This column was first published in the Barton Chronicle in the winter of 2008, a winter which gave Vermonters gigantic quantities of snow…

It could be verse: On a winter night

In summer I would never tread on beds of daylilies, stomp across squash patches, or stride into a wide cornfield. But when winter revises the landscape and I am equipped with snowshoes or skis, the unthinkable becomes the inevitable. In his poem written in 1954,“January Night,” James Hayford takes note of the trodden snow and the trails between the stores. In this whitened world he sees evidence of everyone’s errand and trek pressed wherever they passed. A resident of Orleans, VT for many years, Hayford (1913- 1993) remarks in his introduction to his collection, Star in the Shed Window (New England Press), that his poems were preoccupied with “the comings and goings of the seasons.” With record snowfalls thickening the distance between our boot and lost ground, I thought Hayford might approve my choice of this poem. And though I can’t say I’ve seen people “sashaying” from the Country Store over to the Craftsbury Garage lately, I’d like to assert that poems can act like our own boot tracks: whether we’re reestablishing a habitual path (front door to Subaru) or inventing new routes (out of the squash and into the cornfield), they make us aware of where we go, what we do.

January Night      by James Hayford

The shiny trodden snow
In harsh illumination,
So cold your bootsoles creak;
The houses double-glassed
Against the searching blast–
These things you may have classed
Under the heading, Bleak.

Fact is, the snow was trod
By people warmly shod
And coated–none in mink–
Sashaying to and fro
Betwixt the stores, the station,
Tavern, house of God,
And this bright, crowded rink.

First Snowfall      by Edie Rhoads

If there’s a stillness coming,
let it be winter. Let it be
the day and the night lightless
and with the kind of sharp air
that carves hope from the cold sheets.
Why winter is neighborless I know not.
It is a day closing into night
so slowly all the doors have
eels of ices at their hinges.
Only these eels of ice
that slip from the ledge
of the naked moon all night
comfort me now. They leave me
like snow leaves the streets
below your window. Unbroken,
innocent as the inside of a star.

Hello Darkness, my old friend

In a children’s book, borrowed from the library, I learned about the Bathypelagic zone, where the sun’s rays never reach, 3,300 feet down, where creatures like the homely looking angler-fish manufacture their own illumination. And with leaf debris on floor of our world, trees simplified like seaweeds, haven’t we entered the year’s own Bathypelagic zone? I don’t go gently into this good night—which is why I picked Hardwick poet, Martha Zweig’s ‘Dark Song,’ from her book, Vinegar Bone, as an escort for this season. With its lullaby -esqe repeating lines and repeating rhymes, she soothes someone apprehensive about the absence of light.  Throughout the poem she pelts us with the word “dark” 13 times (including the title). It feels like being hit with the indigo snowball of the word until, dispelling the impact, the dark loses its spook; it becomes, by dint of use, almost mundane.  But then there is her last line…that weird coo, which has the sobriety of a wedding vow, but I also hear an echo of the Wicked Witch of the West sneering to Dorothy.  In the white space following the final word, I hear, “…my pretty and your little dog too.”

Dark Song     by Martha Zweig

Don’t be scared of the dark:
in your tidy room in the dark there is
no hard heart;
you slip into your bed in the dark
like a secret into an ear,
dark to repeat it, dark to overhear.

Don’t be scared of the dark:
all night is in the biggest shadow,
little kid in the biggest shadow, it’s
how you can tell the sun’s behind the world
when the sun’s gone,
when the sun’s gone.

Daylight gone, daylight gone;
think about dark to all the things with no-eyes:
how dark cools off the meadow stones,
how dark stops the sugar work in the leaves,
how dark bends the tall grass
stalks over all wet. Don’t scare

easy of any
such deep dark, how it is, the
toys, your favorites, turtle, cat,
stuffed and buttoned; and who
carries you and keeps you, dark doesn’t, no dark
doesn’t, I do.

*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle on November 18, 2009

Lea’s poem from his book, To The Bone, New and Selected Poems is a reach across town and time. It reiterates the gifts that August and Cupid toss our way as we round the curve of summer.

