Poems – Mary's Room With a View

TOOLS

Hanging on a leather strip from a nail on the greenhouse wall is a hand spade, its handle wood, its blade a fierce copper designed to uproot the most determined weed. Rewarding my passion for gardening, my brother gave it to me for my birthday. The spade is a more sophisticated tool than I would have purchased for myself, and so I wrote him a thank-you poem, which he, in turn fashioned on a wood slab to hang alongside his gift. How often tools bring us together.

In a tidily organized drawer in the garage, my husband stores his father’s tools: a skill hand drill, several wood planes and specialty hand saws. His father was a finished carpenter whose tools have long since been improved on by technology. Nevertheless, my husband stores those tools with the same reverence he has for any memento of his father’s life.

His dad’s lessons endure in the storage shed adjacent to the greenhouse where my husband has affixed wooden pegs in measured spaces one from the other to line up all sorts of gardening implements: hedge clippers, shovels, rakes, each in its place. When my sister-in-law visited and spied what her brother had organized, she laughed out loud at the reincarnation of their father’s devotion to his tools. Like father, like son, you might conclude, but surely no different than my daily use of a small cutting board once belonging to my mom. Why have I not replaced it with a larger one? You know why.

Tools are extensions of ourselves – the paintbrush to Monet, the baton to Leonard Bernstein. Tools can be the measurement of our lives. The artist, Jacob Lawrence, was not a builder, but his paintings and prints are full of tools — tools, hanging, tools overflowing in drawers. We are fortunate to own a self-portrait Lawrence drew of himself in the later years of his life. In the portrait, he sits before an open window in his Seattle studio surrounded by tools. In his hand he holds a plumb line up to the window while looking over his shoulder at Harlem from which he came. A plumb line is an essential tool for a builder because it works with gravity to assure things are aligned. Is Jacob Lawrence reflecting on the journey of his life, looking back to see if his course has been true? As a symbol of measurement, the plumb line occurs more than once in the Bible. In the book of Amos, the Lord explains his judgement to Amos: “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel: I will spare them no longer.” (Amos 7: 7-8)

Although we most often think of tools as creative instruments, the Smithsonian Institute has an exhibition of Civil War weapons it calls The Tools of War. The Bible has much to say about those tools as well. In Micah 4:3, it is written, “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Even as I copy this quotation, my mind moves to the Middle East and to Ukraine. What more can I say that is not already in our hearts? Here is a photo of a sculpture in the garden of the United Nations, a work of art by Yevgeny Vuchetich, a 1959 gift of the Soviet Union to the United Nations. The title is: Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares. Surely ironic today.

The poet, Robert Frost, was always ready to see cruel ironies:

Objection to Being Stepped on:

At the end of the row
I stepped on the toe
Of an unemployed hoe.
It rose in offense
And struck me a blow
In the seat of my sense.
It wasn’t to blame
But I called it a name.
And I must say it dealt
Me a blow that I felt
Like a malice prepense.
You may call me a fool,
But was there a rule
The weapon should be
Turned into a tool?
And what do we see?
The first tool I step on
Turned into a weapon.

MID MARCH

		

In March I scrape a metal rake down periwinkle hill
lifting off the crisp brown leaves 
that maples dropped in their autumnal parting.
For half a year leaves lay flat like wide brim hats
tossed atop the vinca minor
and would disguise the yearning there
for purple spring.  Such fragile flowers
that want to paint the hill . . . and will
if all the leaves that warmed them winter long
are gone, as a secret reveals itself
after cloaked in silence. 

Early spring is such a stealthy time
a surreptitious mime on mid-March days
when winter would just as soon 
grab us by the collar 
and throw us to the wind.
Covert buds cling to wild plums
and we’d be done with chilling rain
if only flowers would return again.
Now ferns want clipping of their drooping fronds
and moss in thick disguise consumes the lawn.
My interventions with rake and shears
may bring spring near, may bring it here
sung closer by frogs beside the pond.  

