Two Wonderful St. Paul Poets - Kevin Fitzpatrick and Norita Dittberner-Jax

Two Poets in Five Days - Kevin Fitzpatrick and Norita Dittberner-Jax


For those unfamiliar with the Twin Cities poetry scene, it might seem unlikely to find two such fine poets reading almost back to back. There was Kevin Fitzpatrick at the funky Midstream venue, just over the Mississippi from St. Paul on Thursday night, September 14, and Norita Dittberner-Jax at the beautiful St. Paul Swedenborgian church on Sunday afternoon, the 17. Their work, especially about primary love, rings so true that it makes me gasp—in laughter and heart-break.

Their life-experiences have not been doled out evenly. Of Kevin’s lively and touching poems, I found myself gravitating toward those that treat of his love for Tina, and Tina’s choice to leave the city for farming. Years ago when I knew Kevin in the Lake Street Writers Group, he was a completely urban guy. Now I encounter this tall, lanky, urbanite reading poems about lambing and sheep-dipping. Never in my wildest dreams, years ago, did I imagine Kevin on a farm.

Tina has strong opinions about berries. The first poem in Kevin’s collection, Still Living in Town (Midwest Villages and Voices, 2017), begins as Kevin reads a poem by Seamus Heaney to Tina. She interrupts: "I wouldn't wash wild berries....They'll rot..." Kevin's last stanza admits,

     I don't know who to freeze or put up:

     Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney,

     whose poetry I love and admire,

     or Tina, who I also love and admire

     and who's a three-time Mille Lacs area

     4-H grand canning champion. (p. 11)

The humor is infectious even as it settles the question of exactly who to trust with berries. And no doubt with real life.

Two facing poems in Norita Dittberner-Jax collection Crossing the Waters (Nodin Press, 2017) describe with poignant love the weight of her husband's illness from Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). In the first (p. 46) "The Window Facing West," she asks,

    How can losing the light be sweet?

    How can the waning days

    of your strength be tender?

In this contemplative pause between light and darkness, she sits alone "as I will be./ You are gone for only an hour." But those quiet words convey the inevitable loss. Then comes a reprieve in the poem's last two lines:

    The bronze of the desk fades. The door

    of your return clicks open.

We sigh with gratitude for them both, beloveds of long standing.

On the right hand side opposite is a long poem with lots of air, titled "The Kiss." Here it is entire:

At the graduation, people ask about you

or don't.

Later, you say when I leave the house I forget

to kiss you.

Are you becoming invisible

to me?

I would rather forget

my name.

After I am sad and pondering the meaning,

I think,

he misses

my kisses.

reminding me of our losing each other

at the Dead Sea resort

you had an announcer summon me;

you were mad

and I was happy, knowing you would never

leave me behind.

***

Brevity and sudden wit in the midst of loss, hope, and undying love. For me, it is one of the lightest and most buoyant poems in this book of sadness and affirmation.

We are so lucky, so wealthy to have both these voices, renewed in handsome volumes. 
     * Kevin Fitzpatrick, Still Living in Town (Midwest Villages and Voices, midwestvillages@yahoo.com)

     * Norita Dittberner-Jax, Crossing the Waters (Nodin Press, 5114 Cedar Lake Road, Minneapolis, 55416)

Margotlog: Bat Attack

Margotlog: Bat Attack - The Warmth of July 31/August 1


Wow! Pal of Mine, if I'd known you'd come...well, it was 3 a.m. two mornings in a row. This "morning" you were swooping in our high stairwell, with the light on, of course, because I became aware of you in my bedroom and had to scram out of there, turning on every light I could find.

After the first "incident" the night before when I was sure you were confined to the kitchen, I found the correct phone number to call for help from the St. Paul Police Department, 651- 291 - 1111 - and with my knees shaking, I called. Then I stood downstairs at the front door, hoping you would come close enough (but not too close) to see an open door. After what seemed like a century, with you landing on the ground floor--pitiful little bunch of life--then rising into "terror mode" again, you actually swooped past me as I stood in the entryway, holding open the screen, and FLEW OUT.

Julia the black and white cat and I were so relieved we sort of hugged, though Julia might have "done battle" had I not screamed her away.

I was still shaking and couldn't quite decide to call back the Police Department and say no need to send the officer. Eventually I did call, but the "officer" was on his way and arrived, looking very official and neat, and spoke with me, gesturing up to the long stairwell, and recounting how tiny an opening a bat can get through, about the size of a dime! And YOU, UNWANTED VISITOR, WERE WAS NOT A PUNY LITTLE BROWN BAT, BUT A BIG BROWN BAT WITH A WINGSPAN OF AT LEAST A COMMERCIAL JET PLANE..

