Author: Catherine White

When we first moved to Virginia we let the grass grow tall in front of the house. I remember wondering if we had a new kind of thistle that was yellow. Then I realized it was goldfinches perched on each purple flower head. Yesterday morning I walked the dog down to the end of a nearby gravel road. At the road’s end with its circular turn around, all I could hear were blue jays, robins, and crows. The birds had flown up into the tops of the bare branches of the willows, persimmons, and dogwoods. When I think back to growing up in New York City roller skating in Central Park I never imagined that poetry would be part of how I understand the world.

It’s the Season I Often Mistake

Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.
The tawny yellow mulberry leaves
are always goldfinches tumbling
across the lawn like extreme elation.
The last of the maroon crabapple
ovates are song sparrows that tremble
all at once. And today, just when I
could not stand myself any longer,
a group of field sparrows, that were
actually field sparrows, flew up into
the bare branches of the hackberry
and I almost collapsed: leaves
reattaching themselves to the tree
like a strong spell for reversal. What
else did I expect? What good
is accuracy amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.

–Ada Limón, from The Hurting Kind, Milkweed Editions

On my morning walk in the damp mist the trees were black silhouettes against a grey sky like loose brushwork on a bowl. I see the outlines of pots everywhere I look. But I have spent my life as a potter trying to see the inside volume. So much of my early training was focused on bowls that it took me a long time to arrive at a place where I could throw bowls intuitively without working against the voice of my education.

First Sight

I see an outline
of you everywhere I look.
We spend our lives trying to
see our insides. Have
you ever watched the trees turn
black before the sky?

–Victoria Chang, in The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press

I am grateful my father taught me to draw the mundane things in our life. He taught me to see plants and more specifically leaves, the chairs, our shoes, the dog, his children, and my mom all as fodder for art. His line was bumpy and exaggerated but based on what he was really looking at. He was after a poetic beauty to his document. He loved the soul of things, the humor, the quirky, not slick prettiness.

After Dad died and we cleared out the loft my daughter encouraged me to keep one of the many Dracaena plants that lined his south facing windows. Drawing my neglected plant in the fading light of December in Virginia connects the threads of our lives. I am grateful for the practice of drawing in my life. It keeps me looking and not taking things for granted. Drawing helps me to write, when I draw there is space in my mind for words and things I couldn’t articulate before, become clear. Drawing helps me to remember details which live in the past but just as much help me to write about tomorrow.

It Is March

In the upper leaves,
it is already next month.
I am still writing
yesterday’s poems, waiting for
clarity to come.
But yesterday is clotting,
next month won’t come down.
How do I live in the past
but write about tomorrow?

–Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything, Hachette, 2022

It must be December again. This must be the day when you start getting images and poems from me again in a calm progression until the 21st, the shortest day of the year in this part of the world.

Darling
       
The days fall out of your pockets one after the other.
Soon you’ll need a new jacket with tougher leather

and seams no one has felt. Soon you’ll bring
the old books into your bed and sleep easy

and alone. It must be December again.
This must be the part of the story where you

refuse to say how the bodies you’ve walked toward
continue walking in you. With heavy black boots

in a calm procession of darling and honey—
they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.

–Alex Dimitrov from Begging for It, Four Way Books, 2013

Today on the longest day of the year, I wore my raincoat to walk the dog. This year’s summer solstice is a welcome wet green day. Today’s rain soaked walks reminded me of a photo of Zoë and my mother in raincoats in Maine. My parents taught us to always have good rain gear so that no matter the weather we could get out and enjoy the day. I have talked to several old friends and relatives this week who all have such fond memories of my parents and the magical way my brothers and I were raised. It’s as if mom and dad carried umbrellas that allowed us to grow in idiosyncratic creative directions. A recent visitor saw my father’s sculptures in our house and she said, “oh that’s where you got your talent.” I thought to myself, no that’s where I got the permission to make the things I dream of. As a kid I danced until the downstairs neighbors complained. Stephen played the drums. Shawn wrote songs and played every instrument he could get his hands on. Nick was ready to play every sport. Each of us filled sketchbooks as a form of breathing.

The Raincoat

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

–Ada Limón, in The Carrying: Poems, Milkweed Editions

I don’t ever remember having fresh peas as a kid. I do remember my father describing being in a market in France in the early 50s when he and my mother were in art school. He said the moment when fresh peas arrived in the market it ignited a special kind frenzy.

I love growing peas. The early possibility of planting the seeds, the sprouts and tendrils, the first pods. But I find picking them requires a special kind of patience and looking. I have a chair I pull into the garden to sit on so I can slowly look for all the peas. Shelling peas requires the kind of serenity and attention to detail that reading poetry does. The effort is careful, full of breaks, but something happens beyond the utility of the task. I return again and again to another pod, splitting each one, admiring the nestled peas, and dropping the fresh green bit into the bowl.

