Jeanne Lohmann: "Questions Before Dark"

                                     Day ends, and before sleep
                                     when the sky dies down, consider
                                     your altered state: has this day
                                     changed you? Are the corners
                                     sharper or rounded off? Did you
                                     live with death? Make decisions
                                     that quieted? Find one clear word
                                     that fit? At the sun's midpoint
                                     did you notice a pitch of absence,
                                     bewilderment that invites
                                     the possible? What did you learn
                                     from things you dropped and picked up
                                     and dropped again? Did you set a straw
                                     parallel to the river, let the flow
                                     carry you downstream?

"Questions Before Dark" by Jeanne Lohmann. Text as published in The Light of Invisible Bodies (Daniel and Daniel Publishers, 2015).

Art credit: "Floating Downstream...," pinhole photograph by Scott Speck. From the caption: "This is a 90 second 4x5 pinhole camera exposure, looking down a flowing stream in the Spruce Knob Recreation Area, in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia [USA].... The pinhole camera was placed about an inch above a rock amid the flowing water. It was a breezy day, so the trees overhead, in addition to being stretched near the frame edges, were moving. Lichens can be seen on the rocks on the cliff wall to the right."

Jeanne Lohmann: "Praise What Comes"

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved
of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

"Praise What Comes" by Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies: Poems (Daniel & Daniel Publishing, 2003). Text as presented on Dancing Down the Moon (4/11/2007).

Art credit: Untitled photograph by Nancy Borowick of her father, Howie, who had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Jeanne Lohmann: "Shaking the Tree"

                         Vine and branch we’re connected in this world

                         of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
                         contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple

                         belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
                         that claims it, then ground. Connections
                         balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,

                         hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
                         support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
                         Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends.

"Shaking the Tree" by Jeanne Lohmann, from Shaking the Tree: New and Selected Poems. © Fithian Press, 2010.  

Art credit: "Apple Picking in Julian, CA," photograph likely by Marlena Maidhof (originally color).

Jeanne Lohmann: "Invocation"

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,

to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing

solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles

we hold in our mouth help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world

be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,

the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers

be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.



"Invocation" by Jeanne Lohmann, as published online by Gratefulness. Earlier published in print in Shaking the Tree. © Fithian Press, 2010.

Art credit: "Flurry of Flying Feathers," photograph by Sean Tomlinson, uploaded February 12, 2012 (originally black and white).

Jeanne Lohmann: "To Say Nothing But Thank You"

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,

breathe the syllables in and out with every step I

take through the rooms of my house and outside into

a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden

where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring

and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy

after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,

when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly

hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,

and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I

remember who I am, a woman learning to praise

something as small as dandelion petals floating on the

steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,

my happy, savoring tongue.

"To Say Nothing But Thank You" by Jeanne Lohmann. Published by The Sun, Issue 401, May 2009. © Jeanne Lohmann.

Photography credit: "Dandelions," by John M. Phillips (originally black and white).

 

Jeanne Lohmann: "What the Day Gives"

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder
in the middle of gray November
what I hoped to do comes back,
asking.

Across the street the fiery trees
hold onto their leaves,
red and gold in the final months
of this unfinished year,
they offer blazing riddles.

In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

"What the Day Gives," by Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies: Poems. © Daniel and Daniel Publishing, 2003.

Photography credit: "Dance of the Migration," by Jan Piller (originally black and white).


 

Jeanne Lohmann: "Rivertalk"

is whatever comes along,
practice always here while we

keep on shore, all the time
saying we want to get wet.

But the river has ways
of sound and light, ripples

and waves that tell us:
don't be so serious, rumble in

where nothing is finished or broken
and nothing asks to be fixed.

"Rivertalk" by Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies: Poems. © Daniel & Daniel Publishing, 2003.  

Photography credit: "Ripples on the River," by unknown photographer.