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Convolutions

Posted in ecology, family, poetry, tagged Beth Copeland, Bill Griffin, ecology, I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, imagery, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Redhawk Publications, Southern writing on August 8, 2025| 6 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Beth Copeland]

Fog

Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.

No, not an erasure but unseen.

Not an erasure but unseen.

The mountain, the laurel still green.

Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,

the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.

The deer depart beneath white sheets

of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream

of fog slipping into a forgotten dream

the ghost mountain dreams.

The ghost mountain dreams.

Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.

Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,

mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.

Beth Copeland

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It’s a big web, here in the corner of our screened porch, but I’m not ready yet to broom it down. The spider is a jointed dried kernel in its center; when I blow, she doesn’t twitch. I don’t see an egg pouch or spiderlings. The strands are not an orb but a diffuse tangle, a chaos of delicate angles and tensions — a miniature of filaments revealed by the background microwave radiation that weave the structure of our entire universe. And what are they made of, those filaments? These I can see before me are nanometer reworkings of hemolymph from mosquitoes denied the opportunity to bite me. Most visible when dusted with pollen. A mess. But I and my broom are not ready yet to offend, to say farewell to the tribe of spiders.

Last week we visited Blue Whales with our grandson, turning eight. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is hosting this exhibit of the largest creatures that have ever lived on our planet – the mystery of their migrations, language, culture; the vital interconnections between their diet of krill, their massive enriching orange poop, and the entire deep ocean ecology. Linda and I stood in silence before the model of a blue whale brain and a model of our own. The whale’s is twice as large and twice as complex, convoluted with its twisting gyri and deep sulci. Surely such an abundance of neurons and synapses must create thoughts as complex as our own. Or more so. And yet blue whales struggle to survive as a species in a world degraded by human beings. I am thinking of that brain and I am not ready yet to say farewell to the tribe of whales.

Chapel Hill cartoonist Keith Knight draws a weekly panel titled (th)ink. Today’s is a portrait of and quotation by James Baldwin (1924-1987): “To be a Negro in this country & to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Human being who is relatively conscious, choose your own rage focal point du jour – human beings caged like animals in a Florida concentration camp; children intentionally starved to advance a particular political agenda; boosting fossil fuels burned to appease a few billionaires; an ocean filled with plastic nanoparticles and deafening human vibrations where blue whales may soon be extinct? Some days I feel like I am not ready to go on living. Some days I am more than ready to say goodbye to the tribe of humans. In a few years I will depart as an inhabitant of planet Earth. Some years after that the last memory of my having been an inhabitant will finally depart as well. On that day, will any whales still remain to swim the depths? Will any love between humans remain, or any love for other creatures? I am not ready yet to answer.

❦ ❦ ❦

October Valentine

A heart-shaped leaf spied in the weeds on my walk

down the hill to the mailbox. I didn’t see a redbud tree

on the roadside, so it must have lifted on the wind

and dropped – a gift! – near my feet. Is it a message

from someone I love – my sweet mother in a halo of light,

my father singing the names of trees in his strong baritone?

Or is it from someone I’ve never seen and may never meet?

As I hike up the hill, I tuck the leaf in my pocket, rubbing it

with my thumb – as if I could read it – skin to skin – by osmosis.

Halfway home, I stop to study it. Cerise with splotches of green,

dark spots, a wormhole bored like a bullet wound, a battered

heart, like yours, like mine, but maybe its scars make it more

beautiful than before. My friends, there’s still so much

love in this world even when you’re alone.

Beth Copeland

❦ ❦ ❦

Is it strange for me to be toying with despair while reading a book of healing and love like Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart? Actually, if you’re not toying with despair you are the strange one. Give grudging thanks, though. Thank the stars and the mysterious hemlocks and the dark fecund earth that in a world full of rage and despair there are poems like Beth Copeland’s. These poems know the feeling of being lost in endless night. These poems have been battered, they have fallen, they have doubted plenty of times whether there is any wholeness or healing available to them, but these poems stand up to testify, My friends, there’s still so much love in this world even when you’re alone.

