Grandparents

My grandmother (who I have always known as Mama) died last Tuesday. If the Hudson River narrates my relationship with my grandparents (which I think it does, from the necessity of crossing the Tappan Zee to visit them to pouring Papa's ashes into the water five years ago), it continued to do so as I crossed the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge toward my parents' home in New Jersey to mourn and bury.

I don't intend to insult Mama's memory by posting a poem about my grandfather, but I didn't write that until four years after his death, so in the future I hope to write of my grandmother, also. Naturally, though, her death makes me think of Papa. The following is a sestina I wrote a little over a year ago:

Sestina

From where I stood below a length of wooden
stairs and dark sea-salted pines, my grandfather
looked as tall as the Owl's Head lighthouse--
Rockland Harbor's brick and mortar. The glass
refracted only sunlight then, but told of ships
led in by fog bells and blasts and keen eyes

in Maine storms. A hat shadowed his right eye,
deep-set in Dutch features carved from wood.
Skull-struck by a heavy bit of shipboard
equipment on the LST 454 in '43, my grandfather's
optics were rearranged, a socket filled by glass.
Docked at New Guinea, wind dimmed his light

in half, and maybe that is why the pixelled light
of television never charmed his one good eye,
but for golf gleaming through the smoke-dusted glass
of an old Zenith. In the small apartment of a wood-
shingled house near Tarrytown, my grandfather
tread linoleum and sat smoking his pipe, like a ship

in a bottle. He couldn't take days in the shipless
trappings of an old man, and would leave the house
in his tool-chest of a Jeep. My grandfather
zipped around the Hudson Valley with a good eye
for fixing, his hands bent from working wood.
His unshaved bristles, like pinpricks of glass,

scratched my head when he bent to kiss it. The glass
stayed still--not seeing, but seen--in the ship-shape
bedroom where I saw him napping. His wooden
chest had lost a hinge and chipped like lighthouse
paint in salt-sea air. Above the wild roses, my eyes
followed sails on the Penobscot to my grandfather

looking out. The blue sweater my grandfather
wore matched the sky above the glass
frame of the fourth order Fresnel, a sightless eye
in the tower's lantern room for the ships
steering past rock ledges below the lighthouse,
to guide them from a fate of splintered wood.

With one eye on the sea and ships,
my grandfather stood as fixed as glass
by the lighthouse, but aged like wood.

I'm not sure what six words I would choose if I were ever to write a sestina on my grandmother. I jotted some down once on some scrap paper that I can probably never hope to find again. In the meantime, I have not a poem, just a list. Because it helps to remember:

cigarette smoke
Dove soap
General Motors Eastern Aircraft
crossing guard
Thornwood
curlers and tape
The Young & The Restless
crosswords
cookies
tissues in her sleeve
blue eyes
clip-on earrings
life is just a bowl of cherries

Lucille May Love Henken (December 23, 1924 - October 24, 2006)

If you've read this far and for whatever reason want to leave a comment, it would be nice to hear memories of your own grandparents, whether it's a short anecdote, poem, list, or just a phrase. =O)

The Shapes of Leaves

If you could pin the leaves peaking to one day, today might be it. So go out of your way to crunch one on the sidewalk, press a few in the dictionary, or just watch quietly as they fall.

The Shapes of Leaves
Arthur Sze

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

Sze was born in NYC in 1950, a second-generation Chinese American. He currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has taught for more than a decade. (www.poets.org)

Thanks to Annabel for the photo!

Blue Days

Because it seems to be one of them:


Dazzling blue days--
Know the longing for those we love.

The green in autumn's garden
withers to autumn hues;

snow fall
lets spring return.

And if I should die and you live?
Or you die? And I live?

On dazzling blue days we know
the longing for those we love.

-So Chongju (1915-2000), translated by David R. McCann

from The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, Ed. David R. McCann. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) p.99

Your Laughter

Your laughter flew and fell like coins on the linoleum
floor that bore the stamp of dried bootprints,
of mud, snow, and rock salt,
no matter how many times Bob mopped,
perhaps because when he mopped the floor
he always spoke of horses,
and I think somehow the horses got in there too,
over the years,
the caution-yellow bucket a trough of old water
licked up by horse tongues,
past rows of teeth
the color of our dirty linoleum floor.

Sardines & Oranges

As I was poking around online and through my poetry anthologies, Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) kept popping up, so he'll be the focus for this post. I confess that I have read very little of his work so far, so if anyone has any other input, that'd be wonderful.

A Frank O'Hara Festival will be held at the end of November, co-sponsored by MOMA and the Poetry Project. More details can also be found on the Poets House website.

And because I'm violating enough copyright laws already, here's a link to Ploughshares (literary journal of Emerson College), where you can read "Two Poems for Frank O'Hara" by Campbell McGrath.



Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look up.
"You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting is
going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

poem from Contemporary American Poetry, 7th Edition, ed. A Poulin, Jr. & Michael Waters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001)

painting is Michael Goldberg's 1955 "Sardines" at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution