The Queen and the French Teacher

The Queen and the French Teacher

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We share a birthday, the queen and I. I was born on April 21, on her twenty-seventh birthday, little more than a year from the day in February she had been crowned after the death of her father. Elizabeth died last Thursday, so we share a birthday no more.

She died a queen, that title both lifting her up and weighing her down; conveying little actual authority, but considerable responsibility; granting her unrivaled access across seven decades to the wealthy, the powerful, and the notorious, but leaving her little time or space or cause to simply be, to simply be Elizabeth.

Her death has unleashed a torrent of public opinion, her title and the unprecedented length of her reign making her a lodestone both of fervent acclamation and vehement denunciation. She is adored for performing her royal duties with decorum and dignity, with grace and humor, and she is reviled for epitomizing Britain’s dubious colonial legacy and for failing to publicly disown it.

I am not sure she deserves either. Yes, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of her unique office with a style particularly decorous and gentle and humble, but the outsized and undifferentiated adulation she is now garnering speaks more to the human need for heroes and saints than it does her qualification to be the one or the other. And, though she is heir to the burden of Britain’s sins, enchained to a past she cannot escape and constrained by the ongoing obligation to buoy the spirits of the present commonwealth by embodying its honor and dignity and pride, it is her title, her office, her heritage that merits unflinching critique, not her person.

Gloria Jean Pollard died last Thursday, in Scarborough, Maine. She and I do not share a birthday, but she shares with Elizabeth their death day. Ms. Pollard had no title, but she did have an office: French teacher. This daughter of Italian immigrants taught French for thirty years, much of it at Yarmouth High School, earning the honor of State Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in 1996. Her office granted her access to children, to human beings with bodies and minds and spirits still forming, still becoming, supple and elastic, not yet hardened and brittle, but tender and fragile and vulnerable, too. She likewise deserves praise for fulfilling her vital duties with skill and sensitivity, with eagerness and attentiveness.

The queen and the French teacher share a death day, but more, too, much more. Despite personal histories and family legacies and public personas and public perceptions that are literally worlds apart, they both died, not as queen and French teacher, but as mothers, grandmothers, widows, women. They both knew the unparalleled anguish and elation of birthing a child, the delight and heartache of raising a child, the thrill and the tedium, the unready challenges and the unexpected discoveries, the sorrow and the joy, of sharing a bed, a home, a life with a husband for a lifetime, and the unquenchable grief of outliving him.

They were both given life, as it came to them, and the opportunity to live it, as it happened to them: with gratitude or with bitterness, with hope or with despair, selflessly or selfishly, lovingly or callously. This is what matters. This is how we should judge them. This is how we should remember them, not merely or especially because of their offices, for how they performed their duties, not as queen and French teacher, but as Elizabeth and Gloria, Lilibet and Glo, as two women whose distinctive and deeply personal and ultimately simple ways of being, of simply being, are indelibly etched on the spirits of those who loved them and live on, in memory and in tears.

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Happiness

Happiness

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A piece written this morning for the Deer Isle Writers Group …

Happiness lives in the space created by all-consuming beauty, all-consuming because in that space, in that moment, the beauty itself, whether perceived by eye or ear or nose or mouth or hand, or somehow, simply, strangely known, is everything. The beauty is, is all the world to me in that moment, and I am happy, though it is not even exactly true to say that I am happy, because, in that place, in that moment, I have no awareness of “I,” the beauty, the overwhelming beauty simply is, and I am somehow gifted with briefly being in the same place and moment as the happiness that is, with or without me.

The stone, the rock, the enormous erratic, perched on the granite ledges extending into the water from McGlathery’s eastern shore, seemingly out of place, is very much in its place. It defines, commands the place, but would be other were it not in that place, that numinous space, surrounded by human activity, but regardless of it, ledges washed by the tides, visited by ermine and gulls, islands emerging near and far from the ever-restless sea. When I turn the corner and see it, when it is not just that I see it, but that in that space and in that moment it becomes the world, all the world, there is happiness.

The frenzied, but careful and ecstatic, interplay of cello and violin and piano, creates its an irresistible gravity that draws me, draws everything, into its orbit. The ears are piqued, are pleased, by the sounds, but it is the heart, the loins, the stuff of being itself, and of my being in so far as I may share being itself, that is moved, deeply stirred, transported, transformed, awash with happiness.

The waters of the creek run clear and cold and powerful, iridescent, translucent, an uncanny green, flowing, rushing, ceaselessly careening down the rock-strewn river bed bearing waters from glaciers high above on the flanks of Mt. Baker into the the ever-burgeoning Skagit River. I watch, I look, I become the looking, there is only the looking, the flowing, the sparkling, the cavorting, the dancing, dancing, dancing of the waters. And there is happiness.

I hold the two broken halves of the crusty bread in my hands and I say the words, “This is my body,” but it is not my body and not my words, and, though it is my hands, it is not my hands that offer this bread. I am, in that space, in that moment, consumed by a giving, an inviting, an all-consuming, but all-creating loving, that is so much beyond what I can give, beyond whom I can invite, beyond what I can create. I am invited into that space, into that moment, along with all who surround me in that sanctuary, and, indeed, with all who surround us in the sanctuary that is the earth. There is in that space, in that moment, a being, a loving, a beauty that fills us and binds us to each other and to the One from whom flows all the beauty and all the love and all being. And there is happiness.

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The potter

The potter

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I am of the ground
lumpy and misshapen
not yet beautiful
but in the eye of your imagining

You knead me and you shape me
the image conceived in your mind now birthed in my body
its curves and edges sculpted under the careful caress of your fingers
its form reflecting the wonder of your genius

Like the clay in the potter’s hands
so am I in your hands

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Katahdin

Katahdin

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Katahdin looms — imposing, intimidating, unnerving — its implausibly enormous bulk dominating the skyline.  Katahdin is no singularly outstanding feature of this wild landscape; it is the landscape, and all the rest — forest, stream, foothill, me — we all lurk in its shadows.

The enchanting voice of my Maine muse, Carolyn Currie, cantillates from the speakers of my Santa Fe: “Red hawk’s rising on the back of the wind and she’s circling with an answer and I finally understand how to begin.”  Red hawk’s rising.  I play the song again and again as I make my resolute approach to the campground and trailhead at the base of the mountain.  Red hawk’s rising.  It is my mantra, my rallying cry, my anthem, as I steel mind and body for the quest that awaits me.  I will not soar like a hawk on the back of the wind, but I do intend to rise.  If it will allow me, I intend to rise to the top of this fabled mountain.

Fabled, renowned, iconic, Katahdin surely is, but, today, none of that matters to me.  Today, Katahdin is not Pamola’s mountain or Thoreau’s mountain or even the mountain of innumerable Appalachian Trail thru-hikers celebrating the denouement of a two thousand mile odyssey.  Today, it is my mountain.  Even surrounded by dozens and dozens of other hopeful summiteers, I climb alone — not to conquer an adversary or meet a challenge or check off an achievement on some life list.  No, any such motive would demean, demystify, devalue the majesty of this mountain.  I climb not to overcome Katahdin, but to be deemed worthy of meeting it, of learning some of its secrets, of being welcomed for a few unforgettable moments into its numinous space.

The trail begins, beguilingly beautiful, following dazzling Katahdin Stream as it ascends gently among birch and spruce and hemlock until reaching fifty-foot Katahdin Stream Falls cascading over a series of granite ledges.  The impressive cataract is well worth the mile and a quarter hike from the trailhead.  Undoubtedly, many a casual Baxter visitor ends the journey here, contented with traversing this splendid wilderness path and rewarded by the spectacular visage of the falls.

Beyond the falls, the climb begins in earnest, ascending four thousand feet in five miles.  The trail is relentlessly steep, up and up and up, not walking a steady incline, but scrambling over ledges and boulders among scattered glacial erratics.  I feel strong and stronger yet as the path grows steeper, taking some pride as my sixty-something body overtakes more than a few twenty-something or thirty-something bodies along the way.

