Other titles by Martina Reisz Newberry from Deerbrook Editions: Learning by Rote Where It Goes Never Completely Awake
Blues for French Roast with Chicory poems Martina Reisz Newberry
With a Foreword by Michael Arcangelini
deerbrook editions
p ub l i s h e d b y Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions f i r s t e d i ti o n Š 2020 by Martina Reisz Newberry All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-9600293-9-6 Book design by Jeffrey Haste
The blues . . . like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it. —B. B. King
“And you became like the coffee, In the deliciousness, and the bitterness and the addiction.” —Mahmoud Darwish
It’s summer dark the night is quiet and close the chair is warm from the day’s heat There are stars in my coffee cup. —Martina Reisz Newberry
Contents
Foreword 9 Passing A Deserted High School In The Nuclear Sunshine Of A Fall Afternoon 13 “Rachel Is Weeping For Her Children . . .” 14 Precognition 15 Discernment 17 Often 19 Sea Shanty 19 White Road 20 Julia Set: ∮ Integration Around A Circle 22 Nushu 23 Certain Stars 24 Wardrobe 24 The Spillsbury Curse 25 Morning Glories 26 Sea Of Galilee–Western Shore 27 Vientos Del Miedo; Lluvias De Sangre 28 If There Was . . . 29 Upon Finding A Sinkhole Opening Up In My Backyard 30 Blues For French Roast Coffee With Chicory 32 Subsequence 34 Wake-Up Call 36 Arras 37 Romans 38 Five Poems For Pablo Armando Fernandez 40 Me And Amy Lowell 42 Geodes 43 Prologues 45 If You Will 46 An Act Of Retrieval 47 By And Large 48 Bad Habits 49 Friday 51 Courage 52 What We Remember 53 Ode To John Frieda 55 Hunger 56 Squirrels 57
Accurate Recall 57 Lotus 58 What To Do If Haunted 60 If It Ends Well 61 Beneath My Blue Tee Shirt 62 Sadie Comes To Visit 63 Too Many Fires 64 Evening Walk 65 Ode To Escrava Anastacia 66 Like Kaa 67 Maker 68 Travelogue 69 Saratoga Springs 70 December 26, 2017 70 Visiting The Vatican 71 Paul Klee 73 Queries 74 Where We Live 75 Summer 76 Why It Shudders 77 The Year I Understood Everything 78 Yuugen 幽玄 79 Road Trip 81 Three Sextets And Some Couplets 82 Acknowledgments 85
Foreword
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I believe I’ve known Martina Reisz Newberry for well over 10 years. Known in that odd way we have become accustomed to these days; without ever having been in the same room together. We became friends over the internet. Initially on a kind of poet’s listserve, then through e-mail, snail mail, and now with social media added to the mix. I have been reading and following her poetry the whole time and for me the release of a new book of Martina’s work is always an event of note. And so it is with Blues for French Roast with Chicory. Herein you will find poems in which the sky can break into jigsaw puzzle pieces and fall to the ground, the setting winter sun apologizes for leaving homeless people still cold, and a skyfull of stars consider their own mortality. These are poems full of magic and ghosts: the corpulent ghost with “a thunderstorm of a smile” in the title poem and the “great ghosts” of Geodes. Or the magic can be as simple as the transcendence of snow falling expressed by one who’s never seen it fall. Current events creep into these pages in the form of politics (Me and Amy Lowell), nuclear contamination (Act of Retrieval), and California’s wind-driven wildfires. In fact strong winds, primarily the seasonal Santa Ana, blow through many of these poems stirring and clearing the air around them and the reader. In Morning Glories she advises us that: “all sins / are forgiven as long as you / keep the closet door closed.” But hope is always flowing beneath the horrors and fears of life like a nourishing underground river. Even among the ruminations and meditations orbiting her 70th birthday she celebrates life and hope in poems both poignant and wise. This poet, who touches us with “fingers like song lyrics” and speaks though the “buttered blades of my lips,” has produced another collection of wonders to loose upon the world and for that I am grateful. You will be, too.
Michael J. Arcangelini
Blues for French Roast with Chicory
Passing A Deserted High School In The Nuclear Sunshine Of A Fall Afternoon I ought to study signs and portents. Had I known that the feather I picked up outside the grounds of the high school on Sunset Boulevard would lift me above the football field and take me back to those dreadful days, I’d have never picked it up.They stand for ascension, you know, Feathers do. The chanting of wraith cheerleaders rang loud in my ears. my stomach folded in on itself. I hit the ground running. It was not a day for flying. Had I known that rocking an empty chair brought bad luck, I’d never have touched our old rocker to hear it creak.This is the reason I lost my wallet when I bent down to pick up that damn feather. It was, I tell you, not a day for bending down in front of deserted high schools on the first day of Fall’s disappointments.
