Red Letter Poem #306

  

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #306

 

 

 

The Three Sorrows

 

 

To know you’re incomplete—

 

Death natters in the squirrel’s ear all day

but I’m mindful of something larger           the width of all shadow

 

Red fruits flourish on the glassy tree I have no name for

 

 

                      To love the thing and not its substance

                      To love the object not its atoms

                      You can love only the differentiated

                      which means you can’t love everything

                      and from this the first sorrow arises

 

 

The neighbors have installed a plastic owl on a post

 

The long sloping roof of their red barn has buckled in the middle

like a piece of wet cardboard

 

Yellow backhoe with its shadow hard beneath it

 

                                         You can’t understand everything

                                         You’re always leaving something out

                                         which means there’s much you must ignore

                                         which means you can’t love everything

                                         and from this the second sorrow arises

 

 

Fly nuthatch goldfinch sparrow woodpecker rabbit chipmunk groundhog

 

 

The intelligent stance of the blue jay

The less intelligent stance of the titmouse

 

Lavender stripe on my left forearm where I burned it cooking drunk

 

 

          You can’t love poison and radiation

          unless they’re in the proper place

          which means you can’t love those places

          which means you can’t love everything

          and from this the third sorrow arises

 

 

Grief enclosures in the trees          black warrens

 

Pockets of deep shadow out of which I’m paid

Roadside ivy closing its summer home one leaf at a time

 

Where the lawn comes down to a storm drain          a granite slab

                                                ––Jonathan Weinert

 

 

                       

 

 

“There was a child went forth every day,” begins Walt Whitman’s entrancing poem from Leaves of Grass, celebratory and elegiac all in one long-lined out-of-breath ramble through the landscape he loved.  “And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,// And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”  I suspect that Jonathan Weinert has received his commission from that storied child––and from the Good Gray Bard himself (as have almost all contemporary poets, in one way or another)––to continue the exploration, no matter where it takes him.  And so he does in this new and wonderfully intricate poem.  It begins with incompleteness (ah, the beauty of that em-dash abruption!), and accepts that condition as both his starting point and his mortal inheritance.  But like Whitman’s child, it only spurs him to venture tirelessly, observe voraciously––as if the momentum itself will, if not solve, then soothe the despair waiting in those widening shadows.  Indeed, “Death natters in the squirrel’s ear all day” (as it does in ours as well), but that won’t keep us from relishing the possibility being offered with this very next breath.  We’re struck by the sheer profusion of our immediate environment (the delight of that little unpunctuated burst: “Fly nuthatch goldfinch sparrow woodpecker rabbit chipmunk groundhog”?)  Whitman, too, was fond of lists–– and naming, of course, is a form of praise and possession.  But beauty is not only a catalog of the ‘eye-pleasing’ details, but all the most vivid sense-impressions.  The cocked head of the blue jay, yes––but also the sagging barn roof and rusting storm drain.  The protagonist of this poem is experiencing the elemental thrill of being alive in the physical world.  And he sweeps us along with his enthusiasm.

 

But the path is not without its obstacles.  The more innocent yearning of the sensory mind finds itself at odds with the analytical/philosophical faculties.  That other voice––offset here in those italicized passages––has an incessant need to parse and comprehend, to step back from experience in order to deliberate.  And that’s at the core of the tension most of us experience daily, the throbbing heart/head conundrum: can we allow ourselves the (dare I say it?) joy of simply waking to yet another day, or must we first demonstrate (to whatever parental/canonical authority we carry inside us) that we are cognizant of all that’s involved?  This speaker carries that conflict seared into his flesh: “Lavender stripe on my left forearm where I burned it cooking drunk.”  He can’t help but admire the beauty of what was once produced by pain––pain so acute, we fragile humans sometimes use/misuse whatever analgesic we can get our hands on.  Those ‘three sorrows’ are, perhaps, inescapable––but we can work toward a finer, kinder relationship with that chorus of consciousness echoing inside our heads.  Because despite it all, we’ve come upon the central element of this abundant garden of delights––“Red fruits flourish on the glassy tree I have no name for”––and, for knowledge’s sake, we are willing to take a bite.

 

Jonathan has authored three books of poems, with two new ones forthcoming.  A Slow Green Sleep was the winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize; and In the Mode of Disappearance, was awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize.  A new collection, The New England Book of Dying and Living, is due out from Saturnalia in 2027 and will contain today’s poem.  Ghost Smoke, a book-length hybrid collaboration with H. L. Hix, will be published next month by Project Poëtica / Bridwell Press.  And so where does today’s “…Sorrows” leave us?  If the poem has not succeeded in harmonizing those conflicting inner voices, what good has it done?  I think it suggests that the reward may lie, not in muting the dissonance, but embracing it.  Dread is indeed lurking––but it’s out of those “Pockets of deep shadow” that the hungry mind is paid in the coin of the imaginative realm.  On some mornings, “the granite slab” down by the storm drain may bring to mind a tombstone.  On others, a protective barrier, a jumping-off point.  Yet another poetic forefather once wrote: “Sorrow prepares you for joy.  It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.  It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.”  That was Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, 13^th century Sufi mystic-poet, and yet another wide-eyed child.  I suspect if Jonathan, Walt, and Jalāl met hiking across that wild field, they would have much to discuss.  I, for one, would happily be invited along on that outing.

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/