The Summer 2020 issue ofMockingheart Review is now up, and I am pleased to have one of my own poems included in it. MockingHeart Review is an online literary journal. Founded as an poetry magazine in 2015 by Louisiana poet Clare L. Martin, MHR is now under the editorship of poet and critic Tyler Robert Sheldon. Their site highlights this quote from a former U.S. Poet Laureate that resonates with me:
“Poetry provides us with a history of the human heart.” -Billy Collins
I haven’t yet had time to read all this new work in Volume 5, issue 2, but of the poems I have read, I particularly like “The Woman in an Imaginary Painting” by Tom Montag and “The Trouble with Billy Collins’ Poetry” by Andrew Ball.
I am also intrigued by the first mysterious image by the featured visual artist, Lynda Frese.
(Navigating tip from my in-house tech guru: use “Control -” to make the display smaller; this will allow you to access the bottom of the list of poets & poems.)
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.
“It is easy to forget that you live in the sky—not beneath it, but within it. Our atmosphere is an enormous ocean, and you inhabit it. The ocean is made up of the gases of the air rather than liquid water, but it is as much of an ocean as the Atlantic or the Pacific. You may think of yourself as living on the ground, but all that means is that you are a creature of the ocean bed. You still inhabit the atmosphere like a sea creature does the water.”
Introduction, A Cloud a Day, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
Mary Englebreit greeting card
At the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, back before the first black-and-white lunar landing, painted dioramas tried to teach me tried to teach me a smidgen of evolution, how sea creatures leapt or wriggled onto the barren beaches of the world, trading fins for limbs, gills for lungs.
I could not comprehend such leaving of home.
First proto-centipedes; then, a hundred million years later, simple plants had the first field day, colonizing rocks and dust. At last, lagging by another thirty million years, fish broke through, climbed into the place of burning, and were changed by their yearning, their hunger for something beyond easy reach. That July of the Apollo 11
I was nine years old. I watched the grainy broadcasts
with my best friend, Brenda. She lived on a farm. We climbed ladders in the old barn, raided the stone cellar for bottles of homemade root beer, walked dusty garden rows to claim gooseberries, tiny cherry tomatoes, and shiny black currents. Her mother set up T.V. trays to we could swim in the flow of history while noshing on popcorn.
Later—-bored—-we put on swimsuits, screamed
as we sprayed each other with ice cold water from the garden hose. Before the next summer, migrant again, my family sought a different climate, climbed into a rattling van, burst through December fog at the top of the Rockies. Descending, my ears popped. Time passed, I grew taller, grew breasts, learned I carried a salty ocean inside me
even as I burned for the far-off idea of my own home.
Leslie Schultz
My earliest ambition was to have a home I would not have to leave, yet in the intervening years I have come to know how leaving home is important to understanding it. How do we develop if we do not explore–mentally, physically, emotionally–at least a little bit of what else is out there? The protective shell is essential but is always, at some point, outgrown, perhaps just when it was getting comfortable. I suspect I shall always struggle with this paradox, meaning photographing clouds and shells over and over.
It was a tune, a light air, in the second or third piano book.
You practiced all that wet spring, young girl with vast imagining.
I recall how you would look out through the glass door
at the April rain streaming, turn back to practice, to dreaming
of pink blossoms, of blooming.
Leslie Schultz
I found the image above yesterday. Tim and I took a walk downtown. I carried an umbrella which I needed on the way home as we encountered one of those delightful brief storms when it rains as the sun is shining. We sheltered for a few moments under the awning of the Blue Monday Coffee Shop, where I saw these other umbrellas in two- and three-dimensions.
And we are here, as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, While ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Each day, we find new roads closed. Evenings now, after jack hammers still, street barricades are stacked haphazardly, a little jauntily. When the sun slips away, their orange lollipop lights begin to blink, not at all in sync, shooting confused instructions for caution into all the houses on our street.
Days contract for the duration of this disruption. What age are we in? Gold? Silver? Bronze? No— Silicon or Microbe. Of social media and social distance. Of masks and doubled-locked doors, small panics, and tidier drawers.
Not an age of Oak or Ash. No way is pure or clear. A kind of Plywood Age, strong in its way, and useful if—viewed edgewise— unbeautiful. Insights and erosions laid in layers like phyllo or millefiori, then folded
into new shape, new tesseractive points of view. Innocence and Anxiety are commingling. Something else is coming, cloudy and stormy as the birth of a star. Perhaps a coalescing, expanded sense of who we are.
Leslie Schultz
I was reminded this morning that it was the British Victorian poet Matthew Arnold who coined from German the English word “Zeitgeist” or “Spirit of the Age” in order to describe the social unrest of the Industrial Age, the widespread disruptions and erosions caused by a move away from hand tools toward machines, away from pastures and fields into cities. We still have ignorance clashing with insight, of course, because we are humans, but I am grateful to be standing on my particular corner of this darkling plain. I find I am quite interested to find out what will happen next.
The giant red nebula, NGC 2014, and its smaller blue neighbor, NGC 2020, part of the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Milky Way, about 163,000 light years away, in this new image by the Hubble Space Telescope.Credit…NASA, ESA and STScI
We have come to the end of the alphabet sequence but not to the end of the month. Who know what tomorrow will inspire?
