(NOTE: To accompany this interview, I've chosen poems I wrote in collaboration with other artists or on commission. They are not arranged in any particular order. MH)
Sunapee Mandala
Cast Concrete, Clay and Granite
Emile Birch, sculptor
Sunapee NH State Park, 1986
LEAVE YOUR SHADOW HERE
ON THE LONG MEMORY OF ROCK
THAT YOU MAY NUMBER AMONG
THE FRIENDS OF THIS PLANET
WE ARE ONE
IN SUMMER WOODS
OVERFLOWING WITH WINGS,
IN THE FIRES KINDLED
BY ORANGE LILY STRUCK
AGAINST FERN FLINT,
ONE WITH THE MUSIC OF WIND
PLAYED ON ICY BIRCH BONES,
AND THE PROMISE POLLEN SPELLS
ACROSS THE WATERY MIRRORS
OF OUR FUTURE.
Night Swim in Scruton Pond
Barrington Children's Playground
Diane St, Jean, illustrator
Acrylic on plywood
Mars floats upside down in the midnight pond
as though the lacquered sky
tipped by our angle of vision
let slide that one planet
while the stars still depend
on the stems of their constellations.
Manny Skating
“The Shoes of Rochester”
Art Esprit project: City of Rochester
Larry Reynolds, illustrator
He's at the far end of the frozen pond, looping and dipping, arms
locked behind his back, bending and shifting on long, supple legs.
To watch him skate is like following a swallow's flight.
To watch him roller skate! waltzing around the indoor rink
through a smog of pink lights, a pretty girl on his arm,
weaving her through the fabric of slower couples
like a tailor’s needle.
STONES: A History
Art Esprit Project, City of Rochester
“If These Rocks Could Talk”
Diane & Ron St Jean, artists
Glacier
(retreating)
Notches
(clawed)
Low coastal hills
(beating sea, glacial till)
A tombolo of sand and rocks
(tumbled)
New land (Dreamland)
(rising)
Above high water
hot summer stones for Piscataqua to dry fish
striated stones under the boots of tall ship sailors
flattened stones for Sunday skipping
Among stones
the purple mussel wampum shell
sea glass
(rum & medicine & Coke bottles, old car blinkers)
twists of polypropylene
plastics like beached jellyfish
New Year, New Hampshire
On the occasion of the inauguration of Craig Benson
as the 79th governor of New Hampshire
January 2003
“Few have ever had anything more of a choice
in government than in climate?”
John Adams; Thoughts on Government
The Hunger Moon draws icy tides upriver
heaving gray-green slabs of seawater
onto the salt marshes. Inland, a house
rides snow swells into evening
while inside the householder, satisfied
in the knowledge of a well-provisioned root cellar,
a woodshed stacked with even cords,
pulls the shutters to, turns from the darkening window.
And still, quarrelsome winds bay down the chimney.
The urge to retreat to hearth
and leatherbound studies of certainty
is as strong as the pull of the moon;
but there are times
when what we may need most
are the rude and raucous disputations
that sputter and spark
like bonfires on frozen ponds,
attracting a quorum of neighbors.
Note Written in Revlon's "Fire and Ice " Lipstick
Zinman Urinals, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2003
I think I secretly wanted to be the girl
you dreamed about as you stood
staring at the phone number
smeared on the tiled wall
by the stalls in a basement jazz club
in Greenwich Village back
when Monk or Mingus or Miles
could have been standing beside you
between sets dreaming
of a number...
and here's my chance.
