Baby Lima Beans

My comments follow the poem.   But before you read, consider the word “secular.”  Contemporary usage varies.  Generally, however, most of us think of the world, the actions, and the thoughts that are not religious, not transcendent, but of the temporal world.  Here and now.

In the Secular Night by Margaret Atwood

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

"In the Secular Night" by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. (c) Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.

Regardless of the difficulty in understand what this poem “means,” a concern, but not my singular concern when reading poetry, there is much that draws me in. 

It’s the details and the contradictions that swell my interest.  The poet recalls past and present.  Its everyday experiences, thoughts, things resonate in my experience.  I omit people because she only mentions those she encounters second hand, in the news. The past’s grape juice and ginger ale, vanilla ice-cream, the forbidden smoke that crawls up the chimney and the present’s lima beans, ritually prepared, and the long creaking walk up the stairs and her search or at least contemplation of the divine and the divine’s absence.

And in all these ponderings life (and death) move mysteriously move forward back to another time. 

Offspring

Here’s a fun one for parents and children of all ages.  How many parents hope their children achieve what they did not?  Live more openly, more honestly?  Never blast off without thinking into the courthouse and in the homes of neighbors.  

I read a quote recently about love.  That is to say, real love is about letting go, at least with children.  Accepting them as they are.  They didn’t ask to come on board.  Most don’t know how they will check out.  And in between, they have to deal with credit card companies, sly banks, insurance companies that do not pay.  Shysters whose pockets are filled with lint and candy wrappers.

Both we and our charges ought, as best we can, follow our bliss.   

And here’s a poem from mother who has enormous hope.  Let us free our charges of that awesome, powerful state, freedom.

Genes  by Sharon Dunn

My eleven year son wants to fish,
he owns two rods, one saltwater,
one freshwater. He loves knives,
Bowie knives, Swiss Army
knives, "Knives like this one?"
my brother says, opening his desk
drawer and taking out a small
jackknife with antler handle.
My boy camps outdoors, begs to sleep
outside, is always shooting
arrows, rubber band guns,
he is lashing together a fort
in the backyard. He sails,
swims, kayaks and wants
to know the stars.
The outdoor hunting genes
are in the dark men in my family.
Yet I believe he is a son of light.
His joy in reading, cooking
and piano are fanned
from the tinderbox
of his father's heart.
He will save rainforest,
he will grow vegetables,
keep horses, fly his own plane.
He will make his own brave life,
he will not remake our lives
nor redeem us, nor pity us.

Philip Levine -- What Work Is

The following is a link to a page with both and audio and text version of a poem. 

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/levine/what_work_is.php

 It is written and spoken by Philip Levine former Poet Laureate.  He is among my favorite poets, and early on in my reading career, at least poetry, I read a poem he had written about his experiences in Detroit when it was a thriving, if not cruel, industrial city.

His poems voice is direct.  No cleverness.  And if there is irony, it isn't frivolous or merely clever.  His poems matter and acknowledge injustice.  "Most of the time," he writes, "a lot of people have to suck it up.  And many who think they are sucking it up have no idea how much worse others suffer." 

I like this poem for its search for fundamental truths.  I like it for its lack of distractions.  I like it for acknowledging the maliciousness and indifference that is part of most people's everyday existence.  And I like it for, in the end, his turning of what we think of as "work." 

Follow the link for both print version and an audio version that he, himself, read.'

Tomato Pies

Tomato Pies, 25 Cents  by Grace Cavalieri

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,
before Pizza came in,
at my Grandmother's restaurant,
in Trenton New Jersey.
My grandfather is rolling meatballs
in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but
saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy
by coming to America.
Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce.
Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean,
sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after
cops delivered him home just hours before.
The waitresses are helping
themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer,
playing the numbers with Moon Mullin
and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942,
tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents.
With anchovies, large, 50 cents.
A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm).
How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix,
would stand outside all the way down Warren Street,
waiting for this new taste treat,
young guys in uniform,
lined up and laughing, learning Italian,
before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

Like a lot of poems I post, this one was an audio podcast from Writer’s Almanac.  And like a lot of poems I post, this one is concrete.  It is specific.  I embrace William Carlos Williams’s maxim, “No ideas but in things.”  As a subscriber to many print literary journals, I spend less and less time rereading poems that do not interest me, that seem merely clever, and offer no real sense of personal experience.  

And here, there is action.  Here are the seeds of a narrative.  Those boys headed to war.  The waitresses and the homes to where they return, their Saturday night romp to brassy bands.  Uncle Joey’s remorse for the previous nights excess nursing a headache and nausea.  And what of Maggie?  Does she gratefully acknowledge her brother’s sacrifice?  Was it worth it after all?  

The numbers guys.  How many knuckles did they break?   What of their grandchildren? And pies, tomato and anchovy.  No ideas but in things.

Thanksgiving Benediction

Thanksgiving

Every year we call it down upon ourselves,
the chaos of the day before the occasion,
the morning before the meal. Outdoors,
the men cut wood, fueling appetite
in the gray air, as Nana, Arlene, Mary,
Robin--whatever women we amount to--
turn loose from their wrappers the raw,
unmade ingredients. A flour sack leaks,
potatoes wobble down counter tops
tracking dirt like kids, blue hubbard[i] erupts
into shards and sticky pulp when it's whacked
with the big knife, cranberries leap away
rather than be halved. And the bird, poor
blue thing--only we see it in its dead skin--
gives up for good the long, obscene neck, the gizzard,
the liver quivering in my hand, the heart.

So what? What of it? Besides the laughter,
I mean, or the steam that shades the windows
so that the youngest sons must come inside
to see how the smells look. Besides
the piled wood closing over the porch windows,
the pipes the men fill, the beers
they crack, waiting in front of the game.

Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters. That's what.
A whole day has passed between the first apple
cored for pie, and the last glass polished
and set down. This is a feast we know how to make,
a Day of Feast, a day of thanksgiving
for all we have and all we are and whatever
we've learned to do with it: Dear God, we thank you
for your gifts in this kitchen, the fire,
the food, the wine. That we are together here.
Bless the world that swirls outside these windows--
a room full of gifts seeming raw and disordered,
a great room in which the stoves are cold,
the food scattered, the children locked forever
outside dark windows. Dear God, grant
to the makers and keepers power to save it all.

Benediction

That’s how I think of it.  Good words, expression of gratitude, the results of good work, our ordering of the chaotic into something beneficial.  And maybe a metaphor for art, taking our incoherent experience and creating meaning.

That first line mystifies me.  They “call it down.”  While the phrase may be merely a figure of speech, there is something odd about it.  Gamey?  A call for a battle..

That first stanza, the women cooking the meal.  The abundance of raw foods.  The steamy windows.  And timing their preparation so all the dishes arrive, miraculously, at the same time.  These details give the poem authenticity that in themselves have value.  “Cataloguing” or “listing” as a technique or as a poetic genre, is one that in my estimation, seems to be a distinctly American form.   There are, of course, others, but Whitman excelled in listing occupations, forms of life, emotional states, and locales in order to express the awe he held in his vision of America.

But here, the list gives a sense of the sheer stuff and disorder that must be transformed to create a feast of thanksgiving.

The exclusivity or maybe obligation of women in the kitchen has, of course, changed, mostly in my lifetime, but as a child, especially on the Dzurick farm, Jewel rose long, long before dark.  They, the farmers, ate at noon.  Only the city people whose luxury of jobs, paid vacation days, paid sick days, and paid personal days would be so indulgent to eat Thanksgiving in late afternoon or evening.

Twenty to thirty people would dine, family and friends.  Pecan and pumpkin pies.  Jewel canned blackberry and gooseberry, and she retrieved them from the musty root cellar behind the house where they piled white potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, and onions.  So the cobblers, too, were placed on a sideboard.

It was a mess, and somehow, my grandmother kept a smile.  It appeared, in some strange way, like a performance.  And despite her efforts, she would, as if confessing to a pries, elucidate, perhaps exagerate the shortcomings of the meal.

And what does it all mean?  The narrator explains implicitly and explicitly in the prayer that closes the poem.  The act of transforming the raw materials is clearly important.  But inside, it is the fellowship, rather womanship of the act itself.  The children are out of doors. The men are cracking beers and smoking pipes. While the “world” “swirls” and this, without explanation, is the blessing.

More catalogue poems to follow by Christopher Smart and Vance Hedderal.

---

[i] Blue Hubbard is a winter squash.

Deliverance

I like this poem if only because it hearkens back to my childhood.  For my first fifteen years or so, we trudged to church three days a week. 

We , my very young parents, my brother, and I, lived in a trailer on what is now the runway at St. Louis Lambert Airfield in northwest St. Louis County.  The Tip Top Trailer Court.  

Given there were no highwaysm we woke early and drove to South Side Assembly of God on the far south side of St. Louis on Grand Avenue.  There my brother an I sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children” with Sister Trendle.  She led Sunday School for kids,.  She bore a purple birthmark that covered most of her face.  No matter how sweet her voice, her purple skin gave me the creeps.  

Later, we joined the adults upstairs for the service.  It was a dank, cavernous room whose boards creaked and angled towards the pulpit.  And before, we greeted adults in ways that I don’t think children do now.  

Andy Keenan had served early in Vietnam and his pinky finger and ring finger of his right hand had been shot off.  He vigorously shook my hand as if to say, “I am here, and losing two fingers in battle is part of he plan.”  

One of the Pickeral twins was wearing a football helmet because his brother locked him in the dryer and turned it on.  Everyone wore a tie.

Sister Giacoletto, a fallen Roman Catholic and recent convert to charismatic principles, brought us a loaf of her crispy Italian bread and apple butter from her backyard tree.

These were a people who possessed deep belief.  They prayed for the sick and dying.    They wept and spoke in tongues.  And afterwards, they felt forgiven, lighter.  I’ve no certainty of what they were experiencing, but it was sincere.  Many people I know might have been frightened and imagined that witch burning would begin after services.

But for me, this was a commonplace.  

There I first flirted with eternity.  Hell? Forever.  Remembering my throbbing thumb that I burned on our stove, I imagined pain today, tonight, the next day, and for a moment, I had a grasp of forever.  

And heaven?  It didn’t seem appealing to me either.  “Streets paved with gold?”  What would I spend it on?  Heaven for me might have been a tree house (we had no tree), a banana split, or holding hands with Michelle and Renee, our heartthrobs next door.

God, while powerful, seemed to lead a dull existence.

After singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” our stomachs gnawed for food.  Dad would discretely slip us gum, Juicy Fruit if we were lucky, Dentyne if not.  The worst was Sen Sen, the bitter licorice flavor.

I prayed that this was over.  Hungry.  Restless.  Please let me walk about.

Oh, had a pigeon flown loose through the congregation to deliver me.

Holy Ghost

The congregation sang off key.
The priest was rambling.
The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.

A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church,
flew wildly around for a while and then
flew toward a stained glass window,

but it didn't look like reality.

The ushers yawned, the dollar bills
drifted lazily out of the collection baskets
and a child in the front row began to cry.

Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low,
swooping over the heads of the faithful
like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost

Everyone took it to be a sign,
Everyone wants so badly to believe.
You can survive anything if you know
that someone is looking out for you,

but the sky outside the stained glass window,
doesn't it look like home?