As many of you already know, I find postcards evocative, and often they are catalysts for my poems. (As I am, for the most part, a reluctant traveler, I find this interesting. I will say that most of the postcards I purchase are in museum shops, and most of the weekly postcards I have published here have been images from my own small orbit–go figure!)
Section VII of Geranium Lake is devoted to the art form of photography.
(Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Sunday Postcard to the Past
Sited by Giotto, best viewed from the east,
as sun rises over the green-rimmed bowl
of Florentine hills, you, bell tower, stand
alone in your old, sacred precinctneighborhood,
lofty as spent granary, looming on the prairie,
or a rusting factory chimney. Sonic silo, housing
seven named bells, we climbed your four hundred
steps sometime in the last gone century.
It was early. We were happy, younger,
open to every view. You, campanile,
dressed in spumoni marble appliqué
without, were rough-hewn within: gritty, dim,
stronger than centuries or human life.
I remember–at each stage, as we climbed–
looking down through your center: your timbers
black as iron with age, your bells silent.
Leslie Schultz
This poem was originally written for National Poetry Month, on Earth Day in 2018, and was published on Winona Media. HERE is the original post–published with other photographs I took on that trip.
P.S. I once attended a Minnesota Humanitis Commission gathering in which Kenneth S. Brecher was the keynote speaker. He described his unusual memoir, in which he uses postcards from his collection to recall pivotal moments from his life, called Too Sad to Sing: AMemoir with Postcards (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NYC, 1988.) My own copy is either in hiding or on the lam, but I recall this work with great affection. I believe it is currently out-of-print, but if it crosses your path, it is worth a look.
The sixth section of Geranium Lake comprises poems inspired by or describing music. This poem, a villanelle, considers the first composition, a minuet and trio in the key of G Major, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, it is said, was only five years old when he composed it. This poem employs the music inherent in a strict pattern of rhyme and meter and repeated lines to suggest the restraint and repetition of classical music. You can hear the piece by young Mozart HERE (be sure to scroll down to the YouTube video cued by the photograph of hands on a keyboard.)
“Mozart at Age Five: Koëchel #1” was first published in the journal Mezzo Cammin in the summer of 2015.
Mozart: Koëchel #1
So complete, this deft-handed beginning:
delicate but assured. Fine bones.
Precise but varied as the world’s spinning.
You can smell ambition. He’s keen on pinning
down those faint, celestial tones.
Quite complete, his deft-handed beginning.
Young gambler, he’s intent on winning
applause and love, those polished stones,
pretty and varied as the world’s spinning.
The music of the spheres bows to him, keening–
harpsichord anticipates trombones.
So complete, this deft-handed beginning.
Composers know each note means re-beginning,
borrowing what one never owns,
precise but varied as the earth’s spinning.
Like ladders, in his dreams come patterns leaning–
he dreams up sonic lattices and cones.
So completes this deft-handed beginning,
precise but varied as the world’s spinning.
Mozart’s Birthplace in Salzburg
Wishing you happy memories of your own early creativity, LESLIE
Minneapolis Museum of Art–Art in Bloom–Spring 2014 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
The fifth section of Geranium Lake is filled with a long, nine-part poem that took me more than twenty years to complete. “Lady Tashat’s Mystery” began as a response to exploring the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art. It evolved into an inquiry about what we, individually and collectively, chose to preserve and display, what effects that has, what it says about us. Museums–temples to the Muses–are very important to me. During the pandemic, I missed their closure more than the closure of restaurants or other public spaces. I find museums lively and stimulating. At the same time, whenever I am in a museum, I am keenly aware of the presences of those long dead, and, in a way, of how culture depends upon conversations with those long departed, upon questions of why the dead did as they did and made what they made–and what we continue to make of it all.
This particular “exhibit” raised more questions than I can answer, even after I spoke with a curator and did as much reseach as a lay person could do. Though I continue to wonder and ponder, I think now that there is no answer or, rather, the answer is simply the mystery of existence.
Below are the first two sections of the poem, and a glimpse of part of my amassed background information.
Lady Tashat’s Mystery
for Leo Luke Marcello
That which is hidden might be preserved.
One day it will come to light.
I. Reading the Bones
Under the desert sand,
Under the rock.
Behind the false door,
Behind the true.
Beneath two heavy lids
And two painted smiles,
Beneath the linen tapes
Stiff with unguent.
I am revealed.
I can tell no more.
But if my riddle begins to tap
Like an ibis bill
Inside your head,
Then you already have the map,
And I, though chill,
Am not utterly dead.
II. The Museum-Goer
The snows of Minneapolis are white as marble dust
and cut the nostrils like fragments of bad dreams.
The Institute, too, is white:
stone, a slippery mountain, behind the delicate tepees
pitched on a frozen lawn. Inside, treasures of
six continents lie in cold cases, on view.
I have been here before
to see the quilts of dead women
and the brushed smoke and sunlight of dead men.
Each time, I circle the Poet's Mountain
hewn from a single piece of bluish jade.
