Baby Dear

Brothers chatting (right before The Bairn bopped Nate on the head with that pipe cleaner and then made him wear it as a mustache).

I was talking to the baby the other night and suddenly remembered this poem that my mom used to quote when speaking to infants.  Steve found some of the lines a bit much (he doesn't think Natey's cheek is like a warm white rose), but I like it.  There's something nice about the thought that people have always spoken to their babies this way and felt they were a gift.  I especially like the last line.  

Where Did You Come From, Baby Dear?

by George MacDonald

Where did you come from, baby dear?

Out of the everywhere into here.

Where did you get your eyes so blue?

Out of the sky as I came through.

What makes the light in them sparkle and spin?

Some of the starry spikes left in.

Where did you get that little tear?

I found it waiting when I got here.

What makes your forehead so smooth and high?

A soft hand stroked it as I went by.

What makes your cheek like a warm white rose?

I saw something better than anyone knows.

Whence that three-cornered smile of bliss?

Three angels gave me at once a kiss.

Where did you get this pearly ear?

God spoke, and it came out to hear.

Where did you get those arms and hands?

Love made itself into hooks and bands.

Feet, whence did you come, you darling things?

From the same box as the cherubs' wings.

How did they all just come to be you?

God thought about me, and so I grew.

But how did you come to us, you dear?

God thought about you, and so I am here.

The Bill Martin Jr Big Book of Poetry

The Bairn loves poetry and I love reading it to him. In fact, sitting in the rocking chair reading "Disobedience" by A.A. Milne to The Bairn makes me terribly nostalgic, takes me right back to my own childhood, and gives me a sense that all the generations of my family must somehow be connected back through time by some variation on this activity.  My mother used to read it to me.

I recently found this children's book of poetry at our library.  It's full of gems and illustrated by a variety of artists, including Lois Ehlert, a favorite of The Bairn's.  If I didn't enjoy poetry so much myself, I wouldn't have imagined that The Bairn could sit still for so long asking for more.

Here are two of the poems we like best from the book at the moment (The Bairn also really loves one about a woodpecker and a silly one about scratching an itch.  Oh, and I also love reading him the one about rain by Langston Hughes, but I'm too lazy to look that one up.  Oh, AND I discovered that in Grade 9, Steve listed poetry as one of his pet peeves and when he looked through this book with us, he couldn't get past the non-rhyming poetry.  He says he doesn't know what makes it a poem if it doesn't rhyme.  Oh, the engineers).

Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when the lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

--Edna St. Vincent Millay


Taking Turns

When sun goes home
behind the trees,
and locks her shutters tight --

then stars come out
with silver keys
to open up the night.

--Norma Faber

Listen to This Poetry

Steve bought me a used elliptical machine just before Christmas (as per my request) and then gave me an ENORMOUS box of chocolates on Christmas day (as per my desires). The real gift, though, is that he takes the kids for an hour or so every morning so I can exercise and watch YouTube videos. This week I've been watching TED talks so now I know the power of introverts, how to hack online dating, how to make stress work for me, and who Sarah Kay is. Sarah Kay is a spoken word poet and I'm really enjoying her work. This is the TED talk she did. She starts with a poem, so when she first starts speaking and you wonder, Why is she talking like that?, that's why.

Poetry Reading with Engineers

The other night Steve agreed to read poetry with me.  In my experience, engineers do not generally enjoy the poetry I enjoy.  One day in college I was studying in the library and I had a stack of books piled up next to me, including a poetry anthology.  An engineering student friend came in, sat down next to me, and cracked open the anthology while he waited for me to finish up.  I glanced over and saw him reading "The Weed" by Elizabeth Bishop.  When he was done, he turned to me and said, "This is not about gardening."  Engineers are quite literal.  I made some Humanities major comments about the human experience and metaphor, and he replied by opening one of his engineering texts to some kind of science-y graph and noting, "Now THIS is poetry."

Steve is similar.  I read him a couple of poems I like and he scrunched up his face a bit and said, "I like funny poems.  That rhyme."  He also likes Rudyard Kipling, especially his poem about engineers and "If", which his grandmother gave him in a card one time AND is the poem that will get you a free hamburger at a certain restaurant in Winnipeg if you can recite the whole thing from memory. 

