The fragrance of leaves.
The chill that comes with evening.
Old wounds ache again.
Tag: pain
Midsummer Anniversary Poem
Here Comes Midsummer’s Milestone
Here comes midsummer’s milestone of our love,
Years since our selfish selves we pledged to yield,
So we’re as broken-in now as the glove,
I wore so long ago while in the field.
Fresh from the store unworn straight to my room,
Rubbed in the oil and every crease explored,
All through the night I savored the perfume,
The musky linseed leather I adored.
Come sober daylight with our job to do,
All awkward stiff not giving either way,
How many sweaty strivings’ deja vu
It took before we as one flesh could play.
Some ragged days I’d spit and pound the palm,
Or hurl the thing against the dugout wall,
But all the while a magic mute and calm
Mutated hand to glove with every ball.
The softening was gradual but sure.
Soon nerves and muscles seemed just like they spanned
From fingertips to join the glove secure,
As if I had been born with one webbed hand.
We’ve come now to the eve of middle age,
Well worn but with a lot of sport to go.
We must each for the other one assuage
Those stinging blows life certainly will throw.
We’ve held through wins and losses and through rain,
That etched new cracks not there at all before.
But loves like this were made to take the strain,
Just like that piece of cowhide that I wore.
Notes:
Not long ago, I asked my wife if she had a favorite poem. Her blink reaction was, “the one about the baseball glove.”
So, that is what she gets on the eve of our 31st anniversary. A re-run.
It was written sometime in the early 1990s. We were young and just starting a family. I had a job I absolutely hated. I would take long lunch breaks and write poems parked by the side of Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis.
Long before I discovered girls, back in Marshall, MO, my first love was baseball.
I cannot begin to total up the hours spent playing baseball, watching baseball, collecting baseball cards, sorting baseball cards, reading about baseball, and dreaming about playing in the World Series.
I knew the starting line-ups of both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City A’s by heart.
When I played one-man whiffle ball against my friend Royce, we would pick a team and go through the line up as each individual player. If the guy batted right, we batted right. If he batted left, we batted left.
(We drew the line at pitching left-handed, because neither of us was truly ambidextrous.)
Our spare time was spent searching for discarded pop bottles which we could turn into the neighborhood grocery store for two cents apiece. Every 5 bottles meant we could buy two more packs of baseball cards.
Somewhere between the ages of 12 and 13, we moved on to other interests. A long and winding path led me to the love of my life.
We were married 31 years ago today.
The inspirations for this poem are multiple. Several years ago, it was coming on to midsummer and my wedding anniversary.
I was feeling that sense of my youth slipping away. But, despite the oppressive job I was enduring, I was confident that good things still lay ahead.
I was also listening to a lot of Van Morrison. His song “Madame George” was stuck in my head. (Quite possible the most poignant song ever written.)
In particular, I was hearing the line where Van does his improvisational thing where he repeats the words “love” and “glove” over and over in an almost hypnotic chant.
My story is about a very different glove, and a very different love. But that merging of the two words was lodged in my mind.
The result of all of this ferment was this poem.
The only time I’ve ever read it in public, I was told it was “an audacious metaphor.”
I’ll take that.
Today, upon the occasion of my 31th wedding anniversary, I submit this little poem. It’s as true today as when I wrote it years ago
Vieques Haiku
Yes, in paradise
lest you forget suffering,
a thorn in the flesh.
Football and Love Haiku
If not for football
Or the women I have loved
I’d hardly know pain.
Further thoughts about pearls …
Usually, I have a pretty good sense about when I’m done writing a poem.
But, after I posted that last poem–the one about writing poetry–I wasn’t satisfied. It just didn’t feel finished to me.
I didn’t like the ending. I didn’t really like the photo I had taken to illustrate it. It just wasn’t right.
So, I went down to the beach of Liberty Bay on the Puget Sound, and found an oyster shell. It inspired me to write a final stanza for the poem.
I feel much better about it now.
As the Oyster Forms the Pearl
As the oyster forms the pearl,
So the poet pens the verse
As balm for the current ache
Born out of the ancient curse.
As the oyster feels compelled
To shellac the sandy grain,
So the poet feels the urge
To transmogrify the pain.
So the pearl grows rich and round
As its luster covers the sand.
So the verse unseen takes form
In its way, designed unplanned.
Sad the pearl that lies unseen
In the depths of the murky sea.
Sad the verse that dies unheard
In the heart clandestinely.
So the diver frees the pearl,
Breaks the stony shell apart.
So the poet frees the verse
Ripped out of his broken heart.
Poems about writing poetry
It seems like, eventually, every poet writes about writing poetry.
One of my favorites is Raymond Carver’s “Reaching”:
Reaching
He knew he was
in trouble when,
in the middle
of the poem,
he found himself
reaching
for his thesaurus
and then Webster’s
in that order.
What writer hasn’t found themselves in just that situation?
Billy Collins, writing more about poetry students than poetry, wrote this in his Introduction to Poetry:
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Isn’t that just like students — so desperate to capture “what it really means,” that they beat a poem to death?
This is my contribution to the vein of poems about poetry. Just a bit of a drawn out metaphor, really.
As the Oyster Forms the Pearl
As the oyster forms the pearl,
So the poet pens the verse
As balm for the current ache
Born out of the ancient curse.As the oyster feels compelled
To shellac the sandy grain,
So the poet senses the urge
To transmogrify the pain.So the pearl grows rich and round
As its luster covers the sand.
So the verse unseen takes form
In its way, designed unplanned.Sad the pearl that lies unseen
In the depths of the murky sea.
Sad the verse that dies unheard
In the heart clandestinely.
Night Walk
EXPERIENCE
I have walked now and then in rain,
Walked until the road gave way to stones.
I have known a thing or two of pain.
I’ve returned home alone at night
To rooms that don’t speak back to me at all.
I have stayed up late without a light.
I have watched the half-moon disappear,
Watched until the frost benumbed my face.
I have seen the seasons of the year.
I have left warm, pleasant rooms for plain,
Left without a word explaining why.
I have known a thing or two of pain.
Autumn Haiku
The fragrance of leaves.
The chill that comes with evening.
Old wounds ache again.
Poetic Champions 