Every Stone a Story

Wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, may the turning of the year bring you renewed joy.

Toward the Winter Solstice

by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.


"Toward the Winter Solstice" from Toward the Winter Solstice (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006, www.ohioswallow.com).

Elegy For Jane

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

--Theodore Roethke

Diane Michelle Thompson, July 10, 1974 - February 8, 1997

Dana Gioia, the great Californian poet, is responsible for the English versions of all three of these poems. One is a translation of Rilke, another a translation of a Mario Luzi poem. I find a certain resonance among them.

( three poems )

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here--through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

--Gwendolyn Brooks

BROTHER JONATHAN'S LAMENT FOR SISTER CAROLINE
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

She has gone,-she has left us in passion and pride
Our stormy-browed sister, so long at our side!
She has torn her own star from our firmament's glow,
And turned on her brother the face of a foe!

0 Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
We can never forget that our hearts have been one,
Our foreheads both sprinkled in Liberty's name,
From the fountain of blood with the finger of flame!

You were always too ready to fire at a touch;
But we said: "She is hasty,-she does not mean much."
We have scowled when you uttered some turbulent threat;
But Friendship still whispered: "Forgive and forget!"

Has our love all died out? Have its altars grown cold?
Has the curse come at last which the fathers foretold?
Then Nature must teach us the strength of the chain
That her petulant children would sever in vain.

They may fight till the buzzards are gorged with their spoil,
Till the harvest grows black as it rots in the soil,
Till the wolves and the catamounts troop from their caves,
And the shark tracks the pirate, the lord of the waves:

In vain is the strife! When its fury is past,
Their fortunes must flow in one channel at last,
As the torrents that rush from the mountains of snow
Roll mingled in peace through the valleys below.

Our Union is river, lake, ocean, and sky;
Man breaks not the medal when God cuts the die!
Though darkened with sulphur, though cloven with steel,
The blue arch will brighten, the waters will heal!

O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
There are battles with Fate that can never be won!
The star-flowering banner must never be furled,
For its blossoms of light are the hope of the world!

Go, then, our rash sister! afar and aloof,
Run wild in the sunshine away from our roof,
But when your heart aches and your feet have grown sore,
Remember the pathway that leads to our door!

Note: this poem is actually about the secession of South Carolina, but I thought it would also speak to the sesquicentennial of the first shots to be fired in the American Civil War, which took place at Fort Sumter, SC. When this poem was written, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician, essayist, poet, professor, was already father of a promising son later to achieve acclaim as one of the greatest of all Supreme Court Justices.

IX. The Tower

This is an architecture for the odd;
Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid,
So once, unconsciously, a virgin made
Her maidenhead conspicuous to a god.

Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep
Lost Love in abstract speculation burns,
And exiled Will to politics returns
In epic verse that makes its traitors weep.

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;
For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die,
Those who see all become invisible:

Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,
Long for a natural climate as they sigh
"Beware of Magic" to the passer-by.
--W. H. Auden


This poem is an old, old favorite. I particularly love the tower/well image; it's apt on so many levels, vivid and exact.

It's part of a much longer poem sequence, "The Quest."

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
--Theodore Roethke

This one speaks to me on many levels right now.

“The Untrustworthy Speaker”
Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When a living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

by Mark Doty
A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
  torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

  over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
  (colors of tarnish on copper)

  against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
  the Choral Society

  prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
  Not steep, really,

  but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
  that neighbor who

  fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
  from the post office

  —tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
  from the T-shirt shop:

  today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
  of distance and formality.

  Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we’re all
about to open a gift we’re not sure
  we’ll like;

  how could they
compete with sunset’s burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
  when the violins begin.

  Who’d have thought
they’d be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
  (a sleek blond

  I’ve seen somewhere before
—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
  is lifted and opened

  into more syllables
than we could count, central ah
dilated in a baroque melisma,
  liquefied; the pour

  of voice seems
to make the unplaned landscape
the text predicts the Lord
  will heighten and tame.

  This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art’s
  acceptable evidence,

  mustn’t what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
  The tenors lack confidence,

  and the soloists,
half of them anyway, don’t
have the strength to found
  the mighty kingdoms

  these passages propose
—but the chorus, all together,
equals my burning clouds,
  and seems itself to burn,

  commingled powers
deeded to a larger, centering claim.
These aren’t anyone we know;
  choiring dissolves

  familiarity in an up-
pouring rush which will not
rest, will not, for a moment,
  be still.

  Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
  the choir insists,

  might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
  quickened, now,

  by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
  Still time to change.

Mark Doty, “Messiah (Christmas Portions),” from Sweet Machine: Poems.
Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted with the permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: Sweet Machine: Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1998)

2009: The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton
2008: selection from "For the Time Being" by W. H. Auden
2007: A Christmas Carol by G. K. Chesterton
2006: The Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot
2005: The Stable by Sr. M. Chrysostom, OSB
2004: no poem, but a meditation of my own
2003: The Guest: A Christmas Prayer by Harold Monro
2002: no poem, but a meditation of my own