The diamond hitch is a top-of-the-line knot, especially useful in cowboy, mining, or logging country – or, as I apply it, the desert foothills of Washington state found east of the Cascade mountains. Forefront in my related set of poems is the unspoken recognition of diamond hitch as marriage, with its implied images of diamond ring and getting hitched. In the background, also unvoiced, is the diamond symbol of the clear and enduring heart – further extended to intense spiritual quest, as The Diamond Sutra (Vajrachchedika in Sanskrit) demonstrates, found also in the Buddhist linkage of diamond to Dharma. In addition to serving as an emblem for the open range of the American Far West, sagebrush, moreover, suggests wisdom, spice, even the Burning Bush of Moses – the profound influence desert has upheld for prophets and mystics over the millennia.
Tag: Poetry
GARDEN LIGHTS
the Tiki torches, hints of pathways in five directions
from the Smoking Garden
* * *
twilight
with charcoal, glowing and ready
poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson
A TURN IN THE GARDEN
As the hot, humid weather kicks in, we shift gears. Our weeding turns lazy, and our plants will just have to fight it out for survival. If we’re diligent, we’ll water, though the utility bill frightens.
Maybe it’s all part of the relationship.
~*~
Of Devis and Other Spirits
A garden without a woman is lamentable
unfolding from Eve
and the Singer of the Song of Songs
all this color and excitement
my Woman wears no cosmetics
she’s organic
but oh so much better for me
than health food
my Lady leads me in unanticipated ways
she’s so unlike the ones before her
she works with wise fingers without hesitating
to get dirt under her nails
still, as the younger one said,
“you’re a mean mommy:
you’re as mean as the thorns in a buckle bush”
In constructing her garden
sod, roots woven tight, close together
the way I thought we would
overlooking the fact we both flower
quite conspicuously
our stems woody or thorny
even through winter
poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson
CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION
Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.
For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.
Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.
When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.
Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.
Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.
You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.
Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.
The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.
What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.
As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.
What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.
On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.
MOVING TOWARD A NEW PERIOD
This miracle of being allowed to release so much pent-up work is impossible to describe, but it is fostering an incredible change within me. The publication of my novels as ebooks through Smashwords.com and the postings on this blog of so many bits from my archives are allowing me to enter a period of reduction – something I’m calling “decollecting,” when it comes to my books, recordings, manuscripts, extra clothing, and other assemblies. What I’m also finding is an opening to rethink almost everything and, like the layers of an onion being stripped away, of finding myself willing to rely on fewer and fewer answers … and more and more questions. Add to that a growing sense of wonder, in many cases, or of futility and cynicism, when looking at so many of the political and economic policies being followed blindly.
What I am accepting is that I require less and less material support. Maybe it’s the renunciation in my yogic past finally kicking in, or maybe it’s the tightened focus on what remains before me.
One thing I know as I view the trail markers before me: I’m not ready to kick back, for certain. Let’s see where this goes.
REGARDING ELK AND MORE
Monday morning, as I noted at the time:
I’d thrown the kids off the PC, where they were watching an episode of The Simpsons, only to find out it was actually an assignment for the older one’s upper-level college course, the Sociology of Humor. [No joking.] And then I got around to some poetry submissions, including an acceptance or two.
Glad you like the work I sent. The elk poems arise out of the four years I spent in the desert of Washington state, bordering the “dry side” of the Cascade Range. They’re part of a series, most of which has already appeared in journals. I’m not a hunter, but living as I have most of my adult life in places near forest (even my time in Indiana and Iowa), I’ve had to acknowledge the existence of hunting as a fact of life – and the ways ancient hunting, with its religious/spiritual dimensions (the discipline of meditation, for instance, arises from waiting for the game), contrasts with modern “harvesting.” Even so, some editors have rejected the work out of hand – maybe they thought I’m a NRA member (quite the opposite, in reality – no guns for me).
Among the poems I’ve written are “After the Fact,” which comes out of Native American lore. It turns out that Gary Snyder also has a piece drawing on the same myth – “This Poem Is for Bear” – which acknowledges the aspect of the girl’s disrespecting the bruin before the abduction. I found another piece along this line of my work, “If a Man Goes Mad,” which works along a similar grain.
Finally, as I look back on the period, I reopen a longpoem, my American Olympus, based on a one-week camping trip with a now ex-wife and a former girlfriend who was visiting (who would have guessed they’d actually enjoy each other’s company). As it turns out, I still hear from the ex-girlfriend.
HOW DID THEY AFFORD IT?
Viewing several documentaries on the writing life in Manhattan in the 1950s leaves me wondering just how anyone could afford it. Yes, the world was quite different then and, if we can believe their arguments, the written word was king the way it would no longer be by the late ’60s.
