Güd wrtr

The poetry inside you
is a chalice
and it is golden.

—”Chalice” by Kathryn Hohlwein,
May 18, 1930 – Nov. 18, 2024

•••

I sat in the poetry center waiting to
read a few of your poems on the eve
of the anniversary of your death,
holding a honey lozenge in my mouth
hoping to quell a seasonal cough.

Of course, you were there,
alive in the eyes of your children
who miss you terribly, coming
from the tender mouths of others
giving voice to your words.

And I thought of you who often found
new poems arriving at night in bed,
even in your final days in the hospital,
honeyed lines that you held in your mouth,
allowing them to melt into you, able
to recite them the next morning.

And in my own waiting, I felt your
sweetness against my own palate.
The cough did not arise, though
your words did from my mouth
at just the right time.

•••

For Laura Hohlwein and Reinhard Hohlwein
in memory of their mother, Kathryn Hohlwein

•••

“Chalice” is from the “Dear Poem” series, in Kathryn Hohlwein’s
collected works, The Little Chapel in Donegal © 2021, Random Lane Press.

says the message on the screen,
by clicking here, checking the box,
identifying all the stoplights,

because only we bipedal ones
with big brains can do so.
What of the whales with

their outsized hearts the
size of a Volkswagen bug,
or our ape relatives who,

as Jane Goodall taught us,
not only use tools but
invent them? What of

the instinct of caterpillars,
who willingly create and
wrap themselves in their

own shrouds, turn to liquid
and re-emerge as winged
creatures with a job to do?

Are we not all here to
pollinate and create
some kind of beauty

with our sizable hearts,
the ones that, if we are
lucky, expand with time,

with love given and received,
the best confirmation
of humanity after all?

The next generation lives there now,
their motion cam picking up all manner

of wildlife in the backyard, the one
that used to be our backyard when

my sister and I were growing up.
My nephew and his wife show us

photos of a little gray fox peering
into the sliding glass door—

one staring at the orange cat inside—
this caller who comes to visit.

In the nearly 60 years that our
family has occupied that house,

we’ve never seen a fox, though we’d
heard they were our neighbors

living in the state park across the road.
This one with such a sweet face

lingers as if it’s checking out the place,
perhaps knowing it well. As if she—

who died in the room on the other side
of that glass, whose essence may have

seeped through it as she headed into
mystery, she who so wished for

reincarnation—has returned to see
who’s coming for Thanksgiving

and what might be for dinner.

He heard it at least weekly from bosses
looking for something striking to anchor

A1 or a section header: Get us a weather
picture. And the photographers would

sigh as they headed out of the office,
into the world, to fulfill the always

challenging assignment. How many
umbrellas, the brighter the better,

and puddles, the splashier the better,
did they scope out, never knowing if

one of their shots would make the next
day’s paper? All these decades later,

the force still runs strong in him,
so, sitting at a stoplight in the rain,

the camera nowadays tucked
into his phone makes it easy

to grab a quick weather shot.
He’s made this picture more than

once, but the drops on the driver’s
side window always render

a unique abstract, and the blurred
lights of a gas station provide

a nice contrast against the gray
day. Through the magic of the air

he sends it to me, a once-upon-a-time
editor who responds that, even

retired for 22 years, he’s still got it,
and if it were up to me,

that baby’d go on A1 tomorrow
with a snappy headline and his byline.

Your maroon nails accent the new blue pen
as it scoots across the pages of a petite

notebook, one each for you and your
classmates brought by two visiting

writing ladies who have set you all
to making lists of possibilities.

You do not hesitate; you dive into
the cool water, into that bubble

where all sound vanishes and almost
without effort, letters spill from

your fingers, turn into words, into
sentences, stories, poems. What

you see on the page surprises you.
Creativity pulses to the surface like

lava, burbling hot as the sun, explodes
with joy, sometimes fountains with rage,

rising and falling, eventually settling,
cooling into rugged mountains of

potential that call you to explore
with pen in hand, to trust this

endless source always within you,
with luck, for the rest of your

wonderfully wide-eyed writerly life.

•••

(for the writing workshop students at Bradshaw Christian High School,
Sacramento, California—from the writing ladies, Jan Haag and Jill Batiansila)

Has rolled off the U.S. Mint
assembly line in Philadelphia,
presumably with others
of its kind, though, as its
New York Times obituary
noted, it was more or less
worthless.

“Not even penny candy” can
be purchased any more with
the thin pseudo-copper coin,
having long since given up
up most of its precious metal
in favor of zinc-coated steel.

Still, the penny “was the going
rate for thoughts,” its obit said.
“It could sometimes be pretty
and other times arrive
from heaven.”

And though some 250 billion
of the Lincoln-faced discs
still exist, that they cost more
than 3 cents each to make
spelled their doom at age 232.

I think of you, my dear, jingling
the once-ubiquitous pennies
in your pocket, sidelining
a particularly shiny one
to place in my palm each time
I cut your hair. It’s still my
going rate—a penny or a kiss.
Nowadays you generously
deliver both.

