Some families excel at sharing family lore. For reasons too complicated for this post (but findable in my book The O in the Air), my family did not. My parents, my sister, and I lived far from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, visiting no more than once a year. So there was no one else I could pump for the facts of my parents’ pasts. A few photographs like the one above are my only evidence that their lives existed before mine did. What those lives looked like, what they felt like, is often clearer to me from period television dramas than from family stories.

Looking for 1937

Esteemed Lord Peter, and my dear Miss Marple,
et mon très cher ami Monsieur Poirot,
especially as lately reincarnated
in the radiant images of the BBC,
thank you for (such as it is) your help
in the hapless search for my parents’ early lives.

Not that you get it right. Wrong side of the ocean,
wrong social class, utterly wrong milieu:
long, sleek Lagondas under covered porticos
loosing their fluttering swarms of white tie, wafts
of evening dress in bias-cut silk satin;
tea shops and church bells in St. Mary Mead;
Daimler convertibles ah-OOO-gah-ing
down country lanes on the left side of the road
unfailingly arriving at the solution—

Not my solution, no. What you supply me
is color. The color miserably absent
from my few sepia-tint and black-and-white
leavings, crumbs of their lives between the wars,
portraits in high-contrast rectitude—
formal sittings, weddings and First Communions,
tight-lipped, not breathing a word that human beings
might have been happy.

But didn’t they live in color?
Colors of rosary processions and pomidori,
card games in shirtsleeves under pergolas.
Those other riches, yours, were their wild dreams,
the Technicolor visions their minds trawled
behind the noir of mobster movies, dodging
hatred aimed like a spray of machine-gun fire
at their immigrant names.

Dear Poirot, Jane, Lord Peter,
help me out here, since all I have is the silence
of two souls who in 1937
are a cold case, an unsolved mystery,
because they have not found each other yet.
And lacking that, the whole plot of the world
lose its way, and the tidy final scene
dissolves to a newsreel grainy with old battles.

(First published in Grand Little Things; in the forthcoming book Notifications from the Unseen, which might be out next year, maybe . . . )

When the weather is good, I walk. Walking around my neighborhood is the only real exercise I get, so in Minnesota’s climate I’m lucky to be able to do it about half the year. I used to range more widely and see more of it; I also used to be a subscriber to the app NextDoor, a sometimes troubling mix of gripes, grudges, and rants about local issues. The juxtaposition led to the poem I want to share today. This year, my neighbors have proved that they’re better than that, going to great lengths to support the embattled immigrants among us. But in some places one still feels the discomfort, the sense of walling people out, that led to today’s poem, “An Enclosed Garden.”

Sometimes, Substack is frustrating. Today, for example, it won’t let me format a poem as right-justified, which it needs to be in order to make clear the Golden Shovel form, in which reading down the line-ends discloses some quoted lines of another well-known poem. So I’ll have to show you the poem I want to share by linking to a page in a past issue of the journal Bad Lilies: https://www.badlilies.uk/maryann-corbett-1

I hope you’ll take a look.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or A Little Levity About Leaven

Because, in its stubby brown-glass jar
or its battered, three-personed foil packet,
it gets entombed in the chaos of cartons
appearing at last, as though resurrected,

Because the lump in which it lies hidden
is formless and potent as creation’s clay,

Because I sink my hands in its history
and come up with levamen—
“solace” or “consolation,”

Because it’s consoling to smack it down—
pummel it, grinning like a Halloween demon—
and find I never defeat it,

Because its down-and-up-again persistence
is like a congregation’s kneeling and rising
(Levate, in the Latin of old rubrics),

Because, at some point in the fifty years
since I learned to file its fungal names
among the tangled roots of the Plantae,
they bloomed, those names, as a kingdom of their own,

And because this makes me smile, recalling
that leaven’s Your own little joke about the Kingdom,

Be praised, O Lord, for this bit of mystery,
which lifts, which lightens.

(Photo credit: Story of a Kitchen)

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants.
On fat leaves, Danainae
bug-adolescents

hunch, gorging, brainless
motor-mouths on sixteen legs,
to be seized and press-

ganged to middle-schools.
Clown-clad and ridiculous,
writhing their own rules,

in the end they close
off all contact, lacquered to
one long, studied pose—

held, the way one holds
breath, waiting to see what form
so much thought unfolds.

Later, on school lawns,
whoops of pleasure will set free
gold-and-sable gowns.

Old, the lesson there.
Teachers stand and clap as lives
lurch, lift, disappear.

(First published in The Harlequin; in the book Street View)

“Tis the season when half my social media contacts are posting exuberant travel photos. I am a rotten traveler; I’ve been out of the US exactly once, and never to Europe. So the poem “Gilt Complex” is entirely a work of imagination, sparked by images of the over-the-top decoration of the Wieskirke and thoughts about the impulse behind it.

