Our Valley by Philip Levine

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

The Visitor

The old rebbe lay dying in his narrow bed,
face toward the sky.
High clouds became letters of light,
and thunder sounded on a distant hill.
The family changed his name then,
hoping to fool Death into looking elsewhere,
but the old man traced invisible letters with his breath.

Death came to him then,
not fooled by the name,
not concerned with tears.
Death came to see what the old man
had written in the air.
When he presented himself before the old man,
Death bowed low and respectfully.
"I saw your name in the sky,"
said Death, "and came calling on you,
as anyone would."

Flight

It never occurred to me that
getting rid of the cocoon meant
getting rid of both form AND substance.
It wasn't so bad losing my spleen, (who needs a spleen?)
or the extra kidney (key word: extra.)
But when I lost control,
and righteous indignation,
my certainty,
my youth---
I wondered if the losses were really necessary.
I wondered---
just how badly did I want those wings?

The crack in everything

How many dawns have I seen? 

There was one in Tennessee over a bridge and a lake, seen from a canoe.

Another from a fishing pier in the Yucatan: 

so many dawns with water, and scattered sunshine. 

Some with dolphins.

One spring, Don and I spent a night behind the union hall

talking about the world and our hearts 

(mine wayward, his congenitally large)

and Oceans we might see. 

The sun rose that morning with no thunder. 

I didn't kiss him and there was no movement of earth or sky,

only clouds of exhaust from a nearby highway. 

And when he died not long after (oh yes—death and the sunrise)

that morning became the essence of all mornings in this world.

Mornings we sleep through.

Missed moments. 

People we ignore on the street. 

Poems we forget to write. 

So when I stop my car on a busy interstate to watch an eastern light,

You may shake your fists or honk as you will. 

I am learning to pay attention to this very dawn.

The Gift

Every child slides wet from the womb with a hidden gift,
this sweetling handing you
the dearest of little somethings they bring
for the new parents---
A birthday gift of sorts.

They hold out their need.

They give you their ravenous,
never-ending
howling
need for everything.

Food, love, warmth, information, toenail clippers,
hair-ribbons, shoe-laces, car insurance--
They need it now.
They need it from you.

This gift is not given lightly.
Do not despise what they give you--
with their untouched fingers,
their curled up arms,
new from a nine-month stint in the cave.
They hold out your salvation.

They hold out to you the only thing
your Lord every really asked you
to give to Him.

--------------------------------------Rhonda

The Art of Showing Up

Prayer and I have an on again, off again relationship—

There are days or weeks in which the praying

and the thanking and the obligating become perfunctory. 

Up and down I go mouthing meaningless sounds

only to finish in the wrong position

or find myself at the end of a sentence

with no idea of the road ahead.

Just as it seems to be a profound waste of time

there comes a day of light in darkness—

a day of lifting up, a day of slamming down.

A day when the words speak me.

Poetry is like that. 

Days of “interesting” poems,

days of revision, with no new words worth working with. 

Weeks of waiting, with wheels whining in little circles,

going nowhere. 

And then comes a day when something

drops out of my hand like a jewel

and I turn it over and over searching for any flaw.

Sometimes, my Dad said, the most important work

is just showing up.

----------------------------------------rhonda

Man's reality is his thought...

Let’s pretend that we live in two worlds at the same time.

A simultaneous life—we’re just pretending, you see.

In one world is a lot of smog, dirty water and bad breath.

In the other simultaneous world

love lasts forever, and we all have good skin.

Singing happens as often as eating in this place.

One world: sadness.  One world: joy.

I’m told they exist together in this poem and wind around,

fold through each other like a moebius strip.

What tips the balance? How do we hold the

two worlds in one hand?  I’m thinking

of a fast train moving in two directions

and here’s a golden ticket in my hand. 

The promised land is under my feet.

I go to meet my expectations

who live in a vast and heavily

forested region of Brazil,

where the air is sweet,

and no chain saw has ever been seen. 

The New Name

The boy shivered, listening to a distant mortar fire.
Around him other children cried softly,
drowsing only in the lightest dreams,
avoiding the deep pools of sleep.
The boy fingered dog-tags under his shirt,
feeling the rough letters and whispering the new name.
This was his nightly prayer,
his rosary, his Greatest Name.
His own small name had lately become
too familiar to the angel of death and so he let it go,
letter by letter,
sound by sound,
along with the memory of his mother's face,
his father's voice,
his right leg.
The man who had worn the name no longer needed it,
indeed, had held it in outstretched hand as he lay
eyes and heart open to the sun, wind, moon and stars.
The boy had taken it gently from his hand,
had traded names with the open man,
had gone back to wait with the other children--
telling them stories of his new name
and the trick he would play on everyone,
on the world,
on death.

