Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Leaf Day

      Spades take up leaves
      No better than spoons,
      And bags full of leaves
      Are light as balloons.

      I make a great noise
      Of rustling all day
      Like rabbit and deer
      Running away.

      But the mountains I raise
      Elude my embrace,
      Flowing over my arms
      And into my face.

      I may load and unload
      Again and again
      Till I fill the whole shed,
      And what have I then?

      Next to nothing for weight,
      And since they grew duller
      From contact with earth,
      Next to nothing for color.

      Next to nothing for use,
      But a crop is a crop,
      And who’s to say where
      The harvest shall stop?
      — Robert Frost, Gathering Leaves

      Every year around this time in mid-November, the oak leaves finally, grudgingly release their grip on mother oak and bed down in the yard. I’m that one person in the neighborhood who waits to clean up the yard until we reach peak optimization—meaning most leaves are down. All of the neighbors are out there with their heavy machinery mowing and blowing at the first sign of a leaf dropping. And with their eagerness, the neighborhood roars like a domesticated NASCAR track. No, thank you. I don’t subscribe to the theory that a lawn should be pristine green. It’s not a golf course, it’s a suburban yard! There’s beauty in fallen leaves too.

      Any homeowner in New England knows that once is never enough when it comes to cleaning up the leaves. If you wait long enough, some leaves will blow away onto those neighboring pristine lawns (you’re welcome), but most will pile up into an increasingly-heavy mass awaiting your attention. Yesterday was that day for my bride and me. The plan was to start early and go until the task was completed. Blow, rake onto tarps, drag said tarp into the welcoming embrace of the woods and repeat. Want a great workout? Join us next year.

      The thing is, I could have paid someone to do this work. They’d have arrived with a roar that would have delighted the neighbors, zipped around the yard for two hours and left nary a single leaf survivor. And I would have sipped my coffee, casually watched them and gone off to do a workout on the rowing ergometer or some such thing. To have done the work myself may not be a noble act, or even the best use of my time, but the ritual of yard cleanup has its own reward. I was reminded of this when I limped out of bed this morning. There’s poetry in labor, when the work is tangible and purposeful. Having completed it for another year, the season is almost complete. Yet even now, looking out on the lawn in the growing light of dawn, I see that it’s covered in the holdouts that watched amused at my industrious labor. No, the work is never truly done.

    • Sunrise at Sea

      When the mild weather came,
      And set the sea on flame,
      How often would I rise before the sun,
      And from the mast behold
      The gradual splendors of the sky unfold
      Ere the first line of disk had yet begun,
      Above the horizon’s are,
      To show its flaming gold,
      Across the purple dark!
      — Epes Sargent, Sunrise at Sea

      I’m not often at sea for sunrise, but as an early bird snug up against the eastern coast, I go out of my way to find a sunrise over sea whenever possible. Put yourself in the way of beauty, as Cheryl Strayed’s mother whispers. And so I rise.

      Getting an early start to the day has its perks, but also its price—generally paid at a time night owls find hilarious. Precious night owls! They don’t know what they’re missing. What’s missing is the crowd. And in that solitude we may hear the whispers of the coming day. We may witness the miraculous beginning of a new day of light and consequence.

      Lately I’ve wondered what to do with the time after I click publish on this blog. One answer is to keep on writing. Another is to keep things the same—a measure of stability in an uncertain world. We have agency in how our day —and our life—unfolds. Is this enough, or have we only just begun? Whatever the answer, don’t waste the day away staring at the horizon wondering when to begin.

      To show its flaming gold,
      Across the purple dark!

    • And So On

      The Lorax: Which way does a tree fall?
      The Once-ler: Uh, down?
      The Lorax: A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.
      ― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

      I saw a bumper sticker on a car at a red light that was meant to goad the left. Something along the lines of: Straight. Conservative. Christian. Gun Owner. Is there anything else I can piss you off with? I looked at her in the mirror as she smoked a cigarette like she had to beat the light, then threw it on the pavement to burn out and roll around in the traffic. I thought to myself, maybe a few more things. If I ever wanted to concern myself with that level of self-celebratory misery anyway.

      We are each leaning the way we lean, however things may fall. I don’t put bumper stickers on my own vehicle, but if I did, it would be in the form of a question. Perhaps borrowing from old friend Mary Oliver, who asked the ultimate question we all ought to ask ourselves today and every day in The Summer Day:

      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?

      Plans have a way of changing, because life changes and so do the living. When I was younger I was a master planner in all the things I would do one day. I’ve learned to stop planning so much and simply do. Do something right now that tilts that future possibility in our favor. Want to write that novel? Write. Want to lose 20 pounds? Move and make better choices in what goes in your mouth. And so on.

      And there’s the thing: And so on. And so each of our days is filled with habits and ritual, on and on to wherever they will take us. Be sure to lean in to the right habits and rituals. We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle once said and this blog has repeated, well, repeatedly. Aristotle quotes would make great bumper stickers too (tell that to the spent cigarette litterer).

      November is already a week old, and candidly, it’s not slowing down anytime soon. Life leaps forward even as the soul asks us to slow down and take it all in. To do a lot of things in a lifetime requires us to lean towards positive habits and productivity. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. When we lean into any one thing too much we tend to lose our balance. Don’t forget to fold something precious into each day.

    • Out of the Wordless

      This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
      Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
      Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
      lovest best.
      Night, sleep, death and the stars.
      — Walt Whitman, A Clear Midnight

      Sleep comes easily on one end of the day, but retreats just as quickly on the other side. Call it the curse of the early bird in a nest full of night owls. As with any bird’s nest, a cat will create unrest. Nocturnal hunter, angry by nature—don’t you dare try to sleep any longer! And so sleep score be damned, I rise when it’s time to get up. The cat seems smugly satisfied, but her indignation is stirred when I don’t reward her wakeup call by immediately filling her bowl. That would result in an even earlier wakeup call tomorrow.

      Every morning, dark and cold though it may be, I step outside and look up at the sky to see what I’ve been missing. Maybe I’m tracking infinity through ritual, or maybe I’m simply checking in on the universe to let it know I’ve made it to another day, but the ritual feels natural, even if the night owls in my life believe it’s unnatural to rise before the sun. In my rush to slow down and take it all in, I wonder what I missed. At the moment, I’m missing sleep. Maybe tonight then?

      The cat isn’t the only restless soul stirring before 5 AM. Waking up restless is a sign that we dozed off with unfinished business on the mind. Just what quiet desperation is haunting me? I feel the urge to write until I find the words. Yes, there’s just so much to do and be and say. If only the words will come on this cold November morning.

    • Busy Got Me

      When I am among the trees,
      especially the willows and the honey locust,
      equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
      they give off such hints of gladness,
      I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
      I am so distant from the hope of myself,
      in which I have goodness, and discernment,
      and never hurry through the world
      but walk slowly, and bow often.
      Around me the trees stir in their leaves
      and call out, “Stay awhile.”
      The light flows from their branches.
      And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
      “and you too have come
      into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
      with light, and to shine.
      — Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees

      Suddenly the leaves have returned to the earth. Tropical rain and gusty wind have done the job, and wet clumps of oak leaves blanket everything like a first snow. I shuffle through the fallen leaves knowing that I didn’t walk in the woods nearly enough this season. Busy got me once again.

      I too am so distant from the hope of myself when I get busy. Too busy for peak fitness or deep work or even to mop the kitchen floor. Too busy to reach out to someone who may need to talk—or maybe it was me that needed to talk. Those moments fall away like autumn leaves in a storm.

      Busy is a choice we make to subtract meaning from our lives for the belief that there is growth in hustle. There’s nothing wrong with filling our days with productive and meaningful work. Just don’t believe that busy is the same thing.

      The answer is to go easier along this path. To back away from the transactional life and choose a new direction while there’s still time. Like tea leaves, those wet leaves blanketing the ground have something to tell us. If not now, when? Don’t let busy rob you of all that is dear. All that is light. All that would fill our days if not for busy.

