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 #206

Walking with My Son at Fresh Pond

Taking a path along the reservoir

he’s my guide. Follow in my tracks.

We go to look at the reflection in the pond,

the trees in a patch of woods that burned,

the lifeless limbs charred charcoal, the scene

all watery, wind-rippled, turned upside down,

and set against sky and clouds.

On the bank he leans forward as if he

truly fears he might be taken into that world.

If I stare, I can imagine it, too.

Yikes! I’m falling off a cliff.

I hold onto him, feel the pull he feels,

the strength of it.

In a stand of evergreen he makes a stick hut,

like the Jews who make a Sukkah for harvest.

I help him collect fallen limbs, lean them

against the trunks of sturdy hemlock.

Then, a village springs up, inhabited

by gnomes and nymphs. They’re all around us!

I want to, love to, and need to

see things through his eyes.

We hunt and hide from monsters

who have powers that let them change

on a whim into huge creatures looming

over us, the landscape, energized.

Eventually reduced to tiny moles, They look

up to us, he says. My boy has the power

to dismiss them all, then allow the hillside

to suddenly become thick with wolves.

He carries a tree branch to ward them off.

Later it becomes a bridge to cross the water,

then a staff to help him climb the mountain,

the hill on the other side of the pond.

He holds his stick in the air whenever dogs appear,

to keep it from them, hoping they’ll know

it’s not a game of fetch he’s after, seeing them

run and jump. Today there were seven dogs:

Each one different, he noticed.

––Mary Bonina

I know: whenever one is tempted to make sweeping pronouncements, you’re venturing on shaky ground. And still, I feel confident with this declaration: most of us owe our survival––in body, mind, and spirit––in large part, to our mothers. Let me quickly say––as a member of the male persuasion, as a dad and a granddad who was and is deeply involved in the developing lives of our family––this is no knock against fathers. Parents, together, are the sun and moon in a child’s firmament, and the more loving and engaged the better. This is simply an acknowledgement that a mother’s love is of a very different nature and intensity, seeming perhaps to merge with biological necessity. Having once been its bodily home, the mother was the first to convey to this little being that the harsh external world would be survivable. At times, this love even appears to extend beyond the bounds of physical and metaphysical laws. Of course, I realize this is not true in every case, but I’d wager more often than not. And as children, I believe we intuitively recognized this, relied upon the gravitational constancy of that caring. Perhaps, over time, we bristled at how overwhelming was our motherly dependence, and so we declared the maternal wars in order to stake a claim to our own territory, earn a measure of autonomy. But, as Heather Treseler reminds us in her poem “Purpura”: “The first empire is mother.”

So, as Mother’s Day swings around again, I wanted to share the second of two new ‘mother/son’ poems I have from Mary Bonina. The first, “Fever” (published back in December, RLP#185) was a hymn to a mother’s reservoir of anxiety and caring, as she tried to help a child vanquish the monsters escaped from his feverish delirium. Comfort is certainly one of the greatest gifts I remember receiving from my own mother. Another, though, is perhaps one of the most impactful a mother can provide: her deep listening––and that’s at the core of today’s “Walking with my Son…”. “Follow in my tracks” the boy commands and, dutifully (delightedly) Mary’s protagonist obeys, switching the parental dynamics of who usually blazes the trail and who tails behind. It is quickly clear that the gift-giving is mutual, as the mother gets to reclaim something of her own childhood self, seeing the world through this imaginative boy’s eyes. In that perspective, menace is always lurking––but also the unbridled delight in being an embodied creature, exploring the world. I love how the real and imagined share a common space and have equally-powerful effects on our fertile minds. After all, those charred trees really did burn; destruction and loss are not just dark figures in fairy tales. But we also get to indulge in those fanciful terrors which we have the power to control: “Yikes! I’m falling off a cliff.” But they do not topple––they play, and danger is a thrilling reminder that we are alive. When those marauding wolves appear (in the guise of dogs, romping on the trail), the boy’s wand––and a mother’s watchfulness––has the power to keep us safe. More than just safe: we are allowed to be fully present to this lived moment; and we can relish the loving companionship we’re sometimes privileged to enjoy.

