A poem is a spider web
Spun with words of wonder,
Woven lace held in place
By whispers made of thunder.
~Charles Ghigna
I wandered the barnyard this morning
studying the complexities of overnight web design,
marveling at one tiny creature’s creative masterpiece
of connection using the slenderest thread.
Through my words and pictures I whisper
from my own corner of the web
and wait patiently for the shimmer of some slim connection,
wondering if my rumbling thunder has been heard.
Time’s fun when you’re having flies…
~Kermit the Frog
Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana.
~attributed to Groucho Marx
…the tiny haunting eyes of the fruit flies, and the swooping melody of their Latin name: Drosophila melanogaster, which translates poetically as “dark-bellied dew sipper.”
~Diane Ackerman from “Fruit Flies and Love”
It’s not easy being green unless you also have a dorsal brown stripe and live in a box of ripe pears on the back porch that has become a metropolis of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies).
Then you are in frog heaven with breakfast, lunch and dinner within reach of your tongue any time.
And the Drosophila happily move in to the kitchen any time pears are brought in for preserving. The apple cider vinegar killing fields I’ve set up on the kitchen counter are capturing hundreds daily, but their robust reproducing (which I carefully studied in undergraduate biology lab) outstrips the effectiveness of my coffee filter funnel death trap lures.
But fruit fly season too shall pass.
Time flies and time’s fun when you’re having frogs.
Everything is made to perish;
the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so.
No, he thought.
The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place.
What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?
~Paul Harding from Tinkers
What persists indeed?
There are times when all appears to be perishing, especially in this dying time of year when the world is drying and burning up around us, blowing smoke hundreds of miles like a giant overhead dust storm soiling the air.
Each breath reminds us that we are mere ashes.
The obituary pages predominate in the paper, accompanying an overload of ongoing cases of contagious illness, bad news, riots and a pandemic of angry rhetoric.
All appears to be perishing with no relief or hope.
Waning light and shortening days color my view like the haze in the sky painting a sunset blood red. This darkness is temporary and inevitably is helpless; it can never overcome the Light of all things made.
Life persists in the midst of perishing because of the cataclysm of a loving and bleeding God dying as sacrifice on our behalf.
Nothing, nothing can ever be the same – He remains here with us through this. We only need to call His name.
God goes where God has never gone before.
~ Kathleen Mulhern in Dry Bones
May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer.
I lived once.
Thank you.
It was here.
~Aracelis Girmay “Ars Poetica”
What do I leave behind as I pass through to what comes next?
It might be as slick and silvery and random as a snail trail — hardly and barely there, easily erased.
I might leave behind the solid hollow of an empty shell, leading to infinity, spiraling to nothing and everything.
Instead,
I pray, grateful, for a legacy of words and images;
I notice the wonder I journey through.
I was here.
There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear
when it is perfect to eat.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts,
thick on the branch,
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.
~Hilda Doolittle Dawson (H.D.) “Pear Tree”
…we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
~Jane Kenyon from “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”
A moment’s window of perfection is so fleeting
in a life of bruises, blemishes and worm holes.
Wait too long and nectar-smooth flesh
softens to mush and rot.
The unknown rests beneath a blushed veneer:
perhaps immature gritty fruit unripened,
or past-prime browning pulp brimming with fruit flies
readily tossed aside for compost.
Our own sweet salvage from warming humus
depends not on flawless flesh deep inside
but heaven’s grace dropped into our laps:
to be eaten the moment it is offered.
The perfect pear falls when ripe
and not a moment before,
ready to become an exquisite tart which
tastes of a selfless gift.
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
~Sylvia Plath from “Mushroom”
This overnight overture into the light,
a parturition of “ink caps” after a shower.
As if seed had been sprinkled on the manure pile,
they sprout three inch stalks
still stretching at dawn,
topped by dew-catching caps and umbrellas.
Nearly translucent as glass,
already curling at the edges in the morning light,
by noon melting into ooze
by evening complete deliquescence,
withered and curling back
into the humus
which birthed them hours before.
