"This"
Morning
New snow on the street, on the bushes,
tracks of small animals in the snow.
Dawn gray,
almost snow color.
No bird yet at the window feeder.
Words make tracks
on the white page.
This day is already a poem.*
Pat Schneider
The book-lined room has a sofa, straight chairs scattered here and there, and the rocker where I wait, my writing pad on my lap, my pen resting on top. I can see Pat in the kitchen talking with several writers who have left their purses and writing pads on their chosen places to sit. Both rooms are warmer than the front entrance, where heavy jackets and coats hang on hooks, or lay over the stair bannister. That space and the front room with the piano are probably colder because there the window shades are up, revealing cold glass and the views of McClellan Street and the side yard behind the driveway. I have been coming on Thursday nights long enough to be a regular, with other writers who are also regulars. A place rarely opens up on Thursdays. It is family, yet different from the traditional family where members are expected to talk about one another. Here, there are rules. A key one is everything that is read aloud after our writing time is treated as written by an author, not the "friend" we had been chatting with moments ago. This is how Pat keeps us safe,—by keeping the space we write in safe. The warmth of the room is the warmth of protection so that we may open ourselves in a way that goes beyond the opening of our coats when we arrive. We open to what has been either joy or sorrow, pleasure or pain in the privacy of a world of oneself. It is only in the sharing that each one becomes part of a bigger one—the group itself—a singular unit where each lives a life in which writing must be a presence . . . where its absence simply cannot be allowed.
"This Day"
with a quote from "This" by Pat Schneider
The rocker came from my grandmother
with its wide flat arms and sagging bottom.
I rock, inspecting the leaves of the copper beech
that bear this recent weight of snow.
The sky, clotted with winter, removes from memory
the summer squirrels, sprinklers' twirls, my sun-heated
arms, and legs. I pull the afghan higher.
My mother's voice in the kitchen is calling,
"Duke . . ." I listen. Wondering.
Mrs. C. assigned writing a poem over the weekend.
This day is already a poem.
PJC 2022
My realization is, "When separated from others, for many different reasons, we may suddenly feel the warmth of their friendship—in the smallest of ways."
* Pat Schneider, The Weight of Love, (Mobile, AL: Negative Capability Press, 2020), 30. Pat Schneider was my beloved mentor, and friend, across nearly forty years. "Pat Schneider was born in rural Missouri in 1934 and is the author of nine books of poetry. She earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, and founded Amherst Writers & Artists, a non-profit corporation which sponsors outreach writing workshops and retreats for “'traditionally silenced populations,”' including low-income women and children. Schneider’s poetry often explored racial and class-related issues in realistic scenarios. Don Junkins, while reviewing her book, Another River: New and Selected Poems, wrote: '“Pat Schneider’s poems cut through to the real world … She not only knows how to write, seemingly without effort, articulate and precise lies, she’s lean in language and abundant in content. Hers is a genuine voice expressed in informed craft, which to be really effective includes the management of tone, which itself depends entirely on the management of restraint' . . . [Pat Schneider] lived in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband until her death in [2020] 2021."' https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/pat-schneider