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

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Yellow

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, Li-Young Lee, nature photography, poetry, The Invention of the Darling on November 8, 2024| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Li-Young Lee]

The Unfound Room

She is humming in the other room.

Leaves are falling in one window

of the room in which I sit

listening to her.

Her voice comes to me

from another part of the house,

and with it

the image of her face.

Throughout our years together, that look of

absence from her body

and the melody it bears forth

and total presence to what she’s at

the time inclined to, her neck bent

toward the task or the thing her hands

are disposed to, possessed of, all of her

given, giving, all of her receiving the shape,

weight, texture, and grade of that particular

and momentary instant of her passing day.

O almost

all of her, since

part of her goes on humming

over and over that one slow phrase

of a song I can’t now place,

humming in a different part of our house,

While in the window before me

leaves are falling

from out of a gone part of our year.

She’s humming a wordless phrase, the song missing,

her voice bearing aloft a familiar bridge

broken off from the before and the after,

a fragment I know, scrap of music

arriving from some unfound room inside her

where the song entire sings,

the song replete

is singing, even as the dead I still love

have gone ahead, as promised,

to make the unknown nearly habitable.

Even while they, remembered, are left behind

in a past I can’t find anymore.

Li-Young Lee

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Autumn is the season of Yellow. Yellow is becoming and going. Yellow is arriving and leaving. Yellow is living again and dying again. As Yellow swells, it fills the ditches, the meadows, forest edges and waste lots. As Yellow fades it leaves feather tufts and seed heads – we wonder, will they sprout again? As Yellow drinks all the blue and green it grows to fill the canopy and the horizon. As Yellow fades, it reveals curvatures and twists and impossible angles – we wonder, is this what death looks like?

I am fickle. I am so easily tempted by pink and lavender, red and bright orange. And of course purple. Yellow, are you worth anything to me at all? You are so common it would seem to be no effort at all to find you, not worth the effort to see you. Easy to ignore you. But then I pause and shiver and if I’m blessed the shackles of time and distance fall away for a moment. Yellow, you have so many bodies and forms! You are so related and so disparate! Yellow, I will write a new song about you and the refrain will sound like this – wingstem, crownbeard, tickseed / sow-thistle, ragwort, coltsfoot / sunflower, coneflower, goldenrod / yellow, Yellow, YELLOW!

Autumn is born, Autumn lives, Autumn begins to die and Yellow flies from the ditches and the meadows into the songs of leaves – tuliptree, redbud, sugar maple. Yellow flies higher and curls to umber, ochre, brown butter. Delicious Yellow, raising the color of earth high and holding it for a day before it falls to become earth again. The season of dying again and living again. This season of leaving and arriving. Yellow, long may you reign.

Native Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa

Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans

Native Hog Peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata

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The Invention of the Darling

The woman you love is singing.

Quick, tell her what you love.

Don’t tell her what you believe.

Don’t tell her if God is dead or alive.

Don’t tell her what’s wrong with the world

and how to fix everyone in it.

The woman you love is singing.

Her voice is laying a table in the presence of death.

The service shines, irradiating

the cardinal points,

dividing above from below.

Now is not the time to quote scriptures.

Now is not the time to repeat manifestoes.

The woman you love is alive

and singing, making a new world

out of all she loves.

Don’t remain outside of her song.

Whatever enters her singing lives again, twice-born.

And there’s only one way in.

Speak your love clearly.

So what if no one else can hear her.

So what if no one else witnesses her making

and re-making the world in the image of love.

Soon, her singing will stop,

and all you’ll hear is the confusion

and violence of a world untouched by her song.

Remaining outside of her singing has cost you so much.

Quick tell her what you love.

Li-Young Lee

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Is it I myself who blocks the doorway between me and love? Is death my adversary or my friend? Stop, you Poem, and explain yourself before you go any further! Oh, my poor analytical mind. Oh no, simultaneous equations and stoichiometry and metabolic pathways. Oh the one thing always corresponding exactly to the one other thing. Oh no, desire to make everything fit together.

And yet doesn’t it? Fit? Perhaps not with my graph paper right angular AB=XY. Not Isaac Newton and William Harvey (and only almost Schrödinger’s Cat). More like a star best seen when I look to its left. The smell of flowers in the woods when nothing is blooming. Or, in The Invention of the Darling, sense is falling petals, wings, the sky within and the sky without, The One and The Many and all of it fit together, all one, all many.

