Not grief. Not yet.

If I stare long enough
will these surf-scoured stones
on my window sill glow
green and pink like tourmaline
the way they were animated
by sound and rain when
I bent and picked them up?
Will they glow like embers
seething in a draft from the dark
outside? Do the stones remember
the difference between sound
and bay? Do they remember
when the glacier dragged its feet?
I will come upon more rocks
where sand blunts the ocean's edge
and I will place them on the sill
by the others wet with memory.

From Passaic Headwaters, Truman Beach near Orient, NY, Buffalo Mountain,
and the ones in this poem, from Ft. Worden.

"Sitting Waiting Wishing" by Jack Jackson makes me feel much more sad than this poem; hence the title.

Other notes:  In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (as the revisions progressed, has become less relevant for this poem). Keats on negative capability. I'm also slowly reading Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Sugar stained

Sugar stained

The despair I felt toward the end of summer
that leaves would fall before I learned the names--

do I feel it still? It is handy learning to look down
for cones, for small twigs a bird or squirrel breaks free,

and for the leaves. When hearts stop pumping
green colors to brown and sugars stained red

and orange emerge. How many lobes?
How sharply pointed? It is handy to look

right in front of you. Is the bark deeply rutted
or peeling like paper or is it scarred

in angled steps that walk your eyes up
through an empty crown to see that they are not gone.

Much is Given

Much is Given

I had a thought about planting tomatoes.

I would plant romas.

I like their shape.

They make me feel useful

with a knife--their consistent

resistance to my blade.

I’ve been reading about nature all winter.

Though I’m not in the mood

maybe I will find some seeds

and press them in soil

in an unbleached egg carton.

They would command me then.

Not my entire life, but hours of it.

When they sprout, and many would,

they would insist I find sunny ground.

Then after suns and rains

when fruit follows flower

I would obey and eat them.

I came across this

on harvesting seeds.

It seems straightforward.

Choose a tomato.

Slice through her equator.

Cup one half in your palm and squeeze

the red pulp into a glass.

On a sunny sill let the slippery mess ferment.

After a couple of weeks

spread the seeds on wax paper

under the sun. If you don’t

plant them all, they make

great holiday gifts.

Gordon argues Dickinson had epilepsy

In "Lives Like Loaded Guns?" Gordon lays out her theory that Dickinson had epilepsy. I haven't finished the book, but it is interesting and the diagnosis seems to fit several facts. It triggers a different reading to words in her poems like "fit" and "throe" which makes it something worth considering. I guess there is nothing definitive available ... and even we had some doctor's explicit notes, we'd still question it perhaps, because the standards for diagnosis varied.

Illness neither deters nor attributes to genius. But one thing it might do, Gordon theorizes, is give Dickinson space and time--a doctor's encouragement to live a reclusive lifestyle.  It would have been consistent with treatments at the time ... acceptable to work late through the night where lamp light was softer than sun ... to avoid social situations, stress ... and even sex, Gordon reports, which was thought to risk a seizure.

Here's an example: I like a look of agony.

PS. One google trick I learned from a fellow #ModPo student was how to search a word in Dickinson's poems: google "throe site:edickinson.org"

meta this and meta that

I've been reading Lyndall Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns," a biography of Emily Dickinson, and came across this quote (pg. 110):Biography is not exactly irrelevant, but bound to be misleading with poems that throw the onus of introspection back into the lap of the reader: they compel us to recognized how our cherished emotion of love--even (or especially) deathless love--is largely imagined, a fictitious vessel for our tastes and dreams.

Who or what is the Sea in “Wild Nights Wild Nights?”  Where is the “I” longing to moor? Did those nights exist only in Possibility? Doesn’t the Reader want a wild night too? I know I do.

With Dickinson, her storied life of seclusion (with Bronte sisters, George Eliot, EB Browning … ) is cultivated by her, her family and friends, and is well known by readers.

You could argue that all poetry, all reading, (perhaps any conversation at all) compels us to imagine. In Dickinson’s poetry we notice how far our imagination takes us.

More from Gordon (pg 111): With strong-willed imaginations it's vital to stress the gains that accompany the pains of denial and longing. During these extraordinary years [in her early 30s from 1860 to 1863] the poet is distilling theorems of experience from her life: desire, parting, death-in-life, spiritual awakening, the creative charge and creative detachment just short of freezing. I want to propose that her poems work when a theorem is applied to a reader's life. It's a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the real challenge is to find our selves. She demands a reciprocal response, a complementary act of introspection.

I resist the discussion in #ModPo on meta this and meta that. I'm not going to argue that some poets (poems) are not completely meta but those are ones I like (or respond to) least. Too clever (and exclusively clever -- no other idea, no other emotion) for my taste.

In Wild Nights, Wild Nights --  With "Rowing" I get the sense more of treading water (along with "Futile"), not making much progress into the "Wind", or not using the wind like a sailing vessel would. And then "Eden." I read Eden as prelasparian--so innocent. The Sea is opposed to Eden. Dickinson wants to moor in the Sea not in the harbor, not in Eden. Mooring there would be not really moored at all. Best case, she and her imagined lover, would be cold, wet and, entwined, bouncing around a bit.

