Only One Thing of Danger

Since yesterday's post was a bit by Neruda, I thought it fitting to offer a "bit" by Phelps which was inspired, in part, by the maestro.

“Look around — there's only one thing 
of danger for you here — poetry.” ~ Pablo Neruda 

I need to say this: Neruda makes it easy
to have something to fall back on.

His words (passionate,succulent) are dangerously 

delicious on my lips.

They pool up at the base of my throat
and trickle,
moist and salty

down, across the soft shadows of my belly and
rest there — quivering
in my navel

waiting and wanting to be sipped by you.

Easy too, because —
if I share his poems and (reading
between the lines) perchance you take offense

(at this boldness, brazen crossing of boundaries
drawn by hearts more easily confined)

I might smile and say with a shrug, “Well, that’s just Neruda.”

Then, I will quietly retreat
and stand behind maestro Pablo.

He knows I am feigning innocence
and he hears me
fervently whispering metaphors (fully ripened) that longingly

ache to be parted by your tongue.

Yes, Neruda makes it easy. 

by Martha Lee Phelps

Ode to Common Things
by Pablo Neruda

I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups,
rings,
and bowls -
not to speak, or course,
of hats.
I love
all things,
not just
the grandest,
also
the
infinite-
ly
small -
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.
Oh yes,
the planet
is sublime!
It’s full of pipes
weaving
hand-held
through tobacco smoke,
and keys
and salt shakers -
everything,
I mean,
that is made
by the hand of man, every little thing:
shapely shoes,
and fabric,
and each new
bloodless birth
of gold,
eyeglasses
carpenter’s nails,
brushes,
clocks, compasses,
coins, and the so-soft
softness of chairs.
Mankind has
built
oh so many
perfect
things!
Built them of wool
and of wood,
of glass and
of rope:
remarkable
tables,
ships, and stairways.
I love
all
things,
not because they are
passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don’t know,
because
this ocean is yours,
and mine;
these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures,
fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms
glasses, knives and
scissors -
all bear
the trace
of someone’s fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.
I pause in houses,
streets and
elevators
touching things,
identifying objects
that I secretly covet;
this one because it rings,
that one because
it’s as soft
as the softness of a woman’s hip,
that one there for its deep-sea color,
and that one for its velvet feel.
O irrevocable
river
of things:
no one can say
that I loved
only
fish,
or the plants of the jungle and the field,
that I loved
only
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
It’s not true:
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touched them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.

A Lifetime Love Affair (Part II)

(This is the second installment of a lengthy post. Part I was published on April 28.)

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,

not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,

oh, my dearest, I would not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is--
sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.         ~Pablo Neruda


My first book of Pablo Neruda's poems were given to me on my eighteenth birthday. I had little life experience to filter his exquisite writing through. Roger Housden says in the opening of his book, Ten Poems to Change Your Life, that good poetry has the power to start a fire in your life, and I think that’s what happened for me with Neruda. I mean, I had already been exposed to good poetry. But it had all come to me at someone else’s behest. With the arrival of Neruda’s love sonnets and odes, I now began seeking new poems and their writers on my own accord. A fire had been lit within me that felt so marvelously untamed and warm, I wanted to stoke the flame with more fuel.

Fortunately, an English major in college is in the perfect spot for foraging. Barbara Clark-Mossberg gave me an education in the fireside poets and the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Thoreau that had my mind and senses overflowing. Ed Coleman, my beloved adviser, baptized me in the African American poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni and others found their way into my marrow. Gloria Johnson stood, with her open Riverside collection of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, and read aloud in class in lilting iambic pentameter that made perfect sense - nearly all the time! I read, listened to and wrote prose and poetry in an environment that inspired more exploration and discovery than I had previously known. This is, of course, one of the beautiful aspects of going to college and studying what you are passionate about. There is plenty of encouraging support around you.

When I graduated, with a bachelor’s degree in English and minors in creative writing and folklore and ethnic studies, I began to make my way toward being a teacher. I hadn’t forgotten that my ten-year old self had a different career goal, but I figured that instilling a love for literature, poetry and writing in children would be a worthy way to make a difference in the world. And it did. Poetry study in my LA classes were NOTHING like what I had encountered in high school. We learned the language, read contemporary works, listened to rock, pop and rap music, threw out the rule books, wrote constantly, shared daily - and had fun. Imagine that?

At home, in my carefree life before motherhood, poetry was present daily. Your dad wooed me in fairly romantic fashion with a piece called “A Late Aubade” by Richard Wilbur, not long after I met him - 

You could be sitting now in a carrel

Turning some liver-spotted page,

Or rising in an elevator-cage

Toward Ladies' Apparel.

You could be planting a raucous bed

Of salvia, in rubber gloves,

Or lunching through a screed of someone's loves

With pitying head.

Or making some unhappy setter

Heel, or listening to a bleak

Lecture on Schoenberg's serial technique.

