May | 2023 | V E R S E and I M A G E

Archive for May, 2023

Tamp – Denton Loving

Posted in Imagery on May 26, 2023| 13 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Denton Loving]

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Foundation

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Unable to stand in our hillside orchard,

too weak to swing a mattock or to wrestle

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with dirt, my dad wants to plant peach trees.

For him, I tear the earth open.

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Rocks bleed out from the poor mountain soil,

and I unwrap swaddled peach roots.

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Before I scrape the dirt back and tamp it down,

I return the largest rock under the young roots,

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a surrogate for what I fear. I bury it back,

imagine the roots encircling the rock,

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enclosing it, building from its foundation.

Like the hard stone buried in the sweetest fruit.

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Denton Loving

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❦ ❦ ❦

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Needful things have a way of turning up. A chance word of assurance from a friend at church. An old photo misplaced and rediscovered. A new book.

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I’ve just called Dad to let him know I won’t be visiting tomorrow. Last week’s COVID has relapsed, and even though I caught it from him in the first place I don’t want to risk returning the gift. Maybe my sister can drive down from Asheville and refill his medication trays. Maybe a neighbor can help him pick up the car he will never again drive from the service department. Maybe all the little errands will get done some way or another until I can see him and Mom next week sometime. Something will turn up.

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Indeed. The needful thing that has turned up for me this week is Denton Loving’s new book, Tamp. Denton’s grief at the loss of his father is both gentle and vicious. Both cutting and sweet. Subtle, surprising, pervasive. But it’s how he expresses loss that is needful for me this week. He recalls and describes the many things he had done alongside his father, the toil and the joy. He describes the tasks he must now do without his father. I feel like I’m walking that very path not far behind him.

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I sit down and force myself to reflect. Push aside for a moment the aggravation and exhaustion of caregiving. Who was my father? Who is he now? Who are we together? I don’t want to summarize our years under the same roof with an offhand quip, “He didn’t like my long hair”; he doesn’t even comment on it now. Lately I labor with the frustration of all the capacities he’s lost (but struggles to admit he’s lost). Instead let me paint for myself an image of his presence throughout the twists and turns of all our decades – a steady beacon of approval. Sometimes distant, but never dim.

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Let me be thankful for the engineer, salesman, executive who still covers the dining room table with stacks of lists. Let me acknowledge how tough it must be for him each time he has to hand over another essential task to me – thanks, Dad, for letting me drive you everywhere, keep up with your prescriptions, clean out the recesses of the fridge. Let me set aside my own to-do lists when we’re together, if only for a morning’s cool respite on the patio.

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Let me prepare now, Dad, for the day when I won’t have you to take care of. Or to take care of me. Let me appreciate each day until then.

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❦

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When I first learned of Denton Loving’s book and placed my order, I was curious about the title. I didn’t select which poems to feature today simply because you’ll find that word within them, but you will. As I re-read all the poems, I think I’m discovering that even without tamp explicitly visible within their lines, each one still speaks to the word’s theme. To create something solid and lasting; to be conscientious and never leave something half-done; to pay attention. And neither you nor I ever really tamp the earth in finality and just walk away. We are only continuing our journey, from fence post upright and steady, from headstone and grave, into the next day and the next. An unbroken genealogy of love.

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TAMP by Denton Loving

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❦ ❦ ❦

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If there’s an angel of lost gloves

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my father didn’t believe and didn’t wait

for holy intercession. He mislaid his gloves

faster than his temper. He wasn’t careless,

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though I never knew him to lay hands

on the tool he needed when he needed it.

So he bought pair after pair, suede

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cowhide fit to stretch barbed wire. Still,

he usually worked with only one hand

sheathed and sometimes then

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with the fingers blown out, each digit

ruptured by the snag of steel points

reaching next to rip open skin.

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Now, I find his leather fingers cupping air

like wren nests, lingering in buckets,

on shed shelves, on the aged oak floor

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of the barn loft, in the midst of a task,

maybe a pair of nails within reach

as if he’ll return when he finds his hammer.

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Denton Loving

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❦ ❦ ❦

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The Fence Builder

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My graves don’t rise or sink

the grave digger says after I show him

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the place to bury my father.