I was very very grateful to have a "back up" and I do truly believe this man makes a fine business of doing "critter calls." He'd already visited two other houses that evening, but much earlier, between 9 and 10 o'clock. He said the huge mansions on Summit Avenue are havens for bats, despite all their glamor. And the residents get as freaked and terrorized as those of us in more modest dwellings. He also explained that in hot weather, aka July and August, bats are especially prone to investigate insides. The fact that I harbored a bat for who knows how long--at least 48 hours--does not mean  that I'm a bad person or doomed to a lower ring of hell.

Right now, nine a.m.ish, I'm hoping we can get through the summer without another visitation.

Margotlog: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

Margotlog: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

     This is one of the most powerful accounts of hope, loss, and suffering that I've ever read. Melissa Flemming, the author, and also chief spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, spent hours interviewing Doaa Al Zanel, a young Syrian girl who grew up near the Jordanian border. As Doaa became enlightened to the oppressive regime, she confronted soldiers on the street. Her large, loving family suffered increasing poverty. It was 2011, and the army had taken control of her town. Curfews, power outages, water shortages, air raids, and violence created tension and danger.
     Her father's employment as a barber became more and more problematic--his shop destroyed, his clientele terrorized, and citizens in general afraid to venture into the street. Finally after agonizing uncertainty, Doaa and her family decided to escape to Egypt. Here she fell in love with a Syrian freedom fighter Bassem, who'd also escaped from Syria. In the crowded hospitality of relatives, Doaa and her family found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The Egyptian "welcome" deteriorated, and she and her family along with many other Syrians were terrorized and reduced to prejudice and extreme poverty. All she had saved from her betrothal gifts and jewelry became the only hope available to her and Bassem.
     Selling her jewelry and other items, she and Bassem gathered the thousands of dollars necessary to buy their way onto the often leaky and unreliable ships that would cross the Mediterranear Sea and bring refugees to Italy. From there, she and Bassem hoped to reach Sweden where Syrian friends wrote that it was possible to make new lives.
     Doaa and Bassem tried three times. Waiting on deserted beaches, shoved into claptrap busses, robbed, beaten, their promised escape soon loomed like a nightmare. But they persisted, returning to other pick-up points, hoping to push their way onto a boat. Finally, having had half their money stolen, but still holding enough to buy passage, they found themselves at sea. As if in a Shakespearean play, storms shook the leaky craft. Eventually it broke apart, scattering the refugees into the welling sea.
     Bassem had bought Doaa a life ring. As she clung to that, bodies gasped, choked, and drowned around her. The waves of cold water were very high. Bassem tried swimming to stay warm. Bobbing all around Doaa were individuals in peril. One woman with a baby begged her to take the child and hold it on the life ring. Moments after Doaa settled the baby, the mother disappeared in the waves. Bassem himself, after trying to stay afloat, sent her his love and also sank. A father with an infant begged her to take it. Now Doaa became very cold, but she had the two babies to protect. She clung to her life ring.
     When there remained perhaps only ten or twenty survivors from the broken ship, Greek sailors on a Merchant Marine vessel spotted them. For a time, afraid to come near or unable to believe there were live people in the water, the sailors eventually pulled Doaa and the babies, along with her cold, exhausted compatriots out of the sea. She was hysterical. One of the babies had died and the other's life was in peril, as was her own.
     This is a story of unforgettable determination and heroism, but also a story of horrible loss and suffering. It brings to life what until now may have seemed far removed from us, in the middle of the middle of our large and essentially prosperous country. That is, until we ask ourselves, how many in the United States may not also be desperate enough to press hope into the shape of escape, yet have nowhere promising enough to go.

Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

     We are not supposed to be brought low by our friends' illnesses, or that was the message I received as a kid. Maybe I was simply a hedonistic type, skipping rope and running up and down the enormous block from King Street to Meeting Street along the bulk of what we called "The Old Citadel." This was Charleston, South Carolina in the days before home airconditioning. During the summer, our parents often took us to the movies, within walking distance, since we lived at the King Street end of The Old Citadel, and the movie theaters were maybe five blocks down King Street -- the Gloria Theater being the one I remember most. Glimmering stars shone down from a large replica of dark sky above our heads.

     Entering the air-conditioned cool and walking the dark sloping ramp to find seats, we settled in to be transported to other realms, other eras. There was a bio-pic of Chopin, played by a pale though not haggard young man, with a mess of curly, dark hair. Several times the camera focused on his hands traversing the piano keys. Finally, the keys were splashed with red blood. Our mother explained that he had tuberculosis, and was hemmoraghing, or spitting up blood. The music he played even as his blood stained the white keys was so delicious, so rampant with fury and passion that I was completely mesmerized.

