Last week I finished my Four Seasons quilt and turned back to the project I had left half done: the eight worldly winds pennants. I had completed four (gain, loss, fame, and disrepute) and so started on Thursday to work on happiness: a small dime store deer standing on a woodsy platform amidst butterflies and a tree. And then at the happiest moment, sewing red curlicues around the happiness label, my machine stopped working. The bobbin started to jam. I cleaned and rethreaded the machine many times, patiently, methodically, but it kept jamming. Way overdue for a tune-up, I thought, so I packed it up and took it to Sawyer’s Sewing Centre. The chatty woman at the counter (who, we discovered during our lively exchange, lives right around the corner from me) said it would likely be two weeks before my machine was ready.

Without my sewing machine, what will I do? Sit around worrying about Covid 19 and the economic and climate crises?

Then, like a soaring bird, poetry ascended, landing in the space that sewing had occupied.

Yesterday I sat Sunday Morning Meditation at our Shambhala Centre for a while, then took off to walk around Fernwood. I headed down Belmont, straight for the Poetree to see what was new.  Some kind, creative person nailed a box to a tall tree right next to the sidewalk and posts poems there for passing people to enjoy.

I stood before the tree in the fragile March sun, reading e.e. cummings’s [love is more thicker than forget].  When I read e.e. cummings or Dylan Thomas, and sometimes T.S. Eliot, my mind tells me I don’t understand, and yet deep in my toes, my heart, my fingertips, my tongue, my soft palate, I get it. I sense the truth of it. I hear the rightness of it. cummings knew that love is certainly mad and moonly, yet at other times sane and sunly. Contradictory, puzzling, complex, maddening, glorious, fleeting, perseverant, inexplicable: love is all of that and more. The double negatives and oppositions in the poem read like wise nonsense spouted by a savant.

This morning, I was preparing a bag of tricks to visit a girl I play with sometimes. Today, I thought to myself, I will take supplies to make paper dolls and some books to read. I have saved a few books from my own childhood, and one of them is We like Bugs, a simple sweet primer wherein two children describe all of the bugs they encounter. Before slipping the old book into my bag, I flipped it open and found an inscription from my adopted grandmother, Phyllis Davidson, who had given me the book when I was five. The poem was a haiku involving a beetle and Michelle, our black female cat. Unearthing this treasure, so long hidden, made me feel happy, a little communion with my long-dead Grandma. Phyllis was a true cat-lover. After we moved to Toronto, she would send multi-page typed letters to us describing the antics of her many cats. Here, she seizes on Michelle’s alertness to sound and movement. Haven’t we all seen a cat’s attention glued forensically to an empty spot, as if ghost-watching? And then you realize a microscopic bug is passing there.

Grandma Phyllis and me, Phillips Beach near Boston, MA

Grandma’s haiku reminded me of the hundreds of short poems Michael and I have written to each other over the years on our little kitchen whiteboard. Transitory as the clouds, the words are there today, gone tomorrow, arising imperfectly from our foggy minds as the coffee grinder buzzes in the early morning kitchen. It all started with Robin Skelton’s book, Islands, that we bought—I think—at a yard sale (Ekstasis Editions, 1993). The water-warped paperback lives in our kitchen drawer, handy for reference. The book’s subtitle is “poems in the traditional forms and metres of Japan,” and in his introduction, Skelton does a brilliant summary of many of those forms, including Sedoka, Dodoitsu, Choka, Mondo, and Somonka. Then in the body of the book, he richly demonstrates  his mastery of these forms, for example, this sharply humorous Dodoitsu (one stanza poem of 7-7-7-5 syllables) that describes a situation familiar to many of us over 60:

In Age

In age we find memory,
a sly old friend, removing
his coat, accepting a chair,
and lying, lying.

(p. 58)

Although most of our poems have disappeared under the quick daily rub of a tea towel, Michael snapped photos of a few of his over the years. He prefers the Choka, a form that Skelton describes as “a poem of any length” that “alternates a five syllable with a seven syllable line and concludes with an additional seven syllable line” (p. 10)­­. This one takes me back to the days when we both worked M-F, 9-5 and all week we ripened for the week-end and its leisurely joys.

Here’s to poetry of all kinds–I love the flawed, fresh jewels in the light; the old burnished friends; the wounded lines so raw and open; also those dense verses like green kernels, hard to crack. When I read a poem–sudden lift of my heart, dark sadness in my inner thighs, tingle in my ears. The way it makes me feel. The sweet heft of writing poetry, the tart cherry scour of sharp words, the high loft of vocabulary, precise yet untethered, vulnerable yet powerful. Poetry is for everybody. Write something now!