Poetry by Lawrence Kessenich: “Meditating with a Dog Named Vasana”

Oct15

Earlier this month we held a ceremony at our house to welcome our 18-month-old, Shane, into my husband’s Buddhist meditation community. We shared some spiritual readings and poetry that celebrated young children’s ability to abide in the present moment, without pretensions or superimposed storylines.

I was reminded of this when I read Lawrence Kessenich’s poem below, which won the 2012 Spirit First Meditation Poetry Contest. Sponsored by a meditation center in Washington, DC, this free contest awards prizes up to $175 for poems on the theme of meditation, mindfulness, stillness, or silence. The current contest is open through January 31.

Like the dog in the poem, the Young Master is very fond of his stuffed squirrel, but he is especially delighted with the singing bowl we bought him for the ceremony. Each morning he reaches for it with a smile, and we have a mindfulness moment as we listen to the ringing echoes fade away. And then he bangs on it and chews on the stick!

Meditating with a Dog Named Vasana*
by Lawrence Kessenich

The mind is not easily ignored.
Told to sit in the corner like
a good little dog, he disobeys
bringing thoughts like toys:
a green rubber block, a stuffed squirrel,
an old, slimy, gnawed-over bone.

Take this simple mantra, I tell him,
and play with that. But he wants to do more.
He barks, licks my face, sniffs my crotch,
drops a brightly colored ball at my feet.
Vasana! I say sharply.
But to no avail. He is my dog
and requires my attention.

I toss his ball across the room
again and again and again.
He brings it back to me
again and again and again.
Until, finally, he drops it,
lays down in his corner, and falls asleep,
dreaming of sticks thrown into rivers.
Good dog, Vasana. Good dog.

*Sanskrit word for concept “monkey mind”

Lawrence Kessenich is an accomplished poet living in Massachusetts—he won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and his poetry has been published in Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Cream City Review, Ibbetson Street, and many other magazines. His chapbook Strange News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. Another chapbook was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and finalist for the Spire Press Chapbook Contest. His current collection, Before Whose Glory, was a semi-finalist for the Off the Grid contest. His poem “Underground Jesus” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kessenich has also published essays, one of which was featured on NPR’s This I Believe in 2010 and appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love. His play Ronnie’s Charger was produced in Colorado in 2011.

Poetry by Lynne Constantine: “Confiteor”

Aug21

Lynne Constantine is on the faculty of the School of Art at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, she has, in other moments of her varied career, taught medieval English literature; headed two nonprofits; freelanced as a journalist, speechwriter, ghostwriter and book reviewer; co-authored a book on migraine; and co-founded a communications consulting firm.

I met Lynne earlier this month at the Ollom Art Festival in Northampton, where she gave a lecture on aesthetics that concluded with the wise and funny poem below. In her lecture, Lynne described the shift from classical aesthetics, with its idealized representations and universal theories of beauty, to modern aesthetics, which honors wabi-sabi, “the perfection of imperfection”. With the advent of photography and film, we no longer need art to establish a consensus on how things look or should look. Art can turn inward to express the artist’s psychological response to her environment, without having to hold up that response as the sole correct one.

This lecture reminded me of my own turn towards experience-based theology, and away from the arguments over the one “right” interpretation of doctrine. So it seemed fitting that Lynne ended with this creative reworking of her Catholic upbringing. Rituals and images remain stubbornly embedded in our subconscious despite our conscious rejection of the belief system where they originated. Perhaps this unresolved tension is one of the imperfections that our art must express, accepting that the rift between these parts of ourselves may never heal.

Confiteor
by Lynne Constantine

Confiteor deo omnipotenti
I am here to confess

I do not know how long it has been
Since my last confession
But I’m here now
And I’m hoping for absolution
For whatever can be absolved

I confess
that I am not the person I want to be

I confess
That I have made up statistics
In the heat of an argument
Which have turned out to be true
Because so much of this shit is predictable

I confess
To pretending not to understand
what the homeless vet in the street asks
me for
and for that I am grievously sorry
and for the fact that he’s in the street I am
grievously sorry
mea culpa

I confess
To making up sins when I went to confession
   as a teen:
“I laughed and talked in church six times,
I took the Lord’s name in vain two hundred
   times.”
I made them up so I could get absolution for
   all the other sins
That I wasn’t going to be telling the priest,
   that old pervert.
For this one I’m not really sorry
But I probably need forgiveness anyway
For something
Mea culpa

Absolution is a beautiful concept
But I confess
That I am not very forgiving
Especially when forgiveness is not followed
By a sincere effort to amend your life…

…Congress
…the Federal Reserve
…AIG
…Fannie Mae
…banks too big to fail
Are you making a sincere effort to amend
your lives
After screwing the entire world
And then getting paid?
Do they make a penance for that?

