Red Letter Poem #155

 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 #155

 

 

 

To borrow a phrase from another illustrious poet, there is an artful arrangement within even our ordinary days, which Mr. Heaney termed the music of what happens.  Unfolding in a single lifetime – or in the cycles of centuries – there are rhythms, refrains, changes in key, and distinct melodies.  Some are hauntingly beautiful, some shrill and jarring, and others so blessedly nondescript they become our background accompaniment, barely noticed.  Walt Whitman made a conscious choice to move away from the classical forms of European poetry, to fashion something closer to the conversational voice and more embracing of the ordinary.  I can easily trace a direct lineage – from the songs of the Bard of Democracy; through someone like Frank O’Hara and his peripatetic I do this, I do that lyrics; to today’s Red Letter poet, Mark Pawlak.  Not only have they all, at one time or another, been entranced by the blab of the pavement on some of those same New York City streets, they maintain a faith that within the clear-eyed, matter-of-fact moments of our days, something essential is revealed.  Beauty is what rings true within the quiet mind.

 

So it is in “Signs and Cyphers”, a brand-new poem from his forthcoming collection Away (which will appear in the fall from Hanging Loose Press.)  The narrator steps out into a spring day (very much like the one outside my window right now), and makes his way – where?  Work? Grocery shopping? Simply wandering?  And on his way, there is a melodic unreeling of verses where the mundane reveals just the faintest glimmer of capital-B Beauty, before receding beyond our attention.  Most of us possess the sorts of lives that will go unrecorded in the chronicles of our tumultuous era.  And yet, when it’s our shadow yawning across the crosswalk; or our breakfast berries, still sweet on the tongue; or our lost shoe, Cinderella-like – these artifacts seem mysterious, like items recovered from some Egyptian tomb.  We feel in them an utter momentousness that may be the hallmark of human consciousness.  After all, what thing more precious do any of us possess than the claims on life staked by an observing mind?  And Mark is the sort of poet whose attention is keyed-in to the modest glory to be found in such dailiness.  Whitman, I believe, would smile at his singing.  And as for “Billy J. 1987”, wherever you are: may today’s sun be warm upon your shoulders.

 

Writer, editor, educator, peace activist – Mark is the author of nine previous volumes of poetry including Reconnaissance: New and Selected poems & Poetic Journals (also from the Hanging Loose imprint) which gathers selections from across a decade of published work.  He also published recently My Deniversity (MadHat Press) – a memoir of his friend and mentor, the late Denise Levertov – in which he describes how he learned just how much of a life one could commit to the search for honest poems.  A native of Buffalo, New York, for many years now you can find Mark pounding the pavement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gathering up in language what others could not stop to notice in their hurried day.

Signs and Cyphers

Stepping out into the spring breeze

to find pear blossoms scattered

over where someone wrote in

the once wet cement: “Billy J. 1987.”

 

And chalked on another concrete slab,

faintly visible beneath hopscotch squares

a palimpsest: outline of a child,

legs and arms akimbo.

 

And at the busy avenue,

my long shadow in the crosswalk:

run over by passing cars,

again and again.

 

Yesterday, two women—a team?—

silently worked opposite sides

of this same street, where

trash cans were out for pickup.

 

One, slender, primly dressed:

dark stockings, dark skirt,

matching waist-length coat,

sensible shoes and pillbox hat;

 

the other, heavyset, sweat shirt,

sweat pants, high-top sneakers, dark curls

peaking out under multicolor knit hat;

each pushing a grocery cart bulging with plastic bags.

 

And yesterday stepping off the bus

in a sudden downpour my hatless neighbor eyed

the broken umbrella discarded

in the gutter and cracked a wry smile.

 

Today, on the bus shelter’s metal bench

an empty Marlboro flip-top box next to

a plastic container half full of ripe berries—

someone’s hurried breakfast?

 

It’s moving day and out bus window:

lamps, chairs, dressers, sofas,

box-springs—you name it—

heaped at curbsides.  In the square,

 

passersby can’t disturb this man

sleeping in the alley behind the post office

on a mattress dragged off the sidewalk—

overstuffed rucksack, his pillow.

 

Around the corner outside the boutique shoe store,

canvas lawn chairs line the sidewalk

where suburban boys in sleeping bags have spent the night

to get first crack at limited-edition sneakers.

 

And on brickwork at the subway entrance,

a woman’s high-heel shoe,

black patent leather—lost? discarded?

— just one, the left.

 

Where was she coming from?

Where was she headed?

Did she leave this one shoe behind

and continue hobbling on?

 

Or did she slip off the other as well

and proceed in stocking feet

along the cold pavement

late for her rendezvous with what prince?

 

Yesterday, dressed in fatigues,

a panhandler on milk crate

extending to passersby his upturned cap

which jostled with a few rain-damp coins.

 

Today, same milk crate, unoccupied

except for a rude, cardboard sign—ANYTHING HELPS—

block lettered message left for contemplation,

cypher to interpret—ANYTHING HELPS!

 

Spring breeze,

pear blossoms scattered

where someone wrote in

wet cement: “Billy J. 1987.”

 

 

    ––Mark Pawlak

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* 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

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner