February | 2024 | V E R S E and I M A G E

Archive for February, 2024

Embrace

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, Joanie McLean, Like Wind into Air, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 23, 2024| 11 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Joanie McLean]

Here Is What’s Left

Summer wanes as usual

the Rudbeckia succumbs

to mildew and wilt

the figs fall

under the weight

of sucking junebugs

the pond is muddy

scummed over and still

even the birds are quiet

their calls diminished

Looking out

at the brittle grass

in the crickety field

I see scraps and tatters

of old assumptions

of unearned grace

being dragged away

with the season’s remnants:

a semblance of security here

a shadow of normalcy there

pieces of convenience

disjointed shapes

of good times

all crumbling

as they go

leaving a light breeze

to stir the stillness

amidst the nodding

muhly grass plumes

So then

here is what’s left

the grass

the breeze

the slipping light

the emptiness

whose touch is so gentle

the kindness of it all

Joanie McLean

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Yesterday I took Dad and Mom to visit a senior living facility. After the tour we stayed for lunch, Dad and Mom seated at a table with two of the residents, Pat and Ken. Mary Ellen and I watched from a distance as Dad introduced himself and made conversation, charming, just charming. He and Mom seemed to be enjoying themselves. When we got home, I asked Dad for his impressions. “The place is nicely decorated, looks like it’s been painted. The lunch was good.” But when I asked if there were any negatives, he surprised me – “The people were all really old.”

Perhaps every ninety-seven year old man lives in a universe of constricted perspective. Just breathing, minute by minute, may exhaust all of his empathic resources; every event of the moment becomes wholly self-referential. Nevertheless I will grant Dad this: when he says, “They were all worse off than I am,” maybe it is true that none have retained their social skills like he has.

What about the seventy-one year old man? What is the insurmountable impediment inherent in becoming me-in-relationship with another? I watch myself constantly calculating how I will respond, or reflecting (regretting) how I have responded. I begin to see the other as the obstacle, the hurdle I must leap to become the actual me.

Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to labor in vain, for the two fires have become one. . . Teresa of Avila

And yet this is still me as observer and not as participant. Me watching and not being. Even if all others were to acquiesce and I in sidestepping could imagine my way forward now open and free and unhindered, I would still be tethered to me-in-relationship with myself. I am standing in my own way. I live by formulations and ruminations. I imagine it is the others who prescribe their expectations of me, but really I am the prescriber. I am the one who builds these enclosures.

Mystics and sages of all traditions speak of the inner fire, the divine spark hidden in our very cells and in all that lives. This flame of love is the pure presence of God. . . Paula D’Arcy

Do I spy a chink in the wall? The clamor of the world is not going to hush on my account, but perhaps I can press my eye up to the barrier and discern a little light. Not another book of philosophy or science, not a lambast of revelation or a self-created masterpiece – just a small warm flame. For even just a moment, let it burn. Let it burn me. Let it burn in me. May I glimpse me-in-relationship with all.

Becoming fire means saying yes to life by the very way we live. . . Christine Valters Paintner

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Still With the Light

First Sunday

after the first full moon

after the Spring Equinox

Easter morning for some

here on this particular land mass

so often a lovely day

at this latitude so often

a sort of gentleness

a willingness to smile

conveyed in the watery

green light that shimmers

and steps across

church lawns

and across my yard

where bluebirds jump

from the fence wire

into the broomsedge

and flutter back up

with crickets in their bills.

There is something else

shifting like clouds

below a horizon

insinuating just beyond

these Easter lawns –

something that would

come near now

if I let it

would bend this light

differently

would spurn

this morning’s naive smile.

So I stand

as still as I can

with the light

the breeze shifting

the shadows

the bluebirds

dropping and rising

that’s all

just this holy light

just for now.

Joanie McLean

❦ ❦ ❦

I am jealous of these poems. No, not jealousy with its sour tang of spite. I desire these poems. I long for them; I long to walk where they walk; I long to lie down in their grass. May I not also please hear the cuckoo and the woodcock, sense the coyote just down the path, know the secret of every color and flavor of light?

Like Wind into Air by Joanie McLean sustains the beautiful image and promise of that title throughout its pages. Everything enters into everything, every season lives its truth, every life swirls and connects to every other: all-in-relationship-to-all. The poet gently dissolves every barrier between the reader and her world. In the grass in the slough in the stand of pines / life and death are fully accountable / part of a bargain –

May I be as emptied and as filled as these poems? May I enter the poems’ world? And as I embrace their world may I not escape my own world but embrace it as well? This is the point of the poetry; this is the point of love.

