Poetry Magazine

 

  Ruth Daigon

USA

RUTHART@aol.com

I'm a woman in a woman's house
among the secret trees
wreathed in the smoke of memory
     
We are living in California almost 15 years-a sweet rush through a slow pace, full of breath and beginnings, but I keep looking over my shoulder, going back to the hairspring intervals between dark and light.

Back
reversing the flow
back through the looking glass
in from out there

Our universe was Winnipeg's North End where the immigrants settled-a New World, not a melting pot but a mosaic with enough warmth and love to keep us safe for the rest of our lives.  We were busy with dancing, piano, debating, glee club, skating and books, books books. That's how we survived the cruel winter, furred nights, and frost-thinned days.

The north wind blows
in the same bare place.
Sun skids on frozen surfaces
and fog chokes off all sound.

Back then I could barely wait for Friday and the Saturday matinees.  To pass the time, we did a lot of walking.  The trick was to keep moving or you stuck to the sidewalk until spring. We could hardly wait for summer, the end of school and Gimli, the Icelandic word for "heaven".
When school was out, we were in the back of pa's pickup on the way to Gimli summers.
Swimming was a big activity and most of us learned to swim when we were thee or four, and I continued swimming clear across the country: in Toronto-the Bay, in Vancouver-the Pacific, in New York-Coney Island and in Connecticut our own pond.

I strip and give myself
to the current in a secret baptism.

We were a large family.  My grandmother had fifteen children.  Most of them married young and the babies came faster than anyone could count. Friday nights when our family sat down to measure time, we measured it by heartbeats and periods of hunger.  Food flowed on gold embroidered threads.  Every Sunday, we'd gather in my mother's kitchen and listened to old stories.

Words streamed in a spill of old stories,
bitter and tart and thick on the tongue.
The air was fresh, the weather excellent,
the room radiant with the dead.

Already it is not difficult to see where the poetry came from and was  influenced by where we lived, how we lived and most of all how the family gave me so much material to work with and I used it gratefully.
After I graduated from the University, I was on my way to the big city on a full scholarship to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada, The North American continent, the Universe, and Mrs. Rappaport's boarding house not far from the Conservatory. I had every ambition to be a famous singer and I figured it would take me a year.  That's because time was forever and I was twenty. Well, it took a little longer than that :four tough years in Toronto, two equally demanding years in Vancouver where I sang at weddings, funerals, barmitsvahs, musical comedy, my own weekly radio show, all the Canadian Symphonies and  then on to touring Canada with an opera quartet and finally New York City: soloist with the New York Pro Musica, concert tours, T.V. appearances and anything that would make it possible to pay for lessons and the rent. By then I was a genuine New Yorker, living in Greenwich Village, recording for Columbia Records.  I even sang at Dylan Thomas's funeral and performed with W.H. Auden both in concerts and recordings.  I was on my way up except for a few path changes.  One summer I had a job as a singer in a fashionable hotel.  I noticed a tall auburn-haired waiter carrying his loaded tray high above his head, his muscles rippling. He asked me to dance. We moved well together and continued the dance for the rest of our lives.

Shadows stitch the night
we are in a different country
I let my fingernails grow
paint my eyelids blue

This happy time continues until a happier one arrives.  I'm pregnant. Tommy makes his entrance followed by Glenn four years later. Eleven years of teaching high school and Artie now has his doctorate and the University of Connecticut is our next stop. For me, there's not a great deal to do.  I sing a little: The Messiah with the Hartford Symphony, a few recitals, then, I organize a baroque trio, Bobby on the flute, Virginia on the harpsichord and I supply the words. In the early seventies Artie suggests I try writing poetry.  I like the idea and before long I'm in the thick of it. Publication seems to come easily, and I spend several months at various writing colonies.  Discipline was established long ago.  I simply do as I have always done.  Get up, have my coffee, leave the dishes in the sink and then, instead of the piano, I head for the computer.

I hold the oldest word I know
cupped in my hand
smooth as stone warmed by the sun
Last night it kissed me on the lips,
kept me company a while before letting go.

I reinvent my life back in Winnipeg and Gimli, tracing my pen back to where it was, back into spring thaw, hot summers, back to a life several futures wide, full of children's kindergarten smiles, parents rocking on the porch and someone always coming home to all those vanished Fridays. I keep the camera close at hand to store the hours and fix the days.

Women know how to wait.
They smell the dust,
listen to light bulbs dim
and guard the children
pale with dreaming.

