Die Bibliothekarin: A Sestina

About the stacks I weave my check-out cart,
pause, ponder, do my part, fill every bag
with fiction, magazines, and picture books,
all destined for my Amish patrons, when
at their farmhouses, bags in hand, I will light
to visit Kinder, Frauen for a while.

Anticipation rises in me while
I check out and bag each book, load, and cart
them to my waiting car. They are not light--
these canvas sacks hold more than words. Each bag
contains a glimpse of the wide-spread world. When
I go to their doors, Kinder grab their books.

They danke me and run off with the books
clasped firmly in chubby fists, run off while
with Mutter I chat (gardens, quilts, jams), when
“Ach, look!” says Bruder, not at horse nor cart--
my auto runs away down the drive! Bag
hits the grass. I’m on the run, footfalls light

and fleet, though not enough; car comes to light
amid a web of barbed wire. All the books
are unmixed--I see to that bag by bag.
My patron friends, eyebrows up, watch me while
around the car I crawl, snip, collect, cart
away the snare. With mirror broken when

it swiped a fence post, scattered scratches when
it lunged the wire, a crack in the tail light,
my car is a sad sight. “A horse and cart
may thus so go astray, as do the books
the Kinder take to the fields,” they say. I while
away the time, not anxious yet to bag

the trophy at the library for bag-
to-back route accidents. For surely when
co-worker friends hear this, they’ll laugh a while.
But I about the mishap will make light,
for their world is made larger by these books.
Through library doors I trail my red cart;

each bag holds books consumed by minds alight,
and when time, I will once again choose books
that might beguile mind, wile heart, from my cart.

[This poem originally appeared in Montana State University: Read This.]

The Warmth of Wool

[For a year, I worked as a home service librarian at a small library in rural Ohio. My job consisted of choosing, checking out (and in), bagging in canvas bags, and hauling books to 70 Amish families. This atypical librarian's job allowed me access to a community that is largely stereotyped, and this peek into my patrons' lives led me to write a number of pieces about them. This one was originally published in Ozark's Senior Living Newspaper.]

Somewhere in America, in some kitchen or living room or bedroom, the wool skirts I wore in high school have gained new life. Good wool is hard to give up. For a decade I kept the earth-tone skirts on a multi-tiered hanger at the back of my closet. Church rummage sales came and went while the skirts slept cosily in their hideout.

Then I met Mrs. Miller, number 42 on my route of home-service deliveries to the Amish patrons of a small, rural library. Despite living in a tiny, white house adjacent to her daughter and son-in-law’s farmhouse, the elderly Mrs. Miller seemed lonely. For company, she had two border collies that she had trained to herd a small flock of sheep, she had a flower garden full of brightly colored perennials, she had Mr. Miller, who suffered from dementia--and she had me. On delivery days I always spent some extra time at her house. I asked if the books I had delivered the month before suited her. I asked about her health. I smelled her flowers.

One day I arrived while she was braiding a rug. Her arthritic hands carefully worked the two-inch wide strips of blue fabric that she had sewed together in continuous strips and wound into balls. As I looked closer, I saw that the cloth strips were not cut from the cotton or wool fabric I had expected. They were polyester. I knew that the local Amish women liked to make their dresses out of the synthetic fabric. Even though it didn’t breathe as well as cotton, the polyester didn’t wrinkle or fray. Yet I had never imagined someone making rugs from it.

Mrs. Miller made rugs to keep busy and to sell. When I expressed interest in her work, she showed me how she made long braids. Then she sewed them together to make round or oval rugs. She had a wool rug half done, but affordable wool was scarce—even at the resale shops where she went to buy wool items to recycle. Then I thought of my old skirts. The next day I made a special trip to her house, my cache of wool in a bag, satisfied that my skirts would have a useful, and perhaps beautiful, second life.

Recipe Box

My brown wooden file holds a life
of tattered, kitchen-soiled 3x5s:

Brown-sugar coconut topped Oatmeal Cake
retired from the middle school home ec contest
after winning three years in a row, written
in my mother’s school-teacher cursive.

Grandma’s German Dills & Gherkins,
seven sweets & sours at holiday dinners.

Christmas Sugars & Wagon Wheels,
in a younger sister’s green-inked calligraphy.

A high-school best friend’s never-used Nacho Recipe,
lost like she was, for over fifteen years.

