Summer Night, Riverside....

Musing about a possible trip to NYC this summer, I remembered...



SUMMER NIGHT, RIVERSIDE
~by Sara Teasdale

In the wild soft summer darkness

How many and many a night we two together

Sat in the park and watched the Hudson

Wearing her lights like golden spangles

Glinting on black satin.

The rail along the curving pathway

Was low in a happy place to let us cross,

And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom

Sheltered us,

While your kisses and the flowers,

Falling, falling,

Tangled in my hair....

The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.

And now, far off

In the fragrant darkness

The tree is tremulous again with bloom

For June comes back.

To-night what girl

Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair

This year's blossoms, clinging to its coils?

Poetry Introductions

What would I do without the poets that others have introduced me to?

I really can't say...don't know if I would have discovered them on my own, or if my life would just be wanting.

I can't count the number of poets that Marion has "found" for me, but they include Rilke, Lucille Clifton, David Whyte and the incomparable Kim Addonizio. I love that Kim and Marion and I are exactly the same age. I think of her as a contemporary poet. That must mean Marion and I are contemporary, too. Heaven knows, we're not old.

From Pam came someone who means a lot to me, Sharon Olds. When I bought my first book from Sharon, I created a habit that has stayed with me. I open a poetry book to a page, any page. Invariably, the poem that is there is my favorite in the collection. It never fails.

I got a poetry book from Kelly for my birthday. Kelly introduced me to the poet Linda Pastan, and gave me her "Carnival Evening". Sure enough, on my very first "opening", I found the poem I love best -- let me share it with you now.

Excursion

I am a tourist

in my own life,

gazing at the exotic shapes

of flowers

as if someone else

had planted them;

barred

from the half-lit rooms

of children

by an invisible

velvet rope.

The dresses in my closet

are costumes

for a different woman,

though I hide myself

in their silky textures.

The man asleep

in my bed

knows me best

in the dark.

~Linda Pastan

I'm not going to draw you the parallels, but suffice it to say, the moment I read it, it was as if I wrote it... so many similar thoughts. A wonderful gift on a great birthday. (Oh, and the poem encompasses my favorite word in all of poetry, one I use over and over in my own poems... "velvet").

That's Pastan, below.

Memorial Day

Poetry about the soldiers who have died in war is inexorably sad. This is a poem that digs into your consciousness and stays there...about the Vietnam war.

"Facing It"

by Yusef Komunyakaa,

a veteran of the Vietnam War

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite.

I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh.

My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey,

the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way--the stone lets me go.

I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again,

depending on the light to make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting

to find my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.

Names shimmer on a woman's blouse

but when she walks away the names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky.

A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine.

I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone.

In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names:

No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Childhood Lies

I saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" this evening. I've been privileged to see all of the films nominated frequently for Oscars this season... I' d avoided "Button" because I'm not caught up in all the Brad Pitt hype. Still, when a friend beckoned, I felt there was just enough that seemed unique about the film to warrant a late viewing, and not wait for the DVD.

"Button"...from Kathleen Kennedy, who is a bit of a genius herself, is based on a short-story by another genius, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film is a tantalizing tale; a jewel, really. It is so beautifully filmed, and contains so many moments of quirky oddities, as well as poignant moments, that it completely stops you in your tracks. Had the bond between Pitt and Cate Blanchett felt truly real (together, they were a little cold), it could have been the film of the decade.

Nevertheless, it struck us both deeply, told in flashbacks from the aging Cate Blanchett. We've both lost loved ones in hospitals who have been truly suffering from painful illness; but, in the film's hospital, there is also a scene from the wistful Julia Ormond (as an aged Cate Blanchett's daughter) where she learns the truth about her past. It felt a little like deja vu.

I had a story repeated from a college friend that stayed around inside my head for over two decades, before I committed the story to paper, in the form of a poem. Got home and ransacked around the computer to find said poem... and here it is, every aching last bit of it. Very symbolic of one of the powerful scenes in "Button"....

Lies Told To Her In Childhood

Ivory parchment aged,
she tears it open with her fingers
sturdy letter opener ignored.
Those same fingers wind her hair in ringlets
the winding ceasing as she catches her breath.
Eyes closed, she remembers the moment he left;
his sorrowful glance at her, a quick embrace.
Could it be that the decade past,
time which never yielded clues to
his absence, time
spent in mourning and loss,
could it be that scoundrel, carelessness,
cost them, distanced them, damaged the two?

She loved him without pretense,
irony, what might have been, has been
her constant companion.
Could it be that this brief note, this
message of love returned,
had been lost these many years?
Shaken, she rises and begins to pace,
to recall her mother’s words and
excuses, her damning anger at his disappearance.
Sarcasm rather than comfort as each
holiday passed without so much as a greeting.
How can it be that she made no mention
of this parting message to her, his daughter?


Rifling quickly through the letters bound up
with a thick, coarse band, she finds, to her sorrow,
that all the others, some twenty
are lettered in the same strong hand.
Postmarked, these; she discovers dates and
locations far to the west; they climb
through the years until they stop some
four years prior, on a date

just before her eighteenth birthday.
She does not have to open them to know that

her father had been the hero of her dreams.....
he'd tried to keep in touch with the little girl
whose hair he gently towel-dried after baths.
He’d not left and forgotten, nor given up.

Weeping, she rises with the letters and leaves,
Locking the door and the lies told to her in childhood
Behind her, for the last time.

My dear friend Angela wept while she told me this story.