"Anna God Remembers" by Eileen Moeller

.

Anna God Remembers

the time she followed in
her father’s footsteps,
tiptoeing through the night
behind him as he left for the barn.

She was only two years old but she remembers
how the front door locked behind her
and he went off to do the milking,
not even seeing her standing there
in her little coat and rubber boots.

She remembers singing to herself
as she curled up on the front porch
to get out of the wind.

But her mother never heard her over the wailing.
The rest she only knows from stories:
how she froze like a porcelain doll there,
on a night that dipped to eight below.

(Her mother always cried at the part
where she found Anna blue as skim milk,
and drove her to the hospital,
dead and stiff on the back seat.
Anna would cry too, over how
the Doctors swore and wept and pleaded,
thawing her out, coaxing her heart into beating again).

It’s fuzzy, but Anna remembers
being startled awake by warm hands
kneading her arms and legs,
and the voices saying: Come on, open your eyes.

Once in awhile she dreams she is her father again:
dozing in the straw against the kindly beasts,
warm as a newborn calf.

© Eileen Moeller

First published in Firefly, Brightly Burning, Grayson Books, USA, 2015

Featured on the Tuesday Poem blog with permission

Editor: Helen Lowe

One of the very great pleasures in being part of a community like The Tuesday Poem blog arises when one of our fellow poets brings out a new book of poetry – which presents not only the opportunity to celebrate with them, but also to enjoy a new body of work.

Today, I am delighted to feature Anna God Remembers from our own Eileen Moeller's recently released book of poetry, Firefly, Brightly Burning, published by Grayson Books.

Firefly, Brightly Burning comprises a number of poetic sequences, one of which features the fictional Anna God. It's too easy, in an age of often intensely personal poetry, to overlook that it is also a form of fiction, and that the point of view character central to a poem is frequently not the poet. The creation of poetic characters such as Anna God helps sustain this vital aspect of the poetic tradition.

Last week, I featured an outstanding example of a narrative poem, Robert Browning's My Last Duchess. In this case, both the 'story' and the character development were encompassed in one poem. Sometimes, however, the narrative arc and understanding of character are explored and developed through a sequence of poems, as is the case with Eileen Moeller's Anna God.

I was particularly taken with the poem I have chosen to feature, Anna God Remembers, because of the power of the subject matter and the vivid picture the poem paints. As readers, we are part of the moment: the all-too-believable scenario of a two-year-old being locked out of the house, having followed her father out into the winter weather, and he, meanwhile:

"...not even seeing her standing there
in her little coat and rubber boots."

while later :

"...her mother never heard her over the wailing" [of the wind]

or how:

"the Doctors swore and wept and pleaded,
thawing her out, coaxing her heart into beating again..."

Like most good poems, it will only speak to the reader if the whole holds together – which Anna God Remembers undoubtedly does. Nonetheless, there are also some fine poetic moments within the poem, including the clever use of repetition around 'remembers' and with images such as:

"Her mother always cried at the part
where she found Anna blue as skim milk"

building on the earlier fact that her father "went off to do the milking."

I hope that you will enjoy the whole that is Anna God Remembers as much as I did on first and also subsequent readings. I also hope you will check out Firefly, Brightly Burning further – starting with another of Eileen's poems, Wind, which I have featured on my own blog today. Wind is a companion to Anna God Remembers, but also highlights the range of Eileen Moeller's poetry.

You may also find out more by going to the Grayson Books site; just click on the book title: Firefly, Brightly Burning

Eileen Moeller was born in 1950 and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, where she had poems published in her high school and college literary magazines. After starting a family, she earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she taught in the undergraduate writing program for many years. She also did storytelling and ran creative writing workshops throughout Central New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the United States and England, in online journals, in self-help and spiritual books/blogs, and on her own blog, And So I Sing: Poems And Iconography. Three poems were set to music in 2011, by contemporary composer, Dale Trumbore for a CD titled Snow White Turns Sixty. She has also been the recipient of The Dorothy Damon and The Allen Ginsberg Awards. She currently lives in southern New Jersey with her husband, Charles.

Today's editor, Helen Lowe, is a novelist, poet and interviewer whose work has been published, broadcast and anthologized in New Zealand and internationally. Her first novel, Thornspell, was published to critical praise in 2008, and her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Helen's fourth novel, Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night Series, Book Three) is forthcoming in January 2016. She posts regularly on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is also active on Twitter: @helenl0we

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting. 

Two Poems by Wang Ping

from The River in Our Blood 

A Sonnet Crown

I

The geese are painting the sky with a V, my lord

The Mississippi laughs with its white teeth

How fast winter flees from the lowland, my lord

And how’s the highland where songs forever seethe?

At the confluence, I sing of the prairie, my lord

My joy and sorrow soar with rolling spring

Its thunder half bird, half mermaid, my lord

No poppies on hills, only ghost warriors’ calling

Today is chunfeng—share of spring, my lord

Two spirits, one on phoenix wings, one on lion’s seat

Across the sea, kindred spirits, my lord

Prayer through breaths, laughing children on the street

Let’s open our gift, acorn of small things

Let river move us without wants or needs  

IV

Moon on river’s bend, long day of mayfly

No sound or word from Damascus’ desert

Limestone ridge along Silk Route—face of Dubai

Crumbles—wind in hyssop, thyme, wild mustard

This flayed land, so raw, parched, only seeds fly

To take roots in the conquerors’ footprints

Dusk weeps like sand through hands, pulling first cry

From Azan’s throat, a black slave as god’s imprints

Home under the ash cloud, darting swallows

From hospitals, roses on broken walls

Tanks at the border. Shadows at ghettos

Remorse in maze—the last muezzin calls

The Dervish whirls, palm to earth, palm to sky

Who gave us the hand to feel your sublime?

Editor: Eileen Moeller

In Wang Ping’s poems, we experience two cultures dancing -- between widely different languages and traditions, between history and the present, tradition and iconoclasm, toughness and tenderness, the political and the intimate. 

Born in Shanghai, Wang Ping moved to the U.S. in 1986. And in the midst of life's shifts and turns, one thing remained constant: a river flowing through the landscape, whether it be in her homeland, or here in the U.S. -- a river that also flows through her recent work on a crown of sonnets, titled “The River In Our Blood”, from which I have chosen the two poems above. 

Though it focuses on the Mississippi, the first poem (I) is driven by image and symbol, to celebrate chunfeng, the Spring Equinox, connecting the scene and the speaker back to China in happy ritual.

The second poem (IV) explores the brevity of life along the Silk Route, past Damascus and Dubai, pulling the reader along to witness scenes of war and destruction. Yet despite this, the call to prayer survives, the Dervish continues to whirl, the belief in God’s goodness is palpable. Clearly, the great sense of unity in these poems is the result of Wang Ping’s deep involvement in the "Kinship of Rivers" project.

Her two earlier books, Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, focus more intently on what divides the bi-cultural self, how language and family heritage shape the psyche, what it means to be a Chinese-American woman bearing up under the weight of generations of brutal treatment. In the poem "The Splintered Eye", she tells us, "There's a sleeping wolf in everyone's head." She deconstructs this assertion in poems that move from image to narrative and back, poems about foot binding, about the drowning of newborn girls, about girls being given names that reflect disappointment.

She also writes of her American experiences with Chinatown, with stereotyping, with love, sex, and motherhood, about war, consumerism, and the victims of September 11th. The world is a brutal place.  
In the first book, even the river is suspect. A haiku titled "A FLASH OF THOUGHT FROM THE RIVER" tells us "I really think I have nothing to do with humans / though I occasionally drown a few / to remind them of their origin." In this fierce and muscular work, one can see the poet risking all to face down and tell of her origins, and to then be able to turn, as the sonnet does, and say, "Let's open our gift, acorn of small things."  