There were no shortcuts to becoming a poet.  I went back to the way I studied and learned to become a singer and used everything I knew about music to discover poetry.  In the performance of a Schubert lied, the emotion is always carefully controlled and the tone as well.  You give less but convey the feeling of great depth and even a greater reserve of energy. Using the rhythmic discipline of music, I consider the cadence and tone of each phrase, each word. I was writing and still singing but it was not enough.  I missed working with people, the comradeship, the excitement.  Isolation was another problem.  Again my husband solved that one as well. Why not start a poetry journal?.  It would appear semiannually, and each issue would focus on a different theme.  In 1976 the poetry started flowing into our mail box. It seems unbelievable that we continued Poets On: for twenty years, and each issue gave us so much pleasure PLUS working with David Alpaugh who produced and designed our mag. We met so many wonderful poets, even those we turned down accepted our decision. Meanwhile my own acceptances were increasing.  In the 70's 80' and 90's not only was I appearing in dozens of magazines, anthologies and hundred of E mags.. but my own books were published as well: LEARNING NOT TO KILL YOU (Selkirk Press), A PORTABLE PAST (Reaities Library Contemporary Poets Series, San  Josee, BETWEEN ONE FUTURE AND the Next (Papier-Mache Press), ABOUT A YEAR (Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series),PAYDAY AT THE TRIANGLE(Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series) RUTH DAIGON'S GREATEST HITS  1971-2000) (Pudding House Publications), HANDFULS OF TIME) (Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series) and I won several National Awards: ("The Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (University of Southern California Anthology, 1997) and the Greensboro Poetry Award (Greensboro Arts Council, 2000) My poetry was published by the State Department in their literary exchange with Thailand and their translation program has just issued the first book of Modern American Poets in English and Thai in which my work appears.
Here in California, we're learning to take time and wrap it tight around us.  Our days flow by with ease, and it is always morning, and it is always evening, and it is always now.

MOUTHING SECRETS

since I have learned not to kill them
things have been easier

though I prefer my ghosts
to inhabit the dark

if they come by day
I'll leave all the doors open

I watch them mouthing secrets
smiling as if there were two heavens

I recall simple equations in the heart's circumference
each sum exquisitely fixed in my memory

women in sweet and sudden rages
for fear the future comes when they're not looking

children claustrophobic in their skins
fanning out like fish bones

younglings piercing love's delicate membrane
to taste the fleshy center

friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn
and the ritual smile

in their company the hours pass
until a spill of sun a sweep of shade

and under the ashen stars
my dead are growing old

 

 

BITTERSWEET

they will go deep and remember
how they flew the ecstatic moments
and returned to a nourishing earth
and what they never knew they invented

caressed by a wind
stirring their deepest sleep
they walk the paths of earth
step by step stone by stone
until parachutes of light announced the dawn

youth was once a gift they could afford to lose
but now as the moments spin retreats
every day is strung
and restrung like broken beads

the storehouse of the past guards
the silken clefts of the body
the straight secret of the spine
the winged scapulae
with their recurrent hints of flight
and the blind hours before dawn to midnight's blaze

the heart recalls
the suddenness of trees
and flawless entrance of morning light
spring blooms and impermanent buds
flowers so fragile and generous
willing to fade
giving way to the fruits of summer

ripe and bursting to bloom
the juice flowing from within
abundant
and the rich life reaching down to the roots again

 

 

SLEEPING WITH THE INVISIBLE

She dreads the thought of leaving
empty-handed as her life leaks out
and words beat against each other
into alphabets of silence.

She fears the wind
with its invisible rope and scaffold
the sea with a thousand eyes
and rain like a dance of knives.

Held fast in amber of memory
she sleeps with the invisible
in the long and late afterward
safe in the dark.

She hears once more
summer harps, choirs of insects,
cinch pods mating
and dandelions snuffing the air.

Night spans out in a slow glide
as a voice deep in her heart's hollow, whispers,

Look long and longer
before the drum rolls of morning
herald the naked earth
no bud time no seed time
and the sun like a dead heart
unfaithful at last.

 

 

ABSOLUTES

Let there be days soft and deceptive
the taste of water absolute
the inner sun absolute
and our awakening absolute

Let our life fly over fields
filled with radiance we almost touch
air we almost embrace
and moments of near fullness

We are one with the legendary shadows
smiling with apricot lips and vanilla voices
singing the sea's high sound
in a rush of joy before dark

When the last feather of light floats down
on the ripening hours
the breath grows visible
dividing and dividing stillness

We recall fine tunings of sun
the moon's ancestral silver
fugitive years and moments
nudging enchantment when we wore

the loose limbs of childhood
and watched endless springs and summers
steeped in the absolute music
of long-traveling light

 

 

MOONBLIND

Let us signal with birds' spiral calls
Like the hermit thrush
piping the dark into daylight
or the nightingale echoing
lost hues of evening

Let our life fly
and the days pass
in a shudder of wings
and a blood song rising sweet

Let us love with lungs and gills
Teeth and claws
making no excuses like
For god's sakes . No harm intended.
It was just a nip.

If love took more time, we'd
Fly in pairs forever
llke fugitive birds angling down the winds
speeding into dark regions
Moonblind

But after the drift and pitch
And timetwisting moments
knocking at heart's door
the old saddled with flesh
tell their tales by not telling them

They speak of love's cool compass
passion's winter eyes
where every breath sustains
and resonates with earlier gusts
as the moon climbs nonchalant into the night

 

 

THE WHITE-LIPPED HOURS

In silence, she leans against the morning.
In silence, she watches earth
rise to cover the jaw of heaven.
In silence, she counts the white-lipped hours
where the fields lie whispering rich rumors.

