My words, like late winter leaf buds, whiten at the tips, wanting warmth. On frosty mornings, finding none, they wait still under cloud and sun. I have moments when I think I know how words work in slow unfolding or how whitening buds become green leaves. Yet, little do I know of their deep mysteries. There is a secret life of words and leaves awakening out of hidden and hallowed places - earth's cold dark and soggy beds, the soggier beds of my own sacred being. _________________________________________________________________ Portland, Oregon - March 16, 2022
Writing
The Blank Page
The blank page waits, offering no help but for intimidating silence
steering me away from the emptiness to the view out the winter window –
the dreary garden
the falling rain.
The cursor blinks unmercifully, questioning all my choices –
my use of time that wraps around me and flies away;
the mistakes I’ve made in the material world, yesterday,
the ones I’ll make today and tomorrow, thoughtless and unaware –
the tedium of idleness
hours stealing away.
A word pokes its head out of the brambles following a line –
where it is going or where its path will lead I cannot tell.
Something is trying to emerge out of the thicket – a small bird
poking around from branch to branch, alighting, vanishing
seeming careless or carefree, wandering through the tangled growth
seeking something just beyond its reach, knowing it is there.
I, the bramble and thicket.
I, the bird.
Portland, Oregon – January 23, 2020
Poet?
I began this site in December 2015 after many years of writing only occasionally. During those years I would, from time to time, dash something out on paper and quickly abandon to a box without taking the time to sit with it, work on it or, as often happens now, trash it because it simply was not satisfying and I could not think how to make it satisfying. In those days I thought to myself that, after all, I am not a poet because I do not write or only so rarely as to not qualify even for my own sense of what calling myself a poet might mean.
Since I began In Cascadia I have written at least one poem every month, for four years. My average output per month is something over three poems. Quantifying poetic output doesn’t go well with the poetic sense, I know, but my reason for doing so is simple. It means that I have been writing consistently and for a number of years. This gives me confidence to say, at least to myself, that I am a poet. While I know that the innate desire was part of me, patiently waiting since at least my high school days, it was not until I began to write with some consistency that I felt I could claim to be, in earnest, a poet.
Now, there is no need to go into whether I am a good poet or not. There are far too many subjective and objective qualifiers to go into here. I have, however, read a few “how to” books from “real” poets, enough to understand that the quality of my work will not likely bear the hard scrutiny of established critical standards. So be it.
My own standards are these:
- Do I like and appreciate my own work?
- When I go back to read poems I wrote months or years ago, am I still satisfied?
- Does writing add meaning to my life?
- Do I enjoy the process?
- Am I fascinated by the way a poem morphs along the way, sometimes ending far differently than how I thought at the beginning?
Yes. To all, yes.
My conclusion is that to be a poet means that I must write poetry and with some regularity. This is no different from any other writing form. One just has to sit down and write and see where it takes you. I do not think it has as much to do with meter, rhyme, line break, or any other of the many qualities that are ascribed to poetry. All these are important of course but writing itself is the finest teacher I have – always there for me.
I am very grateful for those few who follow my work here. I never expected to reach many readers so I’ve not been disappointed. I greatly appreciate your expressions of “like” for my work.
Peace,
Tom
Why did you stop writing?
Why did you stop writing
when I know you have the words?
Your blank white pages
wait for your return.
Are you there?
Are you well?
I lost many words
during years I did not
believe I could find them
out on the tender and vast
landscape of my own living being
stretched across the years.
I did not know they were there
waiting for me to find them.
They did not call with loud voices
but lay silent all along
the paths of the green fields
of my one and only life.
I am gathering them up now,
words along the wayside fallen.
I will arrange them in lines
on the forbidding white page
making, fashioning, creating
a poem from me to you.
Our words – we string them together
as best we can – a gift
we were given from birth.
They help to patch holes
we’ve left behind us.
They help to create the way before us
into the green fields of our lives.
Portland, Oregon – June 23, 2019
I follow a few poetry blogs but noticed I’d not seen writing from some for a long time. I wonder what happened that they stopped writing? There may be very good reasons. I know that it took many years for me to start up again, so there is hope for all writers out there. Just start again, I beg you!
Tender Repose of Our Ancestors
This piece is my reflection on the concluding line of my poem “Continuous Awareness” (January 23, 2017). I published it but did not know precisely what the line meant. It simply “felt” right.
Words entered my fingers without thought
in the evening cold, begotten
as if from the pregnant and shivering air.
“Tender repose of our ancestors…”
where forgotten times and stilled loves
become created life again, speaking.
Words work themselves out of our past
try to say who we are, what we mean,
speak of roads we might travel
remind us of those we must travel alone.
They stumble, fail, fall short of the mark,
tell of promontories seen only in dreams,
memory shards of orchards in spring sunlit bloom,
cold light of blue dusk in a wintry wood.
What did I mean when I wrote the words?
They. They live in my presence
suggesting words for remembrance –
what they saw, wished for, passed on
so to live in the light of the glory world.
What might I do for them this night
but write as they tell me in words?
They fall to me, drifting into time –
nothing more but to catch them when they come.
