Above the Eastern Treetops, Blue

Dear Libby Falk Jones,

I am so happy to hear that you are publishing a new book of poetry!

Publishing is an amazing thing really. I have spent the last few years facilitating publication, both print and online. Publication, I have often said, is a public form of communication. It is the transfer of ideas from one individual to another using some medium of exchange.


When that medium is poetry, well. . . the communication is pretty special. The poet condenses and distills ideas and then communicates and publishes abroad. The words become powerful, like nectar, like espresso, or like a dagger.

I love this poem that you have allowed me to post here.

October Tenth: For My First Son

At a surprise T’ai Chi class (the yoga
            teacher was sick) I breathe in, hold,
                        breathe out, willing my ribs to

expand, focusing on the knot
            in the floorboard, circling my hands
                        over the energy flame in my navel

as eighteen years ago today
            I panted your life into life,
                        my fingers circling my knotted

belly, my focus down
            and out, my core expanding, my
                        center sliding forward, until

there you sat, upright
            in the doctor’s palm, your arms
                        circling the universe.

                                                —Libby Jones

Again, congratulations on your new book: Above the Eastern Treetops, Blue, from Finishing Line Press!

Betsy

Dear Paterson Project

Dear Paterson Project,

Some of us already knew how wonderful this poetry is, but nice to see the recognition grow!




The Chapbook Poets Online

Congratulations.

brd

Lenten Lands

Dear Conversely and T. Azimuth,

I know that I once said that I don't write poetry, and I don't anymore, but this is very old, and never shared publicly before.

I have given up the United States for lent, at least so far. And here in this far away land of Budapest, Hungary, I am thinking of lent and giving up and being far from home.

Lenten Prayer

Alpha, Omega, Ancient of days dawned ashen,
This we bring to you.
The starting of it, later, the ending of it,
And between. . . dark, dank.

Lent, not holy, but desperate and full of stiff
Desperate measures,
One paralysis leading on to another.
No sleep, nor eating,
Choking on the idea of food or warmth or rest,
We sink under the weight.

It was Lent when Judas tossed his coins, felt the weight,
And hanged himself.
Those cords slipped so easily round the guilty neck,
The paralyzed neck
Of one whose sin so beset him that hope, too, fled,
He, left with just rope.

And I also, before dear Alpha, stand proscribed.
“Anathema” sounds, loud.
Sin has so beset us.
Eaten us empty.
We'll feed it no more.

. . . No eating in Lent. We'll feed it no more.
Starve it.
Tear at its clothing.
Let it be naked in the cold, wholly exposed.
Shake it from sleeping.
Give it not a wink's rest in Lent to gather strength,
This sin filled body.

And before Omega come, not as a Judas,
God, not as Judas,
Though our betrayal is as complete and as real.
But tossing us down
At Lent's end, with Peter, lonely, clasping your feet,
Begging, forgive us still.

Peace,
BRD

Uncle Bobby and Billy Collins' Forgetfulness

Dear Uncle Bobby,

Will you be coming to Mom and Dad's 60th Anniversary party? I hope so. You and I always got along so well. A medical doctor, you were always smart and in charge. You were gruff and straight. I liked gruff and straight. I was straight too and I think you liked that. You and Aunt Lillian were so different from Mom and Dad. I wish she had lived, for you surely would have enjoyed 60 years together, loving and fighting all the way.

When the lawyer called to ask me to be your financial guardian she said, "He's such a sweetie." Had she ever met you? You are a lot of things, but sweetie? I don't think so, even now, when what you had for breakfast is hidden under cloud cover. No, not a sweetie but you loved well and you surely loved Aunt Lillian, whose face, I imagine, is still very clear and young in your mind.

The last time you visited our house you enjoyed spending time with our old dog Annie. Now she was a sweetie. You loved dogs. Your medical hands would examine her over and over again. And they would stop in fresh surprise each time you felt the cyst above her right eye. Annie is gone now.

I hope you'll be at the celebration. Sixty years is worth celebrating. But I understand if you can't come because 93 (is that how old you are, I forget) means lots of travel fears, and other fears, like stumbling, and wondering what the name of your wife's sister's daughter is.

With my love,

Betsy
This poem entitled Forgetfulness was written and read by Billy Collins. The Animation was created by Julian Grey of Headgear.

Requiem for the Doomed

Dear Wilfred Owen,

How is it that we, as a people or as individuals, globally, or singly when standing on a hill under the sun, find it difficult to give up warring? Why is the other cheek so rarely, no matter our religious affiliation, no matter how replete our wealth, no matter the level of our education and experience, no matter how inane the complaint, our response? No, it seems our cheeks must be defended at all costs.