Isn't this better?

Think of all the time you are not

Wasting, and would not care to waste,

Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.

Think what a lot

Of time, by woman's reckoning,

You've saved, and so may spend on this,

You who had rather lie in bed and kiss

Than anything.

It's almost noon, you say? 
If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

If you mustgo,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.


...and perhaps this poem even had something to do with why I fell in love with him? I certainly remember the sound of his voice as he read to me, as well as the light in the room and the texture of the ripe pear he had placed gently in my hand.

You see, Sarah, the right poem can change not only the way you see yourself, but it can change the way you see the world. At the least, it entertains us with images and rhythm, at the most though -- it gives us permission, welcomes forgiveness, dares us to push pass the edges of the safety net that we live so much of life within and sustains us when the of life territory feels new, scary, raw and wild.

By the time your older brother had arrived, a decade after Neruda was born into my heart, I had come to realize that one of the biggest reasons I loved poetry so very very much, was because the truly gifted poets - somehow, some -inexplicable- how, seemed to be able to put into words my exact feelings about certain things and experiences - when even I could not. How was this possible? I couldn’t explain it, but felt it deeply and truly. 



(End of Part II)

Roses

“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.” ~ Rumi

It feels only fitting to round out my pre-Valentines week of blog posts with a mildly evocative poem about...love? passion? sensuality? heart connection? (you decide). My currently single (and very romantic-in-spirit) teenaged daughter has been declaring repeatedly the past several days that "Valentines Day is stupid." It may be that. My own single cynic self can relate to her sentiment. Commercially speaking, however; someone struck on a damn fine idea. 

But the stuff of love, passion, sensuality and heart connection - no, these feelings and experiences are far, far from stupid. 

Take Rumi, for example. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a 13th century poet, theologian and Sufi mystic. His poetry has been considered some of the greatest mystical and spiritual poetry ever written. Rumi writes as the lover of God. His poems can be read merely as love poems, but they must also be considered as symbolic of the relationship of man to the divine.

And then there's Chilean, Pablo Neruda, the poet, diplomat and political figure who was once referred to as the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language. While some of his works are about political and social issues in South America, he is most dearly known for his love poetry. If you haven't yet purchased a gift for your Valentine, I highly recommend Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. (Note: Best read aloud in a private setting.....) In my experience, Neruda's words come closest to capturing that exquisite and deep soul place that we all have such a hard time articulating about matters of the heart.

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 

I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close." 

~ Neruda

So in the spirit of something far, far deeper than Hallmark could ever imagine, and with the utmost respect and gratitude for all of the humble writers of love throughout the ages, here is my small token ~

roses

When she leaned into

the roses, 

her face poised

at the edge of a deep red blossom,

he watched her mouth

(wanting to run his tongue

along the inside rim

of her damp lower lip)

which was slightly

parted, like the petals

before her, 

as if tasting

their perfume.

(to linger there

savoring each 

warm

flavor

in delicious prequel)

and so perfect was

the flower’s essence,

it lingered 

underneath her eyes

when she looked into his gaze

(of lovemaking.)

~ May you find your beloved within yourself. See you Monday ~ m.l.p.

Putting It To The Page

The other day a friend who was checking in with me about how life is in our house revealed that when she reads the emails and blogs about my son, she often finds herself weeping. I was moved by her honesty and feel honored that my words have touched another person in such an intimate way. She asked me, "When you're writing about your boy, don't you just sit there and cry the whole time?" 

The truth is, I don't sit and cry. The discipline of writing grants me access to powerful experiences while allowing me to suspend many of the internal emotional touch points that might invoke my own tears. It’s a good thing, really. Because if I were to recapitulate some of the more painful incidents over and over - it would undeniably cause some psychological harm. I write, in part, to heal what has been hurt - not to soak in it.

Do other writers, like surgeons who practice keeping an emotional distance from their patients, also occasionally stand at arms length from their subject matter once they start to compose? I try to imagine the great Chilean poet and Nobel Prize recipient, Pablo Neruda, writing the words from his exquisite love Sonnet XLV:

"don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart."

These words summon feelings of physical passion and manifest despair. Did Neruda relive that torment as he composed? Or did he reach into his heart's memory and call forth the vital essence - but take care not to reopen an old wound?
 

Clearly, to share about our lives - the joys and sorrows, the celebrations and the losses - we hold the initial event in our hearts and minds. The longer a story lies in wait within us, it is shaped and (perhaps) tempered by reflection and time. But when the moment comes to tell the tale, the poem, the song -- to actually put it to the page - the call is not to personally re-live, but to convey it with such acuity that others can also feel, understand and in many ways share the experience. Thus, we become connected in ways we might not otherwise have been, and we learn, grow, empathize, feel a little more seen and hopefully, a little less alone. 

It’s a good thing, really.

Thanks for following. Have a peaceful weekend ~ mlp

“I've learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou