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 #144

“Anger shines through me” wrote Marge Piercy in her tumultuous poem “A Just Anger”; “I am a burning bush./ My rage is a cloud of flame. . ./ in which I walk/ seeking justice.” So let me say right up front: today’s Red Letter is brimming with a righteous anger (for those who might desire a trigger warning.) “A good anger acted upon/ is beautiful as lightning/ and swift with power.” And Fred Marchant – a poet, it should be noted, of an exceptionally gentle spirit, whose work sings with the subtlest modulations – has found cause in this new poem to take up Ms. Piercy’s challenge. He’s bringing the lightning. Buckle up.

Though politicians still tout ‘American exceptionalism’, and claim our longstanding democracy is a beacon for all the world, how can we not examine that special American brand of cognitive dissonance, as the gap widens between our ingrained beliefs about our country and what our eyes and ears are reporting? I can’t speak for Fred about which situations are the most maddening, but here are three uppermost in my mind. When we elected our first Black president in 2008, the public dialogue considered the possibility of a “post-racial society”, free at last from centuries of racial division; today, it only seems that we’ve regressed into new waves of animosity and violence. After witnessing the loss of over a million of our fellow citizens to Covid, we still seem incapable of learning the lesson of our mortal fragility and essential interdependence. And finally, we’ve just passed the second anniversary of what, it has now been made clear, was an attempted coup, seeking to overturn the nearly 250 years of our American experiment. Rather than shocking us awake and unifying the populace, we still see those anti-democratic ideas being used as a wedge to drive us further apart. And so, when Fred sent me this new poem, my heart felt buffeted by its outrage – but I was not at all surprised.

Fred’s very first collection, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize, and reflected his deep commitment to pacifism. Reissued recently in a 20th anniversary edition, the poems seem to have gained a new relevance. Four other collections followed, including the most recent – Said Not Said from Graywolf Press (an "Honored Book" from the Massachusetts Book Awards.) Together, they create a vision of both the power of the human spirit and the tragedy when it is subverted.

Just before I began writing this, a Bob Dylan song was playing on the radio – and it gave me reason to think about the progress in our lives, or lack thereof. It seems not so very long ago that the young songwriter was chanting that “the times, they are a-changin.’” I was a fourteen-year-old when that song seized the national imagination, and I was not alone in being spurred by its optimism. It goes without saying that we’re all a good deal older these days – Dylan, Fred and yours truly. And so, just now, when I heard the singer’s mournful tone, claiming: “I've been down on the bottom of the world full of lies./ I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes./ Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear./ It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there” – I, too, could feel the weight of that darkness settled inside the chest. So how are we to respond? Perhaps we need to raise our voices, curse the clamoring devils, let our righteous anger throw off sparks. Because either we ignite a more honest flame to see by, and hold ourselves to the standard we’ve long claimed for our nation, or else the “whole damned enterprise” may indeed be bound for Hades.

Contrapasso

[In Dante, ‘contrapasso’ refers to the idea that a given punishment in Hell

should symbolically represent the sins committed]

The sun came to me and wanted my friendship.

As it is Nature, it tries this regularly,

but today I looked it directly in the eye

and told it to fuck off,

I wanted no more of that let there be light business.

I wanted darkness on the waters.

Let's see what that looks like.

Let the whole damned enterprise fail.

The one called human.

Let great waves of misery be visited upon us.

And on this land so plagued by thievery and murder.

This people that sells its own down every river.

This nation that claimed it was the exception.

This that we are.

Let us find out what the rest have had to endure.

Let the punishment be fitting and just.

Turn out the lights. Lock up the stores.

Head home and pull down the curtains.

Don't even breathe, if you still can.

There's a hellhound on your trail and mine.

Killer eyes, and a nose for the way we smell.

Sic.

As in sic ‘em.

Derived from seek.

Good dog!

––Fred Marchant

The 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

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 #141

I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours. It’s the unspoken covenant within all literature, extending way back to the time when our thoughts had not yet been turned into written signs. It’s a belief that the telling of stories cannot help but incite in those that hear them a desire to respond, to identify their own narrative threads and follow where they lead. This is true even if the listener – at least for now – keeps their own tales private. There is a faith that the telling is a communal impulse, and we are somehow bound together by what we share. I can’t help but imagine a time when humans huddled together around a fire in the darkest of nights needing to calm the heart before sleep, needing to remind themselves (as we do now) that the darkness would eventually yield (hadn’t it always before?), and the sun would carry us back to morning. In last week’s Red Letter, Jack Stewart’s poem had us gazing into the winter sky and wondering what moved beyond that starlight – or, more to the point, how the stories we tell ourselves shape what we perceive in this present moment. Prompted by his little narrative, I’ll tell you mine.

I found myself thinking back to the last years of my mother’s life when, every few months, I’d fly down to South Florida to spend a several days with her. The visits were largely uneventful: we’d make simple meals together or, for a treat, buy hot pastrami sandwiches and matzoh ball soup from the local deli, so we could hunker down at her kitchen table playing round after round of gin rummy. But the food, the games were largely an excuse for us to sit close and talk: telling stories that dredged up old memories; recalling faces that were distant or had been lost to us; letting laughter heal the ache, confusion, and regret. Though only rarely did we speak of it directly, this was our way of conducting a long goodbye, of making sure we’d settled our hearts while we were together, preparing for the days apart. On one occasion, and to break up the regularity, I suggested I drive her to Coconut Creek to visit Butterfly World, the largest butterfly park on the planet. Though not the sort of thing she might normally have sought out, she agreed – and ended up loving the afternoon, sharing an experience that led to a much-loved photograph, a skein of memories we’d rehash over the card games, and eventually today’s poem.

Here, at the time of mid-winter celebrations – where almost every religious tradition has its own story to tell – we can share this starlit moment together (even if virtually), and wonder about all that lies beyond our comprehension. The story you and your family tell may be about unassailable hope embodied in the birth of a child; or about the endurance of light beyond all rational expectation; about the planet itself sheathed in the cold and dark that, nonetheless, contains new seeds waiting to erupt. Or it may be about an old woman in a butterfly garden, lifted momentarily by the unimaginable beauty of those tiny creatures whose survival depends upon a transformation that can only be called miraculous. Every narrative we share illuminates a small space between the listeners as – eyes finding other eyes – we recognize once again with whom we are sharing this hour.

So: I’ve told you my story, now you tell me yours. Or, better yet, put down the phone or switch off the screen, and tell that person across the dining room table or seated beside you on the couch: about that time you actually. . .how then, out of the blue. . .and you won’t believe what happened next. . .. I can’t tell you how often those gin rummy games come to mind; or how many questions I’d now like to ask, had I the chance; or which family stories, dulled (or so I thought) by the re-telling, I’d give anything to hear her voice share one more time. The constellation of all those red-letter days and evenings – familial or cosmic, simple or profound – by which we steer our lives: savor them now, and then pass them on.

My Mother, in the Butterfly Garden

The white morphos roiling about her head

were not halos. The nervous flurry

of fritillaries, lacewings – not seraphim, not stars.

Even if Divinity had not been, all her life,

a wordless thing, she would never have taken this

for scripture scribbled across the humid air.

Still, mother ooh!-ed and ah!-ed as each one

caught her eye, giddy as the schoolchildren

walking past us – but then suddenly solemn

as one black-and-scarlet beauty lighted

on her withered arm. And later when she

pried herself from her wheelchair and stood

wavering in the afternoon sun so she could

bring her face close to the passion vines (this one,

a spray of spiky blue novas – and this,

a chorus of yellow mouths rising on the trellis),

she smiled and spoke a single word: Wonderful!

It was not meant as benediction but

became that just the same, the syllables

blossoming in the air between us. Tired again,

she had me wheel her to the shade.

For nearly an hour we sat together in this

glassed-in world and let beauty do its work.

So, there it is – the little that’s left to us:

flower, wing, garden, mother, son –

a brief outing at the close of summer.

If not God, then at least the will to desire Him.

If not eternity, then this bloom-scented

breathing in, and breathing out.

All we possess –

all that’s been taken from us –

all that, in the end, we willingly

let slip from our grasp: Wonderful!

––Steven Ratiner