It’s springtime,
fling yourself
into the green
time, in the
meantime,
while there’s still
time, it’s clean
time, out with
what we don’t need
time, you know
what I mean:
let’s deem ourselves
better than fine,
let’s drink the last
sip of winter’s
wine.
photo by Misha M. Johnson
I bought this scruffy poet cardigan
with a big ole stain on the cuff
because it has a professorial pattern
and because it already had a big ole stain
which means it’s safe from spoiling by me,
having already been spoiled by someone else.
Does this sound defeatist? To me it’s relaxing,
the stress of ruination removed by the simple
presence of a big brown smudge. I love you,
big brown smudge! Were you car grease or paint
or pigsweat? Who cares! I’ll eat my stew
with you, I’ll sit at work & cast no sweat
upon this perfect, ugly, poet sweater.
It’s so cold today I’m wearing a sweater vest
over a sweater. And it was so cold yesterday an egg froze
underneath my chicken’s butt! Plus one hen won’t go home
and now lives beneath the porch; it’s so cold she might
be dead, and if she’s not: props, sister. Tonight
the temperature will dive so low it’ll limbo underground
and after that, who knows: maybe the freeze will set
so deep into the ground the earth will send a message
to the moon that reads: that’s it, I quit, I’m comin’
over for a visit. Inside the house, one of our windowpanes
is covered in ice cuz it’s our first winter here & not everything
is sealed all nice & tight. Oh, well. Oh, hell. Maybe
we’ll shave that window ice with a razor blade and use it
for our cocktails! Maybe I’ll scoop the moonlight off
the frozen snow and add it to my hair! I’m wearing too many
sweaters to care what anyone thinks of me & my windows.
Suffice to say: winter’s landed like a bigass prehistoric bird
and I will stay as far from her beak as I’m able.
space
Why were those deer
in the road
this morning?
Didn’t they know
their duskhour is still
lightyears
away? Didn’t they look
dark & lovely
in the morning light,
and didn’t you
hope in your fleshy
heart they’d survive
this season
of guns?
Maybe it’s just because I’m stretched as thin as cheap stockings right now and prone to emotions, but I cried this morning hearing (again) about the passing of Galway Kinnell.
I learned to love his poems in college, by my professor who loves his poems. When I worked for the Dartmouth bookstore years ago, I sold books at a reading he gave at Dartmouth, sitting next to him as he signed new and wellworn copies. The reading he gave was equal parts wonderful and sad; he often lost his place while reading a poem, or seemed to drift away mid-thought. I witnessed the deteriorating mind of a poet whose poems have meant a lot to me.
His epic poem (note: I do not generally use the word epic so you know I mean it) “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World” has so much more of New York in it than Taylor Swift’s new song (that’s not saying a lot), and even more of New York in it than Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ song. He was compared to Walt Whitman after that poem, and I see why: it contains multitudes, big time.
As Daniel Lewis of the New York Times writes, “The poem is a 14-part work about Avenue C in Manhattan, a mother lode of inspiration for someone with Mr. Kinnell’s photographic eye and intuitive sense of other people’s lives. In these verses and on this street, Jews, blacks and Puerto Ricans walked in the spring sunlight, past the avenue’s mainstays at the time — the Downtown Talmud Torah, Blosztein’s Cutrate Bakery, Areceba Panataria Hispano, Nathan Kugler Chicken Store Fresh Killed Daily and others.”
I’ve experienced a renewed love of Kinnell since moving to Vermont, as I read his poems again, many of which are set in this state, such as “Blackberry Eating”:
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, on-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
And then there’s this poem, which has always blown my mind. If someone had told me in college that you could write a poem with the word “is” used three times in a row and it would be a stunner, I would not have believe him/her.
Prayer
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
Harriet Richardson, a Student Organizer at Pennsylvania’s Juniata College, Presses a Cloth to the Wounds of Galway Kinnell, Who Was Then Poet-In-Residence at Juiata, Selma, Alabama, 1965.
