Now comes the fall of glaciers, all fall down. Now comes the rise of blue, blue of the deepening sea. How do we rise to our task, stand common ground, in and out of nature, poison and key?
Pavements are grey beneath us. Graffiti decks the walls. Fluorescents flare and sizzle, curdling night and day. Starlight seems to gutter, but still the moon calls, washing paths along the river silver-grey.
The bees are falling silent. Iron gates gape wide. We have to seek within, clutching tattered maps. Can we summon our making powers deep inside? Invite new-made honey to fill burnt-out gaps,
and return what we have eaten: instead consume flames of inspiration in a cleaner room?
Leslie Schultz
VertigoProvisionsJourneySign PostKeep GoingBee on Chickory
“…the traces of an uneasy compulsive activity shape the image of a separate presence.”
“He sculpted not the human figure but “'the shadow that is cast.’”
Mornings, wearing a tie, you took the train to Flinders Street Station, in the city’s heart. Evenings, sometimes you dallied in the park, watched the black ornamental swans, sheltered from the choppy Yarra on their placid lake, crown jewels of the Royal Botanic gardens.
Other days, you’d cross Prince’s Bridge but veer toward the brick archway of the art museum, the one fronted by a glass wall running with water. One time, you showed us all how you could place your hand on that window sculpted over by flow, force the cascade, like a rock in a stream, to part;
next, you increased your slight magic by lifting your hand to restore an unceasing waterfall, as though you had never been there at all. One evening, you wandered in. I imagine you restless in that space, pecked by artists’ visions, driven toward their shop by the known rubric
of commerce. Why, otherwise, would you carry home a long, thin volume for me, praising the sculpture of Giacometti? Yes, I could see “L’Homme qui marche,” thin as a railroad spike, bent, pitted with weather, long nose sharp as a blade, but I didn’t see, until now, how he resembled you,
your views, your profile, your obdurate strivings. Remember, children don’t always track these things.
Leslie Schultz
My father was a math-physics double-major. He worked first as an engineer and later in computer science. Although identifying with scientists, he showed steady but idiosyncratic bursts of appreciation for arts and crafts. He liked many things, including: carved wooden duck decoys, coins, stamps, science fiction, spaghetti westerns, the song stylings of Johnny Cash, poetry that had been popular in his grandparents’ youth, and the irreverent lyrics and melodies of mathematician Tom Lehrer.
Today, I remembered the one time he brought me home a heavy-to-hold art book. It was a hardcover catalog of the sculptures of recently deceased Italian surrealist sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Then, as now, I was puzzled by this gift, but also touched by it. This morning, I am recalling a line from Dad’s favorite poem by Robert Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,”
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see; It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
This was a poem he could recite from memory with great gusto, always coming down hard on that key syllable, “stabbed.”
To refresh my memory of this sculptor and his work, I looked him up. The first quote at the start of my poem is from a BBC documentary, “Giacometti,” from 1967, the year after the sculptor’s death, the second is from his own analysis of his work. This figure was just my Dad’s height, six feet. I think Dad would be interested to know that it holds stratospheric value today, not only among art critics but among deep-pocketed art patrons.
I am still not sure I understand it, but today it looms large, commanding my attention.
It started as a lark that spring. A few of us piled into someone’s seen-better-days automobile and drove, without a clue, toward that tiny airport covered in haze.
We were trying, I guess, to forestall all thought of the coming fall, who we would be without school. We practiced jumps, I recall, while a tiny plane circled, light and free,
as things do when leaving. The month before—- it seemed an eternity—-my brother perished. An icy turn drove him through his dark door too early, while still raw and unfinished.
Now, we were told to keep leaping off crates. Then it was time to climb into the craft, with glass altimeters strapped to our chests, to rise over fields, to plunge into updraft.
For me, this was dull aftermath, mute ode to April, busy mixing her dead land hues—-memory, desire—-for me to decode, if I could, remake them with my own hand
later, after we limped that night to the fire ring, shaken but standing, glasses and voices lifting.