The wisdom of light

Without a doubt, she said, I’ve been true.

True to the night, true to all wild things—

true to my beliefs. 

South of here, in another city, a city

that knows how to keep its secrets,

she might not speak such blatant nonsense.

She would carry wisdom in her belly

like an unborn child and never, never

pretend to be other than a beacon of light.

Surface Tension

Molecules of water are slippery.
They ripple out of my way too quickly to get any foothold and so
I step into the puddle, rather than onto it,
thus muddying shoes and woolen stockings which will need serious drying time.
But I can imagine walking onto the sea,
reaching out to hold hands with Someone
who holds me carefully in His mind and heart.
Someone Who teaches the art of surface tension
and bodies in motion.
I can feel the rubbery give of the water
as we step between waves,
avoiding dolphins rising before us
and ignoring salt spray in our eyes.
Can we do this forever?  I ask, heart full of tremulous joy.
Can we live out here on the waves forever?
Storm clouds appear on a distant horizon.
The hard part isn't walking on water, He says.
The hard part is living on land.
We move toward the beach, and the city and the crowds.
Just don't let go of My hand, He says.
But His voice is already sounding faint and thin.
When I look back He is gone.
Salt spray dries on my skin.  My socks are wet.
The storm comes ashore to fill the hollows with more water.

    --------------------------------------------rhonda

What would we do without this metaphor, earth?

There would be nothing to compare ourselves to,
and we would disappear into a black and starry sky
with no eyes,
with nothing at all to witness our arrival,
our departure.

We know we exist because of this ripe and wet metaphor
holding our fetal selves,
telling us we are more than vague traces
of wandering dust and empty space.

We've ignored it in the past,
pretending we were sun, moon and stars.
Time to take our place with the
mountains, motes, ants and beauty
to the right of us,
Beauty to the left of us,

Beauty behind us,

Beauty before us.

Beauty around us.

After the War

All around lie hosts of the dead, mumbling in their dark beds
about missed opportunities and endless meetings.
They gripe with closed eyes and complain
about misunderstandings,
late appointments,
rude taxi drivers.
Their cold, dead fingers grip guns, pens, I-Pads.
Toys lie around them in serried rank.
I pick through these piles for anything
that might be put in my pocket for later investigation.

A cell phone wakes at my feet with the blare of trumpets.

                           ---------------------------------------rhonda

My Rumi

Icaros by P. Picasso


In the haphazard way of true anarchists
Rumi travels from heart to heart
without apparent map,
without explainable schema.
Engineers shudder when they hear his name.
He sings law beyond law.
His music lies beyond the ease of breath.

In the comfortably obscure way of true poets
Rumi encourages us to leap
into a stratospheric understanding of flight.
Shams, he said, will teach us about wings.
From him we will learn re-entry and flames.
From him we will learn the delectable arc
of longing,
and return.

 -------------------rhonda

For Immigrant Mothers Everywhere

For Immigrant Mothers Everywhere

War-tossed and famine blown

they built the nest where we were grown

and sang us songs of far-off home.

                                                         Rhonda Palmer

April 4, 1968

April 4, 1968

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate.  Only love can do that.”       Martin Luther King Jr.

Since that date,

a number of people have urged others

to change, to move mountains,

to grow large eyes in a small world.

These prophetic people

live high above clamor, carnage and strife

yet they claim our pain.

They give instruction on life

and offer words. 

They twitter recycled thoughts into hungry space

and sing old songs

to jolt our fibrillating hearts.

These fading words

are only the event horizon

moving away from a pure center—

a center that knew walking,

waking and evident truth

in a strangely disordered world. 

I feel heaven circle round a Memphis balcony,

waiting for one more angel,

waiting for us to send up one more angel.  

                                          R. Palmer

all manner of things shall be well--

The anchoress looks

into high rafters for one bold mouse,

scurrying over the quiet cell

then smiles,

settling into her ceaseless

life of thanksgiving.

Townspeople bring old bread,

moldy cheese, rancid wine.  

