Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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 #260

Metaphysics of the Seahorse

In a seagrass meadow, a male seahorse

gives birth, lunging like the yellow horse

on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade

my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse

grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered

her each year. A camera films the seahorse

expelling hundreds of fry in a murky froth

from his brood pouch. Most seahorses

don’t survive—they’re weak swimmers—

but Poseidon’s chariot was pulled by seahorses.

Imagine the shock of Dr. Julius Caesar Aranzi

in 1587, cutting into a brain and finding seahorse-

shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it

the hippocampus, sea monster horse,

not knowing it held the key to memory

and memory’s loss. The mindful seahorse

can look forward and back at the same time

while staying put. Me? I’m a crab, not a seahorse.

––Teresa Cader

Dizzying terminology. Metaphysics (so says my dictionary) “is the branch of philosophy that focuses on first principles, including ontology and cosmology, and is intimately connected with epistemology.” If ontology feels shrouded in the foggy recollection of your college philosophy class, a thumbnail might point to “the study of existence itself.” Cosmology and epistemology round out this heady quartet with an investigation of the physical universe, as well as the place of human knowledge within its grand design. A little overwhelming. . .and that’s just in the title of the poem! But then everything else that follows in Teresa Cader’s lovely meditation on our tenuous place within the natural world feels intimate and much more present. What a revelation, when I first learned about the seahorse, seadragon, and pipefish––members of the Syngnathidae family––whose males are impregnated by the females of their species, injecting their eggs into the partner’s ‘brood pouch.’ Then it’s the fathers who will fertilize, incubate, and give birth to some 2000 offspring when they come to term. But the poet quickly returns our attention to the human realm, writing: the seahorse “lunging like the yellow horse// on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade/ my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse// grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered/ her each year.” The form of the poem––a contemporary ghazal–– acclimates us to the eddies and repetitions of our thought processes. And so, we slip easily from the nature documentary to the deep heart of the familial––and suddenly we have a good deal more skin in the game, so to speak.

But this deft poet is intent on drawing us into the whirlpool of comprehension by shifting back and forth between (what my mother termed) ‘textbook knowledge’ and the sort of wisdom (or astonishment) that is particular to the lived experience of our species. Mythology and history enter the mix (the names Poseidon and Julius Caesar can’t help but conjure schoolroom memories). And then, in 1587, when Dr. Aranzi performed his early investigations of the human body, we share his astonishment to discover that “seahorse-// shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it/ the hippocampus, sea monster horse”––and we are quickly reminded that, while each day we navigate both the quotidian and the utterly mysterious, saddled to these fragile human bodies, we barely understand how any of this universe works. Human consciousness sometimes seems yet another far galaxy, and just as confounding. We can’t help imagining what depth of meaning resides in that seahorse-like brain structure. And how utterly at sea our lives would be if it were somehow damaged. As these couplets progressed, I felt myself releasing a heartfelt sigh: for the seahorse and its all-too-fragile young; for Teresa and Emma and the yellow rocking horse of youth; for all those scientists and poets who are so hungry to know, they will travel through emotional storms and over whatever rough seas necessary in order to reach that far shore.

I find the poetry Teresa produces to be a perfect combination of craft and invention; she is a student of history, but also an adventurous mind willing to startle us with improvisation. This is the third poem I’ve featured in the Letters from a manuscript that has finally achieved book publication. At Risk––awarded the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Award, and published by Ashland Poetry Press––explores, in a variety of dimensions, how our existence on this planet is buffeted by the storm tides of history, memory, grief––but spurred as well by the tailwinds of love and the full-sails of imagination. Teresa has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe; she also spent years working with young writers in programs at MIT, UMass-Boston, the Emerson College Graduate Writing Program and, for a decade, the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University. And while this poet admires the seahorse’s ability to direct its attention both forward and back, I think Teresa’s crab-mind sideways crawl reminds us that, between where we hope to go and where we’ve been, lies the experience (and the deep rewards) of simply living on this planet.

The Red Letters

* 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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter

@StevenRatiner

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

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 #259

The Nature Of

Generosity

The day my last aunt, Lala, died

I visited, just by God’s chance.

