Postcard: May 18, 2020
Author Archives: Leslie Schultz
Postcard: Happy Mother’s Day, 2020!
Postcard: May 4, 2020
April 30, 2020 Poem “Point Zero”
Point Zero
All new things start in the circle of Point Zero.
The trickiest forms commence with the blank page.
My sense of beginning goes wherever I go.
What I’ve already done is past. (You’d think I would know
this bald and cardinal truth at my ripe age.)
Each new thing must spring from the heart of Point Zero.
Each untried idea holds a certain glow.
Even when closure governs my maker’s rage,
my zest for beginning opens wherever I go.
Possibilities glimmer. Sometimes vertigo
swims up and I am dizzy, as if on stage—
I recall that pratfalls lurk in Point Zero—
and I freeze, caught in emotional undertow.
Then I breathe and allow the fear to disengage.
My need for beginning goes wherever I go.
“My” ideas aren’t mine alone. They exist and they flow.
They wash me out of every preconceived cage.
Each insight leaps from the pinpoint of Point Zero,
recreating me, too, everywhere I go.
Leslie Schultz
On our 2009 visit to Paris and the Loire Valley, Julia, our friend, Ellen, and I made a point of standing in front of Notre Dame on Point Zero, the place from which all distances are measured in France. Not a single day goes by when I don’t think of that, and of the idea of starting out afresh, of exploring variations on the themes of what I already know. The villanelle, that venerable French form, built up of echoes and repetitions, seemed the best way to celebrate this perennial insight.
Thank you, all, for coming along with me on this journey through the month of April in 2020. I truly don’t know how I would have retained my equilibrium in this most unsettling time without poetry–and your companionship.
Good health to you all, and bonne chance! LESLIE
April 29, 2020 Poem “Crossing”
Crossing
From Port Clyde, Maine, you board on foot.
Maybe your belly is full of clams or lobster.
It is windy onboard, so you hold onto your hat.
Five miles out, the mainland slips away,
Christina’s world, all that mid-century reaching,
Sarah Orne Jewett, too, old pointed firs and talk, talk, talk.
The ferry lulls you into calm, alert solitude.
Passing little Manana Island, perhaps you spot a goat.
You step onto the wooden dock at Monhegan,
find your legs a little land-sick at first,
but they recover. You walk along the rocks,
savor the shingle-sided buildings weathered
to that silvery-grey like the breasts of doves, note
cresting swells, white embellishing blue waves.
There is a local museum, a petite library,
a pay-toilet, but you want to leave this age
behind for an hour, so you head away from town,
hike up to Cathedral Woods, enter the windless hush
of spruce needles underfoot, quiet soaring of rough bark.
Your pulse slows. Pungent tannins hang in the air.
You hear insects, a Golden-winged warbler. At your feet,
as your eyes adjust, you perceive tiny doorways, flagstones
of shells, palisades of broken twigs. As you lean, curious
but respectful, toward one fairy dwelling you tumble
headlong into the true magic of this place: clouds
of tiny white moth wings over greening moss; pink
mushrooms, smaller than fingernails, still spangled
with last evening’s rain; and red spruce seedlings
mere inches high but protected in the filtered light.
You allow yourself to kneel, just for one breath, long
enough to notice your breath becoming song.
Leslie Schultz
My thanks to Maine writer Kristin Lindquist, and to the Stuart-Cole family who introduced our family to the magic of Monhegan in 2011.
