Still That Summer Girl

By Elaine Wright Christensen

Elaine Wright Christensen's third book of poems reflects her desire to keep memory alive! Many prizewinning and published poems tell of ancestors, children, and insights gained as a woman who finds herself "still that summer girl.' She writes of losing a child, loving a man for forty eight years, speaking German, and living in the desert beneath a mountain that knows her, while longing every day for the ocean--the only place she truly recognizes herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483497419

Book preview

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Keeping Memory Alive

This collection I’ve put together will hopefully give you, my friends, family and posterity, a glimpse into the last 20 years of my life. Through these poems I have attempted to keep memory alive; stories from my childhood, events from my ancestors lives, and impressions which have come to me these last years of my life. That’s what poets do—keep memory alive! I have loved language as long as I can remember, not just what it says, but how it sounds, and the images it can create.

I came to poetry when my fifth child, Eric Christensen was stillborn. I had a friend, Katherine Clement who took me to a poetry writing class taught by Joyce Ellen Davis, two of the finest poets I have ever known. I began writing in 1985 to find a way to cope with loss, never dreaming poetry would become such a huge part of my life. My first two books, At The Edges, and I Have Learned 5 Things were contest winners, the first in Utah, and the second in a national contest sponsored by the National Federation of Poetry Societies, judged by Michael Dennis Browne.

Since that prize in 1995, I have had many poems published in journals and anthologies, which I have listed in the Acknowledgments, but not another collection. To spare my children having to save my three ring binders full of poems, I have decided to publish most of them in one volume. Hopefully they will give you a glimpse into who I am and who I have wanted to become.

I would be ungrateful not to mention The Utah Poetry Society, which was so supportive of me as a beginning writer and which enabled me to learn from other very good poets. I have been in several critique groups, Sandy Poets, Wit-pickers, No Name Poets, The Poet Conspiracy, and Hungry Poets. It is vital to have others read your work, especially poets whose opinions you value. Thank you to those of you who have helped me find my voice.

Without the encouragement of my mother, Gloria Wright, my sister, Tori Postma, and my other three siblings, I would never have had the courage to continue writing. Of course, having my husband Roger’s support over all these years, has been a great joy. He opened the world of riding four wheeler’s in the mountains to me. I have always been an ocean girl, so together we have seen life below the sea and above 10,000 feet. Better than the landscapes we have enjoyed, he has shared my life now, for 48 years. We have five children we so love, and 16 grandchildren we adore.

Along with all the above mentioned, I thank my Heavenly Father and his Son who created this world, giving us the opportunity to experience mortality with all its opposites: good and evil, joy and sorrow, childhood and aging, mountains and seashores, seashells and seagulls…you’ll find them all in this book of poetry.

IF LEAVES CAN APPLAUD

                  If the mountain can loom into darkness,

                        a frail moon caught

                        on the tip of Lone Peak,

                  then I can swim, a silver fish,

                        out into the night sky,

                  each star a pebble in the black stream.

                  If pebbles can bloom like daisies

                        all over heaven,

                  then I can race the wind through tall trees

                        lining our street,

                  the leaves clapping their green hands.

                  If leaves can applaud

                        each glimpse of twig-entangled sky,

                        each flash of blue-black wing,

                  then I can fly from here

                        to some holy place, some wild

                        prayer-filled wasteland

                        where saguaro lift pulpy arms

                  to the square.

                  If saguaro can burst like fireworks

                        into flower,

                  if flowers can lift petaled faces

                        all day on thin necks in the sun,

                  if the sun can shine like a street lamp

                        all night on the other side of the world,

                  then I can sing with the grass

                        clear, crisp notes of your name

                        over and over,

                        each green blade of your name.

I.

I Can Sing With The Grass

A COLOR YOU’VE NEVER SEEN

            1.

            If I were a shopkeeper,

            I’d have a paper goods store

            with a bell that jangled when the door opened.

            Not a large shop—just room enough

            for one long display case containing fountain pens

            and leather pencil cases.

            When I was a girl in Germany

            there was such a shop,

            where we bought our notebooks,

            one for each subject.

            The Rechenheft had pages covered in grids

            and a separate blotter,

            because even arithmetic was done in ink.

            There were zippered cases that held a pen,

            pencil, eraser, a compass

            and two wooden triangles for Geometrie.

            They came in red, brown, even green, leather.

            I loved the smell.

            What is it about paper, ink and smooth cowhide

            that is better than summer rain

            or gardenias in the dark?

            Speaking German is like telling secrets

            as a kid in pig Latin,

            or being able to sign like Helen Keller.

            Haven’t you closed your eyes

            and put your hand under running water

            like she did,

            trying to imagine not knowing what it was called?

            I know everything in two sets of words.

            A drawer is a Schublade,

            a butterfly, a Schmetterling.

            There are words in German we don’t have,

            words like niedlich. It can’t be translated.

            Imagine a color you’ve never seen.

            We have such words, too.

            Germans have only one word

            for faith and belief: Glaube—

            so they see no distinction between the two.

            Maybe that’s why as a people

            they were so easily blinded.

            2.

            If I’d been taller, I’d have been a ballerina.

            I was a butterfly at three and a half,

            a wild rose, at five.

            I dreamed of becoming a swan

            or the doll in Coppelia that comes to life—

                  one minute, arms bend only at the elbow,

                  legs move only at the hip—

            then human,

            she dances like a bird uncaged.

            As a butterfly, I had blue and silver wings,

            though my arms were really the wings.

            In To A Wild Rose they were petals,

            opening and folding.

            Arms can be waves rippling the shore,

            wheat, pale in the sun.

            They can soar above trees.

            They can outshine the stars.

            They can rain.

            They can sing.

            That’s what ballerinas do with their arms—

            they sing.

            3.

            My husband sings in the shower in Spanish,

            love songs that wash down the drain

            where they belong, since he sings

            of black-eyed Latin girls.

            You’d think with three languages between us,

            we could communicate,

            but without giving birth

            how can he possibly understand who I am?

            Yet everything hinges on him,

            the doors he shuts and opens.

            I never dreamed that when two people come together,

            their arms full of wildflowers, twenty years later

            trees are growing…

                  arms, roughened bark,

                  fingertips blooming each spring,

                  fruit filling eyes and ears with sweet juice.