It shall be repeated
again and again,
this birth from unworthy soil,
this brief and shining life in the sun,
this folding, curling and collapse
to die back to dust and dung.
Inedible, yet so Chrisincredible,
they rise beautiful
and worthy
as is the way of things
that never give up
once a foot’s in the door.
There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse…
~Long time equestrian wisdom attributed to many famous riders
Nineteen years ago today in 2001, two days before the world changed forever, I helped organize a gathering of Haflinger horse owners from western Canada and the United States in our nearby town of Lynden, Washington. We received permission to have a Haflinger parade on a quiet Sunday morning while the townspeople were all in church. We wanted to be sure we would not interfere with traffic coming to town and leaving after worship services.
It was a remarkable morning of over ninety Haflingers – riding, driving, walking their horses, enjoying the quiet peace of a Sabbath morning in a friendly little town.
After September 11, 2001, nothing has felt quiet or calm in the same way ever again.
This is to remember the day we spent together, in the insides of us enjoying the outsides of our horses.
Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.
His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”
Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day.
Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly,
then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.
I too spin elaborate dreams at night:
some remembered,
some bare fragments,
some shattered,
some potentially yield a meal.
We work because we are hungry.
We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.
Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams
~out of thin air and gossamer strands~
where nothing existed before,
not as a trap or lure or lair
but as a work of beauty-
a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.
God put the rainbow in the clouds, not just in the sky….
It is wise to realize we already have rainbows in our clouds,
or we wouldn’t be here.
If the rainbow is in the clouds,
then in the worst of times,
there is the possibility of seeing hope….
We can say, ‘I can be a rainbow in the clouds for someone yet to be.’ That may be our calling.
~Maya Angelou (Harrisburg Forum, November 30, 2001)
Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
~Lord Byron
Painting the indescribable with words necessitates subtlety, sound and rhythm. The best word color portraits I know are by Gerard Manley Hopkins who described what he saw using startling combinations: “crimson-cresseted”, “couple-colour”, “rose-moles”, “fresh-firecoal”, “adazzle, dim”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, “blue-bleak embers”, “gash gold-vermillion”.
My facility with words doesn’t measure up so I rely on pictures to show the hope I see when I look at the sky. I keep reaching for the rainbow hiding within the clouds, searching for the prophetic promise that preserves my days and nights forever.
After all, in the beginning was the Word, and no one says it better than He does.
I don’t mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion–pure union
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
Look at you, chopping and weeping…
~Suji Kwock Kim from “Monologue for a Onion”
…It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent…
~William Matthews from “Onions”
…I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.
~Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Traveling Onion”
from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency…
…You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.
~Pablo Neruda from “Ode to the Onion”
Everything smells of “eau de onion” here in the kitchen as the onions are brought in from our late summer garden to be stored or dehydrated and frozen for winter soups and stews.
This is weepy business, but these are good tears like I spill over the whistled Greensleeves theme from the old “Lassie” TV show, or during any childrens’ choir song, or by simply watching videos of our grandchildren who are quarantined so far away from our arms.
It takes almost nothing these days to make me weep, so onions are a handy excuse, allowing my tears to flow without explanation:
I weep over the headlines.
I weep over how changed life is and for the sadness of the stricken.
I weep over how messy things can get between people who don’t listen to one another or who misinterpret what they think they hear.
I weep knowing we all have layers and layers of skin that appear tough on the outside, but as you peel gently or even ruthlessly cut them away, the layers get more and more tender until you reach the throbbing heart of us.
We tend to hide our hearts out of fear of being hurt, crying out in pain.
Like an onion, each one of us exists to make the day a bit better, the meal more savory, to enhance the flavors of all who are mixed into this melting pot together. We aren’t meant to stand alone, but to disappear into the stew, and be sorely missed if we are absent.
So very dish needs an onion, and for the sake of the dish, every onion vanishes in the process.
No, I don’t mean to make you cry
as you peel my layers away,
gently, one by one,
each more tender until you reach my heart.
Chop away at me if you must
but weep the good tears, the ones that mean
we weep for the sake of our meal together:
you eating and drinking,
and me – consumed.
