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 #197
Under the Overpass Off the 405 North
After I’d claimed my suitcase from the rumble
of the rotating carousel at LAX, after I’d caught
the Flyaway bus and we’d barreled into the smog
and wall-to-wall on the 405 North, after the exit ramp
curving down and around it, for just a second
I saw them, they were like three farmers tilling a field,
two men from the highway maintenance crew
in orange reflective vests cropping a patch of grass
with rotating trimmers and a third man paring the slope—
you couldn’t call it a garden, it was sparse and not
particularly beautiful, a few trees, a bird or two
probably chirping as we drove by—but it was as if
the part of me that had shut down and grown numb
had swallowed a shot of ginger with turmeric—
in less time than it takes to write less time, I was
revived by this nearly eye-to-eye respite from greed
and speed and need—and sure, this was just a job
and likely doesn’t pay well, and I bet those vests
are itchy in the heat, these men eager for their break
or the end of their shift, but they were trimming
the weeds with whirling blades that seemed as tender
as a barber’s shaver shearing the nape of a man’s neck,
and I'm preserving this scene as if it were hoshagaki,
those Japanese dried persimmons which I just misspelled
as permission, I’m letting the sugar crystallize and bloom
into the orange vests the three men were wearing,
I’m letting myself pasture in a patch of earth, a little
tended, a little mended, in the bend of a highway.
––Wendy Drexler
Our flight was delayed and––after a long tiring day of crowded terminals and TSA scrutiny; after the jumble of baggage carousels and airport traffic––my wife and I arrived home late last night, tumbled into bed, and were almost instantly asleep. I found myself subsumed by the sorts of dreams that tend to be instigated by travel, changes of scenery, dramatic shifts in perception. Such visions can’t help but reflect the neural overload that comes as a kind of package deal with the privilege of modern-day possibility. And that word led me back to Wendy Drexler’s new poem and the notion I feel simmering at its heart: possibility––those unexpected worlds that the imagination uncovers in the interstices between one ordinary moment and the next. Her poem seems to me almost overflowing with language and observation, barely pausing to catch its breath; it’s as if the speaker’s mind, buffeted by the world’s tumult, is trying desperately to latch onto some thought that will keep it safely afloat. And so possibility becomes coupled with play––that irrepressible urge to tinker with or repurpose what the day is presenting to us. And wasn’t it delightful to feel our own minds bouncing along in the wake of the poet’s, one playful phrase bubbling into the next? Simple terms seem suddenly suggestive, even mysterious––and what would you expect when (as the title states) you find yourself “under” the “over”, a weary passenger on the “Flyaway” bus? What “claim” can we make on this or any day? How did we wind up on this carnival “carousel” in the first place? And if we’re willing to entrust our fate to this momentum, where in the world will it take us?
But, in the nick of time, the mind does secure its ballast in the form of that little faux-pastorale glimpsed beside the highway exit: “farmers” who turn out to be, not some Wordsworthian vision, but a road crew hacking at the overgrowth. Oh, but the unexpected “tenderness” of those whirling weed trimmers! And the orange reflective vests that remind the poet of dried persimmons––a fruit that, unsurprisingly, brings to mind Japanese New Year celebrations, symbols of good luck and longevity. And that, in turn, prompts me to revisit artists like Hokusai and Sakai HÅitsu who have used the humble persimmon to demonstrate how a simple image can indeed become an exquisite refuge of the mind. But Wendy is not through––and by this point she must be engaged in writing (or typing) her poem, because a slip of the fingers (or perhaps the mischievous auto-correct) turned persimmon into permission. Yes, another in a string of lovely ‘p’ words: possibility, play, persimmon, and the unbridled imagination granting us permission to savor this moment of unconventional beauty. As an older poet once wrote: “The world is too much with us”––and having “given our hearts away”, we must act to reclaim them. Wendy invites us into the pasture of this enticing moment, lush with musical language––and we feel soothed by it, here in a bend in the highway we’re traveling on together (even if our paths have never crossed.)
Wendy is the author of four collections of poetry––the most recent being Notes from the Column of Memory (Terrapin Books)––and, in 2022, was awarded an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in dozens of fine journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, and Prairie Schooner––and featured on the Verse Daily site and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Between 2018 and 2023, she served as the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA. She is also the Programming Co-Chair for the venerable New England Poetry Club. And to this list, I must add that the poet would seem to be a most pleasing traveling partner; never a dull moment when the heart is attentive and the mind is alive.
Red Letters 3.0
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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
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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