Poem of the world war, this one

This poem grabbed my attention because it captures the moment, as good poetry does.
It was posted on Facebook by friend and one-time writing professor
John Calderazzo in Colorado. Thanks, John.

Always a good time to read Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

I look to poetry to ease the pain I feel at the ransacking of my country's democratic principles -- and the destruction of our White House. I didn't automatically go to the poets and writers of the 1920s and 1930s, that era of uprisings in the writing world. I didn't go to the 1960s and 1970s, my time as a young man trying to understand why an America I worshipped was murdering people in Southeast Asia in my name. I sometimes send my readers to that past. But I came across Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" on the Poetry Foundation's web site. It speaks to this time, when fascists are in charge of the three branches of our government. I'd say read it and weep, but if you ain't weeping already, I have no words.

But Maya Angelou does:

Still I Rise (excerpt)

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

At sea level, remembering making mile-high muffins

Mile High Muffins

Muffix mix, two eggs, two-thirds cup water and canola oil, mix well and add blueberries from a can. May need to add more water and a dash of flour. Mix again. Spoon into muffin pan and cook at 400 for time stated on package plus four or five more minutes. It’s science, this Wyoming cooking. Takes longer for water to boil for tea. The oxygen is thinner so sea-level cooks may need to sit-a-spell while the muffins bake. It gives the cook time to look out the kitchen window, see the quaking aspens and their gold leaves, the sheen of frost on the browning lawn. Apples hang from the old fruit tree that’s missing a major limb. The fire hedge blazes. The muffins bake. I stand on an ancient sea.

 

In the Soup: Retired CSU professor John Calderazzo reads in the library

Poetry books arrived this week. The first was “In the Soup,” the second book of poetry by John Calderazzo. John lives in the foothills outside the tiny town of Bellevue, Colorado just north of Fort Collins and Colorado State University. John taught literary nonfiction during his time in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at CSU. He was one of my faculty mentors and I enlisted his expertise as a literary fellowship juror during my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. He still writes and teaches in that genre but explores poetry in retirement.

John writes of many topics but travel is a big one. He is a world traveler so writes about trips to Peru and other overseas locations. His U.S.-based poems are set on Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, Elk Mountain in Wyoming, and Santa Cruz Island in California.  He dedicates some to friends and colleagues. “Kraken” is dedicated to Richard Jacobi, whom I knew in Casper, Wyo. John hears from Richard and his wife, retired University of Wyoming professor Vicki Lindner, about recent falls which, at a certain age, leads to complications, something this person of a certain age knows only too well. After watching a video of his Peru nephew’s toddler son falling over as he tried to walk, John  writes: “I sense what’s reaching out for him—gravity, the Kraken,/tentacled monster of the deep—already taking/his measure.”

The natural world has always featured heavily in John’s writing. In “Gathering Voltage,” he’s in the mountains again, this time in a summer lightning storm. He and his brother-in-law crouch as a bolt hits nearby and he feels “the fatal breath of the sky.” On another day, he rides his mountain bike in a storm: “Shivering as I fly, I sense a lightning/bolt moving into position, gathering/voltage, checking its GPS, its terrible/book of names.”

The author is not always in the wilderness. Sometimes, “The Retired Professor Reads in the Library.” He’s researching a travel essay and is in the aisle with his books and “old-time reporter’s notebooks.” He moves aside to let a student pass and wonders if the young man just sees “Him again—the old guy.” Thing is, he’s “as happy as I was at 10, freed from class to roam the school library.” I know the feeling, the old guy with his walker, crowding the aisle, as he reads a book pulled from the shelves but not sitting instead at one of the tables reserved for the elderly. If asked, I might tell you that some of the glory in the library is being there in the crowded aisle with my friends, the books.

"The Darker Moods of My Father" took me back to my own youth in the 1960s and '70s. He contemplates his father's "darker moods" and his rants on Vietnam and antiwar protesters and "priests drunk on holy water." Meanwhile, the writer remembers "this thing/that wanted to cannon me into jungle mud/since I'd turned eighteen." The poem ends with a revelation about his parents, about how his mother cautioned her husband about going too far with his his diatribes and the father looks sheepish, "knowing he'd gone too far, back in those days/when it was still possible to go too far." Suddenly we're back in 2025, when every day is a lesson on going too far.

