Monte Rio

Monte Rio

I lived for awhile at Monte Rio,

A tiny town on the Russian River;

A bar, a grocery store, and not much more;

Oh yeah, there was a movie theater,

A small, refurbished comfy Quonset hut

That stood near a quiet intersection.

Time and season are an intersection

Like when the quince bloom at Monte Rio

Beside a falling-down, abandoned hut,

Beside the smooth-flowing Russian River,

Where old growth forest remains a theater

Whose ever-changing scenes always promise more.

I’ve heard several times that less is more –

A deer is crossing the intersection

Which looks like an abandoned theater,

The ghosts of burned out buildings at Monte Rio,

The moonlit flow of the Russian River,

The silent presence of an empty hut.

A crow lands upon the roof of the hut,

The ‘caw’ of the crow, silence, nothing more;

There’s a glass-smooth silence from the river,

An angel crosses the intersection,

No cars on the bridge at Monte Rio,

Closed doors at the Quonset hut theater.

Raccoons dance on the beach, like a theater,

As a possum exits a nearby hut

Bats fly swiftly above Monte Rio

While a feral cat looks for a few more

Scraps at the town’s only intersection

Not far from the moon-filled Russian River.

There are seasonal moods of a river,

Watching them’s like watching a theater,

Or people crossing an intersection,

Or shadows on the wall of an old hut,

Shadows on the wall that won’t last for more

Than a few hours as the sun sets at Monte Rio.

At Monte Rio the Russian River

Flows for eons like an endless theater

Past the hut at the intersection of dream and time.

Dawn in the Land of Unknowing

Dawn in the Land of Unknowing

I’m at peace in the early morning hours,

That’s why I like to wake up at sunrise,

Or, even better, a few hours before.

When I go for a walk there is a glow

That slowly grows at the horizon’s edge

As the stars and satellites fade from sight.

Frequent morning walks attune me to the sight

Of the subtle differences in the hours

That form a kind of borderland, or edge,

That separates night from day with the sunrise.

I feel a sense of holiness, a glow,

A calm presence that I’ve known from before.

Like a familiar face from years before,

A recollection that is strong as sight;

A scene from childhood, a campfire’s glow,

The time spent with Dad, uncountable hours,

Camping by ponds that glowed with the sunrise,

That kept me from falling off childhood’s edge.

The borders of the sea, its tidal edge,

Ebbs and flows; where you thought it was before

It disappears in the hours of sunrise.

What once appeared obvious to one’s sight

Becomes, in the accumulated hours,

Remote, like a small candle’s distant glow.

Young lover’s meet, their faces all aglow

While around them the snow softens the edge,

The hedges, fences, the claims on the hours

No longer have the power they had before

Like a door that opens onto the sight

Of returning swans in flight at sunrise.

A time that’s between, the time of sunrise,

When the clouds above capture the sun’s glow.

It’s when Enoch walked with God and the sight

Of creation drew him beyond the edge

Into luminous unknowing before

Day and night and time, before there are hours.

Sometimes a sunrise seems to last for hours,

There’s a glow before dawn when things seem to pause

At the edge of the sight of the unknown.

For Philip Sidney

For Philip Sidney

 

As I mentioned in a previous post, it was Donald Justice who first planted in my mind the idea that I might find the sestina form of interest.  Justice published three sestinas in his New and Selected Poems.  I enjoyed all of them.  One of the sestinas is ‘Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees’.  In that sestina Justice takes the six endwords that Kees uses in a sestina written by Kees and then uses them as the basis for his own sestina.  I was intrigued by that idea.  I thought it a good way to approach the sestina form.  So I tried out using the endwords of other poets in the same way that Justice uses the endwords of Kees’s sestina for his own.  It reminds me of composers who write a series of variations on a theme written by another composer.

Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586) wrote one of the earliest sestina in English.  It is titled ‘Ye Goatherd Gods’.  It is written as a dialogue between two people.  Interestingly, it is a double sestina consisting of twelve six-line verses and a three-line envoi.  The cycle of endwords is repeated twice.  It is skillfully done and a pleasure to read.  I decided to compose a sestina using Sidney’s six endwords as a way of expressing my appreciation for the gifted poet.

For Philip Sidney

I like to journey into the mountains

Far above the bustle of the valleys,
Even above the realm of the forests
Where sky, rock, and air share divine music,
Where the sun sings the song of the morning
Where the moon sings the song of the evening.

We retreat to our homes in the evening,

Even when our homes are in the mountains;
Then we will leave our homes in the morning,
We’ll have a busy day in the valleys
With a break or two for songs and music
While we gaze upon the distant forest.

In a dream I wandered through a forest,

In the dream it was a moon-lit evening,
In the dream I heard some distant music,
In the dream the shadows cast by mountains
Completely covered the entire valley,
Then the light dissolved them in slow morning.

I lit incense at my altar, I was mourning.

Crowds of memories were dense like a thick forest.
I decided to stay away from the valley
And held a static vigil for the whole evening,
A vigil that felt to me like climbing mountains
Against a wind that thoroughly drowned all music.

The world is silence, the world is music,

You can hear both of them in the morning.
The world has deserts, the world has forests,
Above them both there’s a range of mountains.
The world has plains and the world has valleys,
Both of them are covered by the evening.

At times I take shelter in the valley

Listening to contrapuntal music.
At times I watch the day become evening,
At times I’ll watch as night becomes morning,
At times I need the solace of the forest,
Sometimes I need the silence of the mountains.

Mountains and valleys resemble music,

Melodies from an ever present forest,
A chorus heard at the turn of morning and at the turn of evening.

Sears Tower

Sears Tower

Years ago I worked in the Sears Tower;

At that time the tallest building in the world,

At that time it wasn’t even finished,

Construction continued on the top floors

Where the city looked small and diminished

And distant parks looked like single flowers.

I do not remember any flowers

In the countless corridors of the Tower.

Flowers looked out of place and diminished

In the technologically sealed world

Consisting of elevators and floors,

Corridors and doors that never finished.

Though things look solid they are soon finished;

Petals that are falling from some flowers

Landing one by one on a wooden floor.

Things are like the Tarot’s Blasted Tower;

A change of perspective on our whole world,

From distant space it will look diminished.

Sometimes our lives seem small and diminished,

Like there’s nothing left, that all is finished;

But in unexplored regions of the world

There is beauty in some unseen flowers

And glacier-carved granite cliffs that tower

Above a forest on the valley floor.

Before there were walls, before roofs and floors,

Before our lives were timed and diminished,

Before there were words, before the Tower

Of Babel was completed and finished,

Spaciousness bloomed into countless flowers,

Into countless dreams and numberless worlds.

Is there anyone who comprehends the world?

The vastness of the cosmos leaves me floored.

The whole world is but a single flower

The source of which is never diminished,

Whose beauty never fades, is never finished

Like an eternal flame in a distant tower.

A crystal tower reflecting the whole world,

From the smallest flower to everything that’s finished –

We walk on floors of emptiness that cannot be diminished.

Country Sestina

Country Sestina

I can see you are about to leave me,

I see in your eyes there are other skies,
Already traces of all those faces
That we used to share are becoming rare,
I’ve begun to fade to something you’d trade,
Things we used to say are just yesterdays.

Isn’t that the way?  Night will follow day.

Seaside memories of just you and me,
A painting I made I’ll now sell or trade,
Though sometimes my eyes see you in the sky
I no longer care that these visions are rare
And that special place no longer holds your face.

At first I would pace, thinking of your face,

Through the month of May, through those empty days,
I no longer care, pacing now is rare,
There’s always T.V. to keep me from me
(I have become shy of the nighttime sky)
E-commerce was made for hours-soaking trade.

