Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Recently a friend’s entire life got turned upside down by domestic violence. I don’t know a lot of details, and obviously it’d be uncool to share them here without her permission, but I know that she was very seriously afraid of someone she lived with, and had to get away from him in a hurry. I haven’t known her all that long, but I’m still so shaken by what happened, so sorry that I had no idea what she must have been going through. I wish I could have helped.

I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this happen to someone I care about. But it’s not.

She’s better off than some people who end up in this kind of situation. She has relatives she can live with. She has friends who are willing to risk their own safety to stand between her and a dangerous man. But still… I’m worried for her.

So, to my friend (and anyone else who might need it), I want to say: Do not be ashamed. You do not deserve this. It’s not your fault. But you can live through this, and it will get better. You’ve already done the hardest part. And you have friends, and family. Don’t be too proud to lean on them. They care about you, and they want to help.

There’s no poem that’s going to fit here, but I thought some words of hope would be useful. So here’s a few from the Patron Saint of Oppressed Women, Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird—
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Also, if anyone should happen to need it or know someone who does, here’s contact info for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, which can provide crisis intervention, safety planning, information and referrals to agencies in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands: http://www.ndvh.org/ (warning: computers can be monitored – don’t click on the link unless you feel secure on the computer you’re using), 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or 1-800-787-3224 (TTY).

Happy New Year to our devoted readers out there! I hope each and every one of you spent New Year’s Eve just as you wanted to spend it and with someone you love.

What better way to usher in the new year than with Naomi Shihab Nye, pictured here, a poet to whom I give my great adoration. I love what she captures in this poem I’m sharing below. Perhaps for some this would be a source of stress, the mass of Only the Things I Didn’t Do’s, as you look back on a year. To me, it’s very freeing. As one of my other favorite poets once wrote (well, singer/songwriter, but I’d argue she’s a poet, too): “The zero in my hand / is nothing to lose / it’s hard to confuse power with love / love with power / everything that I’m not is all that I’ve got.” Hey, you never know when you might need a zero (or simply a big sunny field). I say the first day of a new year is a good time for one. I love how its absence—and those sudden zeroes—shout and leave us a space, as Naomi puts it in “Burning the Old Year,” originally published in 1995’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (also mentioned before and once upon a time at 7-Imp). I’ll take those spaces—and what they offer us— over a list of resolutions any ‘ol day. And with gratitude.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

You can read the rest here.

Tomorrow’s Poetry Friday round-up will be handled by the dynamic duo over at A Year of Reading.

Here’s to beginning again with the smallest of numbers . . .

I want to share a very good Christmas poem with you guys – but I can’t. At least, I can’t transcribe part of it here and then tell you to “click here to read the rest.” It’s a shape poem (actually, a shape sonnet, if you can believe it) and in WordPress it’s just a pain in the ass to try to get the spacing right.

So… Please click here and read “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” by George Starbuck. I’m sorry I’m forgoing the usual excerpt, but I’ll tell you that it has delicious words like “fury-bedecked” and “glitter-torn” and “bonbonbonanza.” Please take my word for it. It’s good. You’ll like it. Pinky-promise. And… Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Beautiful Solstice.

Laura is on Poetry Friday Round-Up detail at Author Amok. You’ll want to see what she’s got.

The other day I heard Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D Minor (2nd Movement). This piece of music pretty much stops me in my tracks every time. I think it’s transcendently beautiful. It also always reminds me of the scene in the film adaptation (from way back in ’86) of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God in which James Leeds, played by William Hurt, is trying to describe that exact piece of music to his girlfriend, who is deaf, played by Marlee Matlin (for which she won the Oscar, damn skippy). Knowing that he loves the piece, she’s put the record on, walked into the room, and signed, “show me the music.” He tries, but he can’t quite find the words, so to speak.

And then that reminded me of the scene in Philadelphia (from not so far back as ’93), in which Tom Hanks’ character is asking Denzel Washington’s character if he’s ever heard Maria Callas sing La Mamma Morta. And the music moves him so much that he stands up with his IV drip to listen and tries to describe it and lets the music wash over him and the camera’s swinging around him slowly and then red washes over it all and the filming is just so GORGEOUS and it makes me cry so hard like a blubbery fool that the first time I saw it in a dark theater, I thought I’d BUST.