John’s book is published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio: The Literature of Human Ecology. A fine-looking book, printed in a large and very readable sans-serif type. The publisher is based in Pueblo Mountain Road in Beulah, Colorado, which is located between Pueblo and the mountains. I mention this because there are many fine small publishers tucked into many small places. My old friend Nancy Curtis runs High Plains Press from her ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, just a few miles off I-25 down a rutted dirt road that can turn into gumbo during a heavy rain. Anhinga Press has two co-directors in Tallahassee but founder Rick Campbell supervises from his windswept outpost on the Gulf of Mexico (MEXICO!).

One more thing. Some small presses receive support through their local and state arts agencies or some get National Endowment for the Arts publishing grants. I should say they used to get grants but not anymore from the battered NEA and not anymore in Florida where the Governor is on a scorched-earth campaign against the arts and the liberal arts education.

A sad state of affairs. My career was based on connecting local arts groups and publishers to government funding which they had to match 1-to-1. Most of the time, the government dollar was matched many times over. The U.S. government is now in the hands of a wrecking crew that wants to demolish poetry and prose, arts and education. They want to destroy everything I hold dear.

John Calderazzo writes about everything I want to preserve and protect.

Emily Dickinson could not stop for death but could for poetry

How did the Dominican sisters think I could understand an Emily Dickinson poem, "I could not stop for death?"

Sister Miriam Catherine: What is this poem about Mr. Shay?

16-year-old Me: Death, sister.

Sr. MC: What about death?

Me: She could not stop for it.

Sr. MC: Anything else?

Me: There's a carriage.

Sr. MC: Are you a dunderhead, Mr. Shay?

Me: Yes, Sister. Please don't smite me.

There was no smiting on that day. 

I am now smitten with Ms. Dickinson's poetry. I did not, would not, could not understand its full meaning then. I was a kid. She began writing as a youngster but her lifetime of creativity was enormous and almost unknown at the time of her death.

I turn my attention to the poet who became "The Belle of Amherst" on stage but was anything but. Since her death in 1886, Dickinson's reputation has been battled over by family, friends, and biographers. Lyndall Gordon tried to make sense of it all in his biography, "Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds." And Jerome Charyn writes of Dickinson in his 2010 W.W. Norton historical novel, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." You guess that this is a different kind of look at a literary legend because the cover shows Dickinson's bloomers illuminated by candlelight under her hoop skirt.

I'm only through Charyn's first section but know this is a different look at an American poet who bored high schoolers and even college English majors. 

I now know that I didn't get it when I was young. Why does knowledge come so late in life? 

It's a dangerous time to be woke to literature. Liberal arts majors are being threatened in the U.S., maybe no more so than in Florida where I came of age as a writer. If I can identify a fellowship of dunderheads, it rests in the Florida governor's office. He aims to gut everything I treasure at the University of Florida: The College of Liberal Arts, English majors, arts programs, "wokeness" in general, and the Independent Florida Alligator. As a movie hero of mine once said, "This will not stand, man."

Back to Emily Dickinson. Charyn notes in his intro that he is obsessed with her poetry and has been for decades. His first sentence in the author's note: "She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke every rule."

I returned to her poetry and I know what I was missing. I read and reread "I could not stop for death." I couldn't get enough. I went to the Emily Dickinson Museum web site. I read about her and more of her poetry. 

I laughed when I read this on the museum's online Q&A (thanks AI): 

"Q: Is Amherst close to Boston? A: No, Amherst is not close to Boston. It is located in the western part of Massachusetts, about a 90-minute drive from Boston, which is a significant distance for a quick trip. The two locations are in different regions of the state, with Amherst being further west in Pioneer Valley."

I laughed because when I lived in Boston 1972-73, my woman friend and I hitched regularly to Storrs, Conn., to see friends. The two of us had logged some 7,000 miles the summer of '72 by thumb, ending up in her hometown of Boston. My pal Tommy and I hitched from Boston to Putney, Vt., passing just minutes from Amherst, on our way to get high with friends among the colorful foliage. I spent my career driving Wyoming and Colorado. Significant distance, indeed.

I wish I had gone. I still could. For now, I will finish Charyn's novel and read more Dickinson. I live in memory and imagination. 

Read more about Dickinson's "Secret Life" in upcoming posts.

 

Alfred Joyce Kilmer on "Trees"

I salute the turkey oak tree in my backyard.

It's a tough little oak. I was looking out the sliding glass door a few weeks ago and saw its leaves detach in a strong wind. Looked like late September in Wyoming but it was late July in Ormond Station, Florida. The flurry of leaves caused me to call the city arborist and she asked if the leaves were brown on the edges. They were. "Needs water," she said. She was correct. I started hosing it down every day and now the leaves have magically returned. 

The tree is a denizen of the soupy landscape that makes up my neighborhood. We're not in the soup but I can see it from here. I live in the dry section of the wetlands. We are right at the periphery of  the Hull Swamp Conservation Area and the Relay Wildlife Management Area. Wildlife we got. A neighbor spotted a black bear in his backyard. A big ol' Eastern Diamondback was squashed by an F-250 near our PO boxes. We've seen turtles and birds galore. 

We are interlopers here. But, back to the trees.

One of my father's favorite poems was "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. It's beautiful, really, with memorable opening lines: "I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree."

Dad knew the poem by heart. It's easily memorized, rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter which makes for a memorable beat. Four iambs instead of the usual five in pentameter poems. I point this out because it would have been a great choice of poems to memorize during after-school detention at St. Francis Catholic Grade School in Wichita. If we seventh-graders transgressed enough to get detention, the nuns gave us a choice of poems to memorize. Because all 12- and 13-year-olds have places to go and things to do after school, we chose the shortest and easiest of rhymes. No free verse, thank you. No epics such as "Child Harold's Pilgrimage" or "Howl," although I am pretty sure Ginsberg and the Beats were not on the list of approved Catholic verse.

I once had a choice between "Charge of the Light Brigade" and some silly love poem. I chose the war poem and can still recite most of it. "Trees" was never on the list. Odd thing is, anything by Kilmer would have put me closer to war than Tennyson. He also would have brought me nearer to my Catholic roots had I known about the 1917 collection he edited, "Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets.

But "Trees" lives on in collections. Kilmer converted to Catholicism in 1913 and wrote of his spiritual life. He joined up at 30 to fight in the Great War. Died at 31 at the Second Battle of the Marne. He was leading a patrol into No Man's Land and disappeared in a shellhole. When his troops caught up to him, he was quietly looking over the bombed-out landscape. He didn't respond. They shook him, then looked at his face to see dead eyes and a bullet hole in his forehead. Death by sniper. He's buried in the U.S. cemetery in France across from the farmer's field where he was killed.

He's been called "the last of the Romantic Era poets." His poems are predictable and schmaltzy. They rhyme, for goodness sake. Across the blasted tundra, the British war poets -- Sassoon, Owen, Graves -- were leading the charge into the revved-up post-war realism of the 1920s. You might see Kilmer's poem "Rouge Bouquet" in volumes of war poetry. It's about 21 soldiers of New York's Fighting 69th who were killed by a random German shelling. His legacy lives on in the names of schools, neighborhoods, and a national forest in North Carolina. The Philolexian Society at Columbia University sponsors The Annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest. Lest you think this is just an Ivy League Putdown, it is taken very seriously on campus. Here's a description from the scribes at Wikipedia (I donated to the cause and got a cool [EDIT] T-shirt):

The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest has been hosted annually by the Philolexian Society, a literary and debating group at Columbia University, since 1986, drawing crowds of 200–300 students and participants vying for the title of best of the worst. Columbia faculty members serve as judges. The event is usually held in November and is heralded by the appearance of "Bad Poetry in Motion" flyers around campus (satirizing the New York City Subway's "Poetry in Motion" series) featuring some of the best verses of the last 20 years, as well as door-to-door readings in the dorms, usually performed by prospective new members ("phreshlings").

The event is named for "bad" poet (and Philolexian alumnus) Joyce Kilmer. His most famous work, Trees, is read aloud by audience members at the contest's end. In 2012, the Columbia Daily Spectator listed the Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest #1 among its "Best Columbia Arts Traditions".

 As a writer and arts administrator, I commend the Society's efforts to promote poetry and its performance. I can see my father, an army radioman in The Great War Part 2 and accounting graduate of a small Catholic college, standing tall in the auditorium and reciting "Trees" with Ivy League youngsters and aging fans of an almost-forgotten poet. 

"Trees," Joyce Kilmer, those lovely, lovely trees.

Sad days for poets, writers, and historians in Washington, D.C.

A. Friend (not a real name) told me that she and her husband are traveling to Washington, D.C., this week to see the National Museum of African-American History. They want to visit it before the Trump people purge the exhibits and dismantle the building. A. Friend is not a Trump voter, not even a person undergoing what MAGA calls Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS. She and her husband are just regular folks who visit museums and art galleries and historic sites during their travels. Over the years, she has sent me postcards from sites I never knew existed and I am the richer for it. 

