Begin the song exactly where you are,
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air,

(from ‘The Singing Bowl’ by Malcolm Guite)

Where I am now: a quiet Sunday afternoon processing a busy Friday evening and a very long Saturday at the Lifting the Veil conference with Malcolm Guite. Savoring the richness and sorting through the treasures, trying to capture it all before it starts to fade. (Also, suspecting that I might be coming down with the cold that my boys are just getting over.)1

I hope that this attempt to capture some of the highlights and themes of the conference will be a blessing to some of my readers who wish they could attend such a conference but find they cannot. I’ve attempted to add many links and footnotes so that you can read and listen for yourself to some of the speakers who were there. It’s not quite the same thing as being there, but it’s the next-best thing. I’m sorry this is so long. Feel free to skim or skip if it’s not your bag.

Tremont Temple, Boston

I’ve long admired the facade of historic Tremont Temple, which is about a block from Boston Common, across the street from the Granary Buying Ground. They apologized to this weekend’s guests, in a delightful roundabout way, saying that they had installed a veil— really it has nothing to do with restoration of the building—so that they can invite us to go behind the veil.

The inside is as lovely as the outside, a wonderful welcoming place.

I took the train, arrived in town early, and ate my sandwich (pb&j) sitting on a bench near the fountain in Boston Common. I should have tried the doors early because by the time I got inside the line at the bookstore was monumental. I got my pre-release copy of The Coming of Arthur and then stood in the line to get it signed. Alas, I didn’t make it to the front of the signing line before it was time for the first session to begin.

The Call

The unexpected theme that arose for me from this conference was the importance of collaboration—which is lovely because that’s where my heart and my art have been drawing me. Little did I know when I originally chose my Substack title, “Singing each to each,” that it was the earliest hint of a prophetic call, the first note of what is becoming a clearing glimmering: a vocation to sing along with other artists. I still don’t quite know where that will lead me, but it was exciting to hear the call re-amplified again and again throughout the weekend.

The Faces Under the Veil

The evening began with the local group, davy, performing songs from a soon to be released concept album that is in deep conversation with C.S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces. Songs giving voice to characters from the book, songs in which they sing to each other: Orual, Psyche, the Fox, Bardia’s wife. I was excitedly texting my sister as they sang: this is one of her favorite books. The opening act is playing songs based on Till We Have Faces. This is amazing! You need to check these guys out2.

You could say the album is in collaboration with the dead Lewis, or you could say that it sings back to the novel. In was a beautiful beginning to the evening and a perfect opener for Malcolm’s keynote address on Lifting the Veil.3 I’ve heard him speak on this topic before in recorded lectures. But of course each talk is a little different—because he’s not the same person speaking and neither am I the same listener. Both of us have changed. Moreover there was the profound experience of being in the same room with someone speaking, which is not the same as hearing or watching a recording. There is an embodiment to it that makes even the most familiar words and ideas breathe with new life.

The Bell and the Bard

What I heard most strongly in the keynote address was a call to the audience as artists and “creatives” to come together in collaboration and this theme was illustrated most brilliantly by the performance that immediately followed Malcolm Guite’s keynote.

Steve Bell, a Canadian singer and songwriter, has collaborated with Malcolm over the years. He has been inspired to set Malcolm’s poems to music, 18 of them so far. Together they told the story of their collaboration, first one and then the other telling his part and then passing it off to the other. Malcolm read lines of his poems, Steve sang his songs. They talked about emails sent back and forth with lines of poetry, with music files. They talked about in-person visits, and how this friendship and collaboration grew over time, one song after another included on this album or that, becoming a body of work that Steve finally decided to collect into a single album, which he calls Bell and the Bard.

There were beautiful God-moments of inspiration: Steve on a writing retreat, stuck for days with a song he doesn’t know how to complete, and a message from Malcom arrives at the right time with the words he needs. Steve worried about changing the poems to fit the needs of the form, approaching Malcolm with trepidation about having rearranged them and left lines out. (Malcolm’s brilliant response: Steve, the original poem is still there.) Malcolm delighted at how his words are coming back to him in a new form, changed, transformed, transfigured. Steve demanding that Malcolm write more verses to fill out a song he knows is incomplete. There’s a playfulness of friends who have known each other and worked together over the span of years. I feel privileged that they have brought us into that circle.

My favorite moment though was when Steve talked about one song that was the most expensive to record. I can’t remember which song it was, but essentially he hired a voice coach to try to stretch his voice a little higher and a little lower because this song has such a range that he couldn’t quite reach. To me there was such humility in service of the art, this willingness to sing a little badly so that he could play the song as it insisted it must be written and played. A more egotistical artist might rewrite the song or ditch it altogether; but Steve knew what the song needed to be and he put himself out there, telling us that he knew it was a stretch, but doing it out of love.

Malcolm’s keynote talked about how artistic collaboration embodies the interpersonal love of the Trinity and throughout this conference at every session he himself modeled that that collaboration looks like.

The session was supposed to end at nine but the performance lasted until ten.

I didn’t get my books signed, but I did get to introduce myself to Malcolm after the show and shake his hand. But he was clearly tired and they were shooing us out of the auditorium, so the encounter was necessarily brief.

The evening ended with Malcolm taking the guitar and singing a couple of songs including The Green Man.

Poets in the Round: The Depth in you has called to the Depth in me

I got up early Saturday morning after having a hard time settling to sleep and a bout of midnight insomnia. So I went to the coffee shop first thing and there was a huge line. I missed most of the first session.

The second session included Malcolm with Boston poet , who I got to meet last month when she read at the Boston Inkwell meetup and a poet I hadn’t head of before, 4 who lives in London.

Malcolm introduced the idea of “poets in the round” by analogy of musicians in a pub session taking turns going round the circle sharing songs, each song is brought to mind by what has been sung before. So they went round and round, with no formal plan but just responding to each other’s poems, as Malcolm put in his opening remarks: the depth in you has called to the depth in me. Anna read some poems from her upcoming book, Yahweh Loves a Desert as well as from her first collection, Under the Terebinth. Joshua Luke Smith’s didn’t have a book or papers to read from; he recited all of his poems from memory. Malcolm sometimes read and sometimes recited.

I love Anna’s poems from her new collection, which is focused on the prophets Elijah and Elisha and more specifically is responding to the questions that are asked. Thirty-three poems for thirty-three questions. Joshua Luke Smith talked about new creation, about the psalms of lament, about there needing to be a place for sorrow as well as for joy. Malcolm talked about writing sonnets for the Stations of the Cross and how it was easy to write a poem for the First Fall, harder to write one for the Second Fall. And how writing about when Jesus falls for the third time was what broke him open. His poem was about depression and desperation.

I can’t recall everything that everyone read or recited. But there were so many moments where you could hear the entire audience sigh, draw in breath, murmur appreciative words… like we were breathing in the poetry, like it was punching us in the gut. At one point Joshua Luke Smith was beatboxing for Malcolm Guite while he recited a poem. I think it was when Malcolm was reciting his villanelle, ‘My Poetry is Jamming Your Machine’5. But I could be misremembering.

Ordinary Saints

After the lover, only the artist is given permission to really gaze into the face of the other.

The first thing I did after checking in on Friday evening was to descend to the lower level where there was a bookstore set up to secure my copy of The Coming of Arthur. There was a very long line that wrapped around the room and while I was waiting in the line, people-watching and eavesdropping a bit on conversations, I also had the chance to peruse some beautiful portraits that were set up along one edge of the space. A placard told me they were a collection called Ordinary Saints and I found them quite moving, especially one of an older man who was looking intently at the viewer.

Well, evidently Malcolm had the same reaction when he saw that painting, which turned out to be a portrait of the artist’s father by Bruce Herman, who is not usually a portrait painter. Malcolm asked if he could write an ekphrastic poem about the picture and whether he could come and spend more time with the painting in person. So he visited the studio and while there discovered that there were more portraits in the series. So followed a series of poems and eventually a third collaborator who provided music as well, composer J.A.C. Redford.6

View the portraits while listening to the accompanying poetry and music.

Hours of attention are bodied forth in a portrait. The artist has gazed upon a person and through their gaze we also are able to receive something of the personhood of the sitter.

The Holy Trinity is a communion of persons eternally giving to each other the gift of self in love; and we also receive personhood as a gift from others, through relationship.

In collaboration with other artists there is a kind of mutual submission, egos are put aside as each strives to give fully to the art, to the other. And in the end more is received than is given.

To be face to face with another human being is the next holiest thing to the Holy Eucharist. To be patiently present to this portrait of a father looking at a son, to be in the presence of the son gazing at his father, is to retrieve a presence from the absence, a new presence.

If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you know that ekphrastic poetry is especially my jam. This was such a treat and the discussion gave me much food for thought, enough to ponder on for quite some time. Certainly it has made me eager to continue to seek out opportunities to collaborate with visual artists as I did last year with in Scots Pine Diptych. And now that I think about it, I am terribly remiss I never did get around to sharing the beautiful response that Michela sent me. I must get on that.

The morning ended with a discussion about Malcolm’s dual vocations, the poet as priest with the folks from The Common Good magazine.

Lunchtime Communion

I went out to lunch with my friend and Zina’s friend . The conversation that started over lunch continued and spilled over the first part of the afternoon sessions. But aren’t these face to face meetings also a large part of what conferences are about?

I am always longing to have the gift of being in two places at once. I would have loved to stand in line to get my books signed. I would have loved to watch pulling prints, spent more time with Bruce Herman’s art, listened to cellist Kendall Ramseur. But this side of heaven there will never be enough time.

All we are allowed in this life are glimpses and foretastes and if I am occasionally dissatisfied, then may that dissatisfaction increase the longing I have for the heavenly wedding feast where there will never be a shortage of time for music and art and poetry and the communion of souls.

Merlin’s Isle

Sadly I missed seeing the film Merlin’s Isle: The Tale the Land Still Knows7, a documentary film produced by that details Malcom Guite and illustrator journeying across Britain to visit locales central to Guite’s epic retelling of the Arthurian legends. Rather, we walked in right at the very end as the credits were rolling. One of these days I’ll figure out how to watch it.

But I did hear the discussion afterwards in which Malcolm Guite talks about both the film and the making of his Arthurian poem with , the illustrator who so beautifully illustrated these volumes. Stephen is from South Carolina and Malcolm felt strongly that he couldn’t illustrate the poems properly if he didn’t know the British landscape, so they took him there. The film was intended not only to capture their journey, but was also intended to raise interest for Malcolm’s project— no one was sure if there was even an audience for epic poetry about the Holy Grail. Also joining in the conversation were the storyteller and mythographer , himself a master or the Arthurian tradition, and Pete Peterson of , the publisher of Guite’s four volume epic.

I can’t capture here all the ins and outs of this conversation, but it reinforced again this spirit of generous collaboration that has been the theme of the conference. It’s a real privilege to hear artists talking among themselves about the craft and about the meaning of making from a Christian perspective. It has stirred in me a deep longing for that kind of collaboration, the fruit of a creative life poured out and shared with others.

At one point Martin Shaw talked about how interesting it is to be seeing the film and having this conversation here in America. In the Arthurian stories to sail west is to head into eternity. Here in our young country we don’t have the same kind of connection to Arthur as they do in Europe. (Shaw and Guite were both careful to emphasize that Arthur doesn’t belong solely to England, but also to the French and Germans and Bretons and Irish. It isn’t a nationalist tale— and shouldn’t be warped and twisted into one.)8 We are, as Shaw points out, a young country and it is perhaps for future generations to really weave our landscape into the Arthurian tale. Perhaps we have only yet to have birthed the bard who could imagine how Arthur comes to Turtle Island, as Martin Shaw put it.

And why not? If the Britains could imagine Those feet in ancient times walking upon England’s mountains green, why could we not also dream ourselves into the story. If the Romans could dream themselves into the story of Troy. If Dante could dream himself the ghost of Virgil as a guide. Though it seems to me that there is a kind of naiveté or an innocence required for that kind of dreaming that I’m not sure our jaded age can handle with its deep abiding anguish over colonialism and post colonialism. But who knows maybe such a poet will one day sing such a song.

Two Gawain Tales with Martin Shaw

We closed out the day and the conference with Martin Shaw telling two stories about Sir Gawain. The first, the Marriage of Gawain to Lady Ragnel, is a kind of variant on the Wife of Bath’s tale blended with a variant on the story of the Green Knight. The hero in this version is Arthur who must find out the answer to the question of “what do women want?” in order to forestall his own decapitation by a different giant. He enlists Gawain to help him in his quest and it is Gawain who ultimately must marry Lady Ragnel9, the foul old woman with tusks, in order to learn the secret to the riddle. The second story was a fairly straightforward prequel of Gawain and the Green Knight, which partly served to explain why Gawain is so wise in the first tale.

I had discovered Martin Shaw a while ago10, I’m not quite sure how, on his Substack, The House of Beasts and Vines, as a marvelous storyteller11. After scraping through what articles weren’t locked behind the paywall, I found his You Tube channel. I never imagined that I’d get to sit in an audience and hear him spin a tale in person. It is an experience that can’t really be duplicated with a recording. Just as listening live music isn’t the same. I suppose another theme of the weekend was the necessity of embodiment and the superiority of the face to face over the virtual. Of course I am exceedingly glad to be able to experience so much art and poetry and music virtually. The ability to share these experiences is truly a gift. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that it never can fully replace the experience of being in a room together with other people. The experience of chatting with your neighbor, of hearing the breathing of a group, all gasping at once, all laughing together.

At the end Martin Shaw told us it was his birthday and so when the standing ovation was done, the audience sang him Happy Birthday, as a small gesture of our gratitude for being able to share the time with him.

Malcolm finished the day with a benediction and a sending forth.

End of Day Gifts and Holy Fools

After the concert, in true Avengers style, we went out for shawarma (I actually had very good kofta).

We then ended the evening with drinks in the cozy lobby of the Omni Parker House Hotel. I had a very fancy Boston Cream Pie martini (the Parker House Hotel claims the honor of being the birthplace of the Boston Cream Pie).

As we were standing to leave, a woman approached offering four flats of raspberries to all and sundry, saying she’d been given to them by a guy at the farmer’s market (I suspect it was the Haymarket?) as it was closing. But she was leaving the next day so she was passing on the bounty. Zina took a flat, I packed four cartons into a shopping bag in my big carryall. A sweet extra at the end of the day to share with my girls.

As I said farewell to my new friend Celia and descended the stairs to the subway, I heard a piano playing from some upstairs room overhead. I paused a second on the stairs, longing to listen, and then continued down because it was already late.

The train was delayed and thus very crowded, but I managed to snag a seat. After a while it became clear that there was a very drunk Bruins fan standing near the central doors, seeing everyone off the train with a hearty farewell and welcoming them on like old friends. He was striking up conversations with everyone around him, asking their names. He was a very jolly, sociable drunk. The train gradually emptied out as we approached the end of the line and the thinning crowd only encouraged him to talk to more people who were closer to me.

I mostly kept by head down, looking at my phone like a stereotypical passenger, but at one point I looked up and caught the eye of the man across from me, who had been doing the same. We exchanged a friendly smile: Can you believe this guy? Isn’t he such a typical Boston type? It’s amazing how you can have a wordless conversation with a complete stranger in just a moment.

Listening to the jolly drunk in the Bruins jersey I learned the names of some of my fellow passengers and some fragments of their stories. There was a Chinese American girl who had been on a first date and was disgusted that her date insisted he had to be home by 11. I learned that the stranger with whom I shared the glance was named Jerome (Or was it Jermaine?) and that he was coming off of work at the airport. (I imagine he must have worn a uniform for his job because he was dressed in green Christmas pajama pants, which I can’t imagine wearing to work, though I suppose I could be wrong.

As I walked to my car I thought: what a figure of a Holy Fool the drunk man was. He was ridiculous, of course he was, but he was also not wrong. He wanted to welcome the strangers, he wanted to know their names so they weren’t strangers anymore but friends. He wanted to invite them to go out with him when we got to the end of the line, to have a drink with him, to keep the good times rolling.

Jesus, I see you in him. In them.

(But, yeah, I am still not going drinking with that drunk stranger.)

IN GRATITUDE

And Finally, last but not least, a Thanks to and the conference organizers for their help in getting me to this conference. What a gift, an embarrassment of riches, this weekend has been. I would be remiss not to extend my deepest thanks.

I hope that my extensive notes and links which allow some of the riches of this conference to be accessible to those who were unable to attend can be my small way of paying it forward.

Please do comment if you these notes have been helpful and if you discovered something that touched your soul here. Most of all, I want to encourage you to make something beautiful, to notice the beauty around you, and to share it with others in your life. And if possible may you be graced with the ability to collaborate with another to make something beautiful together, even if it’s just baking some cookies or making soup or taking a walk together to admire the gift that is today.

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2

davy is a husband wife duo, Megan and Daniel Tavani. Megan’s Substack:

Queen of Glome

documenting the process of my concept album based on "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis, and musings on the novel itself.

By Megan T

I’ve been clicking around and reading and listening. Good stuff.

