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Spirit of the Walrus & Awaiting Permission to Land

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Poems in POETRY: INUA *“The Eskimos believed that the inua of an animal enjoyed being hunted with a beautiful implement.” William W. Fitzhugh National Geographic Vol. 163, No. 2 February 1983* The spirit of the walrus yearned for the flung harpoon to bear the finest carver’s mark his own father’s tusk incised with lines and eyes to hold the blade the beauty of the tool made pursuit itself an art death a pleasure his inua would find inside an unborn animal a future home == Elisavietta Ritchie [ Poetry Vol. CLXXIX No. 5 copyright February 2002, ==	In Residence In autumn, field mice moved inside our rented hundred-year-old house gnawed new holes in every room, every box of crackers, pasta, cereal and rice. Our manuscripts were shredded lace for tiny cradles, winding sheets. Despite the landlord’s stern advice, I set no traps or bait: God’s creatures. Near the abandoned hen house where turkey vultures raised their single chick (ungainly, ugly, fluffy, anxious to make friends) until the landlord drove them out, now a six-foot black snake sheds his skin. Translucent, whole, this goes on the shelf with arrowheads, fossil shells, otter skulls. Then I gather up the glistening prize, coil by muscled coil. He wraps me in obsidian necklaces and crowns. I carry him inside, ignore the squealing guests, point him toward the hole above the stove. “Go for it, pal!” Unsure, he sways, then catches on, tries the hole for size, inch by inch uncoils his endless neck… The final rubber tail flicks, disappears. Seasons pass. No more signs of mice though generations must have fled chilling gardens, sheds and fields, sought our deceptive shelter. He surely lengthened, thickened till unfit to exit any hole. Too satisfied to try? Odd slitherings in ceilings, walls, confirm his steady presence on the job. I don’t inform the landlord. We move, he reclaims his house, keeps in tenuous touch. “I’ve plugged old holes,” he writes. “No complaints of wintered mice.” No mention of my snake. Elisavietta Ritchie [Earth’s Daughters #57, 2001, An Earth Odyssey; The Spirit of the Walrus. Bright Hill Press, copyright 2005 Elisavietta Ritchie, Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove Publications, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie] ==
HOW TO WRITE A VILLANELLE If you would write a villanelle Choose two of your most brilliant lines, Ones you should have jettisoned. Repeat them till you’re bored And so’s your reader if he’s stuck This far through your villanelle. Do likewise if you find a perfect rhyme. Have no illusions that you are the first: Whoever was, he should have jettisoned All his favorite rhymes and lines. So should you. Try fancy foreign forms If you would write a villanelle. As with new lovers: you repeat a line Till you are bored and so is he or she, That line you should have jettisoned, For soon you may suspect that he’s or she’s A villain/villainess who does not care If you would write a villanelle. This one you should have jettisoned. [[ Poetry Vol. CLXXIX No. 5 copyright February 2002, and in The Poetry Anthology 1912-2002, Joseph Parisi, editor, Ivan R. Dee, publisher, 2002.]	The Bumblebee Gamble: after Blaise Pascal In case God does exist, it’s a good bet to live life on earth as if He does, you can't go wrong— I head down the pier to check the trap, a chicken wire cube, thirty inches per side… Will we have crabs for tonight? Must release any strayed terrapins and small flounders which often swim in. I haul the rope…Something furred— A mouse under my palm? No! Help! A huge bumblebee two inches long, and I'm deadly allergic— I drop the trap, fling the beast through briny air into the cove, retreat toward shore— Invisible swarms pursue me— Yet this bumblebee has not stung, he spared my life, and here I hurled him to his death. A matter of his life or mine. Slow down, bless whatever gods. But there he is paddling, all six legs frantic against the tide, aware of his plight if not musing on mortality, too breathless to bargain as did one fabled hooked fish: “Please, if you spare my life, I'll grant you three wishes.” I grab the long-shafted net, dip it beneath the bumblebee’s wake, scoop skyward, run the net ashore, and flee. [The Spirit of the Walrus, Bright Hill Press, copyright 2005 Elisavietta Ritchie; Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove Collections, WordTech Communications, copyright Elisavietta Ritchie March 2006] ==
