For no other reason except sheer pleasure, magnetic poetry reemerged in our lives…. And sometimes one sentence is enough.
#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction
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
And the Bands Beat On….
My daughter plays clarinet in the band. Her school’s so small the band is both middle and high school, younger kids mixed in with the kids who are driving and working jobs and on the cusp of grownupness. It reflects the small town kind of world we live in, that, by the nature of its size, encourages acceptance. I linked up with a woman I’ve known since our oldest kids were nursing babies, 20 years ago.
Twenty school bands from all over the state played in a parade last night in Montpelier. As I walked around the high school, looking for my daughter, the evening sun in my eyes, I followed the tunes from one band to another. So much live music! So many kids!
For that brief time — the best of parenting. Laughter and silliness in the heady May evening, beneath trees just barely beginning to leaf out. I drove my hungry kid home, listening to her, as we drove through the dusk tumbling down, back to our house and the cats at the door, mewling for affection.
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
Gold Smudge
My work these days reflects the weather’s dreariness — grant-writing — work I implicitly believe I should feel jazzed and excited about — and maybe I will, maybe I’ll get there, but grants so often feel like closed doors, of no room at the inn and all.
To counteract that — and the terrible string of cancer deaths from a Waldorf school where my daughter was once a student — I’m holing up reading novels. Despite the rain, my daughters and I are in the woods every day. Even on late days when I’m at work, they send me photos. One daughter is just out of childhood, the other has but a handful of years left. Observing them, I wonder what of my parenting will stick with them.
The younger daughter and I found our first unopened trillium yesterday. The older daughter asked the blossom’s color. The younger asked if it mattered. Yes, her sister answered.
Everywhere, yellow smears of blossoming forsythia.
The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.— Natsume Soseki
Croquet before the green….
Sticks and Girl
My daughter picks at dirt on the cuff on her jeans, troubled by this, which interests me. She’s a remarkably easy and even-tempered girl, and I sometimes wonder at her own and distinctive understanding of the world’s order.
In my bare root order, I have a handful of what seem to be sticks with filigreed root balls. Walking behind our garden in the damp April evening, she asks me if I’ll still live here when these sticks become trees.
I’m planting for the property, I answer. That answer suffices for her. She stands with me, as we envision stick widening into trunk, twig fattening into branch.