Listen to demos (with lyrics): Ravenous, Riddle

Listen to singles: Psyche

3

Shemaiah Gonzales has a much better summary of the keynote address than I was able to manage:

Shemaiah Gonzalez

Lifting the Veil Conference

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Lifting the Veil Conference in Boston…

Read more

3 days ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Shemaiah Gonzalez

Lucy at Five

Round the block she runs,
          tossing her jacket
                    into the air then

racing to catch it.
          Laughter falling joyful
                     as autumn leaves drift down.

Just so would I catch her
          childhood to myself,
                    holding her small body

close to mine once more
          then release her to time's
                    unrelenting course.

Writing Notes:

In the comments to her lovely poem No wings, no shiny things about the interchange of gifts with visiting crows, Elizabeth, the 26th Avenue Poet, writes about her process of deliberately writing bad poems to keep the poetry wheels well oiled:

. . . Followed by a daily quota of Terrible Poems. Deliberately awful, the worst I can manage, six or seven of them one after another (they don't, after all, call for intensive effort). I was amazed, after I'd done that for a couple of months, to go back and find here a line and there a phrase that deserved to be rescued and reworked. Also: sooner or later I'll set out to write a Terrible Poem and find myself drafting an Actual Poem ... at which all dedication to Terrible Poetry falls away, and we pay attention to the new thing. In the meantime, the habit of putting poem-shaped objects onto paper with absolutely no investment in their quality somehow unlocks a gate so that an Actual Poem, when one arises, can walk through and get my attention. The Terrible Poems also reset the part of my brain that takes poem-making too damn seriously sometimes, and forgets that this work is also supposed to be play.

My own writing goal is similar, though I don’t aim for quite as many bad poems a day. I modestly try for one or two. Usually I use a one word prompt (this month I'm using October Invitations and Inktober prompts) and often I also use a picture prompt— either a photo from my own photo library — I use something I’ve taken recently in the previous weeks or I look for photos taken on this day in previous years—or I look for a painting on several of the social media accounts I follow that share art.

This past week this favorite photo series of my youngest daughter tossing her jacket into the air came up in my “on this day” search. I scribbled out a little poem in my notebook and shared it to my Notes feed. Coming back to it a few days later, I am rather pleased with the way it came out, so I thought I’d share it here along with the complete photo series.

My youngest child is thirteen now and also the only of my children who is still small enough to fit comfortably in my lap— and I know that will not be the case for much longer as she has been growing like a weed.

She was always a tiny little thing. These photos of her at five could easily be mistaken for pictures of a much younger child.

Just so you know, my book notes do not attempt to be spoiler-free, though I’m also not trying to lace them with spoilers. Often, as I’m teasing out what it is I think about a book, I’m thinking about themes and plots and character development and not really worrying about what plot points I might be giving away. If you haven’t read a book and you care about spoilers, caveat lector.

Fiction

Ursula LeGuin’s Hainish/Ekumenical books:

The time seemed propitious to finally finish reading all of Ursula LeGuin’s Hainish books that I hadn’t previously read. (I had read The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness already.) Most of these I listened to as audiobooks; I read the short story collection Five Ways to Forgiveness as an ebook. All were borrowed from the library via either Libby or Hoopla.

In LeGuin’s Hainish books all the various people on all the worlds are descendants of long-ago colonies from the ancient planet, Hain. The Hainish have existed for millennia and have seemingly lost contact with their colonies and then have later started renewing contact. The Hainish have gone through so many cycles of civilizations rising and falling that they have achieved a certain wisdom and a kind of light touch when making contact with these new peoples— it’s not quite indifference, but they have a kind of cultural willingness to play a very long game indeed, tempered by the very human desire of the actual individuals involved to meddle, especially where they see injustice.

LeGuin’s parents were anthropologists and that lens shapes all of her stories. The curiosity about how cultures work, how they shape individuals. So many of her stories— most? all?— involve two or more individuals from wildly different cultures and worldviews dropped into relationship. Sometimes the relationships are antagonistic. Often they are shaded by curiosity. Many times they develop, sometimes into friendships and romance. There is nothing deterministic about it though. Often her protagonists are cultural outliers, outsiders from their own culture. Often they push back against their own cultural norms while making bridges to others. Sometimes they find themselves more at home among the foreigner cultures they have come to study. Always they are very human, individual, beautifully themselves.

One of the questions/problems these novels explore is that of how no one can ever be an impartial observer. And the act of observation is always also an intervention that changes the course of the culture that observes and that which is observed.

Throughout the Hainish books telepathy is a gift that some humans have or are capable of developing. Some peoples seem to have it more than others. Some planets don’t seem to have it at all. Some of the various races also seem to be the product of Hainish experiments with genetics, as in The Left Hand of Darkness where the people are

Rocannon’s World

LeGuin’s debut novel and the first of the Hainish books.

Rocannon is the sole surviving member of an ethnological survey on a planet where there are three intelligent races: the Liuar, who are warriors and ride about on flying cats; the Gdemiar, who live underground; and the elflike Fiia, who are a telepathic race.

He discovers that this primitive planet has been invaded by rebel aliens who want to destroy the League of All Worlds, which is a sort of predecessor to the later Ekumen and he sets out on a quest to find the alien base and prevent them from carrying out their nefarious plans.

All of the LeGuin science fiction books I’ve read have this framework of ethnology— her parents were anthropologists— and of people from very different cultures coming into contact, trying to work together, to understand each other. Her protagonists are often ethnologists, making first contact, or trying to understand a new culture or to forge alliances with a new culture, often they are from a technologically more advanced civilization, making contact with technologically more primitive peoples. But they are seldom able to remain detached observers, instead they experience internal conflict and also find themselves caught up in the conflicts that their own arrival creates. They are often conflicted about whether or how to interfere with local peoples and cultures, but they don’t have anything quite like Star Fleet’s Prime Directive.

Even if he wanted to, Rocannon cannot remain a detached observer but is enmeshed in the culture of the warrior Liuar and needing their aid to complete his mission to warn the rest of the League about the rebel base. And yet he still is an outsider defying many of the Liuar’s expectations, especially in his attitudes toward and treatment of the other species and to the bondsmen/slaves. While it is as expected a bit rougher and less refined than LeGuin’s later works, you can find all of her preoccupations here and it has the qualities that I love in her work: curiosity, questioning, conflicts that are more focused on the internal and interpersonal than battles in or military or political arenas.

Fun fact: this novel is where LeGuin coined the term “ansible” to describe FTL communication devices, a word that has been picked up by other science fiction authors, notable Orson Scott Card in his Ender’s Game series.

Planet of Exile

The orbital period of the planet Werel is 60 Earth years long. The season of Winter lasts for fifteen Terran years. As the story opens Winter is just beginning, with the annual settlement of the nomadic peoples, called by the Terrans hilfs or High-Intelligence Life Form, in walled cities built in the moment for the purpose. It is also the season of the annual migration of other hordes of nomadic peoples, the Gaal, who pillage the hilf cities.

The tiny Terran colony of Landin has been stranded for 10 Werel years—that’s 600 Terran years— and is starting to fail. The Farborn must join forces with the people of the local settlement or both groups will be overrun because the barbarian gaals have banded together for the first time into one massive group as opposed to the smaller bands they have previously encountered.

The story centers around this crisis and also around the unlikely cross-species romance between a young woman, Rolery, a member of the nomadic Tevaran clan and the Farborn Jakob Agat, one of the leaders of the Terran colony. Rolery’s grandfather, Wold, had also previously married a Farborn wife. It is thought that the two species are not fertile with each other, but by the end of the novel it appears that the Terrans have changed and that it is possible Rolery and Jakob will be able to have children together.

City of Illusions

Planet of Exile is the prequel to this novel which explores the dark time after the fall of the League of Worlds to an alien people who have the ability to lie telepathically with their minds.

Set on Earth, in fact in North America, in a far distant future, sometime after the fall of the League of Worlds. The protagonist is a man with no memory who showed up in a rural community in the eastern forests. He sets out on a quest to go west to find the city of the alien overlords so that he can learn who he is, where he comes from, and what his hidden and mysterious purpose is.

On his journey he finds enemies and allies and many puzzles and conundrums. Finally, he faces a choice: he can recover his past memories, his past self, but he will lose all he experiences and memories he has made in the past three years. Or he can hold onto his current self, current memories, but not unlock his past or his purpose. The problem is he doesn’t trust the people who are offering to restore him to himself.

This novel is explicitly laced through with the Daoism that is another of LeGuin’s abiding themes and which is prominent in her Earthsea novels. It’s a thread I don’t particularly understand or vibe with; but I think it adds a flavor of I’m not sure contemplation? gentleness? I like it.

The Word for World is Forest

What happens to a people who have no word for war when they must learn to fight to save their world from exploitation? Will they lose their own humanity and sense of self?

The Athsheans recognize the humanity of the “yumans” while the Terrans, especially the villain Captain Davidson, dehumanize them, calling them “creechies”. But the Athsheans, according to the anthropologist Raj Lyubov, have no concept of murder, rape, war, violence of any kind.

The people of Terra are logging and clear-cutting vast swathes of land on a forest world called Athshe. They have enslaved the local hominid people, who are small, only a meter high, green and furred and whom the Terrans think of as less than human. A Terran anthropologist who has learned the language and customs of the native Athsheans tries to advocate for them.

The story begins from the point of view of the villain, Captain Davidson, who is a self-righteous, misogynistic, racist, rapist and murderer. His character feels rather over the top and more like a caricature than a person and I think is something of a failure on LeGuin’s part. But the culture of the local forest people, who are completely nonviolent, is fascinating. They are crepuscular with a very different sleep cycle and they have vivid (waking?) dreamtimes, a strange state which is a source of wisdom and prophetic knowledge.

Selver is an Athshean who has become an assistant and friend to Lyubov. He has taught Lyubov his language while also learning about yuman culture. When Selver’s wife is raped and murdered by Davidson, Selver becomes a kind of prophet, his people call him a god, leading them on a crusade to drive out the invaders.

Finally the war comes to an end when representatives from Hain and Tau Ceti come to observe the human colony, bringing with them the ansible technology which allows for instantaneous communication between worlds that are light years apart.

This story, published in 1972, is a direct response to the Vietnam War and I think LeGuin’s completely understandable animosity to that war is her one blind spot. She doesn’t have the emotional distance to allow any empathy for Davidson. Making him a point of view character is, I think, her attempt to bridge that gap; but it doesn’t quite work. Still, it’s a minor flaw in an otherwise rich story.

Five Ways to Forgiveness

A collection of shorter fiction set within the Hainish universe. As the title suggests, each of the stories explores something about forgiveness. All of the stories are set either on the planet Werel or its colony world Yeowe, and explore various aspects of slavery and freedom, especially in the context of the observers and ambassadors of the Ekumen. I’m not sure why, but I’m not usually as much of a fan of the short story as I am of the novel. However, these are beautifully crafted stories with fully realized characters that I wanted to linger with longer.

The Ekumen, the collection of worlds that are united by a common vision, eschews violence, war, slavery, and exploitation and yet also generally does not interfere directly with the cultures of the worlds they hope to invite to join the Ekumen. Rather, they rely on an influx of knowledge and cultural influence to slowly guide the peoples towards a better path. Though there are no rules or guidelines quite so clear as the Star Trek Prime Directive, there seems to be a great deal of leeway for the individual ambassadors to act. There is no outright rule of noninterference, only the limitation that of the vast interstellar distances and a refusal of the Hainish to go to war. The individual persons who representatives of the Ekumen have their own personal reactions to slavery and while some of them, especially the Hainish themselves, maintain a mostly detached observer stance, others get directly involved in various ways of trying to shape the direction of change and to hasten the demise of slavery and the end of war. But because they cannot use force, they are limited to the tools of persuasion. Achieving change is difficult, but not impossible. And it always begins with the capacity for forgiveness.

The Telling

The final novel of the Ekumen, this might be my new favorite LeGuin novel. Sutty is a Terran Observer for the Ekumen sent to a planet ruled by a worldwide Corporation/State. Sutty has come from a Terra that has only recently been freed from a worldwide theocracy. From an Indian family that had fled to Canada as political refugees, she was one of the oppressed minorities. She brings with her a lot of her own personal baggage that at first she thinks is a hindrance to her job, but which also gives her much empathy that the Hanish ambassador believes is her strength. She travels into the backcountry where she finds the hidden remnants of the Maz, the purveyors of an oral culture, the repository of a wisdom that the Company has rejected.

The importance in The Telling of story—both oral and written in books— makes this novel sing to my heart.

Other, Non-Hainish books

Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin

This is LeGuin’s last published novel. It is not a Hainish book, but a retelling of Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid from the point of view of the Italian Lavinia, Aeneas’s second wife to whom Virgil gives no words in his poem.

LeGuin had set out to translate the Aeneid,1 teaching herself Latin so that she could read it, and out of her translation grew a novel that continues to explore Virgil’s themes about war and duty and honor. LeGuin says it’s a meditation on war, the moral cost of war, and what makes a real hero. The first part of her novel covers the events of the second half of the poem, the final six books after Aeneas has arrived in Italy. The second half of the novel is what happens after the end of the poem, the what happens next.

The aspect of this retelling that I find most compelling is Lavinia’s awareness of herself as a character in Virgil’s poem. She has several mystical encounters with the shade of the poet as he lays dying on board a ship. He is surprised by his encounter with Lavinia, recognizing that she is much more interesting than the character he had written in his poem. He regrets not being able to go back to revise the poem to include her as a fully rounded character.

Lavinia explores the cultures of the local Latin tribes before the coming of the Trojans, their wars among themselves, the influence of the Etruscans and the Greek colony of Diomedes. And then there is the coming of Aeneas, prophesied by the Poet and by other omens and signs. Lavinia, who dislikes her kinsman Turnus and all her other suitors, is willing to fall in love with the stranger and to make him her husband, even though she knows she will only have three short years with him.

One of the most compelling sections of the novel is when Aeneas wrestles with his pietas, his sense of moral and divine duty, and his fate and his virtue and with what he can teach and pass on to his son Ascanius, who is hotheaded and thinks only of the virtue of heroism in war. Aneneas does not want to be a man of war and yet war has defined and shaped him. He longs for peace and for creating a civilization which will last and he eagerly embraces Lavinia’s gods as well—as much as she embraces his gods. When Aeneas tries to teach Ascanius that there is more to virtue than heroism in war one wonders if the boy is able to learn the lesson that his father so desperately wants to teach.

Retellings of classical tales through the female point of view have been very popular of late, though I haven’t yet read any of them. One thing I suspect that makes LeGuin’s novel different is that, as she says in an interview, she’s not writing to set the record straight or to correct Virgil, but in homage to him and believing that her character and story grow out Virgil’s poem and in tribute to him and in dialogue with him. I hope that LeGuin’s beautiful novel is noticed and read by more people who enjoy that sort of story. It deserves a wider audience.

Maame by Jessica George

A contemporary bildungsroman about a young woman, Maddie, the daughter of Ghanian immigrants in London. The title, “Maame” is Maddie’s nickname, called that by her mother, in her parents’ native Twi language, it means “mother” or “the responsible one”. Maddie resents her mother calling her that, feeling like she’s been saddled with all the responsibility that her mother has avoided. Maddie is caretaker for her father who has Parkinson’s while her mother is living in Ghana and her brother is mostly absent.

The story follows Maddie through losing her job, trying to find another, moving out on her own and trying to get unstuck from being merely her father’s caretaker, unwilling to engage in the larger world. Throughout the novel she turns to Google to look for answers to her questions about what to do, how to make choices. She doesn’t trust her busybody mother who has essentially abandoned her family and whose advise feels out of touch with Maddie’s real wants and needs. But she is still ruled by her mother’s precept that she shouldn’t talk about family business to outsiders. So, while she has friends, and then later roommates, she also doesn’t seem to trust them either because she cannot overcome this prime directive of nondisclosure. She makes relationship mistakes as she tries to enter the world of dating with only Google as her guide. While this was an interesting narrative device, it was also a deeply frustrating personality trait.

Honestly, I found Maddie to be a very frustrating protagonist until the very end, when she suddenly does a lot of growing up fast and learns to communicate more clearly with her friends and her family. Her pattern of poor decision making, her refusal to talk about herself and her problems to anyone outside the family mean that she’s a very stunted person through most of the novel, trapped in the identity of Maame, “the responsible one”. In the end she comes to terms with that identity, growing beyond her childish understanding of it without jettisoning it altogether. It was a satisfying conclusion to a book that mostly earned it.

I just wish the journey to the conclusion had been less cringeworthy. There were many times I was tempted to not finish the novel. Now this is definitely more a me-problem than a problem with the book. As a reader I struggle with secondhand embarrassment. This protagonist who keeps blundering from one disaster to another created a lot of discomfort for me— but then so did Austen’s Emma on my first reading.

But I enjoy learning about cultures and experiences very different from my own and on that this novel definitely delivered. And by the end of the novel I did care about Maddie very much. I want to mother her and nurture her and make everything better. This was a well-crafted first book from a promising novelist.

Miss Mole by E.H. Young

Miss Mole is a spinster who by her own choice has entered domestic serve— mostly as a companion to unhappy older women. As the novel opens she has run out on her latest client and is wandering the streets, reluctant to return home. As the hours stretch past what is plausible for her ostensible errand, it becomes clear that this is a form of silent quitting and indeed she is let go and must look for another position. She finds a position as a housekeep for a widowed Baptist minister and his children. She dislikes the minister, Robert Corder, right off the bat but takes to his children and decides that they need her intervention.