I confess
That as a child I cried for hours
when I found out
that people don’t really turn the other cheek
I am noisy when I am inconsolable
I may cry right now
Mea culpa

I confess
That I want to believe in hell
For racists
I confess that I would like to pick their
punishment

I confess
That I want to believe in heaven for
the poor
And for my dogs

I confess that I hate the concept of
   purgatory
It’s a do-over for mean, petty people
Who should have turned the goddamn
   other cheek
And amended their lives
While it could have done somebody
   some good.
But that’s just me.
Mea culpa.

I confess that I am stubborn and proud.
I confess that I cry at stupid capitalist
manipulative commercials.
Damn you Hallmark.
I confess that I can have a nasty mouth.
I confess that I am not as kind as people think
Nor as generous as I could be
Nor as ready to forgive
As I would like to be forgiven.

And yes, I would like to be forgiven.

For these and all the sins of my past life
And all the sins I will be committing
And repenting
And committing
And repenting
I ask absolution.
I promise to go forth and amend my life.
Amen.

New Writing by Conway: “City Elegy III”

Aug14

While my prison pen pal “Conway” waits for news on his petition for early release, he’s been dreaming of returning to work on those motorcycles and racecars he loves. It’s been almost a year since California repealed its harsh “three-strikes” sentencing law for nonviolent offenders, but my friend’s case is languishing due to the usual bureaucracy and the slow and inconsistent work of his public defenders. The prose-poem below comes from his ongoing series of odes to urban car culture.

Meanwhile, in prison reform news, the FCC finally capped the exorbitant phone rates that were preventing many prisoners from maintaining contact with their families on the outside. Such connections are crucial to keep them from re-offending. Donate to the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice at Nation Inside to thank them for their decade of work on this issue. (Don’t be put off by their unfinished website.)

City Elegy III
by “Conway”

No musical sound true as traffic, has moved these senses so strongly.

Lost songs echo endlessly in this ear’s memory.

Low rumble at idle, or burn-out then roar away.

How can one hand, or foot, hold back the temptation of acceleration, without testing all limits?

I have dared to invoke those hidden horsepowered reins just straining to be released.

What does anyone know. Anyone who has not conspired to call upon an unstrained throttle. Especially the song. A mechanical throat that’s been closed for too long sings. (A reborn derelict.)

Oh to behold the hollow night growling. Deep as an empty stomach. As another restored machine announces its hunger.

An ancient frame vibrates in anticipation, twists as it shakes off the crusted rust of ages. Then unleashes the force of factory-born flame harnessed free-wheelin’ thunders voice, as it bellows out loud a groundpounding — Move!

Momentum begins, as adrenaline purges each driver to quicken forward movement. Pushing gravity beyond simple attraction. Like: an ancient call into battle.

A charge on horseback towards the final clash of combat, or competition. When Hannibal’s men came tramplin’ in on elephants. To crush all those who dared to oppose.

But, even those beasts proved their flesh, to be almost as weak as man.

So, man made machines, cherished steeds became formed from metal. Each iron horse or motorized chariot was forged of stronger stranger magic.

One machine can release the sound of a thousand horses, hooves pounding at full charge.

Or, cruise by slow with the rhythmic thump of drumbeats parading by, like armored knights in their glory, celebrating a victorious return.

This is what I imagine; This is what I hear.

During another power-filled night of hot rods and motorcycles.

The music of oil pans dragging down hard streets and avenues.

I salute all those passengers, who have lost their lives, in the ultimate pursuit of velocity. Those who have sacrificed their flesh to a crush of twisted mangled metal.

I do not count your sacrifice in vain. You! Who knew the danger and felt the pure rush of living unstrained.

You, who attained the last great flash of life without regret.

You, whose headlights form a constellation of stars, up above the Earth and everywhere else.

I cannot see your vehicle, you’re now too far to recognize.

But your light shines down, like the traffic I still hear.

I wonder; Are you still racing up there? Is this the sound the Cosmos creates. Is that just one huge Avenue of cars, trucks and motorcycles?

