned by his insistence that reason is more reliable than the instincts of a dog.  Anyone who has followed the Quest knows differently.  The Quest dogs are hearts with legs and tails; they will do anything for their mushers, who, in turn, will do anything for their dogs.  One rookie musher sleeps in the hay along with her dogs when she camps at night.  Any Quest musher–even the toughest–gets teary eyed when talking about the dogs in the team.

So it’s tough on everyone when dogs die in the race, and they do.  Usually, after necropsy,it’s clear there’s a reason–an undetected weakness in a blood vessel, for example–but often the cause is unclear.  Like endurance horses or race horses, these dogs get constant veterinary care when they are at rest.  If there is any chance that a dog is ill or unfit, they are pulled from the race.  No mistreatment of dogs is tolerated by mushers or by race officials.  Still, the race itself is a risk,with long stretches of solitude, away from human contact.  Things happen.

The race is an elemental test of human and animal spirit–not for everyone.  And it’s starkly beautiful.  Photos of the teams running along the flat white highway of the Yukon against the backdrop of the river bluffs are dramatic and compelling.  There are few challenges that match it, even for an armchair follower like me.

Outside it’s dropping down below twenty below here on the ridge.  Mattie and Sam have long late-winter coats that keep them well-insulated, and I’ll head out before bedtime to take them another flake of hay.  I’ll look up at the waxing gibbous moon, if it’s still above the ridgeline behind the house, and think of those mushers on the trail, running and resting in the soft gray light, thinking of the hamburgers waiting for them at Angel Creek and of the flags on the Cushman Street bridge in Fairbanks, rising over the Chena River, the finish, and a well-deserved rest.  Any time they get there, someone will be there, cheering the dogs for a few more yards, welcoming them all home.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | 2 Comments »

Poetry Challenge 63

February 2, 2011

There’s more light on the corral every day now.  Each afternoon, as I leave campus, I take the measure of it–the level of dusk at 5 o’clock, or 4.  Soon, I’ll be able to come home with enough daylight to begin an evening longeing routine for Mattie and Sam, to get all of us in shape for riding season in May.

Last night, I ordered seeds–radishes, my favorite Chianti Rose tomatoes, Laciato kale, zukes and yellow crookneck squash, and an assortment of flowers that I may be able to convince to grow on the steep bank behind the house.

These are all signs of the easing of the season–and then there’s Groundhog Day.  I wrote about it here last year or the year before, but it’s a holiday that has a certain resonance in my memory of being a teenager in Central Pennsylvania: the smell of mud and manure, anticipating the first crocuses, and the ludicrous seriousness of the Slumbering Groundhog Lodge in Quarryville, PA.  I tell the story to my students every year–how the groundhog sees a blinding flash of light, sees his shadow, bolts back into his hole, and we have six more weeks of winter.  Or he doesn’t see the shadow and we have six more weeks till spring.  In either case, here in the Interior, we have three months till break-up, so we look for other signs–our moods lift, for example, as the sun cycles higher above the horizon.

You may be socked in with snow right now of mired in the bad news of the world.  What images keep you hopeful of spring?

Post a poem in response to this challenge and I’ll add it to this post.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 1 Comment »

Poetry Challenge 62

January 24, 2011

Shakespeare and (not yet) spring

The signs of the season–more light lingering in the afternoon, an orange sherbet color in the late afternoon sky, the luscious greens, reds, yellows of seed catalog photos, the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater Bardathon, the sparkle of snow now that the sun’s high enough in the sky to reflect from each crystal.  From Ocala, news of the birth of Fiddle’s newest foal, out of the stallion Shakespeare, named Bard of Avon–splay legged and already showing the high shoulders and strong haunches and just a hint of coil in the spine that can uncoil in a sprint down the track.  Not any where near spring, but far enough away from the darkest winter that we feel ourselves awaken to dream of spring.

Write about what gives you an inkling of hope, a sense of the change of season to come.  Or, like a new foal, what holds promise for the months and years ahead.  Post it in commments and I’ll add it here.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »