Withered Stumps of Time

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), lines 94-110






          Huge sea-wood fed with copper
          Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
          In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam
          Above the antique mantel was displayed
          As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

                    Eliot’s note: “Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140.”  For
                    more on the sylvan scene, see Eliot’s first endnotes and their
                    reference to James Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic
                    and Religion, 3d Ed. (1914), in turn illustrated by “sylvan landscape” of
                    J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834).  For a more complete
                    context see John Milton, Paradise Lost 137-142 (1667), where Satan 
                    is describing Eden:

                    ...and over head up grew
                    Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,
                    Cedar, and Pine, and Firr, and branching Palm
                    A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend
                    Shade above shade, a woodie
                    Theatre Of stateliest view.

          The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

                    Eliot’s note: “V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela.”  See Ovid,
                    Metamorphoses 6.635-1053 (AD 8; tr. Samuel Garth, John Dryden,
                    Alexander Pope et al, 1717). Procne, far from home, had been longing 
                    for a visit from her sister Philomela, so her husband Tereus prevailed on 
                    the girls’ father to let Philomela sail home with him.

                    Now Philomela, scarce receiv'd on board,
                    And in the royal gilded bark secur'd,
                    Beheld the dashes of the bending oar,
                    The ruffled sea, and the receding shore;
                    When strait (his joy impatient of disguise)
                    We've gain'd our point, the rough Barbarian cries;
                    Now I possess the dear, the blissful hour,
                    And ev'ry wish subjected to my pow'r.

                    Then, before bringing her home,

                    the false tyrant seiz'd the princely maid,
                    And to a lodge in distant woods convey'd;

                    and there with “rude haste” he raped her.  She cried out to her sister
                    and father in vain but then promised

                    ...Tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
                    Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
                    My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
                    And my complainings echo thro' the grove...

                    This provoked the king to cut off her tongue, but she still later told
                    her sister what had happened by weaving the episode into a wall
                    tapestry, and she fulfilled her promise further by filling the forest air
                    with a song of her story after they were all changed into birds, Procne
                    and Philomela into a nightingale and a swallow (sometimes interpreted
                    vice versa), Tereus into a hoopoe.

          So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
          Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
          And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
          “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

                    Eliot’s note: “Cf. Part III, l. 204,” referencing the nightingale's song at
                    TWL 203-206:“Twit twit twit / ...jug jug jug jug / so rudely forced /
                    tereu.”  See also John Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe (1584):

                    Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,’ she cries,
                    And still her woes at midnight rise.

          And other withered stumps of time
          Were told upon the walls; staring forms
          Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
          Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
          Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
          Spread out in fiery points
          Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

From My Journals: Tomorrow, God

Parul is not happy with her mother today.  They don’t want her going to India —because of money, because of safety, some other time maybe —and she’s disappointed.  She threw some shoes at her mother and walked out of the house, eleven miles to 520 Stewart.  

She got rained on several times along the way.  

She’s never been anywhere, she says, and now, forget it, she doesn’t want to go to India. 

“One day we’ll go together,” I said, and she said, “No, I don’t want to go.”  

I brought her to her uncle’s house.  She’s not sure what will happen next.  She’s even having second thoughts about medical school.  

“This too...” I said, but she wasn’t ready to believe me.  

Tomorrow, God, I pray for Parul.


from March to December

From My Journals: Every Prayer Has An Answer In It

     God, when the job at hand is more than I can handle,

     God, when the pressure weighs heavy upon me,

     God, when things are out of my hands,

          when I am helpless, lost and looking for answers,

     God, when I’ve buried my head in the sand,

          sulked in my sorrows and wondered aloud

          in a roomful of sufferers, selfishly cried “Why me?”

     God, when I don’t know the answers,

     God, when I think I need to know

          as a matter of survival, life and death,

     God, the power and the glory

          and the answer, God, is yours.


from March to December

Moleskin 3.4

The following spring found us settling into our second urban home. It wasn’t a big move, four blocks, and I kept the same friends and the same paper route. I don’t even remember the U-Haul this time, but the transition was still remarkable: our townhome life was now squeezed into an apartment, with dinner smells in the hallways and yappy dogs behind neighbors’ doors. Dad’s station wagon was no longer the primary transportation; now it was a coupe: Mom’s no-frills Dodge Dart. We no longer had our own garbage cans: now it was a big dumpster a dozen yards down the sidewalk from our doors. We never had much of a yard to mow at the townhome, but now we were limited to garden pots on a 3 x 6 patio. It was what our mother could afford on nursing home wages.  Not that there was much to grumble about: my friends all lived in townhomes and duplexes, if not apartments, and we were hardly the only latchkey kids in the neighborhood. None of us lived very far away from the drainage ditch, and everything was still an adventure.

