My 3,000 Loving Arms Blooms. Why I like blogging. Daniel Rifenburgh.

First, a note about blogging.

I'm finding daily posting here lifts my spirits. It's the act of writing and the sense of contact. With humans. It's like having the answer, or thinking I have the answer, and getting called on, telling the class my great idea about, say, symbols in cymbals. It's the relief following a deep sigh.

(Looking back, it wasn't me raising a hand in class. Looking back, I was far too shy. Looking now, a blog circumvents shyness.)

Since July 2010, the numbers for My 3,000 Loving Arms have more than tripled. I know that doesn't entirely represent readers--some come in search of an image or hoping to see 15,000 fingers. But still.

Today is the first day of advent which always reminds me of the glee, when I was a kid, of opening the little window on an advent calendar, the bits of glitter and very Euro-kitsch. For today I googled "advent poetry" and discovered some less than stellar work and some work too overtly religious (overtly religious is often less than stellar, too, being without invention).  The title of Daniel Rifenburgh's collection, however, is Advent. And this poem, "Turf Tract," wins my heart with its literary discussion, something I love, ultimately focusing on the personal and particular, ditto.

Like poets Doug Anderson and Yusef Komunyakaa, Rifenburgh is a Veteran of the Vietnam War. Like a bad editor I almost added a bit of punctuation at the end of this poem. Duh! I do have higher angels.

Turf Tract

In Shelley's last, unfinished poem,
In Shelley's great poem which is without closure
Because the poor poet drowned in water,
in Shelley's great "The Triumph of Life,"
The last word of which is "of"
And the whole thing stops right there
While Shelley goes out to take in a boat ride
(Talk about your Lethe and Nepenthe!),
We meet, according to Harold Bloom
And Lionel Trilling, "Rousseau,
Prophet of nature, serving
As a surrogate for Wordsworth, entering
The poem as Virgil, the guide to Shelley's Dante,"
And all of this is related to you by Rifenburgh.

It's much easier, and sometimes as rewarding,
To study the bloodlines of flat-track thoroughbreds,
Such as: Raise A Bid got out of Botcha
Botcha's Bid, or, This
Is Enough from On To Glory
Gave This Is Glory, especially if he won,
But Life always wins. It's got
By Spirit out of Some Kinda Shit
And the odds are a zillion to one
(Or, is it one to a zillion, I forget)
That Life is going to win,
Going to suck you in, and Something Spritely
Is the racing name of that foal.

How can you resist her?
Who said you should?

Shelley did;
Laid his pen aside for an hour
And died, gasping water for air, air
And Life.

I sat in my car outside the track
And counted my losses.
Life lay down with death beside me
And they had the nerve
To fornicate in front of me.

I was thinking how Mar Best gave
Mon Go Fast by Mongo
And mon do go fast
But the colt, he finish last
And my money was wasted
Fast as life, fast as that,

Fast as was the track
Where the fleet hooves
Tossed up the turf;
The little clods of this our earth,
The quick, high flinging and falling of

______
Daniel Rifenburgh, Advent, Waywiser Press, 2002.

Poem: From the Dome of the Willing Firmament

I was noodling around and discovered a broken link to a poem I'd forgotten I'd written (FRiGG, 2005, link below). It was an exciting discovery, like reconnecting with an old friend or finding a sweet, cold, ripe mango I hadn't remembered was in the refrigerator. This poem took forever to write and now I see it is still too wordy in places, but so rich. I might mine it for new work. The initial impulse stems from outrage at how faculty was treated at one of those private commercial colleges advertised on the subway, this during negotiations for better pay; memories of previous jobs; experience of divinity. [Stanza vi.'s layout is spacier in the original, available at the link provided following the poem.] Thanks for reading this.


