Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 28, 2020 Poem “Empyrean”

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 Empyrean
  
 
“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.

April 27, 2020 Poem: “Sakura”

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 Sakura
  
  
 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.

(Photo: Couleur of Pixabay )
Before a Piano Lesson

April 26, 2020 Poem “Zeitgeist”

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 Zeitgeist
  
  
      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?

LESLIE

April 25, 2020 Poem “Yarn”

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 Yarn 
  
  
 Grandma Marie is a founding member
 of the Knit-Wits. They turn out hats, sweaters,
 scarves, and socks. They turn up for canapes
 and cocktails, a little discreet dishing
 of those not there, complete with embroidery
 but just around the edges, building up 
 the local gossip row by row. Here’s the thing:
 we learn from each other how to make it new.
  
 In storytelling, too, there needs to be
 a looping back, complications that only
 appear to be tangles. Details are key;
 so are color and contrast. Without some
 holes, there is nowhere for the attention
 to catch hold. But, ladies, let’s remember—
 vary that pattern but don’t make it up 
 out of whole cloth or improbably sticky yarn.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


April 24, 2020 Poem “Xeriscaping”

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 Xeriscaping
             for Mary Lahr Schier
  
  
 There can be no escaping from storm
 or drought.
  
 (Ink flows across the blank page
 or stops.)
  
 Consider the options with care,
 then choose.
  
 (Develop long roots that seek
 a deep source.)
  
 It is a shame to waste these
 precious drops,
 to fling water like pearls of rain
 onto sand. 
  
 (On the other hand, 
 flow is everything.)
  
 Long roots filter out rank poisons. 
 Water carries them back into
 the making dark.
  
 (Rejection or chagrin are perennial,
 self-sowing.)
  
 Depending upon conditions, 
 select with care.
  
 For sun: 
 asters and black-eyed Susans,
 coneflowers and yarrow,
 blazing star and prairie dropseed, 
 even Blue Heaven little bluestem.
  
 (Read! Read! Read! 
 The blaze of tradition shines forth
 and nourishes.)
  
 For shade: 
 columbine and wild ginger,
 wild geranium and Solomon’s seal,
 pachysandra and dead nettle,
 bugleweed and red twig dogwood,
 wild hosta and cinnamon fern.
  
 (The coaxing practices, the lattices
 of form and habit.)
  
 Finally, perhaps a rain garden? 
 Something to catch what spills in?
  
 (The index cards handy. The pencils sharpened.)
  
 “A garden,” said Stanley Kunitz, “ is a poem
 that is never finished.”

 He knew a thing.
 Or two. 
  

 Leslie Schultz


Today’s poem is inspired by a perennially favorite text, The Northern Gardener: From Apples to Zinnias–150 Years of Garden Wisdom by Mary Lahr Schier. Two years ago, that handy and beautifully written compendium introduced me to a new word and inspired a poem, “Cotyledons,” about those first two tiny green leaves thrust up by a sprouting seed. This year, the chapter on “Xeriscaping” inspired a poem.

The quotation that closes the poem is drawn from a book of essays on poetry and gardening by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.

The photographs here of plants were taken on Earth Day, 2020 at the nearby McKnight Prairie Remnant,seven miles from Northfield. This thirty-five acre piece of land is the epitome of xeriscaping with native plants and is cared for by Carleton College. Tim and I were able this year to visit early enough to see, for the first time, the pasque flowers blooming.