Poetry: Once more, Frank Polite

 

to stagger ashore,
free, cured of use;
simply to be, itself, a green bottle,
a message delivered,
a sailor, like me

Beloved Poems are, to me, like precious gems I keep in my memory box.  Sometimes I bring them out at need, to wear for a while, sometimes they are more like butterflies, mysterious creatures that seem to flitter across my inner landscape, messengers from the  Other Lands, asking me to remember, taste, touch............... For some reason, the words of  Frank Polite , words that  I've been hauling around in my box of literary treasures for some 40 years, did that today.  

I met him at the Cafe Med in Berkeley back in 1975.  Funny how something that happened so long ago can be so vivid.  I can almost taste the coffee, hear the espresso machine, the drone of voices at scattered tables, Frank looking up at me as I sat down at a communal table, a stranger with cup in hand. Our aquaintance was just that day, a conversation about poetry and art with a mild flirtation thrown in.  When Frank left he  gave me a book of poems, "Letters of Transit".   He never could have known that that little book was a friend, the poems travelling companions over the years, among my own restless "letters of transit".  Maybe he did, as we all seem to know things without knowing them.  I suspect he would have a good laugh about that one.

"The Last House On Luna Pier" was one of those jewels in the box, or perhaps I should better say "suitcase", as my own life has had much transit.   13 years later in 1989 I was an artist with my first residency at the Cummington Community, a wonderful artist colony no longer in existence.  I saw that Frank had been there, and wondered if he had perhaps eve worked on his poems in the room I was in.  All I knew of him was that he had moved to Toledo, and much later, I learned that he passed away in 2005.  I never got the chance to thank him for what he gave me...........

In 2009 I was crossing the country again, and on the interstate from Michigan to Toledo, I saw the turnout for Luna Pier, made wholly mythical in my mind and heart for decades by Frank's poem "The Last House on Luna Pier".  I never even knew it really existed,  a misty window of silent blue herons, the brooding presence of Frank's "Lake Goddess Erie", the liminal moment a poem arises from.  

Did I turn off? No.......I knew that the Luna Pier Frank seeded my imagination with was something I would never want to change.

Frank's writings have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, Yankee, Exquisite Corpse, The North American Review and Denver Quarterly.   His Collection Letters of Transit can be found on Amazon.   Thank you Frank.

GOOD ADVICE

1

Do not rush to be disappointed with yourself.
Rather, make a world drag you to it
behind 24 mules of irrefutable proof, and you
still digging in your heels all the way
before you say, "I'm disappointed with myself."

2

Trust only inauspicious beginnings,
the modest seed. What comes
dancing toward you tossing flowers,
soon perishes.

3

It is the weed of life
that grips the garden to your need,
that roots you deep into its soil
which is immortal.

Photograph by Brian Comeau

LUNA PIER  (8)

A sea change leans against the pier
in tumult. I know why I'm here.
Cold streams, contending with the warm
grip the rocks as never before
in my life, and hurl up salt at my door.
What drifts in now is mine, cut loose,
thrown overboard, or drowned:
a wooden spar, a beached bone, a yard
of torn sail like an indecipherable
parchment. Even a shoe drifts in, kicked
around out there God knows how long.

I listen now. I witness. I do not
touch or twist at the integrity of each
survival. It is enough to have arrived
at all, embodying sea changes;
to stagger ashore, free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself, a green bottle,
a message delivered,
a sailor, like me.

 LUNA PIER (9)

I promise a poem to a blue heron.

Every morning, for a week or so, it stood
in the marsh grasses outside  my window,
perfectly still,
one leg poised in the air
as if it were about to kneel, or dip
its quill into a blue pool,  or disappear.

I never saw it move.

And when I turned elsewhere, to poems,
or coffee, or pacing the room,
the heron would be gone.

That last morning...
solitude of the blue heron.
Black branches of trees,
a light snow falling
through eaves of Heaven.