Often I tell myself it is ridiculous to imagine that any sort of inner peace is possible. I have my share of personal regrets and ongoing grief, and even though I’m tempted to look around and envy those people who don’t, when I’m really honest I admit that no one escapes whipping. But peace can’t be a wall built around my sadness – walls keep more things in than out. Despair is inevitable. How foolish is it, then, and how strange, to spend a few hours with a book of words arranged in lines on paper and discover the tightness in my throat is easing? The mountain has rested in one place for 480 million; today its peak is less than a third of its height when it was first thrust up in the big crunch. Does it reflect on loss and diminishment, or does it find peace in the weight of its daily being? Am I inflamed and scarred by the revelations of Beth Copeland’s battles and pain, or am I grateful for her gratitude and strengthened by her strength?

The tribe of human beings seems determined to destroy itself. The tribe of human beings seems determined to link arms and hearts in love. Perhaps discovering a moment of beauty is not a cowardly attempt to escape dire reality – perhaps it is the only thing capable of healing us.

❦

Explore REDHAWK Publications, including Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart and Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of the Peak HERE.

Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE.

More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE.

Dive into the K Chronicles with Keith Knight HERE.

❦ ❦ ❦

My Daughter Paints a Mountain

She wasn’t thinking as her brush swept

across canvas in wave-length strokes,

channeling a crest she’d never seen,

while I was still in the Sandhills

where there aren’t any hills, just fields

of cotton, soybeans, and cedar stumps

in swamp water, sleeping on an air mattress

in a small apartment with prints and paintings

propped against walls instead of hung,

newly separated, newly sober, living

between the husband and home I’d left

and a haven I hadn’t found yet.

*****

As I drove up a steep road to see a house

in the Blue Ridge, a large buck leapt

in front of the car to welcome me,

and I knew I’d found my new home.

I didn’t know the mountain seen at the top

of the hill was the mountain she’d painted

months before, and she didn’t know I’d move

to that house with a view of the mountain

she’d painted as if in a dream or fugue.

How could her mountain – purple, lavender,

pink, and forest green swirled to a peak

with white streak of snow against a blue sky –

mirror the one framed in my window?

Was it coincidence or synchronicity

that the mountain in her mind’s

eye was more map than metaphor?

It was a message from the universe:

You’re home. Open the door.

Beth Copeland

❦ ❦ ❦

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Duet

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature photography, poetry, Visions International on August 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

[poems from VISIONS Issue 110]

Cataract

That woman, somewhere in her seventies,

walking this past week without her husband,

her greeting smile the same but not the same,

water like a cataract behind her,

has managed to sew the morning round her,

given the air she parts the electricity

of apprehension. It recedes. The river

finds its level, and our walk assumes

The silence of a stranger’s unacknowledged

pain; guessing at the gap between her day

and ours, and shamed of it – who isn’t

shamed by fear and rendered speechless by it?

A dozen steps or so, and she recedes,

and suddenly there’s too much song and shade.

We’d stepped around the space he’d occupied

as if he were more vivid in his absence.

Ted McCarthy, Clones, Ireland

❦ ❦ ❦

Will the mowers quiet themselves, becoming blind to their appointed vectors? Will the heat pump rest from its pumping? We wait on the porch in fading light for transition / transformation. All afternoon and evening the rattle, grate, thrill of cicadas, but when daylight succumbs they will one by one release their reins to the katydids. The first movement of the day’s symphony, adagio, will merge without intermission into the forest’s boisterous nighttime allegretto. We wait to enter that moment, the duet of final dying cicada and first katydid newly risen. For a few minutes the two will sing together.

Alchemy it is, a dash of dappled hardwood shade, one lick of humid breeze, stir briefly with cicada song and you will transport me into the presence of my grandmother. Nana holds a dripping glass of tea for 10-year old me as I climb the sandy bluff up from Bogue Sound, between crowding live oaks, little skiff beached below, in my hand a string of croakers and spots. Nana and 20-year old me are in her driveway in Winston, red oaks towering, about to drive her ancient Plymouth to Piggly Wiggly but the “jawflies” are so loud she can’t think what she needs. I will spend half the afternoon trying to down one from its high branch with her BB gun. It decrescendos as it falls.