IN THE MIDST OF THE WORST 1. Quick deaths of anonymous thousands, slow dying of five old lovers and friends gone too far for my help. I brush one white angora cat strayed from an inhospitable barn somewhere up the road, pick new lettuce, one tiny leaf at a time, for one lover, still live, cherish whatever I have. 2. I eat only the core of your pear because we have only one pear stemmed flesh black oval seeds keep inside whatever is fertile sweet or hard yours Elisavietta Ritchie [Poetry Volume CLXXXIX Number 6 March 2002 and the top one in September Eleven: Maryland Voices 2002]	Chickens Are Not Emotionally Satisfying Pets As I learned in a lone Malay hamlet, final year of a marriage, fowl are not loving, like cats, which he banned, nor companionable, like the mutt he got third-hand after I chased out a midnight burglar while he slept. Burnished auburn, emerald and gold, the rooster strutted with audacity, wattles wagged contempt for humankind. The black hen might have felt primordial compassion, for day after day, no matter that the door was to stay shut, in she’d slip, rooster in pursuit, stalk upstairs, leave her gift: one beige egg, laid on my pillow or in my bureau drawer left open by mistake. Were these fertilized? Could I have incubated them, turned foster mother to a flock? But I recalled an adage, Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs, found my darning needle, poked a hole in the narrow end, gulped the rich and slimy life inside. Elisavietta Ritchie [Oberon 2002; The Spirit of the Walrus, Bright Hill Press, 2005; and in Awaiting Permission to Land (winner of the Anamnesis Award), Cherry Grove Collections, WordTech Communications, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie]
SORTING LAUNDRY Folding clothes, I think of folding you into my life. Our king sized sheets like table cloths for the banquets of giants, pillow cases, despite so many washings seams still holding our dreams. Towels patterned orange and green, flowered pink and lavender, gaudy, bought on sale, reserved, we said, for the beach, refusing, even after years, to bleach into respectability. So many shirts and skirts and pants recycling week after week, head over heels recapitulating themselves. All those wrinkles to be smoothed, or else ignored, they're in style. Myriad uncoupled socks which went paired into the foam like those creatures in the ark. And what's shrunk is tough to discard even for Goodwill. In pockets, surprises: forgotten matches, lost screws clinking on enamel; paper clips, whatever they held between shiny jaws, now dissolved or clogging the drain; well washed dollars, legal tender for all debts public and private, intact despite agitation; and, gleaming in the maelstrom, one bright dime, broken necklace of good gold you brought from Kuwait, the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover... If you were to leave me, if I were to fold only my own clothes, the convexes and concaves of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras turned upon themselves, a mountain of unsorted wash could not fill the empty side of the bed. [Poetry copyright 1988, Modern Poetry Society; Sound and Sense, 8th Edition, Perrine and Arp, editors, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. 1991;A Wound-Up Cat and Other Bedtime Stories, Palmerston Press, copyright 1993 Elisavietta Ritchie; The Arc of the Storm, Signal Books, copyright 1998 Elisavietta Ritchie; prose version in Flying Time: Stories & Half-Stories, Signal Books, copyright 1992 & 1996 Elisavietta Ritchie]	Insomnia Cantatas These interruptions, I have known: midnight gunfire, burglars, hurricane, a lover or the lack, tidal flood, that sudden rush of blood and, more frequent now, the pierce of pain— my malformed bones. This is just another broken night, of late more rare thanks to makeshift peace, and age and locks, though one nocturnal thief, a rusty fox, steals indoors to filch the kitten’s fare. Simply: I did not write all day— no, many days when barren pages heap like futile clouds or arctic snows, and wasted brilliance flows— snowflakes melting into rain—and I must hide my rage as unused hours swirl down the drain, away and gone— Such nights I wake at four or barely sleep at all. Thank God this winter night I hear the calls of tundra swans camped in the cove, unlock the door to let in swan cantatas, hungry fox, lover, words, and not too soon, the dawn. Elisavietta Ritchie [The Ledge #29, 2005, their “poem of the month” September-October 2006; The Ledge editor Timothy Monaghan recently nominated it for a 2007 Pushcart Prize; also published in Confrontation I think; and in Awaiting Permission to Land (winner of the Anamnesis Award) Cherry Grove Series, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie]
