writing

The Horses

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Horses Jan 8

Horses were the only pets forbidden on our acres. My oldest sister tested Daddy’s rule from every conceivable angle, but was no match for his resolve. Leaving the battle in her capable hands, I consoled my own longing with Breyer collectibles. My herd grew with each Christmas and birthday, multiplied between as my allowance allowed.

Horses Jan 8

I didn’t play with my horses as I played with other toys. Instead I lavished them with furniture polish and imagination, displaying them on shelves high beyond the reach of rowdy kittens and teething puppies.

Horses Jan 8

I left them behind when I moved into college, but Mother knew better. She waited until I graduated and married, until my husband and I bought a house of our own. Then she forwarded the herd to Virginia, where I welcomed them with tears and furniture polish, with new shelves beyond the reach of rowdy kittens and teething puppies.

Horses Jan 8

And last fall my oldest sister sent her horses to join the herd.

Horses Jan 8 8s

She never knew, until a chance conversation brought it up, that I had coveted her horses in our youth. As she has real horses now, and as she understands how much I treasure my plastic herd, she packed up Misty and a Clydesdale and gave them to me. So we have added two to the throng, though an unpracticed eye might never notice the newcomers.

Horses Jan 8

Whoa, December

Rae Spencer4 Comments

December 1

Whoa, December, wait one minute
I’ve hardly roused from my feasted slumber
When you start to number my days

Set clocks and worry flocks of shoppers
Lost in evergreen lots and sticker-shock
Tick tock, sweet silver bells ring the hour

As if to hurry my step into line
My dour minuet with Father Time
Stumbling on to the end

The bitter end of another year
Another calendar page, scrawled
With duty and a glitter of waste

With things I never desired
The blouse gift-receipt, creased
In haste and taped over the size

I couldn’t accept; a final refrain
After the glaze is scraped
From cold and golden morns

And oh, December, please wait
For the lights to change, for fire
To blaze through our litter of wrappings

Pause tonight among muttering beasts
In their scatter of straw, their dusty ease
From lust’s numb ache, from labor’s strain

Rest among these flight-tired geese
Mid-route, heads tucked under folded
Wings, murmuring psalms to themselves

Review: While You Blue-step

Rae Spencer3 Comments

While You Blue-step by Mary Belardi Erickson
(Aldrich Publishing, 2012)

The poems in While You Blue-step examine the verge between nature and man. Some images are ordinary while others are strange. Swallows nest in metal culverts, butterflies and weeds invade a trash heap, minnows swim under railroad crossings, and a lone pelican lands beside a barn. Trains rattle across many of the pages and water flows throughout.

Like water, the book seeps and eddies from one poem to the next. The connections aren’t always obvious, but there is a general sense of movement. Of momentum without acceleration. By the end of the book, I felt as if time had passed and wisdom had been gained, even though I had not been aware of either process.

For me, the author’s voice is subtle, almost plain. But there are intriguing complexities in these poems, which depend more on meaning than music:

“Life swallowing you       like the whale did Jonah.”    (“Whaling Song”, pg 9)

“you fling pebbles
as if equating impact with answer
in a lifetime of making all blues
a wishing pool.”    (“A stone plunks”, pg 14)

“Winter takes off its gloves and cold
snaps its fingers like a magician
giving his audience an icy look.”    (“Cold Snaps”, pg 44)

While You Blue-step is not a book to be read once and returned to the shelf. My copy will undoubtedly end up creased and scarred, written-in and highlighted. Unmistakable signs of respect.

After Mother’s car accident, I stayed in her house a few months, in Huntsville, Alabama. While You Blue-step reminded me of those months. Chipmunks lived under an old shed in her back yard, and train whistles woke me with their unfamiliar cries in the night. Then there were months of emptiness and grief, after Mother died, and I’m only just now reaching the point where the world is familiar again. I am like the leaf on pages 18 and 19:

“touching ground means finding
waters, yourself flowing from time
to time.”    (“As a leaf”)

Review: Elegy

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Elegy: Poems by Raphaela Willington
(unbound CONTENT, 2012)

In the foreword to Elegy, John Briggs begins by saying, “Raphaela Willington died on January 6, 2004, of ovarian cancer. Death became her muse in her last years.” He goes on to describe a woman of admirable strength and a poet of considerable talent.

