Red Letter Poem #297

 

 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 #297

 

 

 

 

Opening


Dark but somehow clear,

the passageway. Childhood cats

run ahead of me. I'm seventy! What

a long walk. Did someone

call my name? Where's



my passport? Blood-rush loud

in my ears, or perhaps it's the ocean.

Yes. Somewhere a wave collapses,

another. Fish wear scales like snakes

and armadillos and butterflies



and none of them knows its name.

Now I've lost mine. Light comes

in waves, that's what I'm hearing,

but I can't see in the usual way.

How else? I'm not there yet.





––Pamela Alexander














I am a little dizzy amid the rush of images, the twisting syntax, in Pam Alexander’s new poem. Am I dreaming? Just waking? Or (and I have to consider the possibility) have I died and I’m floating on the Lethe, trying desperately to discern what lies just ahead? But somehow I find myself delighted to be carried along by these four surprising stanzas. Isn’t that the definition of authority: a sense that a writer is in control of her materials––even when the subject matter may be beyond ours? And thus, feeling we can trust the poetic voice, we can allow ourselves to be carried––strangely confident that we will arrive where we ought (a different destination, of course, for each set of eyes boarding this craft).



If perhaps, mid-river, I was somehow able to scribble quick notes in a mental-journal about my curious travels through this poem, these might be some entries: beginning with the title, that enticing initial letter O in “Opening”––calligraphic symbol, open vowel-sound. Was that a sun? A moon? An oculus? And who might be watching as I pass through? “Dark but somehow clear”––should I even be entering such a passageway? I’m sensing danger––but then: cats! The bliss of our childhood pets––that ginger tabby with the fluffy tail––perhaps it’s safe here after all. So I join the speaker in this “long walk.” “I'm seventy!” she declares. Crazy, yes? But I recognize the feeling. Wasn’t I, too, a child, only last week? Then suddenly: “Did someone/ call my name? Where's// my passport? Blood-rush loud/ in my ears…”. No turning back now, but the dread is mounting again––or not! It’s not my blood I hear thrumming at the temple––it’s the ocean, that encompassing presence, the mother of all life. Even though I take notice of each successive wave (“collapse” is quite a potent word), I can accept that the world is (as the mystics say) as it should be. The “fish wear scales like snakes” (uh-oh, heart rate elevating again), “and armadillos and butterflies// and none of them knows its name.” And now I've lost my name as well! What a huge step to even contemplate: becoming nameless, untethered from this marvelously elaborate, painfully cumbersome self I’ve been traveling inside all these decades. I’m trying to use the as it should be like a little mantra, to remain calm. “Light comes/ in waves, that's what I'm hearing”––audible light? Didn’t Dante speak of such luminous music?––“but I can't see in the usual way.” Of course not––neither the speaker nor the reader is “there yet.” Revelation, in whatever form it takes, does not come with previews, study guides. We are left to consider (and hopefully savor) this momentum––by which we are carried, and toward what inevitable destination awaits.



Pam is the author of five books of poetry, including Left, recent winner of the Chad Walsh chapbook prize from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her first collection, Navigable Waterways, won the prestigious Yale Prize, and her work has been showered with honors ever since. You may have run into her work in some of the important journals (The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Orion, TriQuarterly, Plume), as well as numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2000, American Alphabets, The Extraordinary Tide, and Poetry for a Small Planet. Her work has also been featured on the websites of National Public Radio and the Academy of American Poets. After a leaving a teaching career at M.I.T. and Oberlin College, she wholly uprooted her life, and spent the next five years traveling North America in an RV with her cat. How can you not admire so adventurous a spirit? And it’s a quality I appreciate in all of her poetry––the kind of quiet daring we find in today’s piece, where she is inviting us to travel alongside her into a vast unknown. Just what is the “there” to which we are bound? At one time in my life, I might have envisioned (along with Signore Alighieri) that: “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.” These days, I fear that only oblivion awaits, and that (much as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California) there may be “no there there.” Or might this eternal realm be linked to the inky marks we’ve left on fluttering pages, coupled with the neural loci twinkling in the minds of loved ones? Of course, this poet will not tell us––even if she knew. Her work is there to prompt the journey––within ourselves and beyond––gaining some understanding of where the mind’s skiff is carrying us. Perhaps the purpose of poems – Pam’s as well as others––is more in line with what Franz Kafka wrote in his Diaries, considering this very subject: “Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”