O Poem Reader, stop! Open your eyes and see the lines inviting you to follow them where there is no path. Close your eyes and see the lines circling and touching and kissing. They explain nothing and they explain everything. And when you have been kissed, you will surely know.

❦

Li-Young Lee lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the many honors awarded his verse are a Paterson Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. The Invention of the Darling, his seventh book, is available from W. W. Norton.

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Going Along

Rocks.

Streams.

And falls.

You were making ready to go.

And then you were going.

And then you were gone.

The bud.

The flower.

The fruit.

You were leaving.

And then you’d just left.

And then I saw the sky

was a very big question,

and earth no answer.

And even the birds, the trees,

even the sun, moon, and stars looked like passengers

boarding at their numbered gates.

Your leaving was on both of our minds

while it lay ahead of you. But we

fast caught up to it, and you

occupied leaving completely,

with no room for another.

And soon it lay behind me, who was left alone

to fold your clothes and give them away,

even as you left leaving behind, as though leaving

were one more disguise.

And the whole world seems a moment

from your forgotten childhood,

or an old house someone abandoned in haste, leaving

the back door open wide.

Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall.

The years follow a very old song

my evry disappearing gesture accompanies,

my each step inflects,

one foot lifting me off the ground,

one foot setting me down on earth.

Walking, danging, running.

Late. On time. Out of breath.

Li-Young Lee

❦

Thank you to my friend Anne G. for the gift of Li-Young Lee’s book in the midst of all these leavings, Mom gone and Dad going, the sky a very big question and earth . . . an answer?

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Panta rhei

Posted in poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, imagery, Melinda Thomsen, nature, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on November 1, 2024| 7 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Melinda Thomsen]

11. Colorado Springs

In a breath, the sun emerges unfurled

behind the hangar, and the sky turns gold.

It burns like an ore, as nearby grasses roll

in a breeze, and rows of sunflowers twirl

and flex. The Queen Anne’s lace slowly maps

the sun’s route west. A magpie somewhere

near the playing field squawks. Dawn appears

in shades of granite wearing a mica cap.

Let me put on the sky’s sapphire chains

and earth’s necklace of headlights from the cars

winding to Denver in their jeweled train.

When headlamps dim, sunshine shoots like stars

off the cargo bays of arriving planes,

and daybreak shows its wealth by reaching far.

Melinda Thomsen

[this poem is one segment of the poet’s sonnet redoublé]

❦ ❦ ❦

The sentinel sugar maple stationed above us on the roadway is first. Each day we park at the track and look up to its expansive globe outstretched in meditation. Preceding all other trees, it affirms change. In the swelling conflict of its upper limbus butterscotch and sulfur, sweet and harsh become the beginning of leaving behind the green of summer. Green we might have convinced ourselves to be eternal and foundational. But all things flow. You can never stand twice beneath the same tree.

❦

Last night a brief gusty squall; this morning the lone sugar maple has relinquished all but a few scattered flags and tatters. As we enter the woods, however, all the other trees in this progressive congregation are industrious in their competition. Who can display the brightest color? Who the most varied, the most novel? The southern slant of sun penetrates as if through stained glass; streaming light proclaims its gospel of chlorophyll, abscission, anthocyanins, carotenoids. Linda and I drop our worries along the trail like a trail of breadcrumbs – we can at least hope that the birds and chipmunks will devour them all in the hour before we return this way.

And now we’ve reached the last straight segment before the walking trail offers to climb the ridge and lead back down to the river. We can see the turning where it beckons. Before we reach it we will cross the high bridge over Crooked Creek and look down to see if our fat water snake is sunning herself among the south-facing rocks as usual. Just beyond the bridge we will enter the final high vaulted cathedral. Overleaning trunks and branches, pointed arches familiar in the minds of trees long before Sumeria or Samarra, clad with brass and jade, they invite us now to share this space in reverence.

❦

This cathedral of flux. The never-changing God this world worships is the God of Changes. The crimson Michaux lilies that celebrated here in August today merely nod a few dry, creased, tri-partite pods, but what do they hold? A celebration of seeds. And beneath the springy duff the roots gone dormant have not forgotten their desire to rise again next April.