Some feelings don’t fade, some things we can’t trade,

We can’t replace a particular face,
There’s no reason why I recall that sky,
Or that I replay what were better days,
Or that old oak tree where you spoke to me,
That is where I dared to think this was rare.

The seasons declare moments that are rare,

Something made from clay that we will not trade,
An afternoon free just for you and me,
The pleasing trace left by a smiling face,
In the sunlight rays autumn leaves and days,
From a mountain high the endless blue sky.

So now I will try to dwell in the sky,

I’ll leave my despair for spaciousness that’s rare,
Through a veil of haze I’ll forget these days,
A long past parade I’ll easily trade;
Dreams without a trace, a forgotten face,
Lost in a vast sea, memories and me.

The thought of me disappears in the sky,

A faceless ev’rywhere like a rare sigh,
A trade for those days at the end of why.

The Number Five

The Number Five

I met the number five today

While walking through a city park
He said he was just visiting,
He was both shimmering and dark.

Shadows will blend into the dark

As when the dusk displaces day,
At such times there comes visiting
Five angels in the city park.

Lovers are walking through the park,

They feel at ease in the dark,
They don’t know they’re just visiting,
Five hours away, the break of day.

What is the number for today?
Five flowers blossom in the park,
For a season they’re visiting,
Stars are shimmering in the dark.

 

 

Goat Rock Beach

Goat Rock Beach

I like to walk on the beach by the sea

Along the coast of Sonoma County

I enjoy feeling the give of the sand

Where the continent ends, gives up on land,

Watching the ebbing and flowing of waves,

Feeling the flow of the wind in my hand.

I can remember walking hand-in-hand

On a summer afternoon by the sea

As dreams of the future rolled in like waves

Along the coast of Sonoma County

The wind has carved strange-shaped cliffs from the land,

The wind steadily shifts the shore-side sand.

The wind slowly turns the cliffs into sand,

Like yesterdays dissolving in one’s hand,

Streams that change course from an earthquake on land,

Displaced landscapes from tsunami tossed seas,

Along the coast of Sonoma County

The lunar tides and the sound of the waves.

The last time I saw you I paused to wave

The way I sometimes will pause on the sand

Along the coast of Sonoma County

A friend of mine needed a helping hand

With the great catch he retrieved from the sea

A long way from the sight of steady land.

Some things feel firm, they feel like steady land;

We can’t see that mountains are tides and waves,

That granite cliffs ebb and flow like the sea,

That even a diamond will become sand,

Like the grains that flow through visitors’ hands

Along the coast of Sonoma County.

Along the coast of Sonoma County

Where sky, cliff, and stream, where ocean and land

Meet each other like two friends clasping hands,

The sound of the wind, the sound of the waves,

The shifting of clouds, the shifting of sand,

The grand full moon’s light brightens the vast sea.

By the seacoast of Sonoma County

The sand is all that is left of the land –

I wave at a whale with my raised right hand.

When an Angel Descends

When an Angel Descends

As I stand on the shore of the river,

Memories and recollections and dreams,
Snatches and patches of songs I once heard
Blend with the glow of the leaves that shimmer
In the wind-tossed fading light of sunset,
A moment I treasure and won’t forget.

As I get older I tend to forget,

My mind resembles a flowing river,
The shifting colors observed at sunset,
The sound of a voice heard in last night’s dream,
The way a desert in mid-day shimmers,
A single verse from a song I once heard.

On the tundra plain a caribou herd,

A scene from my past I will not forget,
Crosses a glacier-fed stream that shimmers,
Sunlight sparkling on the flowing river,
Transforming the tundra into a dream
As the sun slows down for a long sunset.

The musicians start to play a new set,

A striking new melody is now heard,
A melody that’s from the realm of dreams,
A melody not easy to forget,
A melody, a song, from the river,
A melody that makes silence shimmer.

Gabriel descends, wings all a-shimmer,

Many hours after the sun has set,
His wings move like the flow of a river,
The sound of a celestial harp is heard,
A sound, a sight, I will never forget,
A vision I’ll carry into my dreams.

