On Publishing

On Publishing

At the store where I work, a spiritual book and tea shop, we host events every Thursday.  A few weeks ago we hosted a poetry reading with two Native American poets; Kim Shuck and Duane Big Eagle.  It was an inspiring evening of poetry.

In talking with Duane Big Eagle both before and after the reading he informed me that he does not publish his poetry.  I know that some of his poetry has been anthologized, and he seems willing to let that happen.  But he has not made any effort to have a collection of his poetry published even though he is fairly well known in California and his poetry is admired.

I have run into this before.  It isn’t common, but I have seen it with a few poets; this reluctance to publish.  The quintessential example is Emily Dickinson.  Bill Albert is another example that I discovered recently.  He died in the late 80’s and his haiku were published by friends who gathered his haiku into book form.  Albert himself never made any effort to publish his haiku either in book form or by submitting them to haiku journals.  The Chinese poet Han Shan (Cold Mountain) is another example; his poems were gathered together by others and published after Han Shan died.  If you look for poets who were reluctant to publish you can find them here and there.

Talking to Duane Big Eagle gave me an occasion to think about my own mixed history with publication.  Early in my writing of renga I submitted some of my solo renga for publication.  Some were accepted by various haiku magazines.  Some were rejected, but the rejections were always very helpful and detailed.  I still have some annotations by Robert Speis on two renga I submitted to him; he rejected them but took a lot of time writing marginal notes which I read and learned from.  I also, in the early 80’s, submitted some haiku that were published.  And I was anthologized in a few books of haiku and renga.  And finally, when I began writing tanka I submitted some to a few journals and they were published (Denis Garrison was particularly encouraging.)

Then I began to pull away from submitting and pretty much stopped doing so altogether.  I don’t recall making a conscious decision in this regard.  The shift in attitude seems to have simply happened on its own, and I went with it.

Partly, I think, the pull away from submitting my poetry had to do with my own changing esthetic.  As I moved away from a free verse approach to haiku and renga I found the syllabic approach more and more rewarding.  But at the same time I had the realization that I was heading in a direction not shared by the journals and organizations noted for publishing this kind of poetry.  I began to see publication in them as, in a sense, entering alien territory.  That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I began to feel a sense of distance and estrangement from haiku and tanka publications and organizations.

I began to notice what the effect is of having a syllabic haiku published in a haiku journal dedicated to a free verse interpretation of haiku.  The effect is that the syllabic haiku simply looks like a free verse poem.  This is because the relationship to the other haiku does not mark it as distinctive.  Thus free verse haiku has a corrosive effect on syllabics; though free verse haijin won’t see it that way.

To see what I am getting at, if you take a collection of syllabic verse that all share the same form, say the published volumes of the cinquain journal ‘Amaze’, as you move from poem to poem they all share the same form.  This is true even when there are variations on the form.  And the reader picks up an underlying shared sense of rhythm and shape that all of the cinquain share.  There is a relationship between the poems that is deeper than their surface depictions; a communal commitment to a particular pulse.  You can find this in sonnet anthologies as well.

This deeper dimension is lost in modern haiku anthologies because the communal commitment to a shared syllabic shape is not present.  So even if the anthology, or journal, agrees to publish a few syllabic haiku, the effect of a communal sharing of, and commitment to, a deeper, underlying pulse and rhythm, is lost.  If you read a haiku collection by Edith Shiffert, to pick just one example, the shared pulse acts as a stream like current carrying you from haiku to haiku.  But if you take a single haiku from her collection, and then place it in an anthology of free verse haiku, that current that carries the reader from haiku to haiku is simply not there.  I began to feel the absence of this pulse, this current, as a loss of meaning.

These thoughts are in hindsight.  At the time I just felt less and less at home in the free verse haiku and tanka journals.  Tanka journals in particular struck me as simply collections of free verse poetry with no discernible connection to the actual history of tanka as formal verse.  This has developed into a feeling that syllabic haiku (and other syllabic forms that free verse poets have taken a liking to) needs its own space and journals; because when a syllabic haiku is placed in a collection of other syllabic haiku the relationship between the haiku, the shared shape/pulse/rhythm emerges with clarity.  And the fact that this sharing is a communal commitment, and not just an accident (which is what it seems like in a free verse haiku context), and the centrality of that communal commitment, becomes clear.  The result is that the reader senses that the form itself is meaningful, which is not clear when a syllabic haiku is surrounded by free verse haiku.