Linda and I stand here for a moment, in the moment. The memory of red blossoms is not what we worship. The anticipation of future blooming is not what we worship. Right here right now is the only real thing – the only real thing is all things that have come before and all that may yet become. We hold a single thought, we hold all thought. For one brief moment approaching joy we are engulfed, we merge with the flux.

Panta rhei. All things flow.

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Dropping Sunrises in a Jar

When daybreak edged the earth,

++++ I would roll over – unlike the birds.

It was as if we lived in separate jars.

++++ Wrens whistle and chirp about flames

blooming into a ball at sunrise

++++ then hush with the sun’s full burning.

I used to sleep through the daily burning

++++ for I didn’t care much how the earth

rotated itself into another sunrise.

++++ But years later, I wondered why birds

got so excited about a horizon in flames.

++++ So much time, I’ve spent within a jar.

The birds, too, live in a sort of jar,

++++ but they focus outward and seem to burn

with a gratitude that fans their inner flame.

++++ See pelicans fly about the earth?

They dip and lift until the idea of bird

++++ becomes a winged embrace at sunrise.

When I traveled, I watched every sunrise

++++ to see night leave its door to morning ajar,

and in its wake, I heard the calls from birds.

++++ Each place began with its horizon burning,

though, and I worry our Goldilocks earth

++++ is ending. We choose to go in flames,

or up in smoke like a moth drawn to flame

++++ when just right gets too hot, but each sunrise

still unleashes warbling tenors upon the earth.

++++ For we don’t see birds flying into bell jars

or coal mines, do we? While forests burn

++++ in the west, in the east, squirrels and birds

gear up for hurricanes. Notice how birds

++++ of a feather fly from floods and flames?

Instead, I wake to the sky’s daily burning

++++ in these – my sunset – years to collect sunrises.

One by one, I drop then in a jar

++++ like candies gathered from my forgiving earth.

But this burning keeps flushing out the birds,

++++ who welcome the earth as if an old flame

and add their sunrise songs to its tip jar.

Melinda Thomsen

❦ ❦ ❦

Melinda Thomsen lets no sunrise escape her. While the eye notices light returning to the world and the ear may welcome the first emphatic burst of wrensong, the soul delves deeper to discover that the light has never left. Some place where I can untangle myself through flashes of beauty – this is Melinda’s journey and her destination. And as we travel with her across the world and through the universe of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, this might be the promise we hope to fulfill – One day you’ll shape yourself into the bird your soul holds.

❦

These poems are woven with recurring images of sunrise and sky, birdsong and sunflowers, but in addition to these enticements Melinda’s use of formality has ensnared me. I am a sucker for a good sestina; this collection’s title poem is a great one. I had pretty much assumed it’s impossible to actually write a Heroic Crown of Sonnets (sonnet redoublé) but here Melinda has mastered it. In just 31 pages, this sequence elevates us and carries us into new worlds.

Purchase Dropping Sunrises in a Jar at Finishing Line Press.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Zoetrope Sunrise of the Taihang Mountains

Waking in a sleeper car, bunked

with three strangers, I raise the shade

to watch the sunrise, a pale peach glow,

among the snoring. Cornfields stretch

beneath gauzy clouds as our train enters

a tunnel and metal sounds reflect

off its stone interior. As we exit,

the ochre sky lightens, then another

tunnel and again a waterfall of noise.

Now, the sun glows behind mountain

peaks, and mist rests in the Taihang

valley of lush shrubbery when a tunnel

eclipses that view. The train

travels through tunnel after tunnel,

but between glimpses, the sun rises

and we emerge into a village

with streams edging the foothills

framed with cornfields and box houses.

A man feeds his donkey.

The child in our cabin coughs.

For the Chinese, the road over

Taihang means the frustrations of life.

Where the sun rises through slits,

this zoetrope carries me home,

or some place where I can untangle

myself through flashes of beauty.

I had to get out through stillness;

until bit by bit, the womb opened.

Melinda Thomsen

[zoetrope: An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved. – – – bg]

❦ ❦ ❦

Three aphorisms attributed to Heraclitus (Greek, ca. 500 BC) declare change and conflict as the fundamental characteristics of reality:

On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.

We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not.

It is not possible to step into the same river twice.

The central tenets of Heraclitus’s philosophy are the unity of opposites and the centrality of flux (change) as encapsulated in the phrase Panta rhei, all things flow.

[REF]

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