Steve:  It's a really good poem.
MBC: This is a good poem too.
Steve: That poem won't get you a hamburger.

Touché

The Secret of Steve's Success

I started volunteering at the city library today. The man who is my immediate supervisor is about to retire and is a bit of an English stereotype--very well-spoken with a dry sense of humor and an inclination to offer visitors tea. He appears to know everything about the history of the UK and I've learned all kinds of things about grave-robbing traps and medieval buildings and bridge disasters while spending time with him. He has a project in mind for me to work on, but he seems to be most interested that I feel NO PRESSURE about anything--arriving at a certain time, completing work, etc. Instead, I am to enjoy myself and feel free to use the kettle and read up on whatever fascinating files I encounter (so far, my favorite files are 19th century drawings of local gravestones). I am happy to oblige.

The library has quite a lot of information on the poet William McGonagall, and my supervisor is a bit of an expert on him. We ran across several files that refer to McGonagall, which excited me because McGonagall is an important part of my relationship with Steve. McGonagall is a terrible, but much-loved, local poet from the late 1800s, and Steve wooed me with his awful verse. Here's a little gem of an excerpt from "The Sprig of Moss":

And when life's prospects at times appear dreary to ye,

Remember Alois Senefelder, the discoverer of Lithography

Magical, no? To be so brilliantly bad at your craft is a real gift. A gift.

It's National Poetry Month (in that other country I live in sometimes)

Remember Amy Lowell? She wrote "The Letter." This is another poem she wrote that I enjoy. I find the calling out and shouting bit a bit too much, but the last two lines are lovely and the phrase "wedge you away from me" is such a nice image. I like Ms. Lowell's turn of phrase.

The Taxi
by Amy Lowell

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?


My hot cross buns call to me. (Happy Good Friday!)

A New (to me) Poem

I just bought Essential Pleasures, the new poetry anthology edited by Robert Pinsky, creator of the Favorite Poem Project, for the library. I think Robert Pinsky heads up brilliant poetry projects. The poems he selects are notably accessible and he includes a nice range of time periods and styles. Or maybe he just includes a significant number of my favorites. The new anthology encourages listening to poetry read aloud (http://poemsoutloud.net is promoted in the book) and includes a CD of selected poems.

This is the end of Amy Lowell's poem "The Letter." I discovered it in Essential Pleasures.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Holy cow! Have you ever heard anything as descriptive as chafing my heart against the want of you? I can't get over it. It's too good.

Dem Bones Dem Bones

Last week I read Laurie Halse Anderson's new book Wintergirls. Anderson's book Speak is one of my favorite books of all time, and I think Wintergirls is the best thing she's written in the intervening 10 years. HOWEVER, Wintergirls is about anorexia and anorexia creeps. me. out. If I think too hard about elbows or ankles (they're so boney), it reminds me of anorexia, and I feel disturbed. In college I took a yoga class, and when we had to lie on our backs with our hands on our stomachs and relax, sometimes I couldn't, because my elbows were touching the mat and making me think about teenagers starving themselves to death. Even writing about elbows right now is distressing me. Ever since reading Wintergirls, I've had difficulty falling asleep at night. I'm very aware of my bones. Usually if I can't sleep, I lie on my stomach and scoot down until I can hook my feet over the end of the bed, but now when I do that, I feel all of my ribs touching the mattress. The other night I was trying to distract myself from bone thoughts, and told myself, Sing a song, sing a song and what did my enterprising little mind come up with? The toe bone's connected to the foot bone, the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone . . .

[Late additon: I just read this poem by Laurie Halse Anderson about Speak in VOYA, a ya review source. This video is Anderson reading it.]

National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month, and this is my favorite poem. I find it extremely touching. That last line kills me.

Saint Judas
by James Wright

When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.


Anybody else have favorite poems I should be reading this month?

p o e t r y

I believe I've mentioned before that Billy Collins is a rock star and that he created Poetry 180 while he was the U.S. poet laureate. I really like both Poetry 180 the book and Poetry 180 the website, because the poems are so accessible.

I was playing with the website recently and I keep coming back to these two poems. The first one reminds me of Tuey.

