HERE TO CREATE

A story can be told in two ways: the way it happened, and the way it is remembered. The storyteller is welcome at every table, though the story may change with each telling. It really doesn’t matter, it is after all, just a story.

Children are the best story tellers, since they have little recall, the stories they tell are usually created in the moment. If you question the story, they are able to embellish it on the spot. When I was a little girl of four, I created four big brothers. When questioned, they were suddenly locked up and fed bread and water. Clearly a mistake. Are these kind of stories a form of wish? The idea that exaggeration somehow enhances our self-image arrives early.

We are here to create, and all stories do not involve overestimating one’s own abilities, though a stretch of the truth often gives flavor to the imagination.

The creation stories of the Native American cultures, Greek and Roman mythology. and the stories of the Bible are all crossover creation stories. Oral tradition is extremely important, for without it, there would be no story telling. Each tribe, like each family, has its own story, of which there are multiple versions. Just as two or more siblings remember the events of childhood in various ways, our own stories take on new luster in time. More often than not, the Native American stories involve animals or humans who transform and do miraculous things, all explaining the unexplainable mystery of life.

“I Am a Child of the Sun and the Rain” watercolor by kayti sweetland rasmussen

We are all story-tellers; you tell me your story and I will tell you mine. Those stories may change from time to time either from new experiences or from remembrance, but the things we say are mostly true. Taken all together stories form the glorious tapestry of our lives.

CANTALOUP AND KOOL-AID
by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Where is the door to the story?
Can we all walk through it?

A story lives on the lips of
Diego from Hollywood days.
Far from this dusty village
Where nothing happens.
Cantaloup and Kool-Aid
And a bedroll on the floor
In this stone village
where he tells his stories.

Even the tree outside our windows
seems to listen with ruffled
leaves tipping and cooling
in the evening chill.

The pleasant knicker of an Indian pony
through the open window over
heads drowsy with sleep
announced the coming of the dawn.

We sat around the fire pitching our
own stories into the lap of the story teller.
We dropped troubles and pain.
Are they now someone else’s stories?

“EULOGY”

“Black Elk,” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Eulogy” by Sherman Alexie

My mother was a dictionary,

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that no one else knew.

When she died, we buried all those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.

Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.

She spoke the old language.

But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.

She always said to me “English will always be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

Excerpt from commencement speech Gonzaga University
Sherman Alexie, writer, poet, film maker
Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Native

FORGIVING OUR FATHERS

“Taos Man” stoneware sculpture by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Forgiving Our Fathers” poem by Dick Lourie

Maybe in a dream; he’s in your power
you twist his arm but you’re not sure it was
he that stole your money you feel calmer
and you decide to let him go free

or he’s the one (as in a dream of mine)
I must pull from the water but I never
knew it or wouldn’t have done it until
I saw the street-theater play so close up
I was moved to actions I’d never before taken

maybe for leaving us too often or
forever when we were little maybe
for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous because there seemed
never to be any rage there at all

for marrying or not marrying our mothers
for divorcing or not divorcing our mothers
and shall we forgive them for their excesses
of warmth or coldness shall we forgive them

for pushing or leaning for shutting doors
for speaking only through layers of cloth
or never speaking or never being silent

in our age or in theirs or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it –
if we forgive our fathers what is left.

THE WARNING OF THE WATERMILL

THE WARNING OF THE WATERMILL

Poem by Richard Holding

Vitruvius Molinus made me,
With wheel and stone and leat,
While cohorts marched against the tribes
Westward on Watling Street.

Four generations tended me,
Till the Legions recall to Rome;
But a Molinus stayed to work my mill—
He knew no other home.

When invading hordes had settled down
And village life was born,
The sokeman and villeins needed me
To grind the Saxon corn.

I was listed in William’s Domesday book,
As were five thousand more;
I tendered my tax in “sticks of eels”,
According to Norman law.

For centuries have I worked away,
Whatever line was in power;
I garnered the local harvest
And ground it into flour.

Men said then that the power of steam
Was a more efficient way;
So my weir, my leat, my wheel collapsed,
And I began to decay.