Gilt Complex

A concert in the Pilgrimage Church at Wies, Bavaria

I’m thinking of another poet’s phrase
(she called it “buttercreams of ornament,”
the sculpted, gold-leaf scalloping, the crazed

swizzles on so much German Late Baroque)
because I’m staring at a prime example:
As though their last restraining impulse broke,

great swirls of stucco gilt explode around
cornice, cartouches, capitals, organ case
and altarpiece, all set against a ground

so white it hurts. How was this sort of thing
dreamt up—this overwrought, over-the-top
whirligig, vortex, whipped-cream lavishing

of heavenly wedding cake? Well, simply: stock
miracle tale. An old carving—the Scourged
Savior—was said to weep, and pilgrims flocked

trying to grasp the pouring-in of Godhead
on life’s poor drudgework. That’s when Art took off,
giddy to get that holiness embodied

in exultation. Oh, I know the drill
with thrills; I’ve done my time in choirs, ecstatic,
shaken core-deep with the eternal swirl

of Bach’s Johannes-passion, its Herr,
Herr, Herr, the churn and whirr of winds and strings
that lift a hundred singers into air,

lost to our ordinary selves an hour
or two, the fugue tumbling around our heads.
That’s why I have my doubts about the power

of Art to save. The last few notes alight;
we sift out idly to the brilliant noon
of Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit;

and here we are: blinking at glare, adrift,
the grumpy dailiness of being human
hemming us dully in. That’s why I’m left

skeptical that this selfie-snapping team
are pondering the sublime, doubtful their souls
grow feuertrunken with all this buttercream,

troubled by so much writhe and fidget. And
by the clipped consonants of all this German,
smuggling into my head the contraband

of cloudy newsreels from my Fifties childhood
and hates I hope I never understand.

(First appeared, in slightly different form, in Literary Imagination,
Will be in the forthcoming book Notifications from the Unseen.)

(Photo credit: Mattana, public domain)

(The phrase “buttercreams of ornament” is from Mary Jo Salter’s poem “The Bickers.”)

I’ve decided there’s no point casting about for a magazine that wants to publish a short review, and this might be a faster way to alert American readers (who are less likely to read the UK journals where reviews have already appeared) to a good book. So here you are:

Little Griefs, by Andrew Neilson
Blue Diode Press, 2026, £11.00
reviewed by Maryann Corbett

I have only one gripe about Little Griefs, Andrew Neilson’s very appealing first full-length book, and that is the way his closing poem “The Debut” seems to doubt the very strengths of his own poems:

Remaindered in the Eighth Circle,
with other puny, ill-bred things,
no single line within it sings,
yet locked to chain and manacle
(such cruel, unusual punishment),
huge, bloodied tears mar many words
not pecked out by carrion birds,
or drowned in florid sentiment […]

Plenty of lines here sing, and they certainly don’t treat rhyme and meter as chain and manacle. They use meters from tight to rough to none, rhymes from veiled to forthright, and forms from the triolet to the prose poem, including clever inventions like “My Alphabet,” a cross between abecedarian and sestina.

All this craft is not the only way the poems declare their allegiance to poetry, and to poets as a beloved community. From the epigraphs quoting James Merrill and Michael Donaghy, to the ode to Edinburgh via the biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, to the six-part sequence in memory of Roddy Lumsden, to the several nods to Donaghy in individual poems, the book makes gently clear what in-group it belongs to. It’s accessible, though, not exclusive: There’s high culture of the ancient-and-medieval variety, but used lightly and mixed with the popular and the daily for humorous effect. A couple of examples: the “Lachesis” section of “Dates with the Fates” —

Mostly she complained.
Complained about being the middle sister
When your parents are Darkness and Night.

— or this bit of “Screen Time”:

Like Guido da Montefeltro, encased
in lamenting flame, or Benjamin’s Angel
watching a single catastrophic swell
as the present itself is displaced

you swipe through the posts, read the updates,
with a flat white steaming on Formica.
There’s a sound in your head – a roar, like a
joy-ridden Audi, or tectonic plates […]

(In fact, the pop culture references to movies, music, and books need notes as often as the high.)

The book’s other major allegiance is to Scotland – hardly surprising in an Edinburgh poet – in poems like “Wha Stows wi Fergus?” and “The Language of God”. My American ear is probably missing other, subtler references to place.

Above all the book’s faith is in the little griefs of the title. Eczema, not so little a grief, gets its own sequence. A fallen nestling evokes a pained memory of childhood speech therapy; a brother dies; the events of a daughter’s childhood are indelible in memory even when the child is grown:

These things, and more, make up each little grief.
How you would spare her even just one tear!
No need to reason, or profess belief,
to know these moments don’t just disappear,
but like angels dancing, on their pin,
the little griefs grow great. Then grow again.

Yet not everything is grief: witness the lovely “The Week’s Remains”.

