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[with poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]
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Letting Go
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Today the trees release their leaves. The wind
a breath that calls the colors down to earth –
wild dance with crimson, gold and brown
aloft in death, unfurling flaming fields
and forest floor. If I could hurl myself
like this into each ending, long for nothing
sure or safe,
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+++++ descend, a woman trusting the fall,
I’d release all claim to expectation,
breathe the air of possibility,
find beginnings everywhere.
I’d settle down to loamy earth long enough
to nourish what waits, growing still
in the summons from a savage world.
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Pat Riviere-Seel
from Nothing Below But Air, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2014
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Books are patient. Perhaps not the words within their pages, sometimes so flash-in-the-pan, sometimes arrogantly urgent, even caustic. Paragraphs may wheedle, whine, cajole, browbeat. Paper, on the other hand, ink and glue, they will wait for you as long as they must. As long as it takes. If you care for a book, it will not curl its covers like the arms across her chest of a seven-year old who scowls as you attend to something that is not her. The book is patient. It will be ready when you are, and only then.
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Which means, I suppose, that I’m ready. I spy the name on its slender spine, wiggle it free while its companions try to slide out with it (Now, now, patience!). I’ve know it was in the pile waiting for me. I know I’ve opened it a time or two in some misty past. I know I will recognize some of the poems on its pages. But this is the day I, it, we have been waiting for. I sit down, open to the title page, turn once to read the contents and section headings, move on to the first poem prepared to read every page until it ends. I enter the book’s world.
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Please don’t scoff “cliché” when I tell you this book has transported me. The poems ignore any strictures of time and space; on each page I land in another moment of the writer’s life and I live it with her. Perhaps a few minutes pass, perhaps an hour, but when I lay the book down again I discover I am in a different place. Doesn’t each journey create a new journeyer? I look around, I blink, I realize I know things and have felt things I never knew or felt before.
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More than twenty years ago, at one of the first North Carolina Poetry Society meetings I ever attended, I discovered myself in conversation with a red-haired woman describing the poem she had just shared at open mic, and how she’d recently attended a family reunion in Lewisville, NC. “Interesting,” I said, “A few years before my grandmother died we had a big reunion of her family in Lewisville. At the little Methodist church there. My great-great-great-grandfather is buried in the churchyard.” “Why, that’s were we had our reunion, too. My great-great-grandfather was once minister and is buried there. His name was Doub.” “As in Reverend J.N.S Doub? My Mom’s great-great-grandfather?!” Thus the beginning of an enduring friendship with my third cousin once removed, Pat Riviere-Seel.
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Pat’s wonderful Nothing Below But Air has been more than worth the wait. The title is perfectly apt. Pat explores every relationship, whether with family, parents, lovers, with no safety net and no climbing harness. Will she fall? Don’t we all? The most dangerous and revealing relationship she explores is with herself, the self that evolves and grows from youthful mistakes through adult rebellion toward confident maturity. She through her poems emerges finally into that honest self-awareness and humility that only come when you’re willing to leap. And for the nosy cousin, scattered among the poems is evidence of the wildest, highest leap of all, her late-in-life marriage to Ed. Happy 26th anniversary, Cousin, coming up on November 29! And thank you for this rich and personal poetry, as always enriching our friendship.
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You can still order your copy of Nothing Below But Air from the Main Street Rag bookstore. It is still waiting for you. Patiently.
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. . . and discover more from Pat Riviere-Seel HERE . . .
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I took today’s photographs on July 6, 2023 at the North Carolina Aquarium in Pine Knoll Shores. There are also NC Aquaria in Manteo on Roanoke Island, at Fort Fisher near Kure Beach, and on Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head. Each is different from the others and each worth a visit.
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What Emmett Saw
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I outran a storm as he took aim,
his lens focused on distant clouds.
Next morning my anonymous back
appeared in black and white, front page,
local section. Gathering Storm, the caption read.
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I held a backbend till my spine
almost snapped so he could photograph
my profile against the setting sun.
I mounted rooftops, shook
my rusty curls over staircase railings.
I shimmied into trees and once sat
hours under white lights, watching him
watch me. Behind the bellows
he framed a girl whose portrait
won him best in show. It hangs now
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on my bedroom wall, passport
to the days with Emmett,
who embraced grassy slopes,
winter limbs, captured
the woman I was becoming.
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It was the year I exploded –
my first husband, gone
before I turned twenty. Good
sense abandoned, I coiled,
a copperhead ready to sing my fangs
into kindness – showed up drunk
or stoned, canceled dates,
used every curse word I know
but banished all endearments.
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Emmett endured.
I did everything he asked,
even walked the railroad trestle
at dawn in a white bikini –
stumbling, heavy with sleep,
my feet perched on a metal rail
and nothing below but air.
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Pat Riviere-Seel
from Nothing Below But Air, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2014
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First Question
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After the introductions, polite talk
about what brought you here,
twenty miles from the nearest town,
someone always asks, what do you do?
not meaning what is your job-title-status,
but what sustains you,
how the rhythm of your life
keeps you alive.
+++++ Here it is enough
to garden, to run, to knit,
to wipe sot from small noses,
to brush horses in twilight, to spend
your nights on Celo Knob, to know
the names of wildflower, to let
your breath count the hours.
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Pat Riviere-Seel
from Nothing Below But Air, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2014
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There must be hundreds of ways to read books, but here’s my favorite for a volume of poetry: phone and computer in another room, on the couch with my feet up or better yet out on the screened porch, ceiling fan in summer, warm jacket in winter. I ignore the cover blurbs until later – this is my time to spend with these poems – then I read straight through from the table of contents to the endnotes. Maybe it takes more than one sitting. Maybe I read some pages more than once. Straight through, though, is a way to connect on a deeper level with the writer, who no doubt had all these poems spread out on the living room floor for days trying to figure out which one should come next. And did figure it out.
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And each book flies its own little banner, an index card for notes. I jot page number and titles I want to return to. I copy out lines that just slay me. I discover themes or recurrent images. After the final page I go back through and read my favorites again. And then one more process before I share these poems with you, O unusually dedicated reader of this blog to have made it this far down the screen – I type the poems out myself. Interesting how re-typing a poem can reveal the bones beneath its skin, make its whispers audible.
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Thank you for sharing this space and for enlarging the joy that poetry creates
— Bill
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thanks, Mary Alice. Yes, Richard's poetry makes me feel that I live more deeply on earth, with all of us.…