Fort Macon Beach. I’m twelve. Is this dream or memory? Either way it’s true. My little sister snatches from the foam’s edge a clump of stringy green seaweed. Shakes off coquinas and mole crabs. Drapes it on top of her head and down around her shoulders. “I’m a mermaid!”
Of course I believe her. Because what is a mermaid? A creature that rises from a strange and exotic world to challenge all our comfortable assumptions. One who challenges and enthralls only to slip from our grasp. Who breathes a cold hot enfolding incandescent oxygen like no air we’ve been able to imagine.
Any six-year old who will pull ickiness from the surf and adorn herself with it must surely be a mermaid. It explains a lot. My sister who cycled the Eastern Seaboard when she was barely a teenager. My sister more at home in a kayak than a staff meeting (but who can dominate a staff meeting). Who for her forty-first birthday backpacked a hundred miles of the AT with me. Who works her healing power over mind and spirit with Jung and the Buddha at her shoulder. I”ve always suspected it — she does breathe from some atmosphere I’m still trying to discover.
. . . . .
Meet the mermaids of Diana Pinckney’s Green Daughers. Dream or memory, the poems are true. The voice of the watery mother whose daughter is struggling, torn — isn’t it the voice of all mothers? The voice of her daughter tempted by a world out of reach, agonizing for her unknown future — isn’t it the voice of all children? And poems for each one of us — for which of us does not long for deep roots, for a fundament to which we may always return, for sustaining love? Yet don’t we gaze at night into the “sky full / of all her gods and animals” and believe that there is mystery beckoning just beyond our perception?
In the way the next receding wavelet parts the shards to reveal a lettered olive, whole, smooth, its cryptic glyphs revealing a message for my eyes alone, in this way I am still discovering the layers of meaning in Diana’s poems.
. . . . .
What the Mermaid Wishes for her Daughter
I turn to the land and imagine
your long, strong legs kiking a road
I can’t follow, climbing from lavender valleys
to the highest peaks, the whole blue earth
at your feet. And those strange
creatures — men who slipped
like minnows from my grasp —
may you unlock the mysteryof at least one
who listens when you laugh
in your sleep, who cares to chart
a woman’s pleasures and pains. Sailors
have told me love is what
brings the boats home. From where
I sit, nature decides our days
and turns the wheels at night.
I knew you were borrowed, but
you nourished me the way the shore
feeds the sea each day, a glossy
bond unbroken. What you
carry from this place is not
lent, but given.
. . . . .
Diana Pinckney lives in Charlotte, only a few hours drive to the coast when the wind and the traffic are at your back. She teaches poetry at the Cornwall Center. Green Daughters is her fourth collection and is available from Lorimer Press. Get to know Diana and read more of her work at dianapinckney.com.
Diana will be the featured poet at the Sam Ragan Poetry Festival of the NC Poetry Society, March 24, 2012, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Southern Pines NC.
. . . . . .
Diana is one of best!
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Diana’s poems shine and glisten and lure the reader, the way a mermaid does, into the worlds she creates, page by page.
Irene Honeycutt
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Thanks Bill for this intro to Diana’s lovely new book. It was my privilege to be in the workshop with her as these poems and the book took shape.
Gail Peck
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