Clove & nutmeg perfumed Pumpkin Bread,
in a younger brother’s then-round script.

Chinese marinade Shiska-Bobs roasted
over a wood fire in a South Dakota warming house,
after a full-moon night of cross-country skiing.

The reinvented in-law family secret
Chili Sauce, ground just right, typed.

From the hundred-year flooded Mississippi,
Wisconsin Beer Batter for fresh-caught fish.

Indian Curry in Buffalo from my cardamom-scented
walking partner, in her British-schooled hand.

Almond Biscotti translated into English measurements
by a first-generation Italian mother of three in Ohio.

Eucharistic Bread given in Communion
by hard-praying Rhode Island women,
who gifted me with much more
than a hand-flung pottery batter bowl.

President Obama Revises

Imagine you are peaking over the left shoulder of the President as, sitting with his legs crossed and a sheaf of papers in his lap, he works on a speech he will deliver to Congress. Poised to make another change to this important document, he holds the pen firmly with the long fingers of his left hand.

I plan to show the Time photo below to my English students, so that they can see that even the President revises. Writing is revision!

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1893255_1875835,00.html

Daily Drag

Meet my personal trainer, Casey,
Chocolate-and-white spaniel,
Brownie mask, freckle face-y.

Her dance of delight at the door,
Impossible to resist, she
Begs for one stroll, more.

Across the school yard, vacant lot,
Around the church-turned-gym,
Through the cemetery, we trot.

Flappy eared dog-in-motion,
Bobs and weaves, leads
Ten-minute-mile in-tow commotion.

For a mile—more, if her way—
I huff and puff, watch,
Ponder, compse, or pray.

Observers look askance, say,
“Your dog, it doesn’t obey?”
I smile, shrug, look away.

With Casey’s tail-wagging glee,
I’ll someday greet exercise, maybe.
For now, she springs my lethargy.

Thirst

As enclosed in warmth, you nursed
My arms, a constant cradle, did sway
You never seemed to quench your thirst.

My son, when into this world you burst,
We wanted all your fears to allay
As enclosed in warmth, you nursed.

Though we wished you ignorant of the worst
That this hard world could convey,
You never seemed to quench your thirst.

We wished you to know love’s light first,
For joy heavier than grief to always weigh
As enclosed in warmth, you nursed.

Too soon in the world’s ways you’d be versed,
Your growing up we’d not be able to delay--
You never seemed to quench your thirst.

Your rosebud mouth against me pursed,
We rocked peaceful moments away.
As enclosed in warmth, you nursed,
You never seemed to quench your thirst.

[This poem first appeared in Dunes Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 Winter 2007/2008.]

Love Letters

After long nights of editorial work, mornings often find me at the worn oak kitchen table with my daughters, a cup of coffee, a pen, and a pad of paper. This morning we make a get well card for a young cousin. Last week we sat here and made birthday card for Dzia Dzia.

Two weeks earlier we had cut valentines for an afternoon kindergarten class of twenty. Megan cuts pastes, draws, or pats on stickers. She asks me to spell or to take dictation. Two-year-old Christine parrots Megan’s questions and energetically scribbles her own “letter” in washable marker. As I teach Megan to read, I teach her to write short notes. I write my own letters then, to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and friends.

What do I write? The big events, the minutiae, my hopes and dreams--anything and everything. I’ve never been able to keep a diary for more than two days running. Yet for more than ten years I’ve sent streams of letters, sometimes trickles, sometimes in floods, but there’s never been such a drought that they dried up altogether.

It must be the writer in me who knows that diaries get stale. Writing is meant to be read by someone else, published, even if only for the eyes of one reader. My pen is refilled by the comment, “how much I appreciate your letters.”

When as children we took family vacations to our grandparents’ farm two hundred miles away from our home, I couldn’t help notice the big flat boxes upstairs. They were from our mother and her brothers and sisters--letters home. Their aged paper and five-cent stamps spoke silently of lives lived. Their mystery appealed to my imagination.

Letters played varied roles in my youth. I had penpals in faraway places. Shoji, from Japan, sent me beautiful letters, cleverly illustrated with colored pencil drawings. I tried to equal his, but was never satisfied with the results. As a high school student, I spent a summer abroad. My parents worried about me when a mail strike stalled my letters and postcards home.

