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[with 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor]
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What’s Happening?
+++ after Choices, a watercolor by Catherine Mainous
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Of course, I recognize it right away,
this landscape where past and present
bleed into future, as I have bled,
as we all do. I start green and work
my way up, grasping at blue. Earth
always reaches for sky, the tiniest seed
pokes through saltmarsh and sawgrass,
green fingers periscopes looking for light.
I always look for dawn. No, that’s wrong.
Sometimes, I search for dark and find it.
The light comes later, after regret, guilt.
See how that diffused orange glare
in the corner blurs into a bridge
to nowhere, skeletal structure
never completed. That’s what
you get with unrequited ambition.
Beginning, middle, no end.
A purple cloud in the distance.
A crane untethered.
An unexpected answer
to an unexpected question.
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Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
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She doesn’t believe in inertia. If I take both hands off the wheel for a femtosecond, she’s convinced we will instantly swerve into the embankment.
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She does believe in gravity. Since my last birthday she has forbidden me from using the stepladder to hang Christmas lights on the dwarf spruce in our front yard, much less reach to get the star on top.
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She absolutely rejects Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty. Whether I can detect them or not, my keys are fixed in place right where I left them.
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She’s a little iffy on the conservation of angular momentum. If I accelerate into a curve to maintain a constant forward velocity, she wants to know why I’m speeding.
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She accepts evolutionary biology without complaint but wanders from the straight and narrow of taxonomic hierarchy. Lizards and toads she seeks out as cute; snakes are OK only behind glass; spiders and gigantic roaches, even millipedes, she captures under a paper cup, slides a birthday card beneath, and relocates into the yard; fruit flies and ants must die.
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And the law of love? It is, of course, not exclusively physics and biology. It also includes the law of culture and connection, of which she is founder and curator. When a particular issue of National Geographic reaches its twentieth birthday, she tears out each article worth saving and files it, astrophysics to zoology. She will let me re-read them if I but ask.
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One more thing about the law of love: it seems to disobey Newton’s third law of motion. For each of my own actions – and how often they do violate something – there is a reaction, but thank God not opposite and equal. However sharp her initial glance and inflection, the ultimate consequence so far has been forgiveness. This is one universe I am happy to live in.
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The Second Law of the Apple
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If the first law was not to take
the first bite, lest you be banished
from the garden, the second law
ought to be to finish what you start,
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meaning the first bite obligates you
to a second, and a third, and so on
until the apple is eaten, except
for the core, which contains
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the seeds, and sine you will be
traveling anyway, away from
the garden that spit you out,
you might as well learn
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banishment from one place is not
the end, but merely another beginning,
and what you do with the seeds
is everything.
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Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Richard Allen Taylor is part of the holy jangle of things / fastened to the belt loop of a forgetful world. The poems in Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems are able to weave from the commonplace and humbly wonderful things of this world a sweet sadness . . . droll observations . . . life-giving joy. And some good jokes.
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We knew this first collection since Richard’s wife’s death from leukemia would build a house for grief and healing. Who knew that Karen Carpenter would lend such a hand, but Richard weaves remembrance and biography together into powerful metaphors for attachment and loss. These poems speak to grieving with the whispered voice of his late wife, Julie – a mellow bell rings in the canyon. / And the canyon is me – as well as in Richard’s own sure voice of seeking, his wisdom steadily revealed as one that doesn’t cry for answers but is happy to linger with the important questions. All the old questions / that rise in the wake of storms: each of us must confront and accept these questions if we are to be fully alive. Autumn fades, winter enfolds us, but the seasons continue to turn. At the end of everything is not sadness but wonder, friendship, and love.
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Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems is available from Main Street Rag HERE
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I Write to You About Julie, My Wife
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I named a star after her. Astronomers call it
HD 10180. Both Julies—the woman I remember
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and her eponymous star—emit a kind and generous
light. The star deserves a name that twinkles, and she
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deserves the star. I never called her HD 10180,
but often call the star Julie. I chose it out of billions
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because, like you, Julie got along so well with others—
none of that blasting the neighbors with deadly gamma
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ray bursts, the way some pulsars do. And like the star,
my wife, when she was alive, had a family that orbited
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her adoringly. Astronomers have identified a possible
gas giant, designated HD 10180g, residing comfortably
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in Julie’s habitable zone, and—though the giant’s crushing
gravity could never support planetary life, they may find
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moons that do. Suspected of strong winds and colorful
bands, without Julie’s life-giving warmth and shine,
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HD 10180g would be little more than a vast frozen cloud,
a derelict adrift in deep space. I wish I could point out Julie
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to you, but it’s in the constellation Hydrus, which is only
observed from the Southern Hemisphere, and, though
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brighter than our own sun, Julie resides one hundred and
twenty-seven light-years away. We’d need a telescope.
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I understand your concern that the striking similarity
between the designations HD 10180 and HD 10180g
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might confuse some observers. Don’t worry.
To anyone who ever saw us together, it’s obvious
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I am the gas giant, and she is the star.
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Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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ECOPOETRY FOR EARTH DAY 2024
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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
+++ — John Muir
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VERSE & IMAGE is seeking poetry to celebrate Earth Day, April 22, throughout National Poetry Month. Do you have a favorite poem that speaks to universal interconnectedness, as in the above quotation? Send it to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com by April 10 and we may share it in one of several posts dedicated to living together on our living planet.
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Please read these guidelines:
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Deadline April 10, 2024, midnight Eastern Daylight Time USA
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Send ONE poem by any author except yourself addressing the theme of connections.
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Include the full text of the poem in the body of an email or as a .DOC or .RTF attachment to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com. Please add info about where the poem is published.
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Also include a personal statement – how do you feel connected to this poem? What does it mean to you? How has it connected you to the earth? [suggest 100 words or so; may be edited for length]
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Visit GriffinPoetry.com between April 15 and April 30 to see if your poem has been selected for presentation.
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Optional: if you submit one poem by an author other than yourself, you may also submit one poem on the same theme that you have written. We prefer previously published – include acknowledgments.
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Richard Allen Taylor is one of my favorite people an a wondefully accessible and at times quirky poets. But, Letters to Karen Carpenter is his grief catharsis. The poems are express grief and love.
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Thanks Les; I agree totally. Richard pours himself into these poems so that even in the midst of grieving one glimpses his smile. —B
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By coincidence (or not?) Richard Allen Taylor will be reading from his new book this Sunday at 2:00 at McIntyre’s Books in Pittsboro (Fearrington). The reading series is sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.
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Thanks for the reminder, Joan. Not to be missed! —B
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“At the end of everything is not sadness, but wonder, friendship, and love.” Thank you for this, Bill. It is enough, as Richard’s poems in this latest collection affirm.
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Love, sadness, joy, all balled up together in this messy wonderful life. —B
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This is a comment we received from Diana Pinckney:
First of all, I have always enjoyed Richard Allen Taylor’s poems and his books. There is both sadness and humor in them as is true of his latest book, Letters to Karen Carpenter. Richard’s book is a love letter to his wife, Julie, who died of cancer. It is rich with portraits of her, her kindness, her gentleness, her courage. There are other poems in the book not of this nature, but I’m caught in the web of his grief and his love for his lost wife.
I highly recommend this book, whether you have lost a loved one or not. But then, most or many of us have.
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