Trump's Nitwits have already purged some of the exhibits from this museum. They have never met a museum they didn't suspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DIE which is an ironic acronym on its face. MAGA terms it DEI because, well IED was taken (Boom!) and IDE was too close to "Beware the Ides of March" which sounds too Shakespearean which might remind Idiocrats of a college English class they were forced to take in 1997. 

I wish A. Friend and her husband Godspeed and good luck. Make sure to take your REAL ID with you just in case there is an ICE sweep on the National Mall.

More bad news from D.C.: Trump's goons have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Program and canned its staff including Director Amy Stolls whom I have worked with. The administration had already rescinded grants to literary magazines and presses whose only crime was admitting to DIE. 

I am going to list them here because I have read some of their books and they might not have existed with the writer's non-profit publisher, often hanging on by a shoestring. Here are the names:   Alice James Books, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Open Letter Books, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, and Transit Books as well as such literary magazines Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, n+1, the Paris Review, and Zyzzyva.

I have read books from many of these presses. I will mention one. Brian Turner's first book of poetry was published by Alice James Books. Poet, essayist, and professor Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise, also published by Alice James Books on New Gloucester, Maine, a teeming metropolis filled with radical outfits such as the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, Pineland Farms, and the New Gloucester Fair. And one publisher. 

Brian's bio a pretty standard description of a contemporary American poet. But what's that part about the Iraq War? Oh yeah, Turner is a U.S. Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the historic 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Here, Bullet" knocked me out. The title poem will tell you more about war's realities than any non-fiction book. Go to the Alice James web site and buy the book. Better yet, buy all of his books and e-books which include individual poems. 

During my time as literature program specialist at the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought Brian to our fall 2012 writing conference in Casper to read from his work and congratulate the writers he had chosen for the WAC's literary fellowships. Later, he joined two other veteran writers on a panel to discuss the role of soldier/poet in "Active Duty, Active Voices," featured Iraq War veterans and writers Brian Turner and Luis Carlos Montalván. The panel was moderated by Casper College professor and military veteran Patrick Amelotte. Montalvan suffered from severe PTSD and wrote the wonderful memoir "Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him." He brought Tuesday with him to Casper that October weekend. I worked with the state's military coordinator to bring other service dogs and their handlers to the conference to demonstrate what they do. 

I wish I could just end this blog with another Liberal's complaint about our current situation. But I have a sad story to tell. In December 2016, the 43-year-old Montalvan was found dead in an El Paso hotel room. He had left his dog Tuesday with a friend. He killed himself and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Delivering the eulogy was Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Montalvan had persuaded Franken to sponsor legislation expanding the military dog program which passed a different Congress during different times. 

During his time in Casper, Montalvan said his favorite poem growing up conservative Cuban in South Florida was "Invictus." You know the one. It celebrates bravery. William Ernest Hanley wrote it and it's always been a favorite to memorize because it rhymes and is in iambic tetrameter. Montalvan memorized it. It ends this way: "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Rest in peace, Captain.

John Green tells us why "Everything is Tuberculosis"

Did you ever wake up with a nagging cough and wonder “Is this the day I get tuberculosis?” Not bloody likely if you live in England or Germany or Denmark or any other place with an advanced healthcare system (even the U.S., despite its flaws).

If you live in Africa’s Sierra Leone, it might be another story.

That’s the one author John Green tells in his new book, “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.” You may know Green from his coming-of-age novels “The Fault is in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down.” These books for young readers have been made into movie versions you can see in the streaming world.

TB has not been one of Green’s main themes – until now. It grew out of a visit to West Africa with a health organization. There he discovered that poor countries struggle with the affordability and availability of TB medications. Just one of the reasons that 1.25 million people still die annually from the world’s most infectious disease.

Historically, TB patients were described as victims of consumption or labeled “consumptives.” It may sound like a less scary term than Mycobacterium tuberculosis, phthisis, pulmonalis, or the great white plague. But consumption is a quick description of what TB does to the body: it consumes it. When it advances unchecked, it dissolves your lungs, renders you breathless, and then you die.

Readers of classic literature recall poets with consumption such as John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Keats is sentimentalized because he wrote his gorgeous poems while being consumed by ravenous but slow-growing TB bacilli. Its slow pace makes it a particular tough disease to treat. It also, alas, gives writers lots of time to chronicle it.

This was captured in Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the infirm Keats and the true love he found during his dying days. This sentimentalization, according to Green, painted male Romantic-era poets as heroic sufferers and stricken white women as pale and beautiful as marble statues. American poet John Ciardi may have said it best in “A Trenta-Sei of the Pleasure We Take in the Early Death of Keats” from his collection "Echoes: Poems Left Behind:"

The species-truth of the matter is we are glad (of what?)/to have a death to munch on. Truth to tell (which truth is what?)/we are also glad to pretend it makes us sad./When it comes to dying, Keats did it so well (how well?)/we thrill to the performance…

The romance of TB faded as it kept killing people in new and ingenious ways, and that many of those victims were not poets but the guy next door and millions in poor countries. Its discovery by Dr. Robert Koch in 1882 as a microscopic bacillus, a highly contagious one, suddenly made TB a dirty word.

Green meets Henry Reider is a poor black youngster in Sierra Leone with Multiple Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB). He has several strikes against him, as he’s poor and he’s black and he lives in an African country without the medical resources required for long-term treatment. When Green first meets him, the boy is so small and thin that he looks like he’s eight and not thirteen.

Green points out that lack of health care spending is rampant in Africa. If Sierra Leone spent the same percentage of its budget on TB treatment as we do in the U.S., that would be 48 U.S. dollars per patient per year. That is less than what one round of TB prescriptions would cost. These medications are expensive and need to be taken for months if not years. Green writes that the country has its own medical schools, hospitals and doctors. But the drugmakers in the West reap big profits and their attorneys work hard to extend patents. Millions with no insurance are SOL.

Read the second part of my review of "Everything is Tuberculosis" next week.

Irish poet Eavan Boland: "Memory itself has become an emigrant"

The title poem of Eavan Boland's collection "The Lost Land" always moves me. It begins as a confessional with "I have two daughters" but ends with one of the big topics in Irish and Irish-American writing: diaspora. You know the story: the Potato Famine, the rapacious of the English landlords, the sailing away. The Irish, always sailing away and landing on a foreign shore. The last lines always get to me. I send you to the Poetry Foundation web site to read the whole thing and other work by Boland. Go there now. Read an Irish writer today. Happy St. Patrick's Day. 

The Nomad anthology wanders from the western wilds to my fog-wrapped Florida mailbox

The first anthology of The Nomad literary magazine landed in my mailbox yesterday. Unassuming cover with lots of goodies inside. Last summer Ken Waldman, one of the Nomad founders, asked me to send in two pieces of my work, one that I was proud of and had been published and another that I liked and hadn't been published. He tasked me with writing a short essay on my choices. So I sent editor Rachel White one story that had been published several times, "The Problem with Mrs. P," and one I just finished in June, "That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival." The first story is set in Wyoming and the second in Florida and South Carolina.

I spent 46 years in Wyoming and Colorado, did a lot of my growing up in East Coast Florida and spent my first two years of a not-very-successful university stint in South Carolina. I've also written speculative fiction that takes place off-world and in an Earth future that I imagined. I have returned to Florida which has its own otherworldly aspects. 

I am in such good company with this anthology. My long-time friend Ken Waldman has two poems, one set in the Alaska he calls home and a villanelle set in New Orleans. New Mexico's Lisa D. Chavez includes a poem which turns the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale on its head and a nonce sonnet, the meaning I had to look up. Detroit's M.L. Liebler weighs in with "Flag" which dissects yet "another dark chapter in American history" (the one happening now) and "Decoration Day" about Vietnam.

Wyoming friends still talk about 2002-2003 poetry and music performances featuring M.L. and Country Joe McDonald. Buffalo, Wyoming's David Romtvedt explores "another past life" and a childhood dream in his selections. I was undone by the images in Amy Gerstler's poem "Siren" which opens the anthology. Paul Fericano made me laugh with "Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room." Amy and Paul are from L.A. Paul published some of my prose poems on his Yossarian Universal News Service site (yunews.com). New Zealand's Michael McClane got my attention with the long title and World War 2 theme in "On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942."

That's just the beginning. Lots of great selections. You can get a copy of the book by subscribing to The Nomad. It's $25 for one year and $40 for two. You can also donate to this "non-for-profit labor of love by two writers." New submission guidelines are up for 2025. See the web site for the Bountiful, Utah, mailing address.

How does the fog come in on the day after Christmas?