Denouement

To KC, on her first graduation

If I were the falconer

I might never let go; I’d hold on to the tether and you’d learn how to fly in small circles around me: I’d want you to know the spirit of freedom, so I’d give you the sky in gradual increments, ever so slowly releasing you outward and upward, and I would remain in the center within and below you, the turn of your wild and the ground to your sky, the tame of your will and the stage for your show, but the one who allows you the power to fly is the one who eventually has to let go. I am not the falconer; I don’t rule your sky, nor would I deny you the winds of your freedom, but I will stand fast in the fields you came from calling your name out and watching you fly.

from Thirty Birds

More from the Archives: Introduction to Denouement

Denouement.

That's a fancy French word for untangling, and in literature it applies to the point of the story where everything turns towards the final resolutions.

In most stories, we might expect this to happen on the final pages or in the final chapter, but in a good story you might start to see this even from the beginning.  I like the way John Ylvisaker puts it in his song, Borning Cry, which begins:

          I was there to hear your borning cry.
          I'll be there when you grow old.
          I was there the day you were baptized
          To see your life unfold.

Unfolding: Untangling: Denouement

I thought of this about four years ago when my daughter crossed the stage for her eighth grade graduation. And I'll be thinking of it all over again this June as she graduates from high school, and I have had, and will have, the same thoughts at my son's graduations.

As parents, we'd like to think that we have so much to do with the plots of our children's lives, but we really don't, and when it comes down to it, we are just fortunate - blessed - to be in the audience, cheering them on.


from Thirty Birds

  

Water, Water Everywhere

A child asked, where was God
when the Red Sea waters drowned
the Pharaoh’s men? Never mind
Moses and the Pharaoh,
where was God for the soldiers
who had no choice but to do
what they were told to do?
where was God for those
who didn’t know the rules
of Passover, whose children
were killed for the ignorance
of their parents?

This from the mouth of a baptized babe:
Where? Where was God
for the unchosen, those
who were drowned before they had
a chance to be baptized?
God leads his sheep to drink
from still waters, but sends
his enemies to drown in
a stormy sea,
but where was God for the soldiers
without a promised land?

This from a little lamb, carried
so long in the shepherd’s arms:
I do believe in God
who created all water
and quenches all thirst
and cleanses all impurities,
but where was God
in the desert and the dirt
of those who did not know
where to turn
when the impartial waters fell?

This from a child who turns to me,
and what am I to say?
My mouth, my faith is parched

and dry and without words,
except to admit how much
I do not know,
but I try to find words anyway:
Let it be said that in this house
we talk about God,
and every thought is a prayer.


from Stillwater Symposia

Upon the River of Cydnus

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 77-93







          The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

                    Eliot’s note: “Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II., ii, l. 190.”  See
                    William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.190 (1623).
                    Antony’s friend Enobarbus describes Cleopatra, when she first met
                    Antony: “she purs’d up his heart, upon the river of Cydnus.”  He
                    continues (2.2.195-208):

                    The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
                    Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
                    Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
                    The winds were love-sick with them ; the oars were silver,
                    Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
                    The water which they beat to follow faster,
                    As amorous of their strokes.
                    ...O'er- picturing that Venus where we see
                    The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
                    Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
                    With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
                    To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
                    And what they undid did.

                    Venus was the mother of Cupid and Aeneus, further alluded to in
                    the lines to follow (see Eliot’s note at TWL 92).  Compare the
                    undoing and doing by the boys with Pia being made and unmade
                    at TWL 293).

