Red Birds

Beneath heavy, darkening skies, the
canvas of green, white, gray, off-white
is punctuated by red, first a flash here and
a small spot there, then reds, reds of every
shade, an ocean of reds teaming with reds,
a heavenly host of reds soaring, stopping,
hopping, bouncing, walking, prancing.
Then a sharp whistlewind, a crack of
branch-like wood, and the reds shift into
coordinated motion, simultaneous
eruption, then calm, quiet, long periods of
seeming inactivity, followed by short
but intense bursts of motion, movement,
independence suddenly folded into a
unity of red, red.

A roar bursts forth from the un-treed stands,
and the St. Louis Cardinals win 4-2.

The Cunning Poets Society poem-prompt for May is “birds.” No stipulation was made as to whether or not it was birds of the flying variety. I attended the Cardinals baseball game Thursday, they did indeed beat Florida 4-2, and I got inspired.

Photo courtesy of Photobucket.

Marcus Goodyear’s “Barbies at Communion: and other poems”

You’re sitting in church, the communion plate is passing down the pew, and as you reach for the little cup of grape juice you notice your young daughter playing with her Barbie dolls.

You’re coaching your first boys’ soccer game, and you err on the side of bending the rules so the kids can have a little fun.

An old resort hotel is abandoned to collapse in on itself. Or you cut your grass too short and here come the weeds. Or a water pipe breaks in the attic, ruining the stored Christmas decorations. A puppy dies when it catches the motorcycle it’s chasing. Two friends build a bookshelf. Deer show up in the negihborhood to eat your plants. Piano practice.

This is the stuff of poetry? This ordinary, everyday living stuff?

In Barbies at Communion: and other poems, poet Marcus Goodyear (editor of the High Calling Blogs) answers with a resounding yes, because something profound is found in this ordinary living.

Consider “Epiphany:”

We put our Jesus in the attic
after Christmas, buried in boxes
between plastic wreaths and cheap lights.
I rarely think about the idle figure
when I fetch luggage for business trips.
Near the boxes, the space is a maze
of pipes wrapped in thin foam, too thin
for January freezes when water reminds us
who is in charge. So here I am,
my breath like a pillar of cloud.
When the pipes crack, the water sprays.
There is no controlling this flood
and the damage it causes, soaking
through our Christmas, baptizing Santas,
Rudolphs, wreaths and every single Jesus.

Like many of Goodyear’s poems, “Epiphany” is full of Biblical allusions, and not only the direct reference to Jesus. Consider the flood, the breath like a “pillar of cloud,” the reminder of “who is in charge and the water from the broken pipe as a kind of baptism. On one level, “Epiphany” is a poem about nothing more than a broken pipe. But he massages it into a richly layered meditation on faith and God, using the commonality of Christmas decorations – how we understand faith – and how that understanding drowns in the reality of what faith is really about.

What Goodyear has done in this collection of “poetry in the everyday” is to demonstrate that poetry can be accessible, understandable, and real to people who long ago turned their backs when it came to be dominated by the academy.

This is about the poetry in life, about poetry as life, the life we all know.

Reading these poems was like reading some of my own personal history. Like when I was 5 and my dog was hit by a car. And the three days after Christmas we spent in a motel when the pipes burst in our house in New Orleans after a hard freeze. And cutting the grass too short. And cutting the grass on a Sunday. And riding my bike up to Tastee Donuts on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for the family. And the time when I worked with a carpenter friend who made me a typing table and a bookshelf out of yellow pine. That’s the stuff of Barbies at communion.

It speaks to the depth and insight of the poems that they become and reflect our own experiences.

Dionysus

Yet another day in this ancient place, this Romanized sepulcher,
this urbanized temple to worship what never was, this sacrifice
of marbled skin and stone life-blood, paleness of what was.

Yet another span of hours, sameness and tedium; another day
of listening to the new ideas that are neither new nor ideas,
because of the baneful and prideful duty of an archon.

Today a respite from legalities – a babbler commending us for
our gods, known and unknown. What an impudent fellow, as if
our gods known and unknown actually cared for him and for us.