So, we strap our powers upon our thighs and strut. And oh, the strutting does at times seem almost right, upon the rubble in the squares of New York, with bull horn and an eye on the, (how did you say it?) “the arrogance which needs [our] harm.” And with careful preparation, we, for the fight if not for the peace, and with careful preparation, we, for the beginning, if not for the end, so with careful preparation, we, for the death if not for the life, we spy the enemy by satellite and begin to “beat it down before its sins grow worse.”

So we the people, arbiters of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unite as Eves, and say,
“Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.”

And when he began “his spilling mess-tins” from our own hands, were we surprised?

So now we vote to still the carnage, long after the Pandora of this engagement has outted her box and begun it’s filling with the men and women of the 278th from next door and down the road in Davis County and Tulsa and California and Windsor Castle and Baghdad and Bagdad and Bagdad and Bagdad.

It is never too late to hear the poet. It is never too late to stop whistling while the scythe shaves. But, dear God, it is also never too early.

Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet Saeclum in Favilla,. . .
Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla,
Judicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce Deus.

Wilford, The world should thank you for your dying words. Oh that we would hear them now.

Betsy



Note: Wilfred Owen wrote the poetry, (mostly unpublished before his death on the battlefield, just a week before the armistice that ended WWI) Anthem for the Doomed, that shaped Benjamin Britten's pacifist musical statement entitled War Requiem.

Writers Writing about Writing, Right?

Dear Billy Collins,

Some of my favorite writing is that of writers writing about writing. But you have taken that a step further, a poet poetizing about poeting.

The other day I read, I don’t remember where, (Where would that have been? Online? In a bookstore? Metropulse? Not here.) I read a passage by John Lennon that brought you to mind. He talked about wondering why people in his life didn’t notice how special he was as a child. His observation was a bit like yours in You, Reader from The Trouble With Poetry:

I wonder how you are going to feel
When you find out
That I wrote this instead of you.

Is writing, and especially writing poetry, a competition of some sort? Are we, writers or aspiring writers, really so self-absorbed that we think that it is only we who see the beauty and must announce it, teletyping it out across the wires, racing to say it first, to break the news. . . Sumer is icumen in or. . . the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. Do writers write to write or do they write to be read, or perhaps, (ah, less worthy than we thought) do they write to write better than other writers?

Certainly, our greatest writers have left behind a trail of evidences about why, after all, they are writing. Annie Dillard describes the writing life as if an architect, "laying out a line of words." Welty wrote and not satisfied to tell us just about her writing beginnings, told us both what she would and would not advise.

But, this is your life and you have the pulpit, should we criticize you for using it? No, for we wish to hear your words, see your visions, look out your windows. And after all, you are right that:

The clerks are at their desks,
The miners are down in their mines,

but

The poets are looking out their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Thanks for writing.

Betsy

Why I Don't Write Poetry

Dear Professor G.,

I wish you hadn't said you liked my poetry and then denounced it in one visitation. You, in casual khaki, saying "This is very good," and then when I was almost convinced that, perhaps, I could say something, whispering. . . what was it exactly? Did you say that you would like to lie with me?

How to Debase a Person in Their Youth. Is that the title of the book you eventually wrote? You with a fine house on the lake, a wife, a wine cabinet, and a child almost as old as I was?

Tonight, when I look back over my shoulder, it is still with a twinge and with a notebook empty of the poems, good or bad that I might have written, had you not convinced me, that afternoon, that I was not a poet.

I was sorry when that placid little Alcyon Lake was mentioned in TITLE 33, CHAPTER 26, SUBCHAPTER III, § 1324 of that clean lakes act because the trends of water quality in that lake, including but not limited to, the nature and extent of pollution loading from point and nonpoint sources and the extent to which the use of lakes was impaired as a result of such pollution, particularly with respect to toxic pollution.

Had you thrown your other bodies there?

B

The Mystery of the Soul: Symbol and Salvation

Dear Psyche,

I’m having trouble moving my thought processes along in a clearly discernable way. Last night I realized that the best thing to do would be to try to say it and have you and anyone else who wants to try, rip it apart and then I’ll put it back together again.

Let me draw a picture.

God waited around for Moses to die. He didn’t rush the process and I think it is because God likes poetry (hence God would no doubt be entertained by the Paterson Project) and waited around for Moses to speak to the end of his last “Ha’azinu,” his last proclamation of a “Shema Israel.” In a way, it reminds me of John the Baptist’s death question to Jesus. “Are you really the Christ?” But Moses rolls it out more, beginning in his own voice with a proclamation of God’s name, “Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just.” But he turns the voice of the poem over to the Rock, seeking confirmation to the earlier “Shema Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” And the Rock doesn’t say, “hear”, it says, “See now that I myself am He! There is no God besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.” And then Moses dies.