 

 

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

Red Letter Poem #274

 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 #274

 

 

 

 

Long Story Short

 

Tinkering with carbon and hydrogen

for half a million years, life taught itself



to make sugar from sunshine. Whence came

cells, then cities of them: sea sparkles



and slipper, wheel and trumpet animalcules

and eventually big us, tucked into skins



moist and just the right temperature to host

tribes of one- and multi-celled microbes.



Handy, we grew, hungry for more

than food—oil, iron, even sand. We mined



and built and fought. The ground shakes

with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny



atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken, visibly

perturbed, drops bats, drops birds.

 

                              ––Pamela Alexander

                                   

 

If, by chance, the colloquial flourish used as a title for today’s poem has fallen out of fashion among your acquaintances, here’s all you’ll need to know: when you find yourself being regaled by your visiting aunt or next-door neighbor with some convoluted narrative––and they punctuate their epic with the phrase long story short––prepare for disappointment. Any notion of brevity, or the hope for a pithy summation that will justify one’s patience––well, that ship’s sailed. This particular expression is one I very much associate with the rather tangled family stories I heard when I was growing up––tales of hardship, triumph, and general mishigas––and thus I was predisposed, with my first reading, to feel a kind of intimacy toward this verse. So what makes Pamela Alexander’s history of planet Earth––in a mere fourteen lines, no less––so utterly charming (and, at the same time, so subtly unsettling) is that we are left to concoct the bulk of this shaggy dog tale on our own, to tap into our less-than-authoritative resources to understand the implications of what she’s presented. After all, for a few billion years before Pamela’s first couplet, this planet’s atmosphere was an uninhabitable morass of methane and carbon dioxide. A quick billion years elapse, and now cyanobacteria have appeared, performing the astonishing little trick of “mak[ing] sugar from sunshine”––and, as another colloquialism might put it, we’re off to the races! But when those ‘cities of cells’ proliferate, the poet leaps––in a matter of a dozen words––to “big us,” and suddenly the playfulness of this tale has taken on a finer edge. “Handy, we grew, hungry for more/ than food—oil, iron, even sand.” I’m wondering whether you, too, felt a cold shiver down the spine when those alliterative H’s seemed to be encapsulating either humanity’s curriculum vitae or penning its epitaph.



How poignant and, at the same time, shameful to recognize the truth in those lines: “The ground shakes/ with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny// atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken…”. And yet even the most obvious of warnings––birds dropping from the heavens, microplastics rife throughout the food supply, young children with lungs too compromised to play in our sullied atmosphere––seem not to be enough to free us from our inertia, to spur the political will to change course before it’s too late. And since almost all of the crucial details have been left to our imaginations, I found myself thinking of this poem as kind of a thumbnail entry in some galactic Wikipedia, written by an alien race who’d been charged with summing up the brief and brutal history of this blue-green planet after its inhabitants had doomed it to extinction.



Pamela is the author of four captivating poetry collections. Her publishing career began auspiciously when Navigable Waterways was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected at the time by no less an eminence than James Merrill. Slow Fire (from Ausable/Copper Canyon Press) demonstrates how the power of a book of poetry can become even greater than the sum of its parts. The same applies to her recent chapbook, Left––winner of the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. It’s a heartbreaking depiction of the breakdown of a marriage, and the disillusionment involved in discovering how imperfect is our understanding of even those we most dearly love. Today’s new offering seems to revolve around ideas of time and fragility. How the former accelerates dramatically from line to line, prehistory threatening to become a tragic posthistory across a few short breaths. And who would have imagined that the massive planet upon which we’ve made our homes could be almost as fragile as our dreams, as the hearts that craved endless new possibilities? With echoes in my head of a President still clamoring to ‘drill, baby, drill!’ while climate catastrophes abound, I found myself looking back to this poem’s sly title, realizing that the many billions of years it took to compose this story––Earth’s as well as our own––could be cut short in a heartbeat.

 

 

 

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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/