Throughout the novel there are little breadcrumb trails of hints at various things that have happened in the past that are only gradually revealed to the reader. Usually this doesn’t bother me at all, but there was something in the way these hints were presented that kept making me feel like I was supposed to know and understand what was being referred to and that I had missed something earlier in the book. I kept re-reading those passages, flipping back to find earlier hints, and deciding that maybe I was just being spectacularly bad at reading between the lines and understanding what someone who understood the context better might have grasped immediately.

The first of these was an incident that happened while Miss Mole was wandering about town ostensibly looking for thread for the widow she was companioned to, but really trying to find any reason to avoid going back. She saved the life of a man who was trying to commit suicide, much to the relief of the woman who ran the boarding house where he lived with his wife and infant. I’m not sure when in the story I was supposed to have grasped that this is what happened, the hints were just too slippery for me to grasp and it made me feel like a poor close reader. The other was an incident even further in Miss Mole’s past. I’m pretty sure that the reader is supposed to lack enough information to grasp exactly what happened at first, but again something in the way that it was presented left me feeling baffled and confused and like I’d missed some crucial detail.

I really wanted to like this novel, but I felt like the mischievous Miss Mole and I were just not kindred spirits. I never quite vibed with her (as my teenaged daughters would almost certainly not say.) Again, I think this is a me problem. There’s something about midcentury British novels often leaves me confused and wanting a guide to the unspoken rules that I’m just not grokking. (For example, I often feel equally baffled by Barbara Pym as well.)

Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy: A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves

I needed a comfort re-read of something familiar. Relistening to the audiobooks, I am once again swept away by my love for El (Galadriel Higgins) the prickly first person narrator of this series about a magical school that is much, much darker than Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. El’s natural magical affinity is that of an evil sorceress with the ability to destroy worlds. Her great-grandmother prophesied that she would become a destroyer of Enclaves and a bringer of war, but her mother is a pacifist who refuses to use any dark magic at all. El has spent her life trying to fight against this dark fate. She is suspected and shunned by everyone who comes into contact with her and feels her aura of dark menace, even non-magical mundanes feel it and avoid her. And yet she refuses to use any malia at all.

All magic gets its power either from mana or malia. Mana is earned by doing physical labor or can be freely given from one person to another. Malia is life force stolen, either consciously or unconsciously, from other living things. El is determined to be strictly mana, mostly because once she starts to draw malia she knows she will be unable to take only a little but will take everything and in the process become the evil sorceress of the prophecy.

Use of malia creates maleficaria, evil magical monster-constructs that can only survive by consuming the mana of wizards. The Scholomance is a magical school built into the Void with the intent to protect all the magical children from the hordes of maleficaria that would otherwise consume them. The Scholomance can only provide partial protection, however, the majority of wizard children will not survive to graduate. The only reason anyone endures it is that the odds of a wizard child surviving to adulthood are significantly worse if they can’t get into the Scholomance.

NonFiction

Great Courses: History of India by Michael H. Fisher

The Great Course lectures are available an Audible. I know bits and pieces about the history of India, this survey class is a great way to put it all together in a timeline in my head. I’m mostly listening in the car or while cooking dinners.

One of the not specifically Indian things I’ve learned from this class is the use of the terms “emic” and “etic” by anthropologists and historians to describe two different points of view. The “emic” perspective is how a people see themselves, how they would explain their own language, culture, religion, mythology, and traditions. The “etic” perspective is how those things are described by an outsider, a historian or scientist or academic. I love how professor Fisher always starts with the emic perspective first and then switches to the etic perspective second. It feels very respectful of the people and their culture to describe the way they see themselves before presenting what is sometimes a contradictory or at least very different outside perspective. In a way it holds a space for both things to be true in different ways.

This class has played off of my LeGuin reading in interesting ways since so much of her storytelling is about clashes of perspective and conflicts that arise when people fail to create bridges of understanding.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

It’s not often that a non-fiction book grabs me such that I can’t put it down. The narration in this book is so well crafted and the story so fascinating that it’s been my primary book for a while, which rarely happens with nonfiction.

The story of a culture clash between Hmong refugee immigrants and the American medical system. The Hmong are a tribal people who originated in present-day China and migrated south to the mountains of present-day Laos. They were recruited by the Americans during the Vietnam war and eventually many of them ended up in the US. This is a story about a Hmong family in California whose daughter is epileptic and the two very different worldviews that, more even than the language barrier, make it almost impossible for the girl to be effectively treated. Anne Fadiman became intimate with the Lee family over a number of years and she is able to tell the story from both the point of view of the Hmong family and community and the doctors and medical community.

It’s more than a fascinating case study, it’s a very human story. And the timing is fantastic, because at times it feels almost like it could be an Ursula LeGuin novel.

Poetry

When you read poetry how do you read it? Do you finish a whole book in one sitting or over a few? Do you read a single poem at a time and then stop? Do you read one author, one book at a time or do you jump from one to another in a haphazard fashion? Are you a completist or is your approach scattershot? Do you make yourself linger and puzzle over difficult poems or do you skip them, hunting for that which is more immediately accessible?

I tend to be a dipper.

At least recently I’ve been. Sometimes, occasionally, I have found myself hyperfocusing on one poet, one book, a sequence of poems. But in general I’m actually not that good at focusing on poetry for very long.

I struggle with long poems. The stars have to be just right. Sometimes, often, my mind won’t settle. Sometimes the starts are aligned and I sink into the world of a long poem and it sings in me and I wonder why I avoid them.

I keep a bunch of books around that I’m dipping into here and there now and again but I almost never feel like I’m doing any of them justice. And yet, they are one of the foundations of my world.

Wild Iris by Louise Glück

This collection of poems has become a bit of an obsession. I don’t remember anymore who recommended it, but when I said I loved her Vespers poems, someone told me to get the book.

The poems in this book are a wandering outdoors in the wilderness and in gardens. They are a polyphonic conversation whose voices alternate between poems in the voice of various flowers and natural phenomena, those in the voice of the narrator poet, many of them addressed to a God she doesn’t quite believe in and doesn’t quite disbelieve in. And some poems that seem to be responses from God, speaking through nature, to the poet.

The themes are depression and grief and doubt, the dying of the year, and a kind of anger at God for his distance and indifference. But there is also a deeply rooted joy and liveliness, a fast-held hope for the future found in the cyclical nature of the year and there are flashes of the numinous divinity that sing out and defy the poet’s doubt and cynicism and despair.

The Vespers poems remain some of my favorites in the collection. All of them are simply called “Vespers” and so must be distinguished one from the other by the opening line. I think all of them are in the second person. They address a “you” who seems to be a God that the narrator may or may not believe in. That the author is uncertain about. That the author alternatively wrestles with and takes to task and complains to. They’re modern psalms of complaint and lamentation and I love them.

Niall Campbell: Island in the Sound

I discovered Niall Campbell via the North Sea Poets Substack. The first piece of his that I read was an essay, not a poem:

North Sea Poets

The Age of Singing

It was my son’s birthday last week and so I have been remembering two surprises of the first weeks of parenthood. The first waited for us in the sitting room of our rented tenement flat. We chose the flat more for its location than its comfort, being situated in Edinburgh’s southside and near my wife’s parents. The chilly stairwell smelled of damp concr…

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2 years ago · 43 likes · 10 comments · Niall Campbell

Then I must have read some of his poems and I think a review of The Island in the Sound. I can’t quite remember what it was that made me feel I needed to own it NOW. (It might have been on sale?) In any case, it’s been hanging out in the pile of poetry books on the table in the bathroom.

On Eriskay is a lovely poem, rich with Scottish mythology. The House by the Sea, Eriskay, is haunting and tender.

Jane Kenyon Collected Poems and Donald Hall, various library books

After Zina invited me to go with her to Eagle Pond Farm, I’ve been dipping into more Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall. I already owned Kenyon’s Collected Poems, so that has joined the bedside stack and I’ve been flipping through it frequently. I didn’t own any Hall, except the picture book of Ox Cart Man, so I’ve been reading him via what ebooks and audiobooks I can get at the library.

A.E. Stallings Like, This Afterlife

I’ve picked up Stallings a few times in recent weeks: once to re-read “Explaining an Affinity for Bats”2 and another time to find “First Love: A Quiz”3. You can hear Stallings read both of these in this Ted Talk. Of course while I had the books out, I read several other poems, dipping, dipping. Stallings is easy to read and always rewarding and I adore listening to her reading her poems and her lectures about poetry4.

Sally Thomas’s new book, Among the Living

especially the Hermit sonnets. I’ve been reading Sally’s Hermit poems as they’ve been published in various venues5 over the last few years and was quite eager to have them all together in one place. And yet I’m only dipping into them, not gobbling them up like I might at a different season. They are worth sipping slowly and savoring.

Here’s Sally reading some of her poems and fiction at Thomas More College.

Malcolm Guite’s After Prayer

I’ve been slowly copying out the titular sonnet sequence, which grows out of George Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer’. In it Guite uses each phrase from Herbert’s sonnet as the title for his own sonnet, which explores the meaning of the phrase. You can read Herbert's sonnet with Guite’s sequence hyperlinked on his webpage, I love how the internet allows for this hyperlinked version of Herbert’s sonnet to open up to Guite’s responses, nesting each responding sonnet within each phrase.

Here is a video clip of Guite reading Herbert’s sonnet and some of his own poems.

Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems

Maya Popa hosted an Elizabeth Bishop book club in August, focusing on the very short collection, Geography III. I already knew and loved a couple of the poems in this collection including The Moose and One Art. Others were poems I hadn’t previously read but are now new favorites: 12 O’Clock News and The End of March, Duxbury.

The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and Station Island by Seamus Heaney

Inkwell announced a poetry competition with the theme, Corresponding with the Dead. I don’t think I’m at all prepared to write the poem that this prompt sparks, but the prompt took me back to the two poets who have most inspired me and who both, coincidentally, have written poems in which they correspond with dead poets.

I first read Eliot’s Four Quartets more than thirty years ago when I was in college. At the University of Dallas English majors do a poetry project their junior year, aptly called The Junior Poet Project. You adopt a poet and read all of their published poems, read a biography, read a great heaping pile of criticism. You write an annotated bibliography of critical works (each annotation must not be longer than three sentences). You choose an exemplary poem. And then you sit an oral exam with three of your professors, who can grill you on any of the poems and on any of the critical works included in your annotated bibliography. Which is all a long-winded way of explaining how Eliot got so deep under my skin that he’s in my blood.

It’s in ‘Little Gidding’ that Eliot writes about his correspondence with the dead. In Part I he writes:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

That was always one of my favorite passages in the Quartets.

Then in Part II of ‘Little Gidding’ the poet-narrator, patrolling the streets of London during the Blitz, meets the ghost of “some dead master”, catches “the eyes of a familiar compound ghost both intimate and unidentifiable”. Eliot’s ghost isn’t one specific master, but rather a compounding of several memories. He clearly alludes to Dante and Virgil in the Divina Commedia, but also, surely, invokes other master poets.

   So I assumed a double part, and cried
   And heard another's voice cry: 'What are you here?' 
Although we were not. I was still the same,
   Knowing myself yet being someone other—
   And he a face still forming: yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
   And so, compliant to the common wind,
   Too strange with each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
   Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
   We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

When I think of corresponding with the dead, I first think about corresponding with Eliot, and specifically with Eliot’s correspondences with the dead in Little Gidding. I find myself slipping down a rabbit hole of referentiality. No, I do not think I am capable of writing this poem. Not yet. Nor do I think there is another poem that could possibly answer this prompt.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
   To purify the dialect of the tribe
   And urge the mind to after sight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
   To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

Eliot was only 54 when Little Gidding was published. Only a couple years older than I am now. And yet he’s so freely talking about “the gifts reserved for age” as if he were an old man. Middle-aged me laughs about this now, understanding as teenaged me never could, that Eliot isn’t old here. He’s just middle aged.

Certainly, I see much more now in these passages than I did when I was younger. More, I see more of the stuff that connects these passages, the parts that I didn’t connect with once upon a time. And yet I don’t think I’m quite ready to correspond with Eliot.

The other great poet love of my academic life is Seamus Heaney. I first encountered Heaney when I was an undergraduate when I went to a lecture about his poetry. I think it might have been right after he won the Nobel Prize, though possibly it was even before then. My affection for obsession with Heaney was a large part of why I decided to get my MA in Irish Studies, and so Heaney is largely responsible for my moving to Boston.

Heaney also has a poem sequence in which he encounters the dead, the twelve-part ‘Station Island’. My copy of Station Island must be one I bought when I traveled to Ireland; it has the Faber and Faber cover. As Heaney makes the traditional pilgrimage to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg, he encounters a series of ghosts, memories of various friends and mentors who have died. My favorite of these sections is XI, in which he remembers a long-ago monk-confessor who told him to “Read poems as prayers” and to translate something by St John of the Cross. Much of this section is that translation.

And that brings me back again to Eliot who in his Four Quartets paraphrases John of the Cross as well:

                                           You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
   You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
   You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
   You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
   You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

East Coker, III

What do I have to say back to Eliot, Heaney, John of the Cross? I am not sure. But I’m re-reading these sections and letting them lay down another layer of compost in my imagination. Someday maybe it will be ready for planting.

Please do leave a comment and tell me about the books you are reading. I love comparing book notes with other readers.

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Come, walk in the garden with me. The days decline, though the sun is still warm, the breezes have definite cool undertones.

A few scraggly tomato vines are surviving rather than thriving because this was not a year when we were good about watering. (There was a deadly nightshade in the same bed that was covered with mildew. I left it, thinking it was a tomato vine, until it fruited dark berries. Oops!) Still, cherry tomatoes are ripe for the picking and there will be more tomorrow and tomorrow. Volunteer strawberries have taken over the garden bed and if you look carefully you can find sun-warmed treasures under the leaves.

The maples are slowly starting to turn. In mid August we spied a red leaf or two in the lawn. Now there are more, but still not many.

Fall flowers are blooming: sunflowers, morning glories, zinnias, black eyed Susans, marigolds, cosmos. The hostas are trumpeting, bees are humming and crickets chirping. The cicadas are still buzzing and the frogs that sang love songs in spring have reappeared for their autumnal encore.

A couple weeks ago we saw a fat groundhog under the peach tree, eating windfalls. A chipmunk darts across the patio.

If you lounge in one of the hammocks you will probably see a mockingbird—they had a nest in the juniper this year. You’ll likely hear a wren and a song sparrow, grackles and starlings, cardinals and titmice, jays and chickadees. Maybe some swifts or a red-shouldered hawk.

My son and I try to write haiku together on most school days, using a one-word prompt. I’ve gathered a collection of these and some other short poems along with the photos that often inspired them. A little nature journal from my neighborhood south of Boston. Welcome.

first flecks of red—
         sparks igniting
in maple trees

corona 
petals fade, 
gold paint scraped 
to grey-white.

dark eye, compounded
of countless 
unblinking blooms.

how have I never
noticed this minute
perfection before today?

	dark eyed beauties
fading, fall textured, scraped thin,
	the cricket song

           this twisted glory—
ready to spring open
           with loud trumpet blasts

an exultation
of morning 
glories

an idle rake
leans against the wall—
glories take advantage 

late summer
golden suns unfurl
in my garden
a cosmos

         sunning herself
on a golden terrace
         bumblebee

summer clouds—
                a humming
                               of hydrangeas

even at midnight
sunflower glows—
vigilant porch lamp

             midnight dancer waits
for her sun-love— swayed by
		                 cricket serenade

      your voice a murmur—
lost in September’s night
      cacophony

storm-broken,
sunflower still 
blooms—stem
wavy from
my repeated
failures to
remember to
tie her up
to the stake

mixed flocks—
grackles and starlings pitying
the bare trees

re-leave the trees: 
blackbirds falling to branches
with cries of delight

when the tree 
is supersaturated
whoosh, wings explode

on the pine—
four crows alight, one by one
and then regroup

the great white pine—
absent like a missing tooth
I tongue the gap

* * *
the great white pine—
where it stood, the sky.
my eyes cannot roost

For a while now I’ve been visiting (involuntarily) a country called Burnout. I don’t want to talk about it; but it’s why I’ve been more scarce around here than I’d like. My self care has involved spending afternoon hours in the hammock, bingereading the Vorkosigan Saga and the Dresden Files, and avoiding writing and responsibility like the plague.

I have, however, been keeping up with laundry and dishes and listening to children talking about Minecraft etc. So it’s the bigger responsibilities I’ve been shirking— phone calls, paperwork, school planning, writing transcripts—not the daily, one-foot-in-front-of-another tasks.

I recently did a sleep study which determined that I have severe sleep apnea. So now my husband and I have matching CPAPs. I’m hoping that some of the brain fog clears now that I’m actually getting more oxygen at night. For a while I’ve been more tired, but I’ve also been regularly sleeping eight-hour nights multiple times a week, which barring sickness and pregnancy exhaustion, I haven’t done since my oldest was born twenty years ago.

