We’re enormous Christopher Walken fans in our house. My husband and son often (often) do impressions of him, even when ordering food in public (aside: zero students working at area fast food restaurants find this amusing). So when I heard this lovely reading, the perfect pairing of material and performer, I thought I’d like to share it with you.
Enjoy.
This past week I was pleased to open an email from the nice folks in charge of the East Lansing Poetry Attack that read in part, “Your poem Alison’s Poem is destined for a tree in East Lansing.” Readers of my old blog may have seen this before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere here at A Beautiful Fiction, so I’ll share it now. I wrote “Alison’s Poem” on the morning of my sister Alison’s March 24th birthday a few years back. Older than me by less than two years, Alison is the firstborn of the family, but not the first conceived. I was thinking about how my mother must have felt to see her after a miscarriage during her first pregnancy, and so I wrote this…
Alison’s Poem
Clear dawn over the snow-dusted lawn
Deep gray gives way to a subtle ray
Then bright and vibrant hues chase the night
Sweet pink, then yellow—orange—green, I think
So fades cold evening to the next day
So things of winter melt into spring
The poem will be displayed this Sunday, April 26th, at 1-4 PM in the trees in front of the East Lansing Public Library as part of the 3rd Annual East Lansing Poetry Attack. Some of the poems will later be moved to city hall and displayed during the East Lansing Art Fair, May 16-18. More details on their Facebook page.
These are the first lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a poem in nine books which was particularly beloved of Emily Dickinson. I’m just diving in to my copy, an 1884 printing of the 1859 text. This quote strikes me, a professional copywriter who is ever writing for others, as a lovely, selfish thought. That is what my fiction is–writing for me, for my better self.
The scales have tipped, the tumblers in the lock have fallen into place, the dominoes are all lined up and the finger is making contact with the very first one.
What am I talking about? My next novel.
Next novel? But you haven’t even published your first one. Yes, that’s true. But writers write. And this next one, which I hope will be my second to be published (eventually), has been brewing in my mind since the day after I typed “The End” at the bottom of my last manuscript. And on Thursday night, a key plot element was birthed in my mind like a baby star and I am just about ready to really start writing.
Since early March, I have been feeding my mind a steady diet of classic literature in preparation for writing this next novel, and a few weeks ago I finally picked up this beautiful book, a gift last Christmas…
I’m smitten anew and excited to say that Emily Dickinson’s life, spirit, and poetry will get a major nod in the novel. In fact, the backbone of the story is constructed of books and poems, the kind that stay with us throughout our lives and to which we return again and again. It is precisely the kind of story the English major in me can hardly believe she will be privileged to write–one that celebrates our vast body of literature in English, makes a case for the singular importance of the printed book, and traces how our identities are wrapped up in what we read at formative points in our lives.
I’m so excited to get started, I don’t know that I will be able to wait until NaNoWriMo, which I had been thinking of attempting for the third time. And if I cheat, I simply could not wear a t-shirt like this with any sense of integrity…
And this is kind of how I feel about that shirt…
Will patience prevail? Only time will tell.
Spring is a time for poetry. And so I share with you what I wrote this morning.
One Morning in March
It is March,
still winter,
and the white sky
seeks to remind us of it,
hunching low over the bare treetops
like a fog.
Yet this day we recall
that we did not
settle upon a glacier
or the icy moon Europa,
but upon earth.
Grass,
brown and bored,
peeks from beneath
the serrated grimaces of soiled snowbanks,
so reluctant to give any ground
to spring.
Traffic lanes and parking spots
we had forgotten
grow at the margins of this white world
like the black beaches of some volcanic island
still forming.
The wreckage
of the ice storm emerges
like an ancient ruined metropolis.
Oh, yes, we say,
I remember that storm.
Only the snow made me forget.
I pick up the keys
I dropped in the driveway—
the first dirt
to work its way under my fingernails
since November.
Inside
the dog’s muddy prints
on the kitchen floor
don’t raise my ire.
I don’t sigh and say, “Sasha!”
as I might have.
We shake ourselves awake
at the birds.
Birds.
That’s right, we say
in wonder.
There are birds.
I know that our glorious three-day warm up is done and freezing temps are back, but the incredible wind today puts me in mind of this hopeful poem from Robert Frost…
To the Thawing Wind
Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.
My new writing goal is to finish the first draft by the first day of spring, March 20th. Think of it–we are just one month away from the equinox. Not that will mean anything for the weather…
Come, Winter!
OCTOBER by Robert Frost
Common Name: Fringed Gentian
Scientific Name: Gentianopsis crinita
Habitat & Range: wet prairies & meadows, along streams and lakes
Bloom Time: late summer & fall
About: I see fringed gentian regularly up at Camp Lake Louise, but I only have pictures of it from odd years because…it’s a biennial! It takes two years to bloom and, like most wildflowers, should not be picked or dug up. Since 2013 is an odd year, I was on the lookout for them on our trip this year, but it’s been a cool summer and the late summer wildflowers were not in bloom yet when we were up there.
In addition, like many other wildflowers, it depends on a mycorrhizal relationship. In other words, it can only grow where certain bacteria or fungi are present in the soil, so if you decide you are the special exception and you’ll just go ahead and take that plant home thank you very much, it won’t grow in your yard anyway, so please leave it be and bring home some nice photos instead.
The fringed gentian has been the subject of some poetry over the years, including
Emily Dickinson
God made a little gentian;
It tried to be a rose
And failed, and all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows
There came a purple creature
That ravished all the hill;
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition;
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked it.
“Creator! shall I bloom?”
William Cullen Bryant
Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven’s own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.
Thou comest not when violets lean
O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.
Thou waitest late and com’st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.
Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue–blue–as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.
I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.
and Robert Frost
I felt the chill of the meadow underfoot,
But the sun overhead;
And snatches of verse and song of scenes like this
I sung or said.
I skirted the margin alders for miles and miles
In a sweeping line.
The day was the day by every flower that blooms,
But I saw no sign.
Yet further I went to be before the scythe,
For the grass was high;
Till I saw the path where the slender fox had come
And gone panting by.
Then at last and following him I found–
In the very hour
When the color flushed to the petals it must have been–
The far-sought flower.
There stood the purple spires with no breath of air
Nor headlong bee
To disturbe their perfect poise the livelong day
‘Neath the alder tree.
I only knelt and putting the boughs aside
Looked, or at most
Counted them all to the buds in the copse’s depth
That were pale as a ghost.
Then I arose and silently wandered home,
And I for one
Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves,
For summer was done.
Reference: Wildflowers of Michigan by Stan Tekiela; Adventure Publications, 2000
Oh, March. You fickle month. You bringer of sunshine and rain, then ice and snow. You can’t decide whether to reveal the toll the winter has taken on the earth or to cover it all back up again. The birds sing, the red-winged blackbirds and robins and turkey vultures have returned, the very first crocuses have bloomed and frozen. The sap and the rivers are running, but I am sitting inside with my coffee wondering just how much longer until I can get out in the gardens and start cleaning up your mess.
Here’s a poem about March I wrote in 2007 and have been modifying ever since. I think I may have it how I want it now.
March
Month of crows
Driven rain in slush-filled gutters
All the flotsam of winter’s rage—
Empty bags whipped in wheezing wind
Parking lot valleys in the shadows of
Mountains formed from filth and snow and abandoned shopping carts
The frail sun pretends to shine
A sudden squall and all is beaten down again
But then
quietly
pushing up
through mud
comes the green
Stretching
reaching
hoping
comes the green
The sun shines stronger
the days grow longer
and all my fondest hopes of spring
see fulfillment in one blossoming
flower
Erin Bartels 
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