G. E. Schwartz: The Poetic Way Around Chesapeake Landing

The Poetic Way Around Chesapeake Landing

Ways are where
We walk about
And poems are where
We walk out     now.
What of    this poetic way
Around Chesapeake Landing?
The others that
Greeted me last night
Bid me
“Go the way ahead…”
And that dream    was lamplit from
Within        but it turned into a walk in sun.
 Shaking the fern fronds, the wind wound,
Each frond mimicking a stickleback.
 I’d like something beautiful here,
 In this cul-de-sac walk,
 something profound, not this untuned piano staining my thoughts.
 Something exact, lineated,
 scanning the low skies like aisles at Wegman’s,
 as if birds were purchasable as tan envelopes.
 There is bittersweet and aileanthus. There are herds of white-tailed deer.
 No mammalian misfortune for black farce to pick clean, though
Just now a black vulture    cantilevers all above.
 The ancients thought all vultures were female, opening
 their vaginas in flight to the inseminating wind.
 “breeze scavenger.”
Root tangle and stem,         and the buzzards mathematical,
 sine and cosine,         pi in the sky,         the sky
a drawer of wing-nuts and paper-clips.
 Except that’s what I’m most anxious about Nature:
 all those numbers,     bleary,         smeared, the rank way we on them.
 I admit the disingenuousness of this melting snow, rocks, birds, clouds.
 And creeks, holding ponds—all bodies of water. But if a sentence isn’t
a garter snake,         why syntax
and all its sinuous equations?         Consider:
the flattened squirrel—rigor mortising,
clutter of crude taxidermy.
 Not eviscerated but visceral: roadkill. Why not move
it off the road? Better to let it rot in the field?
 Open season. Demolition. Heavy trucks
And earthmovers on the move
 Lumber and mortar and everything mortal.
 Efflorescence with each rumble, waying its way around Chesapeake Landing.

-30-



--G. E. Schwartz

G. E. Schwartz: Walk Notes As Hastily Put Down

WALK NOTES AS HASTILY PUT DOWN
IN MY LITTLE STAPLES SPIRAL NOTEBOOK, SPRING 2014


Again
teardrops
stand
shining
on resinous leaf buds, the
first woodbees blur their velvet, and
walkers—new with babies—stroll. Holy Week,
filled to overflowing with sounds, charged with memories
of dazzling colored Easter eggs, the Garden of Gethsemane,
Golgotha,
the St. Matthew Passion, youthful
enthusiasms, first loves, the first fine taste
of sorrow. White trillium—wavy-edged petals,
sepals narrow and short, leaves unstalked, in cool,
shaded woods. On my walks, never do I distinguish
between indicts and urges and charges within me and the concert of
growing things whose thousand voices sensesurround
me
from without. I walk  by the suburb’s edge, breeze
brushing my face just as it caresses
the assenting Trillium, but as it swirls up a stream of
memories in me like dust clouds, reminders of pain, transience, brevity, evanescence
rising in my blood to notice, to awareness, to consciousness. Slate stone on the path,
weathered-flimsy, but stronger than me. Ragged tree at field’s edge, you
will outlast me,
and perhaps so will you, lost lilac bush, and perhaps
even you, passing trillium. For a single breath I sense more
profoundly than ever the transience of my form, and
feel drawn into transfiguration—to
the stone, the earth, the trillium, the abandoned lilac bush.
My thirst for signs of passing,
the water, the withering of petals. Tomorrow, the day after, soon,
soon I shall be you, I will be leaves, I will be dirt, I will be roots,
the poetry will run out, be done, I will no longer pay the mortgage,
the electric, the gas bills, I will no longer be pestered by TSA officers
as I fly from place to place, and
so—swim cloud in the blue, flow water as drainage to pond and beyond,
bud leaf on mountain ash, I have sunk into oblivion
and into my 1,000-x’s-longed-for
transfiguration.
10 and a hundred times more you will grasp me, amaze
me, hold me, wordworld, opinionworld, peopleworld,
increasing-pleasure-and-fevered-fearworld. 1,000 times
you will delight me, terrify me, with Eric Dolphy songs,
Bach Cantatas on my I-Pod, with newspapers, blogs,
with text messages, with obituaries, with registration forms
and with all your crazed odds and ends, you, World
full of pleasure and fear, breath-burning song
of melodic nonsense. But never more, may it be granted,
will you be completely lost to me, devotion to transience,
passionate music of change,
readiness for death, desire somehow pressing on and on.
Easter
will always return, pleasure will always become fear,
fear will always become redemption, and the song
of the past will accompany me on my way without grief,
filled with assertion, avowal,  affirmation, filled with readiness, with ease, filled
with hope. So, walk… move on.


--G. E. Schwartz