I don't like a meta reading, that "thee" is the reader, and she is mooring tonight in us.

On Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed --" (214)

I agree with the conventional wisdom that the poem is celebrating nature and the inexplicable source of poetic inspiration. I take the “I” literally to be Dickinson, and that she, like the bee, is inebriated by air, dew and the nectar of the “molten blue” Foxglove. In this pub crawl from one blossom (“inn”) to the next, she persists even when her peers, the Butterflies, have quenched their thirst and “renounce their ‘drams.’” She continuously drinks even if she needs a lamppost, “the – Sun!” to stay upright.

The line that is hardest for me to understand is “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --.“ Many critiques skip over the difficulty of this line, taking “Seraphs” literally--if that is even possible. (The snowy Hats would be halos), This reading sets up an opposition between religion and nature--the human space where Dickinson operates. This is in the poem--I don’t disagree--but my gut tells me there is more.

Some read “snowy Hats” as snow-tipped and “Seraphs” as trees, and that Dickinson persists past summer, into fall and winter when the blooms have fallen, still “reeling” in nature. I also don’t mind that reading. I agree that her inebriation, her poetic inspiration, is everlasting. But interpreting Seraphs as trees is a stretch. The Seraphs are positioned in opposition to nature, they are watching the “little Tippler” at the flowers, so, for me, trees don’t fit. (Nor would clouds, pollen, a white flower.)

The temperance movement was strong at the time, as was the Second Awakening of puritanism. Many were railing against drunkenness and other scandalous behavior. The word "renounce" triggers in my mind a feeling of prudish zeal. Succumbing to peer pressure, perhaps, some Butterflies give up drinking. The white bonnet (picture a Pilgrim woman’s bonnet or a nun’s habit) “swings” as she shakes her head disapprovingly. (See this photo of Lucretia Mott wearing a white bonnet.) If male, he wags his powdered wig. “Seraphs” and “Saints” form a zealous Society. More narrowly for Dickinson, Literary Society condemned (or fixed) her poems which used unconventional grammar and lacked charming rhymes (“pearl does not rhyme with alcohol”*).

Another difficulty with the line is “Till.” Until when? Dickinson “tastes,” she reels, and will “but drink the more” until the Seraphs and Saints see her “Leaning against the -- Sun!” Society, protesting, can't but help "to windows run" and see who or what is making all that racket outside on the street. Dickinson, unrepentant, will keep drinking, keep writing poem after poem in which her liberated art shines as bright as the Sun. I can’t decide whether I think Dickinson is playfully teasing Seraphs and Saints, or if she is furious with them.

Dickinson’s creativity, her intellect (as expressed in her poetry) is “never brewed.” There isn’t an editor or publisher she trusts to oversee the poems’ aesthetic or potency. Inebriation is liberation from convention. She may have cared that Seraphs and Saints misunderstood her genius, but she wasn’t going to let them stop her. If her lamppost is the sun (which she can’t literally lean on) then she is relying on herself, her own artistic sensibility. If she leans against the Sun, then there is implied equality of scale between her and the Sun. And let’s not forget fire (Seraphs**, molten, Sun!) Her creative energy burns, renews; her urge to speak is unslakable.

The Black Sun

The Black Sun

1.
I sit far back from the center where people walk
their strollers and throw frisbees. Depending on what
the wind is saying I sit in or out of the late afternoon sun.
A small pool beside me collects coins. My focal point
is a big round polished piece of black granite,
an obelisk rolled upon itself glazed and lumpy
like a chocolate donut. It must have arranged my chair.
I survey the orange and red flowers in rows,
the reservoir, the redwoods, and after each in turn
I’m returned to Noguchi's Black Sun.

2.
Back a second hotter day I take the same chair.
The fountain is raucous. I smell chlorine in cool
mist when the breeze shifts. A woman spreads
a towel on the green lawn. She rolls up her shorts
and kicks off her sandals. I guess she's near Jack’s
age if he were here. Broader views contain more
bare shoulders and frisbees and trees, but the black
stone fills the same still space within me. You ask
me to say goodbye to Jack--an act of kindness--
a happiness project. I know your request is rhetorical.
Shadows track the listing earth day by day around
the sun. Jack is far away and moves as the sun
moves. If he could hear me would I say goodbye?

3.
My chair is occupied when I finally get here.
A neighborly lecture on street side parking
soured my sour mood. The lawn has browned.
The sun not the sculpture selects my new chair.
I seek relief in shadows from other people.
Blocked by a tree what does the Black Sun say
now? Last night I had two dreams. Jack is young.
We are on an ocean liner. Jack falls over the side;
I jump in after. In the other he wants to explore
dark and narrow steps leading underground. I fear
the dank cramped space--no room to turn and find
the sky. Don't go far, I say. I fear I won’t follow
when his fears awaken and I hear Papa? And towels!
To keep him clean! He wants five—I let him take three.
In my goddamn dream! The Black Sun is a ridiculous
metaphor for what it is like for years to lose your son.
It is cold and dead. Through its aperture, I can’t see
Jack's ashes on Hurricane Ridge. There is a reason
why mountains appear blue and blur in the distance.
Color disperses, contrast softens, background bleeds
through, and blue, blue light comes faster.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason. - Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture