Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 17, 2020 Poem “Quote “

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 Quote
  
      Now is all we have.
      Love is who we are.
                 ~Anne Lamott
  
 I’m sifting through files, when this floats
 onto my lap, this cream-colored envelope—
 stationery Tim and I asked a friend to design
 for a business that carried us twenty years
  
 To here.
 To now.
  
 The quoted words are written in my hand,
 something from writer Anne Lamott,
 but the source? Well, I’ve read quite a lot
 by Anne. Never met her. Did not note
 the particular work. Does it matter?
  
 No. It is here.
 With me now.
  
 And I feel the truth, see it everywhere I look,
 stacked on our shelves, between the covers of each book—
 essence of each maker distilled into gifts speaking
 over the distance of years, abundance not just of the maker
 but of so many generous people who carried them here.
  
 Not just each book.
 Wherever I look.
  
 The silver teaspoons of my grandmother, a cross-stitch 
 from Tim’s sister honoring our wedding. A trompe-l’oiel 
 shawl from my mother disguising a battered door.
 Endless list—--towels in the bathroom, sheets on our bed,
 photographs on our walls, all sent by my sister.
  
 10,000 love notes.
 Waiting to be re-read.
  
 Friends. Living or departed, still a rich chorus.
 You, whom we understand, who are there for us.
 You know who you are! You have marked us.
 This morning, I see how love, our magic alphabet, 
 writes us real, sends us back to the source.
  
 To speak and to see,
 To love and to be.
  
 Or in Anne’s words now:
 Help, Thanks, Wow.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


These quiet days are filled with new reading and re-reading…books, letters, memories, and clouds…and the journey continues! LESLIE

April 16, 2020 Poem “Pansies”

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 Pansies
  
  
 Every year, it seems, I will choose
 these paper-thin blooms to plant
 near the front door, ranged in two
 oblong pots glazed deepest cobalt blue.
  
 Cheery, kitten-faced. A grey
 morning fog cannot blunt
 their exuberance or stay
 stray flutters of breeze at raucous play,
  
 bending their light heads on green
 thin stems. Somehow, they never break.
 Not stiff or somber but serene,
 they lift me up if I feel glassine.
  
 Fragile themselves, pansies strongly please—
 offer rich color, solace—true heart’s ease.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz

For me, color is strong medicine, distilled and concentrated. Like poetry. It is the medicine I am especially in need of this season. I thought I might write a poem for today titled “Patriots,” but that did not come. Instead in this season where I am finding too much dissimulation, unintentional buffoonery, and empty rhetoric in the public realm–maybe you are, too?–I thought I might offer some more grounded images of red, white, and blue along with a few simple words.

Incidentally, I remember learning at age eight that pansies are also called “Heart’s Ease.” Remember that passage in Little Women, that perennial classic, when Beth embroiders a pair of slippers for old Mr. Laurence, covering the toes with pansies, and he refers to them by their antique name? It was about the same time I learned the word “glassine.” Today, I learned that glassine, for all its translucence, lightness, and seeming frailness is actually quite strong, protective, and resistant to staining. Today, I will think about how to cultivate those qualities in myself. To that end, I am going to bring up some of my brilliantly colored fabrics and begin working out the design for a new quilt. Later in the year, Tim and I will fill the empty containers in the garden with seeds from Seed Savers that we started inside and which are starting to sprout. Should be a riot of color by July.

Wishing you a splendid day of bright hues and ease and good weather, wherever you are, inside or out!

Until tomorrow, Leslie

April 15, 2020 (Poem “Opossum”)

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 Opossum
      a true tale
  
  
 In the last days of a long-ago marriage
 money was tight.
 It was high summer in Louisiana, 
 a swelter, a sauna.
 My then-husband had found work with a beekeeper,
 traveling with a crew
 to check hives. It didn’t pay much but was honest,
 worked as a metaphor,
 better than his old job welding deep inside oil tankers,
 he said, coming home stung,
 his sinuses swollen by all the wind-blown pollens.
  
 I was academically employed, a grad student on summer
 break, fiddling with Latin,
 the declensions of irregular verbs, the moody subjunctive,
 and trying to keep the kitchen
 in that rented house free of shiny black tree roaches,
 but closing my eyes
 before I turned on the lights, giving them time
 to scuttle back into cracks.
 One evening—I’d fixed jambalaya—his boots dropped
 on the back porch and he
 came in with news: there was work for me in the honey house.
  