LANTERN

Next year I'm forty years old.
I don't know what hump I'm over.
To have made it this far, what
does that mean? Where am I?

Where have I been? Like you,
I've been places, New York, Asia,
Great fields uncut by wire
or river, mountains leaping up.

And O yes, oceans. I felt my way
deeply into each, into the mind
shafts permitted me, into
a flower (perfect on mescaline,

I laughed and wept for hours)
into the tenderness of people...
I've loved, worshipped stones,
written poems to moon and stars,

and depending on the deep and dark
of my downheartedness, I lit
a flame in my forehead like a toad,
imagining myself, at various

times, Lord of Earth, Light in
the forest, even...God.
Down the road with my lantern, I
lifted up the broken, the poor,

the ignorant, the hopeless, only
to come down to this: to be all of
them myself, at once. So what's
it all about? I don't ask anymore:

I am one with the insect and cloud.
I beg my life to lay me down at last
gently if possible, or fast, the way
a horse, plunging into darkness

kicks a stone out of its path. 

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The black butterflies of night
Clipped for sleep to nightshade and widow grief,
Or in shaking luminous flight
On paired and silver wings, are rare,
And rarely seen by human sight.

Yet, they are there, surfacing
Out of range of neons and streetlights,
Preferring underleaf
And the dark offshores of air
To man and moth-maddening glare of things.
Tonight, As crisis after crisis
Cracks our skies like lightning,
I think of death,
Of different ways of dying,
And of Egypt and the myth
That once held black butterflies
Sacred to Isis.

They lived forever in flight
In her private groves, compelled like
Flickering minutes
Never to touch leaf nor stone,
Never to rest, except upon her nakedness
When she turned to love.
And here is death to be envied;
To be crushed to a personal breast
Between goddess
And whatever bird, beast, lover
Fell to her lips.
We are something else. . .

Myth and love will miss us
When the night is suddenly turned on,
Turned blank white,
And the black butterflies
Appear against that vellum sky
As far, flitting, burnt-out stars.
 

 

My face inside

my cupped hands

my fingertips 

at my hairline

like soft pods

tapping the earth.

What is alive

at such times?

The night, the

silence of thought

wrapped in itself.

My skull is

a shell tuned

to emptiness, like

Love itself

before desire

created all things.

Reflections on a Wise Woman by Maria Popova

Wonderful article about Ursula K. Leguin by Maria Popova on her blog: brainpickings.org 

Most people are products of their time. Only the rare few are its creators. Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) was one.

A fierce thinker and largehearted, beautiful writer who considered writing an act of falling in love, Le Guin left behind a vast, varied body of work and wisdom, stretching from her illuminations of the artist’s task and storytelling as an instrument of freedom to her advocacy for public libraries to her feminist translation of the Tao Te Chingand her classic unsexing of gender.

In her final years, Le Guin examined what makes life worth living in a splendid piece full of her wakeful, winkful wisdom, titled “In Your Spare Time” and included as the opening essay in No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters(public library) — the final nonfiction collection published in her lifetime, which also gave us Le Guin on the uses and misuses of anger.

Two decades after her nuanced meditation on growing older, Le Guin revisits the subject from another angle, perhaps the most perspectival angle there is — the question of how we measure the light of a life as it nears its sunset. Like any great writer who finds her prompts in the most improbable of places, Le Guin springboards into the existential while answering a questionnaire mailed to the Harvard class of 1951 — alumni who, if living, would all be in their eighties. (What is it about eighty being such a catalyst for existential reflection? Henry Miller modeled it, Donald Hall followed, and Oliver Sacks set the gold standard.)

Arrested by the implications of one particular question in the survey — “In your spare time, what do you do?” — and by its menu of twenty-seven options, including golf, shopping, and bridge, Le Guin pauses over the seventh offering on the list: “Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).” She considers this disquieting valuation of creative work in a capitalist society where the practical is the primary currency of existential worth:

Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.

