By: L.R.Berger
Sheila’s Marginalia
After she died, the books
that were her friends
went home with her friends.
I buckled mine
into the passenger seat
steering away from the home
where she’d always refused
any facts supporting
hopelessness, branding me
traitor for answering,
Yes, it’s true what they say,
you are going to die now.
That’s how it is
with the sturdy tugboat
women call friendship.
We haul in the oxygen
tanks, crack jokes
redispensing
vomited medication.
We tell the kids,
we phone the ex-husband.
We declare bathing
incontestable and bawl
without apology. We tack
the note to her door
she dictates before leaving
on the stretcher for hospice:
Gone Fishing.
Surrounding the deathbed
we take all requests
for songs, for touch, for
chips of ice held to dry lips.
Sing that one again.
We hold the children,
we comfort the children,
steal the rose from the styrofoam
cup and strew its petals
down over the heart
waiting for the undertaker.
Then we go home
and await the ingenious means
our dead friends devise
to keep talking to us.
Sheila’s medium is
her flare for marginalia
in those books
unpacked and shelved
among my own ten years ago.
Just this morning over coffee
she said, Listen to this!
her five pointed star
penned in blue beside,
There are 84,000
dharma doors
always available to wake us.
I reread that sentence
fingertip to star.
Her two pencilled
question marks
beside a paragraph
on reincarnation
waiting when I turn
the page.
Blue Yonder
The geese are going places,
flying west in formation
low over the tidal marsh.
We’re all going places,
some of us flying low
under evening’s sky
closer to the place
we all end up going.
There was a time
I wanted to go with them—
watched them coursing south
across a late October field
in a dream I woke from
crying, Take me with you.
My body that night, the place
they were passing through.
I can still hear them calling
though they’ve flown
out of sight like the dead
whom I also love, gone
to their unimaginable places.
Who knew I’d still be here,
at home, at last,
feet to good earth?
Good luck, I holler,
with everything I’ve got—
words pitched
weightless,
no trace of longing
for any blue yonder.
Ask Anybody
I am carrying on. Ask anybody.
The only way to photograph wind
is to catch it cool-handed
stirring something —
night’s white nightgown flying
pinned by a seam
to the clothesline.
On that second-hand
bicycle of childhood,
pumping hard
I could turn speed
into wind. I made it to save me.
Ask anybody. Wind
is God’s great source
of subsequently
visible gestures.
I’ve been meaning to tell you,
the wind was so strong
on Tuesday, I leaned into it
forging up the hill
to the orchard
as if pressing
through something,
as if moving forward
despite. Love was in the wind,
wind pushing in the other
direction. Even the trees
were carrying on—and words,
desiring each other,
aspiring to be gestures.
Forgive me. I’m always
trying to pin one down
on a page. Your left hand
cupping the right side
of my face before the movie.
My chin at rest
in your palm.
You were drawing me
toward you. Ask anybody.
L.R.Berger’s collection of poems, 'TheUnexpectedAviary,' received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She’s been the grateful recipient of fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and The American Academy in Rome. With Kamal Boullatta, she assisted in the translation from the Arabic of “Beginnings” by Adonis (Pyramid Atlantic Press). She lives and writes in NH within earshot of the Contoocook River.
Interview with the Poet:
Cathexis Northwest Press: How long have you been writing poetry?
L.R. Berger:
I began writing poetry after my second grade school teacher silently placed two books of poetry on my desk. Perhaps she intuited that poems could enter and engage the deep silence I was lost to at the time. Those poems introduced me to a world of music and voices that I heard nowhere else in my life, and offered themselves as evidence that deeper human resonance and companionship existed. Not that I exactly understood this at the time. But I felt I could make a home in the world of poems, and I'd be welcome.
CNP: Can you remember the first poem you read that made you fall in love with poetry?
L.R. B:
One of the books, which I still have, was "The Hand Organ Man" by Elias Lieberman. The poem that captivated me, "To A Tree" was dedicated to the school children of New York. The first line read, "Let me stand under your great arms and feel your benediction..." and there was a black and white etching on the facing page with a small, naked human at the foot of a mammoth tree.
CNP: Who are your favorite poets? Any specific poems?
L.R. B:
At the moment I am happily lost to the poems of Joy Harjo.
CNP: Can you share for us a little bit about your writing process? Any specific rituals that get you in the zone?
L.R. B:
I compose in the morning when new ideas, phrases, images have the spaciousness to arise with a mug of coffee. Revision can happen any other time of day, but new work needs morning air and light and quiet mind. I also have long silences when it seems I've forgotten how to make a poem. During this time I keep a journal of word lists, untethered images, phrases. And read a lot.
I often don't know where a poem is taking me, so I have to weather through a period of uncertainty while holding to some faith that what can feel like chaos will find its way to clarity. That can take weeks, months. But sometimes it takes decades. I'm a snail. When a poem arrives near whole, which is very rare given how my mind works, I live in astonished gratitude.
CNP: How do you decide the form for your poems? Do you start writing with a form in mind, or do you let the poem tell you what it will look like as you go?
L.R. B:
My poems always have to lead the way as to form.
Someone once told me writing depended on a precise relationship between will and grace.
My will tends to need to ride in the back seat until it's time for revision. CNP: When do you know that a poem is finished?
L.R. B:
I am an insufferable revisionist. Some people describe this process as feeling the poem isn't "good enough." I am not so much sitting in judgment about a poem's worth, so much as I am perpetually sensing that the poem can go further, deeper, take yet another more interesting turn. At some point I decide a poem has come a long way and send it out.
Comments