 I showed up at the low concrete building, a warren
 of ill-lit rooms, built 
 for something else. The beekeeper showed me how
 to set wax patterns
 on the wire sheets, slide the ready frames into wooden hives,
 portable as document boxes.
 I got the hang of it in half an hour, fell into a light trance
 alone in the honey house,
 some far-off door open, its frame filled with sunlit greens
 and soft, lulling breeze.
 I recited scraps of old poems I’d learned by heart:
     
 Let me not to the marriage
 of true minds admit impediment/Love is not love…
 I liked the rhythm,
 the hum and slide and rattling thunk of old wood. 
 It reminded me, I guess, 
 of the shuddering return of my typewriter carriage.
 Love is not love,
 Love is not love….After great pain, a formal feeling 
 comes…then something stirred 
 in my peripheral vision. Something ghostly crawled
 toward me, red-eyed, 
  
 balding, dragging a long pink tail. I stood and screamed!
 It hissed and ran
 and it was a long time before my heart stopped thumping
 but I did catch hold
 of myself. Taking deep breaths, I saw the funny side—
 me, jumping on the chair,
 like a cartoon housewife startled by a mouse.
 I only recognized,
 weeks later, that turning point, fear-born gift
 of clear sight, despite long
 hiding: a fierce intent to claim my own power.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


Image by Roy Guisinger from Pixabay 

Today’s poem was a collision with current events (my review this week of the Latin verbs “sum” and “possum” or “I am” and “I can” and a rich and deep conversation yesterday) and an old memory surfacing. (It was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a graduate student of poetry, that for fun I began my peregrinations through the Latin language. When I left Lake Charles, I also left my first marriage.)

Leslie

April 14, 2020 Poem “Nests”

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 Nests
  
  
 One spring morning, under the trembling
 white blooms of our kiwi vine—
 supported by an old ladder, just in line
 with the seen-better-days porch railing—
  
 I glimpsed, as though deep into a cave,
 the woven edges of a wren’s nest.
 No doubt you guess the rest. 
 For the rest of the season, we gave
  
 those tiny, vociferous birds
 a very wide berth,
 moved our chairs, well knowing the worth
 of a space without words,
  
 of resonant emptiness, hidden
 under a fragrant curtain
 while the outcome is uncertain,
 in intent endeavors, bidden and unbidden.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


April 13, 2020 (Poem “Masks”)

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 Masks
   for my sister
  
  
 Monday now, and your birthday.
 We talked yesterday, bright joy
 for me in an April snowstorm.
  
 Your package arrived weeks ago,
 you told me. Worried about lockdowns,
 I mailed it a month early.
  
 All over our small city,
 those who venture out now
 cover their faces with masks.
  
 I used to think of masked balls,
 or Halloween. Now, highway men
 and worse, The Masque of the Red Death,
  
 my early assiduous reading
 of Poe, horror of plague,
 woe, the colors of crow.
  
 Yet joy is ascendant, leaps
 like that spritely spotted cow 
 who jumps over the moon.
  
 I’m here, you’re here.
 We’ll talk again soon. 
 Meanwhile, for you,
  
 who always meets me
 where I am, never asks
 that I put on a false face,
  
 I am making a mask
 of the softest cloth
 to send to you, just 
  
 a bright, little scrap
 of current ingenuity
 and hope. Just in case.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz

Recently, Tim asked me to make him a mask. We found instructions online, thanks to the tiny but incomparable shop on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, Treadle Yard Goods. From their website, and inspired by their initiative to make masks for healthcare workers, as well as friends and family, we found a pattern at a site called Sew Good dedicated to making and donating quality handmade items. (I have included the link so the pattern is available to you.)

Usually, I sew by hand, but I knew that I couldn’t manuver a sliver-sharp quilting needle through denim in tiny stitches (too painful!). Some years ago, my friend, Corrine Heiberg, had given me her beloved Elna sewing machine. This past winter, by chance, I found a place to have it reconditioned, but given my timidity with machines and technology, I had not yet moved forward on my intention of becoming comfortable using it.

This past week, with Tim standing by for technical and moral support, I have now successfully wound bobbins, threaded top and bottom threads, and (yes! I see the metaphor!) adjusted tensions. I found some much-laundered cloth–a denim kitchen apron retired from service due to a frayed neck strap that I had always meant to replace, and some soft flannel from pajamas that had been put out to pasture. My only deficit in terms of materials was elastic. There, too, Corrine came to the rescue. I re-purposed the elastic from some Aeroflot eye shades she sent my way. This elastic is thin and soft and a discreet black, but it looks strong enough to hold.

Here is the prototype with a dashing model. Who? Perhaps Spiderman?

Encouraged by the first one, yesterday I made two more, one for Karla, one for me.

Effective? So they say, and I think they do signal reassuring safety to others.

Meanwhile, I am thinking, now that the trusty Elna and I have become friends, of other projects I might attempt this year. (Quilts! Quilts! Quilts!)

Wishing you a safe and lighthearted day, whatever you are doing on this Monday,

Leslie