Two sonnets for the goddess

I.

The goddess moved in me, I welcomed her

Let her cool fire lick outward toward my skin

Let my soft heat respond, suffuse the air

As joy rose swiftly upward from within

Why not? Though stern gatekeepers would prevent us

From spreading love so free, unearned, untallied

Would say such feeling, absent set conditions

Was better to be cast aside than valued

For there’s no harm if all is in her service

If every touch, however meant, will bless

Affirm divinity aroused within us

Light up our day with heightened consciousness

Each time the goddess offers to possess me

I’ll respond with a resounding yes.

II.

Much later, in the courtroom of my mind

Considering the thoughts that I had voiced

I noticed, pleased and curious to find

No stance of opposition to my choice.

In younger days I might have thought it wrong

To know the goddess, let her play a part

Along with God, in crafting my life’s song

Elucidate the function of my heart

But now my sense of what is true is clear

God can be All, and I still have the goddess

Just as I still have sunshine, mountains, stars

All good a part of Truth, resplendent Oneness

My goddess flight is granted quiet landing

So, step by step, unfolds my understanding.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 30, 2011

Dreamscapes

I offer today an old poem - from May, 1987.  I still find it amazing that, when I start to think about dreams I’ve had, memory upon memory of dream sites come to me.  In my dreams they are familiar places, yet I don’t know how many times I’ve visited them.  Only once, but with embedded memories of many times? Or repeatedly, given how familiar they feel?  I’m quite sure at least some of them don’t exist anywhere but in my dreams. They parade before me, one after another, dreamscapes perhaps based on real-life places, but changed enough that I can’t match them up.  That half unreal feeling of dream memories was what I was trying to capture in this poem:

Back Into Dream

Seeing my bare foot stepping ahead on the dock

In afternoon sun

I remember dreaming of wind chimes

The colors of the dream are lit

With different light from those of day

The dark behind the gold

The light within, not from afar.

I find in dreams

A different balance

Lying on my side while walking

Curling smoke-like under doors.

I take grand jumps

Sometimes truly fly.

New power down the insides of my arms,

New currents through my fingers

Long after I wake

The shadow tugs

Drags the corners of my vision out of square

Puts wrinkles in my day

I travel back

In sliding leaps

Inward and sidelong

Through time

Rolling under like surf

Along the large cliffs by the sea

Down the distant inlet once again

Soaring home to the memory 

Of the dream.

©Wendy Mulhern

Stories

My daughter mentioned today that the first line of a story contains the story.  Should, anyway.  A fascinating concept; I looked through several books I like to see if this were so.  The first book I looked at was one I just read, by Guy Gavriel Kay, called Ysabel.  The first sentence is: “Ned was not impressed.”  I was impressed, though, by how much is in this sentence - the presupposition that something was impressive, or trying to be, but that it wasn’t having the expected effect on the character.  It suggests that the character might, for some reason, not be as easily impressed as some people.  These things turn out to be true, and important to the character and the story; the whys and hows of them unfold gradually, but the kernel is there.

Here are a few others: “My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” (Life of Pi, by Yann Martel)

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” (The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver)

“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a bloodless combat over how my brother and myself would be raised.” (October Sky, by Homer Hickam)

“I hadn’t meant to shoot the cat.” (Telempath, by Spider Robinson)

“Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.” (Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay)

Most intriguing.  I have so much to learn.

Yesterday I wrote about how a poem led me back to writing stories, and I mentioned that it first engendered a companion.  I got to thinking about what a male muse might be like, and came up with the following:

Muse II

The sphere he holds is black, opaque, and moon-sized

But it is you he looks at, with his soft eyes

A question kindles, stirs you to your core

But is it just a tease, or is there more?

He holds your gaze with enigmatic light

That grounds you, poised and still, to where you are

The sphere exudes a haunting smell of midnight

Fresh and cool, with taste of piquant stars

If he would beckon, Oh! You know you’d follow

And so you reach to touch the silent sphere

It draws you in, you swirl into its hollow

Cold vapor sudden in your throat and ears

What touch sustains you - where are those kind eyes?