The first poem begins: “Sometimes you wake / into silence” (“Sometimes You Wake”, pg 20). From there the book proceeds to muffle death’s dirge with birdsong and rustling leaves. The poems’ gardens are vividly alive. Zucchini and paperwhites thrive there, tomatoes and zinnias. Deer, squirrels, and groundhogs roam the pages, and “The sun is today a citadel / falling falling / yet standing” (“This Day”, pg 28).

In Elegy, death isn’t a morbid centerpiece, nor is it draped in mourning. Instead, it is herded into place as simply another visitor in the gardens. When the author finds the skull of a buck, antlers still attached, she says:

“One ear remains intact, as if listening, I imagine,
for the sound of the voice of my father calling us,
     mother and me,
in from the dusk of the garden
     at the end of a long day.” (“Endgame”, pg 45)

Later, she hears her name in winter’s approach:

“deer feasting on our hearts,
tomatoes crystallized into summer’s rubies
set in circlets of dying vines” (“Growing Seasons”, pg 76)

The foreword says, “A culture plumped with its belief in self-importance and fixated on amassing accomplishment might judge that Raphaela didn’t ‘do’ much with her life.” (pg 12) I say she did much that was remarkable, and I’m particularly grateful to her for writing Elegy. It seems to me as if she peered through the veil that separates life from death and fearlessly recorded what she saw. Then she wrote her observations into beautifully lyrical, meticulously revised poetry.

  • Find out more about the book here.
  • Six poems from Elegy were the inspiration for a song cycle that recently premiered at Western Connecticut State University. Read about “Wrensong” here.

Last week, my trip included a morning in Elora, Tennessee, where my mother’s father is buried alongside his parents and a handful of other relatives. I never met my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, and I have few memories of his parents.

My visit was intended to honor Mother’s memory, more than theirs, so I was surprised by how their headstones affected me. I became intensely curious, wandering past name after name. Who were these people? How much of them lives on, in me? My connection to these graves was strengthened by my recent experience reading Elegy, which I had finished the day before our drive to Elora.

Review: A Strange Frenzy

Rae Spencer1 Comment

A Strange Frenzy:  17 poems by Dom Gabrielli
(unbound CONTENT, 2012)

This smart, nuanced little chapbook pairs each of its seventeen poems with a quote from Rumi. Printed in an interesting horizontal format, complete with delicate artwork, the airy expanses of white space invite marginalia.

The author’s short introduction asks “From what star in the skies of the Outside do these poems gather their light?” These poems glimmer and burn with a unique light of their own, making no attempt to outshine Rumi’s timeless quotes. In fact, the poems are stripped of punctuation and mostly devoid of capitalization, as if deliberately deferential to the accompanying quotes.

Despite their unassuming arrangement on the page, these poems are refined. And, while love is the unifying theme, this is not a collection of love poems.

“once i courted a diamond / to cut my wrists / in the thunderstorm of battle / and love poured down like rain” (Poem II, page 11)

“i say me / i should eliminate it / i should stretch it out / and flatten every notion of person” (Poem IX, page 25)

“every drink they offer is poison // all the food they have is dangerous // if you do not eat // you shall starve” (Poem XII, page 31)

I’m delighted to add A Strange Frenzy to my poetry shelf, and I’m already looking forward to the moment, perhaps years from now, when I pull it down from the shelf and discover its poems anew.

  • Author Dom Gabrielli and unbound CONTENT publisher Annmarie Lockhart discussed A Strange Frenzy in this blog talk radio episode.
  • Poem II appears on the poemblog at vox poetica.