The key words are spare time. What do they mean?

To a working person — supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress — spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such.  But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time? I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been and am proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to a more respectable category, but I rather doubt it.

Virginia Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, illustrated by Nina Cosford for Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Biography by Zena Alkayat.

A century and half after Kierkegaard extolled the creative value of unbusied hoursand ninety years after Bertrand Russell made his exquisite case for why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, Le Guin examines the meanings and misconstruings of “spare” time in modern life:

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

Two millennia after Seneca placed the heart of life in learning to live wide rather than long and a century after Hermann Hesse contemplated how busyness drains life of its little, enormous joys, Le Guin examines the vital difference between being busy with doing and being occupied with living:

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters is a wonderful read in its totality, replete with Le Guin’s warm wisdom on art and life. Complement this particular portion with German philosopher Josef Pieper on why unoccupied time is the basis of culture, English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on why a capacity for “fertile solitude” is the basis of contentment, and two hundred years of great thinkers on the creative purpose of boredom, then revisit what I continue to consider Le Guin’s greatest nonfiction masterpiece: her brilliant essay on “being a man.”

The Waters of the World Revisited

"We welcome you to Avalon

Thank you for bringing the Waters of your lands.

Together we'll make a great medicine of love."

I'm pulling away for a while from politics to try to recover my balance, and looking back to do that. In  2011 I went on Pilgrimage to Glastonbury, and also presented at the Goddess Conference there.  The ritual process at the Conference, the raising of energy they did, and the profound power of the Sacred Place that is Avalon.........I shall always cherish.   An important ritual for all times and places, reciprocity with the waters and land and the group.   I wanted to touch those waters again.

August, 2011, Glastonbury, U.K.

The Goddess Conference here at Glastonbury ended yesterday with some beautiful rituals, and I find myself feeling at a loss to write it all, but I'll try.  Having done week long ritual cycles in the past, as well as leading a few around the work of the mask, I've experienced the kind of "group mind" or entrainment that happens when one works together in sacred space and "mythic mind".  That sounds pretty lame and academic - forgive me.

Imagine gathering the first day in groups of people who come from different parts of the world - in my case, from the "west".   We have all brought water from our homes, and speaking of this, we pour our water into a vessel, which later will become added to a vessel for all participants. As an opening ceremony, each group approaches the Priestesses of Avalon in a barge, "rowing" to share our waters to the magic isle.  This water will be joined with rituals at the "holy wells of Avalon", the Chalice Well and the White Spring.  Later small vials of this charged, healing, universal "water of the well, water of the world" are given to each of us to carry back, and we will all make a procession with our banners through the streets of Glastonbury to the river (which once was a great lake, the legendary home of the Lady of the Lake) to pour some of this water into the flowing waters.

Quite a wonderful sight, to see so many blue clad, singing women and men gathered waist high in the stream, with our vessels of water, and a woven mermaid!  Then a sharing of fruit, to remind all that the Goddess gives to us the fruits of the Earth, always, to share, and to receive.

The closing ceremony included a "give away" where all present exchanged gifts.  And I leave with my heart open, and my vials of water to share with other waters, and to remember.

You know, I honestly feel rather speechless - moved, changed by this experience, the ceremony, the people, the place.   The work is about the Goddess, and it is collective, and a field opens that is also deeply personal and transformative.  A "mystery".  One sees with mythic eyes, with archetypal vision, and waking life becomes a revelation.  For example,  at the river yesterday, I picked a branch of elderberries, finding them beautiful, and wanting to add them to the "fruits" being shared, but decided it wasn't a good idea.  I wasn't even sure they were edible.  Some seeing me with them in my hand told me that they were very magical, connected to the Crone and the Goddesses of the underworld.  That's why they were called "elderberry".  She also said they made medicine from them, and Elderberry wine.