That promise of a hand to lift and guide

How fast, how far, will you keep falling inward

And what can stabilize you from inside?

Ah, there - the touch, the hand that steadies

There the light that caught you, drew you in

You’ll walk in him whenever you are ready

Look from his eyes and quietly begin.




©Wendy Mulhern

I sensed that the two poems together might contain an idea for a novel (I needed to write one, as I was participating in NaNoWriMo, at my daughter’s behest.}  She was the one who suggested that the two could be muses for each other, and that became the basis for my plot.  So much to learn, but a huge part of my learning that month was how alive it made me feel to write the story.  Especially as the characters began to fall in love; I experienced the zing of it as if it were my own.  I felt it not only while writing but whenever I wanted to, and I wanted to more often than I told anyone.  Though it was fiction, it was very real for me.

So I’ll keep working at how to do it.  I’ll become a master of my first lines, and my plot lines, and my character development.  Well, first I’ll be an apprentice; I’m not proud.

Muse

I had talked myself out of writing stories, though it had been an elemental urge, one of childhood’s strong attractions.  I told myself I didn’t have any, didn’t have a voice. In truth I just didn’t know how to take on the monumental task of crafting fiction.  It was a poem that led me back.

The poem started with two lines that floated into my thought on a bicycle ride.  I worked on it later,  at home, at Carkeek Park, at home again, teasing out the images until a story emerged.  That poem later inspired a companion, and those two poems became the basis for my first attempt at writing a novel.  Though I have much to do to hone that craft, the joy it brings me keeps me at it.  So in a real way, this poem I wrote in the spring of 2009 has been my muse:

Muse

She slips between the curtains of the day

To walk the secret landscape wide away

Vistas lift along the rise of hills

Colors shifting on the lake

She slips between the curtains of your mind

Down your enshrouded corridor to find

You waiting by your quiet bulb

Her clasp is cool, her hands are slim

She leads you like a ripple in the wind

Light darts quickly, runs in sparkling lines

While water underneath it moves more slowly

Revealing glinting glimpses of the depth.

You follow, and you don’t know where you’re going

Your solar plexus full of light and air

The view too huge to paint, beyond all knowing

The touch too true to speak, too soft to bear

You feel a stab of desperate dependence

Aware her frame is far too light to lean on

Beyond your overwhelm, you seek transcendence

And something solid to believe on.

Don’t be afraid - she isn’t going to leave you

She’ll shine through you like light through water

You won’t need to live, create without her

She came to you because you thought her.

©Wendy Mulhern

What is Poetry?

My sister and I were talking about communication, and how difficult words sometimes are.  They have their different meanings and connotations to different people, they have their ruts - phrases they stubbornly stick to, huge concepts and their antitheses that suddenly slide into people’s thought with a word or phrase that you use, till at some point you realize that, with the set of words you share, there’s no way of making yourself understood.  And my sister said, “perhaps poetry is the only place where words can be unchained.”  Which I thought was interesting - probably true even though in poetry the words are more constrained (and yes, I noticed the rhyme in my thought.)

Janice asked me yesterday, “What is poetry?” because I had told her about my new blog and she’s taking a poetry course.  I said it’s a good question.

I think one aspect of poetry is an agreement that the writer and the reader  make to unchain the words from their usual associations, to be open to new ones.  Sometimes the constraints of form - rhyme and meter, size and shape - divert the thought from more prosaic meanings so that the urgent questions - How does this make sense? Do I agree with it? - can be put aside.  New questions can be considered: How does this touch me? How does it sing?  

Both poetry and prose can share the admonition:  say exactly what you mean - don’t add words to be impressive, flowery, rhythmic or rhyming.  Don’t leave things out because you don’t know an easy way to say them.  The meaning is the gravity. The words are the water.  They fall down over the constraints of form in the most vertical route, at each moment, toward the sea.  The poetry or prose is the river that results.

