Let’s have champagne first: Here are some spring Haiku, small poetic bubbles that they are.
A half-circle of melon dawn disappeared. March snow. Between small hills, dawn stays blue. The bare tree is still its shadow. Storm wind trickles in somewhere. The prism fidgets, glints green-gold.
POND WALK Pond blinks, red-rimmed under October cloud-glare, as landscape begins to change. Or that is just eyes grown used to gritty air. But here, freely, widely do the encircling, while water shines or clears of sun-leaves, ripples, swans’ feet. Pass a wine-stained, blood-stained, love-stained vine winding a tree, a melancholy, a potion. Yes and no. Leaves know only their going, not the pacing of minds. Sit on a stone embedded by water. Pick up driftwood birch with its dark inscriptions, but look elsewhere. Hear the greens crackle behind you. Pond wind fans bright, cold coming fire.
Nuances of shape and color when the summer pinks fade are just as beautiful as the variations of autumn colors arriving. Flow out, flow in. Nature offers changing Creative gifts, and we offer our attention in return.
Photos by Me.
With sincere thanks to the gardeners of Pond Street in Jamaica Plain, MA for the artistry of their abundant gardens and their wish that passersby have pleasure.
After a six-day heat wave, any thoughts for an essay-like post are bobbing around my head like semi-cooked pasta. But the poetry is enough of a practice to have things to share.
I think these are two parents and their two fledgling cormorants at Jamaica Pond (Boston), and I’m always thankful to have them in my day. This poem was inspired by a beautiful online-gathering talk “at” the Greater Boston Zen Center.
Bird and Fish
for Julie
The cormorant intent, curved,
sharp, sewing surfaces:
diving that stitches the city
edges, the open spaces, my faithful
circling of water.
It sometimes arises with
a sliver of fish,
silver arc of gasp that cannot
live, but eaten, still shines
in the wide net of bird.
One day one dive,
one sudden reappearance, with
this, long body of a trout, caught
with unrealized skill, but now, what, so wildly
not to be swallowed. A fish unaware
it lived in water, too blinded now,
too bitten, too big not to pull
both of them under again. Cormorant
then bathes and flutters back
to quiet floating. Fish will be fish
below, being one of those
too much to enter
the gate of bird. Cormorant will eat
later, even later stand with wet wings
offered open to the air. Fish may
remember when water was something
that could be left behind, that would
release. But it may not.
I take pleasure in sharing Creativity I encounter. in our brimming-over world. A couple of things about doing so occurred to me recently. One, I have some lovely photos of local gardens I am just too lazy to sort out of my phone albums. Two, Everyone and their neighbor’s second cousin is putting Creative Work online because we have to, and although the reasons are awful, the results are often wonderful. And three, I’ve never really put my own Creative Work on my own damn blog. Maybe 2020 is the year to let that hesitance fade into the past with a lot of my former way of living.
Actually, I’ve been writing as steady practice, and I’ve been growing. In earlier heydays of my poetry, there was an intellectual quality to the way I handled language and ideas. Buddhist practice has made me want to let go of that type of hard work, to see what happens when I am more embodied and present in the moment as a writer. Yeah, and vulnerable and open, and all that stuff…
The thing is, it’s working, and I like it. I still falter, as I did with a recent poem that originally had a fixed end point and a prettily written lecture to get it there. Turns out it really is a woefully and wildly personal poem , and I’m letting that happen now in the revision, and it’s like riding surf without a boogie board.
So I will share some of my recent work here. Although I have been published in both journals and anthologies, it’s a somewhat big step to put this here without the ringing approval of a poetry editor’s acceptance.
This is a poem I wrote for an artist friend when she shared on social media that her tough feelings about our times were hampering her Creative energy. I hope it brings some uplift. And yeah, I’m going to link you to her work, of course. It is her poem, after all.
Bears in Bad Times
for JPH
Antique brown bear observes bad times from a shelf,
ears wide, silent, but flourishing its bronze ribbon,
a bohemian tie. Imagine evening, a half-dressed
painter, youthful and intent, the room’s view
a damp canvas, the sky’s blue hour rising.
Another artist, red and green in woods
elsewhere, is photographing bears. Her
bird feeders strain and sink beneath mounds
of starved gravity with long tongues
intruding. Every type of refuge now
seems hollow of all but emptiness. Yet
companions appear, right over there—
the bearings we have lost, the kind bearing
of chaos and grief, and creatures,
too, who are constellations.
Thank you for the inspiration and for your beautiful jewelry, Jen.
