Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, February 13, 2019   “There will be daffodils in the Back Bay”

view from my Detroit window – December 2007

Boston is my second city, after Motown. I’ve lived there 7 different times, whole years and half years, at MIT and Boston College. The city is dear to me, dear with familiar urban mazeways (like where to get my car fixed, my hair cut, my teeth tended, smart ways to avoid heavy traffic if you can manage it), how to plan contemplative times beside the sailboat basin of the Charles, whether to walk from my Jesuit house in the Back Bay over the Mass Ave or the Longfellow bridge. All those years have connected me with soul friends.

This week’s tedious patch of winter is more real and sensual because both cities are slogging through sleet and the ice it leaves behind. Winter fatigue and soul friends whose years of kinship help me to take in a Detroit Mercy facilities man who, scooping ice on the walk outside our administration building yesterday morning, lest I slip on more treacherous ice than we’ve seen in a while, tells me that his first salt run was c. 4:30 am.  He confessed as we crossed paths that he was “ready for this to be over!”   I responded that February ice and sleet have a graceful aesthetic purpose;  our fatigue begins to whet our appetite for green grass and daffodils. Whole cities collectively are-learning to long for spring.  Yesterday, an idea for today’s post snuck up on me. I am posting a playful poem I wrote one April afternoon in 1983 while walking across the Mass Ave Bridge into Newbury St. heading home after a work day at MIT.  Is the poem whimsy, or a reminder, or a promise, or a blessing?  Doesn’t matter.   All of the above.

May we each have three good surprises before the end of work today.

john sj

Today’s Post — Meeting at Rush Hour

A gust of wind
sent the metal street sign for Charlie’s Tavern
skittering fifteen feet up Newbury Street, an unlikely sailboat
escaped, perhaps, from the Charles.

The clatter and improbability
set us both free.

She looked twenty two,
blond and lovely,
going the other way
and no doubt equally homeward bound.

In our sudden bemusement
at the sign’s startled venture
our eyes touched.

Then, the wonder.
We grinned.

Delight at our moment’s kinship
freed us from fear
from strategy and burden.
She flashed fire at me
and I, no doubt, at her.

A moment’s celebration quickly passed–
rare and winsome beauty,
breathed through two human forms
filling us with awe.

We went our ways with no word spoken,
both journeys blessed.

April 20, 1983

Dawn outside our front door – March 8, 2007

February 10, 2019  –  “a mutual commitment to noticing”
Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I partnered in a mutual commitment to noticing.   Now that she’s left us,  I miss her most on Saturday mornings when driving into center city to buy new baked bread.    While I drove home, we would talk about the condition of our inner lives.  Through Connie’s last year, our talk was more brave and sad as she recognized her growing diminished, her grief at losing the life in Madison that she loved and lived so gracefully.  Ignatius calls such talk paying attention to “inner disturbances,”  both consolations and desolations.   Noticing.

originally posted January 23, 2017 (@ 2 weeks before she died)
Perhaps this Denise Levertov poem came to mind because I flew into JFK Saturday, braved Long Island’s expressways with their too tight turns matched by slightly-too-narrow lanes, to spend time with my dying soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj.   Connie has become frail, like the ancient poet in today’s poem.  She misses nothing, I realized, but you have to lean in close to hear;  worn with fatigue, she whispers, and pauses to breathe.  We visited three times  (c. 90 minutes,;  25 minutes; and 4 or 5 at the end when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK early Sunday).  I love it that the 40 mile drive on the parkway was wearing;  it reminds me that those miles and our 3 conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of life with Connie.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post   Sunday, February 1o, 2019  – –  “In Love”        Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of Connie.   Perhaps this wintry but hardly arctic morning might tempt you to open your window or step outside so you can read “In Love” while breathing a little.

Over gin and tonic (an unusual treat) the ancient poet
haltingly —not because mind and memory
falter, but because language, now,
weary from so many years
of intense partnership,
comes stiffly to her summons,
with unsure footing —
recounts, for the first time in my hearing, each step
of that graceful sarabande, her husband’s
last days, last minutes, fifteen years ago.