Poems in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association: SIGHTINGS A skiff or whaleboat caught in a northeaster far out praying to ride the crests, not founder in the troughs, and reach whatever shore-- That’s the cyst in shades of gray on the sonogram while the device like an MC’s mike skims the dead-calm surface of the questionable left breast. Benign, reads the report. Yet just as meteorologists with radar screens and satellites, helmsmen with sextants and charts, cannot always guess right, so a shipwrecked skipper at the lifeboat’s oars must keep rowing, hoping, rowing toward what might be a port, or the wind-spun heart of a hurricane. [JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 288, No. 7, August 21, 2002] ==	Snow in Leningrad 1. Blizzard here in Washington, I’m shoveling snow. My mind sifts snow in Leningrad, World War Two, the Siege, as I try to track my Aunt Maria….She steps over snowy ruins and humans dead of famine, illness, shells. Early dusk and snow mask the dead, a while. No burials till the hard ground thaws. She lugs rubble from wrecked buildings to raise new barracks. Nights, she mans an anti-aircraft gun. One slice of bread a day. Bombs hit her flat, in Pushkin’s former stables, but a captain rescues her: “Come,” he begs, “teach English to our officers: someday they’ll need it.” At headquarters she gets a cup of soup with bread, a place to sleep, safer if not warm but no one is. Medals afterwards. She survives the war, more blizzards, tribulations from the KGB. They allow her to teach English, French, and keep her piano. She moves into three barrack rooms in a village north of Leningrad. She dares not write, but sends me picture books. 2. A luminous June, 1986. At last we meet. Eighty-one, half-blind, she serves me tea and talks of childhood skating on the Neva, troika rides across St. Petersburg, walks with Akhmatova and Blok, those nine hundred nights the Germans ringed her wounded town. Her champion Airedale disappeared in someone’s cooking pot. Now a small white mutt and large gray cat sleep on her feet: “Trust creatures more than certain humans…” Neighbors are curious, nervous, may report strangers, but her friend Ludmilla is faithful, discreet. 3. December 1991. Ludmilla writes: Maria is in hospital. Midnights she wakes the ward with lectures on Pushkin, Dickens, Bach, English grammar, and Voltaire. My plane from Washington lands a day too late. By three metros and a bus Ludmilla takes me miles across the city heaped with dirty snow. Not neighborhoods for foreigners. We skirt the hospital on snowy paths toward the morgue. A white-smocked worker chases out a dappled cat who slips back in, resumes his watch beside the slab where my chilled aunt lies in state. She wears her blue professor dress, beret she swore she would wear to the grave...Through falling snow we escort her to the marble crematorium. Friends flock. Something like a service. Then the fire—the Church forbids it but she’s seen too many dead awaiting spring. Attendants, thrifty, keep her clothes. The coffin slides through low brass doors. We troop to her old flat, repaired, and toast her soul’s lone journey through the snowy skies. The rest will go beneath a churchyard stone. 4. Washington, 2002. In this wind swirling white I seek her still, and still the night is blind. My attempts to fix her life in words freeze, then melt with flakes of snow. Yet, as if these were the drifts that cloak the stone above her distant sack of ash, I keep on shoveling. [in Potomac Review, 2005, and Awaiting Permission to Land (winner of the Anamnesis Award), Cherry Grove Collections, WordTech Communications, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie]