There is another aspect about poetry journals that makes some poets reluctant to participate; and that is that they are ephemeral.  And most of them have a very tiny readership.  And this readership is often scattered geographically so that you don’t really get a sense of community from their presence in the pages of a journal.  For some, it is unsatisfying.  I even wrote a sonnet about exactly that feeling.

Eventually, I would access print-on-demand technology, and this made it possible for me to publish my work in a way that I find satisfying.  I think this is true for many poets today.  The gate to publication is no longer controlled by those who have a particular esthetic commitment; in the case of haiku, publication is no longer controlled by official haiku organizations that have an esthetic commitment to a free verse interpretation.  This kind of access has tipped the balance away from such organizations and allowed poets to put forward their poetry even if that poetry is based on an understanding out of sync with the official gatekeepers.  I think that is a very good thing.

Kokinshu Day for 2016

The Kokinshu is the first Imperial collection of waka poetry from Japan.  It was edited about 905 and contains 1111 poems, almost all of them in the waka form; what today we refer to as tanka.  This form has a long history in Japan.  The form is remarkably stable consisting of five lines, or 'ku', in the following pattern: 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.  The stability of the form has lasted for about 1400 years and continues to be a central mode of poetic expression in Japan.

I have set aside a day to pay homage to the Kokinshu, also known as the Waka Kokinshu, primarily because there are two translations into English that replicate the syllabic structure of the original.  The two translations are:

Kokin Wakashu, transalted by Helen McCullough, and
Kokinshu, translated by Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius.

Both of them are excellent.  And both of them, remarkably, retain the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure in their translations into English.  What this means for those of us interested in English syllabic verse is that we have two anthologies of syllabic verse, written by competent scholars, excellent translators, who were sensitive to the significance that all of these poems share a common form.  In an era when many free verse poets are form deaf, this is a significant accomplishment.

My feeling is that both of these translations can serve as manuals for how to construct effective syllabic verse, and tanka in particular, in English.  And that is the primary reason I have set aside a day to celebrate this anthology.  

I slightly prefer the McCullough translation.  But price is an obstacle.  At almost $100 the McCullough version is beyond the reach of many.  In contrast, the Rodd translation is priced reasonably; so if price matters (and it almost always does), go with the Rodd translation.

Just to give an idea of the difference between the two, here is tanka 210 from both translations:

Now they call again
above the mists of autumn --
those flocks of wild geese
who took their leave of us
merging into springtime haze.

(McCullough, page 54)

the voices of the
wild geese that were swallowed up
by the mists of spring
have returned   to penetrate
the autumn haze and sound again

(Rodd, page 108)

My feeling is that McCullough has a surer grasp of lineation.  Notice how in the Rodd translation line 1 to line 2 is a runon; ending line 1 with 'the' undermines the basic syllabic shape.  Rodd tends to use this kind of enjambment and it is the main reason why I consider her translation not quite as efficacious as the McCullough translation.  I don't want to exaggerate; the Rodd translation is really fine and well worth reading.  On the other hand, the syllabic shape is more clearly delineated in the McCullough translation.  It's too bad about the price of the McCullough version.  My hope is that Stanford University Press will issue this translation in paperback and make it more accessible to a wider audience.

So take a moment today to look at the Kokinshu in English and, if you feel inspired, you might want to compose a syllabic tanka of your own.

Etheree Day for 2016

Today is set aside to celebrate the Etheree syllabic form.  I have a great fondness for this form: its simplicity, its flexibility, and the way it starts slow and then blossoms into fullness are attributes that offer a poet many opportunities.  A number of my books use the form:

'Poems of Place' contain a series of 'Tea Etheree', most of which begin with the word 'tea'.

'Safe Harbor' contains an Etheree series I call 'Cathedrals'.

'Even in Winter' has Etheree poems scattered through the collection.

The Etheree is a form I have explored extensively and continue to do so.  It seems to have endless possibilities.  Here is one I wrote recently:

From a Hermit's Perspective

Place
Stasis
Quince blossoms
From dusk to dusk
Boulder in a stream
Butterfly migrations
The rise and fall of nations
Enacting my daily routines
The waking world, the world of dreams,
The desert hermits from long ago
Seasons of summer, seasons of snow,
Stability as the stars ebb and flow

Syllabic Tanka Day for 2016

Greetings:

Today is January 22nd.  I bet you didn't know that this is Syllabic Tanka Day!  Hooray.  It seems fitting that now that I'm plunging into Genji Monogatari, which has hundreds of tanka/waka scattered through the book, that I take a moment to celebrate this form which has been so rewarding for so many poets and readers down through the centuries.  In the anglosphere tanka has not yet taken root; instead what you have are people writing free verse poems (usually five lines) and then labeling them tanka for no clear reason.  That's OK; it's what is happening.  But for those of us who want to really engage with traditional Japanese tanka the syllabic count is essential.  Thankfully a small number of poets are slowly learning the syllabic shape and using it skillfully in English.

Here is a tank from my collection 'Tanka River', a landscape:

The hours before dawn,
Before the sun has risen,
Before the stars fade,
Before the world rushes in,
The hours of the morning calm


And here is one from a sequence on love:

By the ocean's edge
I wait patiently for more
Memories of you,
Riding the incoming waves
Or the last rays of the sun


And here is a tanka from one of the first tanka collections in English, 'Wind Five Folded', edited by Jane Reichhold:

Walking east, I watch
The moon rise, huge, smokey orange,
Almost full, alone.
Walking home, I'm almost used
To you being gone again.

John Gribble, page 65


And another one from 'Wind Five Folded':

Ginkgos are boring
Until autumn golding and
Persimmons taste tart --
The vague words of your language
Often mean less than they seem

Mimi Walter Hinman, page 77


Slowly a cache of syllabic tanka is being written.  My feeling is that the less a poet has taken on the narrow esthetics of official haiku, the more accessible tanka becomes to a poet.  I see tanka as more closely related to the Psalms and to hymnody than to free verse haiku.  There is the same quiet contemplation, the same sense of steady rhythm meant for chanting or singing. 

But to find these tanka you have to look beyond official tanka organizations and magazines because most of them (all?) were started by people committed to free verse and completely allergic to syllabics.  They seem also to have absorbed the nihinjinron based mythos of the specialness of the Japanese language.  But, again, that's OK.  They get to do that.  And we get to connect with the Japanese tradition by counting on our fingers: 5-7-5-7-7.

On Genji -- Part 1

On Genji – Part 1

I’m rereading The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari).  I’m enjoying it immensely.  I first read Genji decades ago; I think it was at least 35 years.  And, if memory serves, I did not read the entire work at that time, finding myself overwhelmed by the immense cast of characters and the huge size of the novel (over 1,000 pages).  I admired the work at first reading, and there were passages of great beauty that spoke to me; but as an overall whole Genji eluded me.

This time I am responding differently.  I love it.  I think this is partly due to simply being older.  The understanding of impermanence permeates Genji at multiple levels.  The world of nature is one way that this expressed, but there is also the impermanence of human relationships both at a personal and political level.  I think it is easier for an older person to resonate with this; in any case it speaks more to me now than when I read Genji before.

The fickleness of human desire is another major theme in Genji and, again, I think this is something that is learned, if it is learned, over time.  All relationships end in parting, either by death or divorce; and though that is a universal truth, it is a truth that takes some experience to really comprehend.