She files her belongings freestyle, jumbled
in plastic bags — poems, old letters, ribbons,
old socks, an empty picture frame;
but keeps her fifty years of marriage wrapped, flawless,
in something we sense and almost see —
diaphanous as those saris one can pass through a wedding ring.

Denise Levertov  1923 – 1997

Consuela  (Connie)
August 2006

Laughing

Smiling

Contemplative

Friday, February 8, 2019

“It turns out that Williams, despite fragile health in his later years, mentored younger poets at his home.
One of them was Denise Levertov, a favorite of yours.”   George Danko to jstsj  May 22, 2018

George  and I met in early September 1973 as we both began finding our way around on our first day at U Penn’s PhD program in American Civilization. These 45 years later we remain good friends who sometimes trade stories of insight or grief or beauty.  Last May, George surprised me.  From reading the Work Day/Hard Times poetry list, he knew that the poets William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov often appeared there.  Until last May, I had no notion that they shared a living room where Williams listened to Levertov’s young voice and told her what he heard – – a magical inter-generational kinship.

Two poets, two poems.  I hope you can find time to read each one out loud, with pauses.  They will be worth the time this Friday early in February.  Have a blest weekend.

john sj

p.s. Just now, c. 8:30 am here in Detroit, a lovely snow began to fall, large flakes helped along by a trace of wind.

Today’s Post:   George Danko to jstsj, May 22, 2018

“Dear John,

I recently read a children’s book, A River of Words, about William Carlos Williams, the pediatrician and poet who wrote and administered to families in my hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. His son also followed his father in a medical career and was my pediatrician. It turns out that Williams, despite fragile health in his later years, mentored younger poets at his home. One of them was Denise Levertov, a favorite of yours.

George”

William Carlos Williams:     The Manoeuvre

I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.

William Carlos Williams
September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams

Denise Levertov:  The Poem Rising By Its Own Weight
‘The poet is at the disposal of his own night.’
Jean Cocteau

The singing robes fly onto your body and cling there silkily,
You step out on the rope and move unfalteringly across it,

And seize the fiery knives unscathed and
Keep them spinning above you, a fountain
Of rhythmic rising, falling, rising
Flames,

And proudly let the chains
Be wound about you, ready
To shed them, link by steel link,
padlock by padlock–

but when your graceful
confident shrug and twist drives the metal
into your flesh and the python grip of it tightens
and you see rust on the chains and blood in your pores
and you roll
over and down a steepness into a dark hole
and there is not even the sound of mockery in the distant air
somewhere above you where the sky was,
no sound but your own breath panting:
then it is that the miracle
walks in, on his swift feet,
down the precipice straight into the cave,
opens the locks,
knots of chain fall open,
twists of chain unwind themselves,
links fall asunder,
in seconds there is a heap of scrap-
metal at your ankles, you step free and at once
he turns to go —
but as you catch at him with a cry,
clasping his knees, sobbing your gratitude,
with what radiant joy he turns to you,
and raises you to your feet,
and strokes your disheveled hair,
and holds you,
holds you,
holds you
close and tenderly before he vanishes.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

Wednesday,  February 6, 2019

“The subject of today’s investigation
is things that don’t move themselves.

They need to be helped along,”

I’ve been on the road: DC,  Baltimore, and a mildly harrowing connection via Atlanta during Super Bowl Sunday to get to New Orleans for a trustee meeting of the National Jesuit Volunteer Corps til last night.  That’s got me behind as Wednesday begins.   Weather.com tells me that rain is likely, maybe even “sullen rain” until a sweet Saturday of sun after prevailing winds shift to Detroit’s best direction, West at 25 mph Friday to clear the air, down to West at 9 mph Saturday.

What sort of poem for this little patch of gloomy weather and an agenda that needs tending?  I thought of a classic and wonderful indoor poem from Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska.  Turn on a bright lamp indoors, get comfortable (some more coffee?) and read.  Best read out loud with pauses.   The post will be back Friday and so, I suspect, will the sun have returned.

Have a blest mid-week,

john sj

Today’s Post “A Little Girl Tugs At The Tablecloth”
Wislawa Szymborska

She’s been in this world for over a year,
and in this world not everything’s been examined
and taken in hand.

The subject of today’s investigation
is things that don’t move themselves.

They need to be helped along,

shoved, shifted,
taken from their place and relocated.

They don’t all want to go, e,g., the bookshelf,
the cupboard, the unyielding walls, the table.

But the tablecloth on the stubborn table
– when well-seized by its hems –
manifests a willingness to travel.

And the glasses, plates,
creamer, spoons, bowl,
are fairly shaking with desire.

It’s fascinating,
what form of motion will they take,
once they’re trembling on the brink:
will they roam across the ceiling?
fly around the lamp?
hop onto the windowsill and from there to a tree?

Mr. Newton still has no say in this.
Let him look down from the heavens and wave his hands.

This experiment must be completed.
And it will.

(Translation: Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak)

Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska [viˈswava ʂɨmˈbɔrska]
(2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012)
Nobel Prize in Literature 1996
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisława_Szymborska

Thursday, january 31 –  “Stopping by a wood on a Snowy Evening”  written 1922

Twenty-some years ago, our university hosted the meeting of Jesuit national leaders (called “Provincials”).   All the brass coming to our city was a pretty big deal for us.   I can’t remember who organized logistics;  whoever that was asked me if I could arrange an all afternoon event for them to show off The Greenfield Village, a world-famous historical park within the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village complex. Technology and Culture, the international journal I edited then, was co-sponsored by the Ford Museum and we had our editorial offices there.   It was not hard to ask Greenfield Village to arrange one of their 19th century sleigh rides for our group, horse-drawn sleighs on runners through the winter snows blanketing the Village at that time of the year.   The village supplied us with 19th century “sleigh rugs” to keep our legs warm.   We needed them too; a wind-swept blizzard turned the G Village into heavy magical snow riding the howling winds.

Some of the Jesuits thought that afternoon was a blast, very fun to taste winter travel from c. 100 years before;  other provincials emphasized the “blast” more than the “fun.”  I love the memory and those courageous leaders who tackled the challenges facing The Society of Jesus three decades ago.

I’d forgotten that we had posted “Stopping by a wood” once before, February 7, 2014. “This winter’s snow is acting like winter:  demanding & labor-intense, wearisome. .  As a help to transcending plodding through these days, here is an offering from  Robert Frost,  one of the great U.S.  poets of the 20th century.   ‘Stopping by Woods’ is one of his understated classics, exploring the tension between stillness and beauty vs commitments and weariness.

Have a good weekend.”

john st sj

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
—  Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost
1874-1963
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost

Monday,  January 28   “I used to want to be this bad at a job.”

I hadn’t posted a poem from Detroit poet Jamaal May in a while.  He writes “Shift” with the subtle density of language that characterizes his poetry.   “Shift” asks a reader to read two or three times to find a way into a world of growing up into an adult’s awareness of often violent power moves by supervisors over the people temporarily in their power; this all the while learning the honor of showing up and doing a job.   It’s worth the 2nd and 3rd read, better out loud with pauses.

Have a blest week.

john sj

p.s. In Detroit we are a couple hours into the beautiful stillness that often accompanies a snow storm with only a little wind.

today’s post:  “Shift”

Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor

at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers.

Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths

of talkative students by the time she neared retirement,

and Mr. Vickers, a skilled electrician in his day,

didn’t adapt when fuses became circuit breakers,

a fact that didn’t stop him from tinkering

in our basement until the house was consumed by flame.

I used to want to be this bad at a job.

I wanted to show up pissy drunk to staff meetings

when the power point slides were already dissolving

one into another, but I had this bad habit

of showing up on time

and more sober than any man should be

when working audio/visual hospitality

in a three star hotel that was a four star hotel

before he started working there.