Are all those demolished vehicles polished and rollin’ again — Rolling into view, down the Avenue. Cruising with the Gods…

Two Poems from Marsha Truman Cooper’s “A Knot of Worms”

Jul11

I discovered the work of Marsha Truman Cooper when her poem “You Had to Be There” won third prize in our 2004 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest. Since the judging was anonymous, I was quite surprised to learn that this searing account of a young man’s tour of duty in Vietnam was not autobiographical, so convincing was her first-person storytelling.

Cooper’s poetry chapbook A Knot of Worms was published this summer by Finishing Line Press in their New Women’s Voices series. These quiet poems are charged with a sacred attention to healing the wounds sustained by our bodies and ecosystem. In the aftermath of war or illness, the human spirit finds wholeness by recovering our common bond with whales, dragonflies, and yes, even worms. She kindly shares two sample poems below. “Ashes” was first published in Poetry Northwest.

Ashes

She will not do
what you expect, not even
if you make love to her.
She can never tell
what she has learned,
no matter how safely
she rests under your arm.
But one day, she may open a jar
she brought from that place.
She will say
it holds the burnt bones
of hands, just the hands,
of people she has known.
Though it cannot possibly
be true, you’ll believe her.
You’ll pour out
her pieces of calcium
as if they were uncut jewels.
You’ll sort through them,
wondering which bone
was the finger of a thief,
which held a violin,
and how the tiny ones
could have belonged to anybody
but a child.
Then you will see
why she can be so positive
that we are all joined.
There will never be a way
to separate these friends.

****

After the Man Who Counted Dragonflies

died, he opened his eyes and discovered
he was still in Oregon, his research tent
still pitched in a forest of pines
near the edge of a snow-fed, mile-high lake.
He took off his clothes and walked
across the beach pebbles hot as coals,
splashed into icy water— a contrast which,
if he did say so just to himself, felt heavenly.
Apparently, it was still July. A blue darner
dragonfly touched down on his index finger.
He saw the indelible ink dots he’d used
to mark the animal, a pattern recorded
by date for an insect whose life cycle
ended long ago. He wanted to ask him,
a male he’d decorated, the question
that had deviled him in life. He raised
his arm skyward, but before he could speak
more of his subjects joined them. By tens,
then hundreds and finally by thousands
his friends flew to greet him. Nymphs
he had saved from extinction cracked
their shells, split open, crawled up a reed
and darted into summer. They all whirled
around the man, a blue darner wind. Then,
they landed in a mosaic of iridescence—
their wing tips touching randomly in what
looked like sunshine— while his spirit
skittered over acres of their humming surface.
As the sun lowered, he realized that there
might be darkness. At last, he thought,
they would show him what nobody on earth
could find— where they go at night.

Poetry from Inside: “Of Father, From Prison”

May23

My prison pen pal “Jon“, who is serving a life sentence in California for a burglary-related homicide, continues his efforts to grow in self-awareness and spiritual maturity through writing. I thought this recent poem was one of his finest, expressing compassion for his child-self alongside remorse for the flawed path he took as an adult. It’s a simple but deep story that I imagine many troubled young men will recognize as their own.

Of Father, From Prison

I used to smile in wonder
at the barb of the fish hook
and however you managed to get worms
so delicately placed and pierced.
Then even when you showed me how
I still couldn’t do it on my own
and sometimes couldn’t bear to look.

I used to sit and wander
as the landscapes became cities
with people beneath the lights of day.
Drifting by in gusts of winds
of mountaintops and Mayberrys
and cow filled fields and stars.
Watching from the passenger seat
while you drove your precious truck
and I waited for my turn
that had finally never come.

I used to be amazed
at all the grand and well told stories
of the life you really never led.
I realized I never even knew you
when I noticed they were lies.
You were gentle, very quiet
always private and reclusive.
You could fix anything inanimate
yet never repair the troubled minds
of yourself or those around you.
And I can think of all the places
you would take me as I grew.
Leaving us with memories
of decaying and joyless days,
of worms, fish hooks and barbs.
And I would be amazed
if you ever came to know
how very much alike
we’ve finally become.

I do not wander in wonders anymore
but sometimes think of who you are.
You living in your solitude
and me stuck within my own.
Where computers are your company,
while books become my best of friends.
Your prison is in a house
and mine within a cell.
Inside the worlds of our own making,
trapped within our mortal shells.