Portland, Oregon – February 3, 2017
Fading Coal
Waiting…
Waiting…
Wind flutter on fading coal
in this longing season –
shrouded sun hanging low
over the gauzed and furry horizon –
the reaches of self and the world.
Wind, tree rustling cold bare branches,
thrilling spaces between dark limbs
quavering deep reaches
of space beyond our pale light,
trilling starlight gleams while stellar grains
float broadcast in cosmic fields.
Poetic dream to be wind brushed
hushed into warmth of words
from within, hidden in heart shadows,
the heat of breath on cold winter nights.
Portland, Oregon – December 14, 2016
“Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within…”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, In Defense of Poetry (paragraph 39)
Cancer
Look into darkness, organic form
multiplying within my own body – alive –
portending life diminishment, slowly
as autumn, harbinger of winters night,
passes in slanting shadows
across the landscape of my time.
Write of movement hidden within
from strangers under layers of skin
vital organs, blood vessels – layers thin
as fluttering veils masking passage
of dark and microscopic growth.
Write, poet, words about cancer –
verse inclined towards disease and decay;
give voice to the realm of dying –
cancer’s voice whispering in a breeze
as the far horizon approaches.
Turn not away from this messenger nor
withhold forgiveness for your own body;
do not fear to imagine cellular movement
becoming aware of its presence
sensing in its curves and contours
labyrinthine confusion inside your warm body
coursing as well through wakening thoughts
finding ways into sleep and dreams.
Listen to cancer speaking in echoes
rising from deep and sonorous wells
telling stories from ancient pools
where life began, formed in wombs,
already there, in fertile green places
so like the burgeoning spaces
in which it now resides
on a still autumn afternoon.
Speak, poet, of what is in you
settling down as if in a field of grass
blowing in the breezes of sunset.
Say to the blown grass “here I am.”
Welcome, dark fruit of my being,
stranger from an unknown land.
Sit by my fire, share my bed,
feast on the riches of my life;
stay with me as the leaves fall
and wait with me as winter comes…
then you may go your way
with my blessing – only pray
you not take me with you when you go.
Portland, Oregon – October 3, 2016, eve of the feast of St. Francis.
In answer to your question: Yes, I do. So far, it looks to be treatable and probably curable, so I have hope and for the long term. As I read this, it seems darker than I feel. But, in writing, I feel I have to face this thing. Thus, it is no different than anything I write as a poet. It is about looking at one thing in an attempt to evoke the holy, however you or I may conceive of it.
Practicing Darkness
I will turn out the overhanging lamp,
write by the light of the sun
setting within an aura of crimson glow,
touching pencil to the feel of paper
scraps on the table fading into shadows.
Darkness is another world to be
written of in other ways than with light
pervasive and intruding with bright beams.
How else can I write of gleams
that are stars and worlds spinning
so far and fast so that they are beyond
the reach of revealing light?
I will write by the radiance of deep shadows
sweeping low over my western horizon
a wordless journal of my own mind,
written in filamented whorls
careening through sublime feral country –
unable to see what lies before me.
I will try to understand, touch
what is real about the unknown
that, in light, I thought I knew.
What doorways, open to me, have I passed
believing I could see the way or, illumined
ignored paths I once had travelled?
Darkness may reveal I knew them not
nor where they now would lead.
I will practice darkness for a time
write within its hallowed enclosure,
walk with it, as if with a monk, hooded
old, scarred – forgiveness upon forgiveness
in fields of fading memories
through lavish pastures of green life.
Portland, Oregon – August 31, 2016
Letters
I copied letters, pages of letters
a boy in a house near a curving beach
kneeling on the floor beside the bookcase
as if in prayer hunched over lined paper
glasses slipping down nose, tongue teeth biting
before summer’s screen door opened for me.
I slipped through the cracks between the letters
out of the corner and into the world
strung with the meaning of words lettered formed
strung on the white silence of my life’s page.
Letters drawn by children on a curved beach
with sticks and dragging heels who loved and played
then came a wave washed the letters away
in susurrus roar into the moon tide
where children trace letters –
They sleep. They dream.
Portland, Oregon – April 24, 2016
Dear Mr. Maxwell
Thanks a lot! I started reading your book
On Poetry – Oh, what I’ve been missing!
But I knew I should take a second look
after many years I had been dissing
the need to take my work more seriously –
you have many excellent things to say
and in a way not imperiously.
I must begin to look without delay,
following on my many disasters,
at forms employed by the artful masters
who knew what they were doing when they wrote.
Of Maxwell’s many lines in brief I’ll quote:
“Line break is all you’ve got” on the white page
to separate your poem from your prose –
the time, the beat, the rhythm of the stage.
A poet yet in time I’ll be, who knows?
Portland, Oregon – April 22, 2016
This wreck of a rhyming pentameter poem is “inspired” by beginning to read Glyn Maxwell’s book On Poetry published in 2012, Oberon Books. It’s a good choice to begin my more careful look at the meaning of poetry, how to read and write it. I recommend it. One problem is that, as I look at poetic forms and how poetry works, I’m more challenged in actually writing, worried that I’m not “getting the form” correct. Well, there’s a balance thing I need to live with as I try to learn some things.
In Cascadia 