L'histoire de Baptiste Turcot

Over the spire of Notre Dame du Cap,

the half moon hangs straight up and down.

Baptiste Turcot sings a ballad of love.

His horse picks his way through elm and oak.

He’d dined that night in a Québécois home

met Marie Madeleine Duteau DuTaut.

He’s riding easy, lulled by his hopes,

when he spots glowering golden eyes.

With a snarl the beast leaps to attack.

His horse rears high to escape horror’s bite;

Baptiste quick with his knife spills the blood

of the Devil’s own Wolf, the Loup-garou.

True to French legend, he becomes one too:

A man by day but useless and ill,

a monster at sundown driven to kill.

For one hundred and one demented days,

keep the secret to break the spell

or forever be damned an Unholy Wolf.

Baptiste swears to hide deep in the woods,

survive through the days and nights all alone,

fight his own evil through the dreadful time,

tear only animal flesh, spare human kind.

Late, this same night, in Trois Riviéres
as the half-moon hangs straight up and down

young Marie Madeleine Duteau Dutaut,
slips out to the garden for tender May air.

The rose silk of her gown dances, rustles.

A light wind carries the song she trills

from her father’s house to the dangerous forest

where the new Loup-garou hears her and howls.

With uncanny speed he climbs a great cliff,

spies the glimmer of pearls sewn onto the bodice

of the mademoiselle’s first Parisian gown,

scents lavender soap come by ship from Provence.

During cruel months of spell-bound lust for blood,

Baptiste hides from the hunters he could easily kill,

fights the sickness each day, the Devil each night,

endures, finally triumphs to reclaim his soul.

His first day of freedom in red maple October,
he rides at full gallop to the farm of Dutaut,

speaks to the father of his love for the daughter,

and at Christmas they marry, trembling hand in hand.

Eight of their children survive past five.

The Turcot farm prospers on the Île d'Orléans.

But if he’s alone in the forest, Baptiste will growl,

and he dreams every night he’s the Wolf, Loup-garou.

June 19, 2015

Bad Air Everywhere

Commonplace madness

spews, froths, invades innocence.

Brush fires smolder in likely places

and unlikely places

smoking, choking, spreading low, evil heat,

tended, sustained, nurtured, by the commonplace mad.

Walk to the corner in bare feet. No don’t.

Take care, take care.

Commonplace explosions

shatter, burn, destroy innocents. 

Furnaces blow in cellars,

churches, on street corners,

eruptions of deadly poison, bursting flame

startling, destroying, convulsing,

neglected or overfilled by the overseeing mad.

Sometimes there are warnings. Often none.

Take care, take care.

Two from my book, "One Day Tells its Tale to Another"

San Felipe de Neri, Old Town, Albuquerque, New Mexico

After Dinner with Ted at the High Noon Café

Cheese enchiladas and High Noon Margaritas 

and our evening felt good. His arm on my waist,

we strolled around Old Town in the sweet desert cool

of an Albuquerque summer’s Saturday night.

Our knees weak from laughing, eager for each other

we left the bright square, with its crowd of turistas,

and turned the corner to my dark cobbled street.

Footloose, I stumbled in my blue high-heeled sandals.

As Ted caught and kissed me, I glanced past his shoulder 

to see young Emilio standing under his porch light 

in a blood-spattered shirt. 

Against his thigh dangled 

the glint of a knife.

He swayed from cerveza and cried “Mi hermano!” 

I saw his brother, Tomás, collapsed at his feet.

From inside their casa, I heard women shriek.

I’d an impulse to help and moved toward the chaos

but Ted held me back and soon sirens grew loud. 

A sad hour later, we watched from the shadows 

as the police took Emilio and his brother away.

Green chili and tequila tumbled inside me, 

in the sad, sobered quiet of my city’s Old Town.

Spanish Missions

With slow, quiet steps I walk

through the old stucco house. 

Scents of citrus and rose 

curl through windows barred

by carved wooden spindles.

A maiden’s chaste bedroom overlooks 

the Mission of San Juan Bautista. 

A fragile lace cloth, laundered fresh against the dust 

of the Camino Real, drapes a small table 

where the blue-robed Virgin prays, her painted tears 

flow for the crucified Christ hung on the white-washed wall.

In old California, beneath this small window,

did a gallant play his guitar and sing to his love, lying

safe under the counterpane of this high narrow bed? 