The fog comes/on little cat feet

Thought of this Carl Sandburg poem as I sat watching the ocean as fog crept in. Cats weren't on my mind as much as the view from Tom Renick Park in Ormond-by-the-Sea. My visiting daughter stood beside me. Waves rolled through the fog and crunked on the shore. The surf wasn't bad. Rollers breaking outside but you could ride them out of the fog like a vampire surfer. Three young surfers appeared suddenly, boards under arms, walking north on the beach. No wetsuits. Gotta admire those guys. Two days ago there was sun and a bit of wind and all the surfers wore wetsuits. Must be the wind. The fog today traveled on a light north breeze. We were shielded by the adjacent condo high-rise. Still, tiny mist dabs fell on my exposed legs and dotted my windbreaker. I kept expecting a cat to appear but the only sound was traffic along A1A and kids on winter break cavorting in the playground. No way to hear little cat's feet. I imagined it just the same.

The night is rescued by the south wind

August Wind from the South

 

The setting sun turns the sky red the west wind

Pushes smoke from fires in Oregon and California.

Red haze settles over Wyoming mountain valleys and

The smoke burns the eyes catches in the throat.

 

The wind arrives after dark it surprises us all

it flows from the south the monsoonal flow

and its saturated air designed to douse the

fires sweep the sky clean send it all north.

 

Pull back the curtains open the windows wide.

I smell the rain or think I do but there are no clouds

no lightning no rumbles of thunder. The wind from the

deserts of Saguaros and scorpions and sweeps of sand.

 

I turn my chair to the open window tune out the ball

game the cell phone the gurgling kitchen noises.

Tonight it’s just me and the wind over the high prairie.

The high dry prairie. The rare south wind.

The lone hollyhock in my garden

Lone Hollyhock

My version:

Only one stalk this year. Hollyhock rises among the bachelor buttons and coreopsis. Elbows its way up, beefy stalk, heart-shaped leaves as big as, well, a human heart, if the human heart was shaped like a valentine heart. A cluster of buds promise alcea rosea flowers in magenta, fuchsia, pink, and one I’d like to see, Queeny Purple, which promises a royal presence, a long reign.

Alcea rosea marched from Japan and China all the way to the Middle East and into my 21^st-century garden. Twelfth century crusaders made a salve from the pretty flowers. They rubbed it on their horses’ rear legs (the hocks) to relieve the soreness of many rough miles. Those few holy warriors who made it back to Merry Ol’ told tales of a beautiful flower that grew in the Holy Land that eased their horses’ hocks. It became Holy Hock changed by a monk to Holyoke and later given its present name. Hollyhock was born.

Hollyhocks are in the disjointed Mallow family that includes okra, cotton, hibiscus, and marsh mallow which found its way into s’mores, a staple of every summer campfire. Think of a mallow camp surrounded by hollyhocks, okra in your gumbo, shirts of cotton, hibiscus for your true love, and the dessert ritual of gooey s'mores.

My hollyhock is alone out there in the garden, blooming the magenta of nature, the magenta of the inkjet canisters on his laser printer. A storm is coming. West winds whip the hollyhock. It ticks like a metronome, the rhythm of a horse’s hooves on the hard rocks of Judea, the Cajun beat that rocks the fais-do-dos, that marshmallow smear my wife licks from her upper lip.

I asked AI to make mine more descriptive. This is what happened:

In my garden this year, there stands a remarkable sight: a solitary hollyhock stalk amid the colorful company of bachelor buttons and coreopsis. Its robust, heart-shaped leaves are as large as a human heart, and a cluster of promising buds foretell an imminent spectacle of alcea rosea flowers in vibrant hues of magenta, fuchsia, pink, and the intriguing Queeny Purple. This resilient plant, alcea rosea, has a rich history, journeying from Japan and China all the way to the Middle East before finding its place in 21st-century gardens. Legend has it that 12th-century crusaders used a salve made from these exquisite flowers to soothe their horses' sore legs during their arduous travels. Tales of a magnificent flower that grew in the Holy Land and its beneficial properties to the knights' trusty steeds eventually led to the transformation of Holy Hock into Hollyhock, a name that has endured through the centuries. It's fascinating to think of hollyhocks as part of the disjointed Mallow family, which also includes okra, cotton, hibiscus, and marshmallow – the very ingredient that adds sweetness to the timeless tradition of s'mores enjoyed around summer campfires. As the storm approaches, my lone hollyhock bravely stands, presenting blooms that mirror the vivid magenta of nature and the modern inkjet canisters. Exposed to the whipping winds of the approaching storm, it maintains a steady rhythm reminiscent of a horse's hooves tapping on the hard rocks of Judea or the infectious beat of a Cajun fais-do-do, elevating the marshmallowy treat enjoyed by my wife, licked from her upper lip.

The things that tickled me:

The knights’ trusty steeds

Colorful company of bachelor buttons and coreopsis

marshmallow – the very ingredient that adds sweetness to the timeless tradition of s'mores enjoyed around summer campfires.

A 21-century editor wouldn’t like the overuse of adjectives and adverbs. 

The AI version reads more like the style of a traditional 17^th-century poem. Without the rhyming couplets.

The biopsy van stops here

Crash

Grief clouded my sight and

I rear-ended the van bearing biopsies

Bound for the cancer lab, one of them snipped

From my wife. The rear door flew open

I expected an avalanche of plastic bags, little slips

Of skin, viscous liquids, knobby tumors. But

nothing. And then a blooming flower, pink and white, on

a long green stem grows through the open door.

Out of the open door amidships

More blooms, others bright with purples and white

And oranges, many colors, fanciful shapes.

I knew then everything would be all right, there

Were no ugly lab-bound surprises, just a field of

Flowers at their peak, gloriously and forever alive.

Poetry Monday: The Letter is in the Wind

The Letter is in the Wind

I could dry up and blow away before

A letter arrives

I drag a lawn chair to a breadbox of a mailbox

The kind 1950s teens used for bathing practice

I sit, and imagine letters

Dear Mike: My love is like a red, red rose.

Mike, I miss you terribly I ache with it

I would gladly read whatever missive lands here even

The bad or sad news

Michael, dear: F--- you and the horse you rode in on

Note: my asthma acts up around livestock

Mike: Grandma died today. She was surrounded by

Friends and family and you

Were not one of them

Mike: Our dog Zeke got run over by the truck delivering

Your Christmas package, the box containing the latest

Brautigan book and a chew toy for foundling Zeke.

I would read them all, even the letter that promised

A scholarship in a far-off place and an ensign’s gold bar

A job as reporter in a strange city that will have

Plenty of stories and you will be lonely.

Dear Sir: You too could be a winner!

As I said, I will read them all perched along the

Lonely rural blacktop named Expectations Road.

Bananas at night, Cheyenne Botanic Gardens

This is just to say…

At night, when I clean the Botanic Gardens Conservatory, I unlock the door to the tropical wing, sneak in with my stepladder, and eat a banana. Just one at a time, so nobody notices. Short squat bananas, the size of a deli dill pickle. More yellow than the store-bought variety brought from far away, their skin thick and tough, designed by science to cushion the rough handling of pickers and packers and sorting machines. But this banana? Grown right here, from a tree transported from Honduras. The staff planted it four years ago while a Wyoming blizzard raged outside. It found shelter here, rich soil, constant care. I climb the ladder and pick a ripe one from a stalk and smell its rich scent. I perch on the tip-top of the ladder, just above the warning signs. The misting machines go off, hundreds of nozzles spray a fine mist through the gardens. The trees lose their shape in the fog. I expect a monkey’s call, the cry of an exotic bird. Tiny water droplets cling to the hairs of my arm. The cold winter wind whips the building and it groans like a living thing. I peel the banana carefully, the skin thin as paper that comes off in pieces. A rich scent greets me as I bite. Smooth as banana pudding going down. I sit high in the jungle mist, waiting for my break to end. I hope to eat another Gardens’ banana when they ripen again, just a few at a time. They are delicious, so sweet and so warm, something worth waiting for.

Poem for my November brothers

All Saints Day, the day after Halloween, the

day the nuns set us free from Catholic school only to

corral us later in church for mass of the saints

St. Daniel, St. Patrick, the namesakes without the intro

S-T, my brothers with November birthdays.

The days are still theirs, 18 for Pat, 25 for Dan

which sometimes fell on Thanksgiving.

The years pass and still I miss them. No birthday

cards to send, no phone calls to make, talk about

family and football. Pat passed in the spring, pneumonia,

the really bad kind. He got a bad break in his 55^th year.

Dan passed a week before his 61^st birthday, multiple

myeloma, the really bad kind. Both too young. I see them

now even younger, I surf summers with Pat and Dan, backpack

in Colorado with Pat before he went to the Air Force and Korea.

We're at a school dance, Dan with 30 stitches across his brow

skegged on the morning's big waves, the school now gone, 

named for the first priest to celebrate a mass in Florida, Spanish for

flowery. Someday in the future, our photos will be all that’s left,

an ancestor with travel plans for Mars wonders who

are those young guys posing with their surfboards in

front of The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse in Daytona,

sunburned youth wild and free. We forget, that’s the truth of it,

it’s our lot to forget where we come from. But now, this first

day of November 2023, I remember it all. The images are in

my head; memories, my heart; poem right here, right now, 

on this blog.

