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Time’s Shift

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 17, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Crow cosmogony

The day we made the world, scattered

shattered sand across the deep

steeps and hollows of the sea,

we were playing with chance,

a stance few other gods admired.

We retired then from creation and let things

sing as they would, go

to whatever end luck called good.

We could, and did, breath in a platypus here,

a shearwater there – evolution

our solution to dogma and fate,

the weight of always being in charge

of stars, shoals, plague, all that –

but by and large, we let go, let

sweat and thought fall away,

stray like questing possums

or blossoms of blown snow.

So it was. We didn’t worry how

our sowing would grow. We went back

to hacking with our thick

black bills at death and waste, harrying

carrion, even as the dead

bled ever more numerous over the new

true-straight roads, here

where we shaped the bright turns

and returns of the world, invited

night in: do that, and you get

what you get. Despised

as flies, we pick through pale grass

for carcasses gone flat and dry;

we rise under your very wheels

from meals scant and cold, bring

strings of gut back to our young. But so

goes the world, when you let it go,

throw yourself in its rolling motion, chance

chance: we live on broken squirrels

in the world we made this way.

Catherine Carter

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The postmark is 03-09-97. Linda found the torn envelope, letter inside, at the bottom of a box of mementos she’s still sorting from her parents’ home after their deaths over a decade ago. Dear Dad . . . It’s me writing to my father-in-law, the nuclear physicist. I’ve got an idea for a new story and I need your help. Dad French and I would sometimes share first drafts with each other, his hard science fiction that could use a cool breath or two of metaphor, my airy prose in desperate need of some fact checking. So here’s my pitch:

Imagine a craft traveling to Proxima Centauri, 4.25 light-years away. It’s under a constant acceleration of 2G for the first half of the voyage, then 2G deceleration for the second half. What would be its peak velocity at the mid-point? And how much time will pass for the voyagers relative to earth time?

Relative is the operative word. Dad French was an Einsteinian guru. His favorite Saturday afternoon pastime was to lean back on the couch with a big yellow legal pad and work through the equations of Special Relativity. He felt that he had identified a flaw and was determined to elucidate (from the Latin, “bring it into the light”). The most I could understand from his explanations of time dilation is that any object, whether charged particle or self-aware being, as it approaches the speed of light experiences a slowdown in the passage of time. To me on that spaceship there’s no difference in the ticking of my clock, but if my buddy back on earth could listen in he’d hear an expanding silence between each tick and the next.

But big deal. Who hasn’t felt time speed up or slow down in certain situations? Man, last week was so busy it just flew by. – or – I feel like I’ve been sitting in this waiting room for a week. We human beings are just rubbish at time. If you asked that charged particle, it would know to the femtosecond how long since it got spat out of the cyclotron. My perception of time, though, is all tangled with context and saturated with subconscious. Don’t even ask me how long I’ve been sitting here at this keyboard, much less whether a certain something happened five years ago or ten.

Which is why, when I wake up in the dark, I avoid looking at the clock. If I should still happen to be lying there with my brain in fifth gear when light begins to seep around the shades, when any hope of re-entry into the land of Nod is laughable, then I don’t want to know how long it’s been. I don’t want to know that I’ve just spent two hours on this inventory of all my faults and failings. Surely no more than a handful of ticks. Grant me the bliss of imagining I’m half way to Proxima Centauri at nine-tenths the speed of light and I have all the time in the universe.

❦

Oh, and here is what else I found in that old envelope along with the letter: a Post It stuck to the page with these lines in Dad French’s handwriting.

Park French

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Choptank bluegills take part

in the creation of the world

You couldn’t say bluegills create the stream.

Torn from the stream, they choke

on blazing air. And yet. Those nests,

those few dozen shallow divots together

pocking the creek bottom in dimples

rich with sunfish generations: changing

creekbed, reshaping foundation.