In his song did he compare her black hair 

with the night sky and her skin with the moon? 

Did his fingers strum passion and his melodies woo?

Did the heavy boots 

of her father intrude, 

his quick stride loud

on her clean wooden floor? 

Did the youth hold his ground? 

Oh so faint the ghosts of these three 

in the shadowy hacienda I tour. 

It might have been that way. 

I almost know. How can I?    

But I do almost know.

from The Wire: "Mr. P," on his first day in his 7th grade classroom. 

After the abrupt end of my career in dance, after a couple of years listless shuffling what was left of my deck, I went back to school to get a teaching certificate. Eventually I honed in on special education, with a focus on children with learning disabilities and emotional handicaps. Those were the kids that drew me in, their huge need matched my huge need to feel useful. My fifteen and some years of teaching started in Florida and ended abruptly in Maryland. Dunno. Rugs get pulled, eh?

My first teaching job was in a special education center in Florida. I taught emotionally disturbed Kindergartners. The children had already run into big trouble in their pre-schools or regular Kindergarten classes and they were placed with us. The students, roughly evenly black and white, with a few Asians, a few Hispanic, qualified for free breakfast and lunch 98% of the time. Basically, they were all dirt poor.

“My” children were five and six and once they trusted me, they would let me teach them. In most cases, during the years I worked in this center, the children reached the first goal the school established for them: the student will be able to experience their environment with pleasure. When these children came to our center, they weren’t able to do that, and I felt like that was a damn shame. Here’s a poem:

Children, I will teach you.

We will make Green Eggs and Ham,

sing the alphabet in funny voices, celebrate

your good behavior with stickers and playtime,

watch The Red Balloon, dance on Friday afternoons.

Eric Carle, Maurice Sendak, A.A. Milne, Dr. Zeuss,

Ezra Jack Keats, Chinua Achebe, Beatrice Potter,

and their friends will join us and you will sit quietly,

soaking in poetry, pictures, and tales of wise animals, 

foolishness, kindness, impossibilities, and satisfying resolutions. 

My last teaching job was in a large middle school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in a town half-way between D.C. and Baltimore. The school population was about 60% white and 40% black; the faculty was a fair mix of black and white, men and women; the children came from well-off families, getting by families, homeless families, and no family at all to speak of. When they were poor, more often than not, they came from a poverty of long standing in their family histories.

During my first year at that school I was a “co-teacher,” supposedly working in tandem with regular teachers, supposedly helping the kids with learning disabilities. The special ed students were in large classes meant to be “regular” education, but most of the other students were placed there because they had behavior issues that were deemed “incorrigible,” or were emotionally damaged or learning disabled, but undiagnosed. Chaos reigned. I tried to teach and now and then I felt like I had taught someone something useful, but most nights I left the school feeling utterly frustrated, lost, and depressed.

During my second year at the school, I taught (by myself, which was better) an “intensive” class of 7th and 8th graders language arts and social studies. Once I won the battle with the administration to get my class size in line with special education guidelines, we, the children and I, had a pretty good time and I think they learned. No, I know they did. But I messed it up by needing open-heart surgery in April of that year. I couldn’t return to that job, in fact I never returned to full-time teaching. 

I recently watched TheWire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire,

which originally aired from 2002 to 2008. I didn’t watch it then because, because… Wow. The story is about life in Baltimore, Maryland, but it could be about any city in our country that has poor neighborhoods, political corruption, problems in police departments, a shrinking middle class, children and schools in crisis. So, any U.S. city.  I spread the 60 episodes out sensibly over a couple of months, didn’t binge, because I could only take one or two episodes a night and not every night. Some nights I felt weak. Every American should watch The Wire from start to finish, I think. That won’t happen, of course. Some Americans would rather be shot; for others watching The Wire would never occur to them, simply wouldn’t be in their radar; and for many Americans there would be no opportunity and anyway it would be redundant because they are living it, know the scenes all too well. The fourth season brings a group of middler schoolers into the story and I followed them living out their plot lines with recognition, rage, heartbreak, and in one lone case, joy. Okay, I am, “to the depths of my being” one of the tribe who think this series brilliantly written— accurate, perceptive, and brutally honest, but the thing about the series that both broke my heart and cheered me up the most was that in the final season they zoomed in on the children. We all need to zoom in on the children. Until we do that, we will get nowhere. We can have “conversations” (Jeez louise, I’m sick of hearing about conversations) until we exhaust ourselves, but we can also do things differently so that poverty doesn’t beget poverty, and a zip code doesn’t get to say it all about a child’s chance in America. Let’s finally do as much as we can to help every child thrive and see if that doesn’t help all of us. We need to nurture the roots of us. And yes, I’m a Democrat.

Road Trip, October 2014

View from my hotel room

Last week:

I drove to Viera, Florida to spend time with Kathy, a friend I’ve often talked with, but hadn’t seen since 2006. I knew it would be as if no time at all had passed and that’s exactly how it was. I feel like I’ve been injected with a massive, nourishing, dose of connection. My emotional health is sturdier, my supply of appreciation is refreshed, my regard for my friend, always high, has risen. We’ve lived through much of the whole boomer enchilada in the years since we’ve known each other and I’ve decided we’ve done well. We carry on with grace and courage. I happen to think most of us do, you know, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, good friends help!

I met more Florida Democrats: Kathy’s friends in Viera. I now live in an area nicknamed the Redneck Riviera, the Florida Panhandle, a place replete with white sand beaches, mega-churches, and Republicans. I practice tolerance, almost always, but I’m an aging hippie, artsy-fartsy, New York Liberal and it’s delightful whenever I can say what I think without getting frowned at and prayed over. Plus, Kathy’s friends live on a lake popular with all kinds of seabirds. There was a giant Great Blue Heron resting peacefully right outside their screen door while we were talking politics.

I was a Groupie for three days. I’d never been a Groupie before, but there you go. This road trip to see Kathy seemed like a good time to include a poetry festival if I could find one that fit my plans. Sure enough, Anhinga Press was holding a timely festival and it would even be on the way home, you know, if I went home via Tampa. So I registered for three days at the swanky Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay and settled in to attend days and nights of poetry.  I heard some extraordinary poems read beautifully, talked to friendly writers, editors, and teachers from all over the country, and generally got a big kick out of the biggest hotel I’ve ever stayed in. The last night they held a banquet and I toddled to that, too. And at the banquet the penny finally dropped that I was the only poet there who had not been published by Anhinga Press. Anhinga has been a successful small press for forty years and that’s what they were gathered to celebrate. The event was open to the public, but I was the only public! Huh. No wonder I kept getting asked about my connection to Anhinga! After the speeches, after eating one of the best desserts I’ve ever had in my life, (cinnamon ice cream and a chocolate extravagance) I slipped away without ado. I was only sorry I didn’t say good-by to David Kirby, who I’d had a weeklong workshop with a couple of years ago and I adore, but it couldn’t be helped. Shyness, finally, overwhelmed me. Back in my room I made a cup of tea and thought about things and decided it was all good, after all. But…

I got pissed-off by one thing during this road trip. I’d signed up for a manuscript conference; I’ve had six or seven conferences with various writers over the last few years and they have all helped me immensely with my own writing. This conference did not go well for me. I’m not going to whinge here, but after the hour I spent with this woman I decided I hated poetry, skipped the next session of readings, took a walk, gazed at more sensational seabirds, and ate a big, healthy, breakfast. By afternoon I was happy to listen to poetry again, felt my proper age, and knew I’d keep working on my new book.

  

"There is no one between you and me." Czeslaw Milosz

"There is no one between you and me” Czeslaw Milosz

When I started this blog in 2006, I instinctively titled it Augustine’s Confessions—no other name for this even brushed by. So, I’ll confess. I turned 65 today. Who woulda thunk? I’m proud and grateful. I had one open-heart surgery at 51, and another one eight years later, and the year after that a surgeon put a VERY IMPORTANT stent in my left main artery. For a couple of years my cardiologist checked to see if it was still open, via heart catheterization every six months and it was always fine, so we decided not to go through that for awhile. Oh, and I have a messy neurological disease called Myasthenia gravis (it’s always done that way, with a capital M and a small g ) Six and a half decades! I’ll tell you about them:

1-10: small New Jersey town, neighborhood full of kids, St. Paul’s Elementary, learned to read (!!!) ballet classes & Miss Lynn, 3 remarkable, funny, handsome, teasing, brothers, Mommy and Daddy, Ditty and Bob.

10-20: All of the above and first kiss (Dickie Young in the back of a bus) many more ballet classes, NYC and Juilliard, Antony Tudor, hard, hard, hard work, fell in love 2x, (one painter, one actor) sex, learned about theater, museums, drugs, music, living poor, marched against the war, Bob Dylan, dance, dance, dance, dance.