So here’s catching up on my reading log, beginning with what I was reading in May. I’m no going to chronicle here every volume of the two series I’ve been bingeing—that might come later. But suffice it to say that I think the self-prescribed rest cure has been doing its magic. I had started to sort of subconsciously think of reading as a kind of self-improvement project and had forgotten about re-reading favorites for the sheer pleasure of losing myself in a world and characters that I enjoy. Now I’ve remembered that I’ve always read that way as a form of self-care. It’s nothing to be ashamed of or to view as a moral failure. Reading for education and formation and self improvement are good reasons for picking up a book, but that’s not the full picture of what reading can be and for me it’s a very stunted and stifling approach when not balanced with reading for recreation.

Fiction reading in May:

1. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I pull the stopwatch from my toga (the best ancient Greek philosophers always carried stopwatches in their togas).

I first read Project Hail Mary when it was originally released and loved it even more than The Martian, which was a thoroughly enjoyable novel.

PHM’s protagonist, Ryland Grace, is more interesting than The Martian’s Mark Watney—and so are the book’s scenario and the science. I love the way the science and technical challenges drives the plot without sacrificing character development. PHM uses Grace’s amnesia, and the series of flashbacks that help him to recover lost bits of memory and self, to excellent effect.

Re-read after watching the movie. Just as good as I remembered it.

My sister and I had a marvelous discussion spurred by a First Things article, Project Hail Mary’s Unresolved Moral Dilemmas, whose argument we both disagree with, Charlotte Allen argues that Stratt murders Grace whereas my sister argues that she is drafting him and that his resistance is a shirking of his clear moral duty. It became an interesting exploration of the themes of duty vs desire, just warfare doctrine. We also talked about memory and identity and suicide and ethics of suicide, ethics of suicide missions in general and the PHM mission specifically. Sadly, I don’t have the energy to recreate the discussion here right now. But if anyone wants to talk about it the comments, I might be able to dredge something up.

I do want to argue that it’s not a coincidence that the protagonist is named Grace and that while the name Project Hail Mary might have been a bit of a joke on Weir’s part and while Allen overstates it’s important, I do find the theme of grace quite compelling and read this as an excellent example of a story with a beautiful redemption arc and compelling thread that shows the movement of grace.

2. The Snake Pit/Providence by Sigrid Undset

Olav Audunsson/Master of Hestviken Book II

I’ve slowed down and stalled out near the beginning of volume 2. I know I’ll get back to it, but I definitely needed a summer break. Undset is wonderful and rich and delightful, but she is also demanding.

3. The Queen’s Gambit by Beth Brower

The Books of Imirillia Book I

I love Beth Brower’s The Unselected Diaries of Emma M. Lion, which is well-crafted with brilliant characters. This, an early novel, was available for cheap on Kindle, so I snagged it.

Sadly, I found it a bit of a slog. It clearly reads like a self-published first novel. There are some interesting themes and ideas and characters, but they are not well developed. The pacing is painfully slow at times and there are a lot of rough edges that need polishing. I can see the promise of a good novelist learning her craft, doing some interesting world building, but she’s definitely not there yet. I’m debating with myself about finishing the series once I get to the end of this first volume. My curiosity to see where the plot is going is having a hard time winning out against my frustrations.

*Especially some logistica and world-buildingl frustrations like the queen having only one bodyguard. How on earth is that supposed to work? Does he never sleep? Or why does a small country which is geographically isolated have a complex but also poorly-developed and much too time-consuming system for calling up the levies when facing an invasion— not all invaders are liable to give you a month’s warning before an invasion.

4. Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Murderbot Diaries #8

Happy to have a new installment of this favorite series. It came at the perfect time, reminding me that I love reading series and science fiction series in particular.

I got out of the vehicle and Farai and the juvenile piled out after me. The militia looked at us and immediately broke ranks to usher us through. The fact that I still had a human child attached to my chest probably had something to do with it.

A few years ago, when my sister first told me she was reading the Murderbot Diaries, I thought the premise sounded weird. But she was really into it and so were several other friends so I gave it a shot. It’s now a favorite series and a favorite re-read.

Murderbot is the self-deprecating name that a cyborg security unit (Sec Unit) gives to itself privately in its own mind. It doesn’t actually murder people. Instead it reprograms itself, disconnecting its governor module, which is supposed to control its behavior. Murderbot is antisocial and would rather be watching serials like its favorite, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It doesn’t like having to babysit and protect humans from their own stupidity.

But it somehow manages to befriend one particular group of client who are researchers from a system that is outside the highly corporate Corporation Rim— basically space hippies. It saves them from a disaster and they adopt it and take it home with them. Or try to. It runs away because it doesn’t want to be a pet. But their fates seemed to be bound together. It befriends a robot transport ship and eventually frees some other Sec Units. Is it inadvertently starting the robot revolution?

(Emotion check: Angry. It’s never a good idea to try to do complicated things when you’re angry. Like coding. Coding is complicated. Especially when people are shooting at you. But I do that all the time.)

5. Out Law by Jim Butcher

Dresden Files #18.5

Another installment in a different series that I love dropped in the same week as the new Murderbot!!! What riches!

In my head, the spirit of my best friend, a good man, murmured, It is never unworthy work to attempt to redeem one who is lost and wishes to be found.

Out Law is Dresden Files novella, sequel to The Law, the second in a projected trilogy of novellas. These novellas fill in some of the spaces between the main novels. This is great idea because at this point the cast of characters has become a little unwieldy and the primary plot doesn’t give Harry much time for old fashioned detective work. Here we see him getting back to the basics, pursuing the smaller side-quests: his work for the little guy, for the lost and broken of Chicago. I love Butcher’s shorter fiction as a means of exploring lore and characters that are ancillary to the main storyline but deeply enriching.

The Dresden Files is a sweeping urban fantasy saga. Set in Chicago, it follows Harry Dresden, a young wizard with a traumatic past. The first few novels were written for a creative writing class and are fairly formulaic: Harry, a private detective, solves cases that the police can’t solve involving black magic, werewolves, vampires, necromancers, etc.

Most people in Harry’s world can’t see the supernatural, don’t believe in it. But the powers of good and evil are real and over the course of 18 books (and novellas and short stories) we see just about every flavor of supernatural being out there drawing on myths and legends and folktales from around the world.

Harry often pairs up with a Chicago cop, the fiesty Karin Murphy and his best friend is Michael Carpenter, a faithful Catholic and a Knight of the Sword, dedicated to fighting evil and saving souls. And over the course of the series he makes more friends, makes more enemies, gathers allies, and gradually comes of age becoming gradually wiser and more powerful and becoming a force to be reckoned with. As he becomes more powerful, the stakes are higher and he gets to know more about the higher levels of the fight between the forces of good and the forces of evil: angels and demons. The stakes are real, good people die when Harry makes mistakes, or even when he doesn’t make mistakes— but he always blames himself.

Butcher is masterful at ret-conning his own work, mining the details of the early novels for what later becomes lore, making it feel like the greater designs were planned all along. He develops minor side characters into important secondary characters, giving them satisfying story arcs and character development. Villains are revealed to be more complicated than we thought at first. And there are often glimpses that even they might have the possibility of redemption offered to them.

“Choose your hard,” I said. “What?” “Life is hard, man. All of it. Nothing you can do will change that. But you can mostly choose what kind of hard stuff you want in it.”

[. . .]

Making an honest living is hard too. But they’re different kinds of hard. You don’t spend time in the pen when you play it straight. But there’s a lot of boring stuff, and most days, you’re making yourself do stuff you’d rather not do. You get to choose which kind of hard you want.”

“What about the easy life?”

“Maybe some people get that, sometimes, for a while. But people weren’t made for easy. We were made to work and scrap and struggle to make our lives into something better. We aren’t supposed to lie around, doing nothing, for very long. People who get away from that forward drive get weird fast.”

This novella explores in a small way—but maybe not-so-small after all— my favorite theme in the Dresden Files: redemption. While Harry wrestles with the fear that he himself is beyond hope of redemption, we see him working for the redemption of his enemies. He fights monsters and demigods and beings of pure evil, but the greater battle is the battle for the human soul.

Ultimately, we know that the real battle of the Dresden Files is the battle is for Harry’s own soul; but it is in the fact that he can still care for the small people that he shows that his humanity. His soul, is not lost, no matter how many mistakes he makes and some of the compromises along the way with demons, with the fae, with gangsters, with vampires. He is essentially a good man—though he is the last person to be able to see it.

“You must be kidding,” I said, harshly. “This guy?” “During the Battle,” Marcone said smoothly, “you challenged me on the practice of my principles. It was uncomfortable and necessary. I now return the compliment. Are your principles actually principled, Dresden? Or do they only apply to the people you happen to like.” Marcone is an asshole. And I was furious. But some part of me realized that I would not have been so angry if he didn’t have a point in there somewhere. And I was past the point in my life where I would let my anger direct my reactions.

(Content warning: the Dresden Files series deals with dark and heavy and mature themes and is NOT appropriate for young readers or sensitive readers. There is a lot of sex and violence —though it is thematically appropriate and not gratuitous—and while my husband and I talk about them with our kids, we don’t let the teens read them yet.)

Reading the new Murderbot and Dresden books reminded me how much I enjoy being immersed in a series when I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed and burned out— which as I’ve said has increasingly been my state in the past months.

So in late May I started binge reads of two favorite series. I re-read Lois Bujold’s adventure/space opera/romance saga, the Vorkosigan series. I simultaneously started listening to the audiobooks of the Dresden Files. James Marsters is a great narrator even if he occasionally pronounces a word in a way that makes me cringe—like “writhing”or “sidhe'“.

I'll try to write more later about why I love these particular series and how binge reading is restorative. Also I want to write a separate post about all the new poetry books I’ve been dipping into. But for now, I’m just happy to finally get this post out of drafts and published so I can get on with other things.

Farmhouse

In this house memories dwell
with pinecone turkeys
and in mouse nests that conceal

photographs—among the detritus
of many lives. Where those who made
a nest among the memories

dared to bring their new things
and made the old place their own.
Objects hold memory

tenderly. Hold place
for what has been lost
and for what might still be found.

Ours is the work of reclamation
the slow patient work of unpacking
these treasures that time has given back—

the gifts of white space and a leather
satchel hanging in a closet,
of a purse and scarf waiting on a hook

on the back stairs near a fading poster,
waiting for the shoulder
and neck that will never more accept

their insignificant weight.
Ours is the work of picking
up the fallen threads

to spin into new memories
that we too can pass down:
There we were on pilgrimage,

walking from room to room
a little dazed by the place, the stories,
the invisible generations watching us

and wondering why
we were there. As we ourselves
perhaps wondered—or maybe it was just me?

Happy in the moment to be in place
and gather words and images,
hoarding them in my pockets

like pebbles from a beach,
wondering if they would still
be shiny and beautiful

when I got them home—
the dry light of an editor's eye
passing skeptically over their curves.

Luminous Particulars

Listen, light inhabits
rooms on summer afternoons—
slips through the lace of trees
and the lace of curtains.
.
Sunshafts paint patterns, creeping
across shelves, chairs, across
the floor—waiting for someone
to catch the meaning,
to scavenge something
from the devastation.

On a Sunday afternoon in August I accepted a last-minute invitation from my friend to accompany her to New Hampshire to visit Eagle Pond Farm, the home of the poet and essayist Donald Hall and his wife the poet Jane Kenyon.

I’m far from being well-versed in the poetry of Kenyon or Hall, but Kenyon’s Collected Poems does grace my poetry collection and I’ve poked into it from time to time. I know some of her better-known poems. My kids and I love Donald Hall’s Oxcart Man with the illustrations by Barbara Cooney— we have an extensive collection of Cooney’s books. And I know some of his other work as well.

It’s enough. You don’t have to be an expert or show your credentials to tour a poet’s home. The house is welcoming to all comers no matter who they are or why they are coming. And maybe this excursion will make me want to brush up on my Hall and Kenyon.

And well, who wouldn’t want a Sunday afternoon drive with a friend, talking about poetry, about our lives? Zina and I haven’t had an excursion together in far too long. So despite having just travelled up to Maine and back the day before to drop my kids off at scout summer camp, I joined Zina for a poetry adventure.

The drive up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire was wonderful: beautiful scenery, braided conversation with Zina, interrupted by occasional peeks at the printed directions, cross-checking, hoping the GPS wouldn’t steer us wrong.

Zina and I have known each other for years. I have photos of our third children crawling on the floor together at a conference long ago. And we have been deliberately meeting up since my youngest and her second-youngest were born a couple of weeks apart. We are both mothers of five children, both poets and poetry lovers. Even though we both live in the Boston area, we live far enough apart that our in-person meetings happen a handful of times a year.

Unbelievably we made it to Eagle Pond Farm with no wrong turns. We passed the house without noticing it and had to turn around, but soon we were pulling off of Route 4 into a green yard between an old weathered barn and an old white New England farmhouse with a precariously tilting porch and dark green shutters. We knocked on the door, but there was no answer, even though there was a car there.

We were a bit early so we walked around the house, exploring the yard. I thought I spied someone through a window sitting in the sunlight in a backroom. I wasn’t sure.

Soon enough another car pulled into the drive and parked and a woman in peach-cream overalls told us that she was not Mary Lyn—but that was her car over there. Did we knock? she asked.

We knocked again and this time a short woman with shoulder length curls of grey hair answered the door. Our most gracious hostess and tour guide. Wearing a blue dress and a green cardigan, her voice had shades of Irish vowels. Zina introduced herself and me as her companion.

And we stepped through the door and immediately began the tour in the kitchen, where our guide pointed out the light switch plate: Michelangelo’s David, with the switch in the expected place, slightly naughty place. She told us the original had been lost, but they’d bought a replacement. (I was reminded of the postcard my mom’s fellow choir member bought when at the age of thirteen I accompanied their choir trip to Italy: O DAVID it said. With the O circling his genitals. I was rather shocked.)

Don’t let the house fool you, Mary Lyn said. It was full of Jane and Don’s modern things that they brought with them. They lived a very modern life in this old farmhouse.

Jane writes1:

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating 
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house. 
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.

This kitchen feels that weight of history and I can imagine myself as Jane imagining her life added to theirs.

I try to be even-minded and welcoming of both poets as we toured the house, but it’s Jane who haunts me more. Jane who came here as a stranger and made the place her own. I, a native Texan who have made my home here in New England, feel a kinship with her sense of adopted place.

Jane writes2:

I read the evening paper
with five generations
looking over my shoulder.

In the woodshed
darkness is all around and inside me. 
The only sound I hear
is my own breathing. Maybe
I don't belong here.
Nothing tells me that I don't.

and3:

I feel my life start up again
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water

Likewise, I can imagine myself putting down roots here. Already I love this old farmhouse more than I love the house where my husband and I have been raising our family for the past 18 years. After our tour, Zina and Mary and I will sit in the sitting room and talk about this and that. Mary talks about the light that inhabits the rooms in the afternoons. I talk about how our house has stingy windows that don’t let in enough light. I don’t love my house and I never have. And yet I feel mean to say so. It has tried its hardest to be a shelter to us. It can’t help it that it was never made to be beautiful, never made for love. That it doesn’t stand up to comparison with this old New England farmhouse that has rooted itself in place for more than two hundred years.

Jane writes4:

We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.

We moved from the kitchen to the dining room, peeking at the china in the glass-door china cabinet and in the built-in cupboard and there are the candlesticks, rescued from the estate sale. The red phone on the built-in sideboard. The chairs that have been mauled by the cats and thus were spared being sold off at the estate sale.

We learn how much was lost and how some objects have been rescued and are even now finding their way back. The house is full of empty hooks, but a few pictures have been restored. Modern pictures in this old farmhouse.

Mary is something of a poet herself. As we stand by the bookshelf in the living room admiring the toy ox cart and team of painted wooden oxen, she says the house is a poem. She says the loss perhaps is better than everything having been preserved as it was the day Don died. The last Boston Globe on the table by the chair. The empty space makes space for poets to come and find room for themselves and for their own words.

I jot down words that want to settle themselves into lines, stretch towards becoming their own poems:

white space

what has been lost
creates the empty volumes
waiting to be filled

the house is a palimpsest poem
you are invited to write your lines
and hang them on the empty hooks

invisible whispers wait
to be sorted from the silences,
from the lingering light which inhabits
rooms that are not yet forgetful
of their layered lives,
an anthology of loss and listening,

the wallpaper-peels reveal
layers on layers of loving laughter
and tears, of conversations with the dead
and with future generations

Mary Lyn talks about the hopes for future residencies and the very great need for roof repair and fundraising. Interspersed with anecdotes about Jane and Don are discussions about plans for the future of the non-profit, repairs to the plumbing, the work being done here and there.

Mary Lyn has been a neighbor for a long time. When we poke our heads into the bathroom (the plaque in the hallway says Caldecott Room since it was built with money from Donald Hall’s Caledcott Prize for The Ox-Cart Man.) Mary tells us about brushing her teeth at this sink and looking at the comical toothbrush holder when she was dog-sitting while Don and Jane were out of town.

She tells us about reading gallies of new poetry that came in the mail and about writers she met, about answering the phone and talking to writers.

I imagine the serious conversations about literature and poetry and art. Donald Hall says this farm grew poetry. And I like to think it will continue to grow poetry. I feel seeds of poems planting themselves in dark places in my brain.