I carried those darkly beautiful berries all the way back, thinking as I returned (wet) from the river, and pouring our waters into the worlds waters thus, about my soon to be 62nd birthday.  I'll be eligible for early retirement now.  I'm entering old age, and I don't know what it means - it's this cycle of my life now.  Sometimes, to be honest, I feel very sad and lonely in the midst of it all.  Elderberries, bearing elderberries from the river...............  Crone medicine.

When I got to the cafe at the Assembly Hall, gathering for the closing rituals, the cook was saying to someone "Oh, someone left a nice bottle of elderberry wine here last night.  Potent stuff.  "(!) 

I was amazed. since I was standing there with the same berries in my hand - so I asked her if I could try it!

And so I sat, waiting for the "gifting ceremony", with a nice glass of (like she said, potent stuff!) elderberry wine in my hand, feeling awed, and as if, on top if it all, I had some very magical "medicine" that had just been gifted to me, even before the "gifting ceremony" had begun.  Elderberry wine.  Healing tonic....... gifts of the crone goddess, potency.

It works that way. The huge generosity of world, and when people come together in love and ritual.........when we forgive, love, and join the waters.........

At the closing ceremony, after the procession to the River Brue,  white veils were drawn as the Priestesses/Facilitators withdrew behind the stage.  The "mists of Avalon" closing on the Mystery..........and we left for our various  homelands, bearing our vials of  "holy-wholly" water.

From the Well of the Lady, the Well of becoming...........the joined Waters of the World.

Speechless.

At the closing of the Conference, the "Waters of the World" were taken to the river, in procession, and given to the river to bear them, with the blessings of all those gathered,  to join the waters of the land and ocean.  

American Nomads: In Praise of the Renaissance Faire Community

One more thing I found from my archives........

"I always felt like the show was a dirigible that somehow, when we opened, was up and God knows how the hell it got there.  Admit it, we all wish the village could somehow last forever.  When I leave the Bristol Renaissance Faire, I always remember a town full of people, and I'm glad that, even when it's buried beneath the snow, it exists, it will come back.  It's like Brigadoon.

It's all transitory really - it's only right now that we have anything, anything at all.  And that's what the Faires are.  They're a celebration that bubbles up literally out of the dust, sometimes in spite of the producers, the corporations, the personalities…….the magic is always there."

Bruce Bramson

I've been  in Renaissance Faires for 30 years.  I've stood in many a booth, eaten many a roasted turkey leg, danced beneath a full moon, shared gossip around campfires, and packed and unpacked many a camper.  I've been a mask maker, an amulet maker, a tarot reader, and a dancer, rolling across the country with winter always to my back.

I never meant to join the circus, so to speak. After graduate school I intended to become a professor of art.   But I guess, like most of us, I just fell in love with the Faire.  And, like all love affairs that begin with a lighthearted kiss, one never thinks, at the time, that the charm of this chance meeting might just change the course of your life.  That it might become a marriage, a career, a family, a way of life…...well, perhaps we are blessed that most of us lack the gift of prophecy.  Not that I have any regrets!  

The truth is, I write this as a love token, homage to a very special community.  And this year, 1999, is the first year in many I'll come off the road, to have what my friend Cora the Wheat Weaver calls an "out of bodice experience".  Peggy and others will manage the Rainwalker booths this year.  Well, I'll try, dear ones.  But I doubt this is my last Huzzah.

The festivals began in California in 1962, with the genius of Phyllis Patterson, a history teacher.  They began as a fund raiser for KPFK, public radio in Los Angeles, and offered participants an opportunity to join in the fun of reenactment.    Renaissance Festivals across the country are now a multi-million dollar businesses, a far cry from the counter-cultural encampments they once were.  And there are  three generations of "Rennies", many of whom have grown up on the road.  Some of us have noticed that we are growing old with the shows….strange in a world that, like the Fairy Isles, seems to be timeless.

