Poems – Page 2 – Mary's Room With a View

What Can I Do?

Holiday parties bring together long-time friends who don’t keep in touch on a regular basis, so conversations often begin with inquiries about what engages us these days. Telling my friend Lynn that I had started a blog featuring thoughts as a septuagenarian, she suggested I write one on retirement. Lynn complains that her husband, who recently “retired” after 40 plus years teaching high school art and coaching soccer, has retired his regular paycheck but not his person. Soon after packing up his classroom, he volunteered to show up for any little jobs around school. He can fix anything, no payment required. There he returns many a weekday morning, in his green VW bug, its odometer brimming with commuter miles.

I sympathize with both Lynn and her husband. When I retired from teaching high school over twenty years ago, my identity felt as unstable as a leaf clinging to an autumnal oak. My daughter consoled me with her version of an old saying: “You can take my mom out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of my mom.” I would continue to behave and to think of myself as a teacher. In “retirement,” I became the nanny as well as Nana, to my grandchildren, reading them books, instructing them on names of mushrooms on our walks to the park, and later pressing their chubby palms in to dough as we kneaded loaves of bread.

While working in the pay-day world, we fantasize about retirement, especially when our backbones ache for sitting through late-day faculty meetings, or our Sunday afternoons disappear under stacks of essays in need of grading. I had two fantasies: one was to wait tables so I could still enjoy the company of others, even serve them a pleasant dining experience, but not wake up in the middle of the night revising a lesson plan to better suit a challenged student. The other fantasy was to drive a big truck, sitting high behind the wheel watching the landscapes exchange their variable beauty from one state to another. There would be no student hovering by my side to complain about a grade — the cacophony of high school pep assemblies replaced by soft jazz from the truck radio. This fantasy focused me so completely that one morning I almost missed my freeway exit to school when I saw the sign: North to Vancouver, B.C.

No doubt, restaurant servers and truck drivers would educate me on these naïve perceptions of their jobs. My husband reminds me that driving the truck is only part of the job. I would have to be strong enough to unload it upon arrival. Fantasies serve to get us away without getting away. Once retirement comes, we have finally escaped those parts of our jobs we didn’t enjoy. Yet clinging to those displeasures like a demanding child, are those tasks that actually fulfilled us. In teaching, fulfillment might be that very clinging child whose progress depended on our support. From serving others, our work and ourselves gain importance. I confess that upon leaving Woodinville High School, I couldn’t imagine how seniors unable to take my college prep English class would ever survive in college. (Time here for laughter)

Retirees miss not only their jobs but the routine that employment offers. Sure, my friend’s husband is still driving back to his old school. I walked to and from the University of Washington my final years teaching on campus. I walked down the hill each morning, stopping for a latte and scone on the way. At the coffee shop, Jackson, a garrulous Scottish baker, swapped stories with me as I bit into one of her jam-filled scones she pronounced as “Skhanz.” On the way home, I took the opposite bridge across Lake Washington’s ship canal and back up Capitol Hill. Seasons blessed my exercise with meditation on falling chestnuts and blooming early plums. In retirement, I missed that walk, though I could still walk down and around the university whenever I wished. But without a purpose? Years passed until I began offering to walk my daughter’s golden retriever down the hill and through campus, where the dog’s “I love people” expressions and wagging tail attract undergrads who miss their dogs left at home. Now the walk resumes with “purpose. ”

Routines plug us into the circadian rhythms of a day. My husband’s friend who this year accepted “forced” retirement for those over 70, is depressed. “I don’t know where to go mornings,” he said, with the grief of loss. Something needs to call us, and now it is time to listen for new voices. With time, they may speak from within.

Each Labor Day I feel called to buy notebooks and new shoes. I have not returned to a classroom of my own; however, I have volunteered for after-school homework help at the library and a couple of years tutoring in a ninth-grade classroom at Garfield High. In 2004, a poetry box I affixed to the fence surrounding our home offers a routine of selecting and printing a poem I copy each month. I email the monthly poem to those not close-by to take a poem from the box. On telling those folks this is my 15^th year with the poetry box, my husband’s niece wrote, “We appreciate the lessons and places you’ve taken us with your 15-year commitment to the Poetry Box. Roger and I would likely never discuss poetry without the Poetry Box so thank you for this gift!”