Still, it’s hard for me to believe that writing would have paid that much more in the era than it did when I entered the profession. How many plum magazine assignments were there, anyway? Or how many lucrative book advances?
The argument that rents were low, especially in Greenwich Village, is hard to believe for anyone who tried to find a decent place upstate in the early ’70s, as I did. Even for a full-time journalist working for Gannett, the best the pay would cover was a slum where a heavy rain would leak on my typewriter.
And that was without the heavy drinking that we’re told was required of the New York literary set, as well as the psychotherapy, sometimes daily. Plus the heavy smoking. Did I add, all the men wore suits and ties. (And all of the writers and editors, it was emphasized, were males. Women were employed as “fact checkers.”)
Still, when I run the numbers, they don’t add up. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing?
BLURRING INTO SMOKE
The title, drawn from a line in Galway Kinnell’s “Tillamook Journal,” brings to my mind the corkscrew motion of seasons, memories, and time itself across the sequence of landscapes where I’ve dwelled.
My poems arising in this vein rarely stray far from northern woods. Or from the woodpile or fire, even in summer, no matter how unacknowledged their presence.
Nor do the poems in this range stray far from crickets, whose fiddling is akin to rubbing sticks together to create a fire. Where I live, their night rasping intensifies in early autumn, as though defying the growing chill and approaching, decisive frost. In a sense, there’s an inverse relationship between the mating songs of birds, so rampant around dawn in mid- to late spring, and the cricket activity. In the end, their music goes where the smoke goes. For now. Before starting over.
AT THE FEEDER
I’ve already mentioned my astonishment at the range of wildlife we’ve had at our property inside the city limits. We’ve enhanced that, of course, by keeping our bird feeders up through the year. In fact, they devour much more in warm weather than in the depths of winter.
Watching them along with the garden can provide a marvelous awareness of the changing seasons. Here are some notes I made in the passing:
EVEN IN WINTER GARB NOW EMERGING
LATE SUMMER
already the goldfinches are losing their bright yellow,
shifting over to their “traveling clothes”
cardinal flower still scarlet
the sunflowers nearly past
will we have any pumpkins in this crazy year?
a stream of crows, maybe a hundred, all headed south
(the ten thousand roosting together in a cemetery, how spooky)
admiring the white gull against blue sky
and the black band on its wing
four white droplets fall away and vanish
never seen that before!
today, two large hawks, soaring
* * *
and the goldfinches lost their yellow …
how sudden and uniform this molting!
now-dun at the feeder
MIDWINTER
cardinals singing boisterously, 5 a.m.
a raven or two in our yard
regular visitors
under our bird feeder
corn / cracked corn in the mix
poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson
HISTORIC UPDATES, CONTINUED
As I said at the time, so long ago now …
No changes on the love-life front. Maybe I really don’t have the time or energy these days to invest there. Just too much going on with the writing and publishing – plus the Quaker responsibilities as clerk of Quarterly Meeting (which is something like being bishop of New Hampshire congregations would be in some other denominations).
Besides, am trying to be careful this time not to connect with my previous patterns – a radar that seems to pick up on emotionally troubled romantic partners or seems to draw them to me. Important thing is to keep myself nourished and centered. There are, however some encouraging new friendships, including those arising from a local poetry group (the “Prozac Poets” meeting at Barnes and Noble) and a weekly open reading in Concord. Will be the “featured poet” at another, which raises its own set of concerns: do I basically read from one extended series or period, or do I instead select a sampler from the past thirty years? Any suggestions?
Am leaning, at this point, toward opening with a Hindu chant that’s supposed to be efficacious at warding off tigers and poisonous snakes and closing with a wonderful quote by William Penn, a piece that wasn’t written as a poem but certainly works as one and points toward both Walt Whitman and Greenleaf Whittier. After the opening chant, I would say a few words about poetry arising in the sacred, which includes sexuality and even the more successful sacrilegious efforts, then go into a long piece, “Flight With Sun and Moon,” from the early 1970s. After that, I anticipate a grouping of five micropoems to change the pace, then maybe three sections from a longpoem, Recovering Olympus, followed by five more micropoems, leading into three to five pieces from one of my more recent “Police Blotter Love Poems” series. I would then end my own work with a five-page piece from Maine, addressed to my favorite poet and the influence he’s exerted throughout my own moves during the past three decades. Guess I’m just thinking aloud here. Sound reasonable? Like all good plans, it’s subject to a slew of revisions!
Yipes, it’s time to run already. Another Tuesday, the last day of my “weekend,” and the sun’s just set (well, it is late afternoon) – need to get something to eat before running off to a poetry reading. Some good stuff being done around here, as well as the usual dross.
Am looking forward to all of those pictures you’re promising in your always scintillating ‘zine. And no, no way are you what they accuse. You’re a poet, remember? But you already know that.
Oh boy indeed!
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