This ape, a fixture in the reading nook of my classroom, now sits in my study. Her gaze is so gentle and comforting, unfortunately not captured here to its fullest. The poem seemed too apt not to share.  


Nothing In Common by Freya Manfred

Sometimes I feel I have nothing in common with anyone.
I shamble through the day, dragging my knuckles in the grass,
and each new hour with each new person is a cliff I can’t climb —
yet I know I’m alive now — inside a song as deep as forever,
that stretches to the infinite future and the bottomless past,
connecting every place I’ve lived or nearly died —
and I shouldn’t worry so much about losing what’s most precious,
my simian balance, shaggy fur, bold fleas,
my plentiful fingers and opposable thumbs,
and my curious, glowing, ape-like eyes that still shine
with radiant chaos, wondrous animal calm,
and so much love, for everyone.

Dreams about you

Early this morning I awoke remembering a dream I had about the Wednesday Poets! I have been thinking about trying to start a similar group at our very active public library here in Safety Harbor and so in my dream I was explaining to a very rambunctious group how we did things in the Northeast Kingdom.
Also as Thanksgiving approaches, I am very grateful for each of you and hope your day is filled with delicious food and warm embraces.

Thanksgiving for Two

The adults we call our children will not be arriving 

with their children in tow for Thanksgiving. 

We must make our feast ourselves, 

slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates, 

potatoes and green beans 

carried to our table near the window.

We are the feast, plenty of years, 

arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it 

rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted 

to be good company for one another. 

Little did we know that first picnic 

how this would go. Your hair was thick, 

mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff 

to look over a storybook plain. We chose 

our spot as high as we could, to see

the river and the checkerboard fields. 

What we didn’t see was this day, in 

our pajamas if we want to, 

wrinkled hands strong, wine

in juice glasses, toasting 

whatever’s next, 

the decades of side-by-side, 

our great good luck.

Adrien shares this about Sharon Olds

Adrien Helm (at right) at October Wednesday Poets meeting
with [from left of Adrien] Elaine Wright, Carol Perron, and MaryLiz Riddle.
Steve Hickey stands back at the coffee table but doubtlessly is listening up.

This was in the Writer's Almanac today. I thought it was a delightful reminder for all of us about the ability to take charge of our own lives in radical ways no matter our history. 

It's the birthday of poet Sharon Olds (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1942). When she was eight years old, her teacher asked the students to write poems, and Olds handed in a poem she had read in the post office, which began: "Neither wind nor rain nor gloom nor dark of night ..." When the teacher demanded to know whether she has written it, she explained that of course she had, because it was in her handwriting. It was the first time she realized that writing a poem meant actually making it up, not just writing it down. She said: "My early influences for good writing were the Psalms, and for bad writing were the Hymns. Four beats, the quatrains, that form. [...] I didn't know until I was 55 that my craft was the craft of the Hymns I had grown up singing. I was writing in a way that felt comfortable to me."

Her parents were unhappily married, and her father was physically abusive and an alcoholic. She said, "I grew up in a Calvinist, punitive atmosphere - hell featured in the future, punishment in the present." She escaped her unhappy household at the age of 15, when she was sent to boarding school in Boston. She went on to Stanford, and after college she moved to New York City. She said: "All my life I wanted to get to the Empire State Building and put my arms around it and hang on. I'm in love with New York City. New York is so public. Every day you see a lot of strangers. And I like that. It's the opposite of a little house in the woods."

She got a Ph.D., studying Emerson, and the day she finished she decided to change course. She said: "I was walking away from Columbia with my Ph.D. in my pocket, and I was carrying a couple of children, and I was grinning from ear to ear. [...] I made a vow to myself: I'll give up all that I've learned, all that this degree represents, just to do my own work and lead my own life. What I wanted to do was not let the poem escape, whether it was right or wrong, nice or nasty." The feeling came to her as an epiphany, what she called a "vow to Satan." She had been suffering from writer's block, but the next day she wrote a handful of poems, and she didn't stop for five years.

She wrote about her parents, about sex, about being a wife and mother. When she finally submitted her first poem to a literary magazine, she was rejected. She said: "They told me: 'This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies' Home Journal." But she kept writing, and when she was 37 she published her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980). She said, "I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky."

Olds went on to write many books of poetry, including The Dead and the Living (1983), The Father (1992), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), and most recently Stag's Leap (2012) about the end of her 32-year marriage

One of the things we say to each other is that we mustn't apologize for our poems, as we're inclined to do, humble people that we are.  I think the poem below, Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver, speaks to a similar thought, but this for our very lives, not just our poems we bring to each other to share.

Yesterday I sent a friend a short video of the geese on Crystal Lake; she wrote back that she'd heard Mary Oliver's Wild Geese at a memorial service just days ago.   I told her I'd find the poem to read:  here it is.  Also I post the video of the geese on our Lake Crystal.   (You can hear the geese better than you can see them.  Maybe you can tell us what they're discussing? )   Sylvia

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean, blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.