What is the waking world?  What is a dream?

Between them’s a barrier that shimmers;
Something unseen, something I can’t quite get,
Something I can’t grasp, something like sunset,
Something like a melody I once heard
While canoeing on a placid river.

On the river of dreams I once heard
Shimmering choirs during a long sunset –
A gift freely given that I won’t forget.

For Cold Mountain

The Tang Dynasty poet Cold Mountain, Han Shan, is one of my favorite poets.  Cold Mountain has been a companion of mine for decades.  He has been a big influence on my own poetry and continues to be a nourishing presence.  Here is a sestina dedicated to Cold Mountain:

For Cold Mountain

On the river

Always flowing

Silver moonlight
Autumn glowing
In the distance
Mountain stillness

Mountain stillness

By the river
In the distance
Always flowing
Fall leaves glowing
Under moonlight

Under moonlight

Mountain stillness
Fall leaves glowing
By the river
Always flowing
In the distance

In the distance

Under moonlight
Always flowing
Mountain stillness
By the river
Fall leaves glowing

Fall leaves glowing

In the distance
By the river
Silver moonlight
In the stillness
Always flowing

Always flowing

Fall leaves glowing
In the stillness
In the distance
Silver moonlight
On the river

On the river

Always flowing
Silver moonlight
Ever glowing
In the distance
Mountain stillness

 

Feral

Feral

In the stream a moss-covered log
Can be seen through the morning fog
Deepening pervasive silence
I briefly see a feral dog.

Through the field trots a feral dog
Past the shadow of a huge log,
A door shuts, otherwise silence --
In the distance the coastal fog.

Sometimes my mind is thick with fog
Or distracted, a feral dog,
That's when I return to silence,
Silence like a moss-covered log.

A tree has now become a log
Wrapped in the gentle, swirling fog
Surrounded by fields of silence
Where soundly sleeps a feral dog.

 

Kaleidoscope: A Few Thoughts about the Sestina

Kaleidoscope: A Few Thoughts about the Sestina

1.

I have been writing a lot of sestinas lately.  I find the form attractive.  The form is a balance between rigor and freedom; I mean that the primary requirement of the form is a pre-determined placement of the endwords as the stanzas unfold.  At the same time, everything else is open to the poet’s creativity.

2.

Part of my attraction to the sestina is that the form occupies a unique place in contemporary poetry.  It is the one place where both formalists and free versers meet.  It is intriguing to me that poets such as Ezra Pound and John Ashberry can write sestinas, while at the same time Auden and Donald Justice can also write sestinas.  In other words, the form of the sestina is open enough to allow for multiple approaches to poetic construction.  If you are a formalist, you can compose a sestina using metrical lines and rhyme.  If you prefer free verse, you can compose a sestina with lines of irregular count and without the use of rhyme.  And both approaches produce sestinas that are recognizable examples of the form.

Since I am attracted to a syllabic approach, I apply syllabics to the sestina form.  Principally, I do this by maintaining a consistent syllable count for all of the lines.  At times I will change count for a particular stanza; but within the stanza all lines have the same count.  And I have found that the sestina is welcoming to a syllabic approach.

3.

I think of the sestina as a kaleidoscope of words.  The endwords cycling through the stanzas resembles, to my mind, the way that elements in a kaleidoscope will shift and cycle through various configurations as one turns the scope.  To my mind the visual effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the sonic effect of the way the endwords in a sestina shift and change position in relationship to each other.

4.

Exploring what other people have done with the sestina, I discovered that some poets have applied to the process of endword rotation to verses with different numbers of lines.  The classic sestina has six line verses, concluding with a three-line envoi.  There are six of these six-line stanzas, and when one adds the closing three lines, that makes for a 39-line poem.

Some poets have adopted the process of the sestina to three-line poems, calling these shorter poems ‘tritina’.  A five-line version will be called a pentina, etc.

I discovered that the founder of the sestina, the troubadour Arnaud Daniel, called the form a ‘cledisat’, in the French dialect of his time.  ‘Cledisat’ means something like ‘interlock’.  The term ‘sestina’ came after the form was adopted by the Italians; the term ‘sestina’ refers to the six-line stanzas.

I like the term ‘interlock’; I think it describes well the way the endwords of the form are interwoven, or ‘locked’ into each other as they turn around each other.  So I began to think of the form as defined by the rotational scheme of the endwords and that this rotational scheme could be applied to a poem of any number of lines.  From this perspective a sestina is a six-line interlock.

5.

Each of the interlocks has unique features.  For example, I discovered that with the four-line interlock the endword for line three retains its position through all of the rotations.  Here is how it works:

1        4        2        1 (envoi)

2        1        4        2
3        3        3        3
4        2        1        4

This gives the endword for line three special significance as the other endwords rotate around it.  I found this particular type of interlock especially attractive.

6.

I wonder if the place that the sestina interlock holds in the world of poetry today tells us something about our poetic culture at this time.  Normally we think of the different approaches to poetry as combative and distinct.  Yet here we have a form that seems to be a common ground.  This indicates that there does exist a place where the conflicting views of how poetry works, and how it should be constructed, do not create a barrier to accessing this particular form.

It is intriguing to me, for example, that many free verse poets are willing to accept the restrictions of the sestina.  Does this tell us something about free verse that, perhaps, we have overlooked?  And the modern revival of the sestina among formalists, and their willingness to engage with this form that also attracts those who compose in a free verse manner, may tell us something about formal verse at this time as well.  It is not clear to me exactly what that is; but perhaps that will become clearer in time.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the exploration of this common ground.

 

Armstrong Woods

Armstrong Woods

My fav’rite place on earth is Armstrong Woods.

Old growth groves of redwoods are very rare,

A slower flow of time is present there,

The constant cool and stillness of the air

Resembles a cathedral of quiet

With filtered sunlight scattered on the paths.

Walking on a winding woodland path

Under the giant trees of Armstrong Woods

I experience palpable quiet,

Something that in our noise-filled world is rare

(Ordinarily, noise fills the air)

But human noise is an intrusion there.

Once I found countless orchids scattered there

At the base of redwoods beside a path;

I heard a high bell-like sound in the air,

A soft rustling whisper at Armstrong Woods,

Like a song heard just once, a song that’s rare,

A sound, a song, that merged with the quiet.

There exists an interior quiet,

A grove that’s found within the heart and there

One enters into a stillness that’s rare.

It’s discovered by following a path

That resembles the paths of Armstrong Woods.

It’s our inheritance; we are all heirs.

It’s a grace, freely given, like the air,

A place where all human thought is quiet,

It is the mind and heart of Armstrong Woods

And if I could I would always stay there,

This grove of peace at the end of the path;

But in truth my spare moments there are rare.

But it’s enough to have this glimpse that’s rare,

To rest in the peacefulness of the air

After walking the meandering paths

That emerge in solitude, in quiet,

In luminosity found only there,

The grove of the heart, the grove of Armstrong Woods.

Scatter my ashes at Armstrong Woods,

Scatter my ashes on the quiet path that’s there,

In the cool air, in the quiet that’s rare.

My Alaska

My Alaska

I have never really left Alaska.

Its geography is fixed in my heart;

How the aurora on a winter night

Will take flight, stretching across the whole sky,

Or how the sly midnight sun casts shadows

Across a free-flowing wilderness stream.

All I have to do is sit by a stream

And like a remembered dream, Alaska,

Appearing out of memories’ shadows,

Memories that lie deep within my heart,

Take shape like the moon in the autumn sky

When thin clouds depart on a windy night.

In winter the day hours are mostly night,

It’s easy to walk on a frozen stream.

An owl will take flight in the silent sky

Above the taigascape of Alaska

The Brooks Range, like a slowly beating heart,

Casts deep, dark, and slowly moving shadows.

