Years ago, when my mother passed away, I restored a dilapidated outbuilding and painted a sign for it that read: The Mary Jane Merritt School For Girls. I think my mother, Mary Jane Merritt Hanna, might have wondered at this, but since I’m the oldest of her beloved Honey Girls, she would have approved.

She might feel the same way about this book: flattered, curious, ambivalent.

Poetry was all over the place in that drafty old house on Main Street with its floral wallpaper, iced-over January windows, steam of Sunday afternoon pot roast. It was in our village too with the creek running through it and the train’s dark whistle out on those empty edges. I grew up with poetry but only knew it in a well-worn book of fairy tales.

Words have always been my way of knowing—writing—my way of giving voice. These poems cover many years, many loves, many stumbled-upon moments of grace. They are all together in this book. For better or for worse, they are here.

Angel in Pointy Shoes

To all my dear Readers,

I am taking a break from writing for a bit after a long month of enduring a virus that just won’t quit and has me by the throat.

In these tumultuous times, there is so much to say, so little to say. I return again and again to the present moment and to ordinary things: toast, shoes, books, the sky, apples, paper, wing chairs, water, snow, the wind, friends.

Thank you for your kindness, your patience, your faith.

Be well. I am with you always in spirit.

Kitchen Table Magic

The very best gifts come unbidden and take your breath away: a glorious sunset; a tiny shoot coming out of a very dead pot; the face of a long forgotten friend in a crowded shopping mall; flowers left on the doorstep. Thaumaturgy at work.

A week ago, I wouldn’t have known a word like that, let alone been able to use it. But a friend of mine turned into a thaumaturgist, or maker of magic and miracles, when he gave me my very own two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary complete with magnifying glass!

For years, I have coveted this weighty tome, longed to look up the whole story of a word without going to the library, but I hardly expected the OED to come to me one ordinary afternoon in December. Thaumaturgy is like that though: sudden and startling and out of the blue.

As with most love stories, I remember the time and place when it all began: the enchantment of words. For me, reading began early, and throughout childhood was a means not only of escape but of encounter with worlds I knew were there beyond and beneath the surface of things. My favorite was Volume I of The Young Junior Classics, a thick book with a red cover (that fell off with so much wear and tear) titled: “Fairy Tales & Fables.”

But the real awakening took place in a nondescript classroom at Sacramento State College in the middle of a blistering July afternoon. Taking a summer course in the Romantic Poets, the first literature class I had ever taken after high school, I was quite lost, young, looking for something but didn’t know what. There was no air- conditioning in the classroom, and as I looked out the open windows to the flat, scorched landscape, the gorgeous, bubbling words of John Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” soaked into me like three days of rain. I knew that finding my way had something to do with words.

And now so many years later, the OED rests on the kitchen table, beckoning me to look up every word I’m not sure of or unfamiliar with, to take off my glasses and peer through the magnifying glass to read the tiny type that explains a word and its parentage and what it has become through the ages, all of this backed up by diverse quotes showing the word at work.

It’s all magic to me: the giving of the gift, the OED itself, the effort and happiness of using words to express what would otherwise lie silent, buried, unborn. Thaumaturgy, indeed.

Forgotten Combination

It was just a matter of breaking the code, I thought, all those years so long ago when I was in high school. If I could only get the combination right, the door would swing open to a world of perfect, poufy hair; a cheerleader’s uniform; straight A’s; lots of friends; and most importantly, lots of dates. Boys everywhere: handsome ones, smart ones, funny ones, athletic ones, even older ones all vying for my attention.

Perhaps if I got it right, there might even be a big class ring swaddling my left finger in grimy adhesive tape; a ride to school in, let’s say, an old maroon Mercury; maybe a way-too-big wool jacket with the orange letters, “HF” on the back; dances in the sweaty gym after the games; and certainly, an ensured date for the prom, for the ball.

I would say that by Senior Year, I had figured out two or three numbers of the code, not nearly enough to open the doors of my dreams. I had wonderful girlfriends and a few boys were at least saying hello to me in the halls, but no ring, no maroon Merc, no uniform or poufy hair, and a very long wait for an invitation to the Senior Ball.

But I was getting the hang of it, and given a couple more years, I just might have mastered the code. When we (all 85 of us) graduated that June evening, left the town we knew so well, slammed the door on those growing-up years, and scattered ourselves to the winds, we left each other and the farmy lands for good. I knew this, knew profoundly that something more important than dates was lost to me and was greatly saddened by it.

That’s when the dark allure of homesickness and the melancholy beauty of abandoned farms became poetry for me. As did the land of upstate New York with its hot-baked summers and ice-slicked winters; its vistas of corn and sky; its dark, fathomless lakes; its earth fertile, fragrant, full of secrets and promise.

And I write about this again and again to remember, to hold these things in place.