Wang Ping has many publications, and has been the recipient of many awards in the U.S. She is on the faculty of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can visit her website at  www.wangping.com and the Kinship of Rivers project at www.kinshipofrivers.org

                   

This week's editor is Eileen Moeller, who is from the U.S. Eileen currently lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband Charles, who is a practicing psychologist. Her poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Philadelphia Stories, Paterson Poetry Review, Melusine, and SugarMule. You also can access her poetry blog at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com

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Three Poems By Hayden Carruth

Little Citizen, Little Survivor

A brown rat has taken up residence with me.
A little brown rat with pinkish ears and lovely
almond-shaped eyes. He and his wife live
in the woodpile by my back door, and they are
so equal I cannot tell which is which when they
poke their noses out of the crevices among
the sticks of firewood and then venture farther
in search of sunflower seeds spilled from the feeder.
I can't tell you, my friend, how glad I am to see them.
I haven't seen a fox for years, or a mink, or
a fisher cat, or an eagle, or a porcupine, I haven't
seen any of my old company of the woods
and the fields, we who used to live in such
close affection and admiration. Well, I remember
when the coons would tap on my window, when
the ravens would speak to me from the edge of their
little precipice. Where are they now? Everyone knows.
Gone. Scattered in this terrible dispersal. But at least
the brown rat that most people so revile and fear
and castigate has brought his wife to live with me
again. Welcome, little citizen, little survivor.
Lend me your presence, and I will lend you mine.

from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Copper Canyon Press, 1996

Silence

Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change form day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It’s the way love is in a late stage of the world.

from Collected Shorter Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 1992

The Minute Difference Between Birds And Leaves

She lay unmoving a moment longer, silver thighs
Still splayed, breasts tilted apart so that the bones
Of her chest showed like interlocked fingers while she looked outward
To moonlight and gleaming, billowing trees,
And then she turned on her side and said —
But he did not hear
The words flutter down on him, touching, tickling
With little brittle feet, pecking the meal
Of his arms and belly, the golden grain; he heard rather
The unspoken that is always eloquent, her few pleas,
Echoes very distant behind the lanterns of his eyes.
He rose then, scattering words, and went to the window shivering.
Cold boards fed the hunger in his feet. He looked at the trees
In silver frost, leaves falling, severing themselves and falling,
Their silence falling in moonlight, falling all night without wind,
Mouths falling
searching the whole body of earth with their kisses.

from A Green Mountain Idyll - Poems For Hayden Carruth, Longhouse Publishers& Booksellers, 2002

Editor: Eileen Moeller

It is impossible to represent Hayden Carruth's enormous body of work here, but I've chosen three poems that seem to capture his generous spirit, and his gift for magnifying, and making sense of, the ordinary moment.

Born in Connecticut, Hayden died in New York State on October 2, 2008, having dedicated most of his eighty-seven years to poetry. He was my teacher at Syracuse University, and my most beloved "poetry father". He was a master of poetics, who regularly received and edited manuscripts sent by his many literary friends, including seasoned poets like Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich.

I thought of him as heroic in his dedication to poetry, in his sensitivity, in his constant push against meaninglessness, and in his honesty about the demons that plagued him. His poems speak in the voice(s) of the American Northeast. They evoke a love of the local, of nature, of ordinary people, of the intimacy of everyday human interaction; they convey an open-heartedness and a lust for experience that makes me want to live more deeply.

I can hear his deep voice in all of the poems here, his lilting New England accent. I love the conversational tone of these, the way it offsets their exquisite imagery, the tension between the natural and the craft.

