Still Burning: Collected Poems 1963-2013

By Alinda Dickinson Wasner

Wasner speaks passionately, unabashedly, and with humor about love, physical and spiritual, about the cycles of the seasons and generations. Hers are poems of conscience about hard work and circumstances. Her eye is finely attuned to the tiny details as well as the wild juxtapositions that make up our world. She helps us see it anew.

--Anca Vlasopolos, Walking Toward Solstice

Alinda Wasners poetry sends you over a Niagara of images in a barrel of wonder. And you experience a thrilling ride and a surprising drop, for you never know, when you start, just where shes going to leave you when you splash down at the bottom. The most seemingly innocent beginnings lead to delicious naughty ends. An innocuous start finishes with a poignant detour into the deepest recesses of the heart. Startled to discover where you end up, you know thats where youre supposed to be.

--Anthony Ambrogio, Assoc. Editor, Corridors

"With craft and insight, Alinda Wasner's poems explore the stuff of life -- love and loss, dancing at long-ago celebrations, kisses under the summer sun, and memories as pale as the moon at dawn."

--John Gallagher, The Detroit Free Press and author of Reimagining Detroit.

Alinda Wasner's poetry collection wonderfully and honestly captures how helpless we are before our passions, whether it's a reconciling couple and their love noises muffled by the shrieks of a jay("Ode to the night and morning following an All-Day of Arguing"), a bittersweet visit to a broken-down home in an old neighborhood (Gone) or a truly beautiful solo of a grandmother braving a blizzard to welcome her newborn grandson into the world ("Aria")--Still Burning is a vivid songbook of loss and desire. ---
-- Patrick O'Leary, The Gift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483643762

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Alinda Wasner.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013909524

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4836-4375-5

                eBook           978-1-4836-4376-2

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/13/2015

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Contents

1963-1973

Maybe

Devil’s Dance

Quick! Let’s You And I!

No Funeral

Migrants

Haiku

The One That Got Away

Ice Fishing With My Grandfather

High Tide

The Bait Shop Is Converted To An Art Gallery

Holiday Money

The Boy Who Shot The Baby

Sunrise Near The Byzantine Church, Marblehead, Ohio

1973-1983

Of Fractals And Madness

Stupid Wind

Midwife

This Far North

Sundown On Lake Erie

August Into September

Marigolds

Just Around The Corner

Soaring

Family Secrets

August

Sandusky, 4 AM

Still Life With Purple Sock

Stealing Something To Carry To Hell

Odometer

B & E

Divertimento

Ode To The Carpathian Dancers On The Pier In Ashtabula

Divertimento

Oh, Those Rumpled Dresses

Dinner Party

So Here’s Where My Heart Has Been

Edge Of The Earth

Deadbolt*

Though Some Would Choose

1983-1993

The Letter

Divertimento

You Can’t Get There From Here

Housesitting For The Neighbors

Salt

Untitled

Security Guard At The Main Library

As The Crow Flies

In The Amate Trees

To My Friend Who Came To This Country From Another

From The Girl In The Red Sequin Hat

So These Are Our Daughters

Rooms

Untitled

The Artist At The Ann Arbor Art Fair

Looking Back At The Mainland

Thin Ice

Blue, Largo

Maybe

Double Exposure 1

Improvisation

No One Actually Said

Or, Put Another Way

Anna Karenina Isn’t Dead. Yet

Boy, In Repose

Urban Legend 1

Urban Legend 2

The Swedes Come To The Door

Urban Legend 5

Urban Legend 6

Urban Legend 8

Urban Legend 23

Urban Legend 45

Nobody, Too

Translating Paint Chips

Painting The Front Door

Marilyn, Honey, You Shouldn’t Have Fucked The President

Dry Clean Only

Not Only

Even A Year Later

Love/Hate

At Eighty My Father’s Handwriting

Court Order: Second Warning

A Love Poem

Suggested Reading From The Non-Com Bestseller List And Catalogue

Double Exposure

The Play Offs Go Into Overtime

1987 Earthquake

Summer 1942

Forget This

What Keeps Me Here

Absence

1993-2003

This Boy, That

Don’t Even Ask

Faith

Sunlight On Oranges

Flight Taken After My Mother’s Funeral

Oh, She Said

On Meeting The Artist For The First Time

Cardinal Rules

Dermish

Carnage

Vase, Maybe Swarovski

17 Stairs

Parsonage With Trumpet Vine

Weekend With A Friend

Entanglement

Dawn

Stay Awake!

