by Nils Peterson
A Memorable Fancy I
On the last day of the year, I think about the very first day.
One early morning a Minnesota friend turned his iPhone towards his Minnesota window and we saw snow and a grove of slim, bare trees. He’d been singing, so music was in the air and looking at the beautiful scene I remembered the song, “Morning has broken like the first morning” and I found myself wondering if this is what the first morning looked like.
We think of Eden as summer, everything in bloom, everything perfect and perpetual. A naked Adam and Eve parading around comfortably in their skin suits with navel or without depending on the artist, but suppose the first morning was like this one in Minnesota though the trees, unlike the ones outside my friend’s window, would not have lost their leaves – they would not yet have gotten them. Our hibernating friends, bears and moles say, would be created asleep in their caves or little hollows beneath the new trees. They’d soon awaken for the first time – and the seeds and tubers would begin to stir to their unfolding, to the finding out their size, their shapes, their colors – what they’ll be when they grow up – fruit, flower, vegetable – the creation a child of time, not a creature of eternity.
Adam and Eve came wholly finished later. They entered time without growing into it. Maybe that was their trouble, our trouble, that separation. Also, God told them it’s better not knowing, indeed, ordered them not to know. Perhaps He/She was thinking ahead to Thomas Gray’s line, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.” but we chose knowing, we chose folly, marvelous folly, and have learned much, but we have not yet chosen wisdom.
A Memorable Fancy II
A friend reads a poem that ends “but the word had courage.” I thought about that and thought about words and thought that a word is hurt when it is used hatefully.
Sometimes, maybe not enough, I listen to my thoughts and wonder what they mean. I think now that words are spirit, children of the human spirit, the first ones were born with the naming of things.
Words have a lifetime and many are gone forever along with the language that mothered them.
Words get old, twenty-three skidoo to you. Some go on forever, I, am.
I think of freedom. I used to love that word. Still do. But every time I hear it used to conceal some slavery, I feel for it, feel I must apologize to it, explain that it is not at fault, we are.
Then mind flew to this old poem of mine which is only obliquely connected, but it came unbidden and I must let it say hello.
Dirty
The dirty joke sighs.
It knew midway
it was in the wrong place.
“I’m just a string of words.”
the joke says defensively,
“It’s not my fault
he’s got a tin ear.”
But the dirty joke knows
it can’t be unsaid,
so it hangs in the air
defiantly
like soot
A Memorable Fancy III
How We Followed Rhythm and Rhyme into Being Overweight
I think I can pinpoint the moment the United States started its wobble towards being overweight. The year, 1947. We were recovering from the austerities of World War II. There hadn’t been enough food around to get fat then. You would have had to get a couple extra ration books from the black market. My family had moved up to Mt. Vernon, NY where I played baseball with the neighborhood gang on a small, lumpy field that had been a Victory Garden. At first, over the fence was a home run, then, a double, and when most of us could clear the fence, an out. Over the fence was a pain, the left fielder scrambling over the railing to chase the ball before it started rolling down the hill. If you didn’t get it quick, it could go a quarter of a mile.
After the game, we would go down the street to the corner store, pull a soda out of the red ice chest with a white Coca-Cola emblem emblazoned on it. There would be colas, orange pop, root beer, grape, maybe even a sarsaparilla submerged in the ice. We’d give the grumbly old storekeeper a nickel, flip off the cap with the opener attached to the side of the chest and go sit on the stoop to argue about the Yankees. Satisfying. But here is where verse comes in to widen our waistlines. We all listened to the radio, and we all heard this:
Pepsi Cola hits the spot.
Twelve full ounces that’s a lot.
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.
The fact is, though there was Pepsi, those of us who were connoisseurs of cola, preferred Coke. It was less sweet and had a more interesting taste. But a serious challenge here, twice as much for the same nickael. We were hot and thirsty and that shapely bottle emptied fast. And, we had grown up in a time of depression and war when a nickel was something not easily come by. It seemed almost a sin not to get all we could for our money. The part of me that later grew up to like good wine bought Coke. The part that walked into Woolworth’s and wanted everything, bought Pepsi.
Doing the numbers, the Coke of that day was 6 ounces large Pepsi doubled the size and doubled, at least, the calories while more than doubling their sales. Sixty years later at the new corner store, one can purchase drinks of 54 ounces, nine times the old Coke size.
One of the definitions of poetry is “memorable speech.” Well, I’ll never get that jingle out of my head. It sits there side by side with “To be or not to be,” “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
As a footnote, I must confess I have my parent’s old set of glassware, and its martini glass holds about a quarter of the amount of the one I usually use, but clearly that’s another story.
A Memorable Fancy IV
Thinking of the Thinking of the Models of Matisse
What to make of all these naked ladies some
in blue, some lined out – legs crossed, one arm
behind the head to shift the weight of one breast up-
ward, while the other hangs out with gravity.
Their faces are abstracted, introspective –
“Well, this is what the old guy wants,”
they seem to say. “Well, I’ll give it to him.
He’s paying – If he wants shape, I’ll give
him shape, the old cut-up, but nothing
else of me.”
The Master nods his head,
points his beard harrumphs “Don’t move,”
and though the rump on which most of
their weight rests aches, they’re still till the scissors
are done, or his blue brush, or his sure, inky line.
There was a moment when Matisse’s models went on strike and put their clothes back on. Matisse said, “Ladies, what are you doing? Please take off your clothes off so I can get back to work,” but they refused. “This is ridiculous,” he said, “I pay by the hour, but I only pay when you’re naked.” Still they refused. “How can we work this out?”
Odette spoke for them all, “We will all take off our clothes and let you draw us after you take off your clothes and let us draw you.” Matisse, brooding, said, “All right, but I’ve got to put my hat on.” They agreed – he took off his clothes – put on his hat – and sat on a stool. The women scurried around, found things to draw with and paper to draw on. When they finished, Matisse got dressed and the models got undressed.
Odette insisted that she had drawn the best hat.