To one who looks closely, it is possible to see
drunken men winding up the side of a glassy mountain,
tottering unaware near precipices, over slender bridges,
their thin beards quavering with excitement. They are part
of a world as fragile and polished as the road they tread.
From a distance the mountain
looks like a heavy cloud or a dragon's blue egg. Do you
suppose the poets know this?
Do they think that if they get their words
just right the mountain might split open
with a clap of thunder?
If so, would this be praise?
May this be a day when you, too, enjoy grappliing with an unanswerable question! LESLIE
Reseach into the mystery of Lady Tashat (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Lady Tashat Cartonnage (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
The poem below is the title poem of the fourth section of Geranium Lake. It was written for National Poetry Month in 2019. HERE is the post from way back then. The poems in this section are all, in one way or another, about the artistic priniciples and practice derived from the natural world, or, more accurately, the non-human natural world, since humans, too, are part of nature. (The amnesiac part, I often think–the tiny drop that thinks itself separate from the ocean.)
Aquarium
Ichthyography
What would it be like, the writing
of fish? Something shining, I think,
a muscular, flowing
calligraphy,
a Piscean script—
accents of whirlpool
and fin flip.
Shimmering,
colorful circumlocutions
used, like kennings, over and over,
and with lots of sudden twists
and turns in the plot, breaks
long as winter, slower to resolve
than river fog rising.
What would it be like
to write not with ink
or light but with water?
Describing each fresh syllable
with my whole body, then
erasing it all as I go,
every gesture a metaphor?
Leslie Schultz
Goldfish, Como Conservatory
May this be a day when every cloud shape and tree branch finds a way to speak to you! LESLIE
The Chesterfield Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida Courtyard Fountain, “Youth,” Norton Museum of Art (Photo by Laura Robinson, 2016)Edmund Weston, American (1886-1958), Shell and Rock Arrangement, 1931, printed circa 1947 (Permanent Collection, Norton Museum of Art)
Today’s poem is drawn from the third section of Geranium Lake. This section is titled “Ars Poetica.” It gathers together poems that celebrate–or at least explore–the ways in which the poetic ambiguity of experience flows into poetry on the page. The poem featured here was written after I had undertaken to write two capital campaign case statements for a prominent museum–a few years apart–and made a couple of memorable journeys to Palm Beach, Florida. The first of these campaigns doubled the footprint of the historical Norton Gallery of Art, allowing it to grow into its new identity as the Norton Museum of Art.
On my second visit, in the aftermath of a tremendous hurricane which downed palm trees and threatened the Museum’s collections, the curatorshowed me the place in the floor of one gallery that had marked the outer wall of the old building. It was a thrill to be able to step across it, seamlessly, into the labyrinth of new spaces dedicated to new art. After the tour, though, I felt paralyzed by perfectionism, worried that I would not be able to create the poetic prose required a second time, worried I would not be able to perform when expectations were high.
One cannot encounter the art of others without be moved, sometimes to making art one’s self. For me, this is part of the message of Wallace Stevens‘s masterful poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which I all but memorized in graduate school. My rather cheeky homage to him also alludes to the opening lines I love in his poem “Sunday Morning:”
"Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo..."
Pool, Chesterfield Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida
Today, I mentally substitute “silky freedom of a Maltipoo.” Those who have met Stella know why. In the end, the project was completed with some level of verve. The client and I were both happy. In that afternoon of quiet poolside terror, I was far from feeling complacent, but from a distance I am relaxed about that sojurn. I hope Stevens would enjoy the juxtaposition of “nails” with “palm beach” and the oddity of monkeys in leopard print…one really cannot make these things up!
Polishing My Nails in Palm Beach
A sojourn in Wallace Stevens’s country
I.
The Chesterfield “Charming’ Hotel faces west.
Monkeys framed in leopard print
perch on the elevator door,
adorn the moving walls.
Two decades since I’ve traveled here.
The sky is still cloudless;
the awnings snappy now,
red and white stripes;
the cabbies irascible as always.
In middle age now,
I sit by the pool
polishing my fingernails pink.
This trip is not about me,
not about my photography or poetry,
not about my family – except
that is why I am here, to support
my family, my life,
my precious, playful monkey business.
II.
This morning, at the client’s request,
I drank it all in.
Open to the sky, the old courtyard
of the Norton Museum of Art
is filled with the music of water,
stirs with fresh air, while four striped palms
wheel their louvered green blades.
Skinks, alert and active, shake the purple blossoms
framing an octagonal pool.
At the very center stands “Youth,” carved
in stone, as we all wish it were,
continually renewed,
ankles lapped by clear currents,
toes tickled by coins, her weary mask
of age, slipping like a fan,
tracing the arc of the setting sun.
III.
Now, I must sit with my own fears,
to face the best
I can do, understanding perfection
is impossible but progress
is polish, a slight
iridescence of language
that makes all the difference.
Oranges.
Scent of sweet jasmine.
Shimmer like sun breaking on blue waves.
Art is refreshment – a breeze
off the ocean of time.
