The Windhover

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This is my Christmas gift to you.

After a friend emailed a circle of friends with news of Avian flu and its effects on raptors in Whatcom county (and on a particular, beloved keeper of raptors), we shared amongst us a number of falcon references, and I offered Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Windhover.”

It’s such a gorgeous poem. I memorized it years ago, and it’s one of the poems I often recite to myself when I’m troubled. Its meaning is not self-evident, and I’ve had students admit that they found it baffling; but the sound of it alone is worth the trip. Aloud, Hopkins seems to be writing in an extremely musical foreign language. (Just saying aloud “chevalier,” “lovelier” or “rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing” will demonstrate this, as will noticing the odd line breaks and juxtapositions.) But here’s the poem itself:

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

          To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

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[Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)]
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I borrowed the text from Poetry Out Loud (where you can listen to Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”), a site on which it is asserted that if you wish to memorize a poem, it helps to understand it. I’m not sure you have to understand this poem to enjoy it, but here is my brief explication — not to explain away the beauty of the poem, but to offer a little guidance through perhaps unfamiliar territory.

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who lived in England from 1844-1880. In the first stanza I like to imagine him on a walk in the early morning, catching sight of one of those big, soaring birds (I think of our region’s red-tailed hawks and ospreys), which he calls “morning’s minion,” minion as in messenger (bearing news of something, perhaps, for Hopkins, of Christ), and feeling that he was witnessing the prince of the dawn — “daylight’s dauphin” — as he admires the bird’s dappled underside (imagining the movement of a skate in the ocean — think of the big flat fishy skate, not an ice skate), then, as one does when overcome by unexpected beauty, feeling his own heart soar. The “heart in hiding” always suggests to me depression and a protected, hidden heart, now coaxed out of hiding.

The second stanza is all sound magic. (Read it out loud to yourself!) The heart isn’t just coaxed out of hiding, but rippling like the hawk’s wings against the sky, and “buckle” always makes me think of a sheet of tin shaken and reflecting sunlight. The “chevalier” as a knight in armor reinforces that notion.

The final stanza brings up an image even stranger to our own era: “plowdown sillion.” This was explained to me as the earth turned up by a plow and — it so happens (having been raised on a farm) I know this phenomenon. I didn’t walk behind a plow, too young for that, but I rode on tractors with my Dad and looked back to see the furrows opening and gleaming. The plow of course is another shiny metal image (like the tin I imagine above) but the earth itself shines when it’s first turned up, with moisture and maybe mica in the soil. Sillion is an archaic word referring to the slice of furrow itself, but it makes me think of silicon, another silvery, shiny word. Plodding behind the horse and plow (“sheer plod”) would reveal this unexpected beauty, just as (with the next image) staying until the fire is dying down reveals the beauty of its end.

And those endings (“blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, fall, / Fall, gall themselves and gash gold vermilion”) makes this a poem about endings, about how staying with something — or someone — is worth the trouble, and even death has a beauty for those brave enough to face it.

Finally, to augment my own reading, here’s a link (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/182786) to a Poetry Foundation essay by Ange Mlinko about her experience with the poem, “a love poem to life.”

May you have a restful, shop-free day, a day that includes a walk, people you love, and some unexpected beauty.

A Season of Waiting

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From Chocolate is a VerbReading around a few other blogs (Chocolate Is a Verb, for instance), I find that I am not alone in feeling frantic and wishing 1) that I had more time and 2) that Christmas were over.

This is a season of waiting. My daughters can’t wait for it to be Christmas. Can’t wait to find out what’s wrapped in those presents under the tree. I can’t wait to be done with all the cards and decorations and busyness of the holiday. On Thursday, maybe in an effort to check-out from the busyness,I left my cell phone charging in the car while I had coffee with a friend; when I returned to the car, I saw–my heart pounding–that I had 3 missed texts and 2 missed calls. I grabbed up the phone and the last message (all from my sister) was “Call me! Mom’s had a stroke!”

By the time I called, the paramedics were there with mom, and so was my sister. Mom had maybe had a stroke, but definitely a violent seizure. I was able to help make the decision not to transport her to the hospital. There were tears and not a little anguish. In between calls, I sent texts to my friends. But then, Mom began to feel better. Her speech wasn’t slurred any longer. She was put to bed and my sister sat with her and held her hand.