I went to my high school reunion a few weeks ago and saw many (but certainly not all) of my classmates. I realized in that weekend that age is the great equalizer…that there never was a code to break…just something I made up to cover my shyness and fear. After so many years, meeting again in the bar of the bowling alley, we looked right at each other, right into each other, understanding that no matter what our station in high school, we’re all in this together now.

Combination or no combination, we always were.

Turning Away from the Sun

It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes the clouds part and the sky opens and you have a chance to expresss what is in you to express. Thanks to my friend Michelle Law, a talented artist and fellow girl of the farmy lands, I recently got to do just that in the Chequaquet Gallery at the Centerville Historical Museum here on Cape Cod.

“Go ahead,” Michelle said to me last January. “Do whatever you’d like.”

All I knew was that I loved layers of netty flounce; crows; rust; tears & tatters; words; moody images; handmade books; stained, coarse linen; and stories. But it wasn’t until later in the winter when I was having coffee with my friend David Ellis, another very talented and inspirational artist, that Miss Havisham came to mind. We were talking about the things nobody wants anymore, the neglected and the unseen, the weary and the worn, and the joy of seeing these things from a fresh perspective and perhaps putting them to use again.

And somehow Miss Havisham, star of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, came to mind and so did the recognition of poetry in the cast-offs and the left-overs. “Miz Havisham Revisited: The Poetics of Romantic Decay” took root that morning over strong coffee with a like-minded friend.

I learned a lot from doing this installation. I learned that if an idea silences your mind, thrums your heart, and wobbles your knees, you are definitely going to be okay if you give voice to it. It takes trust to believe that if you just notice and heed the clues, you will be shown how.

I found rusty tableware and hinges, oak frames with no glass, tin ceiling panels, battered shutters, tattered bed lamps in a haunted seaside mansion, starched underskirts, and a boudoir chair with a broken leg. I learned how to make stuffed crows on sticks and how to burn organdy into dark, brooding roses.

I learned how to stain linen and paper too and wrote and illustrated a story about sister crows on paper that smelled like instant coffee, then stretched the little accordion book for three feet on an old mantel hung on an eggplant-colored wall. I learned again and again to trust instinct, trust the vision that has hold of your psyche and your heart and shakes them and won’t let them go.

It wasn’t easy for me. I like control. I like knowing where I’m going. I’m not (try as I might) a big fan of surprises. But when I think about it, every time I put word to paper, I don’t know what’s coming next. I have learned to listen. I have learned to take note. But when it comes to trust, I have a way to go. One word at a time.

Crow in Bare Tree

I have a puppet crow named Ravinia that perches on the spindle of an old platform rocker in my workroom. There are also crows on the mantel: one with real feathers from Friendship, Maine; one little woolly one that’s wearing a shawl; and two small ones in a nest that I found at a yard sale. I often ask for their opinions on such things as remodeling and matters of the heart, and they always give sound advice.

Ravinia is also the patron saint of my writing workshops, where she lands on a candlestick in the middle of the table, in the middle of the papers and the pens, the beating hearts, the minds boiling over. It sends her…all this energy…to a sort of corvine Elysian Fields where there are shiny things, secrets, wing chairs, and much to crow about. I like to think that the writers are transported there too.

Most of my friends know that the crow is my favorite bird, and they often accuse me of dressing like one (it is true that my closet is a melange of black, and it is true that my maternal grandmother looked quite crow-ish). They are the most marvelous of birds: they take care of each other; they’re resourceful; they’re great at clean-up; they’re majestically beautiful walking across snow; they can perch at the very top of a pine with grace and aplomb; they’re smart enough to gather when the four o’clocks descend and collaborate about a nice, safe, warm place to sleep.

It’s true that the crow can practice a bit of thievery now and then, and apparently the Greeks thought the crow a bit gossipy. There’s other dark stuff, of course, but most of those rumors were spread in the Middle Ages, when darkness prevailed. For the most part, the crow is sacred, a guide and a protector. I know that when I look up and see a smattering of them hanging out together in neighboring trees, chatting away about the weather and the best spot for lunch, I feel deeply reassured.

All’s well. Just caws for delight.

Ravinia at Work

Every writing workshop should be like this: held in Joanne Rossman’s magical store in Roslindale, Massachusetts; attended by spirited, quirky, open-minded writers; nourished by chocolates and macaroons; and presided over by Ravinia, whose literary contribution is Poe-ish indeed.

It is a grand two days, filled with words that often go right to the heart of the matter, with the sound of pens scratching across paper the old-fashioned way, with some tears, some laughter, with the age-old attempt to express what we feel about so many things: clotheslines, dogs, beach houses, ghosts, household hints, fathers, sons, daughters, mothers, husbands, great aunts, names, keys to rusted locks, lovers, high school, wallpaper.

At the end of it, I drive the long way home, my mind swirling with all the words and touched by the courageous efforts to push those words down the long blue lines and then say them out loud.

That’s one of my definitions of grace: to be part of that effort, to witness it, to know that as long as life continues to knock on our doors and whoosh its way in, there will be writers saying, “Welcome.”