Again she listens to the high chirping of crickets
legging out their constant tunes,
buds thrusting against the wind
and the sun invading secret corners.

Flickers of memory return,
planetary days from the old dark, the late dark
where the snow lay deep
until the desolation of another spring.

She remembers intoxicating melodies,
bonfires of sound,
their wild rhythms
and dislocations.

She accepts the gift of age,
an overflowing cup of years.
Sipping it slowly,
she returns it empty

and relives those lost moments
until the last swallow tail
fades into seasons
far beyond her view.

 

 

BLOODLINE

As the body's laid out,
we stand at attention
waiting for the clearest light
and then sharpen our instruments.

First the eyes removed
to see what was seen,
ear probed to hear what was heard,
then, the heart dissected
to find what was missed.

It takes time to cut tenderly
into the bone and sinew
of the past, each knife stroke
a loving incision.

There is no entrance.
Only entering.
And when the body's exposed,
we climb inside,
pull closed the flaps of skin
and slowly heal ourselves.

 

 

CHECKS AND BALANCES

Pa
that little black book
recording all our debts
credits
never showed up

We looked through
pockets of old sweaters
reached inside your gloves
inspected sweat bands in your hats
but found nothing

You spent all your evenings
sorting out the days
the years
and in your private code listed
your gifts against ours
a phone call
a letter
a look of love

Our shadows are still crowded
with your outlines-
you nodding to us
in your special chair
in its special place
and we
nodding back

Ma with her passion for small gestures
smiled and signaled love
but you
busy with mathematics
in your universe of closed brackets
never looked up.

Evenings, we'd warm our hands
on hot cups of cocoa
watching for rumors
in the fixed shadow of your face

Now ambushed by time, we're
deep in our brown days
listening for truant voices
busy with our own reckonings at last

 

 

AND WHEN GRANDFATHER DIED

she watched her mother
wet her fingertips
brushing powder
from her brows and lashes
and followed her downstairs

every man wore
matching pants and jacket
every woman
a plain black shawl

before the funeral they
gathered in the dining room
not the kitchen
and drank tea
from the willow pattern
cups and saucers

table cleared
they kissed her on the forehead
and left in a trail
of long black cars

she finished the poppy seed cookies
hidden in the pantry
put her patent leather tap shoes on
and splashed through the yard

came back in
marched upstairs and stood
on the white chenille bedspread
making perfect foot prints that said

I'm here.

 

 

THE GREGARIOUS PHASE

Humans love the hissing of space
where vacancy lives,
pieces of life still waiting to be used
a rich emptiness a windy history.

But cram them together,
an allegro enters the bloodstream,
a frenzy,
all they think of is escape escape.

Locusts, once solitary creatures,
living their lives in moments of grace
grow giddy with rich friendships.

Entering the gregarious phase,
they're suddenly attracted
and find each other wonderfully fleshed and sinewy.

In their world of flow and travel
they shut out the sunlight,
destroy vegetation, a leaf at a time
in their winged terrible trips.

The National Academy of Science reports:
stroking the back of their hind legs
provokes a significant statistical change in behavior.

The untouched hind legs
stroked and caressed
create a perpetual surprise.

In mass migration they leave their bodies
escaping through slits,
singing and calling to their smoky shells,
shapes that held them once
in their ripest hours.

 

 

PICKED CLEAN

Raspberry time's in August
when the difference between
sun and shade grows more urgent.

We plant pails in moist earth
reach for loaded branches and part
them like tangled skeins of hair.

Leaving unripe berries
to drop and rot, we pluck
those rich to bursting

warm from the sun
rub them across our lips
to smudge in color

slip them in our mouths
fruit and teeth and tongue
in juicy unity.

As we strip branches
nothing's in sight
but leaves and sky.

Brambles crosshatch arms
and the world contracts
to the bottom of a bucket.

Returning, we empty brimming
pails into sun-streaked bowls
on the veranda. When night

breathes us in, we stop
and look back at August
picked clean.

 

 

CHOREOGRAPHY OF FLIGHT

Ankled in dust she runs with colt looseness
knees liquid action
in choreography of bone and breath
outstretched world beneath her

In the blood's first ABC
she runs on sinews of paths
feeling cold roots stir
under earth soft and deceptive

Through prologues of sun and shade, she's
looking for the wild-weed child
all bark and twigs, chirping through morning
blatant as bird song

Her heart beats
in its narrow cave
as sweat coats her body
in salt and secrets.

In corridors of afternoon, she
runs a relay race with a shadow
catching up with it
shrugging it off to join the one

ahead racing toward another.
All her life, she has been running toward the sun
with no one behind her

but the old ones
rocking on the porch
nodding in their sleep
waiting for yesterday.

Now what remains is celebration,
daytime songs, nighttime songs
until swift seizures of dark
and the moon's citrus voice.

 

 

© All Copyright, Ruth Daigon.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.