    • Leaves and Plastic

      Nature’s first green is gold,
      Her hardest hue to hold.
      Her early leaf’s a flower;
      But only so an hour.
      Then leaf subsides to leaf.
      So Eden sank to grief,
      So dawn goes down to day.
      Nothing gold can stay.
      — Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

      Each October day the carpet grows. Where once there was grass or pavement, now a fallen kaleidoscope blankets all. The neighbors, eager for pristine green and neatness, rush out with their leaf blowers and oversized mowers to whisk it all away. I will be the maverick in the neighborhood who will wait it out for the love of fallen leaves and pine straw.

      Why do we rush from one thing to the next, never seeing the season we’re in right now? Where do all of the plastic decorations go when their time is up? I believe that storage rental companies conspired with large box stores to create a fear of missing out on molded plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs. FOMO is alive and well in suburbia, just not in me. No matter: whatever Halloween plastic was tempting the masses, it’s too late, because the Christmas plastic is now on display for another week or two before the beachwear is back on the shelves. Blink and you’ll miss it, so buy today!

      Just what do we want our yards to say about us? My own says that my bride loves Halloween while her husband loves to linger with the season a beat longer than the average. In other words, minimal plastic with a touch of whimsy, and a lawn that the neighbors will scorn on a windy day. I like to share in that way. The trees were here before the neighborhood, and their leaves ought to have their moment before being blown away in a roar of machinery.

      Don’t get me wrong, I love a clever Halloween decoration as much as the next person, but everything in moderation people. Running up the credit card on plastic yard bling isn’t a recipe for a happy holiday. Those credit card bills will come due just in time for Black Friday. It’s all a vicious cycle designed to slowly kill the middle class.

      If all this feels like a rant against consumerism, well, I’m glad you’ve been following along. Late October is about that blanket of leaves frozen solid by the first hard frost, that smell of pine straw on a brisk walk in the woods, and the brilliant blue sky conceding to an explosion of stars as Orion hunts Taurus yet again. You can have the plastic—I’ll enjoy the leaves.

    • For Your Consideration

      If I could write words
      Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
      What a bonfire my letters would make.

      If I could speak words of water,
      You would drown when I said
      “I love you.”
      — Spike Milligan, If I Could Write Words

      When I look at the number of words written and published in this blog this year, it equals the length of a long novel. Looking back over the last six years since I turned blogging from an every now and then thing to an every day thing, it translates into roughly eight novels of average length worth of words. And there are another couple of novels-worth of blog posts sitting in draft form. That, friends, is a lot of words given to the vacuum of the Internet. And here is one more for your consideration.

      All this talk of words has me wondering where they’ll lead to next. Words pull the writer along just as much as the reader—perhaps more so. Pile the words just so and you have a blog post or a poem or a novel. Which is worthy of our weight in words? We know it when we feel it. The act of creating things is a ritual of discovery.

      Just because we write a lot of words doesn’t mean that we have a lot to say. Our voice (if we’re lucky enough to be born in a free society) is our birthright, our audience is earned. We ought to experience a few things in this lifetime to pick up the pieces, glued together with our perspective, and presented to the reader to wander about with and occasionally knock down our walls. Burn it all down if you like—the words that were once mine are now those of someone I used to know.

      These words have turned into a blog post. If you’ve followed along this far, thank you. If the words and I should meet again tomorrow, I hope we will have our time together yet again. Until then?

    • Old Riddles and New Creeds

      After one moment when I bowed my head
      And the whole world turned over and came upright,
      And I came out where the old road shone white.
      I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
      Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
      Being not unlovable but strange and light;
      Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
      But softly, as men smile about the dead

      The sages have a hundred maps to give
      That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
      They rattle reason out through many a sieve
      That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
      And all these things are less than dust to me
      Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
      — G.K. Chesterton, The Convert

      Chesterton famously converted to Christianity when he was 48. The fame came with his zealous endorsement of the Catholic faith in his writing. The poem above is one example of that, indicating his joy at being born again. He passed away at 62, which seems really young now, but a full life in 1934 when his whole world turned over and came upright.

