Poem for the Day

To a Snowflake

 

By Francis Thompson, 1891

 

WHAT heart could have thought you? --

Past our devisal

(O filigree petal!)

Fashioned so purely,

Fragilely, surely,

From what Paradisal

Imagineless metal,

Too costly for cost?

Who hammered you, wrought you,

From argentine vapor? --

"God was my shaper.

Passing surmisal,

He hammered, He wrought me,

From curled silver vapor,

To lust of His mind --

Thou could'st not have thought me!

So purely, so palely,

Tinily, surely,

Mightily, frailly,

Insculped and embossed,

With His hammer of wind,

And His graver of frost."

*

3:00 p.m.: I've been standing at my kitchen's east window, putting things in the dishwasher and watching little snowflakes fall.
 

"Once More Unto the Breach. . ."

Yesterday I rearranged my chapbook, This Rough Magic, and made a hard copy to enter in the ASPS chapbook contest. The judging will probably be in June or July. The prize is $100 and 25 copies of the chapbook.

If it doesn't win this time, I want Jed to help me get it printed, using this free image for the cover. It's 20 poems, 24 pages including the title page. I left out the silly poems, and included a few others that are kind of spooky.

Today I plan to pay bills, and make a chicken pot pie.

*

I made a chicken pot pie and a peach cobbler, and I'm worn to a frazzle.

Poem by E. St.V. Millay

Intention To Escape from Him

I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in
America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might
deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, strong to overflow its banks in spring,
carrying away bridges
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear
narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—

Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.

Roosevelts, Kipling, War and Peace

I read Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, a few days ago. And tonight PBS will show the final (I think) episode in the Roosevelt series. The style of the Fraser book is very reminiscent of Kipling; it's about the battles in Burma at the end of the second world war, in which Fraser was a 19-year-old private. Mainly, what fascinated me about it was the cast of characters with their various British accents and colloquialisms.

The Roosevelt series is fascinating, too. Makes me admire Eleanor even more than I already did.

This morning I wrote a poem for one of the ASPS contests, took it to the P.O. and mailed it:

The Wiz: Back in Kansas

A long and weary flight in the makeshift
balloon, through storm and doldrums, rain and snow,
brought me at last wrecked in a stubbly field,
wishing I'd never left the Emerald City.
The post of Wizard was ideal for me,
and much more fun than selling patent brews
or prestidigitating in side-shows.
I most regret leaving the child behind--
precocious angel that she proved to be,
she with her delightful little dog--
Toto, she called him, and he knew his name.
And their refrain of, “There's no place like home,”
sings in my heart each time I think of Oz.
I miss the soldier with the green mustache,
the different-colored horses, and the road
of yellow brick, that ended in a wood
some leagues past Munchkin-land. And, truth to tell,
sometimes I even miss the wicked witches--
although a lady here might be their triplet!
I'd been in Oz so long, it felt like home,
and now I roam this flat and windy land,
wondering if child and canine made it back.
At every farm I pass, I stop and ask
after a little girl who owns a dog
named Toto. In the meantime, I've a plan
to build a different kind of flying craft,
filled with the noble gas named helium;
and if I find her, I'll ask if she'd like
to take a ride back to the land of Oz.

Probably the Two Greatest Poets of the Twentieth Century

I often think of W.H. Auden

and Ezra Pound.

About Pound, 'Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."^'

He mentored, nurtured and influenced other writers until WWII when, like a lot of other folks, he went sort of around-the-bend crazy. I believe he wound up on the right side of the ticket, ruined nonetheless. But his poems are probably immortal.

Of Auden, what can anyone say? "Musee des Beaux Arts." "September 1, 1939." "Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So." "Herman Melville."

Fiddler Jones

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you;
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover,
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter, a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off to "Toor-a-Loor."
How could I till my forty acres,
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a windmill--only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That someone did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres.
I ended up with a broken fiddle,
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

--Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

New Book in the Mail

In today's mail I received a copy of the Georgia Poetry Society's 2014 Anthology. (I wish our ASPS Sampler could be this nice.) Couldn't figure why I got it, because it doesn't have a poem by me in it. But found that it has the three winning poems in the contest that I judged this spring, "The Mnemosyne Award," plus a biographical blurb of me. These are three of the most beautiful previously unpublished poems I've seen in a long time. Wish I could copy them in my blog, but I don't know if that's permitted or not.

