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

Archive for September, 2023

Expected and Unexpected

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, FATES, imagery, Katherine Soniat, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Starfish Wash-Up on September 8, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with two poems by Katherine Soniat]

The Right Frequency

allows the next stillness to occur. Welcome each space

as it appears but confirm slowly –

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ as if an adage drifting

down through centuries of smoke.

Try a later roll in summer grass with its sundial fingers

holding you on top the seven-veiled mysteries

of green.

Above that, motionless clouds predict it’s never lickety-split

to the apparent state that counts.

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Urn, goat, and crimson altar-cloth

are flighty suggestions, hard to pin down despite humans

and their sharpened articles of faith.

Tie a select few to the calf-bell of dogma, then with due respect

leave the dotted lines.

Maybe even get off your mount (the high one) and walk beside

those roped or chained, and stumbling.

Each time you are kind, feel how your breath changes,

the frequency of birds at dusk settling in.

Be aware. ++++ ++++ ++++ One pivotal moment

++++ does not foreshadow a calmer forever on earth.

Katherine Soniat

from Starfish Wash-Up

❦ ❦ ❦

The fence will squander its energy through juicy longstem grasses, nutsedges, greeny ferns, the unimpeded conduction of their potassium solute intracellular conduit. Grounded, not shocking. And so the cattle farmer may be forgiven for having applied his two-foot swath of herbicide all down the half mile of the fence’s length. Nevertheless, even months later we measure this still brown compacted earth and imagine what’s been lost. We do not expect to find the blossoms of September a year ago.

Nevertheless, here they are. Oh yes, beyond the fence’s reach where moisture seeps down from the upslope we find exactly what we expected: Ironweed, Cardinal Flower, Crownbeard. And within the fence’s boundary, where grazers have not been re-introduced this summer, we are not at all surprised to discover swath upon swath of Meadow Beauties. But here before us we suddenly come upon precisely what we had not expected to discover: two low herbs with blue thumbnail flowers.

The hikers walking up behind me are a little rattled when I shout, “Look at this!” I point out the swoop of curving stamens and the spotted lower petals and they say, “How nice,” then move along down the trail possibly hoping I won’t be following them too closely, but as of this moment I am having a very good day.

❦

Katherine Soniat’s poems do not enter at the front door and take a companionable seat at the kitchen table. They shift, they transform, they bury their meaning then suddenly burst forth. To read Starfish Wash-Up, I find I must lay my expectations aside. If I stare at the lines too hard they elude me, but then pages later the unexpected connection emerges and allows itself to be recognized. Soniat describes this as “a dissolving context in which time and space blur – only to reassemble in as part of the vaguely familiar.” The themes I sense, across time and generations, are father / daughter, separation / blame, searching / belonging. The two poems I’ve chosen here display these in their own right without requiring the context of the entire collection to fully convey meaning. To read most of the poems, though, one must read all the poems.

This is an unusual and unique book, disturbing at times. The entire volume is titled FATES and it actually includes full-length works by three poets: The Medea Notebooks by Ann Pedone, Starfish Wash-Up by Katherine Soniat, and overflow of an unknown self by D. M. Spitzer. The three collections are completely different in style but their themes and tropes intertwine and challenge. I am repeatedly wrenched from my comfortable perch and yanked into these narratives. As Ann Pedone writes in Jason Confronts Medea, We soak our bodies in the oil of words / all our lives and yet now / after the thousands we have / spoken to each other / you are as strange to me / as the dark-eared goats / feeding on the grasses / beneath your feet.

❦ ❦ ❦

Kingdom

There could have been time for another life before the strong March wind

swept us from us from all-fours, and dropped us near water.

Mirrors waiting.

No denying that the Nth degree of the unknown is upon us, and there’s no hint

of direction for our wasted planet. Our run at flamboyantly hot lifestyles shrunk

the ice (and more) to pieces. Huff ant strut, and we’ve about destroyed

the globe.

We mark time, belch, and remain on the lookout for chatter, though truth is

we are most awkward within the family circle where the food tastes good

bu the term lineage shows ugly signs of meltdown.

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Who sits where

at the last family feast (?) when any mention of disagreement is met

with angular glares of Thou shalt not repeat tales of personal or climate crisis.

And thou shalt instead sip all thy wine then nod at the endlessly grinning?

My determined place at that annual folly? I doze with my clutch of poems

in the family broom-closet – me, yet another calculated risk to the authenticity

of family history.

++++ ++++ ++++ Cursing in couplets, tweeting of human drift measured in masses:

poor continental wanderers – lost infants, men and women. The elders choking on

water, while in my pine-oiled burrow I grow heavy and sniff broom straw – one

way back to the lost animal kingdom.

Katherine Soniat

from Starfish Wash-Up

❦ ❦ ❦

Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.

Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”

Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here in my weekly posts and of the literary arts!

You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:

++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.

++++++ Elkin, NC 28621

Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.

If you would prefer to pay via PayPal or Zelle, please contact me for transaction details at:

++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com

[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]

❦ ❦ ❦

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Water Dreams

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Jack Coulehan, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, The Talking Cure on September 1, 2023| 10 Comments »

[ with 3 poems by Jack Coulehan]

Darwin’s Prayer

++++ He saw Darwin on his knees, and there

++++ was no difference between prayer and

++++ pulling a worm from the grass.

++++++++ Roger McDonald, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter

Bright bunches

of gardenias

bloom in November,

the loam at their feet

moistened by dew

and spongy with debris.

As I fill my container

with handfuls of earth

alive with these

marvelous worms,

perfected in being

by the wisdom

of randomness,

I’m astonished

by gratitude.

Jack Coulehan

❦ ❦ ❦

Last night the storm whispered its secrets into my dreams. A long dryness, a vain hoping. This morning the drought has ended and flood warnings will as well in an hour or so. Linda and I head to the E&A rail trail beside Elkin Creek to laugh and point at the heights reached by frothy current. To breathe in the hot seethe and funk of saturated forest. To celebrate.

The sadness of the creek slams us, stops us, stills us. Its churning water is the color of pumpkin soup; Spike the Heron does not stalk here; the rattle of Kingfisher is silent, fled. Oh yes, we generally get muddy after a downpour, but never this bad. Miles from here, north of Carter Falls, the dry weeks have parched and cracked 500 acres of tobacco field. No riparian buffer, no catchment pond, not one single fuck does the tobacco farmer give for all of us downstream: when rain eventually returns it can’t slow itself, can’t soak the earth. It has no choice but to sluice foaming into the creek carrying inch-acres of red clay with it.

❦

The poems in Jack Coulehan’s The Talking Cure are expansive; they span the human experience and human influence. Many of his poems have arisen from his decades as teacher, physician, healer; the lines are populated by his patients and their struggles. So often these lines also reflect his own struggle, both to heal and be healed. Other poems explore his family through the generations. Others reflect his deep relationship with literary figures that formed him and with teachers who informed him.

In all of these poems I sense a web of connection. As humans we must all struggle to discover our purpose in being. In this struggle each of us is touched by the people we allow to approach us, to close in, to climb over the wall. And each of us touches others and touches the earth: the human experience and the human influence.

I selected these three poems in particular for their focused peering into that influence, and also for their universality. Jack Coulehan is a humanist, a person who believes that human beings have it within their power to improve the lives of other people whom they are willing to touch. So often, so easily and thoughtlessly, so many of us focus only on our power to dominate, to harm. We easily destroy the earth itself without even noticing. Let us stop and think. Let us feel. Let us touch and allow ourselves to be touched. Perhaps each of our individual lives can enlarge its span. The power of many begins with the power of one.

We are all downstream from someone, and all upstream.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Cherry Orchard

++++ If a great many remedies

++++ are suggested for some disease,

++++ it means the disease is incurable.

++++++++ Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

The end of the century

has come upon us

without a sign of release

or the beginning of justice.

We’re selling the orchard

to pay our debts

and reminiscing about

love’s excitements,

life’s mistakes. I suspect

a century ago the hearts

of the people sitting here

were just as generous,

intense, and cruel as ours.

A miniature flower

thrives in the moisture

and dust of a broken

pavement – this is the gist

of the matter. We want

so strongly to believe

the flower will spread

everywhere. How quickly

it dies! If the disease

had a cure, we would not need

so many remedies.

Jack Coulehan

❦ ❦ ❦
.

Garden of Endurance

++++ Cassia grandis, Costa Rica

Cassia fruit covers the forest floor,

a blanket of black sausage stinking

in the heat as it decomposes,

a mote in the eye of permanence.

Built for grinding by gigantic teeth,

Cassia’s fibrous case condemns its seeds

to suffering, with neither mastodon

nor megatherium alive to free them

and distribute their undigested life

in mounds of shit. Its glory left behind

by climate, tooth, and claw, Cassia

endures by the grace of rodents

that gnaw its weakest fibers

and let a few fertile seeds escape

before they rot. Anachronistic

fruit, your survival – sweet tickle

of a breeze, illusion of peace,

diminishment that overcomes

extinction – is an inheritance

for my kind, too. A hopeful omen.

Jack Coulehan

For additional poems by Jack Coulehan, see last week’s post, Plow Straight, from August 25, 2023.

❦ ❦ ❦

Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.

Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”

You may sample the opening poem from the collection here:

Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here and of the literary arts!

You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:

++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.

++++++ Elkin, NC 28621

Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.

If you would prefer to pay via PayPal, please contact me for transaction details at:

++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com

[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]

❦ ❦ ❦