Mary Kollar
Copyrighted 2022

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
 
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
 
Christina Rossetti

Lines my Victorian-loving father recited to me. Today, winds waft in from the Southwest forming greedy tongues on the surface of Quilcene Bay. High tide surges in as if pushed by an eager parent sending a child on a swing. Waves carry fallen logs snatched along shorelines, and those logs are cradles rocking recklessly on the incoming tide. If this January tide is high enough, logs will be battering rams to wipe out our driftwood fence, falling each picket like a domino collapsing its neighbor. Then the waters will laugh through the gaps and surge across the lawn, all the way to our front deck. In past years, we have looked over the deck’s railing at roiling salt water. We looked down and held our waiting breath for ebb tide to return.

In the surrounding woods, cedars and Douglas Firs dance as if the band won’t take a break. Ferns lean over, revealing under fronds like girls who toss their hair over their heads to dry in the sun. There is no sunshine today. January 2, 2021 blows in the New Year, and I am celebrating fresh air. Barring a brittle alder limb crashing over my head as I walk the trails, and ignoring the threat the power could go out in the cabin, I am having fun.

When my daughter was between three and six-years-old, together we took Windy Day Walks, usually on October afternoons, another gusty month in the Pacific Northwest. Holding hands and skip-walking among falling leaves and plopping acorn hats, we recited Winnie the Pooh’s winter poem titled, simply, “Pooh’s Poem” in which my little girl played Piglet to my Pooh:

The more it snows, Tiddely Pom
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom 
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom
On snowing.
And nobody knows, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
                      Are growing.

My daughter was always on cue with her tiddely poms increasing with exuberance as if we were a pas de deux. I confess that I devised the game to encourage us to get exercise on a windy day. She might have enjoyed more to stay indoors with Sesame Street. Poetry, a line and refrain, kept one skipping foot ahead of another until we were around a half dozen blocks and back home sipping tea.

“Who can see the wind / neither you nor I. ” Yes, unseen forces inspire our imagination. Today’s wind is the brushwork of the creative God, reminding me on this second day of a New Year the immensity of forces surrounding me. I am never alone in the woods or on the waters. I might as well have fun and inhale all the fresh air of a New Year.

OWNING

Raven pulls the sun down

after tribal boats

churn away from the shore

Nets descend with frantic fish

shivering in their interrupted search

for rivers from which they came

So close a destination

felt in fins and swim bladders

for remembered homes

Fishermen, father and son

from the Suquamish,

arch forward with heavy nets

Then fall back in strained pulling

upon shorelines feathered with eel

grass we chose not to mow.

When this property could not be owned,

any more than possessing the sun,

was this shore their home?

Raven repeats a shared song

lends its image to rattles

shaking in dances with drums

Gulls shriek tossing ragged wings

even after a white sun slips

behind purple hills

Everything here wants

its share of the salmon

like relics sacred as bones.

Mary Kollar

2020

Taking Notice

Mondays, before leaving Quilcene Bay to return to Seattle, I take my cottage journal on our morning Kitty Walk.

Pausing at one of the benches on the way I record the date and what happened worth noticing that weekend – the first sighting of violet green swallows investigating the birdhouses, or rototilling our garden and planting the first cool-crop seeds.

Most years, I don’t look back through the journal to see if nature progresses “on schedule.” However, this year seems so out-of-sync, I flipped back a calendar year in search of normalcy. This has been a cool April. I did not plant arugula or potatoes by the end of March, as I did other years. Am I waiting for warmth? If you read the instructions on seed packets, most insist soil temperatures must reach 55 degrees for germination. In the Pacific Northwest, that would be summer expected in spring. I substitute light for heat, counting on the lengthening of daylight to summon growth.

In any season we hear advice to slow down, pause, notice life unfolding. But like a stern mother whose advice wasn’t heeded, Mother Nature and the Coronavirus have forced us to narrow the circumference of our activity, making time for noticing. In these weeks, the media has elevated poetry to the popularity of rock music. Poets are known to take notice. Forced to touch each other only through cyberspace, we email to our friends, poems, words of wisdom, images of sunrises and blossoms.

I am fortunate to have a wooded acre and a small vegetable garden to notice in my forced slowness. Others within small, city apartments may have only a potted violet on a windowsill to watch nature unfold. For the first time, their meditation may center on the endearing way their child butters a slice of bread.

