The last few days I’ve been visiting the family cabin in the north woods. A small place with an outdoor privy, it was built from local tamarack and spruce logs in the late 1940s. While it isn’t fancy, it is filled with all sorts of memories of my extended family. Here’s a poem about my grandfather that tries to be about more than a can of old nails.
To Make the Crooked Straight
On a rusty metal shelf
that stood on the dirt floor
of the shed behind the house:
three rusted Arco cans
filled with bent nails
pulled from a thousand used boards,
and, also, with hope —
to save the unsavory
to make the crooked straight
once again.
Dragonflies are hatching. Skimmers and darners are darting, catching mosquitoes, midges, and whatever else they can find. This poem is about that, but also about the moments that make life rich, and how easy it is to miss them. Gratitude.
Maybe a different day
would have passed unnoticed
like the rabbit, hunched and silent,
who watches you make your way
through the pasture grass.
Especially under a leaden sky
that promises all day rain,
it is easy enough to miss
the significance of things.
But there, at your foot,
pausing for a moment
between the water and the air,
a dragonfly’s transparent wings
glint wet and new;
and within them the whole
threatening sky, the leaning
grass, the dying elms that rim
the field, your peering eye,
this entire large world
caught
in a web of veins.
Here is a poem from my writing notebook that I’ve been playing around with. Last night was so beautiful. I stayed outside long after the fire in the fire pit had died down and the stars had come out.
Below the Surface
Blue whales are large,
but not the largest of living things,
though ask anyone and that’s the
first opinion offered; unless
they mention the giant sequoia – if we
make it past our blindness of plants.
But even that behemoth,
towering 350 feet in the air and wide enough
to drive a car through, is dwarfed by
the mass of a simple fungus*
in Oregon, nearly two and a half
miles across and almost entirely
underground, except for the
mushrooms that carpet the ground
when conditions are right.
Who has not wondered, on a warm spring
night while looking at the stars,
whether things are more connected
than they appear, whether what we see is
not what we get, but something
I had my last day of school on Friday and, while I love my job, I really need some time to think and write and remember what that other life is like. So, the hickory buds took on even more meaning than they usually do this time of year. I’m looking forward to writing more, but first, a trip North, canoe paddle in hand.
Hickory Buds
Again this year, after swelling through April
the hickory buds burst one day in May.
All of a sudden and everywhere
they heave open their doors
and fling themselves into the light.
How I am like this some days, too,
furled, tightly packed, cramped,
I wait, feeding myself
the energy stored in my roots,
then, suddenly, unfurled,
grasping and stretching I leap
towards the brightness of May.
Who, in the long run, can say
which is better? Both are necessary;
the one depends on the other.
Although, I know right now
which one I will choose.
Here’s a small poem that came from another Ben Shahn photo, which was left over from an attempt at a poem every-other-day during April. (Click here for more on my fascination with Ben Shahn.)
From the New York Public Library
Performance Art
We write our lives
in the small things we do:
bare feet on the cold floor,
the bed made, sheet and quilt
pulled up just so;
hands dipped into a basin,
the still-damp towel
hung to dry. Your smile
warms me when I enter the kitchen
after the cold night.
We write our lives
in the things we do.
Our penmanship grows
better with practice.
Her practiced bow
placed on the string
sings clear and bright.
Yet, you? No long-song
rings into the night.
In your ukulele life,
each plucked note
hovers thin and short.
Your music endures
in the blur of a hand.
– Steve Peterson
I wrote this poem in the comments section over at Mary Lee Hahn’s Poetrepository. I got to thinking about how some lives sing like violins and some plunk like a ukulele; both have their beauty, yet each requires such different technique.
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.
Public Domain via the New York Public Library
Considering Anna Atkins and the Brown Algae of Britain
Was it love that moved her
over a slippery beach at low tide
collecting her specimens,
lifting seaweed
from the rocks? Even before Darwin,
she was a seer,
one who sought pattern
in a world of difference,
saw change hidden beneath
the relentless waves.
Who will remember all of
the small things,
the odd little things.
the silent, still
and mute things?
No one walks through
mud anymore. None
collect things – the variety
of the finches’ beaks; the sex life
of barnacles; these
are beneath our notice.
Who slogs among the leeches
of the Malay Archipelago
to bring home beetles? Who
climbs the thin-aired Andes?
