The Ageing Woman as Alchemist, poem by Abigail Wyatt (My Meta-morphosis Series)

The Ageing Woman as Alchemist
by Abigail Wyatt

Dry souls are wisest and best. — Heraclitus

These days, more and more, I wear my pointed hat
and care nothing for those striplings who would mock me.
Close-closeted, by night, I inscribe my coded symbols,
hear the voices of my ancestors whisper on the air.
I prepare, I prepare: by slow degrees, I engage in the piece work of      starlight:
projects, novelties excite me less as the children of Nyx draw me in.
And in time, too, I will build me a fire of dry twigs and the skeletons of      leaves.
I will burn off in clouds of simple steam all that great weight of the too      long unforgotten
that pulls me ever deeper down: passions that bit deep, the wellspring
of old griefs that pollute my noisome soul with their clamour.
No more will I be tethered to this teeming swamp:
hollowed out, my heart burnt out, now I am for burning away.
And, as old glue dries to dust, these days I find I cannot adhere to      things;
left without substance, without juice and flesh, the bones of my being      are laid bare.
Stripped of my follies, my prides, my tears, I am reduced to the rock salt      of my knowing.
I fear a few grains are all the wisdom there is. See, it is blown upon the      air.

IMAGE: “Adoration” by Erté (1892-1990).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem just over a year ago and first performed it at a reading given as part of the Penzance Literary festival. Around that time I had been increasingly aware that I had entered a new phase in my life. I stopped colouring my hair, grew my new, grey hair longer, and began to concern myself both less and more with the business of who I was and what I wanted. What I am discovering is that I need fewer things but, more and more, I resent spending time on the banal and the trivial. I also know now that there is little ‘peace’ in older age since inwardly — and often outwardly too — I rage against cruelty and injustice. It is as much the job, of the elders, I think, as it is of the young to remind the community what where they may be compromise and where there can be none.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Abigail Wyatt writes poetry and some short fiction. She lives in Cornwall but has waking dreams of moving to South Pembrokeshire in Wales. Cornwall is lovely but she has been there a long time and her life has become noisy and stressful. New horizons and new challenges beckon. Another metamorphosis.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON HER PHOTO: Me at the turn of this year: badger hair but the same blue eyes. The trouble is, as my grandmother once told me, you never feel any older.

The Oak, poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson

THE OAK
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. 

Photo: “Old Oak Tree” by Sue Bristo, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. His most famous composition is “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), written about a battle during the Crimean War. The poem includes the often-quoted line: “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.” (For more about Tennyson, visit Wikipedia.)

Calendars, poem by Jim Harrison

CALENDARS
by Jim Harrison

Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio

another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.

They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like

their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times.

Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar

but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons

of greed and my imperishable stupidity.

Of late I’ve escaped those fatal squares

with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.

I had to become the moving water I already am,

falling back into the human shape in order

not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.

Our old cat doesn’t care. He laps the water where my face used to be.
***
“Calendars” appears iin Jim Harrison’s collection In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), available at Amazon.com.

PHOTO: “Cat in birdbath” by Jim Vansant. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

Still Missing the Jays, poem by Stanley Plumly

STILL MISSING THE JAYS
by Stanley Plumly

Then this afternoon, in the anonymous
winter hedge, I saw one. I’d just climbed,
in my sixty-year-old body—with its heart
attacks, kidney stones, torn Achilles tendon,
vague promises of ulcers, various subtle,
several visible permanent scars, ghost-
gray hair, long nights and longer silences,

impotence and liver spots, evident
translucence, sometime short-term memory loss—
I’d just climbed out of the car and there
it was, eye-level, looking at me, young,
bare blue, the crest and marking jewelry
penciled in, smaller than it would be
if it lasted but large enough to show
the dark adult and make its queedle
and complaint. It seemed to wait for me,
watching in that superciliary way
birds watch too. So I took it as a sign,
part spring, part survival. I hadn’t seen a jay
in years—I’d almost forgotten they existed.
Such obvious, quarrelsome, vivid birds
that turn the air around them crystalline.
Such crows, such ravens, such magpies!
Such bristling in the spyglass of the sun.
Yet this one, new in the world,
softer, plainer, curious. I tried
to match its patience, not to move,
though when it disappeared to higher ground,
I had the thought that if I opened up my hand—

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in 1939, Stanley Plumly is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. HIs poetry has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, New Yorker, New York Times, and Paris Review. In 2009, Plumly was named Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland. He has received many awards and honors for his work, including six Pushcart Prizes and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “Baby Blue Jay” by Drewcjm, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Photographer’s note: This baby Blue Jay fell out of a tree while trying to fly on May 14, 2011. Photo shot in the Merchants Walk parking lot, Lakeland, Florida.

Scrim, poem by David Ferry

SCRIM
Poem by David Ferry

I sit here in a shelter behind the words
Of what I’m writing, looking out as if
Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here.

The words are like a scrim upon a page,
Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim.
I can dimly see there’s something or someone there.

But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels,
Or the past, or future, or who it is I love,
My mother or father lost, or my lost sister,

Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there,
I only know that there’s something, or somebody, there.
Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?

###

Note: David Ferry (born in 1924 — making him 89 years old!) won the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press).

 

Let Me Please Look Into My Window, poem by Gerald Stern

LET ME PLEASE LOOK INTO MY WINDOW
by Gerald Stern

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.

Let me walk up Broadway past Zak’s, past the Melody Fruit Store,
past Stein’s Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.

Let me leave quietly by Gate 29
and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light
***
“Let Me Please Look Into My Window” appears in Gerald Stern‘s collection This Time: New and Selected Poems © W.W. Norton & Co., 1998, winner of the National Book Award for poetry. Find the book at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925,  Gerald Stern studied at the University of Pittsburgh (BA, 1947) and Columbia University (MA., in 1949). His work became widely recognized after the 1977 publication of Lucky Life,  that year’s Lamont Poetry Selection, and of a series of essays on writing poetry in American Poetry Review. He has received many prestigious awards for his writing, including the 1996 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1998 National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems, and the 2012 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award for Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2000-2002 and received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2005. Since 2006, Stern has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

Photo: 103rd St. windows

The Night Bukowski Read His Poems, poem by Marjorie Gilbert

THE NIGHT BUKOWSKI READ HIS POEMS
 by Marjorie Gilbert

His reputation preceded him
Campus police guarded the doors
The written word can be dangerous you know
Bukowski was going to read his poems
The only request from Charles
Bring plenty of beer
Everything would flow
What a show!
From the stairwell he stood
Never looking up
Beer can in one hand, poem in the other
The pockmarked face
Showed the ravages of the life he had known
And the seeds he had sown
He read matter-of-factly
Laughter permeated the air
He didn’t care!
He sipped his beer between sentences
As he finished the page he tossed it on the floor
Several pages were scattered about
The words lay in repose
He was loaded and so were we
But in a different way
Raunchy verse from a man who had lived in flop houses
With winos, prostitutes, drug addicts, and other unsavory souls
Images of a life we would never know
This nether world revealed to us by a man who lived his prose.

***
“The Night Bukowski Read His Poems” was originally published in an article by Richard Verrier in the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 14, 2013) and appears in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology, available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Marjorie Gilbert was born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1922 and in July 2013 celebrated her ninety-first birthday. During WWII, she served in the WAVES (the women’s branch of the U.S. Navy) until her husband was released from the U.S. Army. A mother of two, Marjorie went to work as a secretary in the History Department at California State University, Los Angeles, where she worked for over twenty years. During her retirement years, Marjorie has traveled throughout the world. An art lover, she volunteered for sixteen years at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California—a city where she currently resides.

NOTES FROM AUTHOR MARJORIE GILBERT: It is a hobby of mine to write about highlights in my life, and seeing and hearing Bukowski was one of those highlights. Regarding my attendance at Charles Bukowski’s reading at Cal State, Los Angeles, during the 1970s [as quoted in a 2/14/13 article by Richard Verrier in the  Los Angeles Times]:  “It was quite an evening. I didn’t even know who Bukowski was, so I sat there not knowing what to expect. Here he was with a beer can in one hand and he’s got these pages in the other hand and he’s reading to us like he couldn’t care less. He’d sip his beer than throw his page on the floor. He sounded very honest, like he was telling it like it is. I knew he lived a life I would never know, so I was intrigued.”

Summer X-Rays, poem by Nina Cassian

SUMMER X-RAYS (Excerpt)
by Nina Cassian

…Despite all my inner crumblings,
I’m still able to recognize a perfect day:
sea without shadow,
sky without wrinkles,
air hovering over me like a blessing…

“Summer X-Rays” appears in Nina Cassian‘s collection Contiunum (W.W. Norton, 2009) , available at Amazon.com. Read “Summer X-Rays” in its entirety at poets.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nina Cassian (pen name of Renée Annie Cassian, born on November 27, 1924) is a Romanian poet, composer, journalist and film critic. She is noted for translating into Romanian the works of William Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht and has published more than fifty books of poetry. (Read more at Wikipedia.org.)

Let Me Please Look Into My Window, poem by Gerald Stern

LET ME PLEASE LOOK INTO MY WINDOW
by Gerald Stern

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.

Let me walk up Broadway past Zak’s, past the Melody Fruit Store,
past Stein’s Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.

Let me leave quietly by Gate 29
and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light

…“Let Me Please Look Into My Window” appears in Gerald Stern‘s collection This Time: New and Selected Poems © W.W. Norton & Co., 1998, winner of the National Book Award for poetry. Find the book at Amazon.com.

Photo: 103rd St. windows

The Oak, poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson

THE OAK

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. 

Photo: “Old Oak Tree” by Sue Bristo, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. His most famous composition is “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), written about a battle during the Crimean War. The poem includes the often-quoted line: “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.” (For more about Tennyson, visit Wikipedia.)