It is that thrilling and spooky time of year again, leaves turning blood-red, tree limbs baring skeletal lines. Our neighborhood becomes for a brief time punctuated with both cozy cheerful notations and operatic tableaux. This post is a good excuse to share some of my favorite local images from this year, as well as a few seasonally-inspired poems.
My short poem, “All Hallows,” was written long ago, and was published in the summer 2020 edition of The Orchards Poetry Journal. Today seemed like the right time to share it on these pages. Below is an even older poem inspired by this time of year, “Driving to Appleton.”
All Hallows
In the end, we bestow that most precious gift: our life. From all experience there is this quietness of final meek withdrawal.
In these dark trees, the heft of soft feathers knows night is mere caul and cauldron where silence stirs. Owls are uncanny birds.
They glide on silk hush, sift sound, find our mouse hearts; pierce fearfulness with claws sharper than an apt word, keener than the tongs of art,
carry us higher now through our woundedness up to moonlight and beyond, allowing new sight as we wink out, think Good night.
Leslie Schultz
DRIVING TO APPLETON
(1980)
Pumpkins sleep close to houses. Evening light covers them with gold. These farmhouse windows are lit and cold. Grey barns settle on their stones. Everywhere sheaves lean Toward their centers. Great rolls of hay seem to lumber. Winter is coming, but now The culverts are purple with thistles, The cattle are plump, And there, in the hollow, A rusted harrow rests.
The woods beyond Are full of gossips. When the moon washes over The tops of birches, They’ll ride to the cut fields To glean And mend their brooms.
Some things just get better and better. The OrchardsPoetry Journal launched in August 2016 as a twice-a-year online publication. Now, with its eighth issue, not only are the poems available online, but also in a beautiful print format.
And it is chock full of poems I am glad to read and read again. You’ll have your own favorites, of course, but I thought I would mention just a handful of my own.
Molly Peacock, someone whose work I have enjoyed in a number of journals, is the feature poet of this issue of The Orchards. Of the selection here, I am especially taken with her poem “The Shoulders of Women.”
Among the many skillful sonnets in this issue, two–“Abandoned Church in France” by David W. Landrum and “Twilight” by Wendy Sloan–caught my full attention. I know I will return to read them again. Likewise, the very moving (and technically accomplished) villanelle by Allison Joseph, “After Receiving an Unsolicited Mailer from a Monument Company”, used form to soar into a new emotional place.
And I especially enjoyed seeing in print Sally Nacker’s poem for Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Steepletop Museum“, one I read in draft form a while back. Seeing it reminds me of conversation I had with Sally about her visit to St. Vincent Millay’s home near Austerlitz, New York. I, too, have loved St. Vincent Millay’s work since high school. When I worked at Carleton, I taped a photograph of her framed by magnolia branches over my desk in the Development Office, and so I was especially touched that Sally sent me postcards of the famous Remington typewriter and writing shack for my office here at home. Sally’s poem encapsulates the way a life and a place can become intertwined in a way that inspires legend. I am grateful for it because I recently read that the museum is now closed to the public, so it is unlikely I will ever be able to see it for myself.
In closing, I thought that I would offer a little background on the two poems of my own that appear in this issue.
“Blois”
This poem draws on memories of my first visit to the Loire Valley in March 2009, and specifically to a visit to Chateau de Blois.
View of the Loire River taken from the wall of Chateau de Blois.
The chateau has a long history and its history intersected with such fabled people as Jeanne d’Arc (1412 to 1431) and François I (who reigned from 1515 to 1547 and was a patron of Leonardo da Vinci). The chateau occupies the high ground but is linked to the town (and thence to several marvelous patisseries) by a wide and graceful stone staircase, essentially a public street, that envelopes a circular flower bed. It was François I who chose the salamander as his personal emblem.
(As for Images of the famous staircase and a little more on the spectacular chateau, here is a summary. Can’t believe that I was there but neglected to take a photograph of that magnificent architectural detail!)
“All Hallows”
I have been fascinated by owls for decades, at least since Tim and I bought this little bronze replica of an Etruscan statuette on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence back in 1997. Last year, we visited a wonderful new establishment in the small town of Houston, Minnesota, the International Owl Center. So impressed were we with its expansive mission and programming–and by the work of their in-house teaching owls, Ruby (a Great Horned Owl) and Uhu (a Eurasian Eagle Owl), that we returned later in the fall for a field trip Owl Prowl. This year, Tim and I both heard and spotted for the first time an owl in the wild–a Great Horned Owl in the Carleton Arboretum. I have yet to get a clear photograph of an owl–maybe one day. I did, however, find the inspiration for this poem–a meditation on the otherworldly magic of owls–after those visits to Houston, along with real world information on the need to protect owl habitat across the globe.
I hope you, too, will enjoy this watershed issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal!
You can read the issue online HERE. If you would like to order a copy of this first print edition, (as you know I did!) you can do that at the Kelsay Books website HERE.