With these she makes a daily meal 

but remembers always to leave a crumb 

for the small life overhead.

As a child she ran loose-limbed,

wild with sunshine.

That warmth still encircles, enfolds.  

Now she looks up to see neither mouse

nor rafters but instead golden beings

singing, chanting, shouting praises to an Almighty God.

With a quick pen she writes

all she hears.  All she sees.

Soon, exhausted by seeing, purged by writing,

she collapses on her pile of straw.

Mouse finds its way to her pillow

and together they sleep 'midst the ruins of heaven.

Shoestrings

She laced them tight on your fat feet
and you raced down the empty brick street
with the pilot hat tied tight 'neath your chin
kicking a tin can for the noise, for the din,
for the joy of a boy released from the house
where apron strings were everywhere like
fearful fingers holding wings tight to prevent
freedom, to delay flight.

I hold your shoes today--

You outgrew the need for speeding round
country corners in squared off Indiana.

You engineered bits for rockets that never left
this heavy earth.

You found peace in the ready rounding
of the lawnmower and the strong beat
of steady, friendly hearts.

You lie quietly six feet below my tears
and I hold these little boy shoes.
And feel the joy of freedom---
the way of souls in flight.

lemonade

Right when I thought the light was
brightening, when time was sliding
through my hands like that
prom dress I wore the spring of 1968,
when saying yes came easier than
complaints or criticism,
when life had gotten to the sweet spot
and I was ready to hit one out of the park,

Just then....
...well, you were there.
You saw it happen.

I've got a new normal now.
The sweet spot moved, but hey,
I'm flexible.  Adaptable.  Human.

And I've got a taste for lemonade.

Some Shape of Beauty

Very soon will there be voices calling us all to come home.

We will loiter in tall summer grass,

fireflies in hand, feet bare and streaked with mud,

waiting for the sound of our true names.

We will run away from long shadows leaping behind us

toward some shape of beauty.

We will find ourselves home again.

Tired.

Happy.

(This is my love poem to John Keats, that darling boy...)

The Hardware store

Today, redemption finds me sitting

on the wooden floor

of my local hardware store,

gazing at useful things.

Helpful people with embroidered name tags walk by, 

pointing the way—

In this sacred place plumbing can be explained.  

Plaster illumined.

Wander the aisles of bins with me and

look at bits of things that don’t make sense.

We needn’t feel worse for our ignorance. 

Someone knows what it's all for.

Possibility and hope hover over each spool of rope,

each box of nails, the rows of tools.

Hearts lift with the thought of a life made new—

a failed and broken life fixed up,

duct-taped,

and painted over

so that no one need ever know it was broken.
                                    Rhonda Palmer

The Unbearable Lightness of Grandmothers

Run with me, jump with me
says the three year old boy.
Spin in a circle and jump.

I totter behind, following
the curl of his hair, the dimpled hand
pointing the way, run this way.

There go a few familiar strands
of the DNA I so proudly carry---
Red hair.  Imagination.

The falling down on the floor and screaming,
I don't claim that bit.  Biting the sister:
not mine.  Never mine.

Jumping high enough to reach
a nearby constellation of stars, yes.
Blazing with a corona of fearless beauty---

yes.

yes.

for Penny Riddle

"Earth and heaven cannot contain Me; what can alone contain Me is the heart of him that believeth in Me and is faithful to My Cause."  Baha'u'llah

Sacred tobacco rises
in smoky ribbons to the four corners of Mother Earth:

(. . .North. . .South. . .East . .West. . .)

The Creator inhales deeply, searching for worth,
determination, pure heart.  Where can we hide?

From her small house Penny sent clouds of tobacco
in all directions, in all seasons.  Her heart grew large.

This large heart encompassed a cargo of tears,
abandonment, distress.  Dis-ease.

Her large heart pushed less lifeblood with each beat,
but always kept space---
      always kept space----
                    ---for a simple throne in a room filled with roses.

Abandoning the ashes of imperfect, earthly love
she was drawn like clean blue smoke by her Creator

and offered as a prayer of hope to the four corners of our lives:

(. . .Past. . .Present. . .Future.  . . Now. . .)

My Haiku came and I wasn't ready

or: Basho covers his face with both hands and sighs...

Seasons are central
to haiku, essential to
to describing the awakened life.
Summer was gloating and fall hovering but
I saw nothing as I stormed
an inner wasteland.