In this poem which starts as a croon from the fire-pond on sultry night and finishes with invocations of the birds whose names are also their songs, (“whippoorwill/ chuck-will’s widow”) Mr. Lea, the Poet Laureate of Vermont, sings the names of young loves, “Margo, Susie…/…Sarah.”

Isn’t the late summer world full of beings humming, fluting, and chirping their feminine names, Katie-Did, Phoebe? I think I hear an echo of the Veery’s call when the poem coos, “There. There.”

Innocent, this poet asks us in to his late summer reverie, a ditty with pretty phrases, like “the silver guppies sip,” “the egg-rich mayflies dip and rise” The poem re-enacts this jeweled world of plenty, its messages humming, pausing, and humming to each other, a correspondence we should treasure, knowing how brief the season is, how the pauses lengthen later.

To the Summer Sweethearts    by Sydney Lea

The easiness of August night:
a fall of meteors,
moths jewel my house

across the lane, I float
in the fire-pond, in the light-

riffled fire-pond. Cattails puff
their buoyant seed. The tadpoles
have absorbed their tails:
they hum and pause and hum.

Innocent, I ask you in.

The egg-rich mayflies dip and rise,
dimple the surface, die.
The silver guppies sip them.

Come sit, at least, composite
(eyes of Margot, Susie’s hair,
the even smile of Sarah),
there on the bank.
You’ve seen the evil looking turtles,
but sweetheart they never bite.

There. There.
Let’s have a look at you.

Listen to the whippoorwill
chuck-will’s widow,
nightjar.

Selections from Deepening Snow by Michiko Oishi, translated with Judith Chalmer

honey bee
a whole body bathed
in dandelion

a bridge of shirts
built between trees
torsos budding

spring lettuce
one sweet leaf
under the sky

a cake
under strawberries
just picked

heavy bags
on both shoulders
summer market

watching a cloud
drift across
blue sky
I find myself
fading away

“We need more Dicentra.”
“Did you re-stock the Trollius? After you do, check on the Hemerocallis and the Digitalis.”

Since that summer I’ve learned a bouquet of common names for wildflowers: Two-leaved Toothwort, Bladder Campion, Early Saxifrage, Stinking Benjamin and Wild Sarsaparilla–they are so delicious to pronounce!
Brattleboro poet Tim Mayo begins a poem from his book, The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple, 2009) with a kindred experience, syllables dropping like petals off the tongue. He then goes on to ponder the flower’s ability to call attention to itself, with color so vibrant you expect it to be audible.
Mayo’s poem plays with ideas about the plant’s power, how simply uttering its name invokes an ability to glow or bloom, amid inner and outer “sunlessness,” whether you go home with a showy pot of it or not.

Portulaca          by Tim Mayo

Portulaca, I said, Port-tu-lac-a?
to the young girl at the nursery,
and she smiled, her eyes brightening
from some memory like jewels
turning in a light I couldn’t see.

She looked around, then said,
We’re sold out,
her eyes taking on another hue.

All around us things flowered
in the misty gray,
red, orange, pink and blue,
as though shouting
against the sunlessness of the day.

Portulaca– a plant I didn’t know,
I was just buying for a friend,
when from that old greenhouse
inside me where all the plants
jostled and groped for more dark,
the word suddenly blossomed
burning through almost like a sun,

and for that one moment it hung
between us, a bright talisman,
before the gray air erased it,
and I went home to my friend.

On the astonishing ordinary act of birth

Recently, my friend told me she knew a woman who bought a parachute to sew a wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses for her daughter’s wedding. Also this month my cow gave birth to a bull calf. She was licking him off and mooing when I went out after dinner to check on her. When I first read the poem ‘Afterbirth’ by Diane Swan, from her chapbook Jewelweed, the poem rekindled both of these experiences. That’s what I love about poetry: that a total stranger’s carefully chosen words can stimulate personal memories, as well as convey universal feelings such as amazement and awe. Diane, who lives in Barre, said this poem arose out of a scene she witnessed along South Hero when she was driving along. She pulled over to scribble the words down on the back of an envelope. Later she arranged them and rearranged them until she was satisfied. “It’s like a game,” she said about her current manuscript of poems, Enough Light, “what happens if I put this word here and that word there…?”

When I read this poem to my mom she gasped. Whether you’ve seen a hundred cows give birth, or you’ve never seen a cow calve, Ms. Swan’s poem captures the astonishing, ordinary act of birth.