Mary is a poet and prose writer; she’s published two collections––both from Červená Barva Press––and a memoir, My Father’s Eyes. Today’s poem will appear in a forthcoming book, The Charm. Her poem “Drift”, a winner of UrbanArts "Boston Contemporary Authors" prize, was engraved on a granite monolith outside Boston’s Green Street MBTA Station. She’s been honored with a number of fellowships including seven from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where she has been a fellow since 2002. Mary’s taken part in collaborative art experiments with composers and sculptors, working to expand poetry’s vocabulary and reach. And today, she has given us all a good reason to quickly pick up the phone and call Mom. Or, if that is an impossibility, perhaps we can spend a few minutes following in memory’s tracks, journeying back to a time when it was an unexpected joy, simply to see through each other’s eyes.

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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@StevenRatiner

We Know

The time will come, we know, when one of us,

catching a summer chill,

takes on the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill;

or something sidesteps all that fuss,

some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss—

one absent-minded footfall on a hill,

or too close to a cougar’s kill.

Soon or late, one will prove the obvious.

The other, paperwork and speeches done, will come

home to the thought of home, wanting a drink,

a kiss, not to be there another year or twenty.

In that too spacious minimum,

at least for a time there will be time to think

back over plenty.

––Charles O. Hartman

In her essay "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Louise Glück wrote: “I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.” It seems to me that Charles O. Hartman has taken her suggestion to heart. He has crafted here an elegant, if painfully reticent, sonnet; but the reason for the poem, the constituents of that hovering “we”, and the fearful apprehension that is propelling this speaker’s train of thought––little of this is addressed outright. The artfulness of the piece serves to both reassure and undermine the reader, all at once––which, to my mind, is a fitting response to the precarious moment being contemplated. Though the poem commences with a line in iambic pentameter (and certainly the meditation beginning to unfold does call to mind the sort of discourse Shakespeare relished), its rhythms then become more unpredictable; we find ourselves on a stormier sea. And while the poem steadies us with the regularity of its stately rhyme scheme, the barometer of unseen forces is plunging and I can’t help feeling that, at any moment, our little boat could capsize. “It is analogous to the unseen for example,” Glück went on to say, “to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole. . .”. I imagine the late great poet smiling as her fellow-practitioners, like Charles, go on inventing new ways of approaching that emotional whirlwind, establishing that core silence within their poems.

It's been some time since Charles’ New & Selected Poems (Ahsahta Press) made its appearance; and perhaps you, as I, have been waiting for a new collection from this wonderfully-adept, musically-inventive poet. Having previously featured poems in the Letters from his manuscript-in-progress, I was delighted by the news that Downfall of the Straight Line, his eighth poetry collection, will make its debut from Arrowsmith Press this very week. Because of the poet’s nuanced style––conjuring much more in our minds than the poem ever specifies––I look forward to engaging with each new text. And how many provocative phrases are echoing inside today’s poem! I literally feel swept away by the cascade of l’s, by the fragile iambic heartbeat that returns with: “the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill”. And how adroitly he avoids a head-on reckoning with that most devastating of fears: sudden loss of the beloved––“or something sidesteps all that fuss,/ some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss”. To love someone deeply is to know that, sometime along the hazy path ahead, one of you will be forced to mourn the other––“to prove the obvious”: that our mortality is far more than a literary device, and this fate makes no exceptions. “We know”, the poem tells us––but do we really, or do we tend to engage in intellectual conceits and artful gestures to blunt the force of that knowledge? And then, as if it were simply unbearable to contemplate the death itself, our protagonist skips right away to the aftermath of the funeral, coming home to an empty apartment, buffering sorrow perhaps with a drink, not yet prepared to allow reality to sink in.

Just now, after stopping to read the poem yet again, I felt compelled to set language aside––to stand and simply look out at the day. And there: my wife, on her hands and knees, out back in the garden, planting alstroemeria. The utter pleasure visible on her face; her hands caked with dirt––as she’s done with abandon since she was a girl. And when I return to the keyboard, to Charles’ lovely bruise of a poem, this is what I am experiencing: an elegy for the plenitude we, too often, only comprehend in hindsight. A great bell has been struck––not within the borders of the piece but somewhere outside it, somewhere in the speaker’s life we are not privy to in this reserved and well-appointed sonnet. We are taken though, by the waves of reverberations as they slowly fade, until only a deep ache remains.