This poem is by Peter Everwine, and I read it in the New Yorker way back in the Oct. 15, 2007 issue. I’ve kept that issue tucked away in one of my bags of poetry stuff, and I reach in every so often to read it. I think I’ll make a point this year — so many good intentions I have had in my life — to learn more about Peter Everwine. I’ve googled him now. Keep tuned for more about him from me, which thoughts will probably not give him the credit he deserves.

Aubade in Autumn

by Peter Everwine

This morning, from under the floorboards

of the room in which I write,

Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues

in a soft falsetto as he works, the words

unclear, though surely one of them is love,

lugging its shadow of sadness into song.

I don’t want to think about sadness;

there’s never a lack of it.

I want to sit quietly for a while

and listen to my father making

a joyful sound unto his mirror

as he shaves—slap of razor

against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice

singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,

coming from so far back in time:

Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .

my father, who had no faith, but loved

how the long, ascending syllable of wild

echoed from the walls in celebration

as the morning opened around him . . .

as now it opens around me, the light shifting

in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across

the bedraggled back-yard roses

that I have been careless of

but brighten the air, nevertheless.

Who am I, if not one who listens

for words to stir from the silences they keep?

Love is the ground note; we cannot do

without it or the sorrow of its changes.

Come to the wildwood, love,

Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,

and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird

quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—

hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Hi,

First of all, please check out Meetings and Events for more information about the upcoming NSPF meetings. We actually came up with a program for the new year. First of all, on Oct. 24, join us at the Beverly Public Library, 11 a.m., Sohier Room, for a celebration of Halloween. Bring a copy of an original poem about that ever-popular date, so that we can have a little  contest among those who show up. The copy should be unsigned. Each of us will give points to the poems. The one with the most points will win a little prize. It should be fun. And, please, don’t get in a dither!

Also, I thought I had posted three poems by Amy Dengler, and it seems I haven’t. Of course, I really should post every single one, because she is so good. But, still, this additional one might inspire you to come here Amy at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem on Oct. 15, which is National Poetry Day. She and other poets will be reading at the Salem Atheneum on Essex Street. See the link on this site for more information.

Again, this is taken from her collection, Between Leap and Landing.

Driving To Rochester

by Amy Dengler

There are no eagles along the Thruway

so I measure miles in red-tailed hawks:

four hundred miles, eleven hawks.

White-bibbed, they perch in dead trees

scanning for slow mice and sleek rabbits.

They see everything. …

The sun is low when I arrive.

My mother’s apartment is half the size

of the house where I grew us. She is smaller, too.

The able hands that bathed those slippery babies

shake, skin thinned to brown spots and blue veins. …

From the flowered sofa I watch her

shuffle grocery slips, clipped together

like something worth saving. The oak table

where we ate oatmeal and talked and read

is steady as ever under stacks of last week’s news

and notebooks stuffed with receipts and cipherings. …

She suffers from doing and redoing

counting and recounting

checking and rechecking.

She is the slow mouse.

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.