This morning I have exercised my gray cells and cochleae by picking out individuals from amidst the cacophony. One species of cicada is a continuous dry rattle like softly shaken maracas. Another is a sinusoidal sharp-edged rasp, a scraper pulled across a guiro. Then a third sudden loud rising crescendo crests and slows, falls back into stillness. And now at once they all cease, all except a single insistent rasp repeated ten times, twenty, and when it finishes its duet is still audible in a faint far tree. The music of their tymbales, the vibration of the living desperate to connect.

❦ ❦ ❦

At the Goodbye Door

Wind knocks on your door; a mackintosh

slung over its arm, a sigh like coyotes

as they grate their teeth, their rheumy eyes contagious

with stars, tongues slavered with hope –

their coats reminiscent of ones you donated to the thrift,

collars roughed up, delicate threads a reminder of what binds –

how we were together long enough to retrieve the inexplicable.

Satiated, we purged ourselves: You at the goodbye door,

me sweeping the floor where you stood and always a crooner

in the background singing, Loves a Difficult Wing.

Dianna MacKinnon Henning, Janesville, California

❦ ❦ ❦

we were together long enough

to retrieve the inexplicable,

the spring that swallowed itself –

who isn’t shamed by fear

and rendered speechless by it?

the old fields grow, indifferent

+++++++ lines from Visions Issue 110

To Bradley Strahan, for forty-five years of gleaning from fields across all the world to plant and harvest Visions-International, Thank You. To Cal Nordt, for over a decade of encouragement and support behind the scenes and for now lifting the harrow of editor, also Thank You. And to Katie LaRosa, for keeping alive the vision of design and art in the service of words, Bravo. This first issue produced by Cal Nordt is again truly international, as are all past issues, although North Carolina is also well represented with poems by J. S. Absher, Rebecca Pierre, Adrian Rice, and Cal himself. The poetry of Visions has always been brief in lines, deep in heart, brilliant in space and atmosphere – this new issue continues the lineage.

❦

Information about previous issues of Visions-International, as well as other creative endeavors by Bradley Strahan, is available HERE.

For information about Visions under the imprint Cynosura Press, click HERE.

For submissions to Visions, contact Cal Nordt at calnordt@gmail.com

❦ ❦ ❦

Spring

The cunning master of nature

sensed my burning thirst

proffered his hand

to the lush spring

and hauled it in.

Driven by immense thirst

I pressed my lips

upon the dry sand

and let my soul wander

through underground paths

weaving like thread

through minerals and crystals,

searching for the spring

that swallowed itself.

Risto Vasilevski, Smederevo, Serbia

❦ ❦ ❦

Breaking Cloud

It was the crackle in the airport air

that made me think of Austerlitz

or some such flat, fat battlefield

of long ago; a river, sleek these days

and undisturbed. How easily the ground

is ploughed, the iron underneath stirred

as if always there. After the unease

of take-off, news became history,

a movement of horsemen and grenadiers

on hand-drawn maps. Now clouds part,

vapour trailing like a harrow, a brief

shudder as the landing gear comes down.

Contact, and the bump of runway lights;

impossible, as we taxi, to believe

earth now as other than unshakable.

Still, never more than a breath from anxiety –

for how long more will our children prosper?

The old fields grow, indifferent, their shot

and bone dissolving at the root.

Ted McCarthy, Clones, Ireland

. . . . .

Several friends have asked me to keep them informed whenever I schedule a guided naturalist hike in our area. I am planning one (maybe two) wildflower hikes in September as celebration of the founding of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail:
Friday, September 12
(and if there’s interest I’ll lead a reprise on Saturday, September 27).

Sign up at MeetUp.com to receive notifications and to register for events.
Thanks — Bill
.
MeetUp.com — MST Segment 6 Events — September 12
.