All up and down the quiet street, lights wink off and on. Windows open and then close: soft breath of houses. Days flow like ink. Birds are thrilled. Buds form on our glauca rose.
Quiet reigns in the mostly silent streets. I read that seismologists note worldwide how reduced human hum reveals world beats unheard before we chose to move inside,
agreed seclusion was a social gain, could flatten curves of infection and death. At first, we felt relief. Then mounting pain of separation. And now? We find sweet breath
each morning, find peace within our own walls, listen to morning wisdom of bird calls.
Not the wind knocking branches against the eaves, Nor wolves, for they are far, far to the north. Just the small echo chamber of my heart,
Voicing this pain I hear, this pain I see, Twisting shimmers of inherited wroth Polished and shaped for the distance of art.
There is power in voices shaped into song. Our singing breath holds a gathering force. Our sorrows must flow before they are spent,
Acknowledged before any grievous wrong Can be set right. If the river’s course Is dammed, its flow still presses, cannot relent.
Song helps to clear the silt, to sweeten the rue. Our flowing breath can strengthen and renew.
Leslie Schultz
Regular readers of Winona Media might recall some these images. They inspired a NaPoWRiMo poem (April 19, 2017) called “Portrait of a Street Musician” and writing that poem helped me to learn from a reader what the instrument played was so long ago on a grey day in Paris.
This morning, I was thinking about breath and wondering about the tonal and other differences between singing and howling, or indeed whether the difference is only in our naming. Why that today? I don’t really know–gloomy weather, world strife, headache.
What I do know is that it helps me to engage, at least in my own way, to try to make something. To try to make sense.
...all the colours that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable, all the more reason boldly to use them too raw, time will only soften them too much… Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo)
Who knew that paintings fade like flowers?
Van Gogh foresaw the unstable quality of his pigments,
impressed them vividly onto prepared canvas
as in this picture of a man walking with a woman,
arms entwined, air heavy as blue metal,
trees spaced like columns in a Doric temple, where
undergrowth thick and wavy as seaweed
blooms with color— yellow, orange, white—
but that fugitive one, called spark or geranium lake,
sent from far afield by Theo, used to make
a brief flowering of pink has faded to white;
quite the opposite of the trillium
at the base of my elm which emerges like snow
but then blushes each season into oblivion
shaded by showy day lily, shrouded
afresh in the mystery of understory:
this the story, the way of man,
of woman, of all flesh.
Leslie Schultz
Image: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, b.1853, d.1890); Undergrowth with Two Figures; 1890; oil on canvas; Bequest of Mary E. Johnston; 1967.1430. (Cincinnati Museum of Art)
A child asked me, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands… (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6”)
Fever took me by surprise. I was eight years old. I lay in my room, under a blanket covered with pictures of pink roses, and the room began to whirl. I could not understand it, found it curiouser and curiouser. The ceiling tilted and dropped. The centrifugal force created, somehow, by my own body felt as though it would fling me out of it, as though I had become a spinning galaxy of heat and light and pictures and roses that made a body unneeded. I was puzzled but not alarmed. I was on fire with fire that did not consume.
My mother brought in the glass thermometer, held in under my tongue, kept bringing in trays with ginger ale and aspirin, water, sugary puddings after the sun rose. When the sun fell, my fever broke. I was still here but changed. I could hear the pink Queen Elizabeth roses growing on the other side of the wall, hear the pellucid slugs chewing the light green grass, even the music of starlight streaming through the willow tree I once fell from, when the wind was knocked out of me. Where did it go? I wanted to know. I felt then that whole universe unfurled from my home. Soon after that fever I wrote my first poem.
Cannon Beach, Oregon, January 1999 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Ecola for our daughter, on the other coast
Where is the entry point into this poem? The trail head is closed for the foreseeable which seems not that far, now, our human future shrouded in fog.
Fog remains at home, here, on this point where land meets sea, where a crescent of beach curves. Just north, Tillamook lighthouse still battens to its rock, abandoned columbarium;
just south, Haystack Rock looms picturesque, mute. I recall our last visit, four months pregnant with you. We rented a damp cabin at Cannon Beach, dim and stinking of old smoke.
That night, the roar of the surf called us out. We walked into the heavy fog, lights of heaven concealed, even the lights of the town, rocks, docks, Sitka spruce all shrouded.
Delicate as deer, we went, step by step, onto the wet sand, its shining all we could see except each other. The tide was low but we knew it would turn, that morning would come. That fog would burn.
Leslie Schultz
Minnesota North Shore, July 2017 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Ecola State Park, Oregon from Lookout Point (Photo: Hellmann, courtesy of Pixabay)