Finished semester grading blahblahblah had about a week to get read for first fully remote class blahblahblah gig economy juggling blahblahblah
Hello. As much as I have things to say about Stones that have been wanting to burst out of me for weeks, I want to revisit Sticks. The stick building in the park, featured in the first part of Sticks and Stones, continues to grow longer and more complex. It has many more doors and skylights now. Of course, it, um, always had skylights, obviously, but these seem to be intentional. There are wonderful patterns and clever weaving from end to end. I’ve been in it, and it’s fun. Creative fun!
For many years I thought I enjoyed and was thankful for Boston’s chain of green spaces, called the Emerald Necklace. I had no real idea what those emotions were. Now those spaces are where I spend the two hours out of 24 that I’m not in my studio apartment. And they have water and woods and birds and turtles and flowers and sky. Yeah.
The parks are Creative acts themselves, mostly by Frederick Law Olmsted, my personal superhero these days. They also contain other people’s Creativity. The Fens, for example, where I took these photos, have small stone buildings by the architect H.H. Richardson, a formal rose garden, a 17th-century Japanese temple bell found by WWII soldiers in a dump and later gifted by Japan to Boston, and the huge community gardens full of veggies, gnomes, goldfish, flowers, trees, pinwheels, etc.
Even in the awfulness of now, the parks folks are clearing brush and keeping things together, as they always do. The Fens has a comfortable, shabby quality: if it were an old stuffed animal, you would call it “well-loved”. It is that, and it is beautiful just as it is, and more so since some recent landscape renovations. It is also carefully tended and refreshed by people whose work I appreciate even more right now. Piles of sticks and branches, especially after storms, bear witness to their work.
Some visitors, and I’ve said Hello to a couple of them at work along the way, are using those piles for this Creativity, a growing structure under one of Olmsted’s great trees. It began as a much smaller hut and has stretched since, with more doorways, longer halls, and extra skylights. I mean, obviously, a lot of skylights! It’s to smile at, crawl into, add to, play with. And the tree that shelters it will soon have its leaves, and those leaves will catch the pinks and yellows of the sunrise, as I feel sure Olmsted knew they eventually would. And we walk on.
Be safe and well. Be kind.
Boston, like many cities, has malls, and in ours, “stuffed lobster” can be either a cuddly red toy or your dinner. Moving on…
It also has The Mall, in the old-fashioned sense of a shady promenade, with benches, statues, and a central path flanked by trees, running up the middle of An Avenue of Note. Those it was originally designed to delight lived in Gilded Age urban mansions and townhouses.
In winter, the two rows of trees are wrapped in white lights, an eye-feast whether you’re looking up into branches or down at block after block of bright shapes. In the late winter twilight, they glow with a windy softness, like a field of fireflies. In the black dark of a clear winter night, they are fierce.
People chose creatively where to drape, what to wrap. There’s a sense of people seeing each tree’s individuality, the result of species, weather, angles of light, and the large, slow patterns of the Universe’s Creativity.
They’ll be shut off soon for the season, and leaves will take over from the lights as a different multitude, and everything will change.
I look at shadows. Long ones, sharply vivid ones, shadows of ordinary things and unusual things, shadows I never saw before because I’ve never been to that location in that light. From shadows I get the same small charge of pleasure that I get from fireworks: I look expecting to see them, but still, how wonderful to see what is both real yet only made of light and eyes.
No idea why this is, that I have a passion for shadows. Some friends might suggest it’s because I used to love working backstage at the theater, and I’m just drawn to my natural habitat. Is it a chance to pay attention to the intriguing Buddhist ambiguity of the (non)self? I do love modernist photography, that’s for sure, and those Artists were gods of form and contrast.
As a poet and reader, I love me a liquid, sparkling, misty, on-fire metaphor. A shadow is a metaphor, equivalent to a Thing but made of something else. Paradoxically, that something else reveals more of the first Thing to us.
My favorite metaphor right now is Jane Hirshfield’s opening heart as boiling artichoke in the poem “My Species”. An “opening” heart is a metaphor itself, commonplace but fine.
I’ve been looking at a book by Teju Cole, Blind Spot, where he pairs photos with short prose pieces. A striking one (much of the Foreword also dwells beautifully on it) shows a white house behind a tall line of just-greening shrubs, and the sharp, spreading shadow of a still-bare tree that itself does not appear.
Cole writes, “Spring…it is not only the leaves that grow. Shadows grow also. Everything grows, both what receives the light, and what is cast by it.”
Some type of image reaching out from its place of origin, existing beyond the edges of its source, visible when its creator is not. Is that a metaphor for Creativity?? I hope so! I hope It and I will grow this spring. I love shadows.
Blind Spot by Teju Cole was published by Random House. The photos are by the blogger.
The Creative (Almost) Full-Timer 