Poem Number 176

How to Change a Frog Into a Prince
Anna Denise

Start with the underwear. Sit him down.
Hopping on one leg may stir unpleasant memories.
If he gets his tights on, even backwards, praise him.
Fingers, formerly webbed, struggle over buttons.
Arms and legs, lengthened out of proportion, wait,
as you do, for the rest of him to catch up.
This body, so recently reformed, reclaimed,
still carries the marks of its time as a frog. Be gentle.
Avoid the words awkward and gawky.
Do not use tadpole as a term of endearment.
His body, like his clothing, may seem one size too big.
Relax. There's time enough for crowns. He'll grow into it.

from The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm's Fairy Tales, 2003
Story Line Press, Ashland, OR


Poem Number 052

Love Poem With Toast
Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999
University of Illinois Press

Winter

My mom complained that last week I didn't post enough and that my posts were insufficient to meet her blog reading needs. Here's what I have to say about that: It is the winter. I wake up every day in the dark. I scrape the ice off my car in the cold. I go to work and deal with the patrons and explain to folks with head injuries why their computers won't function properly (because they're being operated by people with head injuries) and explain to folks without evaluative skills why we're not going to put special stickers on our movies to warn unsuspecting parents of the content (because the MPAA already puts those pretty little PG-13 ratings on there for us). It's a rough season. I can only do so much.

...People hit 
the sauce in a big way all winter.
Amidst blizzards they wrestle
unsuccessfully with the dark comedy
of their lives, laughter trapped
in their frigid gizzards.  Meanwhile,
the mercury just plummets,
like a migrating duck blasted
out of the sky by some hunter
in a cap with fur earflaps.

-Amy Gerstler, from "A Severe Lack of Holiday Spirit"

Loving Blackberries

I went to the Salt Lake City Farmers' Market on Saturday. Heaven! I love, love, love a good farmers' market. I bought a basil plant, beets, squash, a loaf of bread, apricots, and blackberries.

These are my pretty, pretty blackberries.

In the evening (after first stopping at the Scottish Festival in Payson, where one of the Festival rules was that all swords were to remained sheathed throughout the Festival. Really. I found it in writing), I made a blackberry and apricot free form tart with a cornmeal crust. Delicious.


I always think of this poem when I eat blackberries.

MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS
by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

What I'm Reading

I'm reading a book that's very unhealthy for me at the moment. It's entitled Almost French and it's a memoir about a young woman who takes a leave of absence from her job to travel for a year and ends up moving to France permanently to live with her new French love. Every dozen pages or so I have to remind myself that I don't want a French lover, that I have obligations to speak at some conference deal event thing in a few months, and that as far as I can tell, it's not possible to be a freelance librarian (but that would be spectacular) so I can't go traipsing off to Europe. Yet. All of this is to say that I have to get back to my book and can't post anything more interesting, but you can read this poem that I like. I like everything that has anything to do with librarians. And the words "bookish dark."

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs bum like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-Mark Strand

What I Like Today

Number 1
I'm still thinking about this book that I finished reading last week. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. It's a collection of interviews with staff from the Met--trustees, curators, cleaning crew, security, the guy who provides flowers for the Great Hall--a wide variety of people. I was fascinated by the diversity of experiences, the different paths people took to end up at the Met, and the hugely varied responsibilities of the people interviewed. Most of the interviews also included a little bit of life-affirming Yay Met! Museums are Important!, which I agree with. My brother worked at the Met for a while, and it was NOT his favorite job (but it got me some pretty sweet Met-themed Christmas gifts). This book still makes me want to join the staff, though.

Number 2
I'd forgotten about this poem, but I stumbled across it again recently and remembered how much I like it.

GOD'S MOOD

these daughters are bone,
they break.
He wanted stone girls
and boys with branches for arms
that He could lift His life with
and be lifted by.
these sons are bone.

He is tired of years that keep turning into age
and flesh that keeps widening.
He is tired of waiting for His teeth to
bite Him and walk away.

He is tired of bone,
it breaks.
He is tired of eve's fancy and
adam's whining ways.

-Lucille Clifton

Number 3
IKEA Meatballs
I watched the marmots yesterday while my sister and brother-in-law went to IKEA, and my sister brought me back a bag of Swedish meatballs. I can't logically justify the joy that comes from a bag of frozen meatballs made in Pennsylvania, but they are yummy. Those Swedes. They never let you down.

More Poetry

Can you tell that when I'm too lazy to take time to post something, I just give you a poem to read? Even when I feel like divulging social life information that would be more interesting than this. Can't though. Too busy watching The O.C.

This is my favorite poetry book. It's a compilation from the Favorite Poem Project.


And this is one of the poems I discovered in it. I especially like the image of the pants behind the desk.

From the Journals of the Frog Prince

In March I dreamed of mud,
sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table,
rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.
In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.
Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen
for wafts of silt and ale,
cinnamon and river bottom,
tender scallion and sour underlog.

At night I cannot sleep.
I am listening for the dribble of mud
climbing the stairs to our bedroom
as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran
up them in the dark.

Last night I said, “Face it, you’re bored.
How many times can you live over
with the same excitement
that moment when the princess leans
into the well, her face a petal
falling to the surface of the water
as you rise like a bubble to her lips,
the golden ball bursting from your mouth?”
Remember how she hurled you against the wall,
your body cracking open,
skin shriveling to the bone,
the green pod of your heart splitting in two,
and her face imprinted with every moment
of your transformation?

I no longer tremble.

Night after night I lie beside her.
“Why is your forehead so cool and damp?” she asks.
Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.
The hand that brushes my head is feverish.
At her touch I long for wet leaves,
the slap of water against rocks.

“What are you thinking of?” she asks.
How can I tell her
I am thinking of the green skin
shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?
Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt
of my sword, to the leek-green tip of my soul?
Someday I will drag her by her hair
to the river--and what? Drown her?
Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?
But there’s no more violence in her
than in a fence or a gate.

“What are you thinking of?” she whispers.
I am staring into the garden.
I am watching the moon
wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,
over the stone basin of the fountain.
How can I tell her
I am thinking that transformations are not forever?

--Susan Mitchell

A Good Poem

I like this poem. I hope you like it, too.

The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

I Know a Guy

Marmot Dad has connections. He meets the famous. Last week he met Donald Davis, a wonderful professional storyteller, and he let me meet him, too, which was so nice of him. I'm compiling a list of people I'd like Marmot Dad to meet, so that I can hang out with them. When I started pitching my list to Marmot Dad, he called me a stalker. Harsh.

He did say that Billy Collins might still be a possibility. This is the first poem in Poetry 180, an anthology (the poems are also available online) created as part of a Library of Congress project. There's a second anthology, 180 More, which is also very nice.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I Like Poetry

I like poetry. My mom read us Dorothy Parker and The Highwayman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, when I was growing up. In college I took a poetry class and learned to love Robert Hass and Billy Collins and my very favorite, Saint Judas by James Wright. And then I discovered the Favorite Poem Project, Robert Pinsky's project with the Library of Congress. There are three Favorite Poem Project books, and the best one is the second, Poems to Read. The Favorite Poem Project invites readers to submit their favorite poems and the reasons why they love the poems, which is what makes the books so fantastic--there are reader comments on almost every poem and they're SO interesting. The comments provide an extra layer of meaning to each poem.

This is one of my newest poetry finds. Enjoy!

Why I Am in Love with Librarians

by Julia Alvarez -- Library Journal, 1/15/2003

I love how they know things
only to pass them on,
how they fade into the faux-wood-paneled
walls of the reference room,
their faces hidden between the covers of books,

how they look up only to help you:
What is the capital of Afghanistan?
How do the Maori bury their dead?
Who invented Barbie? How many were murdered in Guatemala in '84?

—every query worthy of their attention,
any questioner taken seriously,
curiosity the only requirement.
I love how they listen, their lined faces opening,
their eyes already elsewhere:

scanning a plain for the lights of a distant city,
hunting for bodies in the highlands,
searching the web for Barbie—
their minds like those flocks of little birds in winter
swooping over a landscape, looking, looking.

And always when they get back to you,
that sweet smile on their faces,
pride and deep affection for what can be known,
as if Barbie's invention
or the tally of the massacred

could save you, could save the world!
And who knows if Stalin or Hitler
had spent their youth in the library,
history might be rewritten,
re-catalogued by librarians?

Curiosity sends us out
to a world both larger and smaller
than what we know and believe in
with a passion for finding an answer
or at least understanding our questions.

That road is paved with librarians,
bushwhackers, scouts with string
through the labyrinths of information,
helpers who disappear the moment
you reach your destination.

for Joy Pile