     After that, for weeks, months, maybe years, my sister and I played at romantic dying in our parents' big bed. She was Violetta from Verdi's "La Traviata." Then I was Mimi from "La Boheme." Snuggling in our mother's fleecy pink bed jacket, we sang lustily as the maid, (aka the healthy sister) brought us glasses of lemonade and a cookie or two to assauge the illness. There was something remarkably lifelike about this play-acting, especially for me. I had periodic bouts with tonsillitus--high fevers and very sore throats, which sent me to bed while penicillin worked its cure. 

     Dying in almost all 19th-century opera occurs not so much to young men, but to beautiful young women. Sometimes like Mimi, the dying damsel is simply pathetic; other times as with Violetta, her illness is a kind of plague brought on by her all too "free and easy" lifestyle, depriving her of a chance to redeem herself except through dying. I have no doubt that enough beautiful young women died of TB during the 19th century to make these scenarios all too realistic. I also sometimes include the great poet Keats in these remembered scenarios, though my sister and I had never heard of him. But now, his poem "Bright Star/ would I were steadfast as thou art," says so much about the 19th-century's scourge of TB and the need to make it poetic.

     Now, the plague is cancer. We live longer, giving those mutations that cause cancer (along with environmental plagues) time to do their horrible work. Right now, I have three friends with cancer, one for the first time. For another, the scourge has recurred. This will be her fourth bout with cancer. And for the third, a man, the cancer occurred perhaps eight years ago, and he has been very lucky to have extremely good care at Boston's Mass General as part of a study, which I believe involves a new concoction of drugs as well as blood transfusions.

     I bow my head to their courage. Sometimes after talking to them, I am so subdued that I need to be quiet, drifting up and down stairs, a bit like walking a prayer. Prayer offers up a supplication to the great powers of faith, hope, and charity which the weakness of my soul, and the absolute incomprehensibility of their suffering require that I petition. Now, outside my window, it is a beautiful morning. I am happy to report that many houses along our block no longer use herbicides and pesticides on their lawns. Yes, our climate is warming, but so, perhaps are our hearts, transformed by awareness of how depredations to our environment bring on slow-or-fast moving catastrophe.

     This, in itself, is worth a prayer of thanksgiving and for me, at least, a determination to continue to support the work to free our world from cancinogens with which we have polluted our air, water, and soil. In the names of my friends, and of the increased number of birds in my backyard--I offer my sorrow and my attempts to do what I can. Yesterday, I saw for the second time this spring, a humming bird at my sweet water feeder. For their lives, and those of my friends, for myself, my neighbors, my family--I offer up a prayer of muted hope.

Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

In the midst of a Florence spring, it's easy to be reminded of what price beauty. The trees at the interchange where I crossed from the old city into a quieter more modern area glowed with rich green. The sky every day for a week was blue as Mary's cloak. My one evening alone, walking along an embankment above the Arno, watching the water twine and flow, three mallards took flight. I could have been on a Minnesota lake.

Many of our Minnesota lakes and streams are polluted by chemicals sprayed to engender huge harvests. Many farmers want nothing to do with "buffers" of plants that will absorb and neutralize these chemicals. I can almost hear the argument: "We have big machines that till and harvest. We need all the space we can get." It's the soy and corn, Dummie. And voracious farming practices that want "carpet crops" with no true dirt around the borders, dirt that if left alone, could absorb much of the polluting run-off.

Italians don't talk much about farm pollution. Their brand of "showing off" doesn't mean so much controlling nature, as sashaying with speed or beauty--beauty as a form of parading the human/divine, Venus on her speeding shell, her nakedness a form of glorious identity, her ropes of golden hair another form of pasta. To eat is to be beautiful. To walk arm-in-arm through the family crowds is to carry your soul-food on either side of you.

Yes, I had lovely things to eat, especially at Omero's in a tiny hamlet high above the Arno called Arcetri. Far enough above the city that only a few lights glimmered here and there, but close enough to perceive the tops of hills still catching the sun, and the dells turning blue in the twilight.

I didn't like what the new steward of the Uffizi has done with the paintings. All the Michaelangelos downstairs in dungeon rooms with black walls. (But isn't that to protect the surfaces? No, says my snide friend, not much impressed with curators. It's because "black" is trendy.) I missed associations from years before. No longer does Venus on her half shell speed forward across a gallery toward a Netherlander image of piety, the donors tiny at the bottom. The Netherlanders now have a whole wall to themselves. And they're rather staid and boring, while poor Venus has no one to counteract her insouscient freedom and beauty.

