Writing Spaces: Words

 

Words, how I loved you

Then—when I

Was young

And you led me

Out of the dark!

 

How I love you now

Even more,

As the dark approaches.

 

(#14 of 15 parts, Gregory Orr, “Ode to Words”)

 

 

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ashmolean Museum

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Giacomo Puccini manuscript (looks like La Bohème), Torre del Lago

An Appraisal Poem: Forgiveness

 

I forgive myself

for being ineffective and unsure.

And I forgive the day 

for being imperfect—

the noise of the cutters of long

and lovely grass on the hillside below,

probably gutting daffodils

in the process, the heartening yellow

of hope not spared either

in the indifferent clearing going on.

The unease lurking in the margins

of it all reminds me 

of a long, shadowed portal 

sliced into sharp diagonals 

by unpropitious interpolations of light.

I forgive the shadows

wherever they fall, the chill

of the long covered walkway

in my heart now, headed backwards,

some winter cloister with no roses 

and no limestone saints, 

perhaps the one way up beyond Harlem

and a battlement bootless now,

won in those hours on the bus 

I rode only one time, unhesitating,

to that place in turn called 

Chquaesgeck, Lange Bergh, Fort Tryon, 

between rivers, on a ridge high above 

the city I had borrowed for a day or two,

as was my wont, in snow and wind 

and no thought the whole while

of any imperfection in myself, that day.

 

 

image:  Cloister, Hans, Pixabay

Writing Spaces

 

image:  "Romeo's House," Verona

(Christie B. Cochrell)

What Poetry Can Do

 

Poetry
tugs me by the hand into the room with all the maps 
the muses on the double stair, the dragon 
spilling out in undulating constellation overhead 

and there—the blue to end all blues, clairvoyant, 
on that little bit of wall I might so easily have missed 
now that they keep the light deliberately dim. 

It builds a fragile paper kite of balsam wood 
on which to knot my shirttails and myself, and fly 
above it all, oh wobbly Icarus, giving myself 
into the breezy, flighty keeping of the February wind. 

And more substantial architectures too— 

the old stone cloister with the winter oranges and 
the unicorn, above the river, following the slow
progression up Manhattan through Harlem by bus. 

And in another time, the low adobe rooms on
Canyon Road that were once science labs, where
in a sunny window children I no longer recognize,
long grown and gone, are shaping red clay heads

reading The Zoo Story, exploring new fantastic
algebraic rhythms, smoky, foreign in the blood

as Tunisia or some one of those other countries in
North Africa where they have those brilliant blue tiles
and spices heaped in little bowls, one of those sultry
countries in the foreign films. 

And in the ghost-light of the projector
it summons ghosts— 

outside the windows of those other science labs 
south of Los Alamos, built on ancient burial grounds 

and Japanese too—unanticipated revenants.
Samurai faces cicatrixed with characters;
the gardener I tailed after for his measured spirit

raking last year’s leaves on the school path 
under a fall of paper-white petals more transient 
than spring snow, before a careless breath 
melted them utterly away. 

And when I stop to find the words to say how much 
I’ve missed him all these years, and
his deep tractor scoop that bore us up into the sea-light
of the apple trees, that man of common poetry,

who I glimpse just ahead of me again 
slipping unnoticed down the muddy rutted drive 
into the canyon’s plum-bruised heart, that place I loved 

once and forever, beyond words,

here comes running 

through all that brittle yellow rabbitbrush 
which the new tenants haven’t taken time to clear
one of the dogs from Billy Collins’s poems,

its cold, insistent nose 
urging me up the silent rise, back up 
into the traffic of the wayward, chatty road.

 

 

 

image:  fresco from Pompeii, commonly said to be Sappho

(just fyi, see this)

Writing Spaces

 

image:  www.VagabondJourney.com

An Appraisal Poem: Cyclamen

 

Two doves on the neighboring roof.

Two pots of cyclamen aflame

in quintessential purple, pink,

out on the deck in shadow still,

two crucibles of holy flame

calling to mind the Delphic oracle 

(priestess innominate and unobserved).

O cyclamen, phenomenon of color 

burning at the verges of the morning chill,

the chill our hearts have taken on themselves

this February when the old divine power

adjured by the oracle’s flame

is no longer divine or even old, revered,

its intent merciless and earth-focused 

instead, the flame only 

a moment of ephemeral brightness 

inside the dolorous shadow.  Shadow 

gorging, spreading, encompassing,

the verge unquestionably breached.

The doves have taken flight;

the cyclamen wavers a little, burns on.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell