Driving home in the dark, I smell freshly turned earth.
I am somehow fifty.
My son’s first year of life was five years long.
It’s like when we are knitting, and the piece is seven inches long for ages and then all of a sudden nine.
Tag: poems
The Horizon is Tougher Than That
It began as a beautiful field,
then became a dusty lot, then
a rapidly rising skeleton to
which insects trundled, their
headlights glowing in the dusk. Now it’s a shiny dull something, a
warehouse or machine shed.
You’d think it would block the horizon, but no.
The horizon is tougher than that, and springs back into place.
You could build a hundred of these warehouse things and not fill up the big sky.
So don’t worry.
It’s Time Again for my Favorite Latin Christmas Carol
Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes
“O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant”
Venite, venite in Bethlehem
“Come, come into Bethlehem”
Natum videte, regem angelorum
“Born see, the king of angels”
Venite adoremus [3x]
“O come, let us adore him” [3x]
Dominum
“The Lord”
Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine
“God from God, light from light” *(these are direct objects, so the subject and verb are coming up)
Gestant puellae viscera
“A girls’ innards carry” (the subject and verb, and by far my favorite line)
Deum verum
“True God” (and still the direct object)
genitum non factum
“Begotten, not made”
Refrain: Venite adoremus, Dominum “O come, let us adore/The Lord”
Cantet nunc io, chorus angelorum
“Now sings it, the chorus of angels”
Cantet nunc aula caelestium
“Now the heavenly court sings”
Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo
“Glory, glory to God in the highest”
Refrain: “O come, let us adore/The Lord”
Ergo qui natus die hodierna
“Therefore, who is born on the day of today”
Jesu, tibi sit gloria
“Jesus, to you be glory”
Patris aeterni Verbum caro factum
“Word of the eternal Father made flesh”
Refrain
See how the Latin is actually more direct/efficient than the English? Kind of shockingly so?
I think because the original Latin version had so many syllables, to translate the lines into English, additional words had to be added, and sometimes even new ideas such as “Yea, Lord, we greet thee,” which is how the fourth verse begins in English and is one of my favorite lines in that version.
And there was also a daughter
And there was also a daughter.
She drops out of the story very early, sacrificed
for good winds on the way to Troy.
But her mother’s revenge has made history.
And there was also a daughter
cursed to foresee the destruction of the city,
as daughters often do,
and no one believed her.
And there was also a daughter,
kidnapped (seduced?) by Shechem,
avenged (destroyed?) by her brothers,
a single chapter in Genesis.
And there was also a prophet,
a man too young to know what women suffer–
yet He did, somehow.
Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.
I was expecting it to be heavy
I was expecting it to be heavy
but it was aluminum, not steel.
I pushed with my foot,
and it slid easily,
and I stood there foolish,
not having had to call upon any strength.
I was expecting it to be heavy, but
–my God–not this heavy,
one of those tasks that it’s impossible to stop
even when repeated failure is guaranteed.
I was expecting it to be heavy,
and it was,
but I can hardly remember now
how somehow it moved when I pushed,
as if someone else was also pushing.
His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
A Peek Inside the Author’s Mind
So, this post may only apply to those of you who have read and/or enjoyed my books … or to fellow fiction-writers who like to talk about the writing process. Others can bow out now, no hard feelings.
I’ve heard that some writers create a “mood board” or a collection of images or media that give a feel for how they want their book to be, when they are building their world. I don’t do that, because I kind of do worldbuilding and plot discovery more or less at the same time, as an iterative process. It’s usually not until I am deep into the draft (or at the end) that the theme of the book emerges.
Nevertheless, with all three of the books in my trilogy, as I neared the end of the drafting, a song or a poem floated up to the surface that seemed perfectly to capture the emotional tone of the book or the experience of a main character. Here they are:
For The Long Guest, it was this poem by Emily Dickinson:
My life closed twice before its close–
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
This poem, obviously, represents Zillah’s experience in a much more succinct way.
For The Strange Land, as I wrote about Ikash’s difficult child and teen years and eventual redemption, I was haunted by this hymn:
“She hath suffered many a day / Now her griefs have passed away.”