Thank heavens no one has tampered with the wildly inventive Uffizi ceilings--those cornucopia of satyrs, angels, griffins, plinths, vessels--so complex and unpredictable that the neck and brain tire together and return the eyes to the floor.

I ate at least one, sometimes two gelatos a day, with pistachio and lemon or pink as cotton candy atop deep licorice, every combination an experiment, some better than others. I found one museum I'd never visited before, dedicated to Galileo, right behind the Uffizi, and so if you've goofed your entry time, as I did, and have time to kill, it's so easy to climb the stairs as models of the sky change around you, globe after globe after globe. Sky and earth, stars and planets. At the end I was no better informed than before as to what precisely he, the great sky-gazer, discovered or predicted, but I saw many many "mock-ups" of solar systems, a few that almost looked like they belonged to us.

   

 

Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends

Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends

Over the past few months, I've often felt dazed by disaster, either that in Washington, or close at hand, trying to help our cat Maggie through an uncertain passage that yesterday ended in death. Now that she has been "put down" by a kind and competent home euthenasia service, MN Pets, and we've buried her in the backyard, I find myself thinking about Iris Origo's World War II diary, War in Val d'Orcia. It is probably the best thing she ever published, among a number of other books filled with deep research about ancient or more modern personages. The best because, in her case, the pressure of writing late at night, after bedding down her children and the orphans she and her Italian husband took in from northern Italy, this pressure of catching truth on the fly created a prose that is intensely vivid and at the same time, cleansed of learned citations or long jaunts into the past. She is whispering to us as the pen crosses the page.

Her life at La Foce, the large, neglected property she and her new husband bought in the dry Sienese hills, had already demanded intense effort, to locate and distribute reliable sources of water. To turn what we would call "tenant farmers" toward more modern and productive methods. To rebuild, furnish, and make somewhat more modern the small estate which was crumbling when they first saw it. By the beginning of the war, the Origos had accomplished much. But their first child, a son, had died unexpectedly at age six. Their other two children, daughters, were born as the war tightened its noose around them.

All this is gripping in itself, but it's her calm, rapid accounting that seems the greatest accomplishment. I tell this because with each passing day and each eruption of scandal and shock, I too am feeling shaken. I want to focus on the passing fears, hopes, and efforts of everyday life. Here is my first entry:

* Three streets in my Lex-Ham neighborhood of St. Paul are planted, almost exclusively, with Ash trees. I live on one of them, Laurel Avenue. Every two years over the past decade, my husband and I have paid to have our boulevard Ash treated with a chemical that kills the Ash Borer. Now, with a friend who works for Rainbow Tree Service, I was spending a warm sunny morning going up and down steps, onto porches and stoops, and inserting flyers printed on green paper explaining that without treatment, the Ash trees would die. Then around each boulevard Ash, my friend and I wrapped a green plastic band that explained Ash Borers Kill Ash Trees.

It was one of those calm, blue Minnesota mornings. The sky rose very high and very blue, as blue as Mary's cloak. Quiet and serene, the streets spread around us as calm as the Virgin seated in her protective niche. We worked quietly, our steps audible as I mounted to houses, some quite high off the street. A 100-year-old lilac tree spread its twisting arms across an entire slope.

Finally as I descended from the last houses, I realized that I felt transformed. Under no other circumstance would I have descended these everyday steps from houses high off the street. Under no other circumstance would I have paid homage to trees bordering twelve blocks of neighboring yards.

We live too much on our own "turf." Yes, months of cold and snow don't encourage chatting outdoors with neighbors. But lately, I've found myself talking to dogs. I pause at an alley backyard and pat a small spaniel who has not barked at me at all, but instead stuck his nose through the wide square mesh and licked my hand.

I exit my house and find myself caught up in a short parade of white and brown children. They announce they're looking for their orange cat. Slowly rounding the corner, a lovely young woman with long dark hair and brown-gold skin comes close enough to explain that the children belong to one family. The children help by pointing across the roofs to the far corner of the huge block. There is their house. Caught up in their chatter, and the young woman's easy explanations, I walk with them, promising to keep a lookout for a cat named Charlie. Finally arriving at their house, I recognize it as one that was recently for sale. "I'm the caretaker," the young woman tells me. "I just cleaned all three stories." The children's father works on a rig somewhere far away. All kinds of questions hover just beyond speech. What is amazing is this passle of children, their lovely young woman in charge of them, and the need to find a orange cat.  