This day, April 25, 2020, I photograph one of many ferns unfurling. How otherworldly their serpentine fronds. For weeks I have passed tight-fisted knuckles in their hearts, for in late winter I had pruned last year’s large, browning fronds. Regardless of my watching, they uncurl in their own time; but I also have last April’s memory of supple green ferns spreading across the hill. Almost May 1^st, I am comforted, looking forward to where their funny, twisting dance is going.

Planting in the Year of a Pandemic

Last April, arugula greened

in fine lines, while spinach and lettuce

followed in their own leafy time.

Make a record of planting

so next year

if frost grips the soil

and black earth stares blankly back

in a year of illness,

you can look back

and say I had seeded by now.

Open the packets of promise.

If you have forgotten

the earth at fifty-five degrees,

imagine then the light

beckoning longer days,

the sun pushing gently against dusk.

In the garden soil

make a clean V in the shape

of geese migrating over the bay,

then mound the chilled dirt

like a dike in Amsterdam.

Drop each seed a safe distance

from the one beside it.

Cover them with one inch

of humus you enriched

with compost from summer grass.

Pat the seeded earth

with your own warm hands.

Composition on Birch Bark

DSC_6065 (1)

Composition on Birch Bark

This lewd peeling away

of birch bark

this shedding of old skin

this rejection of whiteness

that warmed the trunk

throughout a gripping winter.

Flagrant peels roll

from upper limbs.

March wind flaps them

like skirts of Lautrec’s dancers

imperfect skirts striated with

lichen and spots where

sapsuckers plucked

their patterned design.

But where the child can reach

sitting on his father’s shoulders

the bark gives way to eager hands

tearing off wide parchment

like linen for writing

a poem on the copper

underside, a few rhymes

to welcome spring

with words that whip

winter on its way.

Mary Kollar

WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

Unknown

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.

(Alice in Wonderland)

If Lewis Carroll were alive and residing in Seattle today, he would find the perfect atmosphere for writing Alice in Wonderland: anxiety circles around where we are going and how we will get there, wherever there is.

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” (Red Queen: Through the Looking Class.)

First, there is the upcoming Washington State Democratic primary on Tuesday, although our ballots arrived in the mail almost two weeks ago. In a city that is as Blue as any city can be, this primary looms as an important destination. Voting early left people struggling to discern, among six contenders, which best fit the ideal liberal candidate to beat Donald Trump in November. Those who suspected on March 7^th there might be fewer candidates from which to select, held their ballots close to the chest until the race fell to two: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. These voters are basking in the wisdom of their patience. The early voters feel the disappointment of wasting their vote, like eating dessert too soon, while still being passionate about the entree.

Then the Corona Virus. Seattle prides itself for so much: the home of Microsoft and Amazon, stunning national parks, an abundance of green landscapes resulting from weeks of rain. This past week, the Vice President described Seattle as the tip of the spear in the Corona Virus, for having more cases and, sadly, more deaths, than any other city in the country. Seattleites are used to dealing with affluence, rapid growth and tourists. They are not accustomed to germs. The University of Washington has suspended live classes for the next few weeks, and called home all students from their studies abroad. So too have other schools, public and private, are closing for at least two weeks. From our cottage two hours west of my Seattle church, I attended first-time online church services this morning. Prayer is necessary now, but not in a common location where many church members are over sixty-years-old, the population vulnerable to the Corona Virus.

Yesterday on NPR, the talk-show host interviewed a local mental health professional about the anxiety shrouding our Seattle citizens. What can we do to lessen that anxiety? “For one thing,” the therapist said, “ we can all stop listening so often to the media.” Yes, that is all well and good, but one is also advised to stay tuned for alerts and closures. Yep, straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But the therapist had a useful antidote to anxiety: calm, single-focused meditation. “ Take time to notice something slow-moving such as a fallen leaf drifting downstream.” With her advice in mind, I focused here on our wooded property by Quilcene bay. Join me in looking closely at moss:

Lying thick upon a fallen log

its green promise of alive

soft as the morning fog

that moistens, that invites

you to touch what is close

was always there inching along

while you were running through the woods.

Today’s close-up is moss

beside unfolding ferns,

a talisman to tuck

in your breast pocket

while the sun scorches

the fog away

opening up another day.