20-30: Went to Italy for a summer to perform at Spoleto, graduated from said Juilliard, fell in love with a piano player, moved to Albuquerque, taught at the University of New Mexico, started a modern dance company with the piano player and another Juilliard student, lost the guy, choreographed, performed on tour, did costumes, became a drinker, moved back to NYC.

30-40: Tore my Achilles tendon in performance, stopped dancing, kept drinking, sobered up, (32 years, now) went back to school, became a teacher in Florida (emotionally disturbed Kindergartners), almost got married twice, wanted a baby.

40-50: Got pregnant, got married, lost my baby, (the worst thing) spent a year living in England, (maybe the best year) moved to Maryland, dogs, cats, and gardens, taught older special needs kids, felt pretty damn middle class, went to a lot of doctors because I had weird things going on like double vision all the time and it felt like I was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro when I went up a slope, (a slope!) went back to Europe a couple of times, started to look a lot more like Mom.

50-60: Divorce, moved back to Florida to take care of Mom, then Dad, Mom died, my youngest brother, Ric, died, Dad died, (I know) got answers to my health mysteries, began writing poems and a bad novel.

60-65: Peaceful. One of my brothers, (Drago’s his blog name) and I live in a comfortable house with a dog and 3 cats. There are also outside cats who were born in our back garden and who have stayed around. Two of them beg to get their bellies rubbed whenever I go out to see them. My book of poems, “One Day Tells its Tale to Another” got published by The Linnet’s Wings, and I go off on road trips at least once a year to a poetry festival. My brother/housemate and I get along ridiculously well and so do the cats and our dog…and the other cats. My other brother lives in Philadelphia, but maybe he'll join us one day.   

Some time ago I developed the habit of posting something on my Facebook page about a writer (usually) whose birthday was on that day. I wake up, feed the outside cats (and the inside animals if I’m up first) and start reading biographies. I’ve become pleasurably compulsive about this and today I had SO MANY birthday greetings from people who know me through FB.   

I haven’t been writing this summer, but I’m going to. I’m going to write a book of poems about the ancestry research I went from dabbling in to doing intensively. It turns out my family comes from the first kings and queens of Scotland, conquistadors, Alsatian farmers, French pioneers, factory girls, and Irish refugees from the potato famine. During the 19th century my great-grandparents made it to Staten Island, New York and hooked up. And here I am. 65. I still dance, alone in the Florida room when Drago’s out teaching yoga, I still listen to Bob Dylan, (I’m more a Leftie than ever) and I still,  as ever, love to read a good book.

Sin

My brother braces the worn cardboard box against the bed lest the photographs spill from its bowed, damp sides. We didn’t know my mother stored hundreds of photos up there in the dark awkward attic. Setting about my task of sorting treasuring saving all these people and places I am stopped by Aunt Shirley.

My Aunt Shirley, who had moved off Staten Island,

who had a good job, worked in a Manhattan bank,

 who had her own apartment off Washington Square,

who was the most devout Catholic of the bunch of them,

who was in love with her best friend's fiancé,

slept with him, became pregnant and in June of 1952

slit her throat with Grandpop's razor in the white tile bathroom 

of my grandparents' big house on Castleton Avenue.

A man, a neighbor, broke open the door, and so Nana found her. 

Blood, screams and whispers, then a priest who refused 

to say Mass at her funeral or bury her in a consecrated grave. 

Maybe my mother wanted to die too, but she was a wife 

who had children to raise, and a house in New Jersey to keep.

My mother never talked about her sister, but Dad told us. 

I have the photos, can see how close, how alike they'd been back then—

small girls, school girls, teenage brunettes with trim figures, unguarded eyes.

Now that Mom has died, I meet Aunt Shirley. 


a version of this poem was first published at Sheldon Lee Compton's Revolution John magazine

Sleeping with Lowell Nesbitt

I’ve just returned from my January poetry road trip. I grew up in a family with a penchant for traditions. It seemed if we did anything two years running, on, say, Christmas Eve, it became an annual practice for us and I’ve continued to roll the same way as an adult. So, even though there are excellent festivals and conferences for writers during the other eleven months, trips in January to study with poets has been my tradition for four years now. This year my imperturbable 2005 Buick LeSabre and I drove to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, for the Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers Conference at The Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Lots of capital letters needed for that sentence, eh?)

