Red Letter Poem #317

   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 #317

 

 

 

 

 

Scarred Heart of a Selkie

 

 

My husband keeps resurrecting old photos of me: 26 years old, lean and sweat-straining in the Falmouth Road Race.  Smooth-faced twin of a Campbell soup kid, my Dorothy Hamill-hair framing the 35 mm Olympus camera that I prized.  Cropped headless by his camera, I was a naked Venus posed against the cliffs of Gay Head, my beach clay painted torso turning up the heat.  I never wanted that pedestal.  That girl didn't even appreciate what she had when she had it; always the ellipsis of self-doubt, the thin veneer of aspiration like spring ice on the Muddy River.  She went hungry to make weight, replaced indulgence with abstinence, sacrificed love to selfishness.  I've returned to the scene of those crimes, pardoned.

 

 

                    minding the body

                                lifting the weight of past souls

                                                small bites of ripe pear

 

                                                           ––Kerry Loughman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nearly everyone is familiar with the Japanese haiku––since the time of Basho, it’s become one of the most popular styles of verse on the planet.  Most of us will remember our earnest third-grade teachers instructing us in the ‘rules’ they thought defined the form, and then encouraging us to fill our notebooks.  Fewer, though, will be knowledgeable about tanka and renga, considerably older styles of poetry from which the haiku was eventually derived.  But I am surprised that the haibun has relatively little recognition here in the United States, even though there are scores of haiku societies and magazines devoted to traditional Japanese poetry.  A thumbnail description: haibun is a hybrid genre pairing a short prose piece––traditionally akin to a diary entry, travel sketch, or personal memory––and culminating with a haiku that’s not simply a reflection of the prose but often a leap of the imagination, or a shift in the mood and context.  Basho himself popularized the art form near the close of the 17^th century with five prominent collections of ‘travel’ writing, most notably The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

 

By her own account, Japanese poetry and culture have been central influences for Kerry Loughman: accomplished photographer, retired educator, and––later in life––an avid Boston-area poet.  Her letter to me detailed: “2 years language study at college level, 19 years studying Shotokan Karate, one visit to Japan, and many years of trying to write in Japanese forms.”  A number of her poems confront the challenges associated with aging and, because of that, possess an invigorating kind of urgency.  Her poetry has appeared in various journals and websites including Nixes Mate Review, The Main Street Rag, Lily Poetry Review, Writer's Resist, and Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope.  Today’s poem was triggered, not surprisingly, by a photograph––though not one of her own.  Her husband, also a photographer, often reprints older images from their past––in this case, a 1980’s shot of Kerry, caked in clay in front of the cliffs at Aquinnah, on Martha's Vineyard.  Again, I think I’ll let Kerry herself describe her thought process: “Sometimes I'm uncomfortable with the reminders of what I looked like [back] then. . .Most women know the feeling of constant attention to their bodies, their appearance––how it can define you, constrain you, and cause you to rebel and, sometimes, to grieve.”  But when lament transforms into art, the creator behind this new clarity is not debilitated by its expression, but empowered.

 

In the prose section, I was snagged by the use of that word “resurrecting” with all its connotation: not just a new life but redemption.  But the speaker does not glory in the recollection of that young body: “26 years old, lean and sweat-straining in the Falmouth Road Race.”  Nor the innocence of that “Smooth-faced twin of a Campbell soup kid, my Dorothy Hamill-hair framing the 35 mm Olympus camera that I prized.”  One of art’s great powers is to freeze a moment in time for our continual inspection.  If only the subject of the art were also spared what we casually term the ‘ravages of time’ (the razor-sharp bite of that word, ravages, contains a lesson we can only learn with mounting years).  But the description of the third photo is likely the one that will jolt us awake: “Cropped headless by his camera, I was a naked Venus posed against the cliffs of Gay Head, my beach clay painted torso turning up the heat.”  The combination of robust sexuality with implied violence––the model beheaded by the lens––probably felt more innocent in the ‘80s (with visions of the “Venus DeMilo” popular at the time), but is decidedly less so today.  As if the body’s beauty were not dependent on the mind enlivening it.  The speaker has come to some greater acceptance of her old striving for perfection––and I can imagine a number of readers nodding in agreement––but the word pardon still leaves us to wonder.  Unlike the mythical selkie of the title, we are not permitted to escape from and reinhabit those bodies into which we were born.

 

And then, after taking a breath, the haiku: “minding the body” (ah, the doubled meaning hinted here by that verb!); and “lifting the weight of past souls”––grown lighter, perhaps, as our hearts have ripened.  And finally: “small bites of ripe pear.”  I found that concluding line deeply satisfying and quietly unsettling, all at once.  Those “small bites”––do they speak to savoring the sweet pleasure, or the pinch of abstinence?  (And let’s not think too long about other women eating fruit from the mythological garden.)  I even wondered whether Kerry was remembering a marvelous haiku from one of the masters, Buson: “Blossoms on the pear/ and a woman in the moonlight/ reads a letter there.”  The womanliness of the pear––and its connotation of late-blooming fruit––suddenly conjures a half dozen possibilities condensed in that mysterious “letter.”  Kerry, too, hints at the tension inside love: between emotional abundance and contingency; the tangled path between self-negation and self-acceptance.  A difficult billet-doux for our troubled world, but a necessary one.

