Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 9, 2017 Poem “Nine Rooms”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 9

Nine Rooms
            A Spiral Journey Around Our House as a Bagua

Enter through the central eastern front door. Notice here,
in this place of career, a mirror and, opposite, Spring Creek, framed
in ink-black and ever-flowing, with one black stepping stone just out of reach.

Step right, into the space of opening insight, where I write
seated on denim blue, inspired by photographs of swimming pools,
ancient azure carpet, the cerulean sky through high windows.

Next, a still-greening family tree, shelves overflowing with history,
family mystery, and poetry. Here live the documents, ancestor-images,
old letters and departed people’s diaries.

Furthest west, evidence of a rich life. A trio of purple stones,
the global window of the televised tribal life, windows into
a garden filled with the purpling clouds of evening.

Adjacent, that red compass point, anchors inner and outer worlds–a tall vase
in the garden stands in all weathers, on red bricks laid by us. Fame & name.
Inside, a huge glass cherry, lipstick-bright, on its own pedestal: fruit of career.

Balancing lone insight, pink with potential, the rosy dreams
only life with a partner can provide. Also the essential necessities—
from cook books to record books, umbrellas and washtubs—that make dreams real.

Fragrance of oranges in the kitchen. Orange of stove flame
and curried pumpkin. A busy room with four doorways.
Children’s art on the refrigerator. All the best comforts of home.

Travel on toward the dining table and our home school room.
We gather here together, friends. Thank you for your wisdom
and good will, the teachings you share, and every earned white hair.

Arrive here, in the center, the balance wheel of radiant health
governing all else. Here find the polished broomstick,
glowing lotus scroll, and fine pocket watch bathed in golden light.

And from this inward resting place, a flight
of stairs, curving up toward a pearly moon,
the next level of lively adventure.

Leslie Schultz

I have been inspired by the concentrated wisdom of the Feng Shui bagua for many years. I have read a lot and played around with the ideas surrounding “the Chinese Art of Placement.” As a quilter, the bagua reads not only as a compass for balanced life but as a classic nine-patch quilt square.

This is a collage I made in 2010 in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Northfield Arts Guild, part of a fundraiser for the NAG in which visual art was made, donated, displayed in local businesses, and then auctioned off.  My piece–a photography version of a quilt– was displayed for a time at Bierman’s Furniture Store on Division Street. I later made a true cloth quilt version to hang in my kitchen using the same fabrics. (Discerning readers will also note that the favicon for Winona Media is inspired by this piece. It was designed for me by a young artist, Teagan Cole.)

Here is a vintage photo of me with my softer, quilted version of the piece:

Thanks for hanging in there this month! Hope to see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, happy reading! Happy writing! Happy life!

L E  S
L  I   E
@@@

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 8, 2017 Poem “Barcelona”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 8

Barcelona
 
I dream, from time to time, of Barcelona.
When the lakes are frozen and the engines won’t turn over,
when no letters from friends inhabit the mailbox
and my own words stick in my teeth,
when I can’t sleep or I sleep too much,
then I summon visions of Barcelona.

I know people who’ve been to Barcelona.
They leave the prairie towns of Minnesota,
fly into the dawn, then land at golden evening
on an azure shore of the Mediterranean,
ready to dine on octopus and saffron.
Sometimes they bring me back a small, bright trinket.

I have never been to enchanting Barcelona,
nor seen clay mushrooms soar cathedral-wise
(inspired ambition eternally unfinished);
I cannot pronounce my name in Catalan.
But I can imagine walking those sun-baked streets,
glazed mosaics glinting with shattered logic,

realigning scattered pieces in new pictures,
reminding broken hearts of future beauty.
It is good to have a place I will never go,
like Oz but better, a thriving foreign city,
where real life unfolds serene without me.
Sé que encanta Barcelona. Barcelona me encantó.

Leslie Schultz

(Image of Barcelonain mosaic from photo in the public domain)

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 7, 2017 Poem: “At Home, after April the First”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 7

At Home after April the First
(for My Great-grandmother, Katherine Hinman Williamson Schultz)
 
I remember 521 Broad Street,
that solid, brown, two-story house you built
with Emil, local pharmacist. Bridegroom
and bride, yet already quite adult,
were you—zaftig Edwardian thirty-
something—carried over the new threshold
into the hallway and polished music room?

Here is an invitation, on thick cream stock,
to your wedding. It floated for years around
that snug-built but lofty house on the bank
of the Menasha River, was somehow washed
here, to me, in the next century. And
another card announcing when town folk
could call. To announce your new rank

as a married woman, your calling card:
this one, the smallest, in thin gothic script.
A triplet of transformation. You grew
fifty years older there, went from plump to lank,
always loving (if not Emil) then a good joke,
a witty gesture or phrase turned neat,
even, Kate, when the joke was on you.

Leslie Schultz

Some years ago, I wrote a long post about this great-grandmother–part of a series of four–and there is a poem in my collection about the house she built that mentions her piano and her son and daughter-in-law. This morning, I realized, it was high time that she had her own poem.

Leslie

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 6, 2017 Poem: “A Bowl of Blackberries”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 6

A Bowl of Blackberries

Like its very distant cousin, the crisply alabaster lotus,
the blackberry sinks roots deep in moist sand and mud;
but instead of a long, pure, central shaft rising
to support a single porcelain-white bowl filled with calm light,
the blackberry unspools its prickling brambles laterally—
meters and meters of looping, minute red thorns
spun headlong on tough, green cables resistant to pruning, each burning
with a myriad of fruit. Some I now see resting here:
a heap of honeyed coals, and each one alive with embers,
clusters of summer fire, alight with understory
of blood-purpled cordial, precious as caviar or eyesight or
fireflies; like justice outpacing mercy, each delivering
its complex cluster of sweet but stinging juice
with the prophetic bitter wood of seed.

Leslie Schultz

This poem started from looking more closely at things I see every day in my dining room and kitchen. I went to bed last night and awoke dreaming of blackberries, lotuses, and light.

Hope your day is full of sweet surprises!

LESLIE

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April 5, 2017 Poem: “Maple, Sky, Clouds”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 5

Maple, Sky, Clouds

White dappled blue, tapped by red—
looking up at the spring sky
upends my human head.
I don’t imagine I now can fly;

I feel as though I’m falling
into a welcoming well;
that something or someone is calling
or ringing a silver bell,

inviting me downward, and deeper
than I’ve ever ventured before—
Like Alice, I’m falling steeper
than the earth’s magnetic core,

and I’ll finally get to the bottom
of something I need to know,
where something waits, wise and solemn,
beneath this sweet vertigo.

Leslie Schultz

I find it both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to write a new poem and make it public on the same day. It helps if I regard it in a painterly way, as a sketch or a plein-air study. Today’s poem was inspired by these images I took yesterday in our garden, and, despite the formal differences, by the NaPoWriMo prompt inspired by Mary Oliver. (The NaPoWriMo site has a link to a rare interview with her.)

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!