From the Dome of the Willing Firmament

i.
I work for a college owned by a corp. repped
by NASDAQ. Look at me, Lord, I’m on
the Big Board. Compare with tedium editorial,
typographical, secretarial and it’s good.
Tried working phones ten bucks an hour,
the Woolworth Bldg., October 2001.
Pain chilled air invisible. Saw through folk
walking to skeletal fear. Grief-in-the-bone.
So now that familiar Miss, Miss? Prof?
(what’s her name?) Sarai? is snug, the work
of teaching, service—subject-verb agreement
a peace accord mellifluous as the melancholic
titterwoo of Shelley’s hailed blithe spirit.

ii.
O Visitation Friend, sweet whisperer who
blessed me, 4/99 (for example). Your presence
the anointed cubicle 5 Penn Plaza. I proofed
hard copy and CDs in Marketing, used 15 mins.
a morning to write You on post-its in a spiral book.
On stickies’ colored heat I copied meanings: “surrender”
“humility” while my life played the open-ended
help-prayer like a tape looped for companionship
on a long drive. Like a Carver character, I knew
things could get better: a premise to tickle, move.
You to descend a thousand glowing luminarias
from the dome of the willing firmament.

iii.
(This corp.’s stocks soar
on waxy wings.) Tuesday we faculty vote re:
going union. The admin.’s tried
persuasion, promises and $1 million
in spin and advisement. Ferrety guys (made
men) are on-site and menacing
faculty kneecaps.

iv.
I could enumerate other times,
like when I saw eternity in
the air space, but about that
later. About me now like wet
wool on a rank day are greed
stupidity and your sportive
free will and variance of critical
thinking capabilities. What,
My Furnacey Beloved, was
the plan? We went union
(by the way).

v.
(It is possible.) (Things can get better.)

vi.
As for eternity
which I saw
in the airspace
outside the window: green
very small complete
like an Indian
miniature
of two people
in complex embrace.




Sarah Sarai, FRiGG Magazine 2005
http://friggmagazine.com/issueten/poemsstories/poetry/sarasarai/fromthedome.htm

It's Cold: walking, toughery, the female metabolism, D. H. Lawrence

It's cold outside. The month is December, I feel a barbarian invasion at the window along my bed or maybe the barbarian impulse within, to kill and skin an animal and wrap its fur around myself.

Sorry about the word "barbarian" with all its social and historical trickery. I'm reading The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, soaking up its thousand tidbits about fourth century politics, seventh century saints, the forgotten, the victims, the victorious. Point? The "barbarian" is on my bed and the cold is licking at tall windows.

I go as long into winter as I can without turning on the radiator, to keep the air cleaner and me tough. My parents would, as legend goes, leave me out for an hour a day in a baby carriage (a baby was I) in the frosty winter on Long Island so the impulse to tough it out is in me.

But when I was in my twenties and thirties I was always freezing. It was the frosty winter of Los Angeles. "Ach, young women," my mother would say, imitating my Swedish grandmother. She was onto something, the young women part, and our hormone balancing acts, not daredevil but devilish. Back then I was under exercised-one of the reasons I left L.A. for Seattle-I wanted to live someplace I could walk.

I remember freezing or thinking that was the case my first years in Seattle. I also remember walking up and down Seattle's hilly streets. I remember (to use a coined phrase) returning to Seattle after a few weeks in L.A., or that summer in the Bay Area (remind me to write about that) and needing to reclaim my new city by walking from Ballard along 45th to the U district, from Montlake to downtown to Queen Anne. That's a lot of walking and it was compulsive.

Like a cat spraying or dog sniffing. Really. Try to stop me. Even last Wednesday night when I was in Queens around 83rd Street (off the 7 train). I was thrilled to be on new-to-me streets and had to push myself to find my destination. All I wanted was to walk and explore. The area was much like any other area off the 7 train but still . . .

So we can assume my metabolism has upped and warmth isn't the issue it was in younger days. Not sure how a scientist would compare Los Angeles weather with New York weather. Not my concern.

Oh the famous walks of Wordsworth in the Lake District. Oh those D. H. Lawrence characters going for their three-hour strolls in the English countryside after a Sunday dinner. I no longer marvel but simply wish I did even more of it, walking. An hour on flat city streets has nothing on hikes in the wilds (however defined in gem-y England).

It's cold outside and my fingers have walked a few meters over the keyboard. My coffee cup is empty. Time for tea. Time to get outside again.

graphic: http://www.theaa.com/images/travel/maps/walks/Cambridge_Walks_Map17.gif