 

 

 

 

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 #315

 Red Letter Poem #315

 

 

 

 

 

An Unnoticed Moment in Eden:

      the Apostrophe’s Fall

 

“That fallen leaf from the ruined garden”

                     ––from: “Grief’s” by Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Still high above the ground, in

The moment of someone else’s weakness,

When it is still too early for

 

The woodchucks and mice and trout,

The beetles with their shining elytra,

To know they are now dying,

 

The apostrophe has just detached

And is surprised and unaware

It now means loss or is possessed

 

By the serpent-S following,

And is about to start the slow

Descent, to drift into its

 

Increasing shadow, into

That twilight-dimming space

The dead will own.

 

 

                           ––Jack Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I can discuss my response to Jack Stewart’s startling little mythology, I must begin with the literary elephant in the room: the epigraph.  Poets, of course, use epigraphs for a whole range of purposes.  Sometimes it’s to invite the work of another poet into the reader’s mind––a choral background awaiting a new soloist to take the stage.  Or it might signal the harmony or antiphony of thought between an older work and one’s own.  But often, it is a small homage to acknowledge that some element in another’s poem so thoroughly entered this writer’s consciousness that it triggered a new creation in response.  I can say that, over the years, I’ve tipped my hat in this manner dozens of times.  But when I received “An Unnoticed Moment. . .” from today’s poet, who I’ve gotten to know through his Red Letter contributions, I was shocked to realize that this was the first time I’ve ever been a recipient of this gesture.  We forget, sometimes, that when we put our work out into the world, there are actual readers who might lay claim to these poems, use them for unanticipated purposes­­––and even, in the most intense instances, feel the need to respond to what they’ve discovered on the page.  I felt deeply honored. . .and then immediately fearful: what if I didn’t actually like how Jack used my line as a jumping-off point?  But I’d nothing to worry about: this poet took some thematic elements from my recent collection, Grief’s Apostrophe, and used them to challenge his own vision––about the grammar of loss and the power of a simple punctuation mark.

 

Among other things, my collection explored the way we struggle to carry our deepest emotions into language, and how every element at our disposal must be used in an attempt to portray and illuminate.  In one poem, I used a metaphor for the apostrophe that seems to have lodged in Jack’s ear: “That fallen leaf from the ruined garden.”  Such powerful meaning to be embedded in so diminutive a symbol; it signals both possession and a placemark for absence.  Somehow Jack found himself within an Edenic space where all once seemed possible––but now some dire change was taking place.  In his poem, the leaflike punctuation mark hovers “high above the ground”––that earthly domain from which, according to the Biblical text he’s called to mind, we arise and to which we return.  Circumstance is about to lay claim to some unsuspecting pronoun: “The moment of someone else’s weakness.”  The poem has brought to mind the essence of all mortal frailty, and the passage from an inherent grace to an inevitable decline.  I loved those lines of enumeration––“The woodchucks and mice and trout,/ The beetles with their shining elytra”––which also echo the primal human task of naming all we see (even as we are reminded that we creatures must share the same fate).  “The apostrophe has just detached/ And is surprised and unaware/ It now means loss or is possessed/ By the serpent-S following…”.  Here, the apostrophe itself is a consciousness whose descent signals the great transformation––and I found myself smiling ruefully at that “serpent-S,” as if all fruitful knowledge was embodied in every mouthful of language.

 

Today’s poem marks Jack Stewart’s seventh appearance in the Red Letters (which may be a record).  His fine first book, No Reason, was published in the Poeima Poetry Series––and, over the years, his work has appeared in scores of literary journals including Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, as well as international journals in Ireland, Austria, and Italy.  Formerly a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology, he taught creative writing in Fort Lauderdale at the Pine Crest School––but, for the first time, I’m having to shift that verb to the past tense.  After four decades as an educator, working with students at various levels and educational centers, Jack has recently retired.  My hope is that this new expansive time will bring us closer to an anticipated second collection.  I love how Jack’s poems celebrate the creative impulse, play within the endless possibilities of human experience––but do not shy away from the most challenging discoveries along the way.  In today’s piece, that inky curl––like a dried leaf or a wisp of imagination––is about to “start the slow/ Descent, to drift into its// Increasing shadow, into/ That twilight-dimming space/ The dead will own.”  Nothing we can do will prevent that fall––but the attention we bring to the moment, and the way we are able to memorialize the experience in language, feels as if we’ve done more than simply surrender.  Tell me: is it too much to think that all we commit––to each other, to that sacred ground––renews the garden’s fertility?  (Apostrophe-S––because we belong to that green beauty even still, as it belongs to us.)

   

  

 

 

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/