The recent government shutdown leaves many feeling helpless. Many complain, “But what can I do?” That sentiment is akin to the helplessness experienced with retirement. Our years after the routine of salaried employment may offer time to put usefulness in perspective. For me, often a poem rises from memory. John Milton, who felt his career as a writer was his service to God, lamented how his blindness curtailed his writing. From his sorrow came Sonnet 19, that concludes:

“God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

images

The Widow in Winter

When companionship comes in the hum of the Frigidaire,

Sarah spills a mound of dough on a board

swathed in flour as fine as the frost

on winter windows waiting for mid-day sun.

That noonday will bloom over her backyard,

low in branches of the persimmon tree

where feeders hang like pendulums for chickadees.

Here the dough waits for her palms pushing

it into submission, her hands and the yielding dough

in an agreed upon attraction. It wants to rise

slowly as an old hound, having curled within

its nest of a bed, yawns itself to life.

And the loaf she forms, it too knows

her longing for crusts and butter melting.

January 2019

TRADITION

We do something on a regular basis and call it habitual. But when does Habit become Tradition? Tradition is an aggrandizement of Habit that brings people together. When my daughter was eight years old, she asked that I bake for her birthday the same cake her friend Katherine’s mother made for her. Winnie Sperry, known for her famous Mother Sperry’s Plum Pudding, made a birthday cake that requires four hours to finish. Even so, this year as my daughter turned 49 years old, I made that cake again. Once during her 14^th year, I thought I would save time by making from scratch only the frosting, then using a yellow cake mix instead of the 5 eggs, 3-times-sifted, everything-at-room temperature recipe Winnie used. My daughter, clearly disappointed, complained, “Mom, how could you? That cake is our Tradition!” All it has taken over a lifetime with our daughter is for her to announce something is Traditional, and it might as well be etched in stone with gold-leafed letters.

December, including Christmas and Hanukkah, is weighted with traditions. We can easily trace traditions from lighting Menorahs or evergreen trees to Black Friday sales following Thanksgiving. Yes, some traditions have more luster than others. And we cannot judge Traditions by reason as much as a by familiarity. Today, some may be frosting cookies to set on a plate by the fireplace for when Santa descends. The custom may continue each year, long after the children have left for college. Many families either follow established traditions or stumble on to their own, without realizing a little habit or ritual grows like a child whose appetite wants feeding.

For many Traditions, a new one may hang like a leaf on the branch of an established one. Take Christmas cards. In the early lean years of our marriage, we decided to join the card tradition by making our own. My husband graduated with an MFA in printmaking, and the heavy steel presses lined up waiting to be used in his basement studio. Influenced by the etchings of Rembrandt, Allan drew an elysian image of a descending angel, etched it in a metal plate, and ran twenty-five original prints for those to whom we wanted to send our Christmas greeting. We made no commitment to ourselves or to others that there would be another the following year.

Over forty years later, this week we are sending out four hundred original prints. As the recipient list lengthened, my husband moved to silk screened prints. He completes a watercolor painting of his image. Then he cuts a stencil on a film for each separate color. There are several pigments. Next, he runs each color on every card, layering the stencils as he goes, and hanging each to dry between colors. In the early years, as he pulled each color, I would run the card to a drying rack. We were still under a hundred cards then. Recipients collected them, made special Christmas books for their coffee tables with a new page for each year’s card, framed the cards and hung them in their homes. Every time I climb the stairs from the first to the third floor of my friend Loui’s home, I follow the framed cards she has hung in increments along the stairwell. It is like climbing our history. Inevitably, we needed to trust the reproducing work to a professional with a large studio. Allan still creates the image and cuts the stencils before passing on the stencils to Tori, our third professional printmaker.

In the twelfth year, as I admired Allan’s watercolor of ducks on a frozen bay, I told him, “This one reminds me of a winter solstice poem I wrote.”

“Why don’t you copy it and include it with the card?” he suggested. Shyly, I included Winter Solstice on Quilcene Bay. Our friends liked getting a poem with the print, and so . . . fifteen years later, my poem, Thin Spaces, accompanies this year’s print.