I tried to write a poem this week about a walk I had with my friend Becca.  But following my own criteria, I had to admit that it didn’t pass.  So instead of sharing it, I will share a very bad sonnet about the process, from my “sonnet a day” collection:

Failing at Poetry

I tried too hard to write a poem today

Saturday, too, and it would not emerge

My urgency to post got in the way

Of needed clear-eyed dumping of the verse

Some images I liked - they sounded true

Some rhythms and some rhymes lined up quite nicely

But others lurched, and certain lines were trite

And I didn’t get the mood precisely

So though I wrote a clearly stated blurb

On what makes poetry and prose be good

To follow with that poem would be absurd

Would mock the truth of everything I said

I need to find the truth within a poem

Or I won’t find the words to bring it home.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 25, 2011

Ars(e) Poetica

I wrote Harvey Hix a fan email.  I said thanks for writing this book, I am amazed by the poems, all the levels of them.  The sounds, the rhythms, the images, the meaning.  I keep rereading them because they keep revealing more.  

In his interview in The Writer’s Chronicle, he revealed that he is a philosopher poet.  And it was true that his poems revealed a philosophy.  But they invited a different engagement.  To his philosophy as expounded in his interview, I might say well, I can see where you might come to this conclusion here, if you define your terms in this way.  However, a redefinition of terms along this line could lead to a different conclusion.  But with his poetry I say yes, I get how you feel.  There is a beautiful truth in you, and I have a parallel experience.  I am less tempted to engage in a polemic, but more drawn to engage in exploration.

Beyond my expectations, Harvey Hix responded to my email.  I began to imagine the possibility of engaging further - finding ways to engage philosophically on a poetical level.  I did so in my mind  continually, and eventually wrote back, saying (which was true) that I was elated to get a response, and had also been elated to write the first letter.  I didn’t particularly ask for further response, and I didn’t get any.  But I continued to be touched.  I was in love, not with the author, but with the poems. And I did feel a growing desire to be part of a community of thinkers and poets.  

I struggled with the question of how this could happen.  For one thing, I had no voice, no platform, no connections with the literary world.  I hadn’t even been an English major, so my knowledge of poetry was very scant.  Furthermore, there was much poetry I saw, in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for example, with which I had no resonance at all.  Who decided what was worth printing? By what criteria?  Yet I loved the way it felt to form poems, the hum it gave my life to have them hovering about my consciousness.

My thoughts are reflected in the following - Ars Poetica being a term I had to learn the meaning of - meaning a poem about the art of poetry; the (e) reflecting my dilemma. (The first stanza also makes reference to a very self-obsessed teenager who lived with us that year, causing me to learn a great deal, but perhaps not enough, about cross-cultural communication.  From the second stanza on it is about me.)

Ars(e) Poetica

Indeed, there is enough of that

Catching your gaze in the mirror

Jaunty look, cocked fedora

Sideways glance to see who else might see

Imagined crowds adoring, roaring

As you nod your thanks, your ego soaring

A second look, a quick, severe attempt

To catch yourself at fault, to find contempt

An awkwardness, or flab, something unkempt

To criticize, despise, and regiment

I fear the land of poetry

Like every land

Is claimed, policed, and parceled out

To those who play the game

Of who you know

And who you follow

And how your work

Exposes life as hollow

But if I write alone, will my words be

Pale, leggy, blind, a seedling in a box

Reaching gamely for some approbation

Wishing vainly to be seen?

I only can remain so long

Coiled, crouched for a spring

Before the impulse all leaks out

And I remain

Like a curled caterpillar, green

Twitching at your finger’s prodding touch

I seek community, not to be seen

But to photosynthesize

The greening needed not so much from praise

As from receiving that in you which shines

So let this be my statement

This my springing forth

This my breath’s compass

This my true north:

To feel now with this step that it is given

No fraction’s pause between the lead and follow

The bold, cold deep, or ripples spread on shallows

All known to me in this my home, heaven

©Wendy Mulhern
Spring, 2010

Birthing Sonnets

In April last year, coming home from taking my daughter to see her future college, I discovered the poetry of Harvey Hix.  It was in a publication called The Writer’s Chronicle, which I had picked up at an office there.  The whole magazine was filled with glimpses of the rarefied world of poet professors - interviews and essays as well as poems.  I was both entranced and put off - it was a world I could have belonged in, and might wish to, but could also see its perils, the petty competition, the frail translucency of too many years in too-confined spaces.