Those who, so far, only know Andrew Neilson as coeditor with wife Kathryn Gray of the digital poetry journal Bad Lilies (full disclosure: they’ve published me) will probably know it better soon, not only because this book is out, but because Neilson is among this year’s recipients of the James Merrill Foundation fellowships. I expect there’s more good work to come.

Praying Sleepless

after Hudgins and Wilbur

O Lord, that last, late-evening cappuccino—
beautiful fuel of poets’ conversations,
inspirer of wild readings and sweeping gestures,
intense, froth-headed, somewhat over-the-top—
that was poor judgment. Here I am again,
bug-eyed at midnight. Brain a wheeling hamster.
Groping the darkness for some ropey ladder
down to oblivion. Hauling You along.

You must know, Lord, You’re awkward company.
Like that great-aunt, chintz-clad and over-scented,
who pursed her lips around the family secrets
and mumbled her long love in a gravelly accent
that baffled a small child. And I’m still baffled,
starting out with You. The formal approach?
The etiquette says, Start with adoration,

and right away I’m lost. What does adoring
feel like? Like fingers itching for a cell phone?
Eyes gorging big-screen candy, or gowns on the runway,
or the hyped whoever hurtling down a field?
Like awe, in the face of massiveness beyond me—
the Large Hadron Collider, the Horsehead Nebula,
the federal budget? Surely not. Start over.

I know; I’d do this better on my knees.
My body would instruct my gunning brain
in depth, concerning its wet-noodle weakness.
Forgive me, Lord. Kneeling would put off sleep
further. The bed’s warm. Thank You for that,
and for the notion to take things out of order
and do thanksgiving first: For the loved body
next to me, and the wheezing of his CPAP,
and the little Martian-green light of the monitor
that stands as guardian angel over his heart,

though I haven’t prayed in years to a guardian angel.
Lately they seem to be falling down on the job,
always shouted down by the sound of money,
or drugs, or fear of other people. Lord,
what happened to my childhood certainties?
Was it mere recitation, when I knelt
on a little prie-dieu, in a grade-school hallway,
before the Infant of Prague, robed like an emperor
in satins matched to the liturgical season?

Or when I stood to intone the Memorare
crowned with silk flowers, in a blue lace semiformal
in church, before the May-procession crowd?
How do I deal with those period-piece locutions
stuffed with strained imagery and inverted grammar?
“To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.”
“Despise not my petitions.” Even in private
the words sound wrenched, like a bad beginner’s poem.

Where does that leave me, Lord, trying to pray?
Yes, there’s the Gospel-certified Our Father—
but here be dragons, if you knew my father. . . .

so praying crumbles away to the endless question,
Who are You, Lord? What do you want of me?
I hope You hear me, mumbling inside my skull.
You who are somewhere past the edge of spacetime,
somewhere within the null of the neutrino,
lure me off the cliff of my comprehension
the way Road Runner lures Wile E. Coyote,
so that I hang, know I am lost, and fall

and fall, into the surf of repetition,
hail Mary, holy Mary, hidden behind
the wave machine of mantra, aiming at You
but slantwise, down the curl. Just the one prayer,
beadless, uncounted. Now that I have seen
the hour of our death, the hours of four grim deaths,
the ashen hours and days of an almost-death—
I fumble there. I start again, hail Mary,
trusting the earth’s divine maternal forces
to draw the weighted dark over my head.

(First published in Evangelization and Culture; in the book The O in the Air)

The daylilies are blooming, and they remind me of a poem I wrote back when the rumblings of the present evil were just beginning.

Unexplained Bagpipes

After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers

A skewer through the ear,
it spits you to the spot
until you suss it out.
It’s unexpected here:

back garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer, -week, and -day.
Ripping the aural chintz
of airborne oldies airplay,

it groans a jaunty grind.
The kids turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound itself has forgotten
the quarrel it trawls around.

Garish, clownish, bizarre,
still blocks away, it hauls
over your ivied walls
the rack-nerve rumor of war.

Work now. Gather the spent,
blood-spattered peonies.
Daylilies crowd the fence,
desperate. Like refugees.

(First published in Tampa Review; in the book Street View)

On our block of hundred-year-old houses, ours is among the last to be without air conditioning. Several neighbors finally added mini-splits during last year’s worst heat wave. But we are still holding out. Here is a poem for such times.

Overtures

fr. Lat. apertura, ‘opening’

Be praised, Lord, for propped-open windows.
In the muggy meanness of mid-July,
they speak reassurance.

In the next yard, high voices yammer—
small boys brandishing brave new insults
from the old playbook,

while otherwhere across the alley
the tantrum wail of a wild toddler
repeats, da capo.

Will there be, this year, young housemates warring,
screen doors that whomp, wheels grinding gravel?
In this heat, wake us.

