Red Letter Poem #218

 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 #218

 

 

 

 

American Song

 

(after Marcantonio Flaminio)

 

 

If you listen to the love-calls of birds as you walk

early to the bus stop, sweating a little

on the third day of a heat wave,

 

think of me in an apple orchard, the smell of sap

and dust from the once-living trees

cut down, the farmer done

 

with spraying, happy to sell the bloom of acres

to Lennar, builder of golf courses

and homes I could never afford,

 

nor could you.  We’re alone with America’s plenty,

you on foot as a red Mustang blares past,

me in the cab of a backhoe,

 

A.C. on the fritz.  If I fill a bucket with ripe fruit,

let’s picnic Sunday at Morse Park, green glen

soft with late-summer flowers.

 

 

                                     ––Joyce Peseroff

 

 

 

“Amaryllis, awake! Lead your snowy sheep to pasture while the cold grass

glitters with white dew.”

 

–– Marcantonio Flaminio

                                                                  from: “Fête Gallante”

 

 

I was sitting with a group of writer-friends, enjoying conversation beneath hemlock shade, and a troublesome question was posed: what purpose does culture still serve in so battered and polarized a world?  It’s a challenging thought, one we are still mulling over––but I have a single thread in my developing answer: it preserves the concept of we.  We who have long shared this land; we whose memories preserve great tragedies and profound joys; and we who, day by day, attend to the simplest of activities, propelled by the most innately-human of impulses.  When massive political forces have an interest in atomizing the population––thus making us more fearful, malleable––a song, play, painting, or poem that contains a vision of communality is quite a powerful instrument.  In Robert Frost’s early poem “Mowing”, he closes with the couplet: “Men work together, I told him from the heart,/ Whether they work together or apart.”  (Women too––I’m sure he’d add if he were writing today.)  And Joyce Peseroff’s new poem demonstrates that connectivity, right from its opening dedication.  Marcantonio Flaminio was a Humanist poet and scholar of the Italian Renaissance.  His poem, “Fête Gallante”, came to Joyce via the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day postings (another cultural seed-spreader.)  So, on a quiet morning, this 21^st century American poet unexpectedly got to have tea with a 16^th century counterpart who wrote in Latin and could never have imagined the world outside Joyce’s window.

 

Flaminio’s poem was not just a celebration of the pastoral moment––“To-day I will pasture my goats in a shady valley, for later it will be very hot.”––it was a billet-doux to his beloved with a specific intention in mind: “Dear, there I shall be alone, and if you love me, there you will come alone also.”  No further explanation needed.  Joyce began wondering just who those lovers might be in a context closer to home.  Her little stream of tercets is so conversational, so utterly believable, how can we not be seduced by the intimate voice?  I have mixed feelings about Joyce’s poem––and that attests to its power.  The innate poetry (and what else can we call such language when, any of us, alone, are observant of our surroundings and attentive to our own inner voices) that arises from the speaker is open-hearted and coy, at the same time.  Notice this beauty. . .but think of me.  I imagined a young man in the backhoe, but of course readers will conjure assorted possibilities.  And that sweet apple-smell in the air is, we need to remind ourselves, the smell of death––the “dust from the once-living trees”––as he works his construction job, obliterating orchards so that farms can be replaced by condo complexes and golf courses (“America’s plenty” indeed!)  I find myself utterly delighted by his call to love––and quietly horrified by how easily he (and we, by extension) accept the destruction of the family farmer’s once-foundational place in society, along with the beauty of the natural world.  All in the name of progress (or should I say commerce.)  Ah, that bucket of ripe fruit, that picnic on Sunday, the coupling of willing hearts!  Just don’t stop to think about where the children, the children’s children will find themselves one day.

 

Joyce has already given us six fine poetry collections, with more to come.  Her most recent, Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press) was named a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards.  She is a poet, editor, and educator, representing a life-long commitment to the necessity of literature and the arts in the life of the community.  Among her honors are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize.  I’m grateful for this bracingly-honest pastoral Joyce has given us.  It made me hunt down a passage from the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues (carried over from the Latin by another cultural caretaker, David Ferry.)

 

Time takes all we have away from us;
I remember when I was a boy I used to sing
Every long day of summer down to darkness,
And now I am forgetting all my songs…

 

But he did not forget, and neither do we, because the poems preserved that voice for all time.  Whether we know it or not, we are enmeshed in lineages such as this: Virgil, Dante, Flaminio; Dickinson, Frost, Peseroff; that amorous backhoe driver, you and me.  We live here.  We will perish.  We will leave a world behind us––a little better than the way we found it (if that cultural force and the heart’s will can help guide our actions,) or perhaps smoldering after the conflagration.  The answer is still being written.

 

 

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