A sky full of birds,
gaggles and ripples of them,
sentences and paragraphs of birds
flew just above my head.
I reached up to touch them.  I heard them
discuss flight patterns.

I walked with blind eyes
while waves of birds stormed my beach,
sent down troops,
and tried to win this war.
The clouds in my mind were stormy and
I pushed them aside.

Stratospherically,
One shape moved above the birds,
leaving behind a silver contrail of meaning,
a palimpsest for me to scan with my hopeless heart.
"Here there be haiku," it said.

My haiku came and I wasn't ready.

My Library was dukedom large enough.” Wm. Shakespeare

"My Library was dukedom large enough.”  Wm. Shakespeare

Last week the sibs and I went through remnants of a legacy from Mom and Dad.  In two brown paper bags and one battered box was the ephemera of several lives left for us to sort.  We tossed trash that had been carefully treasured over a century, identified some odd pieces of lingering memory, counted the hankies and watch fobs and divided up what we wanted to take home for our own children to wonder over after a funeral feast.

I took the books.  I have them in a suitcase carefully segregating their seeping mustiness from my own precious library.  In these books are the scrawled autographs of school children who became my grandparents.   Grandfather Burr Stephens wrote in a margin of “Macauley’s Life of Samuel Johnson” that he was a junior in high school in 1916.  I can’t imagine any current high school junior even recognizing this book as reading material.  Burr’s spelling lists (folded and tucked into the book for almost 100 years) show that in 1916 he could correctly spell chauffeur and acknowledgement and knew the difference between loose and lose.  Burr went on to marry my grandmother, Marie and they both drank themselves into early graves but here I hold bits of their childhood in a musty suitcase.  In the book Hiawatha is Marie’s name carefully inscribed with a lock of hair tucked between pages.  I see that they read all of Lincoln’s speeches and essays by Charles Lamb.  They studied Shakespeare.

My favorite is a tattered copy of The Indiana Educational Series “First Reader,” published in 1889 by the Indiana School Book Co.  My great-grandmother’s name is written on the frontispiece: Florence Jackson.  Even then she was using the Palmer method with cursive if not yet connected letters.  When her parents and younger sister left for Canada to homestead, eighteen year old Florence was left behind with her new husband.  She grieved the separation for the rest of her life, but here I examine a book she held in her five-year-old hands and imagine her blue eyes widening just a bit as she understands that reading is in her control--that the world is available to her through this small, square device.

The sibs and I received a remarkable inheritance from our forebears: an insatiable love of reading and learning.  The faded pictures; the alcoholism and its sequelae; all those women's handkerchiefs; the watch fobs; the pervasive anxiety--these bits of inheritance we may pass along to our children but we won't brag about it.  The love of reading is better than all manner of stuff.  Stuff gets kept in brown paper bags for grieving relatives to sort.  Reading, learning---now there's the stuff of dreams.

"Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot with pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, through without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them."  Samuel Johnson. 

Lying on my back in a lavender field near Gallium

"Night Route to Gallium,"  Duct Tape art by Michigan Artist Pete Warburton

Against a dark and endless sky

the stars that Vincent loosed go by

to spiral through a painted night.

He gave them wings and taught them flight

that we might learn to make reply.

My words aren’t stars, yet stars are nigh—

They spill into this poem I

describe with intimate delight

against a dark and endless sky.

Or chaos, or a thousand sighs

will not reduce the star’s supply.

I’ll watch with Vincent—learn his sight

and fill my canvas with this light

against a dark and endless sky.

(I bought this artwork by Pete Warburton--isn't it amazing?  Duct tape, of all things.  And beauty.)

a love poem by friend Al Black

Al says:

Carol loves the ocean - I wrote this poem wishing I could take her to the coast for a weekend:

Tides

Sometimes we journey to the coast

Wiggle our toes in wet sand

Feel the wind

Wait for the sun to rise

…..and listen

As clumsy waves speak in code

About the sea

And its love sacrifice to the moon

The roadie

I started down this road early today

cup in hand and warmth in the belly.

Blindness quickly overcame me

but still I walk, oh yes,

I walk like the earth circles the sun—

I walk on.

None to guide me,

only noise and smell—

wind pushing me, rain washing ashes from my feet.

I know your face is in the world.

How will I find you, still as you are and

hidden in tall grasses?  How will I meet you?

I am listening for your little song. 

I am walking to you now.  