Then a “property developer” rebuilt me,
With deal and glass and point,
He turned me into a restaurant,
Described as “rather quaint.”

He took out all my machinery,
Hung my artifacts on the wall,
Displayed my sluice behind plate glass,
As a “picturesque waterfall.”

Perhaps when you’ve used all your North Sea oil,
And your fossil fuel is done,
You’ll remember I was once a watermill,
And rivers will always run.

Proverb: “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”

This grist mill was built by my ancestor Francis Kendall for grinding corn in mid 1600’s, near the town of Woburn, Massachusetts for which he was a founder. He and his brother arrived in America in 1630.

CENTO

Is a writer guilty of writing a patchwork (cento) of other authors works or opinions? Probably. The very act of communication introduces us to ideas not of our own making which we develop and embellish until even the original purveyor has trouble recognizing or claiming as his own.

Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos:
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds is theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

Two examples of centos; The Oxford Cento by David Lehman and The Dong With the Luminous Nose by John Ashbery

Those of us who read or watch a lot of movies see centos in everything. Haven’t you thought to yourself “Oh, I read that in F. Scott Fitzgerald,” or actually knew the next line of dialogue in a movie? They say there is nothing new under the sun, and only so many stories to be told. Just tweak them a little and you may have a best seller. Just be sure to do a good job of your pilfering.

“Touch The Earth” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

In rummaging through the books of poetry in my library looking for a particular one, I came upon a book of James Kavanaugh with an inscription from my daughter in 1979. I had forgotten it and I’m happy to have discovered it again.

The following poem is NOT a Cento, but it does have a relation to those who touch the earth.

TO THOSE WHO WALK EASY ON THE EARTH
by James Kavanaugh

To those who know:
that the desert flowers will bloom
when the oil rigs are silent;

that trees will again stand tall
over the ashes of forgotten wars;

that no one can take away the sunrise
or the smells of spring.

To those:
who walk easy on the earth.

THE SECRET

THE SECRET

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(Through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what’ I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

poem by Denise Leverton
image: Audrey Mabee

“Where’s the wisdom? We’ve lost the information.” t.s. eliot

THE SECRET LIFE OF DAISIES

When I heard that daisies have a secret life, I decided to set out immediately to discover what it is. How dare this common garden dweller have a “secret life”? I soon found out that daisies never tell. Not to be discouraged, I proceeded at once to retrace my steps and lift a few stones along the way.

Through the garden gate to the little haus in the bottom of the garden, I peeked inside to see if there were any trace of a daisy. On my way I found marigolds, geraniums, pelargoniums, roses both prim and not, but not a daisy.

Painters, sculptors, poets and writers from all over the world have celebrated the garden’s beauty, mystery and frustration it can bring.

The robin’s song at daybreak
Is a clarion call to me. Get up and get out in the garden
For the morning hours flee.

I cannot resist the summons,
What earnest gardener could?
For the golden hours of morning
Get into the gardener’s blood.

The magic spell is upon me,
I’m glad that I did not wait;
For life’s at its best in the morning,
As you pass through the garden gate.

I peeked inside and found sunflowers, pots of ivy, mementos from a misspent youth, a few ragtag animal pictures, but not a daisy in sight.

This little corner of pleasure bringing comfort to a tired gardener is where I ponder the important chores of my day.

Out the door, I see the trees are budding, and Spring is nearly upon us. Charlie lounges comfortably on the warm brick, unaware of daisies and their secrets.

Flowers don’t worry about how they’re going to bloom, they just open up and turn toward the light, and that makes them beautiful. Jim Carrey

Gardens heighten nature’s wild language by simplifying it, by sieving its complex messages to extract a choice kernel; a subtle flow of time; a boundary that is and yet isn’t; a balance born of imbalances. We amplify natures messages when we build a garden and in turn the garden awakens us with those thoughts. Sitting and reflecting, drawn into the garden and out of ourselves, we find we are aware of familiar things in ways we weren’t before, granted, if only for a brief moment.

A pleasant hour spent in this garden with its scent of sweet alyssum and roses, laughing at the flight of angry hummingbirds fighting over a single feeder and at the end, not a daisy in sight. Daisies really DO have a secret life.