Although he speaks socratically, with both passion and calm,
like a voice of iron in the forge, does he know the fate of Socrates?
We kill our prophets; assassinate our heroes; poison our truthsayers.

I half-listen until I see Damaris, seated at the front of the crowd in
rapt attention, hearing the babbler’s siren song. Damaris, my soul
mate, my consolation and affirmation that I am not wholly mad.

She is transfixed. The others murmur, laugh and snicker. I turn to
face the babbler, with his thorned flesh. And in that flash of time I
first listen, my soul is seared, torn, shattered like smashed stone.

My heart is pierced; my heart so dead in sameness and tedium, is
stabbed, consumed with the same words that force the crowd’s
laugh and sneer to rise in an illusion of levitation and levity.

The babbler’s piercing look silences the crowd. He leaves with his
few close behind him. I stand to see my white robes now stained
with spilled red from my fingernailed palms, an archon’s stigmata.

Silence gives way to sardonic sneers of those who cultivate minds
of emptiness, the intellectualism of the void. I run to catch the
babbler with the thorn and piercing look, Damaris at my side.

I am broken, she says.
I am not mad, I say,
and run faster.

Painting: St. Paul preaching at the Areopagus by Raphael (1515-1516).

Over at the High Calling Blogs, the prompt for the Random Act of Poetry (RAP) was to go to an ancient place – Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, wherever, as long as it was ancient. I chose the account of St. Paul in Athens, speaking at the Areopagus on Mars Hill (Acts 17).

The Gospel and Stephen King

My article on the influence of Stephen King on Christian novelists has been posted over at Christian Manifesto. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Grace on a Tombstone: A Story

He wasn’t sure where she’d been buried. Her parents had moved away, and he knew that if she’d been buried here, the only place would be White Cliff Cemetery, in the small hills out the western road from town. More than a decade ago.

He parked in front of the cemetery office, once a small frame farmhouse. An older man, late 60s, still tall and broad-shouldered with a shock of white-gray hair, answered his knock.

“Help you?”

He hesitated. “I’m trying to find a grave. But I’m not sure if she’s buried here or not.”

The man gave a short nod, motioning him inside what had been a living room or parlor but was now an office cluttered with paper, boxes and old filing cabinets. “Come in. What’s the name?”

“Elizabeth Prentiss.”

The man gave Sam a quick glance, and then nodded. “I think it’s section 3 but let me check.” He sat at a desk computer and typed in the information. “Section 3, Row 4. Walk up that middle walkway and it’ll be on your left.” He paused. “It’s a nice section. Quiet. Nice view.”

Sam nodded. “Thanks.”

Walking up toward the gravesite, he didn’t see the man walk outside and watch him.


The June wind should have felt warmer than it did. Walking among the graves, Sam pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck.

He knew it might be hard, but he wasn’t prepared for the tombstone. He saw her name, the dates of her birth and death, and then the inscription.

He fell to his knees and began to sob.


“It caused a ruckus, that tombstone,” said a voice behind him.

Sam turned, wiping his eyes, and saw the man from the office.

“Don’t mean to intrude, but when you said her name I figured you were Sam.”

“What ruckus?”

“Her parents insisted on the inscription. Made folks angry that her parents thought the jury was wrong when the whole town believed you were guilty; that prosecutor had you dead to rights. Shows you how gullible we are. But her parents, well, they never said one way or the other, at least to anyone I ever talked to, but they had to get a monument company in Bozeman to do it; the local people wouldn’t touch it. Engrave that inscription and they knew they’d lose business with the town.”

Sam thought of the crowds more than a decade before at the courthouse, screaming for him to hang; the woman who jumped the courtoom rail and hit him from behind, spitting on his face when he turned towards her; the rock thrown when they escorted him to the prison van. Life without parole. Ten years of life without parole.

“Her parents didn’t like me,” Sam said. “But Beth, well, she was more than I had any right to expect. More than I could have imagined.” He traced the inscription with his fingers. “It’s all gone now.”