                    See also Shakespeare, Cymbeline 2.4.85-116 (1623), where Iachimo
                    allusively describes Imogen’s chambers to her husband Posthumous:

                    ...First, her bedchamber,
                    Where, I confess, I slept not, but profess
                    Had that was well worth watching--it was hanged
                    With tapestry of silk and silver; the story
                    Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman,
                    And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for
                    The press of boats or pride: a piece of work
                    So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive
                    In workmanship and value; which I wondered
                    Could be so rarely and exactly wrought,
                    Since the true life on't was–

                    ...The chimney
                    Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
                    Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
                    So likely to report themselves.

                    Dian is the wood goddess Diana, whom the hunter Actaeon saw
                    naked while she was bathing in the forest.  See Ovid,
                    Metamorphoses 3:206-312 (AD 8; tr. Samuel Garth, John Dryden, 
                    Alexander Pope et al, 1717).  For other allusions to Actaeon and
                    Diana, see TWL 10 and 197.

          Glowed on the marble, where the glass
          Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
          From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
          (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

                    Iachimo continues, at Cymbeline 2.4.112-116:

                    ... The roof o' the chamber
                    With golden cherubins is fretted: her andirons–
                    I had forgot them--were two winking Cupids
                    Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely
                    Depending on their brands.

          Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
          Reflecting light upon the table as
          The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
          From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
          In vials of ivory and coloured glass
          Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
          Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused
          And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
          That freshened from the window, these ascended
          In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
          Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
          Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

                    Eliot’s note: “Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726: dependent lychni
                    laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.”
                    See Virgil, Aeneid 1.726-727 (19 BC; tr. John Dryden, 1697):

                    From gilded roofs depending lamps display
                    Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day.

                    After leaving Troy and Italy, Aeneas, in search of a new home,
                    came to Carthage, home of Juno, goddess of marriage. To
                    welcome him, Carthaginian Queen Dido had prepared a lavish
                    banquet, but the night went instead to his brother Cupid after their
                    mother Venus intervened.  Intending to protect Aeneas from Juno,
                    Venus caused him to fall asleep and then had Cupid take his place.
                    This would prove fateful for both Dido and Carthage.  Dido had
                    fallen in love with Aeneas, but they would never marry, and
                    Aeneas would eventually leave Carthage without her, ultimately
                    finding his own place as the founder of Rome.  Dido, left behind,
                    would kill herself, and later Carthage would be defeated and
                    destroyed by the Romans in the Battle of Mylae.  More allusions
                    to DIDO AND CARTHAGE occur at TWL 70 and 307; see also
                    the notes at TWL 12, 31 and 231.

                    For DYSFUNCTIONAL COUPLES beyond Dido and Aeneus, see
                    TWL 111-126 (empty talkers) and TWL 139-172 (Lil & Albert), and the
                    notes at TWL (Isolde & King Mark), 99 (Tereus & Procne), 128
                    (Hamlet & Ophelia) 145 (Lilith & Adam), 198 (Agamemnon &
                    Clytemnestra), 279 (Lord Robert Dudley & Amy Robsart), 293 (Pia
                    de Tolemei) 365 (the traveling bones wife) and 408 (howling wives,
                    men on death beds).  For some balance, see the notes at TWL 165,
                    176 and 289.  Consider also ELIOT’S MARRIAGE to Vivienne
                    Haigh-Wood, who was perpetually troubled from 1915 until her
                    death in 1947.  They separated in 1932 and were permanently
                    estranged in 1938 when she was committed to a mental hospital.
                    In a preface to Valerie Eliot, Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988),
                    T.S. Eliot later wrote,

                    To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state
                    of mind out of which came The Waste Land.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Two Hours on the Pecatonica

One mile down a winding river,
full of overhanging strains
and random estimates, the father
listens as his son complains,
“I’m never doing this again.
The water’s cold, the waves are high,
The stretch we’re on is longer than
you promised. Everything’s a lie!”

Two miles down a rending river,
with the surface rippling
less from flow than from the weather
blowing six weeks into spring,
now the boy turns his teen anger
everywhere at once, turns mad
to the boats and to the river,
to Wisconsin, to his dad.

Three miles down a bending river
making slow turns south and east
through rural hills and rustic pastures,
answering a prayer for peace,
and in time the boy turns quiet,
sullen still but out of breath,
paddling the waves in silence
having beat the horse to death.

