This Glorious Disorder

By Rae Marie Bruce

This Glorious Disorder teems with New England energy, seasons, and characters. The poet uses embellished family stories to create poems depicting the idiosyncrasies of late relatives. Now these people come alive on the pages of this book as they experience both the joys and sorrows of life. In addition, the poet has included a section about her response to various forms of art and even revealed the process of her own painting with pastels. In this book, the quiet moments, the triumphs, and the vicissitudes of human life tumble together, revealing life's glorious disorder of life. The anticipation of a great delight to come completes the collection on a note of optimism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462858521

Rae Marie Bruce

Rae Marie Bruce started writing poetry with her creative writing students. She admits that she learned from both her and their mistakes and from studying model poems with them. Then she started taking summer courses at the University of New Hampshire with the poet Mekeel McBride. In 1996, The New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) named her poet of the year. While working at her local high school, she helped found a writing center, wrote a two semester creative writing curriculum, and taught American literature and creative writing. She has a B. A. from the University of New Hampshire, an M.A. in literature and writing from Rivier College, and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. Bruce has had more than forty poems published in several anthologies and journals as Touchstone, NEATE'S The Leaflet, Southern New Hampshire University Journal, Compass Rose, and The Spoon River Poetry Journal.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Rae Marie Bruce.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2011905986

ISBN:          Hardcover          978-1-4628-5851-4

                   Softcover            978-1-4628-5850-7

                   Ebook                978-1-4628-5852-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

How I Write These Poems

Acknowledgments

I

Valley of the Onion

Overheard in the Kitchen

The Mad River Salesman

Dead of Night

Rule of Color

March in Vermont: 1945

Sunday Mornings

One Sunday Dinner and After

Clamping Down

Begging

Hearing the News

Spinning

Aunt Sadie’s Lamps

In the Hospital

Aunt Sadie’s Only Material Legacy

Aunt Sadie’s Immaterial Legacy

Sorting Pebbles by Moonlight

My Grandmother in the 1890s

My Grandmother in February 1906

Winters

After the Diagnosis

Looking Out Toward Nahant from the Oral Surgeon’s Chair While Wearing

Braces at Fifty-four, I Realized that…

II

Rituals of Rain and Water

Character and Pastels

Separation

Vermeer’s A Lady Writing (1669)

Burial at Sea

The Witch Speaks

For the Red-Haired Kid with the Crew Cut in the Front Row Who Asked If I Could Pinpoint the Exact Moment When I Realized That Life Had Passed Me By

Dali’s Revenge

Elected to the National Academy of Design and Asked for a Self-Portrait, Jamie Wyeth…

Stars on Ice

Stale

Expulsion from Eden

Nightmare: Before and After Retirement

Riding the August Moon

Seeking the Muse in Piran, Slovenia

Joseph Cornell’s Boxes

How I Spent Thirty Years of My Life

The Manner of Our Dying

Behind the Shine

David Hockney’s Garroway Hill

III

The Nature of the Curve

How We Travel

Gathering Cold

In the Land of Winter Drought

Summer

Leaf on the Table

Journey Back a Season

Storms

The Raft Ritual

Letter Left on the Table for Renters

What Leaves Cover

Finding Great Aunt Melindy

My Granddaughter-to-Come

How I Write These Poems

       I become a transparent eyeball.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

I must lose the arm and the hand that hold the pen,

rely only on my eyeball, naked and unlidded,

open to the world as it catches the currents

that foretell storms and carve the shapes

of body language out of air, so I sense

a coming tantrum before the foot stamp, so I

can glimpse the jagged pieces of a marriage long

before it breaks and hear the language of joy

in the tuneless humming of a child. No need

for the nose when the eye’s membrane

is so delicate it breathes without the lung,

swallows up the surface of a vine so the retina

itches with the touch of bark, and tastes

the sweet of honeysuckle before it blooms

in summer, before it trembles to the buzz of bees.

For my late husband

Acknowledgments

The poet gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems have appeared, some in slightly different form: Ad Hoc Monadnock: The Witch from Hansel and Gretel Speaks and Raft Laughter; Compass Rose: Journey Back a Season, Sorting Pebbles by Moonlight; Embers: Mad River Salesman; Heart of the Matter: What Leaves Cover; The Leaflet Rituals of Rain and Water, For the Red-Haired… Me By; Lessons Learned: Storms; New Hampshire College Journal now University of Southern New Hampshire Journal: Valley of the Onion, Overheard in the Kitchen, In the Land of Winter Drought, Shape of Mother, Separation, Winter (part of), Letter Left on the Table for Renters, Buried at Sea, Expulsion from Eden, Joseph Cornell’s Boxes; Spoon River Poetry