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Photo by Emine: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pigeons-on-person-s-hand-15010957/

Matthew Murrey, LITTLE JOY

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I’m really phoning it in today—my apologies. It’s been one of those days (2 days) with a thousand interruptions. Much of it good: carpet edge is reset; electrician has rewired for the new stove and installed the light fixture over the sink; faucet and garbage disposal going in today; appliances, soon. (It looks as though I will have a working kitchen again within 2 or 3 days, early next week at the latest.)

A month or so ago I reviewed Matthew Murrey’s book, Little Joy (from The Portage Poetry Series, Cornerstone Press, 2026) for Escape Into Life. You can read my review by following this link.

And here is one poem, to demonstrate what I mean about the delight Murrey threads through the entire book:

Shifting

I was wind and sunlight again
on the El platform as a train pulled in.

Its doors opened to a woman
with wild, gray hair and loose layers

of mismatched clothes. Without one word
she tossed a blessing of birdseed for the birds

then pigeoned back from the closing doors.
I could call her crazy, but what about you and me

shifting for ourselves in our drabs and grays that hide
our iridescent purple and green fly-away dreams?

I wish I could wear my wings on my sleeve, even as I grub
for the money that gets me the food I need and the place I sleep.

—Matthew Murrey, Little Joy

Think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its resounding end-line, “You must change your life.” Rilke closely observes a statue; Murrey, an old woman feeding birds. If you need a prompt today, take note of two or three things—unusual, maybe—that catch your attention today. Jot down some details from one, and, dwelling on it, consider what you might change about your own life in answer to its call.

Jill McCabe Johnson: DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEA

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DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEA, Jill McCabe Johnson. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2013, 55 pages, $16, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Jack Hill, reviewing Jill McCabe Johnson’s Diary of the One Swelling Sea for Prairie Schooner, described it as “a wrenching reminder of why the sea must be loved, cherished, and protected.” I agree.

As I read, I kept thinking of this passage from Rilke’s The Duino Elegies:

Perhaps we are here only to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower….But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely that the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Elegy” (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

McCabe Johnson lives on Orcas Island, in the San Juans, and, in these poems, we have so much naming. Some of the terminology was familiar to me: driftwood, coral, plankton, barnacle and shark. But much was not, and the poems introduced to my mind’s eye a whole world of creatures: monkey cups, kelee shad, brackenmuck, gillraker, ulve-weeds, black-tailed godwits. (My mind’s eye and my Google Search, I should say.) The names don’t obscure the poems but animate them. Lia Purpura describes them as “entries in a daybook, bejeweled moments, cries from the heart” (back cover).

My favorites among the poems let us glimpse the observer, too, as we see here: [Note: I struggled to get the format to work, and couldn’t. My new practice is to move it from a Word document, but it didn’t work this time—thus, the snapshot.]

To learn more about McCabe Johnson, visit her webpage: https://jillmccabejohnson.com/index.html. In brief, she has four books of poetry, including Tangled in Vow & Beseech, which was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award and will be released by MoonPath Press this year.

image from iStock

“Because once someone dared”

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I keep Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours near my bed, and this morning I opened it and read this poem.

 

Because once someone dared
to want you,
I know that we, too, may want you.

When gold is in the mountain
and we’ve ravaged the depths
till we’ve given up digging,

it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.

Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening.

I, 16