April 22, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem: “Sunday Postcard to the Past”

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

Sunday Postcard to the Past
Earth Day, 2018

Sited by Giotto, best viewed from the east,
as sun rises over the green-rimmed bowl
of Florentine hills, you, bell tower, stand
alone in your old, sacred neighborhood,
lofty as a basketball player or
factory chimney. Sonic silo, housing
seven named bells, we climbed your four hundred
steps sometime in the last gone century.

It was early. We were happy, younger,
open to every view. You, campanile,
dressed in spumoni marble appliqué
without, were rough-hewn within: gritty, dim,
stronger than centuries or human life.
I remember—at each stage, as we climbed—
looking down through your center: your timbers
black as iron with age, your bells silent.

Leslie Schultz

Wishing you a warm and relaxed Earth Day! Fittingly, this first Siberian scilla bloomed today, along the rough edge of our limestone foundation. May new ideas bloom for you today, whatever your climate. Leslie

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April 21, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Ragnarok”

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

Ragnarök

Father, you handed me the rough sphere
about the size of a tennis ball.
In my small hands, I turned it over.
You took it, placed it on concrete,
struck like Thor with your heavy sledge.

It was, you said, a thunderegg,
or might be. You loved Oregonian
geology, the tide pools and lava flows.
This disappointing specimen
crumbled like ash under your blows.

No frozen moonscape/seascape/
landscape inside, no milky eye.
You gave a sigh and turned
for a swig of beer, a rare one,
then crushed the empty can in your hand.

We lived, that year, across the rush
of traffic, from a park
with civic tennis courts,
swings, and childish slides,
frequent thunk-thunk of hit balls.

They look ordinary, you’d explain.
Not agate or geode exactly but some
mysterious matrix of confluence
from those firey thrusts of the dim past,
the slow drip of underground rivers…

You’d tell the tale you did not
remember—pale mammal, scientist,
half-blind like Odin—as if you were there,
and I can still see you, hefting your lightning,
striding the now-riven world.

Leslie Schultz

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April 20, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem: “Exquisite Silence”

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

Exquisite Silence

I recall the first time
we were enfolded
by the fabled acoustics
of this extraordinary place
called Ordway.
Panels of glass
pressed out against
the box of night air.

No visual distractions here,
icy interior, cathedral
of beige and frost.

Lights lowered. There
was applause. Then
the mime, most famous
in all the world, came
out from the velvety blackness
into the lemon-hot spotlight
and took us all in,

his expressive eyes,
piloting the changeable
moon
of his white face.

We could have heard
a pin
d
r
o
p
!

I
think we
did.

Leslie Schultz

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April 19, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Black Kites”

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

“Black Kites” (1997) by Gabriel Orozco

Black Kites

What I’m after is the liquidity of things, how one thing leads you on to the rest… The works are about concentration, intention, and paths of thought: the flow of totality in our perception, the fragmentation of the river of phenomenon. Gabriel Orozco

The face of death. Herein lies emptiness,
The open maw of a still unfilled vase.

Are they bird-hollow, the bones of happiness?
Constructions wrapped around the voids of space,

Swallowed by or swallowing snaky time,
Stillness reverberating under fronds,

Caught in the knotted lattices of rhyme?
What the pencil aims to capture absconds,

Dashes into the underbrush of thought.
How can we remember that we will die?

Look at the old photos. See where you ought
To be now: On the outskirts, asking why

You were born? Or dead-on and central, quite
implicit in this dance of black and white?

Leslie Schultz

I first encountered the work (“Black Kites”) by the conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a great ark of art history on the banks of the Schuylkill River. His powerful memento mori was created with graphite pencil on the blank white curved surface of a purchased skull after a life-threatening illness arrested his attention.

The photograph of my great-grandmother (Clara Pressel) and her daughter-in-law (Marie Pressel–my grandmother) with neighbor Raidibelle Krueger in the middle was taken near their compound on the banks of the St. Lucie River in Florida, on the Atlantic coast. These women of my family are all dead now, of course, but as I remember them dimly they somehow live on, like an underground river below the dome of my own cranium.

This sonnet homage is broken into faux couplets to reflect the interlinking of shadow and light, memory and aspiration, one never existing without the other.