An annoying – though thankfully non-destructive – virus decided that my computer would make a good temporary host, delaying the March Poem of the Month.

The confluence of the virus with Spring Break didn’t speed up the healing, but thankfully the patient has now made a full recovery. With the remnants of Spring Break still lingering in the air for many of us, I thought it was an appropriate time for a poem about travel…and birds.

Happy Spring everyone!

Stewart

Timothy Steele
(1948 -   )

In the Memphis Airport

Above the concourse, from a beam,
A little warbler pours forth song.
Beneath her, hurried humans stream:
Some draw wheeled suitcases along
Or from a beeping belt or purse
Apply a cell phone to an ear;
Some pause at banks of monitors
Where times and gates for flights appear.

Although by nature flight-endowed,
She seems too gentle to reproach
These souls who soon will climb through cloud
In first class, business class, and coach.
She may feel that it’s her mistake
She’s here, but someone ought to bring
A net to catch and help her make
Her own connections north to spring.

She cheeps and trills on, swift and sweet,
Though no one outside hears her strains.
There, telescopic tunnels greet
The cheeks of their arriving planes;
A ground crew welcomes and assists
Luggage that skycaps, treating bags
Like careful ornithologists,
Banded with destination tags.

I was exchanging emails with an old high school friend last week discussing our 20-year reunion, coming up this summer. One comment in her email struck me, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since – “Could you have ever imagined 20 years ago that you would be where you are in life today?”

I saw the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” not too long ago, and one scene in the movie asked a similar question. Brad Pitt’s character narrates an unfolding of events that culminated in an accident that proves crucial to the plot of the movie – “If only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab…”

I can say that I’ve had moments in my life when I’ve applied the same logic to some tragedy or other painful experience – I’m sure we all have. But I can also say that as I sit here sipping a cup of hot tea, my children sleeping quietly down the hall, my cat Emelye curled up in my lap and purring softly, a wedding a few months away, my friends and family on my mind, and a whirl of moments I have experienced, decisions I have made, and paths I could have traveled down, there is a peaceful feeling that life resolves and places us where we are meant to be when we are meant to be there.

Could I have ever imaged 20 years ago that I would be where I am? No. Can I image where I might be tomorrow, or a month or year or 20 years from this moment? No, but like Mary Oliver in this month’s poem, I am extremely optimistic…

Stewart

Mary Oliver
(1935 -  )

Walking To Oak-Head Pond,
And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit
In The Next Days And Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled–
I’m wading along

in the sunlight–
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead–
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon–
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from–
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind–

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage–
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Today marked the passing of one of the country’s true literary legends, John Updike. I hadn’t featured one of his works since September of 2004, when I shared his poem “The Angels” , so it seemed fitting to dedicate this month’s selection to Updike. I thought this particular poem appropriate to his passing – “…know we go to sleep less to rest than to participate in the twists of another world…”

I hope you enjoy this poem, as we welcome in a New Year, a New Government, a new hope just around the corner…

John Updike
(1932 – 2009)

Tossing and Turning

The spirit has infinite facets,
but the body confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross your ankles.
Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.

It seems easy to look back at this year and remember all of the tumultuous events that marked 2008 – economic implosions in the housing markets and then the financial markets; terrorist attacks in Pakistan and India; Governors in New York & Illinois taking precipitous falls from grace, straining our faith in our elected leaders; continuing genocide and humanitarian crisis in Africa; and war and conflict in Russia, the Gaza and yes, still in Iraq & Afghanistan.

But the wonderful thing about our human spirit is that we carry on with hope for something better in the coming days, months and years. Sometimes, an American Olympic Swimmer DOES break all of the records; sometimes BOTH candidates are about doing things a new way; sometimes people DO find the loves of their lives.

Wishing you all a wonderful new year,

Stewart

Sheenagh Pugh
(1950 – )

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

It’s been a busy month here in Seattle, and there were so many wonderful things to celebrate and be thankful for during this last month and especially this Thanksgiving weekend.