Ikash is not unique. His story in some sense happens to everyone.
As I wrote The Great Snake, I realized that the dilemma Klee finds herself in was perfectly captured by this Bryan Duncan song:
And … as for the book I am currently drafting … no data
Update: The official mind-worm for The Bright World is Why Not Me? by the Judds.
How about you, fellow writers? How does your mind work? Do you often have media serendipitously match your book as you are writing it?
Readers, do you get a relevant song or quote stuck in your head as you are reading?
Things We Write to our Friends
Hey. It’s been too long. We should get coffee some time. Yes, of course I’ll be in your wedding–jealous! Did you hear, I’m engaged too. You’re getting married? Better be careful–it’s risky, you know. Congratulations on the birth of your child. Here are some pictures of mine. Did you hear, our mutual friends are getting divorced. How awful. So much of it happening now. How can we help them? How can I help you? Thanks, it’s a lot better now, but boy, things were rough for a while. I’m sorry about your father, your mother, your cousin. I’m sorry your son died.
…rather like Miller’s book, in fact
AXES
They would rather row out to Rathlin Island,
they would rather quarry the difficult
mountain over any easier spot
that happened to house the same stone. Demand
made the axes better, as did the withdrawn,
the journeyed-to, the arduous and removed.
—Tim Miller, Bone Antler Stone, p. 45
You Guys! A Book of Poems about Prehistoric Burials!
There’s a reason I’m posting about this book on Feb. 14.
It does something that I want to do with my novels.
It takes the feeling that I get when hearing about bog burials, stone circles, cave paintings — and amplifies it.
Did I mention that I love it?
I’ll be posting quotations from this book throughout the month of February. The one I posted two days ago – To The Air – could have been written about the scene in The Long Guest where the family cremates … well, I won’t give it away. It was trying for the same thing as that scene, or vice versa. But I mostly posted it for that evocative last line.
you died horribly but are beautiful,
sleeping face and pointed cap and perfect feet,
a peat cutter’s slash dug into your back
but preserved as none of your captors are —
though what a price for immortality.
–from Tollund Man, p. 39
If you’ve ever seen a picture of Tollund Man, this is exactly it.
I haven’t yet read every poem in Bone Antler Stone. They require close attention, and some of them are not short. But every so often I’ll dip into it, and find gems like this one:
The sun sets into the sea with a hiss
and rises with the sound of a driven wheel,
the creak of speaking stone, metal and wood.
The sun sets into the sea to simmer
and rises with the sound of stretched leather
and the song of the horse’s chain and bit.
ibid, p. 23
The idea of the solar system as a great big machine, perhaps made of hoops or wheels, that is alluded to in that first stanza is actually very close to how some ancient cultures conceived of the cosmos.
The last poem in the collection shows the author leaving Orkney, where he went to view the burials, with a friend who is named Pytheas for some reason. This poem raises the thought that not everyone is going to “get” a book of poems like this one.
The price to pay for a place like that,
the price to pay for poems like these…
our intensity is terrifying or just tiresome,
and so the dead and the damp doubleback
into just another of our silent, stone secrets.
It the compares the book itself to a barrow burial waiting to be discovered at the right moment:
So Pytheas proceeded in reply,
assuring me that for us, and for ours,
there was only the odd look, the old look, the awed look,
but rarely the real look of revelation,
or the consolation of having communicated.
And so the motive was to make meaning and memory
a kind of barrow burial in bloom
a garlanded grave underground
forged with turf and stone and fire and then forgotten,
until a propitious step or a sudden storm
blows open this book’s binding
and lays each line out in the light again,
shells of syllables dotting the sand.
Well, with a propitious step, I have found it.
It’s Poem Season and I Don’t Know Why
Poems seem to come over me occasionally, like the weather.
Yesterday, I wrote a long poem about death and being embodied that I will probably never post here. Today, I started one called Take Me Instead. And also today, my students and I whipped out a sentimental but serviceable little Valentine’s Day sonnet. Sonnets are easy because you just plug in the iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme.
Perhaps I accidentally primed the pumped by reading the book I’m about to review tomorrow.
Take care! Watch out for falling poetry!
