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Heading Home Again

Heading Home Again

 

I cannot write as Mary Oliver has written

About snow geese and the song of dawn

Over a living pond far away,

Because she’s far away from me

Now more than ever, more than forever

 

She commanded nature by

Never giving orders

She sensed through more than senses

All she met and came to understand

I think we can rely on her, through

Words and more she left us

 

I wish like wishing on a star

That I could have sat with her just once

Maybe we would not have been good company

My inclination would have been

To do little more than listen

And maybe she would not have left it that way

But like nature as she cast it

Only settled for full participation

 

In my place under town lights

I cannot see the stars

But on the inside I can travel like Thoreau

And other theories

And read her words to let them sink

Like stones returning home from the rim they

Had been cast upon, long ago

 

We can all love the world better

Through our pastored mischief-making

There is need for redemption

But we need to look more closely, all the while

To remember all the places where love sits

Or rises now and then to play

 

All the people who will take us home

Or simply push on gliders made by wind

As we arrive

 

C L Couch

 

 

Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019 [which is now]. She was 83.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver

 

Wild Geese

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/wild-geese

Mary Oliver

 

(image)

John Fowler [destined, if not predetestined] from Placitas, NM, USA – Snow Geese, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24663639

Incoming snow geese fill the dawn sky at Bosque del Apache.

 

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Sunday Morning after Sleeping for a Change

Sunday Morning after Sleeping for a Change

 

I’m not sure what to say today

It’s a sunny day outside

Clear and cold with an edge

Like runners on ice skates

 

The sun is winter-tilting, so

I can see enough

Not all the dust motes, thank you

But like the movie,

Everything Is Illuminated, all the same

 

I could make a point

But the day is its own

There’s meaning in the pattern of

The leaves against the window panes,

 

Enough philosophy for two

Whoever might join me

Who’s already here

No prosperity but the pleasure of one’s company

 

C L Couch

 

 

Observing the Sabbath-closing havdalah ritual in 14th-century Spain.

Unknown – Detail from a miniature in the Barcelona Haggadah, British Library Add MS 14761, fol. 26.

(Public Domain)

 

Everything Is Illuminated, a film from 2005, directed by Liev Shreiber, starring Elijah Wood

 

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East of Java

East of Java

 

My first real taste of the day

Is bittersweet

I simply mean my morning cup of coffee

To which, yes, I add

Something sugary,

 

Which means I set it up

The contradiction and the paradox

First thing

First need

 

C L Couch

 

 

Coffee berries with insect bites.

Jyppe Quidores – Own work

 

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Five, Sixty-Two, and More

Five, Sixty-Two, and More

 

We are getting on

I want God to be simple

But the cosmos is made with

Such small things

Nuclei, electrons

Unless we have it wrong

And atoms are huge

But we don’t know the context

We’ve barely started searching out

The story of the universe

We see, we listen

We know the sounds of space

So far

Maybe when we know the taste

And touch more than moon rocks

(which I did not at the museum,

thank you very much)

Maybe when know the scent of galaxies

We’ll understand something of

The process of creation

The scale of something like

The hand of God

The eye, the nose, the ear

The tongue

Everything that gave us

Anything

And then how to understand it

 

In the morning of discovery, of greeting

Face to face

And sense to sense

The one who saw, who heard, who smelled, who

Tasted, and who touched us first

 

C L Couch

 

 

Lubo Kristek: Monument to the Five Senses, 1991, metal sculpture, 450 cm, collection of the Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech

By Info-kultur – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20245863

 

1

Well, Go Upstairs and Write Something

Well, Go Upstairs and Write Something

 

I hope it’s true, this story

We were told by the poet:

There was a christening,

All the family there

They arrived, and it was only

Upon entry that these two understood

That everyone had brought

A gift but, sigh, them

They had nothing but attendance,

Which maybe should have

Been enough

But she leaned into him

And said, Well, go upstairs

And write something!

He did, a lyric for a child just

Entering the world with a

Name and little else

But the gifts and now some

Brand-new words

 

C L Couch

 

 

(Seamus Heaney in a talk at school, given in the late eighties)

 

Picture of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009.

Sean O’Connor, cropped by Sabahrat – File:Seamus Heaney.jpg

 

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I Want to be a Real Boy

I Want to be a Real Boy

 

I want to be a real boy

For the telling of one story, then another

 

We were beautiful once

Then chips and lines

A crack

Evidence of erosion

The strings need replacing

There should be more paint

And maybe I could have more writing

For the show

 

We were lean

But then came dessication

We thought we knew better

Than Gepetto,

Went out on our own

For metamorphosis

 

With the final threads

Last ligaments

We crawl home

To beg the crafter use some skill

Toward our repentance

 

Being in the world

Has not made us real

The question presses into

All the places that were open,

Bleeding

To the sky

 

What might happen

Once I’m better

Tears would warp fine lines

Now fixed

 

But if I might split open

As lightning opens night,

I must do something

Maybe I could talk with the maker

For allowance

Then gather experience

And evidence more carefully

 

Little do I know

A shark, big enough for two or three

Or maybe more,

Is on the way

 

C L Couch

 

 

Escultura articulada de Pinotxo, Museu Internacional de Titelles d’Albaida (MITA).

Joanbanjo – Own work

 

The Adventures of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi

(1883)

 

1

Corollary Written Late into the Magic Book

Corollary Written Late into the Magic Book

 

In an ancient chamber,

He was locked to a device

And made to drink a potion;

Then she began

An interrogation

 

His answers were halting,

Brief, and

Unsatisfying

She grew angry, threatened him

With turns of wheels to

Bring down spikes

 

He cried out

He could do no better—

For he had deceived himself so long

That the truth was not in him

To tell,

It having been tried and tried again

For such a time

That finally it fled

 

The eldritch liquid moved inside

As if it dripped into

Another empty vessel

 

She drew back

And thought about

The habitation of the tiger

 

C L Couch

 

 

un-perfekt / 179 images

https://pixabay.com/en/bottle-glass-bottle-old-root-tree-3942225/

 

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Mister Sanders Speaks

Mister Sanders Speaks

 

I may not know much

But I can wonder

Why the sky is blue

And my balloon is green

And will I reach the tree

With all the honey

 

Why there is a name on my home

Of someone I don’t know

Who counted out

The hundred acres of our wood

And why does Piglet

Help me in all the plans I make

Despite the fact that

I am of small brain

 

He is so good, my human friend

He could come by more often

Maybe find a way to keep

The tail on the donkey

So that we could

Hunt the Heffalump

And play

And find more honey

 

And better still,

Eat more honey

 

Christopher Robin Couch

 

 

EllenChan / 1110 images

(Pixabay)

 

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Evidence Unsee

Evidence Unsee

 

God

Our hope

Our refuge

We need to say

We need to sing

Because the world-storm rages

All about

And we believe ourselves adrift

So easily, so often

Every day

Because we are only, well, you know

 

And in the way we do

We must

Rely on what is, like perjured

Testimony, inadmissible

In human courts

 

C L Couch

 

 

(image from Pixabay)

12019 / 10266 images

 

(in the title, I left off the n to make a new word in the Old-English, English way)

 

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