Send us street theater, at three in the morning,
mad lovers battling over jealousies, bills,
the whole grand opera.

Watch now in mercy those others, mum
in the iced quiet of their central air,
their curtained sorrows.

(First published in The Windhover; in the book The O in the Air)

This midweek article is an experiment. Will it get more reach than my weekend articles? We’ll see.

My best beloved is very, very fond of all things tech, and especially the equipment of live and recorded sound. We own lots of it, and for many years he, or we, schlepped it to various venues to run live sound boards for church services or poetry readings, or to record the concerts of musician friends. These days we don’t have the stamina for such jobs, and the tech is used for recording poems, as seen above. But here’s a poem in praise of the stuff and the marvelous sounds it preserves.

Microphone Litany

for John, sound guy

Wacky and various though they are, I praise them:
The sort shaped like metallic ice-cream cones
(sturdy, utilitarian, everywhere)
along with the wand-like, pricey as small cars.
The impossibly tiny, glued unseen against cheeks,
tucked into wigs or hair
(their wires always succumbing, always demanding repair).

Dangled from ceilings on squint-invisible strings
or on booms, swaying in acrobatic danger,
hung at distressing heights from spindly stands,
swaddled in foam against windy buffetings
or strung up in weird cat’s cradles of rubber bands—

I praise them all and their magic, which lets me loll in bed
and summon a peal of bells in Normandy
or an ache of countertenor, ages dead.

For such gifts, love (forgiving
their cost, and your digs at performers’ egos, and in hommage
to whatever shakes you wakeful at four a.m.
on a May morning to gather a birdsong barrage)

I will bend my bony knees, while I am able,
to the chilly and unforgiving floors of churches
with patience, gaffer tape, and a hundred feet of cable.
Wired up before these singers, we might dare
pluck loveliness out of the air.

(first published in Hubris, still waiting for the light-hearted collection it belongs in)

Hoarder

The mess it makes, dear God: mountains of crap
spewed on the lawn, obscenely disarrayed.
Whatever sort of order her mind made
of this—crateloads of paper, whole and scrap;
torn couches (drunkenly tipped, upholstery damp
in the spring drizzle); bolts of stained brocade—
is violated. Dumped like a corpse. The date
came, and the truck, and the dumpster, dollies, and ramp
of the cleanout crew. Her cut-rate obit, bare,
boxed in the local paper’s tidy square,
painted a straight-edged life. It wasn’t true.
And now what’s spilling from the garbage bins
lays bare before the world our local sins:
She was a hoarder, and we never knew.

We never knew. We knew she got her mail
and scuffed outdoors in slippers for the flyers
left on the walk, mincing, as though by braille.
We didn’t like to snoop. Should we be pryers
into her fenced-off life? It was enough
to see that someone shoveled, someone mowed.
And in subzero weather, the white puff
of a working furnace was a sort of code
for All-is-well-enough-leave-it-alone.
The porch light still fell feebly in gold pools
onto the graying snow. We had our own
troubles: rezoning, trash collection, schools,
taxes that burgeoned, dandelions that bloomed.
Dailiness ate us up. We were consumed.

We were consumed? I keep on saying we.
Let’s talk about my own consuming passions,
the matter I’ve amassed for sixty years,
I and my spouse. At least our progeny
have flown, trailing their jettisoned possessions,
yet overnight we crammed space that was theirs
with things: books that seemed vital in the moment;
music, its living soul encased in vinyl.
What happened to the frugal hippie bride
I thought I was? What if it had to go—
everything, by some deadline, settled, final?
Fervent recycling wouldn’t stem the tide.
The angel might as well begin recording
the worst: I am a hoarder. This is hoarding.

Yeah, hoarding. But the stuff is not the worst.
The worst is what the body can’t unload.
Memory’s bad enough when it’s the goad
you kick against to trash the things it cursed.
(The dinnerware that graced the very worst
meals of your younger life, china by Spode,
glass by Lalique?) But memory can explode
in pain unpurchased, pain you were coerced
into the bearing of. (The fractured marriage
that fouled your mother’s years down to her death,
its sadness handed down.) Traditio,
that quake you didn’t feel, still leaves its wreckage.
Yours now, it keeps its chokehold on your breath.
Worse than the stuff you own is the stuff you know.

