Here’s another great poem by Mark Strand, from his “Dark Harbor” collection. (Remember, breaks between stanzas will be set off as three dots, since for some reason this wordpress program doesn’t recognize extra spaces at the end of lines.)

VIII

If dawn breaks the heart, and the moon is a horror,

And the sun is nothing but the source of torpor,

Then of course I would have been silent all these years …

And would not have chosen to go out tonight

In my new dark blue double-breasted suit

And to sit in a restaurant with a bowl …

Of soup before me to celebrate how good life

Has been and how it has culminated in this instant

The harmonies of wholesomeness have reached their apogee, …

And I am aquiver with satisfaction, and you look

Good, too. I love your gold teeth and your dyed hair —

A little green, a little yellow– and your weight, …

Which is finally up where we never thought

It would be. O my partner, my beautiful death,

My black paradise, my fusty intoxicant, …

My symbolist muse, give me your breast

Or your hand or your tongue that sleeps all day

Behind its wall of reddish gums. …

Lay yourself down on the restaurant floor

And recite all that’s been kept from my happiness

Tell me I have not lived in vain, that the stars …

Will not die, that things will stay as they are,

That what I have seen will last, that I was not born

Into change, that what I have said has not been said for me.

Those of us in the newspaper business know what After Deadline means  …  Release, often exhaustion, certainly freedom from immediate travail.

Depending upon one’s time in the business, it can mean more or less of the above. I have been in good times and bad, but always, after deadline was a good thing, and sometimes it meant absolute heaven, more often of late.

As more work is required and less help provided, deadline itself has become more of  a reach for those of us who continue to care about the quality of the product. We must change with the times, limit our reach, be thrilled with less and be happy, so they say.

I’m not, and I keep trying to give what I think is verging on a good product, both in print and online. It’s tough, though. That video of the fire at Danvers Town Hall, for instance, still waits for my edits and production. Will it get done? Does it really matter?

Which echoes, of course, the great question of all our lives … does it really matter?

Poets love this topic, in one way or another, and here is a poem by Mark Strand, who I think is a terrific poet,  and this poem may or may not speak to the issue. … from his volume, “Dark Harbor.”

(Note: for some reason, this program does not allow extra spaces between stanzas, so I will indicate such a break with a space and then three dots.)

XVI

It is true, as someone has said, that in

A world without heaven all is farewell.

Whether you wave your hand or not, …

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes

It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,

hating what passes, it i s still farewell. …

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean

Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans

Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting, …

Are stages in an ultimte stillness, and the movement

Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body

Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being …

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion

Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,

Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings, …

The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken

The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions

Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end …

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it

In the temptations of sleep, in the the moon’s ripening,

In the wine as it waits in the glass.

Here is another by Mark Strand, to make up for my lack of attentiveness to the blog this week (mea culpa).

XL I

Sometimes after dinner when I wander out

And stare into the night sky and realize I have no idea

Of what I see, that the distance of the stars …

Is meaningless and their number far beyond

What I can reckon, I wonder if the physicist

Sees the same sky I do, a lavish ordering of lights, …

Disposed to match our scale, and our power to imagine

In simple terms a space like the space we suffer

Here on earth in this room with you sitting …

In that chair, reading a book of which I understand

Nothing, thinking thoughts I could not guess at,

As moments approach whose cargo is a mystery. …

Ah, who knows? we are already traveling faster than our

Apparent stillness can stand, and if it keeps up

You will be light-years away by the time I speak.

Labor Day weekend, and it is a stunningly beautiful Saturday. I intend to spend as much of it outside as possible. So, here’s another poem by Louise Gluck, another called Vespers, actually, and from same collection of poems, “The Wild Iris.”

Vespers

By Louise Gluck

End of August. Heat

like a tent over

John’s garden. And some things

have the nerve to be getting started,

clusters of tomatoes, stands

of late lilies–optimism

of the great stalks–imperial

gold and silver: but why

start anything

so close to the end?

Tomatoes that will never ripen, lilies

winter will kill, that won’t

come back in spring. Or

are you thinking

I spend too much time

looking ahead, like

an old woman wearing

sweaters in summer;

are you saying I can

flourish, having

no hope

of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory

of the open throat, white,

spotted with crimson.

Although I love fall, I also dread it, with its browning over of the green fields and its shorter days and its colder nights thrashing into winter.

I love winter, too, and I cheer up in January as the days get longer. But the many months of it in New England are trying.

So, we are still in summer, a summer that had a very long, cool beginning and lots of rain, so that my garden is not much to brag about. Of course, it never is, but it is usually better. I have puny green tomatoes so far, just a few red ripe ones.

Which, brings to mind a wonderful poem by Louise Gluck, in her Wild Iris collection. I believe that she is talking to God, whom she never names, but with titles of poems like Matins and Vespers, and the gist of them, that is certainly my interpretation. I’ve not read any others.

Vespers

By Louise Gluck

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

Here is another one of Amy Dengler’s poems from her book, “Between Leap and Landing.”

Flight Patterns

By Amy Dengler

It took ten years

to replace take-offs and landings

crew camaraderie and the constancy of change.

I miss the bricked streets of Philadephia

New Orderans’ courtyards

turquoise hotel pools.

I used to know my way around

every low-lit wide-windowed terminal —

that misnamed gateway to anywhere.

What finally emerged

erasing not memory but aimlessness —

words

strings of them

like a skein of geese going somewhere

paragraphing companionably.

Words come like water

in a gush, or in dreams.

Some arrive in the slow and solitary hours

pen pushing a penguin to flight

praying for lift, thrust

a good tailwind.

Amy Dengler will be participating in the Salem Writers launch of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, from Oct. 15-18. See their website, http://www.eventbrite.com/event, for more information about specific times.

Amy has been a member of the Massachusetts State Poetry Society for many years. A resident of Gloucester, she has won many awards through the years. She has read at the North Shore Poets’ Forum National Poetry Month celebration in April many times, and I have personally had the pleasure of participating in the same Round Robin with Amy through the years.

Her book, “Between Leap and Landing,” states that she grew up in Rochester, New York, and at the age of 7 had decided she would do three things: work for a newspaper, be an airline flight attendant, and write a book. She has done all three. We hope she keeps writing her wonderful poems and shares them with us.

(More will be added as I find time to type them … )

Watering the Lavender at Sunset
by Amy Dengler

This could be Provence:
lush purple spilling over the front steps
bees stunned by the fragrance
a seabreeze stirring the black-eyed Susans.

The harbor this afternoon was bobbing with vessels.
We bought fish and fixed supper in the yard,
the tablecloth luffing up
before we moored it with silver and plates.
When the sky opened we stayed put, watched
the haddock swim again on the platter
the wineglasses fill with rain
the candles sputter out.

Lavender anchors me here,
so too a freshening breeze,
slack lines singing in the boatyards.
Tomorrow, all the ceremonies will be the same:
first light, cast off, mug-up,
saltwater lapping enameld bulk, seamusic
as essential as air.

It is sweltering, and I remember how it would swelter when I was a child in Holbrook. Yet, we didn’t mind, somehow. We traipsed off to the woods, leaping over the brook to the big rock, then onto the log cabin, which some father in some distant past had built for the enjoyment of some unknown children.

Sounds like a fairy tale.

Or we went blueberry picking in a connecting woods we got to by filing down the sandy road to O’Han’s Farm, which no one farmed anymore, and beyond to the two pine trees — our picnic spot —  and then crawled to savor the low-bush blueberries.

One summer some of us had an elaborate game of cowboys, and we dressed in dungarees and long-sleeved shirts, and we pulled scarves over our faces and robbed each other. It went on for weeks, that game. We would rush out every morning to begin again, and I remember my mother amazed that we didn’t mind the heat.

Maybe we were 9. Which brings to mind a poem by the great poet Billy Collins

On Turning Ten

By Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.