I am also more familiar today than I was when I first approached Genji with the specifically Buddhist references found in the novel in every chapter.  References to past lives and karma, to the Lotus Sutra, and to the Pure Land add dimensions of depth and meaning to Genji that, I suspect, most westerners would miss.  Murasaki assumes that her audience knows these references, but a modern westerner, unless, like myself, he took a lot of time studying the Japanese Buddhist tradition, is unlikely to pick up on most of them.  And the Buddhism of Murasaki’s time differs in significant ways from Japanese Buddhism today.  Modern Japanese Buddhism is the result of the turmoil of the 13^th century and ended up with strongly sectarian traditions that view each other with suspicion so that in Japan today you find institutionally separated traditions like Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren.  In the time of Murasaki (the 11^th century), however, the Buddhist tradition had not yet fragmented into these mutually antagonistic sects.  There were divisions, naturally enough, but they were divisions found within an organization rather than divisions between organizations.  For this reason the understanding of Buddhism in Japan at that time was more singular and more pervasive than it is now; either in Japan or in the West.

I am also struck, at times amazed, by Murasaki Shikibu’s ability to comprehend and write about human psychology.  The world of Genji is in many ways strange to us.  It is an insular world, an elite world, a world of mannered gestures and coded complex customs that are no longer part of the world (either the western world or Japan’s).  Yet beneath these striking differences Murasaki uncovers motives and purposes that drive her characters and that we can fully recognize as operative in the world today.  That is how Genji can manage to speak to a modern audience.

In some ways I feel while I am reading Genji like when I am reading some sci-fi novel set in another world.  I am thinking, for example, of the Darkover novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Bradley constructs a world on a distant planet named ‘Darkover’, with groups and factions that differ from what we have on earth today.  Yet Bradley’s novels nevertheless speak to us.  Murasaki is a better author; but my point is that reading Genji  today has a similar, off-worldly, feeling to it; like you are dropping onto a planet (a Star Trek first contact) that is filled with strange customs and has a completely different history.  Yet, in spite of that, they are still humanoids and not only is communication possible, but it is surprisingly enriching.

And I am a more experienced poet now than when I first tried to read Genji.  Murasaki was not only a great novelist and storyteller; she was also a great tanka poet.  The world of tanka poetry is a major theme in Genji.  Numerous tanka from the imperial waka/tanka collections, such as the Kokinwakashu, are quoted.  In addition Murasaki herself composed almost 800 tanka that are scattered like jewels throughout the novel.  This integration of story with poetry has left a lasting impression on Japanese literature.

The English language world is blessed with four excellent translations of Genji.  The earliest one is by Waley and is still admired by many.  I am currently reading the Seidensticker translation which I find lucid with just enough footnotes to assist the reader with customs and references.  There is also a translation by Royall Tyler; it is more recent.  And late last year Dennis Washburn published a brand new translation through Norton.  In addition, there is a translation of all the tanka poetry found in Genji by Edwin A. Cranston found in A Waka Anthology, Volume Two: Grasses of Remembrance.  I don’t know enough Japanese (in fact, I’ve forgotten almost all of it that I used to know) to judge the quality of each translation.  (And Genji  is written in Japanese that is 1,000 years old.  My understanding is that modern Japanese read Genji in translations into contemporary Japanese because the Japanese of Genji is too remote.)  Each translation has its advocates.  If you are inclined to read Genji my recommendation is to go online and read from the translations and find out which one resonates most with you and go for it.

This is the first post about Genji I plan on writing.  In subsequent posts I want to address what Genji offers us in terms of insights into human nature, and the place of Murasaki’s poetry in Genji, which, I believe, hasn’t been fully recognized by her English language translators.  I think this can tell us something about our own poetic culture at this time.

More to come.

Anonymous

Anonymous

In the first imperial collection of Japanese Tanka, known as the Kokinwakashu there are a large number that are anonymous; meaning that we do not know the author of the tanka.  Here are two examples:

220.

Now that autumn hues

tinge the bush clover’s low leaves,

will they not perhaps

find it hard to sleep at night –

those people who live alone?

798.

If your affections

were to scatter like blossoms,

would I alone grieve,

wailing as a warbler sings,

to see the end of our love?

(McCullough translation)

According to McCullough about 40% of the poems are anonymous (Brocade by Night, page 176). 

The oldest collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, (aka the Classic of Poetry, or The Book of Odes) is entirely anonymous.  This collection of poems is one of the Confucian classics and appears to consist, to a great extent, of folk songs and ritual poetry, all unattributed. 