I emerge from the trees at the base of the Hunt Spur, the crux of a Katahdin ascent via the Hunt Trail which also serves as the terminus of the Appalachian Trail.  Steep and long and difficult, the Hunt Spur is a naked ridge of jumbled boulders — car-sized, bus-sized, boxcar-sized.  Though marked by blue blazes painted on the granite, the way up is not always clear; every step must be carefully puzzled out, clambering over and around and between the massive boulders.  The climb is physically demanding, but even more mentally exhausting.  The immensity of the mountain, the unsettling exposure, the demanding route-finding, and the unrelenting steepness make an ascent of the Hunt Spur a daunting endeavor.

And a profoundly satisfying endeavor.  I crest the top of the ridge and step out onto the Tablelands, a wide, flattish, tundra-like landscape.  I walk steadily, part of the long procession of hikers following the trail roped off on both sides to protect the fragile alpine ecosystem.  We wind our way over the plateau, pass Thoreau Spring, mount the short summit ridge, and we are there.

I am there, standing atop Baxter Peak, surrounded by dozens of other happy climbers, but still very much alone, alone surveying the breathtaking panorama — Pamola and the Knife Edge, Chimney Pond and the Cathedrals, alone steeped in the joy of this moment, alone celebrating this mountain which has now become a part of my story and I a part of its story, Katahdin, my mountain.

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blood

blood

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A poem written this morning in response to an image painted by Gebre Kristos Desta, an Ethiopian painter and poet.

Golgotha, painted by Gebre Kristos Desta
Golgotha, by Gebre Kristos Desta

Blood.
Blood red,
battered, scattered, splattered.
Is this what we do best,
build cravenly cruel machines —
crosses and guillotines, gas chambers and nuclear submarines —
to batter and scatter and splatter
blood?
Blood red,
blood of hundreds of Ukrainians and hundreds of thousands of Syrians
blood of a million Cambodians and six million Jews,
blood of three thousand New Yorkers and forty thousand Nagasakians, your
blood.
Blood red,
brightly, brilliantly red,
battered but vibrant,
scattered but brimming with energy,
splattered but pulsating with life.
Blood.
Life blood.
Life is in the blood. Life is in your
blood.

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home

home

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As soon as I cleared the last of the spruces and stepped from the needle strewn path out onto the granite ledge and scanned the panorama stretched out before me, green and grey and blue, I knew I was home. There were Cadillac and Newbury Neck, Long Island and Naskeag Point, Isle au Haut and Eggemoggin Reach and the Camden Hills. I could name them all, but it was not the naming that made this home. No, it was this space without edges, beautiful and mysterious, readily seen but not readily known, a space so much bigger than me, so much uncareful of me, yet unquestioningly including me, that made itself home. This is no house built of human hands, no hall or office where I strive to prove myself worthy. No, this is a home so much older, so much wilder, so much truer, a space, a place, where stripped of the need to perform, shorn of the need to prove or to be approved, that I remember, that I remember what I am, that I remember who I am, that I am home.

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Rhyme Time

Rhyme Time

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Three short poems written this morning playing with rhyme …

Out of the muck

What luck
Got my truck
Out of the muck
In which it was stuck

1 John 4:18

Spiders and snakes,
heights and quakes.
Strangers and failure,
Loneliness and censure.
Falling and flying,
losing and dying.
All of our years,
filled with fears
nothing can alleviate,
nothing can ameliorate,
nothing can attenuate,
but love.

Listening to Bela Fleck’s “My Bluegrass Heart”

What fun! the fiddle diddles and dances
while banjo clucks and mandolin prances.
Bravo! the bass galumphs and ambles,
as dobro glissades and guitar gambols.
Bela and Michael, Molly and Sierra,
Justin and Mark, a bluegrass coloratura.

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silence

silence

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it is not merely the notes that matter
but the spaces between them
          and the silence

four arms and four appended bows unmoving, suspended in air
the last vibrations of violin and viola and cello strings now unheard
yet indelibly etched into feeling and memory by that exquisite moment
          of silence

breath and bones and bosom seized by the sudden cry of the loon
its ebbing wail pulling water and wood and paddle and body into its ineffable yearning
yet its power to transfix, transform, transcend is released in what follows
          in the silence

it is not merely the words that matter
but the spaces between them
          and the silence

the poem speaks as much by what is left unwritten
and the sermon by what is left unsaid
the Lord is in his holy temple, let all on earth
          keep silence

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