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“Rachel Is Weeping For Her Children . . . ” Jeremiah 31:15 I imagine I can see the scratched and scarred places on my children’s bodies. They are the places where I used to live. Look carefully and you’ll see my ghost, looking for the rest of my family, for that other life I thought I would have. Careless dreams—curious larceny. I read them like books, thumbing through their pages that did not love me—loved others— but not the smiling, passive woman who seemed only to REact instead of grabbing the bull by its proverbial horns (a pithy observation), and running for those famous hills, their little hides in tow. Oh, I have been penitent all my life— all of their lives— far from paradise, further still from lenity, landed under the spaces in their memories, waving, calling out to their bodies “Here I am. See me. In spite of your memories, I am more than your laments.”
Precognition
I see you turning in your bed, you itch everywhere and there are no bedbugs, no fleas, no insects. Something does this to you each and every night. It is not love. It is certainly not peace. I see you at the kitchen sink. You are washing the sink. It’s not dirty and you spilled nothing into it. But you see filth each and every day that you come to the sink. It is not Obsessive/Compulsive Syndrome. I see you lying by the pool. You are slick with tanning oil. There is no sun. The sun left long ago when times got tough and people got greedy and ate the sun. Now there is only gray light. It is not fog. I see you holding the head of your last lover in your hands. It is not a fake. It is a totem.You keep it next to your reclining chair in front of the T.V. The smile on the face of your last lover is not a pleasant keepsake. I see you at the dining room table. You are not eating there. You are not making a scrapbook. You are drawing a picture on the table. You dip your finger in mayonnaise and draw boxes in three dimensions.
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I see you at the aquarium.You are watching the sharks make circles as if they were in the sea.You tap on the glass. They don’t acknowledge you. You tap dance.You scream at them.You spit. No one notices. I see you at the altar. You are fingering a chalice made of clay. You are eating sticks of incense, lighting them first, then eating them When you speak, smoke comes from your nose and mouth.
Incensum istud a te benedictum, ascendat ad re, Domine, et descendat super nos misericordia tua.
May this incense blessed by You, arise before You, O Lord, and may Your mercy come down upon us.
I see you turning in your bed, you itch everywhere and there are no bedbugs, no fleas. Something does this to you each and every night. It is not love. It is certainly not peace. You scratch a final time and lay quiet. Now you understand everything. Et verbum caro factum est et And the word was made flesh and Habitabit in nobis dwelt among us.
Discernment
for Larry Kramer, Poet (in loving memory)
I don’t understand snow, never having lived in snowy climes. I don’t depend on what is underneath it to reappear in Spring. I don’t feel its curved silence or relish the perfection of every flake. I haven’t seen a pink sunrise reflecting off it or the intense contrast between the night sky and the white ground. I’ve not known snowy fields or spiked angry branches with piled snow. I am better acquainted with strong winds below the canyons and the crystalline heat that follows— a calm that speaks of ghosts and lost loves. I am far more intimate with air so cold you cannot leave it outside, but can only bring it with you from your bones into your house.
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The voice of snow must be very different from the voice of dry winds and canyons . . . soprano rather than alto and basso profundo. And, since I have not heard it trilling and falling so light on the ground, I can only wish it well and continue to embrace what I know.
Often
Often, as I undressed, you said, “Take your time and hurry.” I did and your overwhelmingly white smile sparked and twinked at me—an invitation to the dance, a jeté assemblé into the banquet—and, later, carnage without tears, sacrifice & homage to a madonna’s brief time on earth.
Sea Shanty
The shyness which took 50 years for me to grow out of returned on the arm of my 70th birthday. Since then, and once again, I am the quintessential sea anemone. I fold into myself as time, events and beauty run by. Their breezes touch me and I withdraw, shoulders hunching, toes/fingers curling, hair shrinking into my scalp. Ashamed and not knowing (knowing) why.
