September 2020

I.

All around us now are reminders that fall is fast approaching: The cooler evenings, the shorter days, the turning leaves. With so much in our human world uncertain and strained, there is particular comfort this year in the predictability of the seasons — and in nature’s utter disregard for our concerns — as this month’s featured poet, Lynne Viti, shows us so exquisitely.

Blood Moon

 By Lynne Viti

We tried to see it from the soccer field

at the school people want

torn down, no way to rehabilitate it,

poor drainage, asbestos lurking in the walls,

wrapped around pipes, Eisenhower era

construction, additions stuck on when

school aged children cropped up everywhere.

It’s dark, it’s cold for September, the moon

a bright white orb. We wait and watch.

a sliver of shadow appears at the moon’s side,

slowly creeps, almost imperceptibly, across the white.

It’s not happening fast enough for us.

We want to see the pink moon, the blood moon.

Huddled in this playground we wonder

why no one else is here. Are they watching

the blood moon on their televisions,

getting a clearer, sharper, super pink image?

I pull my sweater snug around me.

The night feels like winter’s breathing

down our backs. The shadow drags across the moon.

An hour later the moon is pink—

Salmon pink,  smaller than the white moon we saw

at first tonight. Out on the grass this night

six of us, in a tight knot, breathe in the cold air.

There won’t be another blood moon for years.

Will we be alive then, and if so, care enough

to step outside to the porch wherever we live,

tilt our heads back, marvel at the sky?

II.

 Long-time readers of this column and friends of Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio will be familiar with the annual plein air poetry walk, traditionally held at the farm one Sunday in September. Like most such events, this, too, has been impacted by the pandemic. Happily, although we will not hold a ‘live’ poetry walk this year, on Sunday, September 20th, at 3 pm, we will host a Zoom reading with the twenty-six poets who have written poems en plein air inspired by the farm on the theme of “Refuge”. Details for how to join the Zoom reading will be forthcoming on the Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio website. Instead of a print chapbook of the poems, we are publishing an online journal which will include Brent Mathison’s photos of the sites that inspired the poets. These photos also will be pinned at the Zoom event. As a preview and an enticement, here’s our featured poet, Lynne Viti’s, contribution:

Ode to a Tool Shed, at Midsummer  

By Lynne Viti

From a distance the structure promises shade, a respite,

its pull-up garage door open wide, welcoming me in.

Spades and shovels line up, and a few rakes and pitchforks.

Shelved trowels, oilcans, white plastic bottles and aerosol cans,

a coil of black plastic hose lying like a sleeping snake.

On the wooden shelves, coated with years of dust and dirt,

 metal baskets overflow with wrenches and files. 

On the floor—seventy-year-old concrete or beaten down earth? —

five-gallon jerrycans of gasoline, cloth tool bag with its mouth agape.

It would take twenty workers to deploy all these tools

to clear the land, prep the soils, rake in seed,

and it’s all been done—the evidence right outside this place,

 lettuce, broccoli astride irrigation hoses, waiting for July.

But here, this tool-chaos cries out for someone to impose order,

arrange spades in descending order of height or by estimated age,

line up the neem oil, rot-stop, spinosad in alphabetical order,

assign a hook or niche for these hundred tools and potions.

But those who wield these things know just where to find them,

 have a scheme known only to custodians of rakes and pitchforks.

Backing out slowly, careful to avoid a wayward rake’s tines,

I breathe in the scent of machine oil and earth.

Lynne Viti is the author of the forthcoming Dancing at Lake Montebello (Apprentice House Press 2020), two poetry chapbooks, Baltimore Girls (2017) and The Glamorganshire Bible (2018), and a short fiction collection, Going Too Fast (2020).  A faculty emerita at Wellesley College, she blogs at https://lynneviti.wordpress.com.