L.R. Berger’s work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award and The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She was Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome, and has been granted residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, Wellspring House and The Hermitage. Her collection of poems, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry.
L . R . b e r g e r
In this beautiful new book, words are unusually alive and active in the poet’s capable hands. A whispered finale meaning finally, a riff on up, an exploration of the letter P : these are among the linguistic players that address both personal loss and political realities, which L. R. Berger explores with searing honesty, emotional depth, and lyric grace. No precious word is wasted here; you will read carefully and gratefully, and want to read again. —Martha Collins
i n d e b t e d t o w i n d p o e m s
The wind in these eloquent, elegant, tensile poems is present as spirit, of course; as spirit it can manifest as the longing or fate of the body (it expires), as intellectual momentum (it inspires), as power for social justice (it aspires). In all these modes, L.R. Berger both controls the energy as form, and honors the charge of the moment—perception by brilliant perception, breath by mortal breath. —Stephen Tapscott
Praise for The Unexpected Aviary
Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com preview catalogue: www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions
d e e rbr o o k e d i t i o n s
The quality of persistent attention in Berger’s work constitutes, I think, the heart of the poetic act. It matters that her attention is paid to such endangered objects as human love and the extra-human natural world; to the intricate connection between our conduct of love and that imperiled world. —Mary Baine Campbell
Indebted to Wind Poems
L.R. Berger
Also by L.R. Berger Sightings The Unexpected Aviary
Indebted to Wind poems
L.R. Berger
deerbrook editions
published by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland. ME 04021 deerbrookeditions.com Online catalogue: issuu.com/deerbrookeditions
first edition © 2021 by L.R. Berger
ISBN: 978-1-7368477-3-2 Book design by Jeffrey Haste Cover photo, Room to Breathe, by Danielle D. Nelson
for Jessica
Contents
Indebted to Wind
11
I First Acts Picking Raspberries Momentarily Untitled Aurora’s Actually Palliative Care Blue Yonder Sheila’s Marginalia The Daoist Lu Dongbin Crossing Lake Dongting
15 16 17 19 21 26 28 30
II Ask Anybody Uprisings The Brooch Home Half-Life My Father Is Dying Evening Cove
35 37 39 41 43 45 47
III A Long and Overdue Letter to Wendell Berry Because Hope Has Only One P The President and the Poet Come to the Negotiating Table Wind Breaks Into the House 38th and Chicago Pandemic Blues Never Afters Don’t Call Me With Your News Points of Departure Stories That Tell Us
55 57 60 62 63 64 65 68 69 71
IV And Still, Dawn Carlotta at Home Duet Stanzas of Rome Coming Unspooled Daily Dialogue With the Pieces The Sea’s One and Only Word
77 79 81 84 88 90 94
Acknowledgments
97
Indebted to Wind
Not what it had to say but what it carried to you. Dandelion silk dispatching seed. The neighbor’s trashcan lid waking you from that nightmare hurled in a tempest against the bedroom window. Howling, love cry, lamentation. Wind carries out the past and in the future, tutors your own breath to extinguish the flame. When love unbuttoned your blouse wind did the rest fumbling through the aspens. You could have believed air was empty space to be lost in, except for wind stinging your face at the height of January, whipping the flag, lifting the sparrow.
11
I
First Acts
Filling the teapot at the tap, turning on the burner— praise be for the day’s first acts requiring no imagination, no choices of consequence. You can be half asleep and already a success at life, draw encouragement mastering the rituals of morning— parting the curtains, reuniting with your eyeglasses. The looming hurdles of the day begin to loom possible, the heavy head of the earth will not today spin off on its orbit without you. The water boils and you know what to do, your cold feet anchored again to the map of the world.
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Picking Raspberries
This morning I went out to the garden with an empty white bowl and walked back inside with an empty white bowl. In between and without decorum, I ravaged the vines of late July, plucked and shoveled palmfuls of sweet fruit into my mouth. Someone watching might have said, now there’s a woman whose body has slept alone in a wide bed for a very long time. My five-year-old godchild Ella carried the empty white bowl for us yesterday to pick raspberries for the first time. It was left to me to explain about thorns. We picked a few together, but then she disappeared into her no-nonsense face, small fingers threading thickets with intent. From now on, she decreed after an uncommon interlude of silence, we are going to pick raspberries every time I come. It was the end of the season. It was left to me to explain about seasons. What could I say to her unforgiving eyes? With what conviction expound on the virtues of going without sweetness to a mouth full of sweetness? 16
Momentarily Untitled
What did I come into this room for? The name of that restaurant? The street where she lives? What was it no one told me? The post office box won’t open with my house key. I thought it was still August but this is where I live. What was it he said that made me leave him? Wasn’t there a grudge? Or two? Who gifted me that carved wooden monk on the windowsill? Her first name started with a G. Is my password still swallowtail? That shrub, mock orange, until I remember it’s honeysuckle. Weren’t there always mistaken identities?
17
Did we see that movie? Did I enjoy it? Were his dying words to me everlasting joy or joy everlasting?
18
Aurora’s Actually
At four, she’s found a word to devote herself to. I’m four and a half, actually. A study in elocution, each syllable bestowed with space and time. Actually, that’s not a beetle it’s a stinkbug. I don’t like baths and I hate spiders, actually. Her small-fry body’s conferred with stature, and with each actually the face that goes with it. Think Priestess. Delphic oracle. What’s a bouquet? she asks, making one of purple clover. They’re not purple, she corrects me. They’re lavender, actually. None of us knows where she learned the word or perfected its deployment. We often don’t know how she knows what she knows. Hers is a mind with a predilection for precision. For truth, 19
actually. So who can blame us for standing chilled in late August swooning at the arcs of barn swallows when out of nowhere she informs us They will not be coming back next year, actually.