Same for that Children of a Lesser God scene. They are both so moving in that here are two mere mortals trying to capture the very ineffability of music. Valiant efforts, indeed, but can we really do that?

Well, Rainer Maria Rilke tried. I’m always drawn to those poets and authors and musicians who try to articulate the inexpressible, who venture out beyond all words into that mysterious realm. And Rilke is rather the master of all that, yes? Those two cinematic memories—brought to me by a serendipitous moment of Bach on public radio this week—invited Rilke’s “To Music” to mind, which has always been one of my favorite poems. “Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends.”{*} Ah. Sublime. Read the rest of this entry �

Here’s the thing about insomnia: it doesn’t just make you tired. It shades everything with a hint of the surreal. After enough nights of lying there watching the hours blink by on the alarm clock, the boundaries between awake and asleep get blurry. I’ll glance at the time on the computer screen at work and realize I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the past hour. I’ll be reading on the couch and doze off, continuing the story in a dream, then wake up and wonder why the story I’m reading doesn’t make sense anymore. I feel a little like Billy Pilgrim, like I’ve come unstuck in time.

I don’t mean to whine – I know my circadian rhythm will settle down eventually. This is just one of those things I’m prone to. Sometimes I get bouts of insomnia when I’m worried or excited about something, and I can’t get my brain to shut up long enough for me to fall asleep. Sometimes it seems to happen for no reason at all. But I think this time it was set off by crossing the international date line a couple of times within a week – my sleep cycle was totally messed up, and I haven’t managed to get it back on track yet. But it’ll pass.

Lines from this poem (a villanelle, one of my favorite forms) keep drifting around behind my eyes. I love it, not just for the irresistible rhythm, but for the dreamy, synesthesia-like atmosphere created by linking all those incongruous sensations. Here’s “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Click here to read the rest. And then head on over to Mommy’s Favorite Children’s Books, where Karen is handling this week’s Poetry Friday roundup.

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving with their loved ones. I didn’t have nine kinds of pie after all, but I did have some pumpkin pie and red wine and made sure to watch this, so all was good.

J. Patrick Lewis has stopped by on this Poetry Friday to share another poem from his forthcoming Countdown to Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year, to be published by Little, Brown next year. This poem was first published in Cricket Magazine, November/December 2008:

“The Menu at the First Thanksgiving, 1621”

The Pilgrims likely brought no pigs across:
That first Thanksgiving they would eat no ham,
No mashed potato, sweet potato, yam,
For lack of sugar, no cranberry sauce.
Corn on the cob would not have been around.
A pumpkin pie? Not even in their dreams.
And yet the bounty was a match, it seems,
For this historic day on hallowed ground.
Wild turkey, goose, duck, swan, partridge and crane,
Cod, bass, herring, bluefish and eels released
Uncommon bonds of gratitude. That feast
Would be their last. They never met again—
The Indians and Pilgrims—to break bread.
But that Thanksgiving Day they were well-fed.

I don’t have much more to say, since—as I type this on Thanksgiving evening—I’m still very full from what you could call a feast, I suppose — except that I very much like that poem and appreciate Pat stopping by and sharing today and that the above painting is American painter Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’ “The First Thanksgiving,” and that the rights to the poem are all Pat’s.

See you all on Sunday for your kicks. Until then . . .

It’s funny how a little shift in perspective can make the ordinary seem not-so. In preparation for my impending trip to Korea, I got a new camera. Of course I had to road-test it a little to make sure I knew how to use it. And looking at familiar little things around my neighborhood through the LCD screen makes me notice details I would normally tune out — the last scraggly brown leaves on the trees, the odd green color of the railing on the bridge over a little creek, a beer bottle caught against the rocks in the current.

I wonder what Korea will look like to me. The only other time I’ve ever been outside the country (Greece, 1997), I remember how even the most mundane stuff took on a surreal quality because the cultural filter was so different. Billboards, TV, menus, conversations I overheard in shops and on the street… since I couldn’t understand the language, what drew my attention were details of shape and color, sound and movement, facial expressions and gestures. Nuances that would normally be lost since I’d be focused on the meaning of what was being said, if I were even paying attention at all.

