Wavering Virgins & Poets

Standing in the Guthrie rush line,
waiting to buy tickets for
An Iliad.
An attractive older woman turned
to ask me a question about a piece she was reading—
I think, part of an itinerary description
in a travel-package advertisement.
It was by George Steiner, and it said something about
an implosion of cultural forces in Renaissance Florence.
The woman wanted to know what Steiner meant
by the word ”implosion.”
I said I thought that the word “confluence”
might have been more apropos.
Then she asked me if I knew who George Steiner was.
She was slender—
maybe my age (62), maybe a good deal older—
with thin, chestnut-colored hair and
an elegant silk scarf.
Later, I saw her sitting by herself,
a little in front of me,
during the An Iliad performance.
I said that I thought George Steiner was a literary critic
who had made a big splash during the ‘60’s
(but I didn’t recall the title of his 1961 book,
The Death of Tragedy).
“I missed most of the ‘60’s,”
the woman said—“the Bay of Pigs,
the youth movement, the Vietnam War.
I was too busy taking care
of my children and my husband.”
She looked around as if unsure
of what had become of them—
seemingly stranded from another life
here in the Guthrie An Iliad rush ticket line.
“I’ve missed a lot myself,” I said sympathetically.
The woman thanked me and moved
up to the counter.

- wenstrom

One of the things I did that my grandparents approved of,
the summer I stayed with them in Aurora when I was eight—
they had given me a little money to take along
on a YMCA trip to the Chicago Field Museum,
and I used it to buy three specimens of garnet,
cubic, chartreuse-green, glassy-smooth,
mounted on a labeled card.

I can’t find them now, although
I still have many of the rocks that I accumulated
in the days of my childhood interest in geology—
an interest always more magical than scientific.
But I think I remember what became of them. 

Having torn them from the card and rubbed off the glue,
I put them with some other rocks
in my own little sectioned, labeled box,
which I then brought to school for Show-and-Tell.
The box had a transparent cellophane 
cover designed to discourage fingers, but the next day
I had to complain to the teacher,
Mrs. Eggering,
that several of the rocks were missing—
the cellophane breached.

Mrs. Eggering must have been fed up with my
rock collections, because, instead of showing concern,
she bluntly asked me to
please stop bringing my boxes of rocks to school.

-wenstrom 

That what I am not doing is good enough.
That I will be alone and be happy.
That nothing
I do will make a deep enough mark.
That the deeply holy and almost silent
spacious music that I cannot remember is lost forever.
That I have something to do that I forgot 
to do something to do.
That I have so much to do and no space or time to do
it in.  Or
that I have space and time galore
and that I’m not doing anything at all
in it.
That all I’ll ever hear in here
is silence and holy music.
That I will be left alone,
and that what I’m not doing is good enough.

- Graham Oj - B

Ha.  That was all I heard the white guy tell the black guy
as I walked past their bench, their homeless culture spot
in the brightly lit downtown
library.  They did not look at shaven me finding
obscure string quartet to inspire a poem.
What a privilege (and all that, one could think) to write a poem
amid the shaking of the city and its needs.
We are not so different though, these men and I
(is another way to think) though in fact we are
quite different, not them and I just but all of us here
in the library.  Our love crawls out at different speeds.
My son might laugh at anything he sees.
Some of us cannot digest wheat, and
the string quartet will stir holograms
of select droplets only.
The psychiatrist thinks this or that insightful thing
about why these men are criminals.
At the same time the guy on the bench
was probably right about why he gets sent to the shrink
every time he gets a new conviction.
He’s right too, even though the judges and legislators
also give a reasonable explanation.
We’re all different in some way, and in some way
we’re all right.

-  Graham Oj - B
   Cold Day in February 2013

Enormous pigeons crown
                 the clay-tiled roofs above
                                the swimming pool—

separated from us
                 by a barred metal fence intergrown 
                                with a sinuous green shrubbery.

Magnificent palms surround the pool, 
                fan-like fronds drooping from pruned 
                                pineapple-shaped stems at the top.

In the morning,
                 great-tailed grackles vie in the leaves—
                                sleek and black

(the only bird whose song is compared to
                a toilet flushing),
                                I saw one sail

over the roof
                above where we’re sitting,
                                a long, green worm in its beak,

the rest of the grackle flock flapping
                 after in a furious headlong
                                racket of pursuit.

Two hearts affect one another
when each is plain to the other’s sight.
The crow that is so black, my love,
will surely turn to white.
If my heart’s slate were a looking glass,
your name therein I’d write—
and share with you your light.

- John Wenstrom

horses eating the sky
from an aerie snort-fort the cavalry fly, eyes
afire the victory pyre, rescue by-and-by,
ferrying soulless riders, muffling guttural cry

harumphing billowy
vapors, we read the Sunday papers, gravity-
bound, anchored to the sound of microwave chirping,
Mr. Coffee burping, day pouring willowy

quietly galloping
movement implied senses haven’t lied this hip-hop
paeon to what silky-smooth newsmen say on top-
of-the-hour straight-from-the-shower jaw-clapping

Hark! and try as we try,
the surge un-surging, multinationals merging,
the downturn expiring, companies hiring, still,
we pay scant notice to horses eating the sky

—john schenk
february 2013