March 14: Beautiful and Familiar Glory, God's Love Number Twenty-Five, Darrell Bourque, "Scratch," New Cartoon

Ives was sitting beside Annie in his old neighborhood church on another Christmas Day looking up at the altar.  There were vases with dozens of orchids on either side of the chalice and pots of blossoms set out on the marble floors and against the columns, garlands of ivy strung along the gallery above.  In the choir stall they had installed the creche with its figures of the shepherds and kings and angels on high and the Holy Family inside the stable, the baby Jesus, the light of this world, at its center.  And they had covered the roof of the stable with evergreen boughs and someone had burned fragrant incense.  That morning as Ives first walked into the sanctuary again, hat in his hand and with his wife by his side, he remembered that beautiful and familiar glory.

Ives has forgiven his son's killer.  He has rekindled his passion for his wife.  At seventy-five, he has found God's love in his life again.  He can go into church, sit in a pew, and not be tormented by anger and sorrow.  In the church where his son's funeral was held, Ives only senses God's beautiful and familiar glory.  Life is finally good for him again. 

It's not easy to trust in God all the time.  It should be, but it isn't.  Human beings want to control their lives, and, when something terrible happens (something unplanned), we struggle, as Ives does, with sorrow and confusion and, sometimes, anger.  I have lived in that state before.  In fact, I think I still sublet a condo there.  It's a dark place, with a terrible view of the outside world.

Today,  I am in a good place, for the most part.  It's Saturday.  Tonight, I will go to Mass, play the pipe organ, and say the familiar prayers.  I have two days without the stress and worry of work.  That is a blessing.  For the next 48 hours, I can be with my wife and kids, read, write, and trust in God.  (Come Monday, all bets are off.)  But, that is God's love number twenty-five for me:  two days of rest, love, and faith.  I'll take it.

Saint Marty has one more Darrell Bourque poem for you.  It's about guilt and confession (or not confessing).  Perfect for Lent.

Scratch

by:  Darrell Bourque

Since that afternoon years ago
when my mother put us on our knees
and told us she was leaving,
I have placed myself in the world,
measured myself against the horizon,
let the sky cover me like some angel bird
hovering. I have seen wide ribbons
of pine making a trot-line at the earth’s edge.
I have studied things up close: stunted trees
growing out of rock. I have gone beyond
tree lines where grasses open seedpods
like prayers. I have stood at the water’s
edge and wobbled, and still no one
knows who knifed the unreadable lettering
on my mother’s new cedar chifferobe
that day. She and my father drove to town
to buy garfish for our usual Friday supper
at my aunt’s house. We were questioned again
on her return but no one confessed—through
the fish cleaning, the seasoning, the frying.
I can’t remember when exactly we laughed
and ran through the yard with our cousins.
It was night when we went home. We were happy.
Just last week, some fifty years later,
one of us brings it up in mother’s
presence. She has not walked for years
and it is no big matter to her now,
but none of us are fessing up today either.
We all know who didn’t do it,
and one of us knows who did.

Confessions of Saint Marty

March 13: Friday the 13th, Darrell Bourque, "Physics Report"

It is Friday the 13th.  It's actually the second straight Friday the 13th in as many months.  I had a pretty crappy day at work, being forced to do things that I wasn't hired to do.  I left at the end of the day with a huge headache and an even huger bad mood.

I'm doing a little better now.  I'm still trying to reclaim a little happiness.  Maybe by the time Jimmy Fallon comes on tonight, I may be in the mood to watch him write his weekly "thank you" notes.  I have a bathroom to clean and carpets to vacuum before then.

Saint Marty is ready for a poem and a drink.

Physics Report

by:  Darrell Bourque

It is the end of the lovebug season here in south Louisiana.
We are taking teflon-wrapped sponges
to our windshields and to the bumpers
of our cars.
In northern New Zealand a mountain top blows. The ash takes with it a lake.
The water no longer identifiable
or measurable as what it was,
a deep blue bowl in thin air.
I know more than nothing about Lorenz’s initial condition effect
on weather systems theory.
I know more than nothing about
energy field physics,
but I like the idea of poets calibrating
the energy in the lines of what they make
and scientists getting out their calipers
to measure the fat content in images.
In Miss Dixie Wynn’s sixth hour class just last week the testosterone levels, she says, were unchartable.
It was as if some Cajun blonde Medusa had turned
this boy-filled class to charged stone.
Empirically speaking, three weeks after
the beginning of the fall term
Elizabeth Broussard’s schedule changed.
Ben Bernard wrote an essay
on a person who most influenced him
and he wrote about his uncle
he works with.
He said his uncle was teaching him a trade.
That it was more than learning how to be a cabinet maker.
It was about how to smooth surfaces
and how to make angles fit.
It was about how to make things
strong so that no one ever noticed
how strong a thing was.
It was about dovetails and miter boxes.
And then he said it was, too,
about how his uncle was teaching him
how to be a good father and a good husband,
and he didn’t know where that last thing came from
and he wondered what connections, if any,
all that had to do with what Miss Dixie had been saying
one day about something that sounded foreign to him
that you couldn’t do when you write,
and then something about writing
having to be about you and having to be true
and it seemed to him that this line in his essay
about a father and husband was both of these things
and besides that he didn’t know why
he kept seeing Elizabeth about to turn
around in his writing-log entries.
Her long blonde hair moving.
Her turning her face to him.
Her eyes the color of deep mountain lake water.
Him, some father, some husband
swimming in them.
Just before he closes his eyes for the last time Hokusai releases thirty-six variations of each of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
This morning at the edge of the pine grove near the emperor’s retreat the mist barely touches
the tops of the boulders in the garden.
The caretaker is raking the gravel.
The imperial embroiderers are taking notes
on the pinks in the peonies blooming.
A hummingbird near the rim of the Atchafalaya Basin is making its way to the red mallows,
the subscription in its wings,
Kyoto, Kyoto, Kyoto
the hurried aria its heart sings
yokuboo, yokuboo, yokuboo 