The first place one is by a gentleman determined to keep on writing, no matter what happens.

The second place poem is like a fairy thing out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The third place winner is probably my favorite, though not as technically impressive as the first two. It's by a lady promising to give her companion any three extravagant things he wants in exchange for two tiny paintings and a Nevada sunset.

*

I've been thinking of a book consisting of selections from my blog. Like "Seven Years of Something-or-Other." The publishing concern "She Writes" is sponsoring a contest for a book of memoirs. I wonder if blog posts could be called memoirs.

The War God's Horse Song

I am the Turquoise Woman's son.
On top of Belted Mountain
Beautiful horses--slim like a weasel!
My horse has a hoof like striped agate;
His fetlock is like a fine eagle plume;
His legs are like quick lightning.
My horse's body is like an eagle-plumed arrow;
My horse has a tail like a trailing black cloud.
I put flexible goods on my horse's back;
The Little Holy Wind blows through his hair.

His mane is made of short rainbows.
My horse's ears are made of round corn.
My horse's eyes are made of big stars.
My horse's head is made of mixed waters
(From the holy waters--he never knows thirst).
My horse's teeth are made of white shell.
The long rainbow is in his mouth for a bridle,
        And with it I guide him.
When my horse neighs, different-colored horses follow.
When my horse neighs, different-colored sheep follow.
        I am wealthy, because of him.

        Before me peaceful,
        Behind me peaceful,
        Under me peaceful,
        Over me peaceful,
        All around me peaceful--
        Peaceful voice when he neighs.
        I am Everlasting and Peaceful.
        I stand for my horse.

(From the Navajo)
by Dane and Mary Roberts Coolidge
in A Little Treasury of American Poetry, New York, Scribner's, 1948

Waiting

Every morning I get dressed, in case UPS or somebody delivers a box of books, and I spend the waiting time getting some chores done. So this week I've paid the bills, renewed my car tag, submitted entries to the writing contests of Alabama Conclave of Writers (first chapter of a novel, and one poem), Ala. State Poetry Soc. and National Federation of Poetry Societies (a bunch of poems to each), done many loads of laundry, and kept the house from molding over, I hope. I tried to read a book about some druids who were inducted into Caesar's army and went to Rome, but halfway through it I couldn't take any more so quit.

Yesterday evening I went over to Sister Susan's for her birthday bash, and that was a pleasant break. We feasted on pizza, chili, ice cream, and the most beautiful birthday cake I've ever seen.

Jed went to Texas last week, and unless he gets lost in that enormous state, he'll be back in Atlanta this weekend.

A neighbor down the street threw away a shelf section built of heavy lumber, and I toted it up to my place, thinking I would lay it down at the end of the driveway and plant flower seeds in it. I've got leftover packages of marigold, catchfly, cosmos, forget-me-nots and Shasta daisies. Maybe Jed can help me get it set up, next time he comes over here. My little hyacinths are trying to bloom along the front walkway.

"If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
and from thy slender store
two loaves alone to thee are left,
sell one, and with the dole
buy Hyacinths to feed thy Soul. "
--SADI  (Moslih Eddin), 13th century Persian poet

A Very Old Poem By Me

Song For Thom, Too Hard To Sing

The first note and the final autumn leaf

fade, both battered by the lonely wind.
A snowflake whirls away a rain-gray tear
that covered up the mind.
Because there is no first note small enough,
no scale so real this singer can embrace it,
and since there are no fresh tears cool enough
to shed for Thom, or shed for winter winds
(however beautiful the shapes they blow
to nowhere out of hope),
the mind forgets the sea-washed symphony
of sunburnt melody, and only the snow remembers.

Because there is no grief

too large for late-born singers
of haunted broken harmonies of fear;
and as I, long since lost, forgot the way
to that high staircase where old melodies
and memories reunite; I relinquish then the face
that haunts the nows. And here’s
a wish for him who sends to nowhere out of hope
his face: this thought is as an orchestra
gone flat, a discord of Decembers.

The days keep drawing in,

the night is cold and dark without a star.
Because there is no grief too large
for too-late singers, and no handkerchiefs
for tears remembering too soon for sleep,
I’ll think of Thom, who could sing anything

and, thinking of him, I will not fear

to dance all night through glissandi of dreams.
And then, although the sun comes up,
I find the daylight is not brave enough
for my faint chords to imitate,
nor lyric so complete for mystery
to bind it to my real.
And so I sing no words;
I hum no lullaby without the words,
but wink away a rain-gray snowflake
that used to be a tear.
If Thom were here, he’d know how to sing it.