The family stuff I know, down in my bones.
The world’s junk hangs around in the tainted air,
a vague particulate matter, but it’s there.
Sometimes my reading stirs it, and it moans
like Dickens’ floating Christmas spirits. Groans
rise from the past, translated by the best
in prose and verse, and humankind’s unrest
comes wailing from the ancient combat zones.
Or the rich years postwar, whose lead exhaust
coughs on. Or the misogynistic blather
of every body-loathing Latin Father.
Or the long foghorn of the Holocaust—
It deepens, Larkin says, like a coastal shelf,
this mess. Beyond Marie Kondo herself,

this mess, and inescapable in life.
To get past stuff, it seems you have to die.
The real life-changing magic, Dante says,
comes when you take the step beyond belief
and into matter-less eternity
where the unblinding Brightness purifies.
How long a flensing does it take a soul
twisted by decades clenched around its hoard
(would Dante classify that pain as Greed?)
to shake its brittle shell off and uncoil?
Pain cleanses—that’s the theory—and you’re spared.
Look up; the Light is everything you need.
This is the theory. And I’ll hope for this
for my poor neighbor, may she rest in peace—

In peace? And then the last line of the Creed—
the resurrection of the body and
life everlasting—snaps me back. I need
to get things clearer. Where we finally stand
is in our bodies? Bodies made of stuff?
It’s difficult to hear this as good news.
The fear that guts the concept of enough,
the gore that everlastingly ensues,
the epics of it, branded on the brain—
How bodies slough the awful heft of hoarding
is something theologians don’t explain
but promise, though for now we’re stuck here, Lord:
these bodies, and this stuff, and this distress.
The mess, dear God. Forgive us for the mess.

(first published in Raintown Review)

This essay first appeared in Construction, a literary journal that has disappeared from the web. I think the essay still deserves an audience, so here you are.

Ghost Edwardians: Love in a Time of Disappearance

One of Richard Wilbur’s best known poems, “The Writer,” begins in his daughter’s room “at the prow of the house / where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden. . . ” For years I thought I knew what that meant, “the prow of the house.” Wilbur’s biographers, who have located the very house and the very room, tell me I am not quite correct, but I hold to my mental image. I live in a house with a prow, and a neighborhood full of such houses. The years I’ve spent writing poetry have made clear to me the hold that these streets and these houses have on my imagination. In the normal order of things, supposing my work is remembered, it might be years before some critic noticed its rootedness in a place. I have the chutzpah to talk about it myself because the place is already beginning to disappear.

In architectural terms, my “prow” is a dormer, projecting from the roof-plane at the front of the house. A gable end with a prominent window can have the same visual effect. On the streets I inhabit, a hundred such dormers and gables jut into the sea of society. In each the containment of the family puts its public face toward the street, propriety and stature on view. These are Edwardian and even Victorian houses, creaky with age but spacious, with dormers that often extend from third stories, looking into the crowns of mature trees. In times past, high windows on these streets would have been tossed with elm; the dying elms gave place to ash trees, now dying in their turn and being more thoughtfully replaced with varied species. Our own tossing is done by maples.

In spiritual terms—that is, from its interior—a dormer of this kind is a place of solitude and protection. As its etymology declares, it’s often a place to sleep. The sloping walls created by the main roof, or by the dormer itself, lean in as if to embrace the inhabitant: sleeping child, daydreaming teenager, adult engrossed in some attic-exiled craft.

Stature and protection. Were these notions even in our minds when we searched, somewhat frantically, for a house three decades ago? With two small children, crammed into an apartment and already renting additional space, all we knew was that we absolutely needed more room. When, in a rush at the end of my maternity leave, we signed a purchase agreement, we joked to friends that what we’d really bought was a set of bedrooms and a dry basement.

“And a dining room with a coffered ceiling and French doors,” one of us would usually add. There lay the first hint of what we’d been drawn to, like migrating species looking for the place they know by instinct, by heart.

* * *

What, first of all, were we migrating from, beyond the truism that young people generally reject their parents’ taste? I grappled with the question:

We were grounded for life: To be growing up
out in the suburbs, when they were new,
was to live life on a single story:
rambler and ranch-style, in homes
neatly bagged in cul-de-sacs;
at schools, too, low-slung and sprawling
over assorted boxy annexes;
at our stolid red-brick churches;
at shopping malls, then just beginning
to extend their asphalt pseudopods
rectangularly over farms;
everywhere children could go,
life was flat, earthbound . . .

(from “High”)

To be more specific: my husband and I grew up in the same suburban neighborhood of Northern Virginia—not in the very same real estate development, but that hardly mattered, since there were so many, sprouting like mushrooms from the hothouse soil of the mid-1950s building boom. Legion and uniform, they were the little boxes of the Malvina Reynolds song, without even the redeeming California colors. Set in their treeless yards, they were still our parents’ great achievment, grasped in eagerness after a Depression and a war. Did we children intuit that those houses were something short of our elders’ actual hopes? That, after so much longing, the reality fell flat?

For flatness was certainly a defining characteristic, not merely of rooflines and floor plans. And over the years it has become clear that no one really loved those low-slung places, which are being replaced one by one with McMansions, as another poem laments. But we were children, and flatness was what we knew. Only by contrast did we come to realize what was missing from suburban featureless walls, minimal door and window casings, and hollow-core doors in cheap Lauan plywood. Those realizations took shape when we visited older houses, older neighborhoods, older people.

