WE HAD OUR REASONS, Ricardo Ruiz

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Business as usual seems beyond me right now, and I’m daily amazed by the advertisements that make their way into my email-inbox—including from writers merrily chirping about new classes and life changing strategies for writing “your next best-seller!”

But here’s me. Dropping some of my 2024 goals, downsizing from the usual blog reviews, but still reading poetry and still wanting to share amazing poets with you, particularly the ones who are sustaining me just now.

We Had Our Reasons, a Washington State Book Award winner from 2022, is one of the books I keep picking up.

This community effort was created by poet and translator Ricardo Ruiz. On the cover, we find not only Ruiz’s name, but also: “and other hard-working Mexicans from Eastern Washington.” It was published by Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing (Seattle, WA).

Each poem appears in the language of the writer (or collaborator), and in English translation. Thus, “Un saco de dormir y un semi,” by Centavo and Ricardo, on one page, and on the facing page:

A Sleeping Bag and a Semi

I came from Mexicali across the border.
There was work for me in Arizona.
I crawled into the gray sleeping bag,
hearing the zipper, feeling the tape
tighten around my legs and body.
I became a gray balloon floating into
the storage compartment
where the trucker kept the chains.
My mind, clouded by the smoke.
I meet the sky again
in Nogales.
I was born in California,
so I could have walked but I didn’t know.
I was bound up in not knowing.

—Centavo and Ricardo

The voices of the poems vary. Many are young, sounding a bit like any suburban kid dealing with divorcing parents, Game Boys, attempts to buy beer. Some, like Centavo, work alongside their parents in the fields. Many of the voices sound to me older, worn out with work and trying to keep families together. Ruiz’s own poems often address his service in the U. S. Military. The profiles of the collaborators are in prose, in the back of the book. We Had Our Reasons has a cumulative power that moved and educated me.

These are the people who will be threatened with deportation in the coming years.

After Ten Years They Came Back Again

My Social Security is good.
When I was detained
on the bus outside of Indio,
we filled out the paperwork.
So, I have been legal to work.

The call came in
while I was at lunch.
Don’t clock in.
Head straight to HR.

The officer told me
I had two choices
– walk out with them
– or be taken out in handcuffs

The shame shot into me
that I was wrong
as ICE paraded me out of my workplace.
I’d worked there seven years.

They took me to my house.
Let me change out of my scrubs
and we waited for my mom.

—Patty and Ricardo

You can learn more about the book at https://www.poetruiz.com/reasons.

To learn more about justice for migrant farm workers, visit this site: https://www.wslc.org/immigrant-toolkit/.

Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

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WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED? POEMS OF NATURE, LOVE, AND AGING, Victoria Doerper. Penchant Press International, Bellingham, WA, 2019, 94 pages, paper, $15.95.

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Hedgerows

I’m convinced that heaven
Lurks in old hedgerows,
Not like a predator, but
More like a mystery
Laced through thickets
Tangled with song.
In those byzantine temples
Of leafy, shaggy, profligate
Bud, flower, and berried
Commonplace delight,
Visited by visions of roses
Wafting the incense of attar
Into the sacred air,
Where angels shelter
The hungry, the trod-upon,
The sky-travelers seeking rest,
No questions asked,
No proof of worthiness,
No papers required
For an offer of ground
In an unsullied place
Filled with the potent
Possibility of grace.

—Victoria Doerper

That “possibility of grace” is, I think, what Chodron is talking about, too.

What If We All Bloomed? is dedicated to John Doerper, the poet’s husband, who also did the lovely drawings illustrating the cover and throughout the book.

The website for Penchant International didn’t work, but I found Doerper’s book for sale at Sidekick Press, and it is also available at Village Books ($1 shipping). Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times is widely available.

When Artists Go to Work

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I meant to show up today to do a blog-review/appreciation of Ada Limón’s 2011 collection of poems, Sharks in the River. It felt like appropriate reading for this week. (And, indeed, it is.) A woman of color, our national poet laureate.

The problem being, I can’t seem to pull a review together.

Time is not the issue. I am at a 4-day writing retreat on Hood Canal, staying in a cottage at the lip of a cove. Each day I wake early and watch the sun come up. I take at least two long walks during the day and see mergansers, grebes, buffleheads, harbor seals. We have a resident great blue heron, and a resident kingfisher. (When I walk, I think of it as going out to see my kingfisher, and he almost always is there, briefly holding still for me to admire him, then chittering across the water.) I feel awash in gratitude for the consolations of nature. I mess around with my writing, too (not really getting much done), and in the evenings I eat wonderful food and talk with like-minded friends — poets, all. For the most part, we are trying to take a break from politics. But sometimes a fragment slips in, like those intrusive thoughts one gets while meditating, and we gently push it away. Later.

(To take a look at the belted kingfisher, visit All About Birds at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)

Meanwhile, this arrived via email from The Nation, the closing paragraph of a bid to subscribe. Which I may do when I’m feeling a little better. Anyway, it’s a paragraph I have shared with a number of friends, and I think you may need to hear it too.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

What an excellent and timely reminder.

both photos by Bethany Reid

Election Day

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I know I have been strangely silent about the U. S. election — in this venue at least. My family of origin used to be decent, working-class Republicans. Something I didn’t even know until I discovered how much my father admired Ronald Reagan. Now they are die-hard MAGA Republicans. It hurts my heart. If I say anything, they think I’m crazy. So I silence myself. In truth, I silenced my little bleeding liberal heart a lot as a child. I’m good at it. Not that they don’t love me, or that I don’t love them.

I remember my brother-in-law once telling me, “If you would only listen to Rush Limbaugh, then you would understand.” Well, if you would read The New Yorker, or The Nation, or freaking Time Magazine, YOU would get it. No, I don’t say that (not out loud). Instead I hang out with my tribe (poets), and watch Kamala’s Tik-Tok channel (or whatever it is) with my daughters.

And I feel really, really anxious. To make matters worse, two weeks ago my old dog died. I really wish he were here.

Pabu in his Halloween costume, a couple years back

How do I deal with election-anxiety? I get up early and sit at my desk, scribbling in a notebook (although he always lay at my feet and I miss having him there), and that makes me feel better. I read poetry, and that makes me feel better. (Though I used to read poems aloud to him.) I go for long, long walks with Pabu’s collar in my pocket, and that makes me feel a little better

I didn’t mean to say all of that. But, for once, I won’t erase what I’m thinking. I’ll just leave it out there.

In the Substack world, several people have today posted this poem by Alison Luterman. I found myself wanting to read it to my friends, and then — aha! — I thought of you. I copied this from Robert Reich, by the way.

I used to tell my students, if we all thought alike, we’d be robots or under some kind of mind control — in movies and novels, that’s always a dystopia. So, read widely, expose yourself to diverse cultures and ideas and voices. Make up your own mind. Be human.

And don’t forget to read poems.

HOLDING VIGIL

My cousin asks if I can describe this moment,
the heaviness of it, like sitting outside
the operating room while someone you love
is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs
eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine
which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise,
waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out
in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down
to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels
as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about
is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat
asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are.
I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity,
the fact that we are all waiting in the same
hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support,
and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up?
Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil,
as families do, and bringing each other coffee
from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it
while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral,
which is also what happens at times like these,
and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment,
heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand,
in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep
of human history, a soap bubble, because empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization,
your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator,
and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about
when she wakes at three in the morning,
cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing,
it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day
and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food,
cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies,
and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls
and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer,
the icebergs for the love of God—every single
blessed being on the face of this earth
is holding its breath in this moment,
and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin,
then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it
we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.

— Alison Luterman