Permission pending for use of the three poems, more on Hayden here, and a list of his poetry publications:

• The Crow and the Heart, 1946-1959, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1959.
• In Memoriam: G. V. C., privately printed, 1960.
• Journey to a Known Place (long poem), New Directions (New York, NY), 1961.
• The Norfolk Poems: 1 June to 1 September 1961, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1962.
• North Winter, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1964.
• Nothing for Tigers; Poems, 1959-1964, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1965.
• Contra Mortem (long poem), Crow's Mark Press (Johnson, VT), 1967.
• (Contributor) Where Is Vietnam?: American Poets Respond, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1967.
• For You: Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1970.
• The Clay Hill Anthology, Prairie Press, 1970.
• From Snow and Rock, from Chaos: Poems, 1965-1972, New Directions (New York, NY), 1973.
• Dark World, Kayak (Santa Cruz, CA), 1974.
• The Bloomingdale Papers, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1975.
• Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllables, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1976.
• Aura, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1977.
• Brothers, I Loved You All, Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1978.
• Almanach du Printemps Vivarois, Nadja, 1979.
• The Mythology of Dark and Light, Tamarack (Madison, WI), 1982.
• The Sleeping Beauty, Harper (New York, NY), 1983, revised edition, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1990.
• If You Call This Cry a Song, Countryman Press (Woodstock, VT), 1983.
• Asphalt Georgics, New Directions (New York, NY), 1985.
• Lighter than Air Craft, edited by John Wheatcroft, Press Alley, 1985.
• The Oldest Killed Lake in North America, Salt-Works Press, 1985.
• Mother, Tamarack Press, 1985.
• The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986.
• Sonnets, Press Alley, 1989.
• Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands, New Directions (New York, NY), 1989.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1992.
• Collected Longer Poems, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1993.
• Selected Essays and Reviews, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1995.
• Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1996.
• Doctor Jazz: Poems, 1996-2000, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2001.

This week's editor is US poet, Eileen Moeller, who lives in Philadelphia. Visit her Tuesday Poem on her blog and go to the sidebar for a host of other Tuesday Poems posted today.

"The Astounding Circus of Dr. Tourette" by Heather Davis

The urge to tic—they say it’s like an itch.
I try to imagine this, to be you for one
involuntary moment, forever
suppressing, tamping down, betrayed
by neural pathways. It’s always
eye blink, hand twitch, ghostly
falsetto in the throat, that random soundtrack.
I see how it becomes
a circus in here
but you can’t charge admission
to the strangers who stare, the bosses
who wonder, the mothers as they
pull their children back for fear
something may be catching. At least
you don’t curse out of turn, hurl
insults without cause though I know
you want to and would be
wonderful at it. Not so long ago,
we would have called a priest
to exorcise your demons
or asked for the shining
shock therapy machine. Both
would fail. I am only beginning
to understand what this
possession must be like and already
I feel singled out, unbearably eccentric.
Pretending to be you, I’m like
the bearded lady, resigned
to her stage, who’s learned
to take comfort in the antics of monkeys,
and in the shocking boom
of the human cannonball, who
revels in the backstage benders of clowns
as they wash away their sadness, who’s come
to love her own exact and beautiful
separation from the crowd.

In this wonderful poem, Heather Davis lets us enter the mind of compassion. As readers we alternately step inside and outside the skin of an exotic other, attempting to understand, as the speaker does, what it feels like to "be you for one/ involuntary movement", to have "strangers who stare"," bosses who wonder". Through the intimacy of Davis's well chosen imagery, we grow strangely accustomed to, and even excited by this new "circus" life, becoming "like/ the bearded lady" whose wisdom and self-acceptance leave us with a deeper understanding of the pain and joy that coexist in that "exact and beautiful/separation".


Heather Lynne Davis earned a B.A. in English from Hollins University and an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. She attended the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and is a winner of the 1991 Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize at Syracuse University, a Larry Neal Writer’s Award, and the 2007 Arlington County Moving Words Poetry Contest. She is the author of The Lost Tribe of Us, which won the 2007 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, and Sonora Review, among others. She lives in Front Royal, Virginia with her husband, the poet José Padua, and their daughter. With her husband she writes a blog about post-city life in small-town America called Shenandoah Breakdown. Her book is available at Main Street Rag Press
















“The Astounding Circus of Dr. Tourette” is published on Tuesday Poem with permission. Eileen Moeller is a poet from Philadelphia, Pa. Visit her Tuesday Poem on her blog And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography, and the other Tuesday poets using our blog list.