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WHITE ROAD
Men che dramma di sangue m’è rimaso, che non tremi.*
Don't throw me no drag, now she said. I don’t, I won’t. While you still hear me, I’ll tell my tales as candidly as I can. These are wretched times; times that poems can not fix and we are living them. We are stricken with lies and food that leaves us hungry and the vivid marks of war like stripes on the backs of our souls. This is what I ask of you: that you stay to the end of this poem– at least this one. While you still hear me, there are things you should know: they may be bruised, but there are still apples, tart and cool from a tree and while the sky is definitely falling, there are, now and then, patches of beryl, cerulean, and iceberg still haunting it. We are not kissed by fortune nor blessed by happenstance so there is reason to fear and, that being said, while they may be hardened by work, by slavery, by rancor or pain there are still hands, warm caresses on our heads. And, while the nourishment of good sex is undervalued, and turned sometimes into revenge, the bare calves of a lover beneath a quilt still sustain and condole.
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I’ll throw you no drag, no matter what. I say live, even precariously, even sadly. Live, you who are left to listen, as though the notion of life intrigues you, as if living is all there is to do even as it remains a velleity.
Divina Comedia, Dante Alighieri, , Canto XXX, lines 46-48
*
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JULIA SET: ∮ INTEGRATION AROUND A CIRCLE One woman fooled and fueled by God ∮ watching the kindnesses the disasters the ever-increasing number of wars . . . ∮ She speaks, defines herself as a denizen of the planet. Screw countries & borders & fences! she seeks her kind daring to blow on the soul’s slag to make fires in their eyes ∮ Because she is white, she knows privilege. Because she is a woman, she knows powerlessness. ∮ Because she is become older, she knows invisibility. One woman, who left a badland where too much to bear had happened/was happening ∮ came to her Cronedom in the city of maelstroms which allows everything suffers anything. She has been emigrating all her life: Maiden> Mother> Crone>Unavowed Being Released from the leash she smiles shudders moves from the shadows Ask of her what you want now ∮ Now is the time.
∮ Integration around a circle (mathematical symbol)
NUSHU*
It is the 28th year of Mingguo today. When on earth will our country be in peace? —an old song sung by Yang Xixi, 1999
Here in the capital of competition and cupidity, we are segregate...and uniform. We are persuaded by used-car salesmen, inspired by a celebrity’s starved body, a lawmaker’s starved mind. Time now to be cautious. It approaches– a prowling mist–the forenames of the populace are held captive as it comes. The weed with the white-tufted, feathery top shivers, is blown free of its slender anchor. Games of innocence, death of innocence, scent of longing . . .pray to these lesser gods, my dears, that they will jump into the way of what comes for us.
Nushu: a nearly extinct script Chinese women used to correspond with one another. Nüshu is a special form of writing that is only used and understood by women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province.
*
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CERTAIN STARS
Though they know they’ll have to fade and disappear by noon, they shine exuberantly, (while they shine shower us with the blandishments needed to coax us out of our dark dreams into daylight’s absurd moraine. They live without regret or desire– orderly, coherent and wondering what it is like not to be.
WARDROBE
The light is escaping the sky. I’ve rifled through my lingerie drawer more times than I can count, searching...Where is the “I” who cleaned the house, drove for errands, offered gourmet meals, made love like a young man’s myth? The drawer doesn’t hold a clue, nor does the mirror, nor does the puddle on the sidewalk out front (and I do check it frequently). So why do I continue to look for her—that “I’ who is misplaced? I want to give her something—something she can keep with her now that she is in a safe place—a song, a sweet gesture, a bracelet, a birthday cake.
THE SPILSBURY CURSE
I learned the world as I sat, still as a stone, while the sky broke into puzzle pieces and fell on me. “There it is,” I thought, “just waiting for me to put it together and shove it back where it belongs.” Time has sped by with me unable to match the cobalt borders with the pale blue centers. I have spent countless days– maybe minutes–looking down at those pieces, wanting so much to reveal the whole picture. My wanting remains a to-do. This after noon, through the ironwork that separates our terraces, I see my neighbor, Jess. At her feet are puzzle pieces of clouds, shades of white and gray and eggshell. She stares down at them. She is sitting very still, mind you, waiting to see if they will solve themselves and float back to a sky no longer there. My fault, I know, I get that.
The engraver and cartographer John Spilsbury, of London, is believed to have produced the first jigsaw puzzle around 1760, using a marquetry saw.
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MORNING GLORIES
Bitter unkind Autumn when the gloaming grips the sky, whines like a whipped dog. The light produces an exquisite ungainliness, a clumsy attempt at dance. At night, a small light, only as bright as a single candle, shows me the dark mouth of the closet door open to devour or expiate my sins by sacrificing sleep. Autumn is a pliable sort of mourning. And, still, a mourning in deed. Years ago, I called my mother to tell her my Morning Glories had bloomed. “And what,” she asked me “is so glorious about mornings?” A flood of fear made my scalp tingle, my mouth dried up. I had no answer then. I do now. Now I would tell her that any morning you wake up is glorious and all sins Are forgiven as long as you keep the closet door closed.