It is more difficult to find anonymous poetry in collections of western verse.  Perhaps this reflects differences in cultural attitudes.  It is a fairly common observation that the west is more individualistic than the far east and the dearth of anonymous poetry in western collections may be a manifestation of that.

But in some of the more extensive anthologies readers do come across anonymous poetry.  In The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition there is an early section of “Anonymous Lyrics of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries”.  But this is a very small percentage of the anthology; nothing like the 40% of poems found in the Kokinshu or the 100% anonymous poetry in The Book of Songs.

I bring this up because I want to touch on an incident that happened in 2014 in American poetry that, I believe, tells us a lot about how we approach poetry today.  I tend to avoid remarking about the various squabbles among contemporary poets and poetry institutions unless they directly impact syllabic verse and its place in English language poetry.  First, it is inherently unpleasant and, second, it is almost always unproductive.  For these reasons I refrained from remarking on the incident at the time it took place.  But now that more than a year has passed and it is no longer a ‘current event’, I’d like to make a few remarks.

The incident occurred when the American poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, found that he could not get his poems published.  So Hudson adopted a pen name, Yi-Fen Chou.  The result was that poems that had been repeatedly rejected were now accepted for publication, including one poem that had been rejected 40 times and was now accepted by Best American Poems of 2014.  This anthology was edited by Sherman Alexie, who is Native American.  Alexie admitted that he gave the poem extra credit for its minority source.  To Alexie’s credit, when the truth came out that the poem was written by a white guy using a nom de plume, Alexie retained its place in the anthology.

There was a lot written about this incident, mostly focusing on the political and ideological aspects.  Conservatives considered it an example of SJW thinking run amok.  Progressives, in contrast, viewed the author as engaging in a strategy of oppressive deception.  But what I would like to focus on here is what it tells us about how we, today, tend to read poetry.

To shed light on how we read poetry today, I want to consider is how we read an anonymous poem.  When we do not know the author, how do we engage with a poem?  How do we find an anonymous poem meaningful? 

In a way this is not a difficult question.  If we think of a poem as an artifact then we can make an analogy to other artifacts that we use in our ordinary lives.  I don’t know who made the mug I am drinking coffee from, but that does not hinder me from using it, admiring it.  I do not know who developed the particular type of rose in my neighbor’s garden, but that does not create a barrier to my appreciation.

In a similar way, I can admire a poem without knowing anything about the author.  The poem can speak to me, inspire me, offer me insight even though I do not know anything specific about the author or the circumstances which caused the poem to be written.

Take poem 220, quoted above, from the Kokinshu.  The poem comments on loneliness and isolation and uses late autumn as a seasonal expression of loneliness.  This poem speaks to us because loneliness is a common human experience and resonates with the fall season in a way that makes sense to us even though we are living in a very different culture and centuries removed in time.

Similarly, poem 798 is about the fear of losing the affections of someone we love.  Again, this is a common human experience; one that almost anyone can relate to (the exceptions being those who have never been in love).  This poem might have been written by a woman, by a man, by someone young, or someone older, by an aristocrat, or by a peasant.  Those details do not really matter because the experience transcends the specific autobiography of the author.

The tendency today is to read poetry through ideological categories; but I think that is a mistake.  Such a tendency imposes on the poem the specific intellectual apparatus of a time and place.  For example, the Confucian Book of Songs was often interpreted by later Confucians through the lens of their own Neo-Confucian ideology.  The result was to take a simple poem, what was probably a folk song, and turn it into an elaborate allegory on duties to the State and Emperor.  This kind of ideological apparatus, to my mind, actually creates a barrier to understanding the poem; rather than allowing a poem to speak to us directly we force the poem into our own preconceptions.  Beginning in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries scholars divested themselves of this Neo-Confucian apparatus.  It took a lot of work.  But it was worth it.

Ideological analysis always, always, always, diminishes our capacity for understanding art.  And I think that is as true today as it was in the past among the Neo-Confucians.  In the 20^th century the ideologies that dominated were Fascism and Marxism.  In the 21^st century the dominant ideologies seem to be Progressivism and Radical Feminism.  Running at a distant third place is an ideological Traditionalism.