Since last month’s Poem of the Month, I accepted a position with T-Mobile as their Manager of Finance Training and Career Development. My role with TM is to develop job competencies and career paths for the 900+ employees in TM’s Finance organization. I’m very thrilled to join such a great company.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, our festivities included my kids getting to meet their “new” cousins from California, who came up with their families to celebrate Thanksgiving at Jody’s parents. It was a convening of the Kealy clan that included Brothers, Sisters, close family friends, and an Aunt and Uncle. We all hit the Seattle Thanksgiving Parade, and to round out the weekend, Jody and I were lured into attending a surprise engagement party, where we got to spend a wonderful evening surrounding by new, and old, friends.

I hope that your Thanksgiving was filled with joy, hope, and that wonderful recognition that life creates infinite things to be thankful for.

Warmest wishes,
Stewart

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman
(1952 -  )

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

I began this month with my annual Port wine trip to Portugal with our For The Love of Port tour, spending four days in Oporto visiting the Port Lodges, and then travelling the 100 miles up the Douro River for four days, visiting 7 Quintas over the remaining four days. The harvest was in full swing while we were there, and there was considerable buzz not only about the 2008 harvest being picked, but also the developing quality of the 2007 vintage that has been in casks for a year. For the wine lovers and Port fans, my tally for the week was 176 wines, ranging from two 1937 colheita Ports to 2007 Ports sampled directly from the barrels, to even a few 2008 wines, whose grapes were literally crushed hours prior. Other highlights included a once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the fabled Factory House with some of the luminaries of the Port industry and being able to once again climb into the big stone lagares at Quinta do Crasto and actually do some grape-stompin’ myself. We had a great group travelling with us, and it was a very memorable return to Portugal for me.

After Portugal, my lovely girlfriend Jody met me in London, and we spent the next few days enjoying the London sights and culture. We saw “Wicked” in London’s West End, and attended another Port tasting. After a week of drinking Port, you would think that I’d be looking forward to a break, but this monumental tasting of some of the great Ports from Cockburns could not be missed. The 23 Ports on the day’s tasting agenda included Cockburns Ports from 1896, bottles from every declared vintage, 2007 cask samples, and even a bottle from the non-declared 1977 vintage, which basically doesn’t officially exist. It was provided from the private reserves of Cockburn’s winemaker, who joined us for the event from Portugal and added absolutely wonderful commentary about the wines throughout the night.

How could one top such a week and a half? A surprise trip to Venice for Jody, who thought all along that we were just going to spend “a few days in Scotland” after London. The weather was warm and perfect, the city was absolutely magical, and as the final exclamation on an unforgettable two weeks, we got engaged at dusk in the plaza of San Marco, steps from bank of Venice’s Grand Canal.

For October’s Poem of the Month, I give you a selection from the prose Poet Louis Jenkins…

Louis Jenkins
(1942 -  )

Flight

Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even to a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour de force, really. There’s a lot of running and flapping involved and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching, waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows? You might just make it.

I’m heading out tomorrow for my annual trip to Portugal’s wine region, where I will spend a week with wine friends touring and tasting through the Douro Valley. This will be my third year visiting there during harvest, and one line from this month’s selection, “The long brown path before me” makes me recalled the rugged beauty of the rocky Portuguese vineyards seemingly far away from the rest of the world. The Douro Valley is a far cry from places like Napa or Walla Walla, mainly because there simply are not a lot of tourists, shopping, spas, or other amenities you’d fine in many other wine regions. Maybe I love it for the fact that such a place of simple ruggedness and beauty produces such amazing Ports and wines from its rocky soils. It’s a magical place, and I am looking forward to arriving there in a matter of hours.

Portugal will be followed by a few days in the UK, visiting friends, catching a show in the West End, attending a monumental Cockburn Port tasting reaching back to the 1890’s,  enjoying some museums and…well, since I’ve always been such an Anglophile…just taking in the sheer history of the place.