Every room has built-in shelves and so does the back hall. They are mostly empty, but some books have been reclaimed. Empty and not empty. The house doesn’t feel like a museum. It doesn’t feel inhabited, but neither does it feel abandoned or deserted. It holds onto its sense of self and Mary’s stories and memories keep its spirit alive. What will it be when those who remember are gone? Will it then fade into museumhood?

Don’s office/workroom has so many built-in shelves, even one that sticks into the room. A rickety little table for the fax machine is propped up in a corner. The large dark wood desk with the rolling chair from Staples in Boston. Here’s the closet with the leather satchel that held books when he was going to readings. I covet the satchel, dare to lift it in my hands and open it, to peek inside and imagine slipping books into its pocket and slinging it over my shoulder. I’m tempted to sit in the desk chair and roll across the floor.

The yellow bedroom with the painted bed5 and paintings on the walls feels like one of the most put together rooms in the house. A beautiful place to sit and dream. The windows with lace curtains look out to the pond, which is now hidden by trees.

We head up perilously steep stairs to the mostly unused second floor: the best bedroom where they put guests, the bedroom where a cousin used to stay in winter when he came down from the mountain.

And the office that used to be Don’s where the proof for Jane’s first book is tacked on the wall next to the window from which you can no longer see Mount Kearsarge.

We go through an attic space and into the back room and across some planks that groan and shift alarmingly— but Mary says they are safe— to find Jane’s workspace.

Jane’s is a perfect office, bright and cheerful with a desk that looks out the window, her quilted cushion on her desk chair. There’s a large cast iron stove, a sitting area with bookshelves, a cozy chair, a rug. On the back of the door hangs a Chinese calendar and a homely oven mitt— necessary for the tending of the stove, but I also imagine Jane running down to tend to something in the kitchen below before coming back up here to write a bit more.

There’s a second window, charmingly low right at the floor, and the ceiling slants under the roof. Oh yes I crave a chance to spend a day here reading and writing and dreaming. Did Jane know how lucky she was to have this perfect room of her own? Not that I would truly exchange my family for this solitude for more than a few days or a week; but oh it does look like bliss from where I type this in my bedroom on the southwest corner of my little 1950s Campanelli ranch house.

We descend from Jane’s office down a small back stairs that opens into the kitchen. At the bottom of the stairs is a hook where someone has placed a handbag and a scarf. There’s a poster for Graywolf Press there too, beside the door.

We start to say goodbye, but it feels too soon, so we return to the sitting room where Zina and I take turns sitting in the blue chair.

We learn that there were once two blue chairs facing each other across the room, one for Jane and one for Don. Sometime in the years after she died he fell asleep in his chair with a cigarette, something that happened more than once, and the chair caught fire and ended up being dragged into the yard by the fire department and hacked to bits. Then Jane’s chair took its place.

So while we were sitting in Don’s chair, we were also sitting in Jane’s chair. A lovely bit of history playing out in Mary’s story.

The Sitting Room

Bookshelves tell stories of lost words
and the minds gone that breathed
words into being and made them live.

Only the books remain and the gaps
where books once were. The empty
blue chair remembers being one of a pair.

Dreams of two facing each other
across a sunlit room—matching
one and then the other. Two who claimed

equal right and equal authority
over words—the give and take
of conversation, a cats cradle of sense
woven between many voices.

Things fall apart when lives are undone.
Objects scatter that were once gathered
under one roof to make a home.

And what can be gathered again
are remnants, incomplete—
an uneasy truce with entropy and time.

This video contains more views of the Eagle Pond farmhouse as it is now, paired with a recording of Jane reading her melancholy and prophetic poem, ‘Otherwise’. One day, she says, I know it will be otherwise. One day she will not be here. And so it is today. And one day I will not be here either.

empty hooks waiting
in the empty house for art
that might not return

Mount Kearsarge Hides6

The stately blue mountain is eclipsed now
hidden from the farmhouse porch
ghosting behind crowds of wild trees.

Jane's daffodil bank sleeps forgetfully
through the summer at the foot
of Ragged Mountain, awaiting new bulbs
that her hands will never plant again.

Eagle Pond lurks somewhere
beyond the hayfield where the cow barn
is long gone. A cluster of trees
forms a screen to hide its shining waters.

A line of turkeys, hens and chicks, could perhaps
lead us there if we tried to follow them.
They disappear into wild
green thickets and are gone.

Be sure to visit the At Eagle Pond website to read the wonderful newsletters that are full of stories and photographs. I’m sure Zina will have her own post and photos up soon, I’ll link them here when she does.

No matter how late the others let you sleep,
You present yourself at the table neat, 
And tidy in striped dress and blue pinafore.

Black stockings, black buttoned boots, highly shined,
Neat braids looped and tied with neat black ribbons—
picture of propriety perched upright 

At the neatly set table. Betrayed only 
By her glum expression, she sulks sadly
Over her cold and solitary breakfast. 

Unfair that while she dressed everyone else got 
Their lovely eggs hot. Now she faces cold loaf 
And tepid tea in the much-detested, 

Much-contested checkered mug. And terribly 
Unfair that her sister in her red beret
Is already slipping out to the autumn 

Garden where she can hear the shouts and play 
Of the laughing others as the glorious 
Game goes on without her. Miserable breakfast.

What is it this time? Pirates or prisoners?
Princesses of Mars? Egyptian Pharaohs’
Daughters drawing out baskets of babies?

Slaves or mummies in sarcophagi or
The burning of Joan of Arc or crowning
Of Charlemagne or stabbing of Caesar 

In the Roman forum? Or rows of rowers  
On a galley bound for sunny Palestine?
The peaches and lingonberries and flowers 

In the lidded pewter pot taunt and tease 
With promised bowers. But she resists the lure. 
Never will she eat their bread of iniquity, 

Their crusts of captivity nor meekly
Take the toast and tea. Surely if she holds 
Out They will see how unjust it all is. 

Surely the others will come running back 
In, crying that it is impossible 
To play the game, any game, without her. 

The red napkin flying under her chin
Declares that she will never surrender. 

I can’t remember off the top of my head if I’ve posted a Carl Larsson-inspired poem here yet. I have a bunch of them and some of them I’ve published on my old blog and some of them have never been published. And I also have a lot of scribbled notes that are not-quite-poems yet.

I adore Larsson’s beautiful paintings and drawings, especially those that depict his family, a big bustling beautiful family in the beautiful home that his wife, also an artist, Karin Larsson curated.

I wrote a first draft of this poem back in 2019 and it was recently asking to be dusted off and polished up.

My house has always been much more chaotic than the serene images of the Larsson home. Though I suspect that with so many children the Larsson, too, saw their share of chaos. My daughters were never quite this put together and breakfast was never so formal a meal. But with three long-haired daughters I have plaited my share of braids. And I have bestowed on this girl and her siblings some of the games my own children have played over the years. This poem is as much a tribute to my children and their beautiful imaginative games as it is to Larsson’s beautiful painting.

Garrowby Hill

Down from the high hills 
	the purple road flows
		twisting and leaping 

	like a gleeful girl 
		in a new twirl dress.

Down down down from the wolds
	into the patchwork  
		valley between fields 

	fearfully tiger-
		striped, new-plowed furrows
			 rippling contours.

Down between the rows 
	of sentinel trees 
		alert red boles
			standing at attention 

	their green canopy 
		shields the roadbanks, 
			shadows green hill’s feet.

The tumbling road dreams
	itself a river
		running towards the sea.

The dazed driver dreams 
	she’s floating adrift 
		on Huck’s wondrous raft, 
		
	cataracting down
		into a color- 
			saturated valley. 

Lost in heaven-dreams, 
	the blue and gold, green
		and violet landquilt 

	rises up before 
		her in glorious waves
			of slow turquoise haze
		
		only to fade fog-
			 like into bank-rolls 
				of distant cloudscapes—

We saw David Hockney’s Garrowby Hill at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2016. It was hanging around the corner from the elevator down to the Garden Cafe. We stopped to admire it on our way down for lunch.

My oldest daughter was quite enamored of it and a decade later the postcard still hangs among the collection next to her bed.

I wrote the first version of this poem in 2020 when I saw the painting on Facebook and recognized it as an old friend.

Then this past week I learned that David Hockney had died and it seemed time to brush off this poem again.

I had a feeling in 2020 that I wasn’t done with the poem and I still have that feeling now, but I’ve messed around with it a bit and I think this version is a at least a little bit better than the first. So here it is, my tribute to David Hockey, may he rest in peace.

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Rainy Day, Boston, 1885

Humanity in motion—
Long skirts, damp at the hems, hiked up 
by hands not holding umbrellas.

Umbrellaless children walking 
close at umbrellaed elbows, 
shrinking from stray drops that sneak under.

Dirty boots, leaking at seams, 
heels tapping on rain-slick pavements,
counterpoint to beating rain.

Horse hooves clopping, splashing,
perched carriage drivers hunched 
against the weather.

Black umbrellas shine and whirling 
carriage wheels reflect slippery light, 
mirrored in the puddled asphalt.

Conversations 
buzzing through the watery air 
like wayward flies.

Rain dripping off hat brims
and harnesses and the awnings hanging 
from the forever redbrick rowhouses.

Rain dripping from the iron railings
and from leaves of the lonely trees 
that ornament the residential streets.

Rain pooling on the rose petals
in the small garden patches
that flank the stoops.

Humanity harried, 
hurrying for shelter
heedless of transient beauties.

Humanity leisured,
sauntering through sodden streets,
savoring the sudden shower.

Humanity busy on bustling errands,
doing business and taking pleasure where they can—
sometimes at the same time.

Rain heavy in the lowering skies,
breathing into summer afternoons
ghosts of early spring.

Rain breathing cold down wet necks,
encouraging soggy sojourners
to huddle in and light a fire

when they finally reach home's haven
and hearth's rest: a warm cup of tea
and a snack of toasted brown bread.

My friend the artist John Herreid recently shared this painting on Facebook. Not only am I a huge fan of the American impressionist painter Childe Hassam1, but I’ve been living in the Boston area for more than twenty years and Boston feels like a second home.

This painting called to me.

It’s rather reminiscent of Gustave Caillebotte’s famous 1877 painting Paris Street; Rainy Day; but I like it better.

Caillebotte’s painting is crisp and sharp, where Hassam’s street scene is soft and more impressionistic. Hassam also boldly leaves his foreground empty, emphasizing the space. Hassam’s figures are smaller and less detailed and yet somehow to me that makes them feel more real. I can smell the rain and hear it in Hassam’s Boston and feel the atmosphere of a chill New England rain. Caillebotte’s Paris doesn’t have that same sensory richness for me. Caillebotte’s rainy Paris is beautiful and I have long thought of it as a favorite, but put beside Hassam’s Boston, I find it fades a little— which is rather sad.

I found myself wondering where exactly in Boston is this painting’s scene located. And then whether I’ve been there and what it looks like today. (I don’t think I’ve been walking there, though I might have driven past.)

A short search led me to this lovely interactive site which explored the painting and gave me a location: “the wide avenues and new brick row houses of his hometown Boston’s fashionable South End at the intersection of Columbus Avenue (on the left) and Appleton Street.”

It took me awhile to find the spot on Google Maps, but eventually I located the intersection and found it on Street View:

That building in the middle is clearly the same one. Take away the lovely awnings and paint the middle section with the windows a brighter cream and you get the modern building, a little sadder but with the same pair of chimneys.

Here’s another street view from 2020 that I found on a Reddit conversation about this painting.:

Also, Reddit informs me that the tree-filled plaza in front of the middle building is Allan Rohan Crite Park. Crite is another Boston artist I’m very fond of and about whose work I’ve been meaning to write more in this space.

Additionally, Reddit informs me that there is a Childe Hassam Park further up Columbus Ave. I’m starting to think I need to visit the South End for a walking tour to take in both parks.

The modern intersection doesn’t look much like it did in Hassam’s day; but you can see that further down the street many of the redbrick rowhouses with bow fronts still stand: iconic Boston.

But the catalyst for my poem, beyond the painting itself, was the quote from Hassam on the Toledo Museum of Art website that I used as my epigraph: “I am never tired of observing them in every-day life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure. Humanity in motion is a continual study to me.”

That phrase, “humanity in motion,” wanted to become a kind of refrain along with the painting’s rain.

A rainy day in Boston in 1885 isn’t really so different from one today. Replace the horses with cars, of course, update the clothing. But people are people and rain is rain and light still plays magically over the wet asphalt.

1

We saw a lovely exhibit of Childe Hassam’s work at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem about a decade ago.

chainsaws
chainsaws cutting through
the morning birdsong

and the maple crown
floating impossibly up 
over the treetops

one by one by one
the great trees go, groaning
into the roaring maw

the chipper devours
rustling winds, shady noontimes,
and the dawn chorus

bewildered starlings
congregate, wondering where
their nests have gone

robins' serenades 
become dirges, starlings 
caoineadh, catbirds cry

and the engines
of destruction drone their bass
growls long after leaf-fall

and no one thinks 
to plant new trees to give shade
to their grandchildren

This poem has been brewing in my head for a while.

A caoineadh, or keen in English, is a traditional Irish lament for the dead. The most famous caoineadh is the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

In form my poem really has nothing to do with an Irish caoineadh. And yet I’ve been haunted by the form since reading Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s memoir, A Ghost in the Throat. Ni Ghriofa also writes about starlings in that memoir and in her delightful poem, “at half eleven in the Mutton Lane in, I am fire, slaughter, dead starlings”.1 2

This poem has been brewing.

We live in a neighborhood that was built in the 1950s. Before that this land was a farm. And long before that it was wild woodlands. Wherever humans stop ruthlessly cutting back the trees, empty lots tend to revert back to woods. Our local forests are young and criss-crossed with stone walls. Once those grounds too had been cleared for farming. But when we stop clearing the trees, the forests return.

All the roads in our neighborhood are named for the members of the family who last farmed this land. Now there are rows of Campanelli houses.

All the trees that were planted by the builders or original owners are now getting old. Some of them are likely in their 70s. So it’s understandable that some of them have to come down. But no one is planting new trees and gradually our neighborhood which was once tree-lined and shady has been transformed. All the lovely maples and pines, locusts and catalpas are going. And my heart grieves each time we lose another tree-friend.

This poem has been shaping itself in my head like storm clouds gathering.

Yesterday morning I took a walk with my second daughter. By the time I took an evening walk the great silver maple on the corner of the block was gone. Only a stump left. And the starlings that nested there… sitting on a wire nearby. Yes the tree was old and needed to go. In a spring storm it dropped a large branch that took out a section of fence and part of the gutter on the house and narrowly missed knocking a hole in the roof. But now there is another gap.

This morning I watched as the neighbors behind and to the side of us took down a whole row of maple trees along their back fence. Another hole in my heart, another blank spot on the horizon that was just yesterday filled with leafy branches.

This poem is a gathering storm.

Last year our next-door neighbors took down the locust that shaded my bedroom window. And the people behind us took down the white pine that I could see from my kitchen window while washing the dishes. Every one of these trees has a story. For some of them I have poems as well.

recently linked to this essay by : On Noticing a Tree Being Cut Down. Harrellson’s essay echoed the lines that have been forming in my head, in my heart. Perhaps it helped to give them this particular shape as well.

Yesterday’s chainsaw chorus and dirge also reminded me how physically visceral tree removal feels. The sound really bypasses abstraction. You feel it in your chest. The vibrations travel through walls and windows with an alarming thud when a solid and alive oak lands suddenly. It unsettles birds, and dogs bark differently. Even the light changes almost immediately once a canopy disappears. A yard that felt sheltered in the morning suddenly feels exposed by afternoon.

There is a phenomenology to tree loss that environmental discourse often misses. We talk about carbon sequestration, heat islands, runoff mitigation, biodiversity, and property values. All of those matter, obviously. But there is also the immediate lived experience of absence. A street feels different when older trees disappear. The scale of things changes. Time itself feels altered. Older trees bring a sense of temporal depth to neighborhoods. They silently witness generations.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy comes to mind, especially her insistence that perception is never neutral. To perceive another being as alive requires a kind of openness that exceeds utility. Perhaps ecological intentionality begins precisely there... in learning again how to perceive the more-than-human world not as scenery or resource but as neighbor.

Harrellson continues:

I do not know why those particular trees were cut down. Maybe there were entirely legitimate reasons (the house was recently purchased, and I haven’t met our incoming neighbors yet). Maybe the owners had worried about storm damage, roots, or decay. I’m not interested in condemning neighbors from across the street by any means.

But I do think the question matters.

Because every removed tree reveals something about how we imagine our relationship to place. Whether a yard is merely owned space or a shared habitat. Whether shade is an inconvenience or a gift. Whether we understand ourselves as managers, stewards of landscapes, or participants in living ecologies.

I am not finished lamenting for the trees. I could write whole books about them. I likely will. The trees are my friends, living beings who shared my neighborhood. They were neighbors. I miss them.

I would love someday to found a non-profit organization that will help individual homeowners plant new trees when old trees must be cut down. I have no idea how to go about doing such a thing. But every time a tree goes down, it not only hurts my heart, it also fills me with a desire to DO SOMETHING. I want to find some way to enable people to plant a new one it its place. I want to be able to give them a tree.