Four miles down a wending river,
later in the afternoon
the sun comes out from undercover
like a mouse predicting June
and the boy from broken shadows
finds the words he hadn’t said
and the father smiles at the 
son, as two boats forge ahead.

Five miles down a wand’ring river
muddy shores turn into rocky
bluffs that would defy the river’s
native title, what the Sauk
had called wet earth, but for the moment
man and boy behold the banks
that rise above them as they lumber
onward with unspoken thanks.

Six miles down a wondrous river
four deer running up the bluff,
a turkey flushing into flight,
an eagle soaring just above,
and then the son: “When this is over
and we bring our kayaks home
I guess you’re gonna chew me out for
all the things I’ve said and done.”

Seven miles down the river
a snapping turtle almost bites
the passing paddle, then the father:
“No, son, everything’s all right.
I will be glad when this is over,
proud of you and thrilled that we
could have this afternoon together,
happy you were here with me.”

Eight miles down a winsome river
on a stretch we’ve made our own,
from Blanchardville to Thunder Bridge,
but there’s an island halfway down,
and there’s a goose nest on the island,
and all along the muddy banks
the world is fishing, farming, hunting,
living with unspoken thanks.


from Stillwater Symposia

Introduction To Two Hours

In two hours' time

we wrote a poem
spent time together
rode a river
and enjoyed the day

we committed that day to memory
shared a moment as son and father
followed a downstream flow
and appreciated the heart of spring

we sang a song along the way
learned to be more than old man and teenager
let the current carry us
and took the moment as our own

we established a record
built a relationship
ran the course
and made good time.

This one I will remember:
son and father in the same story,
riding that river to the pickup point
and making the day count.

A record.
A relationship.
A course to follow.
A time to keep. 


not previously posted

Moleskin 3.3

At the somewhat ripe age of ten I got a job delivering Tribune newspapers up and down the halls of apartment buildings. The way I remember it, I took the initiative to get that job, clipping an application out of the Sunday comics section and mailing it in. It was the beginning of fifth grade, and I had seen a classmate coming to school with an inky canvas bag hanging at his side, and it immediately stirred me with envy. But more reconciling: I was never alone in that first employ; my parents must have approved, probably encouraged. I don’t recall them leading the way, but I know they were right there all along. I learned to wake up at 5 a.m. without rousing the whole house, but Mom was there at the onset, shaking me awake when my body wasn’t used to it. On Sundays, when the papers were thick and heavy, there was my dad with his station wagon, helping me to make the deliveries. Mom opened up a savings account for me and taught me how to deposit my $50.00 paychecks, and on Saturdays there was Dad again, taking me to Mr. Donut after the job was done.

Redbellies

A celebration of the Springs on the banks of the Suwannee River: the Day. Lepornis Auritus, of the Breams and the main course of many Southern fries: the Fish. Inky black, purple and garnet with rich plum, red currant, liquorice and oak: the Shiraz. Indigenous to the Oz bushland where the Angove family makes their wine: the Snake. A vegetarian Piranha cousin colossoma bidens to aquarians in the know: the Pacu. A ranging fish in a narrow curving band from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island west: the Dace. A pet store Melanophryniscian with fire and crickets in its belly: the Toad. A hook-billed conure of the house where men can talk, but hens just squawk: the Parrot. A turtle with yellow lined head, neck and legs called Cooter of the Chesapeake Bay: the Terrapin. A South American quadroped in a multimale-multifemale social system: the Tamarin. An arboreal Guinean of Nigeria and Benin, finding the wet parts of dry tropical forests: the Monkey. Billardiere's pouched weasel, a Pademelon to the Aborigines: the Wallaby. An Amazonian revolving life around Mauritius Palms with a reedy high-pitched scream: the Macaw. A North American, pressing its torso to the trees, showing red better in hand and up close: the Woodpecker. And all that remains, the solid biomass incompletely combusted: the Char.


from Thirty Birds

Beside Still Waters

The person of God
is a shepherd, my shepherd,
who assures I will have
all that I need,

A place to rest
and be refreshed
in the greenest pastures
beside the stillest waters,

A path to follow
to righteousness
in the name of the one
who leads me,

A prayer to say
as I walk through the shadows
that I may never feel afraid,
even in the face of my enemies,

A presence here
to comfort me
with your shepherd’s staff
and the strength of your stand.