Leslie Schultz
public domain photo by Guenther Dilligen (pixabay)
Smells of chalk and Elmer’s glue and hot lunch linger. Thunk of rubber balls on asphalt. On Valentine’s Day, the delicious crunch of sugar cookies with pink sprinkles. Salt
made icy sidewalks safe. Our third-grade class transformed cardboard into a Zulu hut, covering the roof and sides with bright grass made from crepe paper, green and tawny, cut
with Mrs. Munford’s sharp, black-handled shears. When we were good, we could spend time inside, use flashlights to read African books. Fears were smaller then. Or maybe not. I cried
when I sounded out pollution, then learned that our air, land, and water were sick; might die under our bad care.
Leslie Schultz
In third grade, I was lucky enough to fall in love with my teacher, Mrs. Munford. She was wise, and generously proportioned, and truly saw the best in each of her students. She taught us about China and Africa; and the turbulent history of The Stout-Hearted Seven, an authentic account of orphans alone navigating the Oregon Trail; about blood cells and constellations, and gerbils, and how seeds sprout; about multiplication tables, and arrays, and short division; and about the power of listening to whatever interests you.
When I started looking this morning, I could not locate any photos of me from that year–though in my school record book, artistically covered by my mother, there are photos for the flanking years.
Second GradeFourth Grade
Yet, I know I changed and learned a lot about myself during those nine months at Cedar Hills Elementary School. It was in second grade (across the hall) that I became mesmerized by rhyme, but it was in Mrs. Munford’s class that I started, all on my own, to write poems. I would think them up, write them down, copy them with my very best handwriting, and then illustrate them on ruled paper at home. The next day, I would turn them into my teacher, who always, always encouraged these extracurricular forays despite the many elementary mistakes I made. Mrs. Munford knew about potential and how to foster it in us. Toward the end of that year, I turned them into my first book.
Inside, I found that one of my first verses was dedicated to Mrs. Munford. I wish I could curl up, just for a few moments, again in that cardboard hut. And I wish she could read today’s new poem for her. LESLIE
Some loomed like towering infernos, I (young reader) imagined, all up rush of rages, tornadic destroyers, impartial whirlwinds of wroth.
Others shimmered like illustrations in expensive library books, slicing themselves out of their pages, scimitars raised for particular victims.
Others still—home-grown from Black Forest spores—hunkered small and slimy in garden pots, waiting to latch on: diminutive, unfocused globs of ill will.
Now, I know the worst, glimpse those who slink in the tangled dendritic forest of my brain, who rush from the angry underbrush,
those unbidden thoughts that have sometimes caught me by the throat, then kept developing, like polaroids of ugly faces,
stray impressions that rode me, causing me to snarl, to singe my own hair, before they would disappear-- shaken off (but not quite.)
Leslie Schultz
The concept of the “demon” is one I first discovered as an avid young reader of fairy tales, those of old Europe–Perrault and the Brothers Grimm–and of the Islamic Golden Age. Scheherazade seemed to me the greatest hero of all, stepping into the flaming circle of a despot’s unreasoning anger, spinning a safety net for herself and all other women through the filaments of story itself. I felt terrorized by the landscape of her world, but she showed me the core truth that art saves lives, rights corruption, soothes the spirit.
These days, for me, battling demons is less panoramic and technicolor, less Hollywood or Bollywood orKaiju.
I woke up this morning, after a peaceful sleep, thinking about how anger can ride us sometimes even when we think we are in the driver’s seat. Last week, I was startled to see this vehicle parked on a Northfield street–sort of humorous, sort of frightening. That’s the way we can all sometimes park our anger and resentment out in public under the guise of a joke or a jab or a verbal poke, isn’t it?
Behind the steering wheel of this Herman Munster-mobile appeared to be burst chains draped across the seat. Maybe it’s that easy. When we feel an angry thought, maybe we could just signal it, pull over to an appropriate curb, turn off the engine, and…walk away?
LESLIE
P.S. For contrast, here is another Scheherazade-inspired poem that came during 2017’s NaPoWriMo activity, called “A Vinyl Memory.”
