Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo Challenge 2020

April 30, 2020 Poem “Point Zero”

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 Point Zero
  
  
 All new things start in the circle of Point Zero.
 The trickiest forms commence with the blank page.
 My sense of beginning goes wherever I go.
  
 What I’ve already done is past. (You’d think I would know
 this bald and cardinal truth at my ripe age.)
 Each new thing must spring from the heart of Point Zero.
  
 Each untried idea holds a certain glow.
 Even when closure governs my maker’s rage, 
 my zest for beginning opens wherever I go.
  
 Possibilities glimmer. Sometimes vertigo
 swims up and I am dizzy, as if on stage—
 I recall that pratfalls lurk in Point Zero—
  
 and I freeze, caught in emotional undertow.
 Then I breathe and allow the fear to disengage.
 My need for beginning goes wherever I go.
  
 “My” ideas aren’t mine alone. They exist and they flow.
 They wash me out of every preconceived cage.
 Each insight leaps from the pinpoint of Point Zero,
 recreating me, too, everywhere I go.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


On our 2009 visit to Paris and the Loire Valley, Julia, our friend, Ellen, and I made a point of standing in front of Notre Dame on Point Zero, the place from which all distances are measured in France. Not a single day goes by when I don’t think of that, and of the idea of starting out afresh, of exploring variations on the themes of what I already know. The villanelle, that venerable French form, built up of echoes and repetitions, seemed the best way to celebrate this perennial insight.

Thank you, all, for coming along with me on this journey through the month of April in 2020. I truly don’t know how I would have retained my equilibrium in this most unsettling time without poetry–and your companionship.

Good health to you all, and bonne chance! LESLIE

April 29, 2020 Poem “Crossing”

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 Crossing
  
  
 From Port Clyde, Maine, you board on foot.
 Maybe your belly is full of clams or lobster.
 It is windy onboard, so you hold onto your hat.
  
 Five miles out, the mainland slips away,
 Christina’s world, all that mid-century reaching,
 Sarah Orne Jewett, too, old pointed firs and talk, talk, talk.
  
 The ferry lulls you into calm, alert solitude.
 Passing little Manana Island, perhaps you spot a goat.
 You step onto the wooden dock at Monhegan,
  
 find your legs a little land-sick at first,
 but they recover. You walk along the rocks,
 savor the shingle-sided buildings weathered
  
 to that silvery-grey like the breasts of doves, note
 cresting swells, white embellishing blue waves.
 There is a local museum, a petite library,
  
 a pay-toilet, but you want to leave this age
 behind for an hour, so you head away from town,
 hike up to Cathedral Woods, enter the windless hush
  
 of spruce needles underfoot, quiet soaring of rough bark.
 Your pulse slows. Pungent tannins hang in the air.
 You hear insects, a Golden-winged warbler. At your feet,
  
 as your eyes adjust, you perceive tiny doorways, flagstones
 of shells, palisades of broken twigs. As you lean, curious
 but respectful, toward one fairy dwelling you tumble
  
 headlong into the true magic of this place: clouds
 of tiny white moth wings over greening moss; pink
 mushrooms, smaller than fingernails, still spangled 
  
 with last evening’s rain; and red spruce seedlings 
 mere inches high but protected in the filtered light. 
 You allow yourself to kneel, just for one breath, long
 enough to notice your breath becoming song.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz

My thanks to Maine writer Kristin Lindquist, and to the Stuart-Cole family who introduced our family to the magic of Monhegan in 2011.

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