Poetic Moments

Poet Bill Carty opens the evening’s workshop asking, “Did anyone experience a poetic moment since we last met?” One or two writers share their moments. No one asks Carty to define “poetic moment,” as if they intuitively know one when they have it. Besides, as with all things significant, it is better intuited than defined.

For me, salmon migration from Hood Canal into Quilcene Bay; a journey to the Big and Little Quilcene Rivers to lay eggs, to fertilize them, and to die; creates a series of poetic moments beyond a biologist’s explanation. Every year, I reflect on the sheer determination of the salmon: the impulse, the mission, the harrowing journey past humans with snagging hooks, and spread nets – as well as dodging ravenous seals a hundred pounds greater than the fish’s silvery weight, and the penetrating eyes of eagle and osprey from great heights. Moses’s flight from Egypt pales in comparison.

I lean precariously over the Little Quilcene Bridge and hold my camera steady, my back against the glare of early autumnal light, to capture the thrilling swish of a spawning pair. The shallows swirl around them in mock frenzy, river water splashing upwards like reverse rain.

When the tide recedes, only the stream beds remain across the flats. What fish have not yet reached the river’s mouth, struggle up thin streams, surrounded by twenty to forty, rubber-booted people, their trousers rolled. They have parked their trucks along the road at the end of the bay and sloshed through the flats with fishing gear to snag the stragglers in the shallows. Determined to spawn, the fish have lost interest in feeding, ignoring any dangling bait, and thus victims only to snagging. Some sport.

Yet, in a way, I too am taking something from the salmon run. Within hearing distance of the fishermen on the flat, I sit on my beach with my journal open. Overhead, a raven calls, like a muse from ancient tribes who fished this bay before white intruders were imagined. I thank the salmon for another poem.

Decay

Through September’s opened windows,
comes a stench of chum rejected
from tribal nets, and tossed overboard,
rotting corpses half buried in sand
and whiskered eel grass.
I fetch a shovel and the rusty wheelbarrow
from my garden on the hill.

Where the tide retreats, September’s
light spills like olive oil
across the muddy flats.
On the beach where yesterday I swam,
three large salmon lie,
shining slabs in wasted stages of decay.

It should be easy to shovel
one into the waiting barrow,
then push it up the hill to a hole prepared
beside late-to-harvest squash.

Death’s stench softens in the salted sand.
Shovel ready, I thrust
the tool under a silver belly,
golden roe spilling like marbles intended
(in her unfinished swim)
for the cool stones of the Quilcene River.

Her agate eye– a stone too–
as is her three-foot corpse, a defiant
cemetery slab refusing to bend.
End over end, I wedge and swivel
with my tool, until feeling like a fool
flip her into the waiting barrow.

What would you expect?
Not her defiant weight,
nor the way her fragrance freed
from beach to garden gags me.
I wrap across my nose
a towel used to dry the morning dishes,
then push the little boat of a barrow
to tip it over radishes gone to seed.

I promise to visit her in spring,
when compost brims with mulching
autumn leaves and the soil is
turned for another hopeful crop.
One fish, a gift to earth, will with winter’s rain
nourish us with lettuce next July.
But when April comes,
not one flinty bone of her remains.

My Feminist Garden

I am a seventy-five-year-old poet

who writes lyrical poems

tuned to iambic pentameter.

Today, I want to write a modern poem

about daffodils I planted in October.

Some line up in a row by the split rail fence,

but more often now I plant them in clusters.

I’ve learned over the years that one flower

isn’t beautiful because she stands

next to one that is plain.

In clusters, or circles, the yellow bells

sing like a choir of sopranos.

That simile slips out from the lyrical

voice I am trying to suppress,

in order to present as post-modern.

Yet, over seven decades, I’ve learned to be heard

by suggestion, not assertion,

a voice others call strident in women.

I have endured cruel winters

like my green daffodils

standing unblossomed in March.

January tricked them with moderate rain,

so they pushed through soil

before February snow muffled their mouths.

The package of bulbs boasted

they would regenerate each spring

without my having to do a thing.

It is like a law, once passed —

say a woman has a right

to choose motherhood or not —

forever she might decide.