Marjorie's writing table

On the way, (sort of) I stayed at a B&B in Micanopy for two nights. I’d been off B&B’s for awhile. I suppose I became weary of gimcracks. This one, Herlong Mansion, is on the National Registry of Historic Places and is, more importantly, only a few minutes away from Cross Creek State Park, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ farm. (I’m not going to be bothered by capital letters from here on. They can appear, or not, as they will.) I had a chilly morning at the farm, saw the small table on which the author wrote The Yearling, her nonfiction books, and her astounding short stories, (try “Jacob’s Ladder”) saw the tiny guest room and the single bed that Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, Robert Frost, Gregory Peck and lord knows who else slept on, picked tangerines, with the park ranger’s permission, (frost was on its way) soaked up as much of Marjorie’s aura as I could, and in the afternoon meandered through a few antique shops in the tiny, no stoplight town of Micanopy, the oldest inland town in Florida. At the Mansion I had the Carriage House and there was a huge jacuzzi tub smack dab in the same room as the bed! There was a separate bathroom, too, but man, I got a charge out of taking my bath “out in the open” like that. I forgave the B&B its furbelows because Caroline West, the owner, was so delightful. And she liked my poetry.

Cross Creek: Camillias and kitchen garden

The Atlantic Center for the Arts is stunning. The exteriors of the buildings are rustic and smooth themselves into the setting of palmetto, pine, and exquisite quiet without a single jarring note, but within them are state of the art facilities for musicians, visual artists, dancers, writers, and artists-who-work-with-electronics (how does one say that more efficiently, one wonders?) Each participant has a room of her/his own, with a bath, lots of places to put things away, a long desk, enough plugs, good WiFi, and big windows that open and that look onto the green, green, green expanse of the Center’s park. Nice. I was in the Lowell Nesbitt (he was an early Artist-in-Residence) room all week. His photograph hung opposite my bed and he watched me, with approval I thought, as I wrote, drank tea, and slept.

Everyone eats together. Everyone. I was shy on the first night and then I forgot about it. Richard Blanco, my workshop leader, and I had most of our meals together. There were always others at our table, of course, but we shared his attention amiably. The poets met in the library every morning for five days and we worked hard and we laughed a lot, too. I can see myself becoming a Richard Blanco groupie. You know, following him around from reading to reading, conference to conference. Maybe he would take me on as a Tia Nonnie, and I could learn to cook him arroz con pollo ( or something) at a moment’s notice or staple his teacher’s packets together for him. I could become a whiz with printers, even irritating, impossible to get along with, slow as mud printers. I’d do those things for him, because he was so generous to me and to the other fine, funny, interesting poets in my workshop.

Talking while eating

Working in the Library

Me and Richard Blanco!

In the intelligently designed, intimate,“black box” theater, Mark Doty, (Memoir workshop) Pam Houston, (Fiction) and Richard (I can call him Richard, now) gave readings in the evening. Jeffrey Shotts, the edtior from Greywolf Press gave a talk here called “The Art of Rejection,” and despite the title of his talk he was engaging and supportive both in the theater and later when he and I had a private consultation.The audience for these readings and Jeffrey’s talk was small each night, mostly the thirty or so participants, but each of them behaved as if they were sharing their writing and thoughts at Lincoln Center. Awesome, giving, devoted professionals gave us their best and I’ll never forget it.

Open Mic Night

So. I had a good time. I even got to spend a couple of evenings with my brother, Robert, who flew down from Philly, and Cormac, a friend I’ve had since I was three and who lives in New Smyrna Beach with his wife, Lovely Nancy. My Buick and I got a bit lost on the way home to Panama City Beach, but we’re used to doing that and were not upset, and when we did get home, three cats and a little dog who live inside the house and the six backyard cats were as happy to see me as I was to see them. My brother/housemate Drago got home from work a couple of hours later bearing Chinese take-out. I enjoy my road trips, but I am so grateful that I also enjoy getting home as much as I do. This has not always been the case with me and it is not the case for too many people. With poetry, pets, a trusty Buick, loving brothers, cousins, and friends, I know I have it good. I’m a lucky duck swimming around on a small pond that suits me and I’m amazed at how well things are working out for me. “Appreciate” has become one of my favorite verbs.

"Big Bend" (near Appalachacola)