That’s the idea that drew me to this poem. I love how well it captures the sensation of the familiar rendered bizarre, as well as the idea that sometimes you need to change your point of view to truly see. Here’s “Waving Goodbye” by Elizabeth Spires:

The world bends us to its purpose.
In the public gardens, we found
a “gazing globe” balanced
on a waist-high pedestal,
a silver ball a foot in circumference,
reflecting sky and ground,
ourselves as we stood above it.
We stared into its depths,
as in a crystal ball,
our faces large and wild,
arms and legs unnaturally small,
as if a spell were on the world,
or, finally, we clearly saw the world
for what it was: too brightly
shining, circular, unadorned.

Please click here to read the rest.

Holly Cupala is hosting this week’s Poetry Friday Round-up at her blog, Brimstone Soup.

(How much do I love that blog name? A LOT. Seriously, I am so jealous she thought of it and I didn’t. I’m trying to be cool about it here, but I WANT IT. Jules, I think we should steal it. “Seven Impossible Bowls of Brimstone Soup Before Breakfast.” Yes? Yesss. HOLLY, WATCH YOUR BACK. Just sayin’.)

I’m falling back on an old favorite today for my turn for Poetry Friday, as in one of my favorite poems. Ever.

I’ve been thinking again this week about the hustle and bustle of our lives. And, as a result, I went looking yesterday for my copy of What the Living Do: Poems (published in ’98) so that I could re-read the poem for which the anthology is named. This was Marie Howe’s second poetry anthology (I see she has a new one this year that I’m going to have to hunt down), a beautiful anthology of spare, intimate poems, primarily about the death of her beloved brother, John. Though many of the poems are about grief, elegies to those she has loved and lost, Howe has described the anthology in this way: “Each of {the poems} seems a love poem to me.” Indeed, underlying every poem is a joy, a deep reverence for life.

The first I time I read this poem, the room spun around a bit and I had to collect myself afterwards. Because Howe nails. it. This is what we do.

I take my chances by posting it in its entirety instead of breaking your reverie by making you have to go to another link.

Yat-Yee Chong is hosting Poetry Friday today over here. Enjoy.

Tuesday night, while history was being made, my husband was at work – Ithaca College was in final rehearsals for a show. Around the time he got out, he heard a lot of commotion and screaming from somewhere on campus. The next day a student told him what had happened: when Barack Obama was declared our President-elect, hundreds of students rushed outside and launched into a spontaneous rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” You can watch it here:

Call me a sap, but I just think that’s incredibly moving. So today’s poetry choice seems like an obvious one to me. Here’s another celebratory song, “I Hear America Singing,” from that rascally old patriot Walt Whitman.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

This is my celebratory song. I’ve had it in my head for going on three days now. What’s yours?

Happy Poetry Friday, America. Our dear friend Jone, a.k.a. Ms. Mac, is hosting over at Check it Out. Godspeed.

… he was really quite entertainingly bad.

I don’t mean to offend any Poe fans out there. I mean, I love “The Raven” as much as anybody. And I thought of Poe today, not just because of Halloween and all things spooky, but because last weekend while digging around for my high school senior photos, I also found a pretty hilarious picture of my (future) husband and myself dressed as the Ushers for a Poe-themed party given by the Humanities department at our college. No, I’m not sharing that one.

Anyway. The thing is, while Poe definitely had a real talent for meter and rhyme, and a brilliant imagination… dude could sometimes stray pretty far into Melodramaville. Sometimes he was downright emo, even for a Victorian. Take this poem, “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad.” I mean, he even had to make the title mysterious making it clear it’s dedicated to somebody but he’s not saying who.

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispèd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Okay, pretty good so far, right? He’s doing what he does best: setting a spooky, supernatural tone; and that repetitive thing he’s doing is almost like a chant – maybe an invocation, maybe a talisman against some sort of malevolent power – which adds another layer of mysticism to the mix.

But read on.
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