Litany

It's been a hard week so far. I've tried all my best remedies for winter: eating my favorite comfort food ("death chicken"), drinking glasses of wine, going to an indoor pool with sauna, taking vitamin D, watching DVDs with the family, looking at the price for various destinations on Expedia, sitting in front of a "sunlight lamp," and finally reading Todd Davis.

Still, every day seems like a repetition. Every night I'm tired again. The world stays black and white--black asphalt, black tree trunks, white snow, white sky. The Todd Davis volume I was paging through yesterday had this one in it, "Litany," and it's just the right poem for today:

We assure each other the days must grow short.
Yet our lamentations over the darkness that binds us
to this season are like the grouse's cry, useless

in its petition for the sun to return, to rise on wings
and roam freely above our heads. And so on this
Thursday in January, cold rain seeping from the sky,

ground closed and water running off
with the river, we know no language can hurry
the light from its perch. Like the litany the minister asks

us to speak each Sunday in church,
words will not make God walk across the earth
any faster, heat of the sun flying at his back.

What can we do but repeat the same words over and over to ourselves, waiting to get past this Thursday in January?

And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

At this dead and frozen time of year, I'm looking for ways to get through each day, and so I've been reading more poems by Todd Davis. One of his poems is a strong enough tonic to get me through one more day towards spring; this one, "And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible":

Everything shines from the inside out--
not like the blaze of the sun, but like
the moon, as if each of us had swallowed
a piece of it. Our flesh opaque, milky,
indefinite--the way you see the world
when cataracts skim your vision.
What so many mistake as imperfection--
bulge of varicose, fatty tumor's bump--
is simply another way for the light to get out,
to illuminate the body as it rises.
We're caught up all the time, but none of us
should fly away yet. It's in the darkness
when your feet knock dew from leaves
of grass, when your hand pushes out
against the coffin's lid. Just wait.
You'll see we had it right all along,
that the only corruption comes
in not loving this life enough.

My favorite line of this poem is "we're caught up all the time." I like that it can be read at least two ways, one of them about how we get caught up in the busyness (business) of our own lives and forget to get a birthday card sent in time (sorry Sarah; happy birthday today!) or just to think about what someone else is going through at the moment. Sometimes I think about how nice it is not to have a sore throat. I don't have one now. Do you?

This poem makes me think about the time I spend in doctor's waiting rooms. In December I was at an ophthalmic surgeon's office, having a consultation about a little growth that was removed from my eyelid and turned out to be nothing worrisome, and I saw a lot of old people complete with things like red eyes and fatty tumors, some of them shuffling behind walkers. It helps me to be patient when I'm behind someone like that--let's say an old person who is confused about how to fill out the insurance paperwork--to try to see a physical imperfection as a daughter or son would, something so slight and so gradual that if you noticed it, you would only feel more love for the person who had to bear such a frailty.

Tomorrow I go to the orthopedist's office for the yearly checkup on my artificial knee, and I'll see a lot of old people who have been in pain so long it's affected their personality. I used to be like that, but part of my body has already risen. Now I can love this life enough--even in January, if I squeeze my eyes closed so the old snow in the background looks like light.

Gastronomy

Looking for a Thanksgiving poem to leave you with for the rest of the week, I found one that wasn't exactly what I had in mind--not a poem about harvest or gratitude, but about eating. And the more I looked at this poem, "Gastronomy" by Todd Davis, the more I liked it:

A glacial erratic sits unmoved by the garden, purple and white
cosmos lifting up what's left of September's skirt. Like a bit
of pesto on the lip's rim, this boulder was forgotten when ice
pulled its tongue back inside the world's mouth.

How long does it take to digest a planet? How much wine
is in the oceans that circle us? My sons ask where the broccoli
and tomatoes, the melons and pumpkins disappear
when we throw them back upon themselves.

