For no other reason except sheer pleasure, magnetic poetry reemerged in our lives…. And sometimes one sentence is enough.
poetry
Teen Somersaults
The rain cleared in the early evening, and my daughter and I hung out on her trampoline while she waited for her friend. She’s a pro; I’m a novice. Eventually, I lay back and stared at the clouds breaking apart, and the enormous box elders behind our house, leafing out.
She, at nearly 14, demonstrated all the moves that can be done on a trampoline. In her face, I could see the sweet impishness of her earliest years.
Rain, rain this May. There’s a kind of rightness to this, the earth and the ponds and the saplings and plants rushing headlong toward green and procreation. May is the season for this, and there’s a sweet satisfaction in the daily discoveries of what’s grown each day. May: bring it on!
Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.
—Hayden Carruth
Shape of May
I always imagine Medieval life as so much field around all those storied castles. In May, the Vermont landscape is wide open. The forest aren’t leafed out yet. The bushes are sticks without greenery. The shape of the land is there for the looking.
The comparison ends there, I know. Contemporary Vermont isn’t bound by class or infused with religion. No holy temples are built here, save what each family builds for themselves.
But there’s still all this land, fallow, ready for seed. All this potential, of yet another growing year.
Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems.
— Basho
Sacred Spring
T. S. Eliot who famously wrote April is the cruelest month did not live in Vermont, where we have much crueler seasons. Like January.
Yesterday, on my way from work to a grant-writing workshop, I returned home and changed from a sundress to jeans and sweater (again), but the robins are under the trees, wrenching out live worms. Daffodils splash.
Take what goodness you can get: I hold this as a mantra of single motherhood, but that’s likely my own solipsism. Vermont spring, while inevitably snowy in places, is a ubiquitous joy.
The workshop was held on the second floor of a gorgeous community art center, where I admired the artwork and the particularly pleasant shade of lavender on the walls. Last year, I was knocked out in the final round of this competitive grant; this year, I partook liberally of their snacks and chocolate, a kind of boon.
In this State 14, my daughter’s rock garden appears.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
— Wendell Berry
Duck Joy
My daughter calls two ducks besides the April-fat river Mrs. and Mr. Duck — Out For an Evening Swim.
A brown female the hue of last year’s fallen leaves. The male’s garish, jade head reminds me of the unmistakable hue of Japanese beetles.
Nothing more — nothing earth-shattering — merely those two ducks easing into the muddy river, the frothy current quickly ferrying them around a bend and beyond our sight.
And yet I keep thinking back to that duck couple, a poem in motion, in no need at all of my fond wishes or thoughts.
Don’t say my hut has nothing to offer:
come and I will share with you
the cool breeze that fills my windows.
— Ryōkan
Easter bouquet
Drop by Drop
This hopeful holiday is paired with tiny spring blossoms — crocuses, grape hyacinths, glories of the snow — and early morning services in the cemetery beside our house.
Yesterday, at Quechee Gorge in the pouring rain, we stop in at the state park visitor center where there’s no one but us and an elderly man behind the counter who lays his glasses on the newspaper and takes his time talking with us and telling us about the trail. When you go under the bridge, he says, you have to stop and look up. The bridge, when we get there, harbors singing birds — a great steel enormous arch over the spring-wild Ottaquechee River, so far down this rocky channel.
We walk further to the dam, where the water roars. The two younger girls are afraid, holding back from the edge. The rain has stopped, with a few sprinkles of sunlight pushing through the mist. Water: so much water. Rain, river, the profligate clouds, a few drops in our palms from the first maple buds we touch: drop by drop, water cutting through stone.
Awakened, I hear the one true thing —
Black rain on the roof of the Fukakusa Temple.
— Either Dōgen
Stony Soil Vermont 