Ode To Andre Segovia

Dear Mr. Rich Man

Treachery

Summer

Sea Change

Ghost Trees

2003-2013

Tryptych

Rereading Sandburg At The Beach

Morning After

Fool’s Gold

Wedding Dance

High School Tromp L’oeil: What I May Or May Not Remember

On The Back Roads

Suddenly, Suddenly, You Here, The Thin Blue Thread Of You

Wedding Dance: Tsifstetelli

Bitch Of A Moon Over Port Of Detroit

Alain, Alone

Rain

Grief

Trumpet And Voluntary

Tonight The Snow

Divertimento

On The Head Of The Pin

Memory Birds

Woman Kills Spouse On Honeymoon At Grand Canyon

Three

Dead Toad

Sound Poem

Aria

Still, Life

Thumbnails

Riptide

Armistice

So Maybe We Should Have

Speak Or Forever

When You Don’t Know Who You Are

So Her Phone’s Out

Promiscuity

The First Time

Epilogue

Incidental love

U-Turn

Oh, House

She Tried Everything, Really

Orange Shoes I Inherit From My Mother

Phillip, Asleep

Those Initials

Test

If I Were You

So, Tell Me

Hospital

Absence

I Am Burning Some Things

B And E

Don’t Even Ask

Family Reunion

Hymn

Passing Trains

Light Year

In The Field, A Piano

Shower Curtain With Antique Car Motif

October

Small Craft Warnings

Divertimento

What Are The Odds?

Love Me Some; Was Not, Was

Line Drive

Avalanche

Losing You

Say It Never Happened

Deep Blue Night

Spring Forward, Fall Back

Mostly, I Never Think Of Her

Wedding

This Is Where We Lived

Here’s What I Think

Untitled For Emily Dickinson

What Is Normal?

Trust Me

And Then What?

Orbit

All That Talk

Life Sentence

Spring Forward; Fall Back, 2

Sleep, And Not

In The Days Of Overdue Books

More

I Tried To Get Past The Words

The Seductive Book Cover

Say What You Want

The March

When Gas Was Cheap

As If A Vase, A Knife

Reading Back To Front

Miss Your Crazy Ass

Be That As It May

Life On Harding And Kercheval Streets

I Drove Through The Mountains

They Were Living With Us

All They Wanted

Wildfire

Accusation

Fairy Tale

Almost Winter

Crime Show

The Morning You Leave

The Poet Stops Writing

Orbit

While On The Porch

Mismatch

Ode To The Night And The Morning Following An All-Day Day Of Arguing

Duel

Shelf Life

Ferris Wheel

Kissing The Ikons

Rosary

At The National Bird Sanctuary With My Father, Age 90

Divertimento

I Never Tasted A Pomegranate

After The Woman Who Longed

Refraction

Gone

So How Do You Know?

Ecosystem

Red

Menage A Trois

Equinox

Love, Again?

Night Vision

Sunday, Early

As The Light Changes

Rain, Doorway, Grief

Why I Came Here: Lines Penned At Lake Huron Following My Father’s Death

What Worried Me Most

Home Improvement

Parasol

Late Summer

Call Me, I Love You

Morning Cold And Your Words

Can’t Do It

And The Other Really Weird Thing

Summer

The Boy Who Once Walked Me Part Way Home

February

Topography

Wildfire

Fall

Alps

How We Talked All Night

The Thing Is I Didn’t Know

A Day With You

Morning

Storm

I Love To Stand At The Window

Too Late I Loved You

What Are The Odds?