❦

Joanie McLean’s Like Wind into Air at Redhawk Publications HERE

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In Late February

there is always

a wind in the woods

a basso continuo hum,

the fugue the chorus frogs

play toccata against,

the sound memory makes

when it wakes and rises

up through the earth

towards sleeping roots.

The field has forgotten

about summer and bees

and lightning.

But the trees,

whose roots are deepest,

are remembering something

and the frogs,

whose sleep is the lightest,

are dying to hear it.

Of course February

would sing like this

whether I heard it or not.

But again this year

I am here in the field,

at the edge of the woods.

Joanie McLean

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Boyanimal

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Don Ball, imagery, Janis Harrington, nature photography, NC Poets, Pam Baggett, Peter Makuck, poetry, Southern writing, Tar River Poetry on February 16, 2024| 6 Comments »

[with 3 poems from Tar River Poetry]

Submersible

+++ “Red Sky at Morning”

++++++ – for Peter Makuck

All day and into the evening sullen rain has bucketed dow upon us,

and I think of Peter and the blue-black coastal squalls purpling seaward.

Ignoring heavy weather is what natives do on Emerald Isle. Years ago

I failed to talk him and Phyllis into fleeing Hurricane Florence, a monster

storm grinding on Wilmington. Likewise, I used to remind my rother

at Kitty Hawk, half-joking, that he lived in the middle of the god-damned

Atlantic Ocean. He never listened either – even after his son refused

evacuation from Hurricane Isobel and almost drowned inside their cottage

with his loyal dog and bobbing bamboo furniture. Tenaciously, Peter and

Phyllis have been anchored to their apartment for years, weathering cancer

treatments and the Pandemic. Finally – like my father decades ago –

Peter had had enough of chemo, remission, drug cocktails and radiation,

so six weeks back he stopped. Meanwhile the world obsesses over five men

trapped in the submersible Titan, its only hatch bolted from the outside and

the seven ways it’s supposed to shed weight and resurface from its great drop

down to Titanic’s ghost spines. The one porthole is small. They’re out of air.

Peter too has begun a long descent through the murky waters of memory,

morphine, and goodby to land finally (I hope) upon the soft silt of forever.

Everyone’s half-waiting for the last storm to fade and for Peter – teacher, poet,

and sailor – to resurface and note with delight, again, a red sky at night.

Don Ball

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

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As soon as he hops from the car he’s Tyrannosaurus, miniature dangling forelegs, ferocious jaw gaping as he swivels his head side to side, Linda and me his prey. While we wait for food Chameleon appears, thin compressed lips, deliberate robot-like ratcheting gait, front digits at right angles all asplay. Later we interrupt our walk for him to climb the big rock, Gila Monster, but then he elongates his body along a fissure and becomes Chuckwalla.

Boys are animals. This boy, though, is the master of animals. Not only in transforming himself one into another but also in the thousand and one details he can tell us about their lives and characteristics. We imagine his kindergarten teacher’s eyebrows rising higher and higher at the revelations he pours forth. And what is the best place to really mix it up with animals? Besides, that is, the back yard – bird feeders, bunnies, snakes, hens – and walks along the greenway – deer, skinks, herons, eagles? Well, of course the North Carolina Zoological Park!

This is the second straight year we’ve spent my birthday at the Zoo with Bert. And with about a thousand other boys and girls of every possible age, shape, size, and color. Come to the Zoo and see the wild children! What other place can keep kids walking for hours and miles with minimal meltdowns? (And what other place features Polar Bear pee and Gorilla poop, fascinating stuff.) Just pack plenty of snacks and you won’t hear the first whine. And while we adults are rewarded minute by minute with Bert’s company, it’s only fair to end the day with one final reward for him at the gift shop. Another addition to the home menagerie. Next time we’re together, I’ll be sure to keep my fingers to myself when Boy Snapping Turtle meets me at the door.

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The Dead

We want to button them to us,

wear them like clothes. We want

to savor our morning café au lait

with them, hold yoga poses,

walk dogs, skateboard, eat sushi,

rake leaves, stream movies, tango

dribble basketballs with them.

We want them to ride beside us,

windows down, singing

along with our favorite playlists.