Liberating Auschwitz

Davy, "the Nose" fell apart right when we walked in there.
Him the toughest of all of us and the captain.
I had to slap him a couple of times,
make him think about getting these people some help
and he finally pulled himself together.
Don't tell me it didn't happen.
I was nineteen when I walked into those gates--
the smell made it pretty obvious what had happened.
When those...people...came out of the barracks
looking like walking dead things,
well, I lost my lunch.  Damn near thought one of 'em
might try to eat what I lost, they was that bad off.

Davy could talk some of their language and he was giving them
all our chocolate and rations and coffee.
Told the rest of the platoon we could just go hungry a few days.
Davy made us bathe 'em real gentle, and make 'em
broth and feed the ones as couldn't feed themselves.
By the time the Red Cross got there we had done
what we could.  We didn't give 'em much.
Just some bad food and a bath.

There wasn't enough food, enough love
to fill up the hole that camp made in the world, I tell ya.

Almost Falling

for Catarina,  a planter of trees.
“It is said that the prophet Mohammed exhorted every man, woman and child to
plant at least 1000 trees in their lifetime, and that for this act they would be blessed.”

Every step we take is a sort of falling down,
although we don't actually hit ground
unless we're infants and haven't learnt 
the art of catching ourselves in the process. 
Or we're too old to maintain 
the grace of not falling.  
Or we're on ice, pretending to be 
Nancy Kerrigan and we aren't.  
Then we hit the ice with a bounce and lie still afterwards,
thinking about gravity and soft tissue damage.  


It's not about not falling.  
It's about the almost falling. 
And in the work almost 
lies our hope, our heart, our faith, 
and why we care for those weaker than ourselves,
and why we plant saplings we'll never see grow into trees.

Some Comments on the Manner of Death

(a found poem, from a lecture on Medicolegal Death Investigations.)

People think of death as cooling--

that unclaimed people, fixed or unfixed,

will cease to occur at standard room temperature.

Death is a process of fermentation and care must be taken

that matches not be used indiscriminately.

(most of you will never see this.)

Most of you will never see this

because you are hanging out your wash on the rooftops

while overhead a million small flames spiral in a cobalt sky.

More about "Starry night" by Van Gogh

Going home for tea

Footprints mark new snow,

leading many directions—

I walk home for tea.

The skull

Your skull protects gyrated bits of brain

where music and poetry and stars all dance,

in miraculous molecular light shows—

Neural networks lead to last night’s left-overs

and oh, the keys.  And how to drive.

In that beautiful treasure box is the secret

of how your crooked mouth

smiles its tender morning smile. 

This precious bony skull—

a skull any phrenologist would long to touch—

This skull contains infinite connections. 

In the case of cancer and craniotomy

then you lose irretrievable stray items:

the name of your first love. 

                         . . .the word love. . .

and how to keep from crying 

when loving eyes try guiding you

(with a nameless sort of hope)

to this morning’s tender smile.

Sanctify it....

"Thy heart is My home.  Sanctify it for My descent."  Baha'u'llah

If they said my Beloved stood outside the door,

I would run with delight into His waiting arms.

He would hold my rough and dirty hands in His and say,

“Well done, thou best, and dearest child.”

If they said my Beloved would be here in five minutes,

I would say a prayer as I washed my hands and face,

would clear books off the best chair for Him to rest Himself,

and then I would run with delight into His waiting arms.

He would sit down in my messy room and say,

“Well done, thou best, and dearest child.”

If they told me my Beloved would visit in one hour,

I would say a prayer, wash my hands and face and put on

my nicest clothes.  I would hurry to make my room

into a shrine for Him with a chair near the window,

and a cup of sweet tea nearby.

He would make Himself comfortable, sip the tea and say,

“Well done, thou best, and dearest child.”

If they told me my Beloved would visit tomorrow,

I would cook delicious food and invite my family and friends to

meet Him.  My house would be a beautiful haven for all,

and we would practice singing a welcome song for His delight.

He would touch each cheek, gaze around the room and exclaim,

“Well done, thou best, and dearest child!”

If they told me my Beloved would visit sometime before I die,

that He would visit me, in my little room….

            Would I keep the chair cleared for Him? 

Or would I wander the streets in search of something

I couldn’t name, picking up bits of string in my trembling hands,

pretending I didn’t know

that the Beloved was waiting with sweet tea,

heavenly food and songs of welcome. 

Waiting for me to come Home.