More than a repetitive practice, Traditions can be the creative force in a marriage. I don’t know when Allan first thinks of next year’s image, though he starts on the watercolor between October and November, getting it to the printmaker to allow her a few weeks’ work. I wait to see the watercolor, sit with it for a bit, and let it take me where it will. I never ask him what he intended. I don’t tell him what inspiration ignites me. Here we are separate creative entities. It may not be apparent why this poem and this image would be in the same envelope; however we ride this Tradition on different horses set out for the same horizon.

As much as making that birthday cake for my daughter, our Christmas card, like any tradition, requires time. In addition to old friends and relatives, our list includes my Bible Study group, Allan’s basketball buddies, our neighbors to whose mailboxes we hand-deliver the cards on Christmas Eve. Then there is the Washington Athletic Club group. What started as a small gathering of early-morning athletes celebrating a Holiday Season breakfast, grew to sixty strong. Gordy dresses as Santa. After handing out our cards, Allan describes the artistic process, and acknowledges the fellowship of starting each day with a workout among friends. I read the poem aloud. Each year, we wonder if maybe we should forego the task of contacting catering, renting a room, taking sign-ups in the locker rooms. But each year, club members ask, “What is the date of this year’s breakfast? We love that tradition.” Suspending a “Tradition” can feel like desertion.

Within a weekend or two after Thanksgiving, my husband and I turn up Christmas music and sit down at the dining room table, one across from the other, while we address, write notes, and slip those cards and poems into envelopes for mailing. As tired as we are with that long sit, we are also remembering each recipient, sometimes sadly erasing the names of those deceased. We smile when a friend’s name takes us back to those early years when not having a lot of money to buy Christmas cards, we started a new Tradition and made our own.

Thin Spaces

The space is thin

where heaven and earth meet,

shallow as an ebbing tide.

Thin is winter wakening

beneath diaphanous snow

on hills seen through leafless limbs

of an oak planted in hopeful spring.

Thin is that hovering hush

before the raven calls,

a cry we know will come

with the returning tide.

The year divides itself in half,

speaking in a space without words.

Mary Kollar

December, 2018

Heron

The Heron

How do I know she senses my presence

long before her needle-thin throat

rises from ochre reeds, also thin,

bending agreeably with shore breeze?

The incoming tide hastens my spotting.

I silence the oars, letting the current carry

me to her eye, set unblinking

in a shape that might be an upturned scythe

poised in grasses not meant for mowing.

Hers is a lesson in patience,

mine a lesson in measured paces

like an elderly man

practicing tai-chi in the park.

I would not startle her to flight,

that I might be with her

together in what is timeless,

although the shoreline separates

like the division of cells

who belongs to the shore

who with the sea.

Only the two of us now,

where recognition destroys acquaintance.

I watch her blue-gray wings

lift as if exhaled from updrafts —

those wonderful wings

wider than my arms

always out of reach.

1-great-blue-heron-in-flight-brian-wallace

Mary Kollar

Rehearsing Loss

A flowering vine blooms along East Quilcene Road. Its lavender blossoms are bubbles, like sweet peas, so I have called them wild sweet peas, until my neighbor recently shocked me, identifying the vine as vetch. Walking up the road Sunday afternoon, I saw a long, flowering vetch vine winding itself like a garland around a young pine tree. The vine used the tree as a support for its growth, an attractive decoration.

I had been thinking on my solitary walk, about a recent email from a friend in Connecticut. She wrote how she is supporting a friend who recently lost her husband. Her friend’s loss made her fear how she herself would continue on, were her lover of over forty years to die. Because they have never lived together, she might not know he had died, only that he would no longer call. Where would she find support to proceed with her life without him?

As I continued up the hill that hugs the shoreline of Quilcene Bay, I practiced what I would say to her. It occurred to me that her imagination and her email to me were like rehearsals for inevitable loss. I could reply, “Live in the present.” But no one completely lives in the fleeting moment. We prepare for our futures from the time we realize there will be a tomorrow. After seventy, the tomorrow holds loss. When the Seattle Times Obituary column starts to look like our high school annual, the future looms, and it is not one where we are preparing for college.