My first encounter was in the early '70's, when I wandered into a circle of interesting people doing some interesting dancing at MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, one sunny afternoon.  They invited me to step into the magic circle, and before I knew it, I was dancing with them at the northern California Renaissance Festival, my velvet gown swirling behind me as I bowed to my partner, to the beat of drum and dulcimer music.  I do not think I will ever forget, late one night, as the flaps to our troupe's admittedly noisy tent parted.  Within the aperture, framed by the yellow light of a lantern, coated, cloaked, and formidable, stood the Sheriff of Nottingham.  "Thou dost disturb the peace!" he said.  Busted!

Many "Rennies" are nomads, which is a phenomenon in itself worth writing about.  Why do people become nomads?  What draws them into a lifestyle of constant movement?  I'm curious.  I've been asking myself that question for a long time.  Perhaps it appeals to a certain kind of restless soul who thrives "enroute" without, at least on the surface, the physical and emotional commitments that being "landed" engenders.  Maybe it's more primal than that: the Renfair community is rather tribal, and there are not many opportunities left to live a tribal lifestyle these days.  Like all tribes, it has its touchstones, rites of passage, weddings, births, deaths, rules, and ethics.  It's simply always on the move, coalescing and dissolving with each show.

There's a familiar rhythm.  It begins with an excitement that mounts as the show goes up.  For a month or more before the show opens, energy builds as, literally, it comes to life.  Booths go up, new paint and banners appear, trailers and tents sprout like mushrooms.  People drift in - craftspeople setting up their workshops, trying to get stocked for the show, performers rehearsing, carpenters with stages to build and roofs to shingle, kids with beat up vans, piercing and dreadlocks, looking for jobs.  The on-site schoolhouse opens,  potlucks are organized, birthday cakes are baked, drum circles might happen.  And then all too soon there is the amazingly fast breakdown.  A stream of vans, buses and trucks hauling trailers flow out of the gate, for points west or east….perhaps you pass them on route 40, and honk, wave.  "See you in New York!  See you in Maryland!"

It never fails to strike me that this is, well, Zen.  There is a living metaphor here, as I watch each show melt like a snowflake.  Here is a lifestyle that will not let me forget the fragile transience of our lives….we're all nomads, really.  We come together for a while, we make a family, a village, we dance together, we celebrate, we fight sometimes, we create, and then we pack up and we're gone, all in different directions, until next year, next cycle, next lifetime.

Until we meet again.  Same place, same season perhaps.  In the summer when bagpipes call from across the green or in the fall when the trees are crisp and brilliant, and multi-colored banners are flying from some fanciful turret.  

To all  who have celebrated with me for so many years, friends, colleagues and customers, I offer my deepest gratitude and praise.

Lauren Raine
(Berkeley, 1999)

"And we'll all go together,  to pull wild mountain thyme,

All among the purple heather, will ye go, laddie, go?"

With thanks to so many bodiced ladies, and the men in tights who wore them so very well:

Dellie Dorfman, Berkanna, Vicki, Taylor Marie, Barbara and Rick, Michael Stewart, Chris the dressmaker, Heidi the wanderer, Laurette, Pam DeLuna, Madame Ovary, Ceil, Peggy, Cora, Rosanna, Tracy the mask maker, Judy, Sandy and John Lockwood, Kathy and Thor, Judith, Mari, Jayvanti, the Mud Men, Robb Fletcher, Duncan Eagleson, Pat Murphy, Kerry McNeil, Dan, Jeff , Mitch, Cliff the Greenman, Bob, Seamus, Bruce Bramson, Kip, Michael Valentine, Herb and Rita, Bob Lepre, and so many more.

May we remain evergreen.

Ancestral Visitations.........a Samhain Portfolio

Getting ready for my annual Feast of Samhain, I found some old photos that were irresistable in their mystery and their pathos.  Wanted to remember, especially, the unknown Grandmothers who brought me here.  

Just a few "snapshots from the other side of Forever".............................

 http://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/ancestral-visitations-a-samhain-portfolio-40168014

Thank you.  Thank you all for bringing me here.