The interpretation of poetry through an ideological lens dominates most University English Departments in the anglosphere at this time.  This is a primary reason that I recommend that young people interested in poetry not major in English literature or pursue an MFA in poetry.  There are exceptions and if you have found a specific teacher, or even an English Department, which has not been completely taken over by an ideological agenda, then ignore my suggestion.  But for the most part I suspect that my observation is correct.  My feeling is that a young person’s love of poetry will be badly deformed at most Universities today.  I say this because I regularly read contemporary literary criticism and it is as marked by ideological bias as the Neo-Confucian interpretations of the Book of Songs.  This is obvious to those who do not share the ideological biases of the authors.

How do we break free from this tendency to read poetry ideologically?  I believe that a significant step in that direction is to read the poem as if it were an anonymous poem.  For example, when you read Stopping by Woods by Robert Frost, never mind that it was written by someone we know about.  Read the poem as if the author was unknown.  Assume you have no idea if the poet is male or female; white, black, or asian; rich or poor.  And then get a feeling for what the poem is saying.  In other words, bracket the authorial specifics.  This bracketing of the authors specifics opens up the universal message of the poem.

You see, my view is that what all of us share is more significant than the specifics of our biographies.  And what is it that all of us share simply by virtue of being human beings?  We all share mortality; we are impermanent.  This is a central fact of human existence and poets have been speaking about this, and how it impacts our lives, in a multitude of ways that help us come to terms with this truth. 

We all share the experience of parting with those who are our friends and those we love.  Again, poets have illuminated this experience in many ways that resonate with us across time and culture.

We all interact with other human beings in ways that are both helpful and stressful.  We all have obligations that we are expected to fulfill.  And we are all limited in our abilities which can give rise to frustrations of various kinds or appreciations for our own and others’ talents.

Because these aspects of our lives are universal it is possible for an anonymous poet to speak to us about them, and to illuminate their meaning, even though they may be of a different race, class, sex, gender, and speaking a different language.  This is what ideological approaches to poetry miss.  And to my mind what they miss is the heart of what poetry is about.

Seven Deer

Seven Deer

Pervasive quiet

A glow in the eastern sky

Before the sunrise

The warmth of the windless air

The warmth of a dusty road

A bird sings in code;

Perhaps we don’t understand

The way of nature

Attending a long lecture

Regarding evolution

Waves by the ocean

Slowly transforming the coast

Transforming a pier

Seagulls suddenly appear

As the sun dissolves the fog

A passive prologue

To a thickly scheduled day

Of obligations

Heart-felt associations

That draw us into the world

Like a flag unfurled

Blowing in a constant wind

Next to the town square

An old car needing repair

Rusting in the parking lot

Something she forgot,

When she was a little girl

How she felt secure

How illness was quickly cured

By the concern of parents

How they paid the rent,

How they cooked and served her meals,

How they bought her clothes,

How they helped though indisposed,

Though they were very busy

Trapped in the city,

Trapped by fate and by karma,

By astrology

As the planets glide slowly

Singing their songs in the sky

Planet earth relies

On the seasons of the sun,

The wheel of the year

The Spring Equinox is here

By the stream are seven deer

The water is clear,

On the bank a well-worn path

Where young students walk

That is where they smile and talk

As they’re strolling hand-in-hand

They think life is grand,

That this will last forever,

That time will stand still,

But for better or for ill,

Though they thought that this would last,

Love becomes the past,

Even grasses do not last,

Even mist dissolves

As the second hand revolves

On the public courthouse clock

It’s time to take stock

At the local statue store

Deities galore

Gods and Goddesses implore

That we put an end to war

Turning to the four

Directions, finding a place

In the stream of space

An angel flies, filled with grace

Above the field of the past

Where our hopes, at last,

Join with dreams and hand-in-hand

Create our future

A dance of many creatures

On the ground and in the air

Where a white-maned mare

Gallops on a field of stars

While the planet mars

Steadily observes the cars

That fill the rush-hour highway

The night of payday

Two friends heading to a bar

Feel the fist of cold

Even though they are not old

They pull their gloves on tighter

The snow looks whiter

Than the snow from last winter,

Maybe that’s because

The snow was thin, it would thaw,

Mixing with exhaust and dirt

Where it would convert

Into shiny slick black ice,

Slippery, like vice,

Slippery, like promises,

Slippery, like last week’s cash

Or the drugs he stashed

Behind his favorite books

Where no-one would look

As the ancient moonlight shook

The foundations of his dreams

All his hopes, it seems,

Did not work out in the way

That he hoped they would

Like some badly knotted wood,

Like a garden that turned dry,

Like a friend whose sly

Words covered a deception

Like a poisoned meal

‘Come on, it’s not a big deal,’