SEA OF GALILEE—WESTERN SHORE
I am Magdalen—hair long and slightly curled, scented clothes and bare feet, doing simple chores in the afternoon heat. My parents have died and I am here alone in the house they built. I please men, take their money, warm and wash and whittle away at their power with the buttered blades of my lips. I am Magdalen waiting for the wars to begin and end, waiting for warriors—young, old, maimed—to use what I offer: kisses to make them whole, touches to shatter them. I am Magdalen. My skin is the color of asses’ milk, my mouth is a bruised blossom. I can be oracle or ornament for the right price. When I finally close my thighs and the curtains and secure the door on my sins, on the moon’s intrusion, on the noises from men and the animals, I lie silent, remain open, but only to forgiveness.
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VIENTOS DEL MIEDO; LLUVIAS DE SANGRE*
We know each other’s stories, or think we do; have done the telling of them many times. I believe all of yours and very few of my own. There is a dubiety about my life, its continuum consistently interrupted by the changing of seasons, We know each other’s stories, or think we do. Winds of fear, rains of blood (the stain of which will not respond to love or bleach). I believe all of yours and very few of my own. I offered you the velveteen stomach of surrender and you, blessings on you, dear, (We know each other’s stories, or think we do), accepted, though rains of blood, stories and seduction. (the stain of which will not respond to love or bleach). I believe all of yours and very few of my own. My heart’s bones blurred your vision, remained. Strong enough for eventual betrayal. We know each other’s stories, or think we do. I believe all of yours and very few of my own.
*Winds of fear; rains of blood
IF THERE WAS . . .
If there was such a thing as Mercy, the execrable vaulting into seniority would stop, move rearward and instead of de con stru ct ing, we would become.
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UPON FINDING A SINKHOLE OPENING UP IN MY BACKYARD I tasked myself at an early age. I would pray peace into this world; I would meditate for health, healing, an end to wars. I would pray peace into this world. I would urge others to join with me and, oh yes, an end to wars. Like standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” I would urge others to join with me. Our individual strength would be (like standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus) a billion strong and every bit as harmonious. Our individual strength would be . . . I would meditate for health, healing... A billion strong, I tell you, and just as harmonious. I tasked myself at an early age. I told my father about this task when I turned 15. His answer was “I hope you can accomplish what no one else, including Jesus Christ or Ghandi ever has, Kiddo.” His answer was a hope that I could accomplish. It was not discouragement (Ghandi, et al, you understand). It was a statement of true hope. This was not a discouragement, Though dirtied a little by the slag and soot, it was a statement of true hope, (soot from the steel mill) Dirtied a little by slag and soot, what no one else could [accomplish] soot from the steel mill where he worked, I told my father about my task.
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With each re-invention of self, I renewed my dedication to my task and the years swept by. They swept by. I renewed my dedication to task. Each morning a glorious beginning... Years swept by Each night a resigned sigh. Each morning that glorious start. But this morning, a portent at my back door. Last night a resigned sigh. I surrender. This morning, my back door revealed a sign. The years had swept by. I surrender, I whispered, A last re-invention of self.
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BLUES FOR FRENCH ROAST COFFEE WITH CHICORY
Too corpulent to be a mist or steam rising from one more cup of coffee, yet here you are again–– my favorite ghost–– hair waving, light-footed, fragile fingered . . . your thunderstorm of a smile cleansed at one time, never healed, but knew how to cleanse and does, I guess, to this minute. It was grace that set you free, oh Prince of Lighthouses and Hauntings, grace that pointed you to a path without barriers or pot holes, and grace that kissed you goodbye, left very quietly without tears or cursing or questions. It was truly amazing grace that surrounded you with a benign fare-thee-well and a faint touch on your hand and not one request––no, not one. Bob Seeger says he “Stood alone on a mountain top, starin' out at the Great Divide,”* figured next time he’d get it right. Well, I like to think I have done just that except for those
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brief times at the beginning of Fall’s sad visions when the light starts to fail and a ghost shows how little he has to do with the day’s last cup of coffee.
*from the song, “Roll Me Away,” by Bob Seeger Original Release Date: December 1, 1982; Copyright: ℗© 1994 Hideout Records & Distributors, Inc. under exclusive license to Capitol Records LLC; Record Company