I take in the view as if this valley

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is what he’ll see for eternity.

Down the hill, children play

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outside the elementary school.

Sheep pasture around the cemetery.

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Some people just push their pile of dirt back in.

But I tamp the dirt at every level.

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I’d never wondered why some graves swell

and some settle and sag

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but the grave digger’s words stay with me.

He taps the clay above my sleeping dad,

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leveling the damp ground

just as the man in the casket

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taught me to tamp around wooden posts

to make a new fence last,

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packing the dirt and rocks

so wire is pulled taut, forced to hold tight

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for at least a generation,

those rhythmic strikes a refrain

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for all those who take pride in a task well done,

those men who work the earth –

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the fence builder erecting his monuments,

the grave digger and all he lays to rest.

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Denton Loving

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❦ ❦ ❦

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❦ ❦ ❦

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Remember

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry on May 19, 2023| 4 Comments »

[featuring three poems by Valerie Neiman]

What you see, that is what survives.

What you remember is all there is.

Don’t you want to save the world?
+++++++++++ from Catechism by Valerie Neiman

❦

Yesterday I walked and tried to remember. Here beside my foot, what is the name of this so familiar leaf? Distinctive, like no other leaf, for that reason alone I should remember it. Surely I have seen it before and known it. Surely the other things I’ve seen and learned for the first time today have not pushed from my memory an equal number of things I learned yesterday, cargo jettisoned?

Later I found a photo of the leaf and immediately knew it and where and when I’d first learned it, Jumpseed or Virginia Knotweed, Isaac’s Trail (MST), August 2022. It was in bloom then and I recall a definite small joy in learning it – the leaf, after all, is distinctive. Old friend, it is good to see you in your Spring garb.

Lately I’ve been chiding myself for always walking the same trails every week, sometimes every day. Branch out, see something new! But these woods are never quite the same today as they were yesterday. I notice the same things in different light or at a new stage of growth; I see and hear things I’ve never noticed at all in years of passing this way. I suppose I’ll keep walking these trails until I’ve noticed everything. Or perhaps even longer, until memory no longer retains a thing and each day is indeed entirely new.

Except that’s not quite how it ends. There are all the people who’ve walked beside me on these trails, who’ve shared with me and with whom I’ve shared, if only the shapes of leaves. It’s not quite true that what you remember is all there is. What you share is all there is.

❦ ❦ ❦

Out of the Ordinary

My friend mourns the missing thrushes,

ee-o-lay that used to rise
like fireflies at the verge of oak woods.

Her memory saves a space for their song;

others, later, won’t notice the lack,

satisfied by the insistent mockingbird

(his repertoire a hundred songs or more,

including cell phone and cricket chirp),

reweaving a looser web of dawn chorus:

So one bird replaces a canopy of absent

warblers, as a synthesizer sets ghosts

in the chairs of an emptied orchestra.

+++++++++ ❧

Like scissored silhouette
of a child’s shadow, this becomes the is
of that isn’t. What is no longer,

like those ballads that bridged generations.
We no longer lift our quotidian voices
to pace work or ease the idle hours,

now that professionals provide
tunes at the ready, electronically
clipped and smoothed,

like purebred stock at the fair,
not one hair out of place,
not one note quavered.

Valerie Nieman
from Hotel Worthy, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

Last week I was helping my wee mother take a little walk – tie her shoes, re-button the pink sweater, find her cane – and as I held her elbow to steady her across the threshold, she looked up and said, “You’re a good boy.” If you are also an oldest child, perhaps you, too, have spent a good chunk of your life doing whatever it took to hear those words (and no, I haven’t had to wait 70 years to hear them for the first time). But doesn’t every child, primogenitor or not, long to gain their parents’ favor? More than to be loved – to be worthy?

Valerie Nieman writes there on the left is the Hotel Worthy and I realize I’ve been trying to check in for years. Many of the poems in Hotel Worthy struggle with conflict – how to be worthy? Or how to be true to yourself? Is there some hallowed doorway that leads to both? Or is it true that The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is / to know every name of every part of the sailboat from gudgeon to headstay and . . .

The purpose of life is a shadow ducking behind a tree in a dark wood. Pursue, pursue! After spending several hours reading Val’s book straight through, I find myself returning to poems that especially entice me on, this one, that one, re-reading and discovering new connections, doorways opening into new places. The archaeologist’s surface stratum is scratched away to reveal a metaphor for human relationships and generations. So many metaphors, each one more true than the last. Valerie’s collection creates a lifeline and a world of knowing that emerges not as a tree, spreading from root to bole to branch, but as a web, nodes across time and place. I scribble a collection of her lines I want to hold on to and learn from. I smile when an awareness dawning in the poet dawns in me as well. I’m glad I accepted the invitation to check into this Hotel – you come, too!

❦

Valerie Nieman is a graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, and teaches writing at North Carolina A&T State University and at other venues including John C. Campbell Folk School. Hotel Worthy is the second of her three poetry collections which Press 53 in Winston-Salem NC has published; the first is Wake Wake Wake and the third The Leopard Lady. Her Press 53 novel, Blood Clay, received the Eric Hoffer Award, and her fourth novel, To the Bones, was published in 2019 by West Virginia University Press.

❦ ❦ ❦

Stratigraphy

++ In archaeological sites, natural and human-generated material occur together

++ in layers. These layers, called strata, form a record of past events . . .

++++++++++++ – Research Laboratories of Archaeology, UNC

Prehistory

is what has been cut apart

and swallowed,

bite by terrible bite,

and laid down in the body’s lattice.

Small sharp things:

that glance across the table,

those unfinished gestures.

History waits in the antechamber

for the arrival of words:

no documents, no history.

But what’s down inside

the long galleries of the bones

all the while, without any light,

painting aurochs on the walls?

Now if you only want to pry

artifacts out of the generations

of mud, what can be salvaged

for love or for money,

hurry, then, with pick and shovel –

difficult to tell what it all

amounted to, once,

except that sometimes

in the upended clay the light

finds a carved head, a bit of gold,

or flaked edge of obsidian

that might (or not) have been employed

in a clenched fist.

The careful investigator,

with dental pick and bone brush,

would find the same shattered femurs,

the same engraved figures

(vulva and tectiform shelter),

but frame them

in time and meaning:

how high the icy water rose

that spring,

how the deer fled,

how we starved.

Valerie Nieman

❦ ❦ ❦

Dark Matter

Seaweed, scoured from the deep, scatters
its beads upon the beach. Everything broken.
I gather twists and bits, small lives blasted
##
and holed, shoved aside by the waves, a slattern’s
house(un)keeping, fires heaped with trash,
any salutary offerings to one goddess or another
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scrabbled up by dirty hands, a smidge and a smatter
to feed a momentary appetite. So I kick along the tide
line and analogize, my disappearing domestic
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bliss no match for weighty issues of war-shatter
everywhere east to west, eruptions staggering the world;
but still, but still, I accumulate little bomblets
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of disaster and embrace them, the spatter
of heartsblood ready to fly when the least jounce
lets it all come apart, and so the personal
##
etc. holds little hands with the larger all the way up, dark matter
flinging this fine universe outward from one hot bang,
farther, colder, the space-between we imagine.
##

Valerie Nieman

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Wind & Fire

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bill Griffin Photography, imagery, NC Poets, poetry, Regina Garcia, The Firetalker's Daughter, Tornado on May 12, 2023| 9 Comments »

[featuring two poems by Regina Garcia]

This Fire Tastes Like . . .

This fire won’t taste like the last ones did
Singed souls torn up, crying, wandering,
wondering how to get love back
How to fix life
How to repair
The last fires tasted like . . .
Tasted like loss
Tasted like shame
Tasted like despair
Tasted like mourning
Tasted like no way out
Tasted like no way back
tasted like Tulsa
Tasted like Elaine
Tasted like Watts
Tasted like Wilmington
Tasted like old Eppes High . . .
Tasted like all that it had consumed

This fire tastes different
This fire tastes fed up
This fire has eyes set
Beyond loss
Beyond prison
Beyond death
Beyond the graves
This fire has new eyes
Fixed on that “New New”
Jerusalem
New fire gonna propel these children into
promised land
They won’t need the water fo the oppressor
Because they are children of living waters
And Raging Fires
And earth tht has promised fertility
Yet pushed out weeds to choke and distract