Those older people were grandparents, great aunts, great uncles: people who lived far away from the cities that gathered our parents into that suburban sameness. People we visited rarely, via long and tiring car trips. People who doted on us, overfed us, exclaimed over our every accomplishment, over our very being. People whose houses had oval, beveled-glass windows set into their entry doors and curtained with lace. Or leaded-glass lunettes. Or perhaps glass doorknobs, or intricate dark woodwork on window and door frames. And sleeping porches. And dormers.

My husband’s maternal grandparents were comfortably well-off and owned a house with many of these features. Mine were poorer and may never have owned the two-family house in which they lived on the upper storey, but even that house had those glass knobs and that dark woodwork. And that distance from the ground.

As we did our house-hunting, only after many showings did we make sense of our reactions. Our real estate agent may well have seen the pattern before we did, a lightbulb that came on for me years later:

Those months when we’d drift through houses
dreaming and vague, like air through the August windows,
what glamours were cast around us

by the molding’s ogival curves,
by the darkened heart of the oak and the sheen of woodwork?
What old-world charms were recited?

For certainly we were spellbound
in deep designs--saltbox, colonial, foursquare--
concealed from our rapt attention.

Our agent, her lacquered smiling
changeless, took pains to show us the patterned surface,
part image, part invocation

of faces out of our childhoods
kissed at the end of a day-long drive in summer.
Of love that demands no labor. . .

(from “Showings)

Whatever the effects on our taste of college dormitories and drab grad-school apartments, what we chose in the end was the kind of house where, as we believed, something lived that already loved us.

* * *

Most sources don’t need recourse to love to explain the presence here of so many large old houses. Money had much more to do with it: the money and the ambition of developer John L. Merriam, banker and statesman, who bought the land at a midpoint between the two downtowns of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in the 1880s. A railroad linking the downtowns threaded through the area, and Merriam was canny enough to foresee that a residential district close, but not too close, to commerce would be attractive to businessmen in both cities. He set his minimum price requirement high, aiming for a well-off clientele. He achieved it, and the resulting neighborhood—which grew for the next forty years—is full of striking houses, each different from the next, according to its first owner’s taste.

But even striking houses decline with age, and by the time we bought, many houses had been to the bottom and were just beginning a kind of return. Some were living less dignified reincarnations, chopped up into student rental units, regular sources of irritation to their homeowning neighbors. Others were being updated slowly, painstakingly. This is where love comes back into the picture: a house is occupied by an intrepid remodeler, improved by his own work, modestly or grandly, and sold. We snapped up one of the modest ones.

The bringing-back and nursing-along of old houses supported, and still supports, a standing army of specialized local trades—everything from hardwood floor refinishers to ornamental iron workers, along with a fair number of architectural salvage dealers. Plain maintenance has also required plenty of labor from my own hands, and poems have come out of such jobs as wall repair and the replacement of ancient window putty. “Work is love made visible,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, and the houses worked on all around us were clearly beloved by the people who lived in them, our neighbors. Some of them took unreasonable risks with that love; working on the roof of a three-storey house is a matter for specialists, as our neighbor, who lost the use of his legs attempting it, will tell you.

So there are limits even to love. And I sometimes wonder whether the ability to work with patience and care is diminished for modern people. The century-old devotion that led apprentice carpenters to trim out even the insides of our closet doors with full headers and mitered moldings —that struck me, when I wrote about it, as a degree of devotion that had died amid the horrors of the twentieth century’s wars.

. . . Ordinary human love
fails to hold the world in form.
Different rigors, soon enough,
wrung from dulce et decorum,
follow from the battlefront:
settling plaster cracked to crumbs,
simple comfort sunk to want,
houses hacked to rental rooms.

Dumb, occult, the beauties sit,
oak or maple, dark and sweet.
Mitered corners meet and fit.
Ghost Edwardians shade the street

down its hundred years of ill,
sullen in their crafts and arts.
We who merely buy and sell
strip them for replacement parts.

(from “Trimming Out, 1911”)

* * *

Researching the neighborhood’s history, I once quipped that the work of local architect Clarence Johnston is so ubiquitous here that for forty years I have been walking around inside his mind. I riffed on that thought:

I have breathed the air of his Edwardian uprightness,
his line a mortar that limes together
the jumbled stones of my living.

His forms are Roman porticos
with weighty matters to uphold.
Which is not to say they are dour.
They juggle Georgian dentils and Doric capitals,
amused at what such gravity drops into place.

But the final effect is dignified,
and for a century his buildings
have lifted their faces to my own
declaring, This is stature.
And I have been of their mind.

See how this one struggles to speak it now,
ground floor prinked in the clown suit of commerce,
babbling a second childhood
as it wags the day-glo sign of a yogurt franchise
and the pastel banner of a cupcake store.