You prepare for me
a banquet feast;
you pour fragrant oils all over me
and fill my cup to its capacity

And you promise me
your grace to follow me everywhere,
your loving mercy until the day I die
and your place, a place for me to live forever.


from Walled Gardens

Rumination

I cannot wrap my mind

around God’s ways. I cannot comprehend

the shape of God, nor deign to understand

the details of God’s intricate design,

though I would try.

I cannot stretch my soul

around the grace of God. I cannot hold

the scope of God, delivered and revealed

so perfectly within my failing field

of vision. I am blind,

and yet I see

that God occurs to me as God allows,

despite these thoughts that drag their mortal chains,

beyond these dreams that lag reality,

and though my span of reason God restrains

God’s wisdom will prevail.

Within God’s house,

my reason is a guest; as God allows,

a servant soul invited to the host’s

parade; a child perpetually enrolled

in the master’s school, rewriting what’s assigned

with a crooked scrawl.


from Walled Gardens

Words

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), Section II







          II. A Game of Chess

                    This is the “air” section, characterized by ostensibly meaningful words 
                    made empty in their presentation.  Several coarse seduction scenes are 
                    staged through a series of walls that talk (see note at TWL 8) and then 
                    some chatty marital advice is set to a bartender’s “last call” mantra (TWL
                    139-172). All of this follows the beat of dying words in disguise, by the last
                    gasps of Hamlet and the departing words of Ophelia (TWL 128 and 172). 
                    
                    The spectrum of DYING WORDS in this poem ranges from the 
                    deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die (see the epigraph) to the 
                    speechless death of the drowned sailor/hyacinth girl (TWL 38-40, 47-48).
                    Rhetorical questions hang in the air (TWL 111-134), souls sigh in limbo 
                    (TWL 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (TWL 182) and a lovely woman 
                    sees death as her only escape (see note at TWL 253). There are allusions 
                    to the last words of Hamlet (TWL 128) and Ophelia (TWL 172), 
                    Agamemnon (TWL 198), Joseph Conrad's Kurtz (note, TWL 298), John
                    Webster's characters Flamineo (TWL 44) and the stabbed patient (TWL118),
                    and to tragic stories woven into tapestries (TWL 97-110). There are also 
                    subtle allusions to the speechless deaths of Marie’s cousin Rudolph 
                    (TWL 8-18), the Earl of Leicester’s wife Amy Robsart (TWL 279), the 
                    children of Lilith (TWL 159) and Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal (note, TWL 42). 

                    For the latter, see T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 
                    1934):

                    I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset,
                    the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late
                    afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find
                    out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli. 

                    See also the “little life” allusion at TWL 7 and see the extended “little life” 
                    passage in  Shakespeare, Tempest 4.1.148-154: 

                    PROSPERO: 

                    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,                    
                    As I foretold you, were all spirits and
                    Are melted into air, into thin air;
                    And —like the baseless fabric of this vision—
                    The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
                    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
                    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
                    And like this insubstantial pageant faded
                    Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
                    As dreams are made on, and our little life
                    Is rounded with a sleep. 

                    But there is more: see note at TWL 298 for the more enduring words of
                    epitaphs.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

The Real Thing

I would like to say
that there is nothing
like the quenching power
of a Diet Coke,
ignoring for one
indulgent moment
what other poets
choose to write about.
I would like to note

the pleasant feeling
of carbonation
and the sweetness of
zero calories
and the bitter hint
of a grownup taste,
the icy chill, the
feeling of steel and
the perk of caffeine,

but I’d have to add
quickly, being one
from that grownup world
of bittersweetly
carbonated gas
how the “real thing” is
hardly everything
and “nothing like” is
much less than it seems

after the bubbles
die down and the air
takes the chill away,
when the buzz wears off
and you hunger for
more, anything more
than the flattened
aluminum taste of
water in disguise.

With wisdom and age,
everything is less
than you thought before,
more than you supposed,
nothing like they told
you when you were young,
something that your youth
might spend all its life
trying to understand,

something like the power
of water with no
color, taste or fizz
poured without ice
into a lucid glass
and then lifted up
to the waiting lips
of simplicity.
I need nothing more.


from Stillwater Symposia

Movie Review of the Bark River

This was a lazy river, an easy run
without resistance for those paddling
against the flow and gentle as the breeze
for those who want it breezy coming home.