When the entire North Atlantic blacked out,

every soul in the Hyatt Regency Dearborn flooded

the parking lot panicked about terrorists and rapture,

while I plugged in microphones and taped down cables

by flashlight—you know, in case whatever cataclysm

unfolded didn’t preempt the meetings. Meetings,

before which I’d convince a children’s hospital

to pay fifteen dollars to rent a nine dollar laser pointer.

Thirty-five bucks for a flip chart,

extra paper on the house. Is it good to be good at a job

if that job involves pretending to be a secret service agent

for Phizer’s George Bush impersonator? I don’t know

if it’s better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job,

but there must be some kind of satisfaction

in doing a job so poorly, you’re never asked to do it again.

I’m not saying he’s a hero, but there’s a guy out there

who overloaded a transformer and made a difference,

because in a moment, sweating through my suit,

groping in the dark when my boss was already home,

I learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache

like this to know that I could always ache for something.

There’s a hell for people like me where we shovel

the coal we have mined ourselves into furnaces

that burn the flesh from our bones nightly,

and we never miss a shift.

BY JAMAAL MAY

http://www.jamaalmay.com

Friday,  January 25, 2019

I am participating in our regular January Board of Trustees meeting so I stepped back to the same date, January 25, 2017.

one of my favorite poems ever.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Wednesday  January 25

Gray days lined up one after another,  not as tough as Sunday’s dense fog you couldn’t see through even a little,  not as tough as serious deep ice/snow in Maine  . . .  but the gray lineup can get wearing too.  On our three campuses, the pulse and bloodstream of learning and teaching has pretty much hit stride for what we call “Winter Term.”   Final exams live off in the distance, and when they arrive, so will the flowering trees and tulips.

Today seems like a good day to read W. H. Auden’s puckish celebration of the flow of love’s tenderness and passion around and through the work commitments we try to accomplish any given day.

A very cool poem, worth reading out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day

john sj

April 22, 2006,  Detroit Mercy campus

Today’s Post –  “Song”

The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, “Wait till I return,
I’ve got a date with Love.”

And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm-
To keep his date with Love.

February 21, 1907 – September 29, 1973

Poem: “Song” by W.H. Auden, from As I Walk Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse. © Vintage Books. Reprinted with permission.

Weather.com  says that it’s -4º  at 8:00 am, peaking at +11º at 2:00 pm before heading down to -12º about 10:00 pm  — if you like high pressure and clear skies (n.b., I do.)  this is your kind of winter day.

from President Garibaldi’s Jan 18 email to our Board of Trustees:

“Our students and community are preparing for three events to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leading into MLK Jr. Week, members of the Princeton Street Block Club will be on campus today for cider, donuts, fun, and games exploring the link between racial, economic, and food justice. On Monday, students, staff and community members will board up vacant homes and clean lots around the Fitzgerald Community for the “Make it a Day On, Not a Day Off” event. And on Thursday, students from Osborn High School (Detroit Public Schools) will be on campus to meet Detroit Mercy students for “Youth in Action Day.” They will also learn from Public Safety how they can be safe and enhance their own communities.”

“But the end is reconciliation;
the end is redemption;
the end is the creation of the beloved community.

It is this type of spirit and this type of love
that can transform opposers into friends . . .
It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”

MLK 1957

Martin Luther King  (January 15, 1929  – april 4, 1968)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

Friday, January 18,  2019  –  Honoring two strong thinkers as they pass

Mary Oliver has anointed the pages of the “Work Day/Hard Time” list many times since the list began in September 2103. It’s a good bet that her language will continue to keep our 2490 readers company now that the body of her work is complete.  This morning, too, Michael Her Many Horses, will be sent on his way by his family and friends at the Rockyford Catholic Church on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.   Today’s post offers both people an offering of some words; think of both posts as flowers at their graves bearing witness, as flowers left near the resting places of people made sacred by people who carry them in their hearts and memories.

