poem: a break in the rain

raking the (deep crimson) maple leaves
during a break in the rain —
the (bright green) rain-swollen moss
is happy to see the sun again
too

pbj

Growing up, a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich was one of my lunchtime favorites.

I don’t know why, and I don’t even remember when, but somewhere between my teenage years and my 50’s, I stopped having jelly in my peanut butter sandwiches. Once every long while, I would even buy a jar of jelly, but then never actually open the fridge to get it when making a sandwich.

Then one day recently, and again I can’t explain why, I went ahead and added jelly to my lunchtime peanut butter sandwich. It tasted so good, I actually said aloud, “Why did I ever stop doing this??”

poem: summer moon

summer moon rises late:
the waning crescent carries
tomorrow’s morning

It used to be, before clocks, that people could tell time at night by being aware of the phase of the moon. The lighted part of the moon always points toward the sun — as an easy example, a full moon rises opposite to the setting sun, is at its highest point at midnight, and sets at sunrise.

One night, after a hot day, we had stayed up quite late waiting for it to be cool enough to go for a dog walk. As we walked, I noticed the crescent moon rising in the east, a thick curve with upturned points, and I realized that meant the rising sun was trailing  not so many hours behind it. And the light I was seeing in that crescent was actually tomorrow morning’s sunlight, already giving a hint of the new day’s coming heat.

last day of staycation

One final “home project” for this last day of our staycation week: weeding the driveway.  It’s pretty hard-packed pebbles, good for absorbing the winter rains, but over the years plenty of tiny weeds, clumps of grass, etc have taken root. It’s warm but not hot today, so I put on a sunhat, start the poetry podcast playlist on my iPod, grab a bucket, sit down on a short stool, and start picking.

Every few minutes, having pulled every weed in reach, I shift the stool a couple of feet and continue. It becomes a rhythm, practically a meditation.

Some oregano from the herb garden in the corner by the sidewalk has started to put out new sprouts into the driveway. I decide to leave them alone, and let it continue to spread where it can — I’ve noticed a pleasant Mediterranean crushed-herb scent lately whenever I get out of the car, which seems like a good thing. The white and purple clovers as well, I leave alone. The bees like them, and I use the green strips as a target in the rear view mirror when backing into the driveway.

book review: m train

I read Patti Smith’s “M Train” after it was mentioned approvingly by my friend Irene, but I knew basically nothing about it before I started. As I read it, I never knew what was coming next, other than each chapter made the ones before it even deeper and more meaningful. Even the cover image took on multiple meanings from the first chapter to the last.

“M Train” is a very thoughtful and moving series of sketches on memory, travel (physical and mental), coffee, people, culture, reading, writing, photography, dreams, and time. The primary timeframe covers roughly two years, before and after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but this is a memoir told in non-linear threads and retrospective fragments, almost “unstuck in time”, tied by themes that are sometimes only clear in retrospect. In space, it journeys through Pennsylvania, Detroit, Tokyo, Surinam and French Guiana, Paris, Tangier, Spain, Mexico, Berlin, Iceland, and London.

It also provided me a reading list, from the many authors she mentions who are important to her: Isabelle Eberhardt, Mohammed Mrabet, Jean Genet, Max Sebald, Dinah Mulock, Haruki Murakami, Anna Kavan, Paul Bowles, just to start.

This is the first book that ever made me read each chapter at least twice, and go back to reread from the start every few chapters. It is so well-written — sometimes melancholy, often humorous, always well observed, self-aware, and honest — and full of meaning and interlocking thematic callbacks, I wanted to stay immersed in her words at every step. And even then, at the very end the smallest revelation made me reassess the opening pages, and eagerly reread the whole book again with an even deeper level of understanding.

To my mind, the unspoken but ever-present core of the memoir is loss — what you lose and what you retain after loss. For Patti Smith, her many losses include a black coat, a child’s toy, a spouse, a favorite book, a literary hero, parents, a coffee shop, a house, an envelope of treasured photographs, a beloved brother, a “regular” table, a neighborhood, a rare opportunity, a tree, a boat, and a camera.

But loss is not an end. Loss is not all there is to life, but life will always include loss, so we need to learn how to lose. Not with denial, not with avoidance, nor despair. As Smith recalls all she’s loved and lost, she makes connections, appreciates the experiences, mourns deeply, cherishes memories and keepsakes, and begins to build the future after loss. Continue to “do” and make and create and live, even knowing that loss will follow.

Describing Haruki Murakami’s book “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles”, Patti Smith says it is the kind of masterpiece

“where the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. Devastating books. I finished it and was immediately obliged to reread it. I did not wish to exit its atmosphere.”

That’s how I feel about M Train.

M Train, by Patti Smith. Published by Alfred A. Knopf (2015).