(Ekphrastic Poem)
Dear Mrs Dewing
Iris at Dawn, 1899
Maria Oakey Dewing
The first thing I have to say is that I am a writer. And I have already decided that I'm going to be a writer for the rest of my life. I told this to my Great-Aunt Helen who visits our family for a week every summer. (My father says she only has one lung which is why she talks and walks quite slowly.) She gave me this box of blue notepaper (my last name is the initial in the middle) as a birthday present. Also a new ink pen that uses cartridges. I have selected a blue-black color which I like very much. Great-Aunt Helen asked me to write to her on a monthly basis with news of my daily life and she would write back with her news. She said this would be an epistolary relationship. Also she has asked me to choose a person whom I admire to write to as well. She gave me some suggestions and I have chosen you. It's okay that you're dead because as I said I'm a writer so I can easily imagine writing to someone in another “place.” You probably don't know this about me but I am a flower lover like you. Daffodils are my favorites but really all flowers make me happy and so when artists paint them the way they actually grow in nature like those irises (did you really get up at dawn to paint them?!) I feel somewhat the way I do when I find the exact word to say what I want to say which must be how you feel when you get just the right shade of purple or the best green. Does that make sense? Also, Great-Aunt Helen said that artists like you are very, very interested in Beauty with a capital “B.” Me too. One more thing we have been writing to each other about and that's how lots of really good women artists don't get the same kind of importance as men artists. G-A Helen told me that you stopped painting portraits because your husband was a pretty famous portrait painter and that sometimes he asked you to put your flowers in the background of his portraits which I would say isn't really fair. I will ask you more about this in my next letter.
Well, goodbye for now.
Your admirer,
Marie Harris, Writer
(age 10 ¾ )
(from Voices and Visions Project: Working the Piscataqua; Charter Weeks, photographer)
Fish Crow
Corvus ossifragus
croaking bone-breaker
grind of purple clam shell and
chew of rusted rocker panel and
spit of mussel hinge and
caw caw whistle of rising drawbridge
rattle of pebbles behind retreating wave
caw whistle caw of descending bridge
and hoot hoot horn foghorn fog
folding dark wings over encroaching night
clatter of anchor chain
mutter of moon light on shiny black
(Epithalamium lyrics: MH; Music: Basil Harris)
Aubade: Wedding Morning
for Kirsten & Dave
Mountain and morning drenched in the mist,
Shadows the dawn will softly kiss,
Still the hour, fresh is the day
Into whose light you're walking.
Refrain:
Necklace of coal, of diamonds.
Pack your histories, balance them well,
They are the stories you will tell.
Keep this hour, carry this dawn
Into the lives you're joining.
Necklace of coal, of diamonds.
Greet the morning bursting with light,
Promise each other dreams of flight.
Full the hour, ageless the hope
Into the world you're borning.
Necklace of coal, of diamonds.
(Poem commissioned by the UNH Office of Sustainability & the UNH Center for the Humanities for The Soul of Agriculture conference 2002)
Prayer to Saint Isadore
Retablo illustration: Theresa Montoya
A patron saint is just like us: ordinary, approachable.
A patron saint is not like us: mysterious, distant.
Thus Saint Isadore, Laborer:
a suitable patron for those who toil
at composting and tilling and mulching,
at watering and dusting, at picking, gleaning and sorting,
at putting up and putting by.
Like us, he turned the soil.
Like us, he cared for animals.
He worried that the rains would not come,
or that locusts would...or hail, fire, earthquake.
Unlike us, as he knelt to pray in his fields,
angels drove his oxen down row after straight row.
Unlike us, in times of drought
he struck the ground with his goad
and caused springs of fresh water to gush forth.
Saint Isadore, Laborer,
shelter us from … and bless us with …
intercede for whom you can.
This is (after all) all we ask (and, oh!
sun and rain in proper measure).
(State laureates were commissioned by North Dakota Poet Laureate, Larry Woiwode to write a poem commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, 2005)
Western Grebe
Aechmophorous occidentalis
Sun-setting spear-bearer
On any one of his long-strided walks
near the Mandan settlement that first fall,
Meriwether Lewis encountered all manner of shorebirds
and ducks plying the sloughs.
Naturalist, explorer, he shot one of each.
Taxidermist, he sent specimens back East.
Diarist, he described each one shot to the last pinfeather.
I write in my journal
(a letter to you from the West)
...the wind that flattens the tall grass prairie
and keeps blackbirds and meadowlarks low,
deafens foraging waterfowl
to my slow advance.
I am seeing for the first time
for the first time! imagine!
long-legged, blue-legged avocets
giddily spinning phalaropes
the thin-necked grebe with its sharp bill and red eye
So would you, reader,
be my correspondent,
my accomplice?
My Jefferson.
Marie Harris was New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 1999-2004. She is the author of five books of poetry, several chapbooks, and three children's picture books. She was awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council. She served as Visiting Writer and had numerous residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. She has worked as editor, anthologist, travel writer and copywriter. She moved to the mountains of North Carolina in October.