Margotlog: Maggie-May

Margotlog: Maggie-May, aka Calico Short-Hair

I know, to an outsider, a sick cat is simply a sick cat, a being of lesser importance, a pleasant companion but not one to whom we humans extend equal rights. In my younger days, I might have agreed, holding Archie of the red fur and persistent need to be on the other side of the door, in my lap the afternoon just before Fran took him to the vet for the fatal injection. True, Archie had been diagnosed with something truly malignant, maybe cancer. Yet, what shocks me now is that I sat there, saying a casual good-bye to him, sitting in the sun on our front porch. There was no agony to remember. No angst about losing him. Maybe because what was wrong was either incurable or so costly as to be prohibitive. We buried him in the backyard with his pals Fluffy and Justa. I've forgotten exactly where.
Then we replaced him.

For the past month, I've been in dithery shock. Maggie, after eating more helpings of a new Fancy Feast variety than I could count, suddenly fell off a cliff. Constant watery poop. Lethargy like there would be no tomorrow because she was going to die today. Her face became sunken. She shambled and tilted. She forgot how to drink, how to eat. I wasn't much better, vacillating between pell-mell attempts to entice one kind of food or another into her mouth and a kind of "she'll snap out of it" confidence. She didn't. Snap. Out. Of It.

We took her to the vet. Three months before, she'd weighted 7.5 pounds. Now, she weighed 5.2. She was never a long burly cat, but looking back over reports from the last decade, I found that at one point she'd weighed 13 pounds, heftier than either Tilly or Julia, each at 10. The vet couldn't find much wrong, that initial visit, though palpitating her intestines, the vet found they were bigger and thicker than normal. This could mean either an intestinal "condition" or cancer. That visit I didn't ask the vet to draw blood to test for parisites. Three days later I brought Maggie back for the test. No parasites. But we gave her a "water treatment," meaning I held lethargic Maggie while the vet tech with true kindness and humility administered the subcutaneous fluids. Maggie didn't move. Once at home, she seemed a bit more energetic. She ate a tiny bit more of the presription "kibble" for cats with disgestive troubles.

Another week of dithery fear and hope and effort. In my daze I left a half-full, movie-size container of buttered popcorn on the floor. Maggie ate at it. Her watery poop didn't improve though she had more spunk. We started the water treatment at home. Though normally placid and undemanding, she hissed and yowled. Good thing Fran held her, while I administered the fluids. It dawned on me that popcorn wasn't a good snack for a troubled digestive system. I sent it to the composting. Gradually, Maggie showed more zip. She walked up and down stairs from the second floor where it's warmer, to the first floor. She seemed simply to want to be with us.

Now, she even walks around the house, not a lot, but taking an ambling peregrination. Some days I've been so exhausted, I've forgotten her medication. We had a breaktrough when I realized in my fear about intestinal trouble that I'd stopped giving her the anti-hyper-throid medication. The vet said start it up again, at a slightly lower dose. Within 3 days of having that remedied, she was walking more normally, not tilting or stumbling. Somewhere inside myself, a gong beat: OMG how could it not have occurred to me sooner? Taking her abruptly off such a medication was probably like withdrawing alcohol or a mind-bending drug.

Now I can leave the room where she's resting on the bed, or in Fran's office chair turned toward the sun. I don't always have the electric blanket turned on. But the bond we forged remains strong. She comes to get me if she wants her water glass refilled. I refill it even if it doesn't need it. Then I stand with my hand on her warm back as she begins to drink.

I no longer have a daily period of "blur," when I race up and down stairs, bringing her water, food, patting her, asking her. But I hold my hand on her back while she drinks and eats her special kibble. The sound of her tongue lapping sooths and comforts. Tears came to my eyes. I love her so much. I had forgotten how much, I'd forgotten how we first met. Fran had adopted her when he had to rush back from the North Shore to take a flight for Tennessee where his mother was dying. When he bought cat food at Pet Smart for our other critters, he discovered calico cat Maggie, sitting primly with white paws and a serious plea in her eyes. Her name was "Maryland." He brought her home.

A day later I walked into an empty house, knowing that newcover Maggie was there. Something about my sorrow, my fear that she'd be hiding and I wouldn't find her, my round after round of calling, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie," came back to me. A bond I'd forgotten had been forged then, a bond of need, fear, and relief. She finally appeared and let me stroke her. She ate the usual way cats at our house eat: from dishes on the floor. She had a drink from a bowl of water. Until now, she'd  been the middle cat, somewhat outshone by smart and sassy Julia and skittish but beautiful, green-eyed Tilly.

 Oh, Maggie mine. I am so glad you're better. I know we all msut die, but please not now. Please be with us longer, sitting upright and regal, looking at us with green eyes, with your caution and step-by-step climb up the stairs. Be with us, Maggie-Mine, more days through sadness and joy.