And I, along with so many of
my fellow Americans, have
mostly taken for granted
this tiny bit of legal tender
like so much of what is fast
disappearing from our world.

I vow to stop each time I spy
a penny on the pavement
and pick it up, regardless of
how much in-God-we-trust luck
it might or might not deliver
for the rest of the day.

I promise to cherish its
enduring legacy—Liberty—
embossed near the spot on
Mr. Lincoln’s head where
the bullet must’ve gone in.

Long may equality, freedom
and justice for all somehow
survive in this land still
filled with so many of the tired,
the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.

(for Katie O’Rourke)

The Garden Goddess on the corner
is collecting the fallen, arranging
the downed and brown around
the base of a tree and allowing it
to do what comes naturally—
turn itself into compost.

“You make your own dirt,”
observes a woman who likes
to periodically drive by
the GG’s corner to appreciate
the profusion of plant life, as I do,
awed by year-round cosmos,
by hydrangea blossoms
in November.

The GG nods and smiles.
“Yes, I do,” she says, citing
the money-saving benefits
of homemade dirt.

But I think she is offering
more than beauty on her corner.
She reminds us that, in this
season of releasing, of letting go,
the fallen become compost
for new growth later.

And that, if we can be persuaded
to loosen our tight grips,
if we can interrupt hate with love,
we can watch life grow from decay—
someday participating in that
bit of recycling ourselves—

if we just get out of the way.

For a true contemplative, a gratuitously falling green leaf
will awaken awe and wonder just as much as a golden tabernacle
in a cathedral.

—Richard Rohr
from “A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible”

•••

This is where I worship,
awakened with green awe.

So much of what I am made of is here:
under old oaks with long-reaching arms,

some with trunks as thick as elephants’
legs or even their stout middles,

craggy-barked oaks with long limbs
and spindly digits that touch the ground,

undisturbed, untrimmed, losing bits
of themselves gradually, often in storms,

but mostly standing tall and strong,
silent sentries for 100 years or more.

Here I sit in the sanctuary of my people,
the ones who brought us to this place,

now the companion spirits who join
these oak ancestors to call my attention

to a choir of bird song and insect hum,
punctuated by the percussion of a solo

woodpecker. This is as holy a place
as I have ever felt, where the beloved dead

linger in the long shadows and late light
of a warm November afternoon,

the sun lowering itself, as I do, into
fresh grass risen green by recent rains.

I don’t want to miss a bit of this day.

(In memory of my father)

Driving down H Street, I see
a man at the curb, rake in hand,

and another man’s voice comes to me:
I can pray just fine raking the leaves,

though he really said this about mowing,
not being inclined toward leaf gathering

since our yard primarily consisted of old
live oaks that, when they did shed, did so

so unnoticeably that the leaves just lay
on the grass until they got churned up

by the lawn mower, morphing into mulch.
I love these there-you-are moments when

he appears, reminding me that all moments
are holy, no church needed, unless you want

to listen to someone tell a good story, and
close your eyes as a superb pianist fills

a whole room with the sound of eternity.

•••

(With thanks to Dr. Irina Tchantceva, pianist at
the Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento,
for her wonderful weekly performances.)

A pair of young, wiry men work over
my front yard for several days with
hands both strong and gentle,

lifting this earth that was once part
of their homeland—long before their
existence or mine as a native Californian—

for the 27 years when Alta California
was part of the new Mexican nation,
independent of Spain. It did not

take long for new conquerors to
decide that this vast land with its ripe
central valley, perfect for ranching

and crops, needed to be overtaken,
even before they knew about the gold
in these here hills. And they did—

people with pale skin like me—
as the Spanish did from the first
peoples who populated this place.

Many generations later I watch these
landscape artists, listen to their lilting
voices in Spanish as they work

for one more white lady, remaking
the small space I think of as mine
into a lovely swath of river rock

beds into which I will plant annuals
come spring. On a foggy Saturday
morning a trio spreads elephant gray

volcanic rock mixed with soft black
and iron-rich rust that once burbled
up through the earth in liquid form

before cooling into rough bits.
They install smooth slate called
Indian Paintbrush after the plant

as I think of the people who literally
paved the way for my existence,
the ancestors of this land,

along with my own young
parents who migrated west to
make a better life, to raise

California girls, we natives of
a different sort who owe our
comfortable lives to those who

sculpted this land. Like these
men who comprehend un poco
of my too-fast English, as I

struggle with their lyrical Spanish,
men whose wheelbarrows
clatter over chunks of ancient rock.

Who smile shyly when they summon
me to look at their finished work,
who acknowledge my muy bueno

and muchas gracias with a
gentlemanly tip of their ball caps
and a soft chorus of de nada.

•••

With thanks to the team of terrific professionals from JDL Land Management in Sacramento who remade my front yard into a thing of beauty. And to Lindsey Holloway and Chuck Dalldorf who highly recommended Gabriel Garcia and his team… as do I!
(Top photo: Dick Schmidt; photo below: Jan Haag)