This fire tasted different
It tastes like energy

Tastes like righteous fury
Its fuel is dark kindling root
It will combust from a place to deep
So misunderstood
So, underestimated
That it will not be contained
This fire tastes different
It tastes like resolve

It will reject any attempts to thwart combustion
The internal combustion
It will incinerate attempts at trickery for
It has seen the video and believes
It waw murderous hubris
It saw The Dead that were tried for dying
It saw the solid stance of patronizing defiance of other fires
It saw the lies stifling acrid air
This fire tastes different
It tastes alive
It will not stop until there is nothing left that can stop it
It will then scoop the ashes and build
Jerusalem
Yeah
This fire tastes different
This fire tastes like revelation
This fire tastes like change
This fire tastes like
Hope

❦ ❦ ❦

Rainstorm, windstorm, limbs thrashing the house in panic, rain attacking the windows through the screens: we can feel Amelia’s mounting fear each time the sky grows dark and she asks, “Is this a tornado?” No, Honey, just a big storm. We don’t get tornados around here.

Until this afternoon. Severe Thunderstorm pings on the phone while we’re watching a movie with Amelia in the living room. Within minutes the sky is slate and the TV goes black. When hail peppers the porch we lurch for the basement. Amelia makes it into a game, the divine gift of the seven-year old, and while we play with flashlights we hear the drumming of rain but assume those contrabasso reverberations are thunder.

It’s all over in fifteen minutes. We climb the stairs and open the front door – our neighbor’s venerable willow oak, trunk at least two meters in diameter, is angled across the road into our driveway. Not crushing our living room. One sugar maple at the end of our house has had its spine snapped and hurled, but not into our bedroom. As our neighbors emerge, we tally and discover no one is injured (although not true of several roofs).

Everyone’s yard is full of twisted trunks and limbs or huge redclay balls of the uprooted. We notice most of the trees aligned prostrate in the same direction and we mutter, “Downburst.” “Straight-line wind.” Two days later, though, the National Weather Service makes its proclamation: an E0 tornado. We wonder if Amelia will ever want to finish that movie we had started. And if we ever get our power back on, we’re ordering some more flashlights.

❦

Regina Garcia’s new poetry collection, The Firetalker’s Daughter, is elemental – wind, earth, water, fire. She describes her mother and her son as Firetalkers – they can speak to pain and talk it into submission. And isn’t that what these poems do, speak to the pain? If words could remove the pain of the world, the inescapable pain of living, perhaps a new day would dawn when the earth would have no more need of words. We will never see that day.

But strong words, words of compassion and truth, can raise us out of the pain. We can stand on the shoulders of the poetry, the hymns, the stories of the Firetalker and see a way beyond the pain. We can see a road before us where pain can’t wield its power over us. We can live in this world of pain and still proclaim joy, the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers. Oh, Regina Garcia, may your poetry lead us there. You are the Firetalker.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Fire That Consumes: The Burnings of Black Histories

Have you ever seen fire, the kind that consumes . . . ?
a house, a block, a street?
a community?
a town?
a nation?

Have you ever stretched fingers towards fire just because you wanted to feel
the last gusts of breath before the flames melted . . . ?
Mortar from brick?
Wood from steel?
Skin from meat from sinew from bone?
Have you ever jumped at the crack and splinter before the crash?
Hid your face to escape the blowing soot?
Covered your nose to block the smell of escaping gases the incineration of
flesh? Squeezed eyes shut to restrain the release of tears?

Fire destroys completely
Everything
Except memory
Those who have lived through fire never forget that all that was lost cannot
be returned, cannot be restored
Pre-fire life flickering in memory

Have you ever known the indignity of stolen memory?
Of erasure of thought?
A disallowing of necessary history passed on from ind to mind
No collective storage
Trashed as disposable waste
Scores of nations and families of people relegated to one layer of life lived
while other layers burned away
Withdrawn from the light of day
Layers that could have lit
the illumination of minds
the awareness of conditions

the recognition of irreverence and unrighteousness
the tackling of generational traumas
the overcoming of fear
the pride of resilience

Layers of heated memory
Deemed villainous
Tossed into the ashes
By thieves, those who dread
The power that it brings
And the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers

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