Saying goodbye to a friend, Dick Lechman

A eulogy for a friend from a friend: 

Books, books, books.

Dick Lechman had thousands of books at one time at his Old Grandfather Books in downtown Arvada. He had books in the store, books in a garage, and a few in his apartment and his car. I loved going into the Arvada store because I could always find something I didn’t know I was looking for. A history of World War I, a coffee table book of Colorado maps, an unread early novel by one of my favorite writers. If I couldn’t find anything, Dick would always suggest something. His interests centered on spirituality and religion as befits a one-time practicing priest. But his imagination wandered far and wide. My daughter Annie, Dick’s goddaughter, liked the bookstore too. She was little and liked to get lost in the stacks to discover intriguing books about dinosaurs and unicorns, sometimes in the same book. I never met with Dick that he didn’t have a book for me. I might be interested in it or maybe not. But someone who will gift you a book is someone to spend time with.

After Dick and his wife Mary bought a house in Arvada, I sometimes journeyed down from Cheyenne to play ping pong in his garage/office. Books lined the shelves there too. Dick usually won the games and then we retired to the garage’s book section. Dick also built and installed a Little Free Library in his front yard. I like those and usually stop to peruse the library when I see one. It’s like hidden treasure – there could be anything in there. And often was.

Dick was a writer too, a poet with philosophy in mind. He always emailed or mailed me his poetry. I usually commented on it because I know, as a writer and writing teacher, that every written thing deserves attention. In his poetry, Jesus played baseball and so did his disciples. Amazing flights of imagination. I liked the way he always worked friends and family into his poems – that made it very personal. I didn’t understand all of it but appreciated that he spent time and energy writing it down.

Dick was a conscientious godfather. He always brought Annie books and wrote her poems. He went out of his way to help her when she was in a variety of mental health treatment centers, in Colorado, Wyoming and a few neighboring states. It’s sometimes hard to know what to say to a loved one with mental health challenges. Just being there in a big deal. Yourself, listening. Chris and I always appreciated Dick’s attention to our little bird trying to fly.

Dick was one of the first people Chris and I met when we decided to abandon traditional Catholic churches for something different at 10:30 Catholic Community. Some of us gathered together in a men’s group and it turned out we had a lot to share with one another. We went on jaunts to the mountains. I moved away from Denver, first to Fort Collins and then to Cheyenne, and some of the guys went down to Arizona for Rockies’ spring training. Dick liked his Rockies and so did Mary. We all were committed fans and one of my great memories was attending a Rockies-Dodgers game with Dick and Mary and Dick’s brother and sister-in-law. Summer night at Coors Field. Sure, you might get heartburn from the hot dogs and the Rockies relief pitching. But always the best place to be in summer.

It's sad to say goodbye to Dick. The memories remain. He was a good guy with a big heart. And a fine friend.

Dick was always learning. This is some of his commentary on an Easter poem he sent me in April 2022: Remember that is just Dick's two cents/And each of you have your two cents/So it seems this Easter is better than last Easter./Cuz I didn't understand the resurrection of the spirit till/I was 83 years old.

He was 85 when he passed from this life last week. 

2022 was Dick’s final Easter on this planet. He also commented on the afterlife, saying that he hoped there was no paperwork there. By that, I'm guessing he meant PAPERWORK, you know, the kind we all hate to fill out. He didn't mean the paper of books because that meant so much to him. I do believe there is poetry and books, lots of books, in the afterlife. What would heaven be without them?

Dick loved sports and especially the Colorado Rockies. If there's room for books in heaven, there must be be a snowball's chance in Hades that the Rockies can find consistent pitching and go on to win a World Series. We can all keep praying for that. 

Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

The writer's walk

I am a sitter

One who sits

I sit all the time now

My broken back.

Was a time when you

Couldn't get me to stay still 

Could not get me to sit through

A well-intentioned speech or

Even a movie with a message. 

I walked to school and store

I walked just to walk. 

Each step caused a storm of words

That later I made into stories.

Now I walk with a walker called a

Rollator because it rolls with each step.

I stand straight. My back hurts

I proceed slowly and it's not the same as 

When I could walk unfettered Long's Peak  

Lightning Pass Colorado River headwaters  

Appalachian Trail Florida Trail 

Tomoka River Harper's Ferry

Down every street in D.C. and Denver

I cannot walk the writer's walk

So I sit.