In the dim sun of a cold wet month, we turn soil, spread ash
from our little fires, cover the bed with leaves. New stones
swim slowly to the surface as everything becomes everything else.
In the dark, all that's left is to eat each other and savor our goodness.

As an omnivore, I enjoy the last line. As a fan of puns, I love the suggestion of "dim sum" in the "dim sun" phrase, so apt for a day like today--this morning I saw a flurry of red leaves whirl in a wind off of our ornamental pear tree in the front yard, with an almost black storm cloud behind it. And then, of course, there's the "wine dark sea" allusion from The Odyssey.

After all, it's really not Thanksgiving until you've had dinner, is it?

The Secrets of Baking Soda

I'm in love with the poems of Todd Davis. I checked his newest volume out of the library--The Least of These--and have been reading all the poems while laughing and crying at the same time. I'm probably going to inundate you with too many of them in the next few months, but for today, just one, to show you what I love:

The Secrets of Baking Soda

The older we get the more we've learned to accept
that the body runs, then walks, eats, then sleeps, only
to wake again--sometimes to passion, sometimes

to the vague tug of this day's chores: laundry, dishes,
a yard to mow, bushes to trim, a room to paint.
After twenty years of marriage, I know the smell

of your body after you've bathed, the way the pores
of your skin open like certain flowers in the day's
first light. But this is like saying I know water seeks

the lowest point or the vireo gladly accepts the burden
of its song's notes. Perhaps it's what I haven't learned
that I love the most: you and your mother talking for hours

about how to hang curtains; how to remove the stains
our children bring on their knees; the secrets of baking soda
and vinegar, flour and the slightest hint of cinnamon.

I'm in love with the idea of a man married that long who still pays that much attention to the little things she does. . . and says so.

Aren't you? Couldn't you just positively swoon?

Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September

It's a lovely community-building exercise, but I think I've already written all I have to say about the BBAW topic for today--a book or genre I tried due to the influence of another blogger. My thoughts about the anxiety of blogging influence are in my May 20 post about book recommendations.

Rest assured that if your blog name is on my sidebar, you've influenced my reading. I started making a list, but anyone who comes here regularly knows that I don't have the soul of a librarian--I hate making lists or cataloging what I've read. Ron just came by and I said to him, "you know, you always instigate our bouts of organizing books" and he agreed, saying "you don't like categorizing them" and then added "if it were up to you, you'd have them all on the shelf by which ones had amusing titles next to each other," which is true, and a game we often play. It started with a story my mother told about finding two books side by side on the shelf at her college library: The Sound and the Fury As I Lay Dying.

Try it right now--go over to a nearby bookshelf and find two books that really ought to be right next to each other. I'm going to do it myself. Okay, I'm back; it took me about two seconds to see that Summerland ought to be next to The Gone-Away World at this time of year.

That makes me think that what I really want to share with you today is another autumn poem, this one by a poet I've just discovered that I love, Todd Davis. Don't let the title put you off; you don't have to know Kinnell's poems to enjoy this one.

Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September

I confuse the name for goldenrod with the name for this month,
but what else would we call this time of year--afternoon light
like saffron, blue lake reflecting blue sky? Where we entered,
asters and goldenrod flooded the length of the meadow, field

literally abuzz, swaying with the movement of bees, air
warm enough to draw sweat and the smell of those flowers
and our bodies drifting around us. The part of the sun that rested
the kettle of heat upon the goldenrod's tiny, yellow blossoms

lifted the clearing clean out of the ground, somehow suspending us--
if not in air, then in time--and that's what we want after all.
Not starting over, not being reborn, but borne up like these bees,
or the birds who migrate toward a place of neverending, all of us

unmoored, still part of the earth, but absolved of our obligations to it:
the necessity of growing old, the bald fact that a month from now
all this beauty will crumble--asters black, goldenrod brown,
no more than flower-dust when we rake our hands across their heads.

This is what I want in all things--to have the rules suspended just for me. Don't you?