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 #230
A Warm Spell in November
My jack-o’-lantern bloomed with mold.
I tossed it out behind the stone fence
for the deer to ravage. Poor smile,
poor googly face my son drew on
to guide the knife. Stout runners out
in shorts and Ts, a peloton
on Liberty I swerve my Prius
to avoid. The local market’s
full of local Gravensteins: small
this year because of chill spring weeks
and summer drought. I hailed John Greenlaw
on his tractor in the cabbage fields
at Clover Farm, and he complained,
as John is wont to do, of yields
and prices and the late year heat.
The north barn roof fell in, he said.
A big relief. Let someone else
rebuild. I’ll burn the wood for heat
once the season finally turns.
He swiped his brow, his John Deere cap
black with perspiration. It’s not
the way that I remember it,
but how long have I really got?
I felt the same. Miles of houses,
heat shimmers from the parking lot
that make the HomeGoods’ glass doors wave.
If one more jerk nice-weathers me,
I swear I’m going to scream. The dream
devours everything. At night
the dry sorghastrum ticks against
the cedar shakes. The stripped boughs bend,
and then they break.
––Jonathan Weinert
The lyric poem sings, the narrative poem tells and––when artfully melded together, and set in the New England countryside––the result becomes a type of lettered passage that was Robert Frost’s métier, inviting a reader into the rural landscape as well as the heart’s. Poet Jonathan Weinert has found himself walking along similar roads (both literary and actual) near his home in Stow, Massachusetts, nestled amid farm and conservation land. Living there, he could not help but witness a part of the natural world––not to mention a traditional American way of life––straining beneath the forces of modernity, their very survival being challenged. This was especially true for him during the pandemic when threat encompassed our lives like a strange unseasonable weather, and there was little else to do but walk, think, and (if you were fortunate) attend quietly to the kind of solitary work which sustains.
Jonathan is the author of three poetry collections: the first, In the Mode of Disappearance won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. His most recent, A Slow Green Sleep was chosen for the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize. Along with Kevin Prufer, he is the co-editor of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin, a finalist for a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year. His work has earned him fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Ucross Foundation. More importantly, he consistently produces the sort of poems that both entrance and challenge, reflect our lived experience back to us and reveal its hidden dimensions.
Ecclesiastes (not to mention the old rock tune from the Byrds––for those of a certain age) informs us: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." Late fall is the season of natural summation and breakdown, but this poem subtly paints a picture of an accelerated destruction, with mankind’s fingerprints all over the steering wheel. How tragic, that promising orange face––sketched by the son, carved by the father––now left to rot amid the scrub. How unsettling to imagine the force of the American economic machine which has made farmland more valuable as the site for suburban homes than the source of our food supply. And when “The north barn roof fell in,” I found myself feeling the ache of defeat; but the farmer, John Greenlaw (a name Charles Dickens would have admired)––who has been a keen observer of our society’s trajectory––reports only a kind of dark relief. “(B)ut how long have I really got?” he muses. How long indeed. What in hell is happening to us?––I kept hearing that thought inside my head. But that’s disingenuous: we all know exactly what’s happening and, it seems, have decided not to do a whole lot about it. To my mind, it is the authenticity of the narrative in “A Warm Spell. . .” that draws us into its distressing situation; but it’s the music of the poem that causes the neurons to tremble and sets the mind’s deepest recesses echoing (that place a poet in Frost’s time might have understood as the soul––and of which contemporary culture, I fear, understands precious little.) At the close, Jonathan forms an arpeggio of k-sounds across the final two lines––tick, shakes, and then break. When the back of the tongue forms those hard consonants, momentarily stopping the airflow, we both choke back and then expel little sharp breaths. We intuitively understand that something which should be green and supple inside us might now fracture beneath the strain. And for the briefest of moments, that fragility, that threat, sings its brief elegy beneath the proscenium arch of our imaginative understanding. It might actually make us feel what––of our lives, our planet––is presently at stake.
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