The rose-gold world 
resounds with end 
of day gladness:

sky stretched canvas
tautly waiting 
for calling crows, 

starlings winging
home to their roosts,
robin redbreasts

serenading.
The grass’s green 
a-glimmer with gilt.

Sentinel trees 
darken their cloaks,
looming, shoulder 

to shoulder, black 
and grey shadows
ringing the field. 

Sun-warmed field where
She, unaware 
that she glows gold 

and pink, caught now 
in this moment 
between day's death

and night's dark-birth,
brandishes her 
silvered stick-stave.

She calls out, full- 
voiced, into the 
bird-haunted dusk, 

joining her song 
to the twilight
chorus. Now let
the echoes come.

A revision of a poem I originally wrote in 2020.

The girl in this painting could be a portrait of my oldest daughter, often seen at this age with stick in hand, lover of birds, singer of songs, utterly unselfconscious.

This poem is a tribute to B, my little chickadee who turned twenty this week.

“. . . that Light consists of Rays differently refrangible, which . . . were according to the degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards diverse parts of the wall . . .”

—Sir Isaac Newton, quoted in Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers

original source: ‘A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton … containing his New Theory about Light and Colors’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, No. 80 (19 Feb. 1671/2), pp. 3075-3087.

Refrangible

Newton split a light
with a prism knife
and then bent

the broken beam
back together
with a double-curved lens

he marveled
that light consists
of rays differingly
refrangible
according to their degrees

the rays once divided
are directed
towards diverse parts
of the wall
according to their degrees

each color bends
according to its kind
and rests in its own
proper resting place

redirected by the change
in medium
air to glass
glass to air
to glass to air

and then alights on the wall
like a brave but tired butterfly

the glass medium
transmits the secret
message
hidden all this time:

invisible waves
washing on the shores
of my eyes’
retina-nets,

catching colors
like elusive fish
and sorting them by kind.

so little rainbows dance 
over the chaos
of the shoe pile
when the front door
opens and closes.

Forest Blanket

Version 1

I pull the blanket of forest around me
wrap myself in trees and ferns and shrubs,
mosses and mushrooms, lichens and bracket 
fungi, butterflies and birdsong. 

Invisible birds
move among the branches,
hidden among pine needles, early leaf buds—
sweet sweet sweet 
is their invitation to go deep, deep, deeper.

Roots and rocks try to trip me.
Or maybe they aren't trying to trip me up
maybe they are trying to slow me down?
Pay attention to where I place my boot;

notice the earth beneath my feet,
the way walking is falling into gravity's arms
and catching myself again and again.
Every step a trust fall— Just watch a baby

taking their thousandth steps or ten thousandth.
Still wobbly, still wondering whether 
they will end up sitting 
on a diapered bum in the middle of the kitchen and laughing—

Falling is funny when you are close to the ground.
Funny, yes, but more often frustrating— sometimes it's tears
of anger, wanting so much the grace and ease
of the big people: walking, running, jumping, dancing. 

But all they can do is wobble and fall.
And here I am in the forest-blanket
standing still now, searching the treetops
for the invisible birds: goldfinch, I think.

Or maybe chickadee? Or titmouse?
My ears trying to tune themselves
to the forest singers but still wobbly. 
Still unsure of themselves. I had forgotten how hard, how hard

it is to learn a new skill. How embarrassing it is to fail
again and again and again.
But sunlight dapples through the trees
and kisses my face kindly—

My child, she seems to say, my child,
she brushes wind fingers gently through the rustling leaves
and through my hair, across my cheeks.
She wraps me in stillness, holds me

in communion, drinking deep the sacrament of blue 
lake water rippling through the trees
and a pair of buffleheads stretching their wings,
rising up out of the water,

flashing black and white semaphore
that I cannot decode but I suspect is a message of peace.
Perhaps it is the start of a courtship
a lifelong love that returns always to nest in the same place. 

Forest Blanket

Version 2

I pull the blanket of forest around me.
Wrap myself in pinesighs, smoothbark beechboles, 
showers of red mapleflowers, in rocks 
coated with luscious mosses, and fallen

logs with fragile fungi brackets and lacy
lichens, in flitting blue-white butterflies, 
in falling-down stone walls separating nowhere 
from nowhere, in babbling streamsong and birdsong.

Invisibly birds move among the tree tops 
and in the understory, hidden among 
needleclusters, and budding branch screens—sweet 
sweet sweet is their invitation to go deep, 

deep, deeper. The path, familiar and strange, 
meanders, opens then closes before me.
Roots and rocks reach, try to trip me. Or maybe 
they aren't? Maybe they are trying to slow me down?

Pay attention to where I place my boots;
notice the earth beneath my feet.
The way walking is falling into gravity's arms
and catching myself again and again.

Every step a trust fall. —Just watch a baby
taking her thousandth steps or ten thousandth.
Still wobbly, still wondering whether 
she will end up sitting on her diapered bum

in the middle of the kitchen and laughing—
Falling is funny when you are close to the ground.
Funny, yes, but more often frustrating— 
sometimes it's tears of anger, wanting so 

much the grace and ease of the big people: 
walking, running, jumping, dancing. 
But all she can do is wobble and fall, 
wobble and fall. And here I am, 

swaddled in the forest-blanket, standing 
still now, searching the treetops for the invisible 
birds: Goldfinch, I think. Or maybe black-capped 
chickadee? Or tufted titmouse? My ears

trying to tune themselves to the forest
singers but still wobbly. Still unsure 
of themselves. I had forgotten how hard, 
how hard it is to learn a new skill. How 

embarrassing it is to fail again 
and again and again. But sunlight dapples 
through the trees and kisses my face kindly—
My child, she seems to say, my child.

She brushes wind fingers gently through the rustling 
leaves and through my hair, across my cheeks.
She wraps me in stillness, holds me in communion, 
drinking deep the sacrament of blue 

lake water rippling through the trees and a pair 
of buffleheads stretching their wings, rising 
up out of the water, flashing black and white 
semaphore that I cannot decode. 

Perhaps their wing-beat lovesong
is the start of a courtship,
a lifelong love that returns always 
to nest in the same place year after year. 

This poem started out as an attempt at writing morning pages. But the first line I wrote told me it wanted to be a poem and so I ditched the morning pages and instead wrote the poem as it came to me.

The opening image comes from a beloved fleece throw-blanket that my sister-in-law gave me for Christmas 2024. One side is black with plants and mushrooms and little forest critters: foxes, deer, hedgehogs, squirrels, and blue birds. The other side is golden with white arabesques. This is my favorite blanket and I had just wrapped myself in it and taken a sip of my morning tea when I sat down to write. So literally I was wrapping myself in my forest blanket.

I was also thinking of a hike in our local state forest which I recently took with my youngest daughter. I think it’s the first hike we’ve taken that was just the two of us with none of my other kids.

There are two places where I go to be refreshed: the beach and the forest.

Ames Nowell State Park is one of those places our family has gone back to over and over again through the years since our kids were quite small. We’ve seen it in every season, in drought years and caterpillar years, in snow, in the heat of summer, and in autumn’s colors There’s something wonderful about having those places you know so well and you have watched change over time.

So this poem is also a love note to one particular patch of beloved forestland.

When I was reading over my initial draft, the first stanza seemed a little non-specific. Trees and shrubs… which trees and shrubs? So I rewrote it. And changed a few other things here and there.

And yet, while I like the specificity of the opening lines of the second version. When I re-read it, I began to wonder if they feel overwritten compared to the rest of the poem. There’s something about the simplicity of the first version that I like. Maybe it’s ok for them to be generic trees and shrubs?

I do think I prefer the ending of version 2. I cut the part about the message of peace— too much telling instead of showing— and let the courting buffleheads do the work for me.

But what do you think? Are the first two stanzas of the second version clearer or is it too much? Do the other changes work? Which version should I go with?

If you can, tell me in the comments why you prefer the version that you do. Which lines or images do you like?

FICTION

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

The whole tree was blazing with light, sparkling yet so gentle that it did not blind the eyes. Its clear, clear silveriness washed into he dark smelly old kitchen like a wave of sea water washing into a cave, in and out again, cleansing it. Yet the light had never left the tree and was composed of the myriad minute globes of water with which the mist had spangled every twig. The sun had come out for a moment and been born, a microcosm of itself, in the heart of each globe.

“My God,” ejaculated John. It was not a profane exclamation but an acknowledgement of a miracle and a revelation.

A novel set in the years after World War Two, in the English parish of Belmaray. The story centers around the vicar, ReverendJohn Wentworth, and his family: wife, Daphne, three daughters, Margary, Pat, and Winkle, and his old nanny, Harriet, who is elderly and disabled and lives with them. Harriet is a wise and holy soul who never leaves her room but surveys everything from above and seems to know most of what goes on. Her goodness and her prayers create ripples of grace.

The peace of Belmaray is disturbed by the headmistress of the children’s school, Mrs Belling, who is petty and selfish and the first truly evil person I’ve encountered in a Goudge novel— it was rather shocking. Mrs Belling warps everything about her, sucking the goodness out of the two teachers she employs: Miss Giles and Mrs Belling’s Irish niece, Mary O’Hara. Miss Giles torments the girls, especially Margery. Mary is less affected, but still finds herself powerless to resist Mrs. Belling at times.

And then there is the stranger with a mysterious past, Michael Stone, who washes up in the village with no money and no plans. John takes him under his wing, Mary starts to fall in love with him. And Michael finds himself employed by John’s spinster aunt, Miss Maria Wentworth, who manages the estate of Belmaray Manor, to which John is technically the heir.

The way their lives thread together is typical of Goudge’s novels, a tapestry of grace and beauty.

The Axe by Sigrid Undset

The boy sat in the dark hall listening to Ingunn’s obstinate weeping. then he climbed up into the bed and lay down by her side.

“Be sure your father will take vengeance. You may well believe he will do that. And I trow I shall be with him, to show that Steinfill has a son-in-law, though his sons are too young to bear arms!”

It was the first time Olav had dared to speak straight out of the betrothal that had been made between him and Ingunn when they were children. In the first years he spent at Frettastein the servants had sometimes chanced to speak of it and tease the children with being betrothed, and it had always made Ingunn wild. Once she had run to her father and complained, and he had been angered and had forbidden his people to speak of such things—so wrathfully that more than one of them had guessed that maybe Steinfinn repented his bargain with Olav’s father.

That night Ingunn took Olav’s reminder of the plans that had been made for them in such wise that she crept up to the boy and wept upon his arm, till the sleeve of his shirt was drenched with her tears.

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt

The thin child knew the promise could not hold. Something, somewhere, must have been missed, must have been forgotten. Stories are ineluctable. At this stage of every story, something must go wrong, be awry, whatever the ending to come. It is not given, even to gods, to take complete, foolproof, perfect precautions. There will be a loophole, slippage, a dropped stitch, a moment of weariness or in attention. The goddess called everything, everything, to promise not to harm her son. Yet the shape of the story means that he must be harmed.

Set during World War II, this semi-autobiographical novel is the retelling of the Norse myths through the consciousness of the unnamed “thin child” who clings to the stories in her mother’s book as a lifeline during her family’s evacuation from London while her father is a pilot in North Africa, likely never to return.

The retellings are delightful, full of details from the girl’s science classes and nature studies. These tales are the ones that fire her imagination, not the tales of gentle Jesus meek and mild that she learns in scripture study in church nor the morality tales of Pilgrim’s Progress. They have a power and are told primarily to delight and entertain rather than to instruct or moralize.

I especially love the descriptions of Yggdrasil and Randrasil and of Loki frolicking in the ocean with his serpent-daughter, Jörmungandr.

Here’s part of the description of Yggdrasil:

In the beginning was the tree. The stone ball rushed through emptiness. Under the crust was fire. Rocks boiled, gases seethed. Blebs burst through the crust. Dense salt water clung to the rolling ball. Slime slid on it and in the slime shapes shifted. Any point on a ball is the centre and the tree was at the centre. It held the world together, in the air, in the earth, in the light, in the dark, in the mind.

[. . .]

Its tall trunk was compacted of woody rings, one inside the other, pressing outwards. Close inside its skin are tubes in bundles, pulling up unbroken columns of water, up to the leaves, which opened in the light from the sun, and mixed light, water, air and earth to make new green matter, moving in the wind, sucking in the rain. The green stuff ate light. At night, as the light faded, the tree gave it back, shining briefly in the twilight like a pale lamp.

The tree ate and was eaten, fed and was fed on. Its vast underearth mesh and highway roots was infested and swathed by threads of fungus, which fed on the roots, wormed their way into the cells themselves, and sucked out life. Only occasionally did these thriving thread-creatures push up through the forest floor, or through the bark, to make mushrooms or toadstools, scarlet and leathery, with white warts, pale-skinned fragile umbrellas, woody layered protrusions on the bark itself. Or they rose on thrown stalks and made puffballs, which burst and spread spores like smoke. They fed on the tree but they also carried food to the tree, fine fragments to be raised in the pillar of water.

Here’s Loki, playing on the beach:

The demigod squatted down beside her and made a line of wet pebbles and a translucent rainbow shells. He said he had a project to map the shoreline. Not in great regular half-moons as gods and men might draw this bay, to make a haven for dragon-ships. But small, stone by stone, rivulet by rivulet, promontory by promontory, even as small as these fingers, even as fine as a fingernail. A map for sand-fleas and sand-eels, for everything hangs together and the world may be destroyed by too much attention, or too little care, towards a sand-eel for example.

I love Byatt’s lyrical prose and beautiful descriptive passages. This is a strange book, hard to categorize. A quick read, if you don’t linger too long savoring the descriptions. Only about 150 pages, with woodblock illustrations.

I read Ragnarok to my kids during our school read-aloud time. They weren’t quite sure what to make of it; but we had some interesting conversations.

POETRY

What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar

Tripping on Metaphors

          A line is spider
silk cross-linking
          an inkling with

another of
          its ilk. A line is
a tripwire that

          when tripped on
closes a neural
          circuit. What detonates

is significance
          that trips
up logic since

          metaphor
 is to logic
          what analogy is

to twins, what psilocybin
          is to water
from the faucet

          because it
hallucinates
          a kinship of some kind,

This is a library book, but I need to buy myself a copy so that I can write in the margins. Majmudar is so good.

Galahd and the Grail: Merlin’s Isle Vol 1 by Malcolm Guite

It was the Eve of Pentecost,
and Arthur kept the feast
with royal hospitality
to greatest as to least.

For Arthur was magnificent,
a kind of high renown.
And unto Arthur's court there drew
a hundred loyal knights and true
to where the golden dragon flew
above the golden crown.

And Arthur reigned with Guinevere,
a queen in her own right,
the fairest lady ever seen.
Whenas she moved in silken green
or silver mantle's satin sheen,
it seemed to men that she had been
mantled in Heaven's light.

Even though I bought the beautiful book— and it is a most gorgeous and delightful exhibit of the printer’s art— I’ve been listening to the audiobook, which is read by Malcolm Guite himself.

I plan to read this one aloud to my kids soon. I think they will enjoy it very much.

NONFICTION

Tolkien’s Modern Reading by Holly Ordway

The writings of James Joyce represent the apogee of Modernist incomprehensibility and, again surprisingly, Tolkien knew of Joyce’s work and responded to it with a fair degree of tolerance and thoughtfulness. He was sufficiently intrigued by Joyce’s literary experiments to transliterate the name Anna Livia Plurabelle into his invented language of Qenya, and also to write several pages of notes about Joyce’s work.
[. . .]

Tolkien shares Joyce’s interest in the sound of language. Tolkien observes that most of the time our awareness of the meaning of language makes it difficult appreciate “the independent contribution of the sound part”; we attend to what the words mean rather than to their purely sonic effects, their sheer musicality: “It needs an ear and training to appreciate it.” He seems to be recognizing that there is some merit in Joyce’s experiment, remarking that there is a slender sort of ‘meaning’ to the text— he puts the word in inverted commas— which might better be called ‘atmosphere,’ but that this “is so clearly subordinate to sound, that one necessarily pays chief attention to the latter.” Nor does this emphasis on sound appear to be a bad thing: he adds that it is “unfair to call it a mere ‘metrical’ experiment. One might call music a mere ‘accompaniement’.” Indeed, it could be said that Tolkien’s use of untranslated Elvish poetry in The Lord of the Rings has a Joycean flavor: Hiley suggests that his “sprinkling of invented languages . . . enables readers momentarily to give themselves up to pure sound.”

I’ve owned this book for a while. It’s not the kind of book I’m ever likely to read cover to cover. Rather, I dip in to a section that looks interesting. Or I pick it up to answer a specific question or to find a citation. It’s a reference book, I suppose. Though that makes it sound rather boring— it’s much more than that. It’s a fascinating book and it easily could be read cover to cover (by someone whose brain was a little less distractible than mine) and it answers so many questions about Tolkien’s engagement with the modern literary world.

I picked it up recently in response to a specific comment/question. I can’t remember the substack anymore but someone was writing about Tolkien and said something to the effect that the Professor probably didn’t know X because for him literature stopped in the Middle Ages. It’s precisely that popular misconception that Holly Ordway sets out to redress in this book.

But Ordway’s book isn’t merely a catalog of Tolkien’s reading. It’s also quite good literary criticism and many of her speculations, like that about Tolkien’s appreciation for Joyce, open up new aspects of Tolkien’s work in rich and delightful ways.

