A Trio of Poems

Some days, it is better to listen . . .

I. Robert Frost

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if the were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

II. Carl Sandburg

Under the Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

III. W.B. Yeats

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Simply Stated

Granted, that 4th Q? Not so beautiful. The rest . . . exquisite.

Hopefully next time Pittsburgh's D will remember that they are playing football and not hockey: the game doesn't end after the 3rd, fellas!

Still . . . Here we go, Steelers! Here we go!

A Quiet Day

It began when my husband, himself not a coffee drinker, woke me with the scent of my favorite hot brew. This has been our weekend routine for some time now, ever since he learned to use my French press. He wakes, grinds the beans, measures out the water and the coarsely-ground, fragrant roast, presses, pours, and lets the oversized, steaming mug coax me from sleep. We sit in bed, talking of nothing in particular, while I lay against the pillows and sip and sip and sip.

A short time later, I made breakfast: slow-cooked oatmeal on the stove, garnished with Honeycrip apples and a bit of cinnamon. I stirred the milk as it steamed, scalding it to a pale and golden white, its warmth and scent a perfect complement to the slow, fall morning.

The day pressed on. The kids played; they built a tent out of blankets and the dining room table, and they took the kitty inside with them. We watched football. Kurt and the kids made popcorn. During the Penn State game, my son crawled up on the couch next to me and propped his cheek against my arm. It wasn’t long before I felt his head relax against me, nod just slightly forward. I lifted him into my lap. He shifted, and sighed, and smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, much the way infants do once they’ve fallen, sleepily, from the breast. Across the room, I could hear my daughter quietly talking, and talking, and talking to her Daddy.

For dinner, I made the best meatloaf of my life. A few weeks ago, I attempted tomato preserves; while the taste was perfection, the preserves didn’t set. I used some as a glaze on grilled pork, and tonight I used a jar to make meatloaf. Culinary goodness.



All I can say, today, is that sometimes beauty is simple and implicit.

A Beautiful Mind

On June 11, 2008, my grandmother went to the hospital for a routine, preventative procedure, during which she sustained significant, unexpected trauma. That singular event changed not only her entire state of existence, but it altered our family dynamic and, from all accounts, reframed and redefined both ‘the personal’ and ‘the professional’ for the doctor who performed the procedure.

It was a rough summer: just weeks after my grandmother’s trauma, my husband’s grandmother began a rapid decline, and we lost her. The day of her funeral, in Detroit, my grandmother was taken in for emergency surgery, in West Virginia, a surgery that was necessary for her survival but that she wasn’t expected to survive.

But she did survive. Strong, tough Appalachian woman, I said. But when we visited her at the hospital---in her minimally conscious state, it took me a moment to recognize that wonderful woman who has given me so much of herself . . . most symbolically through her recipes.

I treasure my “Grandma Weezy’s” recipes, and I share her love of the kitchen. On a visit to her home in Pennsylvania a few years ago, she sat me down at her kitchen table, and we went through her book--a binder filled with her favorite recipes. Of course, not one recipe in that book is followed to the letter when Grandma makes it, so she walked me through each recipe adding her own “now I don’t do thats” and “but here’s how I do its” and “it works best if you do it this ways.” I left her house that day with my own collection of annotated recipes, and they have been my source of comfort since her trauma.

She has improved and declined by turns, suffering several subsequent ‘events’ secondary to that original trauma. For just a short time around Christmas last year, she was finally--after some six months in the ICU--able to go home, but that lasted only days before she suffered seizures and a stroke and was back in the ICU. She hasn’t been able to go home since, splitting her time between a nursing and rehabilitation center, the ER, and the hospital. Sixteen months.

The last time we visited her, I took her some of my freshly canned, homemade jams. I treasure the smile she shot me as she turned the jar over in her unsteady hand.

Though she is often coherent and alert, the trauma has left its imprint on her, and she now experiences frequent confabulation. While I was talking with my mom last night, she explained that the subject of nearly all these confused memories and perceptions involves the kitchen. Grandma just baked bread (she gestures to the side table). Grandma finished canning tomatoes, or hot peppers and sauerkraut, or green beans. “Go get yourself some. They’re your favorite, and they’ll go well with that fresh bread.” And on.

All day today, I’ve been going over the conversation I had with my mom last night. It is tragic to see my grandmother--strong, independent, blithesome--so compromised. But her mind--her beautiful, beautiful mind-- seems to give her solace, seems to compensate for her present condition by placing her in her vibrant kitchen and freeing her do what her body will no longer allow.

"Things of Beauty May Be Then in Season"

I began today with an attitude of discovery, looking “up and out,” just as I had hoped. It was something of a joy to notice the spray of burgundy leaves crowning the line of trees I pass every day, to glimpse the surprising strip of vivid green framing the drying cornfields and the shock of golden chrysanthemums on display outside the fruit market, a contrast to the crates of fresh honeycrisps. Quiet, iconic October.

And then . . .

Acid-washed jeans with tapered legs. Members Only-style jackets. Neon, color block hi-tops. An abundance of safety pins worn as accessories. Pleated pants with a long rise. Footless, lace-trimmed leggings. Oversize, neon, plastic sunglasses. Canvas, checker-board print, slip-on shoes. And a Whitney Houston-“I Wanna Dance With Somebody”-style perm.

More ugly, of a different kind: the creepy, scowling, leering guy on the bus who looked like an understudy for Argus Filch. The person sitting behind me on the bus whose breath I could smell with each exhalation. Whatever it was that someone dumped into the ‘bubbler' drain ('bubbler,' by the way, is ‘Sconnie for ‘water fountain.’). Just . . . ew. Then, on the way home, it rained mud.

So on day one of purposefully seeking and noting beauty, I was surrounded by a whole lotta ugly.

"There ought to be gardens for all months in the year,
in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season."
~Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Gardens," 1625

At least I can be sure of this: October has a wicked sense of irony, and that is a beautiful thing.

An experiment

Bear with me for a moment, folks: I've grown bored with myself.

Bored with my writing, which has grown ever more academic and dense. Bored with my thinking, which feels hopelessly unremarkable. Bored with my scholarship, even as it is becoming more relevant and interesting. Boo-frickin'-hoo, right? But here's the thing: nothing worth reading has ever, I assume, come from a bore: "that which is written without labor is read without pleasure," as Johnson wrote, and labor may be a lot of things, but it is never boring.

So this morning I had a thought. I scribbled a couple lines of verse

September's final kiss--
light frost at morning's light,
the delicious scent of autumn's breath
brings promise and renewal.

(go easy on me . . . it was just a few lines of scribbled verse while I was waiting for my coffee to brew. Anyway . . . )

Autumn, for me, is the very essence of beauty and renewal, and here we are on the cusp of October. In honor of October, then, and in an attempt to shake this ridiculous self-indulgent boredom, I have decided to carry out a little experiment: once a day, for the next 31 days, I will post something that has struck me as beautiful, beauty being as good a criteria as any, I suppose.

In doing so, I want to remind myself to "look up and out"--up beyond my immediate frame of reference, out beyond the end of my own nose. In posting every day, I hope to establish a bit of a rhythm, a bit of discipline in my non-academic writing, a scheduled 'break' from the academese that will, in turn, improve my other writing efforts. I also hope that, maybe, those of you who read my musings here will enjoy the fruits of my little experiment . . . and by the end I might have created an interesting little October essay. So, I guess we'll see.

Eight Years

I'm doing what many are doing today: remembering. It comes to me in snapshots now, only eight years later, rather than in a neat and consistent narrative. Maybe that is how I experienced it, through the burdened silence and plethoric fog of disbelief and nascent grief. Snapshots.

We thought there had been a terrible accident when we turned on the news. Kurt had come by for breakfast, as was our routine. We sat in my living room, on the loveseat, eating cereal and trying to understand what we were seeing. Even the news team speculated that some freak accident had caused the plane to smash into the tower. Then, in just a glimpse between the towers, the cameras caught the second plane.


That striking, clear sky seems to have worked its way into our collective memory. Calm, still, unchanging blue.


In moments, I tried to get in touch with my friends who were in NYC: Lucy, my oldest and dearest, who worked for Viacom at the time. David, a doctoral candidate at NYU. Both responded. Lucy wanted information; they were in some sort of lock-down in her building in Midtown Manhattan, and little information was coming in. David was across the river, in a laundromat in Hoboken, describing what he saw. I saved those e-mails for a long time. Eight years and several computers later, I'm not sure where those files are.


With the world's attention on New York and, by this time, D.C., the news out of PA was but a footnote, an aside: "Another plane has gone down in rural Pennsylvania, about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh." That's it. No detail. Selfish, I know, but those were the most chilling 14 words I had yet heard. I called my Dad. No answer. I called my mom. No answer. No answer. God.


I finally reached my mother some time later. She hadn't yet heard.


Later, I talked with my friend, Ryan, who lived about a mile from the crash site. He said the sound of impact woke him that morning.


I went to campus. Classes had not yet been canceled. We gathered in our offices and in the hallway, piecing together what we knew, what we thought we knew. In the Midwest, there was increasing anxiety about the security of Chicago. Would it be targeted, too?


Classes were canceled by the late morning or early afternoon; my very dear friend, Bill, and I walked across campus together to let our students, who were likely already on their way to class, know. I spoke to my students briefly--they were already in their seats. I have absolutely no idea what I said.


I spent the rest of the day in the campus cafeteria, huddled around a TV on a tall, rickety media cart with Bill, Nicky, Alex, Peter, Geoff . . . a few others came and went. Alex was feeling particularly bad after chastising the students in his early class for their lack of attentiveness and apparent apathy; he had not yet heard about the attacks when he did so, but they had.


That evening, Kurt and I went to his folks' house. We were all . . . quiet. And even though Kurt and I were not yet married--were not even yet engaged--it was very important, somehow, to be with family. And that's exactly what they were . . . even then.


What is extraordinary to me is the immediacy of these snapshots, fragmented though they may be, and the banality of them. The logical memory recalls, reflects, but the emotional memory seems to evoke, and in doing so eight years could be eight seconds or eight decades: the heaviness, the quietness, press as fully and steadily as they did in those moments eight years ago, slipping, somehow, into timelessness.