Fall

There were many herons in the dark last night.

I'm not fond of the fading light. I think I may have done better with the autumnal devouring darkness in a previous life. Sleeping in a one-room cave with other hairy people. Gnawing giant hunks of meat around a blazing fire. Popping the cap on that firewater we've been fermenting all summer.

In this current life I turn on extra lights and grumble silently about my electric bill. I fight the urge to hibernate. I wonder what it would be like to run into the marine version of sasquatch (Replace hair with scale and fins--see it? Yeah) or an ax-murderer on my evening walk. I find myself in a Day-of-the-Dead mood at night. Honestly, with the natural death and decay and darkness that visits us this time of year, I so wish everyone did an all out Dia de Los Muertos. We should set up those altars on our patios and porches and light them with hundreds of candles and make a pilgrimage every night to visit one another's dead.

I find myself driving by the pumpkin fields near my house every chance I get. Orange is good this time of year.

But those dead lost ones are still with us. Even when they're not.

Here's a Jack Gilbert poem for you.

MAYBE SHE IS HERE

She might be here secretly.
On her hands and knees
with her head down a bit
tilted to peer around the doorjamb
in the morning, watching me
before I wake up.
Only her face showing
and her shoulders. In a slip,
her skin honey against the simple
white of two thin straps
and the worked edge of the bodice.
With her right hand a little visible.

Two Things that Made My Day/Happy Saturday to You

THIS ARTICLE in the New Yorker about the way a nursing home cares for elderly patients with dementia.

This poem by Jack Gilbert:

Older Women

Each farmer on the island conceals
his hive far up on the mountain,
knowing it will otherwise be plundered.
When they die, or can no longer make
the hard climb, the lost combs year
after year grow heavier with honey.
And the sweetness has more and more
acutely the taste of that wilderness.


And because the name of the nursing home mentioned in the New Yorker piece is Beatitudes, I'm going to toss this into your day, too. 

From the King James version of the Bible:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    For they shall be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    For they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    For they shall be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    For they shall obtain mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    For they shall see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    For they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
    For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And because I've spent the last several months living with a person who is very hard of hearing, there's this:

Last night as I stepped out my front door about to head out for a walk, I was greeted by a blizzard of blooms. 

Just a bit ago, I came across this poem by Jack Gilbert:

What do they say each new morning 

                                               in Heaven? They would 

weary of one always 

singing how green the 

green trees are in

 Paradise. 

Surely it would seem convention

 and affectation

 to rejoice every time 

Helen went by, since 

she would have gone daily by. 

What can I say then each time 

your whiteness glimmers

 and fashions in the night? If each time your voice

 opens so near

 in that dark 

new? What can I say each morning

 after that you will

 believe? But there is this

 stubborn provincial 

singing in me, 

O, each time. 

And tomorrow I will take a workshop with one of my favorite writing teachers.

And after I will see the man who loves me.

Somehow, in my brain this all fits together wonderfully.

A Jack Gilbert poem and thoughts worth considering about love and marriage

On Thursday, I have old friends coming to stay with me for several days. They've been married a long time. Perhaps they've known the wisdom in this Jack Gilbert poem from the beginning. But maybe not. Maybe they stumbled upon it in the ruins, parched and out of water, cursing under a relentless sun. Tear It Down
by Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back toward childhood will not help. The village is not better than Pittsburgh. Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh. Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound of racoon tongues licking the inside walls of the garbage tub is more than the stir of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not enough. We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within the body.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19356#sthash.JFty2bJN.dpuf

Happy New Year!/ Islands and Figs by Jack Gilbert

Not a New Year's poem per se, but it does speak of endings.

Islands and Figs

The sky
on and on,
stone.
The Mediterranean
down the cliff,
stone.
These fields,
rock.
Dead weeds
everywhere.
And the weight
of sun.
In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.


Photo note: That's an olive tree not a fig tree. You can see it for yourself: http://www.astragreece.com/writing.html

Jack Gilbert: Coming to the End of Triumph

I read my first Jack Gilbert poem in Barbara Abercrombie's UCLA Extension class Writing the Healing Story. It seems overstated, perhaps, to say that now, a decade later,  I can conjure up the classroom, where I was sitting, and many of the faces around the tables that were arranged into a large hollow-centered rectangle. Barbara's writer-whisperer style of teaching often meant that she would use a poem as a prompt, and while this poem by Jack Gilbert did not wrench a premonition from me about the not- so-distant demise of my marriage, time stood still long enough for Gilbert's words to settle into me. Reading it again just after the poet's death on Tuesday, it felt all the more moving as a perfect description of how my marriage didn't end.


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.

If you'd like to read more about Jack Gilbert, you can find a piece  here and here. 

The image at the top of the post is a Peter Paul Ruebens painting.