This moment is especially sweet for me. My term, which has been easing to a close with the announcement of Wyatt’s appointment at the end of April and now this ceremony tonight, ends, appropriately enough, poetically. Spring is at its height, irises abound all directions, and in the past 24 hours I’ve had glimpse after glimpse of poetry-inducing moments, some easy (watching the sun balancing on the horizon after some tortillas and refried beans last night at my home) and some more challenging (listening to a gorgeous jazz ballad as I drove through the lovely moonlit night in my nightgown at 3 a.m. to pick up my son from the almost-all-night high school graduation party). One irony of being poet laureate, although I tended to be in denial about it most of my term, is that you experience all this poetry-catalyzing beauty, tenderness and inspiration without having adequate time to write about it. Now that time is returning to me, and despite a mild case of sleep deprivation from last night’s interruption, I’m already feeling energized about writing a lot of new poetry.

I’m also inspired to write more about some of what I experienced over the last four years, so much of it an honor and a gift. The gifts were sometimes literal. When a former colleague interrupted a faculty meeting I was in at Goddard College, where I teach, to give me a lovely painting featuring a Kansas stamp to celebrate my laureateship, I told my colleagues, “Oh, yeah, people often give the poet laureate gifts.” They laughed with me at this, but it was true: I amassed wonderful books, an occasional bouquet of flowers, a hand-made vase, a whole lot of dinners, a few beautiful stones, a Navajo rug, and most of all, moments of connection with people I never would have met otherwise.

“The gift must move,” one of my favorite prose writers, Lewis Hyde, writes in his superb book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The gift filled me up, and I reciprocated however I could along the four-year journey. Tonight, we honor Wyatt Townley, who not only has the distinction of having one of the best possible first names for a Kansas poet laureate but who writes with power, precision, an eye for the magical underpinnings of the ordinary and an ear for the music that poetry gives us. I’m grateful for the gift of her poetry and presence, and I’m ready to bop her (lightly, of course) on the head with a certain giant fake sunflower at this changing of the poetic guard. Praise to all who made this happen, and may the overall gift of the poetic power of language continue to imbue our lives with meaning and light.

For us, it started with Daniel at New York School in a kindergarten class in which all the kids did Army boot camp style call and response chants as they marched down the halls. Within a few years, we switched to Cordley, a school we fell in love with, and a school both Ken and some of his family attended. Daniel felt deeply at home there as did we, and I remember the thrill of the first Cordley carnival, the first school concert, the first parent-teacher conferences there. We found Cordley welcoming, bright and particularly passionate since we started there just as the school was threatened with closing. Meetings, letters to the editor, signs and research came forth from this cohesive community, which not only succeeded in keeping the school open but taught me about the power of the social contract.

During one brief year, we had all three kids at Cordley — Forest in Kindergarten, Natalie in three grade, and Daniel in sixth — and it was also the year of our family’s terrible car accident. The school community wrapped tight around us, filling our refrigerator with food, our table with hand-made cards, and our hearts with healing. The then-principal, the great Kim Bodensteiner, even rushed to the hospital to try to help us. By the time Natalie was ready to graduate Cordley, she along with a big group of other sixth-grade girls threw themselves on the cement steps of the school, weeping in each other’s arms. I knew how they felt.

From elementary school, we entwined ourselves with two junior high schools — South for Daniel and Natalie, and Central for Forest. At each school, we found some superb teachers, perhaps even more admirable because they dealt with junior high students all day. There were many concerts, long nights visiting teachers on parent night, and piles of books the kids hauled between lockers and backpacks.

In the Cordley parking lot many years ago

Then there was high school, and high school was friggin’ amazing, at least from our perspective. Every fall, there was a night when parents followed their kid’s schedule, going class to class for just 10 minutes each. I always loved those nights, and how the teachers were obviously in love with teaching.

High school filled our schedules in complicated ways, especially the years we had kids in three different schools. We had nights Ken went to parent conferences at the junior high when I hit the band concert at the high school. Eventually, the double and triple school-booked nights dissipated as we got down to two, then one kid in public school

Now we come full circle to whoever we were 19 years ago when we didn’t have a public school on speed dial, didn’t concern ourselves with paying school fees or checking whether a child was passing algebra at the school website. At the same time, we’re not who we were: driving past any of the five schools we’ve known as our own in some way, I realize these schools will always be, in one way or another, our own.

A round rainbow is called a glory.

What you survive in life is called a story.

You only see the arc of it after the storm.

To see the whole miracle, you have to hold on.

The workaday miracle is where you belong, where you belong.

The story of how this song came to be may be a pebble in the ocean of the story of where this song is going, now that it’s inscribed in the memories and hearts of all of us who took place. But the song came in a miniature miracle kind of way: several week ago, watching Kelley Hunt perform at the Dakota in Minneapolis  I couldn’t help thinking of one word repeatedly: miracle. It’s a miracle she gives us this life-lifting music, and it’s a miracle that so many of us who create in any form for a living/for a life find sustenance for our art in this culture. But we do, and it kept coming to me that this was a workaday miracle, the kind you help to unfold word by word, note by note.

On the way home from Minnesota, Ken took a photo of a round rainbow with the shadow of the plane in the center of it. I posted it on facebook, and past Brave Voice participant Sandy wrote that “a round rainbow is called a glory.” Both Kelley and I emailed back and forth about that line, the photo, and the idea of a new song that encompassed all this.

A day later, I was walking the dog when we both got tired. I sat on the gravel driveway with Shay, and I began singing quietly, not really paying attention to myself. Shay cocked his right ear and leaned in. Soon I realized, I was singing “A round rainbow is called a glory./ What you survive in life is called a story…” and the rest of the song. I soon went to Kelley’s house, sat with her at her kitchen table, and sang this. “I think it’s the chorus of a song,” I told her, but she told it would work beautifully as a little song. Within a few hours, she found/created several other parts, mostly comprised of stretching the word “glory” into beautiful arrangements. We decided this song would travel with us to Brave Voice, but once there, Kelley found some verses to grow this little song.

On Tuesday morning, Kelley led the group singing in three-part harmony to this little but mighty chant, and on Wednesday evening, we ended our performance with the fuller song, complete with breathtaking cello playing by Teresa (one of the BV partipants) before surprising everyone with the chorus they all knew by heart. The song itself became a round rainbow for all those present in that moment.

Singing this song with others all week, by myself while walking across the prairie at Brave Voice, and in my mind as I fell asleep many nights, I feel its power seeping into me with each repetition. The glory of the workaday miracle is where we belong.

Top photo by Ken Lassman; other photos of Brave Voice by Dianna Burrup.

Labor itself took a while, but that’s so Forest too. After who-knows-how-many-hours of contradictions, I had a simply thought: “To hell with this.”  I decided to simply push this baby out despite my midwife telling me I was early in the “transition stage” (translation: you won’t remember this later because it’s so painful). Since Forest is accommodating, he went along with me. From there, he moseyed through infancy and toddler years gently, sleeping through the night from an early age.

Part of what made him easy was that he’s never been very demanding, and until he was about three, he hardly talked at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how but rather than he had no need. Of course, given our other kids, he probably also couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Natalie was his seeing eye dog to the world, leading him toward whatever he needed or wanted in between dressing him in frilly dresses. She also translated the look on his face into whatever he needed from us: “He wants more juice,” or “He needs you to stop at the store and get ice pops for him.” I remember him waking us one early morning — Natalie was still asleep — holding a loaf of bread, a jar of jelly and a butter knife. That’s how he asked for breakfast.

Forest with Ken and Woody

When he started school, he folded in easily without any of the drama or glitter of the older kids. But at age five, he and the rest of us had a life-changing event: a very bad car accident involving our mini-van and black ice threw Forest from the car and onto the banks of the wetlands. He was life-flighted to Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City where the doctors reported his brain was bleeding in three places and his jaw was broken in five. Thanks to a flood of prayers from around the world, a spectacular energy healer who worked with him night and day (Ursula Gilkeson), and the expert and compassionate care of nurses at the hospital, we experienced a Forest miracle: in three days all the breaks vanished from his jaw, his brain healed itself, and he was woken from the drug-induced coma. Our whole family is still terrified of black ice, but we’re immensely and enduringly grateful to all who saved his life.

