Lori A. Howe Verse-Virtual October 2023

October 2023

Lori A. Howe
lhowe@uwyo.edu / lhowe.com

Bio Note: Hello, everyone—it's a pleasure to join such excellent company again in the V-V community. Thanks to Jim (whose tomato sandwiches inspired me to write "Calendar of Pleasures"). I think there is something in us that is drawn to Autumn, to its fires and the sense of leaving. I hope you enjoy these poems. My thanks to Jim and all the editors at V-V.

Calendar of Pleasures
for Jim

This month is filled with fat, red tomatoes thronging countertops stovetops tables windowsills, proud and glossy, rounded handfuls, juicy gifts still warm from the sun. Oh, the storytelling: One friend boasts of deep, ruby slices the size of a man’s hand, large enough to lap the edges of the bread; another smiles at how his teenaged son took one bite of the summer's first tomato sandwich–thick and pillowy with good mayonnaise, a little salt, fresh pepper–and ran away with it, down the hall, out into the front yard, giggling with pleasure.

Oh, summer. Here we are, past the middle of August, the last of the heat making us forget our year is already on the wane, how next month we’ll slide into socks and desks and yellow leaves, and soundlessly into October and the first snows, when strewn like pirate's caves across the Midwest, smoke houses fill with well-salted hams and streaky flitches of bacon, root cellars pile deep in garnet beets and golden spuds, their walls lined with shelves of jars and bottles of tomatoes and sauce, gleaming crimson, bright as bumper cars, opening a swift door between us and summer, the cut-grass lilac perfume lingering, a carnival of pleasure, a promise of fullness until the apples fall.

Now, families in sweaters and boots walk out into fields aglow with pumpkins. Now is always the most precious of days, second only to tomorrow, when our counters jewel with pies, wisping fragrant into the cool air, and October keeps its promise—to always end with a bite of something sweet.

Nocturnes (a partly-found poem*)

	for Patrick
						
Einstein dreamt with the soul
of an octopus, his myriad self coveting
the news from Patagonia, salt, mathematics.
As a child, electrochemistry the sibling who stole
all the attention, but the compass, oh, 
those invisible forces, how they took his hand
and pulled. His mind an alchemist’s kitchen, he longed
for an immigrant’s table, a book of pleasures,
a geometric function to slake away noise
like a windshield wiper, a window
into how to love. 

In one of his dreams, humans lived only one
day, half their lives in darkness, half in light; 
in another, human longing could be churned:
oh, what a strange, delirious butter, 
ribboned with sea voyages and mermaids, 
desire crystalized and crunchy as pink salt
from the Himalayas,
smooth and rich and sweet as a first kiss. 

*Many thanks to the following poets and authors whose book titles 
appear in or were inspirations for this poem:

Kurlansky, Mark. Salt 
Lightman, Alan. Einstein’s Dreams
Montgomery, Sy. The Soul of an Octopus
Rich, Susan. The Alchemist’s Kitchen
Sanelli, Mary Lou. The Immigrant’s Table
Tuck, Lilly. The News from Paraguay

The Spandrels of San Marco* and Other Living Fires

	for Patrick

Tonight, in Circleville, Ohio, 
a teenaged boy lifts his rifle,
intent on the dinged metal targets
flowing by on the conveyor, 
flipping like synchronized
swimmers in their caps, to win
a stuffed bear for the girl beside him,
her cheeks flushed with cold. 
In this mosaic, everything adapts. 
There he stands, on the knife edge,
in front of everyone, in the blue hour
of twilight. Now, Bob Groathouse pulls
his flatbed pickup into the gravel lot, grinning 
in his new red flannel shirt, his boots shined to gloss,
and everyone turns, amazed, his prize pumpkin
the size of a carriage, enough pies and soup
to feed a village, radiant in the gloaming. 

Tomorrow, townspeople and farmers
will rake crabapples into fragrant, cidery piles,
drop them by the wheelbarrow-full into truckbeds,
drive them into the forests and leave them
in rosy, sainted heaps for the bears, who come
to stuff themselves with sweet, boozy apples,
rolling and drowsing in rapt pleasure, fattening up
before the long, dark sleep of winter.

But now, on this cool, October night, as a rare fog
wisps like lost children in the corn maze,
its husked corridors dividing darkness from light,
I try to breathe it all in, pull peace and patience
from the air, like water, but instead,
I only isolate helium and neon. No design can hold me.

I was born on fire.

*“The Spandrels of San Marco” is the title of an article by Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, published in 1979. In this paper, Gould and Lewontin cautioned the scientific community against accepting a theory of biological determinism to explain how all organisms and their traits evolve, which they believed to be a potentially dangerous over-simplification of evolution and an artificial constraining of the diversity of life.