dual personalities

Category: Poetry

January 24, 2019

Guiding light

by chuckofish

How about a little Mumford & Sons to get you started this morning?

I meant to mention earlier that Mary Oliver, the poet, died last week. Known for her “secular psalms,” she has been dubbed by some “the unofficial poet laureate” of the Unitarian Universalist denomination. Well, then. I liked her anyway.

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

You can read about her here and here.

I will also note that on this day in 1848 James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento. Our great-great-great grandfather, Silas Hough, went west the following year to seek his fortune, but died of cholera just east of the Rocky Mountains.

Screen Shot 2019-01-23 at 12.27.49 PM.pngHis 16-year old son, our great-great grandfather John Simpson Hough who had accompanied him, went home to Philadelphia. He didn’t stay long though. He had seen the Rocky Mountains and there was no holding him back.

And, hey, this was an interesting interview. (I had never heard of this book. I may have to read it.)

When people talk about poverty, there are different kinds. There is a poverty of status in our country where you have all the food and water you need but you think other people are doing better all around you. You can also have a poverty of control. You feel you can’t choose how you spend your day, when to get up. We don’t talk about those kinds of poverty a lot.

Food for thought.

(The painting is Sunrise on the Mountains at the Head of Moraine Park, Near Estes Park, about 1920, by Charles Partridge Adams, CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder

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January 17, 2019

The scattering winds

by chuckofish

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For to the snow he says, ‘Fall on the earth’;
and to the shower and the rain, ‘Be strong.’
 He seals up the hand of every man,
that all men may know his work.
Then the beasts go into their lairs,
and remain in their dens.
From its chamber comes the whirlwind,
and cold from the scattering winds.
 By the breath of God ice is given,
and the broad waters are frozen fast.

–Job 37:6-10

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I am grateful that I work inside. And have an attached garage. And seat heaters in my car. I am grateful for a warm coat and gloves.

What are you grateful for?

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January 9, 2019

A psalm for the day

by chuckofish

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Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

3 Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

4 For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

5 Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

7 For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

8 Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

9 For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

13 Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

14 O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

17 And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

–Psalm 90 (KJV)

(The painting is by Albert Bierstadt.)

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January 8, 2019

From the mail department

by chuckofish

screen shot 2019-01-07 at 10.32.14 amI received an email, of which the following is a tidbit, from one of my oldest BFFs to whom I had sent Alleghany Uprising (1939) for Christmas.

Allegheny Uprising was GREAT!!  You would think after reading your blog for years that I would have seen more John Wayne movies, but we had only seen a few classics (Stagecoach, The Quiet Man). That is definitely going to change and “watch more John Wayne movies” may actually qualify as one of my resolutions this year!!

I ask, what could be a better new year’s resolution than that?

As the poet Fernando Pessoa lamented, “One of my life’s tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers–I can’t go back and read it for the first time.”  Alas, there are practically no John Wayne movies I can watch for the first time, but, readers, you can!

My son-in-law (DN) is woefully behind in his old movie watching, so I gave him The Great Escape (1963), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1967) for Christmas–all of which he has not seen. Think of watching them for the first time!

[I must say there are some real spoilers in this trailer!]

Also from the mailbag: One of the books I bought at an estate sale last Saturday was a copy of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite of mine. In it he recommends two books that “are always among my things…

…the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen. I wonder whether you know his works…Get yourself the little volume of Six Stories of J.P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels Lyhne…A world will open up to you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid to you a thousand and a thousand times…

Sold!

I had never heard of J.P. Jacobsen before, but I will “live a while in these books.”

It’s January–try something new!

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November 8, 2018

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”*

by chuckofish

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Koichi Okumura (1888-1976)

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

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We still have most of our leaves on the trees here in flyover country, but winter is coming…

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. (Ecclesiastes 3:15)

The last five paintings are by Andrew Wyeth.

P.S. I watched Nevada Smith (1966) last night. “I’ve got a rifle, a horse and eight dollars. It’ll  hold.”

*Ecclesiastes 3:1

 

4 Comments
October 24, 2018

Nothing gold can stay

by chuckofish

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Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

–Robert Frost

It is the time of year when I always think of this poem.

Keep your eyes open for the “Golden Hour” when the sun is just at the point on the horizon that the light is redder and softer than usual, and it hits the golden and orange leaves of the trees and turns them into molten gold.

All too soon it will be dark driving home and winter will be upon us. I am never ready for that.

[The painting is by Eric Sloane.]

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October 4, 2018

Look for the blessing

by chuckofish

 

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Some days are better,

Some days are worse.

Look for the blessing instead of the curse.

Be positive, stay strong,

and get enough rest.

You can’t do it all. But you can do your best.

Thought for the day. It’s a good thought, right?

[The painting is by Edward Le Bas (1904-1966)]

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September 20, 2018

“Those who wish to sing always find a song.”*

by chuckofish

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding

and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul

sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,

for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

 

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,

dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.

All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine

clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

 

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,

gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,

and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,

three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

 

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load

a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.

Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill

of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

 

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,

one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,

led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,

and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

 

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,

and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,

shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,

where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

 

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,

roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,

yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter

frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:

 

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

–Donald Hall from Kicking the Leaves (1978)

Today we toast the poet Donald Hall (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) whose birthday it is. I missed the fact that he died earlier this year.

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Hall published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including  New Poets of England and America (1957; coedited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson). He went to Exeter, Harvard and Oxford, had a successful career as an academic and editor, then happily went to live on his ancestral farm in New Hampshire and devoted himself to poetry. 

I remember this book from my children’s childhood.

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In other news, the wee babes dropped by my office yesterday and ran up and down the long hallways.

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They are both recovering from ear infections, so they didn’t stay long, but it was sure fun to see them and their daddy who brought them.

It is still pretty hot here in flyover country. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for fall. Enough already.

*Plato

3 Comments
September 12, 2018

Even our tears belong to ritual

by chuckofish

The First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph’s dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

–Howard Nemerov

Boy, do I remember sending my children off to school back in the day.

You are so careful with your children and then one day you just say goodbye and they go off to school. You can’t protect them anymore, once they’re out of your house, not from mean kids and not from overzealous teachers with opinions. They are on their own.

When they were in elementary school, my kids walked to school and I would see them off at the back door with their backpacks and their lunches. Put on the full armour of God, I would pray.

…Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place,15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6: 14–18)

Sometimes I would say outloud, “Remember! You can go over the top for Jesus!”–which I had read was the last thing Tony Campolo’s mother would say to him as a child leaving the house on the way to school. We would chuckle about this, but I believed that sending them out on a positive note was important. And I never stopped praying for them.

2 Comments
August 30, 2018

The camp-fires of the past

by chuckofish

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A soft veil dims the tender skies,
And half conceals from pensive eyes
The bronzing tokens of the fall;
A calmness broods upon the hills,
And summer’s parting dream distills
A charm of silence over all.The stacks of corn, in brown array,
Stand waiting through the placid day,
Like tattered wigwams on the plain;
The tribes that find a shelter there
Are phantom peoples, forms of air,
And ghosts of vanished joy and pain.

At evening when the crimson crest
Of sunset passes down the West,
I hear the whispering host returning;
On far-off fields, by elm and oak,
I see the lights, I smell the smoke,–
The Camp-fires of the Past are burning.

–“Indian Summer” by Henry Van Dyke

The painting is “Summer in the Blue Ridge” by Hugh Bolton Jones. Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927) was an American landscape painter. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his early training as an artist. While studying in New York he was strongly influenced by Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School.

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