Here is how we prepare. We call our lawyers and make wills. As we walk through our homes, we look with critical eyes at the stuff we have collected over the years: paintings and pottery, furniture willed from our own parents – settees and rockers we have not used in recent memory. Thinking kindly of the ones who will have to deal with it all someday, we may begin to give things away. My own mother taped our names on the bottoms of silver tea services. Somehow this disposition of accumulated stuff is not the most important loss for which we must prepare. The most frightening for some of us may be to lose a life-partner, a likely reality. In my mind, I imagine living alone. “ I lived as a single woman the first thirty years of my life — I can do it again,” I console myself, knowing that I will not be the same young single woman. With this practice in mind, envisioning my single self, I walk on to the crest of the hill and watch the easy, returning tide on the bay.

What we do not rehearse are the out-of-order losses, such as the death of a child. Last week, a friend whose daughter died of cancer this year, shared with our church group some experiences she found comforting. People have been coming to her to tell her things about her daughter she had not known. They tell her stories about her daughter’s teaching, and how it had made a difference in the life of their own child. Another had a funny story in which her daughter played a humorous role. Instead of maintaining what they might assume would be respectful silence about the lost one, these people comforted the mother by bringing her lost daughter to life in a new way. It is almost as if the stories rejuvenated both mother and daughter. As her daughter succumbed to cancer, my friend may have struggled to imagine how her own life would continue without her daughter’s presence, a very short time to practice loss. Now that she walks through the loss, she accepts surprising and unimagined support from others.

Will the loss of material things help prepare us for the loss of life? Recently I lost a gold chain necklace somewhere on the cobblestones of Rome. It was my favorite jewelry that I wore almost daily and perhaps had not secured properly. I was in Rome with my granddaughter. Greta and I had our own cozy VRBO apartment and had just settled in for our first night to adjust to jet lag, when I realized my necklace was no longer around my neck. We both scoured the apartment to no avail. I did not want to dampen the holiday by laying my grief on my granddaughter. I made light of it all until she had fallen asleep. Then I texted my husband back in Seattle, wailing in cyberspace about the loss, how I had loved that necklace he had given me for an anniversary gift. I may even have asked his forgiveness for being so careless in fixing the clasp. His response? “Is that all, Mary? Look now, you still have Greta.” There he was again, my support in an unimagined way.

Just as the lavender vetch intuited the supporting tree, so we too may find a way to continue growth through the grieving season. A life teaching and writing poetry supports me, for there is rarely an experience that does not call up a poem that holds me. Here is a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

Memorial Day

Memorial Day

The white lilacs intoxicate.

My shears snap off enough to mix

with newly blossomed chives,

plump and purple on their onion stems,

then finish out my sad bouquet

with columbine, resplendent in its grief.

It is a spring walk through the park

to Lake View Cemetery where I go to tell

my parents’ stone of the imminent

death of their first born.

On my path, lilac petals shed

like bread crumbs Hansel and Gretel

dropped to lead them back to home.

“It is good,” I tell my parents’ ghosts,

“you did not live to see your child die.”

I console them

knowing not the wisdom

for how to watch a brother go.

They might be on the lookout,

if our spirits hang around in

the gravitational pull of memory.

They might be on the lookout

for their son. He will be the one

whose voice is new with love.

What he could not love in life

perhaps in death he’ll find

in the largeness of space

where damages drop like broken

branches from their own weight.

City of the Lost Spring

Candytuft against a picket fence.

I planted it there,

a sprig of a thing, fifty cents of a chance

that April would return

and the sun would warm the fence

you painted in August’s heat.

Like white coins, these flowers

where I walk through the gate, alone,

my ears tuned to the words

of one more Holocaust novel,

all despair thrown up against what

spring would want me to forget.

What I had forgotten was spring itself,

some faith that it would return

after you had gone.

I looked for you in the odd places —

the tool shed behind muddy rakes,

a corner of the shed where I stored seeds.

Loss is like that, fooling recollection —

where you last set a spade

before turning to another task,

or the combination to a lock

you thought you knew by heart.

It had always opened the door.

Now this two o’clock sun

on an April day calls out

White on white –

the candytuft,

the whitewashed fence.

I close winter’s gate behind me.