When snow begins to melt in the shadows

And the flood of sunlight reduces night,

The sight of flowing water cheers the heart

And people launch canoes upon the streams,

Both great and small, that criss-cross Alaska.

Heading north, a flock of swans in the sky.

Days arrive, long and warm with sun-filled sky,

When it seems as if there are no shadows

To be found anywhere in Alaska,

And people sleep less during the brief night,

Listening to the sound of nearby streams

That seems to soothe a busy mind and heart.

Cold comes quickly and falls upon the heart.

Winds start to pull the leaves into the sky.

All those years have slipped by me like a stream

Increasingly covered by long shadows.

I’m swiftly approaching that endless night,

The sight of the tundra of Alaska.

An Alaska lives deep within my heart.

During the night while standing on the sky

Shadows from the past like a stream flow by.

Obligations

Obligations

I keep thinking of things that I should do

After work is done and the day is through,

But my mind works better in the morning.

My mind seems to shut down with the sunset.

I used to stay up all night with the owls.

Now I greet the dawn along with the larks.

The stark winterscape, the absence of larks,

Thinking about debt and bills that are due,

From the oak outside the hoot of an owl

Which lasted for hours is finally through,

Like the darkness at the edge of sunset

When the world pauses, a kind of mourning.

The stars pale, a warning of morning,

In summer the dawn is welcomed by larks,

A new day forgets yesterday’s sunset,

I check my new phone for things I should do,

I’ll stop for some gas as I’m passing through –

Overhead, silently gliding, an owl.

Athena is often seen with an owl,

Because dream wisdom flees in the morning

Unless with the dawn we have a breakthrough;

A new insight, or song, like the light-greeting lark,

Dispeller of dark, welcome of dew,

Whose hours are few, long gone by sunset.

Watching Dad build a campfire, his son’s set

On growing up fast.  The sound of an owl

Sounds like music. There is nothing to do

On a bridge of dreams until the morning

When they wake up to the song of a lark

As the stark rays of the sun cut the fog through.

I had a thought – it was a through and through.

It disappeared like the light of sunset.

There was a mountain – it’s gone like a lark

That is replaced by the night by the owl

Who in turn is gone at dawn, at morning,

When starlight can still be seen in the dew.

Life has obligations, things we must do;

Starting with morning on through to sunset,

From the song of the lark to the call of the owl.

A Dream of Home

A Dream of Home

In a dream I was standing on the moon

Watching the earth rise on a field of stars.

It felt completely natural, like home,

Though there was no one else, I was alone.

There was an atmosphere, the wind was warm

And I did not have to wear a space suit;

I wore shoes, pants, a shirt; which seemed to suit

The situation.  It seemed that the moon

Was like the Arizona desert; warm,

Stark, silent, with a nightscape thick with stars.

In such a place you aren’t really alone,

There’s the feeling that the cosmos is your home.

The moonscape felt familiar, like home,

Or the strange way Dad’s hand-me down suit

Fits just right.  Sometimes, when I am alone,

I will look up at the face of the moon,

Or, if the moon is new, at the bright stars,

And feel within a touch that’s kind and warm.

The first spring wind is singularly warm,

And there are places you’ll always call home,

Distant galaxies give birth to new stars,

While these cleaning rags were once a new suit

That I wore while dancing under the moon,

A memory that says I’m not alone.

Solitude does not mean being alone,

That’s why my lunar solitude was warm,

That’s why the rocks and dust upon the moon

Looked like the furnishings one finds at home,

Or clothes hung in a closet, shirts and suits,

Or the sparkling light of the summer stars.

Some seasons are known only by the stars,

Though distances are great stars aren’t alone.

Yesterday a friend bought me a new suit.

At the memorial it felt warm,

The service took place in her old wood home;

After, people lingered until the moon,

The summer moon, and the numberless stars,

Like a perfect suit for a night that’s warm,

Touched us with a type of grace that’s felt at home when we’re alone.