Four Blue Eggs – Page 2

June 30, 2016

The Beauty of Faces

Babci’s recipe, mom’s hands, Amy’s poems.

Josephine Nawocki

Mothers in Law

1951

South Colony

Babka

I eat the bread with raisins and some butter
remembering how I first learned to knead it.
My mother’s hands would shape the bread

in careful mounds, the counter floured
in a dusting, light as graying memory.
I mix the dough with raisins and some sugar

moving the moist glob with my hands.
She’d warn me not to knead too gently,
her hands would show me how the bread

should give and tug, like elastic,
then surrender; let the yeast begin
to tease the bread with flavor and some nurture.

Standing in the kitchen, the light streams in;
the heat takes over with deft precision,
my mother’s hands would ease the bread

into awaited sleep. She tells me now
to let it sit, give it time, watch it rise.
I eat the bread with raisins and some butter.
I long to see her hands rising in my own.

~published in Potato Eaters, Finishing Line Press, 2008

The Beauty of Faces

We hold tightfisted to the beauty of faces
because photographs have no sound
unless we tap into the orchestra behind them,
try to hear the family’s voices piped
and whistling the day they were recorded
as we can only imagine how glaciers
moving in and out of the landscape
create sound spacious enough to crack
the horizon. So, too, the hiss and spit
of the northern lights must be dreamed
because our ears are inefficient
as old telegraph wires.

So the house
on South Colony Street carries
children’s laughter up the front stairway
sloping toward the kitchen
where Josephine’s peeled oranges hum
like music from the Victorola
filling the heart with remembrance and history,
pulling toward a place called home.

~published in Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2014

June 1, 2016

73

From Four Blue Eggs, published by Homebound Publications. Celebrate 5 years independent publishing, order your copy today, and give it to your mom.

On My Mother’s Seventy-third Birthday

The hike is pleasant; the trail markers
are new, ferns and mountain laurel bloom
along the path. A soft whispering breeze
says something about remembrances
and a flimsy gasp escapes from my lungs.
Wishing for its own voice, a trickle of water
inches down a slope of jagged rocks as if
wanting just to touch something, however cool.
In a clearing, I see across the rounded tops of trees
into the valley and into the complex
gathering of green—the heart of June,
new and curious. Yet, everything seems
to be empty. Despite the emeralds
all I spy are gaps; rifts appear where leaves
and bark separate, the gulf between earth
and sky is full of ever-present grey stones.
More than a half-life has passed
since we wondered whether the hair
she was losing would grow back black
or peppered with white ash, but I cannot
remember what we decided. Memory
in its detachment, is as insufficient
as a summer waterfall.

Ferne C. Tandy Nawrocki

Forest Dwellers

May 19, 2016May 19, 2016

Thinking

The Thinker as Poet

Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens

—Martin Heidegger

How like a whisper the wind
engaging the cup of my ear.

How like a shout these echoing
passages filter northwest to southeast.

How like a growl the rustling leaves request
channel from shadows to true

existence.

How like a thought disappearing
into thin air these pages ruffling beneath
my pen beneath a passing sun
beneath the loud, enchanting

chimes of Sunday in spring.

This poem appears in Four Blue Eggs, published by Homebound Publications in 2014. Make your purchase of the full collection here.

January 7, 2016January 7, 2016

The True Weight

West Highland Way, August 2011; a little tough, a little glorious

eric in pain

The True Weight

We make a list of all our favorite moments—
best hikes, finest meals— skipping
over the hard parts—when boots filled
with muck and rain froze our hands
and spun through the plastic
of our water-proof coats, each cursed step
you suffered through pain without ever
surrendering to sighs. Cataloging
the singular bluebell doesn’t really

tell the whole story. The tiny tear-shaped
flower pressed between “A Dream” and
“Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald”
in the pages of Robert Burns
does not relate the true heft of that volume—
the pages, browned and frayed, turn easily
one at a time but bound together
they hold the true weight of the poet’s words.

So too, yellow broom and wood sorrel
decorating the ascent through Glen Nevis
or the heather spilling lavender toward
the modest peak of Bien Inverveigh
can never be summarized
in one sprig of tiny rainbow blooms.

From Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2014

November 22, 2015November 22, 2015

Rusting

IMG_20150521_135555

From Four Blue Eggs

Please add Homebound Publications to your list of stops for holiday shopping. Winter Sale–25% off! Finish 2015 off with a book in your lap.

How to Say Goodbye

The eighth month buzzes
through lichen days, dry
and hot; mud pools sweat
from the long-ago decadence
of rain and frogs plop like ice cubes
into this imagined summer drink.

Badges of mica shimmer
in the sun-bathing rocks
and the thirsty earth sends
missionaries—brown mosses
crunching underfoot; leaves
absorbing the prism, reflecting
the short, electromagnetic
waves we have come to call
green, and grasses turning
now, slightly away as if
to say, enough, spreading
chlorophyll cylinders
to catch a dreamed of
rain drop. Even crickets
sing with parched voices;
their constancy interrupted
by an intermittent hiccup;
small bow legs pause to rest
and then return to syncopation.

It’s too hot for human flesh:
our scales have fallen off,
and our naked, unprotected cells
do not photosynthesize.
We are much like sticks
fallen from hardy oaks,
vulnerable to the breakage
of heat. But there are promises, too
here in this parched world:
of shelter, protection, the sip
of a cool night, the awe of witnessing
something of change; promises
of relief if only we hang on until
our reddest moment, after we’ve turned
everything to sugar and can let go
knowing winter’s white can hold us.