My husband Mark and I met as a first-year college students. Our universities were eight hundred miles apart and our budgets small, so we corresponded. When I spent my junior year abroad, we exchanged airmail letters. I saved Mark’s letters, and on our wedding anniversary I dig them out. We read them aloud and refresh our memories. We see how much our lives have changed, how much we’ve grown.

For a while I tried to be a modern correspondent. I composed and stored my letters on computer. I individualized them--or so I thought--and printed them in batches. That way no one got my news second hand. After about six months of computer printed letters, one of my sisters took me to task. She revealed that she had read virtually the same letter I’d sent her while visiting our parents. Suddenly my letters lost their luster. I went back to writing them one by one, in longhand.

When our father died suddenly, we six children rushed hundreds of miles home to be with our mother. The girls and I were the only family members able to stay with Mom for several weeks. One night, Mom pulled down a box from the top shelf of her closet. It was full of letters, letters sent home to her parents, saved, and later returned to her by her mother. Mom shared this treasure with me. We pored over the letters, reading of Mom’s college years, of her meeting and falling in love with our father, of their life together, of children being born--the big events, the minutiae, the hopes and dreams. Here and there, my father’s handwriting jumped off the page at me, speaking with loops and points, as well as in its words.

The next morning, I wrote a letter to my husband, who had had to return to work. Megan drew a picture and labeled it “Daddy.” When we finally arrived home, the letter was on my desk; the drawing was stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet.

Not all my words are set down on paper. To be honest, I do use the telephone and email, and I enjoy It. In fact, when asked to name my hobbies, I list talking. Getting immediate feedback is exciting and satisfying. Yet spoken words fade much faster than ink, so I teach Megan the almost lost art of letter writing, and sooner than I can imagine, Christine will be old enough to read and write too.

My first letter from Megan came last summer when she went away from home for the first time, on a camping trip with her grandparents. She had dictated the contents to Dzia Dzia, but the signature was unmistakably hers. Reading it made my heart beat faster. But then, it always does when I read love letters.

[This narrative has been published a number of times, first in 1995, but the changes in technology have dated this once evergreen essay. Now, I email or chat most of my correspondance, and I reserve my writing on paper for brainstorming creative work, annotating the margins of books, reflecting in my journal, and writing Christmas cards.]

[While living among the Amish in northeastern Ohio, I learned how little most Americans know about this community and how prevalent stereotypes about it are. This poem, first published in Pennsylvania English, 2004/2005, was my response. JML, 2009]


Black and White

At the outskirts of town,
the black-and-white sign reads:
“Fourth largest Amish community
in the nation.” On Main Street,
a horse trots, pulling a black buggy.

A bearded face peers ahead,
while his weathered hands dance the reins.
A toddler perches on his mother’s lap,
clutches a Sparkle bag of corn chips,
waves a chubby hand at me, a Yankee.

Over the hill crest careen skaters
in Granny Smith green dresses.
White bonnet ties flying,
they race past schoolhouse,
wood-pile, privies.

In straw hats, suspended blue pants,
with Igloo-cooler lunch pails dangling,
aluminum baseball bats slung over shoulders,
Amish schoolboys talk box scores
as they trudge home to chores.

On lines from white house
to carriage barn, to maple,
teal, maroon, violet polyester dresses
wave long sleeves and skirts,
like unpieced quilts.

Nutmeg Belgians pull plows
across stubborn corn stubble,
while on steep ditch slopes
men wielding gas-powered Weedwackers
cut quick swathes.

At Yoder and Miller farms,
aboard a rainbow-sided Bookmobile,
deutsch-chattering girls, proud
mothers at sixteen, check out
romances by the bag full.

After midnight hooves clatter.
A beer bottle crashes
in the derelict churchyard,
where once an Amishman
hid his forbidden automobile.

When sons or daughters Yank over,
do parents cease loving them?
In my mother’s heart,
I somehow know
their black-and-white life is not.

Kisses

[This piece, written by my mother, Carole Blum, was inspired by her mother, Gertrude Hungerford. Grandmother Hungerford had been a teacher in a one-room school house in Northern Michigan. She lived in my mother's home during the last years of her 97-year-long life. JML 2009]

Today I made another discovery! Knowing that my mother would really enjoy them, I had bought some Hershey's Kisses. I decided to arrange them in a two-tiered candy dish, one that had never before been used. I placed some of the Kisses on the bottom plate and some shelled gourmet nuts, a gift from my brother, on the top plate. Because I must always tell Mother what I have placed in front of her, I explained about the candy.

