Laurie Byro Verse-Virtual 2017 February

February 2017

In 1985, while pursuing a business degree, I unhappily landed in a creative writing class and announced to the group that I thought Walt Whitman was a chain of schools throughout the United States. To my astonishment, I had found my pacing, abandoned prose, and started a poetry circle that has been meeting for 16 years. I have published three poetry collections, most recently: “Wonder” Little Lantern Press (out of Wales). https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Laurie+Byro I am the Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library and despite it all, love New Jersey, and have lived here almost 60 years.

Author's Note: Years ago, I began writing “historical poetry” in which I took an interesting artist/writer, character and either as a dramatic monologue or sometimes in form (pantoum, or villanelle) tried to go inward to how a person would feel or think during those times.

I was fortunate to get Gertrude Stein published in book form and described poetically various members of her Salon: Picasso, Cezanne, Ezra Pound, Hemingway etc. Some of them fell off her furniture and broke it, and some of the art she didn’t value and she put those in the bathroom. What times they had! Through it all, her “wife” Alice B. Toklas kept them all fed, and fussed over. She even supplied a recipe for hashish fudge. My husband found that at sixty he had a new hobby of painting. He had never painted but soon was asked to do gallery shows and compete. For fun, Michael painted the famous Gertrude Stein painting that Pablo Picasso said “she doesn’t look like this now, but she will” and this became my cover. He did this in pointillism and my next project was Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf and he was eager to try his hand at those women. The Bloomsberries will be out in May thanks to Karen Kelsay Books. I then landed in Taos. We loved New Mexico and DH Lawrence is a fascinating subject. Lawrence often described himself in his stories as a “fox” as he had a red beard. Mike then painted the Georgia O’Keeffe Lawrence Tree as it possessed the spirit of DH. Again, Mike did it in pointillism with a fox at its base. In 2016, we spent the summer in Greece and Venice. The last day of our trip, on an impulse, we went to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Mistake? I was besotted with her, she was a true heroine who saved paintings and people from the goose steppers who were bent on destruction. Fearlessly, she sent home hundreds of paintings marked as “household goods” the Louvre didn’t want them and got herself and about 10 people safely home and out of harm’s way. As a Jewish woman, this was brave. Her father was equally brave. He went down in the Titanic “like a gentleman in his best tuxedo, smoking a cigar” because he wanted the women and children to be saved. They would not give his Egyptian servant space on a lifeboat. Guggenheim refused to allow himself to be saved while his faithful servant died. This painting would have been the cover of my DH Lawrence MS, and Firestone was kind enough to include 4 of the poems from that MS and Michael Byro’s version of the Lawrence Tree.

We have promised one another this is the last manuscript and painting. We are taking trips to very boring places and only take notes and photos when we are in Newark NJ or Scranton PA.

The Ghost Visits Frieda Lawrence
“She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.”
-D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

Ghost, I have read your letters and worn them
like a chemise, hidden like a star beneath my dress.
They are fragile as weary daffodils, soft as a roebuck’s ears.
I know you are unable to touch me, except
with my own hands, yet you continue to woo me.

Please release me to my Soldier, we had a good life.
I am an ancient. I no longer smell like daffodils.
What use could an old woman be to any spirit
at the edge of that mysterious canyon?
I sacrificed my mother's heart for you, ours beat

in two bodies. We had nothing to gain; we were not
vulgar. You were my gamekeeper, my fox leash,
my genius-forest. Grubby English – they may
as well ground your bones, filthy foes. But now winter
moths cover me in dust. Mornings, we bake you

and eat you like holy bread. I can no longer be seduced
by echoing quills, a foxy Nottingham grin. You used
the usual tricks, hungry hands fingering me, embroidering
your name into my skin, lacing flowers through the pelt
of my animal fur, the forest littered with us, leaves

scattering in the wind like ghostly hearts. I want to take down
my silver hair, imagine it as ribbons of coal, my eyes flashing
wildfire – oh those pyres we lit on the fields in which we lay.
Perhaps, spirit, you wish to witness me in moonlight
and I shall smell of daffodils and wet earth one last time.

Exhuming D.H. Lawrence

I was not always a ghost in your garden, a fox
or jack rabbit dancing beneath a Worm Moon.

We were not enemies, you or I, we held hands
once, then you breathed me into a cloud of fireflies,

I followed you while you cupped me in your hands,
tore my wings off, raised me like Lazarus to be

what you wanted. Was I the quivering muzzle of fox
or a shotgun; your hands shook from touching me.

Often, you offered the rabbit a safe rest yet shunned
me. You and those madmen picked through my ribs,

trying to find a heart. The fangy moon never knew
whether to grin or clamp us in her soft grip of teeth.

Under the orders of Frau Gluhwurmchen, was I the gutteral
sounds the old moggie made, or the randy throated sparrow?

Was I the contralto murmurings of the river while thirsty
peasants lay on their bellies to drink? I want nothing

more than to run through a forest again, twining flowers
in the fur of demon-fox, of vixen. Meanwhile, they’ve trapped

me in this jar among sooty fireflies. Abandoned, I am unable
to rise one last time. I’ve been swallowed and regurgitated

into the bottom of a pint glass, smuggled like tea leaves
in a cloth rucksack. Useless as cinders there is no fire left

in me. I am nothing but a hank of scorched fur
and broken ears, a forgotten forest to run through, to hide in.

The Rain Child
"Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born."
- D.H. Lawrence
It wasn’t even your poem, the air was slick
with mating. When the rain started, like spit,
you began preparing like Noah, two by two,

to become the half of a pair. I gobbled down
your stories. Begin here: Lover, Noah flood
rushing down between her legs. I, the Magpie,

stealing confessions, this time off a creaky ship.
I hunt down a blossom to prove you’ve landed.
Your life trickled to her feet, me seeking

the shiniest piece of foil, a wrapper not something
swaddling. The shiny beads of rain begin, I wear
it around my neck like a rosary. Forgive me fathers

for I have sinned. I have stolen the best part of you,
I have taken the breath straight out of your lips
and shunned the baby in the barn. I have described

the mewling, breached echoes, the fragments of dream
and clotted cream, the absent plate at the table.
Now, you’ll want to spin my mouth shut with

your finest embroidery thread. You disappear into
your life, I walk through le “jardin du sommeil”
the empty bassinets, the cribs and iron playpens creep

silently past. Whitman is rocking a cradle with his pen, but
you and I, endless, Love. Clouds fill with their determined
douche of rain, wring themselves down upon all us sinners.

The Lawrence Tree (in pointillism)
by Michael Byro - after Georgia O'Keeffe

Elegy for the Lawrence Tree

The tree of the Flying Heart is a siren’s song, still and unconcerned,
an old friend who guards my poems. I go to it, make my way like

a pilgrimage. I am half-awake while it strains back to Mellors'
forest, the air good for breathing at last. I sit beneath its branches,

writing long letters, hardly daring to cough, heady with the smell
of lichen and loss. I am adrift in a sea of gamekeeper's moss.

Its boughs are filled with whispers, the moon a cracked mirror.
It shines down, a broken plate of promises. As long as this tree

lives, I live. And after I die, and the next one after me,
its pinecones will still burst into songs of praise.

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