The exemplary sentence

 

I’ve been reading The Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh, and have come across so many well-written passages. Here’s one about watching beggars scavenge a mound of waste and sludge for usable debris:

“It was true of course that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for examinations; it was to those slopes she she pointed when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.”

Back in commission

It’s funny that we say “out of commission,” but rarely the opposite. In my case, I just had hip replacement surgery, and had a lot of worrying to do beforehand. I mean a LOT. But it turned out to be so much less invasive than I imagined. I was up and walking within hours, and went home the next morning. In any case, I am back, and here is your belated poem selection for the week:

Learning How to Write the Beginning

I’d want it to be early autumn,
a day like today, still green,
but gold around the edges,

our old yellow lab lying at your feet,
a Red Stripe beer
on the redwood table.

The sky would be as soft and faded
as that shirt you used to wear,
and it would be quiet, not even birdsong,

nothing to betray
what led up to the middle
or happened in the end.

by Judith Waller Carroll

Frogs on Monday

I attended a poetry workshop on Saturday, and my favorite poem of the day was by Terry Lucas, the new Marin County poet laureate. I said in the workshop that I had recently read that by writing about a bad experience one was able to shift one’s relationship to it to that of witness. I think this poem does that perfectly.

Dear Frogs of Pinckneyville, Illinois

Forgive me for all the times I forced you
into Welch’s Grape Jelly jars filled with cotton balls
soaked with ether from my father’s starter fluid can

he sprayed into dead diesel engines 
on frozen December mornings. I am truly sorry
for not throwing you higher. Please know that I wanted to

put you into orbit like Belka and Strelka, the first
warm-blooded animals to trick gravity and return
alive, but my nine-year old arm wasn’t strong enough

Continue reading “Frogs on Monday”

The Exemplary Sentence

There is a new book of Bette Howland’s stories out, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and I immediately purchased a copy. Since posting about her last year, I have come to know her son, Jake, and was so pleased to see a review of this book last weekend, and see him quoted about her. The new book contains some of the stories from Blue in Chicago, and some I hadn’t read.

It contains the same quality of writing that I loved so much in the earlier book. Here’s a sample, talking about a walk through the park in Chicago peopled by the old and the minders. I love the quality of her observation, and how she paints a picture that ends in beauty:

“They come from the Shoreland, the Sherry-Netherland, Del Prado, Windermere–hotels once famous for the ballrooms, dance bands, steak houses, now providing package care for the elderly. My favorite of these couples is an old gent with a hooked back, houndstooth check cap and plus fours and his young pregnant nursemaid. He likes to get out of his chair and push; she dawdles at this side. Her belly lifts the front of her coat; her legs look gray in white stockings. Meanwhile the great yellow maple is shaking its branches, squandering leaves. They scatter like petals. It’s raining beauty; the air is drenched with gold.”