"Why are they called Kisses?" she asked me.

"I really don't know," I told her, "but maybe it's because they taste so good that everyone smacks their lips when they eat them."

She gave me her usual retort, "Oh, you can always think of an answer! You think of everything!"

I held my tongue, for my inner reaction to this routine response was to take it as criticism. Mother, who has had several strokes and often doesn't know me, daily accuses me of lying.

But this time Mother continued. "How do you think of such good explanations?," she wanted to know. "I think that's probably the reason for the name. You are always so good at explaining."

"What is that part of speech that can be either a noun or a verb?" she added.

This grammar question often comes up for she remembers it was on the teacher-certification exam she took in 1925. So I explained about gerunds yet again.

After a few minutes I realized something had happened, and I was amazed. Had I been misinterpreting her responses these many months, or had my point of view somehow changed? Had what I had been taking as sarcastic criticism for so many months been the opposite?

I decided then that I would look for the positive in all that Mother says, even if it takes some creativity on my part.

I few nights later as I put Mother to bed, I bent over and kissed her good night and as usual spoke into her nearly deaf ear, "Good night, Mother. I love you."

"I love you, too," she said, "whoever you are."

[Originally published in Ozark's Senior Living Newspaper, February, 2005.]

(Ir)Reality Show

[Each work of art must find its own form. Thus, what began in my mind as a dialogue poem became a cartoon. I may try it as a poem yet. Thank you Joel and Libby for providing such good inspiration.]

Automobile Culture Metamorphosis

As we try to re-imagine transportation from both personal and public perspectives, the worldwide automobile industry is undergoing a painful metamorphosis. Fine artist and photographer Pierrick Gaumé visually captures this identity crisis in his series of Automorphoses photographs in College Hill Review.

The editor writes: "Each of these images documents a moment in time that is lost, when a particular car distorted a particular street or building. Like the metal, the images themselves reflect—not only the American street but also the unseen eye that found them and captured them for us."

I happened to be chatting on the phone with the artist when he snapped #7, Mission TL.

http://www.collegehillreview.com/002/0020401.html

At the Y

September 11, 2001

Watching from the lifeguard chair,
I see caps contain their ponytails—
not their exuberance—as noses
clipped by rubber, they slip
from the pool deck into liquid music:
cygnets winging low on/in/under water.

Treading side by side, they dance,
smile playfully slap the water,
lay out—legs splayed, arms fluttering—
become a momentary water lily,
then snap shut like an oyster,
submerging fingers to toes.

Seconds later two right legs thrust up
from the water—pointed ballet toes
like swans looking heavenward—
rotate in complete circles, finally
sink in slow motion out of sight.


[First published in CaKe, Vol. 2, 2008.]

Review of Edward Hirsch's Poet's Choice

[While the debate continues about accessibility and inaccessibility of poetry, I believe that metaphorical language is the property of all humans in their search for meaning. Searchers will gravitate toward the works that provide meaning for whatever stage they are at in their development as thinkers. JML 2009]

In response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, poet Edward Hirsch began writing a weekly column called "Poet's Choice," which appeared in the Washington Post Book World. As he explains, he felt it "especially relevant to a post-9/11 world, a world characterized by disaffection and materialism, a world alienated from art." Hirsch, who is the author of six books of poems and three books of prose, wrote this immensely popular column until 2006, when he turned it over to former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

Poet's Choice (Harcourt, 2006) is a compilation of these columns, some of which Hirsch expanded. In Part I, he introduces readers to works by poets in the international community, in the Part II by American poets. They range in time from works by ancient Greek and Roman writers to twenty-first century Asian American poets. While these poets hail from many cultures, the overarching themes expressed in their verse are universal: the search for meaning when faced with death, suffering, and loss. Anyone can create a compilation of favorite verses, and I have done just that. Like my list, Hirsch's collection reflects its author's preferences. Yet I had hoped to read more about works by women, for only roughly one-tenth of the pieces deal in some way with women poets.

"Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift," writes Hirsch. "There has never been a civilization without it." To come alive, poetry needs readers, and readers need poetry to live fully within the human community. As he did in the best-selling How to Read a Poem, Hirsch makes us better people by introducing us to poets and works that may be new to us. These short columns are like hors d'oeuvres: compact and delicious, they whetted my appetite to read more by poets known and unknown to me.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Jeanne Lesinski, 2006.