His life after the accident threaded itself through many years

Post-Bar Mitzvah

of school, each parent-teacher conference another chance to hear about “Forestisms” (strange and funny comments he made in class) or “Forest tricks” (his self-made formulas for solving math problems). His science teacher recently told us how, when he asked the class to to explain what a volcano is, Forest responded with a lengthy and vivid description correlating the volcano to human evolution and our current political challenges.

We count on Forest to surprise us regularly. Recently, driving behind a car, which was tailgating a flatbed truck with dozens of big-screen TVs bungie-corded together, Forest casually remarked, “What could possible go wrong?” Watching presidential debates, going out for Mexican food, or walking down our road, Forest constantly entertains us, but no wonder, considering he was named after Ken’s cousin (and our beloved good friend) Woody, whose real name was Forest and worked as a forest ranger. When Woody was dying from cancer, Forest mailed back to him a prayer quilt Woody and his wife made for Forest after his accident. That quilt is now somewhere in the pile of blankets on Forest’s bed.

Now Forest is 18, ready to graduate high school, get his first job and his driver’s license, go to Johnson County Community College next fall, and continue to live at home, giving us succinct and pithy updates of the news and sharing with us the funniest videos on the internet. 18 in Judaism is also the letter Chai, which means life and luck. We find both with Forest, and we wish him many years of the same continual joy he brings us and others.

When the Time Comes

To live in this world

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

You let go because it’s just another way to exhale

and you know how much the universe loves a vacuum

it can fill in the next inhalation. You’ve held the work

of your life against your bones with just enough lightness

that the small fire in the center of the sky lantern

can ignite flight. Then the horizon takes what’s released

beyond, and you go back inside to begin again

the daily tasks of daylight and love.

How many conversations composed mostly

of time, listening, waiting for the flock of goldfinch

to sweep sunlight into the moment? How many meetings

in a big room lined with northern windows and stories?

How much holding steady to whatever faith is:

a balance of weather and garden, schedule and surprise

folded in time’s arms? How long the list,

how quick the gait, how hot the coffee, how late

or how early it all cycled through you again?

Now there’s just the late spring, green saturated with green,

lilacs finally back for their week-long dance,

the quiet before the ending, the filled large room

with those who love you or barely know you, all

carrying stories and hot tea, hugs and incredulity.

Then stepping outside, an old trick after days of cloud

lifting just enough to shine what’s shone through you

directly on you now that the time has come.

Indigo Bunting, you are so lovely!

The day began with beautiful birds and ended with me stuck in the mud clutching four pounds of potato salad against my chest between a slope and the side of our car in the dark.

The birds were stunning. The potato salad (and coleslaw) was tasty but heavy. The mud was sucking. If I moved forward, I would fall. If I moved backward, I would slide. In any case, movement would likely mean exploding containers of potato salad all directions. So I stayed still and let Ken surgically remove each container of potato salad from me until I could escape the thick hold of the earth enough to head up the grassy slope. I also laughed so hard that I almost fell over.

What happened in between seeing birds and getting stuck in the mud was both a day of the usual running of errands (including getting child-proof knobs for the stove now that Shay has learned how to turn on the burners, plus new water pistols for our Shay-training regime) and the very rare (a family reunion featuring over a dozen Lassmans from California to Virginia). The child-proofed stove knobs meant I could leave our home without fear for what the dog might do in my absence. The reunion meant I could team up with my sisters-in-law and Ken to put on a big family meal (thus the potato salad).

Baltimore Oriole, you are stunning too.

All went well, and it was a joy to be with people I hadn’t seen in a year or 15 years or at all (such as some new second cousins-in-law once removed or something like that). But there was something was being stuck in the mud with the potato salad after dinner, a little drizzle easing down from the sky, that crystallized today for me just as there was something about taking photos this morning of the beautiful birds. Both moments snapped their fingers at me saying the usual about the unusual: here it is, fleeting and shining, so gorgeous or so stuck in the mud. I laughed at the birds. I laughed at the mud.