Who scuffs among tundra plants,
swatting at mosquitoes? Kneels
to inspect mosses? Or listens
for the seabirds lost
to the fog of the Pribilof Islands?
When did this change? Was
it gradual, this forgetting how to see?
Did we lose it slowly
like the light leaves
the sky at the end
of the day, when suddenly,
we look up from our chairs
and notice that darkness
surrounds us.
– Steve Peterson
Public Domain via the New York Public Library
I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, a set of photos from the digital collection of Anna Atkins’ book, Photographs of British Algae. You can read more about her here. I was intrigued that she was an early believer in evolution, albeit of the Lamarckian kind.
I write this on Earth Day, a day I usually do not celebrate since, as my partner says, “everyday needs to be Earth Day.” This poem is probably harsher than I really believe, although, these days, it is easy for a person to despair. Recently, I read about how some are thinking that this newest “epoch” should be called the “Anthropocene“, since we humans have made quite a mess of things.
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.
Glimpse
Do you ever
catch sight of yourself
in a photo, say, one
from long ago
that you never could have
been in? You get a glimpse
of a life you never
got to live. So it was
you were flipping through some photos and,
like when the hall mirror
captures your image momentarily,
there you are. You’re not
the one in the background
jumping up to be noticed,
or the one striding
to meet the camera,
broad, confident smile on his face.
No, you’re the one standing,
head slightly tilted, curious,
apart from the others,
on the edge of the gathering noise.
You’re the absent one,
fondling a stone,
the one you picked up
alongside the road because
the sun lit up its mossy green streaks
and the black was deep
and mysterious.
You delight
in the smooth, cool
weight in your hand.
– Steve Peterson
Notes
I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.
It has been fun to look through these old photos. When I came across this photo of kids loading onto the school bus in a small town in West Virginia in 1935, I did a double take. The expression on the face of the boy in the foreground is like so many on my face in photos from my past. I began to imagine a connection across the years.
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.
Public Domain via the New York Public Library
Past Time
After the corn failed
he finally gave up the farm
and moved to town having known
for a while that it was long past time
to go work alongside the others
in the factory that banged out
nails for the coffin maker
on the edge of town.
After the whistle blew,
they’d head for the bar
and remember those hard days,
how after they’d cultivated the field
all day under that hot June sun
they’d still have to milk the cows
by the light of the kerosene lamp.
This bar’s better’n that, they’d say,
and then a silence grew as,
heads turned down, they’d watch
memories float and burst
like foam on the beer in front of them,
knowing that soon it would
be past time for them to leave again.
– Steve Peterson
Notes
I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.
As far as the theme? I think I’m working out some of the ways that the rural landscape has changed, my own particular family’s experience with that, and what all that history means for the people who live here. While my grandfather would only rarely be seen in a bar, I do know from family stories of the hardscrabble life so many farmers faced during the Great Depression and, really, through most of the 20th century. The story of the constraints of that farm life and the factory alternative (when there actually were factories to work at!) are pretty deep in the rural Midwest. I guess I’m trying to work out what this all means given the agrarian mythology that you’ll often hear.
PS. There really was a coffin maker on the edge of a town I lived in at one time in my life. And I once did work in a factory that made nails. I spent lunch talking to the men and women that worked there. In the 1970s when I joined them in the factory, many were from the farm at one time, or had relatives struggling through the ’70s on the farm.
There were times I didn’t really like him.
Heck. I hated him sometimes. The chores.
Hot days in the sun pitching loads of hay.
Cold winter mornings in the barn with the cows.
But there were some days I recall, now
that he’s gone, some days when the sun hung low,
and the hay lay mowed and stacked,
sweet green in the late afternoon sun,
on those days we leaned up against the wheel of
the empty wagon, shoulders practically touching.
We listened to the meadowlarks
trill from the fence posts.
Yup.
Maybe these times are all the water a guy needs
to put down roots and
grow into the rest of his life. Maybe
he don’t need no more.
— Steve Peterson
Notes
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month.
Here’s another photo from the New York Public Library’s digital collection. Another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.
I was struck by the two younger men and the older man partly done with the chores; I say partly done because in the background you can see that there is still some mowing left to do. I began to imagine them as family members and what emerged was a poem about the inevitable conflicts that fathers and sons sometimes feel as they work together, but how much gets passed down despite these conflicts. I tried to write in the voice I imagined for the younger man on the right, at a later time in his life.
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