The man looked up at the wide blue sky. “Well, maybe her parents were just stating facts." He watched a flock of birds overhead. "Or it might be one of those messages in a bottle, know what I mean?"

Elizabeth Ann Prentiss
June 16, 1978 - April 4, 2000
She loved Jesus,
And she loved Sam.

If you'd like to read more posts on grace, visit Bridget Chumbley's place for the One Word Blog Carnival.

Photograph: Beach, by Nancy Rosback. Used with permission.

An Artist's Date

Cars need gasoline and cell phones need charging. Writers need fuel, too.

In The Right to Write, Julia Cameron makes the case for what she calls “The Artist’s Date,” a once-a-week “solitary expedition to something festive that interests us.” It could be anything – a museum, a walk in the woods, a festival in a park, a play, a concert, literally anything that you find interesting that will provide a good dose of “writerly upkeep.” (And you’re supposed to do this alone.)

I have three typical venues for an “Artist’s Date,” but only one of them is at least weekly.

The first is the art museum. St. Louis has a nice one, and actually one that has a larger and deeper collection than you might expect, the result of the city’s late 19th and early 20th century heyday and the various bequests of wealthy individuals and companies over the years. My favorites are the 19th century and 20th century American rooms, with the “democracy series” by George Caleb Bingham and the Winslow Homers and Thomas Hart Bentons. I love to stand and study the Bingham paintings; I actually have a framed print of “Stump Speaking” in my office. But when I go to the art museum, my wife is with me, and we explore the place together.

Once a year, when we’re making our pilgrimages to Chicago, we almost always find our way to the Art Institute. I can get lost in the gift shop, much less the collection. But whether it’s the smaller museum in St. Louis or the colossus in Chicago, the art is a definite stimulant, rich fuel and extensive “writerly upkeep” for me.

So art is one kind of “Artist Dates” for me. Another is the Shaw Nature Reserve, what we St. Louisans will always call the Arboretum, 40 or so miles west of St. Louis. It’s 800 acres of woods, trails, prairies and gardens. When my sons were little, they often accompanied me on hikes. Now, it’s usually just me, although my oldest (now 30) did come with me the last time I went. I’ll usually hike to the Meramec River, and then just sit, listening to the water current and the distant cows on the bluffs on the other side. It’s an emptying out for me, becoming a speck in the geography and just listening.


The third “Artist’s Date” for me is biking. My typical ride is either a 20-mile ride on Grant’s Trail in south and southwest St. Louis, or a 30-mile ride that involves riding east through inner suburbs and the city to the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. (I’ve done longer rides, but these are my usual ones.) You have to concentrate on automobile traffic (and drivers using their cell phones are oblivious to everything), but there are stretches of paved trails and dedicated bike lanes where it’s easier. And then the view from the bluff – you can see for miles up river, down river and across to Illinois.

Biking clears my head and, oddly, opens my heart. And I find I do some of my best “writing” on a bicycle.

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Cameron’s The Right to Write. Take a look and see what others are saying, commenting and posting. Last week’s discussion was about going deeper in your writing. This week's discussion is on artists' dates.

Related:

Nancy Rosback’s “The right to write and buying work.”

Monica Sharman's "Sketching."

"Enter the Body" by Nancy Kourmoulis.

Cassandra Frear's "Walking and Writing."

Marilyn's "You Never Take Me Anywhere Anymore."

Melissa's "Slip, Slipping Away."

L.L. Barkat's "Finding Your Words."


Painting: Stump Speaking (1853-1854) by George Caleb Bingham; St. Louis Art Museum.

Graduation Day

There are too many things to say about a child's graduation, too many emotions that run through the heart. For now, I need to let the pictures tell the story, or part of the story. Our 22-year-old son Andrew, our youngest, graduated from the University of Missouri today.




I think my favorite photo is the last one -- a "mistake" in that it all blurred. Except that it perfectly captures that brief moment God gives us children -- and tells us we have to let them fly. Twenty-two years -- and just a moment.

The photos were taken by either my daughter-in-law Stephanie or my wife Janet.

Related: "My Brother, the Mizzou Alum" by Travis Young.