That steady fan-flow of air-

bearing water over eggs settled among

the pebbles, ever so slightly changing

the river’s braiding and unbraiding. That labor

of life: the work to work

with the current as it is and yet

to change it just enough, to manifest

a place a little better for bluegills, co-creating

the world in concert with oxygen exchange,

tectonic motion, that smashed and gash-

edged hubcap pinning down an immortal

plastic bag, the gravity of the moon, whirligig

beetles inscribing creek-skin with runes

written in water, whatever God you say. Flood

of protestors in the street’s torrent, choking

on blazing air. A woman stirring cut

onions over heat, changing them just enough

to turn their burning tears to something

a little more sweet. Fingers moving the pen, the keys,

the lever, and the air and ground

of our lives ever so slightly shifting

in response, recreated (ever so slightly) anew.

The fearful fact: it matters what you do.

Catherine Carter

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What is left for us to believe in? What even matters? When hate is the day’s currency, those who can’t bring themselves to live on hate are emptied and cast aside. As if! Whatever. It’s all just relative, anyway. But stone is still stone, underfoot, under earth, under all, and if you rub the lodestone along the needle and suspend it by a thread, it will still swing north.

And so these poems. Crows and bluegills continue to create the universe and stirring onions in a skillet continues to make the world just that much sweeter. There is still truth you can pin down, categorize, calculate, and right alongside that truth is the truth of breath, discovery, awe. I am not afraid to say it, Catherine: you make me believe that even I matter. How could any of us walk through a world that smells a little of skunk; feel sun on our face while the grass turns that sun into sugar; tremble one moment at the closeness of death and the next moment laugh as life surprises us; travel these lines of verse into strange realms and incantations that transform into our own familiar muscle and blood and mind; how could we do all this and not discover that we matter and that this planet we love matters?

I believe. That there is still hope for us all. And for all that surrounds us.

❦

Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

If you read one book of poetry this year, make it By Stone and Needle. These poems are comforting and harrowing, enlivening and enlightening. They are true.

I featured two additional poems from the collection at last weeks posting (October 10, 2025).

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Crooked

Posted in family, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature, nature photography, Robert Bly, Sourwood, Stephen Dunn on September 19, 2025| 6 Comments »

[poems by Stephen Dunn, Robert Bly, Bill Griffin]

Circular

Daylight illuminated, but only for those

who had some knowing in their seeing,

and night fell for everyone, but harder

for some. A belief in happiness bred

despair, though despair could be assuaged

by belief, which required faith,

which made those who had it

one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

Love at noon that was still love at dusk

meant doubt had been subjugated

for exactly that long, and best to have music

to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy.

Those alone spoke to their dogs,

but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness

of air, while those together were left

to address the wall or open door of each other.

Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,

some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.

Daylight concealed, but only for those

fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up

earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.

How we saw it was how it was.

Stephen Dunn (1939-2021)

Shenandoah, Volume 52, Number 3; Fall 2002

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Josh has taught me how to spot a sourwood across the meadow along the treeline. Always crooked. Curved and arched, clutching branches and trunk like an old man’s spine, in medical parlance kyphosis. It must be because the sourwood is grasping at something always out of reach. Always overtaken by shadow but always trying to edge closer into the light.

When we bought this house in 1983 the steep back lot was choked with hickory and tuliptree; in front, two weighty red oaks flanked the door, centenarian sentries. A dogwood struggled in their shade and at the northern lot line one sourwood straggled out from under. Crooked! That first summer I noticed, of all the trees in leaf, only the sourwood labored with tent caterpillars, messy tangled webbing and bare patches chewed out of its foliage. I though maybe I should try to save old sourwood from its pests, but they were too high for me to spray and I had no spare cash for an arborist. Oxydendrum arboreum, you are on your own.