Yet, I return to our nation’s capital to march.

holding high a drawing my granddaughter made–

a uterus with flowers growing from within

reading Not a Political Object.

Two generations from my granddaughter,

my seed within her germinates

in colors I will not live to see.

She speaks in phrases I did not have:

sexual harassment, right-to-choose

equal pay for equal work.

She didn’t have to work at the corner drug,

where the pharmacist draped mistletoe

above the counter where I reached

for packages to deliver to nursing homes.

I am straying from my struggling daffodils,

something I do often these days,

meandering like Wordsworth in my garden.

I text my granddaughter to tell her

I enrolled in a University class:

The Philosophy of Feminism.

She texts back: Woohoo!

Spring arrives in twenty days,

but I have history on my side —

the bulbs I planted will bloom.

I will still need to pull weeds.

HOPE

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is the first green-gold bud of spring on winter’s leafless limbs. To have a word for hope is a miraculous thing, for how else could we express the force that inspires us to move forward in times of despair? Some linguists argue that without a word for an emotion, you can’t express, maybe not even feel the emotion. I disagree, but I understand the clarity that comes with being able to say, “I hope…”

Hope is not expectation, the latter assuming some planning and reasonable certainty. For example, we wait to plant lettuces until the last frost has passed so we may, according to the seed package, expectabundant produce in 58 days. Hope ,on the other hand, takes over as a word of the imagination, so we plant in April’s cool earth, regardless of knowing there could be more frosts, even snow or ice. Nevertheless, I press the seeds, little flecks, into the cool, damp soil while I imagine June’s salad.

Because it is a word of the imagination, hope reaches for the poet’s tools – simile and metaphor. Emily Dickinson writes “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” We see, in our mind’s eye, not an amorphous soul, but a small, fragile bird chirping in anticipation of attracting a mate, a bird so fragile it would be easy prey for my cat. Emily’s hope is one pounce away from extinction. Nonetheless, her poem moves to gratitude that hope comforts without expecting anything from her. True, it has none of the planning and preparation of expectation, but hope is not fragile. It holds us in our own sturdy hands above the grave.

When does Dickinson hear the hopeful bird song? She hears it in the gale or on the chillest land or the strangest sea. We are most aware of hope when our lives face challenge. It faces off against another strong emotion, despair. Hope was the flag that preceded the march of youth from Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School to the steps of their nation’s capital. Students did not march to scream their despair, like King Lear howling to the heavens. They marched to speak their young hope for a violence-free nation, and it is that hope that sings in the gale. Hope looks forward, not backward. Barack_Obama_Hope_poster Barack Obama based his drive to the presidency not on a slogan to “Make America Great Again”, but on hope. The Barack Obama “Hope” poster is an image of President Barak Obama. The image, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, was widely described as iconic.

It is President Obama’s version of hopethat connects with me in my seventy-fifth year. Words shift meanings when you enter the last couple decades of your life. My hopes are no longer so personal, though I may hope I don’t die of some long-drawn-out disease. I do know I will die, a knowledge I could shove aside in those years when my mirror didn’t offer me wrinkled skin and thinning hair. My hopes now are less personal and more universal. Having 75 years to look backwards, I have the courage to imagine 75 years forward in my absence. At a recent Seattle Arts and Lectures event, the host asked guest author Barbara Kingsolver where she found hope in today’s divided world. She replied that hope is a kind of energy she chooses to renew each day. To abandon hope, she would be abandoning her children, her grandchildren and the children of the world. Each day, as readily as pulling on her socks, she renews the energy of hope. I too renew hope in the storm for my grandchildren, for my planet. I may no longer imagine the June salad on my own dinner plate, but I can hope for food on the tables of a world where climate change has been acknowledged and ameliorated, where peoples around the world share the bounty of what each contributes.

April is almost here. I drive through the Suquamish Reservation to Hood Canal. The highway dips between stands of evergreens spaced by deciduous trees now wearing a yellow green hue, those fist buds on spare limbs, limbs that last week were winter stripped. The windshield wipers click rhythmically to clear steady rain. Like a chant, I hear the punctuated consonance of hope, hope, hope.