I hope you are all doing well, and I leave you with a selection from Walt Whitman’s Songs of the Open Road…

Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)

From Song of The Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

Mary Oliver
(1935 – )

Poem Number 135

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and
Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the
Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled-
I’m wading along

in the sunlight-
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Sometimes I could swear that the clocks in my house accelerate and there are really only 12 hours in each day… May has been a blur marked by birthday celebrations, six weeks of kitchen remodel (finally coming to a beautiful end – yeah!), weekends out of town, kid’s school activities, dinners with friends…

As I sat down the other day to start reading some poems in search of this month’s selection, I stumbled upon this month’s selection, and recalled a fond high school memory of driving out into the Alabama countryside with friends to hang out and listen to music on the car radio (there obviously wasn’t a lot to do for teenagers in my hometown). I remember piling out of the car into the hot evening air, and as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, the stars seemed to grow in their brightness until the sky became of dome of twinkling light. The vastness made a remarkable impression on me, and standing there, slightly stunned, I mumbled a paraphrased line to myself from H.G. Well’s “Time Machine” (here faithfully reproduced): “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.”

Hopefully this poem will provide good intellectual balance to our otherwise busy lives. Read it, and then go out tonight and take a look at the stars…

Adam Kirsch


Now that no one looking at the night

Now that no one looking at the night-
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can’t and weren’t meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

First, my apologies for sending out this month’s poem almost half-way through April! Life, as we all know, can get hectic and busy. In addition to Spring bursting its way onto the stage here in Seattle, this month has already seen a major project at work that has been challenging in both its scope and timeline. My family has a whole litany of birthdays and anniversaries this month (including my daughter’s birthday tomorrow and my own in a few weeks), I have a major kitchen remodel underway, and I just completed the redesigned our www.fortheloveofport.com website. To top it off, I am having to juggle getting my car’s rear window repaired after someone decided that they’d see how much change might be in the center console (I think they made off with about $0.42, an emergency car kit and little else). I actually laughed that someone went through all that effort… The window and the kit are all replaceable – they are, after all, just “things” – and I found two quarters on the sidewalk this morning, so I figure I’m $0.08 ahead now.

I sincerely appreciate you letting me share one of my passions, poetry, with you all. I have long been a lover of words, of the condensing of sentiment into those well-chosen words, those perfect phrases that capture love, or fear, or remorse, or joy and leaves it hanging there, just in front of our eyes purely for our enjoyment. Selecting a poem each month is truly a labor of love for me – it is a time every month when, no matter how busy life gets, I pause to read, to reflect, to share. Maybe it’s just my way of acknowledging and celebrating those small moments of profoundness that seem so elusive for the rest of the month. Either way, thank you for your indulgence.

Yesterday, standing in the middle of my 1942 kitchen, now stripped bare to the stud walls, I started thinking about the meals that had been cooked there, the laughs, the lives that passed through this space. I may have begun to feel a little sense regret at changing such a space, but it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t the cabinets or the tile countertops or the aging linoleum that gave this space is reverence. Kitchens and buildings and places constantly change, but it is precisely those laughs, those lives and those memories that endow those spaces with their meaning.

As if to drive the point home once and for all, as I turned from the scene, I noticed, written by my daughter’s finger in the fine layer of plaster dust that had settled on the sideboard, the words “I love you Dad”.

Wishing you “pristine beauty” in the grain of your own personal granite…

Stewart

Carmel Point
by Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop
rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine
beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. —As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Anne E. Michaels

Orion’s Belt

It is dark enough. Just.
He’s too young to watch the late night sky,
but we walk out together
past dusk, onto the cool grass,
leaves beneath our feet.
He’s wearing pajamas
under his coat. He thinks he sees
Orion’s belt, there; no, there.
It’s funny how, at first,
All stars look alike.

Our necks begin to ache,
so I lie down. Earth is cold.
I make a blanket of myself
to keep him from the chill.
His hair tickles my chin.
We find the Little Dipper first,
then the big one. The Drinking Gourd.
The Bear.

It doesn’t look like a bear, he says.
But there, those three bright stars
do make a shining belt in heaven.
His feet are cold, my muscles stiff -
we make an awkward constellation on the lawn.
He says he sees Orion’s dagger
hanging from the belt; perhpas he does,
his eyes are better than mine.
Still, there’s haze tonight
and too much glimmer from the city
and the rising moon.

I think about Orion, who cannot feel
the grass and cool leaves brush his skin or
a child’s weight upon his body.
I hold my son against myself,
against the cold, against the earth,
against the darkness.
And from this night on, the stars are different:
named, found, loved,
recognizable in their sky.