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[with 3 poems by Linda Allardt]
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Rx
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Spend more time looking into woods
watching the black squirrel
chasing the sparrows off his branch.
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Get to know the stranger your friends know,
the one you can only see in snapshots,
the profile they know as you.
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Smile in your sleep and wake not knowing why
like a writer trying to remember
that perfect lost line.
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Consider the judgement of trees
branching, dividing to hold up their leaves
to all available sun.
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Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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For now we see as in a dim mirror, but then face to face.
Apostle Paul to the believers at Corinth
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Piedmont prairie restoration – Land Conservancy riparian easements protect the Mitchell River here in Surry County. Might this be how the Blue Ridge foothills appeared before tobacco and soybeans? Mitigation suggests alternate water sources to keep cattle out of creeks and plowing and planting practices that reduce runoff; restoration envisions a renewed and brighter landscape. A few years ago, Linda and I joined a guided hike to see the autumn butterflies attracted to milkweed, thistle, yellow asters in the newly planted prarie. We also discovered a former cow pasture converted to native bunchgrass: redtop, foxtail, bluestem. Startling diversity and color. The brightest of mornings.
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Here we are on an unmarked trail that leads through tall flowers, seedheads, leaping and flying things, then gently on downslope until we reach the South Fork of the Mitchell. The overshaded water is so fresh and clear we imagine we might count every dapple on a brook trout’s flank. We continue downstream in twos and threes past riffles, rainbows of polished riverstones, and sweet bank vegetation toward the meeting of mountain streams. Cool riverbreath, talkative watercourse, whispering hikers – now we reach the confluence.
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What is this magic, this mystery suddenly revealed? As the clear South Fork stream merges with the main channel, we perceive it dull and sluggish compared to the crystalline purity of the Mitchell it now encounters. Even the bright water we’ve followed is overshadowed by the brighter. We have looked through the flow to its bank and bed and been blind to the vestige of silt it still carries. At the confluence one’s eyes are opened to one’s true nature.
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❦
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The poems of Linda Allardt’s At the Confluence are deep and still as a dark glade with its secretive woodland stream. Linda wrote these between her eighty-sixth and ninety-third years, the final decade of a long life as writer and teacher, and her friend and student Kathleen A. Wakefield collected this volume for publication. Linda moves from the poet’s constant question, “Why am I here?” to the even more piercing question, “Why am I still here?”
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How to reply? The poems themselves are their answer. I count the years from the stumps in the yard . . . in the things that are gone. . . . Then I count what still stands. Each of the short poems is an observation and a contemplation. Oh yes, a long life must heft its burden of regrets: How many mea culpas must be said . . . Wasn’t there, once, the right question, / and the right answer to it? But astounding as it may seem, even written in one’s ninth decade, this is not a book of looking back but of looking forward. And even more, a book that in looking outward looks within. May each of us look past the dark swirl we carry to glimpse the bright truth that is our nature.
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[Order At the Confluence from FootHills Publishing HERE]
[Kathleen Wakefield would appreciate your reactions to these poems by her friend; you can reach her at COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM]
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Retrieval
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So much is hidden,
what’s past forgotten
or in its slow retrieval rewritten.
What we think we know
is lost in the telling.
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Yet echoes of half forgotten lines
like wind in the wiring
remind us of words once loved
and only half forgotten.
Lines we may have read somewhere,
or written.
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Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In Late November
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I said to the trees, Let go
but the wind-lashed leaves hung on.
I asked them why.
The trees said, You let go,
but I hung on at 93,
knowing no more than the leaves
what handclasp holds us here.
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Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
this lovely oet had me at “spend more time”
thank you
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Yes, it’s just the right prescription, isn’t it? And takes me places I wasn’t expecting. —B
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I meant lovely POET
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These poems are beautiful, poignant an invitation to hold on. I enjoyed your essay. We own a stretch of pristine Stillhouse Branch on Linville Mountain. It is a treasure we hope remains after we can no longer hold on.
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Thanks, Les. I’d love to walk that mountainside with you someday.
Have you considered a Conservation Easement? —B
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We have looked into the Foothills Nature Conservancy. There may be options, but without long-term care insurance, the property may be our lifeline. We hope that we have instilled in oue daughter the same desire to protect the land if we get to pass it to her. We have 80 acres, no old growth, but it hasn’t been cut since the 1940s. A natural rockbound pool in the branch is where I learned to swim.
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So lovely . . . —B
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As usual, your Verse & Image drove me to deeper study and understanding through poetry. Thanks, Bill
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Thanks, Neighbor. Great morning working on the MST yesterday! —B
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