Pie Jesu

Driving around in my car tonight, I was singing Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Pie Jesu. It’s music I’ve had the opportunity to sing in churches several times. I sing it often just to check my position on the high A note. If the placement is right, it feels like everything else in my voice training must be going okay. It’s nice to have singing, one area in my life I can gauge by a single note.

Poem of the day, July 16 2009

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.
………………………………………
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Poem of the day, July 15 2009

Genius

is standing by the stove in a bathrobe
stirring the soup with a long wooden spoon.

Earlier in the afternoon he was busy
in the margins of a heavy book

and tonight he will step inside a molecule
or wade into the deep pool of calculus.

But now there is only the pot of vegetable soup,
and circling of the spoon,

the easy rotation of the wrist
and the aroma of onion, bay and rosemary —
……………………………….
Billy Collins (born 1941)

Poem of the day, July 14 2009

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb. Nor is it palm and knuckles, not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow, not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins. A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body. Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin’s smoothness, not ink. The maple’s green hands do not cup the proliferant rain. What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
…………………………………..
Jane Hirshfield (born 1953)

Poem of the day, July 13 2009

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
……………………………………..
Jane Kenyon (born 1947)

People Get Ready

Poem of the day, July 12 2009

Vespers

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.
………………………….
Louise Gluck (born 1943)

Poem of the day, July 11 2009

The Marriage in the Trees

When the wind was right everything else

was wrong, like the oak we thought built

better than the house split like a ship

on a rock. We let it stand the winter,

spectral, shagged, every sky its snow,

then cut it down, dismantled it in

pieces like disease. Then limbs from

the yellow poplar broke at will—

fell from the heights like bones

of the Puritans; even to gather them

in bundles seemed puritanical.

And the willow, by its nature, wept

long tears of its overbranching,

so pale they were autumnal. These

we turned too easily to switches,

mocking the bickering in the spruce’s

nesting eaves, which crows, then jays

bothered all they could. The list,

the list. The sycamore made maps

of disappearance; the copper beech,

parental in its girth, was clipped

hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn’t

heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then

love—nothing we tried would work.

More apple trees that grew nowhere

but down. More maples spilling sugar.

More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.

…………………………………………….

by Stanley Plumly (born 1939)

Poem of the day, July 10 2009

Breakfast Song

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.
………………………………
Before the poet Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, she wrote this poem for her partner Alice Methfessel, who died last week on June 28. Here’s the article on Methfessel published in the Boston Globe this morning: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/07/10/alice_methfessel_66_muse_to_poet_elizabeth_bishop/

Poem of the day, July 9 2009

Something Comforting

It’s just a day like any other:
God puts the dead in his cabinet
and polishes off the living.
I uncap the jam and the smell of last summer’s
strawberries fills the room.
The first lilacs are blooming
so I find the portable stairs
stew up and snip the branches
I want so badly. From up here I can see
the likes of Irma Sweet, who has been
my neighbor all these years.
I know nothing about her. I never will.
But I see her. She takes the limp,
ragged heads of her flowers and throws them away.
In this, we imitate each other. Who says
it is beautiful? It is ugly, the way
we imitate each other and will not speak
of it, then at night, when each sees a yellow lamp
go on, something comforting comes between us.
………………………….
Mary Ruefle