season

Seasonings

Seasonings

Winter was hard

Not because I was cold

But impoverished in

Other ways

The white was too much

Too tall, too unusual

For me, anymore

I live in the southern part,

Now, of the state

(Okay, a northern state)

And don’t expect such

Walled-off weather

Often, if at all

It was anxiety; I took

A pill, and pretended

That would be enough

Now spring is here

I wonder which came first:

The verb or the season’s

Name

I could look it up

But I’m not sure that

Would tell me

Ancient stories, after

All, have variants

Winter and summer

Are, as coined by my folk-

Literature teacher,

Hilda Kring—they are

Characternyms

We know what they

Are because value

And form make sound

Thar tell us

But the other two,

Spring and fall, might be

Named for what they

Do—or what we do is named

For what they’ve done,

First and longer

We’ll, I’ll spring

Then you and I, we’ll

Summer (because

We know what

That means), and then

Let’s drop like leaves

Of fall, onto an Earth

Softened by snow

And ice, dew and rain,

And the gentle

Wearying

Of all other

Seasons

(Hilda Kring was a professor of

folklore and folk-literature at

my college, while I was a student

there; she made the term

“characternym” for names of

characters who sounded like what,

in depiction, they were, such

as Uriah Heep in David Copperfield

–and maybe Copperfield

himself; she requested someone

to publish this term for her and to

her credit–and here is my try,

“characternym” from Doctor Hilda Kring)

May 14, 2016 13

Ashen Wednesday

Ashen Wednesday
(liturgical need)

You have dirt on your
Forehead, the student says

I wanted you to know so you
Don’t walk around all day
That way

But I had just come from
Church (an early mass), and
Wearing the dirt (the ash)
All day would be our routine

If I had to guess, I’d say the
Room is mostly learner-
Populated with evangelicals
With maybe an honest
Agnostic or two,

In which (for all) formal
Understanding, knowing of
Old church practices would
Not be prominent among or

Within

But any church that survives
In turn gains its own
Orthodoxy,

And we spend time after
Noticing the dirt, talking
About spiritual habits plus
Other rituals

My church is trying this,
Someone observes

Yeah, my church, too, another
Notes

And so together in discovery

It appears—newer evangelical,
Independent communities
Reviving treasured actions
Of the first church,

The one ablaze at Pentecost

Reviving in the church is good:
There is great precedence for
That

And for all of us on this new

Day, we find new ways into
(To share outside)

A faithful, ancient season

February 9, 2016 4

Equinoxing

Equinoxing

It’s so weird
Weirding
To watch the sun pass over
In front of the house
On its way west
So early in the day

But that’s how it is
This side of the planet
With the way we keep
Time and the pereceptions
Realized this way

What if we measured differently
What if we went by lunar time
As many do
Or simply measured seasons
As they felt

Would this day seem so strange
Knowing, as it is, that by three
This afternoon, it will look like
Early evening

Without standard time and
Saving time without the skill
To measure nanoseconds
Would passing moments feel
Differently feel righter
As we might know the
Passing and the tilting
Of our earth

December 12, 2015 2

celebration of the season 3, Ghost

Ghost

it is like us because it was us
breathing, living once like us
ghost become, be-turned in death, untimely
and unfinished

are they real?—we are real, and
we’re the ones who make the ghosts, for
they were us

we know a ghost of one kind lives
we meet it every day: anything that
haunts us in our daylight lives, the
choices and the acts we want to leave

behind but carry with us in a lingering
way not finished

we make our ghosts, and they haunt us

the other kind?—well, why not, since
so much of us is left behind, undone
so that we carry it in some
unresolving way

after dust, before heaven
what we leave that’s extreme and
exigent persists

so we make the ghosts, and they persist

is it bad, then, on one day a year, we celebrate
the ghosts this once?—and then again next year

Happy Hallowe’en
while remembering

they will be

October 31, 2015 2

for the Hallowe’en season 2, Goblin

Goblin

Made long ago
Beneath the earth

Though there’s the curious way it
Adorns cathedrals—look at the spouts of
Notre-Dame, which end with gargoyles’
Wide mouths mouthing, through which
Rain water flows (hence the word for
Throat that gives over “gargoyle”
And gives the English “gargle”)—

Beings that are warped yet lifted high, that
Serve a purpose for the holy
On the ground below

Say they are not goblins, but I think
They might be goblins

It likes the cave and has been seen
Through centuries’ shadows; some say the
Creatures are responsible for changelings, stolen
Children replaced by theirs in human homes, though
I’m not sure I’d understand
The benefit of that

For the goblin in surrendering its own would
Lose its own and thus die out
Within a generation

The goblins in folklore are frightening; but
To this child of the suburbs, I think goblins

Are cool

Although, like you perhaps, I am not anxious
To meet this child from under the earth

October 30, 2015 4

for the Hallowe’en season, Witch

Witch

what a word
“rhymes with” I guess is still popular

and there are the re-broadcasts of
Samantha, Tabitha, Endora (Agnes Moorehead
of the Mercury Theatre), and Maurice Evans
as the father (of Samantha)

I know, he’s a warlock, though if I know
anything about witches (and I don’t know
much), they can be male

was there ever a witch like the one we once
invented then feared? I don’t think so—a
creature who leeched power from the devil
to cry havoc on the earth to wreck it toward
her ways, which must be

bent like her, like the witches in the Scottish play
(“cry havoc,” by the way, from Julius Caesar), as
fearsome pillars of fog and night—or so
they are portrayed; the witch

of Endor notwithstanding (and I don’t know
ancient Hebrew to find if there’s a
better, closer word for her), I think

if there’s a witch who she likes a friendlier
power, the kind from nature, the kind

that heals

the one who studies nature better than Hamlet’s
mirror, as if to use what nature freely gives
to those who care, who want to make the
broad world better

white witch, black witch; red, yellow, blue, and
green witch (have I counted the Olympiad
flag, remembering that its field is white?)—all
who love the world, who heal, who kiss, who
touch our wounds in knowing ways, perhaps

these are the witches now and maybe ever were; if
the rest of us had behaved in better ways, maybe
witch-hunt would not be a shameful part of our
vocabulary: the rest is cant or, better yet, simply
modern Hallowe’en

October 30, 2015 0

Hallowe’en Season

Hallowe’en Season

Why don’t I mind when Hallowe’en is overdone,
when stores stock up and pander to us
the colors, the candies, the costumes, the scares
of Hallowe’en time?

Because that’s what Hallowe’en is, folks.
For the ancients, a time to celebrate harvest
and express hope, through ritual, of a better
crop next year.

For us, a celebration of fright, the good kind (yes,
there is a good fright), the kind that children
can enjoy—and by children, an adult
admission, the child is any of us.

Orange and black, brown, red, and yellow,
colors of fall turned into colors of festivities.
Can it be overdone, over-sold, and over-lived?
Sure—what can’t?

This cool season (in the East) we enjoy beyond
the mask, the crafted holes we look through
to see a tunneled, focused world bent on
cheer and scare in equal measure,

I’ll take it, as it is. How much definition is
there, anyway? Wear anything (a pillow with
big holes and elsewhere black—you are a floating
ghostly head), and take the candy courteously

at the front door, in the mall, in the community
hall, or at the party. Enjoy. Enjoy the fright.
Enjoy the minor excess, dependant on the love of
chocolate and dark nights.

October 19, 2015 0