By Joanne Ramey, 1955
*
This a the final revision of a poem I wrote in 1955. So it's one of my oldest poems. I was at the University with no money, high school clothes gone raggedy and too big since I lost baby fat, but in spite of it all a big old loud-mouth boyfriend that I couldn't stand to listen to. But he was handsome and had cigarettes. I finally gave him to Adrienne.
*
Across the hall from me at Tutwiler dorm lived Eileen W. whose daddy was rich as old Jay Gould and owned about half of Florida. She lent me fabulous clothes for dates and other dress-up occasions. I will always love that girl.

Well said

". . . though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith."


John Skelton, in Collyn Clout (1522)

1994

Great review of a great movie:


'"Shadowlands" . . . is intelligent, moving and beautifully acted [by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger]. It understands that not everyone falls in love through the avenue of physical desire; that for some the lust may be for another's mind, for inner beauty.' - Roger Ebert, January 7, 1994.


Ebert's review: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shadowlands-1994


Julian Fellowes was in that movie.


A Dab of Recognition:


1994 was also the year that, led by my supremely talented sister Ramey, I joined the Alabama State Poetry Society, won my first prizes and thought well, maybe verse is the way to go instead of writing novels and sticking them back in a drawer for shame, as I had done several times before.


Now we are engaged in a great book publishing enterprise, the enterprise greater than the book is likely to be. Rowan Wood Press (namely me), mostly through the dogged collaboration of Mr. James DeWitt Cage, will publish The Lightness of the Dark, Poems by Joanne Ramey Cage, this month if we're lucky, next month if we hit a snag. If anyone wants to rush in and contribute blurbs of high praise beforehand, come on down.


Crazy Computer:


When I hit the return key, it throws in an extra line space. Don't blame me.


Crazy Critters:


I went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, and out the window I saw a chipmunk (or a little bobtailed squirrel) run up behind a bird and nip at its tail.

Frantic Friday

Tony said the fleas are in the yard, and that's the reason they're so hard to get rid of in the house. Someone from Cook's is coming over today to treat the yard, or to arrange a time to do it, I didn't understand which.

Yesterday I succeeded in getting the white cat into the pet carrier, and took him to the vet, wailing all the way--both of us: The cat wailed, and I sang to him. But however, the vet was closed, as it always is on Thursday afternoon, which I didn't know or had forgotten. So we wailed our way back home, and I set the pet carrier down on the patio. I called Ramey at the lib. and told her he was in the carrier, and we decided we'd just let him out for the time being. So I went outside to let him out, and the dear thing had got out of the carrier and was sitting on the deck rail. So I warmed him a bowl of milk, he drank it and left.

I've made progress on the dollhouse. All I have to do is finish papering the spare room walls, replace the floor, restore the baseboards and window moldings, and paint the upstairs hall ceiling. And put some curtains on the spare room windows. I'm determined to get it done today.

Yesterday I ordered a set of dollhouse dolls for Dave's little girls, because I want to keep all my people, which are too small and mostly fragile for children to play with anyway.

***

This is a poem I wrote in 1982, in remembrance of JFK. It doesn't seem to have much relevance to him except the name, but it's what I felt at the time:

November 22

 

The tide’s out, the tide’s in;

Watch ne’er so faithfully,

But nevermore comes Johnny,

Our Johnny o’er the lee.
 

The beckon light’s a glimmering

Half over to the sea;

And all the song that I can sing

Is Johnny o’er the lee.

Chunks Of Prose: Muddy Waters

Leaves, By Me

You can tell people all kinds of truths, except the truth about themselves or their offspring, or their works. The truth about my oeuvre is that it's all poor imitation, except for this colored drawing,

this sketch,

this sky painting:

and a few of what I stubbornly call poems.

Until 1994 when the Alabama State Poetry Society was revealed to me, I didn't presume to call my verse "poetry." The "poet," Mr. Ralph H., chided me for saying that I wrote verse instead of poetry. Upon acquaintance with the output of the ASPS membership (and their contemporaries around the country), I understood why he said that. What most of them wrote might at a long stretch of the definition have been poetry, but it sure as H. wasn't verse. We all long to belong, so I settled in, consenting to be called a poet.

What happened was that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some famous poets started occasionally dispensing with obvious forms, end rhyme, and a few other traditional elements of poetry. The world at large took this to mean that all the bonds were loosened and anything one chooses to write down and call a poem is one. Maybe they're right. I don't know. I DO know, but who am I to judge? The waters are muddied.

The Little Black Boy

Here's a poem that broke my heart and influenced me from an early age:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child: 

But I am black as if bereav'd of light.

 

My mother taught me underneath a tree 

And sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissed me,

And pointing to the east began to say: 

Look on the rising sun: there God does live 

And gives his light, and gives his heat away. 

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love, 

And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear 

The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice 

Saying: Come out from the grove my love and care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me, 

And thus I say to little English boy: 

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: 

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear, 

To lean in joy upon our father's knee. 

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him, and he will then love me.

 

By William Blake

*

I've always tended to think of Blake as an ethereal creature, solitary and withdrawn, lost in his poetry and imagery. Actually, according to history, he was a prickly, pugnacious rebel, of the earth and earthy. Friend of rebels, including Mary Wollstonecraft, preaching for women's rights and opposing institutions such as organized religion.

Gilding the Lily

 

Ars Poetica by Archibald Macleish (1892-1982)

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

 

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

 

A poem should not mean   

But be.

 

***

What brought that on? Trying to rewrite some of my poems that don't quite work. Very hard to do, as in its own way, each one seems complete, and dares me to mess with it.

 

***

 

Some kind of plantain? I haven't found it in the Ala. Wildflowers book.

Sonnet 55

 

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. 

 

*

We don't know whom he was writing to or about. I like to think it was himself; it's truer of him than of any of his contemporaries.

Revisiting Lewis Carroll

You Are Old, Father William

 

"You are old, Father William," the young man said

"And should take care in all that you do;

And yet you defiantly stand on your head--

What the hell is the matter with you?"

Monday Poetry Reading

We had a good crowd, but mostly "new" people. The absent regulars--Ramey, Joe, Sherry--should be aware that we talk about them when they're not there. But good talk.

I almost didn't go to the meeting myself. I got a lot done yesterday, but I hurt all day. All over. Well, not all over; my head didn't hurt. Neither did my feet. Just all that stuff in between. On days like that, I hardly ever remember that in the cabinet I've got at least three mild OTC pain relievers. "One sure, if another fails" (Browning, "Soliloquy Of the Spanish Cloister").

Mo is still at the vet clinic. The doctor said she would call me Saturday afternoon, but she didn't. I phoned yesterday morning, but the assistant said she would call me later in the day, but she didn't. Luckily, she never seems to charge me room and board when she keeps Mo longer than planned, just a basic charge plus whatever tests or medicines that she quotes beforehand or in the process. When she examined him Saturday morning, she said he still has a little bit of vision. Poor Mo.

*

Poetry is important, probably as important as any other art. Painting/visual arts and crafts show form, color, texture, beauty. Prose is stories in one form or another. Poetry is ideas and emotion in distilled form, even if it has no form. Even if you can't see or hear, once you get a poem, you keep the best part of it, sometimes all of it. Of course, that's true of the other arts, like music. Art gets inside you, if you let it.

*

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers "Death."

from "Maud," by Lord Tennyson

"Maud" is a long, creepy and beautiful poem, and worth reading. "...They have not buried me deep enough."

I quit "work" yesterday before remembering to put the trash cart on the curb, and now I hear the garbage truck.

Mackintosh

If you accept the scorn of many critics for the works of Somerset Maugham, you may never read him, and thus may miss some of the sharpest character studies in literature. I can only think of Dostoevsky as a writer who so completely involves the reader in his characters' senses and emotions.

The short story "Mackintosh" is one of the most powerful character studies I've ever read. You start out sympathizing with the lanky, fastidious Scotsman and resenting the fat, obscene old Irishman. At first you wonder which one is Billy Budd and which is Claggart. Before the story is over, you have switched sympathies once or twice, and wind up with horror and at last a grim satisfaction.

I've read Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge enough times to wear out your average paperback book, and I never tire of it. Some of his other novels may be more perfect and concise in composition, but the story! The story is the thing, and very few writers have matched his story-telling.

I guess I was born to be an appreciator of stories, rather than a story-teller with any sort of competence.

"...Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day. . .
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect
But wears a stammer like a decoration.
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes."
--W.H. Auden, from "Herman Melville"