Poetry by William J. Reiter: “Jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers”

May14

I recently got an email from Bill Reiter of Iowa, a poet, Vietnam veteran, and National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient for playwriting. We haven’t been able to confirm whether we’re related, but all Reiters are welcome at the Block. He kindly shares this poem with our readers.

jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers
(the summer of love 1967)

it was a hall
an old movie house really
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace

a grace slick-like chick
was jumpin’ in blue white strobe lights
amorphous light shows pulsating walls
all just a prologue to hendrix

he came out at last
a ‘fro imitation of a black ragdoll
escaped from some absurd beckett cast
surely a tragedy or farce was about to unfold
in the silver screen-less seat-less theater
above a stoned blue clowning crowd

he struck left-handed
upside down strings
a bell-bottomed blue heron
with piercing dark eyes
heavy with one guitar wing

he looked down at us
as if into san francisco’s blue bay
from coit’s tower
as if to jump from another hughes burly bird

i pushed to the front to hear
his voice soft wings
on the wind cries mary
gliding around us
around the statue of saint francis
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace
like a cable car hushing up telegraph hill

i wanted to know about over there
and he played alarums purple haze
murderous intent in hey joe
pain of rejection star spangled banner
with its true blue taps near the end

jimi left the stage that night
prophesying his own end
which came eventually street easy
a barbiturate permanent sleep

he was right-on however about over there
and as he knew coming back was worse

“Crime Against Nature”: A Lesbian Mother’s Poetic Manifesto

Apr10

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is everything a poetry collection should be. Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that’s always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life.

The speaker grieves, rages, yet bravely refuses to take the blame for the impossible choice forced upon her. “This is not the voice of the guilty mother,” she writes. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that “will not divide self from self, self from life.”

Crime Against Nature was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night’s Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it this year in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay. It is the first book in their “Sapphic Classics” series reprinting iconic lesbian poetry that is now out of print. Subscribers to this excellent journal will receive future Sapphic Classics (one a year) as the equivalent of one magazine issue. Crime Against Nature does double duty as Issue #88.

Sinister Wisdom editor Julie R. Enszer has kindly given me permission to reprint a sample poem below. I chose this one because I could relate to the speaker’s dilemma between speaking and not speaking about trauma. In the end it is better to speak, even when it hurts. It sets free others’ “tongues of ice”, as well as your own. Thank you, Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Justice, Come Down

A huge sound waits, bound in the ice,
in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow
on fir branches, in the falling silence
of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant
as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering
wings at midday. With the sun comes noise.
Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter,
splinter, speak. If I could write the words.

Simple, like turning a page, to say Write
what happened, but this means a return
to the cold place where I am being punished.
Alone to the stony circle where I am frozen,
the empty space, children, mother, father gone,
lover gone away. There grief still sits
and waits, grim, numb, keeping company with
anger. I can smell my anger like sulfur-
struck matches. I wanted what had happened
to be a wall to burn, a window to smash.
At my fist the pieces would sparkle and fall.
All would be changed. I would not be alone.

Instead I have told my story over and over
at parties, on the edge of meetings, my life
clenched in my fist, my eyes brittle as glass.

Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.

Poetry by Robert Gross: “Poor Souls”

Mar28

Poet and dancer Robert Gross, whom I met last year at the Ollom Movement Art summer program, has kindly given me permission to reprint this prose-poem. It was first published in the current issue of the St. Sebastian Review, an LGBTQ Christian literary webzine. As I read it, “Poor Souls” suggests that every sin and regret that seems to separate us from God is trivial compared to the magnitude of God’s love, if we could only see it properly.

Poor Souls

Little by little, they unfold out of purgatory; origami figures undone in silence, each a metaphysical yawn, a backbend out of time. Everything slow-motions to the beat of rosaries and suffusions of incense, the unclocked passage of steady repentance. Atom by atom, the gilt wears off; innocence emerges. Back then, I would’ve given anything . . .

They stagger out of the dead-letter office, each one exhausted by the dusty bins of misaddressed intentions, insufficient postage, the vast shabbiness of venial offenses. They squint, contemplate the deserted plaza, sigh. No such thing as an original sin, they chuckle, just the steady dissipation of extenuating circumstances, endlessly recycled . . . the gun misfired. . . I couldn’t get it up . . . I thought desirously of his lips, then sneezed . . . sins of omission and implication, of reverie and miscalculation, inertia and cliché. Nothing and everything mortal.