 

I dare you to make me laugh

March 11: Moments of Silence, Darrell Bourque, "Quietism"

I have very little quiet time in my days.  From the time I get up to the time I climb into bed, I'm surrounded by noise.  Phones.  Patients.  Coworkers.  Students.  Movies.  TVs.  Children.  During the week, the only times where I'm surrounded by silence are in my university office.  I shut the door, turn off the overhead light, and close my eyes for a few moments.  Say a prayer maybe.

Tonight's poem is about moments like that.  Quiet moments, when quiet things happen.

Saint Marty thinks everybody deserves a little noiselessness.

Quietism

by:  Darrell Bourque

—first line from Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Walking Down Blanco Road at Midnight”

It happens in a quiet place.
If too much is moving around,
you never get to see the thin line
of red flickering above the horizon
just before sunrises or just after
sunset—some tag of fire or herald
of no sound whatsoever.
There is a moment when all leave
the table but something still breathes
as fat congeals on plates left behind.
The big chair in the yard near the oak
lived in the silence of trees in forests.
The tools put up in the winter shed,
silent in their work and in their rest.
An audiologist’s finest instrument
might never record the calla lily’s
slow, long, unfolding song.

Can you hear it singing?

March 10: Dam, Darrell Bourque, "Lincoln in New Orleans, 1831"

I came home to a wall of slush and ice in my driveway.  My wife had already moved a good portion of it, but there was literally a dam of heavy, wet snow to clear.  As I swore, cursed, and grunted with my shovel, I kept asking myself, "Why do I love this place?"  It almost made me wish for an eternal winter.  No more snow, just enough cold to keep things from melting.

Well, I'm tired, sore, and hungry.  Ready for bed.  I'm done for the day.

Another night, another poem.

Saint Marty has to go make his daughter some Ramen noodles now.

Lincoln in New Orleans, 1831

by: Darrell Bourque

When he arrived that year he had to walk
a mile or so on flatboats to reach the shore.
He had poled and floated here, watched hawks
circling overhead on lazy afternoons, still bore

the scar he’d gotten years before when he chased
and fought off seven fugitive slaves who tried to rob him
and his measly crew near Baton Rouge. He pasted

some home remedy on the gash and then stemmed
the blood with some cloth he had on board. It lasted
all his life, this scar over his right eye but it hemmed

in nothing. What really lasted was the chatter and talk
around Maspero’s Exchange where one mulatto girl more
was trotted and pinched, undressed while buyers gawked
and ciphered for the lowest price they could get for her.

March 9: Poet of the Week, Darrell Bourque, "Putting William to Sleep"

It's ten o'clock at night.  Tomorrow, the temperature is supposed to climb to around fifty degrees.  In the morning, I'm expecting the city snowplows to come through early, probably sending 500 pounds of slush, ice, and snow into my driveway.  I love spring weather.  I hate spring cleanup.

The poet I've chosen as Poet of the Week is from Louisiana.  In fact, in the past, he's served as Louisiana Poet Laureate.  His name is Darrell Bourque, and I saw him give a reading around eleven years ago.

Saint Marty thinks he deserves to be more widely known.

Putting William to Sleep

by:  Darrell Bourque

for William Bourque Turley, bn. February 11, 1992

He puts his index finger and his middle finger together

when he loves you with his hands

or when he is touching meaning into things

he is bringing himself to for the first time.

The thumb and the other fingers fold

over the mysteries in his palm.

It is some kind of sacred gesture he has carried

into this new world where nothing has a name yet.

He is touching the thumbnail on my left hand

as I stand swinging him in the hammock

I have made for him of dark and arms,

of chest, of cricket sounds outside and smells

inside clothes and skin and room and house.

I sing to him of orchids in rain forests

and how they touch everything around them like that.

He could be that kind of orchid lover,

I sing to him.  I sing to him of loving

by brushing holiness against everything

he comes to and everything that comes to him.

He presses the skin on my shoulder near my neck

just barely and then his hand slides down.

His whole arm is loose and heavy, falling with him--

his benedictions now for some other darkness, some

other namelessness he might grow to imagine, loving

that it always waits for him in the dark, loving

that it always waits for him on the other side.

A really nice guy and great poet