After Hurricane Hugo walloped the Appalachians in 1989, we cut down those two oaks that leaned two threatening meters from our walls and roof. At the base they were bigger around than oil drums. A few years after those monsters came down I noticed the sourwood, not standing any straighter but now stretching a new arm pure vertical, due upward, sunward. Another thirty years along and that sourwood is still making flowers in the spring, champion of honeybees, and still sharing its bright summer green with any and all itinerant webworms. The dogwood and redbud look up and pay homage from around its knees. But even with all the newfound light my sourwood remains crooked as hell.

Teach me the same lesson, Josh and Sourwood. Life ain’t ever going to get cobbled together perfect. Most mornings I have to claw through a web of nasty wormsilk before I can struggle up from sleep. Most days I’m noticing the weeds and cankers I haven’t yet yanked from my beds more than I’m noticing the asters’ spiral floret emerging or bumblebees’ shanks stuffed with pollen. Step back. Look again. Forgive the mess of life just making its daily living. Forgive the darkness that less hides the light than shows it brighter. Forgive myself that I can’t fix it all, make it come out straight. Forgive my own crookedness. Isn’t that what makes the sourwood a sourwood?

Oxydendrum arboreum

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What Things Want

You have to let things

Occupy their own space.

This room is small,

But the green settee

Likes to be here.

The big marsh reeds,

Crowding out the slough,

Find the world good.

You have to let things

Be as they are.

Who knows which of us

Deserves the world more?

Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/what-things-want

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Sourwood

Bent from overshadowing,

+++++ crippled

by the broad red oak;

tent caterpillars, years

+++++ of limp submission,

robbed of flowers

by heartless shade.

Rocky soil, no tap root, many winters:

the big red finally kneels, prostrates itself,

and Spring delivers sun to sourwood.

Straight up tangent to the curve of trunk

+++++ new arms jubilate,

new fingers reach to pull down sky, bees

celebrate creamy clusters

and there is honey.

Bill Griffin

featured in Poetry in Plain Sight 2014 by the Winston Salem Writers.

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Wingstem & Bill

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Bad Time

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged About Time, Bill Blackley, Bill Griffin, Carbon Canyon, David Duchovny, family, imagery, nature photography, poetry on September 12, 2025| 6 Comments »

[including Carbon Canyon by David Duchovny]

We cannot know how good for us

the bad times were.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . – High Five in the Sky –

Bill and I decide to take a walk together this autumn afternoon. The year is 2020. Does visceral memory plunge you into context? When did he and I last see each other, if only above the nasal hem of an N-95? But today we will be together outdoors, the light breeze adequate to disperse particulates as we pick our way along the steep trail down to Dutchman Creek below our homes. Near neighbors, nearly always separate in our daily meanderings. Today reconnecting. Today again confessing to each other that we are connected somewhere deep in our guts, spleen & pancreas, since that first day in 1979 when Bill introduced himself to me as my Senior Resident and I stepped onto the wards at Durham County General as an Intern.

That first night we stumbled on the brink of fucking up completely. One patient we had stabilized and put to bed crashed at 3 AM while we were looking elsewhere. We were able to bring her back and at 0600 coffee before rounds with the Attending we listed to each other all the things we’d just learned. Still learning now, forty-one years later, Bill on the bench I’ve planted on my hill and me on a rock six feet distant. We confess completely fucking up again, this time our friendship when we split ten years after that very first connection. Time is not calligraphy, an artful line advancing with curlicues that mark each pleasant memory. Time is a patchwork of craters where the bombs went off. Time may soften a few scars, allow fireweed and fleabane to bloom amidst the desecration, but be careful you don’t stumble at the lip of former chaos.

Or do stumble. Look up for once from always looking down. Pull up your sleeve and share the bruises. I’m talking to you, one Bill to another Bill. I am grateful to have you as my friend.

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Carbon Canyon

We lived in Carbon Canyon the, before the fire,

unpack that given irony – were there no

carbon copies, we so unique and blessed?

There was a time when I walked

with my three-year-old daughter

(I think three . . .).

Anyway, I know we were walking the deep decline

of Carbon Canyon

on one of those short, mommyless jaunts . . .