Whether or not we are seeing the tide of poetry’s popularity ebb or flow seems to be somewhat up in the air. But what I do know, and what I am most intimately familiar with, is that poetry helps, that on days when I feel overwhelmingly bullied by the ongoing barrage of vitriol and pain in the world, there is a very real and significant joy that occurs when I return to, or discover, a really good poem. But explaining why it matters, or how it helps, is difficult. It’s like trying to explain to someone why walking into a stand of trees helps, or why going to the water helps, or seeing that one kind burst of blue sky among the terrifying scrapers helps.

Perhaps why it matters, how it lifts us, and why some of us return to it again and again is, unlike any other form of writing, poetry has breath built right into it, thanks to the line break, and the stanza. “And here we breathe a little,” the poem says, “and here we breathe a lot.” Right now, as a society, I think we need that breath. That necessary pause that allows for our own wrecked little selves to enter the poem, or even just return to the room we are presently in, that particular moment is where the real brilliance of great poetry happens.

–Ada Limón, Why Poetry Helps

I baked a cake today to witness another year gone by. As the rain pulled in, we stayed on the porch before dinner and toasted to what we have been through and whatever will come next. I remember my Grandmother would never tell people how old she was. Instead, I follow in my mother’s footsteps, forging a new path–buying myself flowers and happily answering anyone who asks how old I am.

I love birthdays. I love my birthday and I love celebrating other people’s birthdays. To me, it’s important to witness another year gone by. To recognize what we’ve been through, to hold up the glass of champagne, and say yes to whatever is next. On that one day in March, I tell strangers it’s my birthday. I throw myself birthday parties. I’ve even baked myself a cake.

–Ada Limón, from the podcast The Slowdown, 605: Birthday, February 7, 2022

It has been ten years since my dad had a heart attack which led to his death. I think about his sense of humor, his photos, and the Abraham Lincoln beard that he had for a while in the 1970s. I look at black and white photos that he took. It’s not the facial hair that sticks in my mind but the hunch of his shoulders, the khaki pants, the way he liked to laugh at his own jokes. I love all the evidence of his love of life that he made as an artist.

It’s been a year
since I’ve seen him in person, I miss how he points
to his apple trees and I miss his smooth face
that no longer has the mustache I adored.
As a child I once cried when he shaved it. Even then,
I was too attached to this life.

–Ada Limón, from My Father’s Mustache, in The Hurting Kind, Milkweed Editions, 2022

My dad was a loud sleeper. Boy, did he snore. In the summer after my mom died Zoë slept in the cabin room next to his, separated only by a thin pine wall. She was dismayed by his dream swearings in the wee hours of the night. Our family also believed in naps. My brother Stephen and I used to wonder if the soup and sandwiches at lunch were drugged to make us all nap so soundly.

My father also hated it when his children retold their dreams at the breakfast table. I have had recent vivid dreams of baby sitting for our grandson or meeting my dad at a Soho restaurant. In my dreams my mom is worried about candles and flowers. I always want to slip into a dream life that is less messy, perhaps full of the seeds of ideas, simple rich meals, and resonant pots. I have been dreaming of scattering the poppy seeds in our field for next year’s blossoms and visualizing the Meyer lemon tree weighed down with fruit.

Careful of what I carry
in my head and in my hollow,

I’ve been a long time worried
about grasping infinity

and coaxing some calm
out of the softest part

of the pins and needles of me.
I’d like to take a nap.

But not a nap that’s eternal,
a nap where you wake up

having dreamt of falling, but
you’ve only fallen into

an ease so unknown to you
it looks like a new country.

Let me slip into a life less messy.
Let me slip into your sleeve.

Be very brave about my
trespass, the plan is simple —

the plan is the clock tower
and the lost crow. It’ll be rich.

We’ll live forever. Every moon
will be a moon of surrender

and lemon seeds. You there,
standing up in the crowd,

I’m not proud. The stove
can’t boast of the meal.

All this to say — consider this,
with your combination of firefly

and train whistle, consider this,
with your maze and steel,

I want to be the rough clothes
you can’t sleep in.

–Ada Limón, excerpt from The Noisiness of Sleep in Bright Dead Things, Milkweed Editions

Today at lunch I noticed a baby ground hog climb up on a three-foot high willow stump on the edge of the pond. I reached for binoculars and sat on the porch to watch as a parent climbed up to join in the fun. They both rubbed their ears against the rotting wood. I was mesmerized by the liquid bristle and waddle.

Give Me This

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

–Ada Limón, originally published in Poem-a-Day, 9/16/2020, by the Academy of American Poets