We want to tuck them in books

to mark our place, jingle them

in our pockets, lucky coins,

hook them over our arms

like umbrellas to keep us dry.

Coming home at night, we want

the porchlight’s yellow halo

to mean they’re waiting up.

As our key turns the lock,

we pray they’ll call out to us

from the empty rooms

of our dark house.

Janis Harrington

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

I first immersed myself in Peter Makuck’s poetry when I was poet-in-residence at the NC Zoo in 2012. I was working on the Poetry of Conservation project, selecting poems by North Carolina writers that might be displayed in the park, and I also published daily posts of my observations (spending all day every day in the Zoo – it doesn’t get better than that!). In my very first post I featured Peter’s poem, My Son Draws an Apple Tree, a beautifully simple poem that cuts to the truth of the bittersweet relationship between father and son. Peter’s collection in which the poem appears, Long Lens, is filled with generous, haunting, contemplative recollections and themes.

Peter Makuck founded Tar River Poetry and served as its editor for decades during his tenure at East Carolina University. The current issue arrived this week [vol 63, nr 1, fall 2023] and is dedicated to him – he died last year at the age of 83. Peter inspired me through his writing but equally through his generosity and friendship. Somehow we struck up an email correspondence through the years, first about poetry, then about the NC coast, nature sightings, just stuff we discovered we had in common. Even when wearing his editor’s hat – and I have accumulated more rejections than acceptances from him and Luke Whisnant, the current editor – he was never anything but encouraging and giving of himself. He would have liked me to believe that I, even I, could write poetry as worthy as his own.

❦

Tar River Poetry is a journal of national stature and reputation, but the three poems I’ve featured today are all by North Carolina writers who appear in this current issue (the wonderful poem One Year Old by Rebecca Baggett is also in this issue but space constraints etc.). Check out TRP and join me in subscribing HERE

Long Lens by Peter Makuck is available HERE. Learn more about Peter and his other books HERE

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Picking Up Trash with My Sister

on Crab Orchard Road

She plunges a foot into the dry ditch,

tosses cans, plastic bottles, empty

cigarette packs onto the gravel road

so we can sort them into garbage

and recycling. As she works she asks,

Is this poison ivy? Is this?, trusting me

to protect her as I’ve trusted her since my beginning,

older sister in pictures at ages five and three,

reading to me as we sit on the sofa,

feet sticking straight out, book open in her lap,

pink cat’s eye classes she pushed with one finger

back up her nose.

And later, at nine and eleven, trying

to sooth with the only stories that made sense:

we’re fleeing the potato famine in Ireland

or Nazis coming to take us away

that morning we heaped dolls into blankets,

shoved clothes into flowered suitcases, fearing

each floorboard creak might be our father

come home to carry out night’s drunken threat

to shoot our mother.

My sister stomps a beer can flat,

drops it in her bag, slips a Styrofoam cup

into mine. Who would do this? she says,

shaking her head, pushing dark purple glasses

with one finger back up her nose. She twists the lid

from a water bottle, pours the last sip

over the roots of a wilted aster

Pam Baggett

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

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Old Sam Peabody

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Essential, imagery, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 9, 2024| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Jenny Bates]

Essential

Trees are a gathering of circles.

If I touch this tree

say your name,

Light from the moon, the stars

will burn inside it.

Frost kindles its leaves to flame,

Spills them on to yellowing grass.

Unchanged.

From prehistoric times the ages

are inconsolable, so they turn.

Mantle shadows by truly seeing them.

I tell you this as I touch the tree,

circle this tree, say your name.

The tree and its golden mean listen

without an ear to hear.

As you wear yourself out

with a single essential thought.

Give.

Jenny Bates

❦ ❦ ❦

Ah, February – enter the season of Romance! Naturalists will mark its approach with sightings of large red heart-shaped boxes lining the entrance to Food Lion. Outdoors we notice that, yes indeed, that gray squirrel robbing the feeder looks nicely plump: she will deliver her puplets in a high leafy nest on Saint V’s Day. Wood frogs and peepers, surprise!, have already begun to sing their amorous invitations to amplexus. Owls have a jump on the festivities, already nesting, while there is a general restiveness and revving among the yard birds.

