by Fitz | Nov 14, 2019 | Journal, Poetry
This shift from fall to winter
Is the cruelest month:
Long days and nights
In a blather of responsibility’s
I hoist from a murky hole
And sort and sift
On a messy desk.
I pity my students who tremble
My red pen of vengeance;
Who wait with fetid thoughts
Freighted by what they did–
Or didn’t do.
I hear the stern words of parents
Parsing my elliptical thoughts
When all I really need to say
Is he or she gave a damn
Or didn’t.
But “why?”
Why is what they
Need, want, plead
Beg almost, to know
What they already do.
by Fitz | May 11, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am You, and You are me…
Give a damn & figure it out
I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…
That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy?
I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.
I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.
I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.
I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…
So, how does one start something like this?
I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…
(No–way to vain and presumptuous)
Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)
Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)
Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…
But if you know me, you have heard this all before…
I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…
I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.
Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did!
I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…
I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates…
I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent expanse of earth called Concord.
I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…
I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.
I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”
I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:
Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.
The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?”
And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess.
After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?
In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.
I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…
And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…
by Fitz | Mar 22, 2019 | Journal, Poetry
And shivers its literal timbers.
Cold, wet and pleading,
Scarred by winter winds
And pasty snows,
My small field and patch of woods
Is now a monument
To aging neglect.
Shorn limbs and branches
Hang high and tangled
in the Sugar maples
(Widow makers we called them
Back in my logging days—
But that is a poem
For another day).
Even the last ash is too far gone
And will have to come down.
We already lost (last year)
The towering white pine
To heart-rot and beetles;
The fruit trees never took
To the shade and droughts,
And only the black cherry, neglected
In a sea of blackberry brambles,
Keeps growing unperturbed
In its stoic obedience
To tropism.
Always a lazy poet,
I find something else to do
And stoke the fire inside
And steep another strong coffee:
And tune my old saw
And scrape out the oiled dust
And clean the jets
And sharpen the chain
And lube the bar
And convince myself
The trees, too,
Can wait another day.
by Fitz | Mar 11, 2018 | Journal, Poetry
An early March snow brought down all these branches
Cracking and crashing throughout a long night,
Piling them impatiently in the yard
Like jacksticks in a child’s messy room.
The stepladder I used to rake the ridge
Stands like an awkward sculpture draped in white
Bellies of bulging snow piled on the steps
And a perfect barrel resting on top–
A meticulous testament to God
Pulling one more trick from winter’s sleeve.
It reminds me of impermanence–
Our shaky place in the scheme of things,
My sixty years of New England winters
In the sultry moodiness of winter’s grasp,
And the fickleness of expectation.
It is a poet’s job to measure things
And juxtapose words upon a blank page
With the same crystalline efficiency;
To make sense and form from infinite flakes
And give the world one more chance to see
Our place within eternity.
by Fitz | Feb 27, 2018 | Journal, Poetry
I have an old lobster buoy
Hanging dully from
A wrought-iron basket hook—
A rough cutaway
Filled with suet,
Clabbered in wire mesh.
.
I had imagined chickadees
Squabbling with angry jays
And occasional sparrows, finches—
Maybe even cedar waxwings
tired of scrounging
For dry berries;
But here it is,
A warm night in March,
Still untouched,
Still beckoning
A lingered hope.
The snows are gone,
The muddied lawn now full
With the promise,
Of idle seeds and soft grasses,
Of carcasses and shells—
A winter’s kill, enough
To fill the belly
And gorge the void—
this lost friendship,
This gift unclaimed.
by Fitz | Feb 19, 2018 | Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am sitting here realizing how hard it is to ask you–a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys–to write iambic dimeter poetry, a form of poetry that is more or less ignored nowadays. I (literally) played around for a couple of hours penning these poems, which are at least minimally worth keeping. (My other attempts were horrid and insipid.
I am sure you will come up with some good stuff, but writing poetry under pressure [aka: last-minute] is like trying to eat Cocoa Kripsies while juggling on a unicycle in beach sand with the tide coming in.
Really–walk around with your phone on record. Get a beat–a rhythm–going. Start talking in iambic dimeter. Sooner or later some words that actually make sense will pop out. Settle for what feels good; otherwise, you’ve made a bad deal–but better than no deal at all.
The crazy thing is that it works. Sooner or later you will have made the world (and your life) a better place.
And then it is worth it after all.
Poems don’t flow out of the soul just because you want them to. They are pried out of the earth with pickaxes and teaspoons…
The Light Within
It’s hard to write
When asked to do
A task this night
That’s hard for you:
The mind goes still;
The light goes dim;
With time you will
Find words within
Here is a three verse one I just wrote with a different rhyme scheme and more use of words that are naturally iambic (each beat does not need to be a single word). Generally, a poem “reveals itself” in the closing stanza or closing lines. Everything else prepares the reader for this moment of insight.
The Jays Cry
The biting cold;
The drifts of snow–
Lone squawks of songs
In sounds we know.
The Jay and me
Both try to see
What’s right and wrong
With poetry.
We scream with words
(To each absurd)
And sing along
To just be heard.
These are not going to win me any poetry prize, but as a poet, at least I have won my own day.
Start with digging…
