Matt's Page

I just read this one in the Jan. 29 issue of the Nation. I had to get out my dictionary for this one, but it was well worth the effort. I like to find this forest I think.

Caveat

There's a caveat on the living trees,
but don't chop up the dead wood:
especially not the trunks stretched
hollow, homes of snakes and echidnas.
When it rains hard they drum a bold
message, and when the wind stirs
through these sacred woodlands
they pipe like great church organs.
That's your patois.
Understand.… Continue

One cold gray drizzly winter day not too many years ago I was walking down Brighton Avenue where Portland turns into Westbrook. Its as grim a place as you can find in Southern Maine, or so I thought. To my right was a shopping center comprised of acres of pavement, and to the left was some kind of sprawling cement and asphalt factory. I was all soured up and feeling mean and grumpy when I noticed in that in the bittersweet vines covering the chain link fence around the cement factory were many l… Continue

Here is one by Elizabeth Alexander who has been tapped by President Elect Obama to read at his inauguration next month. I'd never heard of her until now(ish). She's good. You can find some of her poems on the web, which is where I got this one. I'm not sure what makes it "pagany" other than the fact that it talks about living in the here and now.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’… Continue

Their holy places are woods and groves

That's what Tacitus says about the old heathens east of the Rhine in 98 CE. I find some trees to be especially holy and I know several of them around Portland. I'm in my 40's, but there are trees flourishing yet that exist in my earliest memories. I don't see them as much as I should, but they are old friends indeed.

Anna Akhmatova wrote a wonderful poem about her favorite tree.

Willow

I was raised in checkered silence
in the cool nursery of the… Continue

Years ago I used to go lobster fishing with my father or my uncle and sometimes my grandfather. Once in a while a porpoise would follow in the wake of the boat. Unlike seagulls, I don't think they followed because they wanted bait, I think they liked to ride the waves the boat made, like a surfer.

Here is a great poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that brings those days to mind for me.

Dolphins

Those real ones, who gave their equal
the power to grow and to take hold
everywhere, felt through kindred s… Continue