Afterbirth                                      by Diane Swan

In the calendar pictures, the cow

leans over her calf, a dry miniature

of herself, as if the cow-stork

dropped it clean into her daisied field.

But when I saw the afterbirth, bright red,

hanging from her square backside

I stopped the car and watched her lick

a shapeless package in the grass.

Soon it stood, hind end first, forelegs

knuckled under until need unfolded them,

then he was up, searching her warm belly

to find the milk. I told the farmer

your cow just had a calf now

in the field, wanting him to clean her up,

take it away. Of course he’d seen it

many times, this vivid scarf she’d spun

out of her body’s jeweled insides, flag

that made the rest recede—farm, the trees,

the sky—all leach into a monochrome.

Not an apple red or lipstick, or the bloody

evening clouds, but red as deep and elegant

as silk. This parachute her calf had ridden down.

*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle on June 13, 2007

Here is the first poetry column I ever published back in 2007. And it’s all still true…

Poems are like teabags in that they have the potential to infuse our mind-hearts with the flavor of their contents. They communicate feeling, connection and meaning.  They are immediate little pieces of humanity; they are portable worlds. Poetry, we sometimes think, belongs in a special place, like a literature class, or a valentine. But what if poems were as ubiquitous as advertisements? What if poems secretly crept out of their lonely volumes and appeared in your lunch box, your in-box, or on TV, a brief haiku between the six o’clock news and Seinfeld.

April is National Poetry Month, a perfect month to inaugurate a poetry column. To kick off the column, I chose a poem by a local poet, Herbert Elliott (1914-1990), whose observations in his poem ‘Birds With Us’ conveys the tugging of spring upon winter, winter upon spring, as we and the old and the just arrived birds carry on together amid the unsettled season. Elliott was a dairy farmer in St. Johnsbury. This poem comes from his collection, Take Your Last Look, selected by his daughter Sandria Elliott Ebbett.

Birds With Us        by Herbert Elliott

The April snow came late

And covered bush and weed.

Around the house in flocks

The Spring birds came to feed.

The wood-birds left the woods

And snowy forest floor

And printed little tracks

Before the kitchen door.

The night came, and the moon,

And in the silver gleam

In barn they dreamed of spring

On rafter and on beam.

*column first appeared in the Barton Chronicle on April 26, 2007

Had Mr. Travis found himself in such a situation today he could tweet his need, or upload a YouTube video to connect with his “followers.” Yet for all the communication devices to emerge since Travis’ dire time: telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, fax, email, as Burlington poet Nora Mitchell notices in her poem, ‘Listening Through Snow,’ “we take//so many things for granted.”

Her poem, from the book, Contemporary Poetry of New England, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, features other creatures engaging in the same broadcast networks they have used for millennia— releasing odors, issuing foot tracks, transmitting code of a tiny pounding heart.

Mitchell asks us to imagine the world her dog apprehends beneath the snow—a chambered and tunneled world, a world on the far side of the horizontal white wall where shrews skitter like anxious thoughts inside the besieged fort of a winter mind. Her poem leaves us with a tinge of desperation, a connection broken and lost. Despite all the sophisticated communication gadgetry, my Post Office and town message board are papered in a simple photocopied image of the loved dog next to the word: Missing. And for all its magic the snow sometimes feels like the limiting walls of a fortress, beyond which replies to our questions, Have you seen? Can you help? languish among the slow moving rescue team: Spring.

Listening Through Snow

by Nora Mitchell

Underneath,
mice and shrews are moving,

the dog can hear them down there,
out of sight and reach.

Your hunch may be right
after all, we take

so many things for granted. Thermostats,
refrigerator trucks. When children

wait in a clump at the curb,
their faces expectant and resigned,

the yellow bus will come.
The dog’s body grows still

and fills again with listening,
visibly, the way a glass fills.

What do you suppose
it’s like, that crawlspace

under the snow? Low ceiling,
a whole landscape laid out

in a blue-grey glow, the hue
of aerial photographs in wartime,

cities in grids, pockmarked
and pitted, messages painted on walls:

Everyone from this house
has been rescued.

Mrs. Simon, where are you?
We have looked everywhere.