SHOELACES For John Lawson, MD My whole life I’ve tied shoes. For children, grandfathers, great aunts complaining of age and lumbago, unsure of left over right. Adolescent sons left laces untied, soles flapping alligator jaws, tore off their shoes in the front hall, sailed beyond reach. My own laces came unmoored until I learned the sailors’ lexicon of knots: left over right, right over left, for a trusty square. What disjointed lives I’ve tried to retie, helped a few bind theirs with rhymes. But granny knots unravel, snarl like webs of spiders on amphetamines. Today I cannot reach my feet. Ornery spine curves like a scythe, one extra vertebra, mutation shared with Inuits, clamps on a nerve. Before your duller drugs untangle my web of pain, you lean down to tie my black Nikes so I’ll run again like an antique clock that just needs rewinding and a squirt of oil to chime on the hour and remind how our time goes round and round before it winds down, dissolves in balls of dust, expires. Someday when you are old and ache and cannot bend, I will return, my hands no longer freckled, scarred or cramped like blue crab claws (my natal totem draws me ever seaward), but supple again, alabaster pale, bitten nails grown long in the grave and painted in rainbows. Then my transparent fingers will retie your shoes with unforgotten repertoires of square knots, clove hitches, bowlines, cat’s-paws, fisherman’s bends, Gordian knots. [JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, February 20, 2002; reprinted in newsletter of the Arthritis and Rheumatism Association summer 2002.)	This Heart Strangely, suddenly, beating like surf that splashes now over bulwark and dock, shock troops of hurricanes farther south but on course to crash here. My heart was always docile, ignored as it pumped full, ebbed on schedule, pulse normal, blood salty as sea, relied on, like seasons and tides. And all the recurrent seasons of love which jumpstart body and brain— What’s happening now? I don’t know. Such pounding, invisible crimson surf all day and all night, a generator gone wild inside my chest and head. Take care! This casket of flesh and bones could shower your green world red. Elisavietta Ritchie 17 September 2004 [JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 27 July 2005; reprinted in Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove Series, copyright January 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie]
VISITATIONS, PROCREATIONS A real big mother of a snapper impervious to poison ivy, briars, lumbers up the river bank. Shell slate black, crenellated at the stern, snake neck, scaly limbs, hook claws, horny beak to sever fingers or a foot. A dozen rabbits race about, skitter, bound, zigzag, scatter among tiger lily clumps. Still, I bet on her. She heads straight across the yard, an armored carrier programmed on a course set fifty years ago when she was young, this lawn a forest. She pauses on the grass. Confused? Was there a house across her path before? I offer her my pear core, sprint aside. She studies me: with loathing, mere disdain, slow-stirred memory of a duel beneath primordial cycads, or am I the perfect meal? She’s hellbent not on making war or lunch but to unload her oblong leather eggs in some cache underground. Now where… I edge behind, lift her gingerly – not only dangerous, she stinks -- carry her to an abandoned flower bed. She takes off, a millstone on the march, around the yard’s perimeter at such a pace, distracted by the rabbits, I lose track. She grunts through the herb bed, crushes dill, churns the earth between oregano and rosemary. When I check again, she’s covered up whatever spot she finally chose, slid down the bank and disappeared. How did that repellant hulk entice a mate so tolerant of her appearance, scent? Was he drawn by long affection or, with pure chelonian lust, snatched the first female to swim past for lengthy coupling or quick fix? Love in the muck in the dark or light of the moon on waves, to prolong her dynasty engendered before dinosaurs were born. Like roaches, snappers may outlive us. Unsure of their gestation span, I’ll watch the spot, escort phalanxes of hatchlings to the shore, ward off ospreys, foxes, gulls … But this very night, raccoons search among the herbs, leave shards like broken ping-pong balls. [published in Potomac Review 1999; reprinted in Fresh Water: Poems from Rivers, Lakes, and Streams, editor Jennifer Bosveld, Pudding House Press, 2002.]	