She was sitting on the couch,

corpse-thin, smiling.

“Susie dear!” And, as they all did, always,

she reached her arms out to hold me.

Fear

Walking along the tar-stuck lane,

past a crowd of roses,

grandparents on the screened porch.

Nineteen years old. Each rose

accusing: you don’t love him.

Dry-mouthed. Alone.

Heroism

My cousin Stephen held one sister up

from beneath the cracked ice,

as another clunked off on skates for help.

Held, held, so she could clutch at

and keep her life. Then he sank.

That apple of his father’s eye.

––Susan Donnelly

“So clearly will truths kindle light for truths”––this, from Lucretius, Roman poet and philosopher from the first century BCE, and author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), often considered the greatest masterpiece of Latin verse. Composed in six books, some 7400 dactylic hexameters, the didactic poet lays out the principles of Epicurean thought, the nature of the mind and soul, and the world of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. In today’s Red Letter, Susan Donnelly makes her return to these electronic pages with a much more succinct portrayal of our human landscape: a mere three 6-line verses, stitched together by the tremulous needle of a heart in motion. Unlike Lucretius, her poems do not entirely dismiss the hand of the divine––but they do present clear-eyed observation of lived experience, leaving us readers to elaborate on the philosophical implications. Her subtitles––‘Generosity,’ ‘Fear,’ ‘Heroism’––remind us that, for several thousand years, humankind has considered what takes place within the all-too-brief span of a lifetime, wondering whether meaning is inherent or imposed by the ones talking about it.

What I love about Susan’s poetry is the way she crafts completely naturalistic scenes, portrayed in simple colloquial voices; but beneath that ‘simple’ surface, tumultuous dramas and cerebral surprises abound. Our own imaginations quickly become willing collaborators in the unfolding mystery. “The day my last aunt, Lala, died” sets the stage with deliberate iambic pacing and that string of open vowel sounds. But it may take a second or third read to begin sensing the gravity of those seemingly off-hand details. “My last aunt” hints at the succession of griefs that life presents––something each new generation is compelled to recognize. But it’s the simple love which family often provides (there’s that deceptive term again) that is crucial here: “And, as they all did, always,/ she reached her arms out to hold me.” Always. How easily we trusted that idea in our youth, and how bedeviled by it as the years progress.

Of course, we aging children find ourselves more than a little benighted, rarely possessing much confidence about our place in the scheme of things. Are we worthy of that unconditional affection, or must it be somehow earned? And, as in the second poem, can we even trust the heart’s assessment of its own mercurial nature? The grandparents, behind the scrim of that screened porch, exist in a world very different from this heartsick nineteen-year-old’s (where even the roses are accusatory.) But that reaching out returns in the final poem with a gesture that seems unmistakably pure, yet nearly impossible to grasp. How deftly Susan sketches the deadly drama of thin ice on a New England pond. “Held, held, so she could clutch at/ and keep her life.” (If you heard a sonic allusion here to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, you’re not alone.) Precious life will both triumph and succumb in a matter of fourteen words. Didn’t that matter-of fact drumbeat of three stressed syllables––“Then he sank.”–– make your own heart turn leaden? And the poet follows it with an unaffected folkism–– “That apple of his father’s eye.”––because that’s why cliché often exists: to say something when the unspeakable engulfs us, though we know words will fall short. Words do––but we do not. In the depths of the imagination, we place ourselves into this moment––as the girl clutching at her young life, and as the brother preparing to let go of his own––and wonder to what we would cling.

Susan is the author of four full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her first book, Eve Names the Animals was awarded the Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press; and the title sequence in The Maureen Papers and Other Poems (from Every Other Thursday Press) shared the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Award. Recently, she published The Winners: Poems for Tim, a small collection written in the time leading up to her brother’s death and its aftermath, elegiac and deeply moving. “Life is one long struggle in the dark,” writes Lucretius, and I know Susan is honest enough to acknowledge the truth of the statement. Yet she seems more committed to the possibility that honest thought and the music of well-crafted language generate their own kind of light. I, for one, am grateful.