October 7, 2015October 7, 2015

Writers in the Housatonic Classroom

Thanks to Peter Everett and all the students from Housatonic Community College for inviting me to speak and sharing their ideas about point of view, perspective and crafting a voice in poetry. Special thanks to my former student James Novoa spending your day off with me and for snapping a few pictures. Videos to come.

September 27, 2015September 27, 2015

A Great Deal of Company

A wonderful gathering at Nomad’s End put me in the mind of this poem from Four Blue Eggs. Thanks to Ann Nyberg, Eric D. Lehman, Leslie Browning, and Andy Long, Jim Lampos and Michaelle Pearson, John and Denise Surowiecki, Jose Cabrera and Michael Doran.

A Great Deal of Company
~from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
After the storm, the loneliness
does not evaporate. A half-day trek
to the shingled cottage through dunes
ripe with coyote tracks and unfriendly
dwarf pines means another week in isolation
with only the oily pigment of August
and the acrid stink of turpentine
to argue with. Even when the sun
in its naked, unforgiving callousness
ventures out again, holes in the atmosphere
remain. It could be worse.

A fourth trapped mouse rumors
to be still alive behind the shack,
and the ghosts of bums and poets ricochet
around the creaky loft. These, anyway, are voices,
consolation for the blank canvas in front of her.
A still life of bowled fruit decays in the charcoal
of her mind. First the brush must dip itself
into the clear water where the muses bathe,
but the well coughs up only the red iron of earth.

Once the mottled conglomerates
of sunset arrive, dinner is made; the wood stove
sparks against a damp log, the unswept floor
calls for a broom, and the burden of idleness
finally exhausts her. She dunks dry bristles
into wet, sandy paint, spreads black onto white
and forges a scene: stick figures walking
in the terrestrial moonscape of dune summer.
A blue crescent of water loops off
the feathered page, blurs past beach grass
to the deep, ample surf, its shores crowded
with the blinking eyes of sea gazers, each
with gravity ’s sadness salted to one brush tip.

June 23, 2015

Gardening Blues

This poem appears in Four Blue Eggs, available if you click here. A few more clicks and it will conveniently appear in your mailbox or on your doorstop.

Arboriculture

I’m sure the red mulch
spread beneath the dormant azalea
has in its loamy peat the macerated remnants
of a massive Louisiana cypress.
I know it in my bones.

Somewhere in the swamps
of Atchafalaya, an ancient
colossus towering hundreds of feet
fell with the unheard echo
of a stolen temple bell. The harvested

trophy died again at the mill,
chomped to confetti by the grimacing
false teeth of a machine. I suffer
the russet sin with my arms elbow deep
in agriculture as I distribute
the ground cover around sweet william

and verbena blossoms in the front yard.
I’m hardly as wicked with those;
their plastic trays were purchased
from the farm stand where tiny, ripe
organic strawberries pleased my lips

and sour cherries melted like wine
lozenges in my mouth. I spit the pits
out the car window on the drive home.
But I am wicked to the core
and today, the supermarket is closer

to the mail drop and the library
where mediocre books, half-read
are overdue, and those bags of the dirty fill,
stacked on the concrete walkway near the store
seem so utilitarian, so earthy

and convenient, plus I hate the weeds
that the bag promises to squelch
and the neighbor, with her elegant
foxgloves and geraniums is really
the one to blame for this. But I cannot

loose the swamp cypresses
from my mind, these conifers, these
sacred fellows holding the soil in
with their gracious roots, exhaling
with delicate silence. I feel like God

doling out the flood waters
with bloody hands handsomely disguised
by garden gloves. I am a fraud, a pirate,
and when the levees break again
I will sink into a counterfeit soil and drown.

June 1, 2015June 1, 2015

Happy Birthday

This poem was originally published in Four Blue Eggs, which is available from Homebound Publications (ON SALE) as well as on Amazon (paperback or e-book ON SALE!). Please consider purchasing a copy or downloading it for your Kindle or Nook and enjoying the poems on a summer day. In these transitional weeks between mother’s day and father’s day, you can read poems that honor family, nature, renewal and stamina. Enjoy. Buy a copy for your mom. This poem is for my mother, who’s birthday is today, June 1st. She’d be 72.

On My Mother’s Sixty-sixth Birthday

The hike is pleasant; the trail markers
are new, ferns and mountain laurel bloom
along the path. A soft whispering breeze
says something about remembrances
and a flimsy gasp escapes from my lungs.
Wishing for its own voice, a trickle of water
inches down a slope of jagged rocks as if
wanting just to touch something, however cool.
In a clearing, I see across the rounded tops of trees
into the valley and into the complex
gathering of green—the heart of June,
new and curious. Yet everything seems
to be empty. Despite the emeralds
all I spy are gaps; rifts appear where leaves
and bark separate, the gulf between earth
and sky is full of ever-present grey stones.
More than a half-life has passed
since we wondered whether the hair
she was losing would grow back black
or peppered with white ash, but I cannot
remember what we decided. Memory
in its detachment is as insufficient
as a summer waterfall.

May 15, 2015May 15, 2015

Riverwood Poetry Series

I had the pleasure of reading at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford yesterday, May 15, for the Riverwood Poetry Series. Joining me was poet Jasmine Dreame Wagner. It was so great to meet her and get to know her work. Both of us were invited and introduced by my good friend, David K. Leff, host of of the evening’s events.