For Linda and me, the end of winter and first blood flow of Spring are marked by a plaintive two note whistle issuing from the rhododendron. There it is again! A rising minor third, clear and bright, the introduction to a joyful motet, the Oh My! of Oh my Canada, Canada, Canada. The White-Throated Sparrow is tuning up.

Why do birds sing? All winter the white-throat has minded his own business, hopping in the litter beneath the feeders or posing quite sage in the azalea. Now he sings his first couple of notes, but within a few weeks he will have flown far from here to breed in Maine or Michigan or the infinite boreal forests of Canada. Why sing now? Obviously his whistling can’t be to establish a territory in our back yard. And it defies imagination to think he’d hope to attract a mate here in North Carolina and keep her by his side all the way to Quebec. Today’s song, to judge from the snippets and fragments he’s practicing, sounds like he’s just warming up tor the big date.

Here’s how I see him – my little White-Throated Sparrow is Jeremy Brett in My Fair Lady, walking down the street where she lives. He’s passed this way before, but today the pavement simply refuses to stay beneath his feet. Days lengthen and love fills his breast until it is impossible any longer to resist – it must overflow in song. And so although the street where she really lives is 1,000 miles from here, White Throat graces Linda and me here in the NC foothills with his opening aria of Romance. Ah, February!

❦

* The song of the White-Throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollia) comprises a couplet of long clear ascending whistles followed by three more rapid triplets, and can also be recalled by the mnemonic, Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

** On the Street Where You Live, 1956, Lerner & Lowe, from the musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn & Rex Harrison, with Jeremy Brett as Freddy singing: “I have often walked down this street before / but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. / All at once am I several stories high, / knowing I’m on the street where you live . . . .”

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Red and Green

where the surface of one thing meets the surface of another . . .

— William Bridges

You were twisting and turning

leaping and swerving a flame

on each foot, on a field so green

so green – so gorgeously

green, the earth’s addiction.

And you, warrior Fox as you fought

you fought off the mysterious foe, rattled like

a shaman losing part of his soul.

You danced between spirit and spirit and matter

danced all parts of your body a spontaneous me!

When you finally stopped puffing

from chaos, from chaos and glee you flowed

a rhythm of stillness – so still

you stood as if in meditation

and mantra on what you created.

Jenny Bates

❦ ❦ ❦

I have never met Jenny Bates but I imagine a visit to her home in the woods. Afternoon sun through west-facing panes is captured by glass in the colors of earth, sky, pasture, summer asters. We don’t remain indoors but take our mugs of oswego tea with local honey out beneath the pines. Dusk creeps in and we allow it to fill us with its silence. Creatures creep closer as well, wild but curious. If we were to threaten them, they would flee or turn and slash, but we and they simply remark each other’s presence and respect our distance. They go about their crepuscular business and grant us leave to be part of their universe. Being part of. Communion. Creating wholeness. The highest call and at once the most confounding task of the rational being.

This is also a visit to Jenny’s poetry in the woods. The universe Jenny Bates creates through words is one of deep acceptance and communion. Essential, from Redhawk Publications, continues her series of books which create a sort of natural theology. The You whom Jenny addresses in so many of her poems – is it God? A spirit familiar? A ghostly memory? Or is it the fox who stares cautiously from the edge of night? You might be a source of answers but more often is simply one with whom to share the questions. In this universe, there is no supernatural, only the fundamental reality that we are all one. One, that is, if we are able to open ourselves that much.

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Visit Redhawk Publications and purchase Essentials HERE

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Be Bold

I said to the Woodpecker

as I lifted it off the ground

cradled it for a half an hour, this

second Woodpecker to break its neck.

I’m no angel I said to him, though I’ve

been called it many times

a few drops of Be Bold I tell myself

when there is a need, but sometimes

those drops don’t soak in and I’m left

buckling to my knees.

The body will be gone by morning

and sure enough it was, yet still I

struggle How can one keep up with

death stare it in the face? Or program our

unconscious to react in certain ways?

Sweet smelling or dour unpleasant odors

are all we instinctively know, and here,

I’m not too Bold.

I placed the bird on one big leaf, hearing

another drum away

laid his head on dry curled grass

a pine bough for a wreath

both of us changed and changing

the pattern of our resonance.

Jenny Bates

❦ ❦ ❦

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? This morning I discover Romeo Sparrow perched in the Silverbell. He turns to gaze fondly at Juliet, perched one branch higher. Perhaps they have booked adjoining seats for the flight to their Canada!!