(from “Catalogue Raisonné)

The yogurt franchises and cupcake stores are coming, though not on the first waves of change. The first waves were there before us, in the properties carved up as student rentals. The next waves still leave the exteriors of the houses unchanged, but they damage the soul of the place. Bit by bit, they make painfully evident how little love has to do with streets full of big old houses.

What does one do, for example, with a six-bedroom, three-storey house in need of repairs, when few families are big enough to need it or well-off enough to buy it? In many cases, its use will change; it will be something other than a family home, and families in nearby homes will feel that at best as a loss, and at worst as a threat. Under threat, people can be ugly.

The likeliest new use for such a dwelling is as a halfway house—a place, surely, for people in need of love. It might be a residence for people whose difficulties are with mental health, or with substance abuse, or with criminal history. In a neighborhood graced with houses big enough to accommodate a dozen souls, proposals to allow these special uses are made in block after block; one such facility is down my block and around the corner.

How much do I even need to say here? Already you are picturing tense conversations among those who own homes that will be near such houses, among parents whose children go to school there. You know what NIMBY looks like and sounds like, in agitated district meetings where people speak shakenly, hoping hard not to appear cruel or selfish, but always possessed by some absence of real love, some fear of relapse or of physical or sexual threat, and underneath all else, fear of the loss of property value.

Of course, some well-off buyers exist. Flippers somehow bring wobbly buildings up to code and curb appeal, often for sale to people even more well heeled. Most of this labor is of money and love in combination. Up and down our own block, such renovation has happened; kitchens, bathrooms, decks, landscaping. In the present white-hot real estate market, in which every day’s mail brings offers to buy our house, our neighbors’ houses are selling for five and six times what we paid thirty years ago. A happy situation, until one realizes that this rising vortex of numbers is pricing people out of the market, putting upward pressure on rents, and adding to the number of homeless who haunt the bus stops, the on-ramp corners, and the tent city at Cedar and Hiawatha.

Sometimes, though, a wonderful house is too far gone. However hard neighbors may push for historic preservation, a house’s state of disrepair may mean it can’t be profitably made livable. What then is the more loving choice? To deprive the neighborhood of one of its jewels, and lessen the value of neighboring properties, by letting a developer replace the ailing building with modern apartments? Or to preserve the grand building as a historic property and deprive its elderly owners of the profitable sale that will fund their needed but expensive care? Week by week, the narrative unfolds in the neighborhood paper.

* * *

It will leave nothing. Nothing. The future comes,
ripping the asphalt up—black, jagged slabs.
It chews and spews and carts away the crud.
We’re in its dust, coughing, detoured, irate,
squeezing our wheels between blaze-orange drums,
while on both sides the wheeler-dealers land-grab.
Where refugees nursed little stores on blood
are artists’ lofts and high-end real estate,
their grand decks stacked against us. How this ends
(upending our directions in mid-scheme
without the be, finale to the seem)
is a steel-track lesson: that your road depends
on dreaming of what cannot happen yet.
The future comes. It frees us to forget.

(from “Central Corridor Light Rail Construction”)

When I wrote about the difficult, disruptive creation of the Green Line on University Avenue, I realized that it was only superficially the first domino in the neighborhood’s fall. Much more was going on than light rail: for example, the loud new construction of five-storey apartment buildings, in the popular style that looks for all the world like a pile of shipping containers. From the neighborhood’s boundaries inward, the pressure of population and the need for affordable housing chip at the nature of the place. The growing shape of a new soccer stadium looms to the northeast, desired as a bringer of business, loathed as a bringer of traffic, crowding, and noise. To the south, local college officials are nearly rabid to build additional student housing of the sort that locates dorm rooms on upper floors above commercial space, with minimal setback from the street and no space for grass or trees. The low hum of change I tuned out while I was a working parent is a ceaseless tinnitus in my now-retired ears. It accompanies the morning pounding of pile drivers.

Change happens; nostalgia solves no practical problems. So how will I learn to recognize love in the sort of neighborhood this will become, and the sort of home that is almost certainly in my future? I do have some idea about that future. I have lived long enough to lose one parent, then watch the other be stripped of everything—first of a house, then of a large independent apartment, then of a smaller one nearer a daughter, and finally of her life, in a tiny efficiency in assisted living. While I was looking desperately for someplace to care for her, I saw over and over how such places put on, in their lobbies and public spaces, the same Edwardian costume of stature and protection that my parents missed in their ’50s homes and that I have hugged to myself for decades. Woodwork on a grand staircase, William Morris prints, and turn-of-the-century furniture are the calming mask on the unsmiling face of geriatric care. I know enough now to fear the cookie-cutter standardization of that care. It is the same standardization that disheartened our childhood homes, those houses that were built for the press of population we exerted as we were born and are doomed to exert again as we die.