And we came upon

the recently car-crushed carcass

of a gray field mouse, part three-dimensional

as in life,

part flattened as in a drawing,

the weight of the car

having made its lower half unreal, a cartoon.

The drive long gone,

unaware of their handiwork, guiltless.

A tiny trickle of blood from its slightly opened

mouth, a last profound unheard utterance,

so perfectly dramatic and telling

as if to seem placed by a movie crew

hiding in the bushes perhaps.

And my daughter (two, three, four?)

about to spy it on the ground, and I, a daddy,

with knowledge spilling out of my pockets,

life lessons, sense a teaching moment for the disquisition

on mortality that very parent believes

every three-year-old needs –

(see, it all ends, best laid plans and all that,

life’s unfair; carpe diem, little one;

Latin for . . . heaven; there but for the grace of god –)

in these moments, I realize I am nothing but a recording

of my own parents’ voices – their greatest hits,

my soul their phonograph . . .

Fade in: a father slows his daughter, allowing

the chance to happen upon a dead mouse,

it/death knowledge. Consequence. Mortality.

But it is only now, as we kneel,

that I notice the vibrant cha-cha line of ants

dancing in and out of the ruined creature

in all their anarchic discipline,

carrying to and fro unseeable bits of meat

and nutrient mouse ooze.

And my breath catches

because suddenly this lesson is for Daddy,

and it is Daddy who cannot face too much death,

the death after death, my death

in this mouse’s mouth, my daughter’s death.

I’ve not quite stomach enough

to face the pieces of us all carried off into oblivion,

eaten till we are unrecognizable, digested,

shit. Roadkill.

Dizzying, I say, “Oh, let’s go sweetheart . . .”

But it’s too late – my daughter,

two or three or four, has seen

leans down farther, her blue eyes

in inch or two from the ground, and says,

“Daddy, look the ants, there’s so many of them.”

“Yes, I see. Maybe we should let the mouse sleep, let her

sleep.”

I take her hand to lead her, though I don’t know where.

I know I am blind and unprepared,

a child leading a child,

and the little one stops and smiles,

and points back to the carnage –

“No, the ants, Daddy, the ants – look how much they love

her.”

David Duchovny

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This morning, 6 Sept. 2025, I pick Bill up at his door for another walk. Before we get in the car he hands me a gift, a book, a book of poetry. Poetry, admit it, has been the gravity that brought Bill and me back to earth after we had orbited so far apart. Years of smoldering enmity smoke out when a friend made us sit down together in the sam room to read poetry, to write it, to share it with each other. Something as tenuous as spider silk can still contain the angry wasp – we did indeed think we were still intent on stinging each other until we discovered we weren’t. One line leads to another. Today Bill reaches out to give me David Duchovny’s book after he himself has read it, most pages heiroglyphed with his own lightly pencilled checkmarks and squiggled connectors. Which I will pay more attention to than the words themselves.

Time, I tell myself, is a crap teacher. I’m always ever looking backwards at the time I’ve mangled and wasted, misunderstood and misspent. If time is so instructive, why can’t I look forward and craft a hunk of time into the shape I hope it shall become? Now time has brought Bill himself across a health threshold from which there is, this time, no returning. We talk about it as we reach our trailhead; we live within its reality as we walk the trail. We reach our limit, turn around, walk back towards the car, and time keeps on arrowing in its singleminded direction. Here we stand in the mess and glory of autumn blooming. Some flowers, dying and dry, want their seeds to hitch a sticky ride on our pants; some pods pop as we brush by; some buds are just this day erupting. Time is not a thread. Time is a thousand threads, a billion-billion threads and all tangled and intertwined like this patch of hog peanut within the thicket of goldenrod. You can’t pick it apart but here and there you can find the flowers. Wherever our threads have crossed and re-crossed, Bill, I will keep learning to be grateful.

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David Duchovny is an actor, director, singer-songwriter, podcaster. About Time, his first full length poetry collection, follows four published novels and is available HERE.

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