The Smile of a Ragpicker: The Life of Satoko Kitahara, Convert and Servant of the Slums of Tokyo by Paul Glynn, S.M.

“The rosary with its image of the Crucified does not just mean that we are Christians. No, it is the rosary of a young woman prepared to fast till death for the love of the people of Ants Town. Her great love has made our community unique, unique maybe in the whole world. One day her name will be known throughout the world, I assure you. Her example will win freedom for poor people everywhere.”

“In Tokyo, a city of seven million, there are seven thousand homeless people. Seven hundred thousand others are living in poverty. You in the government have failed to come up with any solution to all this. The people of Ants Town have found a solution— in what is thrown out as garbage! If just 20 percent of the city of Tokyo’s garbage were utilized, billions of yen would be raised annually. The money needed to purchase a new site for Ants Town, and to honor Tokyo’s seven thousand homeless, is under your nose! Don’t just burn us out. Help us to keep helping ourselves. Use your authority to find us a new site where we can continue making an honest living by collecting scrap. And send us your other homeless and we will teach them how to make a living too!

If you refuse to help us, she will come and sit outside this City Office, praying and fasting until she dies, because she cares for the good people that you authorities dismiss as mere vagrants. One sick woman will stand up for them against all you power brokers and so-called civil servants. I beg you, sir, consider well the consequences of your decision.” [Tooru Matsui to the City Office section chief]

Satoko Kitahara’s father was a distinguished academic. The Kitahara family could trace their family tree a thousand years to an aristocrat of the ninth century who was a Shinto priest. She had a university education and had survived the Second World War, but she gave up her comfortable life to live penniless in a Tokyo slum and die of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Gave up everything for love of Christ and of the poor rag-pickers of Ants Town.

The beginning of the book sometimes felt a little heavy on history and context of the Second World War, though much of it was fascinating—I didn’t know much about the Japanese experience during the war. But Satoko’s life is incredibly moving and inspiring. Despite the occasional unevenness, the book is well-researched and strives to contextualize Satoko’s life and world for non-Japanese readers. I feel like I’ve made a friend. I very much love and cherish Satoko.

After Satoko had been baptized in the Mercedarian Sisters’ chapel, the nun took her aside and made her a request. Congratulating Satoko on her beautiful smile she said a smile can be a prayer of trust in God . . . and a real encouragement to others. Would Satoko promise God that she would always try to smile. Satoko readily agreed and together they knelt before the statue of Mary and asked her help in keeping the promise. There were times of darkness and pain when Satoko did not keep the promise. However, in the final years of her life when she lived with the ragpickers, she kept it magnificently. It was something everyone remarked on after her death.

My second daughter and I read this together during her school time. It’s one of those books that has really stuck with us and connected to a bunch of other stuff we’ve been reading and talking about.

OTHER

The Darkling Psalter podcast

If you’re not reading ’s The Darkling Psalter, you should be. Patton’s versions of the psalms are beautiful and haunting. For me they are like a strong drink, needing to be sipped slowly and carefully.

Try Psalm 18.

Recently I subscribed to the podcast and have been listening in the car, while I cook, while I fold laundry.

The Darkling Psalter

The Darkling Psalter is a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms (in text and audio).

By Andy Patton

There are so many other brilliant substacks that if I tried to list them all I’d never get this published. So I’m going to try to list one or two a month, sad that I cannot include everything I’ve been reading. (I tried. Oh I’ve tried— and it was NOT possible.)

What have you been reading, Dear Readers? Please share. I love reading your lists.

Subscribe now

Late afternoon shadows paint
a white room dusky—
shades of brown and gray and blue—
but the mind’s eye still supplies 

white: Old white dog curled
on the counterpane, his tired white 
head pillowed on snowmounds. 
Four poster bed shrouded

in a white fringed coverlet.
Small white squares of sunshine,
made rhombuses by the sun’s angle,
snooze on the bed’s white foot.

Outside the window a white sky,
the corner of the house bleached 
almost-white, and silhouetted pine 
branches peek in, longing to lay down 

in the whiteness. I, too, want to crawl 
into that white bed, pull the blanket 
up to my chin, smell the warmth of dog, 
of sun, of a room holding 
its afternoon breath.

“You know, dogs are the damnedest thing. They just take over the house.” during an interview with Victoria Wyeth remembering her grandfather “had come home tired one evening wanting to take a nap, only to find Rattler had got there first. “

I don’t love the title, “The Master Bedroom”. I think “The Family Dog, Rattler” might be a better one.

But neither title quite captures what it is that fascinates me about this painting.

Andrew Wyeth is one of my favorite painters and I’ve loved this painting for a long time. I think I’ve even tried to write a poem in response to it before. Or at least made a few unsatisfactory notes in the direction.

I came back to it now because shared it. And seeing this old familiar friend, I decided to write a little love note to it.

I was also reacting to one of the comments on PAP’s note: “All those beautiful browns.” It struck me because when I look at this painting I see a symphony of whites. For me the browns are merely shades among the shadows that define the whites.

And that little bit of resistance gave shape to my response: a catalog of whites. And somehow that opened the door to what it is I want to say to this painting. At least what I have to say today.

Both poetry and painting are about perceptions. Here, come see through my eyes for a minute, the art invites the viewer/reader.

And yet we always bring to the experience our own histories and our own ways of seeing.

So in a sense no two viewers or readers will ever experience the exact same work of art. We see not only with our eyes, but with the mind and with the heart.

Thanks again to Plein Air Poetry for always sharing beautiful art.

in the waiting room
my son spins 
magnetic rings
around his fingers.

three black geartoothed rings
with strips of rainbow flair

click together and separate,
kiss and catch
each other.

tooth tapping tooth
again and again through a never-
ending spectrum 
of rotations and revolutions.

my fidget of choice
to make the minutes twirl
is a book of poems.

the words spin
round in my mind
click together,

shuffling images, meanings,
never-ending kaleidoscopic

sounds that exist on the page,
in me, on the page,
in me,
on the page in me.

This morning three of us had dentist appointments. There were two hygienists, so my son and I got our teeth cleaned while my daughter waited. While her teeth were being cleaned my son and I sat together in the waiting room. I had my book; he had an audiobook and some fidget rings.

Some books of poetry make me itch to write my own poems. In between reading selections from Amit Majmudar’s What He Did in Solitary, I tapped a rough draft of this poem into my Notes app on my phone.

Then this afternoon I revised it in my notebook while waiting at the optometrist with my youngest daughter to complete a battery of tests— she got to try out every scanning machine he has.

It seems my trend for this year is slow reading. Once again I’ve finished exactly one novel. I’ve started several more, and am reading slowly through quite a few books of poetry.

Now that I think about it, perhaps I’m reading less because my eyesight is getting worse. In the past few years I’ve developed diplopia and reading is harder. Is my distractibility while reading about being addicted to my phone, or is it really about my eyes getting fatigued and needing a rest?

But also, I’m feeling drained, squeezed-out, and brain-foggy. Nothing quite seems in focus these days and I always have more on my plate than I can handle. I’m trying to accept the season for what it is and just enjoy the fruits such as they are.

FICTION

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge

Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like a taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.

This was a re-read for me. I felt I very much needed to spend time with Goudge this Lent and The Scent of Water was a perfect choice.

The protagonist, Mary Lindsay, thinks she has her retirement mapped out. She’s going to live in London with a friend “where they would have music, ballet, and good plays, all those things.” . And then a cousin dies and leaves her, The Laurels, a house in the country village of Appleshaw. And suddenly remembering her single and singular long-ago encounter with her father’s cousin, she gives up all her plans to move into that house.

“This may be my last chance to live it.”

“What?”

“Country life. I’ve never known it. I’f like to before it and I disappear from the English scene.”

Her deceased cousin, also called Mary Lindsay and in the book always referred to as Cousin Mary or Miss Lindsay, was a woman that Mary had met only once, when she visited the cottage as a little girl. The two Marys felt an instant connection, but Mary was never brought to visit again.

When she moves into the cottage Mary becomes part of a small village community, and becomes enmeshed in the small local dramas and relationships: with Mrs Baker who had been paid by Cousin Mary to help her for a few hours a week but who spent much more time with her and who loved her, with the blind novelist Paul and his wife Valerie who has become emotionally estranged; with the children next door and especially with the adopted oldest girl, Edith, who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere but who has a connection with Mary’s house and with the “little things”, a collection of miniatures which also enchanted Mary when she was a girl; with the vicar’s sister, Jean, who is most certainly neurodivergent, clumsy and afraid but who has a beautiful soul which blossoms under Mary’s loving care; with the elderly and frail Colonel and Mrs Adams whose wastrel son squanders all their savings.

Mary gets to know her cousin through reading her diaries but also through talking to the people who knew her and cared for her. Cousin Mary had a mental illness all her life but also a deep spiritual life and she found healing living at the Laurels, which she discovers used to be the infirmary of a long-ago monastery.

The scent of water, of the rain and of the dew. It was difficult to separate it from the grateful fragrance of the life it renewed, but it had its scent; the faint exhalation of its goodness. It would still come down upon the earth after man, destroying himself, had destroyed also the leaves and the grass. Its goodness might even renew again the face of the burnt and blasted earth. He did not know. But unlike Job’s comforters he believed there was a supreme goodness that could renew his own soul beyond this wasting sorrow of human life and death.

The Scent of Water is a story about healing and community. Almost all of the characters have wounds— many of them that can be traced back to the Second World War. Mary lost her fiancé, John and her coming to the Laurels becomes a time where she finally feels free to grieve him. The closer she comes to her deceased Cousin Mary, the closer she comes to John as well and she comes to love him more as she comes to love her neighbors in Appleshaw.

“My dear,” he said, “love, your God, is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, ‘Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.’ Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.”

The Axe by Sigrid Undset (Olav Audunsson/The Master of Hestviken Book I)

Olav Audunsson is a four-volume work by Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset. I have read Kristin Lavransdattar, her other multi-volume medieval masterpiece, twice now and her modern two-part novel The Wild Orchid/The Burning Bush as well as her biography of Catherine of Siena and many of her essays.

I’m reading the older translation, which was called The Master of Hestviken, because that’s the copy I have. The newer translation retains Undset’s original titles. I imagine at some point in the future I might pick up the newer translation for a re-read.

My plan is to read slowly—right now I’m managing about two or three pages a day. I’m about halfway through Volume I, The Axe/Vows. This feels like the right pacing. Undset’s medieval Norway is already familiar to me from Kristin, but even so the story starts slowly. It was good to begin to read it while also reading The Scent of Water— much easier for me to be patient with a slow start when I’m reading another book that moves forward at a slightly faster pace and is easier to read. (Not that Scent of Water is at all a quick-moving book!) But as I go on I imagine I might pick up the pace and make Olav my primary fiction focus.

The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

I read the first four or five stories in this short story collection before it went back to the library. Jhumpa Lahiri is Indian-American (though she is currently living in Italy and writing in Italian) and most of the stories are about Indian-American characters living in the Boston area. Some of them are about people in India or as in the title story, about Indian-Americans visiting India. The stories I read were mostly about broken relationships, infidelity, and heartache and missed connections. Good stories, but not very uplifting. I will check out the collection again in the future to finish the stories and see if any of them are more hopeful. I don’t have much to say about the ones I read. I’m still processing them. But in tone they reminded me a lot of some of Claire Keegan’s short stories.

Maame by Jessica George

A novel about a young woman living in London. Her parents are from Ghana and her absentee mother spends every other year in Ghana. Meanwhile the protagonist works at a job that she doesn’t love and is caregiver to her father who has Parkinson’s. I’m not very far into it.

I picked it up on a recommendation by of Always Be Reading. (I have very much been enjoying her You Tube chats with Stefani Roth about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.)

Chantel-LaVonne’s Substack

What I Read in January and February, All 13 of Them

January and February felt like a return for me…

Read more

8 months ago · 20 likes · 11 comments · Chantel Grant

This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

My current audiobook, This Is Happiness returns to the small Irish village of Faha in County Clare in which The History of the Rain and The Time of the Child are also set. An elderly man remembers the past, narrating about the time the rain stopped when he was a youth, linking it to the coming of electricity to the town of Faha. Appropriately, the main action so far has been taking place over Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

POETRY

No One Ever Says by Mary Katherine Creel

I finally finished my first pass through this beautiful collection. I am sure I will read it again and again. I had already come to love MK’s nature poems on her substack, a small spectacle. They are delicate and deep and always a refreshing like a cool draught of water. Seeing them collected here, though, I find myself reading them differently, drawn into a story of grief and a dialogue with nature that is healing. These poems feel intimate, confidential, and vulnerable. They are at the same time strong and fragile.

After Prayer by Malcolm Guite

The first section of this collection is a sequence of sonnets that meditate on George Herbert’s sonnet, ‘Prayer’, each of Guite’s sonnets takes for its title on phrase in Herbert’s sonnet. (click through the link to see how Guite has delightfully arranged his poems as hypertext to Herbert’s poem. Also to hear Guite read Herbert’s ‘Prayer’.)

I’ve been reading these during my Wednesday night holy hours, a few poems at a time. So lovely.

What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar

This is a library book, so I’m trying to read through more quickly. I’ve been reading it while waiting during my kids’ karate lessons. Witty, often pointed, sometimes heartbreaking. I love Majmudar’s word play. An anesthesiologist, he often plays with medical terminology and those poems often hit a sweet spot for me.

My favorite poems so far from the first section of the book are:

‘Chillicothe Apostrophe’, an ode to Ohio':

“Here’s my odi-et-amo                 Ode to you, O 
homely Ohio                                  of the torn-up turnpike,”

‘Cat’s Cradle’, a love poem that uses the string game of cat’s cradle as an extended metaphor for a romantic relationship. The form in this one delightfully mimics the form of a cat’s cradle:

"               The cat
        in my creche
is your name

         on my breath. To love
is to be bound
          like this and freed

like this.

‘Neurology of Pain’ a three part poem:

1. Asterognosis, [a loss of the ability to recognize objects by handling them]

"He places his hand in hers, 
but she doesn’t recognize it. What was love once 
is beyond forgotten now, is never having known
at all. "

2. Apophenia, [the perception of patterns and connections where none exist]

"Their minds were rhymes. But rhymes can rhyme by chance.
A rhythm, too, can hear itself where there's 
really nothing but the rain's spondees"

3. Prosopagnosia, [the inability to recognize faces]

" The ancient tragedies
are always ending with anagnoorisis,
the recognition scene, in which the lover
proves to be the one person 
the oracle warned you never to love.
might this estrangement be
the least unhappy ending?"

‘Rate Your Pain’, a list poem, riffing on the kind of comparative pain scale that doctors use to try to assess patients’ pain; but in this case the numbers and their descriptions tell a story, the dramatic progression of an ailment and relationships in the life of a singular, though unnamed person:

3) Sharp, but only in certain easily avoided positions. Unexpected recurrence during afternoon racquetball game. Controlled with over-the-counter nonsteroidals already in medicine cabinet but close to expiration. First passing reference in conversation with spouse.

Under the Terebinth by Anna Friedrich

This one just came in the mail and I haven’t had time to read more than a couple of poems. I love ’s Substack, Monafolkspeak, and especially the series she’s currently working on, An Overness, exploring the idea of God being over, above, up, on high— which was an idea that we discussed with our tour guide, Lorella, this past summer in Italy.

MAILBAG

Is there anything in the world better than getting poetry in the mail?

Luminaries, ’s beautiful handmade volume of poems, offered as a limited run. Everything about this book is enchanting, the lovely thick paper, the original watercolor. And the poems are delicate and precise. My 13 year old daughter and I took turns reading them to each other one afternoon. A feast for the heart.

It makes me want to make my own little collections of poems.

A lovely collection edited and with notes by of Horace and Friends.

“In early modern England it was taken for granted that a good poem is both beautiful and useful: that it teaches or expresses something that is helpful to remember, as one tries to conduct a decent life. This pamphlet presents a selection of English poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. The poems have been chosen to reflect the kinds of verse that were most popular with readers at the time, but also for their beauty and utility.”

A collection of poems I’m savoring slowly. I like that it is small, easy to slide into a purse or large pocket, that the poems are selected with thoughtful care. I want to read older poems as well as newer ones and this collection is another reminder to do so.

Two shape-poem postcards with poems from of and and an essay that I haven’t read yet. But will in time.

Sometimes I like to savor my mail and hold off reading to prolong the anticipation. Do you ever do that?

(By the way, if you would like to receive original poetry in the mail, become a paid subscriber to Singing, each to each and I will periodically send you a poetry postcard or other goodies.)

Please chime in with comments about what you are reading. I really want to know —other people’s book lists are irresistible.

CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD 
and by His death He has trampled upon Death 
and has given life to those who are in the tombs.

1

“Today Hades tearfully sighs: ‘My power has crumbled, for the Shepherd crucified has raised Adam; and those whom I had possessed, I lost. Those whom I had swallowed by my might, I have given up completely: for the Crucified has emptied the graves, and the power of death has vanished!’ O Lord, glory to Your Cross and to Your holy Resurrection!”2

3

“For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you who left a garden, I was betrayed in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

“See on my face the spit I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once stretched out your hand to a tree.