As she turns and walks away

The sky’s touched by gray

By a subtle hint of light,

A prelude to dawn

He wakes in bed, then he yawns,

There’s the first frost on the lawn

As crisp leaves hold on

For another week or two

Prior to a storm

Whose wind totally transforms

The way that the garden looks

The flow of a brook

Carries a discarded chair

Planks of rotting wood

Like words we’ve misunderstood,

Given half a chance we could

Have made it all good,

But that was not meant to be,

Like one lost at sea

Or a cup of bitter tea,

Or a song that’s badly sung,

Or a bell that’s rung

Fading into the warm air

Of the afternoon

With the cherry trees in bloom

Outside of the living room

They’ll soon come to doom

Shaken from their branches,

The simple fact is

Years have passed and now I’m old

Like a moss covered oak tree

That she stops to see

Next to the new masonry

The shadows are long

As the sunrise sings its song

As the new grass grasps the light

Seven larks in flight

Disappear behind the sight

Of the dancing white

Cloud formations, the polite

Children at kindergarten

Watch the new fountain

That was finished yesterday,

That was donated

By a man who was fated

To always feel insecure

To not know for sure

What he should do or should say

And that was the way

That he lived day after day

So he became reclusive,

Someone elusive,

Like a sound that’s barely heard,

An unuttered word,

Like the moon behind a cloud,

Like a letter never sent,

Like a fabric rent,

Like a rock beneath the snow,

Like a dream that I

Can’t understand though I try

To unravel the meaning

It stays unyielding,

The mist of time concealing

What we are dealing

With, like incense dispersing

When the morning Mass is through

And there are a few

People sitting on the pews

Quietly in prayer

‘Times like this in life are rare,’

Two old friends are hand-in-hand

Like the cliffs they stand,

Monuments to endurance

As the seasons change

Like a fluid mountain range,

Like cool fog above a stream,

Things swirl, planets dream,

Things swirl, it’s the first frost’s sheen,

Things swirl, stars careen,

Things swirl, they are inbetween,

Things swirl, the wind stirs the trees,

Things swirl, falling leaves

Skitter past a silent fox

To a fence that blocks

A path to some glacial rocks

Lying at the farm-field’s edge

Near a shaggy hedge

By a new development,

Sixteen new houses

Empty, and the problem is

That no one can afford them

Words from an anthem

No longer seem to inspire

Like an off-key choir

After the divorce she’s mired

And the kids, though grown, require,

Because things are dire,

More assistance, more support,

Than she expected

Life is tough, things neglected

Have a way of coming back

Dark, the road is black,

The swift outline of a bat,

Slowly thunder claps,

Somewhere a twig snaps,

A feral cat eats a scrap,

Time bends, there’s a gap,

An angel looks at a map,

He must arrive at

A cop at a speeding trap,

On the street a missing cap

Like other things that

Disappear without a trace

Cities that vanish,

A conjuration banished,

An ancient sea now deceased,

An apartment leased,

A full eclipse of the sun,

Days of joy and fun

When we used to play and run

On the shore of Elbow Lake

August was a break,

A motorboat left a wake,

On our vacation

We would joke and would mention

How the night was filled with beasts,

They were friendly beasts,

Seven deer and fireflies

And the white-barked birch

Seemed to shimmer and give birth

To stories both new and old,

Stories always told,

Stories that I never heard,

Stories without words,

Stories that seem sometimes blurred,

Stories that the moss will tell,

Stories from a shell

That sails on the stream of time

Past all that is here,

Past all the things that appear

Beyond all that disappears