The oh-so-autumn pumpkin display at Killdeer Farmstead, where we sampled teas yesterday.
Misha, setting up those colorful tea tins, boiling water, being bearded.
The sissy visit earlier this month, during which we wore each other’s scarves, ate zealously, drank at the local bar, picked out tiny pumpkins at Cedar Circle, and talked a lot about INTEGRITY.
The photo taken the day we closed on our house, which actually wasn’t quite the real closing, but still we were happy, and afterwards we went to a barn to buy a guy’s old futon frame, and then he showed us his highland cattle, and the view on the top of the hill was stunning, and we like, almost kissed on the lips.
New home hoop dreams. Suburban accents of our new home also include: 2 car garage, porch, vinyl, wood paneling, wood paneling, wood paneling.
Sexy glass jars plus rosemary plus then I added the olive oil. Aaaaaand we’ll sell them with a cute little tag tied around their elegant necks around Christmastime.
***
These photos are a random smattering of what’s been going on. Not as photographic highlights (lowlights) from the past month include
packing things into cardboard boxes
doing yoga in the living room
threshing beans in the chilly barn
the return of celeriac
a lot of rain
listening to the Godspell soundtrack on high while Misha’s away
Cabot cheddar.
Soil air sky breeze
available now
no lease no
contract all
yours & always
open free &
more where
that came from
Jeez you’d think
we’d be cherishing
all this so hard
by now (picture
it: generations
of women
& men in love
with earth)
but no
we are shitting
on it more
than ever &
convinced of
the truth
of machines
You know
what I think
technology is
mostly harmful
also ugly &
expensive unlike
these patches of
black-eyed Susans
dancing from the base
of their stalks up
to the petals
in the fields
all around me
three goatbutts into a bright blue Kia
then heading off to work. I drive
along the first branch of a river,
past brandnew calves, sideways barns,
and the sign that reads FROST HEAVE
AHEAD which no one’s taken down
because just seeing it makes the green
of the pastures an even sweeter sight.
The silos this morning are brimming
with the years they’ve seen, the guineas
bold enough to eat the grass that runs
along the road, and the local library
has its OPEN flag highfiving the wind.
On days like this, it feels like everyone
and their mother is pushing a wellworn
wheelbarrow in the direction of joy.
(That image is a poemjoke. Do you get it?)
with songs from the seventies
on in the kitchen drifting
above the dirt on the floors,
wafting beneath the smells
of basil and cheese in the oven.
In the ocean the tides move
everything slightly every
few seconds but here tonight
I am as still as a stone
in a slow-moving stream.
A San Diego friend emailed me this poem this week. How did she know this was the week I was missing peaches so badly? Also missing Annie of Sweet Tree Farms, the best & coolest fruit farmer in the Whole World. We do have a couple of peach trees on the property, but no fruits yet. Although there are huge, bodacious raspberries blooming. Also blueberries. And plums! So there is really nothing for me to complain about. But ooh. The joy of eating a peach. While standing over the sink. The juice dripping down my chin. And looking out the window as I bite. And taking the pit in my fingers. And throwing it outside. Just in case. It wants to grow. Into a peach tree of its own.
**
Only one insect has feasted here,
a clear stub of resin
plugs the scar. And the hollow
where the steam was severed
shines with juice.
The fur still silvered
like a caul. Even
in the next minute
the hairs will darken,
turn more golden in my palm.
Heavier, this flesh,
than you would imagine
like the sudden
weight of a newborn.
Oh what a marriage
of citron and blush!
It could be a planet
reflected through a hall
of mirrors. Or
what a swan becomes
when a fairy shoots it
from the sky at dawn.
At the beginning of the world,
when the first dense pith
was ravished and the stars
were not yet lustrous
coins fallen from the
pockets of night,
who could have dreamed
this would be curried
from the chaos.
Scent of morning and sugar,
bruise and hunger.
Silent, swollen, clefted life,
remnant always remaking itself
out of that first flaming ripeness.
panache, perhaps 