Poem and picture by Wendy Morton:

THE POND AT SOLSTICE

Today, wind, alderfall. The thin December sun. 
I’ve picked a bouquet of calendula, lemon balm,
and the last Abraham Darby rose.

I know that darkness arrives early each day,
with rain or the eclipsed moon. Ice.
In the pond, each leaf, a celebration.

We’ve worried the shape of passing clouds, have been glad of many horizons; and on night-time beaches and through lancet windows, our eyes have searched night stars and day moons—and still we dream—even as our dreams have long been answered in each other.

I like the ribald poems of sloggers and shufflers, their sweeping hands and glint-eyes, the meat still in their teeth as they tell it loud. I like swaggering poems—poems that have a pack of Players rolled up under the short-sleeve of a white t-shirt. I like bawdy, libidinous poems, flowing flowering Song of Solomon poems; I like a full-lipped-Flaubert of a poem. And I like the balanced elegance of a plaited poem; a filigree of Frost. I like the surprise poem—the one that at the end of a perfect day happily pushes you in the pool; and I love the one that steals you away to a slow river with broad grassy banks, and lets you lie there and breathe. Such permission in a poem is like roughed-in plumbing—all you need to do is choose your tub, fill and bathe. I like poems that are unsure of themselves; a teacher will say these are weak and deficient poems, but I like them because they are so much like people. I like a carefully-wrapped poem, and inside something turquoise and without purpose—something you’ve always wanted but would never buy for yourself. I like care-less poems, poems that sleep-in, then leave you notes under your windshield wiper while you’re in church—telling you when and where to meet them. I love a free-verse small epiphany poem—like a friend skipping class that hangs outside of your schoolroom window madly waving her arms and grinning, waiting for you to notice her, and the clear sky behind. I also like the ones that take you seriously, respect your mind and your time—and if not your time, at least your mind. I don’t like freighted teleological poems or big cosmic ontological poems. They are like model rockets—all decals and plastic—that topple over in a minor gust, spark and fizzle and spin in circles on the pavement. I don’t like poems that tousle you, because I hated being tousled, and even hate the word tousle. And I don’t like hail-fellow-well-met cowboy poems, although I’ll admit to smiling through a few. At the same time, I don’t like elevated poems, pointy  poems, God-bless-’em poems, poems that talk too much and don’t listen or look—those kind don’t have ears, which means they can’t have a heart. I don’t care for poems that support a thesis, unless the poem came before the thesis was conceived, in which case it can be brilliant and beautiful. But I do like poems that spitball you, chase you and chide you with their slant rhymes and bumpy meter and screwy trochee—and you sit there and take it because they’re saying something important. But the poem that breaks me open, the one that hurts without doing me harm, oh, give me this; give me your signet, your sonnet, your elegy or epic, and I’ll climb, kneel, open my hands, eat the host and drink the wine; trust me, I’d wait through any black night with you.

Yesterday she heard a song
that made her feel
as though she had found everything.

Today she heard a song
that made her feel
as though she had lost everything.

Listen, she says to no one,
except her dog,
it’s the same song.

Penitence

This old monk, hermit, says to me,
go ahead and swallow
the camphor with your tea,
but don’t expect the glory of the Lord
to shine round about.
And I thought; what,
the itch to retch sin and shame
by rending will and flaying flesh—
a vestigial tail, a tumid tonsil?
The denial of bread and wine,
to gore my guilt—an appendix?
And I catch the glint of freedom
in those cowled eyes,
and feel a sudden pull
to move in those arms.
My stony world, its caste of blight
now in full relief—
I turn to that lavender light,
and feel within a gathering leap—
when I remember all those years
of mete remorse and mulled regret.
All my work to put ahead what lies behind.
My daily wail, my ashened face.
All that comfort of lasting Lent,
blessed by Sunday mourning chorales of praise.
Oh Ascesis, would thou waste me this late?  
My years of pious breast pounding a-wash?
No, sooner drink the brine of self-deceit.
Sooner hail the sour estate.
And serenely model
the righteous rigour of self-hate.

–

When dogma and doctrine come to define us, and the command to love your neighbour as yourself is always willed as an “ought”, but never consented to as a sweeping irresistible power, the ought finally twists itself into self-hate. That’s what I think.

With much love dear reader, Stephen

It’s early November and the windows are showing streaks of cold.

Through the smudged glass is the night’s outline of a spruce tree, and beyond, a blackout of tangled bush.

In two hours the dawn will arrive to remove a cuticle moon and some scattered stars.

I sit bundled in layers of clothes, in front of an electric heater, on an old couch, and pray that I never take this beauty for granted; pray that the beauty I see will find a home within, toward which I will rise and repeatedly respond.

For my gratitude is the ragged kind, my words, forgetful. But this—until there’s a newer day—is still what I bring to offer the penetrating silence.

And as the closing season creeps in and I increasingly feel like an Arctic aven; I pray that while I breath I would yet bloom—under the snow if need be.