      Now I’m not especially religious, but I fancy myself a spiritual being on a quest for experience, knowledge and enlightenment. This blog is a ship’s log of sorts, showing where my journey has taken me thus far. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way. I’d like to think there are many pages left to write. ’tis not for us to know such things, only to do what we can with today’s entry.

      I’ve come to value the sands of time more than gold, and the wisdom of voices who have crossed the threshold. The young seek shortcuts to influence and wealth, the old seek solace in a life of connection and comfort. I’m somewhere in between, learning what I will, sharing what I feel s’éclairer. This is our age of discovery, friend, for we are here, now and alive. Picking up what we can in our time even as it falls away.

    • Never Mind

      For every ailment under the sun
      There is a remedy, or there is none;
      If there be one, try to find it;
      If there be none, never mind it.
      — W.W. Bartley

      Life piles on some days. Some things demand our full attention. Mostly though, we choose what to burden ourselves with and what to release from our shoulders. Developing a mind focused on what we can control is the path to some measure of serenity in a chaotic world.

      “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer

      I’m not the first to associate the Bartley poem with the Niebuhr sermon—you can find it right on Wikipedia if you like. I share them both here because they dance well together, and who doesn’t love a beautiful dance? Both offer timeless wisdom, yet each originated within the last hundred years.

      It helps to find something that will remind us that we must pause and assess all that washes over us, if only for a beat, and choose how to react. Some things we must endure. Some things we can work to change. But there are some things that we should never mind at all, for they aren’t ours to carry.

    • The Stuff We Write

      Boldly I dip it in the well,
      My writing flows, and all
      I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter
      Of this tormented night
      Is quite illegible. No matter:
      Who reads the stuff I write?
      — Friedrich Nietzche, “Ecce homo”, The Gay Science

      For all the perceived sternness of Nietzche, there’s a funny, charming character hiding within. It was said that he was an introvert and lonely. When compared to whom? The world is full of introverts. That many of them are creative, deep thinkers is no surprise. The trick is to find an audience worthy of the work. Right. Try to tell an introvert that they must reach beyond themselves to find an audience and watch how quickly they backpedal away from you. Yet Nietzche did it. What of us?

      We’re all introverts in some way or another. We all may be extroverted when we let our guard down and step into the role. It’s something you get used to over time. Introverts are great in conversation because they listen to what is being said to them instead of simply waiting for us to shut up so that they can speak again. There’s nothing more grating than a conversation with someone who won’t simply listen and absorb what we’re trying to say before responding. Two ears, one mouth is the rule: we must listen more than speak.

      Now clearly, I have a lot to say myself. I mean, I write this blog every day, often repeating myself in my zeal to live a worthy life. But writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, we must digest to produce. Ah, produce what? Garbage in, garbage out? To simply put content out for clicks may raise our number of views, but is it moving us closer to who we aspire to become? Is it helping others find a path towards their own personal excellence? Just why are we burning our precious time creating content anyway?

      “Be so good they can’t ignore you” — Steve Martin

      Knowing why we do anything offers clarity of purpose. The stuff we write may not solve the world’s problems, but it offers a hint at who we were in the moment, for anyone that cares to find out. That includes the writer, of course. Who were we today? How does this step connect to all that will follow? Does it lead to an ascent or a spiral? Time will tell. It matters, if only to us, but maybe also to a reader this one time. Still here, figuring it all out, together. If what we produce is good enough, it will resonate. Steve Martin is another introvert who broke through.

      The root of the world’s problems is that we’re not inclined to listen and understand each other as much as we ought to. When we’re all screaming at and over each other we aren’t listening or finding creative answers to those compounding problems. The world needs more creative introverts stepping out from the shadows and finding ways to connect us all together. What binds us? Step outside of that shell and share some of that. The only place to grow is outside of who we already are.