“How many cars did you go through during your poet laureate term? Three? Four?” Shawn asked me during the last poetry caravan a few weekends ago. Actually just one, and I’ve been going through the Toyota Sienna, aka poetry-mobile, for many years, first using it to haul babies, then random couches found on curbsides, small trees, thousands of bags of groceries, rafts of teenagers, hundreds of pounds of recycling, many trays of basil to plant, lots of relatives, and bevies of poets. With 216,000+ miles, it still has life left in it, but that life is now mostly for Forest as he starts college. It was time for a vehicular life transition for me.

What surprised me was how fast it happened: I kind of knew what I wanted, something a bit smaller than a van but not too much, with lots of room for hauling stuff I find here and there, and it had to come in a great color. We spotted a 2004 Honda CRV for sale at our favorite dealership in town for just the price we wanted and with less than 50,000 miles. We test-drove Mon., had it inspected by our mechanic Tues. morning and bought it Tuesday afternoon. It was mercifully easy, in great part because from the moment I sat at the wheel, I knew this was my car. Maybe it’s the shimmery gold exterior (I’m also a sucker for bling) or the chocolate interior (and I love chocolate even more), but it just

Out with the red and in with the gold

felt like home, or home moving down the highway at 60 mph. Besides, as Kris said, it looks like a Reese’s peanut butter cup, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Although I’ve been on the road all-too-much for the last year, I feel ready for a different kind of road trip now, one that brings me into more spacious scenery with more time to take it in. I’m also ready to drive home repeatedly with gratitude in my heart and a shimmering gold hood leading the way.

I’ve gotten to know Wyatt through the last decade or so, and especially during my term as poet laureate because she and her husband, the wonderful poet and children’s writer Roderick Townley, participated so soulfully in Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices, the poem of the week project (now at http://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com), and many other collaborative writing community projects. What I find in Wyatt is a kindred soul: someone who communes with the deeper beauty and magic of the living earth and sky in her writing and life, and someone who embodies, in every aspect of that word, what it means to live with an open heart and graceful voice.

Wyatt loves the wind, and and no wonder that the subtitle for her website is “words in the wind.” Read an excerpt from her exceptional poetry collection The Afterlives of Trees, and you’ll feel that wind in the breath alive in each poem. I also love the wind, and so it was a joy to explore the windier and wilder edges of Kansas with Wyatt, traveling with her, Roderick and other poets a year or so ago to way-out-western Kansas, all the way to Ulysses (which I now know is beyond the edge where the world ends). There, I saw her charm and move an audience composed mostly of elders when she discussed the nuances of a poetic form. With humor, dedication and approachability, she elaborated on the potential of poetry to help us feel our own pulse and verve.

I’ve also burned a prairie with her on our land when she and Roderick were game enough to follow me back from a reading at Johnson County Community College one spring day, despite a crazy traffic situation on K10 that day. She’s easy to laugh with as well as delightful to talk shop with, and her vision – on the page or in the field – always lifts me.

Please join Wyatt and many others of us at the Lawrence Arts Center for her welcome reception and for our poetic transition in full at 5:30 p.m., Thurs., May 23. Celebrate not just the survival of the Kansas poet laureate program, but how this program is thriving and ready to grow in new ways, thanks to Wyatt Townley and the Kansas Humanities Council.

Press Release from Kansas Humanities Council

TOPEKA – The Kansas Humanities Council (KHC) announced that Wyatt Townley of Shawnee Mission, Kan., has been named the 2013-2015 Poet Laureate of Kansas. As Poet Laureate of Kansas, Townley will promote the humanities as a public resource for all Kansans through public readings, presentations, and discussions about poetry in communities across the state.

“Wyatt’s work, along with her knowledge of the craft and history of poetry, will guide Kansans as they make the connection between poetry and humanities at Poet Laureate events across the state,” said Julie Mulvihill, executive director of the Kansas Humanities Council.

“I’m humbled and honored to be asked to serve as Poet Laureate of Kansas,” shared Townley. “It’s wonderful that the laureateship has found its way home to the Kansas

Humanities Council – a natural habitat for it. The notion of ‘home’ is a long-held Kansas value, and I’d like to start a conversation around the state about coming home to poetry. Poetry is a place we can return to in all kinds of weather, with its innate power to heal and comfort, transform and inspire. Its porch light is always on.”

Wyatt Townley is a widely published, nationally known poet and a fourth-generation Kansan. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor, in US Poet Laureate Emeritus Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and published in journals ranging from “The Paris Review” to “Newsweek.” She has published three collections of poetry: “The Breathing Field” (Little Brown), “Perfectly Normal” (The Smith), and “The Afterlives of Trees” (Woodley Press), a Kansas Notable Book and winner of the Nelson Poetry Book Award.

A founding board member of The Writers Place in Kansas City, MO, Townley has served as a teaching artist with Young Audiences and Writers in the Schools program, and has appeared at writers’ conferences and literary festivals in the Midwest and Northeast.

To request a Poet Laureate of Kansas presentation with Townley, visit http://www.kansashumanities.org.

Support for the Poet Laureate of Kansas has been provided by Lon Frahm of Colby and Friends of the Humanities.

The Kansas Humanities Council is a nonprofit organization that supports community-based cultural programs, serves as a financial resource through an active grant-making program, and encourages Kansans to engage in the civic and cultural life of their communities. For more information or to donate to the Poet Laureate of Kansas program, visit http://www.kansashumanities.org.

The business of making yoga class mixes takes time and inspiration for me to bring the right balance of bass-infused chanting, Celtic ballads, jazz standards, a good helping of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Eva Cassidy, and a perky showtune thrown in for good measure. Still, I couldn’t help but mourn in miniature the loss of some inspired moments when great songs I couldn’t remember led to other great songs I couldn’t remember. I told myself that eventually I would squirrel myself and this computer beyond the time-space continuum to recreate many more yoga mixes for my classes. Eventually come spring to be more exact.

It’s come spring, and today as I put down the new cannister of yoga music (which somehow is also holding 9 CDs full of Springsteen mixes for long road trips), I saw the old cannister. “Where have you been?” I started to ask, then realized I didn’t actually need to know. The music rolled away, and now it’s returned. As I slipped an old friend CD into the player today, I reveled not only in the deep river voice of Mary Fahl, right before a Krishna Das chant, but in the mystery of lost things returning.

At the beginning of March, I trembled when I looked at my calendar. With the end of my poet laureate term ending, I basically stopped thinking critically, or maybe just stopped thinking. Add to that our daughter’s senior recital (in March) and graduation (in April), a bunch of big events in this area, and a weekend visit that entailed almost more travel than non-travel to see our son Daniel’s life in Knoxville, TN and hike in the Smoky Mountains some. Did I mention it’s poetry month and Holocaust commemoration time? My calendar was a vivid example of how what’s written neatly or scribbled in metallic pink doesn’t translate so neatly or shimmery into real life.

No surprise then that I coped my usual way: sleeping as much as possible, rocking a sinus infection that resisted treatment for stretch, working out somewhat regularly, and of course, turning to cheetos and dark chocolate when all else failed. Yet like most overcommitted times in my life, I also was moving too fast, worrying about having the right directions or if I should have packed a sweater, to notice very often the green world exploding in slow motion all directions. Simultaneously, it’s been a blast much of the time: posing with a posse of poets in front of the world’s biggest ball of twine, sharing tea with an old friend after a reading, discovering strange museums and stranger thrift stores, listening to poetry so good it could (and did) break my heart in a room where everyone was previously a stranger.

Today, finishing packing the last suitcase of this time (the one that holds our clothes for flying to St. Paul, MN tomorrow for Natalie’s graduation), I stopped. Looked outside. A squirrel was holding onto a small board with one hand while eating something with the other. I watched long enough to discern that board was part of a small birdhouse, fallen apart with the aid of said squirrel. The air brightened. Cottonwood Mel leaned one way, the leaves just starting to bud out.

For a long time, this spring has been moseying through its pre-vernal unfolding, almost on the edge of big change and yet suspended just before all the leaves that will change our views for months to come. My pre-vernal unfolding may have been more frenetic and certainly less grounded than the trees’, but I’m so grateful that somehow we arrive at the same place at the same time.