I had begun my day with a million things to do. I mentally crossed most of it off the list. I went to the gym (I was already dressed!), I went to the school to wait for Emma (who turned out to have other plans), I went home and showered and packed. I took a plate of spaghetti to my friend who had surgery yesterday. I got in the ferry line. I waited in the ferry line for an hour and a half!!! (I had a book; no worries.) A little before 8 p.m. I rolled into Allyn. My sister was able to go home. I slept in the recliner in Mom’s room; or, I didn’t sleep (good British movie on the telly; and the amazing caregivers who woke us every two hours to check on Mom and reposition her in the bed).

The next morning Mom was her chatty self. She told me that my uncle lives there, too, but that she hasn’t seen him for awhile. She wanted to know who is taking care of Dad while she’s there. “Can’t you just take me home?” she kept asking. She ate almost all of her breakfast (which was a surprise) and she was no longer complaining of a headache. Her blood pressure was good.

Before I left, Debra, who owns the Haven (and is a gift, herself) arrived and took me in hand. We sat downstairs in her office and had a long talk. It’s so easy to get into a mindset of “waiting for Mom to die.” A mindset that makes every moment agony. Or, at the least, unpleasant. If you are waiting for the next moment, rather than being in this one, then you can’t really enjoy this moment. You can’t bask in it. “Your mother is dying,” Debra told me. “But not right now.” I told Debra the story of my grandmother’s last three years in a nursing home, and how Mom used to say, “Don’t you let that happen to me.” Debra said, “But is this like where your grandmother was? Is your mother, your grandmother?” Her best advice was, “Make new memories.”

Mom is in a good place where she has her own bedroom with her own pictures on the wall and her television playing the deer at havenChristmas music station. Deer and rabbits visit. The caregivers are good to her. One of them calls her “Grams.” My youngest sister is able to see her almost every afternoon after work. I can be there in two hours, and have been able to visit almost every week.

What I am going to remember is sitting and holding her hand. I’m going to remember reading Agatha Christie novels aloud to her. I’m going to remember the ride on the ferry and seeing gray whales and eagles and flocks of surf scoters.

I’m going to try to enjoy this week before Christmas when my to-do list is almost completely crossed off and the tree is lit up and presents are (mostly) wrapped in anticipation. I’m going to try to bask in the anticipation.

I’m going to try to enjoy this time before my novel rewrite is finished (it is so close) and everything is still possible.

I’m going to try to enjoy being able to visit my mother while she is still in this plane of existence with us, in whatever condition.

And I’m going to reread Cherie Langlois’s blogpost, “A Christmas Question,” which says everything I have been thinking, but says it better.

3 Ways Writers Can Stay Creative and Protect Their Mental Health

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3 Ways Writers Can Stay Creative and Protect Their Mental Health.

I enjoyed this post from Lauren Sapala’s blog and thought you might, too.

One of the ways, of course: KEEP A JOURNAL.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

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1955My mother will be 82 years old tomorrow; I’m going to visit overnight, and three of her sisters and a niece will be meeting me and my sister in Allyn, at Mom’s new home, to have lunch–and cake!

Here is a picture of Beverly with some of her sisters, a sister-in-law, and a niece, and five of their young children. My mom is the young woman in the middle, looking right at the camera. In this picture, she is pregnant with me.

With my mother now in care, I’ve been thinking about my grandmother’s illness toward the end of her life, when she was still being cared for at home, and of this poem (originally published in Calyx, a Journal of Art and Literature for Women).

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To Carry On

My grandmother’s name was Arada–
In another language, “fertile field.”
I am the second child of her eleventh
And grew up next door

On the old creek road. When Granma
Was old, she took six pills a day,
Thought she saw babies
On the chair, on the pillow, on the floor

Beside her bed. “Careful,” she said,
“Don’t sit on the baby.”
Her daughters cared
By turns, departing after

Like moons into the dark of planets.
From the threshold once
I heard her call, “Don’t forget me,”
But I had already turned into the hall,CAM00421

To a time before names were spoken.
My aunts moved aside invisible bundles,
Clucked their tongues
And counted pills. “She’s never been sick

Except to have babies.” They smoothed
A blue blanket under her chin,
Smoothed back her black hair.
When I dream of my grandmother, my dream

Is a word from a wordless deep,
A shaft of light. She is tiny
And wrinkled. I wrap her in my arms.
I bear her up the stair.