But Harvey Hix - I saw his poems before I read his interview.  The one that first grabbed me was called “One Sparrow,” and it had a hypnotic rhythm and an intriguing scheme of rhyme and half rhyme (a villanelle, I later learned) while telling, in clear imagery, a story that was dear to me.  So then I looked at the other poems there.  Very challenging - lots of words I didn’t know.  Words strung together that demanded to be read out loud - so brilliant with sound.  Partial rhyme that I only started to notice after many readings.  I bought his book Legible Heavens (there’s a link about it, off to the right, under Books I Mention) and spent the spring and summer steeped in it.  Phrases would come as I rode my bike, and as I slept.  I woke up one morning with the line: “I have dreamed rhymes, I will birth sonnets.”

I didn’t yet know exactly what a sonnet was, but Legible Heavens noted that one set of Hix’s poems were sonnets.  And that summer, the following poem came to me (pretty much straight out of my pen, straight out of images at my mom’s house on Martha’s Vineyard.)  It’s not exactly a sonnet, I guess.  But it speaks of my being called to poetry:

I have dreamed rhymes—I will birth sonnets:

Words gather around me like birds,

The soft summons of my rhyme puts them

at ease.  They cluck and coo, calling to

their mates and young.  Great flocks 

gather in the yard.  I don’t need

to order them.  They arrange themselves

large long-necked turkeys walking with their chicks

crows jostling each other to silence

cardinals and finches hopping closer

seagulls circling overhead

All of them will listen, all attend

All will speak, each in its perfect time

not for me but for this confluence

of meaning.  Giving purpose to the rhyme.

      
©Wendy Mulhern
August, 2010

A Sonnet a Day

A few years ago I was captivated by Stephen Fry’s Book The Ode Less Travelled, Unlocking the Poet Within.  His gently self-deprecating admission “I write poetry” gave me permission to explore something I’ve loved but not dared to take seriously.   At his wry suggestion, I dedicated a journal and started doing the exercises he presents, such as:  “Write five pairs of blank iambic pentameter. . . To make it easier I will give you a specific subject for all five pairs. 1. Precisely what you hear and see outside your window; 2. Precisely what you’d like to eat, right this minute. . . .”

I found I greatly enjoyed working with meter, rhyme, and meaning.  Later I came to love poetry with partial rhyme and subtle meter - where the images might take me first but then I would notice how the sounds rocked me.  So at the end of November, at a lightening of other duties, I took it upon myself to write a sonnet a day - not to be profound but just to hone my craft.  Today I share one in response to my friend Kathleen Noble’s post on loneliness:

Loneliness

How quickly all the flurry settles down

The waves recede, the foam evaporates

In sudden quiet, here I am alone

No partner, cohort, no collective state

It is a lie, of course, this isolation

My family’s here, although in different rooms

They care for me and hold me in relation

I haven’t really wandered off in gloom

And though I feel I’ve drawn the circle small

So few who know me, few who care I’m here

Another view would show me one with all

Would make my contribution strong and clear

It’s just an artifact of how I’m seeing

Succumbing to the void, or brightly being.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 3, 2011

Hum

Words sing around my head like lullabies

Phrases rendered senseless by the light

Find meaning in the chambers of my almost

sleep.  Murmurs remembered as melody

Before the mind knew they were words

Bring comfort, company and soft-hued harmony

So when I rise and look up quickly

Just in time to see a patch of blue

Ushered off hurriedly by efficient clouds

I also sense, like words that flit away as I awake

A flash of radiant possibility

©Wendy Mulhern
August, 2010