#PoetryBreak: When the Vacation is Over for Good

Wales (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

When the Vacation is Over for Good

by Mark Strand

It will be strange
Knowing at last it couldn't go on forever,
The certain voice telling us over and over
That nothing would change,

And remembering too,
Because by then it will all be done with, the way
Things were, and how we had wasted time as though
There was nothing to do,

When, in a flash
The weather turned, and the lofty air became
Unbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumb
And our cities like ash,

And knowing also,
What we never suspected, that it was something like summer
At its most august except that the nights were warmer
And the clouds seemed to glow,

And even then,
Because we will not have changed much, wondering what
Will become of things, and who will be left to do it
All over again,

And somehow trying,
But still unable, to know just what it was
That went so completely wrong, or why it is
We are dying.

"When the Vacation is Over for Good" by Mark Strand, from New and Selected Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

#SOL17: Out of Darkness

Winter Solstice (M.A. Reilly, 12.21.10, 3:05 a.m._

The Coming of Light 

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

                - Mark Strand 

                

I. 

I had planned to stay up to shoot the lunar eclipse. What I did not know was that my husband had planned to join me. I thought he had gone off to bed. He had not and as we stood outside at 2:30 a.m. in the freezing cold of late December--we each felt so very much alive.  

This is mostly how we lived.


II.

Closer to 3 a.m. we agreed that Devon, who at the time was ten-years-old, should see the eclipse too, witness the Blood Moon. A total lunar eclipse on the Winter solstice. I waited outside with the tripod and my camera as the darkness continued to gather. Rob went inside to rouse Devon. A few minutes later they both came outside bundled up. Devon drowsy and leaning his slight body into his father's.

We stood there in wonder. None of us talking as the moon turned red.


III.

The next day, I showed both of them the image I made from that night. 

What caused it to be red? Devon asked. 

And Rob, equally as comfortable as scientist as he was poet, launched into an explanation about the Earth's atmosphere and scattered light.


IV.

In the year following Rob's death, what I have mostly learned, 
          mostly remembered 
          from living with this man, 
                      making a family with him 
     
         is that it is 
         so often 
         about the coming of light. 


V. 

We created love together out of darkness. 

" The stars/are not yet bells"

Something Like the Moon (M.A. Reilly, The Badlands. 2010)

Summer

Mark Strand, 1934

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.


2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.


3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures --
the mouse and the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

Eating Poetry

from here

Eating PoetryBy Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

Keeping Things Whole: How Do you Open to New Possibilities?

Suburbia (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Yesterday in a quick Twitter exchange with Pam Moran (@pammoran) she commented on the importance of administrators developing voice. I thought about what that might mean as well as what might inhibit one from developing a voice.  At this same time I was reading and stumbled upon "Keeping Things Whole," that American poet, Mark Strand (1980) wrote.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk I part the air

and always

the air moves in 

to fill the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Here's a visual interpretation of the poem:




So I am curious as to how you open yourself to (k)new possibilities?  What does opening yourself to possibility mean given the work you perform, the life you compose, the art you become?

I move/
to keep things whole.

How about you?


Work Cited:
Strand, M. (1980). Selected poems. New York: Atheneum.