Winter - Patricia Fargnoli

Today's book of poetry:  Winter.  Patricia Farngnoli.  The Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, Volume VI.  Hobblebush Books.  Brooklyn, New Hampshire.  2013.

For the past few days there has been a meme making the rounds of FaceBook.  It goes like this:

     

     The legendary cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued to practice at age 90.

     "Because I think I'm making progress." he replied.

I'm thinking this applies to the elegant poetry of Patricia Fargnoli.  Fargnoli, a former New Hampshire Poet Laureate,  shows us some of the characteristics of the senior artist whose has seen it, tried it, out-lived it, and now has that considered voice of experience.  Fargnoli has learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and winnowed to the essential grain, where the nourishment lay.

Winter Grace

If you have seen the snow

under the lamppost

piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table

or somewhere slowly falling

into the brook

to be swallowed by water,

then you have seen beauty

and know if for its transience.

And if you have gone out in the snow

for only the pleasure

of walking barely protected

from the galaxies,

the flakes settling on your parka

like the dust from just-born stars,

the cold waking you

as if from long sleeping,

then you can understand

how, more often than not,

truth is found in silence,

how the natural world comes to you

if you go out to meet it,

its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,

its vacant birdhouses, and dens

full of the sleeping.

But this is slowed-down season

held fast by darkness

and if no one comes to keep you company

then keep watch over your own solitude.

In that stillness, you will learn

with your whole body

the significance of cold

and the night,

which is otherwise always eluding you.

...

These languid poems seemingly roll off of Fargnoli's effortless tongue but I'm certain the Pablo Casals motto holds true.  How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice.

Winter, Patricia Fargnoli's fourth book of poetry, has a gentle forcefulness behind every line.  You can call it wisdom or experience, I'm going to call it the reader's luck.  Fargnoli talks to us about "the quiet things that are".

The Weight

Four times a day and twice during the night

through all of the relentless

ice-locked mid-winter days,

my widow-neighbor carries her dog,

a little honey-colored mutt,

down the stairs from her second floor apartment

into the sharp zero cold.

It's actually more like lugging an inert body,

Neddie his name is, old now and ill.

He whines and she knows

something is hurting badly.

Soon she will have to put him to sleep,

she can't do this much longer, old herself,

his weight unsteadying her on the steep stairs.

She cries while she tells me this,

as she lowers him down

to the ice-covered snow,

where he turns and turns, slipping a little

before he finally settles down,

the lemon juice stain spreading out

across the whiteness.

She says she's fighting off grief,

and not for the first time,

then stretches her back,

tired as it is, and bends to lift him again,

smoothing his long fur

with the practiced strokes of a lover.

...

The Precious Book

          Gwen John, circa 1920, oil on canvas

Who among us becomes what we set out to be?

The girl in the long blue dress cradles the open book

in a handkerchief in her hands. Next to her on the table,

an empty white plate and a closed black book

that partly extends over the edge of the table

as if she had just put it away and taken up this other.

The book she is reading is red and the girl's face is as devout

as a nun praying. The background, only a beige wall, nothing else.

Do the words of the valuable book enter her mind and change her?

Does she grow into the woman the artist later becomes?

A model for Rodin, his lover, that sad affair,

how she died overshadowed, unrecognized?

The red book is the only thing of bright color here, a light

in her hands. We give our hearts to her, don't we?

The long blue dress of her life, this moment of stastis

when the future can't touch her.

...

Time and time again as I read these pages — I wanted to share more poems.  Is it too trite for me to say these are sage wisdom stuff?  Well, it's been said.

Fargnoli hits the right note time and again, whether she is asking the much needed question or providing resolution.  These quiet, understated and very powerful poems resonated with me.  Winter addresses questions of our mortality, our morality, big question stuff, but it is never in your face, the quiet timing of Fargnoli's approach, giving voice to the essential little questions as well, somehow it is the voice of something weathered, but still strong and dependable.

Sixty Years after My Mother's Death

Her voice is nothing

but wind through a tunnel

beneath a snow-covered mountain

somewhere in the high country

a tunnel over tracks

where a train has just rattled through

a brief flash of lighted windows and passengers

on the way to the emptiness of the plains—

so that the tunnel is filled with absence

except for this wind that does not howl

but whispers as if she were bearing

her vestige back to me.

...

Shadow at Evening

After all day walking the Vermont craft fair in the sun

after the goat-milk soaps and rose-scented sachets

the bright pottery stalls and the wooden animals

while my shadow preceded me along the grassy aisles

and disappeared reappeared as I moved in and out

of the shadows of maples and gray ash trees

where the breathy music of the accordion player floated

where the field was vibrant with color and motion

stalls of candles relishes and pickles cotton candy in plastic sleeves

I drove home and my shadow rode beside me drove lazily

watching the Green Mountains pass outside the windows

home to my own small cache of solitude and grace

then my shadow disappeared into the brown carpet

disappeared into the bookshelves and the books

I never missed it but just continued on with my quiet life

but now through the east window evening approaches

but now night is knocking against the long shadows

of the street lamp as my shadow rises mysterious and compliant

and I beckon it to enter me until I am one with it at last

and I allow the day to close and dream to come

allow the dream to rise from nowhere and come to me

...

In the end, I couldn't get enough of Patricia's Fargnoli's Winter.  I liked the pace of these poems, the politic of these poems, the mature love of poetry in these poems.

Patricia Fargnoli reading "Wherever You Are Going"

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