Sassistas! Our dish on the social soup.

Being Still

Our season of loss is calling the Sassistas! to be still.

We'll return when we feel less overcome.

Love to all.

 

 

My Mother Knew

 This year's Mother's Day poem is posted in memory of

Momista and PEACEsista's mom

who both died since last Mother's Day. 

 

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

-- "The Great Blue Heron" by Carolyn Kizer

    Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000

My Life Waits

 

The following poem is posted in honor of Flannista's oldest sister, who celebrates a birthday today. Thank you, dear sister, for teaching me how to "sing". Also in exactly one month, Flann turns "the page from fifty-nine to sixty."

 

You beak-chattering blaze of blue,

patch of sky squatting on a power line,

teach me to cock my head, too.

 

Together, we'll watch -- what is there to see

in Tennessee? July can only shrug,

after a night's caterwaul of katydids.

 

Now, into the deserted street, a fawn tiptoes

from the woods toward well-tamed lawn.

A dead branch moves, doe rustling to life.

 

You keep singing, bird, and no one minds,

but I have drawn breath too noisily -- 

toward me, eyes carved of obsidian turn.

 

Into mossy ears as big as a man's cupped hand

a clamor pours: somewhere beneath us,

a mole shoves earth from one dark to another.

 

Blood blunders through the chambers of my heart.

My life waits to turn the page from fifty-nine to sixty.

A feather too blue to be real -- how long does it last?

 

-- "To An Eastern Bluebird" by Debora Greger

 

 

A Fool

A fool I was to sleep at noon,

         And wake when night is chilly

Beneath the comfortless cold moon;

A fool to pluck my rose too soon,

         A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;

         Faded and all-forsaken,

I weep as I have never wept:

Oh it was summer when I slept,

         It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring

         And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—

Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,

No more to laugh, no more to sing,

         I sit alone with sorrow.

-- "A Daughter of Eve" by Christina Rossetti

All Stories Stop

 

 

 

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease
over blanching yolks with an expertise
hone from three decades of dawns
at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine,
where even the oldest in the men’s booth
swore as if it were scripture truth
they’d never had a breakfast better,
rapping a glass sharply to get her
attention when it went sorrowing
so far into some simple thing–
the jangly door or a crusted pan,
the wall clock’s black, hitchy hands–
that she would startle, blink, then grin
as if discovering them all again.
Who remembers now when one died
the space that he had occupied
went unfilled for a day, then two, three,
until she unceremoniously
plunked plates down in the wrong places
and stared their wronged faces
back to banter she could hardly follow.
Unmarried, childless, homely, “slow,”
she knew coffee cut with chamomile
kept the grocer Paul’s ulcer cool,
yarrow in gravy eased the islands
of lesions in Larry Borwick’s hands,
and when some nightlong nameless urgency
sent him seeking human company
Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese.
She knew to nod at the litany of cities
the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past,
to laugh when the hunters asked
if she’d pray for them or for the quail
they went laughing off to kill,
and then–envisioning one
rising so fast it seemed the sun
tugged at it–to do exactly that.
Who remembers where they all sat:
crook-backed builders, drought-faced framers,
VF’ers muttering through their wars,
night-shift roughnecks so caked in black
it seemed they made their way back
every morning from the dead.
Who remembers one word they said?
The Longhorn Diner’s long torn down,
the gin and feedlots gone, the town
itself now nothing but a name
at which some bored boy has taken aim,
every letter light-pierced and partial.
Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill,
I picture you one dime-bright dawn
grown even brighter now for being gone
bustling amid the formica and chrome
of that small house we both called home
during the spring that was your last.
All stories stop: once more you’re lost
in something I can merely see:
stream spiriting out of black coffee,
the scorched pores of toast, a bowl
of apple butter like edible soil,
bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass,
my plate’s gleaming, teeming emptiness.

-- "Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone" by Christian Wiman

    from Every Riven Thing

 

The Call

At first, attending to the anxiety of existence can seem like a zero-sum game. Any attention turned toward spiritual truth is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as "life." Thus we parcel out our moments of devotion -- a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple of hours of meditation a week -- all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments. This is inevitable, for the initial demands of any coherent spiritual life are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal. We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the farthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life, but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls "the music of what happens."

-- from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of Modern Believer by Christian Wiman

 

Ikkyu in Love

Yesterday, the Sassistas! posted some of the poetry of 15th century Zen master Ikkyu Sojun from Crow with No Mouth. In this late seventies, Ikkyu scandalized the Buddhist community when he fell in love with a blind singer forty years younger and celebrated their love in verse. Following are four of Ikkyu's love poems:

 

night plum blossoms spreading under a branch

between her thighs narcissus revolves smell it?

 

she'd play with it almost anywhere day and night

touch it with the deepest part of herself

 

a beautiful woman's hot vagina's full of love

I've given up trying to put out the fire of my body

 

a butterfly hovers in front of her face

how long will she sleep

 

Ikkyu in Life

In her latest book, The True Secret of Writing, author Natalie Goldberg devotes an entire chapter to Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481), a scandal-ridden, erotic-minded Japanese Zen master and monk who, writes Natalie, "is part of my writing life -- my sitting, walking, standing life. We carry the people we let sink in deep."

Ikkyu's poetry is published in Crow with No Mouth, translated by Stephen Berg. Flannista had forgotten that Gwendolyn had given it to her in 1996. This week, Flann once again read the book. Today, the Sassistas! are posting four different Ikkyu poems/haiku about life. Tomorrow, a few more that Ikkyu wrote about love.

 

        if there's nowhere to rest at the end

        how can I get lost on the way? 

 

        night after night after night stay up all night

        nothing but your own night

 

        clouds very high look

        not one word helped them get up there

 

        pleasure pain are equal in a clear heart

        no mountain hides the moon

 

 

My Oldest Companion

A jay complains from the ash tree,

So unforgiving

His voice makes my whole body feel

The way my thumb feels

When I draw it along a knifeblade,

Testing the edge.

 

I've done something wrong,

It doesn't matter what,

Let me just say it was wrong enough

To make someone sob

And sit out a whole day of anger

Watching nothing out a window.

 

Our friend the jay bobs his head,

Aims his beak at my chest

As if to warn me

He could with little trouble

Fly right through my heart.

I'd throw a stone at the bastard,

But if I hit him I might feel bad.

 

Who wants to haul that weight?

Sometimes I think guilt

Must be my oldest companion.

If only I could be a cause

Without an effect.

If only I could throw this stone.

 

-- "My Oldest Companion" by C.G. Hanzlicek from The Cave

 

 

Danger

Just once I'd like to be a danger

To something in this world,

Be hunted by cops

And forced into hiding in the mountains,

Since if they left me on the streets

I'd turn the country around,

Changing everyone's mind with a word.

 

But I've lived so long a quiet life,

In a world I've made small,

That even my own mind changes slowly.

I'm a danger only to myself,

Like the daydreaming night watchman

Smoking his cigar

Near the dynamite shed.

 

-- "To Be a Danger" by C.G. Hanzlicek from The Cave