Waiting for a Biopsy Report To get a crack at immortality: leave better work. Stop hanging out the wash…Yet life eclipses literature though pinning wet clothes by the inlet, cattail-framed, on a sun-struck day, forms a haiku. On the line, a spider spins her web between the lover’s shirt and a black lace slip: an untold tale. The three-year-old, pumpkin-haired, sprints at billowing sheets: this Don Quixote writes his own book. A puzzled hummingbird probes crimson blossoms on the waving blouse--- Merely blood from punctured skin. Red ink of malignancy? Best tend to the garden where summer’s last tomatoes hang blotched by hornworms, bottom rot, but still good if the bad’s cut out, save what you can. Quickly plant before first frost winter spinach, lettuce, chard… Who will be here to harvest? Hang the world, over-rife with growth and love and fear and death. While waiting for the wash to dry, the phone to ring, write. [Confrontation 2006; also won Poetry Society of Georgia’s Gerald Seig Award, 2003; reprinted in Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove, copyright 2006 Elisavietta Ritchie] ==
SAND HILL For Elizabeth, Toronto Beach "If you get on top of the hill you'll never die," says the child patting sand, damp from a week of rain. "You have to be able to touch the peak." Around it she builds a wall too high for wingless insects to cross, they keep tumbling back in her moat. She crowns the crest with a feather. The sun, hidden by fog curling over the shore, enfolding wavering figures in scrim, still pours onto our heads. Observing death waft in quietly, harming no one yet, I know: in climbing this particular alp I'd only smash the mound to infinite grains of sand, myself to finite splinters of bone. When we leave the beach all that's left are footprints, finger trails, traces of moat, rays of recalcitrant light. [published in Potomac Review 1997; reprinted in The Arc of the Storm, Signal Books, copyright 1998 Elisavietta Ritchie]
APPEARANCES, PATUXENT RIVER You'd say, they are real: the child digging clams in wet sand at low tide, the boat in the cove, two canvasbacks overhead. The man fires from the boat, ducks fall into their shadows. The glint of a winch makes the boat seem substantial but the sun will climb into a cloud, the boat spiral in waves and sink. The child, who dreamed herself somewhere and someone else, also may vanish, perhaps in the tide, or she will go home, where they will dress the ducks, undress her, and whether she eats the ducks or the fish eat her, one or the other disappears. [earlier version in Ascent , Spring 1999]
QUESTIONS, ASSUMPTIONS Who knows if she's sweet or mean, that wrinkled woman in shapeless black stirring soup for the child, if she was a general's widow, or mistress, whether she lost her virginity with tenderness or by force to a dashing lad in a flowering grove or a whole platoon in the mud. Or if the old man nodding over his bowl was the one or one of the ones, if he marched on to raze a village or home to tend his chickens and cows. Was this house in his family for generations or just occupied when its owners fled or died in the yard? The town was destroyed. What lies under fields beyond? The child spoons the soup. "But where did I come from?" "You were a gift of God,” they respond. "Or, the gods. An elf found you under a berry bush." They quiz him on sums and saints, complain the storm is prying the shutters off, then, mulling their own recollections without speaking, finish the soup. Is he foundling, or grandchild, of the clan or alien blood? War weaves shrouds of silence around corpses and quick alike. We back away from the window, refasten the shutter, disappear into the storm. The fragrance of soup and blood clings to our clothes. [Ascent Winter 1999/2000]
HOUSE LIONS (after an etching by Durer) Like St. Jerome, we need to keep pet lions dozing by our beds, their paws upon our coverlet while we’re asleep. Affectionate despite the claws in winter lions make ample comforters (we lack the monk’s thick warming cowl). They lull us with deep regal purrs and guard us with their locomotive growl. Lions were smaller in the time of saints or in the artist’s eye that had not seen real lions in savannahs, stalking, quaintly feasting on fresh antelope, bloody, lean. True, table manners aren’t well-bred. Housebreaking them becomes a chore. But why stare at a long-dead human head? You won’t find your live lion a bore. For when we meditate upon a skull we only learn what’s in our own. We quickly learn what lions mull while they lick our cheeks: fine bones. Elisavietta Ritchie [Blue Unicorn 2004]

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