Who Knew Almost Nothing Could Mean So Much?

Today I read my 9/10 girls Frost's "Neither Far Out Nor In Deep."  I was thinking how powerfully the most unremarkable, in fact rarely marked and nearly subliminal perceptions can resonate if we just manage to train a little attention on them. We talked about this for a few minutes, and I mentioned that I'd once written a poem about standing on one foot in the ocean and not being able to bring myself to put the other foot down. Zahava said she'd felt the same thing, the same sudden and ridiculous fear of the unknown sea floor. Anyway, here's Frost's poem and two of mine, poems about almost nothing -- staring out to sea, standing on one foot in the ocean, watching a sailboat cross a lake. It's interesting how they all involve water and a certain state of absent-minded concentration...

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep by Robert Frost

The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass A ship keeps raising its hull; The wetter ground like glass Reflects a standing gull The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be-- The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea. They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep. But when was that ever a bar To any watch they keep?

Beach, Wader, Water

At noon there's a hot white sun,
not large, but damaging.
And then: the warped
colorless air, the water
flying from every dizzy surface,
children racing like molecules
in a heat-crazed gas.
A hum composed of light
has settled everywhere
on your indefensible body
so that you stand in the ocean
on a single foot, in a cold sweat,
shoulders unhappily hunched.
The other foot will not go down.
It is frightened and desirous
and will not go down.



The Sailboat

It first appears
bent forward into wind,
triangle of white
slipping from between the mainland shore
and one green island.

It makes a kind of theater
in the narrow band of air
between lake's brim
and low sky burdened with rain.

There's nothing else for me to do,
sitting on this rock,
but watch the white sail mark and leave me,
mark the basin of the lake and glide away,

first taking everything,
then nothing,
with it.

In honor of Bernie Sanders

Speaks for itself ...



Music of Rich

Beneath solicitous streetlamps
a dozen matrons
ease themselves out of the Club.
Their legs, like clappers
in the stout bells of their skirts,
toll Money, Money, Money.

The men attending them
emit a balding glow
above pale, papery shirtfronts.
Fruit of Our Labors, they chant
in file along the sidewalk
under servile trees.

Who gave them the keys to the city,
these people as noisy
as pots and pans
but proud and not so serviceable?

Tomato Promiscuity

Another garden poem...


Tomato Promiscuity

You are the too fond parent.
Setting them out in May,
twenty-four inches of bare soil
between each lonesome plant,
you tousle the fuzzy tip
of the young tomato,
pity the straggle of root strands
clinging to your hand
and the seed leaf dangling
like a broken arm.

So tenuous is their first week
in the world of weather
that you visit your little ones daily.
Sometimes they topple forward,
as if to lay their heads on the executioner's block:
then the grubby cutworm moves aside his stone
and trundles towards them;
the flat-footed rabbit descends
from the sky;
the pederast wind blows up
and loves them until, dead threads,
they disappear entirely.

All this you must prevent.
And if you succeed,
soon your charges stand again
at full attention, too pithy
for cutworms, reassuring you
crows can't hurt them anymore.
Now their business is pleasure:
drinking, rustling for manure,
luffing their limber bodies up and down
to win over wind's wrestling.
Your solicitous wrists
and dusty ankles
are no longer required.

Come July the tomatoes flower,
sensing they're not alone.
And then they rush outwards
into one another's warm green arms.
The rest is a very old story:
how you tried to keep things straight,
how you'll never be sure in the end
whose tomatoes are whose.

"We must cultivate our garden..."

This poem makes a good start. At the time I wrote it, I was living in an upstairs apartment in a towering but already dilapidated Victorian house in Ithaca, NY.  I cut my very first vegetable garden into the only level tract of ground in its steep hillside yard. This is how I've gardened ever since: on a small scale with my own brand of piety and maternal affection.

The Garden

I peel back sod, like skin, from this small plot,
and turn it upside down to blanch in darkness.
Sun brittles inverted roots;
Air rings with the trauma of my hoe.

I frighten even myself, being no sure gardener,
knowing nothing of the future but a dream
festooned with vines, pendant with grapes and tomatoes.

I would become a member of the church
which lies on its side, whose hope
is Cornucopia: that nature's imprint,
joined to my desire,
will be wholesome, will take the shape
of that long, inexhaustible basket of fruit
pointing back behind itself

and tumbling out ahead.