What does love ask of me now? I wonder that, on nights when I walk toward my own front door and look with a pang at my lit windows. If I’ve been absent-minded and have left the attic light on, so that the dormer is shining like a beacon, the pang is especially fierce.

________________

“High” first appeared in Umbrella and is included in Gardening in a Time of War. “Showings” first appeared in Mezzo Cammin and is included in Breath Control. “Trimming Out, 1911” first appeared in American Arts Quarterly and is included in Breath Control. “Catalogue Raisonné” first appeared in Angle and is included in Street View. “Central Corridor Light Rail Construction” first appeared in Leif and is included in Street View.

Photo credits: Maryann Corbett

(Some notes on the Latin: vis: force, vir: man, hortus: garden)

Asparagus

God of Roman gardens, obscene Priapus,
is that you? now risen in green and purple
thick-stalked rigor, here in the bed prepared for
old-fashioned roses?

Years ago I lusted for kitchen gardens
here, and trenched and phosphated, setting rootstocks
deep—and then I grew in a new direction,
longing for flowers.

Ave, old survivor, both vis and vir, old
force, green fuse still driving among the blossoms,
heedless of my changes of heart and hortus,
phallic as ever.

Heartless, though, to Bobbitt you off for cooking!
One alone, poor godhead, will never serve us,
hungry as we are for the primavera.
Gardening's answer:

Stand there still, O vegetable love. Grow taller.
Soar and soften out to a ferny greenness
feathered open, branched to adorn these hoped-for
armfuls of roses.

(published in Umbrella; in the book Breath Control)

Not in Our Stars

A wrongheaded choice, I see now,
to search the stars, but know too little of stars—
the times when I lay, impatient
beside a sleepless toddler,
waiting for the even breathing that would release me,

and peered through frost-ferned windows
imagining I could see the belt of Orion,
while in the sky behind me
Orion, a hundred eighty degrees around,
stood winking at my nebulous hold on facts.

And later on, when I sat grade-schoolers down|
in front of Nova, reverent,
and scattered NASA photos like cupcake sprinkles,
my head was still in the clouds
(though they hid the comet, that freezing night in the schoolyard)—

What business did I have
aiming the star-eyed young at physics departments,
at nights in mountain observatories
listening for beings who might not even have breath,
when all I want from the night
is whatever the psalmist heard, that shout of glory?

I know this much: the cosmos
is flying apart. The old drift off the signal.
The children have reached lightspeed.
The galaxies move away
in search of work in a more exciting city.

(first published in Astropoetica, in the book Breath Control)
(photo by Till Credner - AlltheSky.com, CC

Hand

On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

I move on steadily, noting organization,
stories, verse forms, language variants,
marginal scribbles. I don’t know how long
I’ve worked like this when I come to the colophon,
the little end note that the scribe has left.
The words are, Pray for him that made this book.

It hits like a stone: Handwritten words on paper,
like any scrawl on spiral-bound, ripped out
and passed across the classroom, any note
on an envelope’s back, left on the kitchen table,
and in my cradle-Catholic head, the prayer
has said itself before the doubt spoke up.

It’s only later, as I walk toward home,
that I picture a grave—somewhere near Hull, I think—
and wonder how long the bones of a hand would last.

(first published in Strong Verse, in the book Mid Evil)

Mayday

remembering “Make Way for Ducklings”

From the small safety of their storm-drain puddle,
two bird-brained birds
puzzle across four lanes at seven a.m. They bob and waddle
—there are no other words—
his iridescent head, green beyond mistaking,
blazing a way for her dull brown. Unhurried,
they preen at the midline, pecking
at air. I pause mid-step beside the roadway, worried,

because my childhood faith, set on the sacred texts
read to me, read to my children, still blessing the shelves
of the branch library, holds that some love protects
such innocent selves.
It wants a policeman to materialize,
whistling and gesturing with white-gloved hands.
Slim chance: in less benevolent guise,
he stands

above with radar gun, in dark blue interdiction
while cars bomb down the pavement toward our couple, forty-fiving
in a thirty zone. The gods of children’s fiction
appear not to be driving
this plot. (Do I expect them to hold sway,
or the grown-ups’ god, the Stillness in the Dance?
The Ground of Being, who let the ground give way
in Port-au-Prince?

Two bobbing question marks.)
Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

(first published in The Chimaera; appears in the book Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter)

On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in Spain

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.

Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness,

when all of a sudden, the loveliness ends with a boot to his backside,
wrenching him back to the work of the clay, to the kneading and wedging,
back to the tedium foisted on children from time immemorial—

Well, it’s a charming hypothesis—not that it’s carved into marble,
the dream of a song-loving youngster who scratched in the red mud of Baetica
eighteen-odd centuries back (if the pot has been dated correctly).
Scholarship writes in the dust, and its musing flies off to the whirlwind.
All we have left is the singing, the sound of it fired in our clay.