It was a winding stream, each twist and turn
keeping the paddler’s journey interesting
but wide enough so that the water flows
around each bend in ordinary time.

It was a rural river with the smell
of fertile pastures just beyond the bank,
yet with rows of woods on either side it was,
for those who would prefer, a forest stream.

But in the end, and at the casting call,
this paddler’s lazy river was, for all
its wandering, a small town resident
with locals fishing at the final bend.


from Stillwater Symposia

Moleskin 3.2

With Dad trying hard to make our weekends special, we made a point to see and resee all the major Chicago attractions — two zoos, a half dozen museums, the lakefront, Wrigley Field — and we kept the tourist routine up long after we stopped feeling like out of towners. But let this scratchy record be reconciled: this was not our city. We didn’t live by that backwards river and we didn’t even reside in Chicago proper.  We lived along a drainage ditch in unincorporated Cook County, much closer to the Des Plaines River than Lake Michigan. As far as our distant cousins were concerned, we were still Chicagoans, and we preferred this tag over suburbanites, but in our neighborhood we made no claims. My newfound friends and I were content catching crayfish in the ditch and filling up our wagon with muddy water. We walked four blocks to school, when we didn’t find longer routes to take, and on weekends we rode our bikes on vacant lot dirt paths. I was still Huck Finn, a few miles out of town, and home was wherever I happened to live.

A Sonnet, Defined

It makes me smile to write these fourteen lines
With structure, cadence, balance, pattern, pose
But I have learned that just one thing defines
A sonnet and determines how it flows
More than the number of its syllables,
More than its meter or the way it rhymes,
More than the measure of its parables
Dressed up in templates drawn from other times:
A sonnet is a river that appears
To trickle out of nowhere; it’s a stream
That cuts its path, a course that winds and veers
With more beneath its surface than would seem
But what defines the river most to me
Is how, in time, it brings me to the see.


from Stillwater Symposia

Fire and Water

When love sets fire

to your soul

and lifts it from its place

its foot no longer

touches ground;

love whispers,

the ground moves

and stagnant reasons

disappear;

you are no longer there;

Your feet begin

to move, just as

a river finds the ocean

with no more talk

of searching; you

are nothing but the river

and there is nothing

in the end
but the ocean of God.

from Walled Gardens

Rhyme for Mother's Day

A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.
— Samuel Butler


A mother’s basic instincts start and stop with being there And everything revolves around the children in her care: The raising up, the rearing, the protecting and preparing. She just keeps keeping on, with evolution in the air: She gets no formal training anywhere; Her nest is made, her eggs are laid and all she does is care. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details and the devil’s left behind. She saw her mother do this from a different point of view; The world was all around her then and everything was new: The view itself, the air, the grass of green, the sky of blue, The miles of horizon and a nagging hunger too, And suddenly her mother coming through. Nobody really told her what to do. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details and the devil’s left behind. And now she is the mother, got it all down to an art. She’s facing danger daily, but she plays her precious part: The watch, the cry, the flash of passion, every stop and start Instinctively designed and yet distinctively so smart, And even when things seem to fall apart She takes the stage and plays it from her heart. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details and the devil’s left behind. She cries out loud staccatos in a stuttered anti-phlegm And then she starts performing her sublime dramatic gem: The stumbled pace, the broken wing, the red beneath her hem, To lead her looming enemies astray, away from them. Some folks would automatically condemn The way the mother has abandoned them. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details... This is my rhyme for Mother’s Day, a silly killdeer song With no connection to the mothers I’ve known for so long: The mother of my children, and my mother too, are strong And not inclined to cry or play the fool when things go wrong, And yet if evil ever came along I guess it never stayed around for long. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details and the devil’s left behind. (The author of this platitude nobody seems to know; It’s randomly attributed to many people though: To Flaubert, Nietzche, Einstein, even Michelangelo, Le Corbusier, John Ruskin, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. No one is certain but the truth will show, Beyond all words and birds, everything we need to know. You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine But God is in the details and the devil’s left behind.)


from Thirty Birds