Reunion

Still Life

Hymn

Confession

In The Neighbor’s Attic

I Need To Go Home Now

Wind

Ode To The Bullet Holes

Keep Me, Sailing

Hit Hard

Every Damn Light On

Blue

Galaxy

Fantasia Impromptu On The Ursid Meteor Shower

Love, Was It?

After Most Of The Guests Have Gone

. . . I was kindling… making the real fire/Out of myself and I am still/ Burning.

~Eloise Klein Healy

Dedication

I will always be grateful for my husband Hal for his steadfast support and enduring patience, who understood my need to pursue my passion; for the members of The Detroit Writers Guild’s years of encouragement and keen insights; to the Burton Historical Collection of The Detroit Public Library Main Branch where the originals of these works and others are archived in The Michigan Writers collection; and for Professors Allen Koppenhaver and Herbert Merrill of Wittenberg University who not only helped light the fire under a budding writer, but tended it masterfully at the beginning so it would not die out.

This is not a complete collection because there are still hundreds unpublished. Others have been lost in moves or in computer crashes and I especially grieve the loss of Ruby Falls, which was first place winner in the 1989 Mr. Cogito Press publication, and the poem RBIs which never found its way to publication but was dedicated to a childhood friend whose passion for baseball equaled mine for painting word pictures. I still hold onto the hope that these will surface some day.

Thanks also to the publishers at Ex Libris who have assisted me every step of the way during the 18 month publishing process.

This book is divided into 5 sections. Because I wrote mainly fiction from 1963-1983, fewer poems appear in the first three sections. Due to work constraints, I began in 1989 to encapsulate my ideas for fiction into vignettes that I hoped would ultimately be developed into longer works; but as time went by I began to see that I had so many vignettes that seemed to fit into the realm of poetry, I began to look at them anew and rework them into poetic form.

My purpose in collecting these works was to fulfill the request of my children that they have a tangible collection of my work without having to go through file cabinets of papers and photos when I die and try to decide what to keep or throw out. This way they can gather once a year if they wish to, and I hope they will, to read through those other papers and journals and not have to worry about having to store them in their own basements or attics.

Although some of the early poems were published relatively soon after they were written, many poems were written decades before I had the time to send them out for publication.

1963-1973

Maybe

Maybe August—

maybe a purple sun

teasing the purple clouds

or maybe purple clouds

slumped across purple elms

or maybe March

maybe purple ice

turning the trees to glass

or maybe lightning

splitting the trees in two—

or maybe June

the ground in purple protest

lurching beneath our feet

but maybe May

perhaps the green shoots

protruding from

this dirt

and maybe me

waiting for the right words

to parade across my heart

or maybe you

wandering towards me

across these fields

oh, maybe

yes,

maybe you.

Devil’s Dance

Laughter kicked his heels together

In a summer rain

I heard it

In the hot wet afternoon

The laughter in his beard

Went curling underneath his chin

As though I must have

noticed it too soon

but I threw back my head

and danced

and hurled my abandon

at the moon

while Laughter whistled

through his teeth

that bittersweet

nostalgic little tune.

Quick! Let’s You And I!

Gather summer and the sky

That falls between the leaves

And catch the sun with yellow

Eyelashes out to here

That curl around each waterfall

And sometimes lift up all

The tails of fireflies.

Come! Then we can go

And gather milkweed pods to blow

And listen for sounds that no one hears

And maybe we can catch the tears

Of eagles’ eyes.

And then to pause and wonder when the summer’s through

That somehow we have gathered Autumn, too.

First place: Sounds Literary Review, Wittenberg University, 1964

No Funeral

try to think her

Still, not returning

      letters

      just unanswered

sounds of bones

         Stones

Crushed by waves—

hollow voiced wind

Hallowed trees

      wind threading

      The last of the birdsong,

   blue dusk

   the only word drowning

over and over

poem fragments

   Roiling the water

   clouds dark and circling—

   and crowd gathered,

   shore buried

   Tide family, frantic

Still calling her name.

Migrants

The wind has just scurried by us

Leaving us in a wake of sidewalk-patterns

Of leaves that fell when the cement was

                                             Still wet.