And then, Joshua begins. And the folks of Israel are ready to enter the land of dreams. And this part of Scripture is where I, too, begin in piecing together my picture of the human soul. The children must cross the River Jordan in order to enter the Promised Land. Of course, I don’t have to talk about the salvation symbolism that has splashed out of that river. The whole party of Israelites went through the dry baptism of the River Jordan led by the covenant of God. And when they had reached the other side, Joshua chose 12 disciples and sent them back out into the riverbed to gather memorial stones. Those they brought to where they lived in the camp. And Joshua made a pile to serve as an eternal reminder.

That pile of rocks, for me, describes the human soul. Our souls are monuments to the salvation of the Lord, the Rock of our salvation. The salvific act of crossing the Jordan is one thing and it is a miracle of God and has to do with the essence of our beings. But the composition of our eternal souls is a rock collection that memorializes for time and eternity the existential affirmations, happening moment by moment, to the salvation that enlivens us.

The other symbols of Scripture that speak of soul are similar in their multiplicity of form. The children of Israel themselves are a picture of the soul. The grapes of the vineyard. The molecules that make up the baby being born. All have unity and diversity, singularity and multiplicity intrinsic to them. The soul is not a singularity.

Believe it or not, this is where I begin my thinking about exclusivism. And I'll continue this line of thinking another day.

B

Out of the Debris

Dear Rukshani Weerasooriya,

I have enjoyed (is that the right word? I don't think so.) reading your poetry. My sister Debby gave your book, Salt to me for a few days. It is very good. Out of the Debris is very touching. On the WriteClique.net site you have titled the work Tsunami. I understand that, but I prefer the title you used in Salt for I pictured so many places, Pakistan, New Orleans, Iraq, and Sri Lanka.

I appreciated the words of Lance Corporal also:

"I'm tired
It's midnight.
I'm propped up
Against the mud
Like a cannon gun,
To fight
The battles you
Criticize
From behind
Your trenches
Of ink.

My blood.
Your right.
That's not so hard
To rationalise,
When I'm out here
And you're safe in there.
Your sovereignty
Well intact.

Our skies are not the same.
Mine and yours.
Mine is black.
You've taken my stars
Away.
Away.
To stud
Your darkness
With my light.

I was like you
When I signed my name.
Just a father,
A son,
A lover. A friend.
But today
I am a coin in your
Treasury of blood.
Cold, worthless blood
You so casually
Spend."

More people need to be able to read your thoughts. But I couldn't even buy this on Amazon.

Email: pp144@isb.paknet.com isn't enough of a marketing plan for you. Are you working on it?

Betsy

Dear Caleb,

Thank you for letting me publish your poem on my blog. I think it is stunning. I meant to comment, but no, I shall let it stand alone. Later, perhaps, I will write.

Offering
-For a minister in Loudon, TN

You imagine her looking out
from where you look now,
the chapel dark and soundless
but for the gnarly oak
pawing at the shingles.
You fear the last thought
to sizzle through her head
before that bullet was you.
A step from where she was raised
to new life, she fell last night,
our wounded Healer hanging behind.
The baptistry rippled.
Even the ears of angels rang.
You dip from the tranquil pool,
cradle each drop that is poured
out behind the pulpit,
the two elements mixing
like they might have wept
from the crucifix’s side.
At this altar you have honored
the body and the blood.
Where feet have been washed,
you bow now to scrub like Christ
what you can from this stain.
O my mother, my sister,
the blood is still cleansing,
the water still holy.

-Caleb Brooks

Copyright 2006--Caleb Brooks

For the Women in My Daughter's Class

Dear Marilyn Kallet,

I attended a reading that you sponsored for the aspiring poets in one of your poetry classes. I came, for I love poetry. I came, for I love my daughter and she was in your class, ready to read her work. I enjoyed.

I think I had read my daughter's work prior to the event. I don't quite remember which of her many poems she read that evening. I do remember the work of some of the other women though, for they caused me to think and to wonder and to write my own poem.

For the Women in My Daughter’s Class

I’m fifty years old and I’ve only had sex with one man in my life.
I suppose that sounds naïve to those of you who, at twenty-one
Think of your lovers in a row, or judging from your readings,
In a line-up.

I’m fifty years old and the one man in my life can make me rage.
But not because, after telling me he loved me (or not), he left,
But because he spits his toothpaste in the sink or on the mirror
And never rinses.

I’m fifty years old and could be convinced by you or my own imaginings
That a life of multiple lovers makes lovemaking hotter
And orgasm vitally anticipated, poignant, and quick.
Does that cover it?

And a life of practiced monogamy, me, knowing him, him, knowing me,
Me, sure, him, sure, me, loved, him, loved,
Could be less, I can see, because I’ve propensities too.
But I don’t know, for I’m fifty years old and I’ve only had sex with one man.



Betsy