Have a blest weekend,

john st sj

Today’s Post # 1   Michael Her Many Horses  

To honor Michael, since I cannot make it to Rockyford tomorrow, I want to ask Fr. Klink to read these words for me.  Please, also, read this saying that Dom Helder spoke in the years before he died in 1999 in Brazil.   Think of it as a blessing for Mike’s sending.

“Since word came to me last Sunday that Mike had died he’s been on my mind – – remembering him, missing him, tasting the ways he touched me over 50 years.   I woke on a soft winter morning this week and an improbable spirit companion for Mike came to mind, one of my heroes from Recife Brazil, Dom Helder Camera who died in 1999.   Mike reminds me of Dom Helder, especially the way Mike loved to look at realities in the world and to say what he saw.  Sometimes Mike would call me to talk and, while talking, he would clown around almost like a Heyoka  but like a Heyoka you could tell that his teasing always came from looking and seeing in the world.   That capacity for vision cost Mike, he lived with sorrows about the wounds at work in the world but. to my knowledge, he never gave up on paying attention to the way the world lives its many lives.  I think Mike never stopped expecting to recognize meaning in what he saw; he was the complete opposite of a tourist.  Was there sadness in his passion for paying attention?  I think so.  Was there joy in the resiliance of Mike’s expectation that paying attention mattered, and was worth the stillness it required?    Yes.

I don’t know if Mike ever met Dom Helder but, if he had, I like to think they would have recognized each other.

Dom Helder Camera:

It is possible to travel alone, but we know the journey is human life

and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.

The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,
takes us where she finds us,  listens to us.

Intelligently, gently, above all lovingly, we encourage each other to go on
and recover our joy
On the  journey.”

Today’s post # 2  Mary Oliver

“April 18, 2018.   Yesterday, a magical time for me and my sibs at Mary’s northern Wisconsin home.   The best blizzards in a long time (two of them, separated by c. one hour, both 14” plus with serious winds sculpting them.   This morning, back on campus, I looked for a Mary Oliver poem that was new to me and found one about a very late winter storm.   It’s exciting to find a new Mary Oliver poem.   Yes, definitely good to read it out loud, with pauses.”

my brother Bill’s van parked in my sister Mary’s drive
after an April 18, 2018 blizzard-blessed family gathering
Marinette Wisconsin

“Starling in winter”   Copyright ©: Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

From: Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

New York Times obit.    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/mary-oliver-dead.html

Several years ago,  Joy Harjo sent me her new book of poems: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, (New York: W H Norton, 2015).  This mid-week morning I decided to return to two pieces from Conflict Resolution. Taut, clean words that opened my soul this winter morning shrugging into its January morning warm jacket of low flying clouds.   Over our city, over our McNichols Campus, over our part of a land just now worn down with fear and anger and high-pitched debating.   Not only our neighborhood, not only, even, our country . . .  our world.  That’s  why I am leading with Warsan Shire’s world Atlas and following with two sayings from Joy Harjo’s 2015 book of poems, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, (New York: W H Norton, 2015).

Joy, thank you.

Try reading each out loud, with some slow breathing in between.

Back Friday have a blest day.

Today’s post # 1 Joy Harjo – “Conflict Resolution”

Humans were created by mistake. Someone laughed
and we came crawling out. That was the beginning
of the story; we were hooked then. What a wild
dilemma, how to make it to the stars, on a highway
slick with fear —

page 13

Listened to an alto sax player jamming on the street.
He played a few jazz standards, mostly popular tunes
the people would know who changed buses there. Nice
tone. I walked from the hotel into the dusk of the city to
listen closer, to speak with him. l We shared names, gear
info, and other stories of the saxophone road. He told
me, “I’m making a living out of small hopes . . . “ There’s
someting about a lone horn player blowing ballads at
the corners of our lives.”
page 10

Joy-Harjo

Today’s Post # 2    

Warsan Shire –   “what they did yesterday afternoon”

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night

i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

Warsan Shire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsan_Shire