I was determined to offend big-time but my mother came to visit . . . Imperceptibly, each infraction becomes unfascinating, silly, dwindles before the massiveness of love. I even considered . . . I know this sounds ridiculous . . .I can’t remember how . . .

One by one, the penitents come unmoored and are carried out to sea. A delicate flotilla awash in perpetual indulgence and plainchant; crystalline buoys impelled toward a luminous horizon.

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “Woman in the Day Room Crying”

Mar27

Reiter’s Block contributor Donal Mahoney describes the inspiration for this poem as follows: “Fresh out graduate school in English in 1962, I had a pregnant wife and couldn’t find a job. At that time, a degree in anything qualified a person to be a caseworker in Chicago. Seeing hundreds of clients, one sometimes suspected child abuse in the adult the child had become. PTSD isn’t the product of war alone.”

Woman in the Day Room Crying

Lightning bolts in childhood
can scar the soul forever.
They’re a satanic baptism
when the minister’s your father,
mother, brother, sister,
anyone taller, screaming,
shooting flames from the sky
all day, all night.

The years go by
but the scars remain.
The pale moonlight of age
makes them easier to see
and scratch until they burst
and bleed again,
another reason I wake up
at night screaming.

When the daylight comes,
I talk about the scars
when no one is around
to say shut up!
I draw the details in a mural
on the walls and ceilings so
everyone can see the storms
that never left a rainbow.

Poetry by Rosalía de Castro: “Dos Palomas” (The Two Doves)

Mar19

Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885) was a Spanish Romantic poet who is recognized as the most outstanding modern writer in the Galician language. Australian writer John H. Reid, who is affiliated with our Winning Writers contest resource website, also happens to be an expert on de Castro and introduced me to her work. He kindly shares his translation of her poem “Dos Palomas” below. Apologies if the accent marks in the Spanish version don’t appear properly in your browser.

Dos palomas
Rosalía de Castro

Dos palomas yo vi que se encontraron
cruzando los espacios
y al resbalar sus alas se tocaron…

Cual por magia tal vez, al roce leve
las dos se estremecieron,
y un dulce encanto, indefinible y breve,
en sus almas sintieron.

Y torciendo su marcha en un momento
al contemplarse solas,
se mecieron alegres en el viento
como un cisne en las olas.

Juntáronse y volaron
unidas tiernamente,
y un mundo nuevo a su placer buscaron
y otro más puro ambiente.

Y le hallaron al fin, y el nido hicieron
en blanda cama de azucena y rosas,
y en ella se adurmieron
con las libres y blancas mariposas.

Y al despertar sus picos se juntaron,
y en la aurora luciente
sus caricias de amor se retrataron
como sombra riente.

Y en nubes de oro y de zafir bogaban
cual ondulante nave
en la tranquila mar, y se arrullaban
cual céfiro süave.

Juntas las dos al declinar del día
cansadas se posaban,
y aun los besos el aura recogía
que en sus picos jugaban.

Y así viviendo inmarchitables flores
sus días coronaron,
y nunca los amargos sinsabores
sus delicias turbaron.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

¡Felices esas aves que volando
libres en paz por el espacio corren
de purísima atmósfera gozando!

****

The Two Doves
rendered from the Spanish of Rosalía de Castro
by John H. Reid

I saw two doves flying in the sky
when suddenly their wings touched
and they were momentarily joined together…

A light touch it’s true, perhaps by magic,
but the two trembled. They were shaken,
and a sweet charm, brief but indefinable,
infused their souls.

Suddenly their two single flights
became twisted into one,
and they were happily rocked in the wind
like a swan on the waves.

Joined together, they flew tenderly attached.
To their pleasure, a visionary world opened,
and a more totally captivating environment.

At last, at the end of their flight,
they jointly find their nest
in a soft bed of lilies and roses,
where they sleep together,
free and white, like butterflies.

At dawn, they raise their beaks together,
and in the shining light of the new day,
their loving caresses make a bright,
cheerful parasol over their nest.

In clouds of gold and sapphire,
they row a rolling ship
in a tranquil sea,
and coo gently
in the day’s
cool breeze.

Together the two exchange
the honey in their beaks.

And thus their days were capped
in these living, unfading flowers,
and bitter disappointments never
disturbed their delights.