Then, all the other sometimes come

Whir-rr-ing back like a boomerang"

                        A yesterday world of bubble-gum fortunes

                        And cornflake milkshakes:

                        We sold tax stamp stubs

                        So all the mothers in the neighborhood

                        Came to our show

                                             And the dancing fleas

                                             Were grains of sand

                                             On a metal tray

                                             That I tapped with a spoon…

         AND THE MOTHERS REALLY BELIEVED IT!

And the feel of the shade of the porch steps

Against our hot summer backs—

         A sky that everyone knew was really a lake

         And we could hum to math the sound of the motorboats

And the warm mud path ran under our barefeet,

         Down to a crick that always scurried away

         With our reflections

         As soon as we got there

         So other people at the ocean could see us…

            And maybe if we waited long enough we could see theirs’ . . .

Yes, a boomerang of grinding roller skate noises

And clouds that unwound

            Faster than our rope swing

First place: The Wittenberg Review, 1965

Haiku

Midnight moon-puzzle

Caught in the tree’s top branches

Waiting for the wind

Haiku

O, baby your lies

Are a purple sourball

Rolling on my tongue

Haiku

As the wind whispers

To the tress of the forest

So my heart listens for yours.

The One That Got Away

Fishing for perch off Kelly’s Island,

my father lowered his oar

over the side of the boat

until it hit the coral reef

and then let out his lines.

Though I couldn’t get my mind around

what made him want to sit all day

casting into the same bed of weeds

in hopes of reaching his limit

which in those days was

a hundred fish a day,

I was content to crawl

into the hull, my tiny stateroom,

with a box of Ritz crackers

and Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon

convinced that under different circumstances,

my dad, who in his bashfulness

was not unlike Captain MacWhirr

must have longed for some adventure.

At least, I wanted adventure for him.

I wanted him to have a bigger, better boat,

say, one with an inboard motor

and a real depth finder

and perhaps an expanse of mahogany on the deck

not to mention chrome louvers on the windows.

But I said none of this

Though I see now

He probably knew.

Ice Fishing With My Grandfather

Inside his fishing tent

my grandfather digs two holes

just inside the door

and I take the line

he hands me

but at first he can’t remember

what he did with the worms

so we try empty hooks

and the fish, hungry and stupid

bite anyway, their tails

flashing under the water.

In winter, the light

rises out of the ice

like the Holy of Holies

and we lower our lines

as if he thinks this time we’ll come away

with some new secret—

an understanding

that although already a hundred times I have heard him say

he’d give up farming for peace and quiet

that he should have been a priest

and listened to his mother—

I won’t automatically figure today will be just like any other.

But as the afternoon lengthens,

the sun glints up through the augur holes

as if they are the mirrors my mother

and grandmother sewed onto their headscarves

to ward off evil spirits.

And despite myself

I confess that I really hate ice fishing

that I’ve been planning to run away

since I was seven.

But he just laughs and takes my hand

as if it were the last bead on his rosary;

And the fish doze and I doze

and the tent is so warm

that we stay until the moon itself

rises just like an angel ascending to Jesus in Heaven.

High Tide

Pulled under

By your eyes

Closing over me

Like water over a stone

Eddies,

Waves spreading to tsunami

And my heart, a new map

Continent still uncharted

As if the land and sea changed places

Upside-down horizon

In bowl of blue

The great waves

Spilling

Sloshing over!

The Bait Shop Is Converted To An

Art Gallery

if it were only an oil painting

ice would be the pigment

the colors dripping

onto the floor of the

temperature-regulated rooms

the docents ooh and ahh

pointing out the

allegorical significance

of the artist gone missing

the patrons

lined up three deep

in the lobby

where the lures and penny candy

used to be—

the artist was a local boy

who moved away,

chose not to live here,

airbrushed the suffix from his last name

then put it back again—

remains unknown

to those of us

who thought we knew him.

Holiday Money

Was usually chocolate coins

wrapped in gold foil

shimmering in our imaginations

as we hung our stockings from the sofa.

Because there was no fireplace;

But Rudolph and Santa always

left a thank you