20
Palliative Care for Hal 1. What was going on in that room was going on in that room. Outside was the world that is always on fire and the world that always isn’t. But we were there, we were. And God could sometimes be found in your final watercolor propped up and facing us on the sill of the hospital window— its suggestion of wintered trees fracturing banks of blue while under a tent of white sheet you faded like fugitive colors. 2. But not your eyes. They were steady blue flares up ahead on the gravel of night’s back road. Your smile, slightly askew, still offering itself to everybody. Wheeling toward you 21
through the revolving glass hospital doors all my formerly nursed concerns were breathlessly confiscated. 3. Sometimes the heft of a word’s true meaning comes to find us. Inside your room, two windows, three chairs— one word was enough. But have I done enough good? was the only enough at first that concerned you until weeks later you rallied to protest enough is enough. Wearing the face of the jilted you woke each morning to find death stood you up. Your doctor confiding, Enough to kill a horse. Morphine enough.
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4. Tuesday you’re a wooden broom. Wednesday, a sleeping prince. Fallen nestling, featherless, still breathing splayed on an asphalt driveway Thursday. Saturday at dawn, yours is the still living face of Christ crucified. Sometimes the heft of a word’s meaning comes to find us. Wind circling the hospital with something like intention, whirlpool of winter, Sunday, refusing to lose its grip. 5. For weeks I neglected the moon. Walking home I never thought to look at the sky. During the night I was dreaming about birds we don’t have. Nightingales. Magpies. Cuckoos. Whatever comes next we’ll have to cross
23
through an old-growth forest to get there. 6. One of our last conversations concerned color. I pulled the cotton blouse from my closet to offer your eyes a blurry swatch of blue. Chicory-weed. Forget-me-nots. What would we have done, you asked, without the companionship of blue? Then you looked off squinting, that fixing of the eyes we hope sharpens our ears, yours tuned now to other frequencies. Someone’s last breath down the corridor? The tolling of stars? Vibrato of blue? 7. The bouquet of dahlias I bought weeks ago won’t die. Do you really think it would be all right if I let go of everything?
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Once you stopped breathing so long I crossed the room whispering finale, meaning finally. Then you gasped like a newborn gulping his first fist of air. 8. Forty days and, no kidding, forty nights. Sometimes the heft of a word’s true meaning comes to find us. For awhile it was affliction. But now it was now. Whatever comes next we’ll have to cross through an old-growth forest to get there. Virgin forest. Dappled light: yours finally leaving us.
25
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the editors of the following journals and anthologies where many of these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions: The American Journal of Poetry: “My Father Is Dying,” “Because Hope Has Only One P” Painted Bride Quarterly: “Half-Life” The William and Mary Review: “Aurora’s Actually” Cathexis Northwest: “Ask Anybody,” “Blue Yonder,” “Sheila’s Marginalia” Broad River Review: “A Long and Overdue Letter to Wendell Berry” Red Rock Review: “Carlotta At Home” Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall: “Duet,” “Picking Raspberries,” “First Acts” Abstract Magazine: Contemporary Expressions: “Uprisings,” “Indebted to Wind,” “Home,” “The Daoist Lu Dongbin Crossing Lake Dongting,” “Points of Departure” Pinyon Review: “And Still, Dawn” The Other Side of Sorrow; Shock and Awe War on Words; Peacework: “The Poet and the President Come to the Negotiating Table” Saint Katherine Review: “The Sea’s One and Only Word” Persimmon Tree: “Momentarily Untitled” 97
Joy of Aging Anthology: “Coming Unspooled” Syracuse Cultural Workers Women Artists Calendar: “Don’t Call Me With Your News” The Poetic Dialogue Project: “Daily Dialogue With the Pieces” appeared in response to and coupled with Carolyn King’s painting installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together”
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I am grateful for fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and for residencies at The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Wellspring House, The Hermitage, and most especially The Blue Mountain Center, where many of these poems were hatched and revised. My tender thanks to Ella Moye-Gibbons for her contribution to “Picking Raspberries,” to Aurora Ellis-Hopkins for instigating “Aurora’s Actually,” and to Jane Kaufman for inspiring “Don’t Send Me Your News.” I am indebted beyond measure to Karen Latuchie who generously read these poems over many years, and believed in them. I could not have asked for a more incisive and thoughtful reader. Her love, imagination and friendship sustain me. My deep gratitude to all who read this book as a manuscript and offered their time, insights and encouragement, especially Kathleen Aguero, Deborah Brown, Martha Collins, Jessica Ellis-Hopkins, Alice Nye and Stephen Tapscott. 98
My heartfelt thanks, as well, to those who offered the companionship and spaces of refuge necessary to bring this book into being, among them Harriet Barlow, Cile Beatty, Betty Burkes, Barry DeJasu, Evelyn Ellis-Haines, Helen Fitzgerald, Patricia Gianotti, Catherine Hoffman, Sandra Ileuscu, Eric Lister, Cassandra Medley, Laura Slattery, Sue Morin, Rachel Vaughan, and the late Vincent Harding and Peter Ediger. Finally, my gratitude to Chris Jerome for her full-hearted gift of editing, to Danielle Nelson for her perfect cover image, and especially to my publisher Jeffrey Haste at Deerbrook Editions who takes poets under his generous wing.
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