“I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

“Rise. Let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see! I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.”

From a Homily for Holy Saturday
by St. Epiphanios of Cyprus (+403)

spring song

by Lucille Clifton

the green of Jesus 
is breaking the ground 
and the sweet 
smell of delicious Jesus 
is opening the house and 
the dance of Jesus music 
has hold of the air and 
the world is turning 
in the body of Jesus and 
the future is possible

The green of Jesus is breaking the ground.

Daffodils shoot up before the rest of the world turns green, shooting up their green blades in ground that is dull and brown, littered with last year’s leaves. Lucille Clifton rightly uses that image to figure Jesus’ bursting from the tomb.

Our first daffodil of the year bloomed on Holy Saturday morning, a golden trumpet heralding Easter joy.

This Easter morning is grey and cold and rainy, but another golden starburst is now blooming next to the fence, small celebrations that lift my heart along with the beautiful pastels of Easter eggs and the singing of the Gloria and the Alleluia.

Last night we attended the Easter Vigil at our parish. Candles in the darkness. The readings of salvation history. Blaze of lights and glory. Seventeen people were baptized, including a young man who has sat behind us at Mass for the last several years. My daughter says she thought he was crying after his baptism.

Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,
exult, let Angel ministers of God exult,
let the trumpet of salvation
sound aloud our mighty King's triumph!

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
ablaze with light from her eternal King,
let all corners of the earth be glad,
knowing an end to gloom and darkness.

Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
let this holy building shake with joy,
filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.

—from the Exsultet, the beautiful proclamation of Easter chanted in the dark church lit only by the Easter candle and the candles held by the congregation, lit from the Easter candle, one flame divided yet undimmed.

4

Every year I love to read the Paschal sermon of St John Chrysostom. It’s so beautiful and nourishing and consoling.

I especially love the invitation to rejoicing to those who have not kept the fast, to those who have been slothful, to those who crept in at the last minute, to the failures and to the exhausted.

I often slump across the finish line after a Lent that feels like one long failure. And St John is standing there cheering me on, reassuring me that it’s ok, Jesus welcomes me to the feast just as I am, fallen and failing.

The Paschal Homily of Saint John Chrysostom

Is there anyone here who is a devout lover of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival.
Is there anyone who is a grateful servant?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any now weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!
If they have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour, let him with gratitude join in the Feast!

And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he shall have sustained no loss.
And if any have delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him who toiled from the first.
To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the work as he greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!
First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!
Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry; partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when he descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he said,
You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar, because it was mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it was destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.

It is in an uproar because it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and it discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is your sting?
O Hades, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you, O death, are annihilated!
Christ is risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ, having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen!

This year’s Lent was similar to last year’s. Last year I wrote: “I didn’t really pray more. Didn’t do the spiritual reading I intended to do. Didn’t fast well or give alms. … Some seasons of motherhood are harder than others. And yet Good Friday arrived and we went to the service of the Lord’s Passion and suddenly I found myself snapped in. Jesus was there, I was there, it was all ok. We went to the Easter Vigil. . . We kept the feast. We ate our chocolates. We celebrated with cheesecake that looked a wreck but tasted fine.”

I could say the same for this year. Except this year going into Lent I expected more of the same. I didn’t set any goals for myself because setting goals seemed too hard (and, honestly, I felt strongly that setting goals was not what I was being called to do). My diet has already been penitential, cutting out many of my favorite foods as I try to manage symptoms. I already fast many days, only eating a small lunch and dinner. I didn’t feel I had the mental bandwidth to try to add more prayer or spiritual reading. And I really didn’t want prayer to be an item on a checklist. I wanted my prayer life to be about relationship with Jesus. So I guess my goal was to focus on that relationship in small ways.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

—John Updike (1960)

My dear friends, I hope you are having a very blessed Easter.

When I posted this piece last year, I told the story of how it was inspired by my daughters’ play. All that is true. But it’s not the whole story. Here is another piece that seemed too much to include at the time, but feels important now.

My little sister is disabled. She has multiple chronic conditions, but the underlying condition is a genetic one. The heart of this meditation comes almost directly from a text conversation between my sister and myself. It was many years ago and I no longer remember most of the particulars. She was feeling very low and I was consoling her. It was the kind of deep spiritual conversation that two people who love each other and who love Jesus can sometimes have. My sister and I are more than sisters, more than friends, we are what the early Irish Christians called anamchara, “soul friend”.

I wrote this meditation as a personal communication to my sister, to say: if you feel like you are in the tomb, well maybe that’s not such a terrible place to be. If you feel you cannot believe, well, Jesus in the tomb can hold you anyway.

The image of the shroud in the poem that Jesus wraps around his beloved child, is simultaneously the shroud that Jesus was wrapped in and also, somehow, my son’s favorite blanket, the one he called simply: White Blankie” and that he not only slept with but carried everywhere, like Linus. He carried it to church with him and rested on it when things were hard— and they were almost always hard for a little autistic boy who finds people and noises and smells overwhelming.

The idea that the shroud could be not a thing of horror and bloody awfulness but a comforting blanket came out of nowhere. I think the warm shroud also in my mind resonates with the wonderful heated blankets the nurses would tuck around me when I was cold in the recovery room after all of my c-sections.

This poem might be the piece I’ve written that is closest to my heart.

In the Tomb with Jesus

And me, I keep seeing that body, in that shroud, in that tomb.

I find myself a small girl sitting in that tomb.

It’s not a dank, damp, smelly tomb. It’s dry and warm, sandy, rather like a hobbit hole. A pleasant place to be. Out of the cold. Smelling of earth, a little like dry dust. A little like the smell of a church.

I sit on the stone. It would make sense to be scared. I’m in a tomb. But I’m not scared. I feel safe. Protected.

I’m wrapped in the shroud like a child wrapped in a best beloved blanket, Sophie with her Flower Blanket worn to rags, Ben with his White Blankey draped over him during Mass, or carefully arranged on his pillow at night so he can press his face against it.

The shroud smells like perfumed oil, the smell rubs off on my skin. There is blood on it. It’s not scary, smelly, or sticky. It’s sweet like wine. The very best wine.

+ + +

The oils dripping down over your head.

Oozing into your wounds.

His blood on your skin. In your wounds.

His oil on your skin. In your wounds.

+ + +

The shroud is warm.

Not the warmth of a light wrap that covers your shoulders on a chill evening. No, more like the heated blankets they bring you in the hospital when you are recovering from surgery, cold and shaky, and the nurse tucks them gently around you.

That deep radiating warmth.

Full of the warmth of Jesus’ body.

That warm glow of a million suns.

The linen is soft, so soft, and smells like the outdoors as well as like the oils. The rich scented oils of anointing. And with a faint smell of… someone. A human scent. A little like sweat, like a body that has been in the sun, walking. Not unpleasant. But also a little like the smell of your baby’s head when you press your nose against his scalp and breathe deep that smell which you can’t place except it’s his and yours and it just smells . . . right.

+ + +

And there I sit, wrapped in a burial cloth. Not waiting. Just being.

Nor am I alone. Nor is it dark. There is one who sits beside me. He holds my being in his Being. He is the light.

+ + +

What does dying mean? Non-existence?

Non being. Extinction. Emptiness. Nothing.

But. . . There is no such thing as non-existence. I don’t believe in it.

There is the tomb. There is death. Then there is new life.

The tomb is scary to think about. But Jesus went into the tomb so that we don’t have to be alone in there.

Jesus is Being and will not let you fall into unBeing.

You cannot be Xed.

You are forever.

You are not Nothing. You are Beloved.

The song that is you cannot be unsung.

But maybe you don’t believe that. So you sit in the tomb.

Waiting. Wrapped in the shroud.

What are you waiting for? You do not know.

Resurrection?

Do you believe in it? I don’t think you do. Not really.

So there you are in the tomb. But you are not alone.

You are not alone. And there is singing

Outside the soldiers are sleeping.

But Jesus hasn’t left yet because he doesn’t want you to be alone.

The night is deep, the stars are singing to him.

The earth is singing to him.

The angels are singing to him.

The souls newly freed from the grave are singing with them.

All the patriarchs and prophets are singing to him. And the souls of all the little boy babies that Herod killed. All singing.

+ + +

Outside the tomb it is night, easing to dawn. The soldiers are sleeping. The stone has not yet been rolled away. The garden is quiet. Only a bird is making a little noise, the very first of the dawn chorus, awake a little early. Dawn’s light is not here yet.

But inside the tomb… you can hear the music.

Jesus has a deep voice and he is singing softly to you. He sings the psalms slowly. And the cradle songs that Mary once sang to him. He had a big chest, solid, well-muscled.

He’s holding little bloody you against his chest and he is singing to you.

You curl against him and listen to his breathing, feel the vibration of his voice. Hear the heart beating in his chest. You curl up like a nursing baby in its mother’s arms.

And you reach up and gently probe a finger into his wounds. Not doubting, like Thomas. Not verifying. No, more like a child plays with his mother’s necklace, pulls on her sleeve, pokes his flingers into her mouth. Exploring the world of Mother with roving fingers while he drinks deeply of her comfort. That is you with Jesus, gently poking into all the wounds, touching his beard.

And he is singing you the song of you, telling you your story. He will never tell you any story but your own. And he’s telling you his story, too— the greatest love story ever told. And it is really the same story. If you listen carefully, you’ll see that is true.

I think maybe you know how this one should end.

+ + +

And then suddenly two little girls are there in the tomb with Jesus, giggling like they’re playing hide and seek. Like it’s the greatest joke ever.

“I’m in the tomb with Jesus!

I’m in the tomb with Jesus!

I’m in the tomb with Jesus!”

'Adam, where are you?'
                                          God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.

Multiplicity, his despair;
                                            God's hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairground—
noise, lights, the violent odors—
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

Fragmented Adam stares.
                                              God's hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself. God
suffers the void that is his absence.

“On a Theme by Thomas Merton”1—I meant to write about this Denise Levertov poem back in December for Advent, as a companion to my essay about Flickering Mind but I never was able to get around to it. But it seems an appropriate Lenten poem as well and it’s been tickling at the edges of my mind. So, late as it is—Holy Week already!— I don’t think it’s too late to stop and ponder if some more.

Here is a recording of Denise Levertov reading the poem.

This short poem—only three stanzas long—begins at the beginning of things with a reference to the book of Genesis: God searching for Adam after Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit. (Genesis 3:9) “The Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’”

'Adam, where are you?'
                                          God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.

Darkness, the Void that is Inattention

Levertov’s imagery makes it clear that the darkness and void that separates Adam from God is Adam’s inattention, his distraction, and his despair. The physicality of God’s hands palpating the darkness is wonderful. This is a God who is seeking for man. Even in the darkness of man’s despair, God is reaching out his hands, feeling for him.

I find myself particularly drawn to the seeming contradiction of “Adam’s inattention” and “his confused attention to everything”. Human minds cannot attend to everything everywhere all at once and the attempt to do so leads to despair.

Impassioned by Multiplicity

Adam is “impassioned by multiplicity”, too many passions, feelings leading him every direction. The world is full of so many distractions. For us how many more than for Adam? And our attention to them distracts us from the presence of God reaching out, reaching into our darkness.

I feel this so deeply. I have half a dozen projects—probably more—currently stalled out because I cannot focus on any one of them. Each one is a passion project, an outpouring of love for a subject. And yet I despair because of the multiplicity of my passions.

I don’t know where to start. And if I do start, I quickly become distracted by another shiny new thing. Every time I check something off my list five other things take its place.

Multiplicity, his despair;
                                              God's hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds—
noise, lights, the violent odors—
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

Multiplicity, His Despair

The repetition here of the phrase “multiplicity, his despair” is powerful. Man despairs because his own multiplicity prevents him from the single-mindedness, the focus and attention to God’s presence that would allow him to perceive God’s hands. The single-mindedness of devotion, of prayer. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “the twittering world”.

Hundreds of tabs open on my computer. Emails, substack posts, comments, Facebook, games, books, plans, projects, tasks, to-do lists… so many voices competing for my attention. How can I find silence, focus, single-mindedness?

One place where I can begin to focus is the adoration chapel. Once a week on Wednesday nights from 11 to midnight I rest in the silence, the dim light. Oh there are still plenty of distractions there. But they are fewer. There I can find moments of inner silence.

I can find silence in the roaring of the waves on the beach, the single-mindedness of the sea focuses my attention beautifully. I can find silence in the woods, in the heart of a flower, the curl of lichen, the daintiness of moss, the ever-changing sky.

I can find it in folding laundry, washing dishes, stirring a pot. The single-mindedness of work can free the mind from its ceaseless twittering.

Enacting Blindness

“God’s hands /enacting blindness” is the phrase in the poem that most stops me cold. “Enacting” is a delightful verb. God isn’t truly blind, of course. Rather, man projects his own blindness onto God. God seems blind in his search for us because our own blindness prevents us from perceiving him. It rather reminds of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an animal so mind-bogglingly stupid that it thinks if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.” (You can ward off its attack by wrapping a towel around your head as a blindfold.)

At a Barbaric Fairgrounds

“Like a child at a barbaric fairgrounds” is such a striking image: “noise, lights, violent odors”, “the whirling rides!” It’s so incongruous with the Adam and Eve story, so anachronistic. And so perfect. So relatable. The way this section of the poem fragments itself is also a perfect enactment, the “noise, lights, the violent odors” slashed in between the two parts of the simile, separating the child from Adam.

This Lent I’ve been thinking so much about fragmentation and distraction. Obviously we should be seeking focus, attention, connection. But what do you do when the fragmentation of your attention seems beyond your control? I have failed at Lent. Failed before I even started because I did not give anything up. I’ve already had to give up wheat and tomatoes, cinnamon and just about any food that has “natural flavors” on its ingredients list. I couldn’t bear to give up more. My attention is already fragmented but my executive function is already over-extended. Taking on more prayer, more reading… it didn’t feel possible. And also I don’t want prayer to become simply a task on a to-do list, a checkbox to click. So this Lent for me has been about surrender and acceptance and trust and relationship; trying to feel the hand of God in the darkness, in my fragmentation, in the midst of the noise and the chaos and the whirling rides.

Fragmented Adam stares.
                                               God's hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. God
suffers the void that is his absence.

God’s Hands

Adam cannot see God’s hands reaching out to him. He is dazzled by the whirling rides, blinded by the lights. But it is not Adam who suffers from the absence of God. He is too dazzled to notice the absence. Rather, it is God who suffers the void that is Adam’s absence.

Here we are in Holy Week. Good Friday. This is when we remember that God’s hands never stop reaching out to us. The poem enacts that with the second line of each stanza being offset, each line the same two words: God’s hands. The hands that made Adam. The hands that stretch out to him, that reach into the darkness to find him. The hands that ultimately are nailed to the cross for Adam. For all of us.

Ultimately I am in God’s hands, even if I cannot see him though the blinding lights, even if I am dazzled by the whirling rides. Perhaps this Lenten journey has been about trusting where I cannot see. Trusting that even when I fail to push back against all the multiplicity of distractions, those hands are still there for me.

Accepting What This Lent Has Been

The other day my sister shared an article I’d read before, which says something I needed to hear again;

Be content with whatever your Lent has been. If you haven’t used your Lent in any especially admirable way, there’s not really any such thing as scrambling to make up for lost time at the last minute. That was never what it was about anyway. We all show up empty-handed. You can offer up failure to the Lord, too, and He receives that as graciously as any great achievement or sacrifice. The point is to show up. Always show up. The only mistake you can make is to stay away.

This underlined and highlighted a realization that I was already arriving at, coming from a different direction.

Paradoxically, this Lent has been about accepting the distractions and the distractibility of my own mind. My family are all neurospicy. Our brains are the kind that struggle with executive function. Put down the phone, turn off the screen, other distractions will still crowd in. And yet God made me the way I am. Surely he didn’t make me incapable of finding him?

Certainly, I would like to be healed. I would love to be able to find silence, be free from distraction, have a life with room for quiet contemplation. But I am a wife and mother of five children. I do not live in a monastery. I live in the world and the world is LOUD.

If I am distracted from distraction by distraction, as Eliot says2, perhaps rather than tying to exert control, rather than trying to force myself not to be distracted, perhaps I can lean in and find God in the midst of my distractions? Make my poetry and my writing a path to him. Make my absorption with flowers and trees and skies and birds a path to him. Find him in all the busyness of daily life?

Let This Poor Heart Be Your Mountain

There’s a song by Brother Isaiah3 that has been haunting me: “Let this poor heart be your mountain, the mountain where you dwell, O Lord.” If I cannot climb the mountain to find God, then let my heart be the mountain. If I cannot will away the distractions, then I will seek him in the midst of the barbaric playground. I will look for him on the whirling rides. I will seek him in the dazzling lights.

It’s not that I don’t try to find the still spaces, but a recognition that a still space can be a small space. The space of a breath. The size of a dust mote.

Maybe I don’t need to find a hermitage, a desert retreat, or vast swathes of silence. Maybe this suburban house can be a hermitage. Maybe the silence can be